48 thoughts on “Paging Dr Kennedy”

  1. Conclusion – Trump did it.
    Seriously I’ve forwarded the study to a couple of medical professionals for their thoughts. From what I could glean it would explain the high comorbidity with conditions involving any cardiac compromises.

  2. Lots of viral illnesses include myocardial injury. This virus, especially in those older and with comorbidities, seems to be more cardiotoxic than many.

    Interestingly, viral cardiac injury seems to be more common in the young.

    Myocarditis can be induced by a number of different infectious agents and represents a significant cause of death especially in young individuals. Following infection, patients may develop lymphocytic, eosinophilic, or giant cell/granulomatous myocardial inflammation. It can lead to infectious dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease frequently requiring cardiac transplantation.

    One of the early heart transplant cases I knew was a young woman with vital cardiac injury.

    My wife, who has a long history of COPD, had an illness in June which her two internists think was Covid partially mitigated by her long term HCQ use for rheumatoid arthritis.

  3. I still want to know what was the deal with all those videos from China in late January of people collapsing in the street…

  4. “I’m not a doctor but I talk to them a lot in real life.”

    The consensus of two internists and a PA in the Dartmouth system. “This is preliminary but worrisome.”

    One would think that COPD and asthma would be the big worries for pre-existing conditions here, but they are behind cardio and diabetes.

  7. We have known about the effects of Corana 19 on the heart for months. The Chinese told us. A recent piece from Dr John Campbell:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAO60IU8dxQ&t=1083s

    Opinions really don’t matter, except that they reveal what people think about their government’s response. We will suffer this virus till we deny it new victims and it dies. There do appear to be problems with a vaccine, and we may not get a good one. Your government has done a really bad job of containing this. Right up there with the UK and other dithering governments. You did not take care of your people at all well, and prioritized your economy. Its not getting better in America, and many will die unnecessarily.

    Trump is toast. The ignorant ramblings on TV are just too egregious to spin. Louie Gohmert is hilariously stupid, and the piece about how a mask may have given him the disease, was pure gold.

  8. “We will suffer this virus till we deny it new victims and it dies. There do appear to be problems with a vaccine, and we may not get a good one. ”

    Without a good vaccine, reliable treatment or widespread developed immunity it’s impossible to deny a virus new victims. With international travel any flare up, anywhere in the world can trigger the whole process all over again. We still don’t understand where it came from, so as far as anyone knows that reservoir still exists, just as Ebola repeatedly returns in Africa. That’s why there has been a faction in the public health community from the get go that has insisted the only practical solution is a managed spread of the disease to develop immunity while protecting the most vulnerable. Without a vaccine all the more successful countries has achieved is a delay. Sooner or later all of the control measures will be ended and the virus will be out there, ready to spread again. Given the summer outbreaks in the US it doesn’t even look like you can try a focused seasonal approach as with influenza. So are we going to live with the current restrictions forever?

    To borrow a metaphor from Scott Adams, you’re trying to say who won the game at halftime. Until this is over, we will not know what the right response was.

  9. BTW – one reason I like the halftime metaphor is that it doesn’t deny we are behind. As an American with some understanding of political science I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that a parlimentary system such as Canada has some significant advantages when it comes to responsiveness and accountability which work well in this type of situation. Similarly a national health system means both prevention and treatment measures are coordinated through the same chain of command, which surely helps with coordinating the various responses, something the US has obviously struggled with. But that comes at a cost, as poor decisions can also be implemented quickly and effectively to great harm.

    Beyond the strictly constitutional limitations, the US is also dealing with a a period of deep internal divisions, headlined by a virtual war between the mainstream press and the executive, which blurs communication between the government and the people rather than clarifying it. Canada is more uniform politically, with its deepest divisions more cultural (Quebec) than policy-driven (as seen from this side, if you want to argue differently I’ll listen). Trump built his campaign and his current political base by hijacking a hostile media to pay attention to his issues through hyperbole and exaggeration. That worked to get him elected, and has also allowed him to accomplish more of his agenda in the face of considerable opposition than I for one would have thought possible. But it is obviously a communication style that is ill-matched to this particular situation (both in and of itself, but also because the hostility it provokes makes transitioning to a more traditional style basically impossible). So sure, if the only thing you want a president for is dealing with the immediate outbreak of an epidemic, Trump isn’t your man. But there’s a lot more to the job than that.

    And just as in 2016, the election will be between Trump and somebody, not Trump and anybody. So we’ll see.

  10. PenGun is not an unbiased commenter. He has malice toward the US for reasons I don’t know but perhaps due to the New Democrat Party which is far left and mostly centered in Vancouver Island. The Covid numbers have been grossly exaggerated for political reasons. “Prioritizing your economy” gives a hint of his leftist bias. There have been as many deaths as a consequence of the economic damage as those by the virus. As a general rule, taking advice from your enemies is not a good idea.

  11. The reason Ebola keeps coming back is because it seems only able to infect a few thousand before it burns itself out. If it was ever to become as widespread as wuflu, the survivors would mostly be immune, there just wouldn’t be many of them.

    Australia thought that they had beaten this. That they were wrong isn’t due to some failure on their part, it’s just the nature of the beast. Once prevalence got around 1%, there wasn’t any way that it could be contained. The long, mostly symptom free incubation period makes contact tracing impossible. How many people have you been around the last two weeks? Could you supply names and addresses? Then there’s the unknown number of infected people that never showed symptoms and the probability that they are capable of infecting others even if at a lower rate than the symptomatic.

    New Zealand may have actually contained it only to find themselves having to curtail almost all travel in order to preserve their victory. They are a very small country and much more dependent outsiders for a lot of vital functions. If you need a service call on a vital piece of equipment, you’ll not only have to wait an extra two weeks but find someone willing to do so, not to mention pay at the rate of hundreds of dollars an hour for them to stew in a hotel room.

    Once this was circulating, and that may have been as early as August, it was launched. We may have been able to trim around the edges a little with the lock downs but it’s going to keep infecting people as long as there is a pool of vulnerable people. A vaccine may happen soon enough to make a difference but I’m not betting on it. We’re all just going to have to take our chances, some will be lucky, some not.

  13. There is an ongoing narrative that equates succumbing to the wuflu as a moral failing, both individually and in terms of regions and especially nations. This is particularly annoying in the case of the media and one particular commenter here.

    When you find yourself in a situation where much is beyond your or anyone’s control, it’s comforting to imagine that you have avoided trouble or death because of superior competence, vigilance or policy simply because these things are in your control.

    There’s a lot here about co-morbidities, pre-existing conditions, etc. The truth is that it’s a little late to become the sort of person that runs marathons or never smoked or never ate a second helping of desert. It’s especially too late to be 20-25 years younger. I personally figure there are a lot of people sicker and older than I am that are surviving, I’ll take what precautions seem useful and trust to luck. It’s not as if any of us have a choice.

    I’m fairly scrupulous about wearing a mask now that it is “required”. Some people that know me find it slightly amusing or possibly an improvement. I do this not because I have much faith that it will protect me or anybody else but because a lot of people are at least nervous if not outright scared and some find it reassuring. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have to look very hard to find someone willing to sell me an amulet, or blessed mask or something, guaranteed to ward this off. We should be glad that masks are imagined to work, the alternative might have been garlic.

  14. I do this not because I have much faith that it will protect me or anybody else but because a lot of people are at least nervous if not outright scared and some find it reassuring.

    I think this is most of the reason for the masks. We used to have a saying in ICU, “Don’t just do something, stand there !” The temptation to do something can be almost irresistible, especially for politicians.

    The economic damage that is being done, with a virus that largely spares the young and fit, is appalling. The cruise ship experiment of nature taught us that 20%, roughly, are infected. Less than 1% die and those are mostly elderly and ill. The 1918 virus pandemic was so much worse because the young and fit were selected to die.

    Interesting that my wife tried to renew her HCQ prescription this week and was told it was being restricted and in no circumstance would it be allowed for the virus. The excuse was that supply was being exhausted. She takes it for rheumatoid arthritis but was still refused. I suspect use off-label is massive.

    If Eastman Kodak can ramp up production it will help. If only Democrats would follow their party’s advice and refuse to take HCQ, it would mean adequate supply for the rest of us.

  15. For all that is worth criticizing the FDA about, the one thing they have consistently refused to do is interpose themselves between doctors and patients when it comes to prescribing approved drugs. Now we have hack politicians doing it.

    I actually defended the FDA elsewhere by pointing out just how great it would be with no one to try to insure that the ingredients on a label, matched the contents. Imagine if prescription drugs were the same free-for-all that “supplements” are.

  16. It would be nice if ALL the myriad Three Letter Agencies would stick to their knittin’ but unfortunately there’s been a lot of mission creep, either by way of ill-informed desire of legislators to ‘do something’, bureaucratic empire-building, or their leaders overblown sense of moral superiority.

  17. Being in a high-risk category doesn’t necessarily mean that one is personally at high risk. It may mean that one spends time near other people who are at high risk.

    Every time and place has its hazards. Most of us are fortunate to enjoy high levels of personal health and safety relative to what’s been typical of most human experience. But there are no guarantees and things can always change in an instant.

    The politicizers left and right are forcing their favorite templates onto events that are fluid and too complex to characterize easily.

  18. “He has malice toward the US for reasons I don’t know” I have explained my desire for the US to have it teeth pulled, as it has killed so many innocents in pursuit of wealth, a few times now. Its not malice, I just want this bad dog curbed is all. As you are so head strong, it will have to be some combination of forces that convince you to change. ;)

  19. Of course Penny has also told us a few times how much he admires China. Think about that.
    Perhaps he should emigrate there and those good Chinese folk can harvest his organs while
    he is still breathing.

  20. China has raised a billion people from poverty in a very short time. Not a bad dog at all. You are ideologically opposed to any kind of socialism and I most certainly am not. So we do not agree on China, among many other things. ;)

  21. The gangsters in control of China have enriched themselves in cahoots with Western business and political leaders and raised the per capita GDP from sub-Saharan Africa poor to just normal third world poor, while brutalizing the population through forced abortions and sterilizations, organ harvesting, and cultural (and literal) genocide of non-Han peoples. Anyone celebrating them is a moral midget.

  23. “The gangsters in control of China have enriched themselves in cahoots with Western business and political leaders and raised the per capita GDP from sub-Saharan Africa poor to just normal third world poor, while brutalizing the population through forced abortions and sterilizations, organ harvesting, and cultural (and literal) genocide of non-Han peoples. Anyone celebrating them is a moral midget.”

    I don’t believe you. ;)

  25. After the Saudis whacked the 2 NY towers, I don’t believe WT7 was their fault, you attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which had zip to do with that attack. A suspicious person might suspect it was all BS so you could attack who you wanted to. A million innocents died over that bit of legerdemain. I could go on for a long time.

  26. A suspicious person might suspect it was all BS so you could attack who you wanted to.

    A rational person might notice that the United States could attack whomever we wanted to, whenever we wanted to, with most countries utterly unable to do anything about it except whine to the UN and the traitorous American media.

    But you aren’t rational. If the US was the country you imagine, Canada would not exist. No one in the rest of the world would notice or care, nor would so much as bat an eye if we killed a mere million of you erasing your country.

    Anyway, I find your ignorance both appalling and hilarious. It’s appalling because no one should come to a foreign website, with a swarm of smart, knowledgeable authors writing for it, and demonstrate such a complete and total ignorance of that foreign country. But it’s hilarious, because you come to a foreign website and demonstrate a complete and total ignorance of that foreign country.

    After the Saudis whacked the 2 NY towers, I don’t believe WT7 was their fault, you attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which had zip to do with that attack.

    Are you deliberately trying to look as stupid and ignorant as possible?

    If so, you’re doing a good job.

  27. In defense of PenGun — it is good to have an environment in which a wide range of views are expressed, even if some of them are from far out of left field. And as the famous saying goes — Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

    Of course, supporting “free speech” and the airing of far-out views does not necessarily extend to taking those views seriously.

    The part that PenGun misses is that he tars every American with the brush that should be reserved for the US Political Class, who are destroying the nation with their blanket of laws, regulations, and corruption. If he targeted the lawyers & politicians & academics actually creating the problems he feels so strongly about, he might be more worth listening to.

  28. “with a swarm of smart, knowledgeable authors writing for it” Really? There are certainly smart people who post here, but also some pretty stupid ones as well. ;)

  29. the taliban having given sanctuary to al queda, although they retreated to pakistan, my novella deals with some of these matters in the kingdom proper, in yemen, and other places,

  30. Miguel I am interested in that time. There is some evidence the Taliban even offered to give up Bin Laden, after understanding what he had done, but were turned down. Where is your book?

  31. In defense of PenGun — it is good to have an environment in which a wide range of views are expressed…

    Excellent point. One important reason why I’m willing to take the time to write comments here is because I have concluded that if the site management can tolerate PenGun, they can surely tolerate me. I heart them for that, just a bit.

    Anyway, someone- Robert Conquest, I think- made the point that any organization not explicitly rightwing becomes leftist over time. I think there is an analogous position regarding free speech, in that unless you are explicitly and ideologically intent upon supporting it, you effectively degenerate into censorship.

    That’s a terrible mistake, especially in politics. An organization eventually ends up missing evidence that it’s making terrible mistakes because the people willing to tell it so have been chased away, having learned that the people in charge just don’t want to hear about it.

    I’m thinking of you, Geee Ohhh Peeeeee- and your supposedly conservative, uhm, brain trust. The rightwing cancel culture goes back to at least when William F. Buckley chased the John Birch Society out of the public discourse, which is something these folks have never stopped crowing about.

    End result, the GOP became a neutered and irrelevant nest of nullities, because it stopped worrying about answering the arguments of its internal critics and became more interested- much more- in chasing them out.

    End result- President Donald Trump. Rambling concluded.

  32. they could not, under the custom of pashtunwali, now the taliban, is just a continuation of warriors, they were dubbed the ghazi in kiplings era, that bedeviled the brits for a better part of a century, they were selected in this instance by the Isi, as part of their deep strategy against india,

    now yemen, from whence bin laden and awlaki arises is a more interesting angle, that cohort involved fighters who went to afghanistan, and were enlisted into Saleh’s conquest against the South, of course like scorpion, well you know the drill.

    O’sullivan, one of thatchers aide de camps came up with that observation, now conquest is fascinating because he was on the left, and then had an awakening later joining the ird, the british govt’s information department about communist activities, he was the one that unearthed some of the matters, gareth jones had revealed about the holomodor, and it’s hard to understand ukrainian politics, without that event, the nationalists the oun, arose out of that catastrophe, which had dire consequences, in the next engagement, as a result national sentiment in the ukraine was stifled for the better part of 50 years, they resurfaced in the 00s, as the svoboda party, who had representation in the first maidan govt, and lost it with zelensky, hence the backstory to last winter’s narrative,

  33. “they could not, under the custom of pashtunwali” I understand he was a guest, with all that entails, but there was talk that they were so horrified by what he had done, they wanted to give him up.

    There are conflicting reports. ;)

  34. …but also some pretty stupid ones as well

    We can agree, because for most intents and purposes you are an author here. All the other folks, not stupid.

    There is some evidence the Taliban even offered to give up Bin Laden…

    So what?

    The Taliban were quite happy to host Al-Qaeda, in roughly same the same way Imperial Japan was quite happy to host the Imperial Japanese Navy.

    Should the United States have been mollified if Japan had offered to give up Admiral Yamamoto after the Pearly Harbor attack?

    I think not. And I also remember talk about giving up Bin Laden. The Taliban refused to meet our demands, which we put upon them because they attacked us.

    I say again, they attacked us. We did not go to their far away country most Americans- and most Canadians- could not find on a map and had no reason to go looking for.

    They. Attacked. Us.

    The hell with them. Any bad consequence that followed from their attack, they worked to get, and they deserved much worse than we gave them.

  35. I think the commenters here could have a useful discussion of Afghanistan but PenGun is not a useful commenter. The NDP, which seems to have taken over British Columbia, is a Socialist party and has been pretty radical. PenGun seems to be of that persuasion.

    I am uninterested in his opinion of international affairs. Mostly because, in addition to his political bias, he seems to have a bit of trouble with truth,.

  36. LOL. The NDP is a political party. I am a complete loner, I have no group and I like it like that. No echo chamber of like minded fools, and really I am a very happy camper nearly all the time.

    It is my hobby to understand what is going on, and dealing with thickets of lies, is what I do every day. I do that by taking everything as opinion, and probably a lie, and waiting for the truth to out, as it likes to do. Just paying attention to a wide variety of sources makes this a rewarding pastime.

    Anyway Mike its all made up by me. I have no cohorts at all.

  37. “We can agree, because for most intents and purposes you are an author here. All the other folks, not stupid.”

    As the hooker said when the ship came in. “Its like shucking peas.” ;)

  38. “ Brian Says:
    August 4th, 2020 at 8:43 am

    I still want to know what was the deal with all those videos from China in late January of people collapsing in the street…”

    It bugs me too. Along with the oh-so impressive video of choreographed, three abreast fogging trucks rolling up a wide street, and people being welded into their apartments and guys in moonsuits spraying aircraft interiors and on and on- all, somehow, escaping the iron net of Chinese censorship of the web. Ever notice how that type of video abruptly disappeared a few weeks into the spread, after the rest of the world got all in a tizzy?
    IMO, all that was a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign, designed to get the rest of the world to overreact.

    Or the more terrifying implication is the Chinese themselves did not know what evil brew had leaked out of the Wuhan Bioweapons lab and really were freaked out. Do not imagine for a second that this covid is the worst bug they have been working on.

  39. There is a good sized industry putting videos on youtube that demonize China. Being a long time watcher of so many things, I noticed when several people went from making vids about China in general, to making vids attacking China. As many of these people make their money from youtube, it can be quite a lot with enough views, its was obvious they had done this to improve their income, and that did work for them.

    Its mostly lies and the reason is money. ;) There was Covid 19 in sewers in Venice in December. The Chinese claim it possibly came from Europe.

  41. As I said when the Chinese official death toll was 2,000ish. That would count as a successful deployment of a bio-weapon. For the Chinese, even 100 times more deaths wouldn’t be a deterrent.

    I think the flood in China shows that we have been considerably over-rating the competence of the CCP. Not to mention it’s still very much in the air whether the eventual deaths will be in the thousands or millions if Three Gorges fails. What remains to be seen is if the Chinese People can bring them to account. The precedents are not auspicious.

    All this is very much old business here. It’s almost enough to make you wonder if Pengun isn’t conducting some sort of anti-CCP false flag operation. But for him, this would never have come up.

  42. And we have two people who watch and believe that stuff. Its not reliable information, but speaks to your beliefs, which is why I assume most stuff is just lies.

    By about 2030 China will be as large economically, as the US and EU combined. This will continue, absent massive madness.

  43. “To borrow a metaphor from Scott Adams, you’re trying to say who won the game at halftime. Until this is over, we will not know what the right response was.”

    On Vancouver Island, where I live, we beat it down to zero. We did this by being socially responsible and having an island to live on. We only get cases from incoming people now, so we have won the local game. Its nowhere near halftime, and you are losing brutally already.

    If, as seems possible, there will be no really good vaccine, our method is the only one that works. So act like commie, thanks Mike, hippies, or die in much larger numbers, while maintaining your freedoms. ;)

  44. I’m betting you’d get pretty hungry and come winter pretty cold if it weren’t for all the less enlightened that keep you in food and power by taking their chances, going to work every day. There are times I think about disconnecting and letting someone else take the chances. Live on your knees or die standing up.

    I suspect being confined with Pengun might make one long for an even painful death.

  45. PenGun’s problems have little to do with his political assumptions; we only notice it more because they differ from ours. He has anosagnosia, which is not a mere stubbornness or unwillingness to engage, but a full inability to consider that he might be mistaken. There is a strictly neurological piece to this he that he has no control over and you will not argue him out of. You will not find the suggestion in any of his comments that he has ever been even 1% in error. He may have acknowledged that such a thing is theoretically possible, but I can’t recall ever seeing it. That is an adaptive trait in some situations and so persists in the gene pool. One sees it in most national leaders, frankly. It is more usually a symptom associated with social difficulties.

    I fancy that it is more common among liberals, but that could easily just be an example of confirmation bias on my part.

  47. Really I have condition. Well that’s good to know. I thought I was just right all the time. ;) AVI you are a treasure, that I’m sure I will come to appreciate more. ;)

  48. “I’m betting you’d get pretty hungry and come winter pretty cold if it weren’t for all the less enlightened that keep you in food and power by taking their chances, going to work every day.”

    Indeed we are most grateful for all that keep the wheels turning. Being a moderately advanced country living in BC is all about Hydro. It does not need much outside of general maintenance and the odd repair. Not really a crowding problem normally. I buy most of my food from a local farmer lately as he has set up a great store, of moderate size, with only 2 people allowed in at once. It was one person but we are opening up. ;) My greatest gratitude goes to those on the front lines treating the sick, and most of all Dr Bonnie Henry, who is now a quasi deity in the province, after leading us through this pandemic so very well.

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