Scottish care homes owned by the Chinese state in tax havens
CNN – Here’s the right (and wrong) way: “So, about masks — they do next to nothing if you don’t wear them properly. Yep, even the cloth coverings touted as the best thing since social distancing have instructions. We’ve laid them out below, based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. And remember: Masks are effective only if they cover your mouth, nose and chin. And however tempting it may be to remove your mask for a moment, doing that could expose your fingers and face to the very virus you’re trying to avoid. Keep that and more in mind when wearing your mask — If we all do it right, we could save 33,000 lives…”
- See also LifeHacker – Risk Isn’t Just About You – includes a video with more information on correct mask use and cleaning
Q&A: How is COVID-19 transmitted?WHO. Revised after the aerosol transmission letter to WHO from 230 signatories.
Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2: The world should face the realityEnvironment International. Worth reading in full:
“It is difficult to explain why public health authorities marginalize the significance of airborne transmission of influenza or coronaviruses, but a possible reason is that it is difficult to directly detect the viruses traveling in the air…. The fact that there are no simple methods for detecting the virus in the air does not mean that the viruses do not travel in the air. … To summarize, based on the trend in the increase of infections, and understanding the basic science of viral infection spread, we strongly believe that the virus is likely to be spreading through the air. If this is the case, it will take at least several months for this to be confirmed by science. This is valuable time lost that could be used to properly control the epidemic by the measures outlined above and prevent more infections and loss of life.
Investigating SARS-CoV-2 surface and air contamination in an acute healthcare setting during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in LondonClinical Infectious Diseases. From the abstract: “Our findings of extensive viral RNA contamination of surfaces and air across a range of acute healthcare settings in the absence of cultured virus underlines the potential risk from environmental contamination in managing COVID-19, and the need for effective use of PPE, physical distancing, and hand/surface hygiene.”
Exaggerated risk of transmission of COVID-19 by fomites The Lancet. A comment
Covid-19 is 1,000 TIMES better at infecting humans than its closest relative found in bats because it evolved from several coronaviruses which merged together Daily Mail. Summarizing results from the Francis Crick Institute.
One of the most confounding aspects of the pandemic has been Congress’s unwillingness or inability to spend to fight the virus. As I said in the LA Times:
If an invader rained missiles down on cities across the United States killing thousands of people, we would fight back. Yet despite spending trillions on unemployment insurance and relief to deal with the economic consequences of COVID-19, we have spent comparatively little fighting the virus directly.
Economists Steven Berry and Zack Cooper have run the numbers:
By our calculations, less than 8 percent of the trillions in funding that Congress has allocated so far in response to the virus has been for solutions that would shorten or mitigate the virus itself: measures like increasing the supply of PPE, expanding testing, developing treatments, standing up contact tracing, or developing a vaccine. A case in point is the most recent House Covid-19 package. It calls for $3 trillion in spending; less than 3 percent of that total is allocated toward Covid testing. As Congress considers next steps, it’s imperative to shift priorities and direct more funding and effort toward actually ending the pandemic.
Berry and Copper point to the vaccine plan that I am working on as an example of smart spending:
…a group of prominent economists, including Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer, has proposed spending a $70 billion dollar vaccine effort. The proposed expenditure is both much larger than anything proposed by the White House or Congress and also quite cheap compared to the potential benefits.
…[Similarly] Nobel Laureate Paul Romer and the Rockefeller Foundationhave each sketched out $100 billion plans to increase testing. We say: Let’s fund both, allocating half the funds directly to states, who can spend to activate the vast capacity of university labs, and also fund Romer’s plan to scale up $10 instant tests for true mass testing. We could create a $50 billion dollar challenge prize that rewards the first 10 firms that develop effective treatments for Covid-19 — $5 billion each. We could fund Scott Gottlieb and Andy Slavitt’s bipartisan $50 billion contact tracing proposal. We could allocate $100 billion to fund the libertarian leaning Mercatus Center’s proposal for advanced purchase contracts to procure massive quantities of PPE.
What makes this all the more confounding is that spending to defeat the virus will more than pay for itself! As I said in my piece in the Washington Post (with Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver):
Economists talk about “multipliers” — an injection of spending that causes even larger increases in gross domestic product. Spending on testing, tracing and paid isolation would produce an indisputable and massive multiplier effect.
Who gains by killing the economy and letting people die? Yes, it’s possible to spin some elaborate conspiracy about someone, somewhere benefiting. But in talking with people in Congress the message I hear is not that there’s a secret cabal with a special interest in economic collapse and dying constituents. In a way, the message is worse. Multiple people have told me that things move slowly, no one is stepping up to the plate, leadership is absent. “Who is John Galt?,” they sigh. Ok, they don’t literally say that, but that is what it feels like in the United States today at the highest levels of government.
