"Say ‘ahhh’ to the smartphone: It’s a new tool for detecting COVID-19; Sonde Health's app searches for subtle changes in the timbre of a voice" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff, July 9, 2020
A Boston company says it has developed a new way to spot symptoms of COVID-19: Just pick up your smartphone and say “ahhh.”
Sonde Health is one of several companies pioneering a new kind of diagnostic technology that uses “vocal biomarkers.” These are subtle changes in a person’s voice that can be identified by a computer. These changes could indicate the presence of illness — not just COVID, but also other lung and heart ailments, and even anxiety and depression.
That is the kind of GAWD she is talking about, and how absolutely frightening!
It might sound a little too hocus-pocus, but to Amir Lerman, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who is not affiliated with Sonde Health, it makes perfect sense. The voice, Lerman said, “is like any other signal that’s coming from the body. It’s something that you can actually, with the right technology, make as a marker for disease.”
Subtle changes in a person's voice can be anything. Dust, dirt, liquid, solid, anything.
Now a frog in the throat will be diagnosed as COVID by these evil, $elf-$erving mon$ters.
For example, Lerman’s own research has found that changes in the voices of patients can predict impending heart failure, but these days, COVID detection is the hottest market in diagnostics, and Sonde Health is diving in. The company has just launched Sonde One, a service that uses a smartphone app to test a user’s voice for signs of infection. The app is for sale to companies that want to run daily health checks on employees before allowing them to report for work.
The whole COVID-19 control grid is being erected before our eyes, and it sure looks like the Mark of the Bea$t.
David Liu, Sonde Health’s chief executive, stressed that Sonde One can’t diagnose the disease on its own. “We are not telling you whether or not you have COVID,” Liu said. Instead, the software just detects changes in the voice that are consistent with the disease, usually subtle changes that the human ear wouldn’t pick up.
So it's a looting operation meant to further other goals.
App users first train the software by saying “ahhh” five to 10 times into the microphone. This provides a baseline measurement of the person’s voice. From then on, the person simply says “ahhh” for six seconds when prompted by the app. The software searches the digitized voice data for any changes.
I wonder how it will hand an expletive-filled tirade.
For instance, respiratory problems caused by COVID and other illnesses will often lead to changes in timbre, the complex mix of frequencies that gives a unique sound to every person’s voice. Timbre is why a trumpet sounds different from a saxophone playing the same note, and subtle changes in timbre can reveal the presence of an infection, but the voice test is only the beginning. Users would have to complete a questionnaire that checks for symptoms or any recent contacts with infected people. The Sonde One software combines this information with the voice test to decide whether the worker should call the doctor for an actual COVID-19 test.
We are all better off unemployed then.
Is that what the masks are for?
To muzzle complaints over this type of in$ane technological tyranny?
Sonde isn’t alone in trying to track COVID-19 infections through vocal cues. VocalisHealth, an Israeli company with a Boston-based management team, is testing a similar product.
“Like a lot of people, our world changed in February,” said Michael Seggev, VocalisHealth’s chief commercial officer. The company originally focused on diseases ranging from sleep apnea to congestive heart failure, but today it’s all-in on vocal tests for the coronavirus.
“We have developed a vocal biomarker that’s specific to COVID-19,” said Seggev, whose company launched a clinical trial of the technology in Israel in March.
Related:
Meet the Israeli intelligence-linked firm using AI to profile Americans and guide US lockdown policy
She is not the only one who knows about it.
Sonde Health was founded in 2015, based on technologies developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory. The original plan was to measure a person’s voice to detect neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and concussion.
What a relief to know that Military-Industrial Tech is in charge of the show, in case you have forgotten.
About six months ago, Sonde Health researchers began to study illnesses that affect the lungs, like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The company collected 300,000 voice samples from 50,000 people in the United States and India. The samples came from people who spoke seven different languages, but Liu said it didn’t matter; they were analyzing their tones of voice, not their words. Sonde Health ran the digitized samples through an artificial intelligence system that learned to recognize the variations in sound that indicate lung problems.
COUGH!
“There are a hundred different muscles and parts of the body that need to come together for you to be able to speak,” Liu said. If a disease affects any of these body parts, “it’s going to change the physiology of speech, and the sound that you make from your voice.”
Shhhhhhh!
The shift toward studying respiratory illness was perfectly timed; Sonde Health had already completed much of the research needed to bring a product to market, but Liu said that Sonde Health will continue to develop vocal biomarker tests for a broad range of ailments. An unnamed health care provider in India is already using its software to test patients for symptoms of depression.
Oh, yeah, how coincidental!
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Related:
Big Whoop
Better get your BP tested:
"Defying predictions, money still pours into health tech" by Juliet Isselbacher STAT July 08, 2020
Despite forecasts that investment in health technology would dry up by mid-year, venture funding for digital health companies continues to surge.
That is who is driving health care, huh?
Vultures of the wor$t kind.
A report from the health-tech-focused venture firm Rock Health projects that 2020 will shatter annual records for investments, number of deals, and average size of such deals. That counters previous predictions that the uptick in investments seen earlier this year would subside as the pandemic continued to take a toll, but despite the unstable economy, health venture investments are on the upswing, mainly due to an infusion of cash into telehealth innovation. The sector’s funding trend line is now expected to hit a high of $10.2 billion — split between 432 deals at an average of $23.6 million each — by year’s end. In comparison, annual funding reached only $7.4 billion in 2019, down from 2018′s then-record $8.28 billion.
Money is constructing the technological dystopia, and for whose healthy benefit?
The report said that investments did ebb in March and April, probably because prospective investors were spooked by price uncertainty and preoccupied with salvaging their portfolios when the economy took a dive.
After the stock market rallied, however, May and June witnessed a resurgence in investment, launching the investing trends now buoyed by the growing demand for digital health infrastructure — and the relaxed regulations that have come along with it. These regulatory changes include expanded Medicare coverage for virtual visits, loosened privacy policies, and new licensing flexibility.
“While some of these changes may not be permanent, it’s tough to close the barn door after the cat is out of the bag — consumers and providers have experienced the value and convenience of virtual care,” the report states.
Yeah, it's great, and can the mixed metaphors.
Unfortunately, I probably outed myself as an enemy of the state the last time and now slated for destruction. I went off on him on about half of what is here, make clear my stand on the GMO vaccine, so..... I felt liberated, then regretted it, and now, after a while, am at peace with it.
What was I waiting for, the moment before they plunge in the needle to let the $y$tem know I object? Don't doctors need to hear to get these monsters to call off their evil, wicked plans?
Banking on a paradigm shift, investors have poured $926 million into telemedicine companies so far this year, solidifying virtual care’s spot at the top of the best value propositions in digital health.
Almost a billion f**king dollars while our health problems are neglected by telecalls pa$$ing themselves off as an examination.
Of course, now I don't want to be examined anyway.
Digital behavioral health companies have also seen investments soar, most likely because of rising anxiety and continued recommendations for physical distancing in many parts of the country. The sector has seen $588 million in investments so far this year, an amount already surpassing 2019′s total.
Oh, no, no, no. Distance is a wonderful thing.
Headspace, a mindfulness and meditation app, took the lead within its cohort by clinching $140 million in funds. This surge in behavioral health investment — clinical and nonclinical alike — is likely to have staying power post-pandemic, the report’s authors predict.
Oh, I'm sure it will!
On the sector’s future, the authors take a stance of “guarded optimism.”
“While the pandemic appears to have stoked investors’ appetite for digital health companies in particular, their focus could shift in a longer term economic downturn,” they caution. “On the other hand, there’s never been a greater need — or demand — for technology-enabled healthcare.”
They literally want to get into your head at some point, per WEF protocol. What they implant in you will, according to them, let you think freely in a safe space -- meaning they will implant "right"thoughts in your head while eliminating "wrong" thoughts.
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Related:
"Second-quarter profits could prove to be the best ever for health insurance companies as delayed surgeries and doctor visits promise to keep costs in check — for now. If analyst estimates are to be believed, industry bellwether UnitedHealth Group Inc. is poised to show record-high adjusted earnings per share when it reports quarterly results on July 15. Record-breaking profit reports may be in store for Anthem Inc. and Centene Corp. as well, but when Americans resume seeking regular health care services, costs will certainly pick back up for insurers, and while COVID-19 wanes in some places and infections surge in California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona, a recovery in surgical procedures is anyone’s guess. Estimates compiled by Bloomberg suggest third-quarter earnings will drop off from second-quarter highs. Given the uncertain outlook, companies may offer “conservative” forecasts for the rest of the year, RBC analyst Frank Morgan wrote in a note to clients."
Next stop, Alewife:
Another big piece of real estate near Alewife Station on the MBTA’s Red Line is trading hands
The life-sciences developer IQHQ is buying the headquarters of GCP Applied Technologies, in North Cambridge, for $125 million, and expect more lab space to follow soon.
Better get your gear on:
A medical professional put on personal protective equipment inside the Coronavirus Unit at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston on Monday (David J. Phillip/Associated Press).
"Grave shortages of protective gear flare again as COVID-19 cases surge" by Andrew Jacobs New York Times, July 8, 2020
As coronavirus cases surge across the country, hospitals, nursing homes and private medical practices are facing a problem many had hoped would be resolved by now: a dire shortage of respirator masks, isolation gowns and disposable gloves that protect front-line medical workers from infection.
Unlike the crisis that caught a handful of big city hospitals off guard in March and April, the soaring demand for protective gear is now affecting a broad range of medical facilities across the country, a problem public health experts and major medical associations say could have been avoided if the federal government had embraced a more aggressive approach toward procuring and distributing critical supplies in the early days of the pandemic.
That's BS, and I'm sure it's all Trump's fault based on the byline.
Doctors at Memorial City Medical Center in Houston who treat COVID-19 patients have been told to reuse single-use N95 respirator masks for up to 15 days before throwing them out. The country’s largest organization of registered nurses found in a survey of its members in late June that 85% had been forced to reuse disposable N95 masks while treating coronavirus patients. In Florida, some hospitals are handing out only loose-fitting surgical masks to workers treating newly admitted patients who may be asymptomatic carriers.
The inability to find personal protective equipment, known as PPE, is starting to impede other critical areas of medicine, too. Neurologists, cardiologists and cancer specialists around the country have been unable to reopen their offices in recent weeks, leaving many patients without care, according to the American Medical Association and other doctor groups.
“We have kids living with grapefruit-sized abscesses for over three months who can’t eat or drink and there’s nothing we can do for them because we can’t get PPE,” said Kay Kennel, the chief officer of Lubbock Kids Dental, a clinic serving low-income families in Texas that has a list of 50 children awaiting emergency surgery. “It’s been just horrible, and given the growing number of infections here, I’m afraid things are going to get worse.”
Part of the Great Cull of 2020.
In a coronavirus briefing Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence downplayed the shortages, but said the government was preparing to issue new guidance on the preservation and reuse of protective gear. “PPE, we hear, remains very strong,” he said.
Many of the problems of early spring, when hospital workers in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, California and other states first walloped by the virus scrambled to obtain rudimentary protective gear, have only grown. The United States remains dependent on overseas manufacturers and fly-by-night middlemen who have jacked up prices sevenfold amid soaring global demand, according to supply chain specialists and public health experts, who warn that the problem will intensify as the pandemic spreads. The handful of American companies still making protective equipment domestically say they are already at maximum capacity.
All that crap is now made in China.
“It’s been chaos for us,” said Randy Bury, president of the Good Samaritan Society, which has struggled to keep its 200 nursing homes supplied with hand sanitizer, masks and gowns. “The supply chain in the United States is not healthy, and we’ve learned we cannot depend on the government.”
The crisis has reinvigorated calls for President Donald Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act and order American manufacturers to step in and help. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, said this week that he would use that law to boost domestic protection of medical gear if elected.
Our factories are not set up to do that, so it's hollow politicking on his part.
“It’s incredibly frustrating because a lot of attention was paid to the need for ventilators early on in the pandemic, but now we’re realizing that there’s going to be a tremendous ongoing need for simple things like masks, gowns and face shields,” said Dr. Susan Bailey, president of the American Medical Association, which last week wrote a letter to Pence urging the administration to use the Defense Production Act. “We need a national coordinated strategy.”
More Communist centralization is not the answer.
Now take a breath.
In recent weeks, congressional Democrats along with a growing number of governors and medical associations have been urging the White House to play a more muscular role in the production, procurement and distribution of crucial supplies. They are also urging the administration to tackle the flagrant price gouging that has frozen many long-term care facilities, low-income health clinics and small hospitals out of the market.
They should set up a sting!
Trump has resisted using federal powers to address the problem, saying in March that individual governors should find their own gear because “We’re not a shipping clerk.” With the National Strategic Stockpile depleted, states have been left to fend for themselves, though the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been distributing modest shipments of gear to nursing homes and long-term care facilities.
He also knows they will use it against him and say he is a dictator.
At GetUsPPE, a volunteer organization that helps health care facilities and workers find protective gear, demand has been rising sharply in states experiencing a surge of infections. In June, the amount of PPE requested from medical providers in Iowa jumped 440% from the previous month, and more than 200% in Texas and Louisiana.
“I feel horrible for the health care workers and hospitals that are dealing with this,” said Dr. Ali Raja, a founder of the organization and an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. “They are crying out for help.”
Those that are still open and who have jobs.
Members of National Nurses United, the country’s largest organization of registered nurses, said they were worried about the ability of reused masks to filter out virus particles after so much wear and tear. Many are also concerned about the health implications of a chemical decontamination process recently approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration that involves spraying soiled masks with hydrogen peroxide. The FDA has also granted emergency authorization for decontamination procedures that use ultraviolet irradiation and moist heat, though regulators acknowledge that reusing disposable masks is less than ideal.
And you wonder why you can't breath?
“Nurses and health care workers are being forced to reuse masks with an unproven system,” said Deborah Burger, the organization’s co-president. “It’s almost five months into a pandemic in the richest country in the world and we’re putting people’s lives at risk because we don’t have enough PPE.”
The risks are not abstract. More than 900 health care workers have died of COVID-19, according to a tally by the organization, and Burger said many of the deaths have been linked to inadequate protective gear. “There are tools at President Trump’s disposal and he has failed us,” she said. “These deaths are entirely preventable.”
Her politicizing this thing makes me sick.
FEMA has been distributing 14-day supplies of gear to nursing homes, but many providers have quickly burned through the shipments. There have also been widespread complaints about defective equipment, including child-size gloves, gowns without armholes and loose-fitting cloth masks that are ineffective for filtering out virus particles, according to LeadingAge, a national association of nonprofit care providers. The dearth of protective equipment at facilities serving older adults has prompted mounting alarm among public health experts. More than 40% of all coronavirus deaths have been linked to nursing homes and long-term care centers, according to a tally by The New York Times. FEMA said in a statement that it had made changes to most recent shipments in response to feedback from recipients.
When they are around, WATCH OUT!
The national free-for-all to obtain scarce protective gear has favored large hospital chains with procurement professionals and established supply chains, but even deep-pocketed institutions have been rationing masks and gowns. At St. Petersburg General Hospital in Florida — part of HCA Healthcare, a for-profit chain that includes more than 2,000 hospitals, clinics and surgery centers — medical staff members said they were given a single surgical mask each day to make their rounds; only those assigned to the COVID ward were allowed access to N95s, which are kept under lock and key. “If you sneeze in your mask, you still have to wear it your entire shift,” said Barbara Murray, a nurse at St. Petersburg General.
Ah-CHOO!
Murray said medical staff members worried that surgical masks offered little protection when treating asymptomatic carriers of the virus. She said she was increasingly seized with anxiety as the hospital filled up with coronavirus patients, some of them sent from local nursing homes, because staff members lacked even basic protective gear and were unable to care for them.
Then WHY do WE have to WEAR ONE?
Hospital administrators, she said, won’t even allow employees to wear N95 masks they have purchased with their own money. “We’re nurses — we want to take care of our patients and we want them to be safe,” Murray said, “but at the end of the day, we want to go home to our families and know that they are safe too.”
Standard response when it is kill or be killed, and they can't be serious about $ports coming back.
A spokeswoman for St. Petersburg General declined to comment on the hospital’s mask policies but said adequate supplies were available to employees who needed them.
Across the country, private medical offices, especially those without access to group purchasing networks, are struggling to get protective gear on the open market. Even when they can find them on Amazon and other websites, doctors say they are paying up to $7 for N95 masks that sold for less than a dollar before the pandemic.
Is their stock still selling for over $3,000 a share?
“Community physicians have it worse because we are at the bottom of the totem pole,” said Dr. Inderpal S. Chhabra, an internal medicine specialist in New Hyde Park, New York, who recently reopened his office but could see only four or five patients a day because of limited supplies. “Everyone is running around like crazy trying to get N95s, but no one can get them. I afraid for my staff.”
Now I feel bad for unloading on my doctor.
At Arizona Community Physicians, a private health clinic in Tucson, medical technicians are not given N95 masks but they are still required to see COVID-19 patients, who arrive for nonemergency procedures like mammograms, ultrasounds and chest X-rays, according to two employees who asked to remain anonymous for fear they could lose their jobs. The employees say they have been unable to buy medical grade N95 masks online; some vendors have run out of supplies while others say they won’t sell to individuals. “Every day I go into work and I am scared to death — not just for myself, but for my family,” one worker said.
It's almost as if they see you as a weaponized threat.
Arizona Community Physicians did not respond to emails and phone messages seeking comment. A spokesman for the Arizona Department of Health Services said state regulations for protective gear did not apply to private clinics.
That’s not the case in Texas, which requires health facilities to have adequate equipment before reopening. State officials said they had distributed 500,000 respirator masks to dental offices, but Kennel, the chief officer at Lubbock Kids Dental, said her clinic was not among the recipients.
Not helping either of them.
Her employees spend much of their day on the phone trying to calm the parents of children in severe pain. Others show up at the door with their children and beg for help. With dental clinics across the state facing the same problem, the staff can only prescribe antibiotics and tell caregivers to sit tight. Her greatest fear is that an untreated abscess will enter the bloodstream and turn fatal, a preventable death that has claimed dozens of lives in recent years.
“We’re not talking about silver crowns, teeth cleaning or veneers,” Kennel said, her voice choking with emotion. “These are children with severe infections, and there is nothing we can do for them. It’s just heartbreaking.”
Those in charge of this transformation of society care not, more does the pre$$ that is pushing their agenda.
The wars based on lies killed children; why would they give this a thought at all?
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Related:
"The personal protective gear that was in dangerously short supply during the early weeks of the US coronavirus crisis is running low again as the virus resumes its rapid spread and the number of hospitalized patients climbs. A national nursing union is concerned that gear has to be reused. A doctors’ association warns that physicians’ offices are closed because they cannot get masks and other supplies. And Democratic members of Congress are pushing the Trump administration to devise a national strategy to acquire and distribute gear in anticipation of the crisis worsening. “We’re five months into this and there are still shortages of gowns, hair covers, shoe covers, masks, N95 masks,” said Deborah Burger, president of National Nurses United, who cited results from a survey of the union’s members. ‘‘They’re being doled out, and we’re still being told to reuse them,” she added."
At least they stopped tracing your calls, or so they say:
"Contact tracing for coronavirus in Mass. significantly downscaled as leaders report chronic problems" by Kay Lazar Globe Staff, July 8, 2020
Massachusetts is significantly scaling back its first-in-the-nation partnership with Partners in Health to track down people infected by the coronavirus, as the rate of positive cases in the state has held steady at or below 2 percent since mid-June.
That's the same Partners in Health that is funded by George Soros and Bill Gates, with Chelsea Clinton on the Board of Trustees. That's who Baker contracted to do contract tracing.
Hundreds of contact tracers hired since the program was launched in April were recently laid off, and leaders in several cities and towns that collaborate with the Boston-based global health organization have expressed frustrations about problems with the initiative. Some have dropped out.
Governor Charlie Baker said Wednesday that there just wasn’t enough work for the Partners in Health employees who were tracking down close contacts of those infected.
“The number of people who need to be reached out to has dropped dramatically,” Baker said at a news conference. “We eventually had way more people than we needed.”
The Massachusetts program drew national attention when it was launched in the spring. Experts say contact tracing is crucial to help prevent clusters of infections from becoming widespread outbreaks.
BULL$HIT!
Tracers call individuals identified as COVID-19 positive by the state Health Department, and ask about their activities and their close contacts — those who were within 6 feet for at least 15 minutes in the days before the infected person tested positive. The tracers then contact those people and urge testing and quarantining until they know whether they’re infected, too.
How will they figure that out, with one of their awfully inaccurate tests?
See:
"Test results for the coronavirus are taking so long to come back across the United States that specialists say the results are often proving useless in the campaign to control the deadly disease. Some testing sites are struggling to provide results in five to seven days. Others are taking longer. Outbreaks across the Sun Belt have strained labs beyond capacity. That rising demand, in turn, has caused shortages of swabs, chemical reagents, and equipment as far away as New York. The long testing turnaround times are making it impossible for the United States to replicate the central strategy used by other countries to effectively contain the virus — test, trace, and isolate. Like catching any killer, speed is of the essence when it comes to the coronavirus. ‘‘Instead of going from one step to the next, it’s like you’re already stumbling right out of the gate,’’ said Crystal Watson, a public health specialist at Johns Hopkins University. ‘‘It makes contact tracing almost useless. By the time a person is getting results, they already have symptoms, their contacts may already have symptoms and have gone on to infect others.’’ After attending a funeral, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and her family got tested June 29 as a precaution. No one in her family had developed symptoms. A week later, her test results still hadn’t come back, but her husband started feeling ill. So they got a different, rapid test through Emory University. Within hours, Bottoms learned that she, her husband, and one of the couple’s four children had become infected. It wasn’t until the next day that their initial test results arrived. They showed that when the family first got tested, only one of them, a child, had the virus. While they waited for their test results, the boy possibly passed it to his parents. ‘‘It really speaks to the failure of testing in this country right now,’’ Bottoms, a Democrat, said in an interview Friday. ‘‘Had we known we had an asymptomatic child in the house, we would have immediately quarantined and taken all the precautions.’’ Instead, the mayor’s husband, Derek Bottoms, 56, turned feverish and fatigued and experienced night sweats. He lost 20 pounds in a week, Bottoms said."
Yes, test, test, test, trace, trace, trace to prevent another spike in coronavirus infections so we can get out of the house and back to work and stay-at-home orders can be prevented.
Exactly how many tracers and related staff have been laid off is unclear. The Baker administration said in a statement that the program hired and trained nearly 1,900 people, but by mid-June the force was down to about 1,200.
Still way to many.
Need to get it down to 0!
The administration said that after other departures, the program, a collaborative between local communities and Partners in Health, further reduced its team by another 350 people. It said it currently employs more than 700 people, including community health center staff.
With concerns that infections could increase as more businesses and then schools reopen, Baker said Partners in Health has assured him that many of the laid-off workers could be called back if necessary.
I knew they weren't going anywhere. This is more deception from the pre$$.
Local health departments also conduct contact tracing, and the state effort was meant to help with that effort, but the state collaboration with Partners in Health was plagued by problems from its start in early April, according to several local health department leaders. They said widespread computer glitches, gaps in training, and communication struggles led to significant delays in contacting infected residents.
So it would spread!
Public health experts say ideally it should take no longer than three days to connect with and test those who may have been in close contact with an infected person, but some local health leaders said it often took longer than that for Partners just to connect with the initial infected person, delaying efforts to identify and isolate others.
While some of the problems have been fixed, delays and communication issues in the Partners in Health-led collaborative continue today, local health leaders said Wednesday.
“I gave up on [the collaborative] because it’s more of a pain than it’s worth,” said Wil van Dinter, Watertown’s public health nurse. “I handle all the calls myself. I don’t trust them [PIH] or the information they provide.”
He isn't alone there, and I imagine fines will soon be introduced for noncompliance, like in New York:
"Travelers from certain states landing at New York airports starting Tuesday could face a $2,000 fine for failing to fill out a form that state officials will use to track travelers and ensure they’re following quarantine restrictions. New York — hard-hit by the pandemic in March and April — is trying to get more travelers to comply with a June advisory aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19 from states where the virus is now surging. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut last month issued a joint travel advisory that requires a 14-day quarantine period for travelers from a list that now includes 19 states, including Texas and Florida, where COVID-19 appears to be spreading. The advisory includes states if their seven-day rolling average of positive tests exceeds 10 percent, or if the number of positive cases exceeds 10 per 100,000 residents. In New York, airport travelers from those states will now face a $2,000 fine if they leave the airport without filling out the form. Impacted travelers could face a hearing and an order requiring mandatory quarantine, under a new state emergency health order issued Monday."
Who would ever want to go there anyway?
Too often, van Dinter said, the Partners in Health team would return difficult cases to Watertown days after the information about a positive case first appeared in the state’s computer database and was assigned to the PIH team. After giving up on the collaborative, he said, he relied on them again about two weeks ago for cases over a weekend and found the problems persisted.
Van Dinter also said he has doubts about some of the data the collaborative has reported, saying on average the Partners in Health team was finding that each infected person only reported about two other close contacts, but Watertown has been routinely finding at least three close contacts for each infected person.
“If you report way less than what the average public health nurse is finding, then you seriously start having some doubts,” he said.
Yeah, the virus is always more widespread than reported -- meaning the opposite is the likely truth. The Clinton-Soros crowd ignored it because they want people sick so they can track them.
Framingham’s director of public health, Samuel Wong, said in an e-mail Wednesday that his community also opted out of the program.
“Framingham did not participate in the [Partners in Health] initiative partly because of communication issues with [the collaborative] but more importantly, it is because we have adequate local capacity to conduct case investigation and contact tracing ourselves,” Wong said. “Our local team of public health nurses know our community better in terms of available resources, and are able to connect with our own residents more effectively.”
Through telehealth!
Chelsea, which has been a hot spot for infections, has also had problems with the initiative, said Cate Fox-Lent, innovation and stategy adviser to the city manager. She said that while the contact-tracing portion has improved, communication with Partners in Health has not.
“I am frustrated,” Fox-Lent said.
PIH doesn't want to share it with you! It's for their own use!
She said Chelsea leaders have been asking the collaborative for weeks to share aggregate data on the infections in their city, such as the occupations of those infected, and whether there are common threads, such as having children in certain day care centers, or shopping in specific stores, that might help city leaders better target public education and inform decisions about reopening.
“I don’t know what the point of contact tracing is if you are not looking at the big picture,” Fox-Lent said. “Case numbers are really low and now is the time to figure this out.”
Statewide, it’s been a mixed bag for local public health officials, said Sigalle Reiss, president of the Massachusetts Health Officers Association and Norwood’s health director.
“A lot of it depends on the connections between the local health department and the [collaborative,]” Reiss said. “My experience in Norwood has been pretty positive, but I know it has not been that across the state.”
Reiss said that the Partners in Health initiative was a “Band-Aid” during the surge of COVID-19 cases, but that now is the time, during a lull in new cases, to build up local health departments to be prepared for what many expect will be a rise in new cases as more of Massachusetts opens up.
Partners in Health said Wednesday that it’s working to improve operations and ties with local health departments.
“This includes a new team of local health liaisons, starting next Monday and made up of former [collaborative] supervisors, that will be responsible solely for maintaining open lines of communication with local health departments,” the organization said in a statement. It said it is working on “quickly reaching out to new cases on the day a case is received, and contacts within 24 hours.”
That is damn scary considering who is behind it!
Data provided Wednesday by the state indicate the collaborative has ”engaged with” a total of 47,000 people out of 55,000 people it has attempted to reach, an 85 percent engagement rate. It did not further identify what it means by engaging with a person, for instance whether any contact information was obtained.
The state’s nine-month contract with Partners in Health, which ends in December, shows that the Baker administration agreed to pay the organization as much as $55 million.
Oh, at least the Clintons got paid!
The administration also allocated $39 million for two other companies, Accenture and Salesforce, to establish and manage software for the collaborative
That's interesting, seeing as Accenture is an arm of the defense intelligence community with links to DARPA, and Salesforce is a creature of $ilicon Valley?
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Related:
"Dr. Emily Wroe started working for Boston-based Partners in Health, the renowned global health nonprofit, while still a Harvard medical student. She worked with the government of Rwanda to build a modern hospital in the country’s poor northern region, perched on a terraced hilltop surrounded by subsistence farms. Later, in Malawi, she treated patients with tuberculosis and HIV, working with community health workers to track down sick patients by foot and, sometimes, motorbike. Now she’s building a new squad of public health workers. Only this one is based in Massachusetts and it’s a virtual one, 1,000-people strong. Their mission is to track down every person in the state who comes in close contact with an infected person and help them isolate, thereby slowing the spread of the deadly virus, and this time, the tracking will be done by telephone.Wroe is part of the Partners in Health team charged with creating the state’s ambitious contact tracing program. The concept crystalized in a late-night phone call between Governor Baker and Dr. Jim Yong Kim, one of PIH’s cofounders and the former head of the World Bank. Baker wanted to know how to go on offense against the virus,” he said in an interview with the Globe. The governor recalled sitting in his car, parked on the side of the road, as Kim told him that people couldn’t hide from the virus forever, and that “the only way you can run at it and contain it is to put some sort of program in place that builds on this idea of testing and tracing....."
Yeah, how could you not trust her when she shows up at your door?
Makes you want to go right out and get tested, huh?
Barry Chin/Globe Staff/The Boston Globe
"Coming soon to 8 Mass. cities: free, on-demand testing for any state resident" by Dasia Moore Globe Staff, July 8, 2020
For many Massachusetts residents, the wait for free, accessible COVID-19 testing may finally be over: no symptoms or referrals required.
Governor Charlie Baker on Wednesday announced that the state is launching a new Stop The Spread campaign to offer free COVID-19 testing in eight municipalities hit hard by the virus: Chelsea, Everett, Fall River, Lawrence, Lynn, Lowell, Marlborough, and New Bedford. Starting on Friday, testing centers in these communities will be available to all Massachusetts residents.
Though expanded testing came as welcome relief for people living in the cities selected as testing sites, some public officials and experts fear that the rest of Massachusetts, without a way to seek testing close to home, will be left behind. Targeted testing, they said, may miss the big picture and allow new outbreaks to spread undetected elsewhere in the state.
PFFFFFFFT!
We all know they want to test everyone because that is all part of this sick, control-freak plan.
“It might make sense to have a focal strategy to enhance testing at places or in cities or locations where there are more cases,” said Dr. David Hamer, a physician at Boston Medical Center and a professor of global health and medicine at Boston University. “I think it would be better to have a more broad-based strategy or a mix of the two — to continue to advance testing overall but perhaps targeting and enhancing it in at-risk neighborhoods or cities.”
Massachusetts on Wednesday reported 162 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 30 more deaths. The state also reported that 9,133 new individuals had been given the coronavirus test, and that the positive test rate had risen to 2 percent, up from 1.9 percent the day before. That metric has hovered between 1.8 percent and 2 percent since June 18. The current number represents a 93 percent drop from mid-April highs.
Still, some communities have remained well above the state’s average positive test rate — a key indicator that measures the percentage of all administered tests that come back positive — even as the number of new cases continues to fall. Baker said the eight cities chosen for the testing campaign make up roughly 9 percent of the state’s population, but 27 percent of all positive tests in Massachusetts have been recorded in them in recent weeks.
Baker, speaking at an afternoon briefing, said the campaign will begin Friday and run through Aug. 14.....
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Will be a fine for refusing the test, as testing shortages are clouding decisions on the economy, according to the latest briefing and as the pages of death notices attest. Not even pets are immune from the engulfed by the virus.
The numbers don't add up while working from home is still working. It's time to recuperate and avoid the hospital that puts profits over public health as we have a long way to go given the surge in deaths, so don't let up (the panel members wasted no time) regarding coronavirus infection in the state or we are history.
So as the state ramp up other surveillance techniques, such as monitoring the amount of the disease in sewage, one health flak has acknowledged that some serology tests have been marred by inaccurate results, but that the information remains valuable -- at least to Ginkgo and other like them.
Of course, most Americans -- with good reason -- do not trust the tracking app of tyranny, even as Baker begs us to comply. One day it will be simply to access food before they snatch you away.
See:
WHO health emergencies director advocates government snatch and grab teams to forcefully remove, detain, COVID-19 positive family members, children, from homes
Also see:
CNN lies about 68% of Americans waiting for vaccine to return to normal life as lockdown gives MSM new lease on life
Washington Governor To Residents: COVID-Test-Deniers Will Not Be Allowed To Leave Home To Get Groceries
Flattening the Curve: More Than A Million Health Care Workers Lose Jobs
Here is a girl who need not worry:
Aviv Regev is leaving the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to become head research and early development at Genentech
I gue$$ evil comes in all forms.
Finally, your test results came back:
"COVID CHAOS: A Closer Look At Coronavirus Testing" by May 13, 2020
A remarkable story made headlines last week — a goat, a quail and a papaya tested positive for coronavirus.
Following a request by the president of Tanzania to evaluate the country’s coronavirus test kits, state security services sent a series of non-human samples to the national health laboratory to be tested. The samples — which included goat, quail and papaya, as well as inorganic substances such as motor oil — were labelled with human names and ages, while technicians at the lab were not told of the plot.
After the fruit and animal samples received their positive results, President John Magufuli said there was a “dirty game” playing out at the lab, and that the imported test kits were faulty and had “technical errors”. He also questioned whether there was a possibility of bribes or sabotage taking place:
“People could be used, the test kits could be used too. It could also be a sabotage because this is war… So when you notice something like this, you must know there is a dirty game being played in these tests… that there are unbelievable things happening in this country. Either the laboratory workers in there are bought by people with money, either they are not well-educated, which is not true because this laboratory is used for other diseases… Because even the reagents are imported, because even the swabs are also imported, so it’s a must that something is actually going on.”Importantly, the president then expressed concern about false positive test results, saying that the some people are being told they are infected when they are not actually carrying the virus.
“Through the extra information I have here, there must be people who are told they are positive, while they are not really corona patients, and some might even die from worry.”
In response, the Africa CDC, who provided the tests in conjunction with the Jack Ma Foundation, defended the tests, as did the World Health Organization. Jack Ma, the richest man in China and the man behind Alibaba, has been on a mission to supply over 150 countries with medical supplies, including a shipment of 1.1 million coronavirus tests kits to Africa.
Note that instead of acknowledging a possible problem with test kits or procedures, MSM reporting on this story repeatedly mentions President Magafuli’s endorsement of a Madagascan tonic as a COVID-19 treatment, his wish for Tanzanians to “pray away” the virus, and Tanzania’s failures with respect to its coronavirus response. Mainstream outlets tend not to mention that he has a PhD in chemistry, his comments about sabotage, or his concerns over faulty tests and false positive results.
Flaws in Testing
This is not the first time coronavirus tests have come into question. In Britain, tests produced under Public Health England (PHE) protocols were found to lack sufficient accuracy and were abandoned. Similarly, in the United States, the CDC’s own tests were also found to be flawed. Other countries including the United States, Spain, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Turkey and India have all reported faulty or inaccurate tests from Chinese suppliers.
Obviously, bad tests means bad results. False negative test results return people who are actually infected with COVID-19 back into the community, confirmed to be safe to enjoy their remaining freedom. If the virus spreads and behaves as the MSM would have us believe, a small number of false negatives could spell disaster.
False positive results are dangerous for another reason — they cause people to be diagnosed with COVID-19 when they don’t actually have it. Considering those people and possibly their entire households may then be quarantined, this is not a good outcome. It gets worse when you add in the possibility of all their contacts being traced, notified that they might have COVID-19, and also possibly being isolated, based on bad test results.
Bear in mind that when large numbers of people are tested, a small percentage of false positives will falsely inflate case numbers, possibly giving the appearance of outbreaks occurring where there may be none. Considering much of the world has been placed on lockdown and large chunks of the global economy held for ransom, we ought to have an exceptionally high degree of confidence in the tests being used to detect coronavirus.
Preparation for extraction of SARS-CoV-2 genome using RT-PCR (Photo: Dean Calma/IAEA. Source: Wikicommons)
A Closer Look
Unfortunately, taking a closer look at the details of the testing process does not inspire confidence. Rather, it brings up a number of potential pitfalls, which, taken together cast a different light on the entire coronavirus crisis. The following brief analysis by virus researcher David Crowe summarises his discoveries regarding the RT-PCR test, the main method being used to test people for COVID-19. His research points to what are potentially massive flaws, including:
- the arbitrary nature of test procedures and the ambiguous nature of test results
- documented cases in which test subjects alternately test positive, then negative and then positive again on successive tests
- the inability of the test to prove that a virus is functional or even present
- the possibility of both false negative AND false positive results
- variability in test procedures (which portions of the virus are being sought, etc) among dozens of different test kits
- the possibility of the ultra-sensitive tests being contaminated.
So, who will test the tests? How accurate would you like your test to be?
More on this from David Crowe’s The Infectious Myth:
A lot depends on the result of your COVID-19 test, whether it is positive, indicating infection or, big sigh of relief, negative, indicating that you are not infected, but is there such a thing as “the” COVID-19 test? Indeed there is not. There are many and each is looking for different things and making different decisions about whether those things are present or not.
The Test is Not Binary
It is important to understand that the COVID-19 test does not inherently have only two values. The test uses multiple cycles of the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) technology, with an arbitrary count of cycles being the boundary between positive and negative, usually interpreted as infected and uninfected. Not only is this division arbitrary, but we know that it does not work that well because there are numerous published examples of people testing positive, then negative, then positive again, within a few days. There is, so far, no explanation of this phenomenon amongst people who are unwilling to question the test technology, test implementation or viral theory, although manufacturers do obliquely refer to this problem in their technical documentation by admitting that false positives can be caused by “non-specific signals in the assay” or, more directly, “As with other tests, false-positive results may occur.”
Imagine a game dreamed up by Harry Potter and Lewis Carroll. It is played in a field and the bounds are a circle that is not marked. If someone yells “out of bounds” the referee goes to the centre with a curled-up flamingo and rotates it a number of times, a number chosen arbitrarily by the referee. Some choose 30, and some choose other numbers up to 45. Additionally, different referees have flamingoes of different sizes, and sometimes they are curled up more tightly than at other times, but, if you are within the, say, 37 flamingo turns, you are safe, and if not, out of bounds. Welcome to the world of testing for the coronavirus.
Complexity
Coronavirus tests are performed by sophisticated machines with simple interfaces. Program the parameters of the test, pop in the samples, and in a relatively short time, the results are displayed, sometimes as a graph, or other times as simply as “Positive”, “Negative” or “Invalid”. But the process is not simple. First the RNA needs to be extracted from the sample, which will include a lot coming from your cells, from bacteria, or other sources, as well as possibly some from viral particles, all of which could possibly react with a later stage, causing a false positive. It is also important at this step to eliminate non-RNA substances that could interfere with following steps.
Secondly, the RNA needs to be converted into DNA, because PCR only works with DNA. This process uses the enzyme Reverse Transcriptase, hence the moniker RT-PCR for the combination of RNA conversion followed by standard PCR. The RNA to complementary DNA (cDNA) conversion process is quite inefficient. Stephen Bustin, a professor at Anglia Ruskin university, and perhaps the world’s leading expert on quality control of RT-PCR, told me in a recent interview
(infectiousmyth.podbean.com/e/the-infectious-myth-stephen-bustin-on-challenges-with-rt-pcr) that the amount of DNA obtained can vary widely, easily by a factor of 10. Since the PCR cycle number is a measure of the amount of material obtained, different efficiencies at the RT step essentially invalidate the simple use of the PCR cycle number. Two different test setups in two different labs, that both use the PCR cycle number 35 as a cutoff, may actually have the cutoff between negative and positive at wildly different places.
Finally, the third step, pure PCR occurs. As described above, this is repeated many times. On each cycle the DNA is unrolled from the double helix into two strands, the portion of interest is duplicated, and the DNA rolls up again.
You may think this explanation is complicated. Yes. It is a complicated process. And although a fancy machine makes it simple to operate, it doesn’t mean that every machine, every lab and every operator gets comparable results. Your situation is even worse than the operators because you will likely just be told either “Infected” or “Clear”.
A Potpourri of Tests
The NHS does not exert much control over the choice of COVID-19 test, allowing in-house validation of test kits (http://www.england.nhs.uk/coronavirus/wp-content/uploads/sites/52/2020/03/guidance-and-sop-covid-19-virus-testingin-nhs-laboratories-v1.pdf) although, more recently, it started to insist that commercially available, rather than in-house tests be used (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/21/public-health-england-admits-coronavirus-tests-used-send-nhs). The US Food and Drug Administration, on the other hand, requires at least a façade of test approval through their Emergency Use Authorizations. I downloaded 33 of the test kit instructions, hopefully a representative sample, to try to see how the tests differed in what they were looking for, how long they were looking, and how they decided whether they had found it or not. I also scanned the test limitations, to see whether the manufacturers thought their tests were perfect or not. If you are a true masochist, you can check my analysis at:
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/emergency-situations-medical-devices/emergency-use-authorizations
The Number of Flamingo Turns
For some tests in the FDA list, the number of PCR cycles to distinguish positive from negative is not specified, but for most, it is. In general, the more PCR cycles, the more likely that a false positive will be obtained, and the fewer cycles, the more likely a false negative will be obtained. One manufacturer each recommended 30 cycles, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38 and 39. 40 cycles was most popular, chosen by 12 manufacturers, and two recommended 43 and 45. The MIQE (Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative RT-PCR Experiments) guidelines for operation and reporting of RT-PCR states that the use of 40 or more cycles is unwise (academic.oup.com/clinchem/article/55/4/611/5631762).
Bustin’s advice in my interview with him was that not more than 35 cycles be used. With either 35 or less than 40, the majority of COVID-19 RT-PCR tests approved by the FDA may be pushing RT-PCR to its limits or beyond.
What is Being Looked For?
The RT-PCR tests look for only a tiny fraction of the COVID-19 genome. And different tests look for different tiny fractions. Most do not specify the size of the portions, but a test developed by Charité Berlin (not on the FDA list) looks for the RdRp and E genes, which amount to 213 bases out of about 30,000 for the entire genome, or less than one percent. On the FDA list, the tests reference the E, N and S genes and portions of the ORF (Open Reading Frame). What is most important to know is not what the function of these RNA segments is, but simply that the tests are looking for very different things. It is as if we went looking for leopards with one person using spots as the guide, another the claws, another the teeth and another the eyes.
Worse than differences in what they are looking for is the way of defining whether they have found it. Some tests look for one portion that must be present for the test to be declared positive. Others look for two portions and both must be positive, while others only require one of the two to be positive. Some tests look for three portions, and generally only require two to be detected, although one test requires all three.
This is worth thinking about. A test that looks for three portions of the genome is generally happy if two are found. That means that we can have a leopard without spots as long as it has leopard-like claws and teeth. Or spots and teeth, but different claws. What does it mean to have a genome of a very simple creature like a virus, for which any part can be missing, but we still say it is what we are looking for? And if we only have 1% of an animal, is it possible we will decide it is a leopard when it is actually an ocelot?
Limitations of the Test
Each test comes with a list of limitations. And the majority probably apply to all tests, even though they are only listed in some. These include noting that the test is only looking for RNA, and does not prove that a virus is present, and certainly cannot prove that the virus is functional. Some note that RNA from the virus may persist after the infection has been resolved.
A variety of reasons for false negatives and false positives are given. While public health agencies are generally not interested in false positives, this problem has the power to magnify the epidemic, as well as turning people’s lives upside down. Some tests note correctly that false positives increase as the number of actual infections in the population being tested decrease. Also, RT-PCR is so ultra-sensitive, that a tiny amount of contamination at any stage of the process can result in a false positive, and the manufacturers warn about this. Some tests indicate that other coronaviruses may cause positive test results, but many coronaviruses are not believed to be very pathogenic, so this is equivalent to a false positive to the person receiving the misleading result. A mix-up of two specimens may cause one false positive and one false negative, as people are given the wrong results.
Some tests indicate correctly that the presence of the coronavirus RNA, even if taken as proof of viral infection, does not prove that it is the cause of any symptoms being experienced.
Many also recommend that the test alone not be used to make a diagnosis but that clinical information (such as symptoms) and a doctor’s opinion be incorporated.
Many tests admit they have not been tested on immunocompromised people or on people with symptoms, indicating that the manufacturers are concerned about the accuracy in these groups.
Impact on Your Life
One story from China illustrates the absurdity of the current situation with COVID-19 testing, the impact on people’s lives, and the unwillingness of medical professionals to consider that the test could ever be a problem.
The story of an elderly Chinese man is found in a pre-publication medical article (https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-23197/v1):
A 68-year-old man was admitted due to fever, muscle pain, and fatigue. He was initially diagnosed with COVID-19 according to two consecutive positive results for SARS-CoV-2 RNA plus clinical symptoms and chest CT findings, and was discharged from hospital when meeting the discharge criteria, including two consecutive negative results. He was tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 RNA twice during the quarantine and was hospitalized again. He was asymptomatic then, but IgG and IgM [antibodies, with IgG indicating immunity] were both positive. He was discharged in the context of four consecutive negative test results for SARS-CoV-2 RNA after antiviral treatment. However, he was tested positive once again on the 3rd and 4th day after the second discharge, although still asymptomatic. IgG and IgM were still positive. After antiviral treatment, the results of SARS-CoV-2 RNA were negative in three consecutive retests, and he was finally discharged and quarantined for further surveillance.The most disturbing thing about this article is that, at no point, did the authors raise the possibility of false positive test results. Perhaps the unnamed 68-year-old man would disagree, arguing that his life being turned upside down, being forced to take drugs while healthy, and being isolated from his family was more disturbing.
More Information
For more information, discussion and references, see David Crowe’s critique of the COVID-19 pandemic theory at: http://theinfectiousmyth.com/book/CoronavirusPanic.pdf
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