Source: News 5 WKRG

Well, we certainly don't want the public to know what's actually going on!

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:

From Georgia Innocence Project website:


From GIP email received today:



Johnny Lee Gates


Joey Watkins

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

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.

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:


From the "About" page of the Folding@home project web site:

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