With the world
descending
deeper and
deeper into coronavirus chaos, we all face
unnerving unknowns:
how long we'll
have to remain in isolation, when the
pandemic will peak, the depths to which the
stock market will tumble.
But what's
abundantly clear is that this novel disease is
most deadly for the elderly.
The young
may not present any symptoms at all, and
this is especially dangerous to their elders,
because they can pass the virus on to them
without realizing it.
The country
has the second-oldest population on earth,
and its young tend to mingle more often with
the elderly, like their grandparents.
Such demographic
research will be critical in facing down the
threat elsewhere, as more countries grapple with
a deadly pandemic that's just getting started
and we learn more about how the virus is
transmitted within families and communities.
In Italy, 23
percent of the population is over age 65,
compared to the US, where that population
is 16 percent.
"Extended
longevity has played some role in changing
the population structure," says University
of Oxford demographer and epidemiologist
Jennifer Beam Dowd, lead author of the new
paper.
"But it
actually has most to do with how rapid the
decline in fertility has been in a
population."
That is, it's
affected more by Italians having having fewer
children than it is by them living longer.
At the same time,
young Italians tend to interact a lot with their
elders. Jennifer Beam Dowd's Italian coauthors note that young
folks might live with their parents and
grandparents in rural areas but commute to work
in cities like Milan.
Data on the
composition of Italian households bears out this
familial arrangement too.
The study's authors
argue that this frequent travel between cities and family homes may
have exacerbated the "silent" spread of the novel coronavirus.
Young people
working and socializing in urban areas interact with large crowds,
where they may pick up the disease and take it home.
If they have no
symptoms, they'll have no clue that they're infecting their elders,
the most vulnerable population.
"We know now
that the mortality is higher in older individuals, but what's
not clear yet is why," says Carlos Del Rio, executive associate
dean of the Emory School of Medicine at Grady Health System, who
wasn't involved in this research.
For example, it
could be a matter of older people having weaker respiratory systems,
which could also lead to a higher mortality rate among seniors for
diseases like pneumonia.
Other researchers
studying why children don't seem to get that sick from Covid-19 have
pointed out the corollary:
Kids tend to have
"pristine" lungs that have not already
been damaged by a lifetime of inflammation caused by allergies,
pollutants, and diseases.
This might make
them more resistant to attack by the new virus.
Despite
a full lockdown in place in Italy since the weekend, the virus
has already spread far and wide.
But with this kind
of demographic knowledge, public health officials can better
confront the threat elsewhere, Jennifer Beam Dowd says.
"One of the
points that we were trying to make is that it's not necessarily
just about isolating the older population - we are identifying
that they're the most vulnerable - but the general
social distancing that's being encouraged to flatten the
curve," says Dowd.
Flattening the
curve means,
slowing
the rate of new infections
buying researchers time to develop
treatments and vaccines
giving hospitals some respite
"I think our
point was that's actually more important when you have
a higher fraction of your population that is vulnerable," she
says.
But while
separating younger and older people might work in theory, it
can create practical problems.
For example,
desperate to
flatten the curve, local officials in the US are closing
schools.
If parents can't look after their children -
because they're still working out of the home, or because
they're ill themselves - that care might fall on
grandparents.
To
complicate matters even further, a study in Italy doesn't
exactly track with what we might expect in a massive country
like the US, where the demographics vary greatly from place
to place.
Some cities might have far more young people than
seniors, and some suburbs are likely just the opposite.
Or
think about Florida and its masses of retirees.
"Florida is
like an uber-Italy," says Andrew Noymer, a demographer at
the University of California, Irvine, who wasn't involved in
this research.
"Florida is going to be a tough situation, I
would predict."
In a place
with so many elderly people, many of them living close
together in retirement homes, social distancing will be
extra important to avoid disaster.
"It's not destiny to say
Florida is going to be absolutely clobbered by this," Noymer
says.
"There is time with social distancing to flatten the
peak. Maybe we can make this the dog that didn't bark, so to
speak."
An aging
population doesn't have to mean a devastating Covid-19
outbreak.
Japan, along with neighbors including Hong
Kong and Singapore, had rapidly
ramped up testing in the early days of the outbreak and
instituted strict travel controls.
But
Dowd
says we can use Italy's example to take practical steps in fighting
the pandemic.
We might pinpoint areas with older
populations and try,
"to anticipate a little bit where the
burden of care is going to be the most severe."
After a
long delay in the rollout of mass testing in the US, on
Friday the FDA
approved the use of two commercial coronavirus tests.
This may help Americans keep infected young people and
healthy elders apart.
In the meantime, if you want to check
in with your grandparents, do it by phone.
Serious doubts about the
accuracy of COVID-19 testing methods, results, mortality
rates, and the supposedly unique and extreme lethality of
this virus are starting to emerge, even within mainstream
media and government reporting.
the
status of one's immune system and overall health determines
morbidity and mortality, and likely your
susceptibility to infection in the first place.
The study found that,
"More than 99% of Italy's
coronavirus fatalities were people who suffered from
previous medical conditions, according to a
study
by the country's national health authority."
Moreover,
"The Rome-based institute
has examined medical records of about 18% of the
country's coronavirus fatalities, finding that just
three victims, or 0.8% of the total, had no previous
pathology.
Almost half of the victims suffered from at least
threeprior illnesses
and about a fourth had either one or two previous conditions.
More than 75% had
high blood pressure, about 35% had diabetes and a third
suffered from heart disease."
The
Bloomberg article also pointed out that the primary threat
is to the elderly (the average age of someone who died was
79.5) and that the fatality rate may have been significantly
overblown:
instead of 8%, the
fatality rate may, in fact, be closer to the global average of
about 2%.
"The median age of the
infected is 63 but most of those who die are older.
The average age of those
who've died from the virus in Italy is 79.5. As of March
17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease.
All of
Italy's victims under 40 have been males with serious
existing medical conditions.
While data released
Tuesday points to a slowdown in the increase of cases,
with a 12.6% rise, a separate study shows Italy could be
underestimating the real number of cases by testing only
patients presenting symptoms.
According to the GIMBE
Foundation, about 100,000 Italians have contracted the
virus, daily Il Sole 24 Ore
reported.
That would bring
back the country's death rate closer to the global
average of about 2%."
This new report challenges
much of the global reporting on the topic which presents a unilateral
narrative that simply being
exposed (within six feet) to someone who may have
tested positive for the virus is life-threatening,
independent of one's health status and other precautions one
might take, such as supporting one's immune system.
Elderly
people, already experiencing
polypharmacy for multiple
life-threatening diagnoses for chronic diseases, are highly
susceptible to opportunistic infections due to their chronic
conditions, the adverse effects of pharmaceuticals, and
subsequently weakened immune systems.
Blaming a
single virus for causing their deaths is not evidence-based,
nor does it fulfill the basic postulates established by
19th-century German physician Robert Koch to ascertain
whether a singular virus can cause a singular disease.
There are a wide
range of viruses that can cause the symptoms associated with
COVID-19 infection, which include the several hundred different
influenza viruses known to play a role in seasonal flu.
It's
also known that the Coronavirus family of viruses contain
over a hundred different strains, seven of which cause the
common cold.
Some of these viruses
exist naturally within
the
human virome, and never express themselves
pathogenically, but will potentially cause false positives
through the many different COVID-19 testing methods being
used today.
Indeed,
assuming the original source point of this supposedly novel
form of infection came from Wuhan, it doesn't appear that
the claimed singular causative agent - COVID-19 - was ever
properly identified, purified, and characterized in multiple
humans suffering from the disease (nor was its absence
determined in healthy humans).
This would be required, as we
pointed out recently in Dr.
Wolfgang Wodarg's testimony, in order to fulfill
step one of Koch's four postulates, which would demonstrate
scientifically that a singular microorganism like a bacteria
or virus is the causative agent behind a disease (the most
basic tenet of germ theory).
Based on the
testimony of Dr. Wodarg, the gold standard
would have required,
the purification of the virus and
characterizing it via electron microscope technology, as
well as establishing an effective and independently verified
virus testing method (which would have required using PCR-reverse
transcriptase testing within multiple cases of those
suffering from the identical disease) - two things, it
appears, were never done; or at least not reproduced and
therefore validated independently through other laboratories and
medical institutions.
Nor were
any of the remaining three Koch postulates fulfilled:
The
microorganism must be found in abundance in all
organisms suffering from the disease, but should not
be found in healthy organisms.
The
microorganism must be isolated from a diseased
organism and grown in pure
culture.
The
cultured microorganism should cause disease when
introduced into a healthy organism.
The
microorganism must be re-isolated from the
inoculated, diseased experimental host and
identified as being identical to the original
specific causative agent.
Until an
original singular causative agent can be identified through
multiple cases, and that agent can be purified and proven to
cause the same disease in animals, and then re-purified to
establish it is indeed the cause in humans,
much of what we
are hearing are "confirmed cases" and "COVID-19 fatalities"
may be inaccurate, and further fanning the flames of fear,
panic, and global instability...
Flu typically rises exponentially, and then drops off nearly
as fast once everyone is exposed, or the behavior of the
virus changes due to weather, etc.
This time, government
will claim "it was 'their' draconian actions" which caused it to
fall.
