Category Archives: COVID-19

The delta variant is no big deal if you’re young or vaccinated.

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The toll of COVID-19 has been terrible: 660,000 dead by my count, based on excess deaths, graph below, or 620,000 according to the CDC based on hospital records. Death rates appear to have returned to pre-pandemic levels, more or less*, but folks are still getting very sick and going to the hospital, mostly for “the delta variant.”

Weekly US death rates since October 2015.

As the following chart shows, severe symptoms of COVID are now almost entirely in the old, and unvaccinated. The risk to the young and middle aged is low, but even there, vaccination helps. According to the CDC, 72.2% of the adult US population is vaccinated with at least one shot. The vaccination, doesn’t prevent you from getting the delta variant nor from spreading it; it just protects from the most serious consequences of the disease. It seems a previous infection has the same effect, though less so.

Vaccination helps prevent hospitalization – at all ages (Israeli data)

If you’re over 60 and unvaccinated, I recommend getting vaccinated with at least one shot; the inconvenience and side-effects are few, and the benefit is large. The second shot seemswothshile too, and for all I know a third will too. Sooner or later there is a diminishing return. The benefit of masks seems is smaller, as I judge things. I notice that the disease is spreading at about the same rate in masked and unmasked states, and that the death numbers are as high, or higher in heavily masked, blue states as in red. New York and NJ are the top COVID death states, with Michigan not far behind. Masks seem to help, just not very much.

For those who want further advice, I can suggest dilute iodine gargle. I did this when I got a sore throat, I also suggest got a pneumonia vaccination, and take and adult aspirin every other day for COVID and heart-attack prevention. I also take a vitamin D tablet every few days.

If you wish to check my analysis, go here to get the raw data: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html. Then, to calculate the COVID effect, I subtracted the weekly death rates in 2020 and 2021 from the corresponding week rates in 2019, correcting the deaths by 1%/year for population growth and aging. *I find that there are about 500 excess deaths per week, and I assume those are among the unvaccinated. If you are vaccinated, I’d worry about something else besides COVID-delta: heart attack, cancer, suicide, or Afghanistan.

Robert Buxbaum August 18, 2021. I made a video of cute iodine reactions, including the classic “iodine clock”, where I use vitamin C as as the anti-oxidant (reducing agent).

Brown’s gas for small scale oxygen production.

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Some years ago I wrote a largely negative review of Brown’s gas, but the COVID crisis in India makes me want to reconsider. Browns gas can provide a simple source of oxygen for those who are in need. First, an explanation, Browns gas is a two-to-one mix of hydrogen and oxygen; it’s what you get when you do electrolysis of water without any internal separator. Any source of DC electricity will do, e.g. the alternator of a car or a trickle charger of the sort folks buy for their car batteries, and almost any electrode will do too (I’d suggest stainless steel). You can generate pressure just by restricting flow from the electrolysis vessel, and it can be a reasonable source of small-scale oxygen or hydrogen. The reaction is:

H2O –> H2 + 1/2 O2.

The problem with Brown’s gas is that it is explosive, more explosive than hydrogen itself, so you have to handle it with care; avoid sparks until you separate the H2 from the O2. Even the unseparated mix has found some uses, e.g. as a welding gas, or for putting in cars to avoid misfires, increase milage, and decrease pollution. I think that methanol reforming is a better source of automotive hydrogen: hydrogen is a lot safer than this hydrogen-oxygen mix.

Browns gas to oxygen for those who need it.

The mix is a lot less dangerous if you separate the oxygen from the hydrogen with a membrane, as I show in the figure. at right. If you do this it’s a reasonable wy to make oxygen for patients who need oxygen. The electrolysis cell can be a sealed bottle with water and the electrodes; add a flow restriction as shown to create the hydrogen pressure that drives the separation. The power can be an automotive trickle charger. You can get this sort of membranes from REB Research, here and many other suppliers. REB provide consulting services if you like.

In a pinch, you don’t even need the membrane, by the way. You can rely on your lungs to make the separation. A warning, though, the mix is dangerous. Avoid all sparks. Also, don’t put salt into the water. You can can put in some baking soda or lye to speed the electrolysis, but If you put salt in, you’ll find you don’t make oxygen, but will instead make chlorine. And chlorine is deadly. If you’re not sure, smell the gas. If it smells acrid, don’t use it. This is the chlorine-forming reaction.

2NaCl + 2 H2O –> H2 + Cl2 + 2NaOH

Ideally you should vent the hydrogen stream out the window, but for short term, emergency use, the hydrogen can be vented into your home. Don’t do this if anyone smokes (not that anyone should smoke about someone on oxygen). This is a semi-patentable design, but I’m giving it away; not everything that can be patented should be.

Robert Buxbaum, May 13, 2021.

New York and San Francisco rents fall, Detroit rises for now.

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Rents in New York and San Francisco are far less expensive than before the pandemic. It’s been a boon for the suburbs, the south and the midwest, one that’s likely to continue unless Biden steps in. Before the pandemic, rent in San Francisco for a one bedroom apartment averaged over $3700 per month. New York rent was similar. People paid it because these cities offered robust business and entertainment, the best restaurants and bars, the best salons and clubs, the best music, museums, universities, and theater. New York was Wall Street, Madison Avenue and Broadway; San Francisco was Silicon valley and Hollywood. These cities were the place to be, and then the pandemic hit.

Post COVID-19, the benefits of big city life are gone, and replaced by negatives. The great restaurants are mostly gone; the museums, theaters, and salons, shut along with Hollywood. Wall Street and Madison Ave have gone on-line, as have the universities. If you can work and study from anywhere, why do it from an expensive hotbed of Corona.

People of means left the big cities with the first lockdowns. Wall Street moved on line, with offices in New Jersey, and many followed, along with college students, and hotel and restaurant workers. New York’s unemployment rate increased from 4-5% to over 9.5% today, among the highest rates in the nation, 9.5%. It would be higher if not for the departures. Crime spiked; the murder rate doubled. To keep people from leaving, landlords have lowered rents and many will now forgive a month or two of rent to keep apartments full with some rent coming in and an illusion of exclusivity. This is good for tenants, but tough on landlords.

Detroit rent history, 2014 to January 2021. Rents fell a lot on election day, maybe because of Biden, or because we think the pandemic is over.

As things stand, the suburbs and smaller cities are the beneficiaries of the exodus. Among the cities benefiting the most are cities in the south and mid-west: states that are more open and are relatively low cost: Phoenix, Oakland, Cleveland, St. Petersburg, and even Detroit. Detroit’s rents were already moving up as auto manufacturing returned from Mexico, see chart. Between early 2017 and October 2020, they went from $500/month to $1250/month for a 1 bedroom apartment, according to Zumper. Detroit rents fell after election day, but are still up 20% on the year. The influx of wealthier working folk to Detroit is welcome to some, unwelcome to tenants who find their rents are raised. I think it’s is a sign of a healthy economy that people follow life-quality, and that rents follow people. Our landlords are happy, but there are a lot of Detroit renters who are not

Joe Biden has promised to step in to make things right for everyone. He promised to have the government pay people’s rent so they don’t get evicted. I presume that means paying about double to people in NY and SF as to those in Detroit. He claims he will shutter smokestack industries too, and create the good jobs of the future in computers and high tech. It’s a nice claim. I suspect it’s a bailout of big city landlords, but what would I know. I suspect that the US would be better off if Joe just sat back and let New York rents fall, while allowing Detroit to gentrify. Detroiters need not worry about rents getting too pricy here. We’ve1500 shootings per year, that 15 times more than NYC, per capita. Unless that ratio changes, Detroit will continue to be the lower rent city.

Robert Buxbaum, January 17, 2021.

COVID E. Asian death rate is 1/100th the Western rate.

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COVID-19 has a decided racial preference for Western blood, killing Americans and Europeans at more than ten times the rate of people in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, or Vietnam. The chart below shows the COVID-19 death rate per million population in several significant countries countries. The US and Belgium is seen to be more than 100 times worse than China or Hong Kong, etc., based on data from http://www.worldometers.info. IN the figure, the death-rate rank of each country is shown on the left, next to the country name.

For clarity, I didn’t include all the countries of Europe, but note that European countries are the majority of the top ten in terms of deaths per million. Belgium is number one with over 1,400. That is somewhat over 0.14% of the population has died of COVID-19 so far.

Peru has the highest COVID-19 death rate in South America at over 1000 per million, 0.1%. The US rate is similar, 0.082%. These are shockingly high numbers despite our best efforts to stop the disease by mandating masks, closing schools, and generally closing our economies. Meanwhile, in China and Japan, the economies are open and the total death rate is only about 1/100 that of Europe or the Americas. Any health numbers from China are suspect, but here I tend to believe it. Their rates are very similar to those in Hong Kong and Taiwan. At 3 per million, China’s death rate is 1/400 th the rate of the US, and Taiwan’s is lower.

This is not for lack of good healthcare systems in Europe, or lack of preparation. As of December 1-10, Germany, a country of 80 million, is seeing a COVID death rate of 388 per day. Japan, a country of 120 million, sees about 20. These are modern countries with good record keeping; Germany is locked down and Japan is open.

The question is why, and the answer seems to be genetics. A British study of the genetics of people who got the disease particularly severely found a few genes responsible, among these, TYK2. “It is part of the system that makes your immune cells more angry, and more inflammatory,” explained Dr Kenneth Baillie, a consultant in medicine at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, who led the Genomicc project. He’s theory is that versions of this gene can allow the virus to put your immune response “into overdrive, putting patients at risk of damaging lung inflammation.” If his explanation is right, a class of anti-inflammatory drugs could work. (I’d already mentioned data suggesting that a baby aspirin or two seems helpful).

As reported in Nature this week, another gene that causes problems is IFNAR2. IFNAR2 is linked to release of interferon, which helps to kick-start the immune system as soon as an infection is detected.

It could be accidental that Asians are just lucky interns of not having the gene variations that make this disease deadly. Alternately, it could be that the disease is was engineered (in China?) and released either as a bio-attack, or by accident. Or it could be a combination. Whatever the cause of the disease, that east Asians should be spared this way is really weird.

Suggesting that this is not biowarfare is the observation that, in San Francisco, the Asian, per case fatality rate is as high as for white people or higher. One problem with this argument is that there is a difference between death rate per confirmed case and death rate per million population. It is possible that, for one reason or another Chinese people in San Francisco do not seek to be tested until they are at death’s door. Such things were seen in Iran and North Korea, for example. It pushed up the per-case death rate to 100%. Another possibility is that the high death rates in the west reflect disease mutation, or perhaps eastern exposure to a non-deadly variant of COVID that never made it west. If this is the case, it would be just as odd as any other explanation of a100x difference in death rates. Maybe I’m being paranoid here, but as the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies.

I think it’s worth noting this strange statistical pattern, even if I have no clear explanation. My advice: take vitamin D and a baby aspirin; and get a pneumonia shot,. I plan to take the vaccine when it’s offered. If a home test becomes available, I’d use that too. Stay safe folks. Whatever the source, this disease is a killer.

Robert Buxbaum, December 16, 2020.