@edps
Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Dwynne, while I agree with Dave re a 1TB SSD, one thing I would stress to your daughter is that using an SSD brings a requirement to have a very regular backup regime. SSDs die without warning, while HDDs tend to throw errors or make noises before they die. I’d also suggest that from time to time your daughter runs a slideshow of her backed up photos – there is nothing more frustrating than to discover that a back-up photo is corrupt and that the master has been wiped!
Lee, although I have voted for a subscription base, I’m happy to go with the flow. I have no problem with adverts or paid product reviews if that is what it takes.
In the Beeb interview with a leading Wuhan hospital GP he stated that the death rate appeared at times to be worse than SARS. As this was an official interview you can be certain that the GP was both a senior figure in Wuhan, and an expert who had already cleared all his data up the chain of command. To remind everyone, although the initial CFR for SARS was 3.8% when the data stabilised they found that the CFR run-rate in Canada was about 17%.
Looks like Mushroom Matt has been piling on the B.S. so as to not scare either the plebs, and the Stock Market. In fact last night he let the cat out of the bag by saying that economic impacts had to be taken into account when looking at precautionary measures such as closures. My Cummings conspiracy theory looks correct!
Joking aside, I still think that this has been handled very incompetently from a crowd psychology standpoint. Small useful measures early with good accurate information would have much better prepared the UK public, and slowed the future rate of spread of the virus. Instead we have been fed comfortable BS from paid (or ignorant) shills.
While I agree with the electoral impacts, maybe Cummings thinks that is easily outweighed by solving the NHS, Social Services, Dementia, Pension costs as well as the shortage of housing stock and blame it all on mother nature. Not only that, the cherry topping is that the Treasury gets a windfall of Estate Duties.
btw I read the comorbidity comments a couple of times and I’m still insure whether they can be treated as separable variables or what it means to have comorbidity factors for both male and female.
Congratulations – well done!
The WHO have released some data to chew on which pretty coherently identifies the people who should be considering how to lower their personal risk.
If you are under 40 it isn’t much worse than flu, and if acting selfishly you can pretty much ignore it and treat it like just another case of flu. If you are under 65 and 50 or more, and still working then it may pay to work from home more of the time.
As you get over 65 the risks grow very rapidly. (I’m not sure how to factor in comorbidity for preexisting complaints but it is obviously worse). Ditto male versus female effects. If you are in the upper age bracket then avoiding infection for as long as possible is probably the best strategy e.g. full protective gear when out and cut down on socialising and certainly never shake hands with anyone!
Perhaps I can now cynically understand the secret Cummings Government strategy – do the minimum necessary to avoid public unrest and go for a cull of the non-productive over 65s thereby quickly solving a lot of national problems.
You are correct Richard, if no vaccine is forthcoming and if (as seems likely) warm weather does not inactivate it then the 60% case WILL eventually be reached. However as I previously stated the timeline is the important factor. IF we can halve the rate of infection then we will substantially reduce the load on NHS hospitals and increase survival rates. IF (big if) we can stretch the time between infections to greater than the infective period then we will win the battle. i.e. the focus should be on prevention whether that be gel stations/hand washing, face masks and goggles or just asking people to cut down on travel (work from home, visit less etc). As an aside the BBC study showed that old pharts visiting relatives caused their virtual virus to travel faster and further than previously thought possible.
I became annoyed with the way Mushroom Matt played down the situation from the beginning, even though its seriousness was obvious to anyone with some science/maths training. He has been more concerned about short-term impacts to the economy rather than taking a big picture view of the whole life cycle of a serious epidemic and how the overall economic impacts can be minimised.
Yet another Greyling lightweight in a position of power who will blame his advisors.
Why new? Based on Dave’s previous advice I purchased a used Lenova Thinkpad from Microdream. Not only is this an approved centre for recycling Microsoft products they run a complete laptop refurbishing system eliminating any knocks/dings etc to give a like-new appearance. I was very pleased with the product and it meant that someone else ate the 60% first-year depreciation that is normally seen for non-Apple laptops. (Apple products tend to have a lower rate of depreciation).
Many of these laptops are ex Office use and come with an industry standard tpm module, which means with only a little work you can get a fairly secure baseline on which to install a reputable AV package.
Although you are not concerned about price a second hand route can give you a very high quality laptop at a reasonable price.
Edits do not work – I wanted to add that I am not second guessing after the event, as our Government had the full simulation study results of the BBC/ICL Pandemic study. IIRC hand-washing halves the rate of transmission, yet our Government continues to dither.
Richard the 60% WILL happen, that is just the mathematics of a virus propagating in a population that has zero natural immunity it has nothing to do with scaremongering or sloppiness. BUT what is important is the time scale. In the worst case if it happens over a 3 month period then once again quoting Private Fraser – “We are doomed!”. If it happens over two years, then there are no real problems.
What the WHO and Governments around the world are trying to do is to slow down the rate of virus propagation and buy time for vaccine work to complete. They hoped (somewhat irrationally) to avoid the draconian measures used by China, and thought that simple identification of those with the virus and their potential secondary flu victims would solve all. This is what was done for SARS and MERS. Unfortunately Covid-19 behaves more like a ‘normal’ flu virus in which 10-20% of flu transmission is done by asymptomatic people. Adding to the woes it appears (unproven as yet) that people can incubate and disseminate the virus in zero to 27 days – these latter two characteristics make normal isolation/quarantine of individuals fairly ineffective as soon as the virus gets loose from any unidentified sources. That is why China were rapidly forced into isolating areas to allow the virus to ‘burn-out’ to the 60% mark, and not infect the whole population. That is also why you now see Italy adopting a similar but slightly half-baked strategy.
What our incompetent Government should have done from an early stage is to have mandated hospital-style alcohol gel/spray hand-cleaning stations at the entrances to Supermarkets, Shopping Malls, places of public gathering etc. This would have slowed the rate of any propagation and delayed the onset of having to do zone isolation. They could still do this, but they are trying ineffectually to exhort the public to do it themselves without even explaining just why hand-washing would work. When time is of the essence, edict is faster and far more effective. Changes in personal habits would then naturally follow. Instead of which Mushroom Matt tried to hush it all up with pabulum to the masses, a sure fire recipe for making it really hard to quickly change unhygienic public habits.
I should perhaps have said that Mushroom Matt banned the UNREGULATED export of chloroquine. I believe the objective was to avoid round-tripping the drug and thereby saving the NHS money.
In the only sensible move I have seen from Mushroom Matt, the Government has banned the export of chloroquine. (without of course publicly naming it, as he has to keep us as much in the dark as possible!)
The US is trialling the use of remdesivir to treat SARS-Covid-19, while the Chinese are suggesting that it be used together with chloroquin. For plebs like us, remdesivir is out of reach for emergency home medication.
Not the Yanks I’m afraid but an International Standard (IUPAC) that also took the second ‘i’ out of aluminum – so stuff you Boris we still have to conform to regulations made by others, but at least we have a say in this one, even if we get voted down!🤗
Seriously Les, if you are on calcium tablets, even with vitamin D I would recommend that you should also be taking Vitamin K2 (MK-7) isomer, it helps ensure that the calcium gets into the bones rather than your blood stream. link. Imo the MK-7 isomer is superior to MK4 as this is the form found in Japanese fermented foods and the Japanese have a significantly lower rate of cardiac problems. Incidentally this isomer is also found in the dairy products from the Island of Jersey (probably due to their cows only being grass fed). The Channel Islands have significantly less cardiac problems than mainland UK but the rest of their diet is very similar.
Those interested in looking at the health benefits of Vitamin K2 may be interested in downloading this pdf, and then look up the heart disease data in WHO for the corresponding countries that it references. My cardiologist told me that K2 MK7 is on the NICE list but only given to those with very high cholesterol that does not respond to other treatments. (a cost issue)
Taking K2 is probably more important for women taking calcium supplements because of bone density issues as it has been proven that taking calcium supplements increases the chances of women having a heart attack. link
I wish I had longer to add edits!
A simple test for zinc sulfide (sorry about the previous ‘old skool’ spelling) is phosphorescence. Shine a UV light on a stool sample and see if it shows green!
An after thought that I could not add as an edit.
Re bad diet: an American friend of mine has a lot of contact with some US medical research institutions points out that sugars are preferentially absorbed in the gut and that this disrupts the mix of bacteria and tends to squeeze out the lacto-bacillus types and favours the sulfur emitting anaerobic types. Perhaps zinc is high-jacked to form non-bio-available zinc sulphide.
All I can do is speculate and run some thought experiments in response:
The ACE2 receptor pretty much dictates where the virus will enter the body and where it will subsequently replicate. Although correlation does not equal causation, the elderly are the ones worst affected by the virus and also tend to be those who have very low zinc levels. Assuming that in this case correlation=causation then one has to speculate WHY the elderly have especially low zinc levels.
My guess would be that we are not absorbing it from the (mainly animal) constituents that contain zinc. The metabolism of zinc, like most gut related things, appears ill-defined. This article says that eukaryotes are the main regulators – unfortunately that is a term that means both everything and nothing, but my guess would be that gut bacteria are the main movers and shakers in getting zinc to these transporting system. If that hypothesis is correct then these are easily disrupted by bad diet and drugs (both illegal and prescription). Young people on medication/drug users and those with especially poor diets e.g. chip butties could then be expected to be in a covid-19 risk category despite being young, while elderly people on PPIs etc would be similarly high risk.
I don’t think my comments carry your theory any further forward as medical science is still in the dark ages when it comes to the roles of different gut bacteria. It may be worth asking your professor if the younger people who died had a ‘disrupted’ digestive system as that could provide another small step in a zinc logic train.
The Harvard Magazine has some interesting information on SARS-Covid-19. (some is understandably dated). Unfortunately the facts it contains are spread all over the place. I have therefore extracted and edited the article to hopefully make its findings a little more coherent. I have pulled together the information into a few major sections. (Any comments I have added are in parentheses).
SARS-CoV-2 is a close cousin to SARS, and uses the same human receptor, ACE2, reports Farzan, who is now co-chair of the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. The ACE2 receptor is expressed almost exclusively in the lungs, gastrointestinal tract, and the kidneys, which explains why the disease is so effectively transmitted via both the respiratory and fecal-oral routes.
(It spreads extremely rapidly, and the virus is carried in aerosoled droplets from the nose and mouth, but it is also expressed in faeces and urine (ACE2 route). It appears to be capable of transmission on dried particles and as a result vertical transmission in apartment blocks has been seen. This is the probable explanation for the Chinese spraying the streets and doorways).
Lipsitch notes a further concern: the fact that the incubation-period distribution and the serial-interval distribution are almost identical. That’s a mathematical way of saying that people can start transmitting the virus even when they are asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, or just beginning to exhibit symptoms. That makes tracing and quarantining contacts of infected individuals—a classic, frontline public-health measure—nearly impossible. (The corollary to this is that Public Health is then forced to use zone quarantine measures and has to allow the disease to burn out in those zones – sacrifice the few to save the many)
On the positive side it appears to have an R0 lower than SARS. (I personally question this finding as it fails to comprehend asymptomatic infections that appear to be running at > 10-15%).
(SARS-Covid-19 kills but most recover.)
The inflammatory response (causing severe infection in 20% of cases) can kill people in the respiratory phase of the disease. The inflammation in the lungs is basically a cytokine storm,” an overwhelming and destructive immune response “that’s the result of innate signalling. (That is why Zinc may be important to control this)There is an interesting omission from the live stats and that is Indonesia. Interesting but puzzling to have zero cases given there are roughly 3+ million ethnic Chinese in the country. However given the genocide of the Chinese that took place in the 60s, my guess is that the local Chinese are concealing any infections that were incurred during the New Year holiday. We should expect a huge jump in infections and deaths as the disease moves into the native Indonesian population.
Returning to the flu versus covid-19 diagnosis problem. Without the CT scan and genetic evidence it is going to be difficult for anyone to make the call between the two without further testing.This is going to make things really difficult for the NHS once covid-19 becomes epidemic in the UK.
I hope (but with little confidence) that once Covid-19 is seen to be epidemic that the Government will publish some guidelines on when to call on the NHS 111 Covid-19 hotline, otherwise seasonal colds and flu will overwhelm the system.
Based on published stats it appears that unless the person has pre-existing coronary or respiratory ailments then no one under the age of 50 should call on the hotline unless they have flu symptoms plus acute breathing problems. For those over 50, two days fever plus coughing should be the signal to hit the NHS 111 hotline pdq as progression into breathing difficulties could bring the kiss of death.
-
AuthorPosts