Practical Advice on Managing Challenges from the COVID-19 Coronavirus

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Here is what I have collected/collated for practical advice from folks with skin in the game for managing Covid-19.

Practical Advice on Managing Challenges from the COVID-19 Coronavirus

https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/08/nursing-homes-veterans-homes-national-epicenters-covid-19/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/05/06/coronavirus-density-mass-transit-bureacracy-censorship-column/3075550001/

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/03/beyond-testing-central-question-for.html

https://theprepared.com/blog/thinking-ahead-a-possible-medium-term-scenario-for-covid-19/

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/31/some-much-needed-coronavirus-perspective/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-so-freaking-hard-to-make-a-good-covid-19-model/

https://covid19.ca.gov/

https://www.inc.com/business-continuity-cash-flow-coronavirus-crisis.html

 

good summary of research on dozens of treatments https://c19early.com/

Mon-Mar-21-2022  making sense of the aftermath

 Dr. Marty Makary: 10 biggest Covid mistakes

  1. Surface Transmission – Wrong. The logical starting hypothesis should have been that COVID was aerosolized. The NIH could have done the definitive experiment in one day to get the answer.
  2. No Hospital visitation The barbaric policy of banning loved ones from holding the hand of their dying loved one and saying goodbye was a human rights violation that spanned much of the pandemic.
  3. Closing Schools
  4. Ignoring Natural Immunity Eventually the data came in. Natural immunity was 2.8 times better in preventing hospitalization than vaccinated immunity and having both meant you had the same protection as natural immunity alone.
  5. Downplaying therapeutics The singular focus on vaccines meant that little attention was paid to lifesaving therapeutics.
  6. Not spacing out vaccine doses  Spacing out vaccine doses makes a vaccine more effective and lowers the side effect profile. It also would have allowed the U.S. to save more lives when we were rationing a scarce vaccine supply. Yet public health officials dismissed pleas to space out the doses as many of us called for.
  7. Cloth masks  The U.S. remains an international outlier by masking toddlers. At this point the only people in America still forced to wear masks are children, waiters, servers and staff. The NIH could have funded researchers to properly study each mask type in the first 10 days of the pandemic, but they failed to pivot funding to do so.
  8. Promising no vaccines mandates, then breaking it This was a stated promise made by President Biden, Fauci and many others – a social contract. They then broke their promise insisting that any unvaccinated workers, regardless of their risk or natural immunity, be fired.
  9. Downplaying a lab leak
  10. Boosters for young people Two top FDA officials quit in protest because of political pressure to approve boosters in young people.

Throughout the pandemic, all COVID decisions were made by a small group of like-minded government doctors who often replaced the scientific method with medical dogma. They had tremendous influence over medical universities, scientific journals and medical societies. In fact, nearly all of these entities received funding from Drs. Fauci and Collins and from Big Pharma.

Martin Kulldorf‘s (@MartinKulldorff) 12 Forgotten Principles of Public Health (Dec-19-2020)

  1. Public health is about all health outcomes, not just a single disease like COVID19. It is important to also consider harms from public health measures. See also Collateral Global.
  2. Public health is about the long term rather than the short term. Spring COVID19 lockdowns simply delayed and postponed the pandemic to the fall. See “The Invisible Pandemic.”
  3. Public health is about everyone. It should not be used to shift the burden of disease from the affluent to the less affluent, as the COVID19 lockdowns have done.
  4. Pubic health is global. Public health scientists need to consider the global impact of their recommendations.
  5. Risks and harms cannot be completely eliminated, but they can be reduced. Elimination and zero-COVID strategies backfire, making things worse.
  6. Public health should focus on high-risk populations. For COVID19, many standard public health measures were never used to protect high-risk older people, leading to unnecessary deaths.
  7. While contact tracing and isolation is critically important for some infectious diseases, it is futile and counterproductive for common infections such as influenza and COVID19. See “On the Futility of Contact Tracing“
  8. A case is only a case if a person is sick. Mass testing asymptomatic individuals is harmful to public health. Hunting for asymptomatic cases encourages pointless shutdowns. Protect the vulnerable instead.
  9. Public health is about trust. To gain the trust of the public, public health officials and the media must be honest and trust the public. Shaming and fear should never be used in a pandemic.
  10. Public health scientists and officials must be honest with what is not known. For example, epidemic models should be run with the whole range of plausible input parameters. See also “John P.A. Ioannidis: As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
  11. In public health, open civilized debate is profoundly critical. Censoring, silencing and smearing leads to fear of speaking, herd thinking and distrust. See also “The COVID Science Wars.”
  12. t is important for public health scientists and officials to listen to the public, who are living the public health consequences. This pandemic has proved that many non-epidemiologists understand public health better than some epidemiologists.

Mon-Jul-25: Our mistake was not acknowledging that an airborne virus will mutate to become more infectious but less severe. Warp Speed capability was not a one time need but an ongoing necessity, both for Covid sequels and the next major epidemic–due within a decade if history is any guide. Warp Speed was about organizing how vaccine development and testing were done, it pulled the risk to the government side of the table so that the next step was funded before efficacy and safety had been proven. The safety and efficacy checks are still there, but it trades speed for paying for the risk that a new vaccine does not work.

Sat-Dec-10-2022 The Recess of Responsibility by Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine Dec-6-2022

Masking, testing, distancing, and quarantine policies were never shown to be more effective than just telling students and staff to stay home when sick. Hygiene theater and the demand for federal funds served little purpose other than to uphold the myth of imminent danger—a myth that, if dispelled, would force teachers and their unions to confront the fact that they severely harmed students. For many teachers in blue states, this is not just a question of admitting error, but of their entire self-image and the need to protect their own psyches. I know that the alternative—facing the fact that your own “team” has done something unforgivable—would be shattering for them.

I know this because I went through this process myself. Before school closures I was a union representative and volunteered for the Bernie Sanders campaign. I did not fit the caricature of the “open schools” advocate: I wasn’t conservative, anti-union, a believer in privatization, or even a parent. I was just a typical public school teacher. Watching my own community needlessly hurt children for more than two years uprooted my entire worldview and sense of identity.

[..]

Real solutions for this fiasco cannot be enacted without accountability for the perpetrators: Democratic governors, teachers union leaders, and politically motivated news agencies and experts. But blame does not just lie with a few individuals. Many regular people simply went along with something morally reprehensible because they believed their own side to be infallible and because they were too smug to face reality. As a society, we sacrificed the well-being of children for the comfort and ego gratification of adults. The very least we can do now is stop making excuses and be honest about it.

Alex Gutentag (@galexybrane) in “The Recess of Responsibility” (December 06, 2022)

June 19, 2024: Rick Rubin interviews Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for a Covid-19 after action review.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, where he is also the director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. After dedicating much of his career to studying the economics of health care, when the COVID-19 crisis began, Dr. Bhattacharya shifted his research focus to the epidemiology of COVID-19, the lethality of COVID-19 infection, and the effectiveness and effects of lockdown policies. This led him to co-author an open letter, The Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a lift of restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity. He is also the co-author of the widely acclaimed textbook Health Economics, a staple in undergraduate and graduate curricula worldwide. He holds four degrees from Stanford: a BA, an AM, an MD, and a PhD in economics.

August 31, 2024 More from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya(from https://x.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1829874384624107663)

The thin excuse the censors use to justify their dangerous, authoritarian measures is that the proles will spread misinformation amongst themselves if given the right to free speech, and they will end up voting for things and people the powerful don’t like.

Actually, the purpose of censorship is to cover up for government policy failure.

A reminder about what the censors got wrong during the covid era:

  • the covid infection fatality rate is an order of magnitude lower than the case fatality rate
  • there is an enormous age gradient in hospitalization and mortality risk from infection, with minuscule risk to most children
  • covid is airborne, actually
  • the lab leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory, and is the likely explanation of the origin of covid
  • hunting for viruses in the wild, bringing them to biolabs in city centers, and genetically altering them to make them more transmissible and dangerous to humans is a dangerous idea that governments should no longer fund and should regulate vigorously
  • lockdowns are a luxury of the laptop class and do not ultimately protect against infection
  • school closures are an irrational response to covid, as proven by the Swedish experience
  • children are harmed in myriad ways by school closures and forced online ‘learning’ is not a substitute for real learning
  • many children are not resilient to the harms of school closures
  • the lockdowns and the financing of them with printed trillions caused tremendous economic damage, including severe disruption of supply chains, small businesses, and lingering inflation
  • the economic dislocation of the lockdowns led to the starvation of millions of the poorest people in the world
  • the covid vaccine’s protection against disease transmission was never proved in a randomized trial
  • the covid vaccine mandates and the false assurances of near-perfect efficacy against infection and transmission undermined public trust in public health
  • there are people who were harmed by the covid vaccine, actually
  • there is substantial immunity against subsequent infection (at least until the next variant) provided by covid recovery
  • there is no good randomized evidence that mask mandates have any substantial impact on covid transmission
  • there is no evidence whatsoever that toddler masking reduces the risk of covid infection for anyone

I could go on, but the point should be clear. The censorship machine suppressed criticism of the government getting all those important points wrong, and bad public health policy was the covid-era norm, with countless people harmed as a result.

The purpose of censorship now is to protect the reputations of the powerful people who pushed all these policies so that governments protect their power to impose them again in the future.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya 6:30 AM · Aug 31, 2024

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