Tag Archives: Chinese Virus

News

Hospitals built for Wuhan Coronavirus patients are being dismantled

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It was probably a good idea for the U.S. government to construct massive hospitals to deal with all the expected Coronavirus patients. But now, these hospitals are being dismantled, and almost all of them never saw a single Wuhan Coronavirus patient. This story was reported by far-left National Public Radio, which is about as far left as you can go, except for North Korea.

NPR reports:

As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country.

The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records.

But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven’t treated a single patient.

The Army Corps of Engineers has contracted with private companies to turn convention centers and other sites into emergency field hospitals. Federal spending totaled more than $660 million. Most of these facilities haven’t treated a single COVID-19 patient. Some haven’t opened. Others have closed but could reopen if there’s a resurgence in cases. This data on some of the biggest projects is current as of Monday.

Things are also going well for states that have re-opened early.

Florida has an excellent governor and it looks like he did the best job of balancing the need to lock down with the need for a quick re-opening to save his state’s economy.

The far-left Miami Herald reports:

Restaurants are seating patrons for the first time in weeks. Shops are cautiously welcoming back customers. And state parks are opening their gates.

As Florida looks to rebound from the crisis wrought by the novel coronavirus, so, too, does Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Florida’s Republican governor is slowly opening the state, a month after he shut it down amid national criticism for his response to the novel coronavirus outbreak that has so far killed at least 1,399 people in Florida and infected more than 36,000.

The move — at a date when early models incorrectly predicted Florida would experience a peak in infections — isn’t without risk. Florida continues to see sickness and death, particularly in hard-hit South Florida. But after avoiding worst-case predictions in March and April, DeSantis has, in May, positioned himself as a conservative coronavirus success story.

“DeSantis right now has been able to thread that needle between overreacting and following the facts,” said Rob Schmidt, a Republican Miami-based pollster with the firm McLaughlin & Associates.

And Georgia also re-opened early, but their Republican governor seems to have timed it right as well.

Far-left U.S. News and World Report has the story:

THE number of Georgia patients hospitalized due to the coronavirus has fallen to its lowest total in weeks, Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday as the state’s death toll from COVID-19 reached at least 1,400.

Kemp tweeted Saturday morning that 1,203 patients were currently hospitalized, the lowest number since the state started reporting the figure on April 8.

He also noted that Saturday’s total of 897 ventilators in use across the state was the lowest number since early April.

“We will win this fight together!” the Republican governor tweeted.

Those states that re-open early will have much better economic growth than Democrat-run states like Michigan, New York, etc. that remain in lockdown mode. I sure hope that the blue states don’t come begging for money from red states after they kill their own economies. I’m in a red state, we’re open, and I don’t want my money being used for socialists who make decisions with their feelings rather than with facts.

 

News

Two new studies reduce the severity of the Wuhan Coronavirus

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Let's take a closer look at an interesting problem
Let’s take a closer look at an interesting problem

I found two new studies that reduce the threat of the Chinese Covid-19 virus. The first one was reported by Sky News, and it’s about a study that says that coronavirus patients cannot contract the disease after they’ve had it once already. And the second study was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, and it says that the virus cannot be transmitted from children to adults.

Sky News first:

A number of reported cases of coronavirus patients relapsing after overcoming the disease were actually due to testing failures, South Korean scientists say.

Researchers at the South Korean centre for disease control and prevention (CDC) now say it is impossible for the COVID-19 virus to reactivate in human bodies.

There have been more than 10,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in South Korea, with 245 deaths – a 2.3% fatality rate, which is lower than the 3.4% average as stated by the World Health Organisation.

A total of 277 patients in the country were believed to have fallen ill for a second time, as had patients in China and Japan.

This prompted concerns that the virus could be mutating so quickly that people were not necessarily immune to catching it again.

However, genetic analyses of the virus have not found any substantial changes which would effectively disguise it from the immune system.

So, this study is good news for people who have had the virus, but I still worry that people who have had it might be able to infect other people unless they are completely cured.

Then Sydney Morning Herald:

No child has been found to have passed coronavirus to an adult, a review of the evidence in partnership with the Royal College of Paediatrics has found.

Major studies into the impact of COVID-19 on young children suggest they “do not play a significant role” in spreading the virus and are less likely to become infected than adults.

While experts insist that more evidence is needed, they note there has not been a single case of a child under 10 transmitting the virus, even in contact tracing carried out by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Public health officials in Switzerland have announced that under-10s can hug their grandparents again because they pose them no risk.

Now a review in partnership with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) has found the evidence “consistently demonstrates reduced infection and infectivity of children in the transmission chain”.

Led by Dr Alasdair Munro, a clinical research fellow in paediatric infectious diseases, the research concluded: “COVID-19 appears to affect children less often, and with less severity, including frequent asymptomatic or subclinical infection. There is evidence of critical illness, but it is rare.

“The role of children in transmission is unclear, but it seems likely they do not play a significant role.”

This study just seems like all good news to me. It means that we can be more confident than we were before about re-opening schools.

Anyway, check out the articles and see what you think.

I’m an investor, and I mostly think that the virus is not an issue right now. My biggest concern right now is that we are doing damage to the economy by staying in lockdown. Damage that will really hurt us in the long run because of inflation and massive debt.

News

Swiss pharma company pledges to donate 130 million doses of drug touted by Trump

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Data: Covid-19 testing in the United States
Data: Covid-19 testing in the United States

There’s been a lot of good news last week, and I tweeted some of it. A lot of private sector companies are stepping up to manufacture the tools needed to defeat the Chinese Wuhan virus. They’re making hand sanitizer, respirator masks, ventilators, and even prescription drugs for testing and treatment. One company really stood out to me, though, so let’s read about them first.

Daily Wire reported:

Novartis Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan said Sunday that the Trump-touted drudged hydroxychloroquine, often used to treat malaria, is our biggest hope in combating the China-originated coronavirus, or COVID-19.

Narasimhan pledged to donate a stunning 130 million doses of hydroxychloroquine and will support studies of the drug as a treatment against COVID-19.

Reuters reported:

Novartis Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan said his Sandoz generics unit’s malaria, lupus and arthritis drug hydroxychloroquine is the company’s biggest hope against the coronavirus, Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung reported on Sunday.

Novartis has pledged to donate 130 million doses and is supporting clinical trials needed before the medicine, which U.S. President Donald Trump also has been promoting, can be approved for use against the coronavirus.

“Pre-clinical studies in animals as well as the first data from clinical studies show that hydroxychloroquine kills the coronavirus,” Narasimhan told Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung. “We’re working with Swiss hospitals on possible treatment protocols for the clinical use of the drug, but it’s too early to say anything definitively.”

According to Reuters, pharmaceutical companies Bayer and Teva “have also agreed to donate hydroxychloroquine or similar drugs, while Gilead Sciences is testing its experimental drug remdesivir against coronavirus.”

As noted by The Daily Wire on Sunday, France officially sanctioned this weekend chloroquine for certain patients infected with COVID-19.

“The French government has officially sanctioned prescriptions of chloroquine to treat certain coronavirus patients,” France 24 English reported Saturday.

“This ensures continued treatment of patients who have been treated for several years for a chronic condition with this drug, but also allows a temporary authorization to allow certain patients with coronavirus to benefit from this therapeutic route,” said Jérôme Salomon, France’s director general of health.

According to a report from Trustnodes, France’s move comes after infectious disease specialist Didier Raoult announced new clinical results… that show 78 out of 80 patients treated with chloroquine recovered within five days.

Trump is trying to get the FDA to move quickly through testing so that these drugs can be made widely available. 

The Daily Wire reported on Sunday night that the FDA is doing everything they can to get these drugs available:

On Sunday night, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, drugs often used to treat malaria and recently touted by President Donald Trump as a possible “game-changer” in the fight against the China-originated novel coronavirus, or COVID-19.

The United States Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) announced in a statement on Sunday that the FDA will allow the drugs to be “donated to the Strategic National Stockpile to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with COVID-19, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible,” a Politico report said.

The statement noted that “Sandoz donated 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to the stockpile and Bayer donated 1 million doses of chloroquine.”

Trump made it clear weeks ago that his administration would work to fast-track promising drugs like hydroxychloroquine with the FDA, all in an effort to combat COVID-19.

The drugs are already being tested in New York state:

Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is on the same page as President Trump when it comes to the popular anti-malaria drugs, permitting trials of hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, and azithromycin to commence in his state.

“Let’s see how it works,” Trump said Sunday, with regard to the New York trials. “It may. It may not.”

But wait! There’s more good news.

I’m currently tracking 5 different drugs to see how they perform during tests, but here is a sixth one that I didn’t even know about.

The New York Post reports:

Two coronavirus patients in New York City are off ventilators and out of intensive care after they received an experimental drug to treat HIV and breast cancer.

[…]The drug, leronlimab, is delivered by injection twice in the abdomen, the Daily Mail reported.

Of seven critically ill patients who received the drug in New York, two were removed from ventilators and two showed significant improvement.

[…]CytoDyn, the drug’s manufacturer, could get FDA approval in six weeks if leronlimab continues to show promise. No drugs currently have FDA approval to treat the novel coronavirus.

Other private sector companies are developing faster methods to test for the Wuhan virus.

CNBC reports:

Abbott on Friday announced it received approval for a test that is capable of delivering positive results of the coronavirus in as little as five minutes, and it will begin making those tests available to health care providers next week.

The Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization for the point-of-care test on Friday, the company said in a statement. The test can detect negative results in 13 minutes. The company said it plans to ramp up manufacturing so it can deliver 50,000 tests per day.

And finally, this from the Daily Wire:

Scientists studying the coronavirus have some good news: as it is transmitted through the human population, it is not undergoing significant mutations, meaning it will not become more dangerous as it spreads, and once a vaccine is developed, it could be as effective as vaccines for measles or chickenpox are. Peter Thielen, a molecular geneticist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who is one of the scientists examining the virus, told The Washington Post,, “I would expect a vaccine for coronavirus would have a similar profile to those vaccines. It’s great news.”

So, the Trump administration is actually doing a pretty good job of cutting red tape to get people help faster. But a lot of the actual work is being down by private sector companies who are making donations and developing tests and drugs to solve the problem. Just keep that in mind when you here doom and gloom from fake news journalists and Democrat politicians.