The Angry Bear

The biochemistry of how COVID-19 attacks the body: a synopsis of the medical studies I’ve been doing some reading over the past several weeks, trying to understand how the COVID-19 virus attacks the human body. Below are quotes I found most noteworthy or interesting from these articles. In essence, they indicate that biochemically the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, mainly binds to the ACE-2 receptor of cell surfaces to gain entrance. These are most...

What the ratio of positive tests to total test results for coronavirus is telling us I want to make a comment about the value of measuring the number of coronavirus tests being administered vs. the number of cases found by those tests. This is because a few people are claiming that the ratio of positive tests to total tests does not give us value. Rather, they claim, increased testing simply reveals increased infections. I will make a bold, unqualified...

 Where Are People Dying Most Intensively Now of SARS-Cov-2? More than a century later, we still do not  know the origin of the Spanish flu, with at least three currently scientifically supporte origins out thers: North America (possibly Kansas), China, and British soldiers in France. This will not be resolved.  I suspect that this may become the outcome of the current debate over the origin of our current pandemic.  While mostly this seems to have become...

We Need a Shadow Government Republican rule in the US is a horror show.  We get incoherent ramblings from our president on injecting bleach into our veins, calls for the states to file for bankruptcy from the Senate majority leader, a veto of modest IMF support for developing countries hammered financially by the virus, and a complete absence of guidance on the most crucial aspects of public health. We already know this. The greater tragedy is that the...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 19 – 23 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The coincident and short term leading indicators, as expected, continue to be awful — probably the worst since the Great Depression. Whether this downturn can be turned off relatively quickly, or whether it metasticizes into something far worse and far longer is going to be determined by the wisdom – or lack thereof – of those few...

Heads up for tomorrow! Tomorrow morning I have a very long post quoting about 20 medical articles at length, explaining (what we think we know so far about) the whole biochemistry of how the novel coronavirus attacks the body. By the time you finish reading it, you will understand a lot about why the disease attacks the organs it does, why it progresses in the order it does, why it produces some extremely unusual complications in victims who otherwise...

This was the first pass (Ernie Tedeschi of Evercore prepared the data) and it is arranged by the percentage of loans completed in each state. As you can see Nebraska received ~81% of the loans applied for by the small businesses in Nebraska. One million, 35 thousand and 86 SBA PPP Loans (1,035, 086) were approved by April 13 totally $247, 543, 397, 521 by 4,664 lenders. Seventy percent of the funds were already allocated by April 13. Some Applicant...

The WHO warns that it is not proven that we acquire immunity to Sars Cov2. If we don’t we are pretty much doomed. However, I don’t see how people could recover without developing immunity or develope immunity without memory with human immune systems. Here, as often, the burden of proof is placed on the optimistic hypothesis. Here again (third time) I dare to be optimistic (third time’s a charm). At Daily Kos Mark Sumner has an excellent post on the...