Trump to make major announcement Sunday night on coronavirus treatment

https://justthenews.com/politi..._campaign=newsletter

After prodding medical regulators to pick up their pace, President Trump will announce Sunday evening a major therapeutic breakthrough for treating COVID-19, the White House says.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted the development late Saturday night.

"News conference with President @realDonaldTrump at 6 pm tomorrow concerning a major therapeutic breakthrough on the China Virus. Secretary Azar and Dr. Hahn will be in attendance," McEnany wrote.

The planned announcement comes after the president pressed the Food and Drug Administration to pick up the pace, even suggesting some bureaucrats were delaying good news until after the general election.

"The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics," Trump tweeted earlier Saturday. "Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!"

So the breakthrough is "convalescent plasma"- taking the antibody-rich blood plasma of a person who has recovered from Covid-19, and transfusing it to a patient with active virus.

Is this really a breakthrough, or just a significant milestone? Early studies indicate that its use could reduce mortality by 35%. OK, I guess that helps, especially if you're one of the 35 out of 100 patients who survives.

quote:

Is this really a breakthrough, or just a significant milestone?

It nothing new at all, but the FDA has now approved it.

Right, the technique has been around a long time, it's only new for Covid-19. I guess breakthrough sounds better.

How's this for fantastic:

NJ gym that defied order to close is now campaign HQs for GOP hopeful

https://nypost.com/2020/08/23/...hqs-for-gop-hopeful/

The owners of a New Jersey gym that famously defied Gov. Phil Murphy’s order to remain closed amid the coronavirus, only to be arrested, say they are reopening as a campaign headquarters for a GOP candidate.

“We took a stand for our constitutional rights and for the rights of all small business owners throughout the country,’’ Ian Smith, co-owner of the Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, told “Fox & Friends Weekend’’ on Sunday of the establishment’s repeated attempts to stay open for business in violation of state virus restrictions.

“And it wasn’t intended to become political,” Smith said of the gym’s defiance. “We were trying to offer a solution to a problem where the government was failing, and it turned political.

“And that was because of Gov. Murphy’s actions. So now we made it political just as much as he has.”

The gym will serve as a campaign headquarters and rally spot for Republican US Senate candidate Rik Mehta, a pharmacist who is challenging Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), the owners said.

Gym co-owner Frank Trumbetti, asked whether the pair thought the state might try to mess with them this time around, responded, “We believe they can’t. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going to.

“We hope it gives us a reprieve until Nov. 3,” he said of potential government interference at the gym. “Everyone who comes in here will be a volunteer for the Mehta campaign, and we’ll be here to exercise our rights.”

“And we’re not requiring masks, either,” Trumbetti added defiantly.

The state requires masks at establishments indoors if social-distancing is not an option.

The governor’s office Sunday referred questions about the gym to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, which did not respond to a Post request for comment.

Fewer than two weeks ago, figures showed that New Jersey ranked the worst in the country in terms of COVID-19 deaths per million residents, with 15,966 fatalities from the virus. But with its infection and mortality rate dropping, some residents and business owners still hampered by health restrictions are calling for the regulations to be loosened.

“We’re really tired of this one-sided control that the governor has,” Mehta told Fox. “We’ve asked many times … Where’s the science? … We flattened the curve, and they keep moving the goalpost.”

I'm confused ~ will someone tell me why a fist bump is safe and a handshake is gonna make you die?

I see everyone fist bumping so I guess it's "acceptable"?

Now this is interesting...someone needs to cc the governor on NY...

Department of Justice Requesting Data From Governors of States that Issued COVID-19 Orders that May Have Resulted in Deaths of Elderly Nursing Home Residents

Data will help inform whether the Department of Justice will initiate investigations under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) regarding New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan’s response to COVID-19 in public nursing homes

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr...rs-may-have-resulted

Good

quote:

Originally posted by mbinky:
Now this is interesting...someone needs to cc the governor on NY...

Department of Justice Requesting Data From Governors of States that Issued COVID-19 Orders that May Have Resulted in Deaths of Elderly Nursing Home Residents

Data will help inform whether the Department of Justice will initiate investigations under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) regarding New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan’s response to COVID-19 in public nursing homes

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr...rs-may-have-resulted

Oh SNAP!

There are some Democrat Governor buttholes that just tightened up today...

Our Dictator-Governor, Tom Wolf, killed over half of PA's Covid casualties in nursing homes. But not before his transgender Health Secretary got her own mother out of one just before all the deaths started happening.

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:





Our Dictator-Governor, Tom Wolf, killed over half of PA's Covid casualties in nursing homes. But not before his transgender Health Secretary got her own mother out of one just before all the deaths started happening.

Somehow, I just don't think that we have heard the last of this debacle!!

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:
Our Dictator-Governor, Tom Wolf, killed over half of PA's Covid casualties in nursing homes. But not before his transgender Health Secretary got her own mother out of one just before all the deaths started happening.

Rank amateur. Ours (Walz) managed to get 74% of deaths in the nursing homes. During the time it was happening, he locked down elective surgical centers and dental offices (places that were already REALLY REALLY good at infection control procedures) under the premise of preserving PPE for "the surge" that never came.

It seems that the CDC has changed its stance on testing.

https://www.foxnews.com/health...ting-guidance-change

Headline: “CDC changes coronavirus testing guidance; asymptomatic people no longer require test; CDC estimates 40 percent of those infected by the novel coronavirus don’t show symptoms“

But CNN reports that the CDC was “pressured from top down” to change The requirements.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/26...-guidance/index.html

About a month ago, Dr. Michael Levitt pretty closely predicted the end of Covid. It was yesterday.

https://jbhandleyblog.com/home.../lockdownlunacythree

quote:

Originally posted by mbinky:
Department of Justice Requesting Data From Governors of States that Issued COVID-19 Orders that May Have Resulted in Deaths of Elderly Nursing Home Residents

Data will help inform whether the Department of Justice will initiate investigations under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) regarding New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan’s response to COVID-19 in public nursing homes

I wonder how Gretchen is feeling now !

quote:

Originally posted by triggertreat:

I wonder how Gretchen is feeling now !

Indignant as this is clearly a political move by the right before an election.

Know we discussed this in theory several months ago, interesting to see actual application.

The University of Arizona says it caught a dorm’s covid-19 outbreak before it started. Its secret weapon: Poop.

Interesting - not a paywall for me, but a lot of popups!

quote:

By
Jaclyn Peiser
August 28, 2020 at 4:50 a.m. CDT

As 5,000 students prepared for move-in day at the University of Arizona this week, the school warned they would be tested periodically for the coronavirus. One test, though, doesn’t involve a nose swab. The university is regularly screening the sewage from each dorm, searching for traces of the virus.
On Thursday, officials said the technique worked — and possibly prevented a sizable outbreak on campus. When a wastewater sample from one dorm came back positive this week, the school quickly tested all 311 people who live and work there and found two asymptomatic students who tested positive. They were quickly quarantined.
“With this early detection, we jumped on it right away, tested those youngsters, and got them the appropriate isolation where they needed to be,” said Richard Carmona, a former U.S. surgeon general who is directing the school’s reentry task force, in a news conference.

Researchers around the world have been studying whether wastewater testing can effectively catch cases early to prevent covid-19 clusters. There are programs in Singapore, China, Spain, Canada and New Zealand, while in the United States, more than 170 wastewater facilities across 37 states are being tested. Earlier this month, officials in Britain announced testing at 44 water treatment facilities. The Netherlands has been collecting samples at 300 sewage treatment plants.
With colleges battling large outbreaks around the country, the University of Arizona — which is trying a mix of online and in-person courses — elected to test sewage from all 20 residence halls. Other schools are doing the same, including the University of California at San Diego and Syracuse University.

On Tuesday at the University of Arizona, that screening process found signs of the virus in the wastewater from a dorm called Likins Hall. Although all students living in the dorm had to pass antigen tests before moving in, the second screening after the wastewater alert found the two positive cases.
Stay safe and informed with our free Coronavirus Updates newsletter
Carmona said without the sewage testing, those two asymptomatic students could have spread the virus far before it was detected.

“You think about if we had missed it, if we had waited until they became symptomatic and they stayed in that dorm for days, or a week, or the whole incubation period, how many other people would have been infected?” he said.
Wastewater testing has been used for years to test for other viruses, to study illicit drug use and to understand the socioeconomic status of a community based on its food consumption, according to Kevin Thomas, director of the University of Queensland’s Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences. Thomas has been working with a federal research agency to develop techniques on how to best detect traces of the virus in Australia. Wastewater testing is effective because fragments of the virus stay in feces, he said.

“I really do think it’s a good demonstration of the technique and technology because all the researchers working in this space internationally have come to the conclusion that is a very good early warning system,” Thomas said of Arizona’s experience in an interview with The Washington Post.

The process used to test the effluent is the same as those used for nose swab tests, which involves “concentrating the fragments within the sample and then extracting the RNA,” Thomas said.
At the University of Arizona, the procedure can also study whether the university’s efforts to curb infection rates have been effective, said Ian Pepper, director of the University of Arizona’s Water and Energy Sustainable Technology Center, in a news release.

“The approach can also be used to help determine if an intervention is working to reduce the transmission of the virus,” he said.
As of Thursday, the university has had 46 positives amid more than 10,000 antigen tests. But students have been on campus for only a week. New cases in Arizona have fallen 25 percent this past week, according to The Post’s coronavirus case tracker. There have been more than 200,000 cases and almost 5,000 deaths in the state since the end of February.

University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins said that numbers will go up on campus. “It’s inevitable,” he said in the news conference. “The issue is going to be can we handle the steady flow of cases or do we get a big spike in cases that overwhelms our ability to isolate and continue to test.”
That scenario has already played out at a number of schools, including Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Michigan State University, forcing them to switch to online classes only. At the University of Alabama, where 530 cases were detected the first week, school officials suspended students who violated social distancing rules by attending parties.

Thomas said that as some colleges bring students back on campus, testing wastewater from dorms could be an effective technique — along with individual testing and contact tracing — to manage the spread of the virus.

“The proof is there that it works, and it does seem to be a very sensitive approach,” Thomas said. “I think it’s a proactive way of trying to manage the potential for infection on campus.”

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Georgeair,

The poop is behind a Paywall.

The proper place for all excrement, much like a pay toilet.

COVID Is Making Younger, Healthy People Debilitatingly Sick For Months. Now They’re Fighting For Recognition.


There were weeks when Hannah Davis couldn’t remember how to send a text message. On top of the extreme fatigue, racing heart rate, and difficulty breathing she experienced daily, the most terrifying part of being sick with COVID-19 for the last 21 weeks, Davis said, has also been one of the hardest to explain: losing her mind.

“I feel like I have a brain injury. I have a hard time remembering who I was,” she said. “It was hard to remember I had to feed myself a couple times a day.”

Davis, 32, is a programmer who spent her days pre-pandemic working on machine learning and artificial intelligence, often presenting to big audiences, including at the Library of Congress. That all came crashing to a halt in March, when she got sick. She had to move back in with her mom and, for 150 days, has been unable to function normally. Doctors, even sympathetic ones, had no answers. Most questioned whether her symptoms, particularly the neurological ones, were linked to COVID at all.

But Davis soon realized that she was not alone. She’s among the thousands of people across the globe — many of whom were young, active, and healthy — who have been debilitated by ongoing, unexplainable symptoms. These patients, also known as long-haulers, are crushing the popular idea that COVID is only serious for a small percentage of vulnerable people.

And after months of self-organizing on social media to document their symptoms and collect data, Davis is now part of a group that’s pushing for the medical establishment to take them seriously too.

On Friday, led by LongCovidSOS, a patient-led advocacy group in the UK, Davis and about 60 other long-haulers had a closed, invite-only meeting with top officials from the World Health Organization in the biggest recognition yet that the medical world is starting to pay attention and figure out solutions.

The growing group of long-haulers hopes that this small but significant progress — eight months into the pandemic, with almost 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 worldwide so far — will draw attention to the more than tens of millions who have survived, blurring what we understand as the difference between illness and recovery.

The long-haulers called in to the WHO meeting from places around the world — the US, the UK, India, Italy, Spain, France, Finland, Senegal, and South Africa — but they all shared largely the same story: I was young and active before this, and now I cannot seem to get better. I haven’t been able to get my doctor to believe me because I do not have a positive test result, and I need a lot of care that does not exist where I live.

Leaders from the WHO, including the director-general, said they were “very aware” of and now doing research into “long COVID,” people who attended the meeting told BuzzFeed News. But even top medical specialists acknowledged they didn’t know that so many of these symptoms were happening in younger people whose cases had been initially categorized as “mild” — meaning they were sick, but not sick enough to be hospitalized. While the meeting was a positive, validating step for Davis and the other long-haulers, conversations around testing, antibodies, and the need for rehabilitative care made it clear that there is far more work that needs to be done.

“This is not just a respiratory illness. This is a systemic illness that makes you lose connection with the world,” Davis told BuzzFeed News from her mom’s Rhode Island home, where she is now living. “And the most shocking thing to me is how long it has taken for doctors and the general public to realize this basic fact.”
David Putrino, the director of rehabilitation innovation at New York City’s Mount Sinai hospital, has been studying and caring for long-haulers at one of the nation’s only post-COVID clinics since May. He said that as important as these grassroots advocacy efforts are, they are far from enough. The CDC and the WHO need to be throwing their resources behind them, Putrino said, or else millions of people are going to be “left out in the cold.”

“It's not that we don't have capacity — we do have capacity. What we need to do is rapidly mobilize and educate people that long COVID is a real thing, and it’s going to be around for a while,” he said. “There's a lot of hurt and we are doing what we can to help, but we need a lot of people to pick up the torch and run with us.”

Davis had no idea what was happening to her back in March. She had to stop showering because there were too many steps — it was exhausting. She would stare at her fingers trying to parse a text message, wondering what they were doing. It sometimes felt, she said, like someone had suddenly turned a windshield wiper on over her brain — everything would go blank.

For 24 days, she felt completely alone. Then, she came across an op-ed by Fiona Lowenstein, another woman in New York who had started a support group to talk about recovery. The group she launched, called Body Politic, now has 7,500 members on Slack. Davis also joined several Facebook groups, with more than 17,500 long-haulers in one Facebook group and 5,000 in another.

Scrolling through Body Politic’s nearly 50 Slack channels, Davis was stunned to keep reading accounts identical to hers, but from yoga instructors in Chicago, college students in Kentucky, and a married couple from Utah in their forties.

BuzzFeed News spoke with more than 100 of these long-haulers who described a set of similar symptoms: Their hearts would race and palpate. They got winded walking up stairs and were unable to stand for long periods of time. Though fatigue was common, many people also said they couldn’t sleep. They had relentless fevers, violent diarrhea, and throbbing headaches. The tips of their fingers and toes often burned intensely, like they got plugged into an electrical socket. Some women described having extremely heavy periods — or no periods at all — and having their hair fall out in clumps. And, like Davis, most of them were trying to figure out what was going on with their bodies while navigating what they call a “brain fog,” a mix between short-term memory loss and an inability to focus.

Most notably, the vast majority of long-haulers described visiting doctors with no answers to give — or worse, who suggested that their symptoms could possibly be linked to anxiety or depression instead of COVID.

But Davis and several other Body Politic members with backgrounds in data, science, and medicine saw a way to counter that doubt: harnessing the anecdotes in the group to gather data and force change. They formed their own research group and began organizing patients’ daily symptoms. It was a “coping strategy,” she said, to sift through information and search for answers.

On May 11, they published the first extensive report detailing the volatile and often unpredictable recovery process, based on the experiences of 640 people. The findings were trailblazing and “a huge shock to the narrative of what COVID actually was,” Davis said, and caught the attention of reporters and prestigious medical journals. It also made clear that testing systems were failing: Only a quarter of the respondents tested positive — nearly half were never able to get a test — but they still all reported experiencing about 60 of the same persistent symptoms. They are aiming to publish another report soon highlighting what long-haulers’ symptoms look like after six months.

“The group is like an open book of patient-written history of the virus,” said Lowenstein, Body Politic’s founder. She calls the group “a headquarters for patient advocacy efforts.”

“You can see how the symptoms have morphed over time and how diverse the patient experience is,” Lowenstein said, describing how people have been joining the group in geographic waves. “In the beginning of the summer, a bunch of people from Brazil were messaging me. Then I started hearing from more people in India and Mexico.”

A small handful of scientists have started collecting data on the longer-term effects of COVID too. A study out of Germany found that 78 out of 100 patients — most of whom recovered at home — had heart complications two months later. An Italian study found that 87% of hospitalized patients still had a variety of symptoms after two months.

Putrino has been studying and treating the long COVID cases since May. He’s been in contact with about 90,000 people in almost 100 countries who are all reporting nearly the same spate of serious, post-viral symptoms that knock their autonomic nervous systems out of whack. Their average age is about 38, he said, and they’re mainly women. Before COVID, many of them were vibrant, active, “and breezing through life,” he said. Now, they can’t work and often need help with basic tasks, like feeding themselves.

“It feels like your body is rebelling against you and, to add insult to injury, it’s an unpredictable war,” he said. “This should be enough to make everyone pause and think, Yeah, I am young and healthy, but can I afford to be out of action for six months? Because that is what we are seeing.”

Months into their advocacy efforts, the murky long-term effects of COVID are getting the attention of the biggest health agencies in the world. In July, the CDC acknowledged that a significant chunk of COVID patients — 35% — do not recover after three weeks, even if their cases were considered too mild for hospitalization. Last week, the patient-led research team met with the health agency, which hopes to start its own investigation, in a meeting Davis called “incredibly validating.”

Friday’s meeting with the WHO was Davis and the other long-hauler advocates’ biggest move yet.

For one and a half hours, the long-haulers shared their testimonies with top officials, including Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the WHO’s technical lead for coronavirus response, Maria Van Kerkhove, who asked questions. The WHO officials agreed to have periodic meetings with the representatives in the future and are putting together a pamphlet on what is known about the long-term effects of COVID-19.

MORE AT THE LINK: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/a...lers-who-coronavirus