week 20

You might remember I reported Trump bought up basically the world's supply, 63 million doses for the US stockpile, of the now debunked hydroxychloroquine for treatment of the coronavirus, another example of his poor business decisions, and so he is now promoting Dr. Stella Immanuel as his new medical expert on treating and combatting covid-19 after seeing and tweeting twice a video of a press conference organized by the Tea Party by the America's Frontline Doctors group where she promotes hydroxychloroquine as a cure and tells people that masks don't work and no need to social distance. Except that this woman is a crackpot and her Breitbart sponsored video has been debunked for the dangerous misinformation it contains and both FB and Twitter have removed it as being dangerous to public health. I saw a post yesterday that I wish I could find again, but you know how that goes, that detailed the education and professional histories of every one of the doctors in the video but I did find this.  I would not consider a single one to be qualified to issue an opinion on this subject.

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And related, Trump announced a big government loan using the Defense Production Act, you know the one he refused to activate to convert factories to making PPEs and ventilators for our health care workers and hospitals, to Kodak, the basically defunct film company, to start producing generic active pharmaceutical ingredients in an attempt to reduce reliance on China. As part of the deal, Kodak will reportedly manufacture chemicals that will allow more hydroxychloroquine to be produced domestically. Because the 63 million doses already stockpiled aren't enough of a drug that has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective?

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As I've mentioned before, there is little reporting of the continuing health problems of people who recover from covid-19 but I did come across this one which reports that two studies in Germany have found 75% of recovered patients had heart damage months later including people in people who were formerly healthy. 

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It has been revealed this week that Jared Kushner and his team developed an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control but then it was trashed because, as a member of Kushner’s team admitted, the virus had hit blue states hardest so a national plan was unnecessary because it  would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert. So Trump and Kushner were perfectly happy for citizens in states with Democratic leadership to get sick and die. What a despicable family.

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Progress has been made on two possible vaccines, both shown to protect against the coronavirus in monkeys, one from Moderna and the National Institutes of Health requiring two shots which delivers a kind of messenger RNA into cells and the other from Johnson & Johnson requiring only one shot which is based on a virus called Ad26 which researchers have modified. You can read more about this here. 

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Researchers from Yale think they have identified markers in immune system responses in patients that will indicate how severe an individual's case may be. If i'm understanding it correctly, the stronger your immune response, the sicker you will be and which seems to cause problems of its own. Here's a link to the article. 

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My county is really climbing, now at 636 cases and 20 deaths (county officials are reporting just 7 deaths). Up from 499 last week. I get my numbers from the worldometers.info site.

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Current US statistics as of today 8/1/20, 17:56 GMT (last week's totals in parenthesis): cases – 4,735,249 (4,318,247), deaths – 157,265 (149,414) though how accurate these numbers are is anybody's guess considering Trump is trying to control the numbers by having all data sent to HHS instead of the CDC.