Jts5665

(1) “Drug repurposing”: it’s a thing. Basically, if you have an emerging disease and need a remedy right this minute — even if you design a new drug that works well in the test tube, you are still faced with months of Phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials.

In contrast, if you can repurpose an existing drug that is already approved for treatment of another condition, you can skip testing whether the drug is safe, what side effects it has, and what is a safe dosage range. (As the old quip goes, nothing is safe at all doses, not even dihydrogen monoxide ;)) All you need to establish is: does it work against the new disease?

So there have been massive efforts to screen databases of approved drugs for molecules that inhibit this, that, or the other enzyme that is a vital part of the viral reproduction cycle. Increasingly, the first step of this is done on the computer, and the most promising candidates are then tested out in vitro, then in “animal models”.

But sometimes scientists stumble serendipitously on something that seems to work. SCIENCE magazine reports on… the H2 antagonist famotidine (sold in the US under the brand name Pepcid), used widely as a heartburn remedy until more recently displaced by proton pump inhibitors such as omeprazole (Prilosec).

“The virus was killing as many as one out of five patients older than 80 [in Wuhan]. Patients of all ages with hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were faring poorly. Callahan and his Chinese colleagues got curious about why many of the survivors tended to be poor. “Why are these elderly peasants not dying?” he asks.

In reviewing 6212 COVID-19 patient records, the doctors noticed that many survivors had been suffering from chronic heartburn and were on famotidine rather than more-expensive omeprazole (Prilosec), the medicine of choice both in the United States and among wealthier Chinese. Hospitalized COVID-19 patients on famotidine appeared to be dying at a rate of about 14% compared with 27% for those not on the drug, although the analysis was crude and the result was not statistically significant.

But that was enough for Callahan to pursue the issue back home. […]

“Anecdotal evidence has encouraged the Northwell researchers. After speaking to Tracey, David Tuveson, director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center, recommended famotidine to his 44-year-old sister, an engineer with New York City hospitals. She had tested positive for COVID-19 and developed a fever. Her lips became dark blue from hypoxia. She took her first megadose of oral famotidine on 28 March. The next morning, her fever broke and her oxygen saturation returned to a normal range. Five sick co-workers, including three with confirmed COVID-19, also showed dramatic improvements after taking over-the-counter versions of the drug, according a spreadsheet of case histories Tuveson shared with Science. Many COVID-19 patients recover with simple symptom-relieving medications, but Tuveson credits the heartburn drug. “I would say that was a penicillin effect,” he says.”

“After an email chain about Tuveson’s experience spread widely among doctors, Timothy Wang, head of gastroenterology at Columbia University Medical Center, saw more hints of famotidine’s promise in his own retrospective review of records from 1620 hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Last week, he shared the results with Tracey and Callahan, and he added them as a co-authors on a paper now under review at the Annals of Internal Medicine. All three researchers emphasize, though, that the real test is the trial now underway. “We still don’t know if it will work or not,” Tracey says.”

I am definitely looking forward to the results of that trial.

(2) I have heard the claim made that US hospitals have a financial incentive to code a patient as COVID19. Given the complexity of the US health insurance market (and governmental players in it), it struck me as “plausible, but verify”. Turns out: yes, Virginia. (The article notes that notoriously left-biased Snopes agrees with them.)

In our own system, there is no financial incentive to do so as it all comes out of the same insurance pool (divided among the four authorized HMOs by enrollment, not actual costs). Whatever downsides our socialized-with-private-options medical system may have, a perverse incentive to code a non-COVID19 patient as COVID19 is not one of them. As a result, we have “only” 208 COVID19 deceased at the time of writing, according to the Ministry of Health’s daily update.

A source in Belgium’s medical community told me that pathologists massively write COVID19 as the cause of death “if the patient has even been near a COVID19 case”, even if the actual cause is heart attack, stroke,… This appears to be one reason for the anomalously high per-capita COVID19 mortality in Belgium (the highest in the world, and far in excess of next-door Germany which uses much stricter criteria). When all-cause mortalities were compared year over year, an excess mortality was found that is comparable to neighboring countries.

(3) In this interview with Imperial College modeler Neil Ferguson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cYjjEB3Ev8 (yes, the one with the “two million million will die” model, that later got revised drastically downward) he seems to take a more nuanced position than some of his acolytes, sees continued lockdown as unrealistic “and causing excess mortality from other causes” (!), expects a second wave (he’s not alone in that), and favors a South Korean-style test, track & trace approach. Defends himself as “as a nation, we acted in time to prevent a breakdown of medical services”. For balance, I offer a video on the same channel by his Swedish critic Prof. Johan Giesecke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfN2JWifLCY The interviewer is fairly tough on both: nice to see some actual journalism.

(4) in John Campbell’s daily update, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu00u2dEnbs about 16 minutes in, John Campbell discussed “pediatric inflammation syndrome” in the UK. Is it COVID19 or some unidentified viral pathogen? Abdominal pain, GI symptoms more annoying than anything else, cardiac involvement more worrisome. “Let’s hope that comes to nothing, but would seem to be expedient to have a higher index of suspicion [of abdominal pain in children].”

He also thinks Canada is starting to look good.

(5) Miscellaneous updates (h/t Mrs. Arbel):

• pathologists are reshaping the time line of when the virus arrived to the USA. https://www.wsj.com/articles/pathologists-hunt-for-earlier-coronavirus-cases-in-new-york-11588003955 For instance, in early February, a 57-year old woman in Santa Clara County, CA (read: Silicon Valley) died of what later found to be COVID-19. [Note that, since it takes 2-3 weeks to get sick enough to die of the virus, that implies she was infected around mid-January.]

• The secretive group of scientists and billionaires pushing for a Manhattan Project against COVID19 (which would not be specific to SARS-nCoV-2 but likely cover the entires family of coronaviruses) https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-group-of-scientists-and-billionaires-pushing-trump-on-a-covid-19-plan-11587998993?mod=trending_now_1
• Israel Aircraft Industries proposes UV-C based “sterilization robot” for passenger airplanes. This technique is both more effective than disinfectant fluids, works faster, and does not require “drying time” after treatment.  https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/israels-iai-tests-uv-light-solution-to-sterilize-passenger-aircraft-625983

Today, Israel marks Yom HaZikaron, or Memorial Day, for its fallen soldiers. Tonight (days on the Jewish calendar run sundown to sundown) it will transition into Yom HaAtzmaut or Independence Day — the former to remind us of those who paid the ultimate price for the latter.

THE MAIN RULE OF JOURNALISM IS THAT TRUMP IS NEVER ALLOWED TO BE RIGHT. An Experimental Ultraviolet Light Treatment for Covid-19 Takes Political Heat: Trump’s musings prompt social-media censorship of information about an experimental treatment.

I ran an obscure pharmaceutical company until a few days ago. Then we got famous. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Aytu BioScience made a commitment to find ways to help. One of those ways came through our newly formed relationship with a prominent Los Angeles hospital.

On April 20 we put out a press release titled “Aytu BioScience Signs Exclusive Global License with Cedars-Sinai for Potential Coronavirus Treatment.” The treatment is called Healight, and it was developed by research physicians at the hospital’s Medically Associated Science and Technology Program. The technology, which has been in development since 2016, uses ultraviolet light as an antimicrobial and is a promising potential treatment for Covid-19.

Aytu and Cedars-Sinai have engaged with the Food and Drug Administration to pursue a rapid path to human use through an Emergency Use Authorization. But hardly anyone noticed—until Thursday, when President Trump mused, “. . . supposing you brought the light inside the body . . .”

My team and I knew the president’s comments could trigger a backlash against the idea of UV light as a treatment, which might hinder our ability to get the word out. We decided to create a YouTube account, upload a video animation we had created, and tweet it out. It received some 50,000 views in 24 hours.

Then YouTube took it down. So did Vimeo. Twitter suspended our account. The narrative changed from whether UV light can be used to treat Covid-19 to “Aytu is being censored.”

These days, politics seems to dictate that if one party says, “The sky is blue,” the other party is obligated to reply, “No, it’s not, and you’re a terrible human being for thinking that.” That leaves no room for science, in which the data speak for themselves, regardless of ideology, and only when they’re ready. Unfortunately, the visceral excitement of political conflict draws far more clicks and better ratings than the methodical world of science.

Technologies like Healight, which if borne out through clinical studies may represent a viable way to kill coronaviruses, aren’t provided the clear-headed consideration they deserve but are instead flushed into the political mosh-pit of “us vs. them.”

Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo are under enormous pressure from political activists. They also need to ensure that information on their platforms is safe and accurate. That’s exactly why Aytu decided to post videos and tweet about Healight.

We at Aytu BioScience are confident that treatments for Covid-19 will be found. We hope we can help. But above all we hope science will ultimately speak louder than politics.

Hope indeed. I’d just be happy if social media companies weren’t complete tools of politicized lefty “activists.”

THE CHINA COVID COVERUP: Chinese internet users who uploaded coronavirus memories to GitHub have been arrested.

A group of volunteers in China who worked to prevent digital records of the coronavirus outbreak from being scrubbed by censors are now targets of a crackdown.

Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project. Chen Mei has been missing since that same day. On April 24, the couple’s families received a police notice that informed them of the charge, and said the two have been put under “residential surveillance at a designated place.” There is still no information about Chen Mei, said his brother. . . .

Chinese citizens had been turning to Microsoft-owned GitHub after the outbreak began, as it remains one of the few major foreign websites that can still be accessed in China. Now, volunteers linked to these GitHub pages are facing the growing risk of reprisals from authorities. Another GitHub page, #2020 nCov memory, which was initiated by seven volunteers around the world to chronicle personal accounts and news stories of the outbreak, is no longer publicly available. In an email (link in Chinese), the team behind the page said that its members decided to make the page private to avoid “potential risks,” according to a screenshot of the email shared on social network Weibo.

In addition to the GitHub volunteers, three journalists have also disappeared since February while reporting from Wuhan, the city where the outbreak was first discovered. Among them, only Li Zehua, a former employee of the state broadcaster, recently resurfaced, and said in a video that he had been detained and placed under quarantine by police for “disrupting public order,” but also praised the actions of the police. The whereabouts of citizen journalists Chen Qiushi and Fan Bin remain unknown.

Related: China Is Working Overtime to Suppress Research About Coronavirus Origin.

This won’t make any headlines in the liberal mainstream press.

Since 1995 the United Kingdom and Wales has had five flu seasons that were worse than the current coronavirus outbreak.
And yet there were no screaming headlines and no lockdowns.

Draconian lockdowns were not considered necessary back then.

And the previous flu outbreaks hit children and young adults.

Via InProportion:

Via Andrew Bostom.

UK total mortality in the recent past compared to covid19 pandemic of 2019-20, weeks 49 to 15: “since 1995 in England & Wales, there have been five seasons that were worse” https://t.co/gMt0cDsoVo pic.twitter.com/YuPpNNL18m

— Andrew Bostom (@andrewbostom) April 27, 2020

The post The ‘Experts’ Were Wrong: Since 1995 the UK Has Seen Five Flu Seasons Worse Than Current Coronavirus Outbreak appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

FASTER, PLEASE: Smart contact lens accurately monitors blood sugar in rabbits, human tests next.

If the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no situation so severe that government can't make it worse. Government's recent crimes are legion: standing in the way of testing; complicating efforts to acquire protective equipment; imposing authoritarian and uniform lockdown rules across very different populations; and enforcing those rules in dangerous and ill-considered ways.

If you can assess the conduct of government officials through the pandemic and conclude that what we really need is more of that, then we're probably going to cure the novel coronavirus long before we find a treatment for whatever it is that ails you.

The societies over which governments exert their power are made up of myriad individuals, businesses, churches, and organizations interacting with one another for purposes of their own. The people in a society may inhabit dense urban areas or sparsely settled countryside. They may have deep pockets or meager resources. They may have high tolerances for risk or shy away from danger. Often, they have little in common except goods, services, and ideas to exchange for mutual benefit. Forcing them to walk in lockstep makes little sense.

"Americans are being told they must still play by New York rules—with all the hardships they entail—despite having neither New York's living conditions nor New York's health outcomes," Bret Stephens pointed out in The New York Times last weekend.

Other than a few basic rules like "don't murder" and "don't steal," there is very little you can impose from the top-down on a diverse society that can help and please one group without hurting and offending another. But that's exactly what government does—inflicting one-size-fits-all-mandates that don't fit many people at all and are usually poorly considered, at that. And during this pandemic, the government has exercised its taste for incompetence and draconian rules with a vengeance.

Famously, the federal government produced a dumpster fire of a COVID-19 test rather than adopt proven tests developed elsewhere. It also prevented universities, researchers, and private laboratories from developing their own tests, throwing bureaucratic hurdles in their way for weeks and allowing the disease to spread.

When it became obvious that available stocks of personal protective equipment were insufficient, federal regulators told aspiring new mask producers that getting approval for their efforts could take anywhere from 45 to 90 days.

Distilleries that tried to shift to producing much-sought hand sanitizer discovered they would be required to pollute their production lines with "denaturant" meant to make the product unpalatable—and therefore complicating the return to producing beverages after the crisis passed.

When hospitals and state officials do find supplies, they have to worry that they'll be flat-out stolen by federal agencies who think they would be better used by somebody else.

Rules closing businesses, limiting gatherings, and even restricting outdoor excursions were supposed to "flatten the curve" to slow the spread of COVID-19 so that hospitals didn't get overwhelmed. But the virus didn't hit the same way everywhere. Instead, New York City and a few other hot spots got slammed. Elsewhere, most medical facilities found themselves tending empty beds, pondering the fate of patients whose "elective" cancer, heart, and back surgeries are deferred to some uncertain date in the future, and watching cash reserves dwindle for lack of patients to treat.

"Mayo Clinic is furloughing or reducing the hours of about 42 percent of its 70,000 employees across all of its campuses in an attempt to mitigate the financial losses from the COVID-19 pandemic," reports the Rochester Post-Bulletin of the famed medical system. "About 60 percent of Mayo Clinic's business comes from elective procedures of the kind that are now on hold."

Furloughs and pay cuts are "a function of clumsy, if well-intentioned, federal and state directives to halt all non-emergency procedures," writes Rick Jackson of Jackson Healthcare, a medical staffing company. He wants the government to get out of the way so doctors and patients can decide for themselves.

Idled doctors and untreated patients are the consequences of rules intended to help the healthcare system. Stay-at-home orders take an even bigger toll on people and industries that are collateral damage.

With 26.5 million jobs lost since governments started ordering businesses closed, the unemployment rate is estimated to have topped 20 percent and could be headed north of 30 percent. Some of those jobs aren't coming back—at least not in the short term—because the businesses that offered them are themselves on the brink of extinction.

A few sectors—such as department stores—were already on the ropes and lockdowns are the final straw. Others are small businesses that can't suspend operations indefinitely and expect to pick up where they left off. They'll eventually be replaced, but only after bankruptcies, impoverishment, and a period of rebuilding inflicted by government decree. Those are costs rarely considered by those who insist, under penalty of law, that we focus on one set of risks and disregard others.

Governments have brought the same lack of judgment behind the formulation of their stay-at-home orders to their enforcement. Violators have been tossed into crowded jail cells, chased through the lonely ocean for daring to venture outside, fined for attending church services while isolated in their cars, and arrested for playing with their children in public.

Inevitably—if to the surprise of those who reflexively defer to government officials—people push back.

This past weekend saw thousands gather to protest in Madison, Wisconsin, echoing demonstrations elsewhere. Some attendees see rules tailored to help densely settled cities "driving resentment among people who live in areas with many fewer cases of the virus and are being subject to the same economic restrictions," according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

True, individuals can exercise poor judgment, gathering too closely in a time of contagion. But their choices are relatively limited in their impact, putting at risk mostly others who choose to gather with them. By contrast, government amplifies the effect of every decision, imposing rules—good or bad—favored by the loudest and most influential across the population. When the decisionmakers are foolish, or panic-stricken, or corrupt, or just idiots, they get to spread the damage they do far and wide.

As we've seen, there is lots of foolishness, panic, corruption, and idiocy to go around in government. That's why it's not enough to say that better people would give us better rules and rule-enforcement. Yes, the president seems utterly clueless when he weighs in on the pandemic. And yes, the governors who are often in conflict with the president appear alternately power-hungry and eager to punish political enemies. But these are the actual officials our system produces, not the philosopher kings some election of the future is supposed to produce once the current officeholders are swept away.

Besides, the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials who screwed up testing and hamper companies trying to respond to the crisis are precisely the sort of experts to whom we're supposed to defer. They're no better with coercive power than anybody else.

And because government and one-size-fits-all rulemaking are involved, the lockdowns and protests are yet more stress for an already politically fractured country. A new working paper by economists from Stanford, Harvard, and New York University finds "substantial gaps between Republicans and Democrats in beliefs about the severity of COVID-19 and the importance of social distancing."

Pandemic politics are certain to make coming elections and factional battles of the future even nastier than they were going to be.

The common problem here is government itself. In a time of health crisis, government has proven to be a crippling underlying condition that weakens society, slows our ability to battle a dangerous disease, and turns us against one another. Fighting COVID-19 is an important short-term goal but eradicating or at least mitigating the plague of government would be an even greater victory for health.

The post Report: 28.3 Million Mail-In Ballots Are Unaccounted for Since 2012 appeared first on The Bongino Report.

This is not about a virus.

15 uniformed officers from 4 different law enforcement agencies descended on a restaurant in Maryland and cited the owner for violating the state’s lockdown order.

Dave Carey, the owner of Lee’s Landing Dock Bar is facing prosecution because approximately 70 people were standing in line waiting for their takeout orders.

Mr. Carey said people waiting for their food were following the social distancing guidelines “to the letter of the law” but the police swarmed his establishment anyway.

Authorities said the restaurant was violating the lockdown order because some people were consuming drinks on the premises while they were waiting for their takeout orders.

“What exactly did we do wrong?” Carey asked. “And who had the authority to take that many resources off the road?”

Maryland State Police spox Greg Shipley told the Cecil Daily, “The investigation indicated the restaurant was selling ‘to go’ food and drink orders, but some of that food and drink was being consumed on the premises. The crowd dispersed and those who remained were determined to be waiting for carryout orders.”

So people are allowed to funnel into grocery stores, but they can’t go into a restaurant…because the government said so.

Cecil Daily reported:

Maryland State Police from the North East barrack have sent information to the Cecil County State’s Attorney’s Office for possible prosecution of Lee’s Landing Dock Bar for alleged violation of the Maryland COVID-19 regulations.

However the owner of the business, Dave Carey, said he was following Gov. Larry Hogan’s regulations for social distancing and crowd size “to the letter of the law” and is troubled that 15 uniformed officers from 4 different law enforcement agencies responded to Lee’s Landing Sunday.

Greg Shipley, spokesman for MSP, said police were at Lee’s Landing at Rowland Drive in Port Deposit Sunday around 2:30.

“Responding troopers estimated the crowd upon their arrival to be about 70 people who were on the ‘boardwalk’ portion of the business. Individuals were seen eating and drinking,” Shipley said via email.

Troopers said they were at the Port Deposit restaurant a week ago responding to reports of large numbers of patrons. Sgt. S. Spayd said Sunday that the law enforcement agency had to return this Sunday and found more than 70 motorcycles in the parking lot.

Dave Carey was shocked by the amount of officers who descended on his business.

“It’s hard enough to get two cops at any other time,” Carey told the Cecil Daily. “If I called for a riot I wouldn’t get that kind of response.”

Had enough yet, America?

The post 15 Uniformed Officers From 4 Different Law Enforcement Agencies Rush to Target Restaurant Owner For Violating Maryland’s Lockdown Order appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MANCHURIAN MEDIA: Atlantic Magazine: Hurrah for Pandemic Censorship!

Exit quote: “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”

NOT JUST FOOD: COVID-19 Highlights the Harms of Bad Food Regulations and the Benefits of Lifting Them.

FLASHBACK: The Man Who Beat the 1957 Flu Pandemic: Pioneering virologist Maurice Hilleman, who is little remembered today, also helped develop nine of the 14 children’s vaccines that are now recommended.

An irascible, no-holds-barred Montana farm boy born in the midst of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, Hilleman survived diphtheria and Great Depression-era poverty to earn a PhD in microbiology and chemistry at the University of Chicago. Practical and impatient, he turned down the prestige of academia and primarily worked in industry, at the pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb & Sons and later Merck & Co, where he led vaccine research for 25 years.

An iconoclast who slung swear words like the proverbial sailor, Hilleman helped develop an astounding 40 vaccines: to prevent measles, mumps, rubella, pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis A and B, and other infectious diseases. The measles vaccine alone has saved an estimated one million lives a year. “Maurice’s genius was in developing vaccines, reliably reproducing them, and [taking charge] of all pharmaceutical facets, from research to marketplace,” biographer Paul A. Offit, MD, told the British Medical Journal for Hilleman’s obituary in 2005. The New York Times later noted that researchers credit him with “saving more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century.”

Sure, but what kind of shirt did he wear?

(1) Bret Stephens in the NYT: lockdowns are good for NYC, but why should the rest of the USA have to play by the same rules as congested NYC?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/opinion/coronavirus-lockdown.html?referringSource=articleShare (archive version http://archive.vn/uCqD7) 

As of Friday, there have been more Covid-19 fatalities on Long Island’s Nassau County (population 1.4 million) than in all of California (population 40 million). There have been more fatalities in Westchester County (989) than in Texas (611). The number of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) is more than 16 times what it is in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (8). If New York City proper were a state, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined.

It isn’t hard to guess why. New York has, by far, the highest population density in the U.S. among cities of 100,000 or more. Commuters crowd trains, office workers crowd elevators, diners crowd restaurants. No other American city has the same kind of jammed pedestrian life as New York — Times Square alone gets 40 million visitors a year — or as many residents packed into high-rises. The city even has a neighborhood called Corona, which, it turns out, has among the highest rates of coronavirus infections.

Consider a thought experiment in which metropolitan New York weren’t just its own state, but its own country. What would the crisis for what remained of America look like, then? In this slightly smaller nation of a little more than 300 million people, the death toll would amount to about 7.5 per 100,000, slightly above Germany’s levels.

I also suspect that, if NYC were at the same latitude as Miami or Houston, it would have seen much lower mortality even with the same population density. Although the NYC subway still strikes me as “the mother of all super-spreaders”, and a study from MIT agrees.

(2) Speaking of super-spreader events: Quillette’s Canadian editor Jonathan Kay did some research of his own into 38 such events in 28 countries. (He restricted himself to documented events in languages he could read: the Purim super-spreader events in Israel he therefore dismissed, despite the extensive documentation I have seen in the Hebrew-language press and social media.) At any rate, let me (over?)summarize some of the patterns seen over and over:

• mass events (at high density), not people going about normal day-to-day business (unless said business involves catering at crowded mass events, of course)
• long duration
• extremely close physical contact — kissing, hugging, or shouting into people’s faces or ears (e.g., because the music at the event was so loud).

Buying seeds or “nonessential” household items is not on this list, needless to say. (If of course said purchase requires queueing in tight quarters for hours, that’s another matter.)

(3) Rick Jackson, chairman and CEO of Jackson Healthcare, the 3rd largest health care staffing company in the USA, points out in an op-ed in Newsweek [!] that many hospitals are standing empty and face closure unless allowed to treat “non-urgent” non-COVID19 patients again — and urges authorities to permit this. He points out that no fewer than 1 in 8 [working] Americans work in healthcare…

(4) The group of systems biologist Uri Alon at the Weizmann Institute developed this “Adaptive cyclic exit strategies” simulator  http://cyclic-strategy.herokuapp.com

Their idea in a nutshell: work x days on, y days off (their recommendation is x=4 and y=10), for example by alternating shifts. I think the easiest to implement in practice would be x=5 and y=9, two shifts (i.e., alternating working weeks). The 9-10 days at home would mean anybody who got infected at work would either be showing symptoms or asymptomatically test positive by the time they’d have to go back to work.

Their simulations show that this is a way to achieve most of the benefit of a full lockdown, while still permitting about 50% economic activity in non-telecommutable sectors (so probably 70%+ overall).  The active case load, rather than a monotonic decay as in a full lockdown, would get a damped oscillation superimposed on it. Below is an example:

Anyway, have a look at the simulator. The key is to keep the effective reproductive number Rt (in their notation) below 1 so the epidemic will die out eventually. A number of larger Israeli companies have adopted this strategy, with two staggered shifts.

(5) As a final reflection: the more I think about COVID19, the more it sounds that, if we had a reliable way to prevent cytokine storm, or nip it in the bud if it appears, we would be following a drastically different strategy. I talked to a source in the drug design community, and it sounds like more and more immunosuppressant/immunomodulator drugs are being repurposed for clinical trials (or compassionate use) in severe COVID19.

IF ONLY THIS PROFESSOR HAD BEEN HOMESCHOOLED: Harvard vs. the Family. A Harvard law professor distorts research findings to justify her campaign to ban homeschooling.

HMM: French researchers to give nicotine patches to coronavirus patients and frontline workers after lower rates of infection were found among smokers. “A French study found that only 4.4% of 350 coronavirus patients hospitalized were regular smokers and 5.3% of 130 homebound patients smoked. This pales in comparison with at least 25% of the French population that smokes. Researchers theorized nicotine could prevent the virus from infecting cells or that nicotine was preventing the immune system from overreacting to the virus. To test this theory, hospitalized coronavirus patients, intensive care patients and frontline workers nicotine patches “

BEIJING”S IMPERIAL COMMUNIST WORLD ORDER: The Wuhan virus debacle and Beijing’s on-going information war are a preview of the 2049 Imperial World Order envisioned by the Chinese Communist Party.

Hong Kong is a thorn in CCP-Beijing’s gut. On April 18, Beijing’s Hong Kong lackeys arrested 15 renowned pro-democracy activists. The detained included members of Hong Kong’s local government as well as civil rights lawyers. The charge: participating in unauthorized anti-government protests in 2019.

Two to 4 million Hong Kongers participated in those protests. (The city has a population of about 7.5 million.) Why target the 15?

Beijing decided to “decapitate” the pro-democracy leaders, with the goal of terrorizing the rest of the city.

My guess: Beijing bets that global media focus on the pandemic serves as a cover from the dictatorship’s political strike. Following the Hong Kong 15’s arrest, the CCP’s Hong Kong lackeys claimed Beijing does not recognize legal restrictions that bar the CCP government from intruding on the city’s local political matters.

Goodbye Two Chinas, One System. We’ve another preview of the CCP’s disregard for treaties and contracts.

Check it out.

RELATED: Two weeks old but still breaking news. Beijing Exploits Pandemic to Probe the South China Sea.

Read the entire essay.

Fasting is a great tool for so many things. You can use it to regulate food intake and lose body fat. Fasting can help you shift body composition, normalize your appetite, and gain control over your relationship to food. Many people report cognitive enhancements from fasting, and it’s a surefire way to speed up the transition into ketosis and full-blown fat adaptation. There’s strong evidence that we look, feel, and perform best skipping the occasional meal—that it’s the evolutionary norm for humans not to have constant, unceasing access to food. After all, we didn’t always have 24 hour grocery stores and fast food restaurants. But what about fasting with a cold?

And what about intermittent fasting and the immune system? Should you fast at all when you’re sick? What about fasting with the flu? Or how about bacterial infections—can fasting help with those? These are actually some of the most common questions I receive. Because intermittent fasting seems to help with so many other conditions, it makes sense to wonder about its relationship to the immune response.

Instantly download our FREE guide: 10 Foods You Should Be Eating for a Healthy Gut

There are two main types of infections that most people worry over: viral infections and bacterial infections.

• Viral infections include influenza (flu), the common cold, viral gastroenteritis, and the various coronaviruses. There are also things like measles, chickenpox, and viral meningitis, but most people aren’t very worried about catching those these days.
• Bacterial infections include pneumonia (most pneumonias are bacterial in origin, though some can be viral), bacterial gastroenteritis, food poisoning, and bacterial sinus infections.

Fasting With a Cold – Viral Infections

In general, fasting doesn’t look like a great idea if you’re dealing with a viral infection like the flu or common cold. Why?

Studies on Fasting and Viruses

Animal studies show that mice who fast have a worse response to subsequent viral infections. In one paper, mice were either fasted every other day or placed a normal diet, then exposed to a “viral mimetic” (a type of chemical that replicates a viral infection). The mice who fasted ended up with higher cortisol, a more inflammatory immune response, more severe symptoms, and acted sicker than the mice who ate.⁷⁵

Another mouse study found that in animals exposed to an infectious virus, a fat-based (fasting) metabolism was detrimental to survival and a glucose-based (fed) metabolism was beneficial.⁷⁶

Viruses Deplete Nutrients

Viruses are much smaller than bacteria and generally cause trouble by hijacking cells and using your body’s machinery to replicate. To do so, they often steal nutrients from the host. One example is selenium, a crucial nutrient for viral replication. Studies show that viral infections can induce selenium deficiencies and that correcting those deficiencies by, well, eating selenium-rich foods can improve the outcome of infections.⁷⁷

Most viruses will deplete nutrients and you need to eat to replenish them.

Fasting Inhibits MTOR, Which is Good and Bad

Blocking MTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) through fasting reduces expression of another major immune component: the interferon-inducible transmembrane protein (IFITM). ⁷⁸ Think of the IFITM as a barrier preventing some viruses from gaining a foothold in your body, including influenza, Ebola, SARS, MERS, Marburg, Dengue, and hepatitis C. These are IFITM-sensitive viruses, but there are also IFITM-resistant viruses, like the common cold.

In fact, one study found that increasing IFITM levels increased vulnerability to infection by the common cold virus.⁷⁹ Using fasting to reduce mTOR and lower IFITM expression could conceivably increase resistance to the common cold while increasing vulnerability to flu (and the others like Ebola and so on). Double edged-blade.

Or perhaps it’s triple-edged.

Part of dealing with an infection is learning from it. Our immune systems have to seroconvert antibodies so that when we encounter the infection again, our immune system is better equipped to head it off at the pass. This is the concept behind vaccination—a measured dose of the infective agent that trains our immune system to defeat the real thing in the future. As it turns out, inhibiting mTOR through fasting could affect our ability to seroconvert antibodies in response to viral infections.

In studies of older adults, higher levels of mTOR predict lower rates of seroconversion, and giving them an mTOR inhibitor improves seroconversion after a flu vaccine. If fasting reduces mTOR (and it does), it should in theory improve the antibody response to a vaccine or infection.

Weird, right? Fasting reduces mTOR, which could impair your short term response to an infectious insult (or improve it if it’s the common cold) while improving your long term response. You might still get sick but at least your chances of developing longterm immunity should increase.

Fasting With a Cold – Bacterial Infections

In general, fasting looks like a better idea when you’re sick with a bacterial infection.

Research on Fasting and Bacteria

Animal models of bacterial infections find that mice tolerate them much better in a fasted, ketogenic state. In fact, the ketone body beta-hydroxybutyrate is able to directly nullify some of the oxidative stress associated with bacterial infections;⁸⁰ while “ketogenesis was required for survival in bacterial inflammation, it was dispensable in the case of viral inflammation.”

Bacterial Infections Reduce Appetite Naturally

One indicator is that your appetite often falls off a cliff when you have a bacterial infection. The last you want to do when you’re dealing a bout of food poisoning is eat. This doesn’t usually happen with viral infections, and I believe that’s important. In those “base” states of survival, what you crave is a good indicator of what you need.

Fasting Improves Phagocytosis (and Sugar Inhibits It)

A key component of the innate immune system’s ability to deal with bacterial infections is phagocytosis: When a class of immune cells called neutrophils surrounds, engulfs, and destroys individual bacteria. The phagocytic index describes the number of bacterial cells a neutrophil is able to engulf and nullify in a set time. Generally speaking, higher phagocytic activity means you have a better response to bacterial infections.

Luckily, we know pretty well how to increase and decrease phagocytic activity in people. To decrease phagocytic activity (make neutrophils worse at engulfing and destroying pathogenic bacterial cells), you simply feed a person sugar.⁸¹ It could be orange juice, honey, sucrose, fructose, or glucose—any simple source of sugars—and if you give 100 grams to a person, their phagocytic capacity drops for at least five hours. Give the person nothing—let them fast—and their phagocytic capacity climbs. Even at 5 hours after eating the sugar, the phagocytosis still hasn’t caught up to that of the fasting person.

Later studies confirm that low fasting blood glucose is a strong predictor of a strong neutrophil:leukocyte ratio⁸². Lower glucose, more neutrophils available to take on bacterial pathogens. Fasting is a reliable way to drop your blood glucose.

Phagocytosis doesn’t work so well against viral infections because a virus sequesters itself in the host’s cells. Neutrophils can’t engulf and kill the host cells; that’d just be counterproductive and probably quite dangerous. However, there’s evidence both ways: that neutrophils can enhance the immune response to viral infections but they can also exacerbate the damage done to host tissues. It isn’t clear what role they play so I’d advise against consciously manipulating them through fasting.

Intermittent Fasting While Sick: Making Sense of it All

There are no easy, straightforward rules governing the optimal fasting strategy for infections, whether viral or bacterial. Each virus is different. Every bacteria is separate. Nothing in biology is simple. What we do know:

• If fasting stresses you out, it will be bad for your immunity. Cortisol depresses the immune system.
• If fasting ruins your sleep, it will be bad for your immunity. Proper sleep is absolutely essential for an optimal immune response.
• If you’re hungry, let that be your guide. Eat. Don’t force the issue.
• If you’re not hungry, skip the meal. Again, let your body’s signals be your guide.
• When faced with an immune insult, or if something’s “going around,” cut back on the fasting or at least keep it shorter than normal. 16 hours instead of 30. 20 instead of 48.
• Realize that fasting is not a panacea. It’s not the answer to everything.
• Understand that bacterial and viral infections often tag along with each other. A virus will weaken the host enough to allow bacterial pathogens to flourish. You’ll often be dealing with both at once. I’d imagine that something that allows you to stay fed while also enjoying a fat-based metabolism—like a lazy ketogenic diet—could work well here.
• Fasting can prune damaged parts of your immune system and replace them with renewed components.⁸³ This is good for long term immune health, but if an infectious agent happens to catch you in the middle of an extended fast while you’re doing the pruning, your risk of infection probably goes up. There’s always a give and a take.

There are no magic bullets, but it cuts both ways. You are resilient. While most of the humans throughout history didn’t make it through hundreds of thousands of years of death, destruction, famine, and disease, your gene line did. So don’t think you have to pick one or the other—fasting or feeding—in response to illness. Go with what feels best, don’t get dogmatic, and just take it easy.

What’s your go-to feeding strategy for dealing with sickness? Do you differentiate between viral and bacterial illnesses? Let me know down below!

The post Fasting with a Cold: How Does Fasting Impact Viral and Bacterial Infections appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: De Blasio Announces System For Reporting Social Distancing Violations: Knowledgeable Actors Reporting Edict Noncompliance (KAREN).

THIS WILL COME IN HANDY FOR THE SPACE FORCE, TOO: Scientists Explore Underwater Quantum Links for Submarines.

FLASHBACK: How a Young Joe Biden Became the Architect of the Government’s Asset Forfeiture Program.

HUH: Could an old vaccine be a godsend for new coronavirus? Using the oral polio vaccine could prevent or reduce the spread of COVID-19 to immunized individuals.

In addition to protecting against polio by inducing antibodies that kill the virus, OPV activates other protective mechanisms, including an innate immune system, thus making people resistant to infections caused by other viruses and bacteria. For example, in large scale multicenter clinical trials conducted in the 1970s during outbreaks of seasonal influenza, OPV protected more people from influenza than most flu vaccines do. Furthermore, observational studies in many countries suggested that the hospitalization rate and the overall mortality among children immunized with OPV were consistently lower compared with unimmunized children, even in the absence of poliovirus in communities.

These are reputable authors, to say the least.

More here.

Related: BCG vaccine and coronavirus protection.

AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD NAILS IT.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Michigan Governor Whitmer Awards Coronavirus Contract to Dem Consulting Firm.

THE CDC HAS NOT EXACTLY COVERED ITSELF WITH GLORY HERE: CDC’s failed coronavirus tests were tainted with coronavirus, feds confirm: A federal investigation found CDC researchers not following protocol.

I’m beginning to think that the CDC just isn’t very good at its job.

Related: The CDC was Fighting Racism and Obesity Instead of Stopping Epidemics.

Flashback: You had one job, CDC.

For several years now, economist Mark Perry has published a chart showing price changes from several key sectors of the U.S. economy. And with each update the divergence of prices becomes more glaring. "The obvious conclusion," Perry says, "is that the more government gets involved, or the more government regulation, the greater are the increases in prices over time. The less government intervention or regulation, the greater the decline in prices over time."

Christa Thompson was trying to clean out her late father-in-law's house when local police in Rathdrum, Idaho, charged her with a misdemeanor offense that carries a fine of up to $1,000 and the possibility of six months in jail.

The crime? Holding a yard sale.

"A garage sale/yard sale is not an essential business and should not be open for business," Rathdrum Police Chief Tomi McLean explained in a post on the department's official Facebook page. "This was a large non-essential yard sale that filled the entire front yard and spilled into the back yard as well."

Peter Thompson, Christa's husband, told the Coeur d'Alene Press that the family was sorting through his father's belongings—including piles of stuff recovered from a storage facility—when the police stopped by the previous weekend to issue a warning.

"They told us we couldn't have a yard sale, that it violated the governor's order. I asked them if we could sort some things out on the lawn, and if it was OK to sell a few things to some people," Thompson told the paper. "They said, 'Sure, as long as there's no signs or advertising or anything like that. So we didn't.'"

That was on April 10. McLean says her officers found a post on Craigslist announcing a yard sale. They returned to the scene of the sale on April 13 to issue a written warning about violating Gov. Brad Little's March 25 order telling all residents to stay home and closing nonessential businesses.

When officers returned again on April 17, McLean's Facebook post says, they found "a large quantity of items were still out in the front yard and sales transactions were occurring while police were present." That's when Thompson was charged with a crime. Under the terms of the governor's order, violations can be punished by $1,000 fines and up to six months in prison.

But the yard sale continued on Monday, according to the Bonner County Daily Bee. Christa Thompson told the newspaper she needed to finish selling her father-in-law's property in order to pay bills and buy groceries for her six kids. With another truckload of stuff from a storage unit just getting delivered the to home on Monday, she speculated that the sale could continue throughout the week, and said she is advising prospective buyers to keep their distance from one another.

The ongoing standoff between the Thompsons and the local police department is a perfect illustration of the limitations of stay-at-home orders meant to combat the spread of COVID-19. Encouraging people to limit their interactions and stay home whenever possible makes sense—is necessary, even—to slow the spread. But it is impossible to stop everything. Bills must be paid, the difficult task of cleaning out a deceased family member's home cannot be postponed indefinitely, and life (to some extent) must go on.

It's also true that you can't have a yard sale without willing buyers. Everyone involved was choosing to violate the governor's order. This should be a signal to policy makers that the status quo cannot be maintained. As I wrote several weeks ago, total shutdowns cannot be expected to last for weeks or months. An equilibrium will be found—either purposefully and orderly by official policy, or haphazardly when people simply can't take it anymore. We are now seeing that, in state capitals around the country and in Christa Thompson's father-in-law's front yard.

As for Thompson's potential legal jeopardy, a Boise-based attorney has already volunteered to defend her. Edward Dindinger told the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a free market think tank, that he doesn't believe the charges against Thompson will stand in court.

"The fact that officers of this department took the time to seek out and arbitrarily cite this individual," Dindinger said, "indicates to me the Rathdrum Police Department has far too much time on its hands and is perhaps itself 'non-essential.'"

DENNIS PRAGER: If Half the Country’s COVID Deaths Were in Montana, Would New York Shut Down?

In his latest column, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman inadvertently revealed how New York-centric his view of America is. Friedman, like virtually all his colleagues at The New York Times, opposes opening up any state in America at this time. He writes: “Every person will be playing Russian roulette every minute of every day: Do I get on this crowded bus to go to work or not? What if I get on the subway and the person next to me is not wearing gloves and a mask?”

Only a New Yorker would write those two sentences. In the 40 years I have lived in the second-largest city in America, I have never ridden on the subway or any other intraurban train or bus. In fact, it is common for New Yorkers to look at Los Angeles with disdain for our “car culture.” Like the vast majority of Americans everywhere outside of New York City, in Los Angeles, most of us get to work, visit family and friends, and go to social and cultural events by car—currently the life-saving way to travel—not by bus or subway, the New Yorker way of getting around.

But Friedman is a New Yorker, and because his fellow New Yorkers walk past one another on crowded streets and travel in crammed buses and subway cars, South Dakotans should be denied the ability to make a living.

Read the whole thing.

A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK OBSERVES: “If you’ve been paying attention — and almost no one has — Hong Kong was strangled over the past several days, as the Communist apparatus rolled up much of the protest leadership, and asserted its right to rule in any fashion it wishes. ‘One country, two systems’ is dead. The city itself will now likely go into decline: ordinarily with Shenzhen taking over its role in commerce, but who can say now? Another light goes out. The Communist Party of China is tying up loose ends and, to borrow a phrase, taking care of all family business. This isn’t the main event. This is preparatory to that. The main event is coming — and it is hastened by a Zhongnanhai calculation that the United States possesses neither the attention span nor the competence to do something about it. You can pick your metaphor: August 1914, December 1941. Just be aware that what they’re contemplating will end up a metaphor all its own.”