26 thoughts on “Seattle”

  1. Fascinating that this is what happens when 40 people die of Corona virus. Yet twice that many are dying every day from the flu, and it apparently doesn’t phase anyone.

    Is it because it looks like the patient can be saved, but then they crash? Whereas with flu the patient is understood to be dying from the get-go?

  2. Also, I love how this is a national emergency, but the CDC can’t update their web site on the weekends. And we want these people in charge of health care?

  3. This seems pretty implausible, and given it’s Twitter…

    On the other hand, a lot of people, including my wife and I, have been sick with a respiratory something intractable for two months and I hear a lot of other people saying the same. Sarah Hoyt was calling it Never-Get-Well and that her doctor called it “post-viral syndrome” (which is one of those meaningly phrases like “reactive airway disease”). There’s a theory it’s been spreading for months, that there are millions infected already, and its not so lethal as all that.

    It does bother me I can’t get hard news anymore (including from CDC), just tweets and blog comments.

    1. I’ve been thinking along the same lines. About a month ago, I was out on the East Coast (Virginia) for a few days; about five days after I got back to the PRK (People’s Republic of Kalifornia), I got a small fever (100.5) and a runny nose for a couple of days; the fever went away, then it turned into a nasty cough that lasted nearly three weeks, the first week of which I was very tired. At the time, I chalked it up to a cold that kind of hung on longer than usual, but I’m wondering now if this was a mild case of C-19. Nobody else in my family got sick though, nor coworkers (at least as of Friday).

      I know, pretty unlikely, but I’d love to see if I have antibodies to C-19. Anybody know if the tests can detect those?

      And the quality of the news, official and media, has been horrible indeed.

      1. I got something like that in November Thanksgiving week in SF CA. The timing seems wrong for C-19 but who knows?

      2. I had an upper respiratory infection in early October that would not abate. Ended up on antibiotics. Worst of my life.

  4. I’ve seen lots of Democrats screaming that Trump’s response is incompetent.

    Yet if Biden or Bernie had been in charge, we’d probably be up over 100,000 cases because neither would have stopped flights from Wuhan. Biden’s corona plan still doesn’t stop flights from China. The Democrats are still ranting about xenophobia and demanding that we tear down the wall. Amusingly, Mexico is going to love that wall because they’re going to bar entry from the US so they don’t get infected.

    In tonight’s debate, Bernie called the virus Ebola and Biden called it SARS. Those two don’t even know what’s what.

    Almost half of all Chinese tourists visit either the US or Australia and New Zealand (25% and 20% of total). Australia and New Zealand immediately followed Trump’s lead on barring entry to anyone who’d been to China in the previous two weeks. As a result, even though the three countries get far more Chinese tourists than Europe (37.6% of Chinese tourists), the US, Australia, and New Zealand have less than 4,000 cases while Europe has over 55,000 cases.

    Had China’s socialist government not kept the outbreak a secret for two months (from November 17th till mid January), it’s quite possible that it wouldn’t have even spread much in Wuhan, much less gone on to become a global pandemic.

    1. My take is that there’s plenty of fault to find with Trump’s response; he didn’t fix the test kit fiasco soon enough (he was a bit too slow in cutting the red tape that caused it – red tape created by Democrats) and he was too slow, and not thorough enough, in imposing travel bans (the ones Democrats screamed were xenophonic, etc, etc, and moved in congress to cut off his authority to impose them).

      Personally, I’d give Trump about a B minus in his handling of this situation overall. However, for every fault he has (and there are many), the Democrats have proven that they are far worse. I’m sure as heck glad Trump is the one in the Oval right now, not one of the shrieking Democrats more worried about appearances and political correctness than saving lives (They are thus, defacto, taking the side of a disease.). I agree, we’d have a vastly larger and faster outbreak by now if they’d had their way.

    2. It doesn’t mattet what Trump does, he will be attacked. Not only that, but the media will demamd certain actions that if he takes, they will attack him for. Trump has to sort through all if this and do what is best while also being mindful of how to deal with a sensational and deceitful press.

      A good example is how they demanded Trump get a test and then attacked him the next day for getting a test.

  5. The six-week crunge was making the rounds last winter, yes. Lots of people had it. Millions, likely, from how commonly the experience is reported.

    Given that, it’s wishful thinking that it was COVID-19 and you’re immune now. Guessing two million cases, they would have noticed the 100,000+ severe anomalous viral flu admissions and the 20,000+ deaths therefrom. The best-case 5%-severe/1%-death stats are pretty well established by several well-contained and thoroughly-tested COVID-19 outbreaks. South Korea and Diamond Princess, to name two. China outside of Hubei Province (where it started and got out of control for a while) for another – you can say you don’t trust Chinese stats, but they do track well with those other two outbreaks, post-Hubei.

    1. The Diamond Princess is a very important data point, but many are missing some huge factors.

      The entire ship, including 1100 crew, was tested. This is an almost unique example where everyone got tested. Almost 700 tested positive, and that was after a time with no preventative measures, and after that poor ones for quite some time. Almost everyone aboard had some degree of exposure, but only 700 got the virus.

      The demographics of the passengers are not reported, but I can attest that on such cruises, they trend very heavily elderly, many in poor health. I’ve been on several like that, and seen a fair number of deaths on them (expected, due to the rigors of travel pus that many in very frail condition).

      So, out of a population very heavily skewed elderly (median in late 60’s, is my bet) and many with poor health, and then being aboard an environment known for being a virus problem at the best of times, we lost 1% of those *infected*. I find that remarkable. I also note that of those infected, half displayed no symptoms at all – they would have never known were it not for the testing, and would have never been picked up even in areas where testing was widespread.

      I’m amazed that more were not infected, and I’m pleasantly surprised that the mortality rate, especially given the demographic, of the infected was just 1%. I think these numbers indicate that expecting this to sicken 50 to 70% of the population, as some say, is preposterous.

      IMHO, Wuhan Coronavirus is bad – but nowhere near as bad as some are saying. (I don’t mean you, Henry – I’m just saying some things that I think need saying.).

      1. All we’ve been told about the cases on the Diamond Princess is the number. I have not seen any breakout of passengers verses crew in that number. Further, of the passengers, how many were in inside rooms (no windows for fresh air) verses balcony rooms. The crew is housed on the lower decks (IIRC, decks 3 & 4), two or more to a room, and of course there are no windows. The air circulation system likely contributed to the spread of the virus.

        We did get a breakout for the Grand Princess. Of the 21 who tested positive, 19 of them were crew members. Those people tend to be under 40 years old.

  6. According to this video one potential area of investigation for an infection vector is the ACE2 receptors in the lungs. What is interesting is that similar ACE2 receptors can be found in the heart as well. Which is interesting given the OP tweet, if that is what is being seen in Seattle.

    https://youtu.be/oBh_h9u7v3c

    1. Work is being done on a monoclonal antibody that may be effective against SARS-CoV-2.

      The chimeric 47D11 H2L2 antibody was reformatted and 56 recombinantly expressed as a fully human IgG1 isotype antibody for further 57 characterization. 58 The human 47D11 antibody binds to cells expressing the full-length spike proteins of 59 SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 (Fig.1a). The 47D11 antibody was found to potently 60 inhibit infection of VeroE6 cells with SARS-S and SARS2-S pseudotyped VSV with 61 IC50 values of 0.06 and 0.08 μg/ml (Fig.1b), respectively.

      https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987958v1.full.pdf

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanized_antibody

  7. I’m not buying the story. It makes a lot of claims that are easy to check. I also think the media would exactly be reporting on this if it was anywhere near as close to as described on twitter.

    Here’s a blog post from the King County Public Health blog. Of the 37 deaths (half of the US current total) in that County, 29 are linked to a single nursing home. I can believe that nursing home may have overwhelmed a nearby hospitals ICU, but lets understand that these people were already receiving 24/7 medical care. That one facility has 190 beds.

    The nearest hospital to that nursing facility is Evergreen Health. Here’s a Seattle Times story from the hospital from 10 March.

  8. This isn’t the Black Death. It also isn’t the seasonal flu, which kills far more people in the United States every year than have died world-wide from COVID-19. The hysteria raised and fanned by the media is stunning. So are the anti-Trump media tirades associated with COVID-19. He is accused of not doing anything, while also being accused of racism and xenophobia for imposing travel restrictions (while several states have shut down all theaters and restaurants), and for calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” or the “Chinese COVID virus”, after the mainstream media had spent weeks doing exactly that.

    Maryland just announced (as I write) a ban on all gatherings of 50 people or more. That should have no effect on Biden campaign rallies.

    This is insanity.

  9. An unusually typically fantastic bleat today:

    We live in those times – by which I mean an era where over-the-top “I’m a doctor and we are going to see the system collapse by Thursday” tweets jostle with tweets about things that seem to be working and advances in vaccines, interspersed with inanities, stupidities, and full-strength poison from people who seem stunned to find that the systems in which they placed their trust for their entire lives were not, as it turned out, beavering away on their core mission.

    “Hey, if we have a pandemic, and we have to switch to an online model, what will our pay structure be, and what will the codes for billing be?

    “Good question. Let’s form a working group on this. Email all the stakeholders, each of whom will come with a set of objections designed to make them look important and concerned and knowledgeable, and when the group’s done we’ll submit the results to the task force, which will pass them over to billing, which will roll its eyes because it’s dealing with other things you just can’t imagine, but they’ll form their own working group and come up with a set of guidelines that either contradict our own or present a totally new set of barriers, or probably both. We should get this done by the end of the year.”

    RTWT

  10. I’m looking forward to the class action suits against colleges and universities who have shut down their dorm services, and then failed to provide any refunds to the students they kicked out.

    All we need now is a nice large earthquake on the west coast. (Or better yet, New Madrid.)

  11. I live just outside Seattle, and the wife works at a VA hospital.

    Based only on this first hand knowledge, this tweet is likely Bullshit. The VA hospital is stressed, not by actual cases, but by preparations for cases (as of March 15). Things might be different in other hospitals, but I have NOT heard even second hand reports of that. Everyone I know in Seattle does NOT have COVID as of right now.

    CALM DOWN.

  12. One other thing: the desciption of an overburdened emergency ward sounds like business as usual at most hospitals. Because of my wife’s long illness, I spent several long nights with her in the emergency facility of one of the US’s most important university hospitals (one that treats important political figures). The ERs on TV (even the bad ones) are happy fairy tales by comparison.

  13. Australia sells high school and university educations to Chinese students. The government just let 31,000 of them back in for the start of the school year (it is Autumn – sorry Fall here). They had to spend 2 weeks self isolating in a country other than China first. Yeah right.
    When the Chinese locked down Wuhan we had a A330 from there inbound in to Sydney but our stupid Federal government let it land and disgorge its passengers into Australia. I’d have kept it on the ramp, refueled it and serviced it and sent it back with the passengers without letting them get off.

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