I’m glad Sabemenos is able to stay at home given that in earlier posts she’s noted some age and other concerns that may place her at added risk. Living on a small farm with limited income has enabled her to get by for the near term without the financial or family resources available to many other folks. I’m rooting for her and others like her. 
I’m in a similar situation, but within my suburban mini-homestead. So compared to many, many others–including family and friends–I suppose I’m in the “very-modest-haves-for-now” group. I’m keenly aware that my situation could change for the worse in a heartbeat.
There are many, many people currently in very dire situations that will become more acute as this pandemic/financial collapse continues to deteriorate and become more obvious to all. The longer we “very-modest-haves-for-now” group can hang-on and persevere, the longer we can serve as a resource to others who are at daily risk working with the public, and/or are struggling to hang-on or are failing.
We are in the midst of a global catastrophe that will lay bare entrenched, extreme economic, health and social disparities in the months ahead. That reckoning will be disruptive, may be shocking and deadly to some more than others, and millions of people will suffer. Those that stand to profit off of this misery will not necessarily be insulated from the suffering or anger of others. I pray that that anger is not misplaced, but I fear that it will be in some circumstances, taking down the innocents and guilty alike. We can prepare and mitigate, but no one will be really “ready” or emerge unscathed from this catastrophic, historic"fourth turning".
You are so much more eloquent and articulate. Well said!
Sparky1 I was trying to post a very good new podcast but don’t know how to do it. Would you give it a go? Its’s David McAlvany’s new podcast with his guest, James Howard Kuntsler. Sorry to ask, I hope you don’t mind but you are very good with information and the podcast is worth listening to.
Thanks so much!
AKGrannyWGrit
Thanks, Granny–you’re too kind!
Here’s the link to the 4/14/20 podcast/video of David McAlvany’s interview with James Howard Kuntsler. Please let me know if this is not the one that you were looking for.
Stay healthy and alert, Granny.
All the best,
Sparky1
https://youtu.be/bDjA8032v_Y
It’s a treat McAlvany and JHK!
dealing with the mental health side of all this…
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/fighting-suicide-in-the-midst-of-a-pandemic/
Chris, thank you for all your exhaustive work. I don’t know where would be without you.
One comment on the Total Closed Cases ( Recovery vs. Death), it might be more useful to strip out the numbers from China and Iran, given that they are totally unreliable.
If you do that, then as of this moment, Total Deaths would be 136,605, and Total Recovered 416,151, or a Fatality rate of 32.8%.
Thank you Sparky and others for the perspective. I hope I didn’t sound smug. You are so right. So many didn’t have the opportunity or the means or the forewarning to prepare and their suffering is real and going to get much worse. Let’s all reach out to help all those we can
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/16/early-peek-at-data-on-gilead-coronavirus-drug-suggests-patients-are-responding-to-treatment/
Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned.
Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies. If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.
The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people, 113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir.
“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital.
This is great news. I was confident that we would find an effective anti-viral for this scourge
Thanks for the info. With 2 teen boys, I need to know we have food, lol.
Hello,
I believe the unexpected trend for the CFR relates to the time it takes an individual dies from the virus compared to the time it takes for an individual to recover. If you look at many US States numbers where they had rapid increase in cases, the number of deaths are higher than the number of recoveries. The issue is world-wide cases (and sadly, deaths) increased so drastically in March and April, but there hasn’t been time for the recoveries to keep up. Hopefully, we can get control of the new cases and we will see the recoveries go way up and the CFR return to a 5% number.
Juul
This is good news. This could be one of the “Three Ts” we need to get back to something like normal. The “Three Ts” are Testing, Tracing, and Treatment. Probably needed in that order.
There must be ubiquitous testing, with nearly instant results. Workers in close proximity need to be tested, 100%, at the beginning of every shift. There must be contact tracing – every person who tests positive needs to be interviewed and all the people with whom they’ve come in contact in the last few days need to be alerted and tested a.s.a.p. And then there needs to be effective treatment, so that a positive test isn’t a 2%-to-20% chance of a death sentence.
If this remdesivir is an effective treatment (at least >98% of the time, for mostly very sick patients), then it could be a piece of the puzzle. But testing, testing, testing is the most important piece. Imagine if you could treat people before they become critical (because you’ve been testing and contact tracing, to catch those infected early in their ordeals).
The market (IMHO) is way ahead of itself, rallying on this treatment news. A treatment alone won’t put people back into restaurants and sports stadiums in a couple of months. (Not me, anyway.)
As the idiots in Washington told us we should go back to work based on the total number of cases in an area, I began to think what a problem that would be for rural areas. Smithfield only had 1 case and now their entire pork plant is shut down.
So I started looking for per capita numbers and found a couple of good sources. This one also shows new case rates over time per US county.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html#states
Here’s a direct comparison of total vs per capita rates. Interesting.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/map-reveals-hidden-u-s-hotspots-of-coronavirus-infection/
I do think that both of these miss what to do about low population rural areas. The numbers are just meaningless
What if Covid-19 does not allow an outcome that balances all three, rather we have to make a choice and live with the outcome?
I’ve been watching Chris’s updates since the beginning and I’m becoming more convinced, as time goes on, that we will have to give up either stopping the pandemic or keeping the economy going.
Sadly, I think keeping the economy going is our only rational choice. We can live without a new iPhone every year, but not without food, energy and some basic household goods.
Don’t get me wrong. Every update I watch make me more fearful of this nasty virus. Never the less, the entire planet can’t sit at home for a couple of years waiting for a solution.
I live in Central Wisconsin, where we produce a whole lot of vegetables. Already, during harvest, we have a terrible shortage of people to help with the harvest. Those of us who have been willing to pitch in, have to work insane hours for two months just to keep the produce from laying rotting in the fields.
This year, I don’t see how the farms will manage to staff the planting season, much less the harvest.
In 2019, the green card workers we count on for harvest, were delayed for two weeks at the border in the whole migration/ICE/Border Patrol mess. With Covid-19 added to the mix, I wonder if we will see a fraction of the green card workers we rely on for harvest and it’s not just Wisconsin. Many states rely on transient green card workers to make the harvest.
I understand why lots of people are upset… But when people say it can’t get any worse, this is all just an overreaction… God will say “Hold my beer.”
I cringe watching TV and reading Facebook these days.
Does this make anyone uncomfortable besides me? Not only have testing problems been reported as erratic, odd, uneven and unreliable, I have found myself wondering if they were testing for something else, such as DNA…where is the privacy protection in all of this? Who gets the data and why?
A potential new blood test designed to detect Covid-19 infection claims to be able to deliver results in just over an hour without the need for a lab. The new Lab-in-Cartridge test from DnaNudge is reported to have undergone a successful initial trial on Covid-19 patients and will now undergo large-scale testing as part of UK efforts to ‘test, test, test’ during the pandemic. Key to the new test is a miniature analyser known as a “NudgeBox’ into which a swab is placed so that no sample handling is required. Results are then provided outside of a laboratory setting. The test is based on an existing DnaNudge DNA testing service launched last year, from which results are used to hopefully ‘nudge’ consumers into making healthier food choices. If successful, the new test has the potential to replace current PCR tests, the accuracy of which are being called into question. Along with making the detection of coronavirus infection simple, effective and quick, data collected could provide a more accurate picture of the levels of infection in order that death rates can be more accurately calculated.
Were I to hazard an unqualified guess, the first thing that I’d look at is a more lethal mutation and/or cross infection to see if lethality increases in patients infected with more than one strain. That shouldn’t be hard to do supposing data regarding strain prevalence exists, since the inflection should match the emergence of the next strain with a 10-17 day lag or something.
After that I’d look at whether depletion/exhaustion in the patient plays a role ie if the patient slowly crashed/tired out, which should be reflected in age ie logically, the young should last longer than the old.
Next, if there were case data available, I’d try to see if shorter or longer dying times matched some underlying morbidity, or predominance in symptoms eg those presenting with mainly respiratory symptoms lasting longer then those with mainly digestive or neurological symptoms.
All at a guess, of course. Very good video btw thankyou.
Focusing on single therapeutics entirely misses the important story here: a top down crony capitalist system that is orchestrated by the 0.001% and includes the FED, well-connected hedge funds, TBTF banks, the deep state, perpetual war machine, medical/industrial complex and the tech giants won’t give up until you and your children are chipped and psychologically/physically neutralized by their vaccine.