Popular UK nurse teacher Dr. John Campbell’s tips. Scientist Paul Beckwith says Canada blundered into disaster, and clearing air could release 25 years worth of warming – this spring or summer. I’m Alex Smith. Here we go.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
REAL HELP FROM DR. JOHN CAMPBELL
Dr. Campbell discusses several countries, but let us begin with his own: the UK. In the Middle of March, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested COVID-19 was not all that serious. The government would let the disease burn through the population until some sort of herd immunity was reached. Hundreds of scientists and medical professionals objected. That deadly idea barely lasted a weekend. But as in the United States, valuable time was lost as top leadership did not get the population to self-isolate.
The Cheltenham Festival is a meeting in the National Hunt horse racing calendar in the United Kingdom. Despite the plague in Italy where over 1,000 had already died, and COVID-19 deaths in the United Kingdom, the races took place in front of two hundred and fifty one thousand crowded fans on March 12. How could that happen? It appears too many people in the United Kingdom really thought they were an island, separated from the plague cutting down thousands in Italy and Spain. Countless British people have second homes in Spain, or take holidays there, and returned, some with the illness. Now tragedy has landed in the United Kingdom. I’m thinking of my many friends and relatives there.
With his extensive experience teaching nurses all over the world, John Campbell is in a unique position. With almost half a million YouTube viewers, he receives tips from many in the medical community, even from Iran. He shares with us in this second interview.
Listen to or download this half hour interview with Dr. John Campbell in CD Quality
We don’t know whether the hospital systems will hold up. If we get serious complications, like pneumonia, will the health care system be too overwhelmed to help us? So I asked John directly, as an experienced nurse and nurse teacher, for a few tips on how we could try and cope at home. He told us that the most serious cases can only be saved in hospitals, especially those who run out of oxygen, as the virus floods our lungs. But trying to cope, at least we can keep sitting up, or lie on our stomachs – but do not lie flat on the back, he tells us. Hydration is key (I’ve heard we need to drink liquids every 20 minutes during the illness).
You need the liquids to keep mucus thin enough to get infected cells out. Stop smoking now – it paralyzes the Cilia, leaving infection down below in the lungs, instead of expectorated (coughing or spitting them out).
HOW MIGHT THIS PANDEMIC END?
We all want to know how this nightmare could possibly end. Let me suggest a few endings,. We are told it takes about 80% of people with immunity to contain this disease. We might reach that absolutely huge number, billions of people, with a vaccine – I would say in a minimum of a year and half or two years, just considering we do not have a vaccine, and producing and delivering so many shots is a mammoth undertaking, during a time when the world economy is collapsing, and possibly some governments fall as well.
Or we may manage to stretch this out over a few years, flattening the curve, saving as many as we can in hospitals, trying to maintain civilization while that happens. We may go absolutely medieval with city states closing their gates to strangers, or something. Or the disease could defeat us, burning through the world’s population leaving the grieving survivors who attained immunity, and a badly damaged civilization. As I have said before, that horrible turning point could at least help us avoid the next killer pandemic: rapid climate change.
HOW LONG THE VIRUS CAN SURVIVE OUTSIDE THE HUMAN BODY
American news outlets, CNBC and Bloomberg, seemed to report that the novel Corona Virus was found on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship up to 17 days after the ship was vacated, based on a CDC study. Obviously it would be alarming if this virus can stay infectious that long.
Here is what the Center for Disease Control Study said in a paper published March 23:
“SARS-CoV-2 RNA was identified on a variety of surfaces in cabins of both symptomatic and asymptomatic infected passengers up to 17 days after cabins were vacated on the Diamond Princess but before disinfection procedures had been conducted (Takuya Yamagishi, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, personal communication, 2020).”
That does not sound like they found a live virus, or at least an infectious one, 17 days later. They likely found traces of RNA from the virus, which would not be that alarming, given bits of the RNA could last hundreds of years without offering any harm. Chris Martenson covers this at 25:28 in his video, March 24.
I wish the CDC had been more clear, but for now, I am sticking with the results of almost all other research saying:
1. the COVID-19 virus cannot live very long outside the human body
2. it can travel about 3 feet, 1 meter, in the air during normal conversation
3. with a cough, a sneeze, an exhalation (like a big sigh), or a laugh, the virus can go up to 25 feet (8 meters) in a matter of seconds.
4. in microscopic droplets, the virus can hang in the air for up to 3 hours (!!)
5. when falling on to surfaces, the virus can last up to 24 hours on paper, and up to 9 days on hard surfaces like metal, or plastic.
Those are guidelines I use, compiled from multiple sources and based on scientific studies. Sure the science is still fluid, the papers have not had time for peer review, and we are still learning. But most agree on the points above.
Finally, everybody – even you! – should wear a face mask when out where other humans might be. While a medical-grade N95 mask is best, an ordinary surgical mask will help, and even a scarf or bits of clothing will limit the spread to others. People I know have a hard time getting the idea that they can feel perfectly fine, in great shape, and be carriers of the virus, spreading it unwittingly to friends, to everyone. That is one reason why this virus is so successful. We will learn that lesson the hardest way. It would take a miracle to avoid millions of deaths during this pandemic.
===================================================================================
A COLOSSAL BLUNDER HITS CANADA: PAUL BECKWITH
I called our regular scientist correspondent Paul Beckwith to discuss his three part-video on whether we can expect extreme heat events as the industrial shut-down lowers air pollution. I think that could happen. It is important. But first – Paul blew me away by predicting Canada is not an oasis from the Corona pandemic developing just south of the border. He says Canadians made “colossal blunders” that could cost us dearly in weeks to come.
Find Canadian scientist Paul Beckwith at paulbeckwith.net and by all means, subscribe to his YouTube channel to keep abreast of the latest developments. Paul needs your financial support as well.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock interview with Paul Beckwith in CD Quality
Paul explains that old adage from the Middle Ages, about travel and the plague. If the plague is happening, do not travel, stay home. If you traveling in a country which has the plague, stay there, do not go home. That is the rule from the Middle Ages, and we broke that rule over and over again, in almost every country. Whether it is the Chinese New Year travel, Spring Break for students, or “snowbirds” returning home – that mass travel helped inflate the numbers of seriously sick and dying people. One in 37 Canadians, almost 3% of the population, returned from March holidays, many from Florida. For weeks, as far as I can tell, none of them were tested or quarantined on their return. 470 million migrant workers are walking to their home villages across India due to the end of their jobs and food supply during lock down.
Of course there were masses of humans already flying around the world for tourism and business. Diagrams of airplane travel, even during this pandemic, are mind-blowing. The weak World Health Organization still said it was safe to fly in February, long after COVID-19 had spread beyond Asia.
Cruise ships became deadly, and there are still a half dozen of them floating around with thousands of passengers, getting sicker, and refused entry at ports in several countries. The newest installment are the military cruise ships, like the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier now stuck at Guam. There are 5,000 crew on board, in close quarters, eating together in mess halls, and COVID cases are doubling daily. No ship is safe now, not even the military. At least they are getting those sailors off the ship.
By the end of this summer, I think we will see more internal migration in North America – and perhaps in other countries – as the economy forces some families to consolidate wherever they can best survive a long term Depression – worse than the 1930’s. My own kids may move back in, where our home is paid for, and we can grow food. If that internal migration happens, we can expect the disease to move with it.
OH CANADA!
I just saw a feature on local news in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia. A man from the building trade said construction workers are “essential workers”. So they have to keep coming to work and building new condo towers in Kelowna. There is nothing essential about that. The local farm lobby just got the Canadian government to allow 100,000 guest agricultural workers, mostly from Mexico, to get in too. It shows how un-seriously Canadians still are in dealing with the new reality.
I saw a chart comparing the number of Intensive Care Unit beds in Canada per million people, compared to other industrialized countries. Canada are way down at the bottom. Is that because Canadians did not need as many ICU beds, due to our public health care system, or what? We are totally unready for the wave of patients about to hit Canadian hospital systems.
The government of Canada has not built emergency hospitals and is very slow to gear up industry to make ventilators, much less masks. It is simply proven that populations used to wearing face masks, mainly due to pollution as in Asia, are better equipped socially to have everyone wear masks. In North America there is very strong social pressure not to wear them, and against anyone who does. This is not a survival trait during a pandemic. No one should go out without a mask. While on TV, the Prime Minister should put one on. All our Police and any public workers should have been wearing them for weeks. Police are already getting sick, and many more will. We are not equipping anyone yet.
Isn’t it marvelous how our mental self protection lets us believe that mass illness and deaths across a border, in a neighboring city or country, will not travel to our city or country? Not just Canadians, but people all over the world have struggled to deny this pandemic is coming to them, or that it only kills old people, or they can’t get it because they are so healthy. We can talk ourselves out of anything. The disease doesn’t care what you believe.
Some Canadians worry: will sick Americans, fearing an armed social breakdown, flood across into Canada, bringing even more cases of the virus with them?
THE CHINA FACTOR
In a recent video, Paul Beckwith showed an article which claims the outbreak in Northern Italy may be due to the high number of temporary Chinese workers in the fashion industry there. Frankly the American Spectator is a right-wing source and not very credible. Yet other reputable news articles do say there were over 100,000 Chinese fashion workers in Northern Italy, and many of them flew back to China for their New Year, while the disease was raging – and then flew back to Italy. We also know that Iran was hit early and hard. They are also a client state for China, especially after the crippling U.S sanctions. Maybe there is another link there.
But in the age of air travel, a pandemic is literally a two-way street. China now says most of its new infections are from citizens bringing it back from other countries. I think we can’t beat this in until all international air travel, including private business jets, are halted.
GLOBAL DIMMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Let’s switch to the subject Paul and I know best: climate change. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just announced a 15 billion dollar bailout package for the Canadian oil and gas sector. The Tar Sands operations are bleeding money daily, now that Alberta heavy crude is selling for about five dollars a barrel, about the price of a cup of coffee. Despite the need for support from the Greens to keep on governing, it sounds like Trudeau’s liberals are committed to continuing to wreck the climate, not save it.
Some apologists for the oil industry claim we must keep burning fossil fuels or the world will experience severe heat. They says global dimming is protecting us, and we need pollution to do that. Paul looked into this with three YouTube videos. He finds the amount of warming triggered by cleaner air is not going to be disastrous. It will just add to the heating we expect because we overloaded the atmosphere with greenhouse gases already.
Global dimming is certainly real. I still think we should watch out for extreme heat events this summer, just from the high carbon counts in the atmosphere from previous fossil burning. I’m nervous that one or more bread basket regions could be hit by heat or drought, endangering the world food supply. The temporary clean air during the shut-down makes that more likely. This is a year when we need to get lucky, but we have already stacked the odds against that. There has already been record heat in various parts of the world, including the U.S. south.
A Reddit post says
“Funny how everything they said was ‘too extreme’ to do for climate change is done in an instant for C19.”
It is crazy isn’t it?
Last week even the United Nations said they were postponing their climate activities to focus on the current Pandemic. That is understandable. You and I are doing that too. But as Paul says, the temporary clearing of the air is not going to stop continuing warming of this planet. The Poles will keep melting, sea levels will keep rising, and we will have severe weather striking again and again, not to mention deadly heat waves. Can we afford to take a few months, or even a year or two, off from the battle to contain a pandemic of climate change?
FROM ALEX
Today I transplanted seven squash plants and a lot of Brassicas, like broccoli. Our geothermal greenhouse is really paying off. Despite cold nights well below freezing, a single fan from the pipes below keeps plants in good health inside. The days have been bright and hot (heading to 90 degrees F, over 30 C during the afternoon). I will be canning soup tonight. These are busy times, trying to plan for an economy in free-fall, and a society locked up. I am still grateful to be alive, and thankful for you as a blog reader and listener. You keep me calling up information we all need to know. Next week I plan to call up a number of non-profit radio hosts, in several countries, to get their view on Coronavirus and social coping.
My special thanks to everyone who supports this radio program and podcast. This is listener-supported media. Find out how you can help here.
Hang in there. One day this will be over, or at least we will learn how to live again in a world with a microcosm, and the reality of natural systems. Please be kind to yourself and others.
Alex
Radio Ecoshock
Please interview John C. Umbau, MD, retired public health specialist at the National Institute of Health on how to prevent a COVID-19 infection or only get a mild one. He published an outline of how lack of sun induced vitamin D in the winter and early spring leads to epidemic acute respiratory infections which he writes probably include COVID-19. His review has been cited almost a thousand times. He advocates up to 500 IU vit D3 daily to get vit D blood levels to 50 ng/ml which he writes appear perfect to protect against viral respiratory infection.
That is 5000 IU vitamin D3 daily
A plane has five passengers on board: Donald Trump, the Pope, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, and Greta Thunberg.
The plane is about to crash and there are only 4 parachutes.
Dr Fauci says “I need one! I have to develop a vaccine to cure Covid-19!”
He takes a parachute and jumps.
The Pope says “I need one! I have to guide people through the spiritual crisis wrought by Covid-19!”
He takes one and jumps.
Donald Trump says ‘‘I need one! I’m the most stable genius in the USA!”
He grabs one and jumps.
Hillary Clinton says to Greta Thunberg, “You take the last parachute. My public life is over and yours has only begun.”
Greta Thunberg says …
“Don’t worry, there are two parachutes left. The most stable genius in the USA took my backpack.”
Love it!
can mosquitoes and biting flies or other vectors transmit the disease, water, vegetables, no one is telling us anything
If the reason for Germany’s comparatively low death toll was just more testing, you would just find lower number of deaths per infection cases, not significantly lower deaths per million of the overall population. But Germany’s deaths/1M citizens is also almost the lowest in the rich Western countries (the lowest is Canada). Worldometer currently counts the death/1M number for Germany at 19; compared to e.g. 24 in France, 73 in the UK, 84 in Switzerland, 263 in Italy. So do you think all of Europe other than big commercial through-fare countries like Germany and France are just that much more widely infected, even though the infection case numbers aren’t counted because only symptomatic people are getting tested in these other countries?
No, I can show you why the death rate is much lower in Germany (and to a lesser degree, France), in a single graph:
https://www.dw.com/image/52721627_7.png
The numbers for the US are about the same as for the UK. I don’t know about Canada.
And no, Paul, hospitals CAN and should prepare for an epidemic or other mass disaster. It’s called “surge capacity”. The problem in severely neo-liberal countries like the UK and US is that over the last 20 years or so, hospitals have been starved of funding (the UK’s NHS) or just been ruthlessly managed for profit (in the US), and they cut away at this surge capacity and instituted “just-in-time” stock-keeping just like with Walmart (meaning next to no stock-keeping to avoid “binding up” dollars in equipment that isn’t immediately used).
Also, your comments about the Mexican agricultural workers are really disgusting. Way to be xenophobic jerks and fuelling neo-nazi arguments, guys. First off, these people are desperately poor and need these jobs to survive – unlike Canadian citizens who will be helped out by your government (governments rarely survive real mass starvation among their citizenry). Secondly, you need those high-labor-input vegetables planted and sown NOW, otherwise there will be nothing to harvest in the summer/autumn and then you get a perfect storm of lots of people just making do with unemployment benefits and social security due to losing their jobs in the lockdown (most of them already so poor to need to live in urban apartments, so they don’t have your privilege to have enough space to grow their own food), and massively increased prices for fresh produce, because anything that will be available will have to be imported (likely from South America, because the US will have the same problem due to closing their borders as well). Especially for Canadians in the High North, who already pay ridiculous prices for produce in a good year, this will mean malnutrition. There is just no time to organize other ways of providing that agricultural labor, which would take a few weeks at least – even if the interest in those jobs were there among Canadian citizens. Because, thirdly, you think First World citizens will be willing to do back-breaking manual labor for 10+ hours a day for those pittance wages, exposing themselves to cold weather and rain all day, and later clouds of pesticides/herbicides, and of course the infection risk of working cheek-by-yowl with a few dozen other people in a field or greenhouse? Then why do you think the fruit/veg industry hired migrant workers in the first place all these years, instead of dipping into Canada’s pool of unemployed people? And lastly, this is SKILLED LABOR – in my country, we have the same problem with migrant workers from Eastern Europe not getting in because Poland closed the border, and the farmers say they don’t even want random unemployed citizens (or press-ganged first-year university students, which is partly how this used to get done under the socialist government until just 30 years ago), because they made the experience that people who have never done this job before (and have no family members already working in the industry who can train them on the job) simply are not capable of working fast enough, don’t know to harvest e.g. strawberries that are just at the right stage of ripeness, don’t have the specialized skills to dig up asparagus without harming the rest of the plant, etc. So there would be far too much “waste” and damaged goods that the farmer couldn’t sell, and with that taken into account, it’s not financially worth the going through the whole operation in the first place, because tiny profit margins mean they can’t afford to pay the labor costs if there’s a high percentage of unsellable produce or the harvest just takes a lot longer than usual (= more work hours to pay). Easier just to cash in the crop insurance and call it a wash for this year. I’m sure there are similar issues with planting the vegetables as with harvesting, especially the “not fast enough if you not used to the work” factor.
Honestly, you should be grateful that these migrant workers are still willing (or rather, are economically forced due to NAFTA destroying their own farms and farming industry at home) to work hard and expose themselves to the risks (You think they don’t want to self-isolate or wouldn’t rather stay home take care of their children and elder parents in this hour of need?) for the sake of near-slave wages and keeping your Canadian farm businesses and food supply afloat.
It’s not like “keeping them out” would protect your country from the spread of the virus at this point. You said yourself, millions of irresponsible vacationers have already done the damage. Besides, with whom are you more likely get in contact – those middle-class vacationers, or migrant workers housed close to their work somewhere out in the boondocks, unable to afford to go shopping in your supermarkets and not insured, so they do their best to stay the hell away from hospitals.
(Though, really? You’d just leave all those people to fend for themselves in foreign countries if and when they get sick? There’s a reason rich governments around the world were scrambling to charter extra flights to get their stranded citizens home, where they will have access to decent healthcare. Protecting ALL its citizens is the first responsibility of any democratic government – abandoning them would have caused a scandal. Of course, all returnees should have been tested and put under mandatory and supervised quarantine, which is what some Asian countries are currently using hotels for.)
Addendum:
I stand corrected regarding France’s death toll. It jumped up massively, right after I posted the above text. Now they have nearly 6 times the number of dead as Germany, despite having about the same number of known infection cases. (Apparently, the number of dead suddenly jumped up so much because France’s authorities until then hadn’t been informed about / hadn’t been reporting people who died in nursery homes and other such assisted living facilities for the elderly, only those who actually died in hospitals.) Considering that France also has tested a lot less people than Germany, this probably means the country has MUCH higher infection rates than Germany, despite listing roughly the same number of known infection cases.
Another thing a German virologist explained on a dedicated daily podcast a few days ago is that, in Germany, the first thousands of infection cases were mostly people who had just come home from a winter sports holiday in Italy – so young-ish and healthy, and most of their social circle whom they directly infected was from a similar population group, who of course have a very good survival chance. Other than in one hot-spot, the disease took some time to get into nursery homes in Germany, and thus hasn’t yet affected a lot of elderly people. (But that might still happen.) And as soon as the scale of the problem was recognized, the hospitals did what they could to send patients home who didn’t absolutely have to be there and to cancel planned surgeries if it wasn’t something life-threatening, because a lot of the infections are happening in hospitals, no matter their efforts of sterilization and hygiene. [That’s always the case – there’s even a special term for it: “nosocomial infection”. Lots of elderly people who go into hospital for things like hip surgery don’t come out again, because they have to stay in bed for a long time, meaning shallow breathing and bad air circulation in their lungs, while at the same time they have a much higher risk to encounter multiple-drug-resistant bacteria in a hospital than outside. So they catch pneumonia, antibiotics don’t help, and their frail bodies can’t fight it off anymore. Both my parental grandparents died that way, aged in their early 90s but during seperate hospital stays, and my father (a doctor) said at the time that this was not an unusual way to go for someone above 70 or so.]
Anyway, according to the Worldometer statistics, the public lockdown and the testing of contacts of infected people in Germany seems to have managed to “flatten the curve” enough that the “active case” count (i.e. new infection cases minus cured or dead people) has actually leveled off these last few days, instead of rising steadily as in other countries.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
This would probably also mean that the number of intensive care beds needed has also stabilized well below the number of beds available, and if it can be kept that way, this would mean that the situation is manageable for Germany’s healthcare system. (Of course people will still die – a virus can only be fought off by the sick person’s own immune system, since there isn’t really any cure, and the ventilators themselves are so dangerous that hospitals only use them for people who would be certain to die without them, even under non-pandemic circumstances. They say the survivors of severe cases will have lowered lung capacity for the rest of their lives, simply because of the side effects of being put on a ventilator.)
Though of course it’s still too early to really call it “under control” – it could just be an effect of the Easter holidays and people somehow not making it to the hospitals for that reason.
As for the agricultural workers, here’s an English-language article about how this has shaken out in Germany:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-drafts-romanian-farm-labor-for-coronavirus-pandemic/a-53066735
In short: Attempts to find enough workers in Germany have failed, and as I said the farmers don’t want unskilled workers anyway for the asparagus harvest. So Germany is chartering special flights and has made a deal with Romania to ferry 80,000 agricultural workers between the two countries over the next 2 months. They are supposed to work and be housed under quarantine conditions (which kind of sounds like a somewhat more hygienic version of a labor camp…) and are promised higher wages than the usual pittance in return. And apparently it’s normal in the industry that the migrant workers (who usually don’t speak the local language at all) are housed and fed on-site, for which their employer keeps more than a third of their wages. So they would have little chance of contact with the local population anyway, even if they weren’t actually forbidden from leaving the farm premises like they will be now.
Vivi, I really appreciate your intelligent and well-documented comments. Thank you. As a person living in a former French colony and watching French news on a regular basis, I can tell you that France knowingly chose not to report nursing home figures. They kept them separate in national reports (so there would be two different sets of figures every day on the news; I guess the government was hoping people couldn’t add) and they did not release the EHPAD data at all internationally. This strange way of reporting the COVID19 data was disclosed and reported as if they were quite unremarkable on French news, and no explanation was given for it. Then at some point they decided to consolidate the figures for all the cases and deaths in the interest of “clearer” reporting.
To be fair, though, I do not think Alex was being racist or protective of Canadian jobs. I think he was just worried about contagion. I do, however, think your worries about malnutrition are very valid and agree that most of the vulnerable are in no position to grow their own food, since they indeed live in apartments, in cities, or in the North, where I have lived briefly many years ago, so I know that you are not exaggerating the difficulty of accessing fresh produce in particular, and I would add that the cost of food in general is very high and selection and availability are limited, so the danger is very great, especially if the South were already hit by supply chain issues. We’re definitely going to have an… interesting winter.