What is sad is that Trump simply stated he heard it was promising. But the media was so intent in squashing any hope that could be contributed to Trump; they gladly trumpeted a study that was deeply flawed. Worse, before the study was even written; some Democrats, like Gov. Whitless, banned the prescription of this FDA approved drug.
Even worse, it looks like the study the media were pushing was a political op. The Democrats set up a fake group that ran a fake study but the media coverage on it was all real. What they did was way worse than Russia spending thousands of dollars on FB ads that everyone ignores.
What they did was way worse than Russia spending thousands of dollars on FB ads that everyone ignores.
I agree and the people involved should be tried for the fraud they committed.
Commies never care who or how many they kill.
Arse Technica hyped every bit of news that was anti-HCQ, but have been strangely silent lately.
Ars’s computer and space stuff is good, the rest is mostly garbage.
I’m super skeptical of everything right now. Is this study better than all of the others that have shown conflicting results? The “science” is all over the board and it is a lot to sort through. Whether or not it is right or wrong, the media has been terrible.
They took a drug with a long track record, with plenty of data on what side effects are and how often they occur, and told the public everyone would suffer and die if they took it. It is astounding how corrupt our media are. They were just as bad in the Obama years but then they were puffing him up and ignoring serious stories that reflected poorly on Obama. Now, the coverage invents scandals, carefully crafts deceits, and presents a false reality of Trump causing societal apocalypse. The media has the same behavior but it is manifesting differently.
I think your skepticism is warranted and I’ve been trying to get people to treat masks (aka Kung flu hijabs) with the same skepticism. Near as I can tell, other people’s mask wearing doesn’t affect me and a vehement support of letting consenting adults do what they want with their bodies, so if you want to wear a mask, go for it. Most of my suggestions and requests have been met with vitriol. Just two quick parting thoughts:
1. Do you have a pulse oximeter? Why not? They’re like $30 on Amazon, accurate to +/- 1% SpO2 YMMV. Buy one – toss it in your medicine cabinet with the thermometer and the band-aids. But before you start wearing a mask, do an experiment. Wear the oximeter around your day-to-day. It clips to your finger so it makes some tasks clumsy, but do your best. Get some averages for activities over a few days. Repeat with a mask on…Are you comfortable with the results? The numbers may surprise you!
2. Warm, damp, dark areas are incubators for bacteria. What are you doing to disinfect/clean your mask? Same deal – go about your day to day, sweat in it, exhale this morning’s breakfast into it etc. You just spent a hot morning doing yard work – are you keen to wear those underwear again? How about 5 days in a row?! But that’s just what people are doing with masks.
Stay safe and stay informed, friends.
A note on pulse oximeters: do NOT assume accuracy in the specified range if you’re at high altitude. You’ll get a lower reading. I have one, and live at 7k feet, so I’m familiar with this effect and the literature on it. If you’re at high altitude (IMHO, anything much over a mile) you can use adjustment tables to make it much more reflective of reality.
I haven’t tried it with a mask, because I do not have a mask. What I wear to go to the store is a full face respirator (a bit better than a medical N95) that’s hard to breathe in, and murder in the heat. And that does show up on my pulse oximetry. It’s okay, though, if I change my breathing cycle to take only deep breaths. The reason I wear it (and have every time I’ve gone anywhere people are, since early February) is I’m the sole carer for a very elderly and very high risk relative (many underlying conditions, etc).
I’m of the opinion that regular masks do help a little, sometimes. The reason is titre – basically, dose. It takes a certain dosage of virus (titre) to cause an infection. It varies from person to person, but there is a threshold below which you’ll get nothing. So, even a very small reduction (such as from a mask) can make a difference in a small percentage of exposure cases (the borderline ones). This percentage goes up if the mask is of proper fit and made of a decently filtering material (small pore size), factors no one seems to pay attention to.
So, I do support proper mask use in situations where people are crowded, in air conditioned buildings, etc. I’d wear one in those situations if I didn’t have a respirator. I support stores making them mandatory for customers if they so choose. I do not support the government mandating them.
Your points of sanitation are excellent. IMHO, the way most people use masks make them a bit worse than useless, and this is a big part of why. Never re-wear without washing one (it’s not the wuhan virus that’s a risk there – it’s things like pleuracy, bacterial pneumonia, etc), and do not touch it with contaminated hands while wearing it.
Best advice though: stay the heck away from places where people are both crowded, and singing, yelling, or talking loudly. Those things increase viral output, a lot. The surge after the protests began is a classic example.
The way I look at masks is that they are not perfect but are a low effort and low cost way to mitigate risk. Like Arizona CJ, I don’t think the government should mandate them but I don’t have a problem with businesses requiring them.
There are a lot of people who don’t care for their masks but the cloth ones are easy enough to wash. The longer this goes on, the more masks people will have, the masks will get better, and people will get better in how they are used.
It is funny how a lot of people are concerned about the health risks of wearing masks like there isn’t an enormous data set of people wearing masks over the last hundred years. It is similar to the media’s fearmongering over the side effects of Hydroxycholoriquine. That isn’t to say wearing one all day doesn’t make it hard to breath but its doubtful we are going to see millions of people keeling over dead because they wore a mask.
@wodun: “I’m super skeptical of everything right now. Is this study better than all of the others that have shown conflicting results?”
Mortality rates from this Henry Ford Health System study for patients with Hydroxychloroquine (HQ) and Azithromycin (AZ) are interesting:
13.5% HQ
20.1% HQ + AZ
22.4% AZ
26.4% neither
But this was an observational study, not a double-blind one, and the patients’ condition helped determine the regimen. For instance, only patients with “severe COVID-19 and with minimal cardiac risk factors” received HQ + AZ. So, did they do worse than HQ-only due to the severity of their COVID-19? Did they do better than “neither” due to their minimal cardiac risk factor and concomitant comorbitidies? Why were patients who were given HQ also more likely to have been given Dexamethasone, and did that skew the results? How does Zinc fit into it?
It looks to be a mess that only a large double-blind study can answer, but is anyone still running one? It seems half the people feel a double-blind study would be unethical because they are certain it risks the patients who aren’t given HQ, and the other half feel they are unethical because of risks to the patients who do receive HQ. What a mess!
Yup, even the “experts” are all over the place. The media will push shallow articles and to be truly diligent, the reader should track down the study and read that for themselves. Most people don’t have experience in picking through these things and reading studies is a boring activity that sucks up time better spent on other things, so we just stick with reading articles.
I don’t know what to think of it all but I’m opened minded and willing to be wrong. I focus on taking small easy steps to mitigate risk without over reacting one way or the other. And I keep close track of the numbers for where I live.
When this first hit but weeks before all the lockdowns, I bought extra food because the future was uncertain. It wasn’t a panic buy, just a little more of the regular things than normal. That turned out to be a wise decision, so I’m continuing with this type of thinking and really, isn’t mitigating risk of an uncertain future what history tells us that we should be doing all the time?
IDK, hopefully enough that he doesn’t get re-elected? Since that’s whole purpose of the US Wuhan Flu hoax.
“That’s when I realised that the entire world simply claimed that there was no immunity, but in reality, nobody had a test ready to prove such a statement.”
…
“When the first statistics from China and later worldwide data showed the same trend, that is to say that almost no children under ten years old got sick, everyone should have made the argument that children clearly have to be immune.”
…
“But this common sense seems to have eluded many, let’s call them “immunity deniers” just for fun. ”
I accepted idea of “no immunity” because new virus, but I didn’t think for a second it meant there wouldn’t any immune response.
Instead I though if population had no exposure to something like the “common cold” then that population would have have worse affect from “common cold”. But didn’t give much thought to the fact I knew that children were “largely” immune to it.
But problem is I am not a friggin doctor. But early on there was german paper, that claimed virus starts in throat, and in serious cases goes to lungs. And if one recovers, it stops in the lungs, and ends with stopping in throat.
Starts in throat, and ends with the throat.
So I assume children would could get in throat, and most of time stop it from going to lungs. BUT children should have less immunity. Or should thought more about this immunity of children, in terms the of “danger of this virus is having no immunity to it”.
But it doesn’t change anything for me. It’s just those two facts don’t seem to fit.
So, again not being doctor, but it seems there is no virus which will kill everyone, nor effect everyone the same. But I thought is it seemed that new virus would spread faster due to lack of immunity.
And such fast spread, is transmission of infected throat to other others people’s throat. The throat infection is not lethal or even serious, the apparent danger is it’s effect upon the lungs {spreading to lungs}.
But I am not even sure China virus is directly infecting the lungs- could just be affecting throat, but which adds a “complication” that allows some other infection {or reaction to] of lungs.
One could say it’s fast spreader because and only because china virus infects throat {and nothing to do with “new”}.
Try a non doctor guess. China virus effects throat, and the immune systems using “resources” fighting it- Or vitamin D is depleted. And due to lower immune “resources” {such as vitamin D} other problems [ other virus} result in problems with lungs.
[[Or we aren’t just testing throat?]]
I think one should have enough vitamins, particularly D and zinc.
And if inform that I have China virus, I would take
Hydroxycholoriquine with zinc and make sure get enough sunlight or take D.
What would avoid is going anywhere near hospital- as hospitals seem far more dangerous than the China virus.
Also, as part of cure, I would also stop watching any of the media- any TV program. As they probably as dangerous to listen to, as going to a hospital. Probably a day of news is less dangerous than a day at a hospital. Or more like a week of news equals a day at the hospital.
But I don’t watch CNN, just local and some Fox {and neither are particularly good].
I hear, that CNN and the others are suppose to be hysterically funny {but seems to me, it’s a ward of the sick and dying].
How’s this for bias in a trial:
The mean age of each treatment group:
HCQ alone: 53 years
AZM alone: 64 years
HCQ + AZM: 62 years
Neither treatment: 71 years
So the treatment group that had by far the youngest subjects had much higher survival rates. What a surprise! /sarc.
Looks like there’s a misprint on the ages for the HCQ group, likely the mean: 53, range 64-74 should be mean: 64, range 53-74, still, that’s 7 years younger than the “neither treatment” group.
OMG, hot on the heals of the Oxford study showing the common steroid dexamethasone greatly improved survival rates we see that in this studythe percentage of each group given steroids was:
HCQ: 78.9%
AZM: 38.8%
HCQ + AZM: 74.3%
Neither treatment: 35.7%
So far more of those getting HCQ were also getting more steroids and were far younger. SMH.
What is sad is that Trump simply stated he heard it was promising. But the media was so intent in squashing any hope that could be contributed to Trump; they gladly trumpeted a study that was deeply flawed. Worse, before the study was even written; some Democrats, like Gov. Whitless, banned the prescription of this FDA approved drug.
Even worse, it looks like the study the media were pushing was a political op. The Democrats set up a fake group that ran a fake study but the media coverage on it was all real. What they did was way worse than Russia spending thousands of dollars on FB ads that everyone ignores.
What they did was way worse than Russia spending thousands of dollars on FB ads that everyone ignores.
I agree and the people involved should be tried for the fraud they committed.
Commies never care who or how many they kill.
Arse Technica hyped every bit of news that was anti-HCQ, but have been strangely silent lately.
Ars’s computer and space stuff is good, the rest is mostly garbage.
I’m super skeptical of everything right now. Is this study better than all of the others that have shown conflicting results? The “science” is all over the board and it is a lot to sort through. Whether or not it is right or wrong, the media has been terrible.
They took a drug with a long track record, with plenty of data on what side effects are and how often they occur, and told the public everyone would suffer and die if they took it. It is astounding how corrupt our media are. They were just as bad in the Obama years but then they were puffing him up and ignoring serious stories that reflected poorly on Obama. Now, the coverage invents scandals, carefully crafts deceits, and presents a false reality of Trump causing societal apocalypse. The media has the same behavior but it is manifesting differently.
I think your skepticism is warranted and I’ve been trying to get people to treat masks (aka Kung flu hijabs) with the same skepticism. Near as I can tell, other people’s mask wearing doesn’t affect me and a vehement support of letting consenting adults do what they want with their bodies, so if you want to wear a mask, go for it. Most of my suggestions and requests have been met with vitriol. Just two quick parting thoughts:
1. Do you have a pulse oximeter? Why not? They’re like $30 on Amazon, accurate to +/- 1% SpO2 YMMV. Buy one – toss it in your medicine cabinet with the thermometer and the band-aids. But before you start wearing a mask, do an experiment. Wear the oximeter around your day-to-day. It clips to your finger so it makes some tasks clumsy, but do your best. Get some averages for activities over a few days. Repeat with a mask on…Are you comfortable with the results? The numbers may surprise you!
2. Warm, damp, dark areas are incubators for bacteria. What are you doing to disinfect/clean your mask? Same deal – go about your day to day, sweat in it, exhale this morning’s breakfast into it etc. You just spent a hot morning doing yard work – are you keen to wear those underwear again? How about 5 days in a row?! But that’s just what people are doing with masks.
Stay safe and stay informed, friends.
A note on pulse oximeters: do NOT assume accuracy in the specified range if you’re at high altitude. You’ll get a lower reading. I have one, and live at 7k feet, so I’m familiar with this effect and the literature on it. If you’re at high altitude (IMHO, anything much over a mile) you can use adjustment tables to make it much more reflective of reality.
I haven’t tried it with a mask, because I do not have a mask. What I wear to go to the store is a full face respirator (a bit better than a medical N95) that’s hard to breathe in, and murder in the heat. And that does show up on my pulse oximetry. It’s okay, though, if I change my breathing cycle to take only deep breaths. The reason I wear it (and have every time I’ve gone anywhere people are, since early February) is I’m the sole carer for a very elderly and very high risk relative (many underlying conditions, etc).
I’m of the opinion that regular masks do help a little, sometimes. The reason is titre – basically, dose. It takes a certain dosage of virus (titre) to cause an infection. It varies from person to person, but there is a threshold below which you’ll get nothing. So, even a very small reduction (such as from a mask) can make a difference in a small percentage of exposure cases (the borderline ones). This percentage goes up if the mask is of proper fit and made of a decently filtering material (small pore size), factors no one seems to pay attention to.
So, I do support proper mask use in situations where people are crowded, in air conditioned buildings, etc. I’d wear one in those situations if I didn’t have a respirator. I support stores making them mandatory for customers if they so choose. I do not support the government mandating them.
Your points of sanitation are excellent. IMHO, the way most people use masks make them a bit worse than useless, and this is a big part of why. Never re-wear without washing one (it’s not the wuhan virus that’s a risk there – it’s things like pleuracy, bacterial pneumonia, etc), and do not touch it with contaminated hands while wearing it.
Best advice though: stay the heck away from places where people are both crowded, and singing, yelling, or talking loudly. Those things increase viral output, a lot. The surge after the protests began is a classic example.
The way I look at masks is that they are not perfect but are a low effort and low cost way to mitigate risk. Like Arizona CJ, I don’t think the government should mandate them but I don’t have a problem with businesses requiring them.
There are a lot of people who don’t care for their masks but the cloth ones are easy enough to wash. The longer this goes on, the more masks people will have, the masks will get better, and people will get better in how they are used.
It is funny how a lot of people are concerned about the health risks of wearing masks like there isn’t an enormous data set of people wearing masks over the last hundred years. It is similar to the media’s fearmongering over the side effects of Hydroxycholoriquine. That isn’t to say wearing one all day doesn’t make it hard to breath but its doubtful we are going to see millions of people keeling over dead because they wore a mask.
@wodun: “I’m super skeptical of everything right now. Is this study better than all of the others that have shown conflicting results?”
Mortality rates from this Henry Ford Health System study for patients with Hydroxychloroquine (HQ) and Azithromycin (AZ) are interesting:
13.5% HQ
20.1% HQ + AZ
22.4% AZ
26.4% neither
But this was an observational study, not a double-blind one, and the patients’ condition helped determine the regimen. For instance, only patients with “severe COVID-19 and with minimal cardiac risk factors” received HQ + AZ. So, did they do worse than HQ-only due to the severity of their COVID-19? Did they do better than “neither” due to their minimal cardiac risk factor and concomitant comorbitidies? Why were patients who were given HQ also more likely to have been given Dexamethasone, and did that skew the results? How does Zinc fit into it?
It looks to be a mess that only a large double-blind study can answer, but is anyone still running one? It seems half the people feel a double-blind study would be unethical because they are certain it risks the patients who aren’t given HQ, and the other half feel they are unethical because of risks to the patients who do receive HQ. What a mess!
Yup, even the “experts” are all over the place. The media will push shallow articles and to be truly diligent, the reader should track down the study and read that for themselves. Most people don’t have experience in picking through these things and reading studies is a boring activity that sucks up time better spent on other things, so we just stick with reading articles.
I don’t know what to think of it all but I’m opened minded and willing to be wrong. I focus on taking small easy steps to mitigate risk without over reacting one way or the other. And I keep close track of the numbers for where I live.
When this first hit but weeks before all the lockdowns, I bought extra food because the future was uncertain. It wasn’t a panic buy, just a little more of the regular things than normal. That turned out to be a wise decision, so I’m continuing with this type of thinking and really, isn’t mitigating risk of an uncertain future what history tells us that we should be doing all the time?
IDK, hopefully enough that he doesn’t get re-elected? Since that’s whole purpose of the US Wuhan Flu hoax.
A somewhat incendiary piece via Instapundit:
https://archive.is/8rLzi#selection-203.0-203.35
“That’s when I realised that the entire world simply claimed that there was no immunity, but in reality, nobody had a test ready to prove such a statement.”
…
“When the first statistics from China and later worldwide data showed the same trend, that is to say that almost no children under ten years old got sick, everyone should have made the argument that children clearly have to be immune.”
…
“But this common sense seems to have eluded many, let’s call them “immunity deniers” just for fun. ”
I accepted idea of “no immunity” because new virus, but I didn’t think for a second it meant there wouldn’t any immune response.
Instead I though if population had no exposure to something like the “common cold” then that population would have have worse affect from “common cold”. But didn’t give much thought to the fact I knew that children were “largely” immune to it.
But problem is I am not a friggin doctor. But early on there was german paper, that claimed virus starts in throat, and in serious cases goes to lungs. And if one recovers, it stops in the lungs, and ends with stopping in throat.
Starts in throat, and ends with the throat.
So I assume children would could get in throat, and most of time stop it from going to lungs. BUT children should have less immunity. Or should thought more about this immunity of children, in terms the of “danger of this virus is having no immunity to it”.
But it doesn’t change anything for me. It’s just those two facts don’t seem to fit.
So, again not being doctor, but it seems there is no virus which will kill everyone, nor effect everyone the same. But I thought is it seemed that new virus would spread faster due to lack of immunity.
And such fast spread, is transmission of infected throat to other others people’s throat. The throat infection is not lethal or even serious, the apparent danger is it’s effect upon the lungs {spreading to lungs}.
But I am not even sure China virus is directly infecting the lungs- could just be affecting throat, but which adds a “complication” that allows some other infection {or reaction to] of lungs.
One could say it’s fast spreader because and only because china virus infects throat {and nothing to do with “new”}.
Try a non doctor guess. China virus effects throat, and the immune systems using “resources” fighting it- Or vitamin D is depleted. And due to lower immune “resources” {such as vitamin D} other problems [ other virus} result in problems with lungs.
[[Or we aren’t just testing throat?]]
I think one should have enough vitamins, particularly D and zinc.
And if inform that I have China virus, I would take
Hydroxycholoriquine with zinc and make sure get enough sunlight or take D.
What would avoid is going anywhere near hospital- as hospitals seem far more dangerous than the China virus.
Also, as part of cure, I would also stop watching any of the media- any TV program. As they probably as dangerous to listen to, as going to a hospital. Probably a day of news is less dangerous than a day at a hospital. Or more like a week of news equals a day at the hospital.
But I don’t watch CNN, just local and some Fox {and neither are particularly good].
I hear, that CNN and the others are suppose to be hysterically funny {but seems to me, it’s a ward of the sick and dying].
The study in question:
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/fulltext
How’s this for bias in a trial:
The mean age of each treatment group:
HCQ alone: 53 years
AZM alone: 64 years
HCQ + AZM: 62 years
Neither treatment: 71 years
So the treatment group that had by far the youngest subjects had much higher survival rates. What a surprise! /sarc.
Looks like there’s a misprint on the ages for the HCQ group, likely the mean: 53, range 64-74 should be mean: 64, range 53-74, still, that’s 7 years younger than the “neither treatment” group.
OMG, hot on the heals of the Oxford study showing the common steroid dexamethasone greatly improved survival rates we see that in this studythe percentage of each group given steroids was:
HCQ: 78.9%
AZM: 38.8%
HCQ + AZM: 74.3%
Neither treatment: 35.7%
So far more of those getting HCQ were also getting more steroids and were far younger. SMH.