Kenneth Sable, M.D. contributes to topics such as Emergency Medicine.
Hackensack NJ, The sun is shining, the number of people in New Jersey who are getting sick from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is declining and the beaches are open. Does this mean that the COVID-19 pandemic is over? Unfortunately, the answer is no: Nothing has caused an end to the pandemic, despite the nice weather and the lifting of certain restrictions, so it’s still necessary to take precautions.
“We are still very much in this fight against COVID-19, so now more than ever it’s important to continue to wear face masks, practice social distancing and wash hands regularly to minimize the spread of this novel coronavirus,” says Ken Sable, M.D., southern region president at Hackensack Meridian Health.
Here’s why taking precautions to reduce the spread of coronavirus is still critical:
There’s No COVID-19 Treatment Yet
The Food and Drug Administration hasn’t approved any drugs to prevent or treat COVID-19.
For many, if you get sick, you may get better if you rest at home, take in enough fluids and use acetaminophen to control your temperature. If you become so sick that you need to be hospitalized, there are some treatments, including the antiviral drug Remdesivir, although they’re not effective in all cases.
“One of the best tools we have in fighting COVID-19 right now is practicing social distancing and mask-wearing to reduce your risk of getting sick when there are no treatments that have proven universally effective,” says Dr. Sable.
Experts believe that a COVID-19 vaccine could offer protection against the virus, but at the moment, no such vaccine exists. Researchers worldwide are working to create a vaccine, which may help to bring an end to the pandemic. It may be several more months, or longer, before a vaccine is available.
COVID-19 Cases Are Rising In Certain States
The number of coronavirus cases have been dropping in New Jersey, New York and other northeastern states that were affected early in the pandemic. But coronavirus cases are spiking in certain states that began reopening early, including Texas and Florida.
People who travel to the northeast from states with higher COVID-19 rates may unknowingly bring the virus with them. For this reason, the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut recently ordered a joint travel advisory guiding travelers from several states to quarantine for two weeks upon entering the tri-state region.
The governors are hopeful that quarantining travelers from those states may help to limit the spread of the virus in the northeast.
“It’s possible that COVID-19 cases may rise again in New Jersey, if travelers from other states ignore the requirement to quarantine,” says Dr. Sable. “For this reason, it’s important not to become lax about mask-wearing, social distancing and hand hygiene, even though numbers have dropped.”
What Can You Do To Stay Safe In the “New Normal”?
If you decide to spend time shopping, dining outdoors or visiting your favorite recreation spot this summer, follow advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to lower your risk of getting sick:
stay 6 feet away from people who aren’t in your household
wear a face covering when you interact with people in public
wash your hands with soap and water for 20 seconds when you return home
cover your nose and mouth when you cough or sneeze, then wash your hands
use hand sanitizer when soap and water aren’t available
don’t touch your eyes, nose or mouth if you haven’t washed your hands
The FDA may not have approved a treatment for Covid, but there is over whelming evidence that hydroxychloroquine and zinc is an effective treatment. There is also evidence that Zinc, Vitamin D and possible C help prevent getting sick from the virus. On the other hand there is no proof that extensive, over-use of face masks has any positive benefit. Beware of appeal to authority fallacies and don’t wear a muzzle.
Not if Murphy has his say. There are still small businesses to bankrupt!
Karl Denninger has come out with a great piece at market-ticker.org claiming the current COVID-19 testing regime is now a scam:
“I write on scams all the time and have for more than 12 years. In fact one of my very first articles was on WaMu (the bank) that was running a massive scam by paying dividends with money that didn’t exist (they collapsed, along with a bunch of other banks, about a year later after the government did nothing to put a stop to it.)
“Covid-19 testing has become a scam.
“What was originally intended to inform public policy, public health and individual care decisions has now turned into a monstrous money-sucking rapejob aimed directly at the American public while making so-called “testing” companies such as Quest billions.
“Let me be quite clear:
“No test results that extend beyond a single infectious turn time are useful for informing public health.
“No test results that extend beyond your viral replication peak are useful for informing individual care decisions.
“The entire thing has now turned into a monstrous scam that exists for one purpose only: To rob you of the funds paying for the tests. It serves no personal medical or public health purpose.
“Let’s start with individual care decisions. Only a test that comes back within hours is useful to you as a person if you believe you may have Covid19.
“Why?
“Because without exception interventions (medications) you can take to interrupt or mitigate viral replication become useless once replication is complete. One example is hydroxychloroquine, a drug that in 2005 Anthony Fauci himself said was “the answer” to SARS. Ivermectin is another that may work on the same sort of mechanism. Both, despite the screaming in the press, are extremely safe and have been used for a long time. Ivermectin is so safe that we let non-medical people hand it out in third-world nations; it is a single-dose medication. HCQ is used by some three million Americans with RA or Lupus on a regular basis. While all drugs have risk these are two that have a long-established safety record.
“Once you show symptoms to a viral disease you are at or near the midpoint of viral replication. Within as little as a day — and perhaps in as little as 12 hours — any therapy intended to interrupt that process is a waste of time and money because viral replication in your body is exponential. Any therapy that cannot help you now has no benefits, just as a cloth mask has no benefits, but does have risks. It therefore is worse than useless; it can only do harm.
“There is no point in going to take a test if you do not get actionable information from the test. Within two days or so from the time you show symptoms you will either be improving or you will be in the hospital. If you cannot get results within hours after symptoms appear then the opportunity to intervene in viral replication is gone. In other words your state’s testing system is intentionally causing you to spend money, either directly or through an insurance arrangement (whether through your health insurance plan or by the state paying for it and taxing you for those funds) for no personal benefit whatsoever.
“Let me repeat that: ALL lab (not “10 minute result, point-of-care”) Covid19 tests that do not return results to you within a couple of hours are of no personal benefit to you of any kind because the results will come too late for you to do anything useful with the knowledge they impart. There is exactly zero reason for you to take a Covid19 test if you cannot wait for the results in the parking lot as it will not, with absolute scientific certainty, give you any actionable information.
“Yesterday these labs ran more than three quarters of a million tests in the United States and for all that did not return results within a few hours their value to the person tested was zero.
“Would you accept a “test” for diabetes that didn’t give you results until after your foot was full of gangrene and fell off? That’s what we’re talking about here.
“Delays of more than a day or so also make contact tracing, quarantine and isolation worthless. Why? Because without the result how do you know who to try to trace contacts from, and against whom to issue a quarantine order?
Further, if you are going to get a mild case and you’re not infectious by the time the results come back then a quarantine order issued against you at that point is legally void and is in fact kidnapping or false arrest, a serious felony. Quarantine orders are only valid against infectious persons. You have every moral and ethical right to resist being kidnapped when the person doing so has designed and implemented a pretext said government goon knows is worthless with whatever force is necessary to do so. Indeed, the CDC itself says that if you’re fever-free for 24 hours and 10 days have passed after symptoms began risk no longer exists. So if you felt “off”, three days later you’re actively sick, you go get tested and the results do not come back for a week so long as you have not had a fever for 24 hours any quarantine order is facially invalid.
“Worse, this scam has made contact tracing worthless because by the time you get the positive result and thus trace contacts not only has the person spread the bug to whatever extent they can since they’re no longer infectious but worse, whoever got it from them is likely contagious already and has spread it again! By the time they get the results back from their tests the cycle repeats and the entire scheme is of no value to public health whatsoever. You’ve taken what has a legitimate public health purpose and turned it into a gigantic scam that has no valid purpose; it is simple make-work harassment. Utterly nobody should cooperate with any such “contact tracer” for this reason; it is not that the purpose is invalid it is that the testing delay makes the attempt pointless for the alleged claimed purpose. Unless you have a positive result back within 24 hours tell them all to go **** goats; there is no value in so-called “tracing” at that point.
“And finally such reports make analyzing epidemiological trends impossible other than in retrospect, which is an interesting data analysis exercise after the entire thing is over but tells us exactly nothing about what is going on at the ground-level in a given community right now. The roughly 3-5 day median period before symptoms appear is a latency we cannot change, but adding to it beyond one viral replication time makes any sort of tracking of what’s going on in terms of the evolution of the outbreak worthless to inform public policy response. This in turn makes any so-called mitigations worthless as well since by the time you can determine what they do you’ve trashed the economy and, if there is no benefit, or worse, harm occurs, you have permitted that harm to compound at an exponential rate.
This also leads so-called “health departments” claiming “we need to give it more time” when something is done — which is fine if it works but if it doesn’t then it takes whatever harm is occurring and multiplies it by whatever (Rt * viral period) happens to be in the delay of the results.
…
“It’s time to cut the bull**** and shut it all down. The virus is going to do what it’s going to do; we have no effective response within any part of the government at this point so all we can do is treat cases as they appear aggressively and make damn sure we don’t vector the disease into vulnerable populations. For those who live in the general community and are at high risk go buy a P100 and use it when outside your own home or vehicle; that might work for you personally. We can’t get accurate data, we’re claiming that someone who had a motorcycle wreck was a “Covid19” death, we’re issuing quarantine orders against people who are no longer infectious which destroys their earnings at their job and does direct and serious harm to the economy, we’re “tracing” people for no purpose whatsoever because we sat on the results until after their contacts already got the bug and passed it on themselves and we’re creating a climate of fear porn all over the media in results that are a look back which has no diagnostic or public health value.
“What was a clear attempt to inform both public health and individual care decisions has now turned into nothing more than a scam. There exist today tests that cost a buck or two, can give you results in 10 minutes from saliva and while they’re not as sensitive as a lab test they detect infectious people, which is the entire point.
These are not being sold in Walgreens and CVS right here and now for one reason and one reason only — they stop the scam instantly as they create no record, are personal to you and are also extremely cheap just like a home pregnancy test that can be had for a couple of bucks — and in addition since they’re both cheap and immediate-result they tell people that they need to stay home which will instantly stop transmission and thus collapse the entire so-called “emergency.”
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“Stop the charade.”
No. Cases are increasing already.