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Restrictions could be lifted on up to 100,000 Minnesota workers by Monday
An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 employees could return to work Monday under a plan by Gov. Tim Walz to dial back the state’s stay-at-home order, which was imposed to reduce or delay the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The move is tailored to manufacturers and offices that don’t have face-to-face interaction with clients and weren’t deemed critical industries that were exempt from the stay-at-home order.
Roughly 20,000 companies in this category now have the option to reopen if they complete and publicize plans to maintain social distancing, worker hygiene and workspace cleanliness, said Steve Grove, commissioner for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
“This is a limited first step in the process of safely reopening some businesses and returning Minnesotans to work,” he said.
The move puts Minnesota in a fairly aggressive posture compared with other states, which have been adhering to the White House’s Open Up America Again Guidelines to pursue only a “phased comeback” once they have seen 14 consecutive days of declines in COVID-19 cases. But Walz and state officials said the decision was science-based and not open-ended like the plan to restart almost all businesses in Georgia that even President Donald Trump has criticized.The move also does not change the rest of the stay-home order, which remains in effect until May 4, or recommendations for people to continue to work from home if they can.
Minnesota appears nowhere near its peak in the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Health Department reporting one-day records Thursday of 21 deaths and 221 new lab-confirmed infections. That brings the totals to 200 deaths and 2,942 cases, and with expanded COVID-19 testing getting underway, health officials expect the case count to surge.
https://www.startribune.com/restrictions-could-be-lifted-on-up-to-100-000-minnesota-workers-by-monday/569895852/
Trump and the UV nonsense with quotes
https://twitter.com/JoeySalads/status/1253760079184007170
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/52/26332
In the current period, it seems that passion dominates rigorous and balanced scientific analysisand may lead to scientific misconduct. Thearticle by Magagnoli et al. (Magagnoli, 2020) is an absolutely spectacular example of this. Indeed, in this work, it is concluded, in the end, that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) would double themortality in patients with COVIDwith a fatality rate of 28% (versus 11% in the NoHCQ group), which is extraordinarily hard to believe. The analysis of the data shows two major biases, which show a wellingto be convinced before starting the work : The first is that lymphopenia is twice as common in the HCQ groups (25% in the HCQ, 31% in the HCQ+AZ group versus 14% in the no HCQ group, p =.02) and there is an absolute correlation between lymphopenia(<0.5G/L) and fatality rate, which is well known (Tan, 2020) and confirmed here : 28% deaths, 22%and 11% in the HCQ, HCQ+AZ and No HCQgroup, respectively. Lymphopenia is the most obvious criterion of patient severity (in our cohort, lymphocytes in deadindividuals(n=22, mean ± standard deviation, 0.94 ± 0.45), versus in the living (n=2405, 1.79 ± 0.84, p < .0001)). As the authors acknowledge, the severity of the patients in the different groups was very different, and their analysis can only make sense if there is a selection of patients with the same degree of severity, i.e. the same percentage of lymphopenia. The second major bias is that in an attempt to provide meaningful data, by eliminating the initial severity at the time of treatment, two tables are shown: onetable where drugs are prescribed before intubation, and which shows no significant difference in the 3 different groups (9/90 (10%) in the HCQ group, 11/101 (10. 9%) HCQ+AZ, and 15/177 (8.5%) in the group without HCQ, chi-square = 0.47, ddl = 2, p = 0.79), and one table, where it is not clear when the drugs were prescribed, where there are significant differences. These differences are most likely related to the fact that the patients had been intubated for some before receiving hydroxychloroquine in desperation. It is notable that this is unreasonable at the time of the cytokine storm, as it is unlikely that hydrochloroquine alone would be able to control patients at this stage of the disease.Moreover, incomprehensibly, the “untreated”group actually received azithromycin in 30% of cases, without this group being analyzedin any distinct way. Azithromycin is also a proposed treatment for COVID(Gautret, 2020)with in vitroefficacy (Andreani, 2020), and to mix it with patients who are supposedly untreated is something that is closer to scientific fraud than reasonable analysis. Altogether these 3 voluntary biases are all pushing to the idea of dangerosity of hydroxychloroquine safest drug as reported on nearly 1 million people (Lane, 2020). All in all, this is a work that shows that, in this period, it is possible to propose things that do not stand up to any methodological analysis to try to demonstrate that one is right.
ReferencesAndreani J, Le Bideau M, Duflot I, Jardot P, Rolland C, Boxberger M, Wurtz N, Rolain JM, Colson P, La Scola B, Raoult D. In vitro testing of combined Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin on SARS-CoV-2 shows synergistic effect. Microbial pathogenesis. 2020. In press. Gautret P, Lagier JC, Parola P, Hoang VT, Meddeb L, Mailhe M, Doudier B, Courjon J, Giordanengo V, Vieira VE, Dupont HT, Honoré S, Colson P, Chabrière E, La Scola B, Rolain JM, Brouqui P, Raoult D.Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-labelnon-randomized clinical trial. Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 20:105949. doi: 10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.105949.Lane JCE, Weaver J, Kostka K, et al. Safety of hydroxychloroquine, alone and in combination with azithromycin, in light of rapid wide-spread use for COVID-19: a multinational, network cohort and self-controlled case series study. medRxiv 2020.04.08.20054551; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.20054551Magagnoli J, Narendran S, Pereira F, Cummings T, Hardin JW, Sutton SS, Ambati J. Outcomes of hydroxychloroquine usage in United States veterans hospitalized with Covid-19. medRxiv 2020.04.16.20065920; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920Tan, L., Wang, Q., Zhang, D. et al. Lymphopenia predicts disease severity of COVID-19: a descriptive and predictive study. Sig Transduct Target Ther 5, 33 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41392-020-0148-4.
https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Response-to-Magagnoli.pdf
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