73% of Inmates at an Ohio Prison Have Tested Positive for COVID-19
A prison in Ohio is accounting for the majority of coronavirus cases in Marion County, which has the leading number of coronavirus cases in Ohio. Officials are attributing the large number of cases to mass testing. Everyone, both staff and inmates have been tested for coronavirus. No COVID-19 deaths have been reported, however, more than 100 staff members and 2,000 inmates have tested positive for the virus.
“Because we are testing everyone — including those who are not showing symptoms — we are getting positive test results on individuals who otherwise would have never been tested because they were asymptomatic.”
Although California, Florida, Georgia, and Texas all have larger prison populations than Ohio, no one has reported case numbers as large as Marion County. Michigan has also reported a high number of inmates testing positive for coronavirus with 572 inmates testing positive out of 889 inmates tested. Michigan has some of the highest case numbers in the country. New York, who also has extremely high case numbers is only testing inmates who show symptoms and has only reported around 1,000 cases within the prison system.
In the midst of the pandemic, the Ohio governor recommended 300 out of 49,000 inmates be released early. Ohio is not the only state to release prisoners early, however, the governor has stated that he is not planning a “Wholesale release” where every prisoner in certain categories is released.
Scientist Explains Why Isolation was Not the Best Way to Flatten the Curve
In a recent article by Collective Evolution, Arjun Walia talked with Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, a Senior Research Associate Rockefeller University, and discussed how social distancing may not be the most effective measure for flattening the curve. Dr. Wittkowski pointed out in a recent study that social distancing, isolation, and the closure of businesses and schools occurred after the peak in COVID-19 cases. This means, according to Wittkowski, that isolation did not actually have anHow to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut effect on the spread of the virus, and that the decline in cases should be credited to herd immunity rather than social distancing measures.
COVID-19 is not as dangerous as media and government is making it out to be, and therefore schools and businesses should be open so we can create herd immunity and kill this virus, while the elderly and immune-compromised individuals should be quarantined and practicing social distancing measures.”
While allowing schools and businesses to operate normally, society is able to build herd immunity. Through herd immunity, we can eliminate the virus and decrease the risk of infection for those who are elderly or immune-compromised. This is according to Wittowski’s data.
There is nothing to be scared about, this is a flu epidemic like every other flu, maybe a bit more severe, but nothing that is fundamentally different from the flus that we’ve seen in other years.”
Hello! Im a doctor in Sweden. I want to correct a few assumptions in this video that is erroneous. First of all, Sweden is working under one very simple presumption: Whether you like it or not, this virus will spread. Lockdowns are only useful if your healthcare service cannot cope with the influx, other than that you are simply just pushing the problem ahead of yourself. When you have a wide spread around the world, there is no point in a lockdown – even if you completely eliminate the virus from your country at some point you will have to reopen your borders. With that being said, the statistics in Sweden are skewed to have a higher mortality rate because we only test people who are admitted into the hospital or high risk patients. We dont test people with mild to medium symptoms.
In Sweden we have extended so that you can have up to 3 weeks of “sick leave” from work(WITHOUT A DOCTORS NOTE!) – and the money will be paid from the government. We have also made so that people can work only 20% of their time and still get 80% of their salary through subsidies from the government(to save small businesses). Alot of more have been done, and all this so that people who even have the mildest symptoms will voluntarily stay home. I think this is much better than holding a gun to someones head and forcing them to stay home. We have to also keep in mind other things:
1) In sweden, the public health ministry is calling the shot. They are a group of doctors, epidemiologists and statisticspeople. This is due to a law from hundreds of years ago that says that politicians cannot interfere with these ministries. Thus there is no political agendas to “look good” infront of the people. Denmark closed the primary schools AGAINST THE RECCOMENDATIONS of their public health ministry.
2) You have to keep in mind all of public health and not get tunnel vision entirely on the virus. Lockdowns skyrocket rate of suicides and domestic abuse. Depression, alcohol abuse, you name it.
3) Everybody who has a positive PCR test and die gets counted to the death toll. So for example: If someone gets posivite PCR test and then dies from a myocardial infarction it will still count as a COVID-19 death.
4) Just to finish this rant off: It is unfair to say that Sweden is doing an experiment. Technically speaking EVERY COUNTRY is doing an experiment right now, because this has never been done before so we dont know what is the “best way”.
New Antibody Tests Show Coronavirus Mortality Rate May Be Much Lower
According to antibody tests conducted in New York, more than 13.9% of the population may have been infected with COVID-19. 3,000 people were tested randomly to determine what percent of the population may have coronavirus antibodies. Tests were conducted throughout 19 different counties and 40 different grocery stores. Based on the results conducted, it’s likely nearly 2.7 million New Yorkers have been infected at some point.
On Sunday, Cuomo said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the state’s antibody test that will provide the “first true snapshot” of how many people have been infected with Covid-19 in New York. State officials don’t know the true number of infections because they haven’t been able to conduct diagnostic coronavirus testing on a large scale”
Results vary among different counties with New York City showing positive antibodies in 21% of the population, 16.7% in Long Island, and 11.7% in Westchester and Rockland county. Mortality rates in New York were originally reported at around 7.4%, but testing indicated that the mortality rate is likely less than 1%.
In America, USC and Stanford have released preliminary studies that show that between 1-2 million people who may have been infected with COVID-19, in California (around 2-4 percent of the population). Despite these findings, California has reported around 33,200 cases, making the mortality rate more than 3%. However, based on the findings reported by preliminary studies, the death rate in California would be closer to .04%, the overall death rate is likely closer to 1%.
In Gangelt Germany, test results show that nearly 14% of the population was infected, this dropped their mortality rate to 0.36%. In Robbio Italy, it’s likely more than 22% of the population may have been infected lowering the mortality rate to 0.7%. In Finland, they’ve reported 4,000 official cases but tests show it is likely closer to 80,000-100,000, lowering their death rate to 0.1%. Some places are reporting flu-like death rates while other states are reporting more than double flu-like rate mortality. This is likely due to the age of people in communities with higher death rates.
Hospital Layoffs and Pay Cuts Are Happening During the Pandemic
The United States healthcare system could be facing a bigger crisis than CoVID-19. While New York Governor Andrew Cuomo begs for healthcare volunteers to combat coronavirus, hospitals throughout the country are furloughing or laying off employees at the highest rate since 1990.
On April 6th, the West Virginia University Health System announced that some of their employees will see temporary 25% pay cuts during the pandemic. As the hospital system is seeing less clinical volume, WVU Health is moving people to new roles, and those who are not matched to a new role will be sent home with a 75% salary guarantee. This new policy will be reevaluated in mid-May.
The WVU Health System hospitals are only one example of the grim reality facing many healthcare workers. According to Altarum, a nonprofit research and consulting firm…
Health care has traditionally cushioned the blow of non-health sector job losses during and immediately following economic downturns…This time, health care looks to be contributing to instead of counterbalancing an accelerating economic calamity. Health care lost 43,000 jobs this month, by far the largest monthly drop in our data series going back to 1990.”
In the case of West Virginia, the state has seen relatively few coronavirus cases during the pandemic, with the number of total reported cases in the state less than 1000. In additional cost-cutting measures, the WVU Health System will institute a hiring freeze, suspend employer match to all employee’s 403(b) for the remainder of 2020, and the health system CEO, hospital CEOs, and certain senior executives will see a 10% percent salary reduction for the next six months.
WVU Medicine employees are lucky. Workers who are sent home will still be making a significant portion of their salary. It’s likely that the employees sent home by the hospital administration will be in lower levels positions or less busy areas of the hospitals.
According to Indeed.com, people in administrative assistant and registered nurse positions at WVU Medicine make $30,000 and $51,000, respectively. Twenty-five percent of these salaries represent a significant chunk of income. Yet health system CEO, hospital CEOs, and certain senior executives are only receiving 10% pay cuts. The average CEO salary in West Virginia is $720,000. If the CEOs of the eleven hospitals in the WVU Health System make that average salary were made to take the same temporary 25% pay cut as hospital nurses and administrators, the hospital system could potentially save $1.98 million. Why are hospital workers on the front lines of our healthcare system being asked to sacrifice further when there are those in much better positions to step up financially?
Coronavirus Could Be Devastating for the Navajo Nation
The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the U.S., saw its first case of COVID-19 on March 27th, and since then has seen over 1,300 positive tests for the virus. Most people in the Navajo Nation live in rural areas, which should limit the spread of the virus, but the tribe is facing several challenges in dealing with the Coronavirus.
Many natives have high rates of illnesses that make the community vulnerable to COVID-19 like asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. A history of mining, especially uranium mining, on the reservation has resulted in higher rates of reproductive cancers. In addition, one in 2,000 Navajos are born with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a genetic disorder where a child is basically born without an immune system, although mandatory screening of Navajo children at birth enables the tribe to treat the condition.
In addition to these health challenges, the Navajo Nation is extremely poor. The United States has an official poverty rate of 12.6 percent. The rate of poverty in the Navajo Nation for families is 46.5 percent, with 14.9 percent of people living in extreme poverty.
Amenities that Americans take for granted, like plumbing, electricity, and paved roads, are not a guarantee on the reservation. One in ten Navajos doesn’t have electricity. In Apache county Arizona where the capital of the Navajo Nation, Window Rock, is located, Native American households are 13 times more likely to lack complete plumbing. Forty percent of the Native nation does not have indoor plumbing. The CDC handwashing guidelines are incompatible with life under these conditions.
A Poor People Pandemic
The Navajo Nation government has taken steps to stop the spread of COVID-19, with President Jonathan Nez declaring a weekend curfew on April 12th, and the Navajo Department of Health mandating the use of masks outside the home on April 19th. Even with these measures, the Navajo Nation will see higher COVID-19 infection rates and deaths, much like other poor and systematically disadvantaged communities across the country.
Coronavirus Cleaning Leads to Increased Calls to Poison Centers
A new study from the Centers for Disease Control reported a 20% increase in the number of calls to Poison Control since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in January. The National Poison Data System (NPDS), CDC, and the American Association of Poison Control Centers looked at data from calls concerning cleaner and disinfectant exposure for the last three years. There were 45,550 chemical exposure calls from January to March, up 20.4% from 2019 and 16.4% from 2018.
Bleaches accounted for the largest increase of calls among chemical cleaners, while nonalcohol disinfectants and hand sanitizers were responsible for the largest increase in disinfectant calls. Reasons for the calls included people improperly mixing bleach with other cleaners and toddlers swallowing sanitizer. Studies have linked the chemical with an increased chance of developing respiratory problems, leaving those who use the bleach more vulnerable to COVID-19.
This worldwide socioeconomic experiment is just fascinating to me. Oil is at something like negative $37 a barrel right now – meaning they’ll pay you to take it off their hands. Instead of “goodbye,” it’s now “stay safe.” The environment is showing incredible resiliency. People are cooking their own food at home. Almost every kid is homeschooled. People are spending more time with their families, less time driving, budgeting smarter (not buying useless crap), eating better, and in many other ways, people are just living better.
This is not to say that people aren’t suffering. For the most privileged, loneliness leading to depression is a big issue. For the less privileged, working through a pandemic that people believe can kill them can be stressful, to say the least – not to mention moms dealing with kids out of school and daycare, being stuck with abusive family members, etc.
But all-in-all, the virus seems a lot like the internet. It’s caused a lot of problems, but it’s also doing us a lot of good (like it or not), and it’s shining a spotlight on corruption and inadequacies (like those of the world’s financial systems).
For all of you conspiracy buffs, there’s a lot of really strange stuff happening too.
Hospitals Are Empty
Not all of them, but many hospitals, and even some hospitals in the hardest-hit areas, are doing very little business outside of the wards that are being used for COVID-19 cases.
One would likely think that with this pandemic and all of the job losses, the safest place to have a job would be at a hospital. One would be wrong.
This doesn’t seem to be talked about at all… People are losing their shifts and paychecks and jobs. We only had 5 people in the whole ER when they sent me home. My agency sent out an email blast basically saying that there are a lot of people struggling to find shifts.
The media tells us that our national healthcare system pushed to the brink, yet emergency rooms are nearly empty.
Yale New Haven Hospital, where I work, has almost 300 people stricken with Covid-19, and the numbers keep rising — and yet we are not yet at capacity because of a marked decline in our usual types of patients. In more normal times, we never have so many empty beds.
Why are hospitals empty? A few reasons. For one, electives have been canceled. But that doesn’t explain the empty emergency rooms. What else is going on?
Heart attacks, strokes, acute appendicitis, and acute gall bladder disease cases have reduced dramatically. Some suspect this may be a result of people not seeking healthcare when they need it due to financial concerns or fear of contracting the virus, but this doesn’t hold water. We would hear reports about the massive amounts of people dying at home and the people would be talking about it incessantly. But we’re not. So what’s going on? I have three hypotheses. First of all, as I already wrote, I think people are living better. I think this is the most significant variable, but, maybe people really are getting just as sick as they were getting before, but they’re not dying because hospitals kill people at a higher rate than the diseases they seek care for. It’s a pretty bold conclusion, but from a natural health perspective, it makes a lot of sense. The third one isn’t really a hypothesis; this is definitely happening. People dying from the aforementioned illnesses like heart failure are being categorized as COVID-19 deaths. And this makes sense. If someone has been suffering from a chronic autoimmune issue and they contract Coronavirus, who’s to say what killed them?
You probably know where we stand. It wasn’t the virus. But that’s how it’s going to be counted – maybe he or she would have lived another 20 years with a bad heart. But while this can account for a radical decrease in certain kinds of deaths like cardiac arrest, nobody’s blaming COVID-19 on appendixes bursting and many other diseases that are affecting us so much less frequently.
With poor testing, unscrupulous motives (from partisan governance to big pharma), and the many other complications involved, it will take years to get a real death toll, if ever.
But that’s not all. A recent study says Coronavirus has reduced California traffic accidents by half! If this is true for the entire country, that likely means that 1,500 people a month that would have died from car accidents since the shutdown did not die.
If coronavirus were an environmental activist there would be none better in the history of the world. This little tiny virus has cut world emissions by more than half for months! It brought the cost of oil down to negative numbers. It reduced human traffic and interference and it’s ruining the finances of some of the most polluting industries in the world. And the world is thanking us for it.
In China, it’s estimated that the Coronavirus lockdown likely saved around 77,000 lives thanks to air pollution reduction. I have the urge to say here that future environmental catastrophes will make the coronavirus look like a hiccup, but the reality is this pandemic is an environmental calamity caused, or at the very least exacerbated, by how we’ve treated the environment. And more pandemics are coming.
How many lives are being saved all over the world due to less air pollution? And how many lives will we have saved because we (hopefully!) take the lessons learned from this pandemic and apply them to our economy and how we treat ourselves and the environment?
Now you may be thinking, “Yeah, but I don’t see how you can claim millions of lives saved.” I think we’re over a million already, but for millions of lives saved, just consider the animal lives.
Since many believe the virus originated at a market selling wild animals in China, the spotlight is on the global wildlife trade. China wants to put a stop to illegal trafficking and poaching of wild animals. This would be especially good for the pangolins, the world’s most trafficked mammal, and the animal initially believed to have spread COVID-19 to humans.
In cities and towns across the world, wildlife has been exploring the deserted streets. Deer, monkeys, boars, and all kinds of animals are being spotted wandering around in large cities. Animals are able to reproduce more successfully. Pandas are even finally having sex!
How many lives do two months of radically reduced human intervention save in the world if you include all of the animals? Hard to say, but I think we’ve easily hit a million if we’re including mammals, reptiles, and birds.
But it’s not all good news for the environment. The EPA is barely functioning, if at all. There are plenty of bad actors taking advantage of lax oversite. And these monkeys are hungry and angry!
We Have To Learn To Live With It
Plus, there will be no working vaccine for the coronavirus and the many evolutions it goes through. It won’t work any better than the flu shot. And more viruses are coming.
We need strong immune systems. This requires eating well. Restaurants do not serve healthy food. Packaged food is almost never good for you. A lot of people are noticing how much better they feel physically with the slower-paced, less consumer-driven lifestyles most of us now lead. Healthy people aren’t dying from COVID-19, and they won’t be dying from COVID-29 or the next influenza or whatever ancient viruses we unleash next, whether it be from a lab or from the melting glaciers. Trillions of viruses rain down on us from the sky every day. Of course, the vast majority of them cannot affect us. But as we get more and more sickly with our ridiculous modern lifestyles, poor diets, and environmental destruction, we as a species will become more prone to novel viruses and other pathogens coming soon.
If you want to know how to have a strong immune system, fix your diet, fix your gut, exercise, and keep eating well. We’re looking at an economic collapse, the likes of which the world has never seen, and more pandemics along with a host of other environmental calamities are sure to come. Now is the time to fortify yourself.