Patients with hypertension, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease are at increased risk of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that originated in Wuhan, China.

Now the debate is clinical use of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs) and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) in patients during the COVID-19 outbreak.

I'm not all that excited about manned missions in space because it is a struggle for NASA to even build a space telescope without going 13 years over budget, but it's worth doing basic research on how an outpost on Luna might be built.

It will require a lot of multi-purposing, and re-purposing. 

Co-authored by by Lauren Philippi, Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences, University of Guelph

In late December 2019 an outbreak of pneumonia cases arose in Wuhan, China. Patients presented with an acute respiratory illness linked to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). COVID-19 is a betacoronavirus, similar to Human Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses. SARS and MERS both cause severe respiratory disease. Although COVID-19 is primarily considered a respiratory virus, there is a strong link to cardiovascular disease.

COVID-19 — by the numbers

I am glad to read that the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt is asking our government to follow the WHO recommendations on COVID19. Not just mass testing, also quarantine and contact tracing, all on an unprecedented scale. His op ed is here:

• Mass testing is the fastest route back to normal life

We can do this. The cobas 8800 by Roche Diagnostics can test 2,500 samples a day.

400 of those machines would test a million samples a day.

The UK’s policy is based on a model such as is used in pandemic simulations. The (simulated) influenza in this model is an upper respiratory tract infection, and is airborne which means you can get it just by breathing the air of someone who is near you. Their simulated disease also has a large population of people who don't show any symptoms and have half the infectivity of those who do have symptoms. These assumptions are not based on real world data for COVID-19 but rather on data for influenza. Influenza and COVID19 are unrelated diseases. Both are respiratory tract infections,but influenza is not a coronavirus.ns is that we are using a simulated flu to guide policy rather than data from the real disease.

Good news - one small Italian town, Vo Euganeo, has completely stopped its outbreak by rigorously testing everyone in the community including those who were asymptomatic. To do that they disregarded a directive from their government to only test those who had symptoms.

Even China didn’t do that, or Singapore. They only tested those with fever or respiratory disease symptoms.

Vo Euganeo is in Veneto which has had consistently lower case numbers than the other provinces and has had the most rigorous approach to case finding.

In a recent post I discussed the conclusions of a study aimed at computing a small but very important correction to the theoretical prediction of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The interest of this lays in the fact that the latter quantity is virtually the only one for which the Standard Model prediction exhibits a tension with the current experimental measurements among all the measurable parameters of the subnuclear world. 

Billions of years ago, an extinction occurred that dwarfed the event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Its history is written in Canadian rocks and show Earth lost nearly 75 percent of its plant and animal species.

But it had a benefit for us. The die-off of microorganisms that shaped the Earth's atmosphere paved the way for larger animals to thrive.

Given the current coronavirus pandemic, the third of the last 17 years, not to mention annual flu and the other infectious diseases we face, it may seem that microbes are unstoppable, but even when biology on Earth was comprised entirely of microbes, they still had enormous die-off events.

How to detect life before complex life even existed

I have sent variations of this email to my local MP, the shadow health secretary, leaders of the main parties etc.

Dear <MP>

Please challenge the government and ask for an evidence based science debate on the basis for their COVID-19 policies.

You can check what I say here with the experts at the WHO.

I have just sent this email to the Prime Minister:

Screenshot

Dear Prime Minister,

Like most writers, Sage Boggs (also on Bandcamp) is a curious guy. At a party he saw there were Triscuits, the snack crackers, and asked why they were named Triscuits.