Practical Advice on Managing Challenges from the COVID-19 Coronavirus

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

• personal safety
  • tracking case status
    • https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/
    • https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus-map/
  • avoiding infection
    • risk factors – age, diabetes, compromised lung function, obesity
    • masks
    • social distance
    • supplement protocols
      • https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_medicine/EVMS_Critical_Care_COVID-19_Protocol.pdf
      • MedCram Coronavirus Pandemic Update 59: Dr. Seheult’s Daily Regimen (Vitamin D, C, Zinc, Quercetin, NAC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM2A2xNLWR4
  • minimizing impact of infection (home treatment / how to monitor yourself and determine whether to go to hospital and what records to keep to help guide early treatment (e.g. historical readings for temperature, blood
    • pull videos from “Nurse John”
    • measure / write down blood pressure, pulse oxygen, heart rate, respiration rate; other significant symptoms) ICU treatment (these are to help people understand options and decisions they may be faced with for a loved one)
  • protocols for hospital treatment (these are to understand what may happen if you are hospitalized) and ICU
    • https://c19early.com/
    • https://covidprotocols.org/
    • https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_medicine/EVMS_Critical_Care_COVID-19_Protocol.pdf
• household level issues
  • Mood:
    • Six Daily Quarantine Questions by Brooke Anderson https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_daily_questions_to_ask_yourself_in_quarantine
    • https://virologydownunder.com/so-you-think-youve-about-to-be-in-a-pandemic/
• firm/establishment/workplace practices
  • see Utah Park City guidelines for ideas https://www.summitcounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/10898/Joint-Public-Health-Order-2020-05—Stabilization-Phase-signed
  • UVC could be an important element in sterilizing indoor areas https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21058-w
    • From the abstract “far-UVC light (207–222?nm) efficiently inactivates bacteria without harm to exposed mammalian skin. This is because, due to its strong absorbance in biological materials, far-UVC light cannot penetrate even the outer (non living) layers of human skin or eye; however, because bacteria and viruses are of micrometer or smaller dimensions, far-UVC can penetrate and inactivate them. We show for the first time that far-UVC efficiently inactivates airborne aerosolized viruses, with a very low dose of 2?mJ/cm² of 222-nm light inactivating >95% of aerosolized H1N1 influenza virus. Continuous very low dose-rate far-UVC light in indoor public locations is a promising, safe and inexpensive tool to reduce the spread of airborne-mediated microbial diseases.”
  • https://www.inc.com/business-continuity-cash-flow-coronavirus-crisis.html
  • Startups managing a Downturn: blog post “ask your employees / customers / suppliers for help and offer them help” and rebut these
    • https://www.nfx.com/post/28-moves-survive-thrive-downturn/
    • https://davidcummings.org/2020/03/21/startup-cash-considerations-in-crisis/
    • https://a16z.com/2020/04/07/saas-businesses-weather-hard-times-by-focusing-on-efficient-growth/
    • https://steveblank.com/2020/03/19/action-today-for-cfos/
    • https://steveblank.com/2020/03/17/the-virus-survival-strategy-for-your-startup/
    • https://a16z.com/2020/03/31/planning-and-managing-layoffs/
• county/municipality level practices
  • Two Track re-opening, protect most vulnerable from Graham Allison
    • https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494949-we-can-protect-the-most-vulnerable-and-reopen-the-economy
    • https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/coronavirus-strategic-challenge-has-washington-misdiagnosed-problem
  • Utah County Guidelines https://www.summitcounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/10898/Joint-Public-Health-Order-2020-05—Stabilization-Phase-signed
  • Model Comparison Forum at 538 https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-forecasts/
    • https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-so-freaking-hard-to-make-a-good-covid-19-model/
  • SEIRD model http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/event201-resources/event201-model-desc.pdf
  • need to communicate criteria clearly, this is voluntary https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/03/dont_expect_losers_of_the_quarantine_to_sit_idly_by_forever_143101.html
  • Reinertsen group level testing models for test efficiency—-
  • I think this June 2020 article will prove prescient: It’s Time to End the State of Emergency Over Covid-19   By Rajiv Bhatia and Jeffrey Klausner,
    • Orders requiring Californians to stay at home and to shutter businesses because of the COVID-19 pandemic relied on rare powers of public health officials.

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/

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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.

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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.

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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.