sandy beach

Doc - stay wait for borders to open and roll up your sleeves and do the genealogy research. You will not regret it.

50 day moving average tops the 200 day for the first time since late March on the S&P daily.

China appears to be pulling the markets up which makes no sense. China is having flooding like they haven't seen since 2012. Hubei is submerged. And those flood water are mixing up a toxic brews of viruses. And they don't have a working private flood insurance program.

Weird - well we'll see what the BLS says Thursday.

Pfizer and BioNTech Announce Early Positive Data from an Ongoing Phase 1/2 study of mRNA-based Vaccine Candidate Against SARS-CoV-2

What was the news?

About 40 points to go and the 50-day could get back above the 200-day on the S&P daily. Locally I'm hearing about a lot of people trying to move out of SF and into the suburbs. No idea if they will be successful but wonder what impact that is having on the market.

Chesapeake Energy has filed for bankruptcy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-28/chesapeake-pushed-into-bankruptcy-by-plunging-energy-prices?utm_content=business&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business

Let's not forget the Trump branded vaccine being pushed out in a couple of months - six months ahead of the most optimistic schedule set by actual doctors - royalties of $0.02 per dose and it comes with a "winning" Morse code set in case you get locked-in syndrome and need to communicate with your eye-lids.

No evidence of a less deadly form. However, there is growing evidence that the strain in Italy in New York represents a more deadly form. Hopefully they will contain it soon. Yes, they are making progress but slowly. They recently had very positive results with dexamethasone in clinic trials for severe cases. They have also learned not to put people on ventilators unless every other approach fails. A lot of patients died early on due to premature intubation because they were worried about exposing staff to the virus. Now they use a combination of prone positioning (lying on your stomach) and Low-molecular weight heparin with passive oxygen with good results. We're learning a lot about the immune response that will lead to better treatments but we haven't testing them yet. For example activation of CD8+ T-cells seems critical and deactivation of platelets during the immune response may lead to improved survival. So we may be looking at using CAR-T or other methods to do this in future. The Oxford vaccine is now entering a trail phase involving tens of thousands of subjects in the UK, Africa and Brazil. So we'll have results from that soon that will be significant. Many other smaller trials are underway.

If you look at a key ratio - percentage of people over 65 versus number of ICU beds AZ major cities in AZ are some of the most at risk in the nation. They'll run out of beds quickly unlike many young University towns with research hospitals for example.

The think about deaths is they often lag infections by four weeks and we are still having protesters, migrant works and "going back to business" shoppers and works mingling every day. The most at risk are sheltered still (I hope). So probably younger folks will be getting infected and only later infecting their older relatives and friends in 1 - 2 weeks who will then die 3-4 weeks after that. So we may not see an uptick for a while. Hopefully infections are limited more to the younger cohorts this time now that more people are aware of the issue. But in some communities information is still not getting in.

Quality of life issue for those who are risk is a real thing. This link shows what your brain looks like via MRI images after the SARS-CoV-2 eats it: https://www.rsna.org/news/2020/June/Brain-MRI-Findings-In-COVID-19 Worth a look but not while you are eating. Sit down before opening link. This is the result of direct infection of the brain or of the arteries in the brain. And this is in addition to all the strokes people are having due to thrombosis during disease and up to weeks later. That's an unrelated issue.

The virus can both cause stroke directly as well as infect the brain and cause swelling and brain cell death. He should definitely see a doctor ASAP. The virus causes endothelial cell infection in the blood vessels that leads to micro thrombosis all over the body and organ damage from blood clotting including in the brain i.e. strokes. We've seen a lot of this. It also infects platelets in the blood and monocytes like macrophages that can cross the blood brain barrier directly and infect the brain and cause damage directly. This has been confirmed in brain scans and pathology studies. And it has been found that it can infect nerves from the lungs and move up the nerves. Many of these people will lose their sense of smell, lose sensation or motor control and / or become delirious. Some more serious psychological conditions have been observed after infection but we can't say yet if they are just temporary or if some of these patients had these conditions before infection and were not properly diagnosed. So we still have a learning curve about this. He may need to be put on a blood thinner and he should have a neurologist look for signs of stroke. The strokes often occur weeks after the person recovers due to blood clotting. So he really may need to be put on low-molecular-weight heparin or something else. They should do a full blood workup as well. Considering this is occurring weeks later stroke seems likely.

Thanks for tolerating my lack of self control. I've just been dealing with this since January and having several relatives infected I can say you don't want to get this thing if you are over 50 years of age. Luckily most are slowly recovering. One in her 50's is still having kidney issues. Another who is a musician (guitarist) has lost some motor control of one hand. Hopefully they will recover further but we really don't know for sure.