I thought my last post was my last. But I had visitants to this blog. Ask me what can be done if we have a second wave to this pandemic after the door is open to it again?
By the end of the week, residents in Georgia will be able to get their hair permed and nails done. By Monday, they will be cleared for action flicks at the cineplex and burgers at their favorite greasy spoon. And it will almost certainly lead to more novel coronavirus infections and deaths. As several states — including South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida — rush to reopen businesses, the sudden relaxation of restrictions will supply new targets for the coronavirus that has kept the United States largely closed down, according to experts, math models and the basic rules that govern infectious diseases. “The math is unfortunately pretty simple. It’s not a matter of whether infections will increase but by how much,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a leading epidemiologist at Columbia University. Closing America was hard. But it came with one simple instruction: Everyone stay at home. There are no easy answers for the phase that comes next, especially with a continued lack of testing, contact tracing and detailed guidance from federal health agencies, disease experts said. Instead, every state will conduct its own improvised experiment with thousands of lives in the balance.
Many of the earliest reopenings will probably be confusing, chaotic, risky affairs — especially for states restarting their economies before most infectious-disease experts and some mayors and residents believe it’s safe to do so. South Carolina’s governor issued an executive order this week reopening department stores and retailers previously regarded as not essential. Tennessee’s governor said he plans to allow most businesses to reopen once his “safer-at-home” order expires next week. Governors in Mississippi and Ohio have said the same. And in Denver, Gov. Jared Polis (D) said some business could reopen on Friday. Some of those same states are, however, still struggling to contain outbreaks. In Ohio, where businesses are expected to reopen by next week, a prison has become one of the most worrisome outbreaks in the country, with more than 2,000 inmates testing positive. In South Dakota, more than 700 infections have shut down a Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant. And because South Dakota remains one of the few states without a stay-at-home order, one business said it plans to go forward on Saturday with a car race drawing 700 spectators. Georgia, according to some models, is one of the last states that should be reopening. The state has had more than 830 covid-19 deaths. It has tested less than 1 percent of its residents — low compared with other states and the national rate. And the limited amount of testing so far shows a high rate of positives at 23%. On Monday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) explained his decision to reopen tanning salons, barber shops, massage parlors and bowling alleys, saying: “I see the terrible impact of covid-19 on public health as well as the pocketbook.” Kemp said he will urge businesses to take precautions, such as screening for fevers, spacing workstations apart and having workers wear gloves and masks “if appropriate.” President Trump Wednesday said he told Georgia’s governor that he “disagree strongly with his decision.” But Trump added, ‘At the same time, he must do what he thinks is right.” In recent days, other governors have defended their decisions to reopen quickly as an economic necessity, an exercise in states’ rights and a matter of freedom.
“What I’ve seen across the country is so many people give up their liberties for just a little bit of security, and they don’t have to do that,” South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R). “We can’t wait until there’s a cure to this,” said Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R), who plans to reopen some businesses after a stay-at-home order expires Monday. “We can’t wait until every single person can get tested every single day to open up our economy.” But even states proceeding more slowly, such as Massachusetts and California, will have to walk their residents through the coming experiment with competing pressures and voices threatening to drown out public health instructions. “As a country, we’re unprepared not just logistically but mentally for this next phase,” said Michael T. Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious-disease expert. He worries most Americans do not grasp the long, hard months facing them and the likelihood of repeated surges of the virus. “For a while, people were told all we need is to get past the peak. Then, they started hearing all we need is testing. Meanwhile, the president keeps telling everyone that things are going to reopen in a matter of weeks,” Osterholm said. “The way you prepare people for a sprint and marathon are very different. As a country, we are utterly unprepared for the marathon ahead.” This is the central problem: The vast majority of Americans are still believed to be uninfected, making them like dry kindling on a forest floor. Barring a vaccine or treatment, the virus will keep burning until it runs out of fuel. “The trick is to keep that burn at a controlled rate,” Osterholm said. “We have focused so much on how we are dying from the virus that we have not focused enough on how to live with the virus.” Epidemiological models suggest the best strategy for keeping the burn rate under control is to drive the number of infections as low as possible before restoring economic activity. That would then provide time to react if cases flare.
The economic devastation that would cause is significant. But those same models suggest that opening prematurely increases the likelihood that communities will have to shut back down once infections reach a certain level, creating multiple open-shut cycles. Adding to those concerns, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that a second wave of infections next winter would be even more devastating because it would coincide with flu season. There’s no simple, one-size-fits-all protocol for reopening the economy, said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rubin is developing a model to forecast how reopening 260 large U.S. counties on May 15 would play out if residents maintained only half the social distancing measures now in place. The good news, Rubin said, is that modest-size, relatively spread-out cities will probably have room to make adjustments. But if restrictions ease too much, New York and similarly dense cities will rapidly see infections spike again. “It comes back really quick, and the peaks are much higher than what you’re seeing right now,” Rubin said. “It was sobering. I was more optimistic before we did our models.” This is why epidemiologists are cautioning state leaders to inch toward reopening with tentative, staggered steps. Newly emerging science illustrates just how complicated and fraught those steps may be. Dine-in restaurants are one sector President Trump and some governors have repeatedly mentioned. To reopen, owners may have to rethink not just how closely diners sit together and how food is served but how ventilation systems and airflow may need to be retooled. A recent case study — published by the CDC — examined how a single patron infected nine others at an air-conditioned restaurant in China. The infected person, a 63-year-old retired woman, did not begin running a fever and coughing until after her lunch Jan. 24 at the Guangzhou restaurant. But over the next two weeks, it became apparent the virus had spread to four diners at her table and to five people sitting at adjacent tables roughly three feet away. Researchers studying the seating arrangements believe an air-conditioning unit propelled tiny viral droplets over distances that are normally safe between the tables. “To prevent the spread of the virus in restaurants, we recommend increasing the distance between tables and improving ventilation,” the researchers concluded. Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, said the restaurant appears to have had an air-conditioning unit popular in China — and increasingly used in the United States — that recirculates warmed or cooled air, with no air intake or filtration. Milton said measures to make such a situation safe would include a ceiling fan paired with better air filtration and ultraviolet lights that kill germs. But he noted such measures would need to be designed to suit specific establishments. Studies emerging in the past week are also changing scientists’ understanding of how the virus spreads, which will make efforts to reopen society even harder. A growing body of evidence suggests the virus is most contagious in people before they develop a fever or even feel a tickle in their throat. That suggests silent spreaders are seeding new cases. When severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) — the cousin to this new coronavirus — emerged in 2002, Asian countries were able to stop it because people became physically ill roughly at the same time they became contagious. That made it far easier to isolate and prevent the spread of disease. A study published in the journal Nature Medicine last week estimated that people infected with the novel coronavirus are contagious almost two and a half days before symptoms appear — and that peak contagiousness occurs about 17 hours before people start feeling sick. In a sample of patients from China, the study estimated 44 percent of cases spread from person to person before symptoms appeared.
A study of Iceland’s population found that 43 percent of the people who tested positive didn’t have symptoms at the time of the test. And a recent New England Journal of Medicine study of 210 pregnant women in New York found that 14 percent tested positive but had no symptoms. Warning signs are also emerging from abroad. For months, Singapore has served as an exemplar, with its pandemic response praised and emulated around the world. Despite its proximity to China and early cases, Singapore used massive testing and contact tracing to keep its disease curve flat. It even deployed police to trace people’s movement with security camera footage and credit card records. Those painstaking efforts kept schools and businesses open and its economy afloat — until this month, when the virus found and exploited a weak point: low-wage migrant workers living in densely packed dormitories. “It only takes a few people to let down their guard, and the virus will slip through,” said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who begged citizens to maintain discipline. The daily number of new cases has soared from 200 last month to 1,426 on Monday. In recent days, the government shut down schools, made masks mandatory and forced hundreds of thousands of migrant workers into quarantine. “What worries me looking at Singapore is how much capacity they have on testing and contact tracing compared to the U.S. and yet months into the pandemic, even they are having to become more restrictive,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Meanwhile, we in America have nowhere near that testing and tracing, yet all we’re talking about is loosening up our restrictions.” Given the dangers involved in reopening, what states desperately need are a warning system and suppression tool to prevent infections from cresting again into the deadly peaks the United States saw in March and April. But states are jumping into their experiments without the two tools deployed by almost every other advanced nation: massive testing and contact tracing. Governors — Republicans and Democrats — from Virginia to Washington to Ohio continue to plead for federal authorities to fix shortages of swabs, chemical reagents and testing kits, a national supply problem they cannot solve independently. Similarly, local health departments, decimated by decades of budget cuts, lack the money and the hundreds of thousands of workers needed to trace and quarantine everyone who comes into contact with infected people.
By pushing responsibility for the pandemic response and reopening onto the states, experts said, Trump has freed himself to play the role of criticizer-in-chief. Already, he is criticizing governors for not reopening immediately, but if cases rise uncontrollably, he can criticize state leaders for reopening too early or mishandling it. “It might be a clever and effective political strategy, but it leaves our country without any way to pull itself out of the current mess,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who was in charge of U.S. foreign disaster assistance during the Obama administration. In Maryland, Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s wife — who was born in South Korea — struck a deal to buy 500,000 tests from South Korea. Hogan said this week that he turned for help from a foreign government rather than the federal government after Trump “made it clear over and over again” that states “have to go out and do it ourselves.” In Massachusetts, state leaders have partnered with a nonprofit that works mainly in the developing world to hire and train contact tracers. But such efforts, born of desperation, will go only so far without federal intervention and funding, public health experts say. Even if a handful of states find some way to shore up testing and contact tracing, the virus could rage on in neighboring states, throwing off sparks that can ignite new outbreaks. “The only tool the governors have had so far is the clampdown because it deprives the fire of oxygen. The second you let that up, the fire comes roaring back,” said Konyndyk, who oversaw the U.S. government’s Ebola response in West Africa. “But until you have water or sand, that’s all you can do. And it remains to be seen whether we as a country are going to figure out a way to get that bucket of water to start putting out the fire.”
NORC poll: Few Americans support easing virus protections THOMAS BEAUMONT and HANNAH FINGERHUT, Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite pockets of attention-grabbing protests, a new survey finds Americans remain overwhelmingly in favor of stay-at-home orders and other efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus. A majority say it won’t be safe to lift such restrictions anytime soon, even as a handful of governors announce plans to ease within days the public health efforts that have upended daily life and roiled the global economy. The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that more than a month after schoolyards fell silent, restaurant tables and bar stools emptied, and waves from a safe distance replaced hugs and handshakes, the country largely believes restrictions on social interaction to curb the spread of the virus are appropriate. Only 12% of Americans say the measures where they live go too far. About twice as many people, 26%, believe the limits don’t go far enough. The majority of Americans — 61% — feel the steps taken by government officials to prevent infections of COVID-19 in their area are about right.
Bing COVID-19 tracker: Latest numbers by country and state About 8 in 10 Americans say they support measures that include requiring Americans to stay in their homes and limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer — numbers that have largely held steady over the past few weeks. “We haven’t begun to flatten the curve yet. We’re still ramping up in the number of cases and the number of deaths,” said Laura McCullough, 47, a college physics professor from Menomonie, Wisconsin. “We’re still learning about what it can do, and if we’re still learning about what it can do, this isn’t going to be the time to let people go out and get back to their life.” While the poll reveals that the feelings behind the protests that materialized in the past week or so in battleground states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are held by only a small fraction of Americans, it does find signs that Republicans are, like President Donald Trump, becoming more bullish on reopening aspects of public life. Just 36% of Republicans now say they strongly favor requiring Americans to stay home during the outbreak, compared with 51% who said so in late March. While majorities of Democrats and Republicans think current restrictions where they live are about right, Republicans are roughly four times as likely as Democrats to think restrictions in place go too far — 22% to 5%. More Democrats than Republicans, meanwhile, think restrictions don’t go far enough, 33% to 19%. “They’ll be lifted, but there are still going to be sick people running around,” said 66-year-old Lynn Sanchez, a Democrat and retired convenience store manager from Jacksonville, Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has reopened state parks and plans to announce further relaxations next week. “And we’re going to have another pandemic.” More than 45,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, while 22 million have applied for unemployment benefits since March. It’s the economic cost that has led some governors to follow Trump’s lead and start talking about allowing some shuttered businesses to reopen, including in Georgia, where many businesses — including gyms, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors — can do so starting Friday. Restaurants there can resume dine-in service next week. Yet the survey finds that few Americans — 16% — think it’s very or extremely likely that their areas will be safe enough in a few weeks for the restrictions to be lifted. While 27% think it’s somewhat likely, a majority of Americans — 56% — say conditions are unlikely to be safe in a few weeks to start lifting the current restrictions. “If we try too hard to restart the economy prematurely, there will be waves of reinfection,” said 70-year-old retired medical equipment salesman Goble Floyd, of Bonita Springs, Florida. “I don’t think the economy or life will get back to normal until there’s a vaccine. It just seems this is so seriously contagious.” The partisan differences are apparent. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is a Republican and unwavering Trump supporter. GOP lawmakers in Wisconsin filed suit Tuesday against the state’s Democratic governor after he ordered most nonessential businesses to remain closed until May 26.The poll finds 59% of Republicans say it’s at least somewhat likely that their areas will be safe enough for reopening in just a few weeks, compared with 71% of Democrats who say it is unlikely.
Still, even among Republicans, just 27% say that’s very likely. “I haven’t met one person at the protests that disagrees with the fact that we need to self-quarantine until April 30,” said Matt Seely, a spokesman for the Michigan Conservative Coalition, which sponsored an automobile-based protest at the state’s capitol in Lansing last week. “Nobody wants to do the wrong thing. But the solution is not to stay in your home until the last case of COVID is gone.” The AP-NORC poll of 1,057 adults was conducted April 16-20 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.
15 practical ways to help keep safe when going out in public. Jessica Dolcourt April 22, 2020 8:27 a.m. PT If you’re not already using these tips for grocery shopping, opening doors and signing your name when you leave the house, now’s a good time to start. Read More Here.
Coronavirus: What To Do By Dr. David Brownstein I am sure you are aware of the coronavirus infection that is causing concern around the world. A January 24, 2020 study in The Lancet reported the latest statistics. (1) The fatality rate (so far) from the corona infection is approaching 15%. That is not good news.
There is a big HOWEVER here: This Lancet report is based on only 41 laboratory confirmed cases of the recent coronavirus strain (2019-nCoV). Keep in mind, the 15% fatality rate is the percentage of hospitalized patients suffering with corona virus. There must be many more people who became ill with this coronavirus and recovered uneventfully and therefore, did not seek care. The symptoms of corona virus initially mimic the flu—fever, headache, cough, fatigue and muscle aches. The 41 patients admitted to the hospital all developed pneumonia.
Coronavirus is nothing new. It has been with us for a long time. Coronavirus can affect both animals and humans. It is important to keep in mind that most corona viral infections are mild. In the last two decades, there were two serious corona virus infections–severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) which both had elevated death rates.
So, what can you do? Wearing a mask will not help protect you from becoming ill with any viral infection—corona virus included. I would check that off the list.
First, its important to maintain optimal levels of nutrients, particularly vitamins A, C, and D. Most people have suboptimal vitamin A and C levels. Both of these nutrients have antiviral abilities and are able to support the immune system when it is under viral attack. If you are not ill, I suggest taking 3-5,000 mg/day of vitamin C. At the first sign of an illness, I would suggest taking 1,000 mg/hour until diarrhea develops, then back off for a time period. For vitamin A, I suggest using 5,000 Units/day if you are not sick and 100,000 Units/day for four days at the first sign of an illness. Pregnant women cannot take these doses. (Note: Take vitamin A, not beta carotene.) Also, vitamin D is very important for fighting infections. I suggest, at the onset of an illness, taking 50,000 IU of vitamin D3/day for four days.
Iodine is essential to not only fighting off an infection it is necessary for proper immune system functioning. There is no bacteria, virus, parasite or fungus that is known to be resistant to iodine. As I have written in my book, Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It, most of the population is low in iodine. If fact, iodine levels have fallen nearly 60% over the last 40 years. The RDA for iodine is inadequate to supply enough iodine for all the bodily tissues. For the majority of my patients, I suggest taking 25 mg/day as a daily dose and more (sometimes 50-100 mg/day) at the first sign of an illness. Iodine can cause adverse effects and it is best used under the guidance of an iodine-knowledgeable doctor.
To prevent becoming ill and to avoid having a poorly responding immune system, it is vitally important to eat a healthy diet free of all sources of refined sugar. Refined sugar has been shown to negatively alter the functioning of the white blood cells for hours after ingestion. Finally, it is important to maintain optimal hydration—drink water! Take your body weight in pounds, divide by two and the resultant number is the amount of water to drink per day in ounces. Dehydration ensures you will be much more likely to suffer serious problems from any infectious process.
Conventional medicine has little to offer to prevent or treat coronavirus infections other than washing your hands–I agree with that one. It is time for you to take the initiative and learn what other therapies are out there. Your conventional doctor simply has no effective tools in his/her toolkit for this. As for getting the flu shot? Fugetaboutit. It won’t help corona infections and there was a study which found an increased risk in non-influenza infections, including coronavirus, in those that received the trivalent flu vaccine. (2)
My last recommendation is to work with a holistic doctor who can give you nutrient IVs when you become ill. Vitamin C, hydrogen peroxide, and ozone IVs can help anyone suffering from an infection. At my office, The Center for Holistic Medicine, we have seen the positive results a holistic approach to combatting viruses can provide. To find a holistic doctor near you go to: www.icimed.com.
To learn more about virus’, vaccines and other health issues from a holistic point of view, join me on Saturday, March 7th for my annual lecture, ‘Holistic Medicine for the 21st Century’. See below for details.
To Everyone’s Good Health! ~Note: These therapies should only used under the guidance of a physician. Dr. B
This is My Final Blog About The Coronavirus ( I will start posting about cancer again.)
BERLIN — Felix Germann was not expecting anyone when his doorbell rang last week. Outside was a doctor who looked like she had just stepped out of an operating theater, green scrubs, face mask and all — and a policeman. “I didn’t do it!” Mr. Germann said, throwing up his hands, and everybody laughed. The unusual visitors had come with an usual proposal: Would he allow them to test his blood for Covid-19 antibodies? Every month? For a year? Starting next week? He would be helping to further the science that would ultimately allow for a controlled lifting of social and economic restrictions and save lives.
“Of course I said yes,” said Mr. Germann, a 41-year-old project manager at a media company. “I want to help. This is a collective crisis. The government is doing what it can. Everyone needs to do their bit. ”With that, Mr. Germann and his girlfriend joined 3,000 households chosen at random in Munich for an ambitious study whose central aim is to understand how many people — even those with no symptoms — have already had the virus, a key variable to make decisions about public life in a pandemic. The study is part of an aggressive approach to combat the virus in a comprehensive way that has made Germany a leader among Western nations figuring out how to control the contagion while returning to something resembling normal life. Other nations, including the United States, are still struggling to test for infections. But Germany is doing that and more. It is aiming to sample the entire population for antibodies in coming months, hoping to gain valuable insight into how deeply the virus has penetrated the society at large, how deadly it really is, and how immunity is evolving. The government hopes to use the findings to unravel a riddle that will allow Germany to move securely into the next phase of the pandemic: Which of the far-reaching social and economic restrictions that have slowed the virus are most effective and which can be safely lifted? The same questions are being asked around the world. Other countries like Iceland and South Korea have broadly for infections, or combined testing with digital tracking to undercut the spread of the virus. But even the best laid plans can go awry; Singapore attempted to reopen only to have the virus re-emerge. In the United States, President Trump is in a hurry to restart the economy in an election year, but experts warn that much wider testing is needed to open societies safely. Both Britain and the United States, where some of the first tests were flawed, virtually forfeited the notion of widespread testing early in their outbreaks and have since had to ration tests in places as they scramble to catch up. In Italy, one of the worst hit countries in the world, the central government and regional leaders sparred over how widely to test.
Germany, which produces most of its own high-quality test kits, is already testing on a greater scale than most — 120,000 a day and growing in a nation of 83 million. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a trained scientist, said this week that the aim was nothing less than tracing “every infection chain.” That high level of testing has helped her country slow the spread of the virus and keep the number of deaths relatively low. More people in Germany now recover from the virus every day than are infected by it. Every 10 people infected with the virus now pass it to seven others — a sharp decline in the infection rate for a virus that has spread exponentially.
Even so, Ms. Merkel, too, has had her stumbles in dealing with the virus Germany has been criticized for failing to offer forceful leadership to the European Union at a moment of profound crisis. The generosity and solidarity on such striking display inside of Europe’s largest and richest economy have been missing in Germany’s response to poorer European nations in the south, which were hit hardest by the virus. At home, however, the chancellor’s mixture of calm reassurance and clear-eyed realism — as well as her ability to understand the science and explain it to citizens — also has been widely praised and encouraged Germans to follow social distancing rules!! Her approval ratings are now higher than 80 percent. That broad confidence in government has given Germany a tremendous advantage. It is much of the reason a knock on the door by a police officer and strangers dressed like aliens asking for blood can engender good will rather than alarm, even in a country where past authoritarian governments have left citizens protective of their privacy. The Munich antibody study, run by the Division of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine at Munich University Hospital, and co-financed by the government of the state of Bavaria, is the biggest of several regional studies being rolled out in various corners of Germany.
Still, scientists caution that there is no proof yet that the detection of antibodies signals effective immunity and even if it does, it is not known how long that immunity might last. Nationally, the Robert Koch Institute, the government’s central scientific institution in the field of biomedicine, is testing 5,000 samples from blood banks across the country every two weeks and 2,000 people in four hot spots who are farther along in the cycle of the disease. Its most ambitious project, aiming to test a nationwide random sample of 15,000 people across the country, is scheduled to begin next month. “In the free world, Germany is the first country looking into the future,” said Prof. Michael Hoelscher, who heads up the Munich study, noting that a number of countries had already asked him for the protocol to be able to replicate it. “We are leading the thinking of what to do next.”Mr. Hoelscher was co-author of what has become a widely influential research paper about how the virus can be transmitted before someone develops symptoms. “There’s no doubt after reading this paper that asymptomatic transmission is occurring,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, told CNN on Feb. 1, three days after the paper was published.
“This study lays the question to rest. ”Asymptomatic transmission is what has made containment so difficult because a large number of infections are not detected. Measuring the number of hidden infections and getting a sense of the true scale of the disease is key to fine-tuning the gradual loosening of restrictions and minimizing income loss and social isolation, scientists say.“ We will have a better idea of the number of undetected infections once we have done these representative studies,” said Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases, which is conducting a number of the antibody tests. “A lot is being done to measure well. ”Some interim results have already come out. In Gangelt, a small town of about 12,000 in northwest Germany, tests of a first group of 500 residents found that 14 percent had antibodies to the virus. Another 2 percent tested positive for the coronavirus, raising hopes that about 15 percent of the local population may already have some degree of immunity.“ The process toward reaching herd immunity has begun,” Prof. Hendrik Streeck, director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Bonn, who is leading the study, said in an interim report. And even if 15 percent of Gangelt has some degree of immunity, levels of immunity are almost certain to be lower elsewhere in the country.
Gangelt was hit early and exceptionally hard by the virus following a carnival event in mid-February that acted as a super spreader. But it may hold valuable insights for places that lag behind as the pandemic runs its course. The mortality rate in the town, for example, turned out to be 0.37 percent, much lower than the national rate of 2.9 percent which is calculated based only on detected infections.The Munich study is expected to be more nuanced in its findings because it follows participants like Mr. Germann for a whole year. In addition to regular blood tests, there will be questions about everything from mental health to income loss. “We are at a crossroads,” said Mr. Hoelscher, the professor. “Are we going the route of loosening more and increasing immunity in the summer to slow the spread of this in the winter and gain more freedom to live public life? Or are we going to try to minimize transmissions.
“This is a question for politicians, not for scientists,” he added. “But politicians need the data to make an informed risk assessment.”Mr. Hoelscher got the idea for the antibody study in the shower. It was March 19, the day before the state of Bavaria announced its lockdown. “I thought to myself if we’re going into lockdown, we need to start working on an exit strategy now,” he said. The next day, he said he wrote a short pitch to the Bavarian government. Six hours later, he had the green light. It took another three weeks until the test kits had arrived, a new lab was opened and teams of medics started fanning out across the city. Six days after they first rung his doorbell, a doctor and two medical students came back to Mr. Germann’s apartment, household number 420 out of 3,000. They put on disposable protection suits, gloves and goggles and one of them sat down on a plastic stool they had brought along to take a small vial of his blood. Then they removed and bagged their suits, disinfected the stool and any surface they had touched and left. It took all of 10 minutes. “I was like, wow, it was a perfect choreography,” said Mr. Germann. “It’s impressive to think they have teams doing this all across the city. And we’re only like one month into this. ”An interim result of the study could be released as early as June. Mr. Germann will get his first results already next week. He is curious. “You kind of wonder, was that last cold I had corona?” Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.
In Germany, a small town near the Netherlands border called Gangelt in the larger area called Heinsberg has a festival marking the beginning of Lent called Karneval. This town of Gangelt (about 12,000 residents) has been called ‘Germany’s Wuhan’ as it has had the largest number of infections and deaths in the country; Heinsberg (the larger principality with about 42,000 residents) as of this writing (10th April) has 1,521 cases and 45 deaths. On 31 March 2020 it was announced they would test 1000 residents that were representative of the population, with the goal of determining at greater detail how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus spreads. Dr. Hendrik Streeck a Bonn virologist said at that time. If there are ways of preventing the illness from spreading in our environment, we want to know what they are, with the goal of finding out how we can freely move about in the environment together. https://translate.google.com/
Dr. Hendrick Streeck, in The Guardian on 31 March 2020 It is surmised through active research across countries worldwide that the coronavirus is not spread through casual contact, such as grocery shopping or sitting next to some random people in public transit, but close social interaction such as hugging, singing, laughing and social kissing. (In Rhineland Germany they greet each other with a Bützchen, or kiss on the cheek.) On 15 February 2020, a group of about 350 gathering for the Karneval listened to live music, mingled with food and drink, heard the town leaders and generally socialized for a total of four hours. 7 individuals, all attending that event, later tested positive, among the first of all cases in Germany. Of the 1,000 volunteers who submitted for both rRT-PCR testing (via throat swab for active virus infection) and antibody testing for resistance to SARS-CoV-2 (via blood draw to test for anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, specifically IgA and IgG), the results of the first 500 samples were released yesterday. In the report (link to the PDF in German is here, the page this PDF comes from is located here) are some surprising, and very interesting, results: about 2% have tested positive for the virus via PCR testing, and 14% have tested positive for antibodies against the disease. Originally given the population size and infected rate, the researchers were expecting a smaller number of IgA/IgG-positive samples (perhaps 5%). In other words, one in seven have been infected and have recovered with antibodies against the virus, and can be considered ‘immune’ from being infected again (although that is also being actively studied). This preliminary data has large (dare I say huge) implications for public health policy, as questions are currently being raised as to how the economies and society of many nations (and literally trillions of dollars of economic activity) will restart again. From a translation of the German PDF, they claim a >99% specificity; will have to await the publication of the results to find out the details. ( Friendly reminder, specificity is the ‘true negative’ rate, thus 1-specificity is the ‘false positive’ rate or <1%.) The larger implication of this 14% number is the calculation of the death rate, known as a the ‘Case Fatality Ratio’ or CFR. If the denominator is much larger (i.e. many individuals having been infected and recovered from the virus) the CFR is much lower. Here the German virologists estimate a CFR of 0.37%, compared to the ‘official’ CFR of about 2% for Germany. As a point of reference, the CFR for the United States is about 3.6%. Many studies of this type are going on right now in the US; Stanford University recently announced serology testing (first among healthcare workers and this week more widely to the general population) and is ongoing in New York City although not to the wider population yet. Accurate, and widespread serological testing is something to keep on the lookout for, as it will indicate who can be ‘certified’ to be virus-resistant. Antibody testing will be a vital tool in getting past this pandemic, along with a vaccine, and getting back to something or a normal life. Preliminary results are out from a COVID-19 case cluster study in one of the regions worst hit by Germany’s coronavirus epidemic.
They are somewhat reassuring. One often-heard statistic is the “case fatality rate”—that is, the percentage of people diagnosed with a disease who will die of it. This afternoon that figure stands at 3.5 percent for COVID-19 in the U.S., but this rate is significantly inflated because it does not count asymptomatic cases or undiagnosed people who recover at home. What we really need to know is the infection fatality rate: the percentage of all the people infected who eventually die of the disease. That’s what the German study attempts to do. Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80 percent of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they’d been infected by the coronavirus. Around 15 percent had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37 percent. The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a while. For comparison, the U.S. infection fatality rates for the 1957–58 flu epidemic was around 0.27 percent; for the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, it was about 2.6 percent. For seasonal flu, the rate typically averages around 0.1 percent. Basically, the German researchers found that the coronavirus kills about four times as many infected people than seasonal flu viruses do. The German researchers caution that it would be wrong to extrapolate these regional results to the whole country. But they also believe these findings show that lockdowns can begin to be lifted, as long as people maintain high levels of hygiene to keep COVID-19 under control. US reopening: What states are relaxing social distancing restrictions and moving away from lockdowns?
This may have revealed a clue about the pandemic? 1/3 Sweeping coronavirus testing of the entire 4860 crew of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt with 94% having been tested. The Navy spokesperson told Newsweekthe ship has seen 3,920 negative coronavirus tests. This may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: of the majority of the 660 positive cases – 60% were/are asymptomatic, with 7 hospitalized and 1 having died officials say. In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if a patient is a carrier for a disease or infection but experiences no symptoms. A condition is asymptomatic if it fails to show the noticeable symptoms with which it is usually associated. Asymptomatic infections are also called subclinical infections. 2/3 The Diamond Princess saw its passengers and crew contract the coronavirus during February this year, sparking worldwide panic that the pandemic could become a genuine threat to human existence. It was packed full of 3,711 passengers and crew, and in total 14 people died from the virus aboard, while 712 were confirmed to have had the infection. After those on board were allowed to disembark, the rate of infection and its spread across the boat was monitored and compared to the original source of coronavirus in Wuhan, which reported the first case on December 31, 2019. Experts found that the transmission of the virus throughout the ship was four times faster than at the peak of the outbreak in the Chinese city. Debate raged as to how long those people should have been left on the cruise liner, given the overcrowded nature of the vessel and a lack of medical understanding of whether cruise goers were virus-free. Quarantined for coronavirus on the Diamond Princesshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess 3/3 The Grand Princesswas kept at sea for several days before being allowed back into port. A source familiar with the process said government officials knew for several hours that there were multiple positive results from the testing done aboard the cruise liner, which had 3,533 people. These include 2,422 guests and 1,111 teammates. In total, they represent 54 nationalities. Of the 1,103 passengers from the Grand Princess that elected to be tested, 103 tested positive, 699 tested negative. While Three passengers who traveled on the Grand Princess cruise ship have died, Over the course of several days, passengers were spread between four military bases in California, Texas and Georgia to complete a two-week quarantine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_ pandemic_on_cruise_ships#Grand_Princess
Also a recent published report that examined data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined after passengers began testing positive for COVID-19 in February. In the analysis, which utilized data from both U.S. and Japanese health organizations, the CDC reported that the virus’ ribonucleic acid (RNA) had survived for 17 days in rooms previously inhabited by symptomatic and asymptomatic in the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship — after those rooms were already vacated by guests. The RNA had also survived on a “variety of surfaces,” the report said, albeit before any “disinfection procedures had been conducted,” per Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases. The Diamond Princess was first quarantined in early February after a passenger who previously departed in Hong Kong tested positive for COVID-19. Further testing revealed that 712 of the 3,711 passengers and crew eventually contracted the virus as well. Later in February, the Grand Princess cruise ship was also identified as the source of a separate outbreak after a passenger who previously sailed on a Feb. 11-21 voyage tested positive for coronavirus and ultimately died while the ship was already on another voyage. That sailing experienced an outbreak among passengers as well, and the Grand Princess was quarantined off the coast of San Francisco amid testing. Source: https://www.foxnews.com/health/coronavirus- survived-17-days-cruise-ship-cabins-cdc-report With the numbers being one in seven that might test positive for Corvid-19 infection. Though that might not seem like that big of deal. Especially when you consider most that acquire the virus are over 60 years of age and in confine spaces with air pollution around them. What is certain, the CDC says, is that cruise ships are “often settings for outbreaks of infectious diseases because of their closed environment and contact between travelers from many countries.” Both the CDC and the U.S. State Department have since advised that Americans avoid traveling by cruise ship. NYC versus Minnesota versus Oklahoma https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/situation.html https://coronavirus.health.ok.gov/ https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Abby Reinhard was expecting her 76-year-old father to be discharged from the hospital earlier this month after a fall. Instead, the 41-year-old mother of three from Rochester, New York, heard from the hospital her father, Donald Adair, — had tested positive for — COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Two days later, on April 6, Reinhard learned that her dad passed away from complications due to COVID-19. “I still fully haven’t taken in what happened with my dad,” Reinhard told “Good Morning America.” “It still feels surreal somehow.” Reinhard and her three siblings — who live around the world — spent the last nearly two days of their dad’s life on the phone with him, as he lay in the hospital struggling to breathe, with a phone propped up by his ear and they listened for his every breath and said their goodbyes. MORE: Coronavirus updates: 21 NYC public school teachers dead She wrote about the experience as it unfolded so she would have a memory of her dad’s last hours on Earth. Reinhard later shared her thoughts in a moving Facebook post that gives a glimpse into what it is like for the thousands of families separated from their loved ones in critical condition due to COVID-19. “When I looked down at my phone, still connected to your hospital line, I wanted so badly to talk to you again, even though I knew you weren’t really there,” she wrote. “I pictured your body lying on the bed and your spirit rising. ‘I love you, Dad,’ I said into the phone. I paused for a few moments and pressed the red button to end the call. At least 23,070 people in the U.S. have died as a result of COVID-19, including more than 10,000 people have died from COVID-19 in New York state alone. Reinhard though said she wants her dad and the thousands of other COVID-19 victims to be remembered as more than just statistics. She also wants people to understand how quickly COVID-19 can turn into a deadly serious illness and how hard it is for those left behind who were not allowed to be at their loved ones’ hospital bedside. “It’s easy to feel at a distance from numbers,” she said. “If we totally take in the extent of what’s happening, it’s almost too much. But when we humanize a tragedy we understand it better.” MORE: This mom has helped hundreds of people per day get tested for COVID-19 Reinhard’s father, Adair, was a Rochester native who graduated from Harvard University on scholarships before graduating from Cornell Law School.
He was an attorney and a grandfather of five, according to Reinhard. “He was one of the smartest people I ever met and he was also very humble and kind,” she said. “He loved his kids and was very proud of us. He had a big heart, a big brain, an incredible work ethic and a lot of love.”
April 5th, 2020, Evening: The terror I’ve felt today is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I can only imagine how hard it has been for you, Dad. I’m so sorry you are going through this nightmare. You went to the hospital after falling, and you were supposed to be discharged soon. But COVID spread, unsuspected, down the hall, before you had a chance. On Saturday night I read that the test came back positive. I can’t describe the fear I felt in that moment, and I thought, “This cannot be happening to my family.” Somehow I was able to regain a sense of calm and went to bed hopeful, because the signs of your health were encouraging. This morning, I got the call and your dire prognosis. “Aspiration… deterioration… suffering… not much time.” Your lungs got ravaged so fast. I couldn’t fully take in what the nurse was saying — it didn’t feel real. Then I heard myself say, ”How are you going to make sure this doesn’t happen to other families? Why did you all wait so long to wear masks, and why wasn’t there more testing? “This never should have happened!” Then I caught myself and remembered that she was an innocent messenger working on the frontline of the pandemic, I told her I was grateful for her.
What was done was done. The weight of this reality hit hard, the dam broke, and I sobbed, realizing I couldn’t go to be by your side. No visitors. COVID wing. Oh my God. I felt a huge rush of fear and then anguish. But I couldn’t stay stuck there. I needed to talk to you, Dad, as soon as possible. The nurse offered to call me from your hospital phone and nestle it by your ear, so I could hear you breathe, and you could hear me talk. “I love you… Thank you… I’m sorry… I forgive you,” I said, as I heard you struggle to breathe and eject the ooze from your lungs. Hearing the retching sound of your cough, I knew you were suffering — and there I was, powerless, on the other end of the phone. But I was so thankful for the nurses. “Yes, Don, get that out,” they said. “You can do it, Don. That’s good.” You settled down in between coughs, and I searched my heart for what to say. I hope you could hear me. I talked about our precious times at the lake. I remembered you playing your guitar around the campfire, and I clung to that image as if it were my saving grace. I hope you could hear through my tears as I sang our old campfire songs. Some of the lyrics seemed so fitting — “Milk and honey on the other side” and “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” I paced back and forth in my bathroom, trying to contain my crying, as I attempted to get the words out. I worked hard to breathe — but not as hard as you.
After a half-hour or so, I realized I could join Tom, Carrie and Emily to the call. Over the next many hours, our conversation with you is one I will treasure for the rest of my life. Although we were each sitting in Dallas, Raleigh, Copenhagen or Rochester, we were together, unpacking memories we had stored away long ago. The lake, the Cape, and our Europe trip. Games, projects, and important conversations. We also sang more campfire songs. I pray that you could hear it all. I had to break away from the call a few times to talk to doctors. I needed opinions. I needed data. Until today I’d actually forgotten I was your health-care proxy, and I was unprepared for the decision I had to make. An unthinkable decision. The doctors shared information and context, and it was clear that they were clear on the hard call I needed to make. But I did not have that same clarity. You always have been so strong, Dad, and I wanted to grasp on to any shred of hope. I read your living will, over and over, meditating on each life-and-death phrase. I tried to put myself in your shoes. I also checked in with my intuition, which I’ve learned over the years is almost always right. The clear voice inside was leading me to the same answer as the doctors. I hated that answer, but I knew it was right and that I couldn’t wait too long, because you were suffering. So I made the horrifying but loving decision. “Comfort care.”
The doctor sounded relieved. Through all of this, I want you to know, Dad, that I haven’t had the feeling that it’s too much too bear. I’ve known deep down, that as hard as this is, I could handle it. And I’m eternally grateful to your sister Robin, who helped me sort out the right course of action. It’s now early evening, and I’ve been sitting at my desk writing while connected to our call. I’m glad to have documented what has happened up to this point. Now I’m trying to absorb this precious moment of being together virtually, giving thanks for you, Dad. It feels so good to laugh and cry. To be connected on the phone with you and my brother and sisters. To bring the images of us from earlier years back to life. It also feels good to hear you breathe. That rhythmic, white noise is the background music to our call. Although we’ve had a few excruciating periods of silence on your end — maybe a minute long each time. When you don’t breathe, I hold my own breath, afraid it’s the end. And we all chime in, “Breathe, Dad — we need to hear you breathe.” Then we finally hear you inhale. Then I let out a sigh of relief, grateful to know you’re still with us. I have never loved and appreciated breath the way I love and appreciate breath right now.
April 6th, Morning: Around midnight last night, I dozed off, with you still in my ear and all five phone lines connected. I don’t know how much sleep I got. Each nap was punctuated by our mantras, “We love you so much… We’re here for you… Your kids are all here, Dad.” Today your breath is more sporadic and thick, like you’re straining to suck paste up a straw. All I can do is listen on the other end of the phone, and write this down. My own chest is feeling tight now, as I imagine your lungs filling, while the virus seeps in. You just moaned softly, and I don’t know if you’re trying to say you love us, or if you’re in pain. We’re listening to you and loving you. I wish desperately we could be with you in person, and I hate picturing you in that room alone. But I keep coming back to my faith, which tells me you’re surrounded by love. I pray you can see angels behind your closed eyes. That you can feel their love — and ours. That you can hear us on the other end of the phone. That you can sense the stirrings of your soul even while your body is becoming numb.
April 6th, Afternoon: It’s been ten minutes since we last heard you, Dad. I know there’s likely just an issue with the phone, but I’m really scared. But I keep thinking, if you were gone, surely by now the nurses would have come in, and we’d hear them through the phone. Right? Please…Dear God. You’re back! The phone had slipped. Thank you, God. Now we hear short, shallow breaths — each one a miracle. You’re here. We’re here. With obvious relief, we’re each telling you again how much we love you. Baby Skylar is hiccuping on Carrie’s line. This is life, and this is death. The newborn baby on the phone with the grandfather she’ll never meet. Then silence again. This one is a dark, harrowing silence… Ok, here come faint, short flicks of white noise. I hope that’s you. Yes, it’s louder now. It’s you! Thank God. I just said the Lord’s Prayer, in short bursts between my attempts at squelching my sobs so my kids can’t hear me. I feel the pressure of the wailing behind my eyes, as I whimper like a dog, and wipe the tears away. I feel it in my throat now too, the pressure. Grief is a strange thing. It comes in unpredictable waves. At one point earlier, I felt slightly guilty because I actually felt ok. And now here I am, pushing back against a huge wave of pain as it crests. I try to breathe through it. I’m breathing. You’re breathing. We’re ok. …I’m back and feeling much better. While it was silent on the phone, I breathed in and out when you did for about 15 or 20 breaths — and it’s all I focused on. A breathing duet and a meditation. I felt so connected to you, and my mind calmed more than ever today. Thank you. …We’re all getting tired. The cadence of our conversation continues to slow.
April 6th, Early Evening: The pain just hit hard again. I exhaled out a sob for so long and so hard, I felt my stomach muscles seize up. These are quiet wails, with just the hiss of air escaping my wide-open mouth. Now that I’m on the other side of that release, I’m feeling much more peaceful. This is lasting much longer than the doctor predicted yesterday. I start to question my decision until I speak with the with the new, kind doctor on the floor, who uses the phrase “terminally ill.” Yesterday’s doctor is “off for the week” — in quarantine, I assume. I also just read an article in the New York Times by an MD giving a gruesome account of intubation and the small chance of recovery it affords. I feel more at peace again with what’s happening. I’m grateful Tom stopped telling you to keep fighting, Dad. But I grieve the loss of his hope — the hope I played a part in taking away, with the decision Tom is so reluctant to accept. The first-born — the only son. The one running for office, who needed his dad to last at least through November. His very proud father. Tom just stepped away from the call, and Carrie and Emily say, “I love you, Dad.” Silence again. I realize now that some of the silent patches on your end of the line are due to your faint breaths that aren’t loud enough to cue the phone line to pick you up. So the line sounds almost dead, as we wait and listen hard. I miss the in-and-out sound of your breaths, but the silence isn’t as scary now. I even manage to eat a slice of pizza. …You’re back! We hear you, Dad. The phone line picked you back up thanks to background noise in the COVID wing, as the nurses opened your door to reposition you. They are superheroes, putting themselves at risk so you can be as comfortable as possible. We hear one of the nurses with a kind, lilting voice narrate as they move your body. Before leaving, she said, “Goodnight, Don. I’ll see you tomorrow.” I can’t help but wonder if she’s right. I feel the need to sing to you again, so here goes, with “Our Love is Here to Stay.”A bit more upbeat than yesterday’s “Amazing Grace.”And just now I played “Country Road”from YouTube, so you could hear one of your favorite John Denver songs.
…You’re now making a new sound! A gentle, guttural sigh. Is this a new phase? Are you having a sweet dream? Are you seeing something? Now it’s gone silent again. How fleeting peace can be. I’m glad I reveled in it while it lasted. Now we wait, and listen, and pray again. The flavor of tonight’s call is so different than last night’s. Only a few stories. Our tired grief is slowing our brains and wearing on our spirits. The silence has been going on for several minutes now. But no nurses have come. Maybe the phone slipped again. Eight-year-old Caroline just popped in to my room asking if Grandpa Don sounded better. I told her honestly that you have been sounding much more calm. “Yes!” she said, with a huge smile. “There have been a lot of recoveries,” and, as her smile faded away, she added,“…and a lot of deaths.” I wonder how the coronavirus will shape my kids and their generation? I think now about what shaped you and your fellow Boomers. Vietnam…. a war against communism in a distant land. Today it’s the coronavirus… a war waged against droplets in the air, all around us. I hear you breathing again, Dad. So grateful for that sound.
Late Evening April 6th/Early Morning April 7th: The four of us just agreed we need more sleep tonight, and that you’d want us to take care of ourselves. It could be hours or days, and there’s no way to know. We couldn’t stay as connected on the phone as we were last night. I stayed muted on the line with you, as I tucked in the kids and got ready for bed. I journaled and fell asleep around 11. None of us hung up the line, in case we wanted to reconnect at any point during the night, but we agreed to step away from our phones and get some sleep. Then came the call, just after midnight. I knew what I was going to hear, and braced myself. Gone. You’re gone. Cause of death: “Respiratory failure in the setting of aspiration and COVID-19.” Time of death: 11:50 p.m. If I’d stayed on the phone just one more hour, I could have been with you. We’d been on the line together for almost 36 hours. What are the chances you would pass within an hour of our break? Maybe you didn’t want us to hear you go. Or maybe you didn’t have the space to leave while we were hanging on your every breath. If I’m honest, maybe part of me didn’t want to hear your last gasps of air. When I looked down at my phone, still connected to your hospital line, I wanted so badly to talk to you again, even though I knew you weren’t really there. I pictured your body lying on the bed and your spirit rising. “I love you, Dad,” I said into the phone. I paused for a few moments and pressed the red button to end the call.
Here comes the pain again, so heavy. I cannot believe this is happening. Dear God, Thank you for welcoming my dad. He is such a good soul. Dad, I know we can still continue our conversation. Thank you so much. I love you forever. Love, Abby
I SAT DOWN WITH TWO INFECTIOUS DISEASE EXPERTS IN HONG KONG. DR. IVAN HUNG & DR. SARAH BORWEIN ~ Kristie Lu Stout
Kristie Lu Stout, “Hong Kong: “Is The coronavirus is man-made.” Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong: “If you look at the virus itself, if you look at the phylogenetic tree, we find that basically the virus pops very nicely in between the beta coronaviruses and the SARS coronaviruses. So we believe that this is actually a natural evolution of this novel coronavirus.”
Kristie Lu Stout: “So it didn’t come from a lab in China. This wasn’t bioengineered.” Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong: “Unlikely.”
”SINCE THE OUTBREAK BEGAN, THERE HAS BEEN A WAVE OF MISINFORMATION, PROMPTING THIS OPEN LETTER BY SCIENTISTS IN “THE LANCET”: “CONSPIRACY THEORIES DO NOTHING BUT CREATE FEAR, RUMOURS, AND PREJUDICE THAT JEOPARDISE OUR GLOBAL COLLABORATION IN THE FIGHT AGAINST THIS VIRUS.”
Kristie Lu Stout: “My pet can give me the virus because we know that a pet here in Hong Kong has tested positive for coronavirus and was placed under quarantine… ”Dr. Sarah Borwein, Partner, Central Health Medical Practice, Hong Kong, GP, and Infectious Disease Expert: “It’s very unlikely and more likely that the dog has been environmentally contaminated.”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong: “Even though it’s contaminated, you won’t get a very high viral load and very unlikely that you can actually be transmitted from the pets to you. It’s very unlikely.”
Kristie Lu Stout: “Now this is a big one. ‘Wearing a mask will not protect me from the virus’ because you have the US Surgeon General telling people you don’t need to buy a mask, it is not effective. Is it?” Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong: “If you look at the data in Hong Kong, wearing a mask is probably the most important thing in terms of infection control. And it not only brings down the cases of coronaviruses, but it also brings down influenza. In fact, this is now the influenza season, and we hardly see any influenza cases. And that is because the masks actually protected not only against coronaviruses but also against the influenza viruses as well. ”
Kristie Lu Stout: “The coronavirus is less deadly than the flu. How do they compare?” Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong: “If you look at the mortality rate, so far, currently it stands at 3.4% because I think recently has been pulled up by the Iranian mortality but otherwise if you look at the thousand cases being reported by Professor Zhong Nanshan in New England Journal of Medicine, basically the mortality rate is around 1.4% or probably even going to go lower as the denominator is getting bigger. So, it still stands above 1%, for influenza, it’s 0.1% or even lower depending on what seasons you are. So it’s still 10 times more deadly compared to influenza.”
Kristie Lu Stout: “The virus will go away in April.” A lot of people think so, including President Donald Trump. Will it?” Dr. Sarah Borwein, Partner, Central Health Medical Practice, Hong Kong, GP, and Infectious Disease Expert: “It is very speculative. And some people partly say that because SARS went away in April-May, but when it’s warm here, it’s going to be cold somewhere else. We’ve got a southern hemisphere too. ”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong: “With SARS, it only affected a few countries. But this time it’s really a pandemic scale. So basically it can come back, especially in the southern hemisphere and then alternate with the northern hemisphere.”
A possible new clue in coronavirus transmission Sweeping coronavirus testing of the entire 4800 crew of the U.S..S. Theodore Roosevelt may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: Of the majority of the 600 positive cases – 60% are asymptomatic, with 6 hospitalized and 1 having died officials say. In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if a patient is a carrier for a disease or infection but experiences no symptoms. A condition might be asymptomatic if it fails to show the noticeable symptoms with which it is usually associated. Asymptomatic infections are also called subclinical infections.
Authorities say finding ‘patient zero’ would help answer crucial questions about the origin of the coronavirus. As the coronavirus death toll rises, health authorities are trying to control or even halt the spreading epidemic by tracking down “patient zero” – the first person to have been infected by the disease. Covid-19, the official name of the illness caused by the virus, has infected more than 82,000 people worldwide and killed at least 2,800. It has spread to at least 44 countries outside China. But the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday that the coronavirus was “not yet” a worldwide epidemic, or “pandemic”. Here are the essential things to know about the hunt for patient zero. Although the term patient zero can be used interchangeably with “index case” and generally refers to the first person infected by a communicable disease in an outbreak, in the Covid-19 epidemic, there are several patient zeros. That is according to Sarah Borwein, who works in the infectious diseases field at Hong Kong’s Central Health Medical Practice. “For example, we know who patient zero is in the big cluster in South Korea, and that is helping to trace all the contacts and understand what happened,” she said. “But we don’t know who patient zero was in the Iran cluster, or the cluster in Italy.” South Korea has reported more than 1,500 confirmed Covid-19 cases and at least 13 fatalities. The biggest cluster of infections has been linked to a secretive Christian church in the southeastern city of Daegu. At the centre of the church cluster is a 61-year-old female member of the sect, who is South Korea’s 31st case. Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has described the outbreak there as a “super-spreading event”. Meanwhile, Chinese officials are still trying to trace the epidemic back to its source in China. The first coronavirus case was reported to the WHO on December 31 and has been linked to Wuhan’s Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market. However, a new study published by a team of Chinese scientists last week said the virus might have been imported from somewhere else. The first known Covid-19 patient, a male who showed symptoms on December 8, had been discharged but said he was not at the Huanan market, the Wuhan government said in a Weibo post on Wednesday. “We don’t know who the very first patient zero was, presumably in Wuhan, and that leaves a lot of unanswered questions about how the outbreak started and how it initially spread,” Borwein said. Why is it important to find them? Knowing who patient zero was would help prevent future outbreaks and provide information about how to prevent transmission, Borwein said. But as time passes, identifying the index case grows increasingly difficult. “Figuring out who patient zero was wouldn’t give us all the answers but it would help to map the path the virus has taken and how it’s travelling,” she said. “It’s hard to draw that map without knowing where it starts.” John Nicholls, a University of Hong Kong clinical professor in pathology, said identifying patient zero during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic in 2002-03 was vital from an epidemiological perspective, as it highlighted the mode of its spread. The disease, which infected over 8,000 and killed 813 people globally, was traced to a 64-year-old medical professor from Guangzhou, who had infected at least 13 tourists staying at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong. But Nicholls, who was an important member of the 2003 research team that isolated and characterised the Sars coronavirus, which is in the same family as the current virus, said the sheer number of infections in the current epidemic meant finding the patient zeros was a huge challenge. “There are so many outbreaks and hotspots around the world, and this virus appears to spread more rapidly than Sars, so it’s going to be a big challenge to accurately pinpoint patient zero,” he said. “Epidemiological resources would be better at mitigating the spread rather than looking back.” Borwein, who worked as head of infection control for a hospital in Beijing and in outbreak communication during the Sars epidemic, said people must be wary of the language they use when talking about patient zero, because it had the potential to fuel xenophobia and panic. “We talk about a ‘desperate hunt’ or a ‘panicked hunt’ for patient zero – and because coronavirus started in China, and patient zero was probably Chinese, it can easily fuel discrimination and racism,” she said. “It’s important to understand that patient zero is a clue, not a criminal.” What are some examples of Covid-19 patient zeros? Most coronavirus patient zeros came from Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak. That includes patient zeros in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and the Philippines. The first Covid-19 case outside China was reported on January 13 in Thailand. The patient was a 61-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan who travelled to Bangkok with family members in a tour group. Two days later, Japan confirmed the second coronavirus case outside China: a man in his 30s who lived in Kanagawa prefecture, southwest of Tokyo. The man had travelled to Wuhan and been in close contact with a pneumonia patient in the city. Around a week later, on January 23, the US’ Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported the country’s first American coronavirus case, a 35 year-old Washington state man who had visited family in Wuhan. There have also been incidents of human-to-human transmission among Covid-19 patient zeros. Vietnam confirmed two cases of the virus on January 23. A 65-year-old man from Wuhan met up with his son, 27, who works in the country and did not travel to China. The father developed a fever on January 17 and the son showed the same symptoms three days later, doctors said in The New England Journal of Medicine on January 28. This family cluster suggested an instance of person-to-person transmission, the WHO said. Germany also reported what is believed to be the first human-to-human transmission case in Europe on January 28. A 33-year-old German man contracted the disease after attending a training session given by his Chinese colleague in the state of Bavaria. The female colleague, who is from Shanghai, had recently returned from visiting her parents in Wuhan, said Andreas Zapf, head of the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety.
Rumors stop with the wise…. it is what it is ? The Chinese are to blame for this Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. The Chinese are to blame for this Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Their containment methods were laughable, their officials refused to inform the public, and people died. They allowed Wuhan to celebrate Chinese New Year, exposing potentially tens of thousands to the disease. Then some five million people left the city before they enacted a quarantine. And now we’re hearing that they knew about human transmissions. The Wall Street Journal’s piece on how this whole international fiasco began all but places the blame where it should rightfully be directed: China!
It was on Dec. 10 that Wei Guixian, a seafood merchant in this city’s Hua’nan market, first started to feel sick. Thinking she was getting a cold, she walked to a small local clinic to get some treatment and then went back to work. Eight days later, the 57-year-old was barely conscious in a hospital bed, one of the first suspected cases in a coronavirus epidemic that has paralyzed China and gripped the global economy. The virus has spread around the world and sickened more than 100,000. For almost three weeks, doctors struggled to connect the dots between Ms. Wei and other early cases, many of them Hua’nan vendors. Patient after patient reported similar symptoms, but many, like her, visited small, poorly resourced clinics and hospitals. Some patients balked at paying for chest scans; others, including Ms. Wei, refused to be transferred to bigger facilities that were better-equipped to identify infectious diseases. When doctors did finally establish the Hua’nan link in late December, they quarantined Ms. Wei and others like her and raised the alarm to their superiors. But they were prevented by Chinese authorities from alerting their peers, let alone the public. Source
Shrimp vendor at Wuhan market may be coronavirus ‘patient zero.’ By Amanda Woods March 27, 2020 | 9:15am | Updated A shrimp peddler at the Chinese market where the coronavirus pandemic likely began has been identified as one of the first victims of the disease — and possibly “patient zero.” The 57-year-old woman, identified by the Wall Street Journal as Wei Guixian, was the first person from the now-notorious Huanan market in Wuhan to test positive for the deadly bug. She was at work Dec. 10 when she developed what she thought were cold symptoms, Chinese outlet The Paper reported. So she walked to a small local clinic for treatment and then went back to work — likely spreading the contagion. “I felt a bit tired, but not as tired as previous years,” she told The Paper, according to a translation by news.com.au. “Every winter, I always suffer from the flu. So I thought it was the flu.” She visited a local clinic on Dec. 11 and received an injection, but didn’t feel any better, so she went to the Eleventh Hospital in Wuhan. “The doctor at the Eleventh Hospital could not figure out what was wrong with me and gave me pills,” Wei told the Chinese outlet — but those didn’t work either. “By then I felt a lot worse and very uncomfortable,” Wei said. “I did not have the strength or energy.” On Dec. 16, Wei went to Wuhan Union Hospital — one of the city’s biggest — to get checked out. A doctor there described her illness as “ruthless” and told her several other people from the same market had already come in with similar symptoms. By the end of the month, she was quarantined when doctors finally established the link between the emerging bug and the seafood market, the Chinese outlet reported. A Dec. 31 statement from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission revealed that Wei was among the first 27 patients to test positive for COVID-19, and one of 24 cases with direct links to the seafood market. Wei, who has since recovered and left the hospital in January, said she thinks she contracted the infection from a market toilet in the market she shared with meat sellers and others, according to the Journal. The vendors who worked on either side of Wei, along with one of her daughters, a niece and the niece’s husband, also caught the deadly bug, the paper reported. “A lot fewer people would have died” in the country if the government had acted sooner, Wei told the Journal in February. Wei may have been “patient zero” at the market, but it’s still unclear if she was the first person to ever contract the novel coronavirus in the country. Rumors have been circulating on Chinese social media that the first known patient did not get sick after making contact with the virus at the seafood market. The virus has been linked to Wuhan Institute of Virology,but the institute has deniedthe outbreak began among lab technicians, including a woman identified as Huang Yan Ling.
Huang was rumored to be “patient zero.” Huang Yan Ling (黄燕玲) worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She is reported to be patient Zero with regard to the CPP virus (Wuhan Virus, Chinese Virus, COVID-19 etc). While it is claimed that she died as a result of the virus, the CPP government has disavowed this statement but has not furnished proof that she is alive. There is a powerful function in our human society known as the 6th degrees of separation. This suggests that any two people on the planet are linked by acquaintances separated by only 6 people. For instance, I could probably pass a message to the Queen of England through 3 people – even though I have no personal direct links to her. Presumably, I could contact a member of the San tribe (also known as “Bushmen”) through 6 linked acquaintances. Under this premise, it should be possible to locate this lady or someone who is familiar with her (if she has died) in order to clarify this supposition. If you read this, I ask that you cast about your acquaintances to see if they know people, who know people (etc.) and find out the truth to this mystery.
Huang Yan Ling 黄燕玲 Name in Chinese, links to her page at WHIOV, shows it’s been scrubbed. so that might mean that she is patient zero. Died on the spot pretty much after contracting a huge viral load, the other staff disinfected the body, sent it to a crematorium, then didn’t tell crem. staff, they mishandled body. Then the lab denied all knowledge of Huang Yan Ling at first, then they said she left in 2015. But that’s not true.
Then they told another lie she’s alive and well. Well where is she? I agree this is HIGHLY suspicious. She has certainly disappeared but that does not mean she is dead. Even if she had a direct IV injection of infected bat blood or its urine that would not kill her “on the spot” But two things could have happen:.
1. She is dead. Basically as you said she got the virus maybe was quarantined for a while but she died. It then spread from the crematorium.
2. Or She got the virus and GOT really really very sick, recovered in 14 daysBUT was still infectious. Then went around Wuhan living her life. Walking to work, walking to the seafood market to buy fresh meat and veggies. Living in that 500m radius of her job in one of the many apartments. Doing the things a young well employed person does in a major city. All the while infecting people and not even knowing it. Option 2 has just as much evidence BUT it also provides for a really easy explanation for how that virus spread so devastatingly in Wuhan and then to the rest of world. https://virusdanger.com/index.php If option 2 were true and I were her I’d want to disappear too. IF the government of China did this… wouldn’t they do a more competent job? I mean they can completely blank her out of the Chinese internet with an edict. So far this looks about like what one would see if a person wanted to not be found at least for a while. Here is what I think, she might be dead. But if other folks got sprayed by the bats, then chances are they went to wet markets and infected people there. The wet markets of china are horrible in hygiene and are overcrowded as well. She might be patient zero in the sense that she also developed symptoms first and possibly died as even the chinese don’t have a cure yet.
From having lived through the Reagan Years: I don’t trust the communist party at all and I am sure someday the truth always has away of surfacing and will end up like Chernobyl.
According to Taiwanese press reports, the first patient, identified by the surname Chen, was a resident of the Wuchang District of Wuhan. Chen had never visited the seafood market, and has been “cured and discharged,” reports said. Independent medical researchers have disputed official Chinese claims. On Jan. 24, the Lancet, an independent medical journal, published a study showing Wuhan’s first patient was not connected to the seafood market. A joint research team representing China’s Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Huanan Agricultural College and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research have also said the seafood market is not the source of COVID-19. “The research provides further evidence that Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was not the birthplace of the virus,” China.org.cn reported Sunday. Despite being largely dismissed by the mainstream media, mounting evidence is giving some serious weight to the theory that the global coronavirus pandemic first spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fox News reported Thursday that multiple sources briefed on the matter have “increasing confidence” that the biolab was ground zero for the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. According to the report, scientists at the facility were part of a Chinese effort to compete with the United States in the field of virology. The sources indicated that the virus was a naturally occurring strain, likely being studied as part of the Wuhan lab’s documented history of working with bat coronaviruses. With access to bats from the remote corners of China, researchers surely had no shortage of the most exotic and dangerous pathogens in the world.
Sources also told Fox that Chinese government is possibly behind efforts to shift the blame from the laboratory to a nearby wet market. Considering the communist regime’s rocky relationship with the truth, this accusation seems to fit right in with the country’s past behavior. Despite the report pointing to the biolab as the source of the outbreak, the building itself was constructed with safety in mind. A 2017 Nature article profiled the WIV’s acquisition of a prestigious BSL-4 biosafety certification, touting the lab’s distance from the floodplain and earthquake-proof construction. While the building was safe from tremors, it was never safe from human error. It’s possible that the virus, which can survive on surfaces for over two weeks, simply hitched a ride on a careless employee’s shoes, clothing or hair. Earlier this year, Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton was one of the first American politicians to openly float the possibility that the novel coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan-area lab. China claimed—for almost two months—that coronavirus had originated in a Wuhan seafood market. That is not the case. @TheLancet published a study demonstrating that of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including Patient Zero. @SenTomCotton Cotton was targeted by the mainstream media for this, as so-called fact checkers quickly dismissed the notion that the coronavirus is an engineered biological weapon, while ignoring the potential for a virulent research sample accidentally leaking. After all, despite the best efforts of government bioweapons programs, the deadliest outbreaks in history have overwhelmingly been of natural origin — the Black Death, the Spanish flu and smallpox all emerged organically.
In Wuhan, a perfect storm existed for the next outbreak to spread like wildfire: The city is the crossroads of modern China, with roads from Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai all intersecting miles from the biolab. China’s position as the center of the world’s manufacturing industry guaranteed constant international flights from a myriad of airports. Throw in lies from the communist government that only helped the virus spread, and it’s clear why we’re now in a pandemic. There’s little doubt that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from an animal, the question is now whether China unwittingly helped the pathogen along.
April 17 (UPI) — China’s economy shrank by 6.8 percent in the first three months of the year, its first quarterly contraction on record, the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported on Friday. The squeeze to its gross domestic product is the first since it started reporting such figures in 1992, and occurred as cities were placed under lockdown, businesses were told to shutter and factories were ordered closed as the country attempted to clamp down on the spread of the deadly and infectious coronavirus. The bureau said in a statement that industrial, service and market sales all dropped while investment growth slowed as did imports and exports. It added, however, that agriculture and the emerging service industries grew while the sales of daily necessities and online retail sales of physical goods “grew fast.” The contraction was announced as health officials in China’s coronavirus epicenter of Wuhan revised up its death toll by nearly 50 percent on Friday.
The Wuhan municipal headquarters for the COVID-19 pandemic increased its number of deaths by 1,290 to 3,869, citing a responsibility to “history, the people and the deceased,” read an English-language transition of the notification published by China’s state-run Xinhua. The health officials said the reason for the discrepancy was due to some patients dying at home, a lack of communication between hospitals, incomplete information concerning patients who died from the virus and an overwhelmed medical system that resulted in either mistaken, belated or missed reporting. The total number of infections was also revised up by 325 to 50,333 patients as of the end of Thursday, the officials said. “Life and people are what matter most,” the notification read. “Every life lost in the epidemic is not only a loss to their family but also a grief for the city. Our sincere condolences go to the families of those who deceased in the the COVID-19 epidemic, and we express deep sorrow to the compatriots and medical workers who lost their lives in the epidemic.” The revision came amid allegations, particularly from the United States, that China has under-reported it figures. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump, who has previously raised questions over China’s numbers, told reporters that he doesn’t trust their counting as he attacked the Asian nation’s handling of its outbreak. “Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China?” he said. “Does anybody really believe that?”
President Trump’s comments came a day after he announced he was pulling funding from the World Health Organization, accusing it of responding too slow to the public health crisis and taking China’s claims of being transparent about its fight against the virus at face value. Since the outbreak began in December, China has several times adjusted either its numbers or how it counts cases. In the middle of February, China revised down its death toll by 108 due to “repeated statistics.” A day earlier the National Health Commission adjusted who it considers to be a confirmed infection. And earlier this month, China began counting asymptomatic cases for the first time. China’s National Health Commission on Friday reported 26 new cases of the coronavirus and zero deaths over the previous 24 hours, increasing its total infections to 82,367 while its death toll stood pat at 3,342. However, the numbers did not include Wuhan’s revisions. Globally, there were 2.16 million coronavirus infections and 145,563 deaths as of this morning. https://google.com/covid19-map/ Please Watch:A documentary showing a Chinese virologist catching wild bats in mountains have fueled a conspiracy theory, which suggests that the novel coronavirus may have originated in Wuhan’s disease control authority.The seven-minute film features the centre’s researcher Tian Junhua, who has visited dozens of caves in Hubei province to capture the flying mammal.
China’s race to contain it… which came amid the Lunar New Year and this countries busiest travel time of year. A 55-year-old individual from Hubei province in China may have been the first person to have contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus spreading across the globe. That case dates back to Nov. 17, 2019, according to the South Morning China Post. That’s more than a month earlier than doctors noted the cases in Wuhan, China, which is in Hubei province, at the end of December 2019. At the time, authorities suspected the virus stemmed from something sold at a wet market in the city. However, it’s now clear that early in what is now a pandemic, some infected people had no connection to the market. That included one of the earliest cases from Dec. 1, 2019 in an individual who had no link to that seafood market, researchers reported Jan. 20 in the journal The Lancet. In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations. President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.
Continued insanity: Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country. It’s uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It’s also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine. But what is clear, experts say, is that China’s rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for “rumor-mongering,” broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals. “Doctors in Wuhan were afraid,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession.” Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan. 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases — distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients, all without telling the public.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization. “Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless,” said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday press conference. The documents show the head of China’s National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials. A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.
“The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event,” the memo cites Ma as saying. The National Health Commission is the top medical agency in the country. In a faxed statement, the Commission said it had organized the teleconference because of the case reported in Thailand and the possibility of the virus spreading during New Year travel. It added that China had published information on the outbreak in an “open, transparent, responsible and timely manner,” in accordance with “important instructions” repeatedly issued by President Xi. The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo’s contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February. Under a section titled “sober understanding of the situation,” the memo said that “clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible.” It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had “changed significantly” because of the possible spread of the virus abroad. “With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high,” the memo continued. “All localities must prepare for and respond to a pandemic.” In the memo, Ma demanded officials unite around Xi and made clear that political considerations and social stability were key priorities during the long lead-up to China’s two biggest political meetings of the year in March. While the documents do not spell out why Chinese leaders waited six days to make their concerns public, the meetings may be one reason. “The imperatives for social stability, for not rocking the boat before these important Party congresses is pretty strong,” says Daniel Mattingly, a scholar of Chinese politics at Yale. “My guess is, they wanted to let it play out a little more and see what happened.” In response to the teleconference, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing initiated the highest-level emergency response internally, level one, on Jan. 15. It assigned top CDC leaders to 14 working groups tasked with getting funds, training health workers, collecting data, doing field investigations and supervising laboratories, an internal CDC notice shows. The memo directed Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, to begin temperature checks at airports, bus and train stations, and cut down on large public gatherings.
The National Health Commission also distributed a 63-page set of instructions to provincial health officials, obtained by the AP. The instructions ordered health officials nationwide to identify suspected cases, hospitals to open fever clinics, and doctors and nurses to don protective gear. They were marked “internal” — “not to be spread on the internet,” “not to be publicly disclosed.” In public, however, officials continued to downplay the threat, pointing to the 41 cases public at the time. “We have reached the latest understanding that the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low,” Li Qun, the head of the China CDC’s emergency center, told Chinese state television on Jan. 15. That was the same day Li was appointed leader of a group preparing emergency plans for the level one response, a CDC notice shows.
On Jan. 20, President Xi issued his first public comments on the virus, saying the outbreak “must be taken seriously” and every possible measure pursued. A leading Chinese epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan, announced for the first time that the virus was transmissible from person to person on national television. If the public had been warned a week earlier to take actions such as social distancing, mask wearing and travel restrictions, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds, one paper later found. An earlier warning could have saved lives, said Zhang, the doctor in Los Angeles. However, other health experts said the government took decisive action in private given the information available to them. “They may not have said the right thing, but they were doing the right thing,” said Ray Yip, the retired founding head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s office in China. “On the 20th, they sounded the alarm for the whole country, which is not an unreasonable delay.”
If health officials raise the alarm prematurely, it can damage their credibility — “like crying wolf” —and cripple their ability to mobilize the public, said Benjamin Cowley, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong. The delay may support accusations by President Donald Trump that the Chinese government’s secrecy held back the world’s response to the virus. However, even the public announcement on Jan. 20 left the U.S. nearly two months to prepare for the pandemic. During those months, Trump ignored the warnings of his own staff and dismissed the disease as nothing to worry about, while the government failed to bolster medical supplies and deployed flawed testing kits. Leaders across the world turned a blind eye to the outbreak, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for a strategy of “herd immunity” — before falling ill himself. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro sneered at what he called “a little cold.” The early story of the pandemic in China also shows missed opportunities at every step, the documents and AP interviews reveal. Under Xi, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades, increasing political repression has made officials more hesitant to report cases without a clear green light from the top. “It really increased the stakes for officials, which made them reluctant to step out of line,” said Mattingly, the Yale professor. “It made it harder for people at the local level to report bad information.” Doctors and nurses in Wuhan told Chinese media there were plenty of signs that the coronavirus could be transmitted between people as early as late December. Patients who had never been to the suspected source of the virus, the Huanan Seafood Market, were infected. Medical workers started falling ill. But officials obstructed medical staff who tried to report such cases. They set tight criteria for confirming cases, where patients. not only. had to test positive, but also, samples had to be sent to Beijing and sequenced. They required staff to report to supervisors before sending information higher, Chinese media reports show. And they punished doctors for warning about the disease. As a result, no new cases were reported for almost two weeks from Jan. 5, even as officials gathered in Wuhan for Hubei province’s two biggest political meetings of the year, internal China CDC bulletins confirm. During this period, teams of experts dispatched to Wuhan by Beijing said they failed to find clear signs of danger and human-to-human transmission. “China has many years of disease control, there’s absolutely no chance that this will spread widely because of Spring Festival travel,” the head of the first expert team, Xu Jianguo, told Takungpao, a Hong Kong paper, on Jan. 6. He added there was “no evidence of human-to-human transmission”and that the threat from the virus was low.
The second expert team, dispatched on Jan. 8, similarly failed to unearth any clear signs of human-to-human transmission. Yet during their stay, more than half a dozen doctors and nurses had already fallen ill with the virus, a retrospective China CDC study published in the New England Journal of Medicine would later show. The teams looked for patients with severe pneumonia, missing those with milder symptoms. They also narrowed the search to those who had visited the seafood market — which was in retrospect a mistake, said Cowling, the Hong Kong epidemiologist, who flew to Beijing to review the cases in late January. In the weeks after the severity of the epidemic became clear, some experts accused Wuhan officials of intentionally hiding cases. “I always suspected it was human-to-human transmissible,” said Wang Guangfa, the leader of the second expert team, in a Mar. 15 post on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. He fell ill with the virus soon after returning to Beijing on Jan. 16. Wuhan’s then-mayor, Zhou Xianwang, blamed national regulations for the secrecy. “As a local government official, I could disclose information only after being authorized,” Zhou told state media in late January. “A lot of people didn’t understand this.” As a result, top Chinese officials appear to have been left in the dark. “The CDC acted sluggishly, assuming all was fine,” said a state health expert, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. “If we started to do something a week or two earlier, things could have been so much different.” It wasn’t just Wuhan. In Shenzhen in southern China, hundreds of miles away, a team led by microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yungused their own test kits to confirm that six members of a family of seven had the virus on Jan. 12. In an interview with Caixin, a respected Chinese finance magazine, Yuen said he informed CDC branches “of all levels,” including Beijing. But internal CDC numbers did not reflect Yuen’s report, the bulletins show.
When the Thai case was reported, health authorities finally drew up an internal plan to systematically identify, isolate, test, and treat all cases of the new coronavirus nationwide. Wuhan’s case count began to climb immediately — four on Jan. 17, then 17 the next day and 136 the day after. Across the country, dozens of cases began to surface, in some cases among patients who were infected earlier but had not yet been tested. In Zhejiang, for example, a man hospitalized on Jan. 4 was only isolated on Jan. 17 and confirmed positive on Jan. 21. In Shenzhen, the patients Yuen discovered on Jan. 12 were finally recorded as confirmed cases on Jan. 19. The elite Peking Union Medical College Hospital held an emergency meeting on Jan. 18, instructing staff to adopt stringent isolation — still before Xi’s public warning. A health expert told AP that on Jan. 19, she toured a hospital built after the SARS outbreak, where medical workers had furiously prepared an entire building with hundreds of beds for pneumonia patients. “Everybody in the country in the infectious disease field knew something was going on,” she said, declining to be named to avoid disrupting sensitive government consultations. “They were anticipating it.”
Did Ava Green stumble onto the missing link for a Coronavirus treatment? TURN UP YOUR VOLUME THIS WAS RECORDED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. After she watched a doctor talk about covid-19 patients being able to talk and breathe and call loved ones before being knocked out and put on a ventilator, she remembered a treatment for her disability, Diamox. Let her tell her story on the world news. Acetazolamide (Diamox, Diamox Sequels) used to remove excess fluid in the body in people with congestive heart failure; to treat seizures and glaucoma; and the prevention and treatment of altitude sickness. Possible serious side effects include liver problems, seizures, and metabolic acidosis. Drug interactions, dosing, and pregnancy and breastfeeding safety are provided. Read the Cureus Article Here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu1AJRZJEI&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR0d8YPjNLJ3jJawTpbYfNW3shm6ZXwCqhskuB5NHaZag6vJuGPzSKyPcLY
Nadia Ackerman, IS A GIFTED ARTIST from New York City better known as “Natchi,” I’m 45 years old and originally from Australia, but I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, with my boyfriend. I work as a singer-songwriter, illustrator, and entrepreneur. I also have my own business called Natchie, where I sell whimsical illustrations of my lyrics, animals, and more. When I’m not writing or sketching, you can find me working out. I consider myself a pretty health-conscious individual; I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, ‘I” Am vegan and knows the importance of living at the cell.
I also exercise five days a week, alternating between hour-long vinyasa yoga and CrossFit sessions. I’ve even hiked the Himalayan mountains. I’m definitely considered “the healthy one” among my friend group. My lifestyle didn’t protect me from the novel coronavirus like I thought it would, though. I spent 22 days battling COVID-19 after going to a large dinner party in March—an event I wish I’d never attended, in retrospect. What follows is a diary of the last month. I hope everyone will learn from my experience with novel coronavirus—and take the precautions that I wish I’d started putting into place earlier.
March 10: I attended a benefit dinner where I now suspect I got the virus. About 100 people had been invited to a thank you dinner by the Australian consulate. (Earlier this year, I put on a benefit concert with three other friends to raise money in response to the Australian bushfires and donated it to the Red Cross.) Now, I realize that this dinner was probably the worst possible environment to be in. It took place in small restaurant, where we had cocktails in a crowded area, then moved upstairs to dinner where everything was served as shared plates and passed around the table. I thought twice about going to the dinner, but at the time I figured I was overreacting because no one was really taking the virus that seriously yet.
So I went — but I now regret putting myself in that situation. All nine people at their table that night fell ill within days, and three have taken coronavirus tests that gave way to positive results. “It felt like someone was punching me on the inside— like I had been kicked by a horse,” the 45-year-old says of her coughing attacks, ongoing fever, scratchy sore throat, extreme malaise, and exhaustion. “Then nausea hit me hard on day four. I have zero appetite, and I lost my sense of taste and then smell. I still don’t have them back.” The headaches come and go relentlessly, and Ackerman describes them as “a million times worse than a migraine.” After several days of battling coronavirus on her own, she made the decision to call for help. “I spent four days in bed thinking it would pass soon. Everyone was telling me I was young and strong and I’ll be fine. I wasn’t fine,” she says. “The fifth day, I woke up to take a sip of water that was immediately met by vomiting and diarrhea. I called 911 and an ambulance took me to the emergency room, where I was treated for severe dehydration, nausea, and headache as a result of the coronavirus.”
She wants people to know that even the healthiest 45-year-old person, who does yoga and leads a vegan lifestyle with no preexisting health condition and educated attitudes about health, can easily contract and suffer from coronavirus. “The thing about this virus is that it comes and goes in waves,” she explains. “Stay home. It’s not only about ourselves but [for] other people, and we should have acted earlier.”
March 12: I started showing symptoms of novel coronavirus. Thursday morning, I had a really weird coughing attack. It was strange. You know when you cough so hard, it feels like you’re going to vomit? It was that kind of cough—hard & aggressive. It lasted about 10 minutes, and it was enough to make my eyes water. At first, I chalked it up to spring allergies. By 5 p.m., I was hit with a fever of 100 degrees, scratchy throat, and sore chest. It felt like a horse had kicked me in the ribs—or like someone was punching me or had punched me in the lungs. My boyfriend had to take care of me, and I stayed on the couch, alternating between burying myself in blankets and throwing them off of me to deal with my fever. I lay there all evening, never making it upstairs to my bedroom.
March 13: I woke up the next morning feeling just as bad, if not worse— so I went to urgent care. At this point, everyone was talking about COVID-19, and I just knew I had it. This wasn’t a flu. It felt different. I hadn’t felt this sick in 22 years, since I first moved to New York and caught pneumonia. I didn’t call ahead or put on a mask and gloves. The only thing I could think was, “I feel sick. I’m going in.” When I walked into the urgent care clinic, things seemed calm. There were only 3 people in the waiting room at the time, and no one behind the front desk was wearing masks or gloves. But when I approached the desk and told them that I thought I had novel coronavirus, they put them on straight away and gave me a mask, too. I sat in the waiting room for about 40 minutes before I was let into one of the exam rooms. When the doctor came in to see me, he wasn’t wearing anything protective. I was shocked because I was sitting there thinking, “I know I’ve got it.” He checked my temperature, and it was 100 degrees. He told me that 103 was the benchmark they were using to decide whether or not someone should be tested for COVID-19. I had been in contact with someone else who was waiting for her test results, but when I told the doctor that, he still said that he couldn’t give me a test; he encouraged to come back if my friend’s results ended up being positive. “You’ve probably got it, but I can’t test you,” he said. Honestly, I was really disappointed. I felt like maybe I was overreacting, but at the same time, I knew I was really sick and that I likely had the virus. It was really confusing. I said to the doctor, “Oh, so there are probably tons of people walking around with this right now, infected and positive, but who haven’t been tested?” And he said, “Absolutely.”
After urgent care sent me home without a test, my symptoms evolved. The cough lingered, but my fever went away—which at first made me think I was getting better. Then came the extreme exhaustion, the kind where you can’t lift your head off the pillow. Next came the headaches. I’m a migraine sufferer, so I can really handle headaches. But I would gladly take a migraine over the headaches I was getting. They were relentless. And nothing worked. Not Tylenol. Nothing touched it. It was almost like my brain was boiling or like someone was like squeezing it inside my head. It was unbearable. I also began experiencing nausea and loss of appetite. And on March 16, my boyfriend became sick. He went down the same way that I did: severe fever; freezing cold, then extremely hot. His fever was up to 102.5. So I got up and rallied. I thought, “I need to take care of him.” I tried to just not think about how sick I was.
March 18-21: I took my boyfriend to the ER, where he was admitted immediately. Meanwhile, I was at home alone, vomiting and too weak to even shower. On March 18, I took John to the hospital, where he was admitted and tested positive for COVID-19. After I dropped him off, I went home alone, got in bed, and stayed there for four days. I became sicker and sicker and sicker. My biggest problem at this point, though, was that I had no appetite. Then I lost my sense of taste and smell. And it wasn’t like a cold, when you lose taste and smell and you’re stuffy. I had no trace of either of those senses. You could have served me rotten eggs, and I wouldn’t have known the difference. Then came the diarrhea. At this point, I actually felt like I was going to die. It felt like there was nothing left of me. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t shower. I couldn’t even lift my head off of the pillow. I was too weak. My boyfriend was still in the hospital, so no one was there to help me.
March 22: I went to the hospital and was finally tested for COVID-19. I was texting my boyfriend about my symptoms, and he mentioned them to his doctor, who suggested, I call an ambulance right away. When the ambulance arrived at my house, the EMTs would not come inside. They knocked on my door and waited for me to answer. They looked scared and were hesitant to even come near me. They walked me to the ambulance and strapped me into a seat. I felt a sense of relief knowing I was on my way to get help. As soon as I went through the doors of the ER, a nurse came running up to me with a mask and said, “Quick, put this on immediately.” She also gave me a bag for vomiting because I was dry retching as I came in. Eventually, I was given a bed and taken into a sick bay where patients were separated by curtains. No one came to see me for about an hour and a half. The first person I saw was the nurse. She took my temperature and blood pressure and said I was extremely dehydrated—so she hooked up to an IV for fluids. When the doctor came in, I told him immediately that my boyfriend had tested positive for novel coronavirus while he was in the hospital. If I hadn’t brought this up, I don’t think they would have tested me because I didn’t have a fever at the time. But because I had been in direct contact with someone who’d tested positive and had every other symptom on list, the doctor gave me the test. And it was not fun. It’s a swab that goes really high up your nose. It was painful, uncomfortable, and I had a little bit of a bloody nose afterward. It’s not nice. After being tested for COVID-19, I was also given a few blood tests and chest x-rays to check my oxygen and lungs. Twelve hours later, I was released from the hospital and told I would get my test results in a few days. I was instructed to come back if I couldn’t breathe. Otherwise, I was given a printout on self isolation best practices and told I needed to quarantine for two weeks and three days. My boyfriend had been released from the hospital earlier that same day, so I went to home to him and we continued taking care of each other.
March 24: I posted to Instagram about my COVID-19 journey. By this point, some of my symptoms had subsided and I didn’t feel completely horrible, so I decided to tell others about my experience. Strangers from the Australian relief dinner started reaching out to me and saying, “Oh, I was at this table, and I got sick, too,” or “You don’t know me, but I was at that dinner and I tested positive.” Everybody started coming out of the woodwork.
March 27: I got a call from the hospital confirming I’d tested positive for novel coronavirus. When my phone rang that day, I knew it was the hospital. I picked up immediately, and a nurse told me that I’d tested positive for COVID-19 and to continue doing what I was already doing—isolating. When she gave me the results, I finally felt validated. Even though I’d known deep down that I had the virus, it felt good to finally have an answer—even if there was no treatment.
April 2: I finally felt like myself again. The days leading up to April 2, my nausea went away and I was finally able to start eating again. I couldn’t fully taste or smell anything yet, but I was hungry. My boyfriend and I started off with the BRAT diet: bread, rice, applesauce, and toast. That’s all we could hold down. But at least we had our appetites back. Finally, I started having the energy to do things like shower or start drawing again. I took a walk outside, keeping a safe distance from others, and I even began gardening.
On April 7, after my isolation period was over. I went out for a grocery store run. (Up until then, our neighbors had been leaving food at the door.) I put my mask and gloves on and walked to the closest market. I was shocked to see so many people in the store who weren’t distancing themselves and weren’t vigilant about sanitizing their hands. I hope people read my story and take it seriously. I know my family and friends are more cautious than ever, now that they’ve seen what the virus can do. Anyone can be affected, and you can turn a corner for the worst very quickly. I should know since it happened to both me and my boyfriend.
GOD GAVE ME STRENGTH This is About Surviving & Thriving Past Life Experience!!! Nadia Ackerman Born in Melbourne, Australia to Afrikaan parents and growing up in Allambie Heights. Which is a suburb of northern Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia 17.5 kilometres north-east of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of Northern Beaches Council. It is part of the Northern beaches region. Allambie is an Aboriginal word that means “peaceful place. From a very early age her desire to be heard was apparent. Nadia began singing at the age of three in her crib. She would wake up her parents at 4 a.m. while serenad- ing her parents with √♥ Don’t Cry For Me Argentina √ and The Mull of Kintyre with perfect pitch and a lisp. This wasn’t surprising given her pedigree – her mother, Tess, was a lead soprano opera singer in Cape Town, while her late father Peter had an extraordinary ear for harmony and could play any instrument he turned his hand to. It was her father who first recognized and nurtured Nadia’s his 3rd child of 4 to an ex- ceptional talent. It was Peter who realized the musical talent in Nadia. While all of the other kids were surfing at the beach. Nadia would be in her bedroom singing harmonies to all of the Beatles albums053: You Can’t Do Thatas well as the Carpenters and Simon and Garfunkel…to name a few. Nadia was extremely artistic. At age 15 Nadia’s love of song became more than a hobby. She announced her intention to become a professional singer. Her focus was strong, and her progress was rapid. In Australia, Nadia was featured with several different musical touring companies, including The Fabulous Blues Brothers Band, and The Stars Of The Future. She toured all of Australia and New Zealand and appeared on numerous TV broadcasts.
The Women Behind The Art of Psychotherapy!!! After the loss of her father when she was 17 her tenacity, talent and drive took her from Australia to Asia, Canada and New York City… where she now resides. Since graduating from high school, Nadia thought she had to make a decision. She chose music and left the art behind. and has worked her way around the world with performances on morning broadcasts in Australia and hotel contracts in Asia to singing backing vocals at Carnegie Hall with likes of Sting, Billy Joel, Shirley Bassey, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, James Taylor and Ken Webb…She has been on quite the Human Experience. (just to name a few). https://kenwebbsite.com/album/glue-of-you/ https://kenwebb.bandcamp.com/album/let-love-grow In Early 1998 at 23 years old, Nadia decided to pack her suitcase and move from her native Sydney, Australia to New York City to pursue her dream of being a jazz singer in the big apple. After spending a summer in New York, she sensed there was no going home. What she didn’t realize is that she had brought a dark part of her past with her on the journey, and it wasn’t until years later that she came to terms with what had sent her running in the first place. And mid-2006ish her own songs started to pop into her head. Since then, Nadia hasn’t looked back. Today she has a catalogue of well over 300 compositions ready and waiting, while more are being jotted down almost daily. Join Nadia and her New York City Band on her journey from Allambie Heights to New York City (which she calls home and creates classical music).
The Color Grey. Here she shares her journey, through music, becoming a songwriter, then an illustrator, a shop owner and brand developer. While ultimately confronting the abuse that she suffered as a child in Australia (and that she had completely blocked for most of her life), until it was impossible to avoid any longer). First the flashback—something terrible that happened when she was six had to go. What would help her to eventually overcome that part of her life….was Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Which is a fairly new, nontraditional type of psychotherapy. It’s growing in popularity, particularly for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD often occurs after experiences such as military combat, physical assault, rape, or car accidents. https://awomensthing.org/blog/ artist-sexual-abuse-survivor- nadia-ackerman-uses-creativity-heal/
TIME TO LIVE AGAIN 14:29 min Once Nadia regain her life: Then suddenly, in early 2006ish she began to write songs, every day, clocking in at 9 in the morning and out at dinner time, She’d hurry his business as best she could and return to her work as quickly as she could. The songs were not “jazz” but they spoke of and to her singing talent to such a degree she has now undertaken the much more daunting endeavor of performing her own material in some indefinable genre. “It’s pop!” “It’s alternative!” “It’s jazzy alternative pop!” “It’s folky pop alternative !” “It’s a new jazz inflected alternative pop idiom heretofore never written or spoken of!” It’s Nadia! And that’s why I guess ‘I’ am here to create music Nadia spent years studying and performing jazz. Nancy Wilson, Carmen MacRae and Betty Carter became her teachers. Out of the blue, mid June 2006 Nadia began hearing songs in her head. Lyrics, Melodies, Harmony and Phrasing. The songs arrived in a complete form and more often than not she was writing two songs a day. Having never written a song in her life she was a little perplexed as to what to do with it.
However, this South African-born, Aussie-raised and now New York-based singer/songwriter Nadia Ackerman is unlikely to remain a relatively anonymous figure for much longer,, The Ocean Master, Named after her father’s fish & chip shop, it’s a record heavily inspired by a childhood spent by the sea on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Also which bravely tackles her more painful experiences in among the rose-tinted slices of nostalgia. Indeed, lead single, “Mary Jane,” is something of a red herring, its jaunty sea shanty melodies based on a nursery rhyme she wrote as an infant (“Mary Jane went to Spain/in a chocolate airplane”) one of the few times the album attempts to quicken the rather solemn pace. Luckily, the other uptempo numbers are less self-consciously kooky, sitting somewhere between the breezy organic acoustic folk of Yael Naim – “Le’ Live” to Laura Nyro and the disjointed jazz-pop of Regina SpektorThe Light (“Lighthouse”). But it’s on the more stripped-back efforts where Ackerman‘s haunting lyrics and gorgeously melancholic tones truly work their magic, whether it’s the steel-laden wistful alt-country of “Risk It All,” the subtle cello-driven “Underground,” which recalls Sheryl Crow at her most understated, Nobody’s Business & Best of Times or the Sigur Rós-esque choral backing vocals which are layered throughout the hymn-like “The Middle of the Sea,” and the haunting banshee balladry of “My Ship.” An unflinchingly honest trip down memory lane, The Ocean Master suggests singing about package delivery companies should be a thing of the past.
Who is Natchie? There is a bit of Natchie in her music. In 2012, Nadia began to see her songs as images and felt an overwhelming desire to draw her music. Out of that desire she became the owner and artist behind Natchie Art ( from the nickname her dad gave to her when she was 13. ) And each piece of art comes with lyrics and a free download code to own the song. In addition to her first retail store in DUMBO, Nadia Ackerman doesn’t just write songs, she channels them. ‘They just happen to me,’ says the Australian-born, New York-based singer, songwriter and artist. ‘I can be doing anything and I’ll be hit with one. They stick to me until I can sit down at the piano and download them. And when the songs come out, they’re fully formed – words, tunes, arrangements, everything.’ Nadia’s short film Time To Live Again was been nominated for a 2017 Daytime Emmy Award by Healthination, produced & directed by Jacquelyn Lobel!! The switch to an Indie pop sound seems to suit her, though–a switch she found inevitable when she began writing songs of her own at a very prodigious rate.
“The Circus Is Back In Town”, Nadia’s first release in the Indie pop mode and her first full-length album, showed a lot of potential and generated a little buzz. From those past experiences of backing vocalist for the likes of Billy Joel, Sting, and Lady Gaga they helped me become who ‘I” am today, Nadia had appearance on Jimmy Fallon which perhaps helped her obtain singing gigs and ad jungle a.k.a. (2010) #UPS“We love #♥ That’s logistics” (that’s what Brown could do for her) to the tune That’s Amore and in (2012) IAMS Dog Food advertising publicité that helps her pay bills. In Some of Nadia’s Past work: it would be remiss for me to write and a shame if her Christmas single, possibly the best recording on Nadia’s young resume, were to slip away unnoticed. Nadia’s lament about a Christmas apart comes across as entirely genuine in it’s emotion, and the instrumentation more than does its part in establishing a melancholy holiday feel. Nadia’s no Rickie Lee Jones, but that is the first singer “What Is Christmas?” called to mind for me, followed by thoughts of Leigh Nash, Norah Jones and Ingrid Michaelson.
Some Other Time = March 30, 2006 With her poignant but simple lyrics in The Circus Is back in Town in place on a variety of different melodies, With also from “Where Are You Headed Now” with a bright and breezy beat about the day to day trials & tribulations and being lonely…to “Live Again” which is a dreamy tune that has a 60’s sound to it for me and “Underground” with a syncopated melody and “Leigh” to “Hulpit” (one of her new tunes) that has a haunting melody! I feel the pain of her life and the love the lyrics within your songs The Well | Clockwork Man | The Mourningtown
HOW DANGEROUS IS CORONAVIRUS? The immediate health risk posed by the Wuhan coronavirus is low in America. Doctors believe the disease originated with an animal source, as many of the confirmed early cases were linked to a seafood and live animal market in Wuhan. Some person-to-person spread has occurred in those who were in close contact with an infected patient, however. A new study published Wednesday found that the infection may have originated in snakes. “Taken together, our results suggest that homologous recombination within the spike glycoprotein may contribute to cross‐species transmission from snake to humans,” a group of Chinese scientists wrote in a study published in the Journal of Medical Virology. The two specific types of snake cited were the Chinese cobra and Chinese krait
Increases of Carbon Dioxide and Bicarbonates Lead to Increased Oxygen The most important factor in creating proper pH is increasing oxygen because no wastes or toxins can leave the body without first combining. with oxygen. The more alkaline you are, the more oxygen your fluids can hold and keep. Oxygen also buffers/oxidizes metabolic waste acids helping to keep you more alkaline. “The Secret of Life is both to feed and nourish the cells and let them flush their waste and toxins”, according to Dr. Alexis Carrell, Nobel Prize recipient in 1912. Dr. Otto Warburg, also a Nobel Prize recipient, in 1931 & 1944, said, “If our internal environment was changed from an acidic oxygen deprived environment to an alkaline environment full of oxygen, viruses, bacteria and fungus cannot live.” The position of the oxygen disassociation curve (ODC) is influenced directly by pH, core body temperature and carbon dioxide pressure. According to Warburg, it is the increased amounts of carcinogens, toxicity and pollution that cause cells to be unable to uptake oxygen efficiently. This is connected with over-acidity, which itself is created principally under low oxygen conditions. According to Annelie Pompe, a prominent mountaineer and world-champion free diver, alkaline tissues can hold up to 20 times more oxygen than acidic ones. When our body cells and tissues are acidic (below pH of 6.5-7.0), they lose their ability to exchange oxygen, and cancer cells love that.
Special Note: This is not the only way to skin the cat (virus). Directly supporting the immune system through a number of natural means and replenishing Vitamin C faster than Ebola strips it from the body creating lightening Scurvy and massive hemorrhage is another. Hitting the body hard with Glutathione and selenium is yet another potent and intelligent avenue of treatment that is not being pursued by the western medical establishment that prefers to complain there is no treatment. Dr. Volney S. Cheney reported that, “A number of cases of colds of varying severity were carefully studied in the laboratory. Observation was made as to the degree of acidity of the urine; the CO2, combining power of the blood as an indicator of the alkaline reserve; tests were also made to determine the calcium content of the blood, the sugar content; non-protein nitrogen and the basal metabolism. The urine invariably carried a higher degree of acidity than the normal-in some cases as high as 800 (normal 350); the CO2 combining power of the blood in all cases was low, the highest being 52 per cent; the sugar content of the blood was generally decreased (below 100 mg. per 100 c.c.); the metabolic rate was always on the minus side.
(These cases were carefully selected because of their lack of any symptoms of disturbed thyroid activity.) There is a change in the blood chemistry and, consequently, there must be a change in the tissues supplied by the blood. There is a decrease in the bicarbonates or reserve bases contained in the blood plasma and the tissues. These findings seem to point the way to the conclusion that a cold is a disturbance of the alkaline balance or reserve, in other words, a mild acidosis, or perhaps better stated, a lessening of the “buffer” action of the blood plasma through a decrease in its bicarbonate content.” Sodium bicarbonate is the important medicine because it gives more carbon dioxide to the body and especially the blood in the form of bicarbonates. Bicarbonate in the blood is easily turned into carbon dioxide (CO2) and the reverse is true in biochemical reactions that happen almost at the speed of light. The bottom line to what happens when one takes sodium bicarbonate orally is that it turns to CO2 in the stomach driving bicarbonates into the blood, which helps more blood and oxygen delivery to the cells.
The Importance of using Sodium Bicarbomate Against a virus. After doing his experiments, Dr. Cheney reported: “I have been able to induce all the symptoms of a cold, in varying degree from a simple coryza to that of la grippe and the “flu,” by the induction of an artificial acidosis through the administration of ammonium and calcium chlorides. The degree of severity of the symptoms was in direct ratio to the degree of acidosis induced. In the more severe degree of acidosis, all the classical symptoms of the “flu” were present, even including a low degree of fever. The symptoms rapidly subsided upon the administration of sodium bicarbonate in large doses by mouth and by rectum. Sodium Bicarbonate is one of the most flexible medicinal in terms of methods and modes of administration. It can be injected in emergency room situations, taken orally, nebulized, used transversally as a lotion or paste, put in enemas and in larger quantities in therapeutic baths. Just dissolve it in water or when treating cancer it can also be mixed with Blackstrap Molasses, maple syrup, or a good honey as well as with lemon or mix with citric acid for use in baths or when making your own bath bombs. There is no question that plasma bicarbonate concentrations are shown to increase after oral ingestion. The most important effect of bicarbonate ingestion is the change in acid-base balance in biological fluids. In Europe, spa-goers drink bicarbonate-rich water to heal ulcers, colitis and other gastric disorders. Ingesting bicarbonate by way of bathing stimulates circulation, possibly benefiting those with high blood pressure and moderate atherosclerosis. It would be highly negligent to exclude it from Ebola treatments.
Protecting Yourself Against Coronavirus Baking Soda Cures Posted on March 14, 2020 by Dr. D
This section was copied from here >>. The flu, a cold, Influenza, any and all version of those need an acid environment to thrive or survive. That same acid condition is what allows cancer to finally form in the body as well. The following has shown absolute results not by fighting the flu but by alkalizing the body. This allows the body’s own miraculous potential to kick in with full force and cure you! And Works every time … During the first day take six doses of half teaspoonful of Bob’s Red Mill baking soda in glass of cool water, at about two hour intervals. Make sure it is aluminum free soda. During the second day take four doses of half teaspoonful of Bob’s Red Mill baking soda in glass of cool water, at the same intervals. During the third day take two doses of half teaspoonful of Bob’s Red Mill baking soda in glass of cool water morning and evening, and thereafter half teaspoonful in glass of cool water each morning until the cold is cured.
A nurse checking on a patient at the Walter Reed Hospital Flu Ward during the Spanish influenza pandemic, circa 1918.
The first strain of the Spanish flu wasn’t particularly deadly. Then it came back in the fall with a vengeance.
Why the Second Wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu Was So Deadly? The horrific scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic—known as the “Spanish flu”—is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims— that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.
While the global pandemic lasted for two years, the vast majority of deaths were packed into three especially cruel months in the fall of 1918. Historians now believe that the fatal severity of the Spanish flu’s “second wave” was caused by a mutated virus spread by wartime troop movements. READ MORE: Pandemics that Changed History When the Spanish flu first appeared in early March 1918, it had all the hallmarks of a seasonal flu, albeit a highly contagious and virulent strain. One of the first registered cases was Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, who was hospitalized with a 104-degree fever. The virus spread quickly through the Army installation, home to 54,000 troops. By the end of the month, 1,100 troops had been hospitalized and 38 had died after developing pneumonia. HISTORY This Week podcast: The Deadliest Pandemic in Modern History As U.S. troops deployed en masse for the war effort in Europe, they carried the 1918 Spanish flu with them. Throughout April and May of 1918, the virus spread like wildfire through England, France, Spain and Italy. An estimated three-quarters of the French military was infected in the spring of 1918 and as many as half of British troops. Luckily, the first wave of the virus wasn’t particularly deadly, with symptoms like high fever and malaise usually lasting only three days, and mortality rates were similar to seasonal flu.
How the Spanish Flu Got Its Name. Interestingly, it was during this time that the Spanish flu earned its misnomer. Spain was neutral during World War I and unlike its European neighbors, it didn’t impose wartime censorship on its press. In France, England and the United States, newspapers weren’t allowed to report on anything that could harm the war effort, including news that a crippling virus was sweeping through troops. Since Spanish journalists were some of the only ones reporting on a widespread flu outbreak in the spring of 1918, the pandemic became known as the “Spanish flu.” Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course. In retrospect, it was only the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutated strain of the Spanish flu virus had emerged that had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection. In late August 1918, military ships departed the English port city of Plymouth carrying troops unknowingly infected with this new, far deadlier strain of Spanish flu. As these ships arrived in cities like Brest in France, Boston in the United States and Freetown in west Africa, the second wave of the global pandemic began. “The rapid movement of soldiers around the globe was a major spreader of the disease,” says James Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies both infectious disease and World War I. “The entire military industrial complex of moving lots of men and material in crowded conditions was certainly a huge contributing factor in the ways the pandemic spread.”
Virus Killed the Young, Old and In-Between. From September through November of 1918, the death rate from the Spanish flu skyrocketed. In the United States alone, 195,000 Americans died from the Spanish flu in just the month of October. And unlike a normal seasonal flu, which mostly claims victims among the very young and very old, the second wave of the Spanish flu exhibited what’s called a “W curve”—high numbers of deaths among the young and old, but also a huge spike in the middle composed of otherwise healthy 25- to 35-year-olds in the prime of their life. “That really freaked out the medical establishment, that there was this atypical spike in the middle of the War,” says Harris. READ MORE: How Florence Nightingale’s Hygiene Crusade Saved Millions Not only, was it shocking that healthy young men and women were dying by the millions worldwide, but it was also how they were dying. Struck with blistering fevers, nasal hemorrhaging and pneumonia, the patients would drown in their own fluid-filled lungs.
Only decades later were scientists able explain the phenomenon now known as “cytokine explosion.” When the human body is being attacked by a virus, the immune system sends messenger proteins called cytokines to promote helpful inflammation. But some strains of the flu, particularly the H1N1 strain responsible for the Spanish flu outbreak, can trigger a dangerous immune overreaction in healthy individuals. In those cases, the body is overloaded with cytokines leading to severe inflammation and the fatal buildup of fluid in the lungs.
British military doctors conducting autopsies on soldiers killed by this second wave of the Spanish flu described the heavy damage to the lungs as akin to the effects of chemical warfare. Lack of Quarantines Allowed Flu to Spread and Grow. Harris believes that the rapid spread of Spanish flu in the fall of 1918 was at least partially to blame on public health officials unwilling to impose quarantines during wartime. In Britain, for example, a government official named Arthur Newsholme knew full well that a strict civilian lock down was the best way to fight the spread of the highly contagious disease. But he wouldn’t risk crippling the war effort by keeping munitions factory workers and other civilians home. According to Harris’s research, Newsholme concluded that “the relentless needs of warfare justified incurring [the] risk of spreading infection” and encouraged Britons to simply “carry on” during the pandemic. The public health response to the crisis in the United States was further hampered by a severe nursing shortage as thousands of nurses had been deployed to military camps and the front lines. The shortage was worsened by the American Red Cross’s refusal to use trained African American nurses until the worst of the pandemic had already passed.
Medical Science Didn’t Have the Tools. But one of the chief reasons that the Spanish flu claimed so many lives in 1918 was that science simply didn’t have the tools to develop a vaccine for the virus. Microscopes couldn’t even see something as incredibly small as a virus until the 1930s. Instead, top medical professionals in 1918 were convinced that the flu was caused by a bacterium nicknamed “Pfeiffer’s bacillus.” After a global flu outbreak in 1890, a German physician named Richard Pfeiffer found that all of his infected patients carried a particular strain of bacteria he called H. influenzae. When the Spanish flu pandemic hit, scientists were intent on finding a cure for Pfeiffer’s bacillus. Millions of dollars were invested in state-of-the-art labs to develop techniques for testing for and treating H. influenzae, all of it for naught. “This was a huge distraction for medical science,” says Harris. PHOTOS: Innovative Ways People Tried to Protect Themselves From the Flu By December 1918, the deadly second wave of the Spanish flu had finally passed, but the pandemic was far from over. A third wave erupted in Australia in January 1919 and eventually worked its way back to Europe and the United States. It’s believed that President Woodrow Wilson contracted the Spanish flu during the World War I peace negotiations in Paris in April 1919 The mortality rate of the third wave was just as high as the second wave, but the end of the war in November 1918 removed the conditions that allowed the disease to spread so far and so quickly. Global deaths from the third wave, while still in the millions, paled in comparison to the apocalyptic losses during the second wave. Source:https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurgence
As The World Governments Try To Figure Out Ways To Treat Coronavirus? I am searching for clever ways to prevent people from getting it and go on living a normal life.
As I research one important piece of the puzzle. The coronavirus death toll in Illinois is at least 597 as of Saturday morning, with more than 17,000 known cases of COVID-19 in the state and over 6,600 cases in Chicago, according to state officials. Coronavirus is disproportionately killing the black community. Here’s what experts say can be done about it African Americans have been dying from the coronavirus at a higher rate than other racial demographics, according to several states’ analysis of data and that same is true in Chicago. Some 58% of deaths from COVID-19 in Illinois’ Cook County were black though the population is 23% black, and 72% of Chicago deaths were black patients though the city is 32% black. “Just this week we talked about the disproportionate burden that black Chicago is facing with infections and deaths related to COVID-19,” she said.
This leads me to believe being that blacks are known to have lower levels of Vitamin D. Could there be a relationship between vitamin D deficiency and an increase chance of getting coronavirus? Many times when it comes to different health issues the so called experts don’t agree on anything. Besides having low vitamin D levels that quite possibly caused the coronavirus to replicate in your body.
Dr. Michael Holick, a professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at the Boston University Medical Campus, is a long-time proponent of what he calls sensible sun exposure. However, “you should never, ever get a sunburn,” he says – that’s what increases the risk for melanoma and other skin cancers. If you decide to get limited, unprotected sun exposure for the sake of vitamin D, he suggests the following rules of thumb:
1. Always protect your face and top of your ears at the beach, because those are the most sun-exposed and sun-damaged skin areas. 2. Allow 10 to 15 minutes or so of unprotected sun exposure to your arms, legs, abdomen and back. After that, follow up with good sun protection, like a 30-SPF or higher sunblock. 3. Choose the right time of day. “If your shadow is longer than your body height, you can’t make any vitamin D,” Holick says. Between 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. is the usual window for significant sun exposure, he says. He’s helped develop the dminder app, which uses multiple factors – time of day, location and skin type – to recommend optimal sun exposure and provide sun-safety warnings. “You cannot get an adequate amount of vitamin D from your diet,” Holick says, even with fortified foods. He recommends vitamin D supplements in appropriate doses for adults and children.
Another important aspect may also be alkalinity and given the variant opinions you have about the aluminum impurities of baking soda and or brands of alkaline water and taking to much can have an adverse health affect. The Survivor of The 1918 Influenza Pandemic Virus that took the lives of 50 Million People was Edna Register Boone.
PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SHE SAYS AT 2:22 AND AT 4:38 IN THE VIDEO.
This is SO VERY IMPORTANT! IT COULD VERY WELL, SAVE YOUR LIFE! After the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919 that infected 500 million people around the world, the US Public Health Service made an observation that people who had been alkalized by Sodium Bicarbonate (same chemical compound of baking soda) rare contracted the disease and those who did, had mild symptoms. The mechanism for bicarbonate is that it RAISES the pH (not lowers). And that’s what Bob’s Red Mill’s Baking Soda is pure, water-extracted sodium bicarbonate. No harsh chemicals, no-aluminum-added and no gluten and.does (raises the pH) You can fight viral infections by neutralizing the pH (the acidity in your cells) and decreasing the environment that promotes viral infections from spreading with this simple ingredient you probably have around the house!
Can baking soda help protect you from the Coronavirus? This video is looking at blood pH, not skin pH. Thanks for watching. In case you are curious, you can mix the baking soda with water directly for the most effectiveness, then with fresh lemon or fresh lime or canned lemon or lime with baking soda and water. I have read people like to mix the baking soda with black strap molasses and maple syrup Raphaela Laurean
The mechanism for bicarbonate is that it RAISES the pH (not lowers). And that’s what Baking Soda does (raises the pH) I was trying to get this out quickly, apologies folks. You can fight viral infections by neutralizing the ph (the acidity in your cells) and decreasing the environment that promotes viral infections from spreading with this simple ingredient you probably have around the house! After the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919 that infected 500 million people around the world, the US Public Health Service made an observation that people who had been alkalized by Sodium Bicarbonate (same chemical compound of baking soda) rarely contracted the disease and those who did, had mild symptoms. This is huge watch the video here. ~ William Seeds MD Read the full articles and sources here: https://seeds.md/make-your- immune-system-fight-viral-infections/
Sometimes people will say, I don’t like the taste of baking soda water and that they’re concerned about the balance between Sodium bicarbonate and potassium bicarbonate that are key components of body tissue that helps to regulate the body’s acid/aklaine base balance.† This formula of pure, buffered mineral compounds can assist in reestablishing the acid/base balance when the body’s own bicarbonate reserves are depleted as a result of metabolic acidosis caused by reactions to food or other environmental exposures.† You may be advised to take it in capsule form https://klaire.com/v033-25-bicarb-formula. Remember this tip is not a cure for coronavirus but may prevent having an occurrence with this dreadful virus causing a global pandemic.
UNWAVERING FAITH, UNCONDITIONAL LOVE AND ETERNAL LIFE – JESUS BY AKIANE KRAMAIRK
In the movie Heaven Is for Real, which was based on the New York Times best-seller. Follows the story of a 4-year-old boy named Colton Burpo. Colton claims to have visited heaven during a near death experience. He shares his story about heaven with his curious father Todd Burpo. With the portrayal and understanding through the child’s innocence, Colton’s family is not sure what to think of his story and his visit to heaven. https://art-soulworks.com/pages/heaven-is-for-real-painting
Throughout the film, Todd tries to have Colton identify Jesus through a varying number of images and photos he has on hand, but without any success. It is not until the end of the film, that Colton identifies the face of Jesus on Todd Burpo’s laptop. A character in the film referred to as the “young Lithuanian girl” paints the image of Jesus, but her name and the name of her Jesus painting is never revealed. Many who have seen the movie are left wondering who “the young Lithuanian girl” painting Jesus is and the connection between her, the movie and Colton.
The “little Lithuanian girl” portrayed in the movie is famed child artist Akiane Kramarik. At age 4, Akiane painted her vision of Jesus Christ, which is replicated in the film. Born in 1994, in Mount Morris, Illinois, to two Atheist parents, Akiane was seeing visions of God, Jesus and heaven. What first began as pencil drawings, Akiane kept replicating these visions into beautiful expressions of art and moved to pastels. By 6 years of age, Akiane switched to acrylic paint and then oils. To date, she has produced over 200 published art pieces and 800 literary creations along with two bestselling books.
Akiane has shared her experience and artistic talent on television shows such as CNN and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Akiane’s image, titled The Prince of Peace, is not only featured in the film Heaven is for Real, but also her life experience is replicated and told through Colton.
Both children share similarities in their experience such as: both being 4 years old when first having their noted heavenly experiences, agreeing on the possibility of an afterlife, agreeing on the existence of God, Jesus and heaven, and more. The two met for the first time in 2012 on the Katie Couric show and say they have more to share, but are waiting on God’s perfect timing.
Summary: The image of Jesus painted by the “young Lithuanian girl” in the film ‘Heaven is for Real’ has sparked major media attention. Now revealed, is the girl’s name, the name of her artwork and the heavenly connection she shares with Colton, the main character in the film.
Jesus, Akiane Kramarik’s new painting of Christ, now revealed. Read the highlights from the short documentary titled, “Painting The Impossible”. A moving video of Akiane Kramarik’s story about her personal journey beginning with the painting, Prince of Peace, (as seen in Heaven is for Real) through the completion of her newest portrait of Christ, titled, JESUS.
Secrets of Akiane Kramarik’s Spiritual Journey Revealed Witness the dramatic story of Akiane Kramarik’s spiritual journey and some of the rarely discussed spiritual battles in her lifelong quest to fulfill the divine commissions and painting the real face of Jesus. Observe the surprising revelations of Akiane Kramarik’s 19-year journey of overcoming darkness as she struggles to be light and bring love into the world through painting her visions of Jesus Christ. Akiane Kramarik describes her purpose in life as God’s Divine Commissions – visions given to her to painting.
God bless you for your obedience to his commission. It is not easy, but he always makes a way where there seems to be no way, Akiane Kramarik is a gifted, visionary journalist who has been reporting her visions and messages from heaven since she was eight years old by using a paintbrush and canvas instead of paper and pen – Breaking News and messages from above.
Original Akiane Painting of Jesus – Stolen? Did you know that the original portrait of Prince of Peace, her most beloved painting of Jesus was stolen about a year before Oprah Winfrey introduces Akiane Kramarik and her Jesus painting to the world at age ten? The theft of Akiane Kramarik’s original masterpiece, the “Prince of Peace” painting of Jesus has continued to grieve her.
God bless you for your obedience to his commission. It is not easy, but he always makes a way where there seems to be no way.
Yes, Akiane Kramarik’s original painting of Christ was stolen by a trusted art agent who sold the Akiane Kramarik’s masterpiece – it was never recovered! As fate would have it while living in Australia Akiane Kramarik discovered the owner and location of her original painting of the Prince of Peace-lay hidden–locked in a vault for over 12 years. Akiane Kramarik offered to buy the painting of Jesus, but the owner was not willing to sell it to anyone.
Update: Our prayers were answered, the original Prince of Peace painting by Akiane has been sold and is now in a private collection.
God Takes Akiane Kramarik On A 12-Year Journey Akiane Kramarik shares with us that over these same 12 years God has taken her on an extraordinary journey – spiritual, physically and emotionally – traveling around the world as a reporter – of sorts. Akiane Kramarik often describes herself as a visionary journalist, charged with painting true life stories. Sharing the deep life lessons from people of many cultures – visual teachings – messages from heaven, rich in metaphoric meaning, spiritual lessons. These profound visual allegories speak directly to the heart – soul of seekers around the globe.
Now Revealed – A New Chapter in the Akiane Kramarik Story. Now, back to Akiane Kramarik’s painting simply titled “JESUS” (as seen above) and the most recent chapter of Akiane Kramarik’s mysterious walk with the Lord which began late in 2016, just after Akiane and family returned to the United States from an extended tour in Europe. At age 22 Akiane Kramairk and her family returned to the United States and settled on a small farm in the countryside in Illinois. Soon she was offered a project not yet made public. To complete the request, Akiane Kramarik was asked to create a line drawing of Prince of Peace. Akiane Kramarik says, “it was an awkward assignment, especially since the original was gone,” yet she felt compelled to accept the unusual request. Recreating the real face of Jesus originally painted at age into a simple line drawing – was not simple at all!
As you will see while watching the “Painting The Impossible” (documentary below.) As the project progressed, Akiane Kramarik became overwhelmed with the incredible detail that was being revealed to her! “I was hearing a new message,” Akiane said. “I prayed about what to do next, and was blown away by the unexpected answer! Despite all my doubts I took out a linen canvas and began painting my vision …” A labor of obedience and love took a strange turn when, with over 1,000 hours invested in the new painting, Akiane began sensing that completing the Jesus painting in her most recent vision – was impossible!
Was this Akiane Kramarik’s Dark Night of the Soul? On Christmas, Eve 2016, dark forces invaded Akiane Kramarik’s sleep … a sinister nightmare unfolded. Akiane saw her portrait of Jesus destroyed. Akiane rushed to her studio. The painting was still there, but the image of Jesus appeared veiled and lifeless! Over the next weeks, as hard as Akiane tried, she could not fix this painting of Jesus! Many, more weeks passed with no progress … Akiane was devastated. This had never happened before. Akiane knew the Lord had commissioned her to do this painting of Jesus. Where was God? – What was happening? Akiane Kramarik began to realize that all of her efforts were not good enough – she began to lose hope. Darkness persisted. For the first time in her life, Akiane was ready to quit, give up and abandon God’s Divine Commission to present this new portrait of Christ to the world.
We were all very, very concerned! In nearly 15 years of working with Akiane Kramarik, I had never seen her in this type of deep despair. We all continued to pray. Her parents, brothers, family, and trusted friends persisted – – – finally, a breakthrough occurred! For a brief time, Akiane Kramarik was shown the full vision of Jesus. Once revealed she quickly returned to her studio. On July 9th, 1992: Akiane Kramarik’s 23rd birthday she excitedly shared her new painting with the world – a beautiful testimony of endurance and a give of great love and light that contains a message to all. Looking back on this mysterious, sometimes dark spiritual drama Akiane Kramarik says, All these years God was waiting for me to grow so I could paint the most powerful message to mankind; A Message of Unwavering Faith, Unconditional love and Eternal life – JESUS. Click below to watch Akiane Kramarik’s story of heartbreak to victory!
