Coronavirus COVID-19 - Global Health Pandemic #54

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N.J. expands criminal investigation into nursing home deaths, seeks tips of alleged misconduct

The state will widen its investigation into the growing death toll from COVID-19 at New Jersey’s nursing homes, and called for anyone with information about misconduct in any facility to report those allegations through a special tips line, Gov. Phil Murphy said.

The on-line link, covid19.nj.gov/LTV, will allow them to report anonymously.

The state’s investigation will look closely at all long-term care facilities that have experienced a “disproportionate number of deaths,” in the wake of the tragedy at the Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center, where 17 bodies were discovered in a makeshift morgue on Easter Sunday.

"We are not alleging misconduct, but we will evaluate whether some facilities put profits over patients,” said New Jersey Attorney General, Gurbir S. Grewal at the governor’s daily briefing on Tuesday. “We are looking back and we will hold people accountable if anything criminal happened.”

N.J. expands criminal investigation into nursing home deaths, seeks tips of alleged misconduct
 
Attorney General Gurbir Grewal on Tuesday disclosed the launch of an online portal to report poor care and other problems in the state's long-term care facilities. Reports can be made at covid19.nj.gov/ltc.

As of May 5, there were 130,593 reported cases in the state, including 2,494 additional cases disclosed Tuesday.

New Jersey has completed a total of 257,587 tests with 39.5% of the tests coming back positive as of Tuesday.

In New Jersey, 5,328 individuals with confirmed or potential cases of COVID-19 were hospitalized as of Tuesday.

Here are the hospitalizations broken down by region:
  • North: 2,869 hospitalizations
  • Central: 1,593 hospitalizations
  • South: 866 hospitalizations
Of those hospitalized patients, 1,534 patients are in intensive care or critical care and 3,461 are in medical surgical beds.

The state is using 37.6% of its statewide ventilator capacity, with 1,169 patients on ventilators. That is the lowest ventilator usage has been in over a month.

There were 232 patients discharged in the last 24 hours.

There have been 8,244 deaths related to coronavirus in New Jersey. Officials reported 334 new deaths statewide on Tuesday.

Long-term care facilities continue to be a concern across the state with 4,151 of New Jersey's coronavirus deaths.

There have been 22,602 reported COVID-19 cases at 509 long-term care facilities across the state.

NJ coronavirus cases at 130,593 as deaths rise to 8,244 on Tuesday (May 5)
 
@cass523 right, no one except employees can visit LTC facilities, so the only "reports" would be Whistleblowers, employees who are currently working at the facility.

I know how those are investigated, they print out the information, and contact the administrator, who is usually going to find out who placed the report. Even if done anonymously. Kiss your career goodbye in any other medical office or facility.

It takes a person who has high standards and moral integrity to do that.
 
April 28, 2020

A new study by Chinese scientists has found that the mutation ability of the new coronavirus has been severely underestimated and could affect the deadliness of the strains, leading to the disease creating different impacts across various parts of the world.

Scientists from Zhejiang University (Zhejiang, China) who studied a small pool of patients found many mutations that have not been previously reported and included such rare changes that scientists had never even thought they could occur. The scientists also offered laboratory evidence to show that certain mutations could create strains deadlier than others. The study provides the first hard evidence that mutation can affect how severely the virus can cause disease or damage in its host.

In order to investigate the virus mutation, the scientists analyzed the viral strains isolated from 11 randomly chosen COVID-19 patients from Hangzhou in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and then tested how efficiently they could infect and kill cells. Using the sophisticated ultra-deep sequencing method, the scientists read each building block of the virus genome more than 100 times, allowing them to see changes that could have been overlooked by using the standard approach. The scientists detected more than 30 mutations, out of which 19 mutations, or about 60%, were new.

The scientists also found that some of the mutations could cause functional changes in the virus’ spike protein, a unique structure over the viral envelope that allows the coronavirus to bind with human cells. Upon infecting the cells with strains carrying different mutations, the scientists fund that the most aggressive strains could generate 270 times more viral load than the weakest strain and also killed the cells the fastest.

The deadliest mutations in the Zhejiang patients had also been found in a majority of the patients in Europe, while the milder strains were found predominantly across the US. The findings could explain the differences in regional mortality with the pandemic’s infection and death rates varying across different countries.

Coronavirus Could Have Mutated into More Than 30 Deadlier Strains, Finds Study
 
Last edited:
May 5, 2020

An Italian pharmacology scholar has claimed that COVID-19 damages the hemoglobin, thus impairing the ability of red blood cells to transport oxygen throughout the body, affecting the lungs and leading to Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS).

In an explanation of her thesis to The Jerusalem Post, Annalisa Chiusolo said that her theory provides the answers to several questions about the novel coronavirus, including the higher vulnerability demonstrated by men, particularly diabetics, to becoming seriously ill from the virus, as well as the lower rate of COVID-19 infection among pregnant women and children. Chiusolo believes that understanding this mechanism can pave the way for a quicker discovery of highly effective drugs for treating the virus.

Chiusolo who is a graduate of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Perugia, Italy, and works as a pharmacist in the country has published her theory in some of the leading Italian newspapers. According to Chiusolo, SARS-CoV-2 is dependent upon porphyrins for surviving and possibly for replicating, making it attack hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood, resulting in less oxygen available for the body. As a result of less oxygen, carbon dioxide gets accumulated.

Chiusolo has also evaluated the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat SARS-CoV-2, and has found that in addition to having an antiviral and immunomodulatory effect, the drug binds to the ferriprotoporphyrin of the ecgonine methyl ester (EME), thereby blocking the key enzyme of malaria. Ferriprotoporphyrin is the group responsible for the oxygen binding of hemoglobin. Chiusolo believes that a similar mechanism can be used against SARS-CoV-2. Her theory is supported by a study by a Chinese university demonstrating that SARS-CoV-2 binds to the beta chain of hemoglobin, thereby inhibiting EME metabolism.

According to Chiusolo, hydroxychloroquine could act as a prophylactic, thus preventing or limiting the symptoms of COVID-19 while a vaccine is being formulated that specifically stimulates the body’s antibody response. Chiusolo believes that hydroxychloroquine could make the patient immune to COVID-19 and/or limit its side effects, but admitted that the drug does has some severe side-effects, especially among patients having heart disease.

Researcher Claims COVID-19 Damages Hemoglobin and Hydroxychloroquine Promises Coronavirus Immunity
 
Worth a read.

Sweden has been the world’s Covid-19 outlier, pursuing social distancing but rejecting mandatory lockdown. Schools, bars and restaurants are open – albeit with strong voluntary social distancing compliance and streets that often look almost as empty as Britain’s. Has this been enough? Sweden’s public health agency has now published a study of its R number, a metric which the UK is using to judge the success of the lockdown. The UK objective is to push R below one, by which it means it wants the number of new cases to fall. Last week, the UK’s R number was estimated at 0.8 (± 0.2 points), a figure described as an achievement of lockdown. But Sweden’s reading is 0.85, with a smaller error margin of ±0.02pts.

This raises an interesting question: might voluntary lockdowns work just as well? And might they keep the virus at a manageable level with lower social and economic costs?


The virus was shown to be spreading far faster in Sweden, said Imperial, "not because the mortality trends are significantly different from any other country" but because "no full lockdown has been ordered so far". Nor was a full lockdown ever ordered. So what did this imply for Sweden? A Lund university academic said it could mean 85,000 deaths for Sweden. An Uppsala team, feeding Imperial's parameters into its own study, agreed. The modelling envisaged Sweden paying a heavy price for its rejection of lockdown, with 40,000 Covid deaths by 1 May and almost 100,000 by June.

The latest figure for Sweden is 2,680 deaths, with daily deaths peaking a fortnight ago. So Imperial College’s modelling – the same modelling used to inform the UK response – was wrong, by an order of magnitude. Of course, as the saying goes, all models are wrong but some models are helpful. To be helpful, Sweden has now published its own graph saying its R was never near the 4 that Imperial imagined and has, in fact, been below the safe level of 1 for the last few weeks.


Sweden tames its ‘R number’ without lockdown | The Spectator
 
Inthedetails said:
I'm confused about what this means. Here's a quote from the link:


"During a COVID-19 briefing, The Virginia Department of Health announced it will now count the number of positive virus tests instead of the number of people who test positive.



That means if one person is tested three-times and all three tests come back positive, it counts as three instead of how the numbers were being counted before, which would have only been one because it was a single patient."

???
Click to expand...

It sure feels like a way to inflate the numbers? I personally would like to see # of people tested, # of positive results, # of negative results, and # of inconclusive results...
 
I'm definitely in the cake stage. That seems to have effectively ended the downward trend in my bodyweight.

Today, we are going to go to a harbor and walk along and look at boats. This is a big change in life.

We are allowed to do this as long as we social distance. While we're not supposed to stop anywhere, local LE has been happily waving at people who take a pause - as long as it is 10-15 feet away from the next group. No groups larger than 4. I've heard that slightly more than half of people are wearing masks and that those without masks steer very far away from the masked, so we're going to go check it out.

It seems very strange to be planning an outing.

By next week, doctor's offices should be allowed to open (and not a minute too soon, many doctors are on the ropes financially and one of ours has had to close up shop for good - merging with a much larger multi-purpose group practice where you have to deal with staff who have no idea who their doctors are and are just message takers).

The vets can open too. Right now, the plan is to allow businesses with 10 or fewer employees open as long as they have a limited number of people inside at a time.

That's because the county I'm currently in is cream-colored on the CDC's chart (plateau). We have had only 1 new case per day for the last 4 days, and only 3 deaths in the last week. So.

Here we go.
 
In Ohio only symptomatic people who tested negative for flu (except for some prisons and nursing homes) were tested for COVID-19. It's interesting that of the 159,838 tested only 20,072 were confirmed positive. So IMO there's a bug out there with the same symptoms that made a lot of people sick.
 
May 5, 2020

This new test uses blood drawn from a vein rather than from a finger prick, as others do.

Swiss biotech company Roche Holdings said it has devised a test that is 100% accurate at detecting coronavirus antibodies and 99.8% accurate at ruling them out.

Roche expects to be producing millions of the tests this month and 100 million a month later this year, the company said Sunday. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared the diagnostic tool for use. The antibody test, Elecsys Anti-SARS-CoV-2, produces a false positive in only one in 500 tests, according to Roche. The test runs on an instrument that can create a single result in 18 minutes and up to 300 in an hour.

The FDA on Monday said companies making COVID-19 antibody tests must apply for authorization by the agency within 10 days of releasing their products. It also specified what's needed for tests to receive regulatory clearance.

Roche said serology tests can determine whether a person has gained immunity against a pathogen such as the coronavirus. Of the more than 200 antibody tests that have flooded the market, the FDA has granted emergency use authorization to only 12 tests. Most tests now in use were not reviewed by the agency.

"We unfortunately see unscrupulous actors marketing fraudulent test kits and using the pandemic as an opportunity to take advantage of Americans' anxiety," the FDA said in a statement.

The tests are viewed as a crucial part of reopening the economy, but some have been troubled by accuracy concerns in the rush to get to market. The White House last week acknowledged the issue, advising that multiple antibody tests should be used to access the spread of the virus, which has infected more than a million Americans and killed nearly 69,000.

Roche gets approval for COVID-19 antibody test as FDA vows closer oversight
 
Wendy's customers ask 'Where's the beef?' as restaurants remove menu items

McDonald's Canada faces coronavirus beef shortage, removes Angus burgers

Wendy's is known for its claim of fresh, never frozen, beef.

Costco, Kroger and other grocery chains are rationing the amount of meat customers can buy at one time as processing at U.S. meat plants has slowed down or stopped completely.

In addition, Wendy's rival McDonald's said its Canadian locations would have to import some beef instead of sourcing it from Canada because of meat plant closures including Cargill's Alberta, Canada, plant.
 
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