SpankyMcFarland

Pulse oximeters are not expensive: BTW I have no financial interest in them. Honest.

The Mountain in Hamilton is what riled me up after Alberta. This little hill, are you serious? I did appreciate warm summer evenings on the deck, though, doing my lizard impersonations. In the places that I have spent most of my time, there’s always a doubt that winter will behave itself and pack its bags.

I know mere mention of the New York Times is liable to send some of you into fits of apoplexy but it has been doing a good job covering the pandemic, in my opinion. Here’s an article that proposes an answer to a central puzzle of this disease: why many people with COVID-19 pneumonia can feel relatively well despite alarmingly low oxygen blood levels and why they suddenly crash afterwards. There’s also a suggestion as to how one might monitor this hazard more effectively in COVID-19 patients:

That is just awful. I hope she recovers.

What I really want is for this whole nightmare to be over with as few of my many vulnerable relatives and friends, and Canadians and humans for that matter, to die from it as possible. As the right-wing journal NRO remarked, stats can tell you many things but look at the direct evidence from New York, Italy and China. This is not the flu.

I’m still surprised Polievre didn’t run. He’s one of the outstanding performers in the House, nearly always speaking in coherent sentences. If the Conservatives win next time, he’ll probably never get a chance to lead his party again.

But it’s a lame example. No Canadian PM would have signed up for TPP once the Yanks withdrew.

There are certain realities about being a North American country other than the US that the former Australian PM doesn’t seem to have fully taken on board. I hope Turnbull mocked Trump at least as much for it was he who scuttled Canada’s involvement in that deal as it stood.

When I read of ”J’ai sera candidate”, strains of Doris Day arose unbidden. As The Beaverton put it:

A Korean wife can be handy these days. Just ask Larry Hogan: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/20/politics/who-is-yumi-hogan/index.html

The first time I heard him on the telly, I though he was a native English-speaker.

I think it’s difficult for people to sue foreign governments. Think of the potential litigation that could occur over various unfortunate historical events.

Patients with COVID-19 have problems in multiple organs beyond the lung e.g. lymph nodes, the olfactory system, the heart and kidneys. Is this simply a non-specific product of low perfusion etc. due to shock or is the virus actively attacking these organs? The jury is still out.

The Times of Israel is a reputable newspaper but there’s very little detail in this claim. As has been noted, the retrospectoscope gives a distorted view of events. If true, this was one piece of info from thousands to be assessed with no red line under it indicating how important it would become.

No, I don’t speak French fluently but I’m not running to lead a major political party in Canada any time soon. I gave you multiple examples of ordinary people who have mastered other languages that are completely unrelated to each other, unlike English and French. Another friend of mine, middle-aged, has learned German and Italian from scratch over the last fifteen years through evening classes (while performing a highly onerous job during the day) and gives medical lectures in these languages. Now he’s learning Arabic. My best friend immigrated to Canada the same time I did and put his four girls in a French-speaking school in Ontario. One went on to earn a degree in France and worked for a French-speaking organization in Ontario. Another translates scientific papers into French and English. At least Harper made an effort to improve. These are political animals; they’ve been dreaming of running the country before they became MPs and they must have known this might come up if things worked out for them. At the very least, I would say ’could try harder’. I’m not expecting perfect Jean Charest fluency here - a heavy accent would be fine as long as they can understand and answer questions.

The other thing we have to hope for is that this virus will evoke immunity lasting a significant amount of time, perhaps years, like its relative which caused SARS did.

Originally, we had no clear idea at all. This virus has only been studied for a few months. Any estimates on mortality rates so far are just that. We knew that the mortality rates would fall as testing got going. Let’s hope we get through this relatively unscathed and better prepared for the big one that’s coming.

Those deaths must be more evenly distributed in time and space - since, when, October and across the US? There is definitely something different about this e.g. health care personnel dying. I don’t think it’s just media hype.

The 'we' here is Canada? I can see this project getting a lot of Canadian travellers, and probably innocent locals too, into a whole load of trouble.

Intelligence services have not prioritized emerging health threats - it's down the list of what they do. Likewise WHO is involved in a multitude of projects and, in addition, depends on the goodwill and co-operation of sovereign governments.

Nearly all native-born Canadian politicians took French in school and it's a closely related language to English. These are verbally adept people. Is it too much to ask them to speak reasonable French? Here are the languages spoken by my last three colleagues apart from fluent English: Afrikaans, some Hindi, a little Zulu; Kurdish, Arabic, some Farsi, a little French; Arabic, Circassian, some French. None would regard themselves as particularly good at languages and they were busy people. Any immigrant who comes to anglophone Canada from outside the anglosphere to work in health care speaks at least two languages, often completely unrelated ones. We can argue about the meaning of fluency in a language - few are perfect in a second tongue - but something approaching the equivalent of the English-speaking ability of most senior francophone politicians would not be an unreasonable expectation for somebody who could be PM.

A peculiar aspect of COVID-19 - people can appear quite well when their oxygen levels are terrible and they may not benefit as much from mechanical ventilation. ‘Proning’ has now become a common treatment:

Prevention is best.

In wars, soldiers are demoted all the time. Some people on the right in South Dakota, like the Governor, have stood by as a COVID hotspot has appeared. They have not handled things well at all. Meat processing plants appear to be high risk operations for transmitting this virus.

Some good news from Stanford on serology testing: