photo by Petra Goeschel courtesy of pixabay.com
A report from Science magazine dated April 26 describes an effort at Northwell Health (a large hospital/clinic chain in New York City) to test the efficacy (positive effects) of famotidine against the novel coronavirus (SARS-COV-2). Famotidine is an over-the-counter remedy for heartburn that has been available for years. It is less expensive than the more potent and powerful drug omeprazole, which is widely used here for acid reflux and peptic ulcers.
Dr Michael Callahan, an infectious disease specialist, was in China (coincidentally) during the early days of the pandemic that started there. He was in Nanjing to study avian flu and he followed his colleagues to Wuhan in mid-January to study the new cases of COVID-19 that were appearing. He became curious as to why poorer patients were not dying as rapidly as those more well-off, and discovered that many were taking famotidine for chronic heartburn because it was much cheaper than omeprazole. He found that those who had been on famotidine were dying at half the rate of those who were not. The data was crude, and it was impossible to conduct a statistical analysis because there were so many confounders (other factors that might have influenced the outcome).
When he returned to the US, he began to analyze the effects of famotidine and discovered that it inhibited a key enzyme that the virus uses in its growth process: papainlike protease. He began to organize efforts to conduct a clinical study. His work was complicated by the fact that, at that time, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was grabbing all the attention. He was forced to include HCQ as a standard treatment in his study, which devolved (grew into) a combination of HCQ by itself and HCQ with famotidine. That was the only way he could do a study, which he deplores, but Kevin Tracey, who is in charge of Northwell’s research efforts, said, “Is it good science? No… it’s the real world.”
It took weeks to obtain enough famotidine for injection (as opposed to the oral form of tablets, which is in good supply), but once this was available, the study began on April 7. The researchers aim to include a thousand patients in this protocol, which will take several weeks to complete.
In the meantime, encouragement came from anecdotal reports by people with acute COVID-19 who consumed the oral form of famotidine and showed rapid improvement. These reports cause concern among researchers because there could be a run on famotidine by anxious people who want to try the drug on themselves, either for prevention or because they think they have the disease already. There is a distinct possibility that people will try this on their own and consume the available supply of over-the-counter tablets long before scientific results are available.
I don’t recommend that anyone run out and buy this drug on their own, particularly since they are unlikely to take it at the right time. Many people have an unreasoning fear of this virus (not entirely unjustified) and are willing and able to try anything, no matter how far fetched, that might work. This was shown when a man and his wife consumed chloroquine intended as a component of an aquarium cleaner because they had heard that [redacted] called HCQ a “game changer” for the pandemic. The man died and his wife became critically ill but recovered. Famotidine is unlikely to cause such drastic effects, but it may be toxic in people with bad kidneys.
The time to take famotidine would be when you know you have the virus, when you have a headache and fever, but before you get pneumonia– but who is able to make rational decisions when they are acutely ill? Especially when this virus appears to cause neurological problems and possibly infect the brain. Hallucinations may follow, encephalopathy and strokes.
Nevermind. Try not to think about it right now, just think about all the smart, experienced people who are working on cures that will come before you get sick. Don’t let xenophobia or fear of other countries distract you from the work that people all over the world are doing to find the answers. As the Science article’s concluding paragraph says:
Callahan has kept busy since his return from China. Kadlec deployed him on medical evacuation missions of Americans on two heavily infected cruise ships. Now back to doing patient rounds in Boston, he says the famotidine lead underscores the importance of science diplomacy in the face of an infectious disease that knows no borders. When it comes to experience with COVID-19, he says, “No amount of smart people at the [National Institutes of Health] or Harvard or Stanford can outclass an average doctor in Wuhan.”
photo by Sasin Tipchai courtesy of pixabay.com
An article in the Los Angeles Times from April 23 describes the quarantine and isolation practices in Vietnam that have contributed to their successful, continuing fight against the novel coronavirus. When Vietnamese authorities first heard about the new virus, they immediately implemented a plan that they had used against SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) just very recently (in 2004).
A few days after the first reported death in China from the virus, the health ministry held a high-level meeting with US and World Health Organization (WHO) officials and laid out their “containment plan”. Vietnamese officials were spurred on by a suspicion of China that goes back hundreds of years to medieval invasions from their larger neighbor to the north. Their plan was successful at limiting the number of known infections to 268 with no known fatalities– out of a country of 95 million people. US officials, according to the article, find their numbers credible (unlike the numbers from China). There have been no new infections in a week, and there are plans to re-open for business this week.
From the article:
Experts credit Vietnam’s early, decisive steps: swiftly banning nearly all travel from China, suspending schools in mid-January even before recording any infections, quarantining tens of thousands of people and employing the extensive Communist Party apparatus to communicate distancing measures and trace the contacts of COVID-19 patients.
The response was made possible by a Leninist one-party system that is often criticized for maintaining secrecy, silencing dissent and trampling on individual rights — but that has proven adept at tackling health crises since it was the first nation to stamp out the SARS epidemic nearly two decades ago.
Say what you will (and I do) about the lack of civil rights in Vietnam, their approach to controlling the virus has been successful, so much so that they are able to produce consumer goods and protective equipment in quantity for shipping to needy customers in the US.
But–I believe that it is possible to succeed in controlling this pandemic without resorting to totalitarian/authoritarian methods.
However, we would have to have total transparency and honesty from all government officials and clear plan of action. This plan includes self-isolation of every contact to someone known to be ill and the contacts of those contacts. It includes testing of everyone who contacts someone known to be ill, whether symptomatic or not, at an interval that allows us to catch asymptomatic carriers (that is, a week or two after contact). It also includes testing everyone who wants to be tested, whether they are sick or not. Most important, we must recognize that even universal tests will not catch everyone who is sick or a carrier. Finally, we must test everyone who dies at home, even if they are suicides or homicides. How do we know that someone has not committed suicide or killed a loved one because they had the virus?
On that grim note, I will close. But, to be clear, I want to say again: it is not necessary to be or to become a totalitarian state to win the war against the novel coronavirus. It is only necessary to inform everyone of the stakes involved, talk them into buying in, and supply them with the tools they need (food, medicine, entertainment, jobs) to stay isolated. If that means giving a homeless person a home, I say, well, it is about time. (What did he say? Ohmygod, housing for the homeless, just because of SARS-COV-2?… well, why not?)
tan tian Buddha by Kon Karampelas courtesy of pixabay.com
The Washington Post ran an op-ed by Martin Lee, a Hong Kong human-rights activist, on April 20. He was arrested on April 18 and he says in the op-ed: “They took as evidence my cellphone and the T-shirt I wore to a demonstration last August that drew 1.7 million people [article in Guardian]— about a quarter of the population.” He was arrested and, apparently, released on bail. His crime? Participating in that huge demonstration, which didn’t have a permit despite its size.
Hong Kong’s government had been liberal in allowing permits for demonstrations that did not interfere with public order. Since the pandemic struck, the people have been unwilling to come out in public to protest and endanger their health by promoting contagion.
This arrest tells you immediately what sort of police state the Chinese Communist Party rules over. In a neighboring territory, Hong Kong, which is advertised as operating under “one country, two systems” and is protected by a Basic Law (a sort of constitution), one can now be subject to arrest for “subversion” or “sedition”.
Article 22 of the Basic Law states “No department of the Central People’s Government … may interfere in the affairs which the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region administers on its own in accordance with this Law.” This restriction is being ignored by Chinese officials who “interfere in the affairs [of Hong Kong government]” with impunity because people no longer protest in public.
“Subversion” and “sedition” are terms not often used in American politics because we value “liberty” more than we value “order”. Liberty, under the First Amendment to our Constitution, guarantees “freedom of speech” and the right to peacefully advocate for lawful change.
Freedom of speech, however, does not give us the right to advocate violent overthrow of our government, nor the right “to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”. In other words, it is not lawful to try to incite panic or, for example, encourage violent attempts to exit a place that is in danger of being overwhelmed by conflagration.
“Sedition” is sometimes defined as:
“an illegal action inciting resistance to lawful authority and tending to cause the disruption or overthrow of the government“
This means that there is a gray area between peacefully protesting and advocating constitutional change, by voting or by passing changes to laws that are unpopular or inappropriate– and unlawfully advocating for extra-constitutional change through disruption of government, such as a coup or widespread violations of constitutional law. Some protesters, desperate for change, may be willing to be arrested for advocating a change that is threatening to the government– civil disobedience.
Totalitarian governments are hypersensitive to protest and interpret any disagreement with the views of authorities as a threat. These governments redefine “subversion” and “sedition” in ways that, in this country, infringe upon our First Amendment rights to speak and peacefully petition the government “for redress of grievances”.
The Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party are particularly sensitive to any speech or public expressions that may cause people to advocate for change. This is most obvious in the Chinese government’s treatment of protests that have garnered the vocal, public support of at least a quarter of the population of Hong Kong– even without a permit to demonstrate.
These officially unsanctioned protests have occurred against a background of a society in Hong Kong that tends to be submissive and consensus-seeking. The consensus among the people of Hong Kong has turned towards revolt against the Chinese government’s encroachment on personal freedoms, but since the onset of COVID-19, people are choosing safety from infection over peaceful protest.
Demonstrations against the Chinese government’s attempts to force Hong Kong citizens to submit to Chinese laws that severely restrict dissent have stopped because there is a pandemic raging. Social activities in which people cannot observe “social distancing”– staying 6 feet apart and wearing masks– have ended.
This silence has allowed the Chinese government to tighten its hold upon Hong Kong without fear of public dissent. Under cover of the pandemic, the Chinese government has set about arresting and punishing public figures who have participated in the demonstrations of last year.
These demonstrations were technically illegal because a permit for public assembly had been denied in certain cases (where disruption of commerce or other risks were perceived by the local government). The local government, however, had chosen not to enforce that law because of extremely widespread public support for those demonstrations. Apparent public silence, after many years of giant demonstrations, has given the Chinese government cover to come in and punish those who dare to commit “subversion” and “sedition” according to their hypersensitive interpretation of dissent.
Dissent in Hong Kong is being suppressed by the Chinese government in violation of the “one country, two systems” principle. The pandemic has given them the cover they needed to proceed with their attacks upon basic civil liberties in the territory of Hong Kong. The only Chinese territory that the Chinese central government cannot control is Taiwan. We must support the independent democratic government on the island of Taiwan to show the Chinese people what good governance actually looks like, as opposed to the totalitarian surveillance state administered by the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland.
A personal note: the virus and me
(random baby from my wife’s iphone)
This out-of-focus photograph illustrates how I felt on February 28, 2020. I didn’t know what was going on, I had no memory of the past; in fact, I had no past. I do remember thinking, when I first heard of the virus going around in Wuhan, this is going to be a veryveryvery serious problem. I had really no conception of just how serious it would be. Every day there are more infections and more people die. Yesterday, there were 2,340 deaths from COVID-19; 889,661 people were confirmed to have been infected in the United States according to Johns Hopkins. According to Worldometer, there are 912,913 confirmed cases in the US. There were 419 cases and 7 deaths recorded in Fresno County (my county) per Johns Hopkins. We have been in a government ordered community quarantine (whatever that means) since March 20. These numbers will be out of date by the time you read this post.
The staggering, eye-popping speed of infections and deaths here and throughout the world is staggering and eye-popping. I don’t know what to think. I must be extremely anxious, but my pulse, blood pressure, and temperature are normal. Maybe I should check them again.
Very little has changed for me. I do the same things every day, same as I did before this started. I don’t go anywhere. I sit in front of the computer. I go out and dig in my garden. I water the lawn and the flowers. One thing has changed. I’ve given up watching the news. I read the news on my new-ish iPhone, for three or four hours a day, but it’s always the same. The president has done and said something alarming and disgusting, maybe to restrict someone’s rights or throw someone off a government program. Now, he’s on TV for two hours every day, which I especially avoid. I can’t stand to see him or hear his voice. The prospect of having him for president for another four years is enough to make me vomit, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t even stop Devin Nunes, the representative in Congress for my rural neighborhood.
I can’t clearly remember what I used to do before all this began. Was everything really the same? My parents have been safely dead for some time. My wife has been semi-retired for some time. I have been retired for more than ten years. I recovered from surgery on my spine four years ago. Nothing has changed, but everything is different.
Now I live with a virus. It is too small to see, but so big that it overshadows everything. I think this is a good place to stop, because I can’t stand thinking about it for too long. I will go to seek solace in an old movie, or a few minutes of meditation, or a cheese sandwich. Anything but that orange-haired man-beast and that ugly little coronavirus.
flip flop sandals by Peggy Choucair courtesy of pixabay.com
First reports by the Financial Times today (April 23) of a remdesivir placebo-controlled trial in China say it was a “flop”. Virtually the same percentage of mortality was found– 13% vs. 14%– with 158 on remdesivir and 79 on a placebo; 18 were withdrawn due to side effects in the active group and an unspecified number (in the FT story) withdrawn from the placebo arm for side effects (this sounds absurd, but is expected in such a trial, in which even the doctors giving the pill don’t know whether it’s a placebo or the real thing).
Fierce Biotech ran a story on the same study and reached somewhat different conclusions. First, “Patients in both study arms experienced side effects at roughly the same rate (about 65%), but more patients on remdesivir stopped treatment early because of side effects compared with placebo (12% versus 5.1%).” Make of that what you will. Second, Gilead’s chief medical officer said, “The study was terminated early due to low enrollment, and, as a result, it was underpowered to enable statistically meaningful conclusions.”
Third, patients were treated as late as twelve days after onset of symptoms. This is too long; most infection treatments don’t help unless they are started early. For example, Tamiflu, which is available by prescription for influenza, says in its prescribing information (wording required by the FDA) that the drug must be started within 48 hours to have a significant beneficial effect in shortening the illness. This restriction makes sense, because the influenza virus (like most viruses) replicates rapidly in the early phases of disease; by the time symptoms are evident, the body has already started to react to the infection and replication rates are already dropping. To have any effect, the drug must interfere in the rapid replication phase and be started as soon as symptoms begin.
All of this does not say that remdesivir will work, even if it is started early. But this warning suggests that we should beware of studies that are done of people who don’t start taking the medicine until they are already in the recovery (and body reaction) phase of the disease.
Currently, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases is conducting a study of remdesivir in COVID-19, and Gilead is conducting additional placebo-controlled (phase III) studies as well. Only time will tell whether remdesivir is beneficial. In the meantime, the stock-buying public is getting a crash course in medicine.
Wuhan by Eric Manzi courtesy of pixabay.com
Bloomberg Businessweek reported a story about the re-opening of Wuhan on April 22, but of even more interest was this statement from the virus lab at the center of conspiracy theories about the outbreak of COVID-19 there:
Yuan Zhiming, director of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, hit back at those promoting theories that the virus had escaped from the facility and caused the outbreak in the central Chinese city. “There is absolutely no way that the virus originated from our institute,” Yuan said in an interview Saturday with the state-run China Global Television Network.
Yuan rejected theories that the yet-to-be identified “Patient Zero” for Covid-19 had contact with the institute, saying none of its employees, retirees or student researchers were known to be infected. He said U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, and Washington Post journalists were among those “deliberately leading people” to mistrust the facility and its “P4” top-level-security pathogen lab.
You could accuse Mr Yuan of lying, but that’s a pretty comprehensive denial– “none” of its workers “were known to be infected”…
The post I was going to write– about the precautions being taken in Hubei, capital of Wuhan– was a little overshadowed by that story.
What are they doing in Wuhan now that they’ve received permission from the Chinese government to come out of lockdown? First, everyone has a cellphone, and they have their status updated regularly: red for infected or likely infected, yellow for contacts, and green for no known contact. Second, when going to work, entering the mall, or going into a public building, everyone has their temperature taken, and anything over 37.3° Celsius (99.1° Fahrenheit) is investigated. Merely visiting a building or apartment where someone else is later found to have been infected will change your status from green to yellow. Apartment compounds can prevent anyone from leaving if an infected person is found within.
A Bloomberg reporter visited the Lenovo factory, where tablet computers are made, and discovered everything has changed. The lunchroom, for instance, is partitioned into individual eating spots with tall plastic barriers. Everyone who has returned to work has already been tested with the antigen nasal swab and an antibody blood draw. Robots are deployed wherever possible to transport supplies. Elevators are closed– everyone has to use the stairs.
The outbreak in Hubei was said to have peaked in mid-February, and according to the government, there are almost no new infections in the area. The surveillance state has gained even more power since the pandemic struck. Every movement, from taking the subway to going to the grocery store, is monitored. Despite the official claim that there is no more virus, people are not going to department stores, malls, or restaurants, and the subway is quiet. Cars are more popular than ever, because they provide individual transportation free of direct interactions with other people.
The government’s effort to control the outbreak in Wuhan was enormous: over 40,000 doctors were imported from other areas of China to help out and to replace others who had fallen ill (or died) from COVID-19. People suspected of being infected were quarantined in hotels and temporary, specially-constructed buildings until they were cleared. Large factories were repurposed to make ventilators and personal protective equipment on government command.
No-one was allowed to enter or leave Wuhan for three months; the first trains with departees left on April 8. Some people had been there on vacation and were stranded there the entire time.
Restrictions on people’s movement like that would be impossible to implement in a society like the United States. Voluntary compliance with isolation recommendations is the best we could do. The other things are do-able: temperature checks, physical distancing, cellphone apps with aggressive contact tracing, virus tests for everyone coming out of isolation. The only thing we can’t do is have mandatory quarantines for people even suspected of having contact with those infected. Quarantines, under US law, are limited to those with active, contagious lethal diseases– like smallpox or Ebola.
I think that enough people would voluntarily isolate themselves to have nearly the same effect as they had in China– especially if the US government were honest with its people and told them everything that is known about the virus, as well as all of our uncertainties and unanswered questions. Is it too much to ask for government people to tell us the truth? Probably, when our president refuses even to release his income tax returns.
sleeping panda by Cimberley courtesy of pixabay.com
Politico reported today (April 24) that the Bank of China bankrolled a nearly $1 billion refinancing deal on a property in which [redacted] has a 30% stake– one of His most expensive pieces of real estate– in 2012, via a $211 million, ten-year loan that formed part of the package. Sadly for Him, He is only a minority stakeholder in this real estate– so he has no control over the policies there and can’t put His name on the buildings.
Since He has been criticized for his weak, late response to the coronavirus crisis earlier this year, He has gone negative on China. At first, he was full of praise for Xi Jinping, the head of the Chinese state. Now he is blaming them for “covering up” the spread of the virus from its epicenter in Wuhan province. In point of fact, by early January the Chinese government was allowing its scientists to report on key facts about the virus: its complete genetic sequence, a critical bit of information that informed efforts to create tests for, and drugs against, the virus. Without actually saying so, the Chinese admitted that there was human-to-human spread. The Chinese warned the rest of the world that the virus would be highly contagious.
There were things the Chinese government did that could be seen as a “cover-up”: they wouldn’t allow foreign experts from WHO into the country for several weeks. They implicitly concealed the probable spread of the virus to four times the number of people who were officially reported. They have taken other steps that, in retrospect, appear to be counter-propaganda: after American sources claimed that the virus was either deliberately or accidentally released from a major virology lab in Hubei, Wuhan, a Chinese government source put out a theory that American soldiers had delivered the virus to Wuhan in late 2019 during a military exercise.
There has been, to be sure, a major propaganda war between the US and China, with the new virus a focal point for attacks from both sides. For example, I recently received in the mail a “newspaper” (unsolicited) from an American organization that was at least five double-sided, newspaper-sized pages with a layout closely resembling a conventional newspaper. The entire “news” content of the paper consisted of scurrilous attacks on China, starting with the assertion that “the Chinese Communist Party” was responsible for deliberately infecting US citizens and sending them back here to spread the virus. The content went downhill from there, and every single article consisted of a propaganda attack on China, particularly the Chinese Communist Party. There were no ads except for offers to subscribe. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that the Americans (at least the Republican Party) are spending good money to spread disinformation among the credulous rural voters in Devin Nunes’ (the “farmer”) congressional district.
This paper is produced by the “Epoch Times”, which claims to be a non-profit organization and uses this claim to get a discount on postage. The whole back page consisted of an ad offering a subscription and a request to share “CCPVirusTruth.com” “with at least 5 friends”. In large print, scare headlines announced that this paper is “A Factual and Honest Newspaper” and “LIES KILL, TRUTH SAVES”– “HELP ALL AMERICANS SEE THROUGH THE CCP’s COVERUP”. The headline on the front read, “How the Chinese Communist Party Endangered the World”. Every single article in this already yellowing paper repeated another aspect of the propaganda claims central to Fox “News” and [redacted]’s attacks on China.
One article went so far as to claim that “21 million fewer Cellphone Users in China May Suggest a High Death Toll”. The implication that over 20 million people in China have died from the novel coronavirus is staggering, not to mention incredible.
This type of propaganda is paid for by secret donations to Political Action Committees (PACs) tied to the Republican Party by like-minded individuals. It is only one example of the monies spent to distract from, distort, and deny the facts on the ground. These are attempts to instill fear and anger in the hearts of naive rural people.
Certainly the novel coronavirus originated in Wuhan, certainly local Communist Party officials initially attempted to cover up the existence of a new form of viral pneumonia. But the authorities completely reversed themselves when higher-ups realized that a truly dangerous situation was at hand. At first, a doctor was called into a police station and admonished for reporting (by the pre-authorized mechanism for reporting new diseases) cases of viral pneumonia that didn’t fit established patterns.
Two weeks later, his punishment was reversed and a formal apology was made to his family (after he died of the virus he warned about). The complete genetic sequence of the virus’ RNA was published in record time by the virological institute that is the subject of negative propaganda now. Its work was entirely confirmed by multiple outside labs in many other countries, and now forms the basis for many other sequences that show how the virus spread and mutated through-out the world.
The Republicans can complain that the Chinese government didn’t do a lot of things that would have been helpful to obtain complete transparency. But if their critics had not piled on with false conspiracy theories and anti-Asian ethnic slurs, perhaps they would not have felt so much pressure to counter with conspiracy theories of their own. At a time like this, when all of humankind is threatened by a new enemy, attacks against the very people who were trying their best to contain its spread are not helpful.
A final word about [redacted] and his obligations to a Chinese state bank: he has no business attacking Biden for being “soft on China” or claiming that his son Hunter profited from his connections to his father. The connections turned out to be a bust for Hunter Biden. He didn’t make any money from the failed deal with Chinese individuals who had business connections with the Chinese government. All he made was a headache for his father, who did not personally intervene to help him and is now being pilloried for having the same name as his son. That won’t stop the Republicans, of course. They are out to throw as much mud as they can against the wall in the hopes that some of it will stick.
Now is a perilous time for [redacted]. Objective citizens (independent voters, not registered with either major party) can see that He continues to fail in His response to the crisis, and they are reacting with disgust. His only plan is to double down on His attacks against American liberty and equality. He is increasing, quietly (while our attention is diverted by the crisis) His pernicious attempts to create more pollution and more global warming by repealing laws that were supposed to help reduce pollution and encourage our transition from fossil fuels to solar and wind energy.
You can expect to see more destruction of American institutions between now and the time Biden’s Democratic administration takes over in January 2021. His minions will continue to subvert the Voice of America by trying to install a head who will create a propaganda arm of his re-election campaign. He will continue to destroy protections for minority groups like LGBTQA people, full citizens who don’t deserve to be discriminated against by bigoted individuals. He will continue to hollow out our international obligations like the support of WHO and foreign aid to countries seriously affected by the new virus. In short, he will keep up the work he started in January 2017: an attempt to make America safe for plutocrats and billionaires, and dangerous for the lower 99% of our population.
flip flop sandals by Peggy Choucair courtesy of pixabay.com
First reports by the Financial Times today (April 23) of a remdesivir placebo-controlled trial in China say it was a “flop”. Virtually the same percentage of mortality was found– 13% vs. 14%– with 158 on remdesivir and 79 on a placebo; 18 were withdrawn due to side effects in the active group and an unspecified number (in the FT story) withdrawn from the placebo arm for side effects (this sounds absurd, but is expected in such a trial, in which even the doctors giving the pill don’t know whether it’s a placebo or the real thing).
Gilead’s stock dropped significantly after this story came out.
The FT story admits that the study was stopped prematurely due to low enrollment. We don’t know for sure what this means. Others are likely to weigh in with their own interpretations of this study as we will see over the next few days. Stay tuned.
photo courtesy of Gerd Altmann (geralt) via pixabay.com
According to the New York Times, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that a preliminary survey or 3,000 people found 14% with antibodies to the new virus. Among 1300 residents of New York City, 21% were positive. The survey was conducted among people who were out shopping, meaning they were not essential workers (like grocery clerks or bus drivers) but not isolated at home. The rate of positive results would probably be higher among essential workers, but lower among people who have isolated themselves at home. The sample will be increased over the next few weeks, which will give a better picture of who has been infected over the entire population of New York State.
The test results suggest that 2.6 million people across New York State had been infected with the virus, although there are only 250,000 positive antigen tests on record– a disparity of ten times.
image by Lothar Dieterich courtesy of pixabay.com
Multiple news outlets (including the BBC) have warned that the pandemic will lead to increased famine, particularly in Africa, where an outbreak of locusts has decimated crops throughout eastern Africa and southern Asia. Yemen has the worst famine in decades from the locusts already.
David Beasley, head of the World Food Programme (WFP), made the following statements:
“We could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months,” he said. “The truth is we do not have time on our side.”
In a call to action, he added: “I do believe that with our expertise and our partnerships, we can bring together the teams and the programmes necessary to make certain the Covid-19 pandemic does not become a human and food crisis catastrophe.”
Mr. Beasley himself recently recovered from an attack of COVID-19. He also said, “Excuse me for speaking bluntly… One way or another, the world will pay for this.” He predicted that 30 million people could die from the famine, a hundred times the number of people who have died from COVID-19 so far. The WFP currently feeds more than 12 million people a month in Yemen.
At the same time, it was reported that 26 million Americans had succeeded in filing for unemployment in the past month. Famine could affect people right here in America, as the food banks are under unprecedented stress from rising demand and smaller donations.
Surely, the US government could find a billion here or a billion there in its over $3 trillion relief program to help the hungry in Africa. But Mitch McConnell (Senate Majority Leader), the most powerful man in the US government after the *president, has said to the states, “drop dead”, literally telling them to file for bankruptcy (which they cannot do under law) in part to get out from under their onerous, underfunded pension obligations. There is no compassion in the people who run our government– none for our own states, who have been forced to compete for scarce supplies with the federal government, and none for the hungry of the world.
[the information about world famine was sourced from the BBC article referenced above; the part about our government comes from multiple recent news sources.]
Conrad Theodore Seitz 