PANDUMBIC

You must be allergic to facts. Too bad that's not a risk factor.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/health/covid-weight-loss-wellness/index.html

https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/21_0123.htm

Movie recommendation for the forum troll:

Another morbidly obese incredibly ancient sickly and terribly terribly smart person dies... of self-inflicted irony.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-03/kelly-ernby-former-republican-assembly-candidate-and-deputy-d-a-dies-of-covid-19?_amp=true

Kelly Ernby, former Orange County GOP state Assembly candidate and deputy D.A., dies of COVID-19

Jan. 3, 2022 5:59 PM PT


Kelly Ernby, a political newcomer who ran for an Orange County state Assembly seat two years ago as a Republican, died this week of COVID-19. In addition to political activism, she worked for 10 years as an O.C. deputy district attorney.

Ernby, a Huntington Beach resident, was 46.

“The Orange County district attorney’s office is utterly heartbroken by the sudden and unexpected passing of Deputy Dist. Atty. Kelly Ernby,” Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said in a statement. “Kelly was an incredibly vibrant and passionate attorney who cared deeply about the work that we do as prosecutors — and deeply about the community we all fight so hard to protect.”


Spitzer praised Ernby’s enthusiasm as part of his agency’s Environmental Protection Team and called it an “absolute privilege” to work alongside her.

News of Ernby’s death surfaced Monday morning when local Republican politicians and party activists began publicly paying tribute to her.

“She was very passionate about her love for politics, for America and the Republican Party,” said Jon Fleischman, former executive director of the California Republican Party and a longtime Orange County GOP activist. “She jumped into a race for state Assembly when not many people knew her, ended up raising more money and having a much larger grass-roots organization than expected.”

In 2020, Ernby declared her candidacy for state Assembly in the 74th District and described herself as a political outsider. The district was anchored by Irvine but encompassed several coastal cities, Huntington Beach most prominently among them. In the primary election, she challenged Newport Beach Mayor Diane Dixon, a fellow Republican, for the chance to unseat Cottie Petrie-Norris, the freshman Democratic incumbent.

Ernby earned the endorsement of former Newport Beach City Councilman Scott Peotter, Dixon’s onetime colleague on the dais. She also enjoyed the support of Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner, former Assemblyman Jim Silva and Mission Viejo Councilman Greg Raths.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Ernby took a firm stance against a new state law tightening immunization rules for California schoolchildren when appearing in an online town hall on the campaign trail in November 2019.


“I don’t think that the government should be involved in mandating what vaccines people are taking,” she said. “I think that’s a decision between doctors and their patients…. If the government is going to mandate vaccines, what else are they going to mandate?”

Dixon edged Ernby for second place by 4,000 votes before narrowly losing to Petrie-Norris in the general election.

“A lot of people take their marbles and go home, but after losing her state Assembly race, Kelly got involved with the county Republican Party instead,” Fleischman said. “She took on the very important job of being precinct chairman, which meant she was finding captains, as they call them, in all of the different cities around Orange County in getting geared up for the next election cycle.”


Ernby became an elected Orange County GOP central committee member in 2020. She was halfway through the four-year term at the time of her death.

According to Fleischman, Ernby was readying another state Assembly run in the newly drawn 72nd District when the two traded text messages last week. Ernby also confided that she had fallen ill with COVID-19, but Fleischman didn’t expect her to die, calling her passing “sudden,” especially as the two planned to talk this week.

“I found her to be funny and generous,” he said. “She quickly became part of the fabric of our party. We’re really going to miss her. It’s very sad.”


During the pandemic, Ernby remained an ardent and vocal opponent of COVID-19 vaccination mandates.

As recently as Dec. 4, she spoke against such mandates during a rally outside Irvine City Hall. Organized by the UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton chapters of Turning Point USA, the rally drew dozens in attendance, according to the Daily Titan, a Fullerton student newspaper.

“There’s nothing that matters more than our freedoms right now,” Ernby said.

I'm just gonna leave this here:  

The daughter of Navy veterans, Ernby grew up in San Diego. She earned a law degree from the University of San Diego School of Law and was recruited to join the Irvine offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Ernby took a significant pay cut in 2011 to work for the Orange County district attorney’s office until the time of her death.

Ernby is survived by her husband, Axel.

Too bad.  Damn disease always takes the people who know everything, too.  Ain't fair.

'We can't vaccinate the planet every six months,' says Oxford vaccine scientist

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/04/health/andrew-pollard-booster-vaccines-feasibility-intl/index.html

(CNN)A leading expert who helped create the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine said Tuesday that giving everyone in the world booster shots multiple times a year is not feasible.

"We can't vaccinate the planet every four to six months. It's not sustainable or affordable," Professor Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and head of the UK's Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, told The Daily Telegraph in an interview published Tuesday.

Pollard also stressed the "need to target the vulnerable" going forward, rather than administering doses to everyone age 12 and older. More data is needed to ascertain "whether, when and how often those who are vulnerable will need additional doses," he said.

Pollard also said he thought further evidence was needed before offering a fourth Covid-19 shot to people in the UK, which is currently rolling out third shots to healthy people 18 and older, and at-risk people 16 and older.

Israel has already begun its rollout of a fourth vaccine dose, offering it to all medical workers and people 60 and older as of Monday.

And in late December, German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach told public broadcaster ZDF that Germans "will need a fourth vaccination" against Covid-19.
But Pollard struck an optimistic note in his interview. The "worst is behind us" and the world "just needs to get through the winter," he said.

"At some point, society has to open up," he added. "When we do open, there will be a period with a bump in infections, which is why winter is probably not the best time."

https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity/florida/12/

CDC Director: 75% of covid deaths had at least 4 comorbidities.

ZUBY:
@ZubyMusic

20 Things I’ve Learned (Or Had Confirmed) About Humanity During The ‘Pandemic’ (THREAD):

1/ Most people would rather be in the majority, than be
right.

2/ At least 20% of the population has strong authoritarian
tendencies, which will emerge under the right conditions.

3/ Fear of death is only rivalled by the fear of social
disapproval. The latter could be stronger.

4/ Propaganda is just as effective in the modern day as it
was 100 years ago. Access to limitless information has not made the average person any wiser.

5/ Anything and everything can and will be politicised by
the media, government, and those who trust them.

6/ Many politicians and large corporations will gladly
sacrifice human lives if it is conducive to their political and financial aspirations.

7/ Most people believe the government acts in the best
interests of the people. Even many who are vocal critics
of the government.

8/ Once they have made up their mind, most people would
rather to commit to being wrong, than admit they were wrong.

9/ Humans can be trained and conditioned quickly and
relatively easily to significantly alter their behaviours – for better or worse.

10/ When sufficiently frightened, most people will not
only accept authoritarianism, but demand it.

11/ People who are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ are often well researched and simply ahead of the mainstream narrative.

12/ Most people value safety and security more than
freedom and liberty, even if said ‘safety’ is merely an illusion.

13/ Hedonic adaptation occurs in both directions, and once inertia sets in, it is difficult to get people back to ‘normal’.

14/ A significant % of people thoroughly enjoy being subjugated.

15/ ‘The Science’ has evolved into a secular pseudo-
religion for millions of people in the West. This religion
has little to do with science itself.

16/ Most people care more about looking like they are
doing the right thing, rather than actually doing the right thing.

17/ Politics, the media, science, and the healthcare
industries are all corrupt, to varying degrees. Scientists
and doctors can be bought as easily as politicians.

18/ If you make people comfortable enough, they will not
revolt. You can keep millions docile as you strip their rights, by giving them money, food, and entertainment.

19/ Modern people are overly complacent and lack vigilance when it comes to defending their own freedoms from government overreach.

20/ It’s easier to fool a person than to convince them
that they have been fooled.

Bonus thought:

21/ Most people are fairly compassionate and have good
intentions (this is good)

As a result, most people deeply struggle to understand
that some people, including our ‘leaders’, CAN have malicious or perverse intentions (this is bad).

The amount of projection practiced by the forum's resident idiot is amazing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/08/sotomayors-false-claim-that-over-100000-children-are-serious-condition-with-covid/

SONIA SOTOMAYOR, U.S. SUPREME COURT ASSOCIATE JUSTICE: We have over 100,000 children, which we've never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

BAIER: Now, (AUDIO GAP) what we can find from Friday suggest there are fewer than 3,500 current pediatric hospitalizations from COVID-19. Is that true?

WALENSKY: Yeah. But, you know, here's what I can tell you about our pediatric hospitalizations now. First of all, the vast majority of children who are in the hospital are unvaccinated, and for those children who are not eligible for vaccination, we do know that they are most likely to get sick with COVID if their family members aren't vaccinated.

So the most important thing we can do for those children to keep them out of the hospital is to vaccinate them and to vaccinate their family members around them.

We also know that --

BAIER: Understood, but the number is not 100,000. It's roughly 3,500 in hospitals now.

WALENSKY: It -- yes, there are -- there are -- and in fact what I will say is, while pediatric hospitalizations are rising, there are still about 15- fold least than hospitalizations of our older age demographics.

BAIER: Do you have a number of children on ventilators?

WALENSKY: I do not have that off the top of my head, but what I can say is for it -- I don't believe there are any in many of these hospitals who are vaccinated. So, really, the highest risk of being on a ventilator if your child is if you're unvaccinated.

We also have recent data out just this week that's demonstrated that dangerous MIS-C syndrome that we are seeing in children, 91 percent protection if you've been vaccinated.

BAIER: But the risk of death or serious illness in children is still very small, right?

WALENSKY: Comparatively the risk of death is small, but, of course, you know, children aren't supposed to die.

BAIER: Yeah.

WALENSKY: So, you know, if we have a child who's been -- who is sick with COVID-19, we want to make sure that they -- we want to protect them, of course.

BAIER: Right. But I'm talking from your data, ages 15 to 24, for example, the risk of death is at 0.001 percent. I guess what I'm getting at in this opening is that the Supreme Court is in the process of dealing with this big issue about mandates. And do you feel responsibility as the CDC director to correct a very big mischaracterization by one of the Supreme Court justices?

WALENSKY: Yeah, here's what I'll tell you. I'll tell you that, right now, 17 -- if you're unvaccinated, you're 17 times more likely to be in the hospital and 20 times more likely to die than if you're boosted. And so, what my responsibility is, is to provide guidance and recommendations to protect the American people. Those recommendations strongly recommend vaccination for our children above the age of 5 and boosting for everyone above the age of 18 if they're eligible.

BAIER: Speaking of statistics, it seems to make a big difference if a person in the hospital is in the hospital for COVID-19 or with COVID-19. It's been almost a year since you've been running the agency.

Do we have that split on numbers?

WALENSKY: You know, what I will say it differs by each variant. So, some variant -- first of all, we're doing screening of many -- in many hospitals, of everybody who's walking in the door. What we are seeing with the omicron variant is that it tends to be milder person by person, but given how large the numbers are that we're seeing more and more cases come into the hospital.

In some hospitals that we've talked to, up to 40 percent of the patients who are coming in with COVID-19 are coming in not because they're sick with COVID, but because they're coming in with something else and have had to -- COVID or the omicron variant detected.

BAIER: Right. But I guess you know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID or how many are with COVID but they had other comorbidities, do you have that breakdown?

WALENSKY: Yes, of course. With omicron, we are following that very carefully. Our death registry, of course, takes a few weeks to -- it takes a few weeks to collect and, of course, omicron has just been with us for a few weeks. But those data will be forthcoming.

BAIER: But, you know, the questioning in the Supreme Court also said that omicron was as deadly as delta. That is not true, right?

WALENSKY: I'm sorry? I didn't hear you.

BAIER: Omicron is not as deadly as delta, at least by your data right now, right?

WALENSKY: We are starting to see data from other countries that indicate on a person by person basis, it may not be. However, given the volume of cases that we are seeing with omicron, we very well may see death rates rise dramatically.

Should we treat Covid like the flu? Europe is slowly starting to think so

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/should-we-treat-covid-like-the-flu-europe-is-starting-to-think-so.html

KEY POINTS
There are growing calls in Europe for the coronavirus to be treated as an endemic illness, like the flu.

Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, is the latest leader to suggest it’s time to reevaluate Covid.

Britain’s government has already told the public that it must “to learn to live with the virus.”

LONDON — There are growing calls in Europe for Covid-19 to be treated as an endemic illness like the flu despite strong warnings from global health officials that the pandemic is far from over.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, is the latest European leader to stick his head above the parapet by suggesting it’s time to reevaluate Covid. He called on the EU to debate the possibility of treating the virus as an endemic illness.

“The situation is not what we faced a year ago,” Sanchez said in a radio interview with Spain’s Cadena SER on Monday, as Spanish schoolchildren returned to their classrooms after the holidays.

“I think we have to evaluate the evolution of Covid to an endemic illness, from the pandemic we have faced up until now,” he added. Sanchez said it was time to open the debate around a gradual reappraisal of the pandemic “at the technical level and at the level of health professionals, but also at the European level.”

Sanchez’s comments mark something of a departure from fellow leaders on the Continent, however, with most of them focused on the immediate challenge of tackling alarming numbers of Covid cases caused by the omicron variant, which is highly infectious but widely appearing to cause less severe illness more akin to a cold than the flu symptoms seen with earlier variants.

Should you wear an n95/kn95/kf94?

https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/should-you-wear-an-n95kn95kn94

https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1479631966437707776?s=20

Viewpoint: Here’s Why COVID-19 Is Much Worse Than Flu

October 1, 2021
Kevin Kavanagh, MD

Unlike influenza, SARS-CoV-2 uses ACE2 receptors to infiltrate cells. Similar to HIV, SARS-CoV-2 can silently spread throughout the host’s body and attack almost every organ.

Medicine appears to have largely bought into the SARS-CoV-2 seasonal influenza analogy. Everything appears to be focused on pulmonary disease. Fringe coronavirus deniers started the narrative that COVID-19 was like the flu. This disinformation narrative has taken hold and has even affected decision making of prominent scientific committees, where disease severity is increasingly defined as a hospitalization (most commonly due to pulmonary distress), rather than the potential chronic and long-term disabling sequelae. This unfortunately, appeared to be the focus of some of the members on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) which failed to approve boosters for those at high risk of occupational exposure, a decision which the CDC’s director promptly reversed.

COVID-19 has a number of presentations and pulmonary is just one. More than anything else, the receptor used for attachment determines the behavior of any virus, along with what organs and even species it can infect.

Human rhinoviruses, the most common cause of a cold, uses the ICAM-1 (intercellular adhesion molecule-1) receptor to enter cells. This receptor allows the virus to replicate in sinus tissues but not to a variety of other tissues. The influenza virus attaches to cells via sialic acid receptors, which are sugar-protein and sugar-fat complexes. There are a number of modifications of this receptor across species, which require differing viral mutations to enable cellular attachment and entry. The influenza virus primarily targets a patient’s lungs, but then the patient’s immune response can also produce a myriad of system symptoms from loss of appetite and myalgias. HIV uses the CD4 receptor residing on Lymphocytes. HIV is initially asymptomatic, and the initial stages of disease can easily be classified as “mild”, a disease which, if left untreated, almost uniformly turns aggressive and fatal over the course of 8 to 10 years.

In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, the ACE2 receptor is used for viral entry into the cells. The ACE2 receptor is entirely different to that used by the rhinovirus and seasonal flu. It is composed of amino acids along with a zinc ligand. This receptor is present throughout the body, not just the lungs.

Clinically, SARS-CoV-2 combines some of the properties of the seasonal flu plus HIV. Similar to the seasonal flu, SARS-CoV-2 can primarily attack the lungs. But ACE2 receptors are everywhere. Similar to HIV, the virus can also enter a stealth mode, silently spreading throughout the host’s body and attacking almost every organ, especially those with a high ACE2 receptor concentration. And similar to HIV, SARS-CoV-2 also frequently causes asymptomatic spread. In full stealth mode, SARS-CoV-2 can asymptomatically attack the vasculature and heart. Myocarditis can occur and the patient is totally unaware of the damage, until an arrhythmia or symptomatic myocarditis develops. In young asymptomatic patients, this is not an uncommon sequela.

SARS-CoV-2 targeting the cardiovascular system of the body should be a given. It has been known for a long time that ACE receptors are involved in cardiovascular regulation. ACE inhibitors and ACE II blockers have long been used to treat high blood pressure. This is the same pathway the virus infects.

Thus, there are multiple presentations of SARS-CoV-2 including pulmonary, cardiac, gastrointestinal (GI), and central nervous system (CNS).

Recently, there has been mounting evidence regarding the CNS effects of SARS-CoV-2. As early as July 2020, scientists were sounding the alarm regarding COVID-19 brain damage: Including temporary brain dysfunction, strokes, nerve damage and brain inflammation. At that time, these conditions were still considered relatively uncommon. An article published in Lancet Psychology found 1 in 3 COVID-19 survivors were diagnosed with brain or mental health disorders, but separating out what is due to the stressors of the illness versus direct effects of the virus was problematic.

Sandra Lopez-Leon, et al. performed a system review and meta-analysis of long COVID-19 and found the 3 most common long COVID symptoms were “fatigue (58%), headache (44%), and attention disorder (27%)”, all of which can affect concentration.

Ritchie, et al, noted that cognitive dysfunction has been commonly reported with COVID-19, but the true incidence is unknown, and notes that: “The hippocampus appears to be particularly vulnerable to coronavirus infections, thus increasing the probability of post-infection memory impairment…” and that the virus may enter the CNS through the olfactory bulb. Finally, in August of 2021, research by Gwenaëlle Douaud, et al. documented with brain imaging “abnormalities in limbic cortical areas with direct neuronal connectivity to the primary olfactory system.” In addition, there was “a marked reduction of grey matter thickness in fronto-parietal and temporal regions.” “The 401 SARS-CoV-2 infected participants also showed larger cognitive decline between the two timepoints in the Trail Making Test (visual attention and task switching) compared with the controls…”

Again, none of this should come as a surprise, since anosmia or lack of smell, is one of the most common presenting symptoms of COVID-19. The olfactory nerve is not actually a nerve but a projection of the brain itself.

Thus, COVID-19 has a myriad of different presentations, all of which can result in severe and long-term sequelae. Just because COVID-19 is asymptomatic or does not produce “severe” pulmonary disease does not mean the patient does not have a serious infection. It is of utmost importance for public health officials to implement strategies to prevent the occurrence of long-term COVID-19 related disabilities and not just focus on acute pulmonary symptoms.

https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/what-infection-preventionists-must-do-in-current-omicron-crisis

**************

Supreme Court blocks Biden Covid vaccine mandate for businesses, allows health-care worker rule

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/13/supreme-court-ruling-biden-covid-vaccine-mandates.html

The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing its sweeping vaccine-or-test requirements for large private companies.

But the conservative-majority court allowed a vaccine mandate to stand for medical facilities that take Medicare or Medicaid payments.

There's no way that the forum idiot could have anything intelligent to say related to a science topic. So I'll just assume that he's still spamming my posts? Lol... bang your pot Ruprecht.