Joy is busy getting her organic farms certified by inspectors.
The Mama dog had five puppies.
Kuya is having trouble getting paid for his rice: hopefully this is temporary but here fraud and corruption is rampant...
I am being lazy so no posts. I am not sick, but when my asthma acts up, the medicines give side effects. When it gets really bad, I take prednisone, and feel great, but that is not a long term option.
The shut down is continuing to the end of the month, something that will ruin the economy but never mind: place virus porn meme here.
CNN (May 2021)warns of a coming famine and more recently, Michael Yon warns to stock up because he senses not only famine but wars are going to start to break out all over. Heh. China already is planning their next war. First Taiwan then Luzon?
Well, Lolo promised me if I moved here I would always have rice to eat, and he would know about such things since he lived through both the depression and WWII...
Right now we haven't heard of covid deaths...There is a virus going around making toddlers sick, but one suspects it is not covid but a virus like RSV.
They are trying to force mandatory shots on everyone, requiring it to go into some businesses here. But can they do this legally, by fiat, without bothering to pass a law?
in Manila there were protests from human rights groups when they said anyone taking public transportation will need a vax card: essentially saying that the unvaccinated cannot work, since poor people can't travel to their jobs. This discriminates against the poor, since the rich can travel in their own cars, and of course a lot of people don't have their full vaccinations. (54 percent).
official report on numbers here, which I don't believe. Nearly half of those tested were positive. I am not sure who they are testing: in the past, our drivers got tested when they entered Manila to deliver rice, but now with their vax card they aren't being tested.... so are the percentages of those tested now higher because only those suspecting they have the virus are asking to be tested?
Ah, but how many with cold symptoms didn't bother to get a test because they weren't very sick? Remember: if you test positive you have to stay home from work for a week in isolation (as if you could really be isolated in your crowded home in the slums of Manila or even in the working class homes that house extended families) and many can't afford to take a week off of work if they are not sick.
Ditto for the two "omnicron deaths in seniors" who had other diseases. Did they die of covid pneumonia, or die with a positive test? No information.
Is there an anti vax movement here? Yes there is: they used water cannons to dispense an anti vax demonstration in Manila.
And the PhilInquirer did have a photo of an anti vax demonstration in Iloilo.
I support vaccinations, but with the omnicron variant going around, it sort of makes the imposition of mandatory vaccinations look stupid: The vaccinations don't stop the omnicron variant, and the article a few days ago that notice ten percent of those tested at random had covid
MANILA, Philippines — The independent analytics group OCTA Research on Sunday estimated that Metro Manila’s actual COVID-19 cases could be six to 15 times higher than the official numbers being reported by the Department of Health (DOH) in its daily case bulletins. OCTA Research fellow Guido David said they reached this estimate based on the random rapid tests conducted by the Department of Transportation on railway passengers on Jan. 12 and Jan. 13 wherein 12.4 percent of those tested were positive for the virus."
The problem is that the continued shut downs are destroying the economy, and the increase in the price of diesel/gas/LPG and the huge increase in the price of fertilizer suggest that the price of food will soon go up. In the meanwhile, many overseas workers lost their jobs.
Famine is coming and one hopes the government will notice this is a lot bigger problem than covid, which mainly kills the elderly, and now is only killing dozens of folks, not thousands of folks.
In other words, lots of statistics and numbers out there, but this ignores the problem of GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out. If your input data is not reliable, the conclusions are not meaningful.
I suspect the covid data is similarly unreliable all over the world: and you know, as docs we used to have meetings where we analyzed articles and often found errors or exaggerations in the medical literature.
The difference now is that questioning authority gets you fired or reprimanded.
question: if ivermectin doesn't work, why does a JAMA article complain that insurance companies were paying for it? The estimate was for 88 000 prescriptions, in one week.
To assess the potential magnitude of US insurer spending on ivermectin prescriptions for COVID-19, we estimated private and Medicare plan spending on these prescriptions during the week of August 13, 2021, the most recent week for which dispensing data were available.2 We assumed that all 88 000 ivermectin prescriptions dispensed that week were for COVID-19
they lament the waste of money of course because they insist it doesn't work.
But did anyone analyze the data here? If 80 thousand people took ivermectin in one week, how many of them tested positive, how many of them were hospitalized, and how many of them went on to die? Were they given the medicine early, or late in the course of their treatment?
And of course, the missing data is the number of folks who simply bought the horse version from vet stores or Amazon. Yes, I know: Vet medicine is not as high quality as people medicine. But in the rural areas where I worked, farmers used animal antibiotics all the time, because they simply could not take a day off of work to travel 50 miles to the doc, sit in the office for two hours, and then pay $50 for the prescription that they could have bought for ten dollars at the animal supply store ( since back then most medical insurance didn't cover medicine.)
as for Ivermectin, I suspect like most of our anti viral medicines it needs to be given early to work, and doesn't work perfectly. But statistically it has helped slow epidemic spread in third world countries: American Greatness article discusses LINK.
One more note: you know, for an article to be published in medical journals, it has to be approved by the editors. And alas, many of our major medical journals (JAMA, NEJM, BMJ, Lancet) have long been politicized and published articles to push various agendas, not to mention the bias from drug companies paying for research.
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