Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

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Darren
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Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Darren »

Here's info on possibly the most important indicator of panic ... toilet paper. What up with restocking? I noticed Walmart had slightly more toilet paper yesterday. It wasn't enough to say the panicked buying has stopped. Maybe, just maybe demand is slightly less than the restock. The store manager commented last week that shipments weren't arriving as fast as he'd like.

Other panic items like flour is back on the shelves but not in quantity. Canned vegetables were in good supply. Meat was well stocked which may not mean much. Freezers and refrigerators may be full. You can't store meat just anywhere like toilet paper.

The other item I've watched is tuna fish. That's been gone in the past. It was back yesterday but the shelves were not full.

Cleaning supplies are still sparse.

The caveat is that the Walmart is located in a county with no reported COVID-19 cases while cases have slowly gone up in surrounding counties. Seventeen cases are in an adjacent county which also has a small university.

"Top toilet paper manufacturer Kimberly-Clark has a message for all those Americans who didn’t get a chance to score rolls during the mad dash for household goods as stay-at-home orders went into effect: Toilet paper is coming.

“We are working around the clock to help get these essential products back on the shelf,” Arist Mastorides, president of family care for Kimberly-Clark North America, tells CNBC"

"“We are producing and shipping 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Mastorides says shelves are still empty because people are buying in such large quantities that it’s hard to keep up.

Over the last few weeks though, Mastorides says the company has “simplified” production lines to increase speed and volume."

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/kimberl ... stock.html
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Crackpot
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Crackpot »

Still haven’t fixed your counting error I see
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Lord Jim »

The reported death toll for New York today is showing a significant uptick; 731...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
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Darren
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Darren »

Another article turned up on medium w/o any attribution. The author offers a simplistic explanation of how COVID-19 damages the body.

The virus damages the hemoglobin to the point the iron within the hemoglobin cannot transport O2 and CO2. If the body signaling the bone marrow to generate more red blood cells doesn't make up for the loss of O2 transport the organs shut down and you die.

A Search found a paper with the study.

Here's the link to the paper. The next post will be the interpretation for the layman.

"The results showed the ORF8 and surface glycoprotein could bind to the porphyrin, respectively. At the same time, orf1ab, ORF10, and ORF3a proteins could coordinate attack the heme on the 1-beta chain of hemoglobin to dissociate the iron to form the porphyrin. The attack will cause less and less hemoglobin that can carry oxygen and carbon dioxide. The lung cells have extremely intense poisoning and inflammatory due to the inability to exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen frequently, which eventually results in ground-glass-like lung images.

"According to the validation analysis of these finds, chloroquine could prevent orf1ab, ORF3a, and ORF10 to attack the heme to form the porphyrin, and inhibit the binding of ORF8 and surface glycoproteins to porphyrins to a certain extent, effectively relieve the symptoms of respiratory distress. Favipiravir could inhibit the envelope protein and ORF7a protein bind to porphyrin, prevent the virus from entering host cells, and catching free porphyrins. Because the novel coronavirus is dependent on porphyrins, it may originate from an ancient virus. Therefore, this research is of high value to contemporary biological experiments, disease prevention, and clinical treatment."

https://chemrxiv.org/articles/COVID-19_ ... n/11938173
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Darren
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Darren »

Following is the Medium article that started the search:

In the last 3–5 days, a mountain of anecdotal evidence has come out of NYC, Italy, Spain, etc. about COVID-19 and characteristics of patients who get seriously ill. It’s not only piling up but now leading to a general field-level consensus backed up by a few previously little-known studies that we’ve had it all wrong the whole time. Well, a few had some things eerily correct (cough Trump cough), especially with Hydroxychloroquine with Azithromicin, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

There is no ‘pneumonia’ nor ARDS. At least not the ARDS with established treatment protocols and procedures we’re familiar with. Ventilators are not only the wrong solution, but high pressure intubation can actually wind up causing more damage than without, not to mention complications from tracheal scarring and ulcers given the duration of intubation often required… They may still have a use in the immediate future for patients too far to bring back with this newfound knowledge, but moving forward a new treatment protocol needs to be established so we stop treating patients for the wrong disease.

The past 48 hours or so have seen a huge revelation: COVID-19 causes prolonged and progressive hypoxia (starving your body of oxygen) by binding to the heme groups in hemoglobin in your red blood cells. People are simply desaturating (losing o2 in their blood), and that’s what eventually leads to organ failures that kill them, not any form of ARDS or pneumonia. All the damage to the lungs you see in CT scans are from the release of oxidative iron from the hemes, this overwhelms the natural defenses against pulmonary oxidative stress and causes that nice, always-bilateral ground glass opacity in the lungs. Patients returning for re-hospitalization days or weeks after recovery suffering from apparent delayed post-hypoxic leukoencephalopathy strengthen the notion COVID-19 patients are suffering from hypoxia despite no signs of respiratory ‘tire out’ or fatigue.

Here’s the breakdown of the whole process, including some ELI5-level cliff notes. Much has been simplified just to keep it digestible and layman-friendly.

Your red blood cells carry oxygen from your lungs to all your organs and the rest of your body. Red blood cells can do this thanks to hemoglobin, which is a protein consisting of four “hemes”. Hemes have a special kind of iron ion, which is normally quite toxic in its free form, locked away in its center with a porphyrin acting as it’s ‘container’. In this way, the iron ion can be ‘caged’ and carried around safely by the hemoglobin, but used to bind to oxygen when it gets to your lungs.

When the red blood cell gets to the alveoli, or the little sacs in your lungs where all the gas exchange happens, that special little iron ion can flip between FE2+ and FE3+ states with electron exchange and bond to some oxygen, then it goes off on its little merry way to deliver o2 elsewhere.

Here’s where COVID-19 comes in. Its glycoproteins bond to the heme, and in doing so that special and toxic oxidative iron ion is “disassociated” (released). It’s basically let out of the cage and now freely roaming around on its own. This is bad for two reasons:

1) Without the iron ion, hemoglobin can no longer bind to oxygen. Once all the hemoglobin is impaired, the red blood cell is essentially turned into a Freightliner truck cab with no trailer and no ability to store its cargo.. it is useless and just running around with COVID-19 virus attached to its porphyrin. All these useless trucks running around not delivering oxygen is what starts to lead to desaturation, or watching the patient’s spo2 levels drop. It is INCORRECT to assume traditional ARDS and in doing so, you’re treating the WRONG DISEASE. Think of it a lot like carbon monoxide poisoning, in which CO is bound to the hemoglobin, making it unable to carry oxygen. In those cases, ventilators aren’t treating the root cause; the patient’s lungs aren’t ‘tiring out’, they’re pumping just fine. The red blood cells just can’t carry o2, end of story. Only in this case, unlike CO poisoning in which eventually the CO can break off, the affected hemoglobin is permanently stripped of its ability to carry o2 because it has lost its iron ion. The body compensates for this lack of o2 carrying capacity and deliveries by having your kidneys release hormones like erythropoietin, which tell your bone marrow factories to ramp up production on new red blood cells with freshly made and fully functioning hemoglobin. This is the reason you find elevated hemoglobin and decreased blood oxygen saturation as one of the 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.

2) That little iron ion, along with millions of its friends released from other hemes, are now floating through your blood freely. As I mentioned before, this type of iron ion is highly reactive and causes oxidative damage. It turns out that this happens to a limited extent naturally in our bodies and we have cleanup & defense mechanisms to keep the balance. The lungs, in particular, have 3 primary defenses to maintain “iron homeostasis”, 2 of which are in the alveoli, those little sacs in your lungs we talked about earlier. The first of the two are little macrophages that roam around and scavenge up any free radicals like this oxidative iron. The second is a lining on the walls (called the epithelial surface) which has a thin layer of fluid packed with high levels of antioxidant molecules.. things like abscorbic acid (AKA Vitamin C) among others. Well, this is usually good enough for naturally occurring rogue iron ions but with COVID-19 running rampant your body is now basically like a progressive state letting out all the prisoners out of the prisons… it’s just too much iron and it begins to overwhelm your lungs’ countermeasures, and thus begins the process of pulmonary oxidative stress. This leads to damage and inflammation, which leads to all that nasty stuff and damage you see in CT scans of COVID-19 patient lungs. Ever noticed how it’s always bilateral? (both lungs at the same time) Pneumonia rarely ever does that, but COVID-19 does… EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Once your body is now running out of control, with all your oxygen trucks running around without any freight, and tons of this toxic form of iron floating around in your bloodstream, other defenses kick in. While your lungs are busy with all this oxidative stress they can’t handle, and your organs are being starved of o2 without their constant stream of deliveries from red blood cell’s hemoglobin, and your liver is attempting to do its best to remove the iron and store it in its ‘iron vault’. Only its getting overwhelmed too. It’s starved for oxygen and fighting a losing battle from all your hemoglobin letting its iron free, and starts crying out “help, I’m taking damage!” by releasing an enzyme called alanine aminotransferase (ALT). BOOM, there is your second of 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.

Eventually, if the patient’s immune system doesn’t fight off the virus in time before their blood oxygen saturation drops too low, ventilator or no ventilator, organs start shutting down. No fuel, no work. The only way to even try to keep them going is max oxygen, even a hyperbaric chamber if one is available on 100% oxygen at multiple atmospheres of pressure, just to give what’s left of their functioning hemoglobin a chance to carry enough o2 to the organs and keep them alive. Yeah we don’t have nearly enough of those chambers, so some fresh red blood cells with normal hemoglobin in the form of a transfusion will have to do.

The core point being, treating patients with the iron ions stripped from their hemoglobin (rendering it abnormally nonfunctional) with ventilator intubation is futile, unless you’re just hoping the patient’s immune system will work its magic in time. The root of the illness needs to be addressed.

Best case scenario? Treatment regimen early, before symptoms progress too far. Hydroxychloroquine (more on that in a minute, I promise) with Azithromicin has shown fantastic, albeit critics keep mentioning ‘anecdotal’ to describe the mountain, promise and I’ll explain why it does so well next. But forget straight-up plasma with antibodies, that might work early but if the patient is too far gone they’ll need more. They’ll need all the blood: antibodies and red blood cells. No help in sending over a detachment of ammunition to a soldier already unconscious and bleeding out on the battlefield, you need to send that ammo along with some hemoglobin-stimulant-magic so that he can wake up and fire those shots at the enemy.

How does chloroquine work? Same way as it does for malaria. You see, malaria is this little parasite that enters the red blood cells and starts eating hemoglobin as its food source. The reason chloroquine works for malaria is the same reason it works for COVID-19 — while not fully understood, it is suspected to bind to DNA and interfere with the ability to work magic on hemoglobin. The same mechanism that stops malaria from getting its hands on hemoglobin and gobbling it up seems to do the same to COVID-19 (essentially little snippets of DNA in an envelope) from binding to it. On top of that, Hydroxychloroquine (an advanced descendant of regular old chloroquine) lowers the pH which can interfere with the replication of the virus. Again, while the full details are not known, the entire premise of this potentially ‘game changing’ treatment is to prevent hemoglobin from being interfered with, whether due to malaria or COVID-19.

No longer can the media and armchair pseudo-physicians sit in their little ivory towers, proclaiming “DUR so stoopid, malaria is bacteria, COVID-19 is virus, anti-bacteria drug no work on virus!”. They never got the memo that a drug doesn’t need to directly act on the pathogen to be effective. Sometimes it’s enough just to stop it from doing what it does to hemoglobin, regardless of the means it uses to do so.

What’s the end result here? First, the ventilator emergency needs to be re-examined. If you’re putting a patient on a ventilator because they’re going into a coma and need mechanical breathing to stay alive, okay we get it. Give ’em time for their immune systems to pull through. But if they’re conscious, alert, compliant — keep them on O2. Max it if you have to. If you HAVE to inevitably ventilate, do it at low pressure but max O2. Don’t tear up their lungs with max PEEP, you’re doing more harm to the patient because you’re treating the wrong disease.

Ideally, some form of treatment needs to happen to:

Inhibit viral growth and replication. Here plays CHQ+ZPAK+ZINC or other retroviral therapies being studies. Less virus, less hemoglobin losing its iron, less severity and damage.
Therapies used for anyone with abnormal hemoglobin or malfunctioning red blood cells. Blood transfusions. Whatever, I don’t know the full breadth and scope because I’m not a physician. But think along those lines, and treat the real disease. If you’re thinking about giving them plasma with antibodies, maybe if they’re already in bad shape think again and give them BLOOD with antibodies, or at least blood followed by plasma with antibodies.
Now that we know more about how this virus works and affects our bodies, a whole range of options should open up.

http://web.archive.org/web/202004050614 ... 182386efcb
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Scooter
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Scooter »

Another armchair immunologist talking out of his hat.
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Lord Jim
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Lord Jim »

With four hours left to go on the GMT clock, US deaths for the day have topped 1500 for the first time:
April 7 (GMT)

21753 new cases and 1529 new deaths in the United States


https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Includes big upticks in New York, New Jersey, Louisiana and Pennsylvania among others (If you follow the link, you can toggle back and forth on the state reporting chart between yesterday's daily totals and today's to see what I mean)

Massachusetts hasn't reported yet...

But the biggest story is Georgia, led by The Stupidest Governor In America...The Honorable Brian Kemp...(Yeah I know there are several other strong contenders for that title...like Florida's Ron DeSantis...but Kemp's a real standout...)

Kemp is the clueless Trumpist idiot who just yesterday overruled a number of local authorities and ordered the state's beaches reopened... :loon :loon :loon

The same guy who only put a very weak-assed full-of-holes stay home order in place last week, announcing it at a press conference where he also ridiculously claimed that he had just for the first time learned that asymptomatic people could transmit the virus (something that has been publicly known for months; the CDC is headquartered in Georgia fercrisakes... :roll: :loon)

Thanks in no small measure to Governor Kemp's tireless efforts on behalf of death for his fellow Georgians, today Georgia reported 100 deaths; up from only 10 the day before...
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Big RR »

Well, when we see an article by qualified scientists and nort by someone who uses a pseudonym (Libertymavenstock?) and calls China an ASSHOE (presumably asshole), I might get excited. Face it, just because it is on the internet does not mean it is true; anyone can post whatever they want and claim they have superior knowledge--hell, the internet encourages people like this.

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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by BoSoxGal »

So let me get this straight; we are to presume that all the world’s foremost pulmonologists and pathologists from China to Italy to the UK to the United States suddenly don’t know what viral pneumonia or ARDS looks like?

:loon :loon :loon :loon :loon
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

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Since this person is such a genius, why not explain to the legion of clueless doctors and medical research scientists why some 102 year old frail persons are surviving while some very fit 30 & 40 year old persons are not?
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Lord Jim
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Lord Jim »

Three hours left on the GMT clock, and we're now over 1800 fearmongering naysaying sob stories for the day:
April 7 (GMT)

26778 new cases and 1821 new deaths in the United States
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

The Massachusetts numbers are now in... another substantial uptick; 96 deaths today versus 29 yesterday...

Darren's pathetic attempts to find "good news" have become so strained that he''s degenerating into self-parody...

It's becoming almost impossible to satirize his efforts since his many of his own examples are so ridiculous they seem like satire themselves...(Perhaps in some cases they are and he just doesn't realize it...)
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Darren »

BoSoxGal wrote:
Tue Apr 07, 2020 9:21 pm
Since this person is such a genius, why not explain to the legion of clueless doctors and medical research scientists why some 102 year old frail persons are surviving while some very fit 30 & 40 year old persons are not?
Whether an elderly patient or a patient with comorbidities survives may be due to how soon they get the hydrocloroquine and the azyromycin.

It looks like some doctors are clueless based on this from WebMD. The two posts above describe the issue is the virus interfering with the hemoglobin. That's why the oxygen is low. The doctors are seeing low oxygen on a pulse oximeter.

"Patients with respiratory failure who can still breathe OK, but have still have very low oxygen, may improve on oxygen alone, or on oxygen delivered through a lower pressure setting on a ventilator.

Gattinoni thinks the trouble for these patients may not be swelling and stiffening of their lung tissue, which is what happens when an infection causes pneumonia. Instead, he thinks the problem may lie in the intricate web of blood vessels in the lungs."

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/2020040 ... g-problems
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Darren »

Hopefully more news to a full recovery for this family.

"CORAOPOLIS, Pa. — A local family decided to have their father try the anti-malaria drug showing promise as a possible treatment for COVID-19.

Channel 11 first told you about 76-year-old Bob Schrecengost last week, when another patient at his nursing home, Caring Heights Community Care and Rehab Center in Coraopolis, tested positive for COVID-19."

"This weekend, his family got the news that he, too, tested positive.

"It was extremely difficult for all of us in my house to hear the news,” said his daughter, Lisa Smarra."

"But with her father's COPD and pulse oxygen dropping, she wasn't confident he could make it so she asked the doctor one more question.

"Ultimately, I asked him, I said, ‘If this was your father, would you prescribe it for your father?' And he said that he would,” Smarra said.

Schrecengost’s temperature and oxygen level are improving.

"It’s amazing. it really is. I’m glad I took the chance.” Smarra said. “I love my dad so much, and I know every child loved their parent. Every daughter loves their dad, but I am so happy that he’s OK.”"

https://www.wpxi.com/news/investigates/ ... XYPSP64VE/
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

Per Darren:
In the last 3–5 days, a mountain of anecdotal evidence has come out of NYC, Italy, Spain, etc. about COVID-19 and characteristics of patients who get seriously ill.
There's your problem, Darren. Anecdotal evidence isn't.

There are plenty of people who will tell you that God told them not to get on a certain plane or not to go to work that day. Until there i a controlled experiment - everyone who gets a message from God reports it to a central spot (godtalk.com?) and we verify for a statistically significant portion of them that the plane did indeed crash (etc.) I will call it horseshit.

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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Scooter »

April 7 brought a record number of new U.S. cases (33,331) and deaths (1,970).

Is this what winning looks like?
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Guinevere »

On the other hand, here’s some actual science, which perhaps answers some of those questions, and puts even more of the blame on the orange asshole who continues to roll back environmental regulations - including just this week a roll back of clean air act emissions standards and enforcement:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/cli ... covid.html

From the article:
WASHINGTON — Coronavirus patients in areas that had high levels of air pollution before the pandemic are more likely to die from the infection than patients in cleaner parts of the country, according to a new nationwide study that offers the first clear link between long-term exposure to pollution and Covid-19 death rates.

In an analysis of 3,080 counties in the United States, researchers at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that higher levels of the tiny, dangerous particles in air known as PM 2.5 were associated with higher death rates from the disease.

For weeks, public health officials have surmised a link between dirty air and death or serious illness from Covid-19, which is caused by the coronavirus. The Harvard analysis is the first nationwide study to show a statistical link, revealing a “large overlap” between Covid-19 deaths and other diseases associated with long-term exposure to fine particulate matter.

“The results of this paper suggest that long-term exposure to air pollution increases vulnerability to experiencing the most severe Covid-19 outcomes,” the authors wrote.
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Darren
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Re: Day 6 in the countdown to an end to the COVID-19 panic.

Post by Darren »

Guinevere wrote:
Wed Apr 08, 2020 7:39 am
On the other hand, here’s some actual science, which perhaps answers some of those questions, and puts even more of the blame on the orange asshole who continues to roll back environmental regulations - including just this week a roll back of clean air act emissions standards and enforcement:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/cli ... covid.html


I wonder if that correlates with the statistics that show African-Americans are dying in disproportionately higher numbers. Diseases resulting from exposure to long-term fine particulate matter would add a co-morbidity.

It's not a surprise the paper suggests a connection with air pollution. Anything that compromises respiratory function further exacerbates the result of the viral attack on the red blood cells.

I'm wondering if the surprising death of younger individuals is related to cigarette smoking or some other cause of undiagnosed COPD.

African-Americans are at more risk due to limited job opportunities which limit access to health care, increase exposure to the public and limit work from home opportunities and more prevalent co-morbidities.

"Stark statistics are coming to light only now and only in piecemeal fashion showing that African Americans are disproportionately affected by Covid-19. The racial divide in who gets infected, who gets tested, and who dies from Covid-19 is emerging from the few cities and states whose data are public."

"People working for an hourly wage don’t have the luxury of being able to shelter at home or the means to buy two weeks’ worth of healthy food. They may work in jobs deemed essential, such as in public transportation, public safety, or health care. If they quit, they would lose their health insurance, if they have it, and access to health care. If they continue working, they risk exposure to the coronavirus. And they are more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure, or asthma, chronic conditions that put them at higher risk for more serious Covid-19 illness."

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/06/fly ... a-limited/
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