Saturday, May 29, 2021

An Interesting Argument

 In a recent article by Wade, the author details his arguments regarding the elegantly engineered COVID-19 corona virus. The author concludes:

What accounts for the media’s apparent lack of curiosity? The virologists’ omertà is one reason. Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses. So when their sources won’t help, these journalists are at a loss. Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory. During the Trump administration, they had no trouble in rejecting the position of the intelligence services that lab escape could not be ruled out. But when Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of national intelligence, said the same thing, she too was largely ignored. This is not to argue that editors should have endorsed the lab escape scenario, merely that they should have explored the possibility fully and fairly. People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true. And then let the reckoning begin.

 This is an exceptionally well written article for the educated public.I am not a virologist but viruses are used as vectors for various immunotherapies. The get stuff into cells and ultimately into the nucleus. Much of this article makes sense.

NOTE:

1. The Chinese denial was published as Wu and Zhao, Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses , Stem Cell Research, 50(2021)

2. An alternate view supporting the above by Segreto et al, Should we discount the laboratory origin of COVID‑19? , Environmental Chemistry Letters 25 March 2021

The USPS: Love it or Leave It?

 The NY Times has an Editorial on how everyone loves the Post Office. NOT!

Now here is my experience with them:

1. Yesterday in the rain I received notice of an Amazon delivery, so I went to the PO Box in the rain and, you guessed it, no package. The driver apparently saw me as he was driving away and turned back past me then made a U turn driving past me and threw the package at me as he passed. He may have been going just under 10 mph but one could call that reckless.

2. I have sent Certified Return Receipt letters to an address at an adjacent PO. They not only never got delivered but were lost! Totally lost.

3. In delivering Amazon packages if the delivery person apparently does not want to do it they either say our mail box is unreachable of that I must come to the PO to pick up the package, mid pandemic.

4. Packages are left on the curb, atop snow piles or in the rain.

5. The Post Master calls and says it is my fault....

6. Tried to write Postmaster General, clueless, then the Congressperson who appoint the local Postmaster, her response was a form letter thanking me for supporting the Post Office!

7. Multiple First Class letters are lost, forever!

etc

So who could love this grossly incompetent political favor factory!

NJ 2021 05 29

 It is slowly dropping to levels seen last summer. We have 4.8 million vaccinated plus 0.9 million previously infected for a total of 5.7 million out of 9 million immune. That is just shy of 60%. There has been 47 cases of the Indian variant and about 3700 of the UK variant. 

The prevalence in the county is below. It has dropped but remains somewhat flat.

The same seems the case for the state as shown below.
Death below show a still high number most likely in the un-vaccinated. The major blip is due to the States redo of the numbers. As we have noted again and again the State reporting is highly suspect.
County incidence is low but remains now in single digits per day.
The state shows a good decline with some counties now at zero.
The worrisome number is the daily vaccinations dropping below 1.5 million with still some 35% exposed. However in that we do have many 0-18 years of age.
Nationally the chart below is positive. The normalized incidence is dropping.
Now by town we see the hot spots remain as we have noted for almost a year now.
Finally the town prevalence is dropping to just a few people.
The incidence for town and county are below. We are approaching zero in both.


Societal vs Genetic

 There is an ongoing controversy that various populations have certain health related issues due to their societal conditions versus a genetic profile. Consider the issue of obesity. Obesity all too often leads to Type 2 Diabetes, T2D, and related health impacts, Thus the sequence of obesity then T2D then cardiac and renal issues is common. It is well known that this is common in Native Americans. Native Americans have a strong genetic trait to survive and prosper on limited caloric intake. Like many other stressed ethnicity this factor get eliminated in an advanced society such as the US and obesity occur due to the proliferation of high caloric food intake. The sequellae are then inevitable,

In a recent paper by Sun et al they note:

Preferential fat accumulation in visceral vs. subcutaneous depots makes obese individuals more prone to metabolic complications. Body fat distribution (FD) is regulated by genetics. FD patterns vary across ethnic groups independent of obesity. Asians have more and Africans have less visceral fat compared with Europeans. Consequently, Asians tend to be more susceptible to type 2 diabetes even with lower BMIs when compared with Europeans. To date, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 460 loci related to FD traits. However, the majority of these data were generated in European populations. In this review, we aimed to summarize recent advances in FD genetics with a focus on comparisons between European and non-European populations (Asians and Africans). We therefore not only compared FD-related susceptibility loci identified in three ethnicities but also discussed whether known genetic variants might explain the FD pattern heterogeneity across different ancestries. Moreover, we describe several novel candidate genes potentially regulating FD, including NID2, HECTD4 and GNAS, identified in studies with Asian populations. It is of note that in agreement with current knowledge, most of the proposed FD candidate genes found in Asians belong to the group of developmental genes 

Thus one may observe that the genetic predisposition is dominant. This genetic predisposition all too often is the controlling factor and not societal constraints. Also generally it demands education of this fact and remediation to assure that the negative effects are minimized. No patient or person is the same but some generalizations may be helpful.


Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Whither Goest Amazon?

 Having been an Amazon user for over two decades all I can say is that things are deteriorating really fast, On average one out of ten packages are "lost" and never get to me as indicated. Their logistics group really need some fine tuning. Order a package, it starts in Edison NJ which is just a hop skip and a jump away and then is sent to south Jersey across from Philly. That place must be run by a group of total incompetents based upon their performance. One third of packages sent there never get here! I now go directly to other vendors since I can get what is promised. Amazon is collapsing by the day. Pity!

Saturday, May 22, 2021

W10 21H1 Crashes System

Microsoft verges on the demonic. I tried to update to the new release and 12 hours later after a clean W10 reinstall, thousands of dollars of lost SW and fortunately I had backup after backup but not much of the SW and I am still reloading. It will take another few days and most likely required a new system just in case. There is no recourse but just hours spent working around the Microsoft junk. 

OK 30 hours later here is what happened:

1. Tried to load 21H1

2. Got blue screen

3. Tried to recover from screen commands

4. No good

5. Had recover USB, it worked but installed a brand new W10 system!

6. Thus I had to reload all SW

7. I had massive backups so loaded files

8. Then had to BUY new MS packages upwards of a grand!

9. Loaded all other SW thus far

10 Still making patches

11. Blocking any future MS updates!

MS is clearly one of the worst if not the worst company even envisioned. You pay for their mistakes again and again. My personal advice is do not update the SW.

UPDATE: It is now 80+ hours and still loading old SW. I gather I am not alone with this colossal mess. Seem MS has withdrawn auto updates with 21H1. In my opinion, MS has incompetent quality control resulting in irreparable harm to a massive number. Imagine them in healthcare!

NJ 2021 05 22

 We are entering the summer with higher vaccination rates.The county prevalence is low.

As is the state
County incidence is decaying
As is the state
This is the problem. As fewer people are in the pool we get a higher death rate of infected, we see 6%+
The town prevalence is still at 10+
The incidence is dropping
Doubling time is high
Immunizations are low
But finally normalized incidence is on a downtuen


Thursday, May 20, 2021

A Real Concern

 

As we track all the positive data there is a serious concern. The mortality rate is now about 6% for those not inoculated and infected. I don't want to sound like the Doge of Fauci but perhaps this is telling and from a Public Health perspective be addressed. Demographically we have little open data. But this spike should be a concern to all, for it is in these people that we get the mutations and thus the new variants.

Antibody Titer and the CDC

 The determination of antibody titers, AbT, is critical for determining ongoing immunity. One would assume, at least a competent rational person, that the CDC would be collecting and reporting on a timely manner the titers across a wide demographic set the AbT to the vaccines. This would give us some understanding of who is protected and for how long. In addition cross titers to the new variants would also be useful.

Regrettably it does not appear that the CDC is even aware of this critical public health effort. I have seen some limited third party efforts, but the CDC seems clueless as has been the case thus-far. They are still stuck in the diagnost6ic phase. 

It is critical that large scale post vaccination demographic titer results be obtained and made publicly available in a timely and utilizable manner. The CDC's approach to data dissemination is mid-20th century. Someone must wake them up and get the data out there as soon as possible. This is just another example of fighting the last war as the new one rages on.

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Stick to Pole Climbing

 The AT&T media disaster follows the Verizon one. It was totally predictable. Professionally I spent almost 10 years in an around the Bell System. New York Telephone, Bell Labs, and NYNEX. I also spent a few years at Warner. The difference in culture is galactic. Warner was a nest of massive creativity. It was fun, it allowed for testing new areas and exploring them, if it worked great if not then on to the next one. The Bell System was a rigid hierarchy, no fun, unless you liked golf. Your office furniture dictated your position in the company. Only Officers had their own personal bathrooms. 

The Bell System folks are good at climbing poles, managing battery back ups, installing switches. Every time they try something new, well, just don't even think about it.

As the NY Times reports:

AT&T is painting a rosy picture for the future of its media business, which it will spin off and merge with Discovery. That new streaming giant is a formidable stand-alone competitor to Netflix and Disney. The move leaves AT&T to focus on its telecom business, which looks less bright after being overshadowed by its expensive — and ultimately futile — deal-making binge in media and entertainment under its previous chief, Randall Stephenson.

 The grass seemed greener on the other side. I remember my first few weeks back at NYNEX and trying to explain that Profit is Revenue less Expenses, not Return on Assets. The telecom business is drastically different than media. The people are different, arguably even genetically. No one ever accused the Bell System of being creative, think black rotary dial phones. If there had been no break-up we may have seen them return! The Internet was shoved down their throats! I remember some twenty plus years ago say IP would replace SS-7. Well it has but only after some kicking and screaming.

Now if AT&T like apparently Verizon can focus on what they do best they may have a shot. If the top management keeps wanting to waste shareholder money on self aggrandizing acquisitions, not so much.

Sunday, May 16, 2021

Aerosols, Masks, and the CDC

 My grandmother was the Head Nurse at Seaview Hospital in New York City during the TB and Influenza outbreaks from 1910 through 1930. She lived well past 90 and I never remember her sick a day. She wore a mask.

Then again a hundred years ago medicine was a bit different. New York had a Public Health system but millions of immigrants. People and troops were coming and going and needless to say the understanding of viruses was nil. Yet by late 1920 things returned to normal. Masks were accepted as a medical necessity, nothing else was available, and they were not politicized.

Now 100 years later they seem to be the focal point of political intrigue. The CDC has a "mask" web site that allegedly lays out the "science". They note:

Multi-layer cloth masks block release of exhaled respiratory particles into the environment,along with the microorganisms these particles carry. Cloth masks not only effectively block most large droplets (i.e., 20-30 microns and larger)but they can also block the exhalation of fine droplets and particles (also often referred to as aerosols) smaller than 10 microns ;which increase in number with the volume of speechand specific types of phonation. Multi-layer cloth masks can both block up to 50-70% of these fine droplets and particle  and limit the forward spread of those that are not captured. Upwards of 80% blockage has been achieved in human experiments that have measured blocking of all respiratory droplets,4 with cloth masks in some studies performing on par with surgical masks as barriers for  

Now the real problem is not the mask but the aerosol transmission. Here are some as of yet unanswered questions:

1. In an infected person, we know that the virus replicates in the cells and that the cells exude virions which can be set free when the infected person breaths out. What does the vehicle of the expirated virion look like? Is it a hydrogen bonded water sphere with the virion inside, or something else. How large is this expelled aerosol and how many virions are in it?

2. We know the virus replicates at 98F in the lungs and seems dormant at 94F in the nasophyranx. We think. Now in a vaccinated person, we also know that if the immune system is properly functioning that virions that make it to the lung are attack and neutralized. Is this the same with the dormant nasopharynx virions? If no then is the nasopharynx virions the transmission agents,

3. If aerosols are the dominant means of transmission, and if the aerosol particles containing virions are the transmission elements, and if these aerosols are say 100 nm, 0.1 micros, we know from Stokes law that they just hang in the air for a real long time. Is this the real cause for transmission? If so six feet is useless. Masks may help, but immunization is the only answer.

4. It appears that despite the now substantial research that little has been done on real viral transmission. We see people singing, droplets flying about, but the aerosol effects almost disregarded at the small nm level.

 Understanding how the virus is transmitted is in my  mind the number one question now and in the future. I also would not totally negate surface infections. Yet.

Friday, May 14, 2021

NJ 2021 05 15

 Things seems to be getting much better. However nationally there is still a high incidence on the vulnerable base. First the prevalence in the County seems to nearing zero. There is a concern as to noisy data still.

Statewide we have the prevalence below, nearing the low point of last summer. It will be interesting to see how this works out.
Mortality shows the results of the bad data recently. However we are still seeing LTC deaths attributed to the virus.
County incidence is very low
State incidence is also low. The four peaks are clear.
Town prevalence is still high. I suspect it is the 18-29 group.
Here we have a problem. Town is high but county near zero. This is a data issue across the state.
Doubling time is good and increasing
The immunization rate is dropping. Hopefully the revised CDC guidelines and J&J improvements solve the problem.
This is the real concern. The incidence normalized is still somewhat flat. It means that the infection rate remains high amongst those not immunized. This belies the herd immunity assumption.


What is an Aerosol?

 There is a fantastic piece in Wired discussing the understanding of aerosols and the transmission of the corona virus. It notes:

On the video call, tensions rose. At one point, Lidia Morawska, a revered atmospheric physicist who had arranged the meeting, tried to explain how far infectious particles of different sizes could potentially travel. One of the WHO experts abruptly cut her off, telling her she was wrong, Marr recalls. His rudeness shocked her. “You just don’t argue with Lidia about physics,” she says. Morawska had spent more than two decades advising a different branch of the WHO on the impacts of air pollution. When it came to flecks of soot and ash belched out by smokestacks and tailpipes, the organization readily accepted the physics she was describing—that particles of many sizes can hang aloft, travel far, and be inhaled. Now, though, the WHO’s advisers seemed to be saying those same laws didn’t apply to virus-laced respiratory particles. To them, the word airborne only applied to particles smaller than 5 microns. Trapped in their group-specific jargon, the two camps on Zoom literally couldn’t understand one another.

The real issue is that one must define an aerosol. There is a classic book by Hinds, Aerosol Technology (Wiley, 1982) worth reading. In the introduction the author notes:

The microscopic particles that float in the air are of many kinds; suspended solid particles, smoke from power generation, photochemically formed particles, salt particles formed from ocean spray, and atmospheric clouds of water droplets or ice particles....These airborne particles are all examples of aerosols.

The author continues to give examples and counter examples. But in the Wired piece one sees that the corona virus is carrier from person to person by aerosols. The questions are:

1. What is the structure of that aerosol?

2. What are its dimensions?

3. What are its aerodynamics?

4. How does it go from one person to another?

5. How is it generated in an infected person?

6. What are the dynamics of aerosol bursts?

And the list goes on. The article does not answer any of these questions. What we do know is that the virion is about 30 nm in diameter and that it may be transported in an aerosol of water about 100 nm in diameter. These small aerosols may collide and get larger or smaller, they may gather as a quasi cloud, they may do lots of things.

But we know that a particle such as this will fall according to Newtons law of gravity with a force of mg, mass times the gravitation pull. Yet against that may be a hydrostatic force due to a differing air temperature in the aerosol and drag due to the viscosity of air. This is the grossly simplistic model.

F(viscosity)=3πμVd

 where we have the viscosity, velocity and diameter. In a simple single particle case the terminal velocity, the settling velocity is:

VTS=(αd2g)/(18μ)

where we first see the density of the particle. Simplified we have for small particles:

VTS=0.003d2 (cm/sec) d in microns

Now this is quite slow. One must realize the particle has a horizontal component that starts high and it too gets to a terminal state. Thus small particles can get stuck in the viscous air. 

Now the fun begins.

1. The particles have lots of sizes.

2. Brownian motion occurs

3. The aerosols collide, get bigger or smaller or evaporate totally

4. There are electrostatic effects

5. and so forth!

The article concludes:

In early May, the CDC made similar changes to its Covid-19 guidance, now placing the inhalation of aerosols at the top of its list of how the disease spreads. Again though, no news conference, no press release.

The problem is that this is a really hard problem. At best we can say that "aerosols", whatever they are, spread the virus. We can also say that the CDC and WHO have not only been clueless but reckless in their approaches. We can make models, but if this pandemic has taught us anything it is that models have been not only useless but counter-productive. We are still at the stage of defining the issue. That takes measurements, data flow, monitoring, and the things we have been doing for a century. 

Regrettably we have seen the worst of politics and "science" in the past year, and its intensification most recently. It is clear to me that the CDC has lost any credibility. Yet we need researchers who can tackle the issue. The Wired piece shows one such alternative. I am sure there are many more.

Also I believe, and this is a belief, that aerosols of the corona virus do linger, but the question is; for how long are they viable. RNA is very fragile, it decays and breaks down, especially single stranded. The aerosol can protect it but for how long. That is just another of the possibly hundreds of questions. We need data, not equations. They may come later, possibly.