Pinback
Pinback's JournalNumbers of people hospitalized in Alabama won't be shared with the public: Mobile County H.D.
Thursday, however, the Mobile County Health Department said that information was on a “need to know” basis and is only being shared with certain people and individuals. MCHD Epidemiologist, Dr. Rendi Murphree, told reporters, “Hospitals are uploading that information three times daily to the Alabama Instant Notification System. These numbers include all their bed types including negative pressure rooms and ventilators.” That includes not only Mobile County but the entire state.
Mobile County has 18 cases of covid-19.
Source: News 5 WKRG
Well, we certainly don't want the public to know what's actually going on!
You know that super-hip song from the Infiniti commercial?
Well, here it is -- "Fifty Foot Woman" by Hannah Williams & The Affirmations!
I dedicate this to Elizabeth Warren and Nancy Pelosi, a couple of fifty-foot women who tower over most of the midgets in Washington!!
First, the original studio recording:
And now a smokin' live performance:
Georgia Innocence Project: GA Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Joey Watkins & Johnny Lee Gates!
From Georgia Innocence Project website:In 2018, Georgia Innocence Project and our co-counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights successfully argued to Muscogee County Superior Court Senior Judge John Allen that Mr. Gates deserved a new trial for a number of reasons, including new DNA evidence, Brady violations, destroyed physical evidence and race discrimination. After a multi-day hearing, Judge Allen granted Mr. Gates’s Extraordinary Motion for New Trial, holding that the new exculpatory DNA evidence, when considered in light of the other evidence in the case, probably would have produced a different verdict at trial.
Judge Allen also made searing findings regarding new evidence demonstrating undeniable and profound race discrimination by the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office in several death penalty trials in the 1970’s and 1980’s in order to secure all white juries.
From GIP email received today:
In 2018, GIP and co-counsel Ben Goldberg argued at a habeas hearing that Joey Watkins should be released from prison because of recently discovered juror misconduct, Brady violations, and prosecutorial misconduct. But instead of hearing the merits of the claim, Walker County Judge Don Thompson dismissed Joey’s habeas petition at the State’s request, finding that Joey was too late to bring his claims and that he could not bring them in a second
habeas petition.
We asked the Georgia Supreme Court let us appeal and to correct Judge Thompson’s erroneous order.
After reconsidering their initial decision denying our request, the Georgia Supreme Court not only heard our appeal - which Ben Goldberg argued this fall - but sided with us on all issues!
Johnny Lee Gates
Joey Watkins
Mrs. Betty Bowers for the win:
If Trump is going to call COVID-19 the "Chinese Virus," I was going to call it after him. But "Swine Flu" had already been taken.
https://twitter.com/bettybowers/status/1239701684013629441
Well, I survived -- something
I'm just coming off a week with flu-like symptoms. Since I never developed pneumonia and I don’t “fit the profile” of covid-19 suspects (no recent foreign travel or contact with anyone who's recently visited high-risk countries) — and I’m not a well-connected Republican official — I haven’t been tested.
So I don’t know if the novel coronavirus is what hit me, but the symptoms are sure similar:
- persistent dry cough (not gone yet)
- fever for 5 days — spiked to 102.3 the second day
- weariness
- weak appetite for almost a week
- vomiting one night, mild diarrhea for a couple of days, and
- some difficulty breathing (improved now).
I had a phone appointment with my doctor’s office on the third day. Nurse Practitioner recommended Mucinex (cough suppressant + expectorant), as well as Tylenol or ibuprofen to reduce fever if necessary. The NP called in an order for a chest X-Ray, which I can use any time in the next several weeks in case of severe congestion or shortness of breath.
I elected not to take a fever reducer, since my temperature never got alarmingly high, and I know fever is one of the immune system’s tools for fighting a virus.
I'm doing fairly well nine days after this started, thanks to a week of bed rest, lots of fluids, and -- most important -- the patient and diligent support of my wonderful wife. And I have a son living nearby, who’s helped us out greatly with trips to the store.
My wife and I are retired seniors, both in reasonably good health, and we each got both a flu shot and a pneumonia shot within the past few months. We’re habitually careful about germs and don’t get colds that often. And we almost never get the flu. So this was a surprise. So far she’s staying healthy, knock on wood.
We'll continue to self-quarantine for at least a couple of more weeks, and will keep to ourselves most of the time as suggested, until the experts say as a society we no longer need social distancing.
I hope at some point to find out if I did have covid-19, because if I have immunity -- and if the virus doesn't mutate -- I could be in a position to help patients or others at higher risk without fearing for my own safety.
Stanford group wants to use your computer to help researchers study the coronavirus
Long-time DUers may recall that we once had a DU "Folding@home" team, joining thousands of others around the world in commandeering our personal computers' unused number-crunching capacity to help the Stanford University Folding@home project research diseases.
Well, the Stanford group is still doing this work. To date, the Folding@home project has focused primarily on cancer and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Now, as they march toward one million members worldwide, they're asking for volunteers to support their research into COVID-19!
In fact, I checked their list of teams*, and there is still a Democratic Underground team -- Team 48157. You can participate anonymously, or create a user name to get credit as an individual or as a member of the team!
* Note: This file has a bz2 extension, so you'll need to use a zip extractor to open it.
The way it works is that participants download the Folding@home software to their Windows, Mac, or Linux computers and then run it in the background. To quote from the project web site: "The Folding@home software runs while you do other things. While you keep going with your everyday activities, your computer will be working to help us find cures for diseases like cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza and many others."
In this video, participant Hannah Samara explains why she joined the effort:
Reading to join me and start folding? Go here: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
Here's some more info on the program:
By Kim Lyons Mar 2, 2020, 6:25pm EST
The Verge
Stanford University’s Folding@home distributed computing project is seeking volunteers to help researchers develop treatment therapies for the novel coronavirus.
Folding@home (FAH) uses the processing capacity of networked computers to simulate the complex process of protein folding, which helps determine how to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer, and SARS, another coronavirus. A brief explainer from Folding@home:
For both coronaviruses (the current 2019 nCoV and SARS), the first step of infection occurs in the lungs, when a protein on the surface of the virus binds to a receptor protein on a lung cell. This viral protein is called the spike protein ... Proteins are not stagnant—they wiggle and fold and unfold to take on numerous shapes. We need to study not only one shape of the viral spike protein, but all the ways the protein wiggles and folds into alternative shapes
Studying how the protein folds could eventually help researchers develop drugs that could treat infections of the virus.
This kind of research requires substantial computational power, which FAH generates by tapping into volunteers’ CPUs when they’re idle.
(snip)
To participate in the coronavirus project, download the FAH software, and your computer’s unused resources will go to the Folding@home Consortium, “where a research team at Memorial Sloan Kettering is working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the design of new therapies,” according to FAH’s blog post.
From the "About" page of the Folding@home project web site:
PANDE LAB
The Pande Lab is the founding scientific group of Folding@home. Directed by Professor Vijay Pande, Ph.D., the lab is part of the Departments of Chemistry and of Structural Biology, Stanford University and Stanford University Medical Center, and works on theory and simulations of how proteins, RNA, and nanoscale synthetic polymers fold.
We founded the project, developed methods for using distributed computing to study long timescale dynamics, pushed its application to protein folding, and wrote the client software and server code for the Folding@home project. The members of the group involved with Folding@home are listed on our web page.
For more information:
- Start folding now!
- Folding@home project home page
- Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19 / 2019-NCOV
- Folding@home Consortium -- other research labs collaborating with the Stanford team
- Folding@home Support Forum
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: GA
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 12,153