monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

He said frenzy,,hahahahahahahahahahaha....he wishes. Hardy har har

President Trump said in a Friday letter to Congress that the inspector general no longer had his full confidence and would be removed within 30 days, the required period of advance notice to lawmakers, the Associated Press reported.

The firing came weeks after Trump removed Christi Grimm as principal deputy Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, after Grimm’s office criticized the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic — detailing “severe shortages” of testing kits, delays in getting coronavirus results and “widespread shortages” of masks and other equipment at U.S. hospitals. Trump had lashed out publicly at Grimm.

Last month the president ousted intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who handled the explosive whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment. He also pushed out Glenn Fine, the chairman of the federal panel Congress created to oversee his administration’s management of the government’s $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package.

Steve A. Linick will be replaced by an ambassador with close ties to Vice President Mike Pence, the department said Friday night.
It has been reported that Linick was looking into whether Pompeo had misused a political appointee at the State Department to perform personal tasks for himself and his wife.

No, I am pointing out a doctor who is questioning it.

that is the goal of the lockdown - delaying spread, not elimination of the virus

"Delay" is entirely the wrong word here. Decrease or minimize are more accurate.

With no vaccine, social distancing and "lockdown" are intended to slow the inevitable spread of the virus, so as not to overwhelm hospitals.

Ronald Ross did astoundingly well for someone who never really wanted to be a doctor. The son of a general in the British Indian Army, Ross discovered on his extensive travels that malaria was transmitted not by “bad air” but by mosquitoes. The achievement earned him the 1902 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

His other valuable insight was that mathematics played as big a role as biology in the pattern and spread of disease. “Epidemiology is in fact a mathematical subject,” Ross opined somewhat tetchily in the British Medical Journal in 1911, “and fewer absurd mistakes would be made regarding it… if more attention were given to the mathematical study of it.” This number-centric perspective has allowed scientists to conclude that, for example, we do not need to eliminate mosquitoes completely to eradicate malaria; and that immunising 95 per cent of the population will provide the “herd immunity” required to keep measles at bay.

Ross makes a deservedly early appearance in The Rules of Contagion, a timely analysis by Adam Kucharski of how diseases, and other phenomena such as financial panic, gun violence and social media trends, spread. “Recent efforts to treat violence as an infection – rather than simply as a result of ‘bad people’ – echo the rejection of disease caused by ‘bad air’ in the 1880s and 1890s,” he writes.

Kucharski, an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, is ideally placed to enlighten readers: as a biostatistician, he has been involved in modelling disease outbreaks, such as Ebola and the 2015 Zika epidemic.

His book was almost signed off when the coronavirus (widely known as the Covid-19 virus) began as a series of epidemics in different countries. It is testament to how well Kucharski understands his topic that he chose not to attempt a panicked update. As I was writing this review, it transpired that China had excluded from some case numbers individuals who were infected but showed no symptoms. Any disease forecast depends on accurate and consistent reporting of such numbers.

It is particularly pleasing that Kucharski decided not to gamble on guessing the coronavirus picture correctly: his previous book, about the mathematics of wagers, was entitled The Perfect Bet. This follow-up work stands on its own as an impressively fluent, fascinating and accessible introduction to how epidemics, trends, behaviours and ideas start, spread – and end.

Disease outbreaks tend to follow a pattern: over time, the number of infections climbs, peaks and then declines. That is because a population contains three types of people: susceptible, infectious and recovered (the SIR model). As an infection sweeps through a population, it gradually infects the susceptible. As the pool of susceptible people shrinks and recoveries rise (with, it is presumed, immunity to reinfection), it becomes less likely that the few remaining susceptibles will encounter an infectious person. This is why a seemingly unstoppable epidemic can suddenly plateau and dwindle away, leaving some uninfected.

“According to the SIR model,” Kucharski explains, “outbreaks need three things to take off: a sufficiently infectious pathogen, plenty of interactions between different people, and enough of the population who are susceptible.” The shape and scale of the rise, peak and decline is exquisitely sensitive to those three SIR factors.

Infectiousness can be represented by the reproduction number R, which is the average number of people an infected person will transmit the virus to. An R below one means a disease won’t spread; above one, it will. The latest research puts the R for the Covid-19 virus at between two and three, which is comparable to that in the 2003 Sars epidemic.

Curbing social interactions can delay or interrupt rates of infection, staggering the burden on hospitals, testing services and health workers. That was the rationale for the Chinese government imposing draconian quarantines on entire cities in Hubei province. It is also the logic behind “social distancing” measures, such as working from home and closing schools.

As for susceptibility, everyone must be assumed vulnerable to this novel virus, despite most suffering only mild symptoms. Hence the global concern: a death rate of even a fraction of a per cent equates to millions dying worldwide. But there is a way to cut susceptibility – by vaccinating. Reuters reports that a dozen drug companies are developing vaccines or antivirals for Covid-19.

When you look at the number of thumbs down on my posts, I would call it frenzy, if not obsession.

The Flynn issue

I think we're so inured at Trumps lies