The U.S. has reported 278,920 new COVID-19 cases today, making it the record for most cases reported in a single day.
The previous record?? YESTERDAY..
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A new study showcasing the complicated nature of spread: At least 50% of new coronavirus infections are spread from people without symptoms..
People who are asymptomatic or never experience symptoms made up about 24% of all transmissions, while presymptomatic individuals accounted for 35% for a total of 59%, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
Meanwhile, on that new scary Yorkshire strain: The mutant coronavirus strain ripping through the country is more contagious because it replicates in the throat, scientists have said…
One further detail on the story showcasing symptoms still occurring after 6 months–that one is troubling. These have been previous called the COVID longhaulers..
More than three quarters of coronavirus patients have at least one ongoing symptom six months after initially becoming unwell, according to a new study.
The research looked at the long-term effects of Covid-19 on people admitted to hospital in Wuhan, China, and found that the most common symptom to persist is fatigue or muscle weakness, in 63% of patients.
Patients also frequently experience sleep difficulties (26%), and anxiety or depression was reported among 23% of patients, according to the study.
Researchers found patients who were severely ill in hospital more often had impaired lung function and abnormalities detected in chest imaging – which could indicate organ damage – six months after symptom onset.
If you rested for a mere few hours this week, you couldn’t keep up with it. The last time I looked at Steve Lookner, his bloodshot eyes were giving out from endless hours of broadcasting online!
The mayhem that ensued during the Battle of the Don was the only thing on the nation’s (and world’s) mind since January 6 when the Capitol Hill mob attacked Washington DC..
Since then, countless MAGA supporters, including the man who sat in Nancy Pelosi’s office and the other who cheerfully stole her podium, have been arrested.
Donald Trump has been removed from Twitter for the rest of his life. Thousands of other accounts related to QANAN have been purged. Google, Apple, and now Amazon have deplatformed Parler after a number of posts were made on that site showcasing attempts to organize further mass violence.
A few points of information necessary for consideration:
There was so much news that it was hard to process: Reports of explosive devices, an armed standoff, a shooting and evacuations. Viewers were able to see some of it with their own eyes, but most of the information was secondhand, from tweets and phone calls and emailed dispatches from congressional reporters, many of them locked in the Capitol..
Only later did it become clear that lawmakers feared for their lives; that some of the attackers were hunting for congressional leaders; that there could have been a massacre.
And hunting Mike Pence, the Vice President?
Several have pondered whether Trump’s words in his January 6 speech to his followers was meant to create a hostile coup and a dangerous plot to murder his own vice President! Immediately as the violence began, Pence was ushered out and hidden for safety..
An extremely important and remarkable Twitter thread from Seth Abramson not only documents some important moment’s from Trump’s speech that professors will study for decades to come, but how some of the anger was purposely directed at Pence for the crowd to get hidden messages..
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said at least one laptop had been stolen from his offices, while another protester was seen brandishing Pelosi’s mail outside the Capitol in the aftermath.
The Senate Parliamentarian’s office was ripped apart by the rabble, with footage showing the floor of her rooms covered in files taken from drawers and cabinets.
And finally, developing late Saturday.. Impeachment II may have a friend in the Senate for conviction: PA Senator Toomey..
“I do think the President committed impeachable offenses,” Toomey told Fox News. The senator, who has said he is not going to run for reelection in 2022, would not say whether he would vote to impeach Trump should there be a Senate trial, saying he is not certain what kind of articles of impeachment would be passed by the Democrat-led House of Representatives.
Toomey said he believes Trump’s “behavior this week does disqualify him from serving. But we’ve got 10 days left, 11 days left.””I don’t know whether logistically it’s actually really even possible or practical and I’m not sure it’s desirable to attempt to force him out, what a day or two or three prior to the day on which he’s going to be finished anyway,” Toomey said. “So I’m not clear that’s the best path forward.”
Just prior to President Donald Trump inspiring a crowd to trash the United States Capitol building in Washington DC, Donald Trump Junior videotaped the family disco dancing and partying while the song Gloria blasted in a tent.
The family and Trump associates appeared to be conducting a watch party, it would appear the video was prior to trumps speech but not clear.
The president himself is seen near the end of the video swinging what appears to be a red boxing glove while watching the crowd on the television.
Meanwhile, concerning the use of the song Gloria, this from the estate of Laura Brannigan:
President president Donald Trump tonight has posted a bizarre video on his Twitter account, 12 hours after his initial ban in relation to the violence on Capitol Hill yesterday.
The video appears to show the president conciliatory about the violence, Even stating he called in the National Guard immediately. Something that is probably debatable..
The typical debate ensued sued. Pro-Trumpers saying that he should go to Parlor, while the anti-Trump crowd serenading him a goodbye. .
But a few others hypothesized something else. Some thing dare we say conspiratorial? The strange imagery of the video seemed bizarre, it looked pixelated, and at points trumps mouth did not even seem to match the words that were coming out..
We have been told how easy deep deep fakes are to make, perhaps easier now than ever before we are told…
Before the violence began a the Capitol, the President addressed a crowd of faithful at a “Stop the Steal” rally in DC that the media was at fault, that the election was stolen, and it was time to fight…
Minutes later, as Trump went into his secure limo despite saying he would tell his supporters he would “walk down” with them, MAGA supporters began to break through police lines as storm the United States Capitol building.
Images that graced us today included Trump supporters taking over the halls of Congress, sitting in the Speaker’s chair and posting for a photo, and even sitting in the offices of Congresspersons and rummaging through their paperwork.
Among the harrowing moments: People scaling walls, a shooting, the floor of the Congress being attacked and guarded by a few armed security officials…
Twitter deleted a pre-taped video of Trump telling people to “go home” and subsequently suspended Trump’s account for 12 hours.. many called for a deletion and more..
Never in recent memory have the events of a single 24-hour period so shaken two presidencies, the very Capitol of the United States and the nation itself as they did on Wednesday.
The effects will ripple out for years to come, and the full consequences will be left for historians to sort out. It seems likely, though, that the chances that other Republicans will see Mr. Trump as the leader of their party after he leaves office have been diminished significantly. As Mr. Trump himself tried to remind his supporters after violence broke out, Republicans like to be seen as the party of law and order, and that is hardly the image he is now projecting.
WE will all have to come to grips with this moment in time.. and with time comes perspective. While so many are quick to have an immediate reaction to moments in real time, at unique historical point like this, it is better to refrain from comment and final judgement.. as the historical events have yet to change and end.
Joe Biden has been officially named the President Elect as of 4am today. But will he be the 46th president? Or 47th?
Moments in time captured by screenshot and photographic evidence of anarchy at the nation’s capitol. The world watched, by the way. THAT should be as scary as what we saw yesterday.
Now a pair of Harvard researchers are raising the possibility that Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft. As they say in a paper to be published Nov. 12 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”
“It is impossible to guess the purpose behind ‘Oumuamua without more data,” Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department and a co-author of the paper, told NBC News MACH in an email. If ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, he added, one possibility is that it was floating in interstellar space when our solar system ran into it, “like a ship bumping into a buoy on the surface of the ocean.”
And now, Avi Loeb wrote a book about Oumuamua.. He said aliens visited us in 2017, and more are on the way!
In his upcoming book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), out Jan. 26, the professor lays out a compelling case for why an object that recently wandered into our solar system was not just another rock but actually a piece of alien technology.
At first, scientists thought it was an ordinary comet. But Loeb said that assumption ran the risk of allowing “the familiar to define what we might discover.”
“What would happen if a caveman saw a cellphone?” he asked. “He’s seen rocks all his life, and he would have thought it was just a shiny rock.”
“This would make ‘Oumuamua’s geometry more extreme by at least a few times in aspect ratio — or its width to its height — than the most extreme asteroids or comets that we have ever seen,” Loeb writes in his book. What’s more, ‘Oumuamua was unusually bright. It was at least “ten times more reflective than typical solar system [stony] asteroids or comets,” the author writes.
But the anomaly that really pushed Loeb toward his E.T. hypothesis was the way ‘Oumuamua moved.
The book will go on,
But ‘Oumuamua didn’t follow this calculated trajectory. The object, in fact, accelerated “slightly, but to a highly statistically significant extent,” Loeb writes, as it moved away from the sun.
In other words, he writes that it was being pushed by a force besides the sun’s gravity alone.
An unidentified flying object spotted in the evening sky over Leeward Oahu prompted witnesses to call 911 on Tuesday. The sighting happened about 8:30 p.m.There are multiple videos of what appears to be a glowing‚ oblong mass — both in the sky and in the water.Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration say there were no aircraft incidents or accidents in this area at the time. But multiple witnesses reported seeing a large blue object fall out of the sky and into the ocean.
Just as quickly as the calendar changed from 2020 to the fresh year of new beginnings, strange activity continue..
DATELINE Rome..
Hundreds of dead birds fell down from the sky in the center of Rome, Italy just after fireworks for New Year. MAYBE a connection?
A motorist uploaded a video to Youtube of the new year carnage:
DATELINE INDIA:
Authorities in Rajasthan’s Jhalawar town have imposed a curfew in a one-km radius after it was confirmed that 50 crows had died of bird flu recently. Deaths of 100 crows, peacocks, and other birds have also been reported in Jaipur.
This one may be less fireworks.. and more worrisome..
MORE..
Bird flu was confirmed on Wednesday in a Jhalawad area where around 100 crows were found dead. The district administration has declared a zero mobility zone within one kilometre of the area to ensure the infection does not spread to other birds.
A post on Twitter from the Friday the 13th franchise brought back memories.. That dreaded Michael Myers mask from Halloween H20..
#JasonVoorhees has his issues with different hockey masks, but never one using CGI. What’s the story behind Mikey’s mask in this scene in H20 pic.twitter.com/CBEVZ3xzrv
— Friday The 13th: The Franchise 🪓 (@F13thFranchise) January 3, 2021
It clearly was one of the weirdest and worst.. the eyes too big.. the chiseled jaw line.. the strange computerized appearance it took on.
The film was a mixture of hits and misses–mostly misses.. John Carpenter thankfully recused it with his re-do in 2018, and subsequent sequel that was delayed until October 2021..
On the 20th anniversary of the 20th Anniversary of the original Halloween, 2019, an article in Screen Rant had an explanation of sorts:
Though there have been some questionable changes made to the mask Michael Myers wears in the Halloween franchise over the years, H20‘s mask stands out a cut above the rest – and not in a good way. In H20, there were four different masks used in various scenes and stages of production. This is different from all the other films in the franchise, which used one primary design. Because of this, there was no real sense of continuity and the changes from one shot to the next took audiences out of the film, effectively limiting the terrifying visage of the antagonist.
While the H20 mask was applauded for trying to look more like the original film’s, it was ultimately disliked by audiences, due in no small part to the fact that there were four masks used in production. These 4 masks are the KNB mask, Buechler mask, Stan Winston mask, and CGI mask.
The Buechler mask is the mask used in the opening scene. It was made to look like the mask from Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
The Stan Winston mask is the main mask in the film and is the mask mostly seen throughout the film. This was used in reshoots to replace the KNB mask in some shots. However, even though this mask look closer to the original mask, it was criticized for being too tight (Michael’s eyes are often clearly visible), looking awkward, showing Michael’s eyes, and having messy hair.
So after all these years.. and all of the dreadful sequels, it is clear. So many bad masks existed in H20..
But nothing as bad as Halloween 5..
Fans have often said it was the worst.. even comparing its look to that of Thomas the Train…
Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of when the global medical community received an alert about an unidentified cluster of a pneumonia-like illness that would later come to be known as COVID-19.
The real story yet to be told is how long before December 30, 2019 that the virus was actually circulating..
Hong Kong health authorities are taking no chances with a mysterious outbreak of viral pneumonia in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, warning of symptoms similar to Sars and bird flu as they step up border screening and put hospitals on alert.
“The situation in Wuhan is unusual, and we are not sure about the reasons behind the outbreak yet,” said Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee said after an urgent night-time meeting with officials and experts on New Year’s Eve. “Since we are now in the holiday season, and Hong Kong has close transport ties with Wuhan, we must stay alert.”
While we need no reminder of how much this virus has affected our lives, they abound. Tomorrow as the clock strikes midnight, New York City will be without a crowd.. Times Square, for all is electric magnificence on New Years Eve, will be hushed.
This indeed has been the lost year. Funny, in a sense, how it all began.
The WHO telling the world there was no human to human transmission was one thing, but then government officials around the world saying not to wear masks as they were meaningless was another!
While so many argue about why science became political in 2020, it’s clear why.. because initially governments all took different courses of action, led with different agendas and mixed messages, and endured missteps in the long journey to the highly infectious December the planet is experiencing.
Seeds of confusion were planted early!
As the year ended, just one year ago now, an “unidentified” virus was identified in Wuhan.
New Years celebrations ushered in the roaring 20s of the 21st century.
Meanwhile, backstage, officials were scrambling for answers.
The cause of mysterious pneumonia cases in the Chinese city of Wuhan remains unknown, health authorities in the city said Sunday, as the number of infected people rose to 59 from 44 on Friday.
Seven of the sick are listed as critically ill, down from 11 on Friday. The number of close contacts of cases under medical observation has risen to 163.
Sunday’s statement, the third from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission about the incident, is the first to give information about when people became infected. The first person known to have become ill began to show symptoms on Dec. 12 and the last date of symptom onset among the sick was Dec. 29, the statement said.
But the rest of the press information aged even worse, a clear sign that early reports were taking what China was releasing as fact.
The report went on,
Preliminary investigations show no clear evidence of person-to-person spread of the infection, and no cases among health workers, the Wuhan authorities said. The latter fact is especially important. Infections among medical staff are common at the start of infectious diseases outbreaks, when health workers don’t know they need to take special precautions to protect themselves. “I would say that … given the dates that they have mentioned there and the fact that no health care workers have been infected would suggest it’s not transmitting efficiently in humans,” said Ralph Baric, who studies emerging viruses at the University of North Carolina.
One year later, in America along, someone is dying every three minutes of COVID in Los Angeles, and the United States is nearing 4,000 people dying of COVID ….. D A I L Y ! ! !
It describes the early days of this just one year ago now and how the world publicly and private reacted.. You should really read the entirely of the article.. but a few snippets worth really taking in includes these:
Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.. Gao started to cry and said, “I think we’re too late.”
Impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump were the highlight of daily American news broadcasts.. meanwhile, Senator Mitch McConnell announced, “In the morning, there will be a coronavirus briefing for all members at ten-thirty.” This was the first mention of COVID in Congress.
During the briefing, health authorities were reassuring. Redfield said, “We are prepared for this.”
One majorly important part of the article was when exactly the virus began to spread..
Perhaps Gao had just been made aware that the virus had been circulating in China at least since November. Certainly, Redfield didn’t know that the virus was already present in California, Oregon, and Washington, and would be spreading in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Iowa, Connecticut, Michigan, and Rhode Island within the next two weeks—well before America’s first official case was detected.
THE EARLY GAME
Italy was one of the harder hit nations in 2020… And there were early reports that the plague year may have began earlier than thought.
Italian researchers are looking at whether a higher than usual number of cases of severe pneumonia and flu in Lombardy in the last quarter of 2019 may be a signal that the new coronavirus might have spread beyond China earlier than previously thought. Adriano Decarli, an epidemiologist and medical statistics professor at the University of Milan, said there had been a “significant” increase in the number of people hospitalized for pneumonia and flu in the areas of Milan and Lodi between October and December last year.
He told Reuters he could not give exact figures but “hundreds” more people than usual had been taken to hospital in the last three months of 2019 in those areas – two of Lombardy’s worst hit cities – with pneumonia and flu-like symptoms, and some of those had died.
A NEW JERSEY mayor claimed he had COVID in November 2019.. the media at the time called his claim unfounded. “I was definitely feeling sick when I was there, and fought my way through it,” he told NJ Advance Media on Thursday. After returning home Nov. 21 from the convention, Melham said a doctor diagnosed his worsening symptoms — including a 102-degree fever, chills, hallucinations and a sore throat that ended up lasting for three weeks — as a bad case of the flu. “I have never been sicker in my entire life,” Melham said, though he acknowledged that he did not have the respiratory problems often associated with the coronavirus.
NEWSWEEK reported that some scientists said outbreaks started as early as September 2019! Based on the data Forster and his colleagues have collected, the coronavirus outbreak appears to have started between September 13 and December 7. “This assumes a constant mutation rate, which is admittedly unlikely to be the case, and the time estimate could therefore be wrong,” he told Newsweek. “But it is the best assumption we can make at the moment, pending analysis of further patient samples stored in hospitals during 2019.”
ABC NEWS reported that intelligence was looking at a spreading virus in November 2019. “”The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing,” the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. “But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on.””
A report in September 2019 talked about interesting symptoms of the vaping epidemic.. Respiratory symptoms reported by patients included shortness of breath, pain associated with breathing and a cough. Other symptoms included fever, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, the release said. But the cases displayed “no clear infectious cause and all required hospitalization.”
Dr Li Wenliang was an active user of Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, over the past 10 years. He posted his last words on February 1: “Today the nucleic acid test result turns positive,” he wrote of the test that confirmed he had Covid-19. “The dust has settled, and the diagnosis is finally confirmed.”
One later later, some in China are still taking to the net to admire and honor him … despite the government’s watchful eye…
