Coronavirus, The plague has arrived

[ChirpingGirl]

Once this gets out there Off bugspray will be flying off the shelves like toilet paper did.

Are you implying people are stupid lunatics? 

[_priapism]

Citriodiol sprays were made available to the British army in the early phases of the Covid-19 crisis because they were known to kill other strains of coronavirus such as Sars.

The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said they were issued on the basis that they would do no harm and could form an additional layer of protection. It is not known how many soldiers have used the spray.

Jeremy Quin, a junior defence minister, said the research found that sprays containing Citriodiol “can kill the virus”.

DSTL was more cautious. In the key test, the lab said there was “some loss of recoverable virus” on synthetic latex skin an hour after it had been treated with Mosi-guard. However, some virus was still recoverable over a four-hour period.

It is unclear whether the spray would make any practical difference beyond frequent hand-washing and the use of alcohol-based hand sanitisers and personal protective equipment in insulating against the virus.

[MintJulie]

Scientists find that Citriodiol, ingredient in insect repellent, can kill COVID-19

Insect Repellent Huffing is going become a thing now?

[_priapism]

Scientists find that Citriodiol, ingredient in insect repellent, can kill COVID-19

Insect Repellent Huffing is going become a thing now?

There was an article down here yesterday, about how many people in the north Texas area have died from swallowing bleach, since Trump’s ill conceived comments about that as a treatment. Let’s just face it, there’s a lot of stupid people out there. Republicans are absolutely killing people daily, in real time, based on their failed response to the pandemic, and the con man president’s snake oil selling press conferences. And undermining all the hard work that a lot of talented experts are putting in.

[Lois]

If used topically it won't cause much harm, but yeah, I can see idiots huffing it.

[Jed_]

Everyone has football on their minds now, only explanation for them wearing their masks as chinstraps.

[MintJulie]

I received a notice from 23andMe yesterday about blood types and the coronavirus.

The part that really struck a cord with me is this...

Our findings, which were shared previously, underscore the role of blood type in COVID-19 infections, specifically that blood type O might be protective against the virus. The significance of this association may be related to the role of blood clotting complications in cases of people with COVID-19.

I have O- blood.   I also tested positive for the antibodies.    I know of 2 other friends that also have O- blood and have tested positive for the antibodies.   We all know of the time we believe we had the virus.  While we had odd symptoms, they were never severe.  Not in any of us.

The full article is here.

[msslave]

We are all connected

What will it take for people to learn? In one of the latest documented cases on the spread of Covid 19, seven deaths have occurred in Maine, all traced back to a wedding reception a month ago. Sadly, none of the people who died attended the reception.

There were 60 people who attended the inside reception. There are now over 170 Covid 19 cases that can be traced back to people who attended that reception.  Maine is a state that had rigid rules to help prevent the spread of this disease. The wedding and reception were in violation of those rules.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913693778/how-1-maine-wedding-caused-hundreds-of-coronavirus-cases-and-7-deaths

Our neighbors who work remotely now along with their kids going to school by computer, have sold their home and are planning on touring the country for a year. They leave in a week...first stop, Maine. They are required to be tested before leaving and have papers showing they are Covid free when they get to Maine. I don't know how Maine enforces this. Doubt there are border checks, but maybe the AirB&B will require the proof when they check in.

This disease spreads quickly and quietly. Until there's a vaccine, the only protection is to avoid people. Oh...and don't listen to the President. There will not be a vaccine before the election.
 

[Jed_]

I received a notice from 23andMe yesterday about blood types and the coronavirus.

The part that really struck a cord with me is this...

Our findings, which were shared previously, underscore the role of blood type in COVID-19 infections, specifically that blood type O might be protective against the virus. The significance of this association may be related to the role of blood clotting complications in cases of people with COVID-19.

I have O- blood.   I also tested positive for the antibodies.    I know of 2 other friends that also have O- blood and have tested positive for the antibodies.   We all know of the time we believe we had the virus.  While we had odd symptoms, they were never severe.  Not in any of us.

The full article is here.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/covid-19-blood-type

“We showed through a multi-institutional study that there is no reason to believe being a certain ABO blood type will lead to increased disease severity, which we defined as requiring intubation or leading to death,”


I’m O-neg.

[Athos_131]

Chiefs fan who attended game tests positive for Covid-19 and now everyone who sat near them is in quarantine

A fan who attended the Kansas City Chiefs' opening night game at Arrowhead Stadium on September 10 has tested positive for Covid-19.

The Kansas City Health Department said the individual that tested positive watched the game from the group's box in the lower level of the stadium and tested positive the following day. The positive test has prompted the Kansas City Health Department to direct 10 people there to quarantine after potential exposure to the coronavirus.
The Kansas City Chiefs were one of the few teams in the NFL that allowed fans into its stadium in Week 1.
All fans and personnel are required to wear a mask or face covering while in the stadium, and the team said that the stadium's "COVID protocol plan limited potential exposure to a single seating zone within the stadium."
The team said that its contact tracing mechanisms allowed staff to identify the individual, the individual's party, any service staff that came into contact with the individual and any other ticket holders that may have been near this person while entering the stadium.
"I want to remind everyone that COVID-19 is anywhere and everywhere. While we're all tired of it, frustrated and even angry at how it has altered and stricken our lives and livelihoods, we must continue to think of those who have not and will not survive it," said Dr. Rex Archer, Kansas City health director.
"We still don't understand why it strikes some so viciously while others have only mild symptoms. If you have an existing or prior health condition such as cancer, diabetes, heart or lung disease, or if you're older than 65, you should not be taking unnecessary risks like being in large crowds. We hope those around you aren't taking those risks either and possibly bringing the virus home to you," Dr. Archer said.
The Chiefs made no mention of whether or not spectators would be barred from attending any games in the future.

#BlackLivesMatter

#BanTheNaziFromKB

[Athos_131]

Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor

A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used to make things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.

The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed about 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies.

The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s intent.

The payments were made even though U.S. health officials think major funding gaps in pandemic response still remain. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. Many U.S. hospitals still face a severe shortage of N95 masks. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address.

“This is part and parcel of whether we have budget priorities that actually serve our public safety or whether we have a government that is captured by special interests,” said Mandy Smithberger, a defense analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.

The $1 billion fund is just a fraction of the $3 trillion in emergency spending that Congress approved earlier this year to deal with the pandemic. But it shows how the blizzard of bailout cash was — in some cases — redirected to firms that weren’t originally targeted for assistance. It also shows how difficult it has been for officials to track how money is spent and — in the case of Congress — intervene when changes are made. The Trump administration has done little to limit the defense firms from accessing multiple bailout funds at once and is not requiring the companies to refrain from layoffs as a condition of receiving the awards.

Some defense contractors received the Pentagon money even though they had already dipped into another pot of bailout funding, the Paycheck Protection Program.

Congress, at President Trump’s urging, is debating whether to pass another massive stimulus package, and the Pentagon and defense contractors have called for an additional $11 billion to be directed toward their programs.

The $1 billion fund was allocated under the Defense Production Act, which allows Trump to compel U.S. companies to manufacture products in the nation’s interest.

Trump has described the law as a “tremendous hammer” and boasted in August that he has “used the DPA more comprehensively than any president in history.” His administration was under intense pressure this spring to use the law to address dire shortages in medical-grade masks and other supplies.

But in the months after the stimulus package was passed, the Pentagon changed how the money would be used. It decided to give defense contractors hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund, mostly for projects that have little to do with the coronavirus response. Defense Department lawyers quickly determined that the money could be used for defense production, a conclusion that Congress later disputed.

Among the awards: $183 million to firms including Rolls-Royce and ArcelorMittal to maintain the shipbuilding industry; tens of millions of dollars for satellite, drone and space surveillance technology; $80 million to a Kansas aircraft parts business suffering from the Boeing 737 Max grounding and the global slowdown in air travel; and $2 million for a domestic manufacturer of Army dress uniform fabric.

DOD officials contend that they have sought to strike a balance between boosting American medical production and supporting the defense industry, whose health they consider critical to national security. The Pentagon, which as of 2016 employed more than 156,000 people working in acquisitions alone, also has lent its expertise to the Department of Health and Human Services as it seeks to purchase billions of dollars in needed medical equipment.

Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said her office has worked closely with Congress and federal agencies to meet the needs of both the medical and defense industries.

“We are thankful the Congress provided authorities and resources that enabled the [executive branch] to invest in domestic production of critical medical resources and protect key defense capabilities from the consequences of COVID,” Lord said in a statement. “We need to always remember that economic security and national security are very tightly interrelated and our industrial base is really the nexus of the two.”

The Democratic-controlled House Committee on Appropriations has made clear that the Defense Department’s decision to funnel the DPA funding to defense contractors went against its intent in that section of the Cares Act, which was to spur the manufacturing of personal protective equipment.

“The Committee’s expectation was that the Department would address the need for PPE industrial capacity rather than execute the funding for the [defense industrial base],” the committee wrote in its report on the 2021 defense bill.

Pentagon officials counter that they have been fully transparent with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress about their plans for the money.

Defense officials say the Pentagon’s funding priorities were influenced heavily by an industry study drawn up in 2018. The study, prompted by an early executive order from Trump and by economic adviser Peter Navarro and carried out in close consultation with defense industry associations, pointed to several hundred supply chain shortfalls that could hamper the U.S. military’s ability to compete with China.

The Pentagon receives funding under the Defense Production Act each year to shore up companies it deems critical, but in much smaller amounts — the 2020 allocation was about $64 million. The money is disbursed by the Pentagon’s industrial policy office under the law’s Title III, which gives the president broad authority to mobilize domestic industry.

The pandemic funding “became an opportunity for the Department to take what is almost a windfall and use it to try and fill what are some very critical industrial base needs … but that are only tangentially related to COVID,” said Bill Greenwalt, a visiting fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute who oversaw defense acquisitions in the George W. Bush administration.

The virus-related funding came at a time when U.S. military spending was already near all-time highs. The $686 billion defense budget for fiscal 2019 is comparable to a typical year during the Cold War or the period shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, although it has declined somewhat as a percentage of the economy. Major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman have remained financially healthy despite some pandemic-related disruption, and have continued to pay stock dividends to investors.

Defense industry groups argue that the DOD awards are crucial to ensuring that important niche manufacturers don’t wither away during the economic shock caused by the pandemic. Companies that sell aircraft parts for both military and commercial jets, for example, have been financially wrecked by a global slowdown in air travel.

“As you lose some of these capabilities, some of them are gone forever, and it comes at a very high price to reconstitute them,” said Wes Hallman, vice president for policy at the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group.

More than a third of the awards were for less than $5 million and went to smaller firms such as the American Woolen Co. in Connecticut, which received $2 million to help make Army dress uniforms. Executives at the company did not return voice mails and emails. A batch of small awards went to companies working on drone technology.

“At the root of this was an enormous unprecedented crisis we were facing, and the need for government to move quickly, which it did,” said Eric Fanning, a former Army secretary who is president of the Aerospace Industry Association.

But hundreds of millions of dollars also flowed to several large, established companies, such as GE Aviation, a subsidiary of General Electric, which received two awards worth $75 million in June. A subsidiary of Rolls-Royce received $22 million to upgrade a Mississippi plant.

Rolls-Royce did not respond to specific questions about the award.

“This funding pulled planned work on existing signed contracts between GE Aviation and the U.S. Government forward and is an important way to help ensure our engineering activities and supply chain, which includes many small and medium-sized companies, can continue to deliver for the Armed Forces, sustain jobs and support the economy,” said Perry Bradley, a GE Aviation spokesman.

Critics say it’s unclear why the defense industry should have gotten what amounts to a dedicated bailout fund when few other sectors of the economy got the same treatment.

And government data shows that at least 10 of the approximately 30 companies known to have received the Defense Department DPA funds also received loans through the Paycheck Protection Program, another relief package created by the Cares Act. That program, overseen by the Small Business Administration, offered millions of firms forgivable loans if they used the lion’s share on payroll.

For instance, Weber Metals, a California-based subsidiary of German firm Otto Fuchs, received between $5 million and $10 million through PPP in April to support 412 jobs, and then got an extra boost through a $25 million DOD relief award in June. Weber officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Defense Department spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said the two bailout programs are not “in conflict or duplicative,” because a PPP loan does not make any directive with respect to supporting national defense.

ModalAI, a small California company that builds drone flight controllers and computing platforms, received $3 million through the Pentagon program for an 18-month effort to develop a new flight controller. In April, it received a PPP loan of between $150,000 and $350,000.

Chad Sweet, chief executive and co-founder of ModalAI, said the company’s proposal was long-planned — it started applying for the Pentagon funding last summer, several months before the pandemic hit. The process gained steam in March and April.

The Defense Department asked ModalAI for documentation on how its business was affected by the pandemic, as well as information on other relief funding it has received. The Pentagon then made the decision unilaterally that ModalAI’s award would come out of the Cares Act funding.

“I don’t know how they made that decision,” Sweet said. He said his firm has been able to hire about five to seven employees as a result of the DOD award.

The Pentagon did initially plan to spend the bulk of the $1 billion fund on medical supplies. In April, Lord told reporters that three-quarters would go toward medical resources, and the rest to defense contractors.

But in June, she told lawmakers during a congressional hearing that the department soon realized that defense contractors had “critical needs as well.”

So DOD lawyers approved an arrangement whereby some $17 billion in HHS funding would be used for the medical industry instead, freeing up more money for defense contractors.

“So it expands the pool, and allows us to use even more money while taking the balance of the $1 billion that came through for DPA Title III, and use a portion of that for the defense industrial base,” Lord said at the hearing. Ultimately, in the spending plan that the Pentagon presented to Congress in June, it set aside $688 million for the defense industry.

Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, said Pentagon officials contend that they have thrown all the money they can at the effort to produce the medical supplies needed to combat the pandemic.

“Their belief is that any investment that could be made to increase the production of covid-19 items has been made,” he said.

One midsize company that benefited from the DOD awards was SolAero Technologies, an Albuquerque firm that makes satellite solar power systems and employs about 320 people.

When the pandemic hit, the firm was squeezed between the huge companies it supplies, which slowed down production, and the smaller, often cash-based businesses that make up its own suppliers, which it was trying to support, chief executive Brad Clevenger said.

Around March, the company heard from Lord’s office, which was contacting defense contractors to understand how the pandemic was affecting them. SolAero worked with the Pentagon to find out whether the company was eligible for other relief programs, which it was not, Clevenger said.

In late May, the Pentagon announced a $6 million award to SolAero to expand production. Clevenger praised the process, which he said involved multiple layers of review but still delivered needed help in two months.

In its news release announcing the deal, the Defense Department said the funding would “enable SolAero to retain critical workforce capabilities throughout the disruption caused by COVID-19 and to restore some jobs lost because of the pandemic.” Clevenger estimated that the award saved the jobs of 25 SolAero employees.

But the Pentagon did not impose any requirement that SolAero refrain from layoffs as a condition of receiving the money, only that it deliver on the agreed project, Clevenger said.

“How we do that, with what workforce, is up to us,” he said.

#BlackLivesMatter

#BanTheNaziFromKB

[Athos_131]

US surpasses 200,000 COVID-19 deaths, Johns Hopkins reports

The U.S. surpassed 200,000 deaths linked to COVID-19 on Tuesday, according to a database kept by Johns Hopkins University.

The deaths — all of which have occurred since February — out-total the number of Americans lost to World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War combined.

The 200,000 deaths are the most of any country around the world. Brazil currently ranks behind the U.S., with about 137,000 deaths.

According to Johns Hopkins the U.S. also has among the highest COVID-19 mortality rates in the world. About 61 Americans per 100,000 have died of COVID-19. That ranks sixth in the world and in the company of countries like Spain (65.27) and Mexico (58.24)

The U.S. also leads the world with 6.8 million confirmed cases of COVID-19. India (5.5 million), Brazil (4.5 million) and Russia (1.1 million) are the only other countries with at least 1 million confirmed cases of the virus.

Johns Hopkins reports that daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 dropped throughout the month of August. However, case rates have ticked up throughout September, and top health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci are bracing for a difficult winter.

Earlier this month, Fauci warned that a wintertime surge could be possible as weather forces Americans indoors and cities begin relaxing COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. Health officials have warned that large indoor gatherings can result in COVID-19 superspreader events.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington — a model often used by the White House — currently projects that an additional 175,000 Americans will die of the virus by Jan. 1. That projection could drop to as little as 65,000 additional deaths with a universal mask mandate and could increase to as many as 225,000 additional deaths with easing restrictions.

#BlackLivesMatter

#BanTheNaziFromKB

[_priapism]

[Athos_131]

#BlackLivesMatter

#BanTheNaziFromKB

[MintJulie]

I put more blame on the citizens.  Everybody is having grad parties.  People are still getting together.  Weddings, bars, college parties.   I see so many things being wrong that we have been told not to do.  

YES, DAMNIT!

[Shiela_M]

I put more blame on the citizens.  Everybody is having grad parties.  People are still getting together.  Weddings, bars, college parties.   I see so many things being wrong that we have been told not to do.  

That may be true, but I also believe that if the trumpster hadn't lied about the severity of the virus, and down play the whole thing, more of his followers may have taken it more serious as well.  By coming out saying thing thing is worse than the flu and can kill you, they may have had second thoughts about not following safety measures.

I still know dedicated trump fans who think that as soon as Biden wins, there will be no more coverage of the virus. 

[_priapism]

I put more blame on the citizens.  Everybody is having grad parties.  People are still getting together.  Weddings, bars, college parties.   I see so many things being wrong that we have been told not to do.  

That may be true, but I also believe that if the trumpster hadn't lied about the severity of the virus, and down play the whole thing, more of his followers may have taken it more serious as well.  By coming out saying thing thing is worse than the flu and can kill you, they may have had second thoughts about not following safety measures.

I still know dedicated trump fans who think that as soon as Biden wins, there will be no more coverage of the virus. 

The lies, the politicization of disease, contradicting the undisputed experts, attacking anyone who actually attempted to do something, promoting snake oil and unproven cures.  He didn’t cause it, but he made it 100 times worse.

[Jed_]

[purpleshoes]

Desperate times call for desperate measures! Good find. 

[Pornhubby]

Republican response, and infection rates...