Apr 10, 2020 | Politics
“….Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates offers insights into the COVID-19 pandemic, discussing why testing and self-isolation are essential, which medical advancements show promise and what it will take for the world to endure this crisis.”
Takeaways:
- Targeted Testing, as done in South Korea and Taiwan.
- Gate’s did agree with Taiwan being shut-out of WHO, especially . (For the record, this is due to the China Communist dictatorship’s control over the UN. Taiwan was warning the WHO about what the NY Times was calling the ‘Wuhan Virus’ from December and was ignored.)
- South Korea did not have to implement a nation-wide shut down because they did such an excellent job at early testing to isolate those with COVID-19.
- Testing should be prioritized for health care workers in constant contact with patients and for those non-health-care workers who are symptomatic given the lack of supply of convenient COVID-19 kits to test everyone.
- The COVID-19 testing problem will be resolved when reliable, in-home, self-test kits that deliver same-day results, are available.
- Isolation & Shut-Down
- If you cannot do a proper job on testing early, then you need to shut down movement to “flatten the curve“
- Once the majority of COVID-19 carriers are isolated, the economy can reopen once you have done proper testing.
- Mass vaccination in the long-run is the solution according to Gates. He has spent a hundred million dollars in advancing vaccination, particularly in third-world countries.
Delay in COVID Testing: “Too many chefs in the kitchen” or “All eggs in one basket”?
The interviewer, head of TED Chris Anderson, attempts to blame free-markets when he asks is the delay in the U.S. getting COVID-19 tests out in time due to “too many chefs in the kitchen.” (In a market there are many biotech companies competing to produce the best test)
The actual cause of the delay in COVID-19 testing was that there was only one “universal” government chef in the kitchen — the CDC — which only approved one “universal” test created by the state and forbade all the “recipes” (tests) from other chefs (private companies) — and the CDC’s test did not work. CDC-FDA “universal” socialist medicine was the cause of the delay in this case.
A better metaphor would be “putting all your testing eggs in one government-controlled basket.”
Thankfully, private U.S. medical companies came to the rescue.
$$$
Related: The next outbreak? We’re not ready | Bill Gates (2015 Talk)
Apr 10, 2020 | Sci-Tech
Writes Matt Ridley on the Bats Behind The Pandemic (WSJ, April 9, 2020):
RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species Rhinolophus affinis, or rather of a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19.
[…]
In a paper published in February last year, Patrick Woo and colleagues at Hong Kong University surveyed the coronaviruses found in bats and came to a prescient conclusion: “Bat–animal and bat–human interactions, such as the presence of live bats in wildlife wet markets and restaurants in Southern China, are important for interspecies transmission of [coronaviruses] and may lead to devastating global outbreaks.”
Apr 9, 2020 | Politics
Better medical equipment, early testing, and younger patients are some of the explanations for Germany’s low COVID-19 death rates.
EuroNews mentions another possible factor: No post-mortem tests.
Quoting from David Courbe, “Dissecting Germany’s low coronavirus death rate” Agence France-Presse (AFP):
Another explanation cited by Italian experts, could be that Germany, unlike other countries, tends not to test those who have already died.
“We don’t consider post-mortem tests to be a decisive factor. We work on the principle that patients are tested before they die,” the [disease control agency Robert Koch Institute (RKI)] told AFP.
That means that if a person dies in quarantine at home and does not go to hospital, there is a high chance they will not be included in the statistics, as Giovanni Maga of Italy’s National Research Council pointed out in an interview with Euronews.
Apr 7, 2020 | Business, Politics
From “Key Medical Supplies Were Shipped From U.S. Manufacturers to Foreign Buyers, Records Show” (The Intercept):
Vessel manifests maintained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and reviewed by The Intercept show a steady flow of the medical equipment needed to treat the coronavirus being shipped abroad as recently as March 17.
[…]
Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare, a Pennsylvania-based health product firm that produces supplemental oxygen machines, sent at least three different shipments of respiratory equipment to Belgium in mid-February and early March. The total cargo included 14 containers weighing more than 55 tons.
Fifty-five tons!
On March 8, two tons of Vapotherm’s high-flow disposable patient circuit units, used for operating its respiratory aids, were loaded onto a container ship in the Port of Los Angeles. The shipment was sent to Kobe, Japan, for Japan Medicalnext Co., a health care distributor.
The records show dozens of other shipments of respirator equipment, medical garments, medical masks, oxygen concentrators, and ventilators sent abroad over the last two months.
[…]
On February 28, a ship left New York for Hamburg, Germany, with about 1.5 tons of ventilator masks manufactured by Allied Healthcare Products, a health product business based in St. Louis. The masks are used for the company’s portable ventilator unit.
The reason?
The U.S. government has placed no restrictions on exports of medical supplies while continuing to impose financial penalties on the import of personal protective gear, protective goggles, pulse oximeters, hand sanitizer, and other medical products from China. On March 10 and 12, President Donald Trump temporarily lifted tariffs, in place since 2017, on some of these medical products.
Apr 7, 2020 | Politics
From Matt Parlmer at the PPE Project:
I’ve been working on an N95 mask production project with a team for about a week now. We just got off the phone with NIOSH [National Institute for Safety and Health].
They told us that approval for a new mask production facility in the US will take at minimum 45 days, but more likely 90 [days].
A lot of people are gonna die.
Apr 6, 2020 | Politics, Sci-Tech
In an excellent article in the UK Telegraph, WHO must answer serious questions before it is trusted with leading a Covid-19 inquiry (April 3, 2020), Matt Ridley shows that WHO’s actions demonstrate that WHO placed politics and cronyism above world health:
[WHO]… failed to prepare the world for a pandemic, spending the years since the Sars and ebola alarms talking more about climate change, obesity and tobacco, while others, including the Wellcome Trust and the Gates foundation, actually set up a coalition for epidemic preparedness innovation, and countries like Singapore and South Korea put in place measures to cope with an outbreak like SARS in the future.
[WHO]… once the epidemic began in China, WHO downplayed its significance, tweeting as late as January 14 that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus”, when it had already been warned by the Taiwanese health authorities among others of strong evidence for medical staff in Wuhan becoming ill. The Chinese government at this stage had known for weeks that the virus was spreading, probably person to person, yet WHO then sycophantically praised the Chinese government.
[WHO]… has failed before. When the ebola outbreak in West Africa that was to kill 11,000 people began in late 2013, on its own admission WHO hindered the fight against the virus, obsessed with not letting others find out what was happening.
Apr 3, 2020 | Politics
American’s For Tax Freedom has posted a list of over 150 suspended regulations to help the U.S. deal with the COVID-19 virus from China.
In all cases, these anti-capitalist, anti-free-market rules have been suspended because they increase the cost and decrease the efficiency and effectiveness of America’s health care system.
Which makes you wonder why such violations of individual rights (non-objective regulations) were put into place, to begin with.
Such “universal” regulations are a political virus that has weakened the U.S. health care for the past century.
They should all be repealed. — MDC
***
Some of the suspended federal regulations include:
FDA allows state leeway in virus testing
“The FDA will allow states to take responsibility for tests developed and used by laboratories within their borders. The labs will not have to pursue Emergency Use Authorization from the agency, an emergency clearance that is normally required.” – STAT News (3/16/20)
FDA loosens regulations on distribution of newly developed tests
“Under certain circumstances, the agency will not object to any manufacturers that distribute newly developed tests before the FDA grants emergency clearance, and a similar stance will be taken toward labs that use these new tests.” – STAT News (3/16/20)
FDA issues emergency authorization of anti-malaria drug for coronavirus care
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to BARDA to allow hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine phosphate products donated to the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with COVID-19, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible.” – Department of Health and Human Services (3/29/20)
Allowance of licensed health care professionals to work in a different state from which they are licensed
The “requirements that physicians or other health care professionals hold licenses in the State in which they provide services, if they have an equivalent license from another State (and are not affirmatively barred from practice in that State or any State a part of which is included in the emergency area)” are being waived. – U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (3/13/20)
Physician-owned hospitals can temporarily increase the number of their licensed beds, operating rooms, and procedure rooms
“Physician-owned hospitals can temporarily increase the number of their licensed beds, operating rooms, and procedure rooms. For example, a physician-owned hospital may temporarily convert observation beds to inpatient beds to accommodate patient surge during the public health emergency.” – Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (3/30/20)
Allows non-physician practitioners (physician assistants, nurse practitioners) a wider scope of practice, like ordering tests and medications
“CMS is issuing waivers so that hospitals can use other practitioners, such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners, to the fullest extent possible, in accordance with a state’s emergency preparedness or pandemic plan. These clinicians can perform services such as order tests and medications that may have previously required a physician’s order where this is permitted under state law.” – Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (3/30/20)
American’s For Tax Freedom also lists suspended state rules and regulations. Most of these deal with licensing restrictions that:
- prevent medical professionals from working outside of the state they are licensed,
- limit the actions and care that physician assistants’ can perform,
- limit the number of medical professionals,
- limit the creation of hospitals and nursing homes via so-called “Certificates of Need.”
Visit American’s For Tax Freedom for the full (and updated) list.
Apr 3, 2020 | Sci-Tech
An awesome video from Kurzgesagt on the Coronavirus using data from OurWorldinData.org
Apr 3, 2020 | Sci-Tech
Nucleus medical media has created an informative video that explains how the Coronavirus reproduces in the human body.
Apr 2, 2020 | Business, Politics
Yaron Brook, in an excellent Twitter thread, makes an off the cuff outline of how he thinks a free-market would respond to the COVID-19 crisis:
In a truly capitalist society, here is how the market responds:
1. Health insurance companies monitor for health risks (they have an economic interest to do so).
2. Warn early — implement plans with hospitals, that have been developed well in advance.
3. Demand from hospitals for extra equipment, causes prices to go up quickly.
4. The market responds by bringing on new capacity quickly.
5. Groceries raise prices on high in-demand goods, thus reducing “hoarding” and assuring continued supply.
6. Hospitals (all private, and in a completely private market) activate emergency plans (which they have a profit-motive to have) for additional beds (in mothballed buildings, local hotels, or other facilities).
7. Private pharmaceutical companies and labs develop tests at the request of hospitals and clinics.
8. Private clinics start testing in mass.
9. Goverment’s job — to make sure those who are a threat to others, are isolated.
10. Private media and health experts, provide objective (non-political) advice to individuals and companies on how to deal, in the context of their own lives, with the pandemic.
11. Testing provides individuals and companies with the kind of information crucial to making rational decisions.
12. Private labs and pharma companies rush to innovate treatments and vaccines.
13. Private testing and certification organizations (“FDA” replacements) ramp up to approve test kits, treatments, and vaccines.
14. Business adjusts to peoples’ preferences for safety. Put in necessary protections and conveniences…
15. People who don’t follow the reasonable guidelines suffer social ostracism and left to suffer consequences.
16. Insurance contracts could be written in ways that say — if you want to be covered, behave…
Feel free to add — private market responses to pandemic…
You can read the original thread and the responses here.
Apr 1, 2020 | Sci-Tech
A team at Rice University has developed an automated bag valve mask ventilation unit that can be built for less than $300 in parts and help patients in treatment for COVID-19. The university expects to make plans to build the unit freely available online. Up-to-date details about the project, dubbed the ApolloBVM, and its progress are available here: http://oedk.rice.edu/apollobvm/
From U.S. Hospitals Have a Ventilator Shortage. A Team of Rice Engineers Say They Have a Solution (Texas Monthly):
Tonight, [Thomas] Herring and five other engineers are rushing to finish a project that is arguably among the most consequential in the world at the moment, one that could be deployed to the public as early as next week: a $300 3D-printable automated ventilator.
If successful, the ventilation unit—a DIY device that looks like the work of a high school robotics club—could go into mass production as early as next week, offering hospitals around the world a way to address a ventilator shortage that is expected to kill thousands of coronavirus patients suffering from the respiratory illness in the coming weeks.
…
High-quality ventilators like the kinds hospitals rely on can easily cost $10,000 apiece. Faced with shortages, doctors might soon have to make tough decisions about redistributing them from older patients to younger, healthier ones, many experts believe.
Many hospitals have an abundant supply, however, of bag valve masks, which are hand-operated ventilators that are inefficient and difficult for one person to operate for more than an hour at a time; they require a rotation of people to keep the patient alive.
The Rice prototype automates the pumping of the bag and can be specifically calibrated for each patient’s needs. With mechanized bag valve masks on hand, hospitals could buy themselves some time, allowing them to redistribute limited resources, move patients to other facilities, or allow family members the chance to say goodbye to loved ones who have no chance of recovery and might otherwise be taken off in-demand machines.
…
The Rice team believes they can eventually lower the cost of their units to somewhere between $100 and $200. The low cost was built into the engineering. The machines were designed using laser cutters and 3D printers, as well as parts that can be found in most hardware stores. “Houston and the rest of the U.S. may have manufacturers that can make these things by the hundreds,” Kavalewitz said, “but a small hospital in Malawi doesn’t have that luxury, but we’ll be able to give the plans to save lives.”
…
The Department of Defense is interested in their design and several Texas Fortune 500 companies have expressed interest in producing the model, team members say. The governor of Tennessee has also expressed interest in purchasing the machines once they’re completed.
Read the rest here.
Mar 31, 2020 | Politics
This is a wonderful talk by Dr. Paul Hseih on the case against medical licensing by the state. This is the first time I’ve seen Dr. Hseih on video and he is wonderful. Enjoy!
Mar 30, 2020 | Business, Politics
The Battelle Corporation has a technology that can decontaminate face masks making them reusable — unfortunately, FDA regulations limited its use until today.
From “Battelle gets full approval for mask sterilization”/ Dayton Daily News:
The FDA gave full approval to Battelle to utilize new surgical mask sterilization technology, which can decontaminate up to 80,000 masks a day per unit.
[…]
The FDA initially limited Battelle’s approval to 10,000 masks a day, drawing criticism from Gov. Mike DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted.
“The FDA’s decision to severely limit the use of this life-saving technology is nothing short of reckless,” DeWine said in a statement. “Battelle’s innovative technology has the capability to protect health care professionals and first responders in Ohio and across the country, but in this time of crisis, the FDA has decided not to support those who are risking their lives to save others.”
Added DeWine: “This is a matter of life and death. I am not only disappointed by this development, but I’m also stunned that the FDA would decline to do all it can to protect this country’s frontline workers in this serious time of need.”
For days running, DeWine has publicly pleaded with the FDA to issue an emergency waiver for the use of the new technology that could sterilize up to 160,000 personal protective face masks every day.
After this crisis is over, the power the FDA yields to halt innovation and progress needs to be abolished.
Mar 25, 2020 | Business, Politics
Professor Jaana Woiceshyn’s marvelous book on business ethics, How to Be Profitable and Moral: A Rational Egoist Approach to Business, has just been released as an audiobook narrated by Sean Salsbury.
Does one have to sacrifice business profits to be moral?
Dr. Woiceshyn says “no”, and explains why, by introducing business students a set of rational, logical, scientific principles on how they can maximize profits in the long run by acting morally.
Required reading — or listening — for all employees, business students, and CEOs.
Get it here.
p.s. We will have a full review posted shortly!
Mar 25, 2020 | Culture
With schools closed mostly everywhere, Glenn Woiceshyn has decided to make many of his Powerful Minds homeschool books available for free.
Writes Glenn, “While homeschooling my kids and some of their friends at the grade 6 level, I wrote a few books for homeschoolers that include text and exercises. Regarding the latter there is a teacher’s version with answers and a student’s version with the answers left out. This makes it easy for a parent to teach the material without being an expert.
“The 14 books, which can be used for grades 6-8 (ages ~ 11-13), are as follows:
- H001-H003: History – The Pre-Civilization Period (text, student version exercises, teacher version exercises)
- H004-H006: History – The Pre-Civilization Period (study units text, student version exercises, teacher version exercises)
- L001-L004: Novel Studies – Dar and the Spear Thrower (two parts with student version exercises and teacher version exercises)
- L005-L006: Novel Studies – Boy of the Painted Cave (student version exercises and teacher version exercises)
- M001-M002: Arithmetic (student version text and exercise, teacher version text and exercise)
“For the novel studies you need to purchase the novels, such as from Amazon. Feel free to print or pass around my books, which are only in PDF form.”
Link: Powerful Minds homeschool books available for free.
Mar 23, 2020 | Politics
In his essay on COVID19: A Path Forward, Dr. Amesh Adalja, a virus, bio-security expert writes on the importance of how draconian measures to foght COVID-19 can be worse then virus itself:
Plans of prolonged, enforced confinement aimed at preserving life at any cost are premised on a misunderstanding of human life and what makes it worth living. When discussing treatment options with a patient, I often invoke the concept of “quality of life”. Patients regularly choose to take on some risk to their longevity in order to preserve or enhance their quality of life. Individual preferences and shared decision-making with physicians guide medical decision making and also should apply to each individual’s decision regarding the degree of social distancing that is appropriate for them.
A degraded quality of life, particularly over time, itself generates its own risks of death. If the lockdown is prolonged, we can expect increases in deaths from cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, mental illness, and substance abuse. How many cancers will metastasize while colonoscopies or biopsies deemed “elective” will be postponed?
Quality of life consists largely in the ability to engage in the activities that make up our lives, and central to these activities is work. Most of us need to work to support ourselves, and many people, including myself, derive meaning from their work. Moreover, humans, as a species, survive by productive work. Jobs cannot be easily parsed into “life-sustaining” and “non-life-sustaining” enterprises. All work consists in the creating of something we need to sustain human life physically and psychologically. Some of these needs are more acute than others, but all contribute to our ability and will to live. Stopping people from working is like depriving a limb of blood flow. Though action is sometimes necessary in an emergency, irreparable and irreversible harm will occur if it is prolonged. A prolonged freeze of the economy — even in the face of a deadly pandemic — will cause a long-term damage far greater than any purported benefit.
He also presents five recommendations, and concludes on a positive note:
In the past infectious diseases claimed more lives per capita than are projected to be at risk from this pandemic, but humans rarely responded by retreating from activity. In the years when smallpox ravaged the planet and rubella crippled babies, humans went to the moon.
Mar 22, 2020 | Politics
- 10-minute test for coronavirus exposure utilizing blood from a finger prick can be performed anywhere by trained professionals, e.g. airports, schools, work, doctor’s office
- Biomerica has begun shipping samples of this COVID-19 test to multiple Ministries of Health and government agencies that have requested the product through the Company’s distributors in the Middle East, Europe, and other countries
- Price point of this single-use, disposable product as low as $10 per patient
- Biomerica has filed a provisional patent on rapid test technology to identify multiple coronavirus strains including the strain responsible for COVID-19
Read more here.
Updates:
How does a coronavirus home test kit work, and how do I get one?
The UK Government has bought 3.5million finger-prick antibody tests that could soon radically transform the UK’s response to Covid-19.
Ten-Minute Coronavirus Test for $1 Could Be Game Changer
U.K. company, Senegalese institute developing hand-held kit. Kits to be manufactured in Africa, sell for less than a dollar
Mar 21, 2020 | Politics
Audible.com Offers Free Streaming of Children, Teen and Classic Audible Books with No Membership
Audible is offering this promotion for children who have been affected by recent school closings. From Audible:
“For as long as schools are closed, we’re open. Starting today, kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories, including titles across six different languages, that will help them continue dreaming, learning, and just being kids.
All stories are free to stream on your desktop, laptop, phone or tablet.
Explore the collection, select a title and start listening. It’s that easy.”
https://stories.audible.com/start-listen
