Category Archives: Uncategorized

MERS: Impact of comorbidity on mortality, revisited

Mens et Manus

While the MERS outbreak in Saudi Arabia has been winding down, I’ve been retroactively adding newly announced deaths to previously reported cases. (Given the ~15 day lag time between onset of symptoms and death, I expect that there’ll be more deaths to add to the tally in the days ahead.)

Recently, I was able to match the vast majority of deaths announced thus far to their respective database case entries, giving us a clearer picture of what case fatality rate has really looked like in recent weeks. As of today – May 27th – only 5 deaths remain unmatched, all from the KSA. It’s certainly possible that I’ve mismatched some of these retroactively-added deaths, despite stringent triangulation using age, gender, location, and (more recently) reporting date data. This said, I feel confident enough in the data as they stand today to share an up-to-date “redo” of the comorbidity/mortality relative risk…

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Hypnotic

Sums up nicely a place we have all been in – wonderful

Night Owl Poetry - Dorinda Duclos

Photo via venturegalleries.com Photo via venturegalleries.com

I see you sitting there
staring into space
A faraway look
that tells me your wheels
are turning, spinning
at an extraordinarily
fast pace but
You say nothing when I ask
what you’re thinking about
as you drift further away

©2014 Dorinda Duclos All Rights Reserved

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Fox is really sick! A Republican World – The ‘Republican Hate, Fear and Loathing’ Edition – ‘Fox News ‘expert’ suggests ‘homosexual impulses’ triggered Calif. mass shooting’ | The Last Of The Millenniums

Reality television psychologist Dr. Robi Ludwig asserted to Fox News that a mass shooting in California over the weekend may have been triggered because the suspect could not cope with his “homosexual impulses.”

via A Republican World – The ‘Republican Hate, Fear and Loathing’ Edition – ‘Fox News ‘expert’ suggests ‘homosexual impulses’ triggered Calif. mass shooting’ | The Last Of The Millenniums.

Race report from the Florida Keys: My first 50-mile race

Think I could walk it – maybe Good on you

Fit and Feminist

Editor’s note: I started writing this a while ago but it turned into a sprawling novella, unfit for publication as a blog post.  There’s more I’d like to say, but for now I’ll just give you the race report.

keys-pre-start

Before the Keys 50, the farthest I’d ever covered under the power of my own two feet was 34 miles.  Somehow I was going to have to find it in me to tack another 16 miles onto that.  The curious thing is how little the idea scared me. I didn’t stay awake all night long dreaming of the abyss like I did the night before my second Olympic-distance triathlon, which had me swim nearly a mile in a murky lake that was home to sunken buses and alligators, and I didn’t suggest to Brian that it wasn’t too late for us to turn around and go home the way I…

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Voters reject EU as shocking new figures reveal Europe is full of foreigners

Pride's Purge

(satire?)

Voters across the width and breadth of Europe have rejected the European Union after they discovered most of their fellow citizens in the organisation were foreign.

The political earthquake comes after shocking figures revealed the EU is flooded with foreigners – including 89 million Germans who have taken up residence in an area of the continent between France and Poland.

Huge numbers of Italians have also been revealed to be swamping the Italian peninsula and other nationalities are residing legally in the EU, including hordes of Poles in Poland, millions of Hungarians in Hungary and vast amounts of Bulgarians in Bulgaria.

Experts say France has been particularly hard hit by the invasion of foreigners with as many as 67 million French people living there, the majority of whom have full access to health and welfare services provided by the French state.

And in the UK, UKIP leader Nigel Farage expressed his outrage at the number of foreign…

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