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Notes from UCSF Expert panel On COVID-19 Community Spread

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The following is not medical advice. Scientists for Wired Technology is not qualified to provide any medical or legal advice. The following is for educational purposes only. This page is one of three legs of the stool that establishes local control over the operations of Wireless Telecommunications Facilities (WTFs); the other two are the US House/Senate Conference Report for the 1996 Telecommunications Act (“1996-Act”) and the stated purpose of the 1996-Act: to promote the safety of life and property.

San Francisco 4G/5G “Small” Cells Leads to
Melatonin Suppression and Immuno-Suppression, Mar 4, 2020
WILL SAN FRANCISCO POWER OFF ALL OF THEIR SO-CALLED “SMALL” CELLS OR NOT?
Resonance: Beings of Frequency — Watch from 1:07:40 to 1:18:00 to learn about
pulsed, data-modulated, Radio-frequency Electromagnetic Microwave Radiation (RF-EMR) exposures
from 4G/5G cellular infrastructure causing melatonin suppression and immuno-suppression.
Dr. Andrew Saul Discuss Vitamin C, Coronavirus, and Censorship
— watch at least from 5:40 to 8:10 and read the slides
Judy Mikovitis, PhD — Coronavirus — What You Should Know
William Schaffner, MD, Vanderbilt University: Coronavirus FAQ: How Deadly Is It?
The 3rd Large Dose VIt C Clinical Study for NCP Approved

Link to China Treating Coronavirus COVID-19 with Intravenous Vitamin C

Consider the benefits of Vitamin C.

Here is one view . . .

1. COVID-19: Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US

By Larry Romanoff, March 11, 2020

The Taiwanese physician noted that in August of 2019 the US had a flurry of lung pneumonias or similar, which the Americans blamed on ‘vaping’ from e-cigarettes, but which, according to the scientist, the symptoms and conditions could not be explained by e-cigarettes. He said he wrote to the US officials telling them he suspected those deaths were likely due to the coronavirus. He claims his warnings were ignored.

2. Global COVID-19 Pandemic, This Is a Test: How Will the Constitution Fare During a Nationwide Lockdown?

By John W. Whitehead, March 12, 2020

The coronavirus epidemic may well be a legitimate health concern, but it’s the government’s response to it that worries me more in the long term. Based on the government’s track record and its long-anticipated plans for instituting martial law (using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems) in response to a future crisis, there’s good reason to worry.

3. Congress Tries to Sneak Through Dangerous Spying Bill Under the Cover of the Coronavirus Crisis

By Free Press, March 12, 2020

Leading members of the House of Representatives are rushing a vote on Wednesday to extend abusive government surveillance powers before they’re set to expire on March 15. If approved, the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act of 2020 would reauthorize Section 215 powers Congress established under the USA Patriot Act in 2001. Section 215 is the provision national-security agencies have cited to support their unwarranted collection of phone records of hundreds of millions of people in the United States.

4. Coronavirus: Why Is Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Lying to Congress and the American People?

By Target Liberty, March 12, 2020

Dr. Anthonu Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, testified before Congress on Wednesday and said that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) is “10 times more lethal than seasonal flu.”

5. US CDC Director Robert Redfield Admitted that Coronavirus Deaths Have Been Miscategorized as Flu

By Larry Romanoff, March 13, 2020

The US has been lying all along. Robert Redfield, CDC director, testifying to Congress, today admitted that virus deaths have been miscategorised as the flu. He also stated that the standard practice has been to first test people for the flu and, if the test is positive, they stop there. They don’t test for the coronavirus.

On the day that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus COVID-19 a “pandemic”, there was not the slightest trace of a pandemic. A pandemic might be the condition when the death-to-infection rate exceeds 10%. In Europe, the death rate is ~0.4%, or less. Italy which is a special case: the peak death rate was 6%.

After the pandemic has been officially declared, the next step may be – also at the recommendation either by WHO, or individual countries – forced vaccination, under police and/or military surveillance. Those who refuse may be penalized (fines and / or jail – and force-vaccinated all the same).

Why was there a coronavirus computer simulation byJohns Hopkins on October 18, 2019, sponsored by the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?

"A total crackdown with artificially induced panic to the point where it would be easy for the EU and US authorities to impose a military stage of siege for “health protection of the people”. In fact, CDC (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta), has already designed harshly dictatorial directives for a “health emergency”.

A Historical Reminder . . .

March 13, 2020 interview with Dr. Nick Begich

Here is another view . . .

By Dr. Jordan Shlain, M.D. | Mar 12, 2020 | Original Linked In article here.

University of California, San Francisco BioHub Panel on COVID-19, March 10, 2020

  • Panelists
  • Joe DeRisi: UCSF’s top infectious disease researcher. Co-president of ChanZuckerberg BioHub (a JV involving UCSF / Berkeley / Stanford). Co-inventor of the chip used in SARS epidemic.
  • Emily Crawford: COVID task force director. Focused on diagnostics
  • Cristina Tato: Rapid Response Director. Immunologist.
  • Patrick Ayescue: Leading outbreak response and surveillance. Epidemiologist.
  • Chaz Langelier: UCSF Infectious Disease doc

What’s below are essentially direct quotes from the panelists. I bracketed the few things that are not quotes.

Top takeaways

  • At this point, we are past containment. Containment is basically futile. Our containment efforts won’t reduce the number who get infected in the US.

  • Now we’re just trying to slow the spread, to help healthcare providers deal with the demand peak. In other words, the goal of containment is to "flatten the curve", to lower the peak of the surge of demand that will hit healthcare providers. And to buy time, in hopes a drug can be developed.

  • How many in the community already have the virus?

    • No one knows.
    • We are moving from containment to care.
    • We in the US are currently where at where Italy was a week ago. We see nothing to say we will be substantially different.
    • 40-70% of the US population will be infected over the next 12-18 months. After that level you can start to get herd immunity.
    • [We used their numbers to work out a guesstimate of deaths— indicating about 1.5 million Americans may die. The panelists did not disagree with our estimate. This compares to seasonal flu’s average of 50K Americans per year. Assume 50% of US population, that’s 160M people infected. With 1% mortality rate that’s 1.6M Americans die over the next 12-18 months.]
    • The fatality rate is in the range of 10X flu. (This assumes no drug is found effective and made available)
    • The death rate varies hugely by age. Over age 80 the mortality rate could be 10-15%. [See chart by age Signe found online, attached at bottom.]

  • Don’t know whether COVID-19 is seasonal but if is and subsides over the summer, it is likely to roar back in fall as the 1918 flu did

  • I can only tell you two things definitively. Definitively it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And we’ll be dealing with this for the next year at least. Our lives are going to look different for the next year.

  • What should we do now? What are you doing for your family?

  • Appears one can be infectious before being symptomatic. We don’t know how infectious before symptomatic, but know that highest level of virus prevalence coincides with symptoms. We currently think folks are infectious 2 days before through 14 days after onset of symptoms (T-2 to T+14 onset).

  • How long does the virus last?

    • On surfaces, best guess is 4-20 hours depending on surface type (maybe a few days) but still no consensus on this
    • The virus is very susceptible to common anti-bacterial cleaning agents: bleach, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol-based.
    • Avoid concerts, movies, crowded places.
    • We have cancelled business travel.
    • Do the basic hygiene, eg hand washing and avoiding touching face.
    • Stockpile your critical prescription medications. Many pharma supply chains run through China. Pharma companies usually hold 2-3 months of raw materials, so may run out given the disruption in China’s manufacturing.

  • We would say “Anyone over 60 stay at home unless it’s critical”. CDC toyed with idea of saying anyone over 60 not travel on commercial airlines.

  • We at UCSF are moving our “at-risk” parents back from nursing homes, etc. to their own homes. Then are not letting them out of the house. The other members of the family are washing hands the moment they come in.

    • Three routes of infection
    • Hand to mouth / face
    • Aerosol transmission
    • Fecal oral route

  • What if someone is sick?

    • If someone gets sick, have them stay home and socially isolate. There is very little you can do at a hospital that you couldn’t do at home. Most cases are mild. But if they are old or have lung or cardio-vascular problems, read on.
    • If someone gets quite sick who is old (70+) or with lung or cardio-vascular problems, take them to the ER.
    • There is no accepted treatment for COVID-19. The hospital will give supportive care (eg IV fluids, oxygen) to help you stay alive while your body fights the disease. ie to prevent sepsis.

  • If someone gets sick who is high risk (eg is both old and has lung/cardio-vascular problems), you can try to get them enrolled for “compassionate use" of Remdesivir, a drug that is in clinical trial at San Francisco General and UCSF, and in China. Need to find a doc there in order to ask to enroll. Remdesivir is an anti-viral from Gilead that showed effectiveness against MERS in primates and is being tried against COVID-19. If the trials succeed it might be available for next winter as production scales up far faster for drugs than for vaccines. [More I found online.]

  • Why is the fatality rate much higher for older adults?

    • Your immune system declines past age 50
    • Fatality rate tracks closely with “co-morbidity”, ie the presence of other conditions that compromise the patient’s hearth, especially respiratory or cardio-vascular illness. These conditions are higher in older adults.
    • Risk of pneumonia is higher in older adults.

  • What about testing to know if someone has COVID-19?

    • Bottom line, there is not enough testing capacity to be broadly useful. Here’s why.
    • Currently, there is no way to determine what a person has other than a PCR test. No other test can yet distinguish "COVID-19 from flu or from the other dozen respiratory bugs that are circulating”.
    • A Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test can detect COVID-19’s RNA. However they still don’t have confidence in the test’s specificity, ie they don’t know the rate of false negatives.
    • The PCR test requires kits with reagents and requires clinical labs to process the kits.
    • While the kits are becoming available, the lab capacity is not growing.
    • The leading clinical lab firms, Quest and Labcore have capacity to process 1,000 kits per day. For the nation.
    • Expanding processing capacity takes “time, space, and equipment.” And certification. ie it won’t happen soon.
    • UCSF and UCBerkeley have donated their research labs to process kits. But each has capacity to process only 20-40 kits per day. And are not clinically certified.
    • Novel test methods are on the horizon, but not here now and won’t be at any scale to be useful for the present danger.

  • How well is society preparing for the impact?

    • Local hospitals are adding capacity as we speak. UCSF’s Parnassus campus has erected “triage tents” in a parking lot. They have converted a ward to “negative pressure” which is needed to contain the virus. They are considering re-opening the shuttered Mt Zion facility.
    • If COVID-19 affected children then we would be seeing mass departures of families from cities. But thankfully now we know that kids are not affected.
    • School closures are one the biggest societal impacts. We need to be thoughtful before we close schools, especially elementary schools because of the knock-on effects. If elementary kids are not in school then some hospital staff can’t come to work, which decreases hospital capacity at a time of surging demand for hospital services.
    • Public Health systems are prepared to deal with short-term outbreaks that last for weeks, like an outbreak of meningitis. They do not have the capacity to sustain for outbreaks that last for months. Other solutions will have to be found.

  • What will we do to handle behavior changes that can last for months?

    • Many employees will need to make accommodations for elderly parents and those with underlying conditions and immune-suppressed.
    • Kids home due to school closures
    • [Dr. DeRisi had to leave the meeting for a call with the governor’s office. When he returned we asked what the call covered.] The epidemiological models the state is using to track and trigger action. The state is planning at what point they will take certain actions. ie what will trigger an order to cease any gatherings of over 1000 people.

  • Where do you find reliable news?

    • The John Hopkins Center for Health Security site. Which posts daily updates. The site says you can sign up to receive a daily newsletter on COVID-19 by email. [I tried and the page times out due to high demand. After three more tries I was successful in registering for the newsletter.]
    • The New York Times is good on scientific accuracy.

  • Observations on China

    • Unlike during SARS, China’s scientists are publishing openly and accurately on COVID-19.
    • While China’s early reports on incidence were clearly low, that seems to trace to their data management systems being overwhelmed, not to any bad intent.
    • Wuhan has 4.3 beds per thousand while US has 2.8 beds per thousand. Wuhan built 2 additional hospitals in 2 weeks. Even so, most patients were sent to gymnasiums to sleep on cots.
    • Early on no one had info on COVID-19. So China reacted in a way unique modern history, except in wartime.

  • Every few years there seems another: SARS, Ebola, MERS, H1N1, COVID-19. Growing strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Are we in the twilight of a century of medicine’s great triumph over infectious disease?

    • "We’ve been in a back and forth battle against viruses for a million years."
    • But it would sure help if every country would shut down their wet markets.
    • As with many things, the worst impact of COVID-19 will likely be in the countries with the least resources, eg Africa. See article on Wired magazine on sequencing of virus from Cambodia.