Our RV Adventures

As I’ve mentioned before, this is not the first pandemic in recent U.S history, or even the worse one. And no, I’m not talking about the 1918 Spanish Flu. (Oops, is that racist?)

Nope, I’m talking about the Asian Flu of 1957-1958. (Sorry, racist again). In this one almost 120,000 people died in the U.S., and over 1 million worldwide. And of course, all of you alive back then remember how the country was completely shut down for months, don’t you?

Me neither.

Right now, as I type this, we’re at almost 57,000 deaths in the U.S. and a little over 200,000 across the world. Anyone really believe that we’re going to double the deaths here in the U.S. or quadruple it worldwide in the next few months?

Me neither.

Now in the 2017-2018 regular flu season, 80,000 people died in the U.S. as well as another 50,000 or so from pneumonia. So 130,000 deaths with no panic or shutdowns.

Now this year, before the WuFlu appeared on the scene, we were on pace for 62,000 flu deaths and 42,000 pneumonia deaths, so about 100,000 deaths predicted.

The reason I’m bringing this to your attention is that since WuFlu appeared, the seasonal flu/pneumonia totals have almost dropped off the map. Now there could be three possible reasons for this.

We’ve all heard about non-WuFlu deaths being attributed to the WuFlu, a number of which I’ve posted here in the last month or so. So could it be that the fact that for each WuFlu patient, hospitals receive $13,000 from the U.S. Government, and $39,000 if the patient goes on a vent.

Somewhat of an incentive, it seems to me.

Or there have been some reports of the states themselves monkeying with numbers, adding ‘maybe’ or ‘possibly’ cases to their totals, perhaps hoping for more government goodies. But maybe it’s a little more innocent than that.

Is it possible that the WuFlu has somewhat ‘replaced’ the seasonal flu/pneumonia, I.e., many of the people who would have been susceptible to the seasonal flu caught the WuFlu instead.

I mean we’re certainly not looking at a straight combination of the two, but some sort of mixture, something in between.

Maybe another reason to wonder about the actual WuFlu mortality rate. Which BTW seems to be dropping all the time, and looks to perhaps be edging in to the the ‘bad’ flu season figures.

We’ll see. Something to thing about while we’re all huddling in place.

And now, the latest installment in my ongoing discussion with John, a blog reader/commenter. As before, John’s comments are in blue.

John,

For a fellow who says he has no “belief” going into all this reading. Your writings show the complete opposite. I’ll leave it at that… You read and believe what you want and I’ll stick to the real science.

What ‘beliefs’ do you think I had/have, and when do you think I had them?

I said I had no ‘beliefs’ when I started. I never said I don’t have them now. Just as I imagine you do, too.

As I said, I had no presumptions about the virus, CQ/HCQ going into this.

I just read stuff.  A lot of stuff.  From everywhere.

Hundreds of places, both liberal and conservative. That way I try to get a balanced view of what’s going on.

I just started seeing too many numbers that didn’t add up, too many ‘facts’ from  one ‘expert’, contradicted by another ‘expert’, and too much stuff just didn’t make sense from the get-go.

Since you like NIH, I’m assuming you saw this that I posted on the blog the other day, about how, back in 2005, they thought CQ was a potent treatment for CoV viruses.

“Chloroquine, a relatively safe, effective and cheap drug used for treating many human diseases including malaria, amoebiosis and human immunodeficiency virus is effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. The fact that the drug has significant inhibitory antiviral effect when the susceptible cells were treated either prior to or after infection suggests a possible prophylactic and therapeutic use”

Most of my information doesn’t come from blogs, twitter, or CNN/FOX/ONAN. I read mostly covid related readings from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ (pubmed) and the Jama Network https://jamanetwork.com/.

I can’t imagine getting my information from only a few sites, like you seemed to.

Are they always right and never wrong?  Every single time?

Yes, I check out things on CNN, and I check out things on FOX. This is because they pretty much at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, and I want to see both sides.  By ONAN, I assume you don’t mean the Cummins company that makes big generators, but probably OAN, One America Network. I know about it but I’ve never watched it.

I read very few ‘blogs’ for any of this, and don’t have a Twitter account.

What do you do when the ‘experts’ disagree on the ‘science?  Like the CDC and W.H.O disagree on the use of masks.

And as far as JAMA, I suggest you Google “Jama Retractions’ to see all the wrong info that they’ve had to take back over the years.

Now I know it’s not NIH or JAMA, but might you give some respect to the AAAS  (The American Association for the Advancement of Science) and their publication Science, you know the one that’s been around since 1848.

Just yesterday they published an article about a 23-hospital system in NYC conducting a research study of using HCQ and famotidine, (Pepcid), a heartburn medicine intravenously, at nine times the heartburn dose. This is because in the analysis of 6212 COVID-19 patient records, it was noticed that many survivors had been suffering from chronic heartburn and were on famotidine rather than more-expensive omeprazole (Prilosec).

It’s been going on for a while, but kept under wraps since of all the ‘bad’ press surrounding HCQ. But now on 14 April, due to the encouraging results so far, the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), is now funding the study to the tune of $20 million. And, even better, they hope to have preliminary results in just a few weeks.

I comment on your blog to counter (to a degree) some of the more “outlandishness” I read in your blog and hope that not all your readers see it as gospel…

You keep talking about my ‘beliefs’ which I assume you don’t agree with, and the ‘outlandishness’ I post in my blog, but you never post anything to rebut what I post, and I’ve ask you several times

I don’t see how you’re ‘counter’ing any of my posts when you don’t offer any ‘counter’ arguments.

Why is that, John?

Greg

Thought For The Day:

For those long nights while you’re huddling in place, you might want to check out this Kodak 51,300 piece jigsaw puzzle. It covers the 27 Wonders of the World, it’s about 29 feet long, and it will set you back about $500.

You weren’t going to spend ALL that Stimulus Check on Booze, now were you?

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