Modified GCQ

I stick by that - and do have the qualifications and work experience to back my views on the virus. But, like every other virologist, I read new things every day and I know the picture is not clear and will not be clear, for a long time to come. The continuation of lockdowns on some islands has, in my view, been an error in balancing risk against economy and people's health (i.e the other medical conditions made worse by the lockdown). I did say that not everything has been done correctly, IMHO - but you have to remember that the Philippines is not as wealthy as Switzerland (I've been there btw) and cannot afford 2nd, 3rd, 4th waves. If further waves follow, some countries are going to go bust and citizens will wake up to find half their bank savings 'borrowed' by governments! But I am aware of Switzerlands top ranking: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnko...tries-in-the-world-for-covid-19/#3015239268c5 due to "“Switzerland and Germany achieve the #1 and #2 positions in this new special case study specifically because of their economy’s resilience, and due to the careful ways in which they are attempting to relax lockdown and economic freezing mandates in a fact and science-based manner, without sacrificing public health and safety,” the study says." See "economic resilience" - it is not the same for very country in the World and, for many, it is not their fault. Lucky you for living where you do.

Btw, was your reference to 'Switzerland/Europe' informing me of your country's location OR that your rules of freedom applied all over Europe? They certainly did not - and look at the mess in many European countries!

 

If you are living on Negros or another island (except Luzon or Cebu) then you are fortunate. I would be interested to know if you will apply your 'treatment' and walk around Manila or Cebu just now! Perhaps Brazil or Iran would be better suggestions (I'll chip in for the airline ticket). Well, actually I would not - as I would feel sorry for the innocents coming into contact with you

 

Hey, i appreciate your passion about this. same for anyone else here who is alarmed and concerned. since you would be interested to know i am willing to explain my take on all this. my first point would be that it seems that there is little agreement on the statistics about coronavirus. deaths due to corona are determined at the time of death as the cause. that is a fixed statistic unless someone goes back and changes it. what is changing is the number of people with the disease which i believe should be determined by reliable testing. so, the death rate due to corona is a function of positive cases and actual deaths. the Philippines "hopes" to have done a million tests by the end of july. that is less than one percent of the population, so the death rate is rather high because of the low test rate. the US has tested more than 10 percent of its population and the death rate is much lower in part just because of the different testing statistics. the CDC in the US revealed two weeks ago that they think perhaps half of all positive tests are "false positives". if so, that would mean the number of positive cases in the US is cut in half and the death rate would be doubled. in the US, nearly half of all covid deaths are nursing homepatients. as a former nursing home administrator, i can tell you that in a one hundred bed nursing home one or two or three people are carried out the back door every week. i made the family calls on that. are those nursing home deaths truly covid? all those people had comorbidities. its a sad truth that most nursing home patients are waiting to die. three states, new york, new jersey and massachusetts account for more than 40 percent of all covid nursing home deaths. why is that? there are serious people on both sides of the questions about wearing masks, or not wearing them. about letting herd immunity develop. about accuracy of need for testing. about the risk to young people. about the future of immunization. i am not cold hearted about covid, or the regular flu, or heart disease. i have worked in healthcare all my life. death is the price of being born. yes i believe we should do what we can about preventing unnecessary deaths and especially premature deaths. it just does not seem to me that there is any agreement on what that prevention should look like, and how it compared to the same issue with dengue and liver disease and seasonal flu. covid is just one more risk factor we all face in our lives. its new so its unknown, but running in fear is not the way to deal with it. people everywhere and perhaps especially in the Philippines also need to eat. if they starve to death but do not die of covid, is that success? the Philippines is the 12th most populous country on earth but has one of the lowest absolute death tolls attributed to covid. but its one of the poorest nations in asia. it cannot keep suppressing and destroying its economy at the expense of the rice bowls of its poorest citizens. we need to stop digging foxholes and trying to defend positions based on sketchy or inadequate information. we need to talk more about this and keep track of what is really happening. covid is going to take a toll, i can see that, but we cannot keep throwing our children out of the back of the troika to try to keep the wolves at bay.

 

Thanks.

My "passion" stems from being a virologist and knowing something about the subject. I realise that if those who know nothing all listen to the anti-control brigade the World, including the Philippines, will now be in one hell of a mess

I am not alarmed as I know what to do - I prepared for this eventuality 10 years ago. I realise that people who had no masks and no knowledge of how to keep the infection out of their bodies were alarmed - so I advised wherever I could. The main reason that masks were originally decried by governments was solely because they did not have enough in most countries. They killed many people because they took no precautions for what was a totally expected crisis - only the timing was unknown.

I am not concerned for myself - as I said I know what to do, even if this virus was far more more contagious and lethal. My concern is for those suffering from the infection - some of whom got it from very irresponsible people who refused to follow safety rules (combined with the stupidity of governments) - and for the effects upon the World economy. It is not essential in life to be only self-interested.

My wish is that those who refuse to follow guidelines are the ONLY ones who get the illness, but unfortunately that is not what is happening. Those who consider themselves 'safe' are not always getting ill but are helping the innocents to get ill.

But surely it is the right time now (with some flights resuming) for guests in a country who do not wish to follow rules implemented to save lives of citizens to LEAVE and take risks with other people's lives in THEIR OWN countries instead. Sounds fair to me.

 

This is common to many diseases. For example, we all hear those who defend smoking (a personal choice anyway as long as not affecting others) telling us they know someone age 90 who smoked 50 a day. On that basis they say all this talk of lung and other respiratory diseases , heart disease and other cancers being caused by smoking is nonsense. In fact that one person they quote had something(s) within their body which prevented the 7000 chemical produced by smoking causing them any known illness - it is possibly certain DNA mutations in their cells. Btw, those who give such an example have no idea if the person would have lived to be 120 if a non-smoker!

So, similarly, people who are asymptomatic for Covid-19 may be so because:
1. They were affected by a strain less dangerous - there is more than one strain circulating. This strain could become more dominant over a period of time and help reduce the impact of the disease.
2. The virus mutated slightly within the host they caught it from and made it less dangerous. This produces another new strain less contagious or lethal and so may again become dominant. One way to make a vaccine for some diseases is to continue to pass it through cells, such as in chicken foetuses, until it weakens. It still can produce antibodies but does not kill the vaccinated person.
3. The asymptomatic has some genetic makeup which enables them to resist the effects of the disease, even though it entered their cells and produced an immune response.
4. Similarly, the asymptomatic had less of an immune response - this may seem counter-intuitive but the way the body responds to a disease can be more damaging than the disease itself. @Tubacoma pointed this out a long time ago in a posting about the cytokine response. Also, I quote this piece from Wikipedia "Cytokine storms are also suspected to be the main cause of death in the 1918 "Spanish Flu" pandemic. Deaths were weighted more heavily towards people with healthy immune systems, because of their ability to produce stronger immune responses, with dramatic increases in cytokine levels"
5. Some people are classed as 'asymptomatic' when they have a very mild infection that is not picked up by current tests. Some may even go on to produce symptoms - so those 'asymptomatics' were really 'pre-symptomatics.
6. Very little is known about Covid-19 and a fuller answer to your question may become apparent in the future!

But whether or not people can benefit from this (apart from the herd immunity it may help produce) depends on if it is purely genetic in a person's makeup and if that genetic makeup is producing some response which can be manufactured or induced in other people. Or there may be something experts learn that is of great use to others.