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A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
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jedclampett Offline
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A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
A lot of folks understandably have frayed nerves, and we definitely need to have something positive to talk about. So I'm starting this thread as a place for us to talk about the good things that are happening with respect to treating Covid-19 and developing vaccines.

I came across this article and thought it would be helpful to share some excerpts from it:

07-07-2012:57 pm


Will COVID-19 vaccines work? What’s the timeline? Here’s the latest on vaccine progress

By Arianne Cohen

Dozens of companies worldwide are swiftly developing COVID-19 vaccines, with trillions of dollars and the health of the planet at stake. Here’s what you need to know:
How’s it going?

Roughly 2o vaccines are currently in human trials, eight of those in China. Experts warn that the one-year timeline touted by companies and the Trump administration may not be feasible: Vaccines typically take years to develop and frequently fail human trials. Ignore Phase I and Phase II trial excitement—you don’t find out whether a vaccine works on lots of humans until Phase III.

What vaccines are in development?

Companies are developing a few different vaccine technologies: Novavax and Sanofi are both creating vaccines that work by inserting a viral protein (the antigen) into the body, to provoke an immune response. Moderna and German companies CureVac and BioNTech are using mRNA from COVID-19 to stimulate an immune response—a strategy that has never been used before in a regulated vaccine. Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca are both delivering coronavirus protection via a benign virus. Moderna, which has not previously brought a successful drug to market, is currently leading the race to large-scale testing in the United States—it’s set to begin Phase 3 testing with 30,000 participants this month.

That’s the Trump administration’s well-funded, multiagency effort to make a vaccine available as soon as possible. In a Senate subcommittee hearing last week, officials refused to disclose which vaccines are front-runners, nor did they say how they are chosen. Moncef Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed, is a 30-year veteran of GlaxoSmithKline, where he was involved in public deception over the health risks of a blockbuster diabetes drug, Avandia.

Does Operation Warp Speed give funding?

Yes. Today, Novavax, which has never brought a successful medical product to market, announced that it received $1.6 billion in funding to speed the development of 100 million doses of vaccine. British company AstraZeneca was awarded $1.2 billion in May. Other companies, including Sanofi, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna Therapeutics have also received funding.

Another story:

Harvard professor develops a $50 nasal spray to thwart the spread of COVID-19

https://www.fastcompany.com/90525117/wil...e-progress
(This post was last modified: 07-09-2020 10:57 PM by jedclampett.)
07-08-2020 04:35 PM
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jedclampett Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
Here's the nasal spray story to consider:

07-08-207:00 am coronavirus

Harvard professor develops a $50 nasal spray to thwart the spread of COVID-19

Developed by Harvard professor David Edwards—who previously created inhalable chocolate and cocktails—the spray promises to stop the spread of aerosols by as much as 99%.
Harvard professor develops a $50 nasal spray to thwart the spread of COVID-19
[Image: Sensory Cloud]

By Mark Wilson4 minute Read

You should practice social distancing and wear a mask to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But even masks aren’t perfect. A high-end N95 mask can filter an estimated 99.8% of the virus from the air, while many cotton masks filter just 50% or less. Given that researchers now know the virus is airborne, you may wonder: Is there anything else you can do to prevent the spread of COVID-19?

According to David Edwards, a Harvard professor and entrepreneur, there is. And it’s not much more complicated than sniffing a specialized saline solution. “It’s cleaning my bioaerosol footprint, if you will,” he says.

With his company Sensory Cloud, Edwards has developed a $50 product that has two components: the Nimbus and FEND. The Nimbus is an aerosol squirter, capable of turning liquid into a cloud of vapor that you puff in front of your nose to inhale from the air. FEND is a solution that goes inside the squirter, composed of a mix of salts similar to seawater.
[Image: Sensory Cloud]

In a recent study on 10 subjects (PDF), Edwards demonstrated that inhaling the solution can reduce potentially infected aerosols—droplets that fly from your nose and mouth while speaking or sneezing—by up to 99% for six hours. That means that if you have COVID-19, you should be less contagious to others. Plus, Edwards believes it could help prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from moving from your upper respiratory system (your nose) down to your lungs, too.

While the Nimbus is a personal device, it can be shared between people (carefully) because it doesn’t go in your nose or body. Edwards imagines that an office, a restaurant, or a hospital could assign one person to pump it for each visitor who walks in, much like people do temperature checks or distribute hand sanitizer today. Each bottle costs $6 and can spray 250 doses, and while that cost is low, Edwards plans profits at scale, as he intends customers to buy subscription packages. “One hundred Nimbi could treat 50,000 people at a stadium,” he says.

How is this all possible?

As Edwards explains, your nose is “the body’s face mask.” Many viruses actually get caught inside your nose like a trap, thanks to mucus. From there, your entire respiratory tract is protected with airway lining fluid, a mix of mucus and fluid that protects the cells like a sticky raincoat. Cilia in those cells beat the liquid to clear it away and any infections stuck inside. But when you cough, tiny bits of that fluid, filled with viruses, can break away. They can fly out of your mouth to infect someone else. Or they can float deeper into your airway, infecting your lungs. Aerosols are a two-way street of infection, both out of your body and deeper therein.

In 2004, Edwards was researching how to protect people from anthrax, the quintessential airborne biological weapon. As part of that research, he looked at mucins, the protein building blocks inside mucus.

“It led to a paper . . . an observation that when you inhale simple saline—sodium chloride—there’s an effect that salt has on mucins and mucin-like proteins and . . . that leads to a calmness of surface in airways,” Edwards says. “It was a minor effect but an effect. For several years we dug into this.”

When you breathe in salt and water, the fluid in your trachea has a greater surface tension. So when you talk or cough, the equivalent of high winds blow across the liquid in your respiratory tract. The effect of saline is that tiny droplets are less likely to break away from the surface. The chemistry at work isn’t terribly complicated: Calcium chloride (a salt) has two positive charges. Mucus proteins are negatively charged. So the calcium in the liquid actually glues two mucus proteins together at the molecular level. (Four aerosol experts we reached out to in order to validate the product’s claims were unavailable for comment.)

Edwards was only able to develop the device so quickly in response to COVID-19 because he originally designed it for something else. It was a food product that Edwards had been working on for appetite control, and he had planned to release it this year. An earlier endeavor in inhalable food was called Le Whif, and it let you puff a few calories of chocolate powder instead of blowing your diet on a whole chocolate bar. This was followed up by Le Whaf, a device that used ultrasonic waves to vaporize cocktails. Le Whif is no longer in production; Le Whaf still makes international appearances at various events.

But as COVID-19 spread across the globe earlier this year, Edwards back-burnered his food products and turned his attention to public health. The Nimbus is calibrated to mist the saline solution in 10 micron droplets. As he explains, if it misted in 50 micron droplets, they’d all end up in your nose. If it misted in 2 micron droplets, they would go straight to your lungs like an inhaler. At 10 microns, the aerosol lands inside the sweet spot of your trachea and bronchi.

Edwards currently has thousands of Nimbuses already produced. And he has licensed the FEND saline solution from the pharmaceutical company Pulmatrix. He is currently beginning pilot studies with the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, while enlisting schools and offices to take part, too.

Right now, you can purchase a Nimbus system for yourself with two bottles of FEND solution for $49 shipping this September, and Edwards says it can mitigate the spread of not just COVID-19, but any aerosol cold or flu, too.



https://www.fastcompany.com/90524003/har...f-covid-19
07-08-2020 04:39 PM
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smu89 Offline
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A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
Interesting potential treatment...available now.

Watch "Dr. Richard Bartlett | ACWT Interview 7.2.20" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/eDSDdwN2Xcg

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07-08-2020 06:26 PM
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jedclampett Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
(07-08-2020 06:26 PM)smu89 Wrote:  Interesting potential treatment...available now.

Watch "Dr. Richard Bartlett | ACWT Interview 7.2.20" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/eDSDdwN2Xcg

Interesting. Maybe this will help some people.
07-08-2020 06:35 PM
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jedclampett Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
In addition to the specific news items, such as vaccine developments, and treatments such as remdesivir and opaganib being tested in Phase 2 and 3 trials, there is also some reason to think that the various treatments that are currently being used in hospitals and clinics, such as the steroidal antiinflammatory dexamethasone and the other experimental treatments approved for humane care are having some beneficial effects.

Broadly, the mortality rate in the raw data (# of deaths attributed to Covid-19 divided by the total # of cases of Covid-19) has dropped from approximately 6% in March and April to either 4.3% or 4.6% according to recent reports. Importantly, this is an average that includes all cases during the 4+ month period of the U.S. pandemic. Although it's too soon to say how high the death count will go as a result of the current major surge in U.S. cases, there are some early data suggesting that doctors may be treating the disease much more effectively now than they were 2 months ago, simply because they have more tools now than they had 2 months ago, and they know what doesn't work and what might work, and at which stages each of the available treatments is most effective.
(This post was last modified: 07-08-2020 06:44 PM by jedclampett.)
07-08-2020 06:44 PM
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jedclampett Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
This recent story definitely belongs in this thread, so I'm reposting it here:

CanSino's COVID-19 vaccine candidate approved for military use in China

Reuters•June 29, 2020


"BEIJING (Reuters) - China's military has received the greenlight to use a COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed by its research unit and CanSino Biologics <6185.HK> after clinical trials proved it was safe and somewhat efficient, the company said on Monday.

The Ad5-nCoV is one of the eight vaccine candidates being developed by Chinese companies and researchers approved to be moved into human trials for the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.

The shot also won approval for human testing in Canada."

https://news.yahoo.com/cansinos-covid-19...20157.html

============================================


"The company has a portfolio of vaccines under research including Ad5-nCoV for COVID-19, developed jointly with the Institute of Biotechnology of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences of the People's Liberation Army.

The company has collaborated with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on vaccine development.

In March 2020, CanSino made a deal to collaborate with the NRC on development of the COVID-19 vaccine candidate Ad5-nCoV, to help end the COVID-19 pandemic, with plans to conduct a clinical trial in Canada. Ad5-nCoV was the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate in the world to begin Phase II human trials."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CanSino_Biologics
07-09-2020 10:59 PM
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A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
Gilead Sciences published new data Friday on its antiviral drug remdesivir that shows it reduced the risk of death for severely sick coronavirus patients by 62% compared with standard care alone.

Gilead said the findings must be further investigated in further trials.

NIAID’s findings led the Food and Drug Administration to issue an emergency use authorization for remdesivir, allowing doctors to use the drug on hospitalized Covid-19 patients. However, the drug has not undergone the same level of review as fully FDA-authorized drugs. There are still no FDA-authorized drugs to treat Covid-19.


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07-10-2020 08:45 AM
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smu89 Offline
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A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
MD CURED OVER 100 COVID-19 WITH HCQ AND ZINC.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/PbZTlxaEb2oP/


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07-10-2020 09:04 AM
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Bear Catlett Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
My son's baseball team has been practicing and playing games against teams from other communities for a month now. Nobody wears masks.

Not one person has caught covid19.
07-10-2020 09:32 AM
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Bear Catlett Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
(07-10-2020 09:32 AM)Bear Catlett Wrote:  My son's baseball team has been practicing and playing games against teams from other communities for a month now. Nobody wears masks.

Not one person has caught covid19.

five hours later...

[crickets]
07-10-2020 02:20 PM
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
Ok
07-10-2020 10:46 PM
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jedclampett Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
Hey guys (and gals, if there are any),

Here's a great article that explores the phenomenon we're seeing, of at least a short term (but quite significant) decline in the Covid-19 death rate.

This article qualifies as good news in my book, even though the good news is being cancelled out right now with over 70,000 new Covid-19 cases on Friday. So it's a mixed bag, but still better than all bad news.

Hope the article will lift some spirits!

NOTE: It has lifted my spirits, because an important part of the picture seems to be that medical personnel are getting better at treating Covid-19 more effective, and that with more widespread testing, more people with the illness are being detected earlier and having better outcomes as a result.

============================================

COVID-19 Cases Are Rising, So Why Are Deaths Flatlining?
The gap between soaring cases and falling deaths is being weaponized by the right to claim a hollow victory in the face of shameless failure. What’s really going on?
JULY 9, 2020

Derek Thompson
Staff writer at The Atlantic


THE ATLANTIC
Updated at 1:40 p.m. ET on July 9, 2020.

For the past few weeks, I have been obsessed with a mystery emerging in the national COVID-19 data.

Cases have soared to terrifying levels since June. Yesterday, the U.S. had 62,000 confirmed cases, an all-time high—and about five times more than the entire continent of Europe. Several U.S. states, including Arizona and Florida, currently have more confirmed cases per capita than any other country in the world.

But average daily deaths are down 75 percent from their April peak. Despite higher death counts on Tuesday and Wednesday, the weekly average has largely plateaued in the past two weeks.

The gap between spiking cases and falling-then-flatlining deaths has become the latest partisan flashpoint. President Donald Trump has brushed off the coronavirus surge by emphasizing the lower death rate, saying that “99 percent of [COVID-19 cases] are totally harmless.” On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned Americans against “[taking] comfort in the lower rate of death” just hours before Trump tweeted triumphantly: “Death Rate from Coronavirus is down tenfold!”


In the fog of pandemic, every statistic tells a story, but no one statistic tells the whole truth. Conservatives seeking refuge in today’s death counts may find, in a matter of days, that deaths are clearly resurging and their narrative is rapidly deteriorating. But liberals, too, should avoid the temptation to flatly reject any remotely positive finding, for fear that it will give succor to the president.

What follows are five possible explanations for the case-death gap. Take them as complementary, rather than competing, theories.

1. Deaths lag cases—and that might explain almost everything.
You can’t have a serious discussion about case and death numbers without noting that people die of diseases after they get sick. It follows that there should be a lag between a surge in cases and a surge in deaths. More subtly, there can also be a lag between the date a person dies and the date the death certificate is issued, and another lag before that death is reported to the state and the federal government. As this chart from the COVID Tracking Project shows, the official reporting of a COVID-19 death can lag COVID-19 exposure by up to a month. This suggests that the surge in deaths is coming.


In Arizona, Florida, and Texas, the death surge is already happening. Since June 7, the seven-day average of deaths in those hot-spot states has increased 69 percent, according to the COVID Tracking Project.


The death lag is probably the most important thing to understand in evaluating the case-death gap. But it doesn’t explain everything. Even where deaths are rising, corresponding cases are rising notably faster.

2. Expanded testing is finding more cases, milder cases, and earlier cases.

There is a bad way to talk about testing, and a nuanced way to talk about it.

The simplistic version, which we often hear from the president, is that cases are surging only because the number of tests is rising. That’s just wrong. Since the beginning of June, the share of COVID-19 tests that have come back positive has increased from 4.5 percent to 8 percent. Hospitalizations are skyrocketing across the South and West. Those are clear signs of an underlying outbreak.

Something subtler is happening. The huge increase in testing is an unalloyed good, but it might be tricking us with some confusing weeks of data.

In March and April, tests were scarce, and medical providers had to ration tests for the sickest patients. Now that testing has expanded into communities across the U.S., the results might be picking up milder, or even asymptomatic, cases of COVID-19.

Read: A dire warning from COVID-19 test providers

The whole point of testing is to find cases, trace the patients’ close contacts, and isolate the sick. But our superior testing capacity makes it difficult to do apples-to-apples comparisons with the initial surge; it’s like trying to compare the height of two mountains when one of the peaks is obscured by clouds. The epidemiologist Ellie Murray has also cautioned that identifying new fatal cases of COVID-19 earlier in the victims’ disease process could mean a longer lag between detection and death. This phenomenon, known as “lead time bias,” might be telling us that a big death surge is coming.


And maybe it is. Maybe this is all as simple as nationwide deaths are about to soar, again.

But there are still three reasons to think that any forthcoming death surge could be materially different from the one that brutalized the Northeast in March and April: younger patients, better hospital outcomes, and summer effects.

3. The typical COVID-19 patient is getting younger.
The most important COVID-19 story right now may be the age shift.

In Florida, the median age of new COVID-19 cases fell from 65 in March to 35 in June. In its latest daily report, the Florida Department of Health says the median age is still in the high 30s.* In Arizona, Texas, and California, young adults getting sick have been driving the surge.

If the latest surge is concentrated among younger Americans, that would partly explain the declining death count. Young people are much less likely to die from this disease, even if they face other health risks. International data from South Korea, Spain, China, and Italy suggest that the COVID-19 case-fatality rate for people older than 70 is more than 100 times greater than for those younger than 40.

Kerry Kennedy Meltzer: I’m treating too many young people for the coronavirus

The youth shift seems very real, but what’s behind it is harder to say. Maybe older Americans are being more cautious about avoiding crowded indoor spaces. Maybe news reports of young people packing themselves into bars explain the youth spike, since indoor bars are exquisitely designed to spread the virus. Or maybe state and local governments that rushed to reopen the economy pushed young people into work environments that got them sick. “The people in the service economy and the retail industry, they tend to be young, and they can’t work remotely,” says Natalie Dean, an assistant professor at the University of Florida. Texas Governor Greg Abbott blamed reckless young people for driving the spike, but the true locus of recklessness might be the governor’s mansion.

No matter the cause, interpreting the “youth surge” as good news would be a mistake. Young people infected with COVID-19 still face extreme dangers—and present real danger to their close contacts and their community. “We see people in their 20s and 30s in our ICUs gasping for air because they have COVID-19,” James McDeavitt, the dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, told The Wall Street Journal. Young people who feel fine can still contract long-term organ damage, particularly to their lungs. They can pass the disease to more vulnerable people, who end up in the hospital; a youth surge could easily translate into a broader uptick some weeks from now. And the sheer breadth of the youth surge could force businesses to shut down, throwing millions more people into limbo or outright unemployment.


4. Hospitalized patients are dying less frequently, even without a home-run treatment.
So far, we’ve focused on the gap between cases and deaths. But there’s another gap that deserves our attention. Hospitalizations and deaths moved up and down in tandem before June. After June, they’ve diverged. National hospitalizations are rising, but deaths aren’t.


The hospitalization and death data that we have aren’t good enough or timely enough to say anything definitive. But the chart suggests some good news (finally): Patients at hospitals are dying less.

Indeed, other countries have seen the same. One study from a hospital in Milan found that from March to May, the mortality rate of its COVID-19 patients declined from 24 percent to 2 percent—"without significant changes in patients’ age.” British hospitals found that their hospital mortality rate has declined every month since April.

So what’s going on? Maybe doctors are just getting smarter about the disease.

Read: A devastating new stage of the pandemic

In early 2020, the novelty of the coronavirus meant that doctors had no idea what to expect. Health-care professionals were initially shocked that what they assumed to be a respiratory disease was causing blood clots, microvascular thrombosis, and organ damage. But millions of cases and hundreds of white papers later, we know more. That’s how, for example, doctors know to prescribe the steroid dexamethasone to rein in out-of-control immune responses that destroy patients’ organs.

Finally, it’s notable that mortality declined in Italian and British hospitals when they weren't overrun with patients. This is another reason why flattening the curve isn't just a buzzy slogan, but a matter of life and death. As hospitals across Texas and Arizona start to fill up, we’ll see whether hospital mortality increases again.

5. Summer might be helping—but probably only a little bit.
Several remaining theories about the case-death gap are more speculative, mostly falling under the category of “summer is just different.”

The transition to summer may have stamped out other illnesses that were weakening our immune systems. People in the Northern Hemisphere may absorb more Vitamin D in the summer, which might mitigate COVID-19 mortality. The virus might have mutated to become more contagious, but not more deadly, which might—in combination with other factors, like superior hospital treatment of the disease—exacerbate an outbreak in cases that doesn’t correspond with an increase in deaths.


Finally, as more people wear masks and move their activities outside in the summer, they might come into contact with smaller infecting doses of COVID-19. Some epidemiologists have claimed that there is a relationship between viral load and severity. With more masks and more outdoor interactions, it’s possible that the recent surge is partly buoyed by an increase in these low-dosage cases.


The case-death gap remains a bonfire of unknowns. And, as we’ve seen, uncertainty is a cavity where propaganda can breed. So let’s conclude with what we know for sure: The surge in cases represents a vast and tragic American failure—even if it doesn’t lead to a correspondingly dramatic spike in deaths.

This virus is a cryptic devil. It can brutalize people’s bodies for weeks or months, even if it doesn’t kill them. It can savage the lungs of young people, even when it doesn’t produce other symptoms. Those who are infected can transmit it to more vulnerable people. Those who contract severe cases can be sent to the hospital for weeks and live for months—which may turn into years—with aftershocks from the illness. Outbreaks might make school openings implausible, sports improbable, and ordinary life impossible.

When President Trump and others point exclusively to lagging death figures during a surge, they are trying to tell you that America is, secretly, winning the war on COVID-19. But we’re not. The summer surge is an exceptionally American failure, born of absent leadership and terrible public-health communication.

After all the graphs, statistics, science, and interpretations, we’re left with a simple fact: Hundreds of Americans are dying every day of a disease that is infecting several hundred thousand of them every week. If that’s success, let’s pray we never see failure.
(This post was last modified: 07-11-2020 04:03 AM by jedclampett.)
07-11-2020 04:00 AM
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smu89 Offline
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Post: #13
A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
Here's another article ...similar w more facts and a lot less opinions of the author


COVID-19 

Deaths Are Now Rising in the U.S., but Case Fatality Rate Continues To Fall

We are starting to see the fatal consequences of the recent infection surge.

JACOB SULLUM | 7.10.2020 4:50 PM

Daily COVID-19 deaths in the United States, which have fallen dramatically since the spring and continued to dropeven as newly identified cases surged, are now rising.  According to the Worldometers tally, which is based on reports from local health departments, COVID-19 deaths averaged 948 during the last three days, compared to 302 during the previous three days. That's a pretty alarming increase in a short time, and it will have a significant impact on the total death toll if it proves to be more than a temporary spike.

The seven-day average of daily deaths, which is a better indicator of trends, has increased less dramatically. According to data scientist Youyang Gu's calculations, which are basedon death tallies from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, that number fell from 1,122 on May 25 to a low of 510 on July 4 and has since risen to 641, which is still more than 70 percent lower than the peak average of 2,238 on April 18. The New York Times database also indicates an increase in daily deaths this week, although the paper says "health experts cautioned that it was too early to predict a continuing trend from only a few days of data."

Gu, who has a good track record of predicting COVID-19 fatalities, is now projectingthat daily deaths will rise to 774 in late August, then gradually fall to fewer than 500 by the end of October. He has increased his estimate of total deaths by October 1 from about 186,000—his projection at the beginning of this week—to about 192,000, rising above 200,000 by mid-October.
Because newly identified infections have more than tripled since Memorial Day, from fewer than 20,000 to more than 60,000 yesterday and the day before, daily deaths were bound to rise eventually. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the lag between laboratory confirmation and death is about two weeks.) Yet the nationwide crude case fatality rate—deaths as a share of confirmed cases—continues to fall. It is now 4.3 percent, down from more than 6 percent in mid-May. That trend likely reflects not only broader testing but also a younger mix of patients and improved treatment.

If the patient mix remains about the same, the case fatality rate could keep dropping even as daily deaths rise. But if the young and healthy people who seem to be driving the recent jump in cases pass the virus on to a lot of people who are more vulnerable to COVID-19, the case fatality rate could go up, as it did from late March to mid-May, when the patient mix was older and less healthy. Much will depend on precautions aimed at protecting people in high-risk groups.
The upward national trend in COVID-19 infections is largely due to dramatic increases in several Sunbelt states. On Wednesday, for example, California, Florida, and Texas, where a little more than a quarter of Americans live, accounted for more than two-fifths of newly confirmed cases.
"The current surge in coronavirus cases in the United States is being driven by states that were among the first to reopen their economies, decisions that epidemiologists warned could lead to a wave of infections," the Times says. But California's prominence in the recent wave of infections complicates that narrative.

California, which led the nation in imposing a lockdown and has been lifting it only gradually, nevertheless saw newly identified cases rise more than fivefold between Memorial Day and July 7, from 2,175 to 11,694. It recorded about 7,000 cases on Wednesday. "The state was once seen as a model for how to contain the virus," the Times says, "but experts blame the current surge on an inconsistent adoption of prevention strategies and a haphazard reopening process that gave people a false sense that they were in the clear."
Still, California does seem to be doing better in some respects than Texas and Florida, which have seen even bigger increases in newly identified cases and daily deaths since Memorial Day. The seven-day average of COVID-19 deaths in Californiarose from 70 on May 25 to 85 yesterday. During the same period, the average rose from 26 to 66 in Texas and from 36 to 56 in Florida.
Then again, Texas and Florida have lower case fatality rates: 1.3 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively, compared to 2.3 percent in California. That suggests patients are doing somewhat worse in California, especially since it has tested a larger share of its population than Texas or Florida has, which would tend to reduce the apparent fatality rate. And according to Gu's estimates, the COVID-19 reproductive number—the number of people infected by the average carrier—is slightly higher in California than in Texas or Florida.

What about states that never imposed stay-at-home orders? Since Memorial Day, daily new cases are up dramatically in Arkansas, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, but not in Nebraska. It sure looks like politicians' decrees play a smaller role in this pandemic than The New York Timesthinks.



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(This post was last modified: 07-11-2020 10:02 AM by smu89.)
07-11-2020 09:39 AM
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billybobby777 Offline
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Post: #14
RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
(07-10-2020 09:32 AM)Bear Catlett Wrote:  My son's baseball team has been practicing and playing games against teams from other communities for a month now. Nobody wears masks.

Not one person has caught covid19.

Awesome!
07-11-2020 11:47 AM
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GoOwls111 Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
(07-08-2020 04:35 PM)jedclampett Wrote:  A lot of folks understandably have frayed nerves, and we definitely need to have something positive to talk about. So I'm starting this thread as a place for us to talk about the good things that are happening with respect to treating Covid-19 and developing vaccines.

I came across this article and thought it would be helpful to share some excerpts from it:

07-07-2012:57 pm


Will COVID-19 vaccines work? What’s the timeline? Here’s the latest on vaccine progress

By Arianne Cohen

Dozens of companies worldwide are swiftly developing COVID-19 vaccines, with trillions of dollars and the health of the planet at stake. Here’s what you need to know:
How’s it going?

Roughly 2o vaccines are currently in human trials, eight of those in China. Experts warn that the one-year timeline touted by companies and the Trump administration may not be feasible: Vaccines typically take years to develop and frequently fail human trials. Ignore Phase I and Phase II trial excitement—you don’t find out whether a vaccine works on lots of humans until Phase III.

What vaccines are in development?

Companies are developing a few different vaccine technologies: Novavax and Sanofi are both creating vaccines that work by inserting a viral protein (the antigen) into the body, to provoke an immune response. Moderna and German companies CureVac and BioNTech are using mRNA from COVID-19 to stimulate an immune response—a strategy that has never been used before in a regulated vaccine. Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca are both delivering coronavirus protection via a benign virus. Moderna, which has not previously brought a successful drug to market, is currently leading the race to large-scale testing in the United States—it’s set to begin Phase 3 testing with 30,000 participants this month.

That’s the Trump administration’s well-funded, multiagency effort to make a vaccine available as soon as possible. In a Senate subcommittee hearing last week, officials refused to disclose which vaccines are front-runners, nor did they say how they are chosen. Moncef Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed, is a 30-year veteran of GlaxoSmithKline, where he was involved in public deception over the health risks of a blockbuster diabetes drug, Avandia.

Does Operation Warp Speed give funding?

Yes. Today, Novavax, which has never brought a successful medical product to market, announced that it received $1.6 billion in funding to speed the development of 100 million doses of vaccine. British company AstraZeneca was awarded $1.2 billion in May. Other companies, including Sanofi, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna Therapeutics have also received funding.

Another story:

Harvard professor develops a $50 nasal spray to thwart the spread of COVID-19

https://www.fastcompany.com/90525117/wil...e-progress

Last time I checked President Trump was not a scientist, he is an extremely positive individual, as far as Corporate executives... They will never say that their company can't "PRODUCE".

What is Joe Bidens solution? The Chines are not the answer.

There is enough independent research done worldwide that it more likely than not that something will be developed before 24 months. JMO
07-11-2020 01:19 PM
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GoOwls111 Offline
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
(07-08-2020 04:39 PM)jedclampett Wrote:  Here's the nasal spray story to consider:

07-08-207:00 am coronavirus

Harvard professor develops a $50 nasal spray to thwart the spread of COVID-19

Developed by Harvard professor David Edwards—who previously created inhalable chocolate and cocktails—the spray promises to stop the spread of aerosols by as much as 99%.
Harvard professor develops a $50 nasal spray to thwart the spread of COVID-19
[Image: Sensory Cloud]

By Mark Wilson4 minute Read

You should practice social distancing and wear a mask to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But even masks aren’t perfect. A high-end N95 mask can filter an estimated 99.8% of the virus from the air, while many cotton masks filter just 50% or less. Given that researchers now know the virus is airborne, you may wonder: Is there anything else you can do to prevent the spread of COVID-19?

According to David Edwards, a Harvard professor and entrepreneur, there is. And it’s not much more complicated than sniffing a specialized saline solution. “It’s cleaning my bioaerosol footprint, if you will,” he says.

With his company Sensory Cloud, Edwards has developed a $50 product that has two components: the Nimbus and FEND. The Nimbus is an aerosol squirter, capable of turning liquid into a cloud of vapor that you puff in front of your nose to inhale from the air. FEND is a solution that goes inside the squirter, composed of a mix of salts similar to seawater.
[Image: Sensory Cloud]

In a recent study on 10 subjects (PDF), Edwards demonstrated that inhaling the solution can reduce potentially infected aerosols—droplets that fly from your nose and mouth while speaking or sneezing—by up to 99% for six hours. That means that if you have COVID-19, you should be less contagious to others. Plus, Edwards believes it could help prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from moving from your upper respiratory system (your nose) down to your lungs, too.

While the Nimbus is a personal device, it can be shared between people (carefully) because it doesn’t go in your nose or body. Edwards imagines that an office, a restaurant, or a hospital could assign one person to pump it for each visitor who walks in, much like people do temperature checks or distribute hand sanitizer today. Each bottle costs $6 and can spray 250 doses, and while that cost is low, Edwards plans profits at scale, as he intends customers to buy subscription packages. “One hundred Nimbi could treat 50,000 people at a stadium,” he says.

How is this all possible?

As Edwards explains, your nose is “the body’s face mask.” Many viruses actually get caught inside your nose like a trap, thanks to mucus. From there, your entire respiratory tract is protected with airway lining fluid, a mix of mucus and fluid that protects the cells like a sticky raincoat. Cilia in those cells beat the liquid to clear it away and any infections stuck inside. But when you cough, tiny bits of that fluid, filled with viruses, can break away. They can fly out of your mouth to infect someone else. Or they can float deeper into your airway, infecting your lungs. Aerosols are a two-way street of infection, both out of your body and deeper therein.

In 2004, Edwards was researching how to protect people from anthrax, the quintessential airborne biological weapon. As part of that research, he looked at mucins, the protein building blocks inside mucus.

“It led to a paper . . . an observation that when you inhale simple saline—sodium chloride—there’s an effect that salt has on mucins and mucin-like proteins and . . . that leads to a calmness of surface in airways,” Edwards says. “It was a minor effect but an effect. For several years we dug into this.”

When you breathe in salt and water, the fluid in your trachea has a greater surface tension. So when you talk or cough, the equivalent of high winds blow across the liquid in your respiratory tract. The effect of saline is that tiny droplets are less likely to break away from the surface. The chemistry at work isn’t terribly complicated: Calcium chloride (a salt) has two positive charges. Mucus proteins are negatively charged. So the calcium in the liquid actually glues two mucus proteins together at the molecular level. (Four aerosol experts we reached out to in order to validate the product’s claims were unavailable for comment.)

Edwards was only able to develop the device so quickly in response to COVID-19 because he originally designed it for something else. It was a food product that Edwards had been working on for appetite control, and he had planned to release it this year. An earlier endeavor in inhalable food was called Le Whif, and it let you puff a few calories of chocolate powder instead of blowing your diet on a whole chocolate bar. This was followed up by Le Whaf, a device that used ultrasonic waves to vaporize cocktails. Le Whif is no longer in production; Le Whaf still makes international appearances at various events.

But as COVID-19 spread across the globe earlier this year, Edwards back-burnered his food products and turned his attention to public health. The Nimbus is calibrated to mist the saline solution in 10 micron droplets. As he explains, if it misted in 50 micron droplets, they’d all end up in your nose. If it misted in 2 micron droplets, they would go straight to your lungs like an inhaler. At 10 microns, the aerosol lands inside the sweet spot of your trachea and bronchi.

Edwards currently has thousands of Nimbuses already produced. And he has licensed the FEND saline solution from the pharmaceutical company Pulmatrix. He is currently beginning pilot studies with the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, while enlisting schools and offices to take part, too.

Right now, you can purchase a Nimbus system for yourself with two bottles of FEND solution for $49 shipping this September, and Edwards says it can mitigate the spread of not just COVID-19, but any aerosol cold or flu, too.



https://www.fastcompany.com/90524003/har...f-covid-19

First positive remarks about COVID-19 from Harvard... Perhaps it's because it involves a Harvard professor. HHHMM????
07-11-2020 01:22 PM
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GoOwls111 Offline
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Post: #17
RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
There's a lot of positive news out there.. Just need to look for it outside of traditional US (Doom and Gloom) Media.
07-11-2020 01:24 PM
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RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
Thanks for the thread #jedclampett.
07-11-2020 01:25 PM
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Post: #19
RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
(07-10-2020 09:04 AM)smu89 Wrote:  MD CURED OVER 100 COVID-19 WITH HCQ AND ZINC.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/PbZTlxaEb2oP/


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Welll, that site surely collects all the conspiracy theories into one convenient place! That comment section is bonkers! 01-wingedeagle
07-11-2020 04:14 PM
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Post: #20
RE: A thread to share positive news about Covid-19 Rx and vaccine developments
(07-10-2020 02:20 PM)Bear Catlett Wrote:  
(07-10-2020 09:32 AM)Bear Catlett Wrote:  My son's baseball team has been practicing and playing games against teams from other communities for a month now. Nobody wears masks.

Not one person has caught covid19.

five hours later...

[crickets]

Look at me!
07-11-2020 04:30 PM
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