RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/medical-students-in-europe-and-u-s-graduate-early-to-join-coronavirus-front-lines-11587233541

Young students just finishing medical schools across the U.S. and Europe are being rushed into hospitals overwhelmed by the new coronavirus to combat a global health catastrophe.

Many are forgoing final elective classes, logging onto Zoom or Webex to recite the Hippocratic oath and donning protective gear to begin their careers, often in areas far from the specialties they plan to pursue.

“We finished exams in March, and two days later we were asked if we would volunteer to work in hospitals. We didn’t even have our results then,” said Caroline Olabisi, 29, who trained in London. Some of her final exams were canceled because of safety concerns.

“They just sent us an email saying we’d been awarded the degree on the same day as we got our results.” She started work in a London hospital three weeks ago.

“Now, we just have to learn on the job,” Dr. Olabisi said. “This week, I’ve had to do two 12-hour nursing shifts and have been putting IV lines in under supervision from consultants. Things that I wouldn’t usually be doing.”

Julia Probert says she has ‘a waxing and waning course of nervousness’ as she reckons with the possibility of contracting Covid-19.

Julia Probert, 31, is heading to a residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in July. But until then, she is reporting for duty at Bellevue Hospital in New York, having signed up for early graduation from New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-koreas-new-coronavirus-twist-recovered-patients-test-positive-again-11587145248

SEOUL—More than 160 South Koreans have tested positive a second time for the coronavirus, a development that suggests the disease may have a longer shelf life than expected.

Many had volunteered for re-examination after exhibiting symptoms such as coughing. Others submitted to extra testing on little more than a hunch despite not showing symptoms. So far, these patients—all of whom needed to twice test negative before leaving medical supervision—haven’t spread the virus to others, local health officials say. 

The initial belief, according to South Korean doctors directly involved with a government review, is that the virus has “reactivated” in the patients, meaning the disease went dormant and came back. The research remains ongoing and inconclusive. The Seoul government’s report will take at least a month to complete, they say.

South Korea is closely watched as an early indicator of how Covid-19 lingers across a population, having flattened its curve of new infections and now contemplating an unwinding of social-distancing measures. The results showing people testing positive a second time could signal a worrisome potential for the virus to linger that could impact health policy.

South Korean SlowdownThe country was the first to hit 8,000 casesapart from China, though new infections haveleveled off in recent weeks.Cumulative casesSource: Johns Hopkins

Feb. ’20MarchApril02,0004,0006,0008,00010,00012,000

“It may be that you have to test these recovered people every month for symptoms or viruses,” said Mary Guinan, a former chief scientific adviser to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director. “Maybe it comes and goes. We don’t know.”

https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/04/17/china-tries-fails-get-wisconsin-pass-law-praising-beijing-on-coronavirus/

Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Thursday that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) outrageous effort to pressure the legislature of Wisconsin to pass a resolution praising Beijing for its handling of the coronavirus effort “backfired spectacularly,” leading to a motion that will condemn the CCP for lying to the world if it passes.

The Chinese consulate sent emails in February and March to Wisconsin Senate President Roger Roth, a Republican, urging him to pass a resolution praising China. The emails even contained the text of a resolution written by the CCP for the Wisconsin legislature to rubber stamp, praising the Chinese government for being “transparent and quick in sharing key information of the virus with the WHO and the international community” – the exact opposite of what actually happened.

Roth told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview last week he was so stunned by the audacity of the first email, and its dubious origin from a Hotmail account, that he dismissed it as a prank. When he received a follow-up email from the consulate in March, he instructed his staff to research it, and they determined it was a genuine communique from the Chinese consulate, whose diplomats sometimes use Hotmail and other public email services because they are “faster” than their official email accounts.

Roth fired back a one-word response to the CCP: “Nuts.” This was the answer famously given by American commander Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe when a different gang of fascists demanded his surrender at Bastogne in 1944.

“I was mad as hell,” Roth told RFA on Thursday.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/truth-the-ongoing-casualty-of-covid-19/

his is from Health Minister Greg Hunt’s website, reporting a transcript of an interview he gave on  April 14.

It’s very different from this concept of herd immunity that has been raised a little bit, but that would mean 60 per cent of the population, 15 million people. If you had a one per cent loss of life, that would be catastrophic. That is absolutely not our policy.

So, to add to Mr Hunt’s arithmetic. One percent of 15 million would mean 150,000 Australian deaths from COVID-19. He is right, that would be catastrophic. It would be unacceptable. Such a death rate, relatively speaking, is in the same order of magnitude that the Imperial College (IC) report, which I reviewed, estimated would apply in the US and the UK if no mitigation/suppression measures were implemented.

I don’t want to pull punches. The IC report has been largely discredited as alarmist. But that aside, a month has passed since the report was issued. Hunt is now armed with more knowledge. Also, he is apparently a very bright bloke and can’t hide behind dimwittedness. He is therefore deliberately putting out misleading information to excuse the governments gross, damaging and continuing overreaction. That is regrettable. Let me explain.

First, no-one ever suggested that nothing be done. The alternative strategy was to protect the vulnerable, build-up additional hospital capacity, and to allow people to continue working and life to go on, while at the same time, taking extra precautions in social situations and at the workplace to cut down the incidence of transmissions.

Second, there is increasing evidence that the fatality rate of those contracting this disease is much less than one per cent; and this particularly applies in a country like Australia with first-class medical resources. For example, virologists tested 80 percent of the population in a town in Germany (Gangelt) finding an estimated fatality rate of 0.37 percent. This was known on or before April 9.