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COVID-19: prison testing results — 43 Comments

  1. The health officials have so convinced themselves that this is a mini Black Death they are struggling to cope with the reality.

    Like the colds CV is related to, it goes fast and with small effect to most people. It is excellent news that so many asymptomatic people are being found. But hardly surprising — unless you were determined it was a new plague.

  2. Griffin:

    Facts matter – if people have access to them and understand them.

    That’s two huge “ifs.”

    Propaganda can beat facts, and the MSM is now nearly completely devoted to propaganda. And education has been so dumbed down that a great many people can’t process facts very well, especially if those facts concern math or science.

  3. How can they simultaneously hedge on the issue of whether infection leads to immunity, yet at the same time advocate for immunization? If natural infection doesn’t lead to immunity, immunization won’t either.

  4. neo,

    Yeah, I wasn’t being totally serious but with the constantly shifting goalposts it does seem like facts don’t really matter because they just wave them off because they are on to the next target.

  5. Griffin & Neo

    It depends which ‘facts’. While this prison study is notable and should be covered by the MSM it’s only part of the story. According to the CDC New York state had between 4,000 and 5,000 deaths from the flu in each year from 2014 to 2018. Yet, they have had over 22,000 deaths from CV-19 in two months this year. Those kind of facts are pretty significant. And since CV-19 is still unknown it makes sense to be cautious even when studies show positive signs.

  6. We are in a state in which the headline writers, and the sound bite impresarios control the information flow; because that is as deep as most people go.

    We are all familiar with instances in which the headline bears little resemblance to the facts in a story; and we know that frequently comprehensive statements are creatively edited to convey a message that is foreign to the original intent.

    I don’t really know how to overcome this. Trump’s tweets are one weapon; and would probably be more effective if he were more disciplined.

    As for the revelations from the prison populations, I would bet there is a 100% chance that they will be spun both clockwise and counterclockwise, depending on the spinner.

  7. Montage,

    Not many even the most skeptical argue that the NYC metro hasn’t been hard hit but that shouldn’t mean everybody else should be treated like them. That is my biggest issue with this and I think has been the driving factor in the ruin being unleashed on the country when it’s been pretty obvious for awhile now that NYC is a pretty special situation for many reasons mentioned here and elsewhere.

  8. It doesn’t say when the samples were drawn. It just says ‘last week’. The median lapse of time from exposure to onset of symptoms is five days and 97% have symptoms within eleven days if they’re affected by this. I would think if you were going to have a sudden wave of convicts falling ill, you would be seeing hundreds of cases already.

  9. Taxonomically, Rhesus macaques are “Old World monkeys”

    Class: Mammalia
    Order: Primates
    Suborder: Haplorhini
    Infraorder: Simiiformes
    Family: Cercopithecidae
    Genus: Macaca
    Species: M. mulatta

    Chimpanzees are tail-less and thus assuredly not monkeys, and are —unstrictly speaking— more closely related to Homo sapiens than to M. mulatta.

    Class: Mammalia
    Order: Primates
    Suborder: Haplorhini
    Infraorder: Simiiformes
    Family: Hominidae
    Subfamily: Homininae
    Tribe: Hominini
    Genus: Pan
    Species: P. troglodytes

    H. Sapiens

    Class: Mammalia
    Order: Primates
    Suborder: Haplorhini
    Infraorder: Simiiformes
    Family: Hominidae
    Subfamily: Homininae
    Tribe: Hominini
    Genus: Homo
    Type species
    Homo sapiens
    Linnaeus, 1758

  10. Montage on April 28, 2020 at 4:33 pm said:
    Griffin & Neo

    It depends which ‘facts’. While this prison study is notable and should be covered by the MSM it’s only part of the story. According to the CDC New York state had between 4,000 and 5,000 deaths from the flu in each year from 2014 to 2018. Yet, they have had over 22,000 deaths from CV-19 in two months this year. Those kind of facts are pretty significant.
    * * *
    These kinds of fact are significant as well: maybe it’s not a good idea to deliberately send infected people into the most vulnerable populations, if you want to keep your death stats low.

    https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/04/27/mark-levin-calls-out-huge-scandal-ny-sending-virus-patients-to-nursing-homes-ny-allegedly-refused-to-send-to-usns-or-javits/

    BTW, that was linked in Neo’s post yesterday — but maybe you had the day off.
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/04/27/on-cuomo-i-wonder-whether/

  11. ‘Maybe you had the day off’

    I doubt that. The work never ends for a troll so no time for days off just off trolling somewhere else I’m sure.

    Haven’t seen ‘manju’ here lately though. Has that handle been retired from the troll roster?

  12. AesopFan & Griffin,

    Yes, I take a day off to work, actually. My place of work is shut-down but my specific job is important so I still log some hours why we wait to get back up and running.

    I did see the NY nursing homes article this morning. It’s bad but according to AARP [who oppose the action] those being moved were only those patients recovering from Cv-19 and because there was a lack of hospital beds and the states [esp NY] were trying to find solutions to that issue.

    A spokeswoman for a trade group for California hospitals urged hospitals and nursing homes to work together. “This is not a situation of good and bad, good guys and bad guys,” said Jan Emerson-Shea, vice president for external affairs for the California Hospital Association. “Hospitals absolutely do need the ability to discharge patients who no longer need that level of care.”

    https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/health/info-2020/coronavirus-transfers-to-nursing-homes.html

  13. That vaccination study on the chimps does sound very promising. I heard the CFO of Johnson & Johnson, on Fox Business, saying they confidently expect to have 800,000 doses of a vaccine by early 2021, and a billion by the end of next year.

  14. The prison testing results in Michigan have been hailed, by Governor Whitmer, as proof that her plan is working. House arrest will end on May 15th. The hospitals are empty. Next step: move everybody who’s now in lock-down, into the hospitals, for an indefinite term of imprisonment. If the inmates get sick, the doctors and nurses will be right there. CNN on every TV, in every room. It’s a socialist utopia.

  15. The so-called co-morbidities of the elderly are evidence they were already on a glide path to death; it’s just a question of rate of descent.

    A case example is my son-in-law’s mother, who recently expired in Boston after ten days on a ventilator in the ICU…at age ninety! She had been on dialysis for kidney failure for seven years. The family insisted she be intensively treated, so she was. Occupied an ICU bed that could have been used for a younger, more salvageable person, in Boston, a COVID hotbed. What were they trying to save her for? More dialysis? She died of COVID, of course, not because she was very old, very frail, devoid of working kidneys; we have no codes for being biologically out of gas.

    What has happened to the old maxim that “pneumonia is the aged pensioner’s friend”?

  16. “those being moved were only those patients recovering from Cv-19 and because there was a lack of hospital beds and the states [esp NY] were trying to find solutions to that issue.” — Montage

    Thanks for the link – the AARP is absolutely right to oppose those orders!

    Some of the states hardest hit by the coronavirus are mandating that hospital patients recovering from COVID-19 be transferred to nursing homes, in some cases forcing uninfected residents to move elsewhere.

    The result: Some of the country’s frailest patients in need of long-term care are being moved around like dominos. And some nursing home residents are facing yet more risk of COVID exposure.

    The sentence you excerpted is the ONLY one in the whole post that even tepidly supports this abysmal policy diktat.

    You are scraping the barrel here to defend Cuomo and other governors who are putting still-sick people “recovering” from COVID (a disease so terrible we have to stay cowering in our homes until April 30, no May 15, no July, nonono at least 2021!) into nursing homes already full of the elderly and otherwise ill.

    “Hospitals absolutely do need the ability to discharge patients who no longer need that level of care.”
    But why displace existing residents?

    AARP again:

    One idea gathering support from nursing home advocates: moving COVID-19 patients to hotels, cruise ships and conference centers. “Save the nursing homes for those who live in the nursing homes and don’t have the disease,” said Karl E. Steinberg, a geriatrician and president-elect of the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Medicine, the national group representing long-term care medical directors, and a nursing home and hospice care medical director near San Diego.

    A spokeswoman for California’s nursing home trade group agreed. “There are shuttered hospitals,” said Deborah Pacyna, director of public affairs for the Sacramento-based California Association of Health Facilities. “There are nursing homes that are closed that can be reopened.”

    That list of alternatives supports the major point that was made by Levin, which is what makes this situation a scandal rather than just poor judgement: there were ample facilities for the recovering COVID patients other than the facilities full of the most endangered faction of the public.

    Now the New York Post is reporting that the Health Department was explicitly warned about the deadly problem at a nursing home in Brooklyn.

    Cobble Hill Health Center CEO Donny Tuchman sent a desperate email to state Health Department officials on April 9, asking if there was “a way for us to send our suspected covid patients” to the hospital built inside the Javits Convention Center or the US Naval hospital ship Comfort — the under-utilized federal medical facilities on Manhattan’s West Side.

    “We don’t have the ability to cohort right now based on staffing and we really want to protect our other patients,” Tuchman wrote in a chain of the emails reviewed by The Post.

    He was denied.

    At the time both the Javits facility and the Comfort were barely in use and they had the capacity to take on patients. They certainly had the hospital facilities, unlike the overstrained and understaffed nursing home.

    55 people have now died in that one nursing home. The Comfort meanwhile is being sent back home because Gov. Cuomo said it wasn’t needed.

    “those being moved were only those patients recovering from Cv-19” – which has kept the world in a panic for months, in case some child swinging in the park infects the city and kills everyone;

    “and because there was a lack of hospital beds” – because they didn’t choose to use the ones they had;

    “and the states [esp NY] were trying to find solutions to that issue.”

    Some solutions are worse than others.

  17. Montage:

    Considering that AARP was and is all in on Obamacare to me their credibility on anything is about the same as an epidemiologist’s model of the Wuhan virus. So the state of NY botched it and panicked sending infected Wuhan virus patients back to facilities that had as yet uninfected but vulnerable patients, this happened after the situation in western Washington was old news. AARP covers for progressives policies, shocked?

  18. Cicero:

    It depends on how you define “elderly,” how many co-morbidities they have, and what those co-morbidities are.

    For example, would you say an otherwise-healthy 65-year-old with high blood pressure as the only co-morbidity is “on a glide path to death; it’s just a question of rate of descent”? Only insofar as we ALL are on such a glide path. But ordinarily, the person I just described would be expected to have an excellent chance of many good years ahead, although of course not quite as good a chance as someone the same age with absolutely no health problems at all.

    For the example you gave of your son-in-law’s mother – yes, your description is almost certainly accurate. It is probably also accurate for the vast majority of people in nursing homes, whose median life expectancy is only 2.2 years. But for quite a few of the people over 60 with co-morbidities who are dying of COVID, your description does not fit. Life expectancy for someone with type II diabetes (another common co-morbidity) is not as good as without it, but it’s still quite good. For example:

    The European Heart Journal published, in 2008, a study that estimated outcomes for people with type 2 diabetes and the effects of intervention methods, such as lifestyle changes and medications.

    The range of estimated life expectancies is wide, depending on a person’s age, lifestyle factors, and treatments.

    At that time, for example:

    A 55-year-old male with type 2 diabetes could expect to live for another 13.2–21.1 years, while the general expectancy would be another 24.7 years.
    A 75-year-old male with the disease might expect to live for another 4.3–9.6 years, compared with the general expectancy of another 10 years.

    The variations have to do with lifestyle issues such as exercise, and how well-controlled the diabetes is. But we’re not talking about people at death’s door here.

    I realize that you know all of this already, since you’re an MD. That’s why the thrust of your comment surprised me.

  19. Cicero,

    I’ve searched for it several times in the past week or so, and can’t find it, but I distinctly remember reading at least two articles in the early stages of this where the Oxford epidemiologist responsible for the COVID projections used by the WHO and many nations (Neil Ferguson?) also listed the percentage of projected COVID-19 expirees who would likely die within the year, regardless. I remember it being a fairly sizable percentage. I just found this at reason.com Maybe this is the quote I heard? https://reason.com/2020/03/27/no-british-epidemiologist-neil-ferguson-has-not-drastically-downgraded-his-worst-case-projection-of-covid-19-deaths/

    “We don’t know what the level of excess deaths will be in this epidemic,” Ferguson said. In other words, we don’t know the extent to which COVID-19 will increase annual deaths above the level that otherwise would have been expected. “By the end of the year, what proportion of those people who’ve died from COVID-19 would have died anyhow?” Ferguson asked. “It might be as much as half to two-thirds of the deaths we’re seeing from COVID-19, because it’s affecting people who are either at the end of their lives or in poor health conditions. So I think these considerations are very valid.”

  20. AesopFan,
    I agree with AARP as well – that this action is dangerous or worse. I only included that one quote because I wanted to point out that Cuomo is not purposely doing this because he is evil. You might disagree. I think he and others around him were looking at the number of cases and the potential problems with a lack of hospital bed and this was a solution. Sometimes the best solution is the least worst solution. I’m not sure this one is the least worst but I know that the medical community and hospitals in NY have been overwhelmed and doing the best they can. Trump too is doing the best he can and the media doesn’t give him a break.

    Perhaps that is really the crux of this. If Trump made this decision the MSM would be all over him. Cuomo does it and few in the media mention it at all. So in that sense I agree with you.

  21. I kind of liked “Alan Lotion”. 🙂

    Branch County… mention of this, neo, caused me to attend. I drive through it once in a while. It’s not an especially obvious location for a prison, to my mind, but upon checking the state DOC map, it seems to be the furthest-southwest correctional facility in the state. Interesting.

  22. Quillette’s Jonathon Kay tries to home in on the transmission of coronavirus in his layman’s analysis of COVID-19 Superspreader Events. Interesting (and hopefully useful) information…

    “But even a layperson can see that there is a fairly clear pattern in the most notorious, destructive, and widely reported cases of mass COVID-19 infection—virtually all of which feature forms of human behaviour that permit the direct ballistic delivery of a large-droplet Flüggian payload from face A to face B. If fomites were a major pathway for COVID-19 infection outside of hospitals, old-age residences, and homes, one would expect restaurant cooks, mass-transit ticket handlers, and FedEx delivery workers to be at the center of major clusters. They’re not. If small-droplet airborne concentrations in unventilated spaces were a common vector for COVID-19 transmission (as with measles, for instance), one would expect whole office buildings to become mass-infection hot spots. That doesn’t seem to have happened.”

  23. “I only included that one quote because I wanted to point out that Cuomo is not purposely doing this because he is evil. ” – Montage

    There is some indication that either Cuomo didn’t even know he was doing this, or he’s throwing his health advisors under the bus.
    https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/28/cuomo-claims-he-didnt-know-about-new-york-rule-forcing-nursing-homes-to-accept-elderly-with-covid-19/

    Either way, you are certainly correct that the press gives the Democrat governor a pass they would never extend to President Trump.
    “Trump too is doing the best he can and the media doesn’t give him a break.

    Perhaps that is really the crux of this. If Trump made this decision the MSM would be all over him. Cuomo does it and few in the media mention it at all. So in that sense I agree with you.”

    Regardless of Cuomo’s intent and actions, it was a criminally stupid decision for anyone to make: there were other ways that the discharged patients could have been accommodated, but they just didn’t take the time and care to find them.

  24. You can google plenty of news articles about defective, inaccurate test kits being found, usually provided by some Chinese manufacturer. Sometimes as bad as only 5% accurate.
    I’d be wondering if the test being given to the prisoners are even giving valid results, if so many show positive with no symptoms.

  25. What if relatively isolated nursing homes and prisons are the last places to get infected rather than the first places to get infected?

    We sure need more antibody testing.

  26. Damned hard to do the isolation, contact tracing, social distancing in a semi-controlled environment like a prison. /sarc It might even be argued that the prisoners are safer from infection when locked up, assuming that the inmates are not actually running the institution, since in theory, in a prison the authorities control ingress/egress, and all the other social interactions. What could go wrong? Ask Jeffrey Ep … aargh, the first COVID-19 fatality in NYC? ;(

  27. JFM,

    That is a very clever observation. I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes empirical sense. The staff at nursing homes certainly wash their hands more often, and follow better hygiene protocols than the kid handing you change at the local gas station mini-mart, and who knows who touched the pump handle before you gas’sed up your vehicle. And nursing homes are disinfected and scrubbed more often than your local Taco Bell.

  28. A recent CDC survey yielded that among more than 9,000 U.S. health-care workers who contracted Covid-19, the median age was 42 years old, with 27 deaths.

    Do the math!
    The death rate, 27/9000=0.003.
    That is 0.3%
    Hardly a figure sufficient to set your hair on fire.
    Doctors, nurses and others in health care have been chronically negligent in following the advice of Dr. Semmelweis in Hungary, mid-19th century, to wash their hands between every patient.

    In contrast to the preceding data, with its median age of 42, “the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas… analyzed national data of licensed physicians and found that roughly one-quarter of physicians are over 64 years old and one-third are over 59. California and New York had the highest number of older physicians.”

    So a large number of MDs are in the COVID high-risk category by age.

  29. Fox News is reporting that, globally, starvation will kill more than COVID, way more, according to the FAO, a UN arm. 3rd world is as shut down as developed world, so farmers are not farming planetwide.
    In the US, meat processors have been told by Trump to keep producing, or, under his emergency powers, he will take them over and get the chickens, pork, and beef out to us (? virus-contaminated?).
    Me? I’m going to put chicken and meat in my freezer. Today. It will keep!

  30. Tyson precipitated the move, IIRC, so as to forestall litigation over their working during the lockdowns if a state wanted more stringent closures.

    BTW – on the 50 (57?) experimental cohorts in America — SD likes their choice so far.
    https://www.dailywire.com/news/south-dakota-governor-refused-to-implement-stay-sat-home-orders-her-citizens-throw-her-a-parade?utm_content=non_insiders&utm_campaign=dw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=housefile&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8wkUlBMZOCN3e49uJQCC_G6wyamEH7dPFquPOM2GzxwASE2lLq460ZYMQ5gSFKU5uoZnLJQ4uO6OzT7lCRYAoHS7cKuQ&_hsmi=87132875

  31. Cicero:

    Not like you eat raw chicken or raw ground beef as a default menu item? Oh, but that was salmonella and e. coli, those are old news. They never kill anyone, aargh! I wonder does cooking your poultry and beef to the safe temperature ~ 165 deg (have to look it up) protect you from the Bat pox? Let me take a leap of faith; yes for $10,000. 🙂

  32. Amadeus:

    Good to hear, and not at all surprising. I have written (somewhere!) that it would be highly highly surprising and unusual if the virus worked that way (re-infection) except in highly immuno-compromised people.

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