week 11

The first official cases of covid-19 were announced in this country in February but I have talked to or read about a lot of people who think they had it in December and January. Case in point, my sister spent 3 weeks with our brother up in the PNW over the christmas holiday and was sick as a dog, thought it was the flu, thought she was infected on the plane ride up, thought she was gonna suffocate, took about six weeks to get over the horrible cough and tightness in her chest. She didn't go to the doctor then or when she got home, just the flu after all. She went to one of her annual physical exams Wednesday and her doctor thinks she had covid-19 and wants her to get an antibody test. And I was talking to a neighbor the same day and he related that another neighbor thinks her son had it in January, same thing, same symptoms,thought it was the flu, finally went to the doctor and no, not the flu and took forever to finally get over. I wonder how many flu deaths were really covid-19.

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I mostly stayed home this week just going out for groceries and even fewer people were wearing masks.

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Democrat Brian Sims of the PA state legislature has just informed us that at least one Republican member of the legislature had tested positive, knew he had tested positive and still continued to interact with Democratic members and exposing them who then went home to their families possibly exposing them as well and the Republicans knew it and purposely did not tell the Democratic members. This is the Republican party folks, people who think it is perfectly fine to knowingly expose the members of the opposition party to a deadly disease.

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My county is up to 53 known cases now, a big jump of 9 from last week. Usually they report just a few so this is a big increase.

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Trump has withdrawn the United States from the WHO. In the middle of a pandemic. It's as if he's trying to kill off as many people as he can.

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Interesting and informative article about research into SARS-CoV-2 otherwise known as covid-19. There is mounting evidence that it isn't a lung disease so much as a vasculotropic virus, that it attacks the vascular system, particularly the endothelial cells that line the insides of our blood vessels, gaining entry through the lungs when they are compromised which explains the blood clots and inflammation of the heart and why people with heart disease and vascular disease and diabetes are particularly at risk and why death is caused as much by heart failure as suffocation as well as damage to the lungs, kidneys, liver, intestines, and encephalitis and black toes. If this bears out then the use of statins and ACE inhibitors might be a better approach to dealing with this disease since they tend to stabilize the endothelial lining of the blood vessels instead of antiviral drugs and a small study did show that those already on those drugs were linked to a higher rate of survival.

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When was the last time we had a report from a disease specialist or scientist? When was the last time Dr. Fauci addressed the public, or even Dr. Birx? Where are the updates on the spread of covid-19 and research into treatments and the progress on developing a vaccine? Pandemic news has evaporated this week as the country erupts over the murder of another black man by another white cop but the virus is still out there, still spreading, still killing people and Trump has decided it's over, done deal. Over 100,000 dead, 40 million people unemployed, riots all across the nation, and he thinks the country is doing great while he agitates for more violence.

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Current US statistics as of today 5/31/20, 23:48 GMT (last ten weeks' totals in parenthesis): cases – 1,837,525 (1,685,367, 1,512,267, 1,384,681, 1,168985, 976,403, 741,230, 534,494, 312,223, 123,958, 38,757); deaths – 106,190 (99,286, 90,206, 81,724, 67,954, 54,965, 39,103, 20,637, 8,483, 2,231, 400); (no longer care about recoveries).