Coronavirus (COVID-19) General News Collection & Resources

[dufus]

Scientists Advising The UK Government On The Coronavirus Fear Boris Johnson’s Team Is Using Them As “Human Shields”

 

Ministers are answering criticism by insisting they were “guided by the science”. But government experts say science is “riddled with doubt, uncertainty, and debate”.

 

 

Some of the scientists advising the UK government on its handling of the coronavirus pandemic fear they will be used by ministers as “human shields” at a future public inquiry, and they have privately discussed how to protect themselves from any attempted blame game, BuzzFeed News can reveal.

 

Members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), and other experts who advise them, have become nervous about senior ministers, including first secretary Dominic Raab and chancellor Rishi Sunak, deflecting criticism this week by saying they had been “guided by the scientific and medical advice”.

 

Some SAGE advisers are worried that they and their chair, chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, as well as the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, and his deputy, Jenny Harries, will be held responsible by Boris Johnson’s political team for the UK taking longer than other European countries to enforce social distancing in March, if this decision is found to have led to excess deaths in Britain.

 

Ministers’ claims to be “guided by the science” were also problematic — because in reality the science of this crisis had been “riddled with doubt, uncertainty, and debate”, according to Professor Robert Dingwall, a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, which advises SAGE.

 

At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Raab responded to accusations by Labour leader Keir Starmer that the government had been “slow” to act on lockdown, testing, and protective equipment by insisting: “We have been guided by the scientific advice, the chief scientific adviser, the chief medical officer, every step along the way.”

 

At Monday’s daily press conference, Sunak answered a similar question by saying ministers had taken "the right decisions at the right time, according to the scientific advice we received".

 

Following a Sunday Times story lambasting Johnson’s handling of the crisis, a senior Whitehall source told BuzzFeed News that the prime minister and his political team had only acted in accordance with what they were being told by Whitty, Vallance, and SAGE, and that it would have been irresponsible for Number 10 to overrule them.

 

On the key task of ensuring NHS capacity was not breached, the advice from Whitty, Vallance, and SAGE was a success, they said, stressing that the experts retained the full support of the government and that the measures implemented by the UK had likely prevented tens of thousands of more deaths.

 

But it was right that genuine questions would be asked of the experts at a later date over areas where the UK may have fallen short, they said, such as the speed with which the government introduced social distancing, and the controversial advice from Harries that mass testing was “not appropriate” for Britain.

 

This emerging line of defence has concerned members of SAGE in recent days, with morale on the committee becoming “low” as government scientists began to suspect that ministers and Johnson’s aides were using them as “human shields” to insulate themselves from blame, a SAGE adviser told BuzzFeed News on the condition of anonymity.

 

Stressing the advisory nature of the group, they said that decisions were ultimately for ministers, a point repeated several times by Whitty at Wednesday evening’s Downing Street press conference.

 

Delegating decision-making to scientific experts was bad government because the ultimate decision on the UK’s overarching strategy — whether to introduce draconian lockdown measures or pursue a looser plan based on herd immunity — was inherently political, they argued.

 

Dingwall told BuzzFeed News that the public should be sceptical of any claim by ministers to have “followed the science”.

“The real world of science is riddled with doubt, uncertainty, and debate rather than a neat and compelling logic that points in a single direction,” Dingwall said.

 

He argued that the job of SAGE was to provide ministers with a set of options and a cost-benefit analysis, and then it was up for ministers to make decisions regarding which scientists and scientific arguments to endorse.

 

In March, BuzzFeed News reported concerns that Johnson’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, had effectively “outsourced” the government’s decision-making process to a small group of experts.

 

“The million-dollar question you have to answer is: Was the role of SAGE as a group of advisers respected or over-relied upon?” the first SAGE adviser said.

 

In response to the claim that experts were being used as human shields, a Number 10 source said the government would protect them from “unfair criticism”.

 

"Government scientists are playing a critical role in the fight against coronavirus. Protecting them from unfair criticism and worse is one of the reasons we have resisted pressure to name all the members of SAGE,” they said.

 

source

 

rats and sinking 

[dufus]

Coronavirus: Health leaders' credentials dumped online

 

Twitter is actively removing lists of email addresses and passwords allegedly from the National Institute of Health and the World Health Organisation, the BBC has learned.

 

They were initially posted to message group 4chan, according to a report from an organisation which monitors right-wing extremism.

 

The BBC understands that some of the credentials are from old hack attacks.

 

Site Intelligence Group did not say who posted them, or if they were authentic.

 

Later, the list was also posted to Pastebin, which is often used to reveal hacked information, and Twitter.

 

In a tweet, Site's director Rita Katz said the alleged list was being used by far-right extremists as part of a "harassment campaign."

 

She also gave details of the research, which indicated that:

 

9,938 emails and passwords came from the National Institute of Health (NIH)

6,857 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

5,120 from the World Bank

2,732 from the World Health Organization (WHO)

269 from the Gates Foundation

21 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology

 

The NIH told the BBC it was investigating the leak, but none of the other organisation have responded to requests for comment.

 

The Gates Foundation told the Washington Post, which originally broke the news, that it was investigating but had no evidence of a data breach.

 

Security researcher Robert Potter tweeted that he believed the leaked WHO credentials were genuine but "from an earlier attack".

 

"Healthcare agencies are traditionally quite bad at cyber-security," he wrote.

 

The BBC understands that the World Bank credentials are also probably from an old attack.

 

Some right-wing groups have questioned the science around the coronavirus pandemic, and according to Graphika - a service that uses AI to study social media misinformation - they have played a disproportionate role in spreading fake news about the virus.

 

The WHO has called the amount of false and misleading information about Covid-19 an "infodemic".

 

bbc

 

[Reefa]

With all the threads on here the only thing i would say is Don't take the Gates coming to a town near you vaccine...

[ghost]

17 minutes ago, Reefa said:

With all the threads on here the only thing i would say is Don't take the Gates coming to a town near you vaccine...

Watch him roll up in an ice cream truck. then we're all bleeped....

[dufus]

 

watch billy .....

[Reefa]

Nov 4, 2019 no virus yet think about it..

 

[Karlston]

Missouri sues China over coronavirus, claims nation “lied to the world”

Missouri is the first state to try it but will probably not be the last.

Enlarge / St. Louis, Missouri, back before everything was cancelled due to coronavirus.

Tetra Images | Henryk Sadura | Getty Images

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The pandemic is a challenge for all of us. The economic knock-on effects of the health crisis are themselves another crisis. Many people are wildly casting about, not just for solutions, but for someone to take the blame. It's hard to punish the SARS-CoV-2 virus, of course; whether or not one regards a virus as a living thing, it is most certainly not a legal person in any sense.

 

The office of Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has apparently decided that, in the absence of any way to sue a virus, the next best course of action is to take to court the entire nation where the disease originated. To that end, Schmitt's office said yesterday it had filed a lawsuit against "the Chinese government, Chinese Communist Party, and other Chinese officials and institutions" for the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

The complaint (PDF) first confirms that, as of Monday, there were more than 5,800 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Missouri, from which at least 177 persons had died. It then claims that "the virus unleashed by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government has left no community in the world untouched," adding that the pandemic "is the direct result of a sinister campaign of malfeasance and deception" carried out by all of China's leadership.

 

The suit accuses Chinese entities of denying the risk of human-to-human transmission of the disease, silencing whistleblowers, not acting to contain the outbreak, and hoarding personal protective equipment, instead only exporting "defective" equipment to other nations.

 

"In Missouri, the impact of the virus is very real—thousands have been infected and many have died, families have been separated from dying loved ones, small businesses are shuttering their doors, and those living paycheck to paycheck are struggling to put food on their table," Schmitt said in a statement, alleging that Chinese authorities "lied to the world" and "must be held accountable."

 

"Accountability," in this case, would apparently look like a big sack of money. The suit asks for the defendants—i.e., China—to be required to pay civil penalties, punitive damages, compensatory damages, and restitution, including reimbursing the cost of the state's "abatement efforts."

That’s not how any of this works

To be sure, almost every state and local government is suddenly facing an immediate spending and budget crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tax revenues are drying up—you can't tax paychecks that aren't being issued to laid-off workers, meals that aren't being served in closed restaurants, retail sales that aren't being made in closed stores, or nights not spent in closed hotels—just as spending on unemployment and other health and social needs is skyrocketing.

 

Suing China, however, is not going to help. Even if every word in the suit had merit—which is a fairly big "if"—US law for the most part prohibits civil suits against foreign states. A handful of other coronavirus-related suits filed against China in other states are likely to fail quickly for the same reasons.

 

A spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday that the suit had no factual or legal basis, adding, "These so-called lawsuits are purely malicious abuses."

 

The administration has been focused on the Chinese origin of the virus since its emergence became public news in January, repeatedly demanding to have it called the "Wuhan virus" or the "China virus."

 

In more recent days, the unsupported claim that China created the novel coronavirus in a laboratory, then tried to cover up its spread, has become a popular talking point among conservative news outlets such as Fox News, and US President Donald Trump on Friday called for an investigation. There is no scientific evidence that this is true, and last week Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, told reporters, "A group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences in bats as they evolve. The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now are totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human."

 

 

Source: Missouri sues China over coronavirus, claims nation “lied to the world” (Ars Technica)  

[Karlston]

As more studies roll in, little evidence that hydroxychloroquine works

Study of veterans finds higher death rates, no benefits.

Enlarge / Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Kimberly Wyss, from Ventura, Calif., dons surgical gloves aboard the hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19).

flickr

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A study observing COVID-19 patients has found no evidence that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, touted as a possible treatment for COVID-19, made a difference to the chance that patients would need a ventilator. The results also suggested that patients treated with hydroxychloroquine had a higher rate of death than those who weren’t treated with the drug.

 

The study was not a randomized clinical trial, which means that the evidence it offers is tentative and should be interpreted with caution. It was also published on preprint server medRxiv, which means it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

 

But interpreting the evidence with caution does not mean disregarding it completely. This study is one of a growing number telling us that we don't yet know enough about hydroxychloroquine, adding more weight to the argument that we need to wait for better-quality evidence from randomized controlled trials before we start widespread use of a drug with significant side effects.

Premature

Some small studies have given us reasons to think that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine could have potential as treatments for COVID-19. In some cases, the findings come from experiments in cultured cells, which won't necessarily translate directly to using the drugs in sick humans. In others, the findings come from small studies that have critical flaws like using very small groups of patients, having no control group, or excluding patients who died from analysis.

 

“Normally, such research would be deemed hypothesis-generating at best,” wrote doctors Jinoos Yazdany and Alfred Kim in an opinion piece in the Annals of Internal Medicine. And they were released at the same time that other early studies were finding no evidence that these drugs help COVID-19 patients.

 

However, early hype—including repeated promotion from President Trump—led to a runaway train of enthusiasm for the drugs. The Food and Drug Administration authorized treatment of COVID-19 patients with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine despite the lack of good evidence for their efficacy, sparking backlash from former FDA leaders.

 

These drugs have a range of possible adverse effects, including serious cardiac damage. Using them for critically ill COVID-19 patients therefore not only runs the risk of not helping, but also of actively harming people. The worldwide run on the drugs and resulting shortages are also a problem for patients using them for conditions like lupus, where they have been found to be effective.

 

A range of clinical trials are now underway to establish whether these drugs are actually beneficial. In the meantime, the FDA authorization means that there is a growing pile of data from patients who have been treated with them.

Testing on the fly

The US Veterans Health Administration is a national system of clinics, hospitals and other medical centers. Because it’s a single organization, data on patients is gathered in a consistent way, which makes it easier for researchers to compare apples with apples.

 

A team of researchers used VHA data to track the outcomes of confirmed COVID-19 patients at veterans hospitals who were treated with just hydroxychloroquine, hydroxychloroquine plus an antibiotic, or neither of the drugs. They found that 27.8 percent of the 97 patients treated with just hydroxychloroquine died, compared to 11.4 percent of the 158 patients who weren’t treated with hydroxychloroquine at all, and 22.1 percent of the 113 patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine and an antibiotic. Rates of ventilation were similar across the three groups.

 

This evidence is weaker than a randomized controlled trial because the patients who were given different treatments may have had other important differences to begin with. In a randomized trial, patients are assigned different treatments (or a placebo) randomly, which means that different groups should all have a roughly similar mix of people who are very sick or only a little bit sick, old and young, and so on.

 

In a retrospective study like this one, the doctors may have given the hydroxychloroquine treatment only to the sickest patients, in which case we’d expect that group to have worse outcomes. There are ways to try to account for this lack of randomization in the statistical tests that researchers use to calculate the risks across different groups, but these adjustments require the researchers to work out what other factors might complicate the analysis—a difficult challenge with a random population like this one.

 

The patients also weren’t representative of the wider population. They were all men and all older than 59 years, which means that the results wouldn’t necessarily be the same in younger groups or among women.

 

The results don’t mean that hydroxychloroquine is definitely useless or that clinical trials should be halted. Recent NIH guidance for clinicians treating COVID-19 patients says that there currently isn’t enough evidence to recommend for or against treating with hydroxychloroquine, and that remains true.

 

But they do offer more evidence suggesting that we don’t yet know enough to forge ahead with using the drugs as treatment. The authors of the study acknowledge the shortcomings of their own work but argue that the results nonetheless “highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs.”

 

 

Source: As more studies roll in, little evidence that hydroxychloroquine works (Ars Technica)  

[Karlston]

The value of lives saved by social distancing outweighs the costs

Social distancing means a net benefit of $5.2 trillion, according to the analysis.

Enlarge / Economic activity vs. social distancing is a careful balancing act.

Mata Hitij

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As Ars reported recently, evidence from the 1918 flu pandemic suggests that cities with more aggressive lockdown responses had stronger economic recoveries.

 

There’s more than one way to think about the economics of lockdowns, and a paper due to be published in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis has an entirely different approach. It accepts that lockdowns will hurt the economy compared to business-as-usual but calculates whether that cost is outweighed by the lives that will be saved by social-distancing measures.

 

The answer is yes—by $5.2 trillion. That’s an estimate that changes based on a range of different assumptions, but it represents what the authors consider the most realistic scenario.

How much is a life worth?

Putting a dollar value on a life can feel icky, but people implicitly act as though lives have a high (although not infinite) value. For instance, throwing all the world’s resources at saving the life of one person is not a choice we’d be likely to make. Yet we’re clearly prepared to pay quite a high price for both life and health.

 

US federal agency guidelines have needed to put a price on life in order to set policy on things that sometimes kill people, like driving. To do this, they use a figure that estimates how much extra money people will pay to save an additional life. For instance, take the higher pay that comes with riskier jobs: when you look at how much extra a group of 10,000 workers gets paid when their job comes with a higher risk, it comes out to around $10 million for each additional probable death in the group.

 

That figure of $10 million, the so-called “value of a statistical life,” is the figure used by federal agencies, and it’s also the figure used by economist Linda Thunström and her colleagues when they calculate the cost and benefit of social distancing. They start out by gathering a bunch of other benchmark numbers that represent realistic or middle-of-the-road scenarios for the pandemic—like assuming that social distancing will reduce contact between people by an average 38 percent.

 

Using that and other benchmark numbers, the researchers calculate that social distancing will save about 1.24 million lives compared to a scenario with no distancing. This translates to a saving of $12.4 trillion, based on the $10 million value of a statistical life used in policy. To work out how much this benefit weighs against the cost to the economy, the researchers take the recent Goldman Sachs prediction that social distancing will cause US GDP to shrink by 6.2 percent, leading to losses of $13.7 trillion.

 

They next had to calculate the impact the pandemic would have on the economy if we rode it out without any social distancing. Estimates made by others ranged from a loss of 1.5 to 8.4 percent of the GDP, so the researchers used a conservative value: 2 percent. This produces a smaller (yet still massive) hit of $6.49 trillion. Combined with the $13.7 trillion saved by the lack of social distancing, this makes the cost of social distancing $7.21 trillion.

 

Subtracting this from their earlier $12.4 trillion figure leads to their headline estimate. “Under our benchmark assumptions,” write Thunström and colleagues, “social distancing generates net benefits of about $5.16 trillion.”

Uncertainty everywhere

With new information rolling in all the time, all the numbers of the coronavirus pandemic are inherently slippery and subject to updates. Because of this, Thunström and her colleagues take their basic calculation and throw a range of different numbers at it to see where its boundaries lie. This analysis works out where the “break-even” point is for a range of different parameters—the point at which the value of lives saved outweighs the cost of social distancing.

 

For instance, if social distancing wasn’t as effective at slowing disease spread but came with the same economic cost, the results wouldn’t shake out the same way: the number of lives saved would be outweighed by economic damage. The researchers estimate that, holding everything else equal, social distancing would only need to cut out one in five interactions to be worth the cost—but that’s a result based on so many assumptions that it shouldn’t be read as a prescription for how much social distancing to aim for.

 

On the other hand, if the virus is more infectious than their initial assumptions, social distancing would need to be way more effective for the economic costs to pay off.

 

The estimate of 1.24 million lives saved seems pretty high. But it’s not necessarily outlandish—a model published by a team at Imperial College London estimated that if the pandemic were allowed to rampage through the United States unmitigated, it would lead to around 2.2 million deaths. Current estimates suggest that the total death toll by August may be more in the region of 60,000 to 124,000 deaths—if (and it’s a huge if) social-distancing measures stay in place. That’s a horrific number, but at its most optimistic, it means 2.14 million fewer deaths than that worst-case scenario. This means that the estimate of 1.24 million lives saved could be on the low side.

 

Importantly, the researchers don’t question their assumption that social distancing will lead to a greater decline in GDP or a slower economic recovery compared to business as usual. That assumption doesn’t tie in with other recent research suggesting that social distancing may, in fact, be the best thing for the economy itself. If the economy recovers faster with social distancing than without, this research would actually be underestimating the economic benefits of lockdown.

 

There are reams of questions still to be answered about the economic results of the pandemic, and models like these will need to be tweaked, repeated, and refined as more information rolls in. But right now, a range of different economic analyses are questioning the knee-jerk assumption that social distancing is a worse economic outcome than business as usual. And a poll of economists at US universities saw a unanimous response: restarting the economy should only be on the cards with a huge increase in testing capacity and a well-formed plan to control new outbreaks.

 

Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, Forthcoming. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3561934 (About DOIs).

 

 

Source: The value of lives saved by social distancing outweighs the costs (Ars Technica)  

[dufus]

Microbiologist claims the coronavirus was man-made in Wuhan lab

A Russian microbiologist has stoked conspiracy theories about the origin of coronavirus, claiming it was accidentally engineered by Chinese scientists who did “absolutely crazy things” during their attempted development of a vaccine for HIV.

 

Speaking with the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, Professor Petr Chumakov said a lab in the COVID-19 epicentre has been developing various coronavirus variants over the past decade – but not intentionally.

 

“They did this, supposedly not with the aim of creating pathogenic variants, but to study their pathogenicity,” said Professor Chumakov, chief researcher at the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow.

 

But in doing so, researchers involuntarily created “variants of the virus” when they were possibly aiming for a HIV vaccine, he claimed. They had no “malicious intent” on creating COVID-19, Professor Chumakov said.

 

An example of the “absolutely crazy things” they did included enabling the virus to infect human cells through interrupting “the natural sequence of the genome” he said, adding that scientists were often just doing what they were told.

 

“There are several inserts … which gave it special properties,” Professor Chumakov said.

 

“Behind the scientists stood curators who directed actions in another direction which they needed.”

 

Even still, “it’s too early to blame anyone”, he said, noting “the picture of the possible creation of the current coronavirus is slowly emerging”.

Their works have been published in the scientific press, Professor Chumakov said, questioning why people were only now starting to catch on to such controversial research.

 

“All this has been analysed,” he said.

 

“It is interesting that the Chinese and Americans who worked with them published all their works in the open press.

 

“I even wonder why this background comes to people very slowly.

 

“I think that an investigation will nevertheless be initiated, as a result of which new rules will be developed that regulate the work with the genomes of such dangerous viruses.”

 

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, this week shut down speculation around the alleged man-made nature of the coronavirus.

 

“In the situation where there is not enough information that has been supported and checked by science … we think it is unacceptable, impossible, to groundlessly accuse anyone,” Mr Peskov said.

 

But when the head of Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency Veronika Skvortsova was earlier asked about the possibility that COVID-19 could be man-made, she said the question “demands a very thorough study”.

 

“None of the versions can be ruled out … I think that we must conduct a very serious research,” Ms Skvortsova said.

 

Calls for global inquiry

 

Meanwhile Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said an independent investigation must be launched to understand the pandemic’s true origins.

 

“Our purpose here is just pretty simple – we’d like the world to be safer when it comes to viruses,” he said.

 

“I would hope that any other nation … be it China or anyone else, would share that objective.”

 

The World Health Organisation will hold its annual meeting of the World Health Assembly over six consecutive days, starting on May 18.

It will present as an opportunity for Australia to pursue a global inquiry into China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

 

“Any member of the World Health Organisation, I think that should be something that should be understood and that’s part, I think, of your responsibility – or should be anyway – in participating in such an organisation,” Mr Morrison said.

 

source

mk.ru

[dufus]

What Did U.S. Intel Really Know About the ‘Chinese’ Virus?

 

 

Hybrid War 2.0 on China, a bipartisan U.S. operation, is already reaching fever pitch. Its 24/7 full spectrum infowar arm blames China for everything coronavirus-related – doubling as a diversionist tactic against any informed criticism of woeful American unpreparedness.

Hysteria predictably reigns. And this is just the beginning.

 

A deluge of lawsuits is imminent – such as the one in the Southern District of Florida entered by Berman Law Group (linked to the Democrats) and Lucas-Compton (linked to the Republicans). In a nutshell: China has to shell out tons of cash. To the tune of at least $1.2 trillion, which happens to be – by surrealist irony – the amount of U.S. Treasury bills held by Beijing, all the way to $20 trillion, claimed by a lawsuit in Texas.

 

The prosecution’s case, as Scott Ritter memorably reminded us, is straight out of Monty Python. It works exactly like this:

 

“If she weighs the same as a duck…

…she’s made of wood!”

“And therefore…”

“A witch!!!!!”

 

In Hybrid War 2.0 terms, the current CIA-style narrative translates as evil China never telling us, the civilized West, there was a terrible new virus around. If they did, we would have had time to prepare.

 

And yet they lied and cheated – by the way, trademark CIA traits, according to Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo himself. And they hid everything. And they censored the truth. So they wanted to infect us all. Now they have to pay for all the economic and financial damage we are suffering, and for all our dead people. It’s China’s fault.

 

All this sound and fury forces us to refocus back to late 2019 to check out what U.S. intel really knew then about what would later be identified as Sars-Cov-2.

 

“No such product exists”

 

The gold standard remains the ABC News report according to which intel collected in November 2019 by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a subsidiary of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was already warning about a new virulent contagion getting out of hand in Wuhan, based on “detailed analysis of intercepted communications and satellite imagery”.

 

An unnamed source told ABC, “analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”, adding the intel was “briefed multiple times” to the DIA, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even the White House.

 

No wonder the Pentagon was forced to issue the proverbial denial – in Pentagonese, via one Col. R. Shane Day, the director of the DIA’s NCMI: “In the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”

 

Well, if such “product” existed, Pentagon head and former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper would be very much in the loop. He was duly questioned about it by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

 

Question: “Did the Pentagon receive an intelligence assessment on COVID in China last November from the National Center for Medical Intelligence of DIA?”

 

Esper: “Oh, I can’t recall, George,” (…) “But, we have many people who watch this closely.”

 

Question: “This assessment was done in November, and it was briefed to the NSC in early December to assess the impact on military readiness, which, of course, would make it important to you, and the possible spread in the United States. So, you would have known if there was a brief to the National Security Council in December, wouldn’t you?”

 

Esper: “Yes (…) “I’m not aware of that.”

 

So “no such product exists” then? Is it a fake? Is it a Deep State/CIA concoction to trap Trump? Or are the usual suspects lying, trademark CIA style?

Let’s review some essential background. On November 12, a married couple from Inner Mongolia was admitted to a Beijing hospital, seeking treatment for pneumonic plague.

 

The Chinese CDC, on Weibo – the Chinese Twitter – told public opinion that the chances of this being a new plague were “extremely low.” The couple was quarantined.

 

Four days later, a third case of pneumonic plague was identified: a man also from Inner Mongolia, not related to the couple. Twenty-eight people who were in close contact with the man were quarantined. None had plague symptoms. Pneumonic plague has symptoms of respiratory failure similar to pneumonia.

 

Even though the CDC repeated, “there is no need to worry about the risk of infection”, of course there was plenty of skepticism. The CDC may have publicly confirmed on November 12 these cases of pneumonic plague. But then Li Jifeng, a doctor at Chaoyang Hospital where the trio from Inner Mongolia was receiving treatment, published, privately, on WeChat, that they were first transported to Beijing actually on November 3.

 

The key point of Li Jinfeng’s post – later removed by censors – was when she wrote, “I am very familiar with diagnosing and treating the majority of respiratory diseases (…) But this time, I kept on looking but could not figure out what pathogen caused the pneumonia. I only thought it was a rare condition and did not get much information other than the patients’ history.”

 

Even if that was the case, the key point is that the three Inner Mongolian cases seem to have been caused by a detectable bacteria. Covid-19 is caused by the Sars-Cov-2 virus, not a bacteria. The first Sars-Covid-2 case was only detected in Wuhan in mid to late December. And it was only last month that Chinese scientists were able to positively trace back the first real case of Sars-Cov-2 to November 17 – a few days after the Inner Mongolian trio.

 

Knowing exactly where to look

 

It’s out of the question that U.S. intel, in this case the NCMI, was unaware of these developments in China, considering CIA spying and the fact these discussions were in the open on Weibo and WeChat. So if the NCMI “product” is not a fake and really exists, it only found evidence, still in November, of some vague instances of pneumonic plague.

 

Thus the warning – to the DIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and even the White House – was about that. It could not possibly have been about coronavirus.

 

The burning question is inevitable: how could the NCMI possibly know all about a viral pandemic, still in November, when Chinese doctors positively identified the first cases of a new type of pneumonia only on December 26?

 

Add to it the intriguing question of why the NCMI was so interested in this particular flu season in China in the first place – from plague cases treated in Beijing to the first signs of a “mysterious pneumonia outbreak” in Wuhan.

 

There may have been subtle hints of slightly increased activity at clinics in Wuhan in late November and early December. But at the time nobody – Chinese doctors, the government, not to mention U.S. intel – could have possibly known what was really happening.

 

China could not be “covering up” what was only identified as a new disease on December 30, duly communicated to the WHO. Then, on January 3, the head of the American CDC, Robert Redfield, called the top Chinese CDC official. Chinese doctors sequenced the virus. And only on January 8 it was determined this was Sars-Cov-2 – which provokes Covid-19.

 

This chain of events reopens, once again, a mighty Pandora’s box. We have the quite timely Event 201; the cozy relationship between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the WHO, as well as the Word Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins galaxy in Baltimore, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health; the ID2020 digital ID/vaccine combo; Dark Winter – which simulated a smallpox bio-attack on the U.S., before the 2001 anthrax attack being blamed on Iraq; U.S. Senators dumping stocks after a CDC briefing; more than 1,300 CEOs abandoning their cushy perches in 2019, “forecasting” total market collapse; the Fed pouring helicopter money already in September 2019 – as part of QE4.

 

And then, validating the ABC News report, Israel steps in. Israeli intel confirms U.S. intel did in fact warn them in November about a potentially catastrophic pandemic in Wuhan (once again: how could they possibly know that on the second week of November, so early in the game?) And NATO allies were warned – in November – as well.

 

The bottom line is explosive: the Trump administration as well as the CDC had an advance warning of no less than four months – from November to March – to be properly prepared for Covid-19 hitting the U.S. And they did nothing. The whole “China is a witch!” case is debunked.

 

Moreover, the Israeli disclosure supports what’s nothing less than extraordinary: U.S. intel already knew about Sars-Cov-2 roughly one month before the first confirmed cases detected by doctors in a Wuhan hospital. Talk about divine intervention.

 

That could only have happened if U.S. intel knew, for sure, about a previous chain of events that would necessarily lead to the “mysterious outbreak” in Wuhan. And not only that: they knew exactly where to look. Not in Inner Mongolia, not in Beijing, not in Guangdong province.

 

It’s never enough to repeat the question in full: how could U.S. intel have known about a contagion one month before Chinese doctors detected an unknown virus?

 

Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo may have given away the game when he said, on the record, that Covid-19 was a “live exercise”. Adding to the ABC News and Israeli reports, the only possible, logical conclusion is that the Pentagon – and the CIA – knew ahead of time a pandemic would be inevitable.

 

That’s the smokin’ gun. And now the full weight of the United States government is covering all bases by proactively, and retroactively, blaming China.

 

source

 

 

Edited April 24, 2020 by dufus

[Karlston]

Unproven Coronavirus Therapy Proves Cash Cow for Shadow Pharmacies

Many of the same shadowy organizations that pay people to promote male erectile dysfunction drugs via spam and hacked websites recently have enjoyed a surge in demand for medicines used to fight malaria, lupus and arthritis, thanks largely to unfounded suggestions that these therapies can help combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

A review of the sales figures from some of the top pharmacy affiliate programs suggests sales of drugs containing hydroxychloroquine rivaled that of their primary product — generic Viagra and Cialis — and that this as-yet-unproven Coronavirus treatment accounted for as much as 25 to 30 percent of all sales over the past month.

 

A Google Trends graph depicting the incidence of Web searches for “chloroquine” over the past 90 days.

KrebsOnSecurity reviewed a number of the most popular online pharmacy enterprises, in part by turning to some of the same accounts at these invite-only affiliate programs I relied upon for researching my 2014 book, Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime, from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door.

 

Many of these affiliate programs — going by names such as EvaPharmacy, Rx-Partners and Mailien/Alientarget — have been around for more than a decade, and were major, early catalysts for the creation of large-scale botnets and malicious software designed to enslave computers for the sending of junk email.

 

Their products do not require a prescription, are largely sourced directly from pharmaceutical production facilities in India and China, and are shipped via international parcel post to customers around the world.

 

In mid-March, two influential figures — President Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk — began suggesting that hydroxychloroquine should be more strongly considered as a treatment for COVID-19.

 

The pharmacy affiliate programs immediately took notice of a major moneymaking opportunity, noting that keyword searches for terms related to chloroquine suddenly were many times more popular than for the other mainstays of their business.

 

“Everyone is hysterical,” wrote one member of the Russian language affiliate forum gofuckbiz[.]com on Mar. 17. “Time to make extra money. Do any [pharmacy affiliate] programs sell drugs for Coronavirus or flu?”

 

The larger affiliate programs quickly pounced on the opportunity, which turned out to be a major — albeit short-lived — moneymaker. Below is a screenshot of the overall product sales statistics for the previous 30 days from all affiliates of PharmCash. As we can see, Aralen — a chloroquine drug used to treat and prevent malaria — was the third biggest seller behind Viagra and Cialis.

 

Recent 30-day sales figures from the pharmacy affiliate program PharmCash.

In mid-March, the affiliate program Rx-Partners saw a huge spike in demand for Aralen and other drugs containing chloroquine phosphate, and began encouraging affiliates to promote a new set of product teasers targeting people anxiously seeking remedies for COVID-19.

Their main promotion page — still online at about-coronavirus2019[.]com — touts the potential of Aralen, generic hydroxychloroquine, and generic Kaletra/Lopinavir, a drug used to treat HIV/AIDS.

 

An ad promoting various unproven remedies for COVID-19, from the pharmacy affiliate program Rx-Partners.

On Mar. 18, a manager for Rx-Partners said that like PharmCash, drugs which included chloroquine phosphate had already risen to the top of sales for non-erectile dysfunction drugs across the program.

 

But the boost in sales from the global chloroquine frenzy would be short-lived. Demand for chloroquine phosphate became so acute worldwide that India — the world’s largest producer of hydroxychloroquine — announced it would ban exports of the drug. On Mar. 25, India also began shutting down its major international shipping ports, leaving the pharmacy affiliate programs scrambling to source their products from other countries.

 

A Mar. 31 message to affiliates working with the Union Pharm program, noting that supplies of Aralen had dried up due to the shipping closures in India.

India recently said it would resume exports of the drug, and judging from recent posts at the aforementioned affiliate site gofuckbiz[.]com, denizens of various pharmacy affiliate programs are anxiously awaiting news of exactly when shipments of chloroquine drugs will continue.

 

“As soon as India opens and starts mail, then we will start everything, so get ready,” wrote one of Rx-Partners’ senior recruiters. “I am sure that there will still be demand for pills.”

 

Global demand for these pills, combined with India’s recent ban on exports, have conspired to create shortages of the drug for patients who rely on it to treat chronic autoimmune diseases, including lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

While hydroxychloroquine has long been considered a relatively safe drug, some people have been so anxious to secure their own stash of the drug that they’ve turned to unorthodox sources.

 

On March 19, Fox News ran a story about how demand for hydroxychloroquine had driven up prices on eBay for bottles of chloroquine phosphate designed for removing parasites from fish tanks. A week later, an Arizona man died and his wife was hospitalized after the couple ingested one such fish tank product in hopes of girding their immune systems against the Coronavirus.

 

Despite many claims that hydroxychloroquine can be effective at fighting COVID-19, there is little real data showing how it benefits patients stricken with the disease. The largest test of the drug’s efficacy against Coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. On the contrary, there were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported.

 

 

Source: Unproven Coronavirus Therapy Proves Cash Cow for Shadow Pharmacies (KrebsOnSecurity - Brian Krebs)

[Karlston]

Experts demolish studies suggesting COVID-19 is no worse than flu

Authors of widely publicized antibody studies “owe us all an apology,” one expert says.

Enlarge / A COVID-19 blood test is administered outside of Delmont Medical Care on April 22, 2020 in Franklin Square, New York. The test identifies antibodies to the coronavirus.

Getty | Al Bello

69 with 52 posters participating

Frustrated statisticians and epidemiologists took to social media this week to call out substantial flaws in two widely publicized studies trying to estimate the true spread of COVID-19 in two California counties, Santa Clara and Los Angeles.

 

The studies suggested that far more people in each of the counties have been infected with the new coronavirus than thought—that is, they estimated that true case counts in the two counties are up to 85 times and 55 times the number of the currently confirmed cases in the counties, respectively. Accordingly, this suggests that COVID-19 is far less deadly than thought. The large case counts in relation to unchanged number of deaths put COVID-19’s fatality rate in the same range as seasonal flu.

How dangerous is this?

We dig into the details of the studies below, but it's important to note that neither of them have been published in a scientific journal, nor have they gone through standard peer-review for scientific vetting. Instead, they have been posted online in draft form (a commonplace occurrence amid a rapidly evolving pandemic that inclines researchers to have fast access to data, however uncertain).

 

The findings seemed to support minority arguments that COVID-19 may be no worse than seasonal flu (a leading cause of death in the US) and that the restrictive mitigation efforts currently strangling the economy may be unnecessary. In fact, three researchers who co-authored the new studies have publicly made those exact arguments.

 

In a controversial opinion piece in the biomedical news outlet STAT, population health researcher John Ioannidis, at Stanford, argued back in mid-March that the mortality rate of COVID-19 may be much lower than expected, potentially making current lockdowns “totally irrational.” Health policy researchers Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, also both at Stanford, made a similar argument in The Wall Street Journal at the end of March. They called current COVID-19 fatality estimates—in the range of 2 percent to 4 percent—“deeply flawed.”

 

Ioannidis is a co-author of the study done in Santa Clara county, and Bendavid and Bhattacharya were leading researchers on both of the studies, which appeared online this month.

 

The new studies seem to back up the researchers’ earlier arguments. But a chorus of their peers are far from convinced. In fact, criticism of the two studies has woven a damning tapestry of Twitter threads and blog posts pointing out flaws of the studies—everything from basic math errors to alleged statistical sloppiness and sample bias.

 

In a blog review of the Santa Clara county study, statistician Andrew Gelman of Columbia University detailed several troubling aspects of the statistical analysis. He concluded:

I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error.

 

I’m serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t think they[sic] authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups.

A Twitter account from the lab of Erik van Nimwegen, a computational systems biologist at the University of Basel, responded to the study by tweeting the quip “Loud sobbing reported from under reverend Bayes' grave stone.” The tweet refers to Thomas Bayes, an 18^th-century English reverend and statistician who put forth a foundational theorem on probability.

 

Pleuni Pennings, an evolutionary biologist at San Francisco State University, noted in a blog regarding the Santa Clara study that “In research, we like to say that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ Here the claim is extraordinary but the evidence isn’t. Also, we learn that even if a study comes from a great university—this is no guarantee that the study is good.”

 

Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch stated on Twitter that he concurred with similar statistical criticisms made online. He added a “kudos” to the authors for conducting the study and “providing one interpretation of it (which supports their ‘it's overblown’ view).”

 

So what has all of these researchers up in arms?

The aim of the studies

Both studies primarily aimed to estimate how many people in each of two counties had been infected at some point with SARS-CoV-2. This is an extremely important endeavor because it can tell us the true extent of infection, help guide efforts trying to stop transmission, and better assess the full spectrum of the COVID-19 disease severity and the fatality rate.

 

Because diagnostic testing has been so limited in the US and many COVID-19 cases appear to present with mild or even no symptoms, researchers expect the true number of people who have been infected to be much higher than we know based on confirmed cases. There is no debate about that. But just how much higher is the subject of considerable debate.

 

The researchers went about their studies by recruiting small groups of residents and testing their blood for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that the immune system makes to target specific molecular foes, such as viruses. If a person has antibodies that recognize SARS-CoV-2 or its components, that suggests the person was previously infected.

Santa Clara

In the Santa Clara county study, researchers recruited volunteers using Facebook and had them come to one of three drive-through test sites. They ended up testing the blood of 3,330 adults and children for antibodies. They found 50 blood samples, or 1.5 percent, were positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.

 

They then adjusted their figures to try to estimate what positive tests they would have gotten back if their pool of volunteers better matched the demographics of the county. The volunteer pool skewed toward certain zip codes in the county and were enriched for women and white people relative to the county’s real

makeup. The researchers’ adjustment ended up nearly doubling the prevalence of positives, bringing them from 1.5 percent to an estimated 2.8 percent.

 

They then adjusted the data again to account for inaccuracies of the antibody test. There are two metrics for accuracy here: sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity relates to how good the test is at correctly identifying all true positives. Specificity relates to how good the test is at correctly identifying all the true negatives—in other words, avoiding false positives.

 

According to the authors of the Santa Clara study, the sensitivity and specificity data on their antibody test led them to estimate that the true prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infections ranged from 2.49 percent and 4.16 percent.

 

Based on the population of the county, that would suggest somewhere between 48,000 and 81,000 people in the county had been infected. The confirmed case count at the time of publication was only 956. That puts their infection estimate 50 to 85 times higher than the confirmed cases.

 

The researchers then estimated an infection fatality rate (IFR) with that large number of estimated infections and an estimate of only 100 cumulative deaths (including from infections at the time. Deaths lag behind initial infections, potentially for weeks). They calculated an IFR of 0.12 percent to 0.2 percent. This falls in the ballpark of seasonal flu, which has an estimated fatality rate of about 0.1 percent.

Los Angeles

There is less data available from the Los Angeles study. In an unusual move—even by today’s pandemic standards—the findings were initially announced in a press release from the county’s public health department, which provided little in the way of statistical and methodological details. A short draft of the study (PDF found here) has also circulated online, but it still has less information on the methods than the Santa Clara study. Also, the draft has even higher prevalence estimates than the press release. It’s unclear why the estimates differ, but we’ll mainly focus on the conclusions formally released from the health department.

 

Generally, for the study, researchers used data from a market research firm to randomly select residents and invite them to get tested at one of six testing sites. The researchers set up quotas for participants by age, gender, race, and ethnicity to match the population characteristics of the county. Their goal was to recruit 1,000 participants.

 

They tested 863 adults using the same antibody test used in the Santa Clara study, which was made by Premier Biotech, of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Of the tests given, 35 (or 4.1 percent) were positive. According to the press release, the adjusted data suggested that 2.8 percent to 5.6 percent of the county’s population had been infected with the new coronavirus.

 

Given the county’s population, that suggests that 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county had been infected. That estimate is 28- to 55-times higher than the 7,994 confirmed case count at the time. As in the Santa Clara study, that puts the IFR in the range of 0.3 percent to 0.13 percent, closer to the IFR of seasonal flu.

 

Problems

Other researchers were quick to flag concerns and flaws about the studies’ methods and statistics.

 

First, there were criticisms and notes of caution about the recruitment strategy in the Santa Clara study. Using volunteers who had been roped in by Facebook ads has the potential to target people who are, well, more likely to use Facebook. Setting up drive-through testing sites may enrich for people who have easy access to cars.

 

Most importantly, by taking self-selected volunteers, there’s the potential you’ll get the people who are most concerned that they have had COVID-19 and want to get tested to know for sure. This could potentially inflate the number of positives in a participant pool, making the disease look more common than it really is.

 

According to an email obtained by Buzzfeed News and reported April 24, the wife of study author Jay Bhattacharya also recruited parents via an email on a high school list serve. This may have further biased the participant pool. The email urged parents to sign up for the study to have “peace of mind” and “know if you are immune.” Bhattacharya wrote in an email to Buzzfeed that his wife's email was "sent out without my permission or my knowledge or the permission of the research team.”

 

The random selection of participants in the LA study, along with the quotas, dodged these criticisms.

 

But the most troubling concerns with the studies, by far, relate to the statistics. Perhaps the biggest concern from critics is that the antibody test the researchers used for both studies is not as accurate as the estimates suggest.

 

Premier’s test—like dozens of others on the market—have not been thoroughly vetted for accuracy. Given the urgency of the pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration has allowed sale of such tests on the market without the usual vetting. In fact, the FDA even flags to healthcare providers to be aware of their limitations. Premier reported testing its test against known positive and negative samples to determine its sensitivity and specificity, and the study authors did their own tests at Stanford.

 

In Premier’s hands, the test correctly identified 25 known positive samples out of a total of 37. In tests at Stanford, the study authors reported correctly identifying 153 known positives out of 160 with the test. Combining the estimates, they figured a sensitivity was most likely about 80 percent (within a range of 72.1 percent and 87 percent possible).

 

When Premier tried 30 samples known to be negative, its antibody test accurately identified all 30 of them as negative. But in Stanford’s labs, the test only correctly identified 369 of 371 truly negative samples tested. The authors of the study concluded the test most likely had a specificity of about 99.5 percent (within a range of 98.3 percent and 99.9 percent possible).

 

The specificity estimate suggests that just 0.5 percent of tests will be false positives, but the range leaves open the possibility that up to 1.7 percent of tests are false positives. This is a big sticking point for critics.

 

In the Santa Clara study, the researchers only found 50 samples out of 3,330 were positive. That’s a 1.5-percent positive rate. Given that the false positive rate may be up to 1.7 percent, it’s possible (if unlikely) that every positive test detected was a false positive.

 

The point is not that critics think that every positive sample the study authors found was actually a false positive. Rather, they note this because it means that assessing the accuracy of the positive sample with precision is impossible.

 

As Gelman notes in his blog:

Again, the real point here is not whether zero is or “should be” in the 95% [confidence] interval, but rather that, once the specificity can get in the neighborhood of 98.5% or lower, you can’t use this crude approach to estimate the prevalence; all you can do is bound it from above, which completely destroys the ‘50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases’ claim.

Going deeper into the math, statistician Will Fithian, of University of California, Berkeley, identified what he described as a “sloppy” math error in the calculations that the researchers used to generate their estimate ranges.

 

The statistics on the LA study are not yet available for review, but researchers have suggested that they may suffer from the same flaws.

 

The authors have reported that they are currently redoing their statistical analysis and will release the results soon.

Things to look for in future antibody studies

As the pandemic progresses, more antibody studies like these will come out—likely with similar caveats and pitfalls. So how can we make any sense of this data that will continue to make headlines?

 

In a conference call with reporters this week, Harvard epidemiologist William Hanage offered some pointers on what to look out for. He recommended noting if the data came from an unpublished, non-peer reviewed pre-print—as the Santa Clara and LA County studies did—or if they were published in reputable

journals. He also said to keep an eye on how people were sampled. Was it a truly random sample of people or a self-selected group, like the Santa Clara study? Then, you also want to look at false positive rates, he said.

 

Last, Hanage suggests that people should pay closest attention to antibody studies that have been done in places known to have a lot of infections. Put simply, having larger numbers to work with can help firm up the math around prevalence estimates.

 

Just on Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the preliminary—unpublished—results of an antibody test in the state, which included finding that 21.1 percent of New York City residents may have been infected with the virus. New York City is known to be heavily hit by the pandemic, which has overwhelmed its healthcare system.

 

Though much of the details of the statistics are not yet known, the state health department noted that the antibody test used (which is different from the one used for the California studies) had an estimated specificity of 93 percent to 100 percent. That suggests that estimated prevalence might still be too high. Still, even with the estimate reported by Gov. Cuomo, the figures would put New York City’s IFR around one percent—10-times higher than seasonal flu.

 

Update 4/24/2020, 2:50pm: This story was updated to include information reported by Buzzfeed that an author's wife recruited study participants via email.

 

 

Source: Experts demolish studies suggesting COVID-19 is no worse than flu (Ars Technica)  

[dufus]

Leaked Cabinet Office briefing on UK pandemic threat – the key points

From management of excess deaths to public outrage, 2019 document set out likely social and economic risks

 

The 2019 National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA) is a comprehensive planning document that sets out the risks facing the UK – and what is needed to prepare for them.

It was signed off by Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. Over 600 pages, it runs through dozens of potential threats – but an “influenza-type pandemic” is at the top of this worry list, as it has been for years. Here are some selected extracts…

 

The 2019 National Security Risk Assessment

 

Overview

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Up to 50% of the UK population may fall ill, with up to 20% of people off work during the peak weeks, causing a significant impact on business continuity. Critical national infrastructure may also be affected during peak periods. There would be a huge surge in demand for health and social care services.

 

Besides very severe levels of stress on the NHS, the level of excess deaths would stretch capacity within organisations involved in the management of deaths. This would be felt on a national scale, with local capacity likely to start to be overwhelmed during the peak of the pandemic. While not explicitly stated in every case, an influenza- type pandemic would probably compound the effects of the vast majority of risks in the NSRA, as all sectors would experience staffing pressures.

 

Response capability requirements

 

Procedures related to disease surveillance and early detection, plus any associated infrastructure, should be in place. Robust and tested arrangements for rapid scientific and clinical advice should similarly be set up.

 

Local and national plans for management of excess deaths resulting from any mass casualty event should be present.

 

Local and national plans to deal with a surge in demand for health and social care services need to be accounted for.

 

There needs to be stockpiles of countermeasures and advanced purchase arrangements for those that cannot be acquired in advance.

 

Communication plans to encourage social distancing and good hygiene should be active. Sector resilience plans, including planning for absence of key workers, need enforcing.

 

Multiple waves

 

It is predicted that an influenza pandemic would come in multiple waves.

 

This means that recovery from one wave could be hampered by the arrival of a subsequent wave. Even after the end of a pandemic, it is likely that it would take months, or even years, for health and social care services to recover, although an exact timescale cannot be predicted. It is likely the economic impact would be felt for years.

 

The reasonable worst case scenario (RWCS) assumes that the pandemic will come in multiple waves (up to three), each approximately 15 weeks long.

 

For example, in the RWCS, 9,840,000 people would require assessment by health services (30% of those who are symptomatic), of which 1,312,000 people would require hospital treatment and 328,000 the highest level of critical care. Using the estimated UK population for 2016, this RWCS could result in 820,000 fatalities.

 

Besides very severe levels of stress on the NHS, the level of excess deaths would stretch capacity within organisations involved in the management of deaths, including coroners and burial services. This would be felt on a national scale, with local capacity likely to be overwhelmed during the peak of the pandemic.

 

• The pandemic would present in one or more waves. Each wave is expected to lasting 15 weeks, with the peak weeks occurring at weeks six and seven in each wave.

 

• Ffity per cent of the population would be infected and experience symptoms of pandemic influenza during the one or more waves. The actual number of people infected would be higher than this, as there would be a number of asymptomatic cases.

 

• A case fatality ratio of 2.5%, meaning 2.5% of those with symptoms could die as a result of the influenza virus. Four per cent of symptomatic patients would require hospital care, 25% of whom are expected to need the highest level of critical care (level three).

 

• Peak illness rates of about 10-12% (measured in new clinical cases per week as a proportion of the population) are expected in each of the weeks in the peak fortnight (weeks six and seven).

 

• Workplace absence rates for illness will be reaching 17-20% in the peak weeks.

 

On vaccines

 

There are no known markers that herald the start of a new pandemic. Based on most current vaccine technologies, it is likely to take at least four to six months after a novel virus has been identified and isolated for an effective pandemic influenza vaccine to become available from manufacturers in large quantity.

 

This means that the first pandemic wave will not be vaccine-preventable; it will not be possible to contain a novel pandemic virus in its country of origin or on arrival in the UK.

 

The expectation must be that the virus will spread rapidly to the UK (a major global transport hub) and that any local measures taken to disrupt or reduce the spread are likely to have very limited or partial success at national level and cannot be relied on as a way to “buy time”.

 

The UK has an advanced purchase agreement for pandemic vaccine, which can be triggered in response to a pandemic threat. Even after the end of the pandemic it is likely that it would take months, or even years, for the health and social care services to recover, although an exact timescale cannot be predicted.

 

On deaths – moderate viral pandemic

 

This variation models a moderate pandemic, based on the 1957 and 1968 pandemics.

 

The annual likelihood of a pandemic with the characteristics described below is 2%.

 

The specific assumptions of this scenario are listed below.

 

About 32% (21,320,000) of the population would be infected and experience symptoms of pandemic influenza.

 

A case fatality ratio of 0.2%, resulting in 65,600 deaths.

 

Of symptomatic patients, 0.55% (117,260) would require hospital care, 25% (29,315) of whom would be expected to require the highest level of critical care (level three).

Peak illness rates of about 6.5-8% (measured in new clinical cases per week as a proportion of the population) would be expected in each of the weeks in the peak fortnight (weeks six and seven). This scenario would still have a significant impact on health and social care systems as well as death management systems.

 

There would also be higher than usual absence from work.

 

On lockdown

 

Public health measures such as school closures and social distancing may be partially successful in delaying the peak of a pandemic wave by a few weeks at most, and might reduce the overall size of a pandemic wave.

 

However these measures are disruptive, with known secondary consequences (eg closing schools would reduce the availability of healthcare workers), and the limited evidence available suggests that such measures have maximum effect when implemented early and simultaneously.

 

For the RWCS, it is assumed that schools have not been closed. Global travel, particularly commercial airlines, will have an impact on the spread of the disease. Although the strain was mild, the pandemic in 2009 showed that a rapid global spread was possible. However, evidence suggests that border control measures would be largely ineffective, because the duration of most international passenger flights is considerably shorter than the incubation period of the illness.

 

On behavioural impact/public outrage

 

The public outrage would likely be determined by the preparations and response undertaken by the government. Poor government handling of the situation would exacerbate the level of outrage significantly. There would be significant and widespread public outrage directed at the authorities given the very high numbers of fatalities and casualties within vulnerable groups. There would also be significant anger if vaccines, antivirals or other countermeasures were not perceived to be effective, evenly distributed or available as soon as practically possible, including when compared with other countries.

 

The performance of the health and care system is likely to contribute to the public outrage, especially if provision of the remaining services is seen as unevenly distributed. There is also a risk public outrage may be directed at both foreign nations and nationals (who are seen as the “source” of the problem) for not preventing its spread or importing disease into the UK.

 

Economic impact

 

Total cost: £2,354,738,558,884

 

Economic impacts – confidence assessment.

 

To put that figure in context, £2.35tn is the equivalent of 131% of GDP.

 

It is worth noting that a large proportion (£1.5tn) of the economic impact comes from the social value of deaths.

 

Emerging infectious diseases

 

Response capability requirements

The capability requirements include disease surveillance systems, staff trained in enhanced infection control practices, adequate access to personalised protective equipment, adequate access to public health staff for contact tracing and follow-up, and excess death management capabilities (including potential infectious material). Decontamination services need to be available.

 

Appropriate specialist healthcare services eg, high level-isolation units must be accessible, as well as appropriate facilities for quarantine.

 

source

 

from 2019 ..... dodgy  b....... !

[ghost]

WHO says no evidence shows that having coronavirus prevents a second infection

 

(CNN)The World Health Organization is warning that people who have had Covid-19 are not necessarily immune by the presence of antibodies from getting the virus again.

 

"There is no evidence yet that people who have had Covid-19 will not get a second infection," WHO said in a scientific brief published Friday.

 

It cautions against governments that are considering issuing so-called "immunity passports" to people who have had Covid-19, assuming they are safe to resume normal life.

 

"At this point in the pandemic, there is not enough evidence about the effectiveness of antibody-mediated immunity to guarantee the accuracy of an 'immunity passport' or 'risk-free certificate,' " WHO said.

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove from WHO has previously said it's not known whether people who have been exposed to the virus become completely immune. The new WHO brief underscores that stance, and jibes with other scientific statements about the idea of developing immunity.

During a Friday briefing, the Infectious Diseases Society of America warned that not enough is known about antibody testing to assume immunity.

 

Dr. Mary Hayden, spokesperson for IDSA and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Rush University Medical Center, said, "We do not know whether or not patients who have these antibodies are still at risk of reinfection with Covid-19. At this point, I think we have to assume that they could be at risk of reinfection."

"We don't know even if the antibodies are protective, what degree of protection they provide, so it could be complete, it could be partial, or how long the antibodies last," Hayden added, "We know that antibody responses wane over time."

 

The society is "recommending that people with antibodies not change their behavior in any way, continue social distancing etc. And we think that this is a really important point to emphasize because we're concerned that if this could be present, that these antibodies could be misinterpreted, people could put themselves at unnecessary risk," Hayden said.

 

CNN's Amanda Watts contributed to this report.

 

CNN

[dufus]

If ministers fail to reveal 2016 flu study they ‘will face court’

 

Doctor’s threat over results of three-day simulation exercise that were ‘too terrifying’ to be made public

 

The government faces being taken to court if it refuses to disclose the findings of an exercise confirming the UK could not cope with a flu pandemic.

Dr Moosa Qureshi, an NHS doctor, is demanding the government publish its report into Exercise Cygnus, a three-day simulation involving government and public health bodies conducted in 2016.

 

Qureshi, who is a campaigner with the group 54000doctors.org, represented by Leigh Day solicitors, has sent a pre-action protocol letter to the secretary of state for health requesting a response by 4pm .

 

If the government fails to disclose the findings of Exercise Cygnus without adequate reason, Qureshi’s lawyers will seek an urgent judicial review challenging the decision and seeking publication. A crowdfunding page to support the challenge was due to go live on Saturday night.

 

The row threatens to become a major embarrassment for the government. The Telegraph has reported that Cygnus’s findings were deemed “too terrifying” to be made public.

 

Last week, the Observer revealed that minutes of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group suggested the report had included four key recommendations, including one that the department of health strengthen the surge capability, and capacity of hospitals to cope with a pandemic.

 

A freedom of information request to see the report has been refused.

 

Qureshi argues that there is exceptionally strong public interest in publication of the report, given that its lessons and recommendations are “directly relevant” to the procedures developed to combat Covid-19.

 

“There is no persuasive argument for secrecy when managing a healthcare crisis,” Qureshi said. “Successful science and healthcare depend on transparency, peer review, collaboration and engagement with the public.

 

“I believe that if the government had followed the Cygnus exercise by engaging transparently with health and social care partners, with industry and the public, then many of the deaths of my heroic healthcare colleagues and the wider public during the Covid-19 pandemic could have been avoided.”

 

Tessa Gregory, a solicitor at Leigh Day, said: “Our client believes that the NHS workforce and wider public have a right to know what Exercise Cygnus revealed about what needed to be done to keep NHS staff and the public safe in a pandemic.

 

“It beggars belief that the information the exercise revealed is being kept hidden when a public debate about its contents may well inform important decisions about how to best protect lives going forward.”

 

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said that she could not comment “because of the legal procedures in place”.

 

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one would think they are hiding something ...... maybr from the world !

[dufus]

Imperial’s Neil Ferguson defends lockdown strategy    Saturday, 25  April 2020
 

 

 

Professor Ferguson's warning comes as new data predicts the number of UK coronavirus deaths could reach more than 60,000 under current isolation rules. 

 

Fresh analysis from Seattle's University of Washington has predicted that the number of coronavirus deaths in Britain - currently 20,319 - could reach 37,494 by August 4.

 

However, the total number of deaths could go as high as 62,500 by that date, according to the university's Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation.

 

The institute, which received $279million (£226million) in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation earlier this year, released its latest forecast this morning.  APRIL 26, 2020

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refresher:

Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, authored a paper that prompted the UK to scrap its coronavirus strategy. His team warned Boris Johnson that "herd immunity" could cost 510,000 lives, prompting an abrupt U-turn. 

 

"On March 17, Ferguson strolled under the architrave of 10 Downing Street ahead of a 5 p.m. press conference where he would outline his findings. He greeted senior members of Johnson's cabinet, gave his speech, and left.

 

Ferguson woke at 4 a.m. the next morning with a high fever, interspersed with a dry cough. On March 19 he tested positive for the coronavirus.

In the days that followed, Johnson, his chief adviser Dominic Cummings, health secretary Matt Hancock, and chief medical officer Chris Whitty reported symptoms of the virus." 

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coincidence ?

Edited April 27, 2020 by dufus

[dufus]

 

full briefing    ..... updated  the don,t like this 

 

 

Edited April 28, 2020 by dufus

[dufus]

CHINA SUGGESTS U.S. IS 'HIDING SOMETHING' ABOUT ITS CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE, DEMANDS AN ANSWER FROM TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

 

 

The Chinese government has suggested that President Donald Trump's administration might be hiding something about its response to the coronavirus crisis, as both Washington, D.C. and Beijing trade accusations and disinformation while the pandemic continues to spread.

 

The Chinese foreign ministry sent a tweet on Monday suggesting there were "growing doubts over the US government's handling of the #COVID19."

 

"When did the first infection occur in the US?" the foreign ministry asked. "Is the US government hiding something? Why they opt to blame others? American people and the international community need an answer from the US government."

 

The foreign ministry did not elaborate on the assertions. Newsweek has contacted the State Department to request comment on the accusations.

 

The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to dodge blame for the pandemic—which originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan—partially by accusing Western nations, most prominently the U.S., of mishandling its spread.

 

Western nations have accused China of a lack of transparency over coronavirus, suggesting the CCP concealed early warning signs of the outbreak and underreported its number of infections and deaths.

 

Beijing has rejected such accusations, framing itself as a victim of conspiracy theories and smears. A European Union report published last week said China—among other actors—was spreading disinformation about the pandemic, prompting an angry response from the foreign ministry.

 

Spokesperson Geng Shuang said Monday that China "is opposed to the creation and spreading of disinformation by anyone or any organization. China is a victim of disinformation, not an initiator."

Trump and key allies including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been especially vocal in attacking China. Both have even suggested that the virus may have escaped from a research laboratory in Wuhan, a possibility now being considered by U.S. intelligence agencies as revealed by Newsweek. As yet, there is no known evidence that the lab was the origin point for COVID-19.

 

Beijing has dismissed any suggestions that its response was inadequate, though early whistleblowers were silenced by local officials and—according to the Associated Press—President Xi Jinping sat on vital information for six days in January even as millions of Chinese people traveled within the country and abroad in the run-up to Lunar New Year.

 

China has dismissed foreign criticism as racist efforts to shift the blame for the outbreak onto China. Worldwide, there have now been more than 3 million confirmed cases and 211,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

 

The U.S. has now become the epicenter of the outbreak, having recorded just under 1 million infections and more than 56,000 deaths. Trump has been widely criticized for bungling the federal response, spreading misleading—and potentially dangerous—medical information and clashing with governors over the supply of key equipment and stay-at-home orders.

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and round .....➿ ➿ 🔂

[dufus]

'Paid for the damn virus that’s killing us': Giuliani rips Fauci over grants to Wuhan laboratory

 

Rudy Giuliani questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci's involvement in grants from the United States to a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that has been tied to the coronavirus pandemic.

 

According to a report, the U.S. intelligence community has growing confidence that the current coronavirus strain may have accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than having originated at a wildlife market, as the Chinese Communist Party first claimed. During a Sunday interview on The Cats Roundtable,

Giuliani questioned why the U.S. gave money to the lab.

 

"Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving any money to any laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses. Prohibited! Despite that, Dr. Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory — and then even after the State Department issued reports about how unsafe that laboratory was, and how suspicious they were in the way they were developing a virus that could be transmitted to humans," he claimed.

 

He added, "We never pulled that money. So, something here is going on, John. I don’t want to make any accusations. But there was more knowledge about what was going on in China with our scientific people than they disclosed to us when this first came out. Just think of it: If this laboratory turns out to be the place where the virus came from, we paid for it. We paid for the damn virus that’s killing us.”

 

While Giuliani placed the blame on Fauci, who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, it is not clear what oversight he had in the funding decisions. The NIAID did award $3.7 million in grants to EcoHealth Alliance to study the “risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China" at wet markets, but not all of that funding went to the lab in Wuhan.

 

President Trump has been asked about the matter and blamed the Obama administration for the donation, saying, "Who is president then, I wonder?" However, the funding was approved from 2014 to 2019, including $700,000 that was awarded under the Trump administration.

 

Giuliani called for an investigation into the Wuhan laboratory, saying, "Today, if I were U.S. attorney, I’d open an investigation into the Wuhan laboratory. And I’d want to know, what did we know? How much did we know about how bad the practices were there? Who knew about it? And who sent them money anyway? And that person would sure as heck be in front of a grand jury trying to explain to me — what are you asleep?”

source

[dufus]

 

full briefing

 

don,t worry chicago  ........  there coming for us all  

[dufus]

 

“You could track people, put bracelets on their arms,” - Theresa Tam 2010   

 

Chief Public Health Officer Canada Theresa Tam Documentary 'Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague' 2010

 

 

refer to post  Rockefeller plan details government takeover through pandemic martial law   This report was produced by The Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network. May 2010

Edited April 29, 2020 by dufus

[Karlston]

No one knows when the COVID-19 pandemic will end

IfIf you’ve been marking the pandemic by the pileup of cautious reopenings and rescheduled events, you might think that an end to this global disaster is in sight. Event planners for the Kentucky Derby and Bonnaroo already have new opening days on the books in September. The Olympics are scheduled to start in Tokyo on July 23rd, 2021. There’s just one problem: if anyone says that they know exactly when this pandemic will be over, they are lying.

No one can see the future. The virus is an unknown player, and the best minds on Earth can’t do more than make educated guesses about what comes next and when. Hell, we didn’t even notice the blood clot situation until just recently.

 

I know. A guess is not comforting when you’re dreading another week of monotony in the same four walls. End dates are comforting. Reopenings are comforting. Contemplating a future that looks a lot like our cozy, crowded past is way more comforting than our isolated present. But let’s not confuse comfort for truth.

 

When bowling alleys and tattoo parlors reopened in Georgia on Friday, the pandemic was not over. It won’t be over when the stay-at-home order in Michigan (maybe) lifts on May 15th or if the stay-at-home order in the Bay Area actually ends on May 31st.

 

The dates politicians are throwing around are not finish lines. They aren’t guesses at an end date for this pandemic, either. Shelter-in-place orders are just time-outs. We have no sure-fire treatments for the virus, no vaccine, and a limited supply of health care workers. To keep as many people alive as possible, we’ve done the only thing we can do to slow the spread: we’ve hid from each other.

 

The virus’s effects have not been, as some proposed, a great equalizer. The less you have, the harder you’re hit. The federal government has mostly failed at leading a coherent response to the pandemic. Doctors are clashing with the FBI over PPE, then running into the ER with whatever they can scrounge up. Governors are hitting up their private-jet-owner friends to have masks flown in from China to equip their hospitals. Nurses at other facilities are resorting to wearing garbage bags in an unsuccessful bid to avoid contracting the virus on the job.

 

People who are already vulnerable are getting hit the hardest. Death rates have soared in black communities already slammed by other public health crises. On the Navajo Nation, experts worry that water shortages are contributing to the virus’s continued spread. The virus has raged through cramped homeless shelters and through the communities that can’t afford to distance themselves. “It’s become very clear to me what a socioeconomic disease this is,” an ER doctor working in Elmhurst, Queens told The New Yorker. “People hear that term ‘essential workers.’ Short-order cooks, doormen, cleaners, deli workers—that is the patient population here.” In some US prisons, the vast majority of inmates are testing positive for the virus, leaving incarcerated persons in fear for their lives. One inmate, Sterling Rivers, grimly observed that “Our sentences have turned into death sentences” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Our failures around the coronavirus are systemic failures of public policy.

 

Those failures have left the health care system struggling to cope, plunged society into a well of uncertainty, and sent the economy cratering. Thanks to an inconsistent and often incoherent government response in the US, we now face an uncertain timeline for both economic and health recoveries. Twenty-six million people have filed unemployment claims.

 

And so some governors will call an end to stay-home orders in the hopes of resuscitating their economies. In Georgia, South Carolina, and parts of Tennessee, that time came on Friday. Other states, like California and New York, are taking a longer view, gradually easing some restrictions on movement while enforcing new requirements — masks on, low temps, can’t lose.

 

As cases decrease, restrictions will relax. But once we let our guard down, we’ll likely see resurgences of cases, once again straining health resources — leaving us with no choice but to close ourselves off again. That’s what’s happening in parts of China now, where new outbreaks of the same disease have emerged. The open-and-shut economy will likely continue as cases ebb and flow.

 

There are paths to victory, but as Ezra Klein notes at Vox, “these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal.” Victory over the virus will involve a lot of things that we don’t have yet. Scientific discoveries will help defeat the virus — but science can’t do it alone. Public policies will play a huge role, and even with firm health guidelines and speedy scientific developments, it will take longer than we want for us to truly eke out a win.

 

What does a win look like? It will take widespread tests of everyone who might be sick and careful quarantining of anyone who tests positive. It will take armies of contact tracers to trace down anyone who might have been exposed. These low-tech interventions are the best thing we’ve got while we give researchers the time they need to come up with other solutions.

 

Scientists will labor over vaccines and treatments, but the overwhelming majority of their trials will turn up nothing useful. They’ll also keep trying to understand the virus and our bodies’ complicated response to it, in the hopes of developing legitimate antibody tests. Eventually, we may discover something that destroys the virus without wrecking our bodies. But none of that is ready today.

 

The end is still likely to be a long way away, as journalist Ed Yong writes in The Atlantic: “The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world.”

 

Consider this a rebuilding year. It might even turn into rebuilding years, depending on our progress. Our brightest prospects — vaccines and treatments — are still in the minors. Even antibody testing isn’t ready to be called up to the big leagues, at least not yet.

 

This is a long game, and focusing on the victory celebrations — like New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio’s plan to “throw the biggest, best parade to honor” health care workers — won’t get us to the end.

 

If we focus on what victory looks like instead of what it takes to get us there, we’re going to keep being disappointed. We’ll feel defeated every time a drug fails in testing. We can’t let it get to us like that. The parades, the ballgames, the worship services that we’re looking forward to, those will be there once this is over. What we’ve got to ensure now is that when we get to reopening day — whenever it is — that our concert halls and stadiums and spiritual homes are filled with as many of our human siblings as we can possibly save.

 

It still sucks when the goalposts move from April 15th to April 30th, then to May 15th. It feels like we’re Charlie Brown and the end to this is a football that Lucy keeps pulling away. But when it comes to the virus itself, the clock isn’t the statistic that matters. These are the ones that do: numbers of tests, numbers of new infections, and numbers of bodies in the morgues.

 

When the numbers of tests go up and confirmed cases and deaths go down, then our playbook will change. But it won’t be the end of the fight — not yet.

 

We play this through to the end — there is no other option. Victory might look like a vaccine. It might look like a robust testing regime or a new treatment. It might look like us cobbling together a sense of normalcy and still watching for repeated outbreaks. Whatever form it takes, we’ll fight our way there with masks, thermometers, and soap, buying some time along the way. We’ll adjust our playbook as the virus adapts. We’ll position ourselves farther apart. We’ll do it again, and again when the next waves of this virus come. We will be exhausted when we get there, but we will get there. But if we don’t pace ourselves for the long haul, it will be that much harder to get through.

 

We won’t be able to mark this finale in our calendars. All we can do is get through today, pushing our leaders to get the people on the front lines the resources and time they need to get us through this. We need politicians who will stop telling us the comforting things we want to hear and start acting to keep as many of us alive as possible.

Correction 4/29: On Friday, 4/24. Michigan extended their stay-at-home order to May 15 from April 30. This article has been updated to include the new date.

 

Source: No one knows when the COVID-19 pandemic will end (The Verge)

[Karlston]

Planes Are Still Flying, but Covid-19 Recovery Will Be Tough

Air travel is down more than 90 percent from last year, and analysts say the rebound will be slower than following 9/11 or the financial crisis.

Airlines must keep serving every city in their networks, under terms of the relief bill passed by Congress.Photograph: Rob Carr/Getty Images

 

Over the past three months, Covid-19 has reduced air travel in the United States to the point where the fact of a nearly full American Airlines jet—one on which many passengers failed to wear masks—warrants international news coverage.

 

Air travel is down more than 90 percent from this time last year. Then, the TSA was prodding more than 2 million people a day through body scanners and x-ray machines. Earlier this week, the total was only 130,000—itself up from even lower depths a few weeks ago. It will be a long, slow climb back to pre-coronavirus passenger numbers. And the price for getting there could mean a significantly smaller American airline industry.

 

US carriers started 2020 on a high note, coming off a great 2019 and logging robust revenues in the opening months of the year. In early February, United forecast such a need for pilots, it bought a flight academy. On Valentine’s Day, Delta paid out a record $1.6 billion in profit to its employees. In March, the pummeling came. International travel bans and nationwide stay-at-home orders pushed US airlines to ground 2,400 aircraft, cutting half or more of their capacity. The likely result is a 70 percent year-over-year drop in revenue, according to analysts with the investment bank Cowen. Carriers are burning through between $10 and $12 billion a month, according to industry trade group Airlines for America.

 

“If they were humans, they’d be dead from hemorrhaging,” says industry consultant George Hamlin. A big part of the problem is that airlines have no easy way to stop the bleeding. Jet fuel may be cheap, but airlines can’t easily slough off costs like lease or mortgage payments for planes, rent for offices and maintenance facilities, and corporate debt payments. “It’s different and frankly scarier than anything I’ve seen,” says Hamlin, given that a Covid-19 vaccine is at least a year away, and a second wave of the virus could hit come winter. The unknown unknowns are legion.

 

The CARES Act set aside a $58 billion salve for the aviation industry, and all the big American airlines have taken loans or grants that allow them to continue paying their workers. The attached strings include limits on executive compensation, a moratorium on stock buybacks, and an agreement not to furlough or fire any employees until the end of September. But the biggest burden is likely the requirement that airlines taking federal dollars keep running flights to every city they were serving on March 1, well before most started grounding jets.

 

Depending on how often they flew to a given city before the pandemic hit, airlines can fly to each city as little as once a week, but in most cases the rules will require them to drop in at least three times a week. That’s why Delta is still sending planes to Alpena, Michigan; American is serving five weekly flights to Roswell, New Mexico; and United is operating three weekly flights for those who’d like to get into or out of Dodge City, Kansas. For the Department of Transportation, it’s important that small cities not be cut out of the national air network, even in, or especially in, a time of crisis. The result, according to the Cowen analysts, is a national average of roughly one passenger for every 20 seats.

 

“That’s making airlines burn cash they’ll need when the economy turns around later this year,” says Mike Boyd, who runs the aviation consulting firm Boyd Group International. Making a profit on a flight requires filling at least 85 percent of seats, he says. “They really shouldn’t be flying anywhere near what they’re flying today.”

 

Boyd is optimistic about a flying comeback, estimating that passenger numbers could return to 80 percent of 2019 levels by the end of this year. The Cowen analysts are less sanguine, anticipating a recovery slower than those that followed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crisis. Tens of millions of unemployed Americans are unlikely to be flying for fun anytime soon, and businesses are now learning how to communicate using Zoom.

 

Staying alive long enough to see who’s right, though, will take serious sacrifice. Pushing down costs starts with selling off planes, especially old ones. American is retiring all of its 757, 767, and E190 jets, along with some of its older 737s and A330s. Cowen expects its rivals to make similar moves, collectively ditching 800 to 1,000 jets, which may be converted to freighters, scavenged for parts, or left to bake in a desert graveyard. Even Boyd, the optimist about a recovery, anticipates that airlines could permanently reduce their capacity by as much as 15 percent.

 

Fewer planes mean fewer people. Because US carriers employ about 100 people for each plane they operate, the Cowen analysis projects that between 95,000 and 105,000 American airline employees will lose their jobs once their protection under the CARES Act runs out on October 1. The CEOs of United and Southwest have warned of layoffs come the fall. Overseas, British Airways is cutting 12,000 jobs, nearly a third of its workforce. Taylor Garland, a spokesperson for the Association of Flight Attendants, says the union will push for airlines to minimize layoffs with options like early retirement offers and voluntary unpaid leave. But, she says, some losses may be inevitable. “We know something is going to happen in October.”

 

 

Source: Planes Are Still Flying, but Covid-19 Recovery Will Be Tough (Wired)

[dufus]

UK pledges £1.65B to Gavi for the next 5 years

LONDON — The United Kingdom has pledged to donate the equivalent of £330 million ($410 million) a year to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, for the next five years.

The government said it will be the largest supporter of Gavi, which works to immunize children against infectious diseases such as measles and polio, as well as supporting the COVID-19 response.

Civil society leaders said the announcement, worth £1.65 billion in total, sent a strong signal to other donors ahead of the Gavi replenishment summit on June 4, which will now be held virtually. It was previously set to be held in the U.K.

“The coronavirus pandemic shows us now more than ever the vital role vaccines play in protecting us all,” said Anne-Marie Trevelyan, secretary of state for the U.K. Department for International Development.

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Gavi's partnership model   bill melinda gates foundation  unicef  who  worlld bank

 

follow the money !