In tangential Trumpvirus news:
Full disclosure: we get “points” at the grocery store, which usually take a bit off, but now of course we’re rarely using them and we’re shopping for my parents, so that was also a major contributor.
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No matter how bad things were before the pandemic, or why they were that bad, it makes a pretty good scapegoat right now.
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I think his reaction is because people (including the WHO) are cautiously starting to say that maybe Sweden’s approach wasn’t so bad after all, and just yesterday an op-ed in the NYT compared it favorably to Trump’s approach.
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Don’t let The Orange One see that study; he will start touting a new quack cure:
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Interesting.
Nothing wrong with the content, and it doesn’t pull from external sites. It might be upset with the no-ip.biz domain, which probably attracts a lot of bad stuff as fast as No-IP can swat it. Or the non-fixed IP address.
Which anti-virus is it?
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When it comes to her research, Eva Lee sweats the details. The Georgia Institute of Technology engineering professor “is extraordinarily talented” at sifting through massive amounts of health care data and finding “novel insights” into how to save lives, improve care, and reduce costs, says physician scientist Brent Egan of the American Medical Association (AMA), who has collaborated with Lee on treating patients with cardiovascular disease.
Lee’s skills are now in high demand. Public health officials from around the world responding to the COVID-19 pandemic are clamoring to use software that she began to develop nearly 2 decades ago. And Lee’s participation in a group of U.S. scientists who raised an early alarm about the pandemic have garnered her national media attention, including on the front page of The New York Times.
In contrast, she’s paid much less attention to the reporting requirements on the grants that have supported her research for more than 2 decades at Georgia Tech. And the 55-year-old applied mathematician is now paying a steep price for that neglect.
I don’t know anything more about the case than this article, but I am automatically sympathetic to her. The rules about money in sciences are stupidly Byzantine, and I for one am not going to claim that I have fully understood all the ramifications of, or even read half of the legal documents I’ve signed my name to.
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In the future, when they release a movie or mini-series about the coronavirus pandemic, casting for who should play Ben Shapiro will be very easy:
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There are roles so awful that they forever tarnish actors’ careers, and I don’t think even half a horse would risk that for the money. I recommend CGI.
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Working as designed by the GOP. Make applying for, using, tracking and renewing grants for science as difficult as possible so that the funding appropriated for it doesn’t actually get used, and waste as much of the scientists’ time as possible so that they have less capacity to expose their shitty lies.
I wasn’t suggesting the horse. 
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This is why it is never worth reporting what Donald Trump says: even he doesn’t know what he’s saying or what it means. He’s just making noises with his mouth. Whether it’s true or false is utterly coincidental. Usually, like this case, it’s neither, just noise. Is Sweden’s approach right? I don’t think so, but neither is a straight numbers comparison with wildly less populous counties.
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More on the China nonsense peddlers:
I should point out that “Terrible disease was created in a foreign lab.” is an old Russian Intelligence stock slander campaign. Now are you less surprised to hear Republicans trying to push it?
The positive news is that they usually deploy it in countries where they know they have lost all future hope of influence.
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March 23rd
April 30
The coronavirus had killed 320 people statewide, including 80 in Pima County, according to the report.
As a matter of comparison:
Pima County Population: 1 million
Norway Population: 5.4 million
Norway deaths: 207
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Just attended a webinar on vaccine development for COVID-19. Some interesting tidbits:
- There are well over 100 vaccine candidates in various phases of testing and development
- Only 5 are in clinical trials at this point. 3 out of those 5 are being developed in China, including the only one moving into Phase 2 (efficacy, vs. Phase 1 which is safety)
- Average time to develop and deploy a vaccine is 10 years
- The fastest deployment to date was the Ebola vaccine, which took 5 years
- the first COVID-19 vaccine is on track to deploy among front-line healthcare workers in early Q4 2020 (!!!)
- US-based researchers who were presenting credited the unprecedented global collaboration for this rapid development and deployment
- there are 4 main approaches (so far) to the vaccine: traditional attenuated/inactivated virus; modified adenovirus or other less-harmful virus that presents or encodes SARS-CoV-2 protein spikes; immune cells that produce the antibody for the SARS-CoV-2 nuclear protein; and T-cells programmed to target the SARS-CoV-2 nuclear protein.
It was a very encouraging presentation and call, especially the part that vaccine researchers are approaching it with multiple parallel avenues. Just taking the traditional approach and generating a ton of antibodies to the spike protein could be dangerous, as that is what kicks off some of the more severe symptoms of COVID-19, so going after the nuclear protein or bypassing the antibody chain to program T-cells could be safer approaches.
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As of 4/15/20:
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A recent trip to my local hardware store revealed discarded latex gloves, paper face masks, bandanas, etc. strewn across the parking lot. Not my problem is now everybody’s problem.
How hard is it for the store to put out waste bins?
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- The ‘visual’ fits!
- I find it disturbing that someone decided to film horsey defecation. Kink?
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Liz has another plan.
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