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A Head Full of Coronavirus Research, Part 84

By December 29, 2020Commentary

The current administration in Minnesota is completely incompetent.  We have one of the lowest per capita rates of vaccination of any state.  The vast majority of our deaths are among LTC residents and the frail elderly.  There are only about 80,000 LTC residents left.  Vaccinate them.  First.  Stop the deaths that feed the hysteria.  Or do they like the hysteria and the power and feeling like Big Daddy protecting poor, scared Minnesotans?

The long dark winter actually never happened, especially since winter starts December 21, and cases began dropping in early November and have plummeted since then.  Dr. Doom, Michael Osterholm, and his axis of evil compatriots, including Fauci, couldn’t have been more wrong about the course of the epidemic, the number of cases, hospitals collapsing, etc.  No one should trust one word they say, and for God’s sake, don’t give them any role in deciding how to respond to the epidemic.  They are completely clueless and ignorant.

On current reported numbers, Minnesota’s case fatality rate is 1.3%.  Seems high.  But the deaths attributed to CV-19 are exaggerated.  And more importantly, even the state believes there currently are multiples of undetected cases to detected ones.  Let’s say the multiple is 5, which is lower than the latest CDC and antibody prevalence data suggest.  The infection fatality rate drops to .26%.  Under normal circumstances, a third to half the deaths attributed to CV-19 wouldn’t be.  You can see we are talking about a pretty non-lethal pathogen.  And I have repeatedly shown the wild age divergence in that case fatality rate.  For the general community-dwelling population, the risk of serious illness is, well, miniscule.

Thanks to a reader who sent me this.  Go back a hundred years and here is the Science magazine article discussing the great flu pandemic of 1918.  (Science Article)   Kind of interesting to see the similarity in issues and how little progress has been made in controlling respiratory pathogens despite our much greater technical knowledge.

And here is a very sensible commentary from a Canadian physician on the harms of lockdowns.  (Canada Article)   As he points out, the harms are far greater than the supposed benefits.

More research on the harms of “distance” non-learning is found in this NBER paper.  (NBER Paper)   The authors found that high-school students from rich neighborhoods suffered little learning loss, while those from lower-income areas had a substantial decrement in their educational progress.  Loss of peer interaction and parent availability and interaction were key factors.

This paper found little evidence of asymptomatic or undetected spread among school children in Switzerland.  (Medrxiv Paper)   Community transmission was high at the time.  Among children and staff tracked for infection, almost none developed CV-19.  And almost all the few supposed positive tests turned out to be false positives on retesting, which is alarming.  The authors conclude that widespread random testing in schools would be unnecessary and counterproductive.

This article in the British Medical Journal further suggests that widespread testing of students is pointless, with a huge risk of false positives.  (BMJ Article)   Thousands of students were tested and the false positive rate was an astounding 58%.  There appeared to be a number of false negatives as well.

Another study finds long-lasting adaptive immune response from CV-19 infection.  (NEJM Article)  Over 12,000 health care workers at a health system in England participated in the study.  There were no symptomatic re-infections among those workers who had antibodies to the spike protein or the nucleocapsid protein.

Those prone to CV-19 freak-out are doing so over a mutation which supposedly makes the virus more infectious.  So far I am not convinced that there is clear evidence that this is the case.  This paper claims that the new strain is associated with higher viral loads, which might suggest greater infectiousness.  (Medrxiv Paper)

 

 

 

Join the discussion 4 Comments

  • dell says:

    Re.: new virus version

    To me it appears to be more hype hysteria than fact.

    If I understand the study, the probability of being infected is based on levels of viral loads, assumes higher loads produce more cases.

    My foggy brain says I’ve never seen a study supporting that assumption. Studies show the degree of initial infection and consequences, NOT whether a person will become infected.

    IOW, won’t the Ro essentially be the same?

    Again, my foggy brain seems to see that even the initial infection is not much different from the current strain(s).

    * The study seems to say that at the highest viral loads there is almost no difference.
    * The low loads show little difference: 9.5 vs 10, 10 vs 10.5
    * Likewise the median: 18.2 vs 19.4, 22.3 vs 23.2

    To me it’s not statistically significant, but the pile-it-on groups want to pile it on.
    🙁

  • Rob says:

    When there is a mutation in influenza, it is given a new identifier. Why is there no new identifier given for a sars-cov mutation is one has occurred? Seems like lots of sloppy non-science going on.

  • LeeS says:

    I love the verbiage on the Science article from 1919. Interesting to see the language structure from that era :-).
    Also it crosses my mind that maybe all these so called asymptomatic people are doing us a favor and spreading some adaptive immunity from the disassembled viral particles that may be giving the false positive – not infectious, but providing some immunity similar to a vaccine. Just rambling thoughts.

  • Eric from Minnesota says:

    Kevin, Thank you for your sage guidance with a bug the STATE has used to expand their powers to a degree never seen in this country; largely based on fear, uncertainty and doubt. For a Governor to use FUD on his own people and only seek counsel from those who already agree with his opinions mean we’re about to enter 2021 with all of this b.s. being tossed down a memory hole and forgotten. As many of us predicted, by Jan. 21st, Corporate media (Disney, ATT, Amazon, Comcast) will flip the switch and stop talking about SCARY CASES and move to % of hospital beds and ICU capacity as well as deaths…but only in relation to the total # of infections…which is .26%. Like a Christmas Miracle, Covid will be gone, and so will any memory of the real pain One Term Tim has cast upon the small businesses and small children of Minnesota, not to mention the Killing Fields in our LTC facilities.

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