Trust the Science

That mantra is being repeated constantly throughout Covid and yet unlike a goal post at a football game this one constantly moves. I am not going through the litany of lists to do, not do, do, then maybe do differently and then turn around a do it all over again instructions that have plagued the pandemic from the inception, no make that realization and awareness of the virus in 2019 that began like the virus to spread throughout the world. We have been there done that and done it again. Talk about read the book, seen the movie, bought the T-Shirt, watched the Broadway adaption and the TV show; Covid drama has had way more variants than the virus itself.

From the beginning the lack of science information and true data was lacking. Who had it first? Where did it come from? What did the Chinese know and when? How was this traced and tracked? And why did we not know more from the very beginning? In other words the ultimate WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN AND WHY? And here we are today in year three of a global pandemic with fewer answers and information than when it began.

Okay so we have some stuff. We have tests but now the tests are not the best kind of test. Who is paying for them? Will they pay for them? Where are they? When can we go back to work, to school, to our lives? What about if you are blind, do they work the same? Which is the best kind? Is this going to be fair and equitable or does race and economics come into play, like all things in America? Lots and lots of who, what, where, when and more importantly why, matter in this crucial period. And when and why I have to care about what Bill Gates thinks, is certainly not how I want to end this nightmare.

One of the earliest and continual problems is the endless flow of studies and information coming out from the varying agencies and groups studying the Virus and the effects of each variant and the long term consequences as well as even the origin of SARS-Covid that arrived in 2019 via a wet market in Wuhan or a lab leak that is also in Wuhan. Either/or we know that the virus started in China and subsequently a lock down and a supression of information from China contributed the endless debate over the virus’ origins and its transmission factors. And this continues as many Scientists refuse to share data for whatever reason that stifles healthy debate and of course research. An article in the WSJ (that paywall will not allow me to link)discussed this at length and why this needs to be changed if we are ever to come to terms with finding the DNA of the virus, tracking its variations, proper cheaper vaccines, treatments and tests to stop the spread, if not even find a cure. (That last one will never happen but a girl can dream). And with this let’s note these comments from the article I linked:

Bottazzi said the reason she and her team did not patent the vaccine was because of her team’s shared philosophy of humanitarianism and to engage in collaboration with the wider scientific community. “We need to break these paradigms that it’s only driven by economic impact factors or return of economic investment. We have to look at the return in public health.”

The reality is that we have MANY sources of information and all of it is both accessible and available but the time involved to read and process the information means reading numerous sources, examining the legitimacy of said source and in turn using, and here is the most essential, the ability to critically think and analyze how this information is useful in your decision making process. I bailed early on the CDC, WHO is not much better, the FDA and HHS also seem compromised and with that I turned to Science Journals and other College papers published to see really where these Politicians and their Health Directors were getting said info. In fact at one point the Health Safety Director of Jersey City (who has ZERO credentials in health or medicine) when I asked about this decision that the Mayor had made about being outdoors and curfew, she cited Lancet, a journal I had read and it had nothing about curfews but okay then. When I informed her that I had read it, she never responded. Since that time the Mayor of Jersey City simply kicks any decisions down the road to Murphy who has made little change in his few mandates since his barely won election. Again the stop the spread, flatten the curve are two expressions long since buried with the dead of Covid. At least the Governor of New York made a universal mask mandate and the new Mayor kept the vaccine requirements in place for attendance at public events/places. We have little to none of that here and when Murphy was Cuomo’s water carrier that was a very different situation and sense of cooperation. So again, who do we listen to and why?

And there we are divided and conquered. We are not better off nor the same. I have read more articles and op-ed pieces about how families are not coping, how some are hoping to contract the virus (I have said that repeatedly that there is a strong contingent of that cohort) and how many are simply confused. One Mother spoke of her son not playing with other children because he fears they have “the disease.” Yep that is coming folks the future generation of anti social fear based children who will become adults and all decision making will center on that. And you complain about the current batch of Millennials with their cancel culture, safe spaces and their need to be validated. Just wait.

When I followed the man on Twitter on Friday raving on about Silicon Valley and how little was actually being done to build product, update and further company goals on maintaining a successful future in business, he noted the endless preoccupation with the issues that are dominating the workforce, the social justice platforms, the need to diversify and of course the move towards home work and its long term affects on building a workforce/company culture. This from the Valley of the Dolls that made work and life so co-joined at the hip there was no work-life balance at all. And with that it created a generation of self involved narcissists who have no clue how to fit in with the mainstream world and are more like the child of the parent who fear playing with others as they have “the disease.” Did no one ever watch the HBO comedy on this? Life imitating art imitating life. In that they showed the guru, the leader who is the benevolent one, of Hooli, who was bettering the world through being Hooli. So, when I read the rant of the poster I laughed as it was either taken directly from that and was a spoof or in fact just speaking about his experience and observations, now called “his truth.” As I continued to follow him his posts content and tone changed to a more aggrieved posture, the angry white male conservative, railing against Trans folks and the rest of the “Liberal woke folks” So I was out. No point in debating or arguing, we were done here and I stopped following and just moved on. We sadly are not able to do that of late. We must be right, we must not have anyone challenging our views and confusing if not contradicting them with facts. We must win the argument. Do we get a prize? Joe Rogan certainly is not better example of this. But he and the Infowars maniac, the Bogiano character and numerous other angry white men are there doing their best to ensure they are, all in rivalry for the new Knighthood available now that the true Knight of all Darkness, Rush Limbaugh, died and failed to pass the grail. And that says the same about Cable News and the generation of sycophants and sociopaths it inspired. Remember Glenn Beck he is now Tucker Carlson. Sean Hannity the new Bill O’Reilly. And so it goes.

I for a few weeks questioned my own ability to communicate and to articulate thought. First through a poorly run online writing class that just did not enable me to find my voice and care enough about those others right from the get go, to my posting on Reddit or Washington Post comment page. I realized as I read 90% of the posts they are written with a limited amount of words available( the same problem in my class), that you are providing a simple one sided opinion on another post or article that requires more than “I liked it” or “I hated it.” And that is what our dialogues have become, a minimal amount of words as to less confuse or cause thought. There is no willingness to read or even write a comprehensive thought and if someone disagrees they fault the grammar, often simple errors in spelling or punctuation, versus actual context. Then often the comments are bait and switch as if they are going to find out just who you are really? I assume this may have to do with the Bots and the endless concerns that the Russians/Chinese are putting misinformation out there. And they well may be hence the intense focus on grammar. But when all else fails, they simply rely on insults or respond with irrelevant information. Discussing masks I commented that Newark’s Mayor was a responsive one to his community regarding Covid, from vaccines, to tests to masks and with that I received: Gov Murphy mandated masks in schools. Okay thanks, I know I live here. I was speaking about how the cities in New Jersey were on their own with regards to guidance and you see that conflict in how many respond to businesses or people who choose to follow their own path, which again is often in direct opposition to another. But in real life versus online it is a very different outcome. You cannot logoff from a man or woman pushing you or yelling at you about your mask on a plane, can you? And with that I have learned to push back. My exhaustion from a lifetime of being constantly reprimanded, scolded and told what I should of done, what I should not have do, what I need to do is absurd. You do what you think is right and best in the moment and in the heat of said moment you often find yourself doing the wrong thing. That said you should not pay for this for the rest of your life. And we have become a nation of scolds who are sure it was done too late, not good enough, not smart enough and Goddamn it people won’t like you! We see that in Congress where for years good ideas have gone to die. And there are no adults in the room there, just overgrown children waiting for their allowance, only now with more zeros. So chatter on and I will continue on doing my best to find out what is the best thing I can do for me to survive this. Yeah you do walk alone Jerry. You do.

A Memorial

This marks a year from the death of George Floyd, in that same year 965 others who were killed at the hands of Police, some known some not. We need to know their names as well.

And with that I will say that Police Reform in some States has moved forward while the federal reform promised has stalled as the issues surrounding the rise of gun violence, crime and physical assaults on people of color and of faith has risen as well, making everyone still angry, still afraid and still looking for answers.

I don’t think anyone in this country reads anything. I have said that my loathing of Millennials leads me to have a cognitive bias towards that Generation as they are very demanding of safe spaces and in mandating change yet few of them seem to have ever read a history book, picked up a newspaper or read a journal that covers said issues in detail. To note I was discussing Feminism and a young millennial declared Camile Paglia, her Feminist idol, (a farce given her views she is not), so when I referred her to an current article about Camille Paglia, who is now Trans and still not a Feminist, (odd) said: “That is a lot of words could you just sum it up for me with the important part.” I refused and said, “Try reading, you may learn something.” Not the first time I have had that discussion with that group, proffering articles and magazines and knowing that they are tossed aside upon my departure. The young man keen on getting into my pants was discussing this very issue of Police reform and I gave him an article from the NYT to review. He never discussed it and then wondered why I was not ever going anywhere with him. Truly what would our convos other than him touching my hair or commenting about me getting laid would we have? Oh yeah the part about what he wants on his sammie after he is done servicing me.

And with that the barometer of how I feel about sex and sexuality is my own and I would never presume, just like my own Atheism, that anyone has to agree with me nor even understand its history, but just treat me with respect and know that I have come to these places with full knowledge and time spent working through it. This folks is what is called “my truth.” And for many all of this is an ongoing learned process through encountering others not like you, reading and more importantly taking the time to do the work. Name me three millennials who do. Yeah, me neither. So the protests for George Floyd, were in my mind for all the thousands who have come before and since.

And with that we now are coming to day 438 of Covid Theater, the drama never ends even as we begin to resume to normal. There will be mass evictions I suspect and despite the demand for employees we are seeing fewer return to the work force by choice due to the low wages and crappy working conditions that existed prior to the pandemic. The exodus from the cities will continue and the debate about a centralized workplace will also be examined as this is not simply a light switch that turns back on. Even Biden is considering making some Government positions to permanently remain off site. Again he never ceases to amaze me each day.

And what about Covid itself, will we ever get the answers and the truth about the virus? Yes and no. We still have quite a large failure on the part of the Trump Administration to acknowledge their failures regarding this among many, don’t look for a January 6th commission anytime soon, so it will largely become a project I suspect for scholars to analyze with regards to the mistakes and severity of it all in decades to come. But the real truth, the origin of the virus itself is coming to light. I early on communicated with a Biology Professor who was sure that it was not Zooinotic and that it was an airborne flu-like virus that was almost random in the way it affected individuals who contracted it and at that point they were unclear as to the length and distance it traveled and remained in air. Since then we have decreased the space between people from 6 to 3 and the time frame was once considered 30 minutes now due to variants sits at 15. The CDC has finally acknowledged it is airborne and admitted well into the pandemic it was not tactile, that asymptomatic transmission is possible and yes folks being outdoors is the least likely way to contract Covid. Poor ventilation, air circulation, veracity of the virus in the host and close, prolonged contact is the source which again months spent on cleaning and other bullshit means, such as temp taking and erecting barriers did nothing to actually STOP THE SPREAD.

There is now clear information coming out that the lab in Wuhan as early as November 2019 had cases of two workers with the same symptomatic illness and in turn hospitalized. This is from Pro Publica’s research and collection of information regarding Covid.

Early in the pandemic, President Donald Trump and some scientists speculated about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was created and accidentally released by Chinese virologists doing some sort of research. That hypothesis was quickly and vehemently dismissed by the scientific establishment, which noted that the genetic makeup of the virus showed no signs of human tampering. I encouraged several ProPublica reporters last year to poke around on a slightly different theory: What if the beginnings of the pandemic were the result of a lab accident in which scientists studying the characteristics of coronaviruses inadvertently became infected with a wild virus and spread it to others. Lab leaks are far more common than one might think and have occurred in the U.S. elsewhere. Our reporting turned up some officials who shared that suspicion. But none could offer any direct evidence that it had happened. This situation is among the least favorable arenas for investigative reporting — a debate in which all sides are drawing conclusions from minimal evidence released by a foreign government renowned for its tight control over information. The credibility of the lab leak theory wasn’t helped by the breathless coverage by Trump-supporting media outlets that took as given China’s culpability. We moved on, but, partly based on my experience reporting on germ warfare, I continued to believe that a lab accident was one possibility among many that would explain the pandemic’s origins. In the year since, theories about the virus originating in a lab have gained traction, even among those who initially doubted it. A growing number of scientists feel China was less than transparent in its recent dealings with a visiting World Health Organization team that was attempting to gather evidence on the beginnings of the pandemic. In a May 14 letter to Science magazine, 17 prominent researchers from around the world called on the WHO to look more closely at the lab theory. “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” they wrote. “A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.” Days later, Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, one of America’s most respected epidemiologists, added his name to the letter. “There just aren’t any answers yet, one way or the other, about how the coronavirus that’s now ravaging the world began,” Lipsitch told WBUR, a Boston radio station. “What we are saying is that the existing evidence has not ruled out a laboratory origin, nor has it ruled out a natural origin. And there’s really no positive evidence, either. It’s just pretty much a lack of evidence right now.” The absence of facts fueled a frenzy of internet speculation, a fair amount of which has focused on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a government-funded lab. To conspiracy theorists, it cannot have been a coincidence that China happened to be doing research on coronaviruses just a few miles from where the pandemic broke out. The head of the institute, Dr. Shi Zheng-li, reminded me of many of the dedicated scientists I interviewed for the book “Germs.” Press accounts portray her as someone deeply committed to the battle against microbes. After China was hit by the SARS coronavirus in 2003, Shi led teams of researchers into caves to capture and take samples from bats that might be harboring more dangerous strains of the disease. When an inexplicable outbreak of pneumonia struck Wuhan in December 2019, she worried that a coronavirus had somehow escaped her lab. She told Scientific American that she frantically reviewed records about the genetic makeup of her samples. Li said she was enormously relieved when she learned that SARS-CoV-2 was only 96% similar to its nearest relative at the institute — decades of evolution away from a match. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said in her interview with Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.” The Chinese came up with the now well-known theory for the origin of SARS-Cov-2. It began in bats and jumped to an intermediate animal that was sold at a wet market in Wuhan. Questions quickly arose about that narrative. Chinese authorities had destroyed all of the animals at the wet market soon after the outbreak began, and researchers have never been able to identify the intermediary animal that transmitted the virus to humans. Then, the British medical journal The Lancet published a paper that poked another hole in the wet market theory. It reported that nearly one-third of the people initially treated in Wuhan hospitals, 13 of the first 41 patients, had no link to the market or to one another. The uncertainty about the origins of the pandemic have only deepened over the past year. More facts emerged about Shi’s training, including that she worked with scientists who spliced together coronaviruses, creating the same sort of chimera viruses the Soviet germ warriors were experimenting with back in the 1990s. The 2016 paper documenting that research is now a central element in some of the online conspiracy theories. It had what turned out to be a prescient title. “SARS-like” coronaviruses, it warned, were “poised for human emergence.” The likely source? Chinese bats. As ProPublica President Dick Tofel likes to say, investigative reporting always begins with a question, not an answer. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal quoted U.S. intelligence reports that three members of the Wuhan institute had become sick in November 2019 and required hospital care for unspecified illnesses. The head of the institute, Shi, has said that all of her lab workers tested negative for exposure to SARS-CoV-2, a result some analysts viewed with skepticism given the prevalence of the virus in Wuhan. The history of germ weapons shows that even eminent scientists can misread the evidence. In the early 1980s, Matthew Meselson, a Harvard geneticist and molecular biologist, disproved allegations that Hmong anti-Communists in Laos had been attacked by a mysterious Soviet chemical weapon known as “yellow rain.” Meselson and a colleague’s inquiry showed it was bee feces. On the other hand, Meselson backed the Soviet cover story that an outbreak of anthrax in the town of Sverdlovsk was due to consumption of contaminated meat. It turned out to be an accident at an anthrax factory. After the fall of Communism, Meselson was allowed to investigate in Russia and concluded that it was indeed a leak from a weapons facility. So where does that leave us? As I’ve watched the theories about the pandemic’s origin wax and wane, I believe more strongly than ever that reporters should begin their research agnostic and remain skeptical as new facts come to light. No story is ever really over. Certainly not this one.

We are a long way from ever knowing the full truth behind the origins of the virus and if it was intended to be a biological weapon, but never in the history of the globe has a virus done this much damage to as many countries at a single moment as Covid has.

I was reading Salaman Rushdie in the Post and he said this: We are not the dominant species on the planet by accident. We have great survival skills. And we will survive. But I doubt that a social revolution will follow because of the lessons of the pandemic. But yes, sure, one can hope for betterment, and fight for it, and maybe our children will see — will make — that better world.

To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

As I wrote in the post Chrysalis, I am not sure as we emerge from our cocoon’s we are able to fully grasp the seriousness of this pandemic and for those who are still afraid they will continue to be. Those who never took it seriously, never will and so on. I am at odds with most people in the best of times so my contrarian nature found myself living my best life during the early days of the pandemic. Perhaps because I was armed with scientific facts and a knowledge of history, and a well developed sense of personal responsibility I thrived. It was only in the waning days of winter with the endless cold that I became despondent, and with that dropped my “No Compromises” mantra to try to make friends with a Millennial! What was I thinking? But today that is behind me and the light is ahead of me. I believe in the power of science but not of medicine as those are two different worlds to me. The Medical Industrial Complex once again proved to me that it is as dangerous and deadly as any virus and that they are staffed and manned by incompetents whose idea of care is charging more and making you believe that you need it. This is one thing that too must change to go forward. But we shall.

The Blame Game

We are Covid years away from ever knowing the origin of the virus and the facts behind the endless mistakes made by the Trump Administration and the agencies in charge of public health in the United States with regards to Covid-19.

Early on in Washington State there was full on awareness and urgent messaging to the CDC and FDA to acquire tests, to devise a better faster test and in turn finding other reported sources and cases of the virus. The lack of a single lab to test and run the RNA of the variants to track and trace the origin and the lack of a coherent cohesive plan to handle a pandemic was obvious yet one existed but appropriately ignored and any further attempts to correct or message the public was often co-opted if not squashed. We have millions of dollars unaccounted for or misspent on both the Federal and State level, from anything for satellite hospitals, to PPE and other costs associated with the pandemic.

We continue to tolerate if not adore Dr. Fauci’s constant messaging despite the endless contradictions and misinformation he has spread throughout the pandemic. If the man was truly in the “know” when did he know it was airborne, a super virus and how deadly it was? February 7, 2020 Trump shared with the writer, Bob Woodward, that the virus was deadly and then did nothing for several more weeks. Meanwhile state and local leaders turned their jobs into mini fiefdoms that may have contributed to more deaths and more mistakes that contributed to the overall spread of the virus. We know that Cuomo did, Murphy in New Jersey still fails to respond to the AP’s FOIA requests on some of the spending and other issues related to Coivd and Gavin Newsom in California is facing recall.

And while many just want this all to go away, we still have a serious problem leading into vaccinations and the role mass media has played into all of it. From the endless negative coverage that failed to actually state the true numbers of Covid deaths (now believed to be 900K) to how the virus randomly affects some over others, failing to note that only 8% of positive cases lead to a hospital admission, to the overall failures by hospitals to treat and diagnose patients. And now asking people about their vaccine situation without follow up or further questions, as illustrated by last night’s news broadcast where they asked a 15 year old if he was going to be vaccinated. His response was he wanted to “wait and see” and his Mother approved, admitting she wasn’t going to get vaccinated either. So, why not ask her what her Plan B was if either contracted Covid, if she was hospitalized or in the most worst case scenario, killed by Covid what her son was going to do and the same if her son contracted it. But nope, no feet to the fire there. It is time to shame and blame them for the millions of dollars it has cost to treat them if they do, as the Government has agreed to pay for all costs including funerals. Really? Why now that we have vaccines is that policy ongoing? At this point it is ALL ON YOU.

Frontline covered WHO’s handling of China and their missteps and in turn I question anything WHO at this point has to say on any of it, in the same way I have questioned the CDC until Biden came on board. But that is still a long way off from restoring my faith in this agency. Again when did you know and why did you fail to do anything regardless of your politics? Shame shame shame.

Expert panel says mistakes led to coronavirus pandemic, but stops short of holding countries, leaders to account

By Emily Rauhala The Washington Post May 12, 2021

About a year ago, the director general of the World Health Organization asked a group of experts to assess an urgent question: How did we get into this pandemic mess?

On Wednesday, the 13-member group, known as the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, delivered a lengthy, significant, but ultimately evasive answer.

The panel reconstructs how early-warning systems failed and agencies faltered, giving the virus time to spread from the central Chinese heartland to the rest of the world, humbling empires and killing millions as it went.

The experts conclude that the rules on emerging infectious threats are inadequate, that the WHO could have acted faster and that many governments ignored warnings — with disastrous results. They call for the creation of a new global health threat council, overhauls to the WHO, updates to the rules governing emerging health threats and action on vaccine equity.

“The current system failed to protect us from the COVID-19 pandemic. And if we do not act to change it now, it will not protect us from the next pandemic threat,” panel co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia, said in a statement released with the reports.

Although the panel presents what is arguably the most authoritative reconstruction of what happened at a global level, its report often stops short of holding powerful actors to account, undercutting its findings and raising questions about the feasibility of its calls for reform.

Here is our guide to what the panel says about what happened — and what is left unsaid.

What happened in Wuhan?

One of the panel’s most notable contributions is tucked away in background materials: an hour-by-hour, day-by-day reconstruction of what happened in Wuhan, China, from December 2019 through January 2020.

Through interviews with officials, a review of WHO documents and a close read of relevant reporting and research, we are reminded, for instance, that Chinese labs started sequencing the new virus before the WHO was even aware that an outbreak was underway.

WHO Wuhan report leaves question of coronavirus origins unresolved

We see clearly and painfully how potentially lifesaving information emerged on social media and through Chinese-language press reports rather than through official channels designed to identify precisely this kind of threat.

In footnotes to the timeline, the panel cites Washington Post reporting about how officials silenced whistleblowers and encouraged residents to keep attending public events despite risks. It also cites an Associated Press series that suggested China’s top leaders, including President Xi Jinping, were involved in the response.

But the main report, for the most part, does not dwell on the reasons for the “delay, hesitation and denial” it identifies. It does not consider which officials are to blame, nor does it address in detail how its proposed overhauls would get around obfuscation the next time around. A news release for the panel does not use the word “China” at all.

“The intention of the Panel in examining in detail the steps taken to respond to COVID-19 is not to assign blame,” the panel writes, “but rather to understand what took place and what, if anything, could be done differently if similar circumstances arise again.”

Evaluating the WHO response

Though the panel treads carefully on the topic of China, it takes a slightly more confident stance evaluating the WHO, spotlighting shortcomings but stopping short of calling out specific leaders.https://c105b62bc4dfad71552ccee188061cb5.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The panel paints a picture of an agency that tried to act quickly but was constrained by an outdated set of rules known as the International Health Regulations, or IHR, for the most part arguing that the agency’s hands were tied, rather than dissecting what it could have done better.

“In this pandemic, the efforts of its leadership and staff have been unstinting but structural problems have been exposed,” the report says.

On two key issues in particular — the WHO’s early guidance on human-to-human transmission and the delay in declaring an emergency — the panel identifies deficiencies but declines to name names.

In the early days of the outbreak, the WHO uncritically amplified false Chinese claims about how the virus was transmitted. Addressing this, the panel reiterates the WHO’s defense — that it did allow for the “possibility” of human-to-human transmission — noting that the agency “could also have told countries that they should take the precaution of assuming that human-to-human transmission was occurring

In another section, the panelists note that the WHO’s emergency committee met in the third week of January 2020 to debate declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, or PHEIC, the public health equivalent of fire alarm, but they do not offer new insight into why the committee declined to act at that pivotal moment.

“The time it took from the reporting of a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown origin in mid-late December 2019 to a Public Health Emergency of International Concern being declared was too long,” one summary concludes, adding little else.

Preventing the next pandemic

The panel makes what it describes as “bold” recommendations for the future, proposing updates to early-warning systems and greater power for the WHO. It also urges wealthy countries to do more, immediately, to close the vaccine access gap.

Though many of the recommendations make good sense, the panelists scarcely engage with how these measures might come about, particularly at a time when, as they stress, multilateralism is under attack and faith in institutions remains low.ADVERTISING

It remains unclear, for instance, whether member states, including China, would consider giving the WHO more power to investigate during times of crisis. The fact that it took a WHO-convened team of scientists a year to get access to key sites in Wuhan suggests it would be a hard sell.

On the question of the WHO’s role, the panel implies the agency is severely underresourced but also charges it with leading a more robust response through the months and years ahead. A key question not addressed is whether member states will want to give more power and money to an agency whose reputation has taken a hit.

Lastly, while the panel points to the need for urgent action on vaccine access, it does not call on any specific country to act.

“The top-line message is: You’ve been warned; we need something big and bold,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who also provides technical assistance to the WHO. “Having said that, the report gave us no clue about how to get that.”

“The report speaks truth to power in a generalized way,” he continued, “but it does not single anyone out for accountability or blame.”

Mighty Airborne

Well to this better late than ever or never whatever. This is my I told you so moment.

Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?

May 7, 2021

Covid Theater Act 1

By Zeynep Tufekci The New York Times

Dr. Tufekci is a contributing Opinion writer who has extensively examined the Covid-19 pandemic.

A few sentences have shaken a century of science.

A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.

The agency’s response to that question had been that “current evidence suggests that the main way the virus spreads is by respiratory droplets” — which are expelled from the mouth and quickly fall to the ground — “among people who are in close contact with each other.”

The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”

The change didn’t get a lot of attention. There was no news conference, no big announcement.

Then, on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of aerosols was one way the virus spreads, even at close range.

There was no news conference by the C.D.C. either.

But these latest shifts challenge key infection control assumptions that go back a century, putting a lot of what went wrong last year in context. They may also signal one of the most important advancements in public health during this pandemic.

If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others. We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary. Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing. We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.

Our mitigations would have been much more effective, sparing us a great deal of suffering and anxiety.

Since the pandemic is far from over, with countries like India facing devastating surges, we need to understand both why this took so long to come about and what it will mean.

Initially, SARS-CoV-2 was seen as a disease spread by respiratory droplets, except in rare cases of aerosol transmission during medical procedures like intubation. Countertops, boxes and other possible fomites — contaminated surfaces — were seen as a threat because if we touched them after droplets fell on them, it was believed the virus could make its way to our hands, then our noses, eyes or mouths.

The implications of this were illustrated when I visited New York City in late April — my first trip there in more than a year.

A giant digital billboard greeted me at Times Square, with the message “Protecting yourself and others from Covid-19. Guidance from the World Health Organization.”

First, “Hygiene” flashed, urging me to wash my hands, “practice respiratory hygiene,” avoid touching my face and wear a mask when necessary. Next, “Social distancing” told me to avoid close contact with people (illustrated by people separated by one meter), avoid shaking hands and stay home if unwell. Then “Medical help” advised me to follow local medical protocols.

I was stunned that the final instruction was “Stay informed.”

That billboard neglected the clearest epidemiological pattern of this pandemic: The vast majority of transmission has been indoors, sometimes beyond a range of three or even six feet. The superspreading events that play a major role in driving the pandemic occur overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, indoors.

The billboard had not a word about ventilation, nothing about opening windows or moving activities outdoors, where transmission has been rare and usually only during prolonged and close contact. (Ireland recently reported 0.1 percent of Covid-19 cases were traced to outdoor transmission.)

The omission is not surprising. Throughout the pandemic, the W.H.O. was slow to accept the key role that infectious particles small enough to float could be playing.

Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the W.H.O. committees that craft infection prevention and control guidance, wanted all this examined but knew the stakes made it harder to overcome the resistance. She told The Times last year, “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do.” She said it was a very good idea, but she added, “It will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”

This assumption that these larger droplets that can travel only a few feet are the main way the disease spreads is one of the key reasons the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. didn’t recommend masks at first. Why bother if one can simply stay out of their range? After the C.D.C. recommended masks in April 2020, the W.H.O. shifted last June, but it first suggested ordinary people generally wear masks if physical distancing could not be maintained, and still said health care workers performing screenings in the community did not need to wear masks if they could stay that single meter away from patients. The W.H.O. last updated its mask guidance in December but continued to insist that mask use indoors was not necessary if people could remain separated by that mere meter — this time conceding if ventilation might not adequate, masks should be worn indoors, regardless of distancing.

In contrast, if the aerosols had been considered a major form of transmission, in addition to distancing and masks, advice would have centered on ventilation and airflow, as well as time spent indoors. Small particles can accumulate in enclosed spaces, since they can remain suspended in the air and travel along air currents. This means that indoors, three or even six feet, while helpful, is not completely protective, especially over time.

To see this misunderstanding in action, look at what’s still happening throughout the world. In India, where hospitals have run out of supplemental oxygen and people are dying in the streets, money is being spent on fleets of drones to spray anti-coronavirus disinfectant in outdoor spaces. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas keep getting closed around the world. This year and last, organizers canceled outdoor events for the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. Cambodian customs officials advised spraying disinfectant outside vehicles imported from India. The examples are many.

Meanwhile, many countries allowed their indoor workplaces to open but with inadequate aerosol protections. There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best. (Just this week, President Biden visited a school where students were sitting behind plastic shields.)

This occurred throughout the world in the past year. The United States has been a bit better, but the C.D.C. did not really accept aerosol transmission until October (though still relegating it to a secondary role).

The scientific wrangling, resistance and controversy that prevented a change in guidance stem from a century of mistaken assumptions whose roots go back to the origins of germ theory of disease in the 19th century.

Until germ theory became established in the 19th century, many people believed that deadly diseases like cholera were caused by miasma — stinking fumes from organic or rotting material. It wasn’t easy to persuade people that creatures so small that they could not be seen in a seemingly innocent glass of water could be claiming so many lives.

This was a high-stakes fight: Getting the transmission mechanisms of a disease wrong can lead to mitigations that not only are ineffective but also make things worse. During the 19th century, fearing miasma, Londoners worked hard to direct their stinky sewers into the nearby Thames River, essentially spreading cholera even more.

But clear evidence doesn’t easily overturn tradition or overcome entrenched feelings and egos. John Snow, often credited as the first scientific epidemiologist, showed that a contaminated well was responsible for a 1854 London cholera epidemic by removing the suspected pump’s handle and documenting how the cases plummeted afterward. Many other scientists and officials wouldn’t believe him for 12 years, when the link to a water source showed up again and became harder to deny. (He died years earlier.)

Similarly, when the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis realized the importance of washing hands to protect patients, he lost his job and was widely condemned by disbelieving colleagues. He wasn’t always the most tactful communicator, and his colleagues resented his brash implication that they were harming their patients (even though they were). These doctors continued to kill their patients through cross-contamination for decades, despite clear evidence showing how death rates had plummeted in the few wards where midwives and Dr. Semmelweis had succeeded in introducing routine hand hygiene. He ultimately died of an infected wound.

Disentangling causation is difficult, too, because of confusing correlations and conflations. Terrible smells frequently overlap with unsanitary conditions that can contribute to ill health, and in mid-19th-century London, death rates from cholera were higher in parts of the city with poor living conditions.

Along the way to modern public health shaped largely by the fight over germs, a theory of transmission promoted by the influential public health figure Charles Chapin took hold.

Dr. Chapin asserted in the early 1900s that respiratory diseases were most likely spread at close range by people touching bodily fluids or ejecting respiratory droplets, and did not allow for the possibility that such close-range infection could occur by inhaling small floating particles others emitted. He was also concerned that belief in airborne transmission, which he associated with miasma theories, would make people feel helpless and drop their guard against contact transmission. This was a mistake that would haunt infection control for the next century and more.

In modern medical parlance, respiratory transmission routes are divided between the larger droplets, associated with diseases that spread at close distance, and the smaller aerosols (sometimes also called droplet nuclei), associated with diseases like measles that we know can spread at long distance and are usually highly contagious. Indeed, studies showing that respiratory diseases spread more easily in proximity to infected people seemingly confirmed the role of droplets.

It was in this context in early 2020 that the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. asserted that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted primarily via these heavier, short-range droplets, and provided guidance accordingly.

But from the beginning, the way the disease was spreading around the world did not fit this theory well. In February 2020, after an infected person was found to have boarded the cruise ship Diamond Princess, hundreds of people trapped on board for weeks were infected, including 567 of the 2,666 passengers, who were largely confined to their rooms and delivered food by masked personnel — hard to explain solely with droplet-driven transmission. (Hitoshi Oshitani, a Japanese virologist who played an important role in his country’s response to the epidemic, said this ship outbreak that helped convince him this was airborne — and it’s why Japan planned around airborne transmission assumptions from as early as February 2020.)

Then there were the many superspreader events around the world that defied droplet explanations. In March 2020 in Mount Vernon, Wash., 61 pandemic-aware people showed up to a choir practice and sang with some distance between them in a large space, were provided hand sanitizer and left the doors open, reducing the need for people to touch the handles. But 53 of them were confirmed or strongly suspected to have contracted Covid-19 anyway, and two died. Long-distance transmission was being documented as well: One study from China in April 2020, clearly documenting transmission from beyond one meter, had video evidence showing the initially infected person had not come very close to those he infected, and there were no common surfaces touched.

Epidemiological studies and examples kept pouring in, too, all of them showing that Covid-19 was spreading primarily indoors and clusters were concentrated in poorly ventilated spaces. And when outdoor transmission did occur, it was often when people were in prolonged close contact, talking or yelling, as with construction workers on the same site.

The disease was also greatly overdispersed, sometimes being not very contagious and other times dramatically so. Large-scale studies showed that more than 70 percent of infected people did not transmit to any other person, while as few as 5 percent may be responsible for 80 percent of transmissions through superspreading events. Despite databases documenting thousands of indoor superspreader incidents, I’m not aware of a single confirmed outdoor-only case of superspreading.

None of this could be explained easily if the disease were “primarily transmitted between people through respiratory droplets and contact routes,” as the W.H.O. had said, since those larger, heavier particles would behave the same indoors as outdoors, would be largely indifferent to ventilation and would not be conducive to so much superspreading.

Finally, it was clear from early on that people who weren’t yet sick or coughing or sneezing — which produce a lot more droplets — were transmitting and that things correlated with aerosol emissions like talking, yelling and singing were associated with many of the outbreaks.

Amid the growing evidence, in July, hundreds of scientists signed an open letter urging the public health agencies, especially the W.H.O., to address airborne transmission of the coronavirus.

That month, after the open letter, the W.H.O. updated its guidance to say that “short-range aerosol transmission” from infected people in poorly ventilated spaces over time “cannot be ruled out” but went on to say that “the detailed investigations of these clusters suggest that droplet and fomite transmission could also explain human-to-human transmission within these clusters” and that close contact could still be the reason, “especially if hand hygiene was not performed and masks were not used when physical distancing was not maintained.”

Evidence kept accumulating. Transmission was documented in adjacent rooms in a quarantine hotel where people never interacted. Several hospital workers were proved to have been infected despite strict contact and droplet precautions. Viable virus was found in air samples from hospital rooms of Covid-19 patients who hadn’t had aerosol-generating procedures and in an air sample from an infected person’s car. The virus was found in exhaust vents in hospitals, and ferrets in cages connected only via shared air infected each other. And so on.

There were quibbles with each study: Was the sampled virus infective enough? (It is hard to catch the viruses from the air without destroying them.) Could some fomite connection have been missed? Still, it kept getting harder to deny the role of aerosols as a major factor.

Last October, the C.D.C. published updated guidance acknowledging airborne transmission, but as a secondary route under some circumstances. And the W.H.O. kept inching forward in its public statements, most recently a week ago.

Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.

First, Dr. Marr said, the upper limit for particles to be able to float is actually 100 microns, not five microns, as generally thought. The incorrect five-micron claim may have come about because earlier scientists conflated the size at which respiratory particles could reach the lower respiratory tract (important for studying tuberculosis) with the size at which they remain suspended in the air.

Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol. She agreed that droplet transmission by a larger respiratory particle is possible, if it lands on the eye, for example, but biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.

Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease, by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.

Since aerosols also infect at close range, measures to prevent droplet transmission — masks and distancing — can help dampen transmission for airborne diseases as well. However, this oversight led medical people to circularly assume that if such measures worked at all, droplets must have played a big role in their transmission.

Other incorrect assumptions thrived. For example, in July, right after the letter by the hundreds of scientists challenging the droplet paradigm, Reuters reported that Dr. John Conly, who chairs a key W.H.O. infection prevention working group, said that there would be many more cases if the virus was airborne and asked, “Would we not be seeing, like, literally billions of cases globally?” He made similar claims last month. And he is not the only member of that group to assert this, a common assumption in the world of infection control well into 2021.

However, Dr. Marr pointed out, there are airborne diseases, like measles, that are highly contagious and others, like tuberculosis, that are not. Moreover, while SARS-CoV-2 is certainly not as infectious as measles on average, it can be highly infectious in the superspreading events driving the pandemic.

Many respiratory viruses carried by aerosols survive better in colder environments and lower relative humidity, Dr. Marr said, again fitting the pattern of outbreaks around the world, for example, in many meatpacking plants. Plus, some activities produce more aerosols — talking, yelling, singing, exercising — also fitting the pattern of outbreaks globally.

Why did it take so long to understand all this?

One reason is that our institutions weren’t necessarily set up to deal with what we faced. For example, the W.H.O.’s Infection Prevention and Control (I.P.C.) global unit primarily concentrates on health care facilities. Many of the experts they enlisted to form the Covid-19 I.P.C. Guidance Development Group were hospital-focused, and some of them specialized in antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections that can spread wildly in health care facilities when medical personnel fail to regularly wash their hands. So this focus made sense in a prepandemic world. Hospitals employ trained health care workers and are fairly controlled, well-defined settings, with different considerations from those of a pandemic across many environments in the real world. Further, in some countries like the United States, they tend to have extensive engineering controls to dampen infections, involving aggressive air-exchange standards, almost like being outdoors. This is the opposite of modern office and even residential buildings, which tend to be more sealed for energy efficiency. In such a medical environment, hand hygiene is a more important consideration, since ventilation is taken care of.

Another dynamic we’ve seen is something that is not unheard-of in the history of science: setting a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it.

As part of its assessment of the virus’s spread, the W.H.O. asked a group of scientists last fall to review the evidence on transmission of the coronavirus. When reviewing airborne transmission, the group focused mostly on studies of air samples, especially if live virus was captured from the air, which, as mentioned above, is extremely hard. By that criterion, airborne transmission of the measles virus, which is undisputed, would not be accepted because no one has cultivated that pathogen from room air. That’s also true of tuberculosis. And while scientists, despite the difficulties, had managed to capture viable SARS-CoV-2 in three studies that I’m aware of, the review noted that the virus was detected only intermittently in general, disputed whether the captured live virus was infective enough and ultimately said it could not reach “firm conclusions over airborne transmission.” The lead author and another senior member of the research group previously said they believed transmission was driven by droplets.

The skepticism about airborne transmission is at odds with the acceptance of droplet transmission. Dr. Marr and Joseph Allen, the director of the Healthy Buildings program and an associate professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told me that droplet transmission has never been directly demonstrated. Since Dr. Chapin, close-distance transmission has been seen as proof of droplets unless disproved through much effort, as was finally done for tuberculosis.

Another key problem is that, understandably, we find it harder to walk things back. It is easier to keep adding exceptions and justifications to a belief than to admit that a challenger has a better explanation.

The ancients believed that all celestial objects revolved around the earth in circular orbits. When it became clear that the observed behavior of the celestial objects did not fit this assumption, those astronomers produced ever-more-complex charts by adding epicycles — intersecting arcs and circles — to fit the heavens to their beliefs.

In a contemporary example of this attitude, the initial public health report on the Mount Vernon choir case said that it may have been caused by people “sitting close to one another, sharing snacks and stacking chairs at the end of the practice,” even though almost 90 percent of the people there developed symptoms of Covid-19. Shelly Miller, an aerosol expert at the University of Colorado Boulder, was so struck by the incident that she initiated a study with a team of scientists, documenting that the space was less full than usual, allowing for increased distance, that nobody reported touching anyone else, that hand sanitizer was used and that only three people who had arrived early arranged the chairs. There was no spatial pattern to the transmission, implicating airflows, and there was nobody within nine feet in front of the first known case, who had mild symptoms.

Galileo is said to have murmured, “And yet it moves,” after he was forced to recant his theory that the earth moved around the sun. Scientists who studied bioaerosols could only say, “And yet it floats.”

So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response. Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.

Righting this ship cannot be a quiet process — updating a web page here, saying the right thing there. The proclamations that we now know are wrong were so persistent and so loud for so long.

It’s true that as the evidence piled on, there was genuine progress and improvement, especially as of late. Even before the change in language last weekk, for example, the W.H.O. published helpful guides on ventilation, first in July and updating it in March. Recently, though the organization’s documents have lagged, more of its officials have started giving advice compatible with aerosol transmission, emphasizing things like close mask fit — which matters little for droplet transmission — and ventilation — which matters even less. All this is good, but nowhere near enough to change the regulations and policy bundles that had already been put in place around the world.

And the progress we’ve made might lead to an overhaul in our understanding of many other transmissible respiratory diseases that take a terrible toll around the world each year and could easily cause other pandemics.

So big proclamations require probably even bigger proclamations to correct, or the information void, unnecessary fears and misinformation will persist, damaging the W.H.O. now and in the future.

Scientists have responded. In just the past few weeks, there has been a flood of articles published about airborne transmission in leading medical journals. Dr. Marr and other scientists told me the situation was very difficult until recently, as the droplet dogma reigned. I co-wrote one of those papers, published in The Lancet last month, arguing that aerosols may be the predominant mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2, a step farther.

I’ve seen our paper used in India to try to reason through aerosol transmission and the necessary mitigations. I’ve heard of people in India closing their windows after hearing that the virus is airborne, likely because they were not being told how to respond. Plus, there are important questions for what this means for higher-risk settings, like medical facilities.

The W.H.O. needs to address these fears and concerns, treating it as a matter of profound change, so other public health agencies and governments, as well as ordinary people, can better adjust.

The past year has revealed how crucial the agency is, despite being hampered by chronic underfunding, lack of independence and attempts to turn it into a political football by big powers. Like other public health organizations, many of its dedicated staff members work tirelessly under difficult conditions to safeguard health around the world. Maintaining its credibility is essential not just for the rest of this terrible pandemic but in the future.

It needs to begin a campaign proportional to the importance of all this, announcing, “We’ve learned more, and here’s what’s changed, and here’s how we can make sure everyone understands how important this is.” That’s what credible leadership looks like. Otherwise, if a web page is updated in the forest without the requisite fanfare, how will it matter?

Yeah, Covid. It’s still a thing

As I just completed my last post about Doctors (a soap that Alec Baldwin used to be on) and Nurses battling over Covid vaccine, once again much of what we are going to see with regards to that can be seen regarding the testing protocol and what happened with that.

Again, we have a incompetent President who well does what he does best, nothing, coupled with States and their rights to be equally incompetent and rivalries and such being settled as people died. The whole blue versus red also playing into the picture which Covid cared one less flying fuck about and people died. Add to this the sheer level of mixed messaging from Igor and the Bride who seemed to contradict each other, the President and themselves. This week Igor has now backtracked vaccine rates needed to achieve herd immunity, it was 75% is now 90%. And he is not leaving, the Bride is retiring with her husband the Monster to her vacation home in Delaware, you know the one she went with family during Thanksgiving but Igor is staying with the new town Doctor, so I expect more of this in the future. Yeah, Covid, it’s still a thing.

But this article in the Washington Post once again finds that stupidity runs freely throughout the swamp, and the CDC really bungled this one in the jungle. From refusing to acknowledge that in fact WHO was right and their test worked, the internal politics and of course our Crazy Dopey Grandpa in Chief with his SIL did little to change the course. And we got over 300K dead now as a result. There will be no magic shot to cure this ailment.

The CDC’s failed race against covid-19: A threat underestimated and a test overcomplicated

By David Willman The Washington Post Dec. 26, 2020

A new virus was exploding in Wuhan, a Chinese city with 11 million people connected by its airport to destinations around the world. In the United States, doctors and hospitals were waiting for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop a test to detect the threat.

On Jan. 13, the World Health Organization had made public a recipe for how to configure such a test, and several countries wasted no time getting started: Within hours, scientists in Thailand used the instructions to deploy a new test.

The CDC would not roll out one that worked for 46 more days.

Inside the 15-acre campus of the CDC in northeast Atlanta, the senior scientists developing the coronavirus test were fighting and losing the battle against time.

The agency squandered weeks as it pursued a test design far more complicated than the WHO version and as its scientists wrestled with failures that regulators would later trace to a contaminated lab.AD

The Washington Post reviewed internal documents and interviewed more than 30 government scientists and others with knowledge of the events to understand more fully the missteps in those early weeks as the coronavirus began to spread unchecked across the nation. Most spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to do so publicly.

This account reveals new details about how an overly ambitious test design and laboratory contamination caused the CDC’s delay, and describes previously unreported challenges that confronted the agency scientists assigned to carry out the work.

CDC leaders underestimated the threat posed by the new virus — and overestimated the agency’s ability to design and rapidly manufacture a test. Quality-control measures failed to prevent the shipping of compromised kits to dozens of state and local public health labs.AD

The CDC’s response to what became the nation’s deadliest pandemic in a century marked a low point in its 74-year history. More than 329,000 Americans have died of the virus. In an agency long known for its competence, hubris became the nemesis that could not be overcome

The CDC has quietly removed or shifted to other duties several scientists who were involved in developing the coronavirus test, according to those familiar with the matter. Those displaced included a longtime division director, a supervising branch chief and a respiratory virus specialist who led the design of the test.

The problems with the CDC’s test kits are the subject of ongoing inquiries by the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general and the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

“We missed the game,” a senior CDC disease-transmission specialist said in an interview. “Many people here wish we had done things differently.”AD

Nearly all of those in charge at the highest levels of the CDC lacked hands-on lab expertise and for weeks deferred to subordinates — scientists who were logging grueling, high-pressure hours on the highly technical work.

Stephen A. Morse, a retired agency microbiologist who had helped establish a formal affiliation with the public health labs to ensure rapid responses to outbreaks caused by nature or biological terrorism, said the CDC’s approach was simply too narrow.

It would have been prudent, he said, “to use the WHO test that was already available. At the same time, get a better understanding of the performance of that test — see if you could improve on it with a second-generation test, as opposed to trying to develop your own test, independent of what’s out there.”

Without tests to identify the early cases, health authorities nationwide were unable to isolate the infected and trace the rapid spread among their close contacts. Those who were asymptomatic, yet contagious, went undetected.

CDC Director Robert Redfield, an appointee of President Trump, took a hands-off approach while the in-house manufacturing efforts foundered and agency scientists clashed over whether to alter the design of the problem-plagued test, according to CDC and other federal officials.AD

James Le Duc, who as the director of the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas oversees development of diagnostics for rare pathogens, said he is perplexed by the CDC’s decision-making.

“The test that the WHO used early on was quite successful,” said Le Duc, a former senior CDC official who still serves as an adviser to the agency. “I frankly don’t know why CDC didn’t accept it.”

Redfield and other CDC leaders declined to be interviewed or to respond to written questions about the agency’s handling of the test.

“Appreciate the opportunity, but we are going to pass,” said CDC spokesman Benjamin N. Haynes.

The struggles with the test kits had far-reaching consequences.

“If we would have put [tests] out there quicker, could we have saved lives? Well sure,’’ said Peter C. Iwen, director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory in Omaha. “If we would have diagnosed quicker, we would have saved people.”

A working test within hours

Since its founding in 1946, the CDC has grown from a regional bulwark against malaria in the southern United States to a world leader in fighting diseases of all kinds.AD

Nowhere has the CDC’s presence abroad been larger than in Thailand, where the agency maintains offices and a staff of about 170 epidemiologists, laboratory specialists and others. In 1980, the CDC established its first overseas epidemiology program in a suburb of Bangkok, training a new cadre of disease detectives.

In early January, Thai doctors in Bangkok were worried by the outbreak in Wuhan, less than seven hours away by airliner. They strategized at length about the threat with their local CDC counterparts. They also learned from scientists enough about the genetic makeup of the new coronavirus to begin developing a molecular test for in-hospital use.

That initial test would use real-time polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR, to examine sputum samples in search of unique genetic material from the virus.

On Jan. 12, using their new test, the Thais became the first country to confirm a coronavirus case outside China, a sickened traveler from Wuhan.

The same day, the Chinese posted on the Internet what public health authorities worldwide had been waiting for: the complete genetic sequence of this previously unseen strain of the coronavirus, the cause of the disease soon to be named covid-19.AD

Another breakthrough came the next day, Jan. 13, when the WHO publicly shared a protocol, essentially a recipe, specifying the materials needed to build a molecular test.

The Thais used that protocol to make a second test to detect the virus. This redundancy would eventually become the model for developing a vaccine against the virus.

“Multiple shots on goal,” as Anthony S. Fauci, the U.S. infectious-disease expert, often said of the approach. That way, said Fauci, if one attempt stalled or failed, another might score.

The approach paid off immediately for the Thais.

“We have not relied only on one testing technique from one laboratory,” Krit Pongpirul, a researcher and clinical epidemiologist at Bangkok’s Bumrungrad International Hospital, said in an email exchange with The Post.

Using their version of the WHO test, Thai health officials within days found other cases, including a taxi driver. He had not been to Wuhan, but Pongpirul and a colleague suspected he had become infected by Chinese travelers. Thai officials traced and tested close contacts of the cabbie and others who were found to be infected. The contacts were persuaded to isolate themselves to prevent the virus from spreading.AD

One of the infected, the Thais found, was asymptomatic — an early warning that the coronavirus was being spread by those not overtly sick.

“Patient 4 had detectable [virus] for 4 consecutive days, but we were only able to follow her for 7 days before she returned to China,” the Thai doctors and others wrote in a subsequent scientific journal article. “Her case is an example of a person without reported symptoms but with radiologic evidence of disease and detectable virus over several days.”

By the end of January, the Thais had diagnosed 11 patients with covid-19, according to Pongpirul, who described the details in the email correspondence and in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the CDC.

Four of Pongpirul’s 11 co-authors were CDC specialists — three of them based in Bangkok and the other in Atlanta.AD

“The early availability of the RT-PCR testing definitely helped to reduce transmission and save lives,” Pongpirul told The Post by email.

The Thai scientists shared their success and insights in a Jan. 13 conference call that included CDC personnel in Bangkok and at headquarters in Atlanta.

“This was the first indication of international spread,” said an Atlanta-based official who described the call as riveting. “ ‘Why Thailand?’ We found out there was a direct flight from Wuhan.’’CDC NARRATIVE | John R. MacArthur discusses the novel coronavirus’s spread to Thailand (GPA Interactive)

John R. MacArthur, a physician who had led the CDC’s Thailand operations since 2013, said that when PCR testing confirmed the first case there, “I immediately contacted CDC leadership in Atlanta to let them know what was happening.”

“Seeing the first case outside of China, I thought, was a big moment,’’ MacArthur said in a phone interview.

MacArthur, one of the co-authors of the journal article, said the CDC’s lab training in Thailand gave officials there “the tools that they needed to respond very quickly and effectively.’’

At CDC headquarters, officials did not adopt the strategy that proved successful in Thailand.

Instead, the agency planned to design and manufacture its own test in-house and ship 300 of those kits to 120 public health labs throughout the United States.

At the time, CDC officials in Atlanta expected that the strain emanating from Wuhan, while worrisome, would be no worse than two earlier coronaviruses that spurred dread before fizzling out, those familiar with the matter said.

One of those viruses, severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, originated in China in late 2002 and killed 774 people worldwide, but none in the United States. Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, emerged in 2012 and over the next seven years killed 866 people, but resulted in only two U.S. infections and no deaths.

Neither SARS nor MERS was known to be widely spread by people who had no symptoms.

“It was being treated as a MERS situation or a SARS situation,” said a CDC scientist who had helped confront the new threat in January and who declined to speak on the record because he was not authorized to do so. “At that point we thought it was going to be a limited activity.”

‘Can you make this happen?’

In the first week of January, Nancy Messonnier, a physician and director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Atlanta campus, spoke to Stephen Lindstrom, an accomplished respiratory virus specialist. She wanted to know if, and how soon, he could get a coronavirus test up and running.

“Can you make this happen?” she asked, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Lindstrom, co-inventor of seven earlier CDC tests for strains of the flu, had transitioned in 2018 to lead a respiratory virus lab that focused on diseases other than influenza.

Before saying yes to Messonnier, Lindstrom had an ask that she would promptly grant: He needed to pull in at least 20 people to supplement his staff of eight lab specialists.

On Jan. 9, Lindstrom outlined his plans to Messonnier, as well as the director of the viral diseases division, Mark A. Pallansch, and the respiratory viruses branch chief, Susan Gerber, among others. In a conference room near Messonnier’s eighth-floor office, Lindstrom narrated a slide show that spelled out how the test manufacturing and other tasks would be divided up.

That same week, Lindstrom recruited Julie M. Villanueva, who was also a PhD scientist and with whom he had collaborated on anti-flu efforts over the previous decade. In 2016, she had led the CDC’s Emergency Operations Center during an outbreak of the Zika virus.

Over the next few days, Lindstrom, who had not previously designed a coronavirus test, set about researching what materials were necessary as well as a recipe for combining them to detect the virus with PCR.

All of the CDC scientists and officials involved with the test’s development and named in this report — including Messonnier, Lindstrom, Pallansch, Gerber and Villanueva — declined to comment or referred questions to the agency’s public affairs office.

Invented in 1983, PCR is a multi-step test to detect infectious agents, including viruses in humans, using a sample of sputum or other genetic material. A machine extracts nucleic acids from the sample, placing them into a small tube with various chemical reagents, including an enzyme that converts viral RNA, which is present in coronaviruses, into DNA.

Some of the solution is then transferred to tiny plastic wells containing additional reagents to help detect whether the virus is present. The wells are placed into a PCR machine, resembling a midsize office photocopier.

The process seeks to copy and amplify targeted regions of the coronavirus genome. If the virus is present in the original sample, a detectable, fluorescent dye is released.

Two components that Lindstrom designed for the CDC’s test, called N1 and N2, focused on separate regions of the virus’s genome, a conventional approach.

But Lindstrom, aided by a lab colleague with coronavirus experience, Xiaoyan Lu, chose to add a third component that distinguished the CDC’s test design from others: This component would identify a wider family of coronaviruses, including SARS and bat-carried strains not known to have infected humans. They called it N3, and Lindstrom told colleagues it would help detect the novel coronavirus if it began to mutate, according to interviews with those familiar with the matter.

Villanueva’s chief role was to ensure that each step of development and production was properly documented and communicated to the public health labs and to regulators at the Food and Drug Administration. CDC officials expected the FDA to expedite emergency authorization of the test, and scientists said Lindstrom and Villanueva worked so seamlessly that colleagues took to calling them what sounded like one name, “Steve-and-Julie.”

On Jan. 17, just days after the Chinese made public the virus’s genetic sequence, Messonnier announced at a news briefing that health authorities in Thailand and Japan had already used molecular testing to detect coronavirus cases. Testing was beginning as well in South Korea and Taiwan.

“We at the CDC also have the ability to do that today, but we are working on a more specific diagnostic,” Messonnier said, indicating that the agency was seeking a more sophisticated test.

To provide reliable detection, a PCR test must be sensitive enough to identify microscopic levels of a pathogen — and able to distinguish them from genetic neighbors.

During the same briefing, Messonnier gave a low-key forecast of what to expect from the new coronavirus.

“It’s highly plausible that there will be at least a case in the United States,” she said.

Nationwide, the stakes were magnified because the 120 public health labs were without a government-approved test of their own and, with few exceptions, depended wholly on getting the CDC’s kits. Based on Messonnier’s forecast, companies had no incentive to navigate regulatory hurdles and mass-produce kits.

Representatives from the public health labs listened to Messonnier’s remarks on Jan. 17 and heard no grounds for concern.

Scott J. Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, recalled thinking: “We’ll get 100 labs up and running really quickly. We’ll be on top of this.”

Confidence remained high over the next few days. Messonnier said in another briefing that, as of Jan. 19, the CDC had “finalized development” of its test. The CDC used it in Atlanta, she said, to quickly confirm the first known U.S. coronavirus case, a man in Washington state who had just returned from Wuhan.

“Right now, testing for this virus must take place at CDC, but in coming weeks, we anticipate sharing these tests with domestic and international partners,” Messonnier said, adding, “We continue to believe the risk of this novel coronavirus to the American public at large remains low.”

On Jan. 30, the New England Journal of Medicine published an account from German doctors describing a worrisome twist with the virus.

They documented the case of a 33-year-old “otherwise healthy” businessman who took ill on Jan. 24 with a sore throat, chills and body aches from what turned out to be covid-19. Three days before, he had met extensively in Munich with a Chinese counterpart. At the time they interacted, she had shown no signs of sickness. But the woman became ill on her return flight to China, where she tested positive for the virus on Jan. 26.

It was “notable,” the doctors wrote, that the woman’s “infection appears to have been transmitted during the incubation period,” before she showed symptoms.

A scientific orchestra

Lindstrom had seen no significant trouble with his nascent test when he confirmed the diagnosis of the first U.S. patient on Jan. 19, those involved said. As February approached, he was collaborating with Villanueva and their team to work through the remaining technical details.

They had to ensure proper manufacturing of the test so it could be distributed to the labs nationwide, and also secure the FDA’s swift authorization.

Lindstrom, who grew up in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan, was known to colleagues as diligent, accessible and, at times, bluntly spoken. A self-described lab geek, he had worked at the CDC since July 2000.

Now he was conducting a burgeoning scientific orchestra.

Lindstrom turned to the Biotechnology Core Facility Branch on the CDC’s Atlanta campus to make detection-enabling “probes” and “primers.” These were synthetic nucleic acids to be added to the mixture of other reagents. As the core lab commenced production on Building 23’s top floor, it sent Lindstrom a portion of each batch for quality-control vetting.

He still saw nothing of undue concern, according to those involved. With help from a third lab, the Reagent and Diagnostic Services branch, also in Building 23, the materials were poured into vials and readied for shipment to the states. On Feb. 4, the FDA granted the emergency authorization.

The state labs started vetting the kits, using samples that contained no virus. Then calls and emails began coming in to Atlanta describing a consistent problem: false-positive results — confined to Lindstrom’s signature N3 component.

Lindstrom tried to grasp the underlying cause. Were the labs doing something wrong? Could his design or protocol for conducting the tests be revised to eliminate the false positives and ensure reliable detection? Did something go wrong with the CDC’s manufacturing?

The troubleshooting dragged on for weeks, but the false positives persisted. The CDC halted further shipment of the kits.

Soon the state labs and the Association of Public Health Laboratories were pressing the CDC: What about streamlining the test to get it up and working? Lindstrom and Villanueva opposed doing so.

“We had a conversation with Steve and Julie and asked, specifically: ‘Lots of members are asking if we can drop N3 and just keep N1 and N2,’ ” recalled Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious diseases for the professional association, based in Silver Spring, Md.

“And their response at that point was: ‘FDA isn’t going to go for that.’ Both of them were like, it’s a non-starter.’’

Government officials later told The Post that the FDA would have considered proposals to remove N3.

Some CDC scientists also were questioning among themselves the need for N3.

“Why are we trying so hard? . . . We know there’s a problem with it,” one of them recalled asking.

Instead of dropping N3, the CDC set about trying to manufacture a new batch of reagents in hopes of eradicating possible contamination that had caused the false positives. On Feb. 11, Villanueva informed directors of the state and local labs about the development.

“Thank you for your patience as CDC investigates reported sporadic aberrant reactivity in the N3 assay,” Villanueva wrote in an email. “After consultation and agreement with FDA, CDC is currently manufacturing and quality control testing a new N3 primer/probe set. . . . We hope to provide this replacement component as soon as possible.”

Lindstrom contacted industry sources, seeking private vendors that could promptly make more reagents, officials said. Scientists said he complained to colleagues about what he saw as a lack of urgency within the CDC to expedite the paperwork necessary for the contracts.

The public health labs remained in limbo as the virus continued to spread.

On Feb. 15, the labs’ newly formed task force on coronavirus testing circulated a bulletin, noting that “an overwhelming number of labs” had reported problems with the N3 component, adding in boldface, “The Task Force does not recommend that any PHL proceed with testing until CDC issues the new primer/probe set for the N3.”

The same bulletin advised that several of the labs had also reported “similar, although less frequent issues” with the N1 component.

A Feb. 17 email from a CDC supervisor, Darin Carroll, to six agency scientists, including Lindstrom, described concern about lab-induced contamination.

Referring to Jan Pohl, the core lab’s director, the email said, “Jan’s thoughts are that if the production facility is found to be free from contamination today it may be possible to have a small production run ready for drying/assembly by late this week.”

That same week, officials from a unit of the CDC responsible for monitoring lab safety and quality, led by associate agency director Stephan Monroe, traveled to the FDA’s offices in Silver Spring to confer about the false positives. Lindstrom also spoke with Monroe’s staff and opened his team’s lab records for review.

Meanwhile, the CDC tasked Lindstrom’s team with overseeing prompt PCR analyses of a growing number of samples arriving from the state labs, which remained unable to conduct tests themselves because the kits were unreliable.

Travelers returning from virus-besieged cruise ships were escalating demands for rapid test results in Atlanta. Lindstrom and Villanueva were also ordered by agency administrators to document their work in a separate information-management system, a time-consuming chore.

In mid-February, Lindstrom sought to clarify priorities at a meeting he attended that was led by the CDC’s coronavirus incident manager, influenza specialist Daniel B. Jernigan, and others in charge. “Tell me what the f— you want me to do,” Lindstrom said, a person who heard the remark recalled.

Though pressure mounted from the public health labs and from within the CDC, Lindstrom and Villanueva defended the test’s design.

Lindstrom warned superiors that dropping N3 might lead to missed cases of infection, false negatives. Villanueva told colleagues that the design was of “Nobel quality,” according to those familiar with the matter.

Lindstrom also conferred with Pohl, the chief of the core lab. A chemist, Pohl initiated rigorous measures to eliminate any contamination that might be causing the false positives, which were not confined to N3, records show.

Nine public health labs, including facilities serving the city and state of New York, the District of Columbia and Minnesota, reported difficulty with N1, lab officials said. The FDA would later conclude that N1 was probably contaminated during work in Lindstrom’s lab in Building 18, a view shared by CDC leaders.

In an email on Feb. 19, a scientist at the core lab, Nicky Sulaiman, told Lindstrom that Pohl had agreed to also decontaminate “all . . . areas and instruments” to be used in further manufacturing of the reagents.

On Feb. 23, a diagnostic-test expert from the FDA, Timothy Stenzel, entered the CDC to examine how the test kits were developed. He concluded that lab conditions for making the kits were substandard and that contamination was the most likely cause of the many N3 false positives, federal officials told The Post. It was likely, Stenzel later told HHS lawyers, that the contamination occurred during quality-control checks made in Lindstrom’s lab.

Stenzel saw nothing wrong with Lindstrom’s design, including N3 — but he flatly advised the CDC to shift any additional manufacturing of the kits to outside contractors.

Lindstrom believed that the contamination with both N1 and N3 stemmed from the core lab, those familiar with the matter said. He continued to say that the kits should include N3.

Meanwhile, the delays had become a national crisis.

By the third week of February, Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was leading the government’s quest for a coronavirus vaccine, ducked into the office of Brian Harrison, chief of staff to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, about the stalemate with testing.

“Brian — you’ve got to do something,” Fauci said. According to officials familiar with the conversation, Harrison replied, “I share your concern.”

Azar urged Redfield and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn to intervene and take steps to end the impasse, a department official said. On Feb. 26, the FDA told the CDC by email that public health labs could use the test, without N3.

Two days later — 46 days after the World Health Organization publicly shared its protocol for coronavirus testing — Messonnier announced that the labs “can start testing.”

Epilogue

Throughout the CDC’s struggle to deliver a reliable test, Director Redfield repeatedly assured officials that a solution was close at hand, according to interviews with those involved.

When members of the White House coronavirus task force pressed him, Redfield, a physician and longtime HIV researcher, signaled complete faith in the CDC’s scientists. One task force member recalled that Redfield “kept on saying, ‘We got this covered, don’t worry.’ He made it seem that the fix was quick, a minor thing.”

Another official, who was privy to Azar’s regular phone calls with Redfield, said the low-key CDC director consistently defended the agency’s approach with the test kits.

“This was kind of the theme for about a month,’’ said the official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to comment.

Messonnier has told colleagues that, not being a virologist or laboratory specialist, she relied on subordinates with greater subject-matter expertise.

Starting in spring and over the next few months, CDC leaders removed or shifted several of the people who worked on or supervised the original test, officials said.

Lindstrom was shifted to an advisory role and no longer leads the respiratory virus lab.

Gerber, Lindstrom’s boss and an epidemiologist experienced with coronaviruses, was excluded from supervisory decisions and accepted a scientific position elsewhere in the agency.

Pallansch, who oversaw Gerber and Lindstrom, was removed by Messonnier from his job as director of the viral diseases division and now holds a title of special adviser, officials said.

A polio virus expert and 36-year CDC employee, Pallansch told colleagues that if he had known about the N3 component when the test was designed, he would have challenged its inclusion as unnecessary. A person familiar with Pallansch’s thinking also said he regretted not having initially sought out the information.

In a June 19 report on the testing problems, the HHS lawyers said that “time pressure to ship test kits out quickly” may have caused the CDC to shortchange proper quality control and to miss “anomalies in data” and “likely” contamination before the kits were released.

What happened at the CDC remains under scrutiny by the HHS inspector general and by the GAO, according to their representatives. The department lawyers also have recently questioned Messonnier and staffers involved with making the kits, officials said.

Global mortality from the disease has varied dramatically: Thailand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, all of which jump-started coronavirus testing in January, have experienced death rates of less than 2 per 100,000 people. In the United States, the rate is 91 deaths per 100,000 people, according to lab-confirmed cases archived by Johns Hopkins University. Experts hesitate to quantify how many lives were saved by the early testing in Asia.

But Michael V. Callahan, a Massachusetts General Hospital infectious-disease physician who was detailed in February by HHS to help repatriate Americans from cruise ships hit by the coronavirus, said the CDC and the White House should have seen the gravity of the threat.

“We had a fast-moving outbreak with a solution at hand,” said Callahan, referring to the tests used immediately in Thailand and elsewhere. “Yes, CDC should make its own super-special test. But until then, they should make the test that will help us curb the problem.”

In recent weeks, senior CDC officials, including Jernigan and Monroe, have been drafting a review of the testing struggles that attributes the test failures with N3 to Lindstrom’s design, and with N1, to contamination in his lab. Officials said the summary is envisioned for public release, possibly in a scientific journal.

The GAO’s chief scientist, Timothy M. Persons, said that lessons to be learned from the CDC’s mishandling of coronavirus testing should shape policy for future outbreaks.

“The whole thing is a race,” Persons said. “You have to get the testing right as soon as possible, because if you don’t, you don’t know the size of the problem.

Friday. Okay, whatever

I am still on unofficial lockdown as the area begins to open up to Stage 2, 3, 16, whatever at this point it is all just smoke, mirrors, games and bullshit.  That said I have no interest in contacting, speaking or giving a shit as these next two weeks will be game changers.

Today in the Washington Post there was considerable alarm at the way we as a country have emerged from our cocoon but rather than a butterfly we are some type of moth that will race to the flame and ultimately die.  Yes folks, while I have long been calling bullshit on all of this I was always sure there was a serious virus, it was and is killing people but what was being done, what is being done and will be done will continue to allow this to happen. At this point they have run out of cards and have nothing left to even bluff with.  The overwhelming failure of all countries regarding Covid other than a few, New Zealand, Iceland to name those with land in their names have done not just a stop the spread but made it literally a flatline.  Why? Each had very unique strategies and of course they were countries run by women, go figure. Women can rule just not in America. What? Ever.

The New Yorker does an excellent piece on why Iceland was a success story despite the numbers that in the U.S. was akin to a death sentence and in turn why Europe is working so well to stem the tide that they are now laughing while secretly being received that Britain did BREXIT given the state of that country’s fiasco handling Covid, as Boris and Trump are two strands alike and both fatal to their country’s well being.   This is an article about the horrific contact tracking/tracing Britain has assembled and it only beats the U.S. in that there is one. No State has taken that on and I just received an email that they are looking for an appropriate administrator of such a program here and will be letting us know soon. In other words they are just hoping numbers go down enough to make that moot and they can move on.  What? Ever.

The posturing today in Cuomo’s last state of the state of covid speech veered to tears as he of course takes no responsibilities for the numerous fiascos of any of it, while DiBlasio is still trying to figure out how to run the city during a pandemic and civil unrest.  It is clear he could barely manage in the best of times so why do it any differently.  And here the third amigo of the posse of stupid, Murphy, once again bores us to the point that there is no point except to remind us that we have a lot of malls here and they need to be open. Okay, then. What? Ever.

Covid is quite serious and every day between protest stories another runs about a drug that is working or failing or how it is spread or not spread, to mask or not and basically how no one is social distancing and Fauci is now backtracking on the second wave and capitulating to the moron in charge who is having a racist rally and whining about Bolton as if he was shocked that an asshole would turn on him. Well had he given him a war to keep him busy then no he wouldn’t but hey what? Ever.

Everyday is another story about Covid, how asymptomatic people spread or don’t spread the virus. **note the constant corrections, contradictions and oxymorons when it comes to this.*** Again I think it is like Herpes and in the first few days, 3 or so, the virus sheds and goes dormant until it leaves the body and again we believe that is after 14 days.  Apparently because no disease actually manifested no antibodies are found meaning there is no immunity but that also may apply to those with Covid as many are coming back testing positive and getting sick. Meaning it is dormant like Herpes and then it flairs up.  Funny that it is steroids that are having the strongest affect as that is often the same treatment for what? Herpes.  (tricked you there, just like herpes)  I may not be a Doctor but watching this and remembering Herpes and AIDS,  the parallels are not lost it is just the transmission that is different.  And again we are being warned that the phase one is getting worse.  Or is that the first wave is now just kinda bigger and longer.  Really or is that NOT a second wave? So is there a third? Folks we are confused about what waves mean and this is now into full blown Tsunami versus Hurricane.  And the difference is that Tsunami starts with an earthquake under water that is stage one then it turns the water into tidal waves which bash the shore with force that comes from the quake A Hurricane is a water gathering wind that passes over land so the first wave is damage via wind and its second wave is the water that follows.  Okay they are kinda the same. Like Covid only not. Okay, then. What?Ever.

We don’t know shit and the CDC has deferred much of the prognostication and projection onto two schools of thought and they are east versus west and it appears that the are dueling it out for who kills more.  Okay, then.  But one thing is certain Covid ain’t leaving anytime soon, like Herpes it is the guest for life. They have never found a cure for it either.

Today is Juneteenth and I found this opinion in the Times much like I too learned of it when I was teaching, like Kwanza I had no real traction on it but it has gained a strong hold of positive energy and for that let’s end on it.

Why Juneteenth Matters

It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom.”

By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
The New York Times
June 18 2020

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.

Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.

“Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”

“Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition,” Sinha writes, and “fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led the abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”

When secession turned to war, it was enslaved people who turned a narrow conflict over union into a revolutionary war for freedom. “From the first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the slaves themselves,” the historian Ira Berlin wrote in 1992. “Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom — and that of their posterity — atop the national agenda.”

All of this is apropos of Juneteenth, which commemorates June 19, 1865, when Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, to lead the Union occupation force and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved people in the region. This holiday, which only became a nationwide celebration (among black Americans) in the 20th century, has grown in stature over the last decade as a result of key anniversaries (2011 to 2015 was the sesquicentennial of the Civil War), trends in public opinion (the growing racial liberalism of left-leaning whites), and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Jamelle Bouie’s Newsletter: Discover overlooked writing from around the internet, and get exclusive thoughts, photos and reading recommendations from Jamelle.

Over the last week, as Americans continued to protest police brutality, institutional racism and structural disadvantage in cities and towns across the country, elected officials in New York and Virginia have announced plans to make Juneteenth a paid holiday, as have a number of prominent businesses like Nike, Twitter and the NFL.

There’s obviously a certain opportunism here, an attempt to respond to the moment and win favorable coverage, with as little sacrifice as possible. (Paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls for justice and equality.) But if Americans are going to mark and celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and awareness of the agency of enslaved people.

Emancipation wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom, which began as soon as chattel slavery was established in the 17th century, and gained even greater steam with the Revolution and the birth of a country committed, at least rhetorically, to freedom and equality. In fighting that struggle, black Americans would open up new vistas of democratic possibility for the entire country.

To return to Ira Berlin — who tackled this subject in “The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States” — it is useful to look at the end of slavery as “a near-century-long process” rather than “the work of a moment, even if that moment was a great civil war.” Those in bondage were part of this process at every step of the way, from resistance and rebellion to escape, which gave them the chance, as free blacks, to weigh directly on the politics of slavery. “They gave the slaves’ oppositional activities a political form,” Berlin writes, “denying the masters’ claim that malingering and tool breaking were reflections of African idiocy and indolence, that sabotage represented the mindless thrashings of a primitive people, and that outsiders were the ones who always inspired conspiracies and insurrections.”

By pushing the question of emancipation into public view, black Americans raised the issue of their “status in freedom” and therefore “the question of citizenship and its attributes.” And as the historian Martha Jones details in “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” it is black advocacy that ultimately shapes the nation’s understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. “Never just objects of judicial, legislative, or antislavery thought,” black Americans “drove lawmakers to refine their thinking about citizenship. On the necessity of debating birthright citizenship, black Americans forced the issue.”

After the Civil War, black Americans — free and freed — would work to realize the promise of emancipation, and to make the South a true democracy. They abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding, instituted universal manhood suffrage, opened the region’s first public schools and made them available to all children. They stood against racial distinctions and discrimination in public life and sought assistance for the poor and disadvantaged. Just a few years removed from degradation and social death, these millions, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction in America, “took decisive and encouraging steps toward the widening and strengthening of human democracy.”

Juneteenth may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to anyone else in this nation’s history.

Try Try Again

Funny once again I read and with reading comes knowledge and knowledge is power.  Today I looked at the Flu of 2017-18 and it killed more people than the current Covid pandemic. Again these numbers are fluid as we have no fucking clue if Covid killed them or that they died of another illness but due to Covid and the crush in hospitals, the lack of a consistent medical examination post mortem we may never know the true numbers.

CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2017–2018 season was also high with an estimated 48.8 million people getting sick with influenza, 22.7 million people going to a health care provider, 959,000 hospitalizations, and 79,400 deaths from influenza. For Covid that is 57,640 and of course is fluid.

I want a 9/11 commission on this whole Covid crisis as again I have never understood the numbers, the reality behind the White House denials, the ever changing landscape of protocols, the hysteria and fear mongering and of course when they knew and why they did nothing and still are actually doing nothing.

At my coffee shop this morning the discussion is always Covid and today I found out the owner of a local liquor store had Covid came in after having a few days off, felt better but was certainly not tested to insure he was negative, had no protective gear on to prevent transmission and staff went nuts.  Some quit and some filed complaints. What that means is nothing but okay then.  Who was his Doctor and did he not explain that the virus sheds until you are negative, not when you feel well?

And if we do in fact actually turn into a military state with regards to tracking, testing and tracing the hardest hit communities are the ones currently being hit, Black and Brown ones.  The absurdity of this is the new drug wars and of course education and information does not provide the resources that cash fines and jails do.  Good luck with this one.

Then we have the stupid, and by those I mean medical professionals who have decided for some nutty reason to come to New York and “volunteer” on the front lines and then go home with a souvenir of Covid.  Again nothing in Tennessee shocks me anymore.  So was anyone on the plane with him contacted? I doubt it.

Then my Barista told me another story of his friend in Cincinnati who has not left her home in over three weeks because she is afraid.  She lives across the street from a park and there have been endless playdates, basketball games and the like, no one socially distancing and wearing masks and is afraid. So much for Mike DeWine the forefather for this bullshit clearly he is like the rest of the Covid Brigade, full of shit.  But I do wonder why she has not left her home, is she going to the park? Well if the answer is no then what is the problem?  And it was like my fight with the idiot here in charge of Health Services who informed me that her neighborhood she had people congregating on the stoops not practicing social distancing and that is why the parks are closed.  Really what has that got to do with parks and there is already an ordinance in place that permits you to call Police to shut that down as affecting egress or public safety.  Did she get back to me on that? No.

So we are sure that Covid is flying around the air waiting to land on an unsuspecting victim to literally squeeze the life out of you. Well in some situations yes ask that Doctor about that and his seat mate or his wife. Did he hug and kiss her and the kids when he got home.  My favorite about that was he had never been home alone in his entire life for four whole days. WOW just WOW.

So once again this falls to personal responsibility, having knowledge, common sense and some way of tracking, tracing and knowing your contacts.   That is a challenge but if you are aware you can be proactive and still leave the house.   So I leave you with this before I go out to enjoy the day. Just be safe! Whatever that fucking means. How about be proactive and take care of yourself and respect yourself by modeling that and in turn respecting others by giving them space, boundaries and letting them do their thing out of your airspace.

Is the coronavirus airborne? Experts can’t agree
The World Health Organization says the evidence is not compelling, but scientists warn that gathering sufficient data could take years and cost lives.

Dyani Lewis
Nature
April 2 2020

Since early reports revealed that a new coronavirus was spreading rapidly between people, researchers have been trying to pin down whether it can travel through the air. Health officials say the virus is transported only through droplets that are coughed or sneezed out — either directly, or on objects. But some scientists say there is preliminary evidence that airborne transmission — in which the disease spreads in the much smaller particles from exhaled air, known as aerosols — is occurring, and that precautions, such as increasing ventilation indoors, should be recommended to reduce the risk of infection.

Covert coronavirus infections could be seeding new outbreaks

In a scientific brief posted to its website on 27 March, the World Health Organization said that there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, except in a handful of medical contexts, such as when intubating an infected patient.

But experts that work on airborne respiratory illnesses and aerosols say that gathering unequivocal evidence for airborne transmission could take years and cost lives. We shouldn’t “let perfect be the enemy of convincing”, says Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

“In the mind of scientists working on this, there’s absolutely no doubt that the virus spreads in the air,” says aerosol scientist Lidia Morawska at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. “This is a no-brainer.”
Confusing definitions

When public health officials say there isn’t sufficient evidence to say that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, they specifically mean transported in virus-laden aerosols smaller than 5 micrometres in diameter. Compared with droplets, which are heftier and thought to travel only short distances after someone coughs or sneezes before falling to the floor or onto other surfaces, aerosols can linger in the air for longer and travel further.

Most transmission occurs at close range, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong. But the distinction between droplets and aerosols is unhelpful because “the particles that come out with virus can be a wide range of sizes. Very, very large ones right down to aerosols”, he says.

And if SARS-CoV-2 is transmitting in aerosols, it is possible that virus particles can build up over time in enclosed spaces or be transmitted over greater distances.

Coronavirus tests: researchers chase new diagnostics to fight the pandemic

Aerosols are also more likely to be produced by talking and breathing, which might even constitute a bigger risk than sneezing and coughing, says virologist Julian Tang at the University of Leicester, UK. “When someone’s coughing, they turn away, and when they’re sneezing, they turn away,” he says. That’s not the case when we talk and breathe.

A study of people with influenza found that 39% of people exhaled infectious aerosols. As long as we are sharing an airspace with someone else, breathing in the air that they exhale, airborne transmission is possible, says Tang. *what kind of airspace, outdoors or indoors? ***What is the radius or square foot transmission rate, three or six feet, or no feet just sharing airspace in the world? 

The evidence so far

Evidence from preliminary studies and field reports that SARS-CoV-2 is spreading in aerosols is mixed. At the height of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, virologist Ke Lan at Wuhan University collected samples of aerosols in and around hospitals treating people with COVID-19, as well as at the busy entrances of two department stores.

In an unreviewed preprint1, Lan and his colleagues report finding viral RNA from SARS-CoV-2 in a number of locations, including the department stores.

The study doesn’t ascertain whether the aerosols collected were able to infect cells. But, in an e-mail to Nature, Lan says the work demonstrates that “during breathing or talking, SARS-CoV-2 aerosol transmission might occur and impact people both near and far from the source”. As a precaution, the general public should avoid crowds, he writes, and should also wear masks, “to reduce the risk of airborne virus exposure”.  **in other words you are responsible for yourself and be smart and proactive or paranoid whatever works.

Another study failed to find evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in air samples in isolation rooms at an outbreak centre dedicated to treating people with COVID-19 in Singapore. Surface samples from an air outlet fan did return a positive result2, but two of the authors — Kalisvar Marimuthu and Oon Tek Ng at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases in Singapore — told Nature in an e-mail that the outlet was close enough to a person with COVID-19 that it could have been contaminated by respiratory droplets from a cough or sneeze.

A similar study by researchers in Nebraska found viral RNA in nearly two-thirds of air samples collected in isolation rooms in a hospital treating people with severe COVID-19 and in a quarantine facility housing those with mild infections3. Surfaces in ventilation grates also tested positive. None of the air samples was infectious in cell culture, but the data suggest that “viral aerosol particles are produced by individuals that have the COVID-19 disease, even in the absence of cough”, the authors write.**meaning that in a confined space there is a higher liklihood of transmission you know like hospital rooms, old folks rooms and jail cells.. or cabins on cruise ships, same diff. 

The WHO writes in its latest scientific brief that the evidence of viral RNA “is not indicative of viable virus that could be transmissible”. The brief also points to its own analysis of more than 75,000 COVID-19 cases in China that did not report finding airborne transmission. But Ben Cowling says that “there wasn’t a lot of evidence put forward to support the assessment” and, an absence of evidence does not mean SARS-CoV-2 is not airborne. The WHO did not respond to Nature’s questions about the evidence in time for publication.

Scientists in the United States have shown in the laboratory that the virus can survive in an aerosol and remain infectious for at least 3 hours. Although the conditions in the study were “highly artificial”, there is probably “a non-zero risk of longer-range spread through the air”, says co-author Jamie Lloyd-Smith, an infectious-diseases researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.  *meaning we fuck all don’t know but hey that closed in idea applies like airplanes

Gaps to fill

Leo Poon, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, doesn’t think there’s enough evidence yet to say SARS-CoV-2 is airborne. He’d like to see experiments showing that the virus is infectious in droplets of different sizes.

Whether people with COVID-19 produce enough virus-laden aerosols to constitute a risk is also unknown, says Lloyd-Smith. Air sampling from people when they talk, breathe, cough and sneeze — and testing for viable virus in those samples — “would be another big part of the puzzle”, he says. One such study failed to detect viral RNA in air collected 10 centimetres in front of one person with COVID-19 who was breathing, speaking and coughing, but the authors didn’t rule out airborne transmission entirely6.

Another crucial unknown is the infectious dose: the number of SARS-CoV-2 particles necessary to cause an infection, says Lloyd-Smith. “If you’re breathing aerosolized virus, we don’t know what the infectious dose is that gives a significant chance of being infected,” he says. An experiment to get at that number — deliberately exposing people and measuring the infection rate at different doses — would be unethical given the disease’s severity.

Whatever the infectious dose, length of exposure is probably an important factor too, says Tang. Each breath might not produce much virus, he says, but “if you’re standing beside [someone who’s infected], sharing the same airspace with them for 45 minutes, you’re going to inhale enough virus to cause infection”.

But capturing those small concentrations of aerosols that, given the right combination of airflow, humidity and temperature, might build to an infectious dose over time, is “extremely difficult”, says Morawska. “We could say that we need more data, but then we should acknowledge the difficulty of collecting the data,” she says.

Cautious approach

The assumption should be that airborne transmission is possible unless experimental evidence rules it out, not the other way around, says Tang. That way people can take precautions to protect themselves, he says.

Increasing ventilation indoors and not recirculating air can go some way to ensuring that infectious aerosols are diluted and flushed out, says Morawska. Indoor meetings should be banned just in case, she says.

Meanwhile, Lan and others are calling for the public to wear masks to reduce transmission. Masks are ubiquitous in many countries in Asia. In the United States and some European countries, however, health officials have discouraged people from wearing them, in part because supplies are low and health-care workers need them. The Czech Republic and Slovakia, however, have made it mandatory for people to wear masks outside the home. Tang thinks those countries have taken the right approach. “They are following the southeast Asia approach. If everyone can mask, it is double, two-way protection,” he says.

But Cowling thinks masks should be recommended for the public only after supplies have been secured for health-care workers, people with symptoms, and vulnerable populations such as the elderly.

Test Track Trace

The never ending bullshit and contradictions and confusion will continue as we reel from crisis to crisis.  This is not about Covid, it is about Unemployment, a return to some type of structure with regards to business, education and of course all the other bullshit from stimulus packages to those getting loans, checks or well any questions answered.

Again we have super spreaders, contact surface tests and my favorite the projectile spit skills that have come up with the 6 feet mandate.  This one I love as who in the fuck is getting from spit from six feet away (aka two Golden Retrievers) that is one hell of a powerful loogie.  Again the WHO found that the CDC test was with a device that has not been blind tested or actually replicated in the field but hey its science lets go with it.  And they also use the correct phrase Physical Distancing to explain the needed skill to go along with the request.   But in America we hate WHO as why?  A Black man with a very challenging last name runs the organization.

And there is this from again another study I found which may explain why despite all the measures in quarantining and self isolating the numbers stay relatively high.  “The most significant finding from our study is that half of the patients kept shedding the virus even after resolution of their symptoms,”  The authors had a special message for the medical community:    “COVID-19 patients can be infectious even after their symptomatic recovery, so treat the asymptomatic/recently recovered patients as carefully as symptomatic patients.” 

And again we have varying time frames from contact to symptomatic.  And here too is another variation of information that we may or may not be given. The time from infection to onset of symptoms (incubation period) was five days among all but one patient. The average duration of symptoms was eight days, while the length of time patients remained contagious after the end of their symptoms ranged from one to eight days. Two patients had diabetes and one had tuberculosis, neither of which affected the timing of the course of COVID-19 infection.

I read most of my daily update from the usual sources the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and PBS.  However I actually read scientific journals and more wonky nerdy sites like Science Live to further educate and inform as well as check the stats, the info and then of course ask the Politicians where they got their info to see if it in fact checks.  They are only using the CDC and that they are also extrapolating data and misquoting it is another issue but then again they never get back to me on that when I cite their sources and provide links.  Funny how that works.

The reality is that we have the CDC and WHO where both have been in conflict from day one so I trust neither and read both as my own way of tracking and tracing this chaos.  We read endless reports from varying sources of testing across the globe and my favorite was Covid Feet and Covid Testicles  which to decide is better is well up to you. But largely the remain similar to how viruses are spread and what to do to protect yourself from contracting Covid.  And yes are the same for any virus and yet we seem to think this is a whole new thing. No just the affects of the virus varies on a case by case basis and has had severe health problems leading to death for many who fall into a larger classification of at risk.   Oddly children usually fall into this but this is the one time I hear very little about the disease and what may mean why this disease is still rampant given our lockdowns.  We should be declining and we are but until EVERY SINGLE PERSON and CONTACT TRACE and in turn quarantine the at risk while this is ongoing we have well this fucked up hot mess.

As this is clear:  Other known symptoms of COVID-19 include fever, fatigue, cough and difficulty breathing. Respondents in Yan’s study were most often persons with milder forms of COVID-19 infection who did not require hospitalization or intubation. The findings, she said, underline the importance of identifying early or subtle symptoms of COVID-19 infection in people who may be at risk of transmitting the disease as they recuperate within the community.  

**ya think kids had some of this and are fine now? I do. Covid has been with us for awhile now.   Again it is a virus and we have had many pass over our shores but we had leadership that was competent and agencies that had actually educated and trained individuals running them. Here in Jersey City our Health and Human Services coordinator is Harvard educated; however, she has a degree in Business and Economics and her single gig before was running the WIC program in NYC. Perfect person to be leading a department of health during a pandemic!

Coronavirus: contact tracing explained

WHO says Covid-19 patient tracing should be ‘backbone of the response’

Sarah Boseley Health editor
Guardian
Fri 17 Apr 2020

What is contact tracing?

This is one of the most basic planks of public health responses to a pandemic. It means literally tracking down anyone that somebody with an infection may have had contact with in the days before they became ill.

It was – and always will be – central to the fight against Ebola, for instance. In west Africa in 2014/15, there were large teams of people who would trace relatives and knock on the doors of neighbours and friends to find anyone who might have become infected by touching the sick person.

Is it harder to do in the case of a respiratory infection?

Most people who get Covid-19 will be infected by their friends, neighbours, family or work colleagues, so they will be first on the list. It is not likely anyone will get infected by someone they do not know, passing on the street.

It is still assumed there has to be reasonable exposure – originally experts said people would need to be together for 15 minutes, less than 2 metres apart. So the contact tracer will want to know who the person testing positive met and talked to over the two or three days before they developed symptoms and went into isolation.

What do the contact tracers do then?

In the way it was operating in February, the tracer would call the contacts and ask them how close they had been to the person with symptoms and establish whether they were low-risk or high-risk. If the latter, they would be asked to isolate themselves for 14 days at home.

The contact tracers would either call each day to check how they were or ask them to phone if they felt ill. If they developed symptoms, the tracers would start again, looking for their contacts in turn.

Who does the contact tracing?

It is organised by Public Health England, which had 290 staff doing it before community testing stopped in mid-March. Public health in recent years has been the responsibility of local government, so any increase in contact tracers might come from councils.

Which other countries have done this to scale?

South Korea has large teams of contact tracers and notably chased down all the contacts of a religious group, many of whose members fell ill. That outbreak was efficiently stamped out by contact tracing and quarantine.

Singapore and Hong Kong have also espoused testing and contact tracing and so has Germany. All those countries have had relatively low death rates so far. The World Health Organization says it should be the “backbone of the response” in every country.