Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Baton Rouge mom dies from coronavirus, and her premature baby girl is fighting for her life | Coronavirus | theadvocate.com (RIP)

Source: Baton Rouge mom dies from coronavirus, and her premature baby girl is fighting for her life | Coronavirus | theadvocate.com

Allie Guidry, 29, had tested positive for coronavirus and was admitted to Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge last month, relatives said. She was about 20 weeks pregnant at the time.

Guidry died Thursday morning after her doctors delivered the baby while performing CPR, according to her family. Madaline Guidry Conish weighed just 2 pounds at birth and remains in the neonatal intensive care unit. She was born almost four months early.

Scientists’ Social Engagement Is Needed to Stem the COVID-19 Pandemic

Note

To tackle the pandemic and other global threats like climate change, scientists, citizens and policymakers need to work together.

By Deborah BrosnanAndreas Rechkemmer & James Bohland Fair Observer

Sep 18, 2020

Photo by Edward Jenner from Pexels

The global COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the unpreparedness and inability of many countries to effectively manage complex risks and ensure community resilience. An important dimension of this dangerous flaw is the sharp divide between those who rely on science to shape policies and actions, and those who undermine or dispel science when inconvenient to their viewpoints and agendas.

The divide has manifested itself in myriad ways, through anti-mask protests, arguments that the coronavirus — which causes the COVID-19 disease — is either a hoax or created by Bill Gates or the Chinese military, or proclamations about untested or potentially deadly “treatment regimes.” The divide is fueled by the rhetoric of…

View original post 789 more words

Lack of Antigen Test Reporting Leaves Country ‘Blind to the Pandemic’ – Note (Covid-19)

Source: Lack of Antigen Test Reporting Leaves Country ‘Blind to the Pandemic’ – Note

“The absence of information is a very dangerous thing,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, which represents public health officials. “We will be blind to the pandemic. It will be happening around us and we will have no data.”

The states that don’t report antigen test results or don’t count antigen positives as COVID cases are California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming, as well as the District of Columbia.

The Baloney Detection Kit – Carl Sagan

Source: The Baloney Detection Kit

Sagan shares nine of these tools:

  1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
  2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
  3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
  4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
  5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
  6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
  7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
  8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
  9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

 

Singapore rolls out Covid tracing tokens – BBC News

Source: Singapore rolls out Covid tracing tokens – BBC News

Singapore is distributing thousands of devices that can track where a person has been and who they have interacted with.

The small bluetooth device is meant for those who do not own smartphones and cannot use a contact tracing app that was previously rolled out by the Singapore government.

While there are some concerns over about data protection, authorities say the token helps vulnerable groups to feel safer when out and about.

For instance, the token helps elderly people keep a a precise record of their whereabouts.

The Dalai Lama and The Followers—Three Questions

Kamal's Blogging Café

Just Three Questions and the Answers will Astonish You- Test it Yourself.

It was partly raining in the evening in Dharamsala close to the perennial snowline and built along a spur of the Dhauladhar mountain range, Himanchal Pradesh, India. Most of the young people were eagerly waiting to wish His Holiness the Dalai Lama on his auspicious occasion of his birthday.

Video link was a suitable device for Dalai Lama to communicate with the followers as Coronavirus pandemic was a big threat around the globe. And, it’s true that there was a message from Oracle— “Human people, it’s a threat you have created yourself, a pandemic that hit in most part of the big cities and countries around the world; Spread PEACE & Promote SAVE ENVIRONMENT; the ecosystem of Earth is badly disturbed… I was entirely exhausted and felt difficult to breath cause of burning heat of fire and suffocating…

View original post 1,307 more words

In ‘Power Grab,’ Health Secretary Azar Asserts Authority Over F.D.A. – The New York Times (Sickening the nation’s health science and credibility)

Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, this week barred the nation’s health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, from signing any new rules regarding the nation’s foods, medicines, medical devices and other products, including vaccines.

Going forward, Mr. Azar wrote in a Sept. 15 memorandum obtained by The New York Times, such power “is reserved to the Secretary.” The bulletin was sent to heads of operating and staff divisions within H.H.S.

It’s unclear if or how the memo would change the vetting and approval process for coronavirus vaccines, three of which are in advanced clinical trials in the United States. Political appointees, under pressure from the president, have taken a string of steps over the past few months to interfere with the standard scientific and regulatory processes at the health agencies. For example, a much criticized guideline on testing for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists, and was posted on the agency’s public website over their objections. It was reversed on Friday.

Outside observers were alarmed by the new memo and worried that it could contribute to a public perception of political meddling in science-based regulatory decisions. Dr. Mark McClellan, who formerly headed the F.D.A. and now runs Duke University’s health policy center, praised the agency’s work on vaccine development but said the policy change was ill-timed.