COVID19 Around the World
Scientists, doctors, nurses and health experts all around the world (who are not Trump supporters) discuss the response to COVID19.
Dr. Michael Levitt, Nobel Prize Winner, Biophysics, Professor at Stanford School of Medicine
“Media manipulation, a complete set of pseudo-scientific nonsense has come to be the common knowledge. I am an apolitical person. Science is difficult and you can’t be partisan. There is an anti science dynamic going on here and policy decisions are being made. The WHO and others have a history of exaggerating.”
Deaths
Vietnam, 0 deaths
South Africa, 128
New Zealand, 20
Canada, 8504
Sweden, 5,280
Finland, 328
South Korea, 282
Japan, 971
USA, 126,000 Dead Americans
Countries with low death rates
Common to countries with low death rates are that they protected/shielded the elderly and high risk vulnerable people quickly and were able to slow the spread of the epidemic through short lockdowns. Many are no longer in lockdown.
Europe:
Dr. Michael Levitt said:
90% of deaths in Europe are people over age 65.
Japan
Testing Is Key to Beating Coronavirus, Right? Japan Has Other Ideas
The country has reported fewer deaths than other major nations and ended a state of emergency even while maintaining a low testing rate.
No restrictions were placed on residents’ movements, and businesses from restaurants to hairdressers stayed open. No high-tech apps that tracked people’s movements were deployed. The country doesn’t have a center for disease control. And even as nations were exhorted to “test, test, test,” Japan has tested just 0.2% of its population -- one of the lowest rates among developed countries.
Yet the curve has been flattened, with deaths well below 1,000, by far the fewest among the Group of Seven developed nations. In Tokyo, its dense center, cases have dropped to single digits on most days.
Sweden
How long should people be locked down in a democracy, six months, a year or more? (I don’t care but some people do want to go outside eventually). People under 50 are minority of the people who get sick.
Questions for Lockdown Apologists
We now have mortality data for the first few months of 2020 for many countries, and, as you might expect, there were steep increases associated with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in each one.
Surprisingly, however, these increases did not begin before the lockdowns were imposed, but after. Moreover, in almost every case, they began immediately after. Often, mortality numbers were on a downward trend before suddenly reversing course after lockdowns were decreed.
This article shows graphs from Financial Times and the Economist. Then he asks:
Q: How is it that governments in every country imposed lockdowns at precisely the same time relative to the future precipitous rise in their populations’ overall mortality rate?
Posthumous testing has shown that the virus was circulating — and killing — weeks, or even months before it was initially detected in many countries. Other researchers are coming to the sameconclusion; the prevalence of the virus was vastly underestimated at the beginning of the pandemic.
Which leads us to our final question:
Q: If health authorities vastly underestimated the prevalence of the virus at the beginning of the pandemic, why did the virus nevertheless wait until lockdowns were imposed to suddenly start killing at levels which exceeded normal deaths?
From Ontario, Canada
ANTI-MASKERS: RIGHT OR SELFISH?
Wear Masks Inside:
Day care centers, hospitals, nursing homes, homeless shelters, enclosed spaces, that is where transmission of virus occurs, anyone in a fragile state, who is already immune compromised is at risk of getting infection.
Scientists and doctors disagree with government officials and politicians
Mushy science vs real science (which is on our side)
It is an infection that penetrates the lungs
Public policy should be
1. Should be a real investigations of what happened (chronology of deaths suddenly)
To clear the air 2. Learn from our mistakes 3. Hold people responsible in the absence of science 4. Forget about the vaccine, you don’t need vaccines for this
We have been living with these viruses for 5 million years. Look at an integrated science, and understand the nature of immune vulnerability.
What is the science of how this virus first attacks you, what does your immune system need? Is your population immune prepared? That will determine the death rate.
Move away from these money making vaccine schemes.
Dr Michael Levitt
There is no need to panic, reduce the fear here, fear negatively affects the immune system, I followed the outbreaks in China
My first concern was about the overall death rates. You need to know how the population will be affected. For a regular population 1 in 1,000, worse than flu but not 10% death rate, not like SARS.
Flu is a serious disease. 30-80,000 people die of the flu every year in the USA. 650,000 in the world.
COVID19 Deaths
Nightmare in Elmhurst, Queens hospital, the epicenter of the epicenter
A nurse working the front lines of the coronavirus battle at New York City hospitals says “gross negligence and complete medical mismanagement” are causing patients to die, according to a disturbing new video.
The health care worker, identified in the YouTube posting and by a pal as Nicole Sirotek of Elko, Nevada, said that when she tried to advocate for her black and Hispanic patients, she was quickly taken off their cases — and witnessed basic medical flubs that proved deadly for others.
Retired Army Sergeant Erin Olszewski, a nurse reveals the horrific maltreatment of COVID-19 patients at Elmhurst Hospital Center, the public hospital in Queens, New York, that is “the epicenter of the epicenter” of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. for the past few months has cared for COVID-19 patients in Florida and New York.
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All patients who are put on ventilation die, and that's a majority of patients at Elmhurst, regardless of their actual infection status. People with low oxygen are being put on a ventilator.
worse than an iraqi hospital, she says.
the hospital is now all COVID-19 but only half of the patients have been diagnosed with covid19, non-coved people are put in the same room as people with COVID-19, and there is a fast test 45 minutes and a 5-7 day and they get admitted and vented whether or not they have COVID-19 .. a lot of people come to the hospital for anxiety, a stroke other reasons, but they are all considered covid19 patients.
Financial incentives appear to be at play. Elmhurst, a public hospital, is able to charge Medicaid and Medicare a lot more for COVID-19 patients than for other diagnoses. According to Olszewski, the hospital receives $29,000 extra for a COVID-19 patient receiving ventilation, over and above other treatments.
From the New York Times
Few places have suffered as much as central Queens, where a seven-square-mile patch of densely packed immigrant enclaves recorded more than 7,000 cases in the first weeks of the outbreak. as the death toll has mounted, the contagion has exposed the city’s stubborn inequities, tearing through working-class immigrant neighborhoods far more quickly than others.
Health care workers and community leaders say it is indisputable that the pandemic has disproportionately affected the Hispanic day laborers, restaurant workers and cleaners who make up the largest share of the population in an area often celebrated as one of the most diverse places on earth. Latinos comprise 34 percent of the deaths in New York City, the largest share for any racial or ethnic group, according to data released by state officials on Wednesday.
The neighborhoods also have large communities of Indian, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Filipino and Nepali people, and a score of other ethnicities that have been devastated by the pandemic.
The New York Taxi Workers Alliance said 28 drivers had died — the vast majority of them immigrants living in Queens — and Make the Road New York, an advocacy organization that serves the area’s working-class Latinos, said eight of its members in Queens had died. “A tragedy is unfolding,” said the co-director, Javier H. Valdés.
Doctors and community leaders say poverty, notoriously overcrowded homes and government inaction left residents especially vulnerable to the virus.
ACLU
The ACLU has said that 50% of those who have died in the USA are elderly and disabled in nursing homes, homeless shelters and other cramped living situations for a long time. They call it Deadly Discrimination