Archive for the 'Medical' Category

The Hill.

Florida has overtaken New York to become the state with the second-highest number of coronavirus cases in the country.

According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, Florida has had 414,511 confirmed cases since the pandemic started, while New York, which was once the epicenter of the outbreak, has had 411,200 cases.

Both states trail California, which has had more than 440,000 cases.

Sounds ominous, yes?  But wait.

“An error by the Florida Department of Health produced a COVID-19 positivity rate for children of nearly one-third, a stunning figure that played into the debate over whether schools should reopen. A week after issuing that statistic, the department took it back without explanation. The next weekly report on children and COVID-19 showed the rate had plunged to 13.4%. The department blamed a “computer programming error” for the mistake, in response to questions from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Experts said the change and the failure to explain it to the public calls into question the state’s data at a time when accurate and trustworthy information is crucial to a society grappling with an unprecedented health crisis.”

Plus: ‘It’s unacceptable to publish information that changes so dramatically that it warrants explanation, and then to not provide any explanation,’ said Jason Salemi, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida College of Public Health in Tampa. ‘I’m trying to get an understanding of why the number changed so much, what underlies it — and can we trust this new number.’”

Nothing coming from academia or the FedGov or StateGov can be trusted.  I’ve had a hard time explaining that to folks who grew up in the age of “And that’s the way it is.”

Even then, that wasn’t really the way it was.

I had previously embedded Ben Swann’s video of his great research on the [in]effectiveness of masks, and then Google took it down from YouTube.  Of course they did.  They, Twitter and Facebook all conspire to hide the truth about everything.

I wrote Ben Swann to ask him about this, and got this reply in return.  I’m copy / pasting the entire contents without additional commentary.

Hi!

This is Sam here. I am the CMO for Ben’s projects. Thank you for pointing out that YouTube took down that video. And thank you for embedding our videos. Luckily, we have just launched our own platform this week. You can watch the announcement video here: https://ise.media/video/ise-media-is-live-14.html

You can find the mask video here: https://ise.media/video/why-face-masks-don-t-work-according-to-science-15.html

We have also launched an equity crowdfunding campaign so supporters and fans can own a part of our new platform. You can learn more about that campaign and, if you choose to, invest here: https://wefunder.com/ise.media

Let us know if you have any questions.

Sam

Ben Swann does a great job with outlining the data in this video.

What he doesn’t really do is explain the why.  All of this data is consistent with what I’ve said before.  The virus is approximately 80 nm in diameter.  In the simple little analysis that follows, I’m going to graciously assume that N95 masks are as effective as a nuclear grade HEPA filter.  That’s not true, not even nearly.  But this explains why not only N95 masks don’t work to filter viruses, but not even HEPA filters will.

Most of the HEPA filters available for industrial use are nuclear grade HEPA filters, which remove particles to 0.3 µm in size (more efficient HEPA filters are available but for our purposes only in use for manned space flight).  This means that a SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80E-9 / 0.3E-6 = 0.27 the minimum size necessary for even the most expensive nuclear grade HEPA filters to remove it from an air stream.

It’s no more complicated than that.  Oh, one can assume that the virus is bound within a droplet, and I can respond with the engineering of moisture behavior and reentrainment in the air stream, but that’s wasteful of effort.  You will never be able to demonstrate that moisture remains captured on filter media (charcoal filters are another story, but even there, moisture becomes reentrained in the air stream after some period of time).

You may as well try to catch mosquitoes with a chain link fence.  The masks aren’t helping you.

From a reader, Fox News.

The simple act of wearing a mask amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has become a politically charged topic in the U.S. and across social media. Despite the urgings of public health officials and pleas from doctors in hard-hit hospitals across the country, some people have still refused to don a facial covering, citing widespread disinformation about alleged negative health effects of mask wearing.

One Irish doctor set out to prove mask detractors wrong in an experiment that debunked the claim that wearing a facial covering negatively impacts the wearer’s oxygen levels.

Dr. Maitiu O Tuathail, a doctor based in Dublin, shared on Twitter that patients repeatedly ask him whether masks affect oxygen levels.

He conducted the test in response to the queries, and he found that the results did not show a lowering of oxygen levels.

The video, posted Tuesday, showed O Tuathail putting six face masks on his face as he recorded his pulse rate on a pulse oximeter.The pulse oximeter showed no change in the doctor’s oxygen levels after putting on the medical coverings.

He’s not an engineer.  I can prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that an increased ΔP causes a decrease in flow rate (Q) unless you’re dealing with a positive displacement pump operating short of “dead head” conditions.

With his brain controlling his lungs and diaphragm, he has a PD pump.  He simply breathed enough to compensate for the increased differential pressure.  But humans get fatigued, and there is no study demonstrating that there wouldn’t have been a decrease in O2 saturation levels over time, or that less healthy individuals wouldn’t have suffered.

This should be placed in the category of fake science.  It’s just entertainment.  Get a team to study it, and then get a PE seal and signature on it.  Then maybe I’ll take it seriously.  Otherwise, it’s just a circus trick suitable for a carnival.  It’s the equivalent of the bearded fat lady lifting a thousand pounds over her head.

PJM.

Last week, a new peer-reviewed study of hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness at treating the coronavirus was published, and it found that the drug significantly reduced mortality rates.

[ … ]

CNN’s Chris Cuomo also mocked Trump for taking the drug, even though he had used a version of it himself for his own treatment following his positive diagnosis for the coronavirus.

How many lives were lost because the Democrats and the media claimed that taking hydroxychloroquine would kill you? In May, Dr. John Giles of Columbia University told NPR that fears about hydroxychloroquine made it difficult to recruit volunteers for clinical studies. “Pretty much everybody said, ‘well, that’s the drug that is dangerous to your heart,’ or ‘I talked to friends and they said don’t take it,’ or ‘I saw it on TV that it was dangerous,’” Giles explained. “It became almost impossible to get anyone interested.”

But Giles knew these fears were unfounded. “It’s a very, very safe drug. It’s been used for over 75 years,” he said.

Despite the drug being safe, Giles eventually gave up on doing his study.

He wasn’t alone. Dr. Christine Johnston at the University of Washington told NPR that volunteers felt “that the study and the drugs feel too political, and they just don’t want to participate at all.”

And all this time, hydroxychloroquine has been shown to cut the death rate of the coronavirus in half.

A Yale study published in May noted that “Five studies, including two controlled clinical trials, have demonstrated significant major outpatient treatment efficacy” of hydroxychloroquine alone or hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin. “These medications need to be widely available and promoted immediately for physicians to prescribe.”

It was never in doubt with me.  But the anti-science people in the MSM killed Covid patients with their hysteria.  They’ll answer to the Almighty for their lies.

There’s this.

AUSTIN, Texas — The national narrative about the current State of Texas Covid-19 crisis (and Arizona’s and California’s) goes like this: Fault for the escalating spike in hospitalizations that have overwhelmed Texas care facilities falls entirely to Gov. Greg Abbott’s phased reopening and the cavalier partying of bar patrons and spring-break revelers, all exclusively inside the state. The governor and local officials are succumbing to the narrative by reinstituting closures as a guard against future youthful stupidity.

But my Border Patrol sources, Mexican media reports, and obscure local media reporting at the border tell a Texas story at sharp variance with that narrative. Taken all together, the collection of reporting persuasively suggests that some percentage of the Texas Covid-19 hospitalizations, likely a significant one, comes from an ongoing influx of seriously ill patients who caught the virus in Covid-exploding Mexico and are legally and illegally crossing the border to flee that country’s completely overrun health system. Refusal to acknowledge this ground truth and to excavate the data necessary to inform the right policy choices presents a danger to life that is more real than any imagined political offense by stating that Mexico is a source.

Enough evidence is now on hand that severely ill patients are pouring over from Mexico and adding to the American counts of hospitalization and death, probably coinciding with regular community spread resulting from recent mass protests. What’s needed now is acknowledgement that there are at least two merging streams, not to be conflated with one another.

The most convincing evidence emerged from national reporting back in May, before widespread second-wave spikes generating the current panicked and uninformed policy responses. These are no longer cited in context of the crisis that much more recently developed: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and most recently, to its rare credit, CNN on June 29, have established a credible anecdotal baseline that Covid-19 patients have been flooding through California and Arizona border ports of entry from Mexico (some illegally) — by the thousands — since at least mid-May as the virus struck our southern neighbor a month or two behind the United States. It was no coincidence that at the same time the Baja and Sonora state hospital systems were seizing up in worst-case scenarios of deadly convulsions.

The CNN report confirmed other reports that American expatriates and Mexican visa-holders were coming up to California ports of entry aboard ambulances, or calling ambulances as they were crossing on foot. The CNN story, for instance, quoted Carmela Coyle, president and CEO of the California Hospital Association, calling what is underway “an unprecedented surge across the border”.

But don’t look for that in the narrative.  It doesn’t fit.

Detroit News.

A Henry Ford Health System study shows the controversial anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine helps lower the death rate of COVID-19 patients, the Detroit-based health system said Thursday.

Officials with the Michigan health system said the study found the drug “significantly” decreased the death rate of patients involved in the analysis.

The study analyzed 2,541 patients hospitalized among the system’s six hospitals between March 10 and May 2 and found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine died while 26% of those who did not receive the drug died.

Among all patients in the study, there was an overall in-hospital mortality rate of 18%, and many who died had underlying conditions that put them at greater risk, according to Henry Ford Health System. Globally, the mortality rate for hospitalized patients is between 10% and 30%, and it’s 58% among those in the intensive care unit or on a ventilator.

“As doctors and scientists, we look to the data for insight,” said Steven Kalkanis, CEO of the Henry Ford Medical Group. “And the data here is clear that there was a benefit to using the drug as a treatment for sick, hospitalized patients.”

The study, published in the International Society of Infectious Disease, found patients did not suffer heart-related side effects from the drug.

Patients with a median age of 64 were among those analyzed, with 51% men and 56% African American. Roughly 82% of the patients began receiving hydroxychloroquine within 24 hours and 91% within 48 hours, a factor Dr. Marcus Zervos identified as a potential key to the medication’s success.

“We attribute our findings that differ from other studies to early treatment, and part of a combination of interventions that were done in supportive care of patients, including careful cardiac monitoring,” said Zervos, division head of infectious disease for the health system who conducted the study with epidemiologist Dr. Samia Arshad.

Other studies, Zervos noted, included different populations or were not peer-reviewed.

“Our dosing also differed from other studies not showing a benefit of the drug,” he said. “We also found that using steroids early in the infection associated with a reduction in mortality.”

This is good news, it’s safe and effective, as I told you all along.  Actually, I learned it from the NIH themselves.  They only switched position when they found out they could make money for big pharma and extend the life of the virus to cause panic and dissatisfaction with the government.

Via Glenn Reynolds, this bit of fascinating news.

The coronavirus’ particle has a diameter of about 0.125 micron, he said, pointing to recent studies. HEPA filters are designed to filter particles that are 0.01 micron and above, Cuomo said, a figure he based on a previous NASA study on HEPA filtration.

Oh dear.  It’s really a shame when non-STEM people try to do STEM without one iota of training or education.  The problem with this is that none of it is true, at least, not exactly.

To rehearse what we’ve discussed before, while he has his sources that the virus is 125 nm in diameter, there are other sources that put it at around 80 nm in diameter.  Furthermore, when he says that HEPA filters remove particles down to 0.01 µm in size, he’s referencing a NASA study of HEPA filters that essentially aren’t in use anywhere but space vehicles.  Without observing the testing and performing my own independent analysis of the data, I question the study, but let’s move ahead anyway.

Most of the HEPA filters available for industrial use are nuclear grade HEPA filters, which remove particles to 0.3 µm in size.  This means that a SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80E-9 / 0.3E-6 = 0.27 the minimum size necessary for even the most expensive nuclear grade HEPA filters to remove it from an air stream.

Furthermore, these systems are extremely expensive to design, build, maintain, flow balance and test.  The filter housing themselves must be sealed and tested, the HEPA filters must be disposed of as hazardous material, the HEPA filters must be procured (there is a marginal market for that since these systems are only used in biological labs and nuclear power plants).  A TAB (testing and balancing) engineer must test them and flow balance them, and the fans are powerful compared to normal use industrial fans since the ΔP is much higher across these filter trains than an ordinary industrial grade filter system.

The testing involves injection of DOP (Dioctyl Phthalate) to test penetration of fine particles through potential tears in the filter media and especially bypass around the filters themselves due to lack of proper sealing against the frame of the filter housing.  The testing engineers for this sort of thing reside in one place, i.e., commercial nuclear reactors and utilities which run them.

I could go on about this, but it’s embarrassing to folks who know nothing about STEM to weigh in like this on subjects way above their head.  I’ve done air filtration engineering, TAB and testing of penetration before.  I know these things by education, training and experience.

The governor is essentially telling businesses in his neck of the woods that they must go out of business.  That is the only alternative.  No store or mall will be able to afford something like this, or the highly paid personnel to install it, test it, monitor it and equip it.  Finally, these systems, if installed, wouldn’t create a virus-free environment anyway.  It doesn’t work that way.  A virus is like any other contaminant, which means that buildup and depletion of contaminants (based on a production term and loss constant) would be modeled with an ODE (ordinary differential equation).

The point is that the concentration of a contaminant can be reduced based on the terms, but not made to go away.  Belief in risk free living based on science is belief in a myth.  But someone who was studied in STEM would already know this.  Only non-STEM people believe that science can work magic for free.

Via David Codrea, this video from Bill Gates explains an awful lot.

So remember boys and girls, Bill had detailed involvement in a huge experiment in India.  Read that account from Indians themselves, not from liar websites like Snopes.

Science.

In the first big research scandal of the COVID-19 era, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today retracted two high-profile papers after a company declined to make the underlying data for both available for an independent audit, following questions being raised about the research. The Lancet paper, which claimed an antimalarial drug touted by President Donald Trump for treatment of COVID-19 could cause serious harm without helping patients, had had a global impact, halting trials of one of the drugs by the World Health Organization (WHO) and others.

Three authors on the Lancet paper requested the retraction, after initiating an independent review of the raw hospital patient data summarized and provided by Surgisphere, a small Chicago-based company operated by Sapan Desai, the fourth author of the study. Desai had previously said he and his co-authors—cardiac surgeon Mandeep Mehra of Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Frank Ruschitzka of University Hospital Zürich, and Amit Patel, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Utah—were getting such an audit of the data, but the agreement apparently fell apart.

[ … ]

NEJM published only a short statement from the paper’s authors, which included Mehra, Patel, and Desai, as well as SreyRam Kuy of Baylor College of Medicine and Timothy Henry of Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. “Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate the primary data sources underlying our article,” they wrote, with apology. By including Desai, the note perplexingly suggests he has no access to the raw data generated by his own company.

The link title is tongue-in-cheek.  There is nothing scientific about what’s going on, and this is certainly not the “first big research scandal of the Covid-19 era.”  The entire thing has been a research scandal, and the retracted study is no more scientific than the claim that masks are effective.  What kind of a “researcher” doesn’t validate the models and conclusions from the raw data?

No one to date has even approached what I said I need to conclude that wearing a mask is a good and necessary protective against a virus.  No one has even proposed such a study.