Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: sPzAbt653

A sight to behold ... it's a modern day miracle !! Something not seen in weeks

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South Australia's last remaining COVID-19 patient has left the Royal Adelaide Hospital, in what nurses say is a miracle recovery.
Key points:

COVID-19 survivor Paul Faraguna has left the Royal Adelaide Hospital
He is the last remaining patient to survive COVID-19 and leave the RAH
There are no known active cases of the disease in SA

Paul Faraguna, 68, the first COVID-19 patient to be admitted to intensive care and the last to walk out, was farewelled by staff from the infectious diseases ward with a standing ovation on Thursday afternoon.

Mr Faraguna was admitted to hospital just over two months ago, after contracting the coronavirus aboard the Ruby Princess cruise ship.

He was admitted to intensive care six days later, suffering organ failure and placed in an induced coma.
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Mr Farugna is now headed for further treatment and rehabilitation at Modbury Hospital.

"The only challenge left is to walk normally again, which should, I feel, happen in the near future due to my physiotherapy program," he said.

SA Health hasn't recorded any new cases of coronavirus for two-weeks.

The total number of COVID-19 cases detected in South Australia remains 439, but there are no longer any known active cases of the disease in South Australia.

But SA Health continues to urge people to maintain social distancing and good hand, cough and sneeze hygiene practices.

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

Here is another article about numbers, from the Atlantic who just announced 20% layoffs and paycuts.

‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’
The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-and-states-are-misreporting-covid-19-test-data-pennsylvania-georgia-texas/611935/

From the article:

Texas, where the rate of new COVID-19 infections has stubbornly refused to fall, is one of the most worrying states (along with Georgia).

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DULUTH, Minn. (AP) — Essentia Health said Thursday it is laying off 900 employees as the coronavirus pandemic cuts into business.

Essentia Health CEO David Herman said in a statement that the recent cost-reduction measures the Duluth-based health care system has taken “are not sufficient to preserve our mission and the health of the organization.”

The cuts represent 6% of Essentia’s workforce, the Star Tribune reported. The cuts are in addition to 850 Essentia employees who have been placed on administrative leave.

Essentia is the largest employer in Duluth with more than 6,000 employees in the northeastern Minnesota city. The health system has about 14,500 employees in Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

More than 450 jobs will be lost in the Twin Ports of Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin, with the rest of the layoffs spread across Fargo, North Dakota; Detroit Lakes, Brainerd and other regional locations.

About 20% of the layoffs affect staff in direct patient care. The rest is spread across support services.

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FARGO, N.D.–Essentia Health has announced their decision to move forward with permanent layoffs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Health organization says it has experienced operational losses nearing $100 million since the beginning of March.

Various measures have been taken to attempt to offset the decline in revenue including placing employees on administrative leave, flexing hours, reducing physician and executive leader compensation, restructuring and eliminating leadership roles, limiting capital expenditures and reducing services and discretionary spending.

Essentia Health CEO David C. Herman, MD says, “Despite our best efforts, the many cost-reduction measures we’ve taken over the last several weeks are not sufficient to preserve our mission and the health of the organization. This has prompted our leadership team to carefully consider the most difficult decision we’ve faced since I joined Essentia five years ago and move forward with permanent layoffs.”

According to Essentia Health, about 900 employees or six percent of the workforce will be affected by the layoffs. This does not include the 850 employees already on administrative leave through July 31.

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DULUTH – Airline-maintenance giant AAR Corp. is closing its Duluth facility, walking away from a 20-year lease and laying off hundreds of employees.

Many workers had been on furlough since April as business declined due to the steep drop in airline travel. Employees were notified Wednesday that they would be permanently laid off and the company would be closing its doors as of July.

“Due to the unforeseen business circumstances associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating effects on the commercial airline industry, our primary customer has informed us that we will receive no new maintenance projects at this site for the foreseeable future,” AAR told the state and city in an e-mail. “Accordingly, we have been forced to close our Duluth location.”

The company said about 275 jobs will be lost by the end of July.

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Head of the pediatric infectious diseases division at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Dr. Audrey John has seen some cases of MIS-C in her department and has seen major success treating kids with it. She describes IVIG as “pooled antibodies” which can be “used to provide immunity to people who don’t make their own antibodies.” She notes that it is the standard treatment for Kawasaki disease (KD), a rare inflammatory syndrome in kids that has many overlapping symptoms with MIS-C.

Dr. Stanford Shulman, a professor of pediatrics with a focus on infectious disease at Northwestern University, adds that IVIG — which is made through blood plasma donations — often comes from students. “IVIG is prepared through plasma donations from the large groups of adults donating plasma, usually on college campuses or nearby,” Shulman says.
The medicine is created through a sophisticated chemical process

The donations used to create IVIG, Shulman says, come from the “liquid part of the blood,” not the red or white blood cells. “Basically you take the blood out of a volunteer's arm and you spin it down and you give them back their red blood cells and you just take the fluid off the top,” says Shulman. “The fluid is rich in many, many kinds of antibodies.”
IVIG likely works by putting a “damper” on the immune system

Although doctors aren’t exactly sure how IVIG helps with MIS-C, the theory is that the healthy antibodies signal to the immune system that it can slow down. “We believe that, like for Kawasaki disease, it puts a damper on the excess and harmful immune response,” says John.

Shulman, who says the medicine has been used since the ’80s to treat KDs, concurs. “Although it's never been totally proven, we believe that IVG works by modulating or suppressing inflammation.”

Both John and Shulman say that patients with KD tend to respond very well to IVIG, and that MIS-C patients are, too. “We and others have found that IVIG and other treatments, such as steroids, lead to a rapid improvement in fever and an improvement in heart function over several days,” says John.
The CDC studied 33 patients with MIS-C, all of whom were given IVIG

As a part of the CDC’s webinar, the organization shared details about the number of patients studied — 33 in total. All of the individuals were given IVIG, 30 percent of them were also given a second dose. The majority (70 percent) were also given a corticosteroid, which works in tandem with the drug to dampen the immune system.

The mortality rate among the group was 0 percent, and 82 percent had been discharged from the hospital at the time of the report.

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKh6kJ-RSMI (about 30 minutes).

We spoke to Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and head of the team that released a study in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate could be as low as 0.1%.

In her first major interview since the Oxford study was published, she goes further by arguing that Covid-19 has already passed through the population and is now on its way out. She said:

On antibodies:
• Many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable”
• They do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity
• “Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour”
• “Much of the driving force was due to the build-up of immunity”

On IFR:
• “Infection Fatality Rate is less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000.”
• That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%

On lockdown policy:
• Referring to the Imperial model: “Should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of lockdown? It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting that case is becoming more and more fragile”
• Recommends “a more rapid exit from lockdown based more on certain heuristics, like who is dying and what is happening to the death rates”

On the UK Government response:
• “We might have done better by doing nothing at all, or at least by doing something different, which would have been to pay attention to protecting the vulnerable”

On the R rate:
• It is “principally dependent on how many people are immune” and we don’t have that information.
• Deaths are the only reliable measure.

On New York:
• “When you have pockets of vulnerable people it might rip through those pockets in a way that it wouldn’t if the vulnerable people were more scattered within the general population.”

On social distancing:
• “Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous”
• “We used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.”

On next steps:
• “It is very dangerous to talk about lockdown without recognising the enormous costs that it has on other vulnerable sectors in the population”
• It is a “strong possibility” that if we return to full normal tomorrow — pubs, nightclubs, festivals — we would be fine.

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Recently?

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

I found the Swedish guy whose interview you posted in the previous thread far more compelling.

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ORIGINAL: CaptBeefheart

I had lunch a couple of days ago with a guy who has property on Palau (not sure whether it's in the Babeldaob or Pelelieu hex). He said the government there imposed a complete travel ban and they have zero Covid cases. Since the economy is something like 95% dependent on tourism, he believes the place will become economically devastated before too long. Although real estate is likely to take a large hit, since he has some rare beachfront property he's hoping in a few years he can sell the home he's building to a tech millionaire who's looking for an isolated pandemic-free second home. Good luck to him.

Cheers,
CB

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

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ORIGINAL: CaptBeefheart

I had lunch a couple of days ago with a guy who has property on Palau (not sure whether it's in the Babeldaob or Pelelieu hex). He said the government there imposed a complete travel ban and they have zero Covid cases. Since the economy is something like 95% dependent on tourism, he believes the place will become economically devastated before too long. Although real estate is likely to take a large hit, since he has some rare beachfront property he's hoping in a few years he can sell the home he's building to a tech millionaire who's looking for an isolated pandemic-free second home. Good luck to him.

Cheers,
CB

A divers heaven. I am sure he will be able to find a rich diver somewhere.

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

That said, I think that I am getting tested tomorrow. I think that it is just a sinus infection so I have some anti life pills . . .

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ORIGINAL: jdsrae

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

That said, I think that I am getting tested tomorrow. I think that it is just a sinus infection so I have some anti life pills . . .

I hope you test positively negative!

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A Calgary father says he was slapped with a huge ticket for violating COVID-19 physical-distancing requirements while his children and some friends brushed up on their soccer skills, despite going out of his way to comply with the provincial rules.

Cenek Patik says it started May 9 when he, four other parents and five children including one of his, were working on soccer skills development at the Deerfoot Athletic Park.

Patik was using a net to keep two players separated. The father of three also used traffic cones to mark boxes on the field, about 10 metres apart, for players to pass the ball back and forth.

He says at all times physical distancing was being carefully observed.

Leave the park or get a ticket

But not everyone agreed.

"The police officer shows up and says 'soccer is cancelled,' We were not allowed to be playing soccer and we need to leave the park," Patik told CBC News.

"We tried to talk to him. We said we were not playing soccer. We were social distancing. He said leave the park or get a ticket."

Patik said something didn't feel right about the interaction. He had followed the province's updates on what is acceptable and what is not.

So he filed an informal complaint with police and asked Alberta Health Services for an opinion.
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"This is not prohibited providing there are not more than 15 of you, the equipment you are using belongs to you, and that people within your party are practising physical distancing.

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

Calgary father fights $1,200 COVID ticket for children's soccer drills

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A Calgary father says he was slapped with a huge ticket for violating COVID-19 physical-distancing requirements while his children and some friends brushed up on their soccer skills, despite going out of his way to comply with the provincial rules.

Cenek Patik says it started May 9 when he, four other parents and five children including one of his, were working on soccer skills development at the Deerfoot Athletic Park.

Patik was using a net to keep two players separated. The father of three also used traffic cones to mark boxes on the field, about 10 metres apart, for players to pass the ball back and forth.

He says at all times physical distancing was being carefully observed.

Leave the park or get a ticket

But not everyone agreed.

"The police officer shows up and says 'soccer is cancelled,' We were not allowed to be playing soccer and we need to leave the park," Patik told CBC News.

"We tried to talk to him. We said we were not playing soccer. We were social distancing. He said leave the park or get a ticket."

Patik said something didn't feel right about the interaction. He had followed the province's updates on what is acceptable and what is not.

So he filed an informal complaint with police and asked Alberta Health Services for an opinion.
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"This is not prohibited providing there are not more than 15 of you, the equipment you are using belongs to you, and that people within your party are practising physical distancing.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/calgary-father-fights-1-200-014448523.html

He was the only one to get a ticket.

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

Will NYC become a ghost town? 80% of one landlord's retail tenants skipped April and May rent as companies 'take a field day' from office lease payments while weighing permanently working from home - triggering an 'alarming' drop in tax revenue

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8345543/NYC-businesses-companies-skip-rent-payments-shutdown-drags-on.html

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

This article isn't for everyone, but it is interesting.

The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea

https://www.aier.org/article/the-2006-origins-of-the-lockdown-idea/

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

Here's a brilliant Russian solution to the problem of PPE making medical staff too hot!

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/covid-19-nurse-with-swimsuit-under-her-gown-exposes-ppe-issues-in-russia/ar-BB14qE5T?li=AAggFp4

The headline says swimsuit but the picture says underwear.

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The current pandemic is different because, instead of targeting the vulnerable populations, we’ve gone for society-wide one size fits all at nearly the national and global level, and certainly the state level. That’s never happened – not with polio, not with the Spanish flu, the 1957 flu, the 1968 flu, or anything else.

As the health official quote above said of the polio epidemic: “Nobody can shut down intercourse of people in communities.” Our rights survived. So did human liberty, free enterprise, the Bill of Rights, jobs, and the American way of life. And then polio was eventually eradicated.

The slogan for polio eradication – “Do everything you can within reason” – seems like a good rule of thumb for the management of future pandemics.