Corona-zona

  To be honest, I thought (and hoped) I would be running out of things to blog about by now. But damn, interesting/important news just keeps coming.  Here are three brief items for your reading enjoyment. If You Have a Fake Vaccine Card, Don't Do This Dumb blonde, Tik-Toker, and Anti-Vaxxer, and Biden hater @notsamantharose17 thought it would be cool to troll the libs by showing off her fake vaccine card . She proudly did so while lip-synching the song What You Gonna Do About It? Only one problem. Her actual identifying info was plainly shown on the card she was displaying. Oops! A user named @thatdaneshguy (whose hobby is apparently reporting online criminals ) decided what he would do about it is report her to the FBI. Having a fake vaccine card is a felony . YouTube Bans Top Anti-Vaxxers—Too Little Too Late YouTube has  banned top anti-vaxxers like Joseph Mercola and Robert Kennedy Jr. and deleted 30,000 of their videos.  Good move guys, but you should have done this like a yea

  This literally just in: A Superior Court judge has ruled in favor of plaintiffs in their lawsuit to void elements of budget reconciliation bills passed this summer that banned virus mitigation measures by Arizona schools. This is a ruling that should surprise no one. Plaintiffs argued that the restrictions violate the Arizona constitution two ways. First, bills must be about one thing. The legislation in question, containing both budget and public illness measures, are about more than one thing.  Second, bills must clearly describe their purpose in the title. Legislation labeled "budget reconciliation" don't make clear that it also contains public illness measures. Arizona Public Health Association Director Will Humble thinks Attorney General Mark Byrnovich will surely appeal to the Supreme Court. And he probably will, to further burnish is credentials as a public servant who is stupid about the pandemic. But I predict he will get nowhere on appeal because the facts

  A few players in the NBA are vaccine resisters.  According to an  article in Rolling Stone , they are pushing their players' union to reject plans by the league to require them to get the jab.   According to the story, during a recent teleconference the response from the players to the proposal was “Non-starter. Non-starter.” The group of COVIDiots rejecting the vaccines represents around ten percent of all players.   One of them is apparently Kyrie Irving. I say "apparently" because he refuses to disclose his vaccination status, but that's as good as disclosing your non-vaccinated status.   Mr. Irving makes around $34 million a year to throw a ball through a hoop. If I were paying someone that kind of money to do that work, you can be damn sure he'd either be vaccinated or be out of a job. The twist in the plot is that sensible and well-governed cities like New York and San Francisco have established rules that nobody can enter an indoor sporting facility—team

 Here are the Arizona pandemic summary numbers for the week just ended: All the numbers continue in the right direction.  Here is the seven-day average graph: This continues looking good, though I worry a little bit that things could be stalling. Here is the vaccine accelerator: No acceleration, just coasting like we've been doing the the last two months.  

  I know I've said this before, but just when you think people can't get any crazier, they find a way.  According to a story by NBC , there is a movement afoot among anti-vaxxers to convince people that hospitals are killing their loved ones on purpose . Or at least the hospitals are keeping them from getting life-saving "miracle cures."  Naturally, they're organizing on that cesspool of social media, Facebook. Groups have sprung up urging people to get their loved ones out, and providing advice on how to do so. Once out, they can receive treatments like ivermectin horse paste , iodine gargles , and (a new one to me) inhaling nebulized hydrogen peroxide. A physician quoted in the article calls this "vigilante medicine," and it's an apt metaphor.   The vigilantes are trying to science-up this course of treatment by calling it a "protocol." Any day now I expect injections of disinfectants and powerful lights inside the body to be added to the

  Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Byrnovich is running for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Mark Kelley. So naturally he is frantically trying to show how T****y he is.   One way he's done that is by being the first AG in the nation to file a lawsuit against Biden's vaccine policies. Those include a mandate for federal workers and contractors, and an OSHA regulation requiring large employers to prove workers are vaccinate or are tested weekly. The mandate part isn't for Americans in general, it's for federal employees. Like any other employer the federal government certainly can make rules for its own employees. And OSHA certainly can regulate workplace safety. The OSHA regulation isn't even a vaccine mandate—notwithstanding the misleading statements in his press release —it's an option, vaccine OR testing. So Byrnovich is making a bizarre argument that Biden's policies violate equal protection because he's not making illegal immigrant

  Today, several updates on matters previously discussed on this blog. Florida Fires Back at Idaho Last week, I reported that Idaho was challenging Florida for the title of top COVIDiot state by appointing to a health board a medical doctor who opposes masks and vaccines and supports ivermectin.   Well, Florida was not about to take that challenge lying down! Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis did them one better by making another such medical doctor the state's surgeon general . Take that, Idaho! Doctors Who Spread Misinformation Are Starting to Face Discipline I have never understood how medical professional organizations have been able to look the other way while their members dispense disinformation about pandemic-related topics like masks and vaccines. As noted earlier, many of these physicians are doing it to make money . Idaho even  appointed one of them  to a medical board. It seems the professional organizations are finally losing patience with these people. A

  As you may have heard, former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona has been tapped  by  Governor Doug Ducey to jumpstart Arizona's flagging vaccination program. And it needs jumpstarting too: The number of Arizonans vaccinated has increased by only fractions of a percent in each of the last eight weeks. Everybody has been waiting to hear what Carmona is getting paid $400 per hou r to do. We have our answer, and apparently the plan is to reinvent the wheel. According to a recent  interview he gave, Carmona wants to do two things.  First, he wants to depoliticize conversation about the vaccine by avoiding "charged words" like mandates.  Good luck with that one, doc. Not clear how you're going to de-politicize things when your colleague Mr. Byrnovich is grandstanding with his  lawsuit against the Biden administration's vaccine policies. It also doesn't help when your boss is going around calling Biden " dictatorial " over the issue. The second

  Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended: Readers, I'm very excited to report that every single 1 week change is in the green ! Even the 4 week change numbers are heading in the right direction, except hospitalizations.  The case rate changes are small (Maricopa County) or steady (statewide), so it's not like cases are plummeting. But it sure is good to see nothing going south for a change.  It's the first time that has happened since June 19! It also looks like the new cases peak-and-decline is hanging in there: Same old story on the vaccination rate.  Here is the vaccine accelerometer: More anemic growth in percent fully vaccinated, though we did climb one notch in the state rankings.  AZDHS has to try something new to get people vaccinated. Or maybe that's too much to expect. We can only hope that between the 52% of us who've been jabbed and the 14% of us who have been infected (not mutually exclusive), we are at least putting a den

  As noted in an earlier post , states like Florida have a problem. They have low vaccination rates because conservative politicians inflame their followers by railing about the government and framing vaccination as a matter of freedom. Meanwhile con-men (and women) target the same audience with disinformation about vaccine dangers in order to make money selling supplements and quack treatments. As a result, lots of Floridians are unvaccinated; accordingly, lots of them are getting sick and dying. According to data compiled by the NY Times , in recent days Florida was the fourth-worst state for COVID-19 hospitalizations and the worst in the country for deaths. This leaves a guy like Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis in a precarious position. One one hand, it's overwhelmingly his supporters who are suffering and dying. On the other hand, he can't possibly come to his senses and take effective steps to get people vaccinated after he's dug himself so deep into tha

  This blog has featured lots of coverage  of Florida and its reckless pandemic behaviors and policies. I never thought any state could challenge their position as the Top COVIDiot State. But Idaho is making a serious run at it.   According to data from the last seven days compiled by the NY Times, Idaho ranks 9th worst among states with 68 cases per 100K, a 19% increase over the previous week.  It ranks 12th worst with 37 hospitalizations per 100K, a 29% increase over the previous week.  And it ranks fourth worst with 1.22 deaths per 100K (no change info given).  Here is a comparison table: Florida is still beating Idaho on hospitalizations and deaths. But don't let that get you down, Idaho! Florida's case and hospitalization trends are downward whereas yours are upward. You can still take the lead! I am gratified to see that Arizona is doing so well in this comparison. Our governor is fighting like hell be as pro-disease as his counterparts in Florida and Texas. Now I suppos

  Physicians in Mesa and Tucson are participating in a clinical trial of a new drug called molnupriavir. Where do they get these names?!?   The drug, produced by Merck, is a wide spectrum antiviral. It is proposed to work by inhibiting viral replication by a mechanism known as lethal mutagenesis.   Specifically, the drug messes with the virus's ability to replicate accurately. This causes the virus to build up genetic mistakes and leads to a process called an "error catastrophe" that prevents it from replicating and spreading.  I got that information from an article in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.  If you want to know how, exactly, the virus does this, the article goes into great detail about it. Be sure to dust off your old molecular biology and organic chemistry textbooks first. Some of the  criteria  for participating in the clinical trial are: You live in a household where someone else has a case confirmed by testing or by having at least one symptom. Yo

  Just when you think anti-vaxxers can't get any stupider, they find a way. The latest fad is trying to prevent coronavirus infections with Betadine, a form of iodine. According to an article in Rolling Stone, people are using the stuff by gargling, spraying it in their noses, and putting drops in their eyes. One ER physician quoted in the article, when he was told people were doing this, said “Fuck me! Of course they are.” Betadine is used almost exclusively as an external disinfectant for surgery, etc. It is not meant to be ingested, and can cause iodine poisoning if someone ingests too much.  Like they might do by, say, gargling with it regularly. Hey, I know! Why be so timid? I think these anti-vaxxers should inject it directly into their lungs.  T**** said  it would work.  That should be good enough for them. Now, boys and girls, let's review. The BEST way to prevent COVID-19 is to get vaccinated. There is no longer any reasonable question that the vaccines are safe. Onl

  Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended: Over the last week we saw the largest declines—in both Maricopa County and the state overall—in the new case rate since early March, when the winter surge was petering-out.  The seven-day statewide average of new cases appears to show a pattern similar to then and July 2020 where the curve gets wobbly and starts to trend down: You can draw your own conclusions, and this could be a false alarm like a few weeks ago. But it sure looks like our infection rate has peaked and is starting to decline. Positive test percentage is up, but the fact that this number was going down when cases were going up reminds us that this is not that great a measure because the testing isn't random.   Hospital beds are up, but only fractionally.  We would expect this number to lag the case rate. The vaccination numbers continue to be stuck at around 50%, with another factional increase this week: If Dr. Carmona is doing anything to im

  You may recall that in February 2020—just when the Apocalypse was getting started—there was a huge outbreak  of COVID-19 in nursing homes in Washington State, leading to many deaths.  An epidemiological study concluded: Long-term care facilities are high-risk settings for severe outcomes from outbreaks of Covid-19, owing to both the advanced age and frequent chronic underlying health conditions of the residents and the movement of health care personnel among facilities in a region. In many states, nursing home personnel have disappointing vaccination rates, as shown in this August 29 data from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services : The Arizona figure is 60.88%.  That's about 10% higher than overall vaccinations in the state, and it puts us in 30th place among states (interestingly, the same rank as for overall vaccinations). But nursing homes aren't the only facilities dealing with residents of "advanced age" who have "frequent chronic underlying h

  CDC and Kaiser Permanente analyzed the health records of 6.2 million members of 8 participating US health plans. They found that no serious health effects could be linked to either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. The study was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It looked at cases of serious outcomes, including acute myocardial infarction, Bell palsy, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis/pericarditis, pulmonary embolism, stroke, and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome within 21 days of vaccination.  It compared those outcomes to the same ones in people who had not been recently vaccinated. Though there were instances of these conditions, they were extremely rare, measured in the tens to hundreds of cases per million person years (MPY). More importantly, none of the differences between those vaccinated and those not vaccinated in the same time period were statistically significant. That means in a sa

  A new study  is—as far as I know—the first truly controlled field experiment on mask effectiveness. The conclusion is that masks work.  We already knew masks work because you can see it for yourself . But it's one thing to see that masks block droplets and another to know that this translates into meaningful protection at the community level. This latest study involved 600 villages in Bangladesh, which have a combined population of 342,126 adults. Researchers randomly selected some of the villages to be in the treatment group and the rest were in the control group.   For eight weeks, people in the treatment villages received free masks, information on the importance of masking, role modeling by community leaders, and in-person reminders. Villages in the control group received none of that. Researchers visited the villages every week over the study period to observe how many people were properly wearing masks and social distancing at mosques, markets, the main entrance roads to vi

Just when you think things can't get any crazier. The Daily Mail reports that a group of veterans formed a group and was mulling armed attacks on vaccine centers and employees. Because the vaccinations are causing...what harm? Veterans 4 Freedom (V4F) is made up of more than 200 douchebags who used to serve in the military.  They pretended to be a peaceful group while using the encrypted messaging app Telegram to discuss violent insurrection. They were infiltrated by a reporter. One member said they were "bringing the fight to the people sticking the needle in." The Daily Mail piece caused the leader of the group, someone named Bellzaac, to call off the group's operations.  Talking out of both sides of his mouth, he said in public on Twitter, "basically we were a peaceful group and have been labelled with being something we are not. We wanted to do this legally & lawfully."  On the other hand, in private on Telegram he was saying "we are fucking

  Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended: There are a couple of hopeful signs in the new cases. Maricopa County is down 11.1 cases per 100K from last week, and the state overall is down about 2.6 cases per 100K.  This corresponds with what looks like a possible downward trend in the new case 7-day average: Too soon to say if this represents a peak and decline, but it's what the beginning of one would look like if it were real.  On the other hand the daily variance in case counts has increased over the last week, so this could just be more reporting issues with ADHS. Test positivity has gone up over the last week, though as I reported last Monday , the positive percentage has the problem that many more uninfected people have been getting tested.   COVID-19 hospital beds are up, but not by as much as previous weeks.  Vaccines are again up only fractionally.  Here is the accelerometer: We are about half vaxxed, and are stuck at rank 30-31 among U.S. state

  The "Three COVIDiots"—Governors Doug Ducey, Ran DeSantis, and Greg Abbott—have a problem. Constituents who vote for them won't take a vaccine that's been proven safe and effective over 367 million times in the U.S. They are suffocating and dying in ICU's.   What to do? You'd think the governors might take steps to increase vaccine uptake. For example, they could require vaccinations or recent negative tests for state employees, like they are doing in California . They could require the same for people to access fun stuff, like they are doing in New York .  But their own politics are denying them this sensible public health option—the only one that will get us out of this nightmare. So they need to think of something else. If only there were some way to save people after their stubbornness and stupidity has already gotten them sick. Antibodies to the Rescue! All three like the idea of antibody treatments, like the one that (unfortunately) saved the life of

  A study recently published by researchers at the University of Arizona and SUNY Stonybrook has found that patients with severe COVID-19 also have high levels of an enzyme found in snake venom. The compound is called secreted phospholipase A2 Group IIA. In deceased COVID-19 patients, its concentration is 9.6 times higher that in patients with mild COVID-19, and five times higher than in patients with a severe case, according to the study . One of the study's authors, Dr. Floyd Hilton, says the enzyme is naturally present in our bodies in low concentrations and plays some role in preventing bacterial infections. For unknown reasons, it increases with COVID-19, and in severe cases this is leads to disintegration of organ tissue: These high levels of this enzyme are looking at those tissues in the organs and saying, "you look like a bacteria, let's shred your membranes. Let's put these organs out of their misery." Phospholipase A2 is a  common component  of the ven

Last week, I had a post about the fad amongst conservatives using ivermectin—a drug used mostly to deworm livestock—to treat/prevent COVID-19, rather than vaccines proven safe and effective over 367 million times in the U.S.  Since then things have gotten even more crazy.  Here are three items for your reading enjoyment. Amazon Search Go to the Amazon website and type "iv" in the search box, and voila, you get a bunch of autocomplete  suggestions for ivermectin. Yesterday The Verge claimed that Amazon was supporting COVID-19 disinformation because of this and wasn't planning on doing anything about it.  Apparently that story generated some heat. Today Amazon announced that it is planning to change the autocomplete behavior to address this. Judge Plays Doctor A judge in Ohio has ordered a hospital there to administer ivermectin to one of its patients. The patient in question is ill with severe COVID-19 and has been on a ventilator for weeks.   The patient's wife g