Spoopy Pic. Almost everyone is looking down at their phones. Connected?

In China's Latest Outbreak, Doctors Say the Infected Get Sicker, Faster

As the delta variant of the coronavirus spreads in southeastern China, doctors say they are finding that the symptoms are different and more dangerous than those they saw when the initial version of the virus started spreading in late 2019 in the central city of Wuhan.

Patients are becoming sicker, and their conditions are worsening much more quickly, doctors told state-run television Thursday and Friday. Four-fifths of symptomatic cases developed fevers, they said, although it was not clear how that compared with earlier cases. The virus concentrations that are detected in their bodies climb to levels higher than previously seen and then decline only slowly, the doctors said.

Up to 12% of patients become severely or critically ill within three to four days of the onset of symptoms, said Guan Xiangdong, director of critical care medicine at Sun Yat-sen University in the city of Guangzhou, where the outbreak has been centered. In the past, the proportion had been 2% or 3%, although occasionally up to 10%, he said

Doctors in Britain and Brazil have reported similar trends with the variants that circulated in those countries, but the severity of those variants has not yet been confirmed.

The testimonies from China are the latest indication of the dangers posed by delta, which the World Health Organization last month labeled a “variant of concern.” First identified this spring in India, where it was blamed for widespread suffering and death, delta has since become the dominant variant in Britain, where doctors suggest that it is more contagious and may infect some people who have received only one of two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

China has uniquely detailed data, however, because it has essentially universal testing in the vicinity of outbreaks, allowing officials to gather detailed information on the extent of cases.

Delta’s spread in southeastern China focuses more attention on the effectiveness of China’s self-made vaccines. Chinese authorities have not indicated how many of the new infections have occurred in people who had been vaccinated. In some other countries where Chinese-made vaccines are in wide use, including the Seychelles and Mongolia, infections among vaccinated people are rising, although few patients have reportedly developed serious illness.

Nearby Shenzhen had a handful of cases last week of the alpha variant, which first emerged in Britain.

As some other parts of the world still struggle to acquire and administer large numbers of coronavirus tests, southeastern China has used its local production of scarce chemicals to conduct testing on a remarkable scale. Authorities said that they had conducted 32 million tests in Guangzhou, which has 18 million people, and 10 million in the adjacent city of Foshan, which has 7 million.

Guangzhou has also isolated and quarantined tens of thousands of residents who had been anywhere near those infected. The testing and quarantine appear to have slowed but not stopped the outbreak. China’s National Health Commission announced Friday that nine new cases had been found in Guangzhou the previous day.

“The epidemic is not over yet, and the risk of virus transmission still exists,” said Chen Bin, deputy director of the Guangzhou Municipal Health Commission.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinas-latest-outbreak-doctors-infected-154327292.html

Apple Is Said to Have Turned Over Data on Trump's White House Counsel in 2018

WASHINGTON — Apple told Donald McGahn, the White House counsel to former President Donald Trump, last month that the Justice Department had subpoenaed information about an account that belonged to him in February 2018 and that the government barred the company from telling him at the time, according to two people briefed on the matter.

McGahn’s wife received a similar notice from Apple, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

It is not clear what FBI agents were scrutinizing, nor whether McGahn was their specific focus. In investigations, agents sometimes compile a large list of phone numbers and email addresses that were in contact with a subject and seek to identify all those people by using subpoenas to communications companies for any account information like names, computer addresses and credit card numbers associated with them.

Still, the disclosure that agents secretly collected data of a sitting White House counsel is striking, as it comes amid a political backlash to revelations about Trump-era seizures of data of reporters and Democrats in Congress for leak investigations. The president’s top lawyer is also a chief point of contact between the White House and the Justice Department.

Apple told McGahn that it complied with the subpoena in a timely fashion but declined to tell him what it provided the government, according to a person briefed on the matter. Under Justice Department policy, gag orders for subpoenas may be renewed for up to a year at a time, suggesting that prosecutors went to court several times to prevent Apple from notifying the McGahns earlier.

Spokespeople for Apple and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for McGahn declined to comment.

Apple told the McGahns that it received the subpoena Feb. 23, 2018, according to a person briefed on the matter. The other person familiar with the matter said the subpoena had been issued by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia.

It is not clear why prosecutors obtained the subpoena. But several notable events were occurring around that time.

One of the roughly concurrent events was that the federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia was the center of one part of the Russia inquiry led by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that focused on Paul Manafort, the onetime chair of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

Because McGahn had been the top lawyer for the Trump campaign in 2016, it is possible that at some earlier point he had been among those in contact with someone whose account the Mueller team was scrutinizing in early 2018.

Notably, Manafort had been hit with new fraud charges unsealed the day before the subpoena. Subsequent developments revealed that Mueller’s investigators were closely scrutinizing some of his communications accounts in the days that followed.

more

https://www.yahoo.com/news/apple-said-turned-over-data-164052447.html

>>13893993

IG Farbin

Bayer

Gates

>>13894020

A Doc Who Helped End Smallpox Says COVID’s Here to Stay

Dr. Larry Brilliant spoke with Harry Siegel about why it’s too late to hope for herd immunity despite the “magic” of vaccines, and much more.

blah, blah here

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-doctor-who-eliminated-smallpox-says-covid-19-is-here-to-stay

>>13894108

Don't forget these asshats

DARPA

Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3)

https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-platform

>>13894169

[RR]

>>13894194

Big Bitter Bitch

Posting article because of the recent Soros Watermelon post. Water Melon? Blood?

Glacier Blood? Watermelon Snow? Whatever It's Called, Snow Shouldn't Be So Red.

Winter through spring, the French Alps are wrapped in austere white snow. But as spring turns to summer, the stoic slopes start to blush. Parts of the snow take on bright colors: deep red, rusty orange, lemonade pink. Locals call this “sang de glacier,” or “glacier blood.” Visitors sometimes go with “watermelon snow.”

In reality, these blushes come from an embarrassment of algae. In recent years, alpine habitats all over the world have experienced an uptick in snow-algae blooms — dramatic, strangely hued aggregations of these normally invisible creatures.

While snow-algae blooms are poorly understood, the fact they are happening is probably not a good sign. Researchers have begun surveying the algae of the Alps to better grasp what species live there, how they survive and what might be pushing them over the bleeding edge. Some of their initial findings were published this week in Frontiers in Plant Science.

Tiny yet powerful, the plantlike bacteria we call algae are “the basis of all ecosystems,” said Adeline Stewart, an author of the study who worked on it as a doctoral student at Grenoble Alpes University in France. Thanks to their photosynthetic prowess, algae produce a large amount of the world’s oxygen and form the foundation of most food webs.

But they sometimes overdo it, multiplying until they throw things out of balance. This can cause toxic red tides, scummy freshwater blooms and unsettling glacier blood.

While it’s unclear exactly what spurs the blooms, the color — often red, but sometimes green, gray or yellow — comes from pigments and other molecules that the snow algae use to protect themselves from ultraviolet light. These hues absorb more sunlight, causing the underlying snow to melt more quickly. This can change ecosystem dynamics and hasten the shrinking of glaciers.

Inspired by increasing reports of the phenomenon, researchers at several alpine institutes decided to turn their attention from algae species in far-flung habitats to those “that grow next door,” said Eric Maréchal, head of a plant physiology lab at Grenoble Alpes University and a leader of the project.

Because so many different types of algae can live and bloom in the mountains, the researchers began with a census in parts of the French Alps to find out what grows where. They took soil samples from five peaks, spread over various altitudes, and searched for algalDNA.

more

https://www.yahoo.com/news/glacier-blood-watermelon-snow-whatever-152637317.html