https://nextstrain.org/?fbclid=IwAR17wXu_r4pxM6a6c3dqxLqxgvjmFNr_QujaXLcNUNPUpWTrRFZUX3P3Wnw

… or at least cause conditions like the cytokine storms which in turn damage those organs.

Which is how these viruses can become so deadly for those with a robust immune system — fit young people. Influenza can cause similar as happened with the 1918 influenza pandemic.

I once read that influenza had broken out in waves, especially in the US, in the build up to the 1918 – 1920 event. I thought my source for this was ‘Catching Cold: 1918’s Forgotten Tragedy and the Scientific Hunt for the Virus That Caused It’ by Pete Davies but having revisited this is not the case. Maybe it was in the book ‘The Hot Zone’ by Richard Preston, mostly about Ebola and other haemorrhagic fevers, which I no longer have to check.

An informative book I am reading at present is :

‘The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History’ by John M. Barry

The large scale farming of fowl and hogs even back in the early twentieth century was considered as a mixing ground which could accelerate the mutation of the virus.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus-kill-clinicians-trace-ferocious-rampage-through-body-brain-toes

A VERY IMPORTANT POINT ABOUT COMPARING COVID-19 MORTALITY RATES

** HERE’S WHAT WE ALL KNOW and are talking about to death (please excuse the expression):

• We have a pretty good idea of which countries are under-reporting COVID-19 cases, for whatever reasons

• We know that COVID-19 testing is inadequate in most places• We know that immunological assays of antibody activity post-exposure and post-recovery are just now getting off the ground

• We THINK we know that even in states and/or countries with sufficient testing to be somewhat informative, estimating COVID-19 mortality by dividing # COVID-19 deaths by # COVID-19 cases yields an over-estimate of mortality primarily but not exclusively because of error in the denominator. We also know that the varying magnitude of this error makes comparisons between locales only “suggestive” (depending upon your hypothesis-of-interest) – at the absolute best.
____________________________
Let me provide as an example two counties I’ve been paying close attention to, among others, in Colorado: Weld County (Greeley) and El Paso County (Colorado Springs). Every few days, one or the other county in this deadly horse race surges to the lead with 6% or 6.5% mortality (# deaths ÷ # confirmed cases) – depending upon the week of the month and the phase of the moon. There is no other county in Colorado that even comes close.

Relatives of mine, laypersons, have hypotheses ranging from “Well, the hospital care is better in City X” to “The people are more stupid – flouting social distancing recommendations – in City Y,” and so on. But the likely truth is that El Paso County, with a young (e.g., military) population but a cluster-fuck of testing screw-ups from the get-go, is yielding vastly inflated mortality figures. Meanwhile, Weld County has as its number-one employer J.B. Swift and Company – one of the largest meatpackers in the world – and (hello!) there’s an epidemic of COVID-19 among meatpackers in the United States. Partly as a result of this situation, Weld County is testing far more people than El Paso County. Voilà. (For the sake of comparison, Denver has almost 1/5 of total confirmed COVID-19 cases in Colorado; their mortality rate by the same equation is 4% – likewise unquestionably an overestimate.)
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** HERE’S WHAT WE DON’T ALL KNOW and needs to be talked about more. Talked about to death, if you will:

• Countries differ in their definitions of what constitutes a reportable COVID-19 case – even when you test positive. In some places (U.S.), a confirmed-positive result gets you added to the statistics we’re all keeping track of and some of us input into our mathematical models. In some provinces in China, you must test positive AND have symptoms to warrant reporting; this is one of the reasons China’s numbers have consistently appeared lower than their actual cases.

• Countries VASTLY differ in what qualifies as “death from COVID-19,” and this creates the biggest skew of all. Weren’t most of assuming that the simple equation # COVID-19 deaths ÷ # COVID-19 cases = Reported COVID-19 Mortality Rate – while clearly over-estimating true mortality in the community as a whole – at the bare minimum had a dependable numerator? That’s what I implied above. But this is not the case –

– Most people (front-line health providers aside) who die from COVID-19 are older. And most of these patients enter the ICU with comorbidities, some of which – asthma, COPD, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease in general and cardiac arrhythmias in particular, chronic kidney disease, autoimmune disease, coagulopathy – make them pretty much toast from the time they’re put on a ventilator. (I should know, I’ll be one of them.)

– Okay, so you’re old – and while possibly generally healthy and functional beforehand [forget for the moment nursing home residents] – let’s face it, you’re not the perfect picture of youthful vitality. And while you may only be taking four or five medications, one of these meds might affect ACE2 receptor regulation in a manner that makes SARS-CoV-2 immensely happy (a topic for an entire post).

– You enter an American hospital via the ED with confirmed COVID-19 and an EMR with a few diagnoses already registered there. But should you, unfortunately, leave the same hospital via the morgue, well … Reportable cause of death? It will be COVID-19 (and sorry, except for bona fide forensic cases, the Autopsy Shops are closed – non-essential businesses, if you will.). After all, COVID-19 was the proximate cause of your death, right?

In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, it is often the distal cause – your pre-existing condition (co-morbidity) which will be listed as legal cause of death. I mean, them’s the rules there – and as there has been considerable discussion of this topic in the professional and lay media, I don’t know why it’s not more widely known. (One of the ways British epidemiologists are trying to get a decent handle on the “true impact” of COVID-19 in terms of mortality is to subtract the number of expected deaths from other medical problems from the number of observed deaths in COVID-19 patients, over a given time period. This approach has many problems, not least of which is the messy reality that much of the high-risk elderly population has more than one comorbidity: how do you model that?)

Meanwhile, once again, according to the American medical model, having your heart or kidneys conk out while on a respirator for COVID-19 pneumonia seems like a distal cause of death – after all, it’s the SARS-CoV-2 virus that killed you, even if your ticker wasn’t in the best of shape – however, this is not the way the Brits and many other countries think of it.

Now of course, “distal” and “proximate” are by definition relative terms – and from some of your perspectives I’ve mixed them up. Never mind. (I could also invoke here the “proximate vs ultimate-causation distinction we use in evolutionary biology – which I actually think would be less confusing – even if medically speaking, non-standard usage. It’s clearer, I think, insofar as (on this small, non-evolutionary scale) your proximate cause of death would be your fatal arrhythmia, but your ultimate cause of death would be COVID-19.)
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My MAJOR POINT here is simply this: As long as different localities continue to differ in their extent of COVID-19 testing; utilize different official reporting criteria for COVID-19 cases, and still different criteria for COVID-19 mortality – the already problematic product of # COVID-19 deaths / # COVID-19 cases will continue to be, at least for comparative purposes – in and of itself, useless.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85925

Here’s our joint scientific and behavioural Covid-19 perspective from (currently locked down!) sunny South West England:

http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2020/04/covid-19-in-south-west-england/

As a “silver surfer” myself I cannot help but wonder if all these surfers at Fistral Beach earlier today are:

a) Resident in Cornwall, and
b) If so only getting wet once per day, and
c) Always over 2 meters apart

Or blame for that shit stain trump playing games like this?

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ppe-and-ventilators-becomes-patronage-in-trumps-hands?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

There is no valid evidence it helps mikeN. None. Anecdotes are worthless, but since you seem to value them, why ignore the anecdotes that it has killed people in these trials?

And why no blame for the massive fuckup your president has made of this?

Someone should tell Andrew Cuomo who has requested more from the Feds, and President Trump, who asked Modi for an exception to India’s export ban.

Why, because some unreliable agents report that hydroxychloroquine apparently treats coronavirus infection? Because Cuomo is willing to try anything that might help, even if it doesn’t, but can be controlled to minimise negative effects? Or because Trump is a grandstanding imbecile who will convince himself at some point that he invented hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure-all (and who just happens to have a financial interest in its manufacture…)?

There’s no reliable evidence of hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy in COVID-19 infection. Anecdotal claims that there is such efficacy are no more than a succumbing to the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc.

I misunderstood your claims about the studies.
I thought there were studies that Trump touted, and then a separate set of studies that you were talking about that found no such thing.
Instead, is it just that the studies Trump touted were flawed, and there are no contrary studies(except Sweden in practice)?

“perhaps because he needs to avoid upsetting Trump”

Perhaps? Haven’t you noticed trump’s habit of firing capable people when they annoy him and replacing them with his brand of dishonest butt-licking moron?

“That is not the same as a negative finding.
Can you clarify if the studies did not find an effect, or affirmative found that the proposed treatment is not effective?”

thanks for verifying your ignorance. The studies that trump touts as showing this has promise did no such thing: as described, they were so bad they are worthless (if you care about things being done correctly which you and other republicans have shown you don’t).

From people involved of a study of it in Sweden:

Chloroquine has been given to covid-19 in several hospitals in Sweden. But last week, all hospitals in the Västra Götaland region stopped using it.

“There were reports of suspected more serious side effects than we first thought. We cannot rule out serious side effects, especially from the heart, and it is a hard-dosed drug. In addition, we have no strong evidence that chloroquine has an effect at covid-19,” says Magnus Gisslén, professor and chief physician at the infection clinic at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, to the Gothenburg Post.

He continues

“We might have made another assessment if covid-19 was a disease with very high mortality, for example 80 per cent dead, but now we can manage most people who are intensive care anyway,” says Magnus Gisslén.

He is self-critical that he let himself be drawn into the chloroquine.

“In retrospect, I can regret that we did. We were a bit naive and thought the side effect profile was much better. I have changed my mind and hope that the rest of the country does too.”

And, again, the work from France was worthless because of their lack of design and internal irregularities (remember, one of the French bits was able to claim 100% recovery because they didn’t include 4 deaths in their treatment group). Same for China.

So yes mikeN, in spite of your steadfast refusal to try to understand why there is no evidence that it works, there isn’t any. Cuomo is wasting money.

The fact that you are hung up on this and not on trump’s monumental series of fuckups and lies over this whole thing tells us a lot: you’re just trying to distract from how badly your people have acted and continue to act.