When you've had a chance to digest it, and to come to grips with the reality, I'm sure there are a number of us who will dive into the deep end with you. We're adults. Our imaginations can be brutally vivid. Even if the information is as dire as you imply, we can handle it. Maybe just put a warning at the top so that those who don't want to know can skip it. There's enough snippets of hope out there to keep us afloat.
CORONA Main Coronavirus thread
- Thread starter Heliobas Disciple
- Start date
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- coronavirus
paul bunyan
Frostbite Falls, Minnesota
The wire loop that is manufactured by hand and inserted in the bic lighter flame guard provides a unique way to sterilize the wire tip.
This technique of flaming the wire in your lighter is similar to normal lab technique:
Microbiology labs transfer bacteria using a nichrome wire loop mounted on a handle. the wire loop is sterilize after every procedure by holding the wire loop in the flame of a bunsen burner untill the loop is red hot.
So the safety pin/ wire loop should be heated up for , i don't know, but atleast 20-30 seconds ( WAG) after touching an elevator button.
You might burn a hole in your pocket if you do not have a proper holster for your flaming poker. as usual, YMMV
bacterial loops for sale on Amazon: Bacterial Inoculating Loops - Holder (8 inch) and Five Reusable Nichrome Wire Tips (2.2 inch): Amazon.com: Industrial & Scientific
Sicario
The Executor
No, they are refusing entry to anyone under 16 and they are checking IDs.
Masterchief117
I'm all about the doom
Seen this ventilation method suggested in Japan. I was watching the NHK World channel and they had a PSA on how fight the virus. I hadn't heard of that being suggested but thought "yeah, it would help". Remember our parents/grandparents talking abour "airing out the house" back in the day.
Tristan
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret.
libertymavenstock
Apr 5 · 8 min read
In the last 3–5 days, a mountain of anecdotal evidence has come out of NYC, Italy, Spain, etc. about COVID-19 and characteristics of patients who get seriously ill. It’s not only piling up but now leading to a general field-level consensus backed up by a few previously little-known studies that we’ve had it all wrong the whole time. Well, a few had some things eerily correct (cough Trump cough), especially with Hydroxychloroquine with Azithromicin, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
There is no ‘pneumonia’ nor ARDS. At least not the ARDS with established treatment protocols and procedures we’re familiar with. Ventilators are not only the wrong solution, but high pressure intubation can actually wind up causing more damage than without, not to mention complications from tracheal scarring and ulcers given the duration of intubation often required… They may still have a use in the immediate future for patients too far to bring back with this newfound knowledge, but moving forward a new treatment protocol needs to be established so we stop treating patients for the wrong disease.
Here’s the breakdown of the whole process, including some ELI5-level cliff notes. Much has been simplified just to keep it digestible and layman-friendly.
Your red blood cells carry oxygen from your lungs to all your organs and the rest of your body. Red blood cells can do this thanks to hemoglobin, which is a protein consisting of four “hemes”. Hemes have a special kind of iron ion, which is normally quite toxic in its free form, locked away in its center with a porphyrin acting as it’s ‘container’. In this way, the iron ion can be ‘caged’ and carried around safely by the hemoglobin, but used to bind to oxygen when it gets to your lungs.
When the red blood cell gets to the alveoli, or the little sacs in your lungs where all the gas exchange happens, that special little iron ion can flip between FE2+ and FE3+ states with electron exchange and bond to some oxygen, then it goes off on its little merry way to deliver o2 elsewhere.
Here’s where COVID-19 comes in. Its glycoproteins bond to the heme, and in doing so that special and toxic oxidative iron ion is “disassociated” (released). It’s basically let out of the cage and now freely roaming around on its own. This is bad for two reasons:
1) Without the iron ion, hemoglobin can no longer bind to oxygen. Once all the hemoglobin is impaired, the red blood cell is essentially turned into a Freightliner truck cab with no trailer and no ability to store its cargo.. it is useless and just running around with COVID-19 virus attached to its porphyrin. All these useless trucks running around not delivering oxygen is what starts to lead to desaturation, or watching the patient’s spo2 levels drop. It is INCORRECT to assume traditional ARDS and in doing so, you’re treating the WRONG DISEASE. Think of it a lot like carbon monoxide poisoning, in which CO is bound to the hemoglobin, making it unable to carry oxygen. In those cases, ventilators aren’t treating the root cause; the patient’s lungs aren’t ‘tiring out’, they’re pumping just fine. The red blood cells just can’t carry o2, end of story.
Only in this case, unlike CO poisoning in which eventually the CO can break off, the affected hemoglobin is permanently stripped of its ability to carry o2 because it has lost its iron ion. The body compensates for this lack of o2 carrying capacity and deliveries by having your kidneys release hormones like erythropoietin, which tell your bone marrow factories to ramp up production on new red blood cells with freshly made and fully functioning hemoglobin. This is the reason you find elevated hemoglobin and decreased blood oxygen saturation as one of the 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.
2) That little iron ion, along with millions of its friends released from other hemes, are now floating through your blood freely. As I mentioned before, this type of iron ion is highly reactive and causes oxidative damage. It turns out that this happens to a limited extent naturally in our bodies and we have cleanup & defense mechanisms to keep the balance. The lungs, in particular, have 3 primary defenses to maintain “iron homeostasis”, 2 of which are in the alveoli, those little sacs in your lungs we talked about earlier. The first of the two are little macrophages that roam around and scavenge up any free radicals like this oxidative iron. The second is a lining on the walls (called the epithelial surface) which has a thin layer of fluid packed with high levels of antioxidant molecules.. things like abscorbic acid (AKA Vitamin C) among others.
Well, this is usually good enough for naturally occurring rogue iron ions but with COVID-19 running rampant your body is now basically like a progressive state letting out all the prisoners out of the prisons… it’s just too much iron and it begins to overwhelm your lungs’ countermeasures, and thus begins the process of pulmonary oxidative stress. This leads to damage and inflammation, which leads to all that nasty stuff and damage you see in CT scans of COVID-19 patient lungs. Ever noticed how it’s always bilateral? (both lungs at the same time) Pneumonia rarely ever does that, but COVID-19 does… EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
— — — — — — — — — — — — -
Once your body is now running out of control, with all your oxygen trucks running around without any freight, and tons of this toxic form of iron floating around in your bloodstream, other defenses kick in. While your lungs are busy with all this oxidative stress they can’t handle, and your organs are being starved of o2 without their constant stream of deliveries from red blood cell’s hemoglobin, and your liver is attempting to do its best to remove the iron and store it in its ‘iron vault’. Only its getting overwhelmed too. It’s starved for oxygen and fighting a losing battle from all your hemoglobin letting its iron free, and starts crying out “help, I’m taking damage!” by releasing an enzyme called alanine aminotransferase (ALT).
BOOM, there is your second of 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.
Eventually, if the patient’s immune system doesn’t fight off the virus in time before their blood oxygen saturation drops too low, ventilator or no ventilator, organs start shutting down. No fuel, no work. The only way to even try to keep them going is max oxygen, even a hyperbaric chamber if one is available on 100% oxygen at multiple atmospheres of pressure, just to give what’s left of their functioning hemoglobin a chance to carry enough o2 to the organs and keep them alive. Yeah we don’t have nearly enough of those chambers, so some fresh red blood cells with normal hemoglobin in the form of a transfusion will have to do.
The core point being, treating patients with the iron ions stripped from their hemoglobin (rendering it abnormally nonfunctional) with ventilator intubation is futile, unless you’re just hoping the patient’s immune system will work its magic in time. The root of the illness needs to be addressed.
Best case scenario? Treatment regimen early, before symptoms progress too far. Hydroxychloroquine (more on that in a minute, I promise) with Azithromicin has shown fantastic, albeit critics keep mentioning ‘anecdotal’ to describe the mountain, promise and I’ll explain why it does so well next. But forget straight-up plasma with antibodies, that might work early but if the patient is too far gone they’ll need more. They’ll need all the blood: antibodies and red blood cells. No help in sending over a detachment of ammunition to a soldier already unconscious and bleeding out on the battlefield, you need to send that ammo along with some hemoglobin-stimulant-magic so that he can wake up and fire those shots at the enemy.
The story with Hydroxychloroquine
All that hilariously misguided and counterproductive criticism the media piled on chloroquine (purely for political reasons) as a viable treatment will now go down as the biggest Fake News blunder to rule them all. The media actively engaged their activism to fight ‘bad orange man’ at the cost of thousands of lives. Shame on them.
How does chloroquine work? Same way as it does for malaria. You see, malaria is this little parasite that enters the red blood cells and starts eating hemoglobin as its food source. The reason chloroquine works for malaria is the same reason it works for COVID-19 — while not fully understood, it is suspected to bind to DNA and interfere with the ability to work magic on hemoglobin. The same mechanism that stops malaria from getting its hands on hemoglobin and gobbling it up seems to do the same to COVID-19 (essentially little snippets of DNA in an envelope) from binding to it. On top of that, Hydroxychloroquine (an advanced descendant of regular old chloroquine) lowers the pH which can interfere with the replication of the virus. Again, while the full details are not known, the entire premise of this potentially ‘game changing’ treatment is to prevent hemoglobin from being interfered with, whether due to malaria or COVID-19.
No longer can the media and armchair pseudo-physicians sit in their little ivory towers, proclaiming “DUR so stoopid, malaria is bacteria, COVID-19 is virus, anti-bacteria drug no work on virus!”. They never got the memo that a drug doesn’t need to directly act on the pathogen to be effective. Sometimes it’s enough just to stop it from doing what it does to hemoglobin, regardless of the means it uses to do so.
Anyway, enough of the rant. What’s the end result here? First, the ventilator emergency needs to be re-examined. If you’re putting a patient on a ventilator because they’re going into a coma and need mechanical breathing to stay alive, okay we get it. Give ’em time for their immune systems to pull through. But if they’re conscious, alert, compliant — keep them on O2. Max it if you have to. If you HAVE to inevitably ventilate, do it at low pressure but max O2. Don’t tear up their lungs with max PEEP, you’re doing more harm to the patient because you’re treating the wrong disease.
Ideally, some form of treatment needs to happen to:
Fini.
- Inhibit viral growth and replication. Here plays CHQ+ZPAK+ZINC or other retroviral therapies being studies. Less virus, less hemoglobin losing its iron, less severity and damage.
- Therapies used for anyone with abnormal hemoglobin or malfunctioning red blood cells. Blood transfusions. Whatever, I don’t know the full breadth and scope because I’m not a physician. But think along those lines, and treat the real disease. If you’re thinking about giving them plasma with antibodies, maybe if they’re already in bad shape think again and give them BLOOD with antibodies, or at least blood followed by plasma with antibodies.
- Now that we know more about how this virus works and affects our bodies, a whole range of options should open up.
- Don’t trust China. China is ASSHOE. (disclaimer: not talking about the people, just talking about the regime). They covered this up and have caused all kinds of death and carnage, both literal and economic. The ripples of this pandemic will be felt for decades.
Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its s…
archived 5 Apr 2020 18:58:09 UTCarchive.is
Interesting hypothesis; citing sources would have helped libertymavenstock's case.
I will be looking forward to more info in this vein...
Thanks for posting it.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
I wondered that as well. (Dad drank gin and tonic in summer. )
Tristan
Has No Life - Lives on TB
11 dead after COVID-19 outbreak at Madison County nursing home; governor orders tighter retail rules
Posted: Apr 6, 2020 / 12:02 PM EDT / Updated: Apr 6, 2020 / 04:22 PM EDT
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.– Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and health officials made several announcements Monday regarding the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Indiana.
Starting at midnight, retail businesses must now operate like bars and restaurants, meaning only curbside, carryout and online order/delivery can be offered. This does not apply to grocery stores and pharmacies.
Retail stores that provide essential items must limit the number of customers in the store at a time, adjust hours to accommodate vulnerable groups and limit hours for cleaning and restocking.
An outbreak at Bethany Pointe nursing home in Madison County has resulted in 11 deaths, Dr. Kristina Box announced. Three employees are hospitalized.
“These are a grandparents, parents, friends, church family, individuals that we care about and want to protect. Please help us do that,” said Box.
Box said there are enough intensive care beds and ventilators right now to handle the expected surge in patients, though staffing may be a problem. The strategic national stockpile provided enough personal protective equipment for the next 13 days if used in a very conservative manner. Donations will be needed.
The governor also ordered all state campgrounds to close, including Indiana State Park campgrounds. An exception can be made for someone whose primary residence is on a campground. State parks will remain open. DNR says people can still go to the parks and use the trails, but can’t camp overnight.
On Friday, the governor announced the state’s stay-at-home order will continue through April 20 at 11:59 p.m. He also said Indiana’s public health emergency will continue through May 3. Monday’s executive order solidified those updates.
The day before, he said Indiana schools will remain closed and focused on remote learning through the end of the school year.
Monday morning, the Indiana State Department of Health reported a total of 139 coronavirus deaths, 4,944 total cases and 26,191 people tested. The ISDH is tracking cases daily on its website.
The governor has been holding daily briefings via video conferencing and encouraging Hoosiers to engage in social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
11 dead after COVID-19 outbreak at Madison County nursing home; governor orders tighter retail rules
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.– Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and health officials made several announcements Monday regarding the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Indiana. Starting at midnight, retail …fox59.com
Snip from another almost identical story:
"The state is helping to transfer residents there without COVID-19 symptoms to another skilled nursing home, Box said."
If I had a loved one in a nursing home and they were transferring untested elderly into it, I would be livid.
"transfer residents there without COVID-19 symptoms..."
Also known as asymptomatic.
Any guesses on which way this goes?
Tristan
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Do not know about the chelation therapy, but it still leaves the issue of hemes that couldn't carry o2 any longer... assuming the post was accurate; which since there are no citations only assertions it's hard to follow up on...
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
39:26 min
Coronavirus Cases: Turning The Corner?
•Premiered 3 hours ago
Peak Prosperity Dr. Chris Martenson (pathologist, investments - including gold)
NEW!! Read our new report on how to avoid wanting to divorce or murder everyone you're stuck in lockdown with https://www.peakprosperity.com/relati...
Very promising developments on the covid-19 treatment and vaccine fronts.
First, PittCoVacc, a vaccine candidate out of the University of Pittsburg, follows previously existing approaches, very similar to the way the flu vaccine works. Initial tests on mice have proven successfully in producing copious antibodies against covid-19. The vaccine delivery system is both painless and highly scalable. So whether or not PittCoVacc is the "silver bullet" here, it's existence shows that the energies and innovation of our research companies is yielding good options -- a process that should only accelerate from here. And now that we have more data, it really does appear that the hydroxycholorquine/azithromycin cocktail combo reduces the severity and duration of covid-19 infection -- provided it's delivered early on enough. These encouraging developments, plus an exploding set of citizen-entreprenuers creating their own DIY solutions (especially with masks) give us the first real sense that we are beginning to make real progress against the coronavirus.
We'll need to hold tight to that good news, as the next few weeks will be quite traumatizing with the expected huge increases in # of infected and deaths. But will well get through this. And it's heartening to see promising developments like PittCoVac and hydroxycholoquine begin to put points on the board for our side.
[NOTE: Amazon,Home Depot and Walmart were all out of the smaller packs of Tool Box Blue Shop Towels for DIY masks, but I was able to order some from Harbor Freight.]
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paul bunyan
Frostbite Falls, Minnesota
New Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers.*********** yes you read that right.....
Covid virus is killing legacy mainframes, bad code, where is Cory where you need him....
josephsteinberg.com
That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are currently overwhelmed as a result of COVID-19-related job losses.
COBOL, for those who are unfamiliar, is a computer language that is over 60 years old, and was once the staple of software development across industry and government. By the late 1980s, however, it had become sufficiently obsolete that many universities did not even include it in their computer science curricula. In fact, while there are certainly are COBOL systems still in use today, relatively few software developers under the age of 50 have ever seen, never mind written, even one line of COBOL. It is not surprising that even New Jersey’s 62-year old governor, who was an executive at Goldman Sachs for decades, had apparently not heard its name recently enough to remember it correctly.
COBOL’s heyday in the 1970s means that the majority of COBOL experts in America are likely well over 60 years old – making them significantly at risk for death or danger by COVID-19 – and probably a bit rusty at their former craft; many of them have likely not developed in COBOL since long before many of the readers of this article were born.
The danger of relying on COBOL despite its obsolescence is not a new issue.
Nearly a quarter century ago, in the mid to late 1990s, as the Y2K bug required updating of antiquated COBOL-based systems, many industry experts sounded the alarm that the supply of qualified COBOL programmers was quickly dwindling; at the time, some COBOL programmers even had to be hired out of retirement in order to carry out Y2K-related repairs. As a result of what was learned dealing with Y2K there was nearly universal industry-wide acceptance of the fact that the many still-remaining COBOL-based systems should be replaced as soon as practical before maintenance became a severe problem.
Since then, many others have voiced concerns – including in a government report entitled “Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems” that was presented to a US Congressional Committee in 2016.
In the case of New Jersey, I can safely mention at this point, that shortly after I began filing payroll tax forms with the state in 2005, I sent emails to various State offices – and even a physical letter to then governor – that the systems with which I was interfacing appeared to both be using obsolete versions of software and contained configurations that could lead to security vulnerabilities. Some of those problems remained in place over a decade later.
The failure to keep systems current is not a keep-up-with-the-Joneses type issue. Today it is delaying unemployment compensation to large numbers of people who desperately need money for food and other necessities after losing their jobs to government-ordered COVID-19 shutdowns. Outdated software almost always introduces various security risks. And, in a 2018 article entitled Why You Should Not Use Software That Is No Longer Supported, I discussed multiple other serious problems introduced by utilizing outdated software; keep in mind that the focus of that piece was on organizations using the obsolete version of Windows known as Windows XP ; COBOL, which is 32 years older than XP, was obsolete even before XP was released.
New Jersey’s information systems did not become antiquated by magic – the State government failed to properly maintain them. Governor Murphy today promised a postmortem – but we were supposed to have had one 20 years ago after Y2K. This time, let’s get it right.
After the pandemic is over, let’s renew the efforts that were supposed to have been made after Y2K, and, across our country, replace outdated systems; we need technology that can be properly supported and secured. If we wait any longer, we may have another disaster – and that one may come when there are no living people with the relevant expertise to fix the computer problems.
Do we still have any cobol programmers left in TB2K?? Please help.
Covid virus is killing legacy mainframes, bad code, where is Cory where you need him....
COVID-19 Response: New Jersey Urgently Needs COBOL Programmers (Yes, You Read That Correctly) - Joseph Steinberg
New Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers. That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are...
josephsteinberg.com
That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are currently overwhelmed as a result of COVID-19-related job losses.
COBOL, for those who are unfamiliar, is a computer language that is over 60 years old, and was once the staple of software development across industry and government. By the late 1980s, however, it had become sufficiently obsolete that many universities did not even include it in their computer science curricula. In fact, while there are certainly are COBOL systems still in use today, relatively few software developers under the age of 50 have ever seen, never mind written, even one line of COBOL. It is not surprising that even New Jersey’s 62-year old governor, who was an executive at Goldman Sachs for decades, had apparently not heard its name recently enough to remember it correctly.
COBOL’s heyday in the 1970s means that the majority of COBOL experts in America are likely well over 60 years old – making them significantly at risk for death or danger by COVID-19 – and probably a bit rusty at their former craft; many of them have likely not developed in COBOL since long before many of the readers of this article were born.
The danger of relying on COBOL despite its obsolescence is not a new issue.
Nearly a quarter century ago, in the mid to late 1990s, as the Y2K bug required updating of antiquated COBOL-based systems, many industry experts sounded the alarm that the supply of qualified COBOL programmers was quickly dwindling; at the time, some COBOL programmers even had to be hired out of retirement in order to carry out Y2K-related repairs. As a result of what was learned dealing with Y2K there was nearly universal industry-wide acceptance of the fact that the many still-remaining COBOL-based systems should be replaced as soon as practical before maintenance became a severe problem.
Since then, many others have voiced concerns – including in a government report entitled “Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems” that was presented to a US Congressional Committee in 2016.
In the case of New Jersey, I can safely mention at this point, that shortly after I began filing payroll tax forms with the state in 2005, I sent emails to various State offices – and even a physical letter to then governor – that the systems with which I was interfacing appeared to both be using obsolete versions of software and contained configurations that could lead to security vulnerabilities. Some of those problems remained in place over a decade later.
The failure to keep systems current is not a keep-up-with-the-Joneses type issue. Today it is delaying unemployment compensation to large numbers of people who desperately need money for food and other necessities after losing their jobs to government-ordered COVID-19 shutdowns. Outdated software almost always introduces various security risks. And, in a 2018 article entitled Why You Should Not Use Software That Is No Longer Supported, I discussed multiple other serious problems introduced by utilizing outdated software; keep in mind that the focus of that piece was on organizations using the obsolete version of Windows known as Windows XP ; COBOL, which is 32 years older than XP, was obsolete even before XP was released.
New Jersey’s information systems did not become antiquated by magic – the State government failed to properly maintain them. Governor Murphy today promised a postmortem – but we were supposed to have had one 20 years ago after Y2K. This time, let’s get it right.
After the pandemic is over, let’s renew the efforts that were supposed to have been made after Y2K, and, across our country, replace outdated systems; we need technology that can be properly supported and secured. If we wait any longer, we may have another disaster – and that one may come when there are no living people with the relevant expertise to fix the computer problems.
Do we still have any cobol programmers left in TB2K?? Please help.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
In Right-Wing Media, the Pivot Didn’t Happen
The president belatedly acknowledged how dire a threat COVID-19 is, but many of his enablers in right-wing media refuse to take his cue.
www.theatlantic.com
In Right-Wing Media, the Pivot Didn’t Happen
The president belatedly acknowledged how dire a threat COVID-19 is, but many of his enablers in right-wing media refuse to take his cue.
11:00 AM ET
Peter Beinart
Professor of journalism at the City University of New York
Mainstream news descriptions of the right-wing media’s approach to COVID-19 typically go something like this: At first, prominent conservatives on television and radio downplayed the threat; only when Donald Trump himself acknowledged that the coronavirus was likely to kill large numbers of Americans did his enablers on Fox News and talk radio reverse course.
On March 31, the New York Times contributing opinion writer Kara Swisher asserted that Fox News had “dished out dangerous misinformation about the virus in the early days of the crisis” and had only recently gotten “much more serious in its reporting on the coronavirus, as has Mr. Trump.” On April 1, the Times reporter Jeremy Peters described an initial “denial among many of Mr. Trump’s followers” in the press about the seriousness of the COVID-19 threat, followed by a “sharp pivot” to acknowledging its severity but “blaming familiar enemies in the Democratic Party and the news media” for the destruction the virus has brought.
As damning as such accounts are, they’re also too generous. They depict the right-wing media’s understatement of the coronavirus danger as a thing of the past. That’s not so. Some of the most influential conservative commentators on television and radio—Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and Glenn Beck—still downplay the danger posed by COVID-19. Remarkably, they’re rejecting scientific expertise even when it’s endorsed by Trump himself.
Not everyone in the conservative media is questioning the coronavirus threat. In early March, Tucker Carlson told his audience that “people you trust, people you probably voted for” were “minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem.”
His Fox News colleague Sean Hannity, who may have been one of the pundits whom Carlson obliquely criticized, stopped playing down the COVID-19 threat once Trump did.
But Carlson and Hannity appear to be exceptions. On April 2—four days after Trump changed course and extended social-distancing requirements until the end of April—Limbaugh, citing an article in the British magazine The Spectator, suggested that the “coronavirus is being listed as a cause of death for many people who are not dying because of it.” The next day he alleged that models suggesting hundreds of thousands of Americans could die from the virus are “just as bad and just as unreliable as climate change models.” He went on to accuse the mainstream media of “hyping huge [potential] death tolls” as they had in 1991, when they warned of “all these body bags [the] U.S. military was gonna [need] because the U.S. military had no way to beat Saddam Hussein” in the Gulf War. Limbaugh’s implication was clear: Just as the Gulf War took far fewer American lives than many commentators had predicted, COVID-19 would too.
Ingraham, who follows Hannity at 10 p.m. on Fox News, has peddled a similar line. On Twitter on March 31, she shared a column by William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn that suggested the number of deaths from COVID-19 would prove “much smaller than our annual rate of opioid overdose deaths—46,802—or annual deaths due to motor vehicle crashes, 33,654” and urged Americans to “reclaim a sense of proportion.” On April 2, she quoted an article in Britain’s The Telegraph, which declared that, in Italy, “only 12 percent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus.” In other words, Italians aren’t dying in large numbers from the virus after all. That same day, Ingraham promoted an interview with a Stanford professor who has claimed that “projections of the death toll” from COVID-19 “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.”
Other prominent conservative commentators are downplaying the coronavirus threat in much the same way. On April 2, Levin—the fourth-most-popular radio talk-show host in America, after Limbaugh, Hannity, and Dave Ramsey, according to Talkers—accused “the leftwing, phony media” of “demanding compliance with the most extreme mortality predictions.” On April 3, he offered “perspective” by tweeting about a chart that showed COVID-19 had killed fewer people than Ebola, MERS, SARS or the swine flu. On April 2, Beck—the nation’s fifth-most-popular radio talk-show host—warned that anti-Trump activists had created virus models that were “wildly inaccurate” and “always skewed to large, large numbers” of COVID-19 deaths. The day before, on April 1, Beck told his Twitter followers, “The coronavirus ISN’T America’s most dangerous virus … That’s the mainstream media!”
The government’s social-distancing requirements, these pro-Trump talkers insist, are likely more harmful than the virus itself. “Ten million people have lost their jobs,” Limbaugh announced on April 2. “That’s not enough for people like Bill Gates. That’s not enough for people who want to shoot down the entire country.” Over the weekend, both Ingraham and Levin circulated a Federalist article headlined “Why Severe Social Distancing Might Actually Result In More Coronavirus Deaths.” On April 1, Beck urged policy makers to “start putting hard dates on some of these [social-distancing] measures because we have got to get back to work … A forced economic recession isn’t a gamble that I signed up for.”
Limbaugh, Ingraham, Levin, and Beck haven’t criticized Trump personally for acknowledging the severity of the pandemic. But neither are they giving credence to his newly dire estimates of the COVID-19 threat. The reason may be that they have different incentives than he does. Conservative talkers answer to their conservative audience, which, according to polls, remains more skeptical than Democrats of government restrictions on movement. Trump must worry about public opinion as a whole, which strongly favors government-imposed social distancing. Trump’s decision to abandon his goal of reopening the country by Easter, according to Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of the Times, came after “political advisers described for him polling that showed that voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.”
Trump must also balance his habitual suspicion of government experts against the fact that Americans trust those experts—in particular, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci—far more than they trust him in the battle against COVID-19. For Trump to reject their advice entirely might hurt his own standing, especially among the Democrats and independents who have helped boost his approval rating since the virus hit America’s shores.
Conservative talk radio, by contrast, is built on distrust of experts. Left-wing populists attack economic elites; right-wing populists attack cultural elites, especially those whom progressives venerate. In recent years, as progressives have championed the scientific consensus that climate change poses a grave danger, many conservatives have come to see scientists as yet another collection of snobs using the veneer of expertise to impose its liberal ideology on the country. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that while a large majority of Democrats believed that scientists were better than other people “at making good policy decisions about scientific issues,” a large majority of Republicans disagreed.
Over the past week, this populist distrust of scientific experts has suffused conservative talk radio’s downplaying of the COVID-19 threat. “The ‘experts’ are routinely wrong on issues big and small—on wearing masks, on reusable grocery bags … virus modeling and treatments,” Ingraham tweeted on April 3.
“So when experts issue edicts, remember their often spectacular record of failure.” On April 1, Beck urged politicians “to stop relying on flawed modeling data to make these decisions” and instead “listen to the people in your local communities.” On April 5, Levin warned that “the media, ‘experts,’ and Democrats are trying to make it impossible for the president to even consider rational options for opening parts of the economy.” On April 3, Ingraham declared, “The ‘experts’ aren’t capable of thinking beyond the virus to an even worse death spiral affecting millions of lives here and abroad.”
This distrust of the scientific establishment helps explain why Limbaugh, Levin, and Ingraham—along with Carlson and Hannity—have all championed hydroxychloroquine as an antidote to COVID-19. Fauci has said he can’t verify that the drug is effective and safe. But for conservative talkers, the prospect that Americans without elite credentials have discovered a cure that has eluded scientific elites is part of what makes hydroxychloroquine so enticing. “I don’t think you need to have 12 years of residency or whatever,” Limbaugh declared in an April 3 segment titled “Dr. Fauci Sides with Bureaucracy Over Hydroxychloroquine Hope.”
When Trump and some of America’s most prominent conservative pundits part company over the coronavirus threat, the discrepancy between them represents a fascinating test of partisanship versus ideology. Limbaugh, Ingraham, Levin, and Beck are trying to balance their loyalty to Trump with their distrust of credentialed experts, especially those venerated by the mainstream media. That, so far, they’re largely choosing the latter suggests that liberals may be overestimating Trump’s influence. Even when he reluctantly accepts a scientific consensus, some of the biggest conservative megaphones in America still won’t.
help the dark and facist domain of joisey? nope no saleNew Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers.*********** yes you read that right.....
Covid virus is killing legacy mainframes, bad code, where is Cory where you need him....
COVID-19 Response: New Jersey Urgently Needs COBOL Programmers (Yes, You Read That Correctly) - Joseph Steinberg
New Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers. That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are...
That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are currently overwhelmed as a result of COVID-19-related job losses.
COBOL, for those who are unfamiliar, is a computer language that is over 60 years old, and was once the staple of software development across industry and government. By the late 1980s, however, it had become sufficiently obsolete that many universities did not even include it in their computer science curricula. In fact, while there are certainly are COBOL systems still in use today, relatively few software developers under the age of 50 have ever seen, never mind written, even one line of COBOL. It is not surprising that even New Jersey’s 62-year old governor, who was an executive at Goldman Sachs for decades, had apparently not heard its name recently enough to remember it correctly.
COBOL’s heyday in the 1970s means that the majority of COBOL experts in America are likely well over 60 years old – making them significantly at risk for death or danger by COVID-19 – and probably a bit rusty at their former craft; many of them have likely not developed in COBOL since long before many of the readers of this article were born.
The danger of relying on COBOL despite its obsolescence is not a new issue.
Nearly a quarter century ago, in the mid to late 1990s, as the Y2K bug required updating of antiquated COBOL-based systems, many industry experts sounded the alarm that the supply of qualified COBOL programmers was quickly dwindling; at the time, some COBOL programmers even had to be hired out of retirement in order to carry out Y2K-related repairs. As a result of what was learned dealing with Y2K there was nearly universal industry-wide acceptance of the fact that the many still-remaining COBOL-based systems should be replaced as soon as practical before maintenance became a severe problem.
Since then, many others have voiced concerns – including in a government report entitled “Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems” that was presented to a US Congressional Committee in 2016.
In the case of New Jersey, I can safely mention at this point, that shortly after I began filing payroll tax forms with the state in 2005, I sent emails to various State offices – and even a physical letter to then governor – that the systems with which I was interfacing appeared to both be using obsolete versions of software and contained configurations that could lead to security vulnerabilities. Some of those problems remained in place over a decade later.
The failure to keep systems current is not a keep-up-with-the-Joneses type issue. Today it is delaying unemployment compensation to large numbers of people who desperately need money for food and other necessities after losing their jobs to government-ordered COVID-19 shutdowns. Outdated software almost always introduces various security risks. And, in a 2018 article entitled Why You Should Not Use Software That Is No Longer Supported, I discussed multiple other serious problems introduced by utilizing outdated software; keep in mind that the focus of that piece was on organizations using the obsolete version of Windows known as Windows XP ; COBOL, which is 32 years older than XP, was obsolete even before XP was released.
New Jersey’s information systems did not become antiquated by magic – the State government failed to properly maintain them. Governor Murphy today promised a postmortem – but we were supposed to have had one 20 years ago after Y2K. This time, let’s get it right.
After the pandemic is over, let’s renew the efforts that were supposed to have been made after Y2K, and, across our country, replace outdated systems; we need technology that can be properly supported and secured. If we wait any longer, we may have another disaster – and that one may come when there are no living people with the relevant expertise to fix the computer problems.
Do we still have any cobol programmers left in TB2K?? Please help.
and I don’t do cobol
or Fortran
these should have been updated a generation ago
r
TBonz
Veteran Member
My guess is that this does NOT end until a very large percentage of us gets it and it burns out. There won't be a vaccine for it.
In other words, the staying in will only keep hospitals for being overburdened, but lengthen the time we deal with this. But it's coming for us.
Tom McDowell
BAMN
Donald Trump paid tribute to Johnson at his daily White House briefing: “I found him to be a fantastic person, a fantastic warm strong smart guy. He loves his country, you see that. He fought like hell for his country. But intensive care is big stuff, really big stuff.”
===
Lots of past tense, is there hope?
A pivotal moment for sure.
===
:-(
===
Lots of past tense, is there hope?
A pivotal moment for sure.
===
:-(
jward
passin' thru
NEWS MAKER
@NEWS_MAKER
24m
Here is a 1200 points on the DOW Headline VIRUS IS MOSTLY MILD AND RARELY FATAL FOR US KIDS, DATA SHOW
View: https://twitter.com/NEWS_MAKER/status/1247361471203266560?s=20
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Virus is mostly mild and rarely fatal for US kids, data show
By LINDSEY TANNERyesterday
FILE - In this April 2, 2020 file photo, an adult and a child, both wearing face masks amid the coronavirus outbreak, carry bags in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. The first U.S. national data on COVID-19 in children suggest that while the virus usually isn’t severe in kids, some do get sick enough to require hospital treatment. The new information is in a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Monday, April 6, 2020. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)
The first national data on COVID-19 in U.S. children suggest that while the illness usually isn’t severe in kids, some do get sick enough to require hospital treatment.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Monday shows that fever, cough and shortness of breath were the most common symptoms in kids, but they occurred less often than in adults. The findings mostly echo reports from China about how the new coronavirus affects children.
The report included nearly 150,000 laboratory-confirmed U.S. cases in adults and children from Feb. 12 through April 2. About 2,500 of them, or almost 2%, were children. While most kids didn’t become severely ill, three youngsters died.
About 1 in 5 infected children were hospitalized versus 1 in 3 adults. Cases were more common in older children and teens but serious illness appeared to be more common in infants. Cases were slightly more common in boys than girls.
The authors cautioned that many details were missing from pediatric cases, so the report should be considered preliminary.
For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms that clear up in a few weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including life-threatening pneumonia.
Confirmed U.S. cases top 340,000 with more than 10,000 reported deaths. Globally, there have been more than 1.3 million confirmed cases, and more than 70,000 reported deaths.
The report authors stressed that because people without symptoms, including children, are likely playing a role in transmitting the virus, “social distancing and everyday preventive measures” are recommended for all ages.
Dr. Larry Kociolek, an infectious disease specialist at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, said the report should reassure parents and health care workers that children are less likely than adults to get very sick from the new virus. But that can pose a challenge, he said, because “patients with milder illness are less likely to quarantine themselves and may be at similar risk of transmitting.”
Authorities need to take that into account when considering when to lift social distancing policies and reopen schools, Kociolek said.
___
Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Tom McDowell
BAMN
Snip from the woodpile.....
Have you wondered what a collapse would really look like? Look around. The long predicted disaster is upon us. We're rafting a waterfall into what looks to be the deepest depression in history.
see the rest ==>> Woodpile Report
===.
Nasty epidemics are a natural thing. Turning the country into East Germany circa 1960 isn't. "Non-essential" businesses have been ordered to shut their doors and face ruin, the population is under house arrest and the job market has collapsed into a smoldering heap. Almost ten million people became unemployed in only two weeks, an off-the-chart record.
St. Louis Fed economist Miguel Faria-e-Castro, projected that unemployment could hit 32 percent in the second quarter as more than 47 million workers are laid off as a result of the pandemic, which has forced swaths of the economy to shut down. That would exceed the 24.9 percent peak during the Great Depression.
Food bank pantries are seeing demand at least double or triple
If civil order breaks down America may become all but ungovernable, even under martial law
Civic life and the economy are in a stark, staring, terror-stricken panic. The details are fascinating but unhelpful. "What's next" is the question that matters. We know this is just the beginning, the lowery sky and chill wind before the storm. The gloomy preppers had it right. Now we'll see if the doomer preppers have it right as well.
All preppers learn from the past and present to prepare for the future. Stockpiling alone is not prepping. Committed preppers have mastered food gardening and dehydration and home canning, they've trained and equipped for medical care beyond first aid, they're well practiced with firearms and preparing game, experienced in woodcraft, can do credible carpentry with only hand tools, and so forth.
But opportunities are closing as an effect of the lockdown. One vivid example: garden supplies, including seeds, have been declared non-essential and can no longer be sold by Walmart and Target in Vermont
Beyond prepping comes self-sufficiency. This means an off-grid homestead. It's a hard and austere life of relentless but rewarding labor, a step too far for most. Some form tiny communities with members selected for critical expertise. After self-sufficiency comes survivalism, a set of skills and practices to endure or outlast extreme events in hostile environments, long term, using minimal kit and as-found resources. This is too demanding for all but the hardiest among us.
Which you choose depends on what you believe is next. But have a care, what comes next may make the choice for you. It's best to be decently prepared on all fronts.
For my part it's as it's always been, continuous tweaking. If it comes to hoofing it, I've upgraded my bugout bag from three day capability to four without adding much weight. Next up is improving my water pre-filter kit. What I have on hand is good enough, this is a convenience thing. I use coffee filters, they're good for removing gunk down to ten or fifteen microns, which relieves the purification filter of the additional loading and delays clogging.
Too much? Not enough? As I said, events will make the call.
see the rest ==>> Woodpile Report
===.
One in five needing hospitalization is not a small number. That is alarming and as a grandparent, not too reassuring.
NEWS MAKER
@NEWS_MAKER
24m
Here is a 1200 points on the DOW Headline VIRUS IS MOSTLY MILD AND RARELY FATAL FOR US KIDS, DATA SHOW
View: https://twitter.com/NEWS_MAKER/status/1247361471203266560?s=20
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Virus is mostly mild and rarely fatal for US kids, data show
By LINDSEY TANNERyesterday
FILE - In this April 2, 2020 file photo, an adult and a child, both wearing face masks amid the coronavirus outbreak, carry bags in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. The first U.S. national data on COVID-19 in children suggest that while the virus usually isn’t severe in kids, some do get sick enough to require hospital treatment. The new information is in a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Monday, April 6, 2020. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)
The first national data on COVID-19 in U.S. children suggest that while the illness usually isn’t severe in kids, some do get sick enough to require hospital treatment.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Monday shows that fever, cough and shortness of breath were the most common symptoms in kids, but they occurred less often than in adults. The findings mostly echo reports from China about how the new coronavirus affects children.
The report included nearly 150,000 laboratory-confirmed U.S. cases in adults and children from Feb. 12 through April 2. About 2,500 of them, or almost 2%, were children. While most kids didn’t become severely ill, three youngsters died.
About 1 in 5 infected children were hospitalized versus 1 in 3 adults. Cases were more common in older children and teens but serious illness appeared to be more common in infants. Cases were slightly more common in boys than girls.
The authors cautioned that many details were missing from pediatric cases, so the report should be considered preliminary.
For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms that clear up in a few weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including life-threatening pneumonia.
Confirmed U.S. cases top 340,000 with more than 10,000 reported deaths. Globally, there have been more than 1.3 million confirmed cases, and more than 70,000 reported deaths.
The report authors stressed that because people without symptoms, including children, are likely playing a role in transmitting the virus, “social distancing and everyday preventive measures” are recommended for all ages.
Dr. Larry Kociolek, an infectious disease specialist at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, said the report should reassure parents and health care workers that children are less likely than adults to get very sick from the new virus. But that can pose a challenge, he said, because “patients with milder illness are less likely to quarantine themselves and may be at similar risk of transmitting.”
Authorities need to take that into account when considering when to lift social distancing policies and reopen schools, Kociolek said.
___
Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Dr. John Campbell (the Brit) mentioned airing out the house, whenever the winter weather allowed, two or three weeks ago. Then he got more caught up with the country numbers, and I haven't heard him say it since. He is a credible source.
Intestinal Fortitude
Have Faith
The Atlantic is leftist drekIn Right-Wing Media, the Pivot Didn’t Happen
The president belatedly acknowledged how dire a threat COVID-19 is, but many of his enablers in right-wing media refuse to take his cue.
In Right-Wing Media, the Pivot Didn’t Happen
The president belatedly acknowledged how dire a threat COVID-19 is, but many of his enablers in right-wing media refuse to take his cue.
11:00 AM ET
Peter Beinart
Professor of journalism at the City University of New York
Talk radio host Rush LimbaughANDREW HARNIK /AP
Mainstream news descriptions of the right-wing media’s approach to COVID-19 typically go something like this: At first, prominent conservatives on television and radio downplayed the threat; only when Donald Trump himself acknowledged that the coronavirus was likely to kill large numbers of Americans did his enablers on Fox News and talk radio reverse course.
On March 31, the New York Times contributing opinion writer Kara Swisher asserted that Fox News had “dished out dangerous misinformation about the virus in the early days of the crisis” and had only recently gotten “much more serious in its reporting on the coronavirus, as has Mr. Trump.” On April 1, the Times reporter Jeremy Peters described an initial “denial among many of Mr. Trump’s followers” in the press about the seriousness of the COVID-19 threat, followed by a “sharp pivot” to acknowledging its severity but “blaming familiar enemies in the Democratic Party and the news media” for the destruction the virus has brought.
As damning as such accounts are, they’re also too generous. They depict the right-wing media’s understatement of the coronavirus danger as a thing of the past. That’s not so. Some of the most influential conservative commentators on television and radio—Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and Glenn Beck—still downplay the danger posed by COVID-19. Remarkably, they’re rejecting scientific expertise even when it’s endorsed by Trump himself.
Not everyone in the conservative media is questioning the coronavirus threat. In early March, Tucker Carlson told his audience that “people you trust, people you probably voted for” were “minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem.”
His Fox News colleague Sean Hannity, who may have been one of the pundits whom Carlson obliquely criticized, stopped playing down the COVID-19 threat once Trump did.
But Carlson and Hannity appear to be exceptions. On April 2—four days after Trump changed course and extended social-distancing requirements until the end of April—Limbaugh, citing an article in the British magazine The Spectator, suggested that the “coronavirus is being listed as a cause of death for many people who are not dying because of it.” The next day he alleged that models suggesting hundreds of thousands of Americans could die from the virus are “just as bad and just as unreliable as climate change models.” He went on to accuse the mainstream media of “hyping huge [potential] death tolls” as they had in 1991, when they warned of “all these body bags [the] U.S. military was gonna [need] because the U.S. military had no way to beat Saddam Hussein” in the Gulf War. Limbaugh’s implication was clear: Just as the Gulf War took far fewer American lives than many commentators had predicted, COVID-19 would too.
Ingraham, who follows Hannity at 10 p.m. on Fox News, has peddled a similar line. On Twitter on March 31, she shared a column by William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn that suggested the number of deaths from COVID-19 would prove “much smaller than our annual rate of opioid overdose deaths—46,802—or annual deaths due to motor vehicle crashes, 33,654” and urged Americans to “reclaim a sense of proportion.” On April 2, she quoted an article in Britain’s The Telegraph, which declared that, in Italy, “only 12 percent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus.” In other words, Italians aren’t dying in large numbers from the virus after all. That same day, Ingraham promoted an interview with a Stanford professor who has claimed that “projections of the death toll” from COVID-19 “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.”
Other prominent conservative commentators are downplaying the coronavirus threat in much the same way. On April 2, Levin—the fourth-most-popular radio talk-show host in America, after Limbaugh, Hannity, and Dave Ramsey, according to Talkers—accused “the leftwing, phony media” of “demanding compliance with the most extreme mortality predictions.” On April 3, he offered “perspective” by tweeting about a chart that showed COVID-19 had killed fewer people than Ebola, MERS, SARS or the swine flu. On April 2, Beck—the nation’s fifth-most-popular radio talk-show host—warned that anti-Trump activists had created virus models that were “wildly inaccurate” and “always skewed to large, large numbers” of COVID-19 deaths. The day before, on April 1, Beck told his Twitter followers, “The coronavirus ISN’T America’s most dangerous virus … That’s the mainstream media!”
The government’s social-distancing requirements, these pro-Trump talkers insist, are likely more harmful than the virus itself. “Ten million people have lost their jobs,” Limbaugh announced on April 2. “That’s not enough for people like Bill Gates. That’s not enough for people who want to shoot down the entire country.” Over the weekend, both Ingraham and Levin circulated a Federalist article headlined “Why Severe Social Distancing Might Actually Result In More Coronavirus Deaths.” On April 1, Beck urged policy makers to “start putting hard dates on some of these [social-distancing] measures because we have got to get back to work … A forced economic recession isn’t a gamble that I signed up for.”
Limbaugh, Ingraham, Levin, and Beck haven’t criticized Trump personally for acknowledging the severity of the pandemic. But neither are they giving credence to his newly dire estimates of the COVID-19 threat. The reason may be that they have different incentives than he does. Conservative talkers answer to their conservative audience, which, according to polls, remains more skeptical than Democrats of government restrictions on movement. Trump must worry about public opinion as a whole, which strongly favors government-imposed social distancing. Trump’s decision to abandon his goal of reopening the country by Easter, according to Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of the Times, came after “political advisers described for him polling that showed that voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.”
Trump must also balance his habitual suspicion of government experts against the fact that Americans trust those experts—in particular, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci—far more than they trust him in the battle against COVID-19. For Trump to reject their advice entirely might hurt his own standing, especially among the Democrats and independents who have helped boost his approval rating since the virus hit America’s shores.
Conservative talk radio, by contrast, is built on distrust of experts. Left-wing populists attack economic elites; right-wing populists attack cultural elites, especially those whom progressives venerate. In recent years, as progressives have championed the scientific consensus that climate change poses a grave danger, many conservatives have come to see scientists as yet another collection of snobs using the veneer of expertise to impose its liberal ideology on the country. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that while a large majority of Democrats believed that scientists were better than other people “at making good policy decisions about scientific issues,” a large majority of Republicans disagreed.
Over the past week, this populist distrust of scientific experts has suffused conservative talk radio’s downplaying of the COVID-19 threat. “The ‘experts’ are routinely wrong on issues big and small—on wearing masks, on reusable grocery bags … virus modeling and treatments,” Ingraham tweeted on April 3.
“So when experts issue edicts, remember their often spectacular record of failure.” On April 1, Beck urged politicians “to stop relying on flawed modeling data to make these decisions” and instead “listen to the people in your local communities.” On April 5, Levin warned that “the media, ‘experts,’ and Democrats are trying to make it impossible for the president to even consider rational options for opening parts of the economy.” On April 3, Ingraham declared, “The ‘experts’ aren’t capable of thinking beyond the virus to an even worse death spiral affecting millions of lives here and abroad.”
This distrust of the scientific establishment helps explain why Limbaugh, Levin, and Ingraham—along with Carlson and Hannity—have all championed hydroxychloroquine as an antidote to COVID-19. Fauci has said he can’t verify that the drug is effective and safe. But for conservative talkers, the prospect that Americans without elite credentials have discovered a cure that has eluded scientific elites is part of what makes hydroxychloroquine so enticing. “I don’t think you need to have 12 years of residency or whatever,” Limbaugh declared in an April 3 segment titled “Dr. Fauci Sides with Bureaucracy Over Hydroxychloroquine Hope.”
When Trump and some of America’s most prominent conservative pundits part company over the coronavirus threat, the discrepancy between them represents a fascinating test of partisanship versus ideology. Limbaugh, Ingraham, Levin, and Beck are trying to balance their loyalty to Trump with their distrust of credentialed experts, especially those venerated by the mainstream media. That, so far, they’re largely choosing the latter suggests that liberals may be overestimating Trump’s influence. Even when he reluctantly accepts a scientific consensus, some of the biggest conservative megaphones in America still won’t.
school marm
Veteran Member
Our feed store was doing the same last Saturday. Not sure if they were checking IDs though.
jward
passin' thru
EndGameWW3
@EndGameWW3
1m
Worker at Elgin Mental Health CenterTests Positive for COVID-19
View: https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1247368385211629569?s=20
@EndGameWW3
1m
Worker at Elgin Mental Health CenterTests Positive for COVID-19
View: https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1247368385211629569?s=20
jward
passin' thru
They may be trying to discourage those "we're bored" family outings as much as the unaccompanied young ones...
ainitfunny
Saved, to glorify God.
[
It won't be long before anyone using anything like that will be suspected of using a device to SPREAD GERMS!
Can you imagine what that must look like on the elevator security cam?
You may be brilliant in some ways but will be explaining yourself over and over to "dumber people" which is not worth all the hours in police stations over and over and over.
Wow!! Didn't your mama ever teach you about avoiding the APPEARANCE OF GUILT?
Card readers, ATM, fuel pump keypads, doorbell, etc.?
It won't be long before anyone using anything like that will be suspected of using a device to SPREAD GERMS!
Can you imagine what that must look like on the elevator security cam?
You may be brilliant in some ways but will be explaining yourself over and over to "dumber people" which is not worth all the hours in police stations over and over and over.
Last edited:
Macgyver
Has No Life - Lives on TB
I did not know the cobal spread over to unemployment.New Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers.*********** yes you read that right.....
Covid virus is killing legacy mainframes, bad code, where is Cory where you need him....
COVID-19 Response: New Jersey Urgently Needs COBOL Programmers (Yes, You Read That Correctly) - Joseph Steinberg
New Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers. That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are...
That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are currently overwhelmed as a result of COVID-19-related job losses.
COBOL, for those who are unfamiliar, is a computer language that is over 60 years old, and was once the staple of software development across industry and government. By the late 1980s, however, it had become sufficiently obsolete that many universities did not even include it in their computer science curricula. In fact, while there are certainly are COBOL systems still in use today, relatively few software developers under the age of 50 have ever seen, never mind written, even one line of COBOL. It is not surprising that even New Jersey’s 62-year old governor, who was an executive at Goldman Sachs for decades, had apparently not heard its name recently enough to remember it correctly.
COBOL’s heyday in the 1970s means that the majority of COBOL experts in America are likely well over 60 years old – making them significantly at risk for death or danger by COVID-19 – and probably a bit rusty at their former craft; many of them have likely not developed in COBOL since long before many of the readers of this article were born.
The danger of relying on COBOL despite its obsolescence is not a new issue.
Nearly a quarter century ago, in the mid to late 1990s, as the Y2K bug required updating of antiquated COBOL-based systems, many industry experts sounded the alarm that the supply of qualified COBOL programmers was quickly dwindling; at the time, some COBOL programmers even had to be hired out of retirement in order to carry out Y2K-related repairs. As a result of what was learned dealing with Y2K there was nearly universal industry-wide acceptance of the fact that the many still-remaining COBOL-based systems should be replaced as soon as practical before maintenance became a severe problem.
Since then, many others have voiced concerns – including in a government report entitled “Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems” that was presented to a US Congressional Committee in 2016.
In the case of New Jersey, I can safely mention at this point, that shortly after I began filing payroll tax forms with the state in 2005, I sent emails to various State offices – and even a physical letter to then governor – that the systems with which I was interfacing appeared to both be using obsolete versions of software and contained configurations that could lead to security vulnerabilities. Some of those problems remained in place over a decade later.
The failure to keep systems current is not a keep-up-with-the-Joneses type issue. Today it is delaying unemployment compensation to large numbers of people who desperately need money for food and other necessities after losing their jobs to government-ordered COVID-19 shutdowns. Outdated software almost always introduces various security risks. And, in a 2018 article entitled Why You Should Not Use Software That Is No Longer Supported, I discussed multiple other serious problems introduced by utilizing outdated software; keep in mind that the focus of that piece was on organizations using the obsolete version of Windows known as Windows XP ; COBOL, which is 32 years older than XP, was obsolete even before XP was released.
New Jersey’s information systems did not become antiquated by magic – the State government failed to properly maintain them. Governor Murphy today promised a postmortem – but we were supposed to have had one 20 years ago after Y2K. This time, let’s get it right.
After the pandemic is over, let’s renew the efforts that were supposed to have been made after Y2K, and, across our country, replace outdated systems; we need technology that can be properly supported and secured. If we wait any longer, we may have another disaster – and that one may come when there are no living people with the relevant expertise to fix the computer problems.
Do we still have any cobol programmers left in TB2K?? Please help.
They have been pissing away money for years trying to get the DMV of that database.
Millions of dollars and nothing to show for it.
COBOL is not a database, it is a programming language.
parsonswife
Veteran Member
3
I agree 1 in 5 is horrendous horrid horrifying stats
Scotto
Set Apart
I did quite a bit of work there 30 years ago.
They had a "criminally insane" ward, and man, the $h!t I saw there. Dayum.
jward
passin' thru
Every grandparent I've watched bury a baby would be thrilled to learn that the cuts were not so deep as they could have been. All a matter of perspective- and gratitude : )
jward
passin' thru
I've seen and heard a few things too. I do not sleep all that much. Probably no connection
marsh
On TB every waking moment
4:19 min
New York hospitals struggle as military reinforcements arrive to battle coronavirus
•Apr 6, 2020
CBS Evening News
The U.S. now reports more than 360,000 cumulative coronavirus cases. Three out of 4 American hospitals are now treating patients with COVID-19. But there are signs that the outbreak might be leveling off in its epicenter, New York state. Mola Lenghi has the latest.
Krayola
Veteran Member
Liberals will take the above info and try to make this Trump's "Katrina moment." They will accuse him of purposely letting black people die like they did with Bush.
Elizabeth Thomas
@lizzkatherine_
1h
BREAKING NEWS: Louisiana just released COVID-19 data which shows that African-Americans account for 70% of ALL DEATHS in the state. African-Americans makes up roughly 32% of the population. #COVID19
Just got done watching the Martenson vid posted above. It raises the possibility Covid-19 is a BLOOD disease. Wonder if perhaps increased vulnerability/lethality among blacks has anything to do with sickle cell?
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNDE12HymYc
marsh
On TB every waking moment
California also has some sort of issue. Wonder if it is the same one.New Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers.*********** yes you read that right.....
Covid virus is killing legacy mainframes, bad code, where is Cory where you need him....
COVID-19 Response: New Jersey Urgently Needs COBOL Programmers (Yes, You Read That Correctly) - Joseph Steinberg
New Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers. That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are...
That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are currently overwhelmed as a result of COVID-19-related job losses.
COBOL, for those who are unfamiliar, is a computer language that is over 60 years old, and was once the staple of software development across industry and government. By the late 1980s, however, it had become sufficiently obsolete that many universities did not even include it in their computer science curricula. In fact, while there are certainly are COBOL systems still in use today, relatively few software developers under the age of 50 have ever seen, never mind written, even one line of COBOL. It is not surprising that even New Jersey’s 62-year old governor, who was an executive at Goldman Sachs for decades, had apparently not heard its name recently enough to remember it correctly.
COBOL’s heyday in the 1970s means that the majority of COBOL experts in America are likely well over 60 years old – making them significantly at risk for death or danger by COVID-19 – and probably a bit rusty at their former craft; many of them have likely not developed in COBOL since long before many of the readers of this article were born.
The danger of relying on COBOL despite its obsolescence is not a new issue.
Nearly a quarter century ago, in the mid to late 1990s, as the Y2K bug required updating of antiquated COBOL-based systems, many industry experts sounded the alarm that the supply of qualified COBOL programmers was quickly dwindling; at the time, some COBOL programmers even had to be hired out of retirement in order to carry out Y2K-related repairs. As a result of what was learned dealing with Y2K there was nearly universal industry-wide acceptance of the fact that the many still-remaining COBOL-based systems should be replaced as soon as practical before maintenance became a severe problem.
Since then, many others have voiced concerns – including in a government report entitled “Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems” that was presented to a US Congressional Committee in 2016.
In the case of New Jersey, I can safely mention at this point, that shortly after I began filing payroll tax forms with the state in 2005, I sent emails to various State offices – and even a physical letter to then governor – that the systems with which I was interfacing appeared to both be using obsolete versions of software and contained configurations that could lead to security vulnerabilities. Some of those problems remained in place over a decade later.
The failure to keep systems current is not a keep-up-with-the-Joneses type issue. Today it is delaying unemployment compensation to large numbers of people who desperately need money for food and other necessities after losing their jobs to government-ordered COVID-19 shutdowns. Outdated software almost always introduces various security risks. And, in a 2018 article entitled Why You Should Not Use Software That Is No Longer Supported, I discussed multiple other serious problems introduced by utilizing outdated software; keep in mind that the focus of that piece was on organizations using the obsolete version of Windows known as Windows XP ; COBOL, which is 32 years older than XP, was obsolete even before XP was released.
New Jersey’s information systems did not become antiquated by magic – the State government failed to properly maintain them. Governor Murphy today promised a postmortem – but we were supposed to have had one 20 years ago after Y2K. This time, let’s get it right.
After the pandemic is over, let’s renew the efforts that were supposed to have been made after Y2K, and, across our country, replace outdated systems; we need technology that can be properly supported and secured. If we wait any longer, we may have another disaster – and that one may come when there are no living people with the relevant expertise to fix the computer problems.
Do we still have any cobol programmers left in TB2K?? Please help.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
I read in some article waaay back that estrogen was thought to account for the differential between men and women. I wonder if it skips pre-pubescent kids because they lack some sort of hormonal influence
NEWS MAKER
@NEWS_MAKER
24m
Here is a 1200 points on the DOW Headline VIRUS IS MOSTLY MILD AND RARELY FATAL FOR US KIDS, DATA SHOW
View: https://twitter.com/NEWS_MAKER/status/1247361471203266560?s=20
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Virus is mostly mild and rarely fatal for US kids, data show
By LINDSEY TANNERyesterday
FILE - In this April 2, 2020 file photo, an adult and a child, both wearing face masks amid the coronavirus outbreak, carry bags in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. The first U.S. national data on COVID-19 in children suggest that while the virus usually isn’t severe in kids, some do get sick enough to require hospital treatment. The new information is in a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Monday, April 6, 2020. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)
The first national data on COVID-19 in U.S. children suggest that while the illness usually isn’t severe in kids, some do get sick enough to require hospital treatment.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Monday shows that fever, cough and shortness of breath were the most common symptoms in kids, but they occurred less often than in adults. The findings mostly echo reports from China about how the new coronavirus affects children.
The report included nearly 150,000 laboratory-confirmed U.S. cases in adults and children from Feb. 12 through April 2. About 2,500 of them, or almost 2%, were children. While most kids didn’t become severely ill, three youngsters died.
About 1 in 5 infected children were hospitalized versus 1 in 3 adults. Cases were more common in older children and teens but serious illness appeared to be more common in infants. Cases were slightly more common in boys than girls.
The authors cautioned that many details were missing from pediatric cases, so the report should be considered preliminary.
For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms that clear up in a few weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including life-threatening pneumonia.
Confirmed U.S. cases top 340,000 with more than 10,000 reported deaths. Globally, there have been more than 1.3 million confirmed cases, and more than 70,000 reported deaths.
The report authors stressed that because people without symptoms, including children, are likely playing a role in transmitting the virus, “social distancing and everyday preventive measures” are recommended for all ages.
Dr. Larry Kociolek, an infectious disease specialist at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, said the report should reassure parents and health care workers that children are less likely than adults to get very sick from the new virus. But that can pose a challenge, he said, because “patients with milder illness are less likely to quarantine themselves and may be at similar risk of transmitting.”
Authorities need to take that into account when considering when to lift social distancing policies and reopen schools, Kociolek said.
___
Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Krayola
Veteran Member
^^ Your post reminded me of an interesting article I read. See below.
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Coronavirus and the Sun: a Lesson from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
Richard Hobday
Follow
Mar 10 · 6 min read
Fresh air, sunlight and improvised face masks seemed to work a century ago; and they might help us now.
by Richard Hobday
When new, virulent diseases emerge, such SARS and Covid-19, the race begins to find new vaccines and treatments for those affected. As the current crisis unfolds, governments are enforcing quarantine and isolation, and public gatherings are being discouraged. Health officials took the same approach 100 years ago, when influenza was spreading around the world. The results were mixed. But records from the 1918 pandemic suggest one technique for dealing with influenza — little-known today — was effective. Some hard-won experience from the greatest pandemic in recorded history could help us in the weeks and months ahead.
Influenza patients getting sunlight at the Camp Brooks emergency open-air hospital in Boston. Medical staff were not supposed to remove their masks. (National Archives)
Put simply, medics found that severely ill flu patients nursed outdoors recovered better than those treated indoors. A combination of fresh air and sunlight seems to have prevented deaths among patients; and infections among medical staff.[1] There is scientific support for this. Research shows that outdoor air is a natural disinfectant. Fresh air can kill the flu virus and other harmful germs. Equally, sunlight is germicidal and there is now evidence it can kill the flu virus.
`Open-Air’ Treatment in 1918
During the great pandemic, two of the worst places to be were military barracks and troop-ships. Overcrowding and bad ventilation put soldiers and sailors at high risk of catching influenza and the other infections that often followed it.[2,3] As with the current Covid-19 outbreak, most of the victims of so-called `Spanish flu’ did not die from influenza: they died of pneumonia and other complications.
When the influenza pandemic reached the East coast of the United States in 1918, the city of Boston was particularly badly hit. So the State Guard set up an emergency hospital. They took in the worst cases among sailors on ships in Boston harbour. The hospital’s medical officer had noticed the most seriously ill sailors had been in badly-ventilated spaces.
So he gave them as much fresh air as possible by putting them in tents. And in good weather they were taken out of their tents and put in the sun. At this time, it was common practice to put sick soldiers outdoors. Open-air therapy, as it was known, was widely used on casualties from the Western Front. And it became the treatment of choice for another common and often deadly respiratory infection of the time; tuberculosis. Patients were put outside in their beds to breathe fresh outdoor air. Or they were nursed in cross-ventilated wards with the windows open day and night. The open-air regimen remained popular until antibiotics replaced it in the 1950s.
Doctors who had first-hand experience of open-air therapy at the hospital in Boston were convinced the regimen was effective. It was adopted elsewhere. If one report is correct, it reduced deaths among hospital patients from 40 per cent to about 13 per cent.[4] According to the Surgeon General of the Massachusetts State Guard:
`The efficacy of open air treatment has been absolutely proven, and one has only to try it to discover its value.’
Fresh Air is a Disinfectant
Patients treated outdoors were less likely to be exposed to the infectious germs that are often present in conventional hospital wards. They were breathing clean air in what must have been a largely sterile environment. We know this because, in the 1960s, Ministry of Defence scientists proved that fresh air is a natural disinfectant.[5]
Something in it, which they called the Open Air Factor, is far more harmful to airborne bacteria — and the influenza virus — than indoor air. They couldn’t identify exactly what the Open Air Factor is. But they found it was effective both at night and during the daytime.
Their research also revealed that the Open Air Factor’s disinfecting powers can be preserved in enclosures — if ventilation rates are kept high enough. Significantly, the rates they identified are the same ones that cross-ventilated hospital wards, with high ceilings and big windows, were designed for.[6] But by the time the scientists made their discoveries, antibiotic therapy had replaced open-air treatment. Since then the germicidal effects of fresh air have not featured in infection control, or hospital design. Yet harmful bacteria have become increasingly resistant to antibiotics.
Sunlight and Influenza Infection
Putting infected patients out in the sun may have helped because it inactivates the influenza virus.[7] It also kills bacteria that cause lung and other infections in hospitals.[8] During the First World War, military surgeons routinely used sunlight to heal infected wounds.[9] They knew it was a disinfectant. What they didn’t know is that one advantage of placing patients outside in the sun is they can synthesise vitamin D in their skin if sunlight is strong enough. This was not discovered until the 1920s. Low vitamin D levels are now linked to respiratory infections and may increase susceptibility to influenza.[10]
Also, our body’s biological rhythms appear to influence how we resist infections.[11] New research suggests they can alter our inflammatory response to the flu virus.[12] As with vitamin D, at the time of the 1918 pandemic, the important part played by sunlight in synchronizing these rhythms was not known.
Face Masks Coronavirus and Flu
Surgical masks are currently in short supply in China and elsewhere. They were worn 100 years ago, during the great pandemic, to try and stop the influenza virus spreading. While surgical masks may offer some protection from infection they do not seal around the face. So they don’t filter out small airborne particles. In 1918, anyone at the emergency hospital in Boston who had contact with patients had to wear an improvised face mask. This comprised five layers of gauze fitted to a wire frame which covered the nose and mouth. The frame was shaped to fit the face of the wearer and prevent the gauze filter touching the mouth and nostrils. The masks were replaced every two hours; properly sterilized and with fresh gauze put on. They were a forerunner of the N95 respirators in use in hospitals today to protect medical staff against airborne infection.
Temporary Hospitals
Staff at the hospital kept up high standards of personal and environmental hygiene. No doubt this played a big part in the relatively low rates of infection and deaths reported there. The speed with which their hospital and other temporary open-air facilities were erected to cope with the surge in pneumonia patients was another factor. Today, many countries are not prepared for a severe influenza pandemic.[13] Their health services will be overwhelmed if there is one. Vaccines and antiviral drugs might help. Antibiotics may be effective for pneumonia and other complications. But much of the world’s population will not have access to them. If another 1918 comes, or the Covid-19 crisis gets worse, history suggests it might be prudent to have tents and pre-fabricated wards ready to deal with large numbers of seriously ill cases. Plenty of fresh air and a little sunlight might help too.
Dr. Richard Hobday is an independent researcher working in the fields of infection control, public health and building design. He is the author of `The Healing Sun’.
References
- Hobday RA and Cason JW. The open-air treatment of pandemic influenza. Am J Public Health 2009;99 Suppl 2:S236–42. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2008.134627.
- Aligne CA. Overcrowding and mortality during the influenza pandemic of 1918. Am J Public Health 2016 Apr;106(4):642–4. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2015.303018.
- Summers JA, Wilson N, Baker MG, Shanks GD. Mortality risk factors for pandemic influenza on New Zealand troop ship, 1918. Emerg Infect Dis 2010 Dec;16(12):1931–7. doi:10.3201/eid1612.100429.
- Anon. Weapons against influenza. Am J Public Health 1918 Oct;8(10):787–8. doi: 10.2105/ajph.8.10.787.
- May KP, Druett HA. A micro-thread technique for studying the viability of microbes in a simulated airborne state. J Gen Micro-biol 1968;51:353e66. Doi: 10.1099/00221287–51–3–353.
- Hobday RA. The open-air factor and infection control. J Hosp Infect 2019;103:e23-e24 doi.org/10.1016/j.jhin.2019.04.003.
- Schuit M, Gardner S, Wood S et al. The influence of simulated sunlight on the inactivation of influenza virus in aerosols. J Infect Dis 2020 Jan 14;221(3):372–378. doi: 10.1093/infdis/jiz582.
- Hobday RA, Dancer SJ. Roles of sunlight and natural ventilation for controlling infection: historical and current perspectives. J Hosp Infect 2013;84:271–282. doi: 10.1016/j.jhin.2013.04.011.
- Hobday RA. Sunlight therapy and solar architecture. Med Hist 1997 Oct;41(4):455–72. doi:10.1017/s0025727300063043.
- Gruber-Bzura BM. Vitamin D and influenza-prevention or therapy? Int J Mol Sci 2018 Aug 16;19(8). pii: E2419. doi: 10.3390/ijms19082419.
- Costantini C, Renga G, Sellitto F, et al. Microbes in the era of circadian medicine. Front Cell Infect Microbiol. 2020 Feb 5;10:30. doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2020.00030.
- Sengupta S, Tang SY, Devine JC et al. Circadian control of lung inflammation in influenza infection. Nat Commun 2019 Sep 11;10(1):4107. doi: 10.1038/s41467–019–11400–9.
- Jester BJ, Uyeki TM, Patel A, Koonin L, Jernigan DB. 100 Years of medical countermeasures and pandemic influenza preparedness. Am J Public Health. 2018 Nov;108(11):1469–1472. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2018.304586.
Coronavirus and the Sun: a Lesson from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
Fresh air, sunlight and improvised face masks seemed to work a century ago; and they might help us now.
medium.com
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