Fortunately most subscription based websites are making their Covid-19 articles free. Here are some of the more interesting stories I found this morning.
Note: The formatting of this diary got messed up with italics and photos not where they were meant to be and out of laziness I decided not to correct it.
Here’s what we know: When you flush a toilet, the churning and bubbling of water aerosolizes fecal matter. That creates particles that will float in the air, which we will now politely call “bioaerosols” for the rest of this article.
Surprisingly little has been published on toilets and disease risk (well, maybe not surprisingly). But there are a few brave scientists out there. Take one 2018 study of flushing toilets in a hospital. Researchers found high concentrations of bioaerosols when a toilet with no lid was flushed.
How many airborne particles, exactly, are we talking about? Upwards of 1 million additional particles per cubic meter of air. Not all of the aerosols generated will carry the virus, of course. But, let’s be clear: When you flush the toilet, you’re breathing in toilet water, and whatever is in that toilet water — including viruses and bacteria.
The study also found that bioaerosols spread around the room and lingered in the air. In fact, basic aerosol physics tell us these bioaerosols will stay aloft until one of four things happen: they settle out onto surfaces, they are removed through dilution, they are removed through filtration or they are removed by your lungs.
In the middle of today’s novel coronavirus outbreak, some are turning to the conclusion of past pandemics to discern how and when life might “return to normal.” The Washington Post has received a few dozen questions from readers who want historical context for our current epidemic. But how did the deadliest pandemic ever recorded come to an end?
Over time, those who contracted the virus developed an immunity to the novel strand of influenza, and life returned to normal by the early 1920s, according to historians and medical experts. Reports at the time suggest the virus became less lethal as the pandemic carried on in waves.
But the strand of the flu didn’t just disappear. The influenza virus continuously mutated, passing through humans, pigs and other mammals. The pandemic-level virus morphed into just another seasonal flu. Descendants of the 1918 H1N1 virus make up the influenza viruses we’re fighting today.
“The 1918 flu is still with us, in that sense,” said Ann Reid, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education who successfully sequenced the genetic makeup of the 1918 influenza virus in the 1990s. “It never went away.”
Update:
Excerpt:
Dr. Scott W. Atlas has argued that the science of mask wearing is uncertain, that children cannot pass on the coronavirus and that the role of the government is not to stamp out the virus but to protect its most vulnerable citizens as Covid-19 takes its course.
Ideas like these, ideologically freighted and scientifically disputed, have propelled Dr. Atlas, a radiologist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, into President Trump’s White House.
Mr. Trump has embraced Dr. Atlas even as he upsets the balance of power within the White House coronavirus task force with ideas that top government doctors and scientists find misguided — even dangerous — according to people familiar with the task force’s deliberations.
That might be the point.
“I think Trump clearly does not like the advice he was receiving from the people who are the experts — Fauci, Birx, etc. — so he has slowly shifted from their advice to somebody who tells him what he wants to hear,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University. He was referring to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease scientist, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator.
Excerpts:
Clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine can be legitimately cut short and could allow a vaccine to become available more quickly than previously expected, Dr. Anthony Fauci says. Fauci says early indication of overwhelming success – or failure – of a vaccine candidate would be grounds for ending the trials early.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he is confident the experts making that call would not be swayed by political pressure as Election Day approaches.
Pompeo defends decision not to participate in global vaccine effort
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday defended the Trump administration’s controversial decision not to participate in a global alliance to develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine.
The White House confirmed earlier this week that it would not be part of the vaccine alliance, which is being led in part by the World Health Organization and involves more than 170 other countries. The global effort involves not only developing an effective vaccine but also ensuring it is equitably distributed across the globe.
Pompeo told reporters Wednesday the U.S. would not participate in the global vaccine effort because the WHO is too political. The vaccine alliance is being co-led by Gavi, which focuses on providing vaccines to children in poor countries, and other groups. The Trump administration has moved to withdraw the United States from the WHO, arguing it was too soft on China when the novel coronavirus first emerged.
Excerpt:
The signals that Trump is planning to announce the availability of a vaccine before the election are not subtle—and they’re everywhere.
If Trump does this, if he rushes a vaccine into distribution without the completion of trials and without the full support of healthcare experts, the result could be more illness, more economic cost, and more deaths than no vaccine at all.
The risks of rushing a vaccine forward without completing Phase 3 testing are more than the threat of releasing an unsafe or ineffective vaccine, but obviously, those arethreats. The 6.2 million proven cases of COVID-19 in the United States is less than 2% of the population. To effectively end the pandemic, at least 70% of the population needs to be immunized. If hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines were administered, even a low rate of safety issues could generate thousands of serious problems. And if a vaccine is less than 70% effective, even administering it to everyone in the nation might not achieve the level of immunity necessary to reduce the rate of transmission below the point where the COVID-19 epidemic would be sustained.
That’s only part of the risk. Even if the vaccine turned out to be almost perfectly safe and almost perfectly effective, pushing it forward without adequate testing will absolutely generate a problem with public trust that could be at least as bad as a vaccine that simply didn’t work.
Update 2
Conclusion:
Trump's coronavirus denialism is spreading past the White House and into the Senate. Earlier this week, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa echoed a QAnon-linked conspiracy theory accusing doctors and hospitals of exaggerating the number of coronavirus cases and deaths, claiming that clinics profit from falsifying that data.
"These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they're doing?" Ernst said.
In reality, medical researchers believe that coronavirus cases are being undercounted, due to lack of testing.
This conspiracy theory also has a precursor in the anti-choice movement: The false claim doctors lie about the effectiveness of contraception in order to trick women into having sex and getting pregnant, so they can get that sweet, sweet abortion money.
This conspiracy theory was endorsed by Bush's HHS appointee Keroack, who ran a "crisis pregnancy center" that claimed birth control "actually increases (rather than decreases) out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion." That myth has since become hardened into common wisdom in the anti-choice world. Abby Johnson, the anti-choice speaker at the Republican National Convention, has repeatedly claimed that contraception access increases the abortion rate by lulling women into believing we "could separate sex from procreation."
It's no surprise that Republican voters so readily sign onto Trump's obvious attempts to spread misinformation about the coronavirus by dressing it up as "science." They've had decades of practice of choosing to believe fake medical science, which is all too often peddled by doctors who should know better. As the Queen in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" astutely observed, the trick in learning to believing impossible things is simply practice.
Update 3
Excerpt:
Experts are raising alarms after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a letter to governors last week instructing them to be “fully operational” for deploying a coronavirus vaccine on or even before November 1.
“CDC urgently requests your assistance in expediting applications for these distribution facilities,” Dr. Robert Redfield (photo, right), CDC Director, said in the August 27 letter, McClatchy DC reports, “and, if necessary, asks that you consider waiving requirements that would prevent these facilities from becoming fully operational by November 1, 2020.”
The New York Times adds that CDC “has notified public health officials in all 50 states and five large cities to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups as soon as late October or early November,” noting that is “raising concerns over politicized timing.”
The same day CDC sent the letter President Donald Trump told supporters at the Republican National Convention, “We will produce a vaccine before the end of the year or maybe even sooner.”
Update 4
"These findings indicate the need for ongoing investigation of the long-term cardiovascular consequences of COVID-19," the authors state in the study.
"It was really concerning that about 80 percent of people had some evidence of scarring or some swelling in the heart," Maddox said. "Even if they hadn't necessarily been that sick."
A separate autopsy study by a different group of German researchers had similar findings, in that the coronavirus had affected COVID-19 patients' hearts.
Maddox explained that there are several concerns around how coronavirus affects the human heart.
"We believe that the heart can be affected by COVID in a couple of ways," Maddox said. "One is that the infection and stress resulting from an infection can cause injury to the heart, just almost as a bystander effect with the heart working so hard to fight off the overall viral infection that can cause damage."
The second, Maddox said, that there might be some "direct viral invasion," although the evidence of that doesn't necessarily stack up. A third concern is for people who have severe symptoms, there could be an overreaction of the immune system attacking the heart. The fourth is related to clotting in the body.
"When the heart gets infected, we think that's related to the overall inflammation, and we think some of the clotting in our blood vessels and other parts of the heart can also cause heart damage," Maddox said. "So, as best as we can tell, some mixture of those four various things can cause heart damage."
Shameless Promotion
I initially posted these on my blog but then decided that after doing all this searching I’d share them on Daily Kos. There are a number of other stories that piqued my interest which you can read here:
Examples from my blog which includes excerpts:
And this story too:
Donald Trump told Sarah Sanders she would have to “go to North Korea and take one for the team”, after Kim Jong-un winked at the then White House press secretary during a summit in Singapore in June 2018.
“Kim Jong-un hit on you!” a delighted Trump joked, according to Sanders’ new memoir. “He did! He fucking hit on you!”