No one’s getting burnt anymore!

Posted on by Thor

The elite love to minimize COVID. They were among the first to flout COVID restrictions when they existed. That is in part because any precautions might cut into corporate profits. Investing in clean air for workers would be an investment. They also feel secure knowing they would have the best treatments should they become infected.

If you look at Hollywood elites or government elites you will not see a mask insight. The inequalities put on display when the rich and powerful flout the rules only add to public discontent. People are less likely to take even the simplest precautions like wearing a mask when elites act as if the pandemic is over.

By focusing on violations, the media helped undermine compliance by creating false norms, by implying, ‘if everyone else is going out, if everyone else if breaking the rules, why don’t we? Leaders should lead by example and the only person I noted doing that this week was Bernie Sanders who wore his mask in a crowded maskless presidential state of the union address.

A study found that the United States and United Kingdom were the only two countries of the 14 polled where a minority of people said the government had handled Covid-19 well. Not surprisingly those two countries have the highest death rates from COVID in the world. of the 6,782,716 deaths in the world, America is number 1 with  1,140,017 deaths. The UK comes in at number 9 with 205,540 deaths.

 

I’ve got a strong natural defense against bursting into flames!

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Does keeping children safe, endanger them? Some scientific “experts” fear that lockdowns could have left children with life-long immunity problems. The fact is that repeat COVID infections are creating life long immunity problems in children. Children are indeed becoming infected with RSV, flu and COVID more often than ever before. This “expert” seems to feel that COVID infections are an education for a child’s immune system.

Data in the UK from the Office for National Statistics suggests about 71,000 children in the UK are suffering from long Covid, which includes symptoms such as debilitating fatigue, brain fog, sleep problems and muscle pain.

On a personal note, I developed scarlet fever as an infant and was not expected to live. Scarlet fever, has had  more than ten times the average number of cases this winter season. COVID-19 reduces the numbers and functional ability of certain types of immune cells in the blood, say researchers. This could affect responses to secondary infections.  96 % of children have already been infected with COVID. Repeat COVID infections are resulting in children being more prone to other infections as well.

Toasy Studio

Posted on by Thor

One assignment I have with my virtual Urban Sketching students is to sketch the studio they happen to be working from.I always sketch and paint along with them and explain in this case, one point perspective and how to block in a scene. In this case the foreground has all warm colors while the mid–ground is more neutral and greyed down. I emphasized how things in the foreground will have fewer horizontal lines while object further away might be home horizontal.

You can see how disorganized I am with rags and folders stored in egg carts. Larger sketches are rolled up on the table and stacks of sketchbooks wait to be filled with sketches. Entry to the studio is blocked with a short stack of plastic containers. That is so the dog doesn’t come in and make even more of a mess. When the dogs have to go outside, they sit at the entrance to the studio and stare at me until I stop painting and let them outside. They are a bit spoiled since they can go out at any time since I am always painting.

Another goal of the painting was to make sure anything outside the windows was painted lighter than anything inside. If I had more time I would erase lines and focus on hard and soft edges of objects.

On July 1, 2022 The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers that updated booster shots for the fall season will need to have added protections against the latest omicron sub-variants. By this time people were becoming keenly aware that breakthrough infections would shift from a statistical anomaly to a regular occurrence.

This is a wildfire of the unburnt!

Posted on by Thor

Ignoring COVID does not make it go away. The World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that, although everyone is tired of hearing about COVID-19 and its restrictions, “we need to face an undeniable fact…the virus is still very much present among us”. Engaging in risky behavior sends the message that COVID isn’t really their problem, that they don’t see a reason to modify their behavior to mitigate risk. To see this behavior just watch the State of the Union Address in which the only member of Congress to wear a mask was Bernie Sanders. The president giving his speech kept coughing.

People feel helpless and out of control. Their only coping mechanism is to pretest the pandemic does not exist. Complacency, denial and ignorance take over for rational thought. People do not want to live in fear, so they ignore the source of the feat rather than facing the fear. The risk has not magically disappeared, they have chosen to ignore the risk. Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is also death.

 

We have all the tools we need to deal with a wildfire!

Posted on by Thor

Tools to fight COVID-19 have been abandoned or are being phased out. Treatments available earlier in the pandemic are becoming useless with the rapidly evolving new variants of the virus. Monoclonal anti-body treatments are no longer effective. “The big problem is that monoclonal antibodies bind to a very small piece of the virus. As the virus changes, we are now in a position in which we lost them all because they don’t bind to the virus anymore,” Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, told NBC News.

In May of 2022 the White House said it would have to wind down it’s COVID relief program since Congress cut  $22.5 billion in COVID relief funding. There will be no more free vaccinations, tests and treatment to the immunocompromised. If more COVID-19 variants emerge, different boosters may be developed to fight them. Without additional funding, the government will not be able to purchase enough boosters for Americans. U.S. doctors will stop accepting claims from uninsured people.

U.S. will no longer be able to invest in more oral antiviral pills or any new promising antiviral treatment. They will also dial back on research into a “next-generation” COVID-19 vaccine that would protect against a wide range of variants. The country “blindsided” to emerging variants. Researchers won’t be able to properly assess any new variants of COVID-19 that could possibly emerge.

You may have a wildfire and you may have water. The water is useless unless you have a way to get the water to the fire.

Wen Misinformation Genie

Posted on by Thor

The pandemic is not over. Yet certain talking heads are placating the public and pretending it is over. Almost 4,000 Americans continue to die every week, about 1,000 more that the number of people who died on 9-11. The death numbers are rising. July 4th of last year president Biden claimed the pandemic was over, and a year later despite all the needless death inbetween, he once again proclaimed the same.

Leana Wen is a research professor of health policy and management. She has been a favored host on CNN. At one point in 2021 she said that people should not be allowed out in public unless they are vaccinated. Far right anti-vaxers were furious. Lately however she seems to be on the far right anti-vax pay roll.

Wen claimed that getting infected should be perceived as the new normal going forward. So 4,000 deaths a week is “the new normal.” In a recent column in the Washington Post, Wen claimed, “We are over counting COVID deaths and hospitalizations.” She didn’t reference any research or data to back up her claim but she did talk to several friends.  The anecdotal opinions of these two friends seemed to be the entire basis for her crazy headline. One said that of the patients he treats in Massachusetts,  just 30% are treated with a steroid for patients suffering from low oxygen. He went on to state that he felt hospitalizations are over counted. Strangely, Wen referenced the 30% number and attributed it to deaths rather than hospitalizations, or treatments with steroids which she earlier referenced. Does she not know the difference between death and hospitalization? The article is misleading at best.

Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Bringham and Women’s Hospital, who teaches at Harvard, and consults with the White House. He said on Twitter, “I can’t say for sure if we are over counting hospitalizations, it is certainly possible, although it is not black and white. But I can say with confidence that we are not over counting COVID deaths right now, including Massachusetts, the state highlighted in the Post, because this is literally what I study.”

Excess deaths (orange) in America follow the same trajectory as COVID deaths (black), with excess deaths often being rather higher. These deaths are compared to what would have been expected given the five year averages of deaths prior to the pandemic. If anything, this makes it seem that COVID deaths are likely being under counted. Dr. Faust went on to say, “If we were truly over counting COVID deaths, an important piece of evidence to support that would be if COVID deaths…were exceeding all cause deaths.” So to state the obvious, simply, COVID deaths are not being over counted. It is very likely that COVID deaths are being under counted.

The misinformation Wen is now peddling is dangerous because it ignited the conspiratorial far right anti-vax, Q-Anon crowd. In the early days of the pandemic I used to respect Wen’s opinions and guidance but now she is quite simply encouraging death and denying the facts all around her as the pandemic continues to rage. Wen’s stance is offensive to all the millions of families who lost a love one because of COVID.

Can someone please cork the bottle of this genie of death.

You just need to catch fire and you will stop worrying!

Posted on by Thor

According to recently published data from experts at the Dornsife School of Public Health, closing indoor dining during the first two waves of the COVID pandemic was associated with a 61% decline in new COVID-19 cases over a six-week span, preventing an estimated 142 daily cases per city, compared with cities that reopened indoor dining during that period. The team looked at data from March to October 2020 in 11 U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, Atlanta and Dallas. The results were published last month in the journal Epidemiology.

At first researchers believed that  recovering from COVID-19 meant the chances of getting the virus again so soon were low. Scientists thought we were protected for at least six months after the initial infection. This as it turns out is not true. You can be er-infected much sooner. The much raster re-infections are due to relaxed safety precautions such as masking and social distancing, as well as declining antibody levels and additional viral mutations, which can result in immune escape by omicron sub-variants.

Re-infections are common. The antibodies you generate in the face of one infection don’t necessarily protect you against other sub-variants for long.

I’m done with wildfires!

Posted on by Thor

Groundhog Day, derives from the Pennsylvania Dutch superstition that if a groundhog emerges from its burrows on this day and sees its shadow due to clear weather, it will retreat to its den and winter will go on for six more weeks; if it does not see its shadow because of cloudiness, spring will arrive early. This year, Canadian Groundhog, Fred la Marmotte, did not exit his borrow. That is because Fred died while in hibernation.

A dead groundhog is the harbinger of only one this, that the pandemic is not over. It also indicated that the pandemic will continue for much more than 6 weeks. The groundhog day master of ceremonies, Roberto Blondin said, “In life, the only thing that’s certain is that nothing is certain, Well, this year it’s true. It’s sadly true. I announce to you that Fred is dead.”

H5N1  or Avian Flu has killed 58,200,536 birds in the United States since January 2022. 47 states have been affected. Last fall in Spain, an outbreak of bird flu at a mink farm resulted in the death or culling of the entire group of 50,000 minks. This may be the first case of mammal to mammal transmission of the virus. Humans are mammals.

COVID-19 has a mortality rate of about 1%. Bird flu has a mortality rate of over 50%. If the virus begins to spread among humans, there is little chance that a targeted response to stop the outbreak would happen. Bird flu would indeed make the COVID pandemic seem like it was a minor inconvenience.

On the Caspian Sea there was a mass mortality event of Bird Flu that killed 700 seals. This is again evidence that mammals are passing the virus to each other. The virus is found the the droppings and saliva of birds. If a mammal consumes a dead bird, or is exposed to droppings, that is one way to contract the virus.

Human infections with bird flu viruses can happen when virus gets into a person’s eyes, nose or mouth, or is inhaled. The first case of an avian influenza A (H5N1) virus in a person in the U.S. was reported on April 28, 2022. Researchers at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology report that H5N1 Bird Flu closely  resembles the 1918 Spanish Flu virus.  The 1918 virus was an avian strain that managed to adapt to humans without first acquiring any genes from existing human flu viruses. Further, the researchers found that several of the same mutations found in the H5N1 virus are found in the 1918 Spanish Flu virus.

57 seals were found dead in Maine having also died from H5N1. In Montana, three grizzly bears wandered, disoriented and blinded and were found to be infected by H5N1. All three bears died.

Since 2003, there have been 868 cases of human infection with H5N1 reported, of which 457 were fatal—a 53 percent case fatality rate. Ecuador reported its first case on January 9, 2023, in a 9-year-old girl who had contact with backyard poultry. So far, human to human transmission has not been reported. The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic started when a bird infected a pig who then gave the virus to a farmer who then spread the virus at Camp Funston in Kansas as troops trained for WW I. Infected troops then spread the virus throughout Europe.

Also infected have been foxes, polecats, badgers and foxes. So did the groundhog die of a virus? No cause of death has been noted.

This wildfire series is inspired by @1goodtern on Twitter. Since the media has gone silent on pandemic coverage, I have turned to Twitter to stay informed.

Wildfires only burn vulnerable trees.

Posted on by Thor

COVID -19 has become the eighth most common cause of death among children in the United States. Covid-19 has been the third leading cause of death in the broader population. Since Covid is the most severe in the elderly and immunocompromised, parents have decided it is a good idea to have their children get infected multiple times in poorly ventilated classrooms. They have been told multiple times that children do not get infected and do not die from COVID.

Researchers’ analysis of data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that there were 821 Covid-19 deaths in children between the ages of 0 to 19, during a 12-month period from August 2021 to July 2022. That death rate – about 1 for every 100,000 children – ranks eighth compared with the 2019 data. It ranks fifth among adolescents ages 15 to 19. Children are less vaccinated against Covid-19 than any other age group in the US. Less than 10% of eligible children have gotten their updated booster shot, and more than 90% of children under 5 are completely unvaccinated.

A CDC survey of blood samples suggest that more than 90% of children have already had Covid-19 at least once.

COVID-19 deaths in America as of January 4, 2023 are as follows.

0-17                                   1,414 dead

18-29                               6,749 dead

30-39                             19,255 dead

40-49                            45,092 dead

50-64                           197,247 dead

65-74                           246,021 dead

75-84                           282,430 dead

85 years and older,   288,990 dead.

Total American deaths due to COVID as of Jan 4, 2023 … One million eighty seven thousand, one hundred ninety eight.

On February 2, 2023 that number rose to 1,134,259.

World wide there have been well over 6 million deaths.

This wildfire series is inspired by @1goodtern on Twitter. Since the media has gone silent on pandemic coverage, I have turned to Twitter to stay informed.

Firefighting equipment makes no difference!

Posted on by Thor

If your town hired firefighters who sprayed gasoline on the fire, your town would have to hire new firefighters. That is of course if the town were still standing after the blaze. We got to watch clowns in countries around the world pour gasoline on the pandemic blaze.

If those same firefighters said they could not put out the blaze and you should accept that we will all be burnt, you would hire new firefighters. Perhaps they might advise you that only 1% of the houses might burn. Hire new firefighters.

When the 2016 American presidential election rolled around I voted to remove the 45th president precisely because he did nothing to put out the fire. The 46th president unfortunately isn’t any better. He chooses to ignore the conflagration. He and his wife both tested positive for COVID twice and so they are “done: with the pandemic.

Someone shared a magnificent video that outlines the 4 stage strategy for COVID Pandemic response.

In stage 1 Politicians say, “Nothing is going to happen.”

In stage 2 They say, “Something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.”

In stage 3, They say, “Maybe there is something we should do about it, but there is nothing we CAN do.”

In stage 4, They say, “Perhaps there is something we could have done, but it is too late now.”

This wildfire series is inspired by @1goodtern on Twitter. Since the media has gone silent on pandemic coverage, I have turned to Twitter to stay informed.