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[Engadin]

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S O U R C E :   Aging Matters

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have become concerned that dangers of the COVID pandemic have been overstated, perhaps deliberately. The containment measures adopted in most Western countries have had little effect on the spread of the virus, but they have been maximally disruptive of our economic and cultural lives, and have produced loneliness and isolation, while throwing millions of people living on the edge of their means into desperate poverty.

 

 

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Here is Dr John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology at Stanford Medical School, speaking to this point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The good news is that daily deaths from the virus have peaked worldwide, and begun their decline. Since death rates trail the rate of new infections by 2-3 weeks, we expect that spread of the virus peaked worldwide in mid-March and in the US 10-12 days ago.

 

 

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Does it make sense to continue with policies of economic shutdown and social isolation now that COVID is declining? The answer depends on whether these policies have been responsible for the decline, or whether COVID is declining for other reasons. I tend to think “other reasons”, but I’ll try to present both sides. I recognize that there is no definitive proof, but only judgment in the face of diverse evidence. My bias is that in such situations I lean toward a contrarian view. 

 

There are three factors which I consider to be plausible reasons for the decline of COVID:

 

  1.  Warmer weather is arriving

 

  2.  Doctors are learning how to treat COVID from others’ experience

 

  3.  Saturation / herd immunity—most people have already been exposed and have built up immunity

 

 

1. Respiratory illnesses tend to be seasonal. Reasons for this are not fully understood, and there may be several factors [ref, ref, ref]. Every year, there is a flu season, and deaths from flu are down almost 100-fold from winter to summer.

 

 

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Is COVID19 likely to be an exception to this rule? We already see that cold countries have much higher incidence and much higher death rates from COVID than warm countries.

 

 

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India may be the most striking example, a very hot country with weak central controls and a large population that is unreached by medical services. There has been no effective lockdown in India, yet COVID deaths per million population are comparable to the US.

 

The above leaves me very hopeful that, like SARS and MERS and countless strains of cold and flu that went before it, COVID is dying out as spring weather sets in.

 

In this week’s Science magazine, an article (summarized on ScienceBlog) argues that unlike these predecessors, COVID may not slow down with warm weather. As I read it, their basis for this claim is that these other seasonal illnesses spread sufficiently to engender herd immunity in the spring, but because of lockdown COVID has not crossed that threshold. Both these assumptions, in my view, are suspect. There is no scientific agreement why respiratory infections are so deeply seasonal, but it’s an empirical fact. If it were just about herd immunity, then we would see some waves of cold and flu that start in the spring or summer and die out by fall; but we rarely see this. And below I argue that if COVID is as contagious and as persistent as is claimed, then we (America and the world) may be acquiring herd immunity already.

 

 

2.  In just a few months, doctors have shared their successes, and there are now several promising treatments (though there has not been time for blinded, controlled clinical trials).

 

• Hydroxychloroquine in combination with zinc. Dozens of clinical trials of chloroquine are underway. Chinese doctors have reported good success rates. Chloroquine is a certified treatment in France. Some American doctors have been using it with good success.
• Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug, has promise.
• Herbs, fungi, vitamin D, and traditional Chinese medicine are reported to help, especially when taken in advance to prepare the immune system.
• Intravenous Vitamin C is subject of a clinical trial in China and has been used in the West.

 

 

3.  It’s more difficult to know whether herd immunity is already being established around the world. We depend here on experts and on computer models. Here’s an expert (Professor Knut Wittkowski, head of Rockefeller University’s Department of Biostatics):

 

 

 

 

 

COVID is reputed to be extraordinarily contagious, and if that is so, I would argue that the kinds of half-measures used in the US and other Western countries are slowing but not preventing spread of the virus. People are still shopping in supermarkets and drug stores. Labs are claiming the virus remains active on surfaces we touch for 24 hours, but we are still freely sending and receiving mail and packages. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Edited by Engadin, 16 April 2020 - 03:17 PM.

[pamojja]

Where did COVID-19 come from? Part 2

Last week, I outlined genetic evidence that the present pandemic had its origin in a laboratory. In the segment below, I tell two stories of how this might have occurred, one as leak from an American lab and one from a Chinese lab. I was surprised to find that there is a history of collaborative work between American and Chinese bioweapons labs on exactly the kind of Coronavirus responsible for the current epidemic, in which a protein that binds with ACE2 was artificially spliced onto the genome of the bat virus ancestor.