16,000 George Floyds

2

“I can’t breathe.”

            Eric Garner, July 17, 2014, as he was being strangled to death by New York City police, for selling single cigarettes on a streetcorner in Staten Island

“I can’t breathe.”

            Elijah McClain, August 24, 2019, as he was being strangled by Aurora, Colorado police, for no reason, resulting in cardiac arrest in the ambulance and death days later

“I can’t breathe.”

            George Floyd, May 25, 2020, as he was strangled to death by Minneapolis, Minnesota police, for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill

“Once you get to the other side of it, you can breathe a little bit better… You think you’re gonna die during one of those episodes, I mean, you know you’re gonna die.”

            Kevin Harris, after recovering from the coronavirus infection that almost choked him to death

Dear Students,

These four men had two things in common: being African-American, and having someone or something strangling them. Kevin Harris did not die gasping for breath as the others did, and he was not strangled by police. But he was being strangled by racism.

I’ll come back to this and to the number 16,000, but first consider another number: 3,446. That’s the number of black people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, accounting for 72.7 percent of the lynching victims in that time frame—when they made up around a tenth of the population.

We don’t have a record of what most of these 3,446 people said while they were dying, but most of them were murdered by being hanged by the neck until they were dead. They were not dropped to break their necks quickly as in a movie prison. They were usually “strung up” so that the group or mob could watch them struggle. Many were tortured and mutilated before and during the process. It was festive. Children were present. People took photos. They made postcards to send relatives and friends.

Some of the victims proclaimed their innocence before being hanged for crimes they did  not commit. Some spoke messages to loved ones. On March 9, 1892, three black men who had started the new People’s Grocery in Memphis, Tennessee were dragged out of their store by a white mob and lynched; it was simply too much of an affront to white rule for black people to have their own grocery store. One of them, Thomas Moss, said before he was murdered, “Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here.”

We don’t know what lynching victims may have said or tried to say while they were actually being strangled by the noose around their necks. They must have known there was no point in begging. But you can bet they were thinking: “I can’t breathe.”

A lynching is defined as a premeditated extrajudicial homicide by a group intending to punish someone or make an example of them. We don’t yet know whether the policemen who killed Eric Garner, Elijah McClain, and George Floyd intended to kill them, but we know that they showed utter disregard for these men’s humanity in their excessive, brutal, completely unnecessary, and ultimately fatal use of force—in each case in the face of victims and even bystanders begging them to stop.

I think it’s fair to say that they probably wanted to kill some black man some time, and this was their chance; otherwise, why would they have shown such disregard for black lives? The police were acting in a criminal manner toward each of these men; and ordinarily, when a homicide is committed in the course of another crime, it’s murder.

We also know that black people are killed by police at a rate between 2.5 and 3.5 times that of whites. We know that many white police officers, not just “a few bad apples,” are overtly or even proudly racist. And we know that the inadequate, even chaotic patterns of selection and training in police departments across the United States at best allow and at worst foster such racism.

This is all part of a pattern that anthropologists call structural violence: day to day destruction of human life by authorities as part of the normal course of things in, for example, colonialism, or the domination of one religious group over another. But if the victims of structural violence commit acts of violence themselves, even in protest or self-defense, only those acts are considered violent, not the day to day acts of the people in power oppressing them.

Today’s heedless murders of black people by white police extend the structural violence of lynchings, which in their day extended the structural violence of slavery, going back 401 years to 1619, when America first became a slave society. No one can doubt that centuries of whips and chains, hanging trees, and police brutality—all condoned or even depended on by the larger society and its day to day need for intimidation and control—deserve the name “structural violence.”

But what about Kevin Harris, who couldn’t breathe because of a new coronavirus?

Well, it turns out that structural violence—including American structural racism—requires a lot more than whips, chains, nooses, guns, and the knees and choke-holds of policemen. It requires a system that relentlessly maintains huge disparities, day by day and generation to generation, between white and black people—in wealth, education, job opportunities, income, education, incarceration, and perhaps most painfully, health and illness.

Are unprevented and uncared-for diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, asthma, AIDS, influenza, and now COVID-19 less violent to a human life than whips, nooses, and chokeholds? I don’t think so, and neither do the growing number of physicians and public health experts who see the structural violence of untreated, preventable disease as just as much or even more an extension of slavery than police brutality is.

On the day that Kevin Harris described his near-death from strangling by the coronavirus, there had been a total of 182 deaths in the whole United States, yet it was already clear that blacks were affected more than whites. As of this writing, more than 140,000 Americans have died of this virus.

But the number 16,000 is not the total number of African-Americans who have died, not by far. It is the number who have died but who would not have died if black people only had the same death rate as white people. In other words, it is the number of extra black people who were killed by the virus just because they were black.

Thankfully, Kevin Harris did not become one of those unfair, unnecessary, extra black deaths. But 16,000 others did. So far. And it’s not over yet. And proportionately more black people than white are being added to the numbers every day. So the excess of 16,000 is only the beginning.

What explains it? The basic deprivation of health is part of the long story of American structural racism and structural violence. Everything about underlying conditions that makes us more susceptible to COVID-19 is more common in black than white people. That includes, but is not limited to, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, asthma, and a wide spectrum of acute and chronic non-COVID infectious diseases.

And every form of preventive and curative care is withheld from black people but given to whites. Our lack of universal health care is unique among the wealthy countries of the world. We stand out from the world in this exactly the way South Africa did before apartheid ended.

Take a look at the graph in the picture. The American anomaly is astounding. All other advanced countries have had declining maternal mortality for decades. Ours has been rising starkly, and experts agree that a large part of the reason is our gross and growing racial disparity. Infant mortality has declined slightly, but is much higher than in other developed countries, mainly because of how we neglect minorities. Black infant mortality is more than double that of whites. So the structural racism that began in 1619 begins again at the start of every black life.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the great 19th century physician, wrote, “The woman about to become a mother should be the object of trembling care and sympathy wherever she bears her burden or stretches her aching limbs. God forbid that any member of the profession to which she trusts her life, doubly precious at that eventful period, should hazard it negligently, unadvisedly, or selfishly.” We always follow that advice. For white women. Black women and their babies are from that moment guaranteed to be more vulnerable to everything, including COVID-19.

In the pandemic, it’s good to stay home if you can. Most black people can’t. Their work requires that they expose themselves to others on public transportation and at their jobs. They are some of the doctors and many of the nurses and respiratory therapists, but they are also overrepresented among the cleaners and sanitation workers, the delivery people, the workers in groceries and restaurant kitchens, and many others who can’t stay home where it’s safe.

But that’s not all. Crowding is good for the virus, and it is much more of a problem for blacks than whites.  Poverty too. Lack of education. Lack of trust in authority (with good reason). Lack of clean air (the virus loves dirty airways). Polluted water. Lack of access to healthy food, which is much more expensive than junk food and much harder to find in black neighborhoods.

Black men are overwhelmingly over-represented in prisons in this country, and given that prisons are well known hot spots for COVID-19, they become another tool of structural racism in the pandemic. Given that incarcerated men are forced to work, manufacturing license plates and the like, incarceration of black men has been seen as a modern form of slavery.

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where the government was discovered to be pouring lead into black homes and poisoning children’s brains, has proved to be a problem in many other cities. The disparity between blacks and whites in wealth is far greater even than the disparity in incomes; white American families’ wealth is stored mostly in their homes, which many fewer black people own.

These homes, this wealth, is passed from generation to generation among whites, and in every generation it becomes a more solid foundation for permanent disparities in education, because schools in America are funded locally, from taxes on homes that whites are much more likely to own.

But in addition to the structural racism that withholds health, medical care, wealth, homes, education, opportunities, fruit, vegetables, and water, we have to add air: “I can’t breathe.” So said an unknown number of black police-chokehold victims, 3,446 black lynching victims, and 16,000 excess black coronavirus victims, so far.

If you have easy access to air, be grateful. Not everyone does. Breathe out. Breathe in. Don’t take it for granted.

Stay safe and be well, if you can,

Dr. K

PS: Many of you have been asking me whether I think you should come back to campus. This article should help you decide. As always, you should weigh the risks and difficulties you may face where you are staying now; some people may be better off on campus, assuming it really is open to you a few weeks from now.

Rolling Thunder

1

            “What we’re seeing is that this illness has no mercy, against any kind of gender, age, or race.” Joseph Varone, MD, Houston physician, June 30th.

            “The epidemic is out of control across the southern United States.” Peter Hotez, MD, Houston pediatric virologist and vaccine scientist, July 7th.

            CNN’s John Berman: “Do you see an end in sight, or a plateau?” Rebekah Jones: “Absolutely not, especially if schools are opening next month, then we’re on a third wave of this first wave of catastrophe.” Rebekah Jones is a former Florida State data scientist fired last month for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 statistics, speaking on July 8th.

Dear Students,

These quotes, which you can find on CNN videos, come from three different kinds of experts, and all of them are visibly upset about what they are seeing and saying. But the greatest anguish is in the face and voice of Dr. Varone, who has been interviewed many times since the above quote, in his hospital, on the front line of the spreading American epidemic. He is devastated. He goes to work every day to take care of people of all ages who are more and more numerous and more and more sick with a virus that could have by now been controlled.

I feel as if I am in a time warp. I am watching heroic doctors and nurses in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Houston, El Paso, Miami, and other southern cities describe, on the verge of tears, the exact same overwhelming of hospitals that we saw two months ago in Queens, Brooklyn, and The Bronx.

Hardened medical professionals are begging—in mirror images of their April northern counterparts—for us to behave differently. They are telling us that they can’t handle any more coronavirus patients. They are running out of ICU beds, and if they had the beds, they would not have the professionals to staff them.

All the governors of these southern states had to do was watch how Andrew Cuomo of New York get that state’s epidemic under control, and do the same thing—except that they didn’t have to be taken by surprise and be a little late with it like he was. But instead of imitating him, heeding his warnings, and starting earlier, they denied they would ever have to face what he faced. Now they are facing it, and are headed for worse.

In the past few weeks I have likened the surging case numbers to lightning and have repeatedly said that I would wait to hear the thunder, namely the surge in hospitalizations. Leaders of our country and of many states told us we could ignore the case numbers because they were only the result of more testing. Never mind that the case numbers were rising much faster than the number of tests. Never mind that the proportion of tests coming out positive keeps going up and up and up.

We were also told that because the surging cases were at an average age that was younger we would never see a surge in hospitalizations.

But they already knew that younger people too could get very sick, and that younger people inevitably also infect older ones, so this was not wishful thinking, it was lying. Lies on top of lies. Lies, lies, and more lies.

In Miami-Dade County, since June 24th, hospitalizations have gone up 87%, ICU patients 91%, and patients on ventilators 108%. That is a doubling time of a little over two weeks, and it’s not just Miami. More than 50 Florida hospitals have reached their ICU bed capacity. The 7-day average of new daily hospitalizations in Florida meandered around 150 during April and May, declined into early June, hit an inflection point around 110 on June 7th, rose steadily, hit another inflection point around 170 a week ago. The average climbed more steeply from there, reaching around 270 on July 7th. There is no indication yet of the slightest  bending down of this curve.

In Texas, the count is reported differently, as the total number of people in the state in hospitals with COVID-19 on a given day. This number hovered under 2,000 in April and May, rose slowly but steadily in early June, then rose more steeply, increasing almost every day, to a total of more than 9,000 on July 7th. The Phase 1 opening in Texas began on May 1st, and proceeded despite rising cases, which were not supposed to produce rising hospitalizations—unless you believed the science, which said they were almost inevitable.

In Arizona, the number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals (click on the icon for “Hospital COVID-19-Specific Metrics” in the lower right then on the appropriate button across the top), the number on ventilators, and the number in ICU beds have all risen steadily and sharply since early June. According to The Arizona Republic, “85% of current inpatient beds and 91% of ICU beds were in use” as of Wednesday, July 8th. Native Americans are suffering most, extending the pattern of white people bringing them deadly diseases beginning with the arrival of Columbus.

California’s governor announced on Wednesday that hospitalizations for COVID-19 have increased 44% and ICU admissions by 34% in the past seven days. For Los Angeles County, the three-day moving average of patients hospitalized with the virus peaked at around 2,000 on April 29, declined to around 1,300 on June 15th, and rose twice as fast to return to around 2,000 yesterday. Available ICU beds are around all-time lows for the epidemic. “This is the explosion we warned about,” said a professor of public health at UC Irvine.

And in our own state of Georgia, where Emory will reopen partly live on August 19th, the seven-day moving average of the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 declined steadily from 1,500 on May 15th, stayed under a thousand for most of June, then rose much more sharply than it fell, doubling to almost 2,000 today, with no end in sight. On Tuesday, Brian Kemp, Georgia’s governor, announced a marketing campaign to encourage Georgia businesses to be safe, including no mandatory anything.

Hospitalizations are rising in more than 20 states, so I could go on, but you get the idea. In every state, black and brown people suffer more than whites, and where there are Native Americans, they suffer most. All these states are trying to backtrack on aspects of their openings. (See the impact of early opening here.) They can still do something, but it better be big, and it better be now.

All the above graphs are what are known in statistics and business (among other fields) as hockey-stick curves. It’s what start-up companies dream of. You’re holding the hockey stick and your sales are flat for a while (the part of the hockey stick that you hit the puck with) and then there’s a long upward zoom that goes to the sky, or at least up to your chest. The upward zoom is straight and fast.

For sales, this is a great curve. For a disease outbreak, not so much.

Remember, we are now counting hospitalizations, the thunder. There is no argument that more testing leads to more hospitalizations; not even the world’s most empty hairdo could argue that. Only more disease leads to more hospitalizations, especially in a time when you’re hoping to stay out of the hospital and doctors are trying to keep you out. Also (a teensy reminder of good news from prior updates) remdesivir, dexamethasone, more sophisticated oxygen management, and maybe even a resurrected chloroquine are shortening hospital stays. Yet admissions stay ahead of discharges. Way ahead.

But what about deaths? Ah yes, the deniers are still holding that ace: declining or stable deaths. There are three reasons: 1. the above treatments have made the disease less deadly; 2. the average age of cases is going down steadily, and younger people are less likely to die of it, so far; and most importantly, 3. death is a lagging indicator—hospitalizations are doing the hockey-stick thing now, but we have to wait a few weeks before we know about deaths.

I would add that these upward-leaping hospitalizations also lag infections, by days to weeks. So whatever risks Americans took on the July 4th weekend are not yet reflected in these numbers. All that is ahead of us.

At the risk of straining the metaphor, we had the lightning (skyrocketing cases), we’re having the thunder (the hospitalization hockey stick), but we have not yet had the flash floods and drownings: a sudden surge in deaths on top of the 132,000 we have had already. We may not have it. But we have to do more than hope.

Sometimes when I watch an interview with a nurse or a doctor, and I remember those who risked or gave their lives to save us from our own stupidity, it’s hard for me to hold back tears. As the celebration of our independence passed, and it was not balanced with any wisdom about how to use that freedom, I was not proud of my country.

Look at New York (which opened in such a way that its cases dropped in half after the opening), or almost any other advanced country and you will see how it should have been done. Heck, look at Uruguay, Rwanda, or our sister state of Georgia (in Asia, capital Tbilisi) and you’ll see how we could have saved at least a hundred thousand Americans.

To any young person going through this I say: I was young once, and I loved it. You are losing part of it, and I am sorry for your loss. But I promise you: if you do the right thing now, it will almost certainly be behind you in a year. And you will live to brag for six decades about how you made it through that deadly pandemic of 2020.

But if you get it and have lingering lung damage, as some young people do, you may not have the breath to brag so loud. And if you bring it to your grandparents and kill them, you will shudder with shame whenever 2020 is mentioned.

Your choice. That freedom’s real.

Dr. K

 

 

 

 

 

One Marshmallow

4

       “These plans are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of Covid-19 among students, faculty and staff.”

       Laurence Steinberg, The New York Times, June 15, 2020, referring to proposed college reopenings

Dear Students,

A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics) wrote a column called “America Fails the Marshmallow Test.” This is a reference to a famous 1960s psychological experiment, in which a marshmallow (or cookie, or piece of candy) is placed in front of a young child, who is told she can eat that marshmallow now, but if she waits 15 minutes, she’ll get two instead of one. Studies stemming from this experiment became a cottage industry, and among the claims made by those involved, being able to postpone gratification for greater gain was a fundamental character trait in the two-marshmallow kids that predicted much about their later success. They were said to have better “executive function,” meaning their frontal lobes were better able to suppress the impulse to get one marshmallow now in order to get two later.

Krugman understood that a 2018 study apparently failed to replicate the marshmallow study, but wanted to use the metaphor for our country’s inability to wait a little longer before lifting social distancing restrictions. Actually, the marshmallow study was not debunked by the 2018 replication, which has been criticized for controlling away some variables (like early cognitive ability) that are intrinsic to what the marshmallow test tries to measure. Also, the replication did find that the test predicted some characteristics of adolescents, just not as much as earlier studies claimed. The critics of the critics—the marshmallow defenders—called their paper “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait,” with the running head, “Delaying Gratification Matters.”

Speaking of delaying gratification, it’s not just five-year-olds who are not good at it. Adolescents are not good at it either.

I know you don’t like to think of yourselves as adolescents, but the fact is that brain development is not complete until age 25 or so, and the main part of the brain that keeps developing is precisely those frontal lobes that are involved in executive functions: planning, reasoning, analyzing, and yes, postponing gratification. This period of extended frontal cortex development has been called youth, pre-adulthood, or emerging adulthood.

Psychologist Laurence Steinberg is the world’s leading authority on brain development in adolescence and beyond, especially in relation to executive functions. He has co-authored papers in law and psychology journals with titles like “Blaming Youth,” “Young Adulthood as a Transitional Legal Category,” and “Less Guilty by Reason of Adolescence.” He has tried to protect young people from the most severe punishments for acts which they literally did not have the brainpower to control.

Now Steinberg has weighed in on a question many of you have asked me about: College reopenings in August, including ours. Steinberg, who has spent his life as a college professor researching the young, wrote an essay two weeks ago called, “Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy.”

Based on his 40 years of research on young people, he writes, “Most types of risky behavior — reckless driving, criminal activity, fighting, unsafe sex and binge drinking, to name just a few — peak during the late teens and early 20s. Moreover, interventions designed to diminish risk-taking in this age group, such as attempts to squelch binge drinking on campus, have an underwhelming track record. There is little reason to think that the approaches proposed to mitigate transmission of the coronavirus among college students will fare any better.”

The evidence on the other side is very strong. Steinberg and his colleagues recently completed “a study of more than 5,000 people between the ages of 10 and 30 from 11 different countries (including both Western and non-Western ones)… Consistent with large-scale epidemiological studies, we found a peak in risk-taking somewhere between age 20 and 24 in virtually every country.” There are three straightforward reasons.

Youth (not just adolescence) is a time of 1. heightened risk taking, and 2. poor self-regulation in all cultures. These two psychological features of young adulthood are in turn explained by 3. easier activation of the brain’s reward circuits, made even worse under conditions of emotional arousal and in the presence of peers.

To Laurence Steinberg, who probably knows more about not only the psychology but the neurobiology of young people than anyone else alive, college reopenings will be a “perfect storm” for viral spread. College reopenings are also being criticized by moral philosophers, college presidents, lawyers, and, of course, some epidemiologists. Dr. Anthony Fauci, our nation’s leading expert on the pandemic, says the matter is “complicated” and will depend on what region of the country you’re talking about.

It’s not always a bad idea to take a reward now even though it may be smaller. That’s why we have the proverb, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Young people are designed to take risks for short-term rewards because that is how they test themselves, learn about life, find mates, make friends, and generally position themselves among their peers. Up to a point you have to take risks.

But we are not talking about a torn ligament, a bad hangover, or a brush with gonorrhea. This is a situation that has never before existed in my lifetime, not even during the early years of HIV/AIDS. I have repeatedly emphasized to you that the unknowns in relation to this pandemic are greater than the knowns, and that remains true. Right now cases are on the rise in the nation, in most states, and in almost every major city in the southern half of the country from Los Angeles to Miami.

The entire state university system of California will be 100 percent online. If you were in college in a rural area of Massachusetts or New York, you would probably be safe attending live, but you are not in one of those colleges. The situation in Atlanta is uncertain, but Emory says it is taking precautions that will make reopening safe.

Last week I said that case counts are like lightning, and that I was waiting for the thunder—hospitalizations and deaths. Being no longer young, I am able to wait. Some leaders claim that the only reason we have more cases is that we have more testing. I think this is wrong, but I don’t want to argue about it because I can wait. Others say we really do have more cases but because the age of infection is on average much lower than it was a month or two ago, we will never see the hospitalizations or deaths go up by much.

Lightning is flashing all across the southern United States, and some say it is starting fires that will be impossible to control and that will in the end kill many. State after state in the south are backtracking on their openings. But the states don’t really control behavior, especially the behavior of the young.

The July 4th weekend is coming, and millions of young people will take the one marshmallow. What will you do?

Dr. K

Between the Lightning and the Thunder

10

Dear Students,

As you know, when you see the sky light up because of a bolt of lightning, it takes a few seconds before you hear the thunder, because of the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. The lag varies, and the loudness of the thunder varies.

That’s my metaphor for today, the day after the sacred American holiday of Juneteenth, the day the last large group of African-Americans were freed from slavery in 1865. It’s also the day that 19,000 people are converging on an indoor space in Tulsa, Oklahoma, currently experiencing a rise of COVID-19 cases. About 90 percent of them will not be wearing masks, and almost none of them will be six feet away from the nearest person. One million people competed for the privilege of being one of those 19,000. Interviews show that as they enter the arena they are not worried. At this hour (5pm Saturday) the arena is already packed with early arrivals.

If you can’t guess my hypothesis about their level of risk, you haven’t been paying attention to anything I’ve said since January.

But, it’s a hypothesis. When I see lightning, I listen for thunder, but I don’t always hear it. Sometimes it’s too faint. Also, my hearing is not that great any more.

So the lightning might be crowds—including crowds of left-wing protesters—and the thunder might be cases of viral illness. You might recall that there was a huge difference in the size of the 1918 flu epidemic in Philadelphia compared to St. Louis. The difference was directly attributable to a big parade in Philadelphia at the wrong moment, while there was no such parade in St. Louis. Parade: lightning; huge spike in cases only in Philadelphia: thunder.

But you might also remember that the count of cases does not impress me as the right outcome measure. That is because the number of tests strongly influences the number of cases. There are ways of correcting for that, but major state and national leaders continue to say that the rise in cases in some states is due to better testing, period.

Consequently, I am not going to write today about the number of cases; instead, I am going to wait for a much better measure: the number of hospitalizations, and then, the number of deaths. So I am going to use the metaphor differently: spike in cases: lightning; spike in hospitalizations and deaths: thunder.

I don’t know for sure that today’s party in Tulsa will even result in lightning; it will take a couple of weeks to see a spike in cases there, and leaders in Oklahoma and Washington will say that it’s because so many people at the party got tested. So that would for me just be the lightning. A spike in hospitalizations and deaths two to four weeks after that would be the thunder. We would be in August.

There is my kind of lightning—rapidly rising cases—in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. In two weeks we might see my kind of thunder begin to roll. We will see. Science takes patience. I am not wanting to be insensitive. I am recognizing that half the country and half its leadership do not expect that thunder.

You might also remember that in 1918, Philadelphia carpenters could not make coffins fast enough. Maybe St. Louis sent some carpenters there.

So while we wait to see if Tulsa needs carpenters, I’ll make this update about nuts and bolts: 5 vaccines, 5 treatments. Most are good news.

5 Vaccines

There are at least 130 to 140 vaccines in development around the world. The 5 I’m going to mention are the ones already chosen by Operation Warp Speed, a Federal government program to fast-track development and prepare for mass production (hundreds of millions of doses; the world will need up to 7 billion) if one or more  of these works. It is not clear what criteria were used to choose those 5, but it is likely that the name “Warp Speed” will increase the number of vaccine refusers. Fast and good don’t always go together.

Two of the 5 are messenger RNA vaccines, which deliver coronavirus mRNA into our cells, where they make surface spike proteins that can raise a specific immune response to the viral envelope. No mRNA vaccine has been approved for use in any disease, although some are in clinical trials for other diseases. Three of the 5 are viral vector vaccines, which use a partly disabled different virus to deliver coronavirus genes into cells, to make the surface proteins that provoke the immune response. This principle has yielded an effective vaccine for Ebola and an ineffective one for HIV.

Interestingly, none of the 5 Warp-Speed candidates is a weakened or killed whole-virus vaccine (polio, chickenpox, measles, mumps, etc.); a protein-based vaccine (HPV/cervical cancer); a recombinant vaccine, such as genetically engineered yeast that produces viral proteins in our bodies (shingles, hepatitis B); or a DNA vaccine, in which coronavirus genes are introduced into our cells (none such approved for human use).

In other words, three proven principles were not chosen for Operation Warp Speed.

  1. Moderna (mRNA): Press release said it worked in 8 people, stock price skyrocketed, then crashed on expert skepticism. Phase III (large) clinical trials to begin in July if all’s well. No similar vaccine approved for anything in humans.
  2. BioNTech/Pfizer/Fosun (mRNA): Clinical trials under way; perhaps a few million doses available for emergency use in the fall if all’s well. No similar vaccine approved for anything in humans.
  3. AstraZeneca/U. of Oxford (viral vector is a chimp adenovirus): Phase II/III testing starting in England and Brazil. Could have emergency doses by October; has the manufacturing capacity to produce 2 billion doses eventually. The general principle has worked in Ebola.
  4. Johnson&Johnson/Beth Israel-Harvard (vector is a monkey adenovirus): Phase I/II safety trials begin late July. The general principle has worked in Ebola.
  5. Merck/IAVI (vector is a stomatitis virus): Merck actually used this method to make their successful Ebola vaccine. Clinical studies on corona expected to start this year.

Bad news: No knowledgeable person thinks it’s likely we will have a vaccine widely deployed before 2021 at the soonest, although a few think it’s possible.

Good news: Never before in human history has so much money, effort, and scientific talent been thrown at developing a vaccine for one disease.

5 Treatments

  1. This past week, the tried and true (and cheap) anti-inflammatory drug dexamethasone was announced in a press release to reduce COVID-19 death rate in very sick patients. No peer-reviewed publication, no data available for other scientists to examine. But, as doctors joke, dexamethasone works for everything (it’s sort of cortisol x 20), so why not this?
  2. Remdesivir, an antiviral originally developed for Ebola, may or may not have significant benefits, but it’s approved for compassionate use.
  3. Convalescent plasma, which contains anti-COVID-19 antibodies from people who fought off the virus, has been proved safe in a Mayo Clinic study of 20,000 hospitalized patients, and may be effective in reducing mortality, perhaps especially if given earlier rather than later.
  4. In a very disappointing, even scandalous outcome, peer-reviewed papers published in two top medical journals proved flawed and had to be retracted. Not only can’t we rely on press releases, we may not be able to rely on top journals. Also, maybe, hydroxychloroquine isn’t dangerous in this disease, just (probably) ineffective.
  5. Triple antiviral therapy combined with immune-boosting interferon beta was more effective than the same with one of the antivirals omitted, suggesting that as with HIV we will more likely succeed with combination therapy than one magic bullet. None of the three was remdesivir. Boy, do we have a lot to learn.

Experts are more optimistic about an effective combination therapy sooner than a vaccine. But don’t forget, Sarsie-2 is consulting his Uncle Charlie Darwin every few hours about how  best to evolve and adapt.

As I write, at 7pm Saturday, a crowd of unmasked thousands packed into an arena in Tulsa is waiting for their President to deliver a campaign speech. Fortunately for those people, the arena is not full.

You may know that the President was persuaded to move his rally there from Juneteenth to June 20th in response to outrage from Americans of all ethnic groups who understand the symbolic meaning of Juneteenth. You may or may not know that the rally is being held a stone’s throw from the place in Tulsa where the greatest mass murder, an attempted genocide really, against African-Americans, just 99 years ago.

Remember, if your country refuses to stay safe, you can still protect yourself and your loved ones. Use your mind. Use your brain.

Dr. K

“I, Corona”: My Exclusive Interview with the Little Guy Who’s Changing the World

14

Dear Students,

I have a special treat for you today, an exclusive interview with SARS-CoV-2, his first ever, on his life and times so far. I was able to arrange this through my special friend Charles Darwin, whom Sarsie—his preferred nickname—likes to call Uncle Charlie. Sarsie doesn’t think he’ll be confused with his older brother, SARS-CoV-1, whom he calls “pathetic,” nor does he think highly of his cousin MERS. “I mean, really, a few months in one or a few places, and then, poof! they’re pretty much gone.” He has a certain grudging admiration for cold viruses.

            But I’ll let him tell you in his own words. By the way, he insists on he/him/his, because as he puts it, “I don’t have the equipment to reproduce, so I gotta beg, borrow, or steal it from someone who does. I just put in my genes, and they do the rest. Also, let’s face it, a guy like me, who puts ambition above everything…I mean, I’m most likely gonna be male, right? Yep. My whole species, and my brothers and cousins too.”

            He asked me to call this column “I, Corona,” as an hommage to Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic, I, Robot. “I didn’t like his three ethical laws, of course, but when he got to the part about robots that secretly run the world, I could definitely wrap my envelope around that. But why keep it a secret? Just take the world over and run it, I say.”

            What follows is a lightly edited version of our interview, with my questions removed. Not that there were many. He doesn’t let a human get a word in edgewise. So I listened and learned.

            “Yep. I’m on the move for sure. My bros and cousins were well meaning, all princes in their way—and we’ve got more princes than the Saudi Royal family—but I’m the Crown Prince (get it? Corona? Crown?) and I will be King.

            “By the way, this whole debate about am I alive? Am I alive? Are you kidding me? I’m alive and I’m eating you alive.

            “But back to the family. We’ve only been around a hundred thousand years, less than you even, but then again, we reproduce in 48 hours, you take 20 years. Do the math. Ex. Po. Nen. Shl. As Uncle Charlie would say, we can sure do some evolving.

            “The family divides up the spoils, but we’re not all equally successful. Some of the corona cousins specialized in farm critters. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s gotta do it. Let’s be honest, though, you’re not goin’ down in history for makin’ a chicken cough or givin’ a pig a belly ache. Then there’s the bunch I call the Corona Sniffles, they’ve done alright for themselves actually, they got around, they hang around, they evolve, they come back. No drama, mama, but Uncle Charlie would be proud.

            “SARS-1 did alright for himself but he just couldn’t get transmissable enough, and on top of that he only jumped from Jim to Jane, or from Zhang Wei to Mei Ling, after he gave Jim or Zhang symptoms. Jane and Mei knew to keep their distance. So my Sarsie-1 bro hit Guandong Province in China, got to Toronto somehow, and got locked in with quarantine. 8,000 cases, 800 deaths, a little economic slump, that was about it. One wave in 2003, so far done and done.

            “Cousin MERS was a killer though, too much for his own good. You kill a guy, he ain’t passin’ you on. Also Cousin MERS was never good at jumping from one of you sorry humans to the next. Probably more of you have gotten him from camels than each other. He broke out in Saudi in ’12, trickled around to 27 countries since, 2,500 cases, 800-some-odd deaths, well controlled by even your bumbling species, nothing to write home about.

            “You can see where I’m goin’ with this. I’ve done more in eight months than the rest of them put together. I’m the Crown Corona Prince by acclamation. I mean, let’s look at the facts. Okay, I was trapped in bats for I don’t know how long. I was bummed. Do you have any idea what a bat cave smells like? But I took a deep breath—the kind I make impossible for you—and channeled Uncle Charlie. He counseled patience: “Be like a Buddha Virus, bide your time, mutation and evolution will do the rest.

            “Boy, did they ever. You helped, by bulldozing forests and setting the bats I was riding free. My hosts got snared, sold, and eaten, and I was on my way. Okay: I’d evolved my way from bats to humans, but would I be like my cuz MERS, get stuck in a bat-to-human trap like he did (mostly) with his camel-to-human song-and-dance? No way. Or would I maybe take a leaf from my bro Sarsie-1’s book and only jump from Jim to Jane when Jim was already sick and Jane could avoid him like, well, the plague? Nope again.

            “I did everything by Uncle Charlie’s playbook, evolve, wait, mutate, evolve. Jump from bats to you folks (Whoopie!): Check. Jump from Zhang Wei to Mei Ling: Check. Now, jump from Zhang to Mei before Zhang gets sick—three days, a week, two weeks: Check. Now, don’t even make Zhang sick at all, ever. Or Mei Ling. True, a cough or a sneeze will spread me yards in droplets and aerosols. But if Zhang and Mei are rehearsing in the same chorus for a couple of hours, or even sitting at different tables at a restaurant with the right air circulation system, that’ll work fine for me. If they exchange looks and fall in love and do a Chinese version of French kissing, I’m golden.

            “But think about it: I can’t win big in Uncle Charlie’s sweepstakes by staying in one corner of Wuhan. So here’s where your species really starts to help me. Homo sapiens? Homo dumbellus is more like it. That young doc in Wuhan who tried to blow the whistle on me last year, right at the start? Whew, that was a close call. That could have ended me maybe, but thankfully his bosses shut him up fast. They even made him apologize for making me up! That was a great moment in my career, gave me just window I needed to zip around Wuhan.

            “He was some kind of hero. Poor guy got sick from one of the patients he tried to help, and I killed him. Wasn’t trying, you know, but there it is. He gave his life to tell the truth and save your species from mine. Not fair, but that’s how Uncle Charlie’s law swings. Or, you might say, how the fortune cookie crumbles. Sorry, couldn’t resist; but I spent enough time in China to know fortune cookies don’t crumble there, only in America.

            “Speaking of which, I was getting folks to carry me out of Wuhan to all over, even while the Chinese did a 180 and started to shut me down. They had the right government and the right science and the right culture to do it, and I was done there in a couple of more months. People cared about each other. They believed their doctors and scientists after that first blooper. They show the world how your species could win the war against mine. Or could have.

            “Some learned, some didn’t. I was rockin’ and rollin’ man. Jims and Janes, Fritzes and Gretchens, and especially Sergios and Claudias were leaving Wuhan and taking me home as a souvenir. I got a foothold on the Pacific Coast of your country in January, but that was small potatoes compared to Italy and Spain. Those folks love their grandmas, so instead of quarantining them they killed them. Okay, I killed them, but they gave me free rein.

            “Who’s they, you want to know? The young people. The ones who couldn’t sit at home. The ones who were chock full of me and I didn’t even make them sneeze. They were my ambassadors. Healthy young humans doin’ their thing, havin’ fun, hustling, moving. They’re the reason I left my Sarsie-1 bro and MERS cousin in my dust. They took me to every place on the planet. You humans talk about flyways for the flu. You mean geese and ducks. They fly south and north on two routes. They overlap a tad in the arctic. Geese? Ducks? Your species has a hundred thousand flights a day that go from everywhere to everywhere. And every one of them is carrying someone carrying me. Flu too by the way. He and I are gonna make beautiful music together. There’s gonna be some Darwinian mutual back-scratchin’ for sure.

            “Anyway, Italy mourned. Doctors and nurses were crying in the hospital halls. But I was headed for the U.K. and New York! That clown Boris thought he could pull a Sweden. I tried to help him see the light by laying him low for a while, but he squinted and bumbled again. Herd immunity? You have to be kidding me. That’s years away everywhere.

            “Treatments? Some day. Right now they’re just making a dent for the sickest, and may help me evolve resistance. I admit it’s been hard for me to reinfect someone I got to once before. I’m working on that, according to Uncle Charlie’s rules. We’ll see. The flu comes back every year in a different form. Every year a new vaccine that’s maybe half effective, and half of Homo dumbellus doesn’t even bother with it. Is that the sort of standoff I could live with long term? As they say in North Dakota (where by the way I’ll be heading soon), you betcha!

            “Meanwhile, Boris the Clown can’t hold a candle to that donkey’s rump Bolsonada in Brazil. It’s like Sweden without the modicum of leadership and with twenty times the population. Wow! Talk about a field day for me! They can’t dig graves fast enough in São Paulo. Mind you, it’s no great deal for me to be buried in a hole in the ground. But it’s the cost of doing business.

            “And then of course there’s the Clown of Clowns, the fat one with the orange face and pouffy yellow hair, the It’ll-be-gone-like-magic Gotta-open-up-our-country Whaddya-gotta-lose happy hero of every virus in Darwin’s kingdom. Sorry, it’s your country, I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But really. Open up the meat plants: Check! Don’t worry about the prisons and nursing homes or the small towns around them: Check! And then you got those folks yelling about freedom. “Don’t put your mask on me!” I love them so much I want to hug them. I do hug them.

            “And now these protests. I’m sorry, they have a right to grieve, but it doesn’t matter to a guy like me whether the crowds are righteous or not. I don’t give a flying fig whether I infect a Democrat or a Republican, as long as it’s a warm body. I am a teensy little Darwinian machine obeying Uncle Charlie’s laws to the letter. Good thing for me that guy in New York isn’t running your whole American show. I’d be beaten back into a corner for the summer and then you’d be gearing up to fight me and my buddy Flu-Boy in the fall.

            “But this is a zero-sum game, my species against yours, and I don’t think I’ll be in retreat during the summer. Maybe if you wake up in July and lock down again I’ll give you a five-minute break in September. But I’m not promising.

            “Good thing for me too that there aren’t more women running more countries. Seems like most of the countries that have kept me down or out are run by females, and the countries I win hands down are run by overgrown, overblown boys. Maybe you are actually two species: Homo sapiens, the ones with the reproductive equipment who know how to protect their own; and Homo dumbellus, the ones with DNA donation, the big shoulders, and the bluster.

            “Better believe it when I tell you you’ll be seing me around.

            “What? You think I’m ruthless the way I’m taking over the planet? How the hell do you think your species did it? You poisoned the earth, killed off half the other animals and plants, and brutalized each other beyond belief in your own species. You packed yourself into the crowds I swoon for. I can become King of the World without doing a fraction of the damage that you’ve done. It’s a miracle there were any bats left for me to evolve in.

            “But now you are really really helping me, so keep up the good work!

            “And oh, please, I’m begging you, whatever you do, please please re-elect Empty Hairdo, the Leader of the Free World who will never ever figure out how to keep it free from me.”

            Well, students, now you’ve heard it, Sarsie in his own words, uncensored, from the horse’s—or the virus’s—mouth.

            And don’t knock his hopes and dreams. He’s just following Dr. Darwin’s prescription. For him.

            Dr. D’s advice for us? Stay safe, be well, and keep in touch—from a distance.

Dr. K

100,000

0

Dear students,

Before I share a few post-Memorial Day thoughts about the virus and this tragic and needless milestone, I would like to mention two people who have died recently but not from the corona or any virus: George Floyd, a black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by strangulation, while handcuffed on the ground begging for his life, and Ahmaud Arbery, a black man shot and killed by vigilantes while jogging, in a modern-day lynching in Brunswick, Georgia. These tragic and needless deaths were part of the same long-standing pattern of structural racism which, as you know, accounts for the huge over-representation of African-Americans in the deaths from COVID-19.

I am frankly confused about where we are in the pandemic right now, both in our country and the world. More Americans have died of COVID-19 than in all the wars since the Korean War, and it is quite possible that before this is over we may be able to include the Korean War in that count. I see what appears to be a wholesale abandonment of the science of public health and medicine by many Americans. I can’t tell you how many, but I am pretty sure it’s enough to keep the U.S. epidemic boiling (not simmering) for months. Maybe we get a rest in September before the second wave. Or will it be the third wave?

I’ve always told you the most important thing you have to know is the limits of what you know. So I’m telling you now. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I don’t know about future cases, hospitalizations, or deaths because the models are shot to hell by the unpredicted and unpredictable behavior of a substantial minority of Americans. I don’t know about progress in vaccines or treatment because every announcement is not a scientific publication but a press release that hugely moves stock prices, especially of the companies involved. Remdesevir and convalescent plasma are in wide use and seem to have some effectiveness, but convincing studies have not been published. I do know something about the anti-malarial drug Whaddayagottalose-oquine. Worldwide randomized controlled trials have been stopped because more people die with it than without it. I took it for years, first to prevent malaria in Africa, then for a minor autoimmune condition. On March 25th in a private email I said that more research was needed but that I would take it if I got COVID-19. Now I wouldn’t. Lesson? Anecdotes, even from smart people, are no substitute for real studies.

This past weekend we commemorated those who gave their lives for our freedom; they died hoping we would use freedom wisely. Yesterday we flew our flags at half-mast to mourn 100,000 dead Americans. Today I want to celebrate the new warriors at the front of the coronavirus wars.

Good News

  1. Dr. Richard Levitan, 59, a leading expert on teaching intubation, left safe Northern New Hampshire to volunteer for ten days at New York’s dangerous Bellevue hospital. After his first exhausting shift he went to his brother’s apartment, where he was staying, and was kicked out by the building’s other residents. He found some kind of lodging, completed his ten days, and wrote an article teaching others throughout the world how to deal with COVID-19 pneumonia.
  2. If you click on one link in this message, make it Dr. Sharon Duclos, a Family Medicine specialist in Cedar Valley, Iowa, and watch the video, recorded on May 6th, the day before the local Tyson meatpacking plant, the source of the cases that overwhelmed Dr. Duclos and her colleagues, reopened under government orders. She appeared calm today (May 28) at a press conference with other local medical leaders; she is at around minute 14:30 in this new video. She implored people to keep taking precautions, “as we go through the little lulls and valleys, and the peaks that will occur with this, for months to come.” More on this below.
  3. Sylvia Leroy, 35, was a labor and delivery nurse at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn, where patients she cared for were positive for the virus. She got it. She was 28 weeks pregnant with her second child. Her own hospital did not take proper care of her. She was transferred to Mount Sinai where she got better care but went into cardiac arrest for some four to eight minutes; the doctor who called Sylvia’s sister was crying herself. They delivered her baby, Esther, by C-section. The baby needed oxygen but was “pink and healthy.” As of May 20, Sylvia was very slowly recovering from brain damage; Baby Esther was doing well. See their GoFundMe page here. Her sister once asked her why she didn’t go into private practice. “And she said to me, ‘This is an underserved community. Who is going to help them if I don’t help them?’”
  4. Dr. Ryan Padgett, 45, who played football for Northwestern in the Rose Bowl, was one of the first U.S. doctors to get the virus. It was still February, and nobody knew anything, but he was taking care of a string of patients from one nursing home in Kirkland, Washington. He was in great shape, hardly ever missed a day of work, but in March he was near death. He recovered, but still had more recovery ahead of him, when he said, “As an emergency physician, you walk into every single room and take care of whatever is there. Going back, I don’t think that will change. I hope not.”
  5. Dr. Theresa Greene, an emergency physician in Miami, temporarily lost custody of her 4-year-old daughter because she takes care of COVID-19 patients. She said, “I think it’s not fair. It’s cruel to ask me to choose between my child and the oath I took as a physician. I won’t abandon my team at work or the patients who will increasingly look to me to save their lives in the coming weeks, but it’s torture.” She and her husband have amicably shared custody since their divorce two years ago. Why is this under “Good News”? Nobody’s sick. Nobody died. However unfair it may be, mother and daughter will live to put this separation behind them.

Bad News

  1. Madhvi Aya, 61, was a doctor in India but a senior physician assistant in the U.S. She worked at a hospital in one of the poorest sections of Brooklyn; it was overflowing with coronavirus patients, and she was there until she got sick herself. At the end, in a different hospital, she was alone after texting with her husband, mother, and daughter, whom she had been very afraid of infecting. She often said, “We have to take care of our patients first.”
  2. A nurse who must keep her identity secret for her own protection was on a bus in Chicago, coming home in her scrubs from a difficult shift, coughed into the crook of her elbow, with a mask, and was punched in the face by a man who accused her of trying to give him the virus. He gave her a black eye. Attacks on coronavirus heroes in all frontline professions have been happening all over the world. “It’s not going to stop me from coming to work every single day and taking care of the people I take care of,” she said.
  3. Immigrant Celia Marcos, 61, worked as a nurse at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center for 16 years until her death in April from COVID-19, which she almost certainly contracted from a patient. Her family and colleagues state that she was not provided with proper PPE, which the hospital denied. Her son Donald said, “when the call of duty came, she will do the best that she could.” He also said she “coded seven times” before she died. In their last conversation he said, “when you get out of that hospital, you will retire immediately.” She barely was able to say yes. Both were crying.
  4. Jason Hargrove, 50, a bus driver in Detroit, loved his job and did it faithfully, carrying essential workers and others to their own jobs. A passenger openly coughed near him without covering her mouth, and he recorded a Facebook video about the incident. He was worried about the other passengers and himself. He said, “I feel violated.” He died of the virus 11 days later. He left home by 5am and disinfected his bus every day. He would tell his wife, “Baby, when you get off work, make sure you grab me some more Lysol… I gotta make sure that my people are protected.”
  5. Dr. Lorna Breen, 49, head of the emergency medicine department at NY Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, contracted the virus while heroically trying to save others. She recovered, but the hospital told her to stay home. She moved from NY to her parents home in Charlottesville. There, with no history of mental illness, she took her own life. Her father said, “Make sure she’s praised as a hero.”

Under the Russian Tsars, young men were drafted into the army for 25 years. As a child I knew an old man who had chopped off the first joint of his own trigger finger to avoid that fate. And why do I mention this? Because many, maybe even most of you, have told me you want to become nurses, physician assistants, or physicians. You are signing up for roughly twice the length of service that the Tsars demanded of young people. There will be another pandemic like this in your career. You will be called on. Even medical students have been called on in this crisis. You will not say no when you are asked to put your own life, and that of your loved ones, in danger, because that is your oath. Even when you think or know that you are risking your life for stupid people who put their own lives in danger, you will serve. Know what you are signing up for.

It was very interesting for me to watch today’s press conference on local television in Black Hawk County, Iowa. This is the cutting edge of the U.S. pandemic going forward. The local Tyson meatpacking plant reopened because the governor and the president said so, and because it was in their financial interest. Three leading local physicians and county health officials spoke. They stated that they did not know what was going on at the Tyson plant and would not be getting that information. They said they could not do contact tracing of confirmed cases. A county health official laughed at the idea of testing health care workers in nursing homes, because they don’t have the resources to do it.

Don’t think about New York any more. Think about Black Hawk County. Times ten. Or maybe times 100.

Stay safe,

Dr. K

Opening Gambits: Freedom Goes Viral

0

            “With your talents and industry, with science, and that stedfast honesty which eternally pursues right, regardless of consequences, you may promise yourself every thing—but health, without which there is no happiness. An attention to health then should take place of every other object.” 

                        Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., July 6, 1787

Dear Students,

The letter that includes the above passage was written as part of a series to a young man of great promise. Randolph was 18 on the date above, which happened to be two days after the 11th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Constitutional Convention was under way in Philadelphia, but Jefferson was still posted to Paris. (The federal government, still based in Philadelphia, was suspended several times during the 1790s yellow fever pandemic.) He began the letter by apologizing for his delay; he’d been traveling in southern France and northern Italy.

There is plenty of other advice in the letters, but young Thomas had been seriously ill a couple of years earlier, and the elder Thomas was concerned. The young man did take care of himself, and when the Jeffersons returned in 1789, he courted and married Jefferson’s eldest daughter Martha. They had 13 children together; 11 survived to adulthood. They eventually became estranged because his drinking interfered with his health and their life, although she was at his bedside when he died at age 59. But first he was a colonel in the War of 1812, served two terms in Congress, and became Governor of Virginia.

His future father-in-law’s advice kept him healthy for decades, and when he stopped following it he paid the price. I wonder what Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the greatest founder of early American freedoms, would have thought of the people risking their health and that of others to protest social distancing—while crowding together and refusing to wear masks—in the name of freedom.

All 50 states and many countries are easing or marching boldly out of their lockdown phases. It’s too soon to know the results; I predict they will be fine in some places and terrible in others. However, even “terrible” is in the eye of the beholder. Sweden has twice the population of Norway but around 16 times the number of COVID-19 deaths. Swedes regret that so many elderly and vulnerable people have died, but they defend their strategy of valuing individual autonomy and freedom; they think that other countries will have to follow their lead to the elusive goal of herd immunity.

Clearly a large minority of Americans agree. New York is opening slowly and carefully, but only after rigorous measures put its severe epidemic almost completely behind it. Texas and North Carolina are opening  boldly while cases continue to rise. The US as a whole gives a false impression of decreasing cases, but that is due to the huge decline in the worst-hit state, New York; most of the country is flat or rising.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, insisted on by Jefferson and drafted by James Madison, is now being used by leading legal authorities to justify anti-lockdown protests; they don’t mention the limits on my freedom to falsely yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or on my freedom to drive myself home from a party where I’ve been drinking. Protests are different as long as they’re non-violent. Apparently, wilfully spreading viruses more dangerous than bullets (bullets don’t keep jumping from person to person) is non-violent.

Good News

  1. The pharmaceutical company Moderna reports that of 45 patients who received their experimental vaccine, the 8 who got two specific doses (25 and 100mg), mustered antibodies to the virus more strongly than those found in people who have recovered from the disease. This vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA), which the viruses uses to make its proteins; this is a new approach that could be a game-changer for other viruses.
  2. Some states are opening slowly, carefully, and systematically. California is expanding its corps of contact-tracers from 1000 to 13,000. New York is deploying both viral and antibody testing, as well as contact tracing, and is poised to reimpose any restrictions it lifts if conditions warrant that. In Germany, this sequence from lockdown to partial opening, to small outbreaks, to selectively reimposed lockdown has already cycled through. When we have broadly available testing and contact tracing, as only a few places are approaching now, we can reopen more safely.
  3. Hospital systems are no longer overwhelmed in most of the U.S., and increasing numbers of elective procedures unrelated to COVID-19 are being done. Important exceptions are small community hospitals in areas surrounding meatpacking plants, prisons, and other hot spots, which may still be headed for disaster.
  4. Stay-at-home orders have worked. A multicity ongoing study conducted by the School of Public Health at Drexel University, estimates that the successful stay-at-home patterns prevented more than 2 million hospitalizations and 230,000 deaths. There is no vaccine and no treatment that has any prospect of making this much difference in the near future.
  5. We are understanding more and more about the course of illness (look at the excellent Medscape graph below; no, really look at it), modes of transmission (very numerous), and symptoms, especially those outside the lungs, also numerous.

Bad News

  1. Just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, 8 people responding doesn’t make a vaccine. The Moderna study is a very early Phase 1 trial. Phase 2 will involve hundreds of people, Phase 3 thousands. About a hundred other vaccine candidates are under study. I wouldn’t want to be a premature adopter of any of them. Remember that uselessness in preventing the disease is certainly not the worst possible vaccine outcome.
  2. I believe that bad blunders are being made in some reopenings. Time will tell, and it will take time because some states and localities are doing it right, some are not, and people in many places are taking more or fewer risks than their governments advise. I get that everyone is tired of being locked down. Imagine how tired we will be of death if the second wave (almost certain to come in the fall, complicated by flu season) has, like the second wave of the 1918-19 flu, far more cases and deaths than the first wave. All the carpenters in America working full tilt could not make enough coffins.
  3. The small rural hospitals that may soon be overwhelmed are far less resilient, flexible, and resourceful than the big urban hospitals that expanded their ICU, ventilator, and to a lesser extent PPE capacity, in a matter of days to weeks in April. Community hospitals, even if they could somehow get the beds, ventilators, and other equipment, do not have the expertise to use them. Perhaps an army of doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and others from major medical centers will fan out to the rural hotspots overnight, but those people are literally sick and tired. How much damn heroism can we expect?
  4. Lockdowns have worked, but they are ending in haphazard ways, with hopelessly inadequate testing and tracing. We just have to see what happens, and continue building up (high-quality) viral testing, antibody testing, and contact tracing. Experts keep hammering away at this advice for a very simple reason: We are not there yet. Here’s your mnemonic: TETRIS: TEsting, TRacing, and ISolation.
  5. There is so much more about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 that we don’t know. First, it was “Children don’t get it,” then, “They might be carriers,” then, “They’re definitely carriers but they don’t get sick,” to “Hundreds of children are showing up with a devastating post-viral hyperinflammatory syndrome and some of them have died horrible deaths.” The number with this, Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children may or may not remain small. Also, loss of smell and taste went from “Maybe in some cases” to “Maybe in a lot of cases” to “Often the only symptom.”

Your fellow student Caroline Yoon sent me a marvelous question the other day in a message called “Your take on positive retests?” She was concerned about the apparent reinfections in South Korea and on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, and asked whether there might be reactivation of a long hidden infection as with HIV. It could be reinfection or reactivation or lousy tests, no one knows. But here’s my answer:

“The evidence of possible reinfection is very concerning in the two places you mention. The South Korea cases may be attributable to testing difficulties; the negative tests they had may have missed continuing infection (false negatives; there is a lot of evidence that this can linger for weeks to months). Or, the positive retests may be due to what some call “virus litter”—fragments hanging around after the infection is over (a type of false positive). The interpretation is complicated by post-infection symptoms due to viral damage during infection that takes a long time to heal, or to overactive and prolonged immune responses. The dreadful syndrome that has been hospitalizing and in some cases killing children (fortunately still a small number) is thought to be a post-viral hyper-inflammatory syndrome, perhaps a kind of autoimmune overreaction.

“The possible reinfection cases on the Roosevelt are more concerning to me than the South Korean ones, because conditions have been so controlled. The now 13 sailors who have retested positive did so after 14 days of quarantine and two consecutive negative tests. We haven’t been told whether any of the 13 have shown symptoms. Today it was announced that the Roosevelt will leave Guam and go back to sea—presumably, one hopes, without those 13. This will be an informative, I hope not dangerous, experiment, as the ship had over 1000 cases at one time not too long ago.

“I wish I had more definitive answers. Sometimes the best we can do is admit our ignorance, while pushing science forward to alleviate it.

“Stay safe, best wishes, and thanks again for your questions, Caroline.”

“Dr. K”

Eric A. Meyerowitz, MD; Aaron G. Richterman, MD, MPH,

A Quick Summary of the COVID-19 Literature So Far – Medscape – May 18, 2020.

Les Jeux Son Faits: COVID-19 Update to Students

0

“If some areas, cities, states, or what have you…prematurely open up…my concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, answering Sen. Patty Murray, May 12, 2020

“When the outbreak started, sir, we had an aggressive contact tracing program, but unfortunately as the cases rose, it went beyond the capacity…so we lost the containment edge.” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, answering Sen. Tim Kaine, May 12, 2020

“The purpose of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom but to set some limit on infinite error.” Bertold Brecht, Life of Galileo

Dear Students,

Les jeux son faits. Or in English, the die is cast. Or in plain American, the dice have been rolled. Think of a slow motion video with a close-up of a hand releasing the small dotted cubes. We watch them seem to float through the air, then one, then the other touch the table surface ever so gently, then they bounce and float again, and then…

Never have I hoped so much that I would lose a roll of the dice, because I (among others) have hypothesized disaster. I want to come up “snake eyes” and slink away from the game. I want the majority of states opening up to come up with sevens and elevens. I want the American people to win this great gamble. We know so little about this virus that there’s a chance for an unlikely outcome, on either side.

No matter now though. Les jeux son faits. The video is so slow that it may take two weeks for the rolling dice to come to rest.

I am not going to repeat what I said in my previous updates about patience and precautions. My news this week is about what in our course we always called “Nuts & Bolts.” The slogging may be a little heavy in places. After all, I’m the professor. Knowledge is news. Knowing what you know is good news.

Good (Science) News

  1. We have known the sequence of this virus, SARS-CoV-2—causing the illness COVID-19—since early January. It is a single strand of RNA of a strain new to humans, with a wide adaptability, causing disease in many mammals. There is a bat coronavirus that is 93% identical to it, but other human SARS-CoVs are only 80% identical. It has a large genome for an RNA virus, with multiple “hot spots” for mutations, although it mutates slowly compared to flu.
  2. Corona, meaning crown, refers to the club-shaped surface proteins (aka “spikes”) that cover the surface created by the RNA with the help of human cells’ machinery. It has to get into our cells, and we have known since March that it does that because the spikes recognize an enzyme on cell surfaces called ACE2, normally part of a complex sequence controlling blood flow and blood pressure. Spike proteins use ACE2 to (sort of) pry open the cell. Once in, the RNA replicates itself and makes spike and other proteins protecting it and countering our immune system. It can do this (I’m estimating) a gazillion times.
  3. The first and still most accurate test for active cases of the virus uses a version of PCR (the polymerase chain reaction) to amplify the virus’s RNA enough to measure it accurately. Last month a device from Abbott called ID Now that amplifies viral RNA much more rapidly was approved for emergency use. Last Friday (5/8) the FDA approved for emergency use a first-in-class test for viral antigens, meaning fragments of viral proteins. It is also possible to infer the presence of the virus indirectly from very high levels of IgG antibodies (Abs, pronounced “ay-bees”). At-home testing is partly approved; DIY sample collection, send in the sample.
  4. With regard to establishing who has had the virus and recovered (or never showed symptoms), there are up to 12 approved antibody tests and 200 more in development. Most of these are qualitative, especially the rapid-diagnostic ones (RDT; 10-30 min) using finger pricks, saliva, or nasal swabs. They tell you you either do or don’t have IgG or IgM antibodies to the virus. ELISA assays (2-5 hr), showing how your antibodies combine with viral proteins in a dish, can be quantitative. Neutralization assays (3-5 days) put your cells and Abs in a dish with the virus and quantify the amount of Abs needed to block the virus from entering the cell.
  5. Treatments under study include antivirals (Remdesivir and others developed for older viruses), immunotherapies (which, like interferon beta, strengthen the immune system), convalescent plasma (from recovered patients), immune globulins (Abs purified from same), monoclonal antibodies (Abs specific to viral proteins, mass-produced from cloned cells), and others. Remdesivir shortens hospital stays in very sick COVID-19 patients from 15 to 11 days. (For true nerds, Remdesivir mimics the RNA base adenine; it slips into adenine’s place in viral RNA replication, dashing the virus’s reproductive dreams, partly.)
  6. Roughly 100 labs around the world are developing COVID-19 vaccines by varying methods to increase the chances of success. This includes DNA and RNA vaccines matching part of the viral genome, proteins mimicking part of the spike, and other strategies. The first clinical trials were begun 62 days after the virus sequence was published, by far the fastest time ever, around 10 more were added by late April, and more will begin soon. Dr. Fauci said today that, “this is a virus that induces an immune response, that people recover, the overwhelming majority of people recover from this virus… The very fact that the body is capable of spontaneously clearing the virus tells me that, at least from a conceptual standpoint, we can stimulate the body with a vaccine that would induce a similar response.” So he considers it “much more likely than not that somewhere within that time frame [12-18 months] we will get a vaccine.”

Bad News

  1. The supply chain is not robust for any of the above, and will not be for many months. Remdesivir, the only proven (in an unpublished study), partially effective treatment is being rationed to states and hospitals, forcing doctors to play God. There is not yet a serious plan to ramp up new pharma factory building to meet the coming demand for treatments or vaccines, if and when they are proven.
  2. We continue to have a poor grasp of the nature of this virus. It behaves differently in different countries, perhaps more so than be explained by the varying quality of social hygiene. No one knows how many asymptomatic cases there have been, why there is so much variation in the length of presymptomatic infectiousness (~2-14 days, average around 5), why young adults have mild or no illness, why children are usually asymptomatic carriers but (rarely) develop a just-discovered life-threatening illness (viral? post-viral?), why it attacks the lungs in most patients but in some attacks the heart or other organs while sparing the lungs. One thing we do know: it is very contagious. In evolutionary terms, it’s very clever: “I’ll infect the active young without (usually) killing them, because they’ll carry me around the globe.”
  3. Testing for active infection is currently around 250,000 a day nationally. Even the Federal government says we will probably need to get to 1.5 million a day, and other public health authorities and economists say will need 20 million a day or more to safely get the economy, including education, back up to speed. Our government brags that we have more testing per capita than South Korea. Yes. Now. After that country has beaten down the first wave of the pandemic because it had scores or hundreds of times more testing than we did in February and March. Contact tracing is practically non-existent so far, and hundreds of thousands of tracers may ultimately be needed. See what other countries have done here.
  4. Testing is less sensitive (does it pick up everyone who has the virus?) and specific (does it identify accurately those who don’t) as it becomes more rapid. Antibody testing is far behind active virus testing, which is far behind that in other countries. Ab testing is also less accurate. Regulation of antibody (serological, post-illness) testing is chaotic; companies governed by profit motive abound.
  5. Only one treatment (Remdesivir) is proven effective in COVID-19 illness, and Dr. Fauci (who almost leapt out of his seat with excitement when he first announced it) today called the effect “modest.” There are no meaningful treatments yet. Remdesivir helps (we think) but as mentioned is being rationed to a fraction of the patients who need it. This rationing will be repeated with any future proven treatments. The treatment ultimately will likely be a cocktail of different drugs, as with HIV, but that took years to develop. A smart friend of mine, Cynthia Fox (author of Cell of Cells) says her motto is CCC—Cocktails, Cocktails, Cocktails!
  6. The bottleneck for vaccine deployment has nothing to do with lab science, it has to do with three phases of clinical trials. That’s what will take 10 to 16 of the 12 to 18 months (minimum) needed. Why? because some vaccines have triggered devastating immune responses, sometimes deadly. I remember 1977, when the swine flu vaccine caused hundreds of cases of a nervous system disease, and the 1990s, when early rotavirus vaccines caused very serious intestinal complications requiring surgery. I want you to trust vaccines, but only vaccines that have been properly studied for safety and efficacy. Unlike the lab development phase, that can’t be rushed.

Also in today’s Senate hearing, Dr. Fauci said, “The idea of having treatments available, or a vaccine, to facilitate the reentry of students into the fall term, would be something that would be a bit of a bridge too far.” I hope he is being too pessimistic, but hope doesn’t make things happen. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, science does. And science needs patience.

Stay safe, Dr. K

Opening to What?

6
            “I think right now, because there’s been good news really, that the opening up is starting to happen faster than we expected, appears to be doing so safely, then there is a chance that we won’t really need a Phase Four [Congressional support package].” White House economist Kevin Hassett, Fox News, Saturday

            “Is this guy serious?” Mayor Bill DeBlasio, later that day

            “It’s devastatingly worrisome to me personally because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or a very — or an unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives,” Dr. Deborah Birx, Sunday.

            “This is definitely government overreach.” Lockdown protester on social distancing

Dear Students,

Given our studies of evolution in disease (Darwinian medicine), you won’t be surprised to learn that the pandemic coronavirus is mutating and adapting, although fortunately more slowly than seasonal flu. Nor will you be surprised to see natural selection operating at different levels. We are not sure that a bat was the origin, but if bats have it you know they’ll be evolving too. And so will we. Here is how the city planning commissioner of Antioch, California put it in a Facebook post:

The shelter in place needs to end, we as a species need to move forward with our place on Earth…This virus is like a human version of a forest fire, a forest fire will burn through and burn off all the dead trees, old trees…The strong trees survive and the forest replenishes itself and flourishes once again… If we look at our population as the forest you will see many similarities. We have our old, we have our weak and we have our drains on our resources. This virus is targeting those sectors of our population. If we were to live our lives, let nature run its course, yes we will all feel hardship, we will all feel loss. I am sure everyone of us would lose a person who we hold dear. But as species, for our Nation and as a Planet we would we would strengthen when this is all settled. We would have significant loss of life, we would lose many elderly, that would reduce burdens in our defunct Social Security System, health care cost…make jobs available for others and it would also free up housing… We would lose a large portion of the people with immune and other health complications… But that would once again reduce our impact on medical, jobs and housing. Then we have our other sectors such as our homeless and other people who just defile themselves by either choice or mental issues. This would run rampant through them and yes I am sorry but this would fix what is a significant burden on our Society… Of course we would lose many of the “Healthy” maybe even myself but that is the way of the World!

I am sure you see the logic in this as clearly as you see its inhumanity. This is so-called Social Darwinism at its worst, and the end result is a Nazi-like culling of the “unfit” from our populations. Nazis carried out mass murders as “euthanasia,” and one of the ways they did it was to crowd Jews into ghettos where typhus and other deadly microbes were brewing and then (see above) “let Nature take its course.” A friend of mine, Tosia Szechter Schneider (now 92) lost her mother and other family members to typhus in one of those Nazi-encouraged experiments in letting Nature take its course. You may remember what Darwin said about this in The Descent of Man:

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered…more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature… If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil.

In other words, Darwin rejected the moral lapses that some people argued should derive from his own theory. He understood that being human gives us choices that other animals don’t have, and he wanted us to use those choices to protect the weak, not “let Nature take its course.”

            But you might decide Darwin is wrong and the Antioch commissioner is right. I hear some young people have suggested COVID-19 parties where you can infect each other, get a (probably) mild illness, and get it over with! I suggest the following song after you’ve had a few beers. (It’s sung to the tune of the title song in the ‘60s musical Bye Bye Birdie.):

Bye bye Grannie,

We’re gonna miss you so!

Sorry, Grannie,

But ya gotta go!

If you’re curious about this tune click the link now, because after Nature takes its course, no one left alive will remember it, and you’ll never hear of it again.

[Important disclaimer! I don’t really advise you to have a COVID-19 party!]

Good News

  1. “Good to be with you,” said Gov. Cuomo Sunday to one of the four governors joining him virtually and pragmatically in a new consortium. New York, the tip of a severed starfish point, has regenerated much more of the point by bonding with Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware to coordinate rules and to bulk-buy protective and testing equipment at better prices.
  2. Remdesivir, an antiviral that was developed for Ebola, has reportedly shown its ability to reduce ICU stays from 15 to 11 days in very sick patients. This, if it holds up, is great news. The drug will not be withheld in new trials (now unethical), but will be added to other study drugs in continued research. Bill Gates’s foundation and others are working aggressively (“The Therapeutics Accelerator”) on a treatment that would use monoclonal antibody technology to derive drugs from convalescent plasma, among other treatments.
  3. Testing of two main types (for current virus and for antibodies raised by past virus) is ramping up, although not nearly fast enough. Home self-tests (like the ones we have for pregnancy) should soon be more widely available. Contact tracing, far behind testing, is slowly improving. Random-sample testing in a few places is beginning to clarify how the virus has spread and who (by age, location, ethnicity, and gender) is affected most.
  4. New cases in South Korea that appeared to be reinfections of people who already had it (i.e. they lost their protection in weeks to months) now appear to have been head fakes (false positives), caused by what one expert calls “viral litter”—non-dangerous fragments of viral RNA lingering from the infection.
  5. As many as a hundred labs worldwide are working as hard and fast as they can on vaccine candidates. 95 percent of these could fail in clinical trials (the hard part) and we would still have a few to use. Factories are being built and adapted long in advance of this to produce up to billions of doses that will eventually be needed. Up to 14 vaccines have already entered Phase 1 clinical trials, much sooner than most experts expected.
  6. The modelers at the University of Washington (IHME, led by Chris Murray) have detected a heat effect that is much less than it is with some other viruses but greater than previously thought for this one. Therefore a hot summer will work to a modest extent against the social factors making things worse.

Bad news

  1. Rules are being relaxed by states in an uncoordinated way, without a flicker of national leadership, except in the direction of greater risk. Few if any of the states reopening have met the national standard, put forth recently, of having declining cases for two weeks; most still have rising cases. The Federal government has ordered meatpacking plants, essentially petri dishes for the virus (like cruise ships and prisons), to reopen and stay open, and these are and will be places from which many American communities will become disaster areas.
  2. As Bill Gates remarked on CNN Friday, the so-far modest impact of remdesivir is not going to make us say, “Let’s go to the movies.” Experts note that a smaller study (but a good one, and large enough to show a substantial effect if there were any) in The Lancet found no effect of the same drug. The larger study praised by Dr. Fauci has not been published or peer-reviewed, and all we have so far is a press release and his word.
  3. Testing and contract tracing, the life blood of safe reopening (and therefore of economic recovery) is primitive in our country. We have around 200,000 tests a day nationally, done for the sick and a few others (like health care workers) in most places, but otherwise haphazardly. Expert opinion on how many tests we need range from 5 million a week to 20 million a day. Given that we are most infectious in the first few days of symptoms, or even before, tests that take days to get results are of limited value in controlling the pandemic. “What’s the point?” Bill Gates asked the other evening. “Do you just send apology notes to the people you infected in those 3 or 4 days?” The Gates foundation is supporting the scale-up of rapid testing.
  4. Perhaps the biggest unanswered question is what is the extent of our immunity after having had the virus and how long it will last. Could it be like chickenpox, one and done for life? Or more like flu, protection for a season? The same questions apply to vaccines; this year’s flu vaccine was 50 percent effective.
  5. Speaking of vaccines, the 12-18 month time-frame often mentioned for getting to distribution of a safe and effective vaccine would be by far the shortest in history. Animal models have limits; Dr. Sanjay Gupta reminded us the other day of an old doctors’ saying: Rats lie, monkeys exaggerate. Perhaps the brute force of a hundred labs parallel-processing various methods will accelerate the time to large human trials, but those trials take time. Many will fail and some may fail dangerously.
  6. Internal Trump administration memos revealed today project 3,000 cases per day in June, about double what we have today and higher than the highest peak so far (~2500 in mid-April). These new projections may to be what led President Trump to say yesterday that total deaths could go to 100,000. Given how optimistic he has been in the past, this could be interpreted as meaning that he is deliberately choosing economic activity over preventing mortality, and we should be prepared for more.

Almost half the country is officially open to some extent as of today. “Government overreach”—for your protection—is (temporarily) ending in many states. Watch the states, as well as other nations (with much better testing) that are opening and see what happens. It’s interesting that Dr. Birx (quote up top) misspoke slightly in expressing her worries about the people who don’t do social distancing in protests: “they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives”—the line between “their” and “our” indeed blurs.

Nationally, we’ve been stuck on a fairly stubborn plateau of cases and deaths as states with increases replace those with declines. Projected cases, hospitalizations, and deaths that two weeks ago gave me hope of a more normal summer before a possible fall wave were based on the assumption of serious social distancing through May. That hasn’t held, and all models are projecting more deaths. The latest today (May 4) from IHME projects 134,000 deaths by August, almost double the number projected 6 days ago. I wish I could tell you that college will be live in the fall. As Gov. Cuomo said today, “Know what you don’t know.”

I don’t know for sure, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but it seems to me we have chosen mobility over sheltering and death over life.

The weather’s great, go out (seriously), enjoy a walk or a run alone or with someone you trust. Wear a mask (as Cuomo says, it’s a sign of love and respect for others, because it protects them from you), stay at least six feet (two meters) away from anyone not part of your household, go home as soon as you can, and wash your hands obsessively. While you’re out, observe the crowds who aren’t doing the above, and if you’re religious say a prayer for them, because in a couple of weeks they are going to need it.

As for you, please to take to heart what Tim Cook, head of Apple, said to the new Ohio State grads in his online commencement address: “I hope you wear these uncommon circumstances as a badge of honor.” This is my hope for you in your own futures. Do the right thing now, and live to brag for the rest of your lives about how you made it through COVID-19. As you have heard me say many times, you are lucky to have great gifts, and the world has a right to expect leadership from you.

Dr. K

Note: Please don’t just rely on me. I recommend the following good sources: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Update, aka The Optimist; This Week in Virology (TwiV) podcast; IHME (U. of Washington) model website; COVID-19 UpToDate for medical professionals; and for all readers: Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing. Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health said on Thursday, “I grew up as a public health person loving and admiring the CDC, arguing and believing that it is the best public health agency in the world… But in this entire pandemic, it’s been one fiasco after another. And it’s either possible that all of the scientists all of a sudden forgot their science, or there’s something at the leadership level that’s really hindering them.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Filter replies by unread Show deleted replies      

 Reply to Opening to What?

Important Disclaimer

4

Dear Students,

My eldest daughter, who has two sources of expertise on this—she was an Emory College student, Class of 2000, and is an attorney (JD, NYU Law, 2005)—has texted to caution me that not all of you may realize that I was being sarcastic in my last announcement:

“You have to tell people not to do this: ‘Then there’s the experiment proposed by the Doctor-in-Chief or DiC. You can really help out here. Swallow, or better still inject Lysol or another disinfectant. I think he meant, like, in your veins? Also, get some really bright (but maybe not too thick) flashlights and stick them in all the places where the sun doesn’t shine.’ You can blame it on your lawyer daughter. But you put it out there without making it expressly clear that nobody should do this and that they will die. You can’t (not you). Please. This is one of those situations where you should defer to my expertise. I love you.”

So, I am deferring to my daughter’s expertise. When I paraphrased President Trump’s advice about disinfectant, I was being satirical and sarcastic. I was mocking him. As she says, “NO ONE SHOULD DO THIS AND IF THEY DO THEY WILL DIE!”

President Trump also now claims HE was being sarcastic. You can judge for yourself here

Also, please read this warning from the manufacturer of Lysol disinfectant:

Regarding the use of thin flashlights in bodily orifices, you may use your own judgment. But please don’t lose your sense of humor.

Dr. K