geri cleveland contributed this via pixabay.com– it’s titled “lampions” (Chinese lanterns) and it reminded me of the electron micrographs of the novel coronavirus.
The first case of COVID-19 in the Philippines was reported on January 30, in a 38 year-old Chinese woman in Manila. She complained of a mild cough and had already recovered by the time test results were publicly announced. The first death occurred on February 1: a 44 year-old Chinese man, the companion of the first woman. He suffered from a co-infection with influenza and Streptococcus pneumoniae. The third case, another Chinese woman, consulted a doctor for “fever and rhinitis” on January 22. Testing was contradictory: a negative test on January 24 and a positive test on January 24.
That woman recovered and returned to China on January 31. For reference, about 1.3% of Filipinos are Chinese, and a large but unknown proportion of the country can trace some of their ancestors to China.
According to Wikipedia, no further cases were reported for a month. Two Filipinos were reported to be ill on March 6. One had visited Japan and the other a Muslim prayer hall in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
As of this morning, 30,094 cases and 144 deaths are recorded in the Philippines. Recorded cases have increased by ten times in the last fifteen days. As in many other countries, these counts are seriously minimized for many reasons. An unknown number of Filipinos have contracted and recovered or died from this disease. The more tragic aspect of this pandemic in the Philippines is that 17 doctors (as of March 31) have died of COVID-19.
Prior to January 30, there were no labs in the country that could perform confirmatory tests for the virus. On February 4, the National Institutes of Health at the University of the Philippines Manila announced that they had developed a test using PCR (polymerase chain reaction), similar to tests made by the World Health Organization (WHO) and in the US. The Department of Health (DOH) announced on March 25 that they were distributing 100,000 test kits to licensed facilities.
Now, the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) in Muntinlupa, Metro Manila and five “sub-national” labs are conducting testing for COVID-19 disease. Thirty other labs are working on proficiency testing to qualify for clinical use (to diagnose patients).
The President of the Philippines announced a public health emergency on March 9. Suspension of in-person schooling and a partial quarantine for metropolitan Manila were declared shortly thereafter. On March 17, the President declared “a state of calamity” for the next six months. On March 25, he signed a sweeping order giving him unprecedented powers: he called this the “Bayanihan to Heal as One Act”. (For non-Filipinos, “Bayanihan” means “the spirit of communal unity, work and cooperation to achieve a particular goal”.)
Some Philippine citizens have been repatriated from other countries and quarantined locally, but there have been multiple difficulties obtaining airplanes, permission to fly, pilots, and visas.
Numerous prominent Filipinos report having positive test results, including three incumbent Senators, the Armed Forces Chief of Staff, the Interior Secretary, the former Prime Minister, and a number of actors and actresses. At first, there was a public backlash because a number of politicians had been tested (and found positive) despite not having specific symptoms nor any travel history. Now, there are a lot more tests available, but the average Filipino will still face barriers to testing including distance, travel time, cost, severity of symptoms, and possibly the biases of individual medical practicioners.
The stock market has entered “bear territory”, thousands of people have lost their jobs, and many entertainment events have been cancelled. Tourism has been completely shut down, along with television shows; radio has been reduced to continuous news productions. Even Cable News Network (CNN) Philippines was forced to shut down on March 16 after one of its employees tested positive. DZMM Radyo Patrol (a 24 hour Filipino language news and talk radio station with a television arm) shut down on April 1 after their entire staff was forced into quarantine. Their programming was replaced by a feed from ABS-CBN News Channel, an English-language pay TV station.
Food production and distribution has been damaged. Restaurants have been closed except for delivery and take-out. Delivery of fresh vegetables from the province of Benguet, which supplies 80% of the country’s greens, has been halted by quarantines. Rice production has not been reduced because the latest harvest has come in, but imports of rice from Vietnam have stopped. In normal times, the Philippines was the largest exporter of rice in the world, yet 25% of its consumption came from Vietnamese imports. Zamboanga City, which supplies 85% of the country’s canned fish, has reduced its production by 50-60%.
Voter registration was suspended nationwide on March 10 until at least the end of April. Apparently this process is quite different in the Philippines from the US.
On January 31, a travel ban on Chinese nationals coming from Hubei province was announced. On March 22, the travel ban was extended to all foreign nationals.
Overall, the Philippines is undergoing a national disaster affecting all areas of its medical system, economy, and social life. The situation there is similar to that in New York City, New Jersey, and Long Island, only with a local flavor. All of the above information was obtained from Wikipedia, which has a long main article about the pandemic in the Philippines.
(yours truly trying to show shock and disgust at White House actions undermining intelligence community; facial expressions not being my strong suit)
In a typical purge of “disloyal” staff members of the executive branch performed at a moment when “nobody is watching” (distracted by the new virus and on a slow period for news pros), the WH (White House) put the inspector general for the intelligence community on leave. This is because the law says [redacted] has to give 30 days notice before removing personnel. There’s little doubt that this poor man was “escorted” (if not “frog-marched”) off the premises and searched for thumb drives with incriminating/embarrassing information stored on them.
This action follows hard upon the dismissal of the captain of an aircraft carrier who complained to his superiors that his crew was being overwhelmed by the spread of COVID-19 onboard. Sailors are being slowly disembarked from the ship on Guam, an American territory. Some are being quarantined in a hotel, but that’s only 700 of a crew of about 5,000. The rest are stacked cheek-by-jowl on a ship that is a perfect petri dish for viral pandemics– almost as good as a cruise ship, of which ten are still out there floating around.
The excuse for dismissing the aircraft carrier commander was that he somehow allowed his letter to his superiors to get “outside of the chain of command” by copying it to 20 additional recipients– all of whom were part of his chain of command. Nonetheless, the letter was quickly leaked, which he could have foreseen but wasn’t responsible for– since the subject of his complaint was already in the press and common knowledge. This smacks of “shooting the messenger” in the same way that the inspector general was figuratively shot out of hand (“loss of confidence” was cited as the excuse).
This disgusting behavior by the sociopathic, narcissistic solipsist who claims to be the Leader of the Free World is appalling but not surprising. Going back to the “era before coronavirus” (EBC) is difficult for most of us because mentally, the Earth seems to have fallen off a cliff sometime in January, February, or March (depending on when you realized that “life as we know it” was over).
To recap ancient history: last summer, the inspector general for the intelligence community defied WH political operatives who deemed the whistleblower’s complaint “not urgent” and who failed to transmit it to Congress. The law requires complaints that are urgent and credible to be transmitted to Congress, in secret if necessary. In this case, the concern was that the president had tried to link military assistance to Ukraine to the announcement of a sham investigation into the presidential candidate for an opposing party. Specifically, in the “perfect” phone call, the presidential pretender elliptically but clearly asked Ukraine’s new president for “a favor, though” immediately after discussing more of the Javelins (anti-tank missiles) which the US had sent Ukraine for defense against Russian aggression (which was happening during the phone conversation).
The transcript, which itself had been quietly redacted by persons unknown and then stored on a high secret computer server, also showed the person in the president’s chair repeating a bizarre conspiracy theory which claimed that Ukraine had interfered in the election against him. In fact, the Russian spy agency had spent a million dollars a month on digital operators who pretended to be American citizens and spread hostile disinformation about the candidate who was running against the eventual Commander-in-Cheat. This conman eventually seized the post by gaining less than 70,000 votes over his rival in three states out of over 120 million votes total across the country (while the other person racked up a record majority of 2.9 million votes AGAINST the Electoral College-declared winner).
The Ukrainian “conspiracy” against our con man president? A few public editorials in English on left-leaning news web sites. The main Ukrainian complaint against the candidate? That he was siding with the Russians against the Ukrainians over the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014. (Coincidentally, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev was born on the border of Ukraine and Russia and considered himself Ukrainian.)
Ancient history: Ukraine was a separate, sovereign country before the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the Russian civil war of 1917-1927. Then the Soviet Union was formed and subsumed several countries on its Western border: Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, et al. In WW II, the Soviets took over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, eastern Germany, Hungary, and several other countries (most of whom had been overrun by the Nazis during their Blitzkrieg to the East); following the war, the Soviets withdrew their armies but left puppet governments behind.
When the Soviet Union was dissolved following the Chernobyl disaster (which occurred April 26, 1986) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian parliament newly elected under perestroika voted to re-declare itself a sovereign nation in 1990. Crimea has always been part of Ukraine, but the Soviets resettled a number of Eastern peoples there to control rebellious groups, much in the same way that they used Siberia for political prisoners. Crimea makes an ideal open-air prison as it is a peninsula that pinches off so tightly that it looks like an island.
The Russians seized Crimea apparently in retaliation for the “Maidan revolution” in which a lavishly corrupt, pro-Russian government was over-thrown after popular protests on the Maidan square. After government gunmen shot a number of demonstrators, the Ukrainian leader fled to Russia in fear for his life. The politicians who remained behind ceded power to the “revolutionaries” without forcing them to commit to an armed struggle. Russian propaganda outlets cast this as an “armed coup” which was supervised by Americans; this line was completely false, and the facts on the ground showed that peaceful demonstrators were shot by police and support for the government collapsed as a result.
After Russia overran Crimea with “little green men” (Russian soldiers with the identifying tags removed from their uniforms), they built a very long bridge from the western edge of the continent across the straits to the northeastern corner of Crimea. This bridge was necessary to facilitate Russian military and civilian traffic to Crimea, making it possible to go there without crossing territory that still nominally belonged to Ukraine.
Not satisfied with Crimea, the Russians invaded Donbas in northeastern Ukraine. Donbas has long been a vital industrial area of Ukraine, and it produced vast quantities of war materiel for the Soviets during WW II. The low-level invasion continues to this day, although it has stalled in the face of patriotic resistance supported by European and American materiel. This is a good exemplar of the new Russian war doctrine: hybrid war using all possible means, including propaganda and “cyber-war”.
The “Ukrainian rebels” (mostly ethnic Russians and mercenaries) were responsible for the accidental shoot-down of a commercial passenger jet that happened to cross over Ukrainian airspace at about 33,000 feet altitude (normal cruising height for such planes) on its way to Asia. The Russians claimed that the jet was mistaken for a Ukrainian warplane, and there is little reason to dispute that, since the deaths of 300 civilians in a very expensive airplane was a public relations disaster. The rest of the Russian story about this crash was false, including who was responsible for arming the “rebels” with anti-aircraft missiles capable of taking down targets flying at high altitude.
The spread of Russian disinformation and our con man president’s credulity in the face of their conspiracy theories and blame-shifting for their election interference is shocking, disturbing, and likely to destroy our democracy if it is not stopped. The conman has removed an essential professional for daring to report a phone conversation that he and his minions tried to keep secret. For shame.
(To Eric: if you have gotten this far, please fact-check this document and provide feedback.)
(sars-cov-2 viruses budding from epithelial cells in culture –electron micrograph from NIAID via Medscape.com)
This evening the Washington Post dropped a long article explaining how the US failed to produce virus testing kits in time and/or in quantity for our pandemic. It makes for deeply tragic reading.
The first step was when Chinese researchers published the virus’ genetic sequence on January 10. With the code in hand, virologists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were able to develop a specific test which identified the virus. They accomplished this in a week– record time. Then they had to produce test kits to distribute to local public health laboratories around the country. That is where an error slipped in, and one of the chemical reagents used in the production version turned out to cause errors in the results.
With the version of the test created at the central lab, the first patient in the US was identified. This 35 year old man re-entered Washington State on January 15 after visiting relatives in Wuhan. When he fell ill, he remembered seeing notices about a new virus in China and told his doctors that he might have it. They ordered a test and confirmed on January 20 that he was infected with SARS-COV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Type 2) and was suffering from COVID (COronaVIrus Disease). He was treated with remdesivir and recovered. His case was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine online on January 31.
Before the US could mass-produce a test, the World Health Organization (WHO) made one that worked and distributed 250,000 test kits to 70 labs worldwide. The CDC created their own test and decided to produce it in quantity for US labs rather than depend on the WHO test. They scaled up the test they were using and made kits that were distributed to state and county public health laboratories. That is when the problem developed. At the same time, university and private commercial laboratories were rushing to develop tests of their own and bring them to market.
The labs that had to use the mass-produced test discovered that they were getting wrong results on February 8. On January 31, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary had announced a public health emergency– the very next day after WHO declared the same. This declaration by HHS is supposed to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) flexibility to speed approvals for critical supplies, including commercial diagnostic tests. When the declaration was put into effect, it made the CDC test, which was approved on February 4, the only legal test in the US.
The declaration also created red tape for government-certified clinical labs at universities and hospitals. Under normal circumstances, such labs are allowed to create their own tests without FDA interference as long as they use them only in their own centers and do not sell them. When a public health emergency is declared, an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) is required of them as an additional step to ensure the quality of the tests.
This EUA is a nasty piece of red tape, with which the lab scientists were not familiar. They struggled with the test produced by the CDC and made it work, but they weren’t allowed to use it until they applied for and received the EUA. One lab director described the EUA process as “flawed, broken, and inefficient” because it did not allow the local labs to modify the approved test they were given to make it work, and they could not proceed until they had filled out mounds of paperwork.
By February 12, the US had completed a total of 2,009 tests, all at the central laboratory. Samples which were taken locally had to be shipped to the central CDC offices for processing, which introduced a delay of several days. In the meantime, South Korea began to test 1,000 people a day. The WHO test was available to US researchers, but legally could not be used to give clinical test results for individual patients because an EUA had not been done. It was used only for research. WHO officials said that the US did not discuss using their test (or ask them for help).
Weeks were lost in filling out EUA forms and waiting for bureaucrats to approve them. Five people at Mayo clinic worked 15 hour days for three weeks to get the data and paperwork that the FDA demanded for the EUA. On February 24, the Association of Public Health laboratories submitted a formal request for the FDA to loosen the EUA rules. By February 27, the famous Anthony S. Fauci became involved. On February 29, the FDA allowed clinical laboratories outside the CDC to begin using any test for the virus without the paperwork, and said that they could submit papers within fifteen days after starting.
On March 2, the University of Washington began testing and within a few days was performing 2,800 tests a day. Within two weeks, Roche and Thermo Fisher Scientific (two of the bigger laboratory manufacturers) won approval for their tests. By the middle of March, there were 2,000 confirmed cases in the US. As of yesterday, there are over a quarter of a million confirmed COVID cases.
Dr. Fauci is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position he has held for many years. On March 12, he told Congress in person that the coronavirus testing system was “a failure”.
(sars-cov-2 budding from apoptotic cells, electron micrograph from NIAID via Medscape.com)
This pandemic could destroy many American hospitals with two simultaneous hits to their income: First, cancellation of all elective surgeries, upon which they depend for steady revenues; Second, a crush of sick people infected with the novel coronavirus.
Already, hospital administrators are warning that they have lost needed revenue because all elective surgeries have been postponed indefinitely. These non-emergent surgeries are usually paid for by insurance plans and provide a steady revenue stream to hospital systems. For the last two weeks, such surgeries have been stopped, and they will not resume for many months due to shortages of necessary materials even after the wave of infected patients subsides.
At the same time, critically ill patients, many of whom have no insurance (especially those with multiple co-morbidities who were unemployed and fell through the Medicaid “safety net”, are about to flood every hospital in the country. This rush of uncompensated care will be poisonous to hospital’s bottom lines.
Some money has been provided in Congress’ third emergency pandemic legislation, but it will not be nearly enough.
Two things have to happen to save our American hospitals: a large infusion of cash and universal health insurance. Let’s see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together to solve this problem.
“A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.” (Raymond Chandler)
(electron micrograph of sars-cov-2 budding from apoptotic cells by NIAID via Medscape.com)
A new article in Science magazine describes an instant digital contact tracing method that may be fast enough to control the spread of the novel coronavirus. The problem with manual contact tracing is that it is too slow to keep up with a virus that may be asymptomatic and takes five days to jump from one person to the next.
A smartphone app is being used in China and South Korea and reduces the need for overall lockdowns that disrupt society by instantly notifying contacts of persons identified with infection. It requires buy-in from the public and needs to be carefully implemented. The article describes a number of requirements that will facilitate buy-in:
Requirements for the intervention to be ethical and capable of commanding the trust of the public are likely to comprise the following.
i. Oversight by an inclusive and transparent advisory board, which includes members of the public.
ii. The agreement and publication of ethical principles by which the intervention will be guided.
iii. Guarantees of equity of access and treatment.
iv. The use of a transparent and auditable algorithm.
v. Integrating evaluation and research in the intervention to inform the effective management of future major outbreaks.
vi. Careful oversight of and effective protections around the uses of data.
vii. The sharing of knowledge with other countries, especially low- and middle-income countries.
viii. Ensuring that the intervention involves the minimum imposition possible and that decisions in policy and practice are guided by three moral values: equal moral respect, fairness, and the importance of reducing suffering.
The success of this smartphone app requires the public to have confidence that it will work and that it does not unnecessarily compromise privacy. This is a difficult ask, but it is being used in a democratic society, South Korea, and it is working. One caveat for the United States is that there is not a “guarantee of equity of access and treatment” because there is no universal health insurance. This one problem could be solved by Congress, if they legislated “free” treatment for virus infection. This action would also save the hospitals from insolvency caused by interruption of their most important revenue stream, elective surgeries, and relief from the burden of uncompensated care for the crush of sick people with the viral infection.
There is a very real danger that many American hospital systems will be forced into bankruptcy by the loss of income from elective surgeries and a rush of virus-infected critical care patients. This problem cannot be over-emphasized, and it will inevitably force us to face the need for universal health insurance in this country.
(electron micrograph of SARS-COV-2 by NIAID via Medscape.com)
(image courtesy of pixabay.com and Marija Gavrilova)
Jared Kushner is working on government coronavirus response behind the scenes, sometimes duplicating the work of experts and displacing qualified personnel from their assigned tasks. He was blamed for his claim that states can’t use the Strategic National Stockpile. According to HuffPost, he said the following:
“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be the states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
The Strategic National Stockpile website, however, states the following:
“When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”
Huffpost then quoted Chris Hayes’ tweet: “our stockpile”…”Jared’s personal stash?”
This shows his sense of personal entitlement and takeover of property meant to be under his care. He is transforming it into the personal property of his father-in-law to use as he pleases. This is an illustration of just how unqualified is this nepotist with an unearned position of power. His experience as an inherited landlord and all-around narcissist explains how he got permission from the solipsistic, sociopathic narcissist-in-chief to marry that door-prize daughter.
Update: on Friday morning, someone took time off from coordinating the pandemic response to go to the website noted above and delete the language that I quoted. Apparently they are reading HuffPost or some other liberal rag and responding to it by trying to cover their tracks. Unfortunately, similar language is repeated all over that website and numerous other government websites so it looks like an obviously incompetent attempt to change reality.
We are reminded of the scenes in Nineteen Eighty Four in which the hero is occupied, as part of his job for the government, in erasing historical documents and substituting currently accepted language, in some cases destroying all trace of an individual’s existence. In this web-enabled world, it is next to impossible to erase the truth. Facilities such as the Way Back Machine keep archived copies of websites so that when they are erased or otherwise disappear, it is possible to retrace the steps by which certain individuals attempt to cover up the facts.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and Engin_Akyurt)
(image courtesy of pixabay.com and Marija Gavrilova)
Jared Kushner is working on government coronavirus response behind the scenes, sometimes duplicating the work of experts and displacing qualified personnel from their assigned tasks. He was blamed for his claim that states can’t use the Strategic National Stockpile. According to HuffPost, he said the following:
“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be the states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
The Strategic National Stockpile website, however, states the following:
“When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”
Huffpost then quoted Chris Hayes’ tweet: “our stockpile”…”Jared’s personal stash?”
This shows his sense of personal entitlement and takeover of property meant to be under his care. He is transforming it into the personal property of his father-in-law to use as he pleases. This is an illustration of just how unqualified is this nepotist with an unearned position of power. His experience as an inherited landlord and all-around narcissist explains how he got permission from the solipsistic, sociopathic narcissist-in-chief to marry that door-prize daughter.
(Olive Oyl wants to know when dinner is going to be served)
A Chinese report published on the pre-print (not peer-reviewed) server BioRxIv states that, of 102 cats surveyed after the novel coronavirus outbreak, fifteen tested positive for virus and eleven had neutralizing antibodies (indicating immunity). This report suggests that cats are susceptible to infection with the novel coronavirus, although there is no indication of increased mortality. So cats can catch it, but we don’t know and doubt that they get really sick from it. Our cats are susceptible too.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 