Blood pressure drug taken by millions of Britons cuts the risk of dying from coronavirus by a THIRD, research shows

Experts found that Covid-19 patients who have been prescribed the medication were 33 per cent less likely to die or be admitted to intensive care.

The drugs – Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers (ARBs) – are used to treat high blood pressure, heart attacks and diabetes.

More than six million people in the UK take them regularly, and the new study shows they can boost coronavirus survival chances in patients taking them for high blood pressure.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia pooled data from previous studies looking at 28,872 patients in hospital with Covid-19.

One quarter of the patients were taking ACE inhibitors or ARBs, including one third of patients with high blood pressure.

The study showed that patients with high blood pressure were 33 per cent less likely to die or be placed on a ventilator if they were taking ACE inhibitors.

More research is needed to see if the drugs could treat coronavirus in patients who do not have high blood pressure.

Experts said the findings are hugely reassuring for millions of patients on the medication.

It follows fears that ACE inhibitors may in fact worsen Covid-19 as they reduce blood pressure by increasing levels of ACE2 receptors on the surface of a patient’s cells.

Covid-19 uses the same receptor to lock on to cells and invade the body. Lead author Dr Vassilios Vassiliou suggested the drugs may reduce the risk of dying from Covid by keeping blood pressure under control and decreasing inflammation in the body.

He said: ‘We can now very conclusively say that if you are being prescribed this medication you should keep taking it and it will not increase death or critical events, in fact it could save your life.’

He added that ACE inhibitors and ARBs may also reduce the severity of coronavirus among patients who take the medication for other conditions, such as diabetes or kidney failure.

‘For patients who were taking the medication but did not have high blood pressure we could see a trend towards them having better outcomes but it didn’t reach statistical significance. We can say it was definitely not harmful.’

He added: ‘We have shown that patients who have been prescribed the medication before they got Covid are better off.

'We do not have any evidence that if somebody got Covid-19 today and you gave them the medication they might be better off.’

The most popular versions of the drugs are Ramipril, Losartan, Lisinopril and Candesartan, according to NHS data.

SOURCE 

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Coronavirus: How fishermen landed a vital clue on Covid immunity

In May a fishing vessel headed out into Puget Sound, off Seattle, hoping for a good haul. When it returned, it brought back something far more valuable – an answer to the most important question facing the world.

On that ship, a study claims, was the first good evidence that being infected with coronavirus conferred immunity.

After setting off, one of the sailors came down with Covid-19. The vessel returned to port, where the health authorities discovered that 103 crewmates had also been infected.

Before sailing, all those on board had been screened, both for live infection and antibodies. Although this testing did not pick up the infected sailor, it picked up something else. Six tested seropositive, showing they could have had the infection. Of those, three had high levels of neutralising antibodies.

When the ship returned to dock, the authorities discovered that the three with a high level of antibodies were among the minority of 18 crew who had not been infected. It is possible that the other three, who did get infected, were false positives.

Among those who had not had it, more than 85 per cent were infected. Among those who almost certainly had, and had a strong reaction, none were.

By showing that a decent level of antibodies offers protection, the findings strongly suggest that the leading vaccine contenders will do as well.

“It would have been catastrophic for the world if we had not seen this,” said Alex Greninger, from the University of Washington, who published the research before peer review in Medrxiv.

The presence of neutralising antibodies has been one of the targets of vaccine trials. “It is a big deal to show if those antibodies are protective,” he said.

SOURCE 

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Kamala Harris Is a Fraud

Joe Biden's new running mate is neither a truth-teller nor a moderate.

If first impressions were serious ones, Kamala Harris might already be in trouble. In her first speech as Joe Biden’s running mate, she came out of the gate with a reckless disregard for the truth – which tells us that Biden’s influence must already be rubbing off. (When he was younger and far more nimble, he managed to tell four fully formed lies in the space of just 124 words.)

“The president’s mismanagement of the pandemic,” Harris railed earlier this week, “has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

“False,” replied National Review’s Kyle Smith. “The pandemic and its associated lockdowns, not the president, are responsible for the economic contraction. … And it’s questionable to compare the current crisis to the Great Depression, which was not only deep but lasted more than a decade.” (Thanks to FDR’s policies, we’d add.)

As for those lockdowns, The Wall Street Journal editorial board saw through the Democrats’ scheme more than two months ago. “The state lockdowns are starting to ease and the U.S. economy should slowly begin to recover,” the editors wrote. “But it’s worth noting that the states opening most slowly are big states run by Democrats that represent something like a third of the U.S. economy. This means a slower recovery for those states and the U.S.”

Next, Harris blamed the Trump administration for our shuttered schools. “Just look where [Trump and Mike Pence] have gotten us,” she complained. “Millions of kids who cannot go back to school.”

Wrong again, Smith rightly said. “It is not Donald Trump’s decision whether kids go back to school, because the federal government does not run schools, but he has urged the schools to reopen. The primary reason kids cannot go back to school is opposition from teachers’ unions.”

We all know this to be true — that the teachers’ unions are adamantly against reopening — and for purely partisan political purposes. And here again, the Journal called them out: “The reopening of public schools poses an economic conundrum: If the schools aren’t open, many parents will lack child care and be unable to return to work. If parents can’t work, the economy can’t recover. Teachers unions are thus in a position to hold the economy hostage.”

Having thus attempted to hang the school closings on President Trump, Harris did further violence to her credibility with this ridiculous comparison: “Six years ago, in fact, we had a different health crisis. It was called Ebola. We all remember that pandemic.”

Huh? Since when does a handful of Ebola cases constitute a “pandemic”? According to the CDC, only 11 people in the entire U.S. were treated for Ebola during Harris’s imaginary pandemic.

SOURCE 

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Trump Considers a Cut in the Capital Gains Tax

President Donald Trump has suggested cutting the capital gains tax as part of the economic recovery from COVID-19. And indeed, cutting capital gains taxes could help spur new businesses, increase the availability of funds for existing businesses, and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.

Reducing taxes on capital gains also could be a good thing for the recovery from the pandemic, but doing it right will be important.

Without decisive spending cuts, the threat of future tax increases will erode the benefits of near-term tax cuts and other policy options may be better suited to support the recovery.

When you sell an investment, such as a share of a company, the government charges a capital gains tax on the increased value. The top long-term capital gains rate currently is 23.8%, with lower rates for lower income levels.

Investment income is taxed twice: once when you earn it as wages, and a second time on any investment earnings. If your money is invested in a corporation, the corporate income tax takes another slice of your investment.

This system makes it more expensive to invest in the future and encourages Americans instead to spend their money today, which reduces overall levels of investment and economic growth.

Our tax code’s built-in bias against saving for the future is partially mitigated by having a lower tax rate on capital gains and dividends than the top income tax rate of 37%. The lower rate is a necessary, pro-growth feature of our tax code. A key promise of Democrats is to tax capital gains as ordinary income, raising the tax significantly. 

Because the capital gains tax is assessed at the time of realization–when the asset is sold–it creates an incentive to hold the asset to defer paying taxes. This has the side effect of encouraging investors to hold appreciated assets longer than they otherwise would for fear of having to pay tax on the gain, creating a “lock in” effect.

This “lock in” has real economic costs when investors hold assets due to fear of taxes rather than belief in a smart investment choice.

These “malinvestments” mean that Grandma still might be holding onto that $100 of Disney stock she bought in 1957 when the company went public. Her investment is now worth over $300,000 and if she cashed out, she could owe more than $70,000 in taxes.

Maybe her dollars might be invested better in her granddaughter’s small business. Or perhaps a different publicly traded company.

Lock in and double taxation mean that high capital gains taxes reduce companies’ ability to raise funds for new investments through equity offerings. They also impose higher taxes on riskier investments, such as startups that run large losses in the initial years with a small probability of successfully making a profit in the future.

Freeing up domestic capital and reducing the tax penalty for entrepreneurs have the potential to be particularly helpful as the economy retools after this current crisis. 

The current high capital gains rate actually could be costing us revenue. The anti-realization incentives of the tax are so strong that under conservative estimates from Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, the revenue- maximizing tax rate is 28.5%.

When factoring in state taxes, the total capital gains tax rate in states such as California and New York is over 30%, and in 2016, the U.S. average cumulative capital gains rate was 28.9%. Investors are so sensitive that high capital gains tax rates lead to lower revenues simply through investors’ behavioral responses.

The revenue-maximizing rate should not be confused for any measure of economic efficiency. Ideally, the tax rate on capital income should be zero. Anything above zero unnecessarily reduces jobs and productivity growth. This harms not just the investors but workers and consumers too.

The capital gains tax also applies to inflationary gains. Inflation isn’t a big deal for the investor who has seen high returns. In our Disney example, less than $1,000 of the $300,000 gain is inflation. But most investments don’t have such great returns.

Poorer-performing investments can be swamped by inflation. In some cases, the effective capital gains rate can be more than 100% during times of high inflation on low return assets. The Tax Foundation estimates that about a third of unrealized household gains are inflationary.

To this aim, Trump previously has talked about the need to index capital gains to inflation so that the tax system stops taxing these phantom gains. Indexing capital gains would increase fairness and could unlock meaningful new domestic investment resources.

Indexing capital gains should be done carefully through the legislative process, since the Constitution empowers only Congress to enact new tax policy. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel agrees “that Treasury does not have legal authority to index capital gains for inflation by means of regulation.”

Leaving new legislation to Congress is not only what the Founders envisioned but also has the economic benefit of being more permanent, which is essential to gaining the full benefit of any tax policy.

Congress may want to index other parts of the tax code to avoid opportunities for gaming and ensure administrative simplicity. This requires careful deliberation.

Congress also must weigh the economic benefits of different kinds of tax cuts. Reforms such as expensing and corporate income tax cuts can provide larger economic gains per dollar of reduced revenue.

A capital gains tax cut or indexing also will have little long-run effect if Congress does not also pair the reform with significant spending cuts.

Projected annual deficits of $2 trillion over the next decade will force Congress to cut spending, increase taxes, or risk fiscal collapse. Without decisive spending cuts, any tax cut is destined to be temporary.

Reducing taxes on capital gains could be a good thing. But without spending reforms, the necessity of higher taxes in the future likely will blunt the impact of otherwise good tax policy.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Sweden stands firm on face masks as Anders Tegnell refuses to copy other countries' strategy

With face masks mandatory on public transport in Denmark from Saturday morning, Sweden is now in the position it has been in so often during the coronavirus pandemic - alone.

The country, which chose not to close lower secondary schools, pubs, restaurants, and sports facilities at the peak in April, is again an outlier in not recommending the general public wear face masks.

Dr Anders Tegnell, the country's state epidemiologist, told the Daily Telegraph that he did not expect the Public Health Agency of Sweden to follow Norway, Finland and Denmark and drop its opposition to masks when it recommends new measures to Sweden's government at the start of next month.

"The main risk, I think, is that people will think: 'okay, I'm wearing a face mask. I don't need to take these other precautions'," he said, saying his agency believed social distancing and self-isolation of the sick were "much more important".

While he admitted there was no study showing that face masks did in fact reduce adherence to other guidelines, he pointed to the trajectory of cases in countries that have mandated them.

"There is now a continuous and even increased spread in a number of countries who implemented face masks, " he said.

"There is a belief that if you just have face masks, you can forget about everything else, you can run your subway with full trains and so on."

Norway last week recommended the use of face masks on public transport in Oslo, and Finland on public transport nationwide, putting Dr Tegnell's agency under growing public pressure to follow suit.

Scientific Forum Covid-19 Sweden, a group of 45 Swedish researchers critical of Sweden's strategy, argued last Sunday in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper that masks should be worn even by students and teachers in schools.

"The scientific data is clear at this point, with most studies  showing that face masks do limit the spread, and to my knowledge not a single study showing they increase the spread, so why are they so stubborn?" said Lena Einhorn, an author with a PhD in virology, who is part of the group.

But Jonas Ludvigsson, professor of clinical epidemiology at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, who on Monday attacked the group for cherry-picking and misrepresenting studies, said that the different approach Sweden had taken was best explained by the unusual independence of its government agencies.

"In the other Nordic countries, politicians often have a stronger role than the experts at public health agencies." Frode Forland, Dr Tegnell's Norwegian counterpart, told the Telegraph he believed Dr Tegnell had "a valid argument" against face masks.

"We've been stressing that it's still much more effective to keep distance than to wear a face mask," he said. "If you keep one metre's distance, the reduction of risk of infection is about 80 per cent, but if you wear a face mask it's about 40 per cent."

He estimated that even with the rising number of cases Norway is currently experiencing, about 70,000 people would have to wear a mask for a week to prevent a single infection. 

On Wednesday, Johan Carlson, the Director-General of the Public Health Agency and Dr Tegnell's boss, appeared to soften the agency's stance, telling a press conference that "the issue over face masks is not at all dead", and that the agency was working on a review of the available evidence before issuing a list of recommendations to Sweden's government on September 1st.

But Dr Tegnell said the agency was unlikely to recommend face masks to the general public across Sweden, unless the rate of infection increases dramatically.

"There might be a role for face masks if you have increased incidence in a limited geographical area and you want to do everything to stop it as quickly as possible," he said.

But he said that Sweden was seeing a downward trend in most regions of the country. "If that changes then of course we need to think about more measures, but its a bit unusual to install more measures when you are in a downgoing trend."

SOURCE 

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Lockdowns Don’t Work, Study Finds

Travel restrictions and containment measures had “no observed association” on the number of critical cases of COVID-19 or death rates for the virus, a new study has found.

Increasing caseloads were associated most with greater obesity, older populations, higher unemployment rates, low levels of national preparedness in early detection and reporting, and limited health care capacity, says the study published by The Lancet. Researchers examined data in 50 countries through May 1 for the study.

“As governments consider partially or completely lifting travel restrictions and containment measures, understanding the roles of these policies in mitigating infection is imperative to minimize the impact of second and third waves of outbreaks,” the authors write.

The study, “A Country Level Analysis Measuring the Impact of Government Actions, Country Preparedness and Socioeconomic Factors on COVID-19 Mortality and Related Health Outcomes,” was authored by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, and Sheila Riazi, and published in the Lancet online publication, Eclinical Medicine, July 21, 2020.

SOURCE 

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Bill Gates: America's Coronavirus Testing Is 'Garbage'

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes the majority of the United States' Wuhan coronavirus tests are "garbage," he told Wired.

According to the billionaire, our nation's testing system is deeply flawed because of testing reimbursement rates that are determined by the government.

"The majority of all U.S. tests are complete garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that," Gates explained. "You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight."

Gates helped fund a diagnostic testing program in Seattle. He said the results were quicker and the testing wasn't as intrusive. Instead of relying on a test that requires a swab from the turbinate – the very back of the nostrils – Gates' test utilized a cotton swab from the tip of a person's nose.

"There’s this thing where the health worker jams the deep turbinate, in the back of your nose, which actually hurts and makes you sneeze on the healthy worker. We showed that the quality of the results can be equivalent if you just put a self-test in the tip of your nose with a cotton swab," he explained. "The FDA made us jump through some hoops to prove that you didn’t need to refrigerate the result, that it could go back in a dry plastic bag, and so on. So the delay there was just normal double-checking, maybe overly careful but not based on some political angle. Because of what we have done at FDA, you can buy these cheaper swabs that are available by the billions. So anybody who’s using the deep turbinate now is just out of date. It’s a mistake, because it slows things down."

The Food and Drug Administration warned about false positives, saying approximately three percent of all tests aren't actually positive.

Since the start of the pandemic we have seen flaws in Wuhan coronavirus case numbers and deaths. Texas had to correct their fatality rate. In Orange County, California, 30,000 serology tests – used to detect whether or not a person has antibodies for the virus, suggesting they previously had an infection – were counted in the "cumulative tests to date" figures for five weeks. In Florida, Orlando's positivity rate was said to be 98 percent, when, in reality, it was only 9.4 percent. Part of the issue was the number of clinics and labs that were reporting 100 percent positivity rates.

SOURCE 

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Kudlow Says Another Lockdown Would Have 'Enormous' Human and Economic Cost

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow says he “wouldn’t mind” seeing a return to a 15 percent capital-gains tax rate, while noting that President Donald Trump wouldn’t seek such a cut through an executive order.

“We are looking at middle-class income tax cuts and capital gains tax cuts to spur investment and jobs and liquidity,” Kudlow told reporters at the White House on Aug. 12

“In another era, we used to call them tax cuts 2.0. The president has never lost those thoughts,”  he said, while adding that Joe Biden, the president’s 2020 rival, would raise taxes if elected.

Kudlow said it’s imperative that legislators in Congress work to come up with a cut to capital gains taxes, adding that it’s “not part” of any Trump executive order or plans on future executive action.

White House officials “had the economic committee during the campaign,” Kudlow said. “We originally had a 15 percent capital gains tax rate. And I wouldn’t mind going back to that.”

“We’d like to take it back to 15 percent, where it was for quite a long time because it helps jobs, investment, productivity, and wages,” he reiterated. The capital-gains rate is currently 20 percent.

On Aug. 10, Trump stated that he’s considering a tax cut on the profit that results from the sale of a capital asset such as a stock, bond, or real estate. He didn’t specify how that could be carried out.

The president said at a press conference that he’s also looking at “an income tax cut for middle-income families.”

“We are looking at expanding the cuts that we have already done, but specifically for middle-income families, and you will be hearing about that in the upcoming few weeks,” Trump said, adding that a capital-gains cut will produce more jobs.

While remaining mired in talks with top Democrats about a pandemic relief measure, Trump took executive action to provide a federal unemployment benefit of $300 per week, with states paying another $100 per week. He also took action to suspend evictions for renters and homeowners, defer student loan payments, and suspend payroll taxes for people who make less than $104,000 per year.

Kudlow’s remarks on slashing the capital-gains tax mirror that of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who told Fox News earlier that there’s a need for “legislation to do what we want on that front.”

“That’s what we need now because of COVID. So I think for the next few years while we recover, we should reduce those capital gains,” he added.

Ian Lyngen, head of U.S. rates strategy at BMO Capital Markets, said in a note to investors that a cut to the rate “would require the support of Congress,” although a Trump executive order “allowing the indexing of capital gains to inflation might be a realizable objective.”

SOURCE 

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Why mail-in voting is a bad idea

With the COVID-19 pandemic still upending our normal routines and the 2020 presidential election looming, mail-in voting continues to be a point of fierce controversy.

Absentee voting is already available for those who cannot vote in person. People who are elderly, immuno-compromised, or otherwise worried about exposure to COVID-19 while voting may apply for an absentee ballot.

But many Democrats want to take that several steps further, by drastically expanding mail-in voting or implementing universal mail-in voting before Election Day. While allowing everyone to mail their ballots in instead of heading to the polls during a pandemic may sound like a good idea, it’s rife with potential for mistakes, complications, and fraud.

“Mail-in ballots are the ballots most vulnerable to being altered, stolen, or forged” writes Hans von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Federal Election Commission member.

Votes cast by mail-in ballot are more likely to be lost or rejected over minor errors, such as a name or signature not exactly matching election officials’ files. “The U.S. Election Assistance Commission says that in the last four federal elections, 2.7 million mail-in ballots were misdelivered and 1.3 million were rejected by election officials,” von Spakovsky points out.

Many have criticized President Donald Trump for overstating the threat of voter fraud that comes with mail-in voting. But even those in favor of expanding mail-in voting acknowledge that it holds more potential for fraudulent activity.

Richard L. Hasen of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, thinks mail-in voting could be done safely with new rules. But as he acknowledged to The New York Times, “election fraud in the United States is very rare, but the most common type of such fraud in the United States involves absentee ballots.”

Douglas A. Kellner, co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, and a Democrat, told the Times, “if you analyze all the steps involved in a mail election you start to see where the weak points are for fraud.”

It’s true that five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington  — conduct their elections entirely by mail. They already have the systems and infrastructure set up to do so. Implementing the level of mail-in voting Democrats are suggesting for the whole nation before November is unrealistic.

Von Spakovsky believes it’s unnecessary to move the election date, an idea President Trump has floated on Twitter. But he doubts Congress, the only entity with the power to move an election, would do so. He notes that even during the Civil War and World War II, elections were not postponed.

“Despite the coronavirus pandemic, experience shows that we can vote safely in-person as long as election officials implement the safety protocols recommended by health experts in polling places—the same protocols we are all using when we go to the grocery store or pharmacy,” he said.

Email from Kerby Anderson: k.anderson@pointofview.net From Point of View Radio Talk Show

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Biden’s hollow reality show an appalling performance

In four days, no one addressed the question of China or the lawlessness still roiling US cities. This was a travesty of a political convention that spoke volumes about Joe Biden

Joe Biden has made his election pitch at last: I’m a nice guy, Trump’s a beast, vote for me. In these dyspeptic, bilious times, such bland reassurance might be enough. Then again, it might not.

The Democratic National Convention was a bizarre decline in American political culture. It mixed a striking lack of coherent content with an endless series of images that circled around a few key emotional themes.

Biden’s nominating speech did the same. Biden’s verbally erratic, gaffe-prone performances have led his advisers to mostly cocoon him in his basement. With Donald Trump taking up all the attention, and coronavirus raging, and most of the media rooting for him, that has worked.

It also kept expectations helpfully low. All Biden has to do is stand up straight and read his lines and it’s a triumph.

Biden delivered his address, the most important speech of his life, with confidence and passion. That a candidate can manage to read a 25-minute speech and get the intonations right is a good thing, but surely the lowest possible bar for a presidential candidate to jump.

The substance of the speech was appalling. Really there was not much substance.

The Democratic convention nearly drowned in schmaltz, most of it concerning Biden’s life. It is indeed tragic that Biden lost his first wife and their daughter in a car accident decades ago, and then an adult son to cancer. The way Biden responded to these tragedies is genuine testimony to his character and any campaign would use it.

But these tragedies, repeated endlessly at the Democratic convention, became the main plank on which Biden seemed to be running for president. That is not how a mature democracy operates. It is reality TV, celebrity politics. Democrats lampoon Trump as the reality TV show president but they stripped all substance from their own convention and turned it into the Biden family reality TV show.

Here is a telling fact. In four days, no one addressed the question of China, either its strategic or economic challenge.

Nor did anyone mention the violent crime and lawlessness still roiling big American cities and soaring murder rates in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.

This was a travesty of a political convention.

Biden identified four crises his presidency would address: coronavirus, the worst pandemic in a century; the economic downturn, the worst since the Depression; racial injustice, where the call for change is more urgent than at any time since the 1960s; and global warming, where he thinks millions of jobs will be created in clean energy.

Yet Biden mentioned almost no policy of consequence.

For the virus he will have a national mask mandate and follow the science. For the economy he will provide $US2 trillion ($2.7 trillion) of infrastructure. For racial injustice he will ooze empathy. And for climate change, non-sequitur alert, there will be millions of jobs.

Biden does have policies on his website. But over four days not a single policy was discussed in any detail. Is the broad public utterly uninterested in policy?

For decades, the big nominating conventions have contained a lot of hoopla and showbiz. They have been declining in substance, partly because a convention centre full of delegates can be not only passionate but unpredictable when policy is discussed.

But they have normally involved high-production video clips introducing leaders, some of whom actually spoke about policies. Not this time. Rather, this convention focused on emotion, not reason. Each day, while concentrating on the main business of abusing Trump and sanctifying Biden, had a few sub-themes.

Women and Democrats were the sub-theme on day three while God made a comeback on day four. Biden is a Catholic, and the Democrats traditionally have a problem with religious voters, so a priest and a nun got bit parts. This is full of paradox and irony. Biden opposes Catholic Church teaching on most life issues, certainly on abortion, as is his every right. But his vice-presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, has a record of anti-Catholic posturing.

In 2018, in a hearing to confirm a Trump nominee, Brian Buescher, to a district court, she attacked Buescher for his membership of the Catholic charity Knights of Columbus.

The Knights are not a political or campaigning organisation. They are a legendary charity and do immense good work. But like all Catholic organisations they are pro-life rather than pro-abortion. Harris strongly implied that this membership therefore was unacceptable in a judge. That would mean any Catholic membership is unacceptable. This so annoyed Harris’s Senate colleagues, even the woke, that the Senate passed a resolution affirming there was no religious test for judicial office in the US.

You wouldn’t expect all that to get a run at the convention, but you’d think something of substance might have been discussed. Harris herself condemned the “structural racism” that she said characterised the US. She and Barack Obama painted a bleak picture of America and its history, but a bright picture of its future so long as Biden is elected.

Harris, like Biden, seems to have no fixed political convictions. Or perhaps more precisely, like Bill Clinton, she holds intensely whatever view she is expressing at any given moment, however it contradicts her past views.

But it is a dismaying indication of what a Biden presidency might actually be like that Harris rose to national notice through prosecuting the culture wars.

And while the Democratic National Convention almost drowned in the gross sentimentality that disfigures so much American life, and that does not lead to virtue or decency in public life but more often emotionalism and self-indulgence, there was still a good degree of nastiness evident.

Obama and many other speakers blamed Trump for more than 170,000 American deaths from COVID. That is an outrageous charge. Most analysts and many Republicans agree that Trump’s leadership in response to COVID has been poor. He got some things right, such as the early travel ban on China. But his messages have been confused and at times he has publicly contradicted the official advice from his own health authorities.

It is absolutely legitimate to criticise Trump, robustly and harshly, for such failures. But to blame him directly for 170,000-plus deaths is grotesque. It is a matter of record that when Trump imposed the travel ban on China, Biden was opposed, calling the ban “xenophobic” and saying it would do no good.

In any event, the US death rate is high — and Trump is at his irrational worst when he claims it is low by international standards — but it is still lower than European nations such as Britain, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and others.

Much of the moral charge Democrats and left-liberal cultural leaders make against Trump is undercut by the way they distort facts, and often enough lie, and the wide-ranging personal abuse they engage in.

Trump has been vulgar, crude and offensive on many occasions and therefore has little to complain about when people behave that way towards him. However, you cannot sell yourself as representing a higher moral standard of pristine decency if you engage debate on those same terms.

Moreover, the Democrats are abusive and dismissive of Trump’s supporters as well. Vice-President Mike Pence has surely never been seriously rude about anybody. Yet Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who hosted the convention’s fourth night, and former Democrat candidate Andrew Yang undertook a ghastly segment where they parodied Pence’s name, a lame joke Louis-Dreyfus returned to through the night. She variously called him poonce and ponce. This seemed a response to TV commentators getting the pronunciation of Harris’s name wrong. This is an entirely trivial matter, but can you imagine the storm of outrage that would follow if a senior Republican lampooned the Democrat vice-presidential candidate’s name?

The convention did achieve a number of positives for Biden.

It presented a united Democratic Party. In truth, the party is riven by ideological and geographical divisions. It suffers the same kind of contradictions that the Australian Labor Party faces and that confront many social democratic parties, the inner-city voter versus the outer-suburban and rural voter. What plays on climate change or identity politics in Manhattan or San Francisco doesn’t go so well in West Virginia or even suburban Michigan.

But Democrats certainly are all united in their desire to defeat Trump and get jobs in a Biden administration. Obama’s two secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, are all over Biden and had honoured spots in this convention. Both are said to be quite keen to return to a Biden cabinet.

Clinton was actually a pretty good secretary of state, but that was when she thought she would face a hawkish Republican opponent, like Marco Rubio, for the presidency.

Kerry was sublimely ineffective, authored the disastrous Iran deal, was useless in the broader Middle East, neglected Asia and over-invested in almost worthless multilateralism for its own sake.

A Biden foreign policy could well be worse even than that.

The convention also featured a lot of former Republicans, such as John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, now endorsing Biden. The Democrats have gone to the left, not the centre, but their pitch to moderates and centrists is that Trump is unfit to be president. The hope is that the presence of these Republicans will give such voters “permission” to opt for Biden.

In policy terms it is almost impossible to glean anything of substance on how Biden might govern. The TV audiences were much smaller than for the parallel event four years ago. But Biden is like a football team, up on the scoreboard with 20 minutes to go. His strategy is to play mistake-free football and hope he’s still ahead when the siren sounds.

But the party revealed some things about itself. One was the almost demented emphasis on identity politics. Pete Buttigieg was the most intellectually impressive of the Democratic presidential candidates, denied the chance to consolidate the moderate vote because his party could not count its votes properly and he was wrongly marked as coming second in a crucial primary he actually won.

He happens to be gay and married. He ran on substantial policies but was happy to answer questions about his marriage and gay rights if asked.

But at this convention he was prevailed on to make the fact of being a gay candidate the main element of his speech. That is a step backwards from where Buttigieg was in the campaign.

The Democratic Party has moved a very long way left. Bernie Sanders was right when he said his radical agenda is now the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Biden is still favourite, but the polls are tightening and the RealClearPolitics betting odds now have Biden at a 57 per cent chance of winning and Trump at 43 per cent. That means it’s a live contest.

If Biden becomes president he might be like Lyndon Johnson. Realising he would have only one term in his own right, Johnson took on the huge task of civil rights. Biden might do the same, perhaps on healthcare or some other domestic issue.

Or he might, like Calvin Coolidge, be a political lifer whose key talent is persistence and survival, who is ultimately somewhat astonished to end up at the top and just enjoys the ride.

We are not any wiser as to what kind of president Biden might be after this infomercial trivialising of American politics, this brain-rotting cotton candy of the mind, that was the Democratic National Convention.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

Democratic National Convention Circus
Viewership tumbles 24% on first night of convention (Bloomberg)

Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren speaks at Native American Caucus meeting (Bongino.com)

Linda Sarsour, who raised funds for terrorist, featured as speaker (The Federalist)

DNC rejects #MeToo "reckoning" over Bill Clinton by gifting him with speaking slot (The Federalist)

Trump takes 700% more questions than Hidin' Biden in one month (Washington Examiner)

Senate Intel Committee says FBI gave "unjustified credence" to Steele dossier, Russia "took advantage" of Trump transition team (Fox News)

Postmaster general suspends changes to Postal Service to avoid any impact on election mail (NBC News)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo publishing book on his coronavirus (mis)leadership after lambasting Trump in DNC speech (Forbes)

Judge blocks Idaho law preventing biological males from competing in women's sports (The Daily Caller)

Yet another riot is declared in Portland on 83rd night of trouble: 200-strong mob of protesters torch city's famous Multnomah Building (UK Daily Mail)

Portland police identify suspect in brutal beating of truck driver (The Daily Wire)

Six arrested after George Washington statue toppled, vandalized near Los Angeles City Hall (KTLA)

New home construction surged 23% in July (UK Daily Mail)

S&P 500 hits all-time high despite COVID-19 devastation (New York Post)

Dangerously incompetent Scott Israel defeated in bid for reelection as Broward County sheriff (The Truth About Guns)

Never-before-seen photos of Bill Clinton getting massage from Jeffrey Epstein accuser released (The Daily Wire)

What corporate media won't tell you about Trump's historic Middle East peace deal (The Federalist)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Sweden's coronavirus expert warns that wearing masks is 'very dangerous' because it gives people the idea it is safe to be in crowded rooms or public transport

A psychologically sophisticated comment.  The psychology does matter

Sweden's top coronavirus expert is refusing to force people to wear face masks in public, arguing that donning them is 'very dangerous' because it gives the impression it is safe to be in crowded rooms or on public transport.

Anders Tegnell, chief epidemiologist at Sweden's Public Health Agency, has expressed scepticism that face masks will control Covid-19 outbreaks.

The infectious diseases expert, who refused to follow European governments in locking down in March, also noted that countries with widespread mask compliance, such as Belgium and Spain, were still experiencing rising cases of Covid.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Dr Tegnell said: 'It is very dangerous to believe face masks would change the game when it comes to Covid-19.

'Face masks can be a complement to other things when other things are safely in place. But to start with having face masks and then think you can crowd your buses or your shopping malls - that's definitely a mistake.' 

Dr Tegnell previously brushed off the prospect of compelling Swedes to wear face masks, and called evidence of their effectiveness 'astonishingly weak'.

Sweden, which has stood out among European countries for its low-key approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic, recorded its highest tally of deaths in the first half of 2020 for 150 years, the Statistics Office said on Wednesday.

Covid-19 claimed about 4,500 lives in the period to the end of June - a number which has now risen to 5,800 - a much higher percentage of the population than in other Nordic nations, though lower than in some others including Britain and Spain.

Email exchanges obtained by journalists in Sweden under freedom of information laws appear to show the country's coronavirus strategist discussing the option of keeping schools open to encourage herd immunity in mid-March.

One conversation was with Tegnell's Finnish counterpart, Mika Salminen, in what Swedish journalists say appears to be a brainstorming of methods to tackle the pandemic.

The newly-released emails which date back five months have caused a stir in Sweden and have fuelled criticism of the country's no-lockdown approach to the pandemic. 

In total, 51,405 Swedes died in the January to June period, a higher number than any year since 1869 when 55,431 died, partly as a result of a famine. The population of Sweden was around 4.1 million then, compared to 10.3 million now.

Covid-19 meant that deaths were 10 percent higher than the average for the period over the last five years, the Statistics Office said. In April the number of deaths was almost 40% higher than average due to a surge in Covid-related fatalities.

Finland's economy outperformed its larger neighbour in the second quarter, despite a tougher lockdown. Finland's gross domestic product shrank around 5 per cent against an 8.6 per cent contraction in Sweden from the last three-month period.

Last month Dr Tegnell's public health agency shrugged off claims that people should wear face masks in crowded public spaces during the pandemic.

SOURCE 

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Democrats Sure Hate America

In watching the Democratic National Convention one thing strikes me over and over again – Democrats really don’t like this country and the people in it. No, this wasn’t news to me, but it was surprising to see them be so open about it; proud of it, really.

The opening night was a list of grievances, an endless stream of whiny leftists declaring how racist everything and everyone is. Honestly, if I lived in a place where I truly believed its very existence was based on oppressing me, you couldn’t keep me there. I wouldn’t stick around, and I surely wouldn’t try to take it over. I’d get the hell out of there and go someplace else.

Yet, Democrats claim to love the country while calling for “fundamental transformation” of it. Try saying that to your significant other tonight – “Honey, I love you, but I want to fundamentally transform you” – and see how well that goes over.

Bernie Sanders has always hated this country, which is why he wants to destroy everything great about it. He doesn’t care that it has made him, a man with no skills or accomplishments aside from winning elections in Vermont, a filthy rich man. Like a wealthy kid who hates their parents while taking comfort in their trust fund, Bernie refuses to acknowledge his story wouldn’t be possible anywhere else on the planet.

Michelle Obama is the same – no skills, no accomplishments, she just married the right guy – and is now one of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the country. And she spent her time trying to convince the public to vote for Joe Biden because Republicans are oppressors. She didn’t explain how the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for minority groups is oppression and racist, but she also didn’t have to. She knew her claims wouldn’t be challenged or her hypocrisy pointed out.

There really wasn’t a speaker who didn’t, at some point, declare the country awful for any number of reasons, fixable only by Democrats. Yet Democrats, when they’ve had power nationally and everywhere they have it locally, have failed to “fix” any of these problems they insist plague the country.

If the United States is oppressive and racist, we’re really horrible at it.

Looking at income by ethnicity paints a different picture than Democrats want people to believe. Evil white people have a median income of $59,900, Hispanics are at $43,000, and blacks come in at $35,000.

Just looking at those numbers, you can see how some people are convinced to believe there is systemic discrimination in the USA. But what if I told you evil white people, the oppressors of all and creators of the systemic racism that keeps minorities down while protecting “white privilege,” were ranked 9th in ethnic group median income? Would that confuse you?

You probably haven’t heard it, it serves no political purpose for Democrats to point it out, so the media never reports it. Indian-Americans have a median income of $100,500, Filipinos are second with $83,300. You can see the list for yourself here.

It is just a coincidence that two ethnic groups Democrats have the most voter loyalty from, and spend the most time trying to convince they’re oppressed, have the lowest median income, I’m sure.

It’s also a coincidence that Michelle Obama, on tape from her mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, told the public this horrible country is a place where “a never-ending list of innocent people of color continue to be murdered” and she was not talking about Democrat-controlled cities.

It’s really no wonder Democrats think the country is an oppressive hell-hole, they live where Democrats have all the power.

What Michelle said – that police are killing unarmed black people in “a never-ending” stream – is a complete lie, but that lie is useful to Democrats, so they keep repeating it. Journalists are tools of the Democrats, so they say nothing.

Not one person on any of the broadcast networks or CNN and MSNBC bothered to correct it or any of the other lies. These people are all rich, and they derive their money and power from convincing people that what isn’t actually is. They aren’t about to rock that boat.

No speaker at the DNC contradicted this or any of the other lies told this week, nor did they condemn any of the brutal attacks by Antifa or Black Lives Matter happening simultaneously to innocent Americans across the country. The “silence equals violence” crowd is not only complicit in that violence, they are encouraging it because they benefit from it.

The virtual Democratic Convention is a literal rally in support of hate and fear. It’s an attempt to keep people angry and/or afraid, because people overwhelmed by their emotions don’t think or act rationally. And people being rational are kryptonite to the modern Democratic Party. I don’t like to use the word “evil,” though I do use it from time to time. But until a better one is invented, evil really is the perfect word.

SOURCE 

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Immunity Conferred By Infection Is Lasting,Several Studies Suggest

To the immune system, not all germs are equally memorable. But our body’s cells seem to be seriously studying up on the coronavirus.

Scientists who have been monitoring immune responses to the virus are now starting to see encouraging signs of strong, lasting immunity, even in people who developed only mild symptoms of Covid-19, a flurry of new studies suggests. Disease-fighting antibodies, as well as immune cells called B cells and T cells that are capable of recognizing the virus, appear to persist months after infections have resolved - an encouraging echo of the body’s enduring response to other viruses.

“Things are really working as they’re supposed to,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona and an author on one of the new studies, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Although researchers cannot forecast how long these immune responses will last, many experts consider the data a welcome indication that the body’s most studious cells are doing their job - and will have a good chance of fending off the coronavirus, faster and more fervently than before, if exposed to it again.

“This is exactly what you would hope for,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington and an author on another of the new studies, which is currently under review at the journal Nature. “All the pieces are there to have a totally protective immune response.”

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

Not just Russia: Iran paid bounties for targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, intelligence suggests (The Hill)

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy agrees to testify amid politicized fury from election-scheming Democrats (Politico)

Trump: Susan B. Anthony to get posthumous pardon (Fox News)

"That's a negative advertising campaign in action": Evening newscasts 150 times more negative toward Trump than Biden (Fox News)

Biden would need Democrat-controlled Senate, unified party to advance sweeping economic plans (The Washington Post)

A Democratic candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives leads vulgar protest at police union president's home (The Daily Wire)

Elderly man sweeping a Chicago sidewalk is sucker punched by a thug in unprovoked attack (UK Daily Mail)

Chicago police are retiring at twice the normal rate; at least 110 police officers are retiring in August and September (Fox News)

Now Twitter is going after The Babylon Bee (PJ Media)

Former CIA officer arrested and charged with Chinese espionage (Department of Justice)

"China poses a greater national security threat to the U.S. than any other nation," Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says (Fox News)

California heat wave leaves threat of rolling blackouts for millions thanks to boneheaded Democrat policies (Fox Business)

Minnesota governor quietly reverses course on banning hydroxychloroquine (RealClearPolitics)

Policy: It was Obama, not Trump, who failed the Constitution (Issues & Insights)

********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Is herd immunity closer than scientists first thought?

Herd immunity against Covid-19 could be closer than scientists first thought and as little as 10 per cent of people may need to be infected for the virus to fizzle out, experts say.

It means pockets of London and New York and countries like India may already be immune to the life-threatening disease, should a second wave hit.

Cases may not rise so drastically as they did during the first peak of the pandemic earlier this year because the disease has run out of room to spread, or the disease may be less severe if immunity is short-lived, scientists believe.

Previously it's been speculated 60 to 70 per cent of the population would need to suffer Covid-19 or be vaccinated to gain 'herd immunity' status. But that would be devastating and cause millions of deaths, which is why Britain quickly dropped the controversial strategy in March.

And scientists still do not have any firm proof as to how long immunity actually lasts once a person has fought off Covid-19, mainly because it is still shrouded in secrecy and has only been known to exist since the start of the year.

Modelling studies have started to suggest that a far lower threshold is needed to achieve herd immunity — with researchers believing it could be between 10 and 43 per cent.

The calculations account for swathes of people who are less likely to get infected. Immunity among the most socially active people could protect those who come into contact with fewer people, scientists say.

The true size of the pandemic is a mystery because millions of infected people were not tested during the height of the crisis, either because of a lack of Covid-19 swabs or because they never had any of the tell-tale symptoms.

Counting how many people who have coronavirus antibodies through blood tests is, therefore, considered the most accurate way of calculating how much of the population has already been infected.

But antibody testing suggests just 5.7 per cent of England had antibodies at the start of August, but the figure was as high as 8 per cent in London. Other estimates have been slightly higher, saying around a fifth of people living in the capital have been infected — similar to levels in New York City.

But research has suggested that antibodies decline three months after infection — meaning only a fraction of true cases during the peak of the crisis may have been spotted and exactly how much immunity the world has developed is unknown.

And scientists say immunity in the UK is likely to be far higher than what Government antibody testing shows because it doesn't account for T-cells. Top immunologists have said the infection-fighting cells are typically more durable and long lasting than antibodies.

There is no indication that any country in the world has developed herd immunity yet, based on antibody studies. But in places severely battered by the disease, infectious disease specialists have speculated that there is some level of protection.

A strain of the coronavirus thriving in Europe, the US and parts of Asia has a specific mutation which makes the virus more infectious but less deadly, an expert believes.

The variation in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the agent which causes Covid-19, is called D614G.

Paul Tambyah, senior consultant at the National University of Singapore and president-elect of the International Society of Infectious Diseases, said evidence suggests the proliferation of the D614G mutation in some parts of the world has coincided with a drop in death rates, suggesting it is less lethal.

'Maybe that's a good thing to have a virus that is more infectious but less deadly,' Dr Tambyah told Reuters.

Tambyah said most viruses tend to become less virulent as they mutate. 'It is in the virus' interest to infect more people but not to kill them because a virus depends on the host for food and for shelter,' he said.

Scientists discovered the mutation as early as February and it has circulated in Europe and the Americas, the World Health Organization said.

The WHO has also said there is no evidence the mutation has led to more severe disease.

Professor Paul Hunter, at the University of East Anglia, said India - with the third most infections globally - didn't look far off herd immunity.

Studies have shown up to a quarter of people living in Delhi, which is home to almost 19 million people, have antibodies.

He told MailOnline: 'They do look like they are running up until the point they are achieving herd immunity.

'Given they are running somewhere in the order of two and five times the incidence in the UK, it means we are way behind that [in terms of herd immunity].'

Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the New York Times: 'I'm quite prepared to believe that there are pockets in New York City and London which have substantial immunity.

'The reason people think it might be lower is that it's not the case that everyone is equally likely to be infected by a transmissible disease,' he told DailyMail.com.

'If you go through the naturally infectious process, you are going to generate immunity in the people most likely to be exposed, by definition.'

In other words, groups like essential workers and people living in multi-generational homes are most likely to have been outside of their homes early in the pandemic, making them most likely to have already been infected and to have developed immunity.

What remains to be seen is how much those groups - which represent a larger proportion of metropolitan areas - will provide a shield for their larger communities. 

Dr Hanage said: 'What happens this winter will reflect that. The question of what it means for the population as a whole, however, is much more fraught.'

His comments follow the research of Professor Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at Oxford University, who also believes London and New York may already have reached herd immunity.

A controversial study at Oxford University led by Professor Gupta claimed that up to half of the UK population may already have had Covid-19, and therefore herd immunity.

Modelling by the group indicated that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January - weeks before the first case was diagnosed. 

Professor Gupta said in an interview with Reaction: 'I think very few people would agree that exposure rates in London are less than 20 per cent.'

She believes herd immunity may have been reached partially because previous infection with other human coronaviruses, such as the common cold, may offer protection against the new one - SARS-CoV-2.

WHAT IS HERD IMMUNITY AND WHICH COUNTRIES ARE PURSUING IT?

Herd immunity is a situation in which a population of people is protected from a disease because so many of them are unaffected by it - because they've already had it or have been vaccinated - that it cannot spread.

To cause an outbreak a disease-causing bacteria or virus must have a continuous supply of potential victims who are not immune to it.

Immunity is when your body knows exactly how to fight off a certain type of infection because it has encountered it before, either by having the illness in the past or through a vaccine.

When a virus or bacteria enters the body the immune system creates substances called antibodies, which are designed to destroy one specific type of bug.

When these have been created once, some of them remain in the body and the body also remembers how to make them again. Antibodies - alongside T cells - provide long-term protection, or immunity, against an illness.

If nobody is immune to an illness – as was the case at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak – it can spread like wildfire.

However, if, for example, half of people have developed immunity – from a past infection or a vaccine – there are only half as many people the illness can spread to.

As more and more people become immune the bug finds it harder and harder to spread until its pool of victims becomes so small it can no longer spread at all.

The threshold for herd immunity is different for various illnesses, depending on how contagious they are – for measles, around 95 per cent of people must be vaccinated to it spreading.

For polio, which is less contagious, the threshold is about 80-85 per cent, according to the Oxford Vaccine Group.

Herd immunity is considered a controversial route for getting out of the pandemic because it gives a message of encouraging the spread of the virus, rather than containing it.

When UK Government scientists discussed it in the early days of the pandemic, it was met with criticism and therein swept under the carpet.

The Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said at a press conference on March 12, designed to inform the public on the impending Covid-19 crisis: 'Our aim is not to stop everyone getting it, you can't do that. And it's not desirable, because you want to get some immunity in the population. We need to have immunity to protect ourselves from this in the future.'

Sir Patrick has since apologised for the comments and said he didn't mean that was the government's plan.

In a Channel 4 documentary aired in June, Italy's deputy health minister claimed Boris Johnson had told Italy that he wanted to pursue it.

The Cabinet Office denied the claims made in the documentary and said: 'The Government has been very clear that herd immunity has never been our policy or goal.'

But the theory of cross-protection has only been explored by a few studies and are unable to give conclusive answers.

Other scientists say immunity levels may be far higher than estimated because antibodies aren't the only type of immunity against Covid-19.

T cells are also play an important role, but currently cannot be measured in surveillance programmes.

It's hoped T cells, which target and destroy cells already infected, would offer long-term protection — possibly up to many years later.

The Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital, in Sweden, believe if there was a rapid commercial test to spot T cells circulating in the body, it may reveal that far more people have some form of immunity against the disease than antibody testing suggests — possibly double. 

Professor Hunter noted 'a big caveat' with herd immunity - no one knows how long immunity to the coronavirus lasts.

He said: 'If you look at other human coronaviruses, they can infect people in subsequent years, so probably Covid-19 immunity doesn't last even year. 'And so they will achieve some degree of herd immunity but it won't last.

'It's quite plausible that most of those antibodies will fade in the Indian population but hopefully T cell immunity will be present.

'They are closer to having some sort of herd immunity that would lessen further waves. They aren't likely to be as bad as the first because the immune system of people who have had it will kick in a bit quicker.'

Previous estimates have suggested around two thirds (60 per cent) of a population would have to catch Covid-19 for herd immunity to develop.

Under this rule, it could have seen 40million people in Britain infected and hundreds of thousands more deaths than there already are. 

However, research since has suggested lower variations for herd immunity thresholds which offer promise.

Just 43 per cent need to be exposed to the virus, according to scientists from Nottingham and Stockholm, or 24 million people in Britain.

Professor Frank Ball, Professor Tom Britton and Professor Pieter Trapman — three authors of the new study — said herd immunity from the disease spreading could be 'substantially lower' than it would be from a vaccine.

They wrote in the journal Science: 'Our application to Covid-19 indicates a reduction of herd immunity from 60 per cent... immunization down to 43 per cent in a structured population, but this should be interpreted as an illustration, rather than an exact value or even a best estimate.'

Antibody testing in New York City suggest that as many as one in five (or about 20 per cent) of people there have some level of immunity to coronavirus.

And the new mathematical modeling study from the University of Sussex suggests that as much as 40 per cent of the state has immunity.

But Dr Hanage cautions that the virus may be spreading much more slowly in New York, and especially in New York City, but it is still spreading.

He also says that the resulting herd immunity would not be enough to prevent the deaths of large swathes of the population there.

'It's quite sobering if you imagine that what had actually happened in New York City was not the result of social distancing, but the natural epidemic curve,' he said.

'That came at the cost of nearly 300 deaths per 100,000 in the population. 'Imagine that per capita mortality rate over the entirety of the US getting [around] 900,000 deaths.'

But he added: 'The more immunity there is in the population, the more benefit you're going to get from non-pharmacological interventions (like social distancing) - it's better bang for your buck.'

Other researchers say just 10 per cent of the population need to catch the disease to gain herd immunity. 

The study by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the University of Strathclyd, found that Belgium, England, Portugal and Spain have herd immunity thresholds in the range of 10 to 20 per cent.

The study lead Dr Gabriela Gomes told the New York Times: 'At least in countries we applied it to, we could never get any signal that herd immunity thresholds are higher.

'I think it's good to have this horizon that it may be just a few more months of pandemic.' 

Carl Bergstrom, an infectious disease expert at the University of Washington in Seattle, said: 'Mathematically, it's certainly possible to have herd immunity at these very, very low levels.

'Those are just our best guesses for what the numbers should look like. But they're just exactly that, guesses.'

The variation in estimates exist because modelling studies all take different approaches. But they are producing lower herd immunity thresholds because they take into account that not everyone is susceptible to catching the disease.

An initial calculation for herd immunity assumes that everyone is at the same risk of Covid-19, which scientists know in real life is not the case.

Catching Covid-19 has shown to be more likely when people live in crowded conditions, live in poorer areas or work in essential roles, from nurses to bus drivers.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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The myth of America's unique COVID-19 failure

If you follow the news these days, you are likely inundated with stories about how the United States, under Donald Trump, has uniquely mishandled the COVID-19 outbreak. Much of the rest of the world, we are assured, has managed the pandemic surprisingly well. But the United States? An unparalleled “catastrophe,” says the Atlantic. “A unique failure,” intones the New York Times.

But what if these judgments are wrong? What if they are so focused on absolute numbers of cases and deaths, that they miss the most important apples-to-apples nuances necessary to make a proper assessment?

It appears this is exactly what has happened with the reporting on America’s COVID-19 response. In fact, when you compare the United States with other countries with similar political and economic systems (the fairest comparison), the United States is more middle-of-the-pack than unrivaled outlier.

Surprised? So were we.

Like many Americans, we found the Trump administration’s initial response to the novel coronavirus to be lackluster, dismissive, and (typical of Trump) politically overwrought. And while there were significant successes, like enacting massive economic stimulus packages with Congress, and an impressive ramp-up in ventilator production, the dire numbers were hard to miss: COVID-19 deaths in the United States have consistently accounted for more than 20 percent of all COVID-related deaths worldwide. Unique disaster, right?

Actually, no.

If you dig a little deeper into the top-line numbers, you’ll find two important mitigating factors at play. First, the United States, with a population of 330 million, was always going to have a higher absolute death count compared with nearly every other country in the world. Hearing that the United States had 1,000 deaths on a given day while Costa Rica had only 15 might make for good copy at CNN — but those numbers are about equal, in relative terms, because Costa Rica has a population of only 5 million.

Second, and more important, the list of countries most negatively impacted by the pandemic, as measured by per-capita deaths per 100,000, is dominated by Western capitalist democracies: seven of the top 10 (and nine of the top 14 — not counting the microstates of San Marino and Andorra) are liberal democracies ranging from Belgium to the Netherlands. The United States, at number 8, is roughly equal to France, and significantly below Belgium, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Sweden.

Yes, some of these countries had terrible early outbreaks that have skewed their overall mortality numbers. But so did the United States — the hard-hit Northeast still accounts for roughly half of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths. And while several countries like Spain, Britain, and the United States (and Australia) are suffering second wave infections, mortality rates have dropped significantly, none more so than in the United States.

In other words, the media-driven narrative that Trump’s America is suffering through a unique COVID-19 failure is wildly misleading. It would be far more accurate to say that American-style liberal democracy has, on balance, faced a much tougher time containing and controlling the worst effects of the virus on its societies.

This should actually not come as much of a surprise when considering that liberal democracies embody greater openness and exposure to international trade and travel than most other countries. They also contain private-sector-based free market economies that are not genetically suited to government-directed “shutdowns” or “lockdowns”; indeed, their natural instinct — none more so than the United States — is to be open and flowing.

So, while media talking heads like to point out that the United States is faring worse than “nearly all other countries” in its handling of the Coronavirus, this is actually an irrelevant point. Does anyone believe that Rwanda, Uganda, and Sri Lanka — the countries least impacted by the virus — should be models for running advanced industrial economies? Of course not. And while some democracies — like Germany and Denmark — have done a better job than others with their response, even they can’t escape being in the top 40 hardest hit countries.

Instead of being caught up with irrelevant global numbers, the United States and other liberal democracies must navigate recovery on their own terms. Indeed, we believe the same capitalist democracies that are having a relatively tougher time managing the Coronavirus will have relatively greater success moving past it. That’s because the same social and economic openness that creates Coronavirus vulnerabilities will also provide the ingenuity and resourcefulness to effectively balance public health and economic vitality, and a return to full strength.

SOURCE 

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UK: Tony Blair warns another national lockdown is 'impossible' and blasts 14 day quarantine rules as too long - as he claims ministers have been over relying on experts during coronavirus crisis

Tony Blair today warned it will not be possible to impose another UK-wide coronavirus lockdown as he claimed ministers had got the Government's travel quarantine policy 'wrong'.

The former prime minister said it was 'not credible' for the Government to repeat the sweeping draconian measures put in place back in March because of the economic damage another shut down would cause.

He said Britons must learn to 'live with' the deadly disease until there is a vaccine and that a mass testing programme is the only way to keep the country moving.

He took aim at the Government's 14 day quarantine rules for people returning to the UK from countries where coronavirus is on the rise as he said the self-isolation period could be cut 'substantially'.

He called for ministers to take a more 'sensible' approach to calculating risk amid rising speculation that Croatia and Greece could soon join Spain and France on the UK's 'red list'.

Meanwhile, Mr Blair also suggested ministers had been over reliant on officials during the crisis and that they needed to recognise 'where the science ends and judgements begin'.

Boris Johnson has not ruled out imposing a second national lockdown should there be a major spike in coronavirus cases.

But Mr Blair told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that another lockdown was 'not possible'.

He said: ‘I just don’t think you are going to be able to do that and I think it was hard enough to do the first lockdown.

‘The economic consequences of that are obviously devastating but if you think about doing that in the winter months I just think it is not credible, it is not possible to do.

‘If you track what is happening around the world today I think countries are moving in the direction of this mass testing.'

Mr Blair has long advocated the introduction of a mass routine testing programme in order to stop the spread of coronavirus in the community.

He said that such a programme is necessary because as many as 70 per cent of cases are asymptomatic.

He said the Government 'has got to change the way it calculates risk' as he called for quarantine rules to be relaxed.

Ministers announced last week that travellers returning from France must now self-isolate for two weeks.

The Government has faced sustained pressure from the travel sector and Tory MPs to ease the rules.

Mr Blair said: 'In every single aspect of this, once you realise you are not going to eradicate the disease, you are going to have to contain it and live with it at least until a vaccine comes, then you have just got to have a sensible risk calculus in every area.

‘So for example now we are telling people to go back into pubs, we are incentivising them, quite rightly for the purposes of getting the economy moving, to go and eat out.

‘All of those things are risk. I think the way we are doing the quarantine rules is wrong actually, I think you could cut that 14 day quarantine substantially.

‘If you recognise that whatever you do there is going to be a risk, you just have to minimise it.’

Mr Blair also called for more political leadership during the crisis as he suggested ministers had tried to shift responsibility for key decisions to the Government's science and health experts.

Ministers have said throughout the pandemic that all of their decisions have been based on the latest official advice.

Mr Blair said: ‘In the end the important thing when you are in government and officials are giving you advice, is the hard thing is sometimes not finding the answers but finding the right questions.

‘You have just got to interrogate the officials properly and I think what has happened is that too much of this has just been, as it were, accepted without really trying to get underneath and into the detail of what people are suggesting so you understand where the science ends and judgements begin.’

SOURCE

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Johannes Leak cartoon shows that the left just can’t handle the truth

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price

Cue the pigeons of confected outrage and send in the cat. What has the left flock all fluttering and squawking is Johannes Leak’s cartoon lampooning Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s words about “brown and black girls”. But there was not a single feather ruffled about the terms when Biden originally used them.

It’s another example of the imputation that everybody on the right is racist and nobody on the left could possibly be.

Those on the left are so blinkered ideologically that they cannot see, or cannot admit, that their condescending identity politics and tokenism are rooted in racism.

In their stampede to push Biden’s campaign, they are prepared to ignore his racist remarks about “brown and black girls” and (disturbingly) his repeated assertion to the African-American community: “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

But instead of being offended by this blatant playing of the identity politics card, which stereotypes people with racial tropes, the left takes to the barricades over a cartoon that uses Biden’s own words against him. The cartoon incisively skewers Biden — a former vice-president — for choosing a running mate not on the weight of her career and achievements but because of the identity politics appeal of her skin colour and her gender.



Imagine the left’s reaction had US President Donald Trump announced the appointments of Small Business Administrator Jovina Carranza as “bringing hope to Mexican girls” or Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao as “bringing hope to Asian girls” — let alone referring to them as perhaps “brown” or “yellow”.

It is assumed by those on the left that they know better than we do, that they know how we think and feel — or how we should think and feel.

It is assumed by the left that to overcome racism we must follow the principles of identity politics and appoint individuals to positions of power because of the colour of their skin and/or their gender.

We are then reduced to the colour of our skin and our gender, not recognised as human and not recognised on the basis of merit.

Those on the left also obviously believe that we brown and black girls can’t cope with subtlety and complexity when it comes to discussing race and gender issues in the way that Leak so obviously can.

He has used Biden’s words to highlight the divisive, insidious and offensive use of identity politics as a means of self-promotion.

But the left, while giving Biden a pass on using the terms, then presumes to speak on behalf of “black and brown girls” and attacks Leak for doing what every good cartoonist should. Why do those on the outraged left feel they have every right to speak on behalf of “brown and black women and girls” around the world, such as me? We little brown and black girls can speak for ourselves.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

NYPD union endorses Trump: "We need your strong voice across the country" (New York Post)

Nevada sent more than 200,000 mail-in primary ballots to wrong addresses (The Washington Free Beacon)

Twenty-eight million mail-in ballots went missing in last four elections (RealClearPolitics)

For the record: Six myths about the USPS and the election debunked (The Federalist)

Biden-Harris ticket aims to spark enthusiasm at convention after low-key campaign (Fox News)

Trump "failure" on COVID-19 will be central message of Biden convention (The Hill)

Black Lives Matter movement to play elevated role at convention (The Hill)

Kamala Harris brings gun confiscation support to presidential ticket (The Washington Free Beacon)

Federal appeals court rules law-evading Hillary Clinton does not have to testify in lawsuit over her emails (National Review)

GAO rules DHS secretary and deputy are not valid officeholders (The Resurgent)

More than sixty 911 calls go unanswered during Portland riot (PJ Media)

Trump threatens to intervene in the Big Apple after another violent weekend saw 50 people shot and seven killed (UK Daily Mail)

Costs from weeks of "protests" take financial toll on cash-strapped cities (Fox News)

The 2020 San Francisco exodus is real, and historic (SFGate)

Iowa requests nearly $4 billion in disaster aid after derecho; the storm damaged or destroyed 13 million acres of corn (Fox Business)

Japan was hit by its biggest economic slump on record in the second quarter (Reuters)

Head-turner: Notorious Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down California's ban on high-capacity magazines, says restrictions violate Second Amendment (Fox News)

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo inks deal to support more U.S. troops in Poland (AP)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Chinese vaccine looking good

Effect of an Inactivated Vaccine Against SARS-CoV-2 on Safety and Immunogenicity Outcomes: Interim Analysis of 2 Randomized Clinical Trials

Shengli Xia et al.

Abstract

Importance:  A vaccine against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is urgently needed.

Objective:  To evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of an investigational inactivated whole-virus COVID-19 vaccine in China.

Interventions:  In the phase 1 trial, 96 participants were assigned to 1 of the 3 dose groups (2.5, 5, and 10 μg/dose) and an aluminum hydroxide (alum) adjuvant–only group (n = 24 in each group), and received 3 intramuscular injections at days 0, 28, and 56. In the phase 2 trial, 224 adults were randomized to 5 μg/dose in 2 schedule groups (injections on days 0 and 14 [n = 84] vs alum only [n = 28], and days 0 and 21 [n = 84] vs alum only [n = 28]).

Design, Setting, and Participants:  Interim analysis of ongoing randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 1 and 2 clinical trials to assess an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine. The trials were conducted in Henan Province, China, among 96 (phase 1) and 224 (phase 2) healthy adults aged between 18 and 59 years. Study enrollment began on April 12, 2020. The interim analysis was conducted on June 16, 2020, and updated on July 27, 2020.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The primary safety outcome was the combined adverse reactions 7 days after each injection, and the primary immunogenicity outcome was neutralizing antibody response 14 days after the whole-course vaccination, which was measured by a 50% plaque reduction neutralization test against live severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

Results"  Among 320 patients who were randomized (mean age, 42.8 years; 200 women [62.5%]), all completed the trial up to 28 days after the whole-course vaccination. The 7-day adverse reactions occurred in 3 (12.5%), 5 (20.8%), 4 (16.7%), and 6 (25.0%) patients in the alum only, low-dose, medium-dose, and high-dose groups, respectively, in the phase 1 trial; and in 5 (6.0%) and 4 (14.3%) patients who received injections on days 0 and 14 for vaccine and alum only, and 16 (19.0%) and 5 (17.9%) patients who received injections on days 0 and 21 for vaccine and alum only, respectively, in the phase 2 trial. The most common adverse reaction was injection site pain, followed by fever, which were mild and self-limiting; no serious adverse reactions were noted. The geometric mean titers of neutralizing antibodies in the low-, medium-, and high-dose groups at day 14 after 3 injections were 316 (95% CI, 218-457), 206 (95% CI, 123-343), and 297 (95% CI, 208-424), respectively, in the phase 1 trial, and were 121 (95% CI, 95-154) and 247 (95% CI, 176-345) at day 14 after 2 injections in participants receiving vaccine on days 0 and 14 and on days 0 and 21, respectively, in the phase 2 trial. There were no detectable antibody responses in all alum-only groups.

Conclusions and Relevance:  In this interim report of the phase 1 and phase 2 trials of an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine, patients had a low rate of adverse reactions and demonstrated immunogenicity; the study is ongoing. Efficacy and longer-term adverse event assessment will require phase 3 trials.

SOURCE 

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She's 'Unbeatable?': WSJ Columnist Shreds the Liberal Media's New Kamala Harris Narrative With One Tweet

This is a case of identity poliics redounding in favour of conservatives. Because of identity politics, Biden had to choose a female, even if it was a real one.  Had he been free to choose the most helpful Veep he would have chosen Bernie Sanders and romped in.  Sanders has a huge personal following among the clueless so adding that to the effect of being on the Donk ticket would have probably wiped out Trump

Actually, it’s a series of tweets, but one particular observation from The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel sticks out— and it’s a brutal one. I mean, do these liberal media types don’t know that we can harness the power of Google. These publications have archives like the rest of us. And there is a trove of articles about the collapse of Kamala Harris’ 2020 run.

It wasn’t a little car crash either. It was a thermonuclear explosion. She was wiped out before the California primary. She had no message, no plan, and an organization that was rudderless. It was a s**t show. Yet, now that Joe Biden has decided to pick her, though she was not his first choice, Harris has undergone this rebirth as some master tactician and campaign ace who will inject steroids into the Democrats’ 2020 hopes. Really?

Here’s the observation Strassel noted that’s both true and damning:

Everyone from Julian Castro to Cory Booker to Deval Patrick to Tulsi Gabbard to Elizabeth Warren to Pete Buttigieg, to Amy Klobuchar to Andrew Yang to Tom Steyer to Michael Bennet had more appeal and staying power than Harris. But now we are told she is unbeatable?

Ouch.

Yet, while Strassel notes how Harris is an unremarkable VP pick, could that be also to her advantage. Just playing devil’s advocate here, when you can’t pin down your opponent and define her in an election—isn’t that a problem? Maybe. Though I would say her opening speech when she was first introduced shows a person who cannot go off-script. The speech was terrible to start, loaded with inaccuracies and lies about the Trump White House, and was entirely predictable. It was as if the entire production staff of MSNBC jotted down the annotations.

Strassel added that now more than ever, Harris will be put under the microscope due to Biden’s apparent mental degradation and her “do no harm” checkbox that she supposedly filled when the Biden camp was forced to pick her could open up the Democratic ticket to what engulfed her first campaign: total disaster (via WSJ):

If commentators are now struggling to define Ms. Harris, it’s because she offers little that is truly defining. The party establishment quickly closed ranks around her 2016 Senate race, allowing her to run a standard liberal campaign that the Los Angeles Times described as “carefully orchestrated” and “overly cautious and scripted.” In her 3½ Senate years, she’s done little by way of legislation, preferring to showboat at hearings. The lack of an animating agenda helps a explain a presidential campaign in which she bounced from left to far-left position, whatever she thought most helpful at the moment. She twice called to eliminate private health insurance—and twice reversed herself the next day after backlash. As Vox noted, the “combination of policy reversals and botched rollout . . . undermined faith in her ability to govern on the issue Democrats rate as most important.”

The campaign was a mess, rocked by infighting, leaks, restarts and financial problems. After the campaign announced layoffs in early November, its veteran Iowa operations manager wrote a scathing resignation letter in which she said she’d “never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly” and expressed dismay at its ability to make “the same unforced errors over and over.” Ms. Harris didn’t even make it to the first contest, dropping out—broke and with embarrassing poll numbers—two months before the Iowa caucuses. The only other “top tier” candidate to implode as quickly or spectacularly was Beto O’Rourke. The Washington Post campaign obituary bluntly called Ms. Harris an “uneven campaigner” who was “engulfed by low polling numbers, internal turmoil and a sense that she was unable to provide a clear message.” The Post this week lauded Ms. Harris as “vibrant and energetic” and a “vessel for Democratic hopes.”

Biden watchers insist the nominee fulfilled the cardinal rule of veep picks: First, do no harm. Possibly, but it’s pretty clear it did no good either. Mr. Biden’s biggest concern remains his lagging enthusiasm numbers. Polls consistently show the majority of Democratic voters notably unexcited about his candidacy. One fix would have been a running mate hailed as a fresh and rising Democratic star. Ms. Harris has alienated key elements of her party, in particular progressives who despise her as a “top cop” from her six years as California’s attorney general. In a poll this week by the Economist/YouGov, Ms. Harris was viewed favorably by only half of African-Americans and very favorably by only 26% of liberals. Will that keep people from pulling a Biden-Harris lever? Maybe not, but she won’t likely be a poll driver.

And there’s still a possibility she’ll do harm. Mr. Biden’s age and questions about his mental acuity guarantee an outsize focus on his running mate, who could end up president. Ms. Harris’s own presidential run proves she has a propensity to make mistakes—potentially big ones. The Trump campaign is eager to define her as a Bernie Sanders liberal, and she’s got a track record that helps—having endorsed Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and gun bans. Many Americans will also remember her leading role in the character assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, matched only in political theater by Cory “Spartacus” Booker. This has the potential to turn off some suburban and independent voters. Even if they don’t rush into Mr. Trump’s arms; they may simply not vote.

There’s a lot of hype here—no doubt. But I don’t think “top cop” Kamala brings much to the ticket. She’s being buoyed by a lot of media-manufactured hot air, flanked by her friends in the Senate. Let’s see how things go in a few weeks. Maybe she’ll hide in the bunker with Joe to avoid making errors because they’re both two peas in a pod when it comes to that.

SOURCE 

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Depression and anxiety are skyrocketing in young adults amid pandemic

Anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts are skyrocketing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study suggests. The study, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that young adults were particularly prone to these increases.

The study researchers analyzed information from more than 5,400 U.S. adults ages 18 and older who completed an online survey in late June.

The percentage of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder increased about threefold and the percentage reporting symptoms of depressive disorder increased about fourfold, compared with levels seen in a survey conducted around the same period in 2019, the study found.

Overall, in the 2020 survey, about 41% of participants reported symptoms of at least one mental health condition; with 31% experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression, 13% initiating or increasing use of substances (including alcohol or marijuana) to cope wtih stress tied to the pandemic, and nearly 11% reporting that they had seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days.

The toll was particularly striking among adults ages 18 to 24. In this group, about 63% reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, 25% reported starting or increasing use of substances, and 25% reported seriously considering suicide in the past 30 days. For comaprision, in a national survey conducted in 2018, about 14% of young adults reported an episode of major depression and 11% reported serious thoughts of suicide in the past year.

The new findings "highlight the broad impact of the pandemic and the need to prevent and treat these conditions," the authors wrote in their study, published Thursday (Aug. 13) in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The study could not determine the reason for the rise in mental health conditions, but factors relating to the pandemic, such as social isolation, school and university closures, unemployment and other financial worries, as well as the threat of the disease itself, may play a role, the authors said. Future studies will be needed to determine the specific drivers poor mental health in the pandemic.

Why young adults seem particularly affected by the pandemic is not known. After all, studies have found that young people are less likely to experience serious illness from COVID-19 compared with old adults. But older adults in the study had the lowest prevalence of mental health symptoms: Among those ages 65 and older, 8% reported experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression, 3% reported starting or increasing use of substances and 2% reported seriously considering suicide in the past 30 days.

One idea is that people's ability to accept uncertainty may be tied to their mental health response, according to The New York Times. "Now there are so many questions, especially for young people, about relative risk, duration of the pandemic and what their futures will look like," study lead author Mark Czeisler, a psychology researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, told the Times. A longer life experienced may help older adults better tolerate these uncertain times.

There is an urgent need to address the mental health consequences of the pandmeic, such as through increased access to resources for diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions and expanded use of telehealth, the authors said.

SOURCE 

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Rapid economic recovery Trump predicted continues as unemployment claims drop

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement on the latest unemployment insurance claims published by the Department of Labor:

“President Donald Trump predicted a fast recovery from the COVID-19, and now it is continuing at a rapid clip with fewer than 1 million new jobless claims for the first time since March, and another 624,000 came off continued claims the week of Aug. 1.

“As a reminder, in Feb. 2020, unemployment was at a 50-year low with fewer than 6 million Americans unemployed and it was the unleashing of the Chinese coronavirus that drove those numbers through the roof. Now, the President’s balanced approach to reopening America while continuing to battle the virus has led to an unprecedented recovery, with 9 million to 10 million jobs recovered in the past three months.

“No President has been as focused on private sector job creation in generations, and it stands in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden so-called shovel-ready jobs promise that paid off public employee unions but did little for Americans who were actually out of work.”

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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