Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Who makes the coronavirus test?

Mologic, a Bedfordshire company that produces pregnancy tests, was granted £1million by the Government to develop the coronavirus test.

SureScreen, a Derby firm, has created a finger-prick test which they say takes 10 minutes to return a result and is 98 per cent accurate. The tests are reportedly being used by private companies a number of European countries.

Source: How does a coronavirus home test kit work, and how do I get one?

I recommend: "The Last of us".
It's great.
I don't know if the sequel has come out yet.
I need to check.

EDIT:
You can pre-order it.
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games ... rt-ii-ps4/

U.S. companies, labs rush to produce blood test for coronavirus immunity

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN21C1KK


Garden Grove doctor one of first in U.S. to offer coronavirus rapid blood test

https://www.ocregister.com/2020/03/25/g ... lood-test/


We Need to Know Who’s Developed Immunity to Coronavirus

https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-need-to ... 1585262496

Last edited by Syd on 26 Mar 2020, 10:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ah so, I will watch. This thread is a bit much to keep up with everything posted to it.

Reminds me of the old days when people still used these kinds of forums.

Last edited by EzraS on 26 Mar 2020, 10:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Forms of fallout.


Harvard, Boasting $40 Billion Endowment, Lays Off Dining Hall Workers Due to Coronavirus
Country's richest university cuts costs as pandemic sweeps country

Harvard University, which has the largest endowment of any school in the country, is cutting its subcontracted dining hall workers without pay as it shuts down in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The move is drawing criticism from employment rights advocates on and off campus who point to the university's $40.9 billion endowment as evidence that the school is hardly in financial straits. They also claim the decision violates Harvard's wage equality policy, which requires the university to compensate dining hall contract workers in a fashion comparable to the school's directly hired employees.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/harv ... endowment/

Oh yeah, I remember that game (the first one). I forgot about all those games along with the movies and tv shows.

People obviously have quite a thing for doomsday plagues.

Therefore easily hyped over this virus.

After news spread that the Italian innovation firm Isinnova successfully saved lives by 3D printing ventilator valves for its local hospital, CEO Cristian Fracassi and engineer Alessandro Romaioli fielded all sorts of calls from around the world.

Many 3D-printing companies wanted to join in and help. Several countries wanted to use similar technology for their populations. But, one call started a whole new project for Isinnova’s staff in Brescia, in northern Italy.

Renato Favero, a retired physician, got in touch with Fracassi and Romaioli by contacting a doctor at the Chiari hospital where the ventilator valves were used.



Dr. Favero explained that he was aware of the shortage of Continuous Positive Airway Pressure masks, also known as CPAP, for sub-intensive care patients suffering from COVID-19. According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute’s website, CPAP “is a treatment that uses mild air pressure to keep your breathing airways open” and “involves using a CPAP machine that includes a mask or other device that fits over your nose or your nose and mouth, straps to position the mask, a tube that connects the mask to the machine’s motor, and a motor that blows air into the tube.”

Romaioli said that Favero proposed an idea: making an “emergency ventilator mask” by modifying a snorkeling mask that was available to the public. The teams contacted Decathlon, the French sporting goods retailer, about the Easy Breath Surface Snorkeling Mask. Isinnova said that Decathlon immediately provided the 3D computer-aided design for the mask, so the engineers could easily evaluate what modification could be made.

Unlike the full ventilators, that breathe both in and out for a patient, Romaioli explained that these CPAP machines regulate the pressure and level of oxygen that go into the lungs.

From start to finish, the project took only three days, Romaioli said, after analyzing, measuring, 3D printing and testing various options. “We had to do it very quickly because it was a matter of saving lives. We didn’t do it as a usual project, where we would have had time to check it three, four times,” he said. “We just had to do it as quick as we could."

The first test was on Romaioli himself. He put the mask on, so that they could determine if the alterations to the snorkel mask had worked.

“I was healthy, so it wasn’t a real test, but before putting on a sick patient, they had to test it on someone else who wasn’t at risk,” Romaioli shared. After that initial test went well, they took the prototypes to the same Chiari hospital where they provided 100 3D-printed ventilator valves. Doctors tested the re-worked mask on multiple patients, to be sure that it could be useful.

They printed about 50 of the pieces needed to alter the mask into a CPAP machine, but Isinnoa pointed out that many other 3D-printing companies joined the fight, and all told about 1,000 new machines were created.

Source: Italian engineers help coronavirus patients by harnessing snorkel masks for CPAP machines

He placed the design plans online and has heard from volunteers and doctors in Canada, Brazil and South Korea about how this redesign has started to save lives. DESIGN PLANS

Go here if you want to see the game mechanics.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=385946

But I thought the World Heath Organization was the top expert group. I mean, it's part of the United Nations, right? So they must be trustworthy. That's what the media always says.


Oxford-Based Group Stops Using WHO Data for Coronavirus Reporting, Citing Errors
Our World in Data researchers announced this week that they had stopped relying on World Health Organization data for their models.

Our World in Data, an online publication based at the University of Oxford, announced on Tuesday that it had stopped relying on World Health Organization (WHO) data for its models, citing errors and other factors.

The group’s founder, Max Roser, said researchers are now using data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

"Until March 18 we relied on the World Health Organization (WHO) as our source. We aimed to rely on the WHO as they are the international agency with the mandate to provide official estimates on the pandemic. The WHO reports this data for each single day and they can be found here at the WHO’s site.

"Since March 18 it became unfortunately impossible to rely on the WHO data to understand how the pandemic is developing over time. With Situation Report 58 the WHO shifted the reporting cutoff time from 0900 CET to 0000 CET. This means that comparability is compromised because there is an overlap between these two WHO data publications (Situation Reports 57 and 58).

"Additionally we found many errors in the data published by the WHO when we went through all the daily Situation Reports. We immediately notified the WHO and are in close contact with the WHO’s team to correct the errors that we pointed out to them."

WHO, an agency of the United Nations, is responsible for international public health. Recent reports suggest US intelligence agencies relied heavily on WHO in its national assessment of the COVID-19 threat.

The errors and inconsistencies, which Our World in Data documented in a separate report, include discrepancies from nearly a dozen situation reports filed by WHO between February 5 and March 16.

https://fee.org/articles/oxford-based-g ... ng-errors/

Absolutely!
The UN is beyond reproach,
A beacon of integrity and fairmindedness,
The pillar of morality,
Not influenced in any way by unwholesome entities.
Errr.

Hint: Irony set to "catastrophic" level.

There is one thing I feel certain of. There are politicians, media outlets and reporters and even doctors/experts who hate and fear Trump so much, they would say just about anything to try keeping him from being reelected. Probably in their minds Trump getting reelected is worse than unnecessary long term massive unemployment.

You are absolutely correct and expressed the situation well.

Inaccurate Virus Models Are Panicking Officials Into Ill-Advised Lockdowns
How a handful of Democratic activists created alarming, but bogus data sets to scare local and state officials into making rash, economy-killing mandates.

As U.S. state and local officials halt the economy and quarantine their communities over the Wuhan virus crisis, one would hope our leaders were making such major decisions based on well-sourced data and statistical analysis. That is not the case.

A scan of statements made by media, state governors, local leaders, county judges, and more show many relying on the same source, an online mapping tool called COVID Act Now. The website says it is “built to enable political leaders to quickly make decisions in their Coronavirus response informed by best available data and modeling.”

An interactive map provides users a catastrophic forecast for each state, should they wait to implement COVID Act Now’s suggested strict measures to “flatten the curve.” But a closer look at how many of COVID Act Now’s predictions have already fallen short, and how they became a ubiquitous resource across the country overnight, suggests something more sinister.

[A long list of officials who have cited and acted on this group's data are given]

So why is the organization or seemingly innocent online mapping tool using inaccurate algorithms to scaremonger leaders into tanking the economy? Politics, of course.

Founders of the site include Democratic Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and three Silicon Valley tech workers and Democratic activists — Zachary Rosen, Max Henderson, and Igor Kofman — who are all also donors to various Democratic campaigns and political organizations since 2016. Henderson and Kofman donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, while Rosen donated to the Democratic National Committee, recently resigned Democratic Rep. Katie Hill, and other Democratic candidates. Prior to building the COVID Act Now website, Kofman created an online game designed to raise $1 million for the eventual 2020 Democratic candidate and defeat President Trump.


https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/25/in ... lockdowns/

https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928?s=19

At the rate these rapid tests are popping up all over the world, everyone will soon be back to school and back to work. There will still be a few more weeks of pain, but we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is the beginning of the end.

A lot of people worked non-stop, day and night, to make solutions possible. There have been all too many heroes. Let's not forget about people in South America, they will need all the help they can get from the rest of the world.

Lesson learned? When in crisis, buy time first. You need time to assemble your team. This has been a true international collaboration.

After this crisis is over, we need to look back and deal with the culprits, and not let gross mistakes happen ever again. WHO has been a joke throughout this pandemic. It either needs to be reformed, or just be dismantled and replaced with something else. Letting poor and corrupt African countries pick the Director-General who would then decide on life-and-death matters of developed countries just cannot go on. Never again.