Tora Tora Tora

I think this was one of the best films of all time. It displays the frailties of human egos in times of stress. I look forward, if at all possible, to whomever makes the Tora Tora Tora of this virus event. The characters and their egos and foibles, the lost warnings, the heroes from the small people at the edges, the tragedy of the lack of preparation, the incompetence of the bureaucracy, and inevitable.

Trust?

Trust is a key element in any relationship. Once lost it is often near impossible to regain.

Now consider what was in The Hill:
 
A top health official in Ohio estimated on Thursday that more than 100,000 people in the state have coronavirus, a shockingly high number that underscores the limited testing so far. Ohio Department of Health Director ... estimates at least 1 percent of the population in the state has the virus. "We know now, just the fact of community spread, says that at least 1 percent, at the very least, 1 percent of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today," Acton said. "We have 11.7 million people. So the math is over 100,000. So that just gives you a sense of how this virus spreads and is spreading quickly."

There seems to be no basis in fact for such a statement.  These reckless, in my opinion, statements destroys trust. If the tests are not done then the statement has no basis in fact. And we wonder why people have lost respect for Government.

There is No Kit!

The virus kit is really a misnomer and one of the means to tell someone who knows something from someone who does not. Here is the CDC protocol.

It is a cookbook for obtaining the sample and processing the sample. Many Labs can do this, thousands actually. So why the delay. Well we have moved from Federal roadblocks to State roadblocks. So called State Labs are turf protecting.

So let us not kid ourselves, Government is the problem, not the solution. And the kit issue was CDCs way of controlling but no people who have no clue are fixated on kits. It is process and not kits. A process which can be repeated all over the country if States would step aside.

Mortality Rates

Mortality rates for such things as the current virus issue are theoretically simple if one has the data. Namely the mortality rate is the number of deaths among those infected divided by the number of those infected.

We appear to know the numerator. For those who have a BA degree or who are in the media, that is the top number in the ratio, the fraction, oh whatever!

Then we need to know the denominator. That again is the bottom number. Now recall that the number is the total number infected. Well how do we get that? Simple, kind of. One must sample a large random population, say thousands of people, to get a reasonable number. And one must do that daily for some period knowing the temporal dynamics of the mortality and morbidity. Are we doing that? No way. In fact the system established prevents that very critical set of information.

Now recall we mentioned six weeks ago when we started commenting on this that RNA identification is trivial. However the Federal regulations prohibited third year Biology students from doing this even though it was part of their weekly labs. The CDC Government employees said only then could decide. Think Medicare for All!

Now it seems that we finally can do what we should be doing. BUT! Why not random testing of say a thousand or so per day? Public Health centers a century ago did this. Yes we closed them all down, but why not open them up again? For example, some sixty years or so ago one need a TB test as part of employment. I recall needing one to get my working papers as a Lifeguard in the 1950s. What happened? HIPPA and a multiplicity of Government regulations as well as a complete demolition of Public Health systems. New York at one time had a good one, if not the best, in the world. With all the immigrants the possibility of the introduction of new diseases was significant. However as things evolved it was easy to cut costs on Public Health, push it off to the hospital ERs. Below is my NYC Public Health card. It really worked then.

To understand the spread one must have data. We do not have data. When we see 3% mortality we really mean 3% die who have a severe recognizable and isolateable infection. That folks is not the mortality rate, it is another rate, mortality amongst those infected. We still have no clue on the denominator. Yet it is so easy to do. Just do it! Bu alas it is an election year and we all seem to find the advantage of collapsing the economy based upon zero data!

Oh and BTW, read the NY Times piece on Patient Zero in New York. This all seems to have happened a whole month after the official announcement of the virus as a putative pandemic, and a month after we had marked it as such in this blog.

It is not "Plastics" it is "Gloves"

In the summer of 1964 I had a job at New York Telephone at 140 West Street in Manhattan. It was a hot summer and it was just after the death of Kennedy. It was the first summer male employees were not mandated to wear hats to and from work. Not owning a hat I was happy. However they still required women employees to wear hats and gloves. So each morning there was this mass flow of men in suits, clean shaven, white shirts, ties, polished shoes, and women with hats and white summer gloves.

Now yesterday as I went into New York, I wore my leather gloves. They serve several purposes. First they give me a good grip on rails so I am now pummeled by fast moving delivery people trying to catch a train. Second, they inhibit any impulse to place one's hands on one's face. Third, they tend to mitigate any infestation of one's epidermis with various micro-organisms running around the filth of the New York Subway system.

Now as I looked about I was the only creature wearing any form of hand protection. In fact there was a young lady, after touching everything as she made her way through the turnstile, stood on the platform, opens a wrapped sandwiches, and slowly consumed it carefully transferring each morsel to her face, along with God knows what.

So my modest proposal is simple: wear gloves!

An Observation

I have spent much of the last ten years looking at miRNAs in the context of cancer. However in doing so it becomes quite clear that identifying RNAs is somewhat easy. I suspect every MIT Bio Junior can or has done so in a lab. Using RNA-seq or similar method one can isolate a targeted RNA from a human and then create the cDNA then sequence it if you have the right primer. What is the primer? Well it comes from the Corona virus sequencing!

Simple, with the right equipment, a few thousand dollars, you can have an AP High School student do it!

So where is the CDC? Well they are first of all Government employees, need I say any more. I believe it was in the same group as the person saying the world was coming to an end. Government health care anyone?