Monthly Archives: May 2020
High Deserts and Lava Lands . . .
Trust the Experts, they say.
But which ones, I say.
The CDC or the W.H.O.?
After zig-zagging back and forth a couple of times early on, the CDC settled into pretty much an ‘all masks, all the time’ position.
However the W.H.O. has pretty much stuck to their guns the entire time, and reiterated yesterday that ‘healthy people should wear masks only if caring for coronavirus patients’.
“If you do not have any [respiratory] symptoms such as fever, cough or runny nose, you do not need to wear a mask,” said Dr. April Baller, a public health specialist for the WHO. “Masks should only be used by health care workers, caretakers or by people who are sick with symptoms of fever and cough.”
And then there’s Dr. Fauci, then and now.
Then:
…There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
Now:
“I wear it for the reason that I believe it is effective,” Fauci told CNN. “It’s not 100 percent effective. I mean, it’s sort of respect for another person, and have that other person respect you. You wear a mask, they wear a mask, you protect each other.”
But trust the experts, right?
As more and more data comes in, the WuFlu mortality rate keeps dropping. Early on, the rate was estimated to be about 6%, much, much, higher than the seasonal flu rate. But with the latest figures, the rate has dropped precipitously.
I told Jan that to illustrate, if you flip a coin ten times, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to get ten heads in a row. But if you flip the coin 1000 times, you will get a near equal division of 500 heads and 500 tails, I.e. the Law of Large Numbers.
Well, this seems to be happening with the WuFlu. According to a new CDC release:
The CDC looked at five scenarios with a 0.4% overall mortality rate considered the best estimate. Bu the data shows a 1.3% rate of people 65+ dying from COVID while the rate for those 0-49 is 0.05 %. Here’s a link for more info: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html … @wcnc
Note that the mortality rate for the average seasonal flu is 1.26%. So it’s starting to look like the WuFlu mortality rate is not substanially higher than the 2018 rate for the seasonal flu, the one where 129,000 people died from the flu/pneumonia that year.
A number of our readers sent me copies of the recent article in the British medical journal The Lancet discrediting the use of CQ/HCQ in combatting the WuFlu. And this article caused the W.H.O. to discontinue all HCQ trials.
But as I mentioned back then, this was not a ‘real’ trial, It was not doctors seeing patients, it was a bunch of people sitting around in a conference room looking at patient’s medical records & charts. And these patients were all over the world in six different countries and 100’s of hospitals, all with different levels of care.
Well, now it’s not just me.
Scientists raise concern over hydroxychloroquine study
“This impact has led many researchers around the world to scrutinize in detail the publication in question,” said the open letter in response to the study, which was signed by a number of prominent scientists and published Thursday.
It added that this scrutiny raised “both methodological and data integrity concerns”.
One of the main concerns was a lack of information about the countries and hospitals that contributed data, which was provided by Chicago-based healthcare data analytics firm Surgisphere.
On another note, don’t know how much you’ve seen about the riots in Minneapolis, but besides the tragedy of George Floyd, you’ve got the tragedy of the individual store owners, mostly minority, who lost everything in the destruction.
One of the best (worse?) examples was a black Minneapolis firefighter who had invested everything he had in a Sports Bar. It was scheduled to open in March, but that was delayed due to the virus. But now with the lockdowns relaxed, it was scheduled in the next few days, but last night it was burned to the ground in the riots. And he has no insurance.
So figuring that someone had set up a GoFundMe site, I found this one.
I gave $50. I imagine anything would be appreciated.
This blog is from back in June 2011 for our first visit to Bend, OR, one of our favorite locations.
Leaving the Redmond area, we drove back through Bend to The High Desert Museum, about 5 miles south of town.
They’ve got a number of inside and outside animal exhibits, including this Chuckwalla desert lizard,
a Gila Monster,
Bald Eagles,
a Grey Fox (OK, why are grey foxes red? What color are red foxes?),
a Prairie Falcon,
and a River Otter.
It turns out that this Bobcat
and this Lynx
are sitting like this, patiently staring at their access doors, waiting to be fed. They know when it’s feeding time.
Beautiful animals.
In another building, they had this highly-detailed 1920’s era sawmill, It took the builder 25 years to build it, and it even works.
Jan really enjoy the display of old quilts. This ‘Star’ quilt dates from 1875,
and this ‘Silk Fan’ quilt is from 1890.
While we were there, our daughter Brandi called to wish me a happy Father’s Day. Now I’m two for two.
We spent a couple of hours wandering through all the many exhibits, and really enjoyed it. The High Desert Museum is small, but very well done.
Leaving the Museum, we drove a couple of miles down the road to the Lava Lands National Forest. We’d been driving past here for the last week or so, and this was our chance to explore further.
We drove up to the entrance gate, and found out something the tourist brochure or the website hadn’t told us.
You have to have an appointment to drive to the top of the butte. There are only 10 parking spaces up there, so they ration access.
We got there about 3:10, and the time given us was 3:45. The gate guard gave us slip of paper with our time on it, and told us we could start up at 3:40. So we parked in the nearby lot and read. Jan always has a book at the ready, and I had my new Kindle with me.
At 3:40 we started our 8% grade climb up the narrow road. They don’t allow buses or RV’s up here, and meeting oncoming vehicles was very interesting.
Getting to the top, we found a nicely laid out parking area, and a Ranger checking our appointment slips. In fact, as we were getting out of our truck, the ranger was sending someone back down the road who had come up too early.
Since our slip said we had to leave at 4:15, we started our climb up to the top of the hill. It was a steep 100 foot trek.
It was interesting to see all the ground squirrels zipping around the lava fields, and although you weren’t supposed to feed them, it was obvious that they were expecting to be fed.
Getting to the top, and still a little breathless, we were able to look back at the parking lot,
and down into the crater itself.
You can get a better idea from this aerial view that shows the roadway spiraling up the butte. The visitor’s center is located about 1 o’clock in this photo, along the rim of the crater.
Looking around we could see other examples of other volcanoes in the area.
Coming back down the butte with 5 minutes to spare, we were able to look out over the lava fields that still surround the area from the eruption over 7000 years ago.
Reaching the bottom a little after 4 pm, we decided to head back into Bend to have dinner once more at Red Robin. This is one of the best places around to get a burger, and even better, the delicious steak fries that come with your burger are unlimited. Of course the burgers are so big, you really don’t have any room for more fries, or dessert, for that matter.
While I was there, I tried logging in to their free Wi-Fi signal with my Kindle, and it worked with no problems. More and more it looks like the problem may be with my Cradlepoint router. Of course, my Blackberry and HP laptop can log in to it just fine.
Nick Russell can log in to his Cradlepoint just fine, too, although he has a CTR-1000 and I have a 500. The tell may be when we getting together with Nick and Terry later this week, and I try to log in to his router, and he tries to log in to mine.
We’ll see what happens.
We finally got home about 6 pm, a great last tourist day here in central Oregon.
Thought for the Day:
Never try to outsmart your common sense.
We Couldn’t Get Plucked . . .
So we got Hooted instead.
Jan had her pedi-appointment this afternoon at 3, so we headed out about 1pm to first have lunch at Pluckers, a chicken wing chain. But there was some of accident on the feeder that slowed us down, and then when we got there, we were told that there would be a 20 minute wait. Since this would leave us kind of tight on getting to Jan’s appointment, we swung around to the other side of the Interstate to have wings at Hooters. Happy to see that they’ve added some more sauces.
After Jan had much prettier cherry pink nails we headed home with a stop at Costco for gas at $1.33/gallon, not quite as good as the $1.20 we got at Sam’s Club a couple of weeks ago, but still nice.
After Jan’s recent heart-attack scare due to her pneumonia shot, I decide to order a KardiaMobile for our medicine chest. I did use my pulse-oximeter to quickly eliminate her myocardial infarction possibility, but it would have been nice to also look at her actual EKG pattern. They’ve been marked down to $89 right now so it seemed like a good time to stock up.
Tired of the seemingly never-ending increases, I thinking about switching from Verizon to Total Wireless. Since TW uses Verizon’s tower system I don’t expect to see any coverage differences.
We’ve been with Verizon since 1992, starting out with one of those Motorola bag phones, the ones that look like a big black purse with a coiled handset attached. Right now we’ve got Jan’s S5, my S8+, and a MiFi for the rig, so not a lot.
Based on what I see online, it looks like I should be able to cut my bill by more than half. Since WalMart sells TW, I’ll check them out.
But I’m curious if any of our readers use TW and what your thoughts are.
According to recent news, 42% of all WuFlu deaths in the U.S have been in long-term care units, and they only house about 0.6% of the population. And it’s even worse in Canada where 82% of their deaths have been in long-term care facilities.
Very sad!
And from Forbes magazine, here’s an article where the CDC Says Possibly ‘Less Than Half’ Of Positive Antibody Tests Are Correct. I guess maybe that would explain why my antibody test came back ‘No, well, maybe, possibility”, as well as a number of other people’s.
And with all the recent negging on HCQ, here’s an article from the American Journal of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins and the Society of Epidemiologic Research saying Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis.
But here’s the key quote on page 20.
HCQ+AZ has been standard-of-care treatment at the four New York University hospitals, where a recent study showed that adding zinc sulfate to this regimen significantly cut both intubation and mortality risks by almost half (46).
Note that, as I’ve said repeatedly, if you use HCQ +Z-pak + Zinc, it works. And note this is on an outpatient basis, not in the hospital.
And if that’s not enough, here’s another article from the Yale Medical system comparing Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin plus zinc vs hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin alone: outcomes in hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
And here’s the key paragraphs here.
In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU.
This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
So if you don’t think HCQ+Z-pak+Zinc works, then you can argue with Yale and the New York University Medical System.
This past blog is from the first year of our Gate Guarding saga, and our 3rd gate that year, when we started following a Marathon drill rig. And as usual we moved to our new site before the rig, so we got to see them put it all together.
It was amazing how they would tear down this H&P drill rig in 18 hours, move it all miles away, and then have it ready to spud in (start drilling) in another 18 hours.
May 28, 2012
But there’s always Plenty of Hot Water . . .
The guy who decided to make large water tanks black has never been in south Texas in the summertime, and tried to take a cool shower.
It’s just all hot, all the time.
I now see why some gate guards have a tarp tented over their tanks. Right now the water in the shower is warm, but comfortable. But as the days get hotter I may have to look into the tarp thing too. We’ll see.
Here’s a series of photos I took over a couple of days as they built our rig.
The thing goes together like a giant Erector Set. But I guess that dates me.
Maybe I should say Legos instead.
I went back by Tita’s Taco Stand the other day for some more of their great tacos. Their green sauce is some of the best I’ve ever eaten. Good food and nice people.
I just wished they served their breakfast tacos all day long, instead of stopping at 11am.
Heck, I wish McDonald’s sold Egg McMuffins all day long too.
Under the heading, “They Grow Them Big Here in Texas” I took this shot of a large green grasshopper who has taken up residence under our canopy.
It’s hard to tell from the photo but his body alone is about 4 inches long. So far, he’s ignoring us and we’re ignoring him.
Let’s hope we keep it that way.
That’s about it for today. Wednesday afternoon we’ll head to Houston for a couple of days for our granddaughter Piper’s graduation, and should be back early Friday evening. Gate Guard Services is sending someone over to work our gate while we’re gone.
I will try to post a blog from Houston, but don’t know if I will have time.
Thought for the Day:
“If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.” — Curtis LeMay
