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| If you're smarter than this guy, you could be the next head of the CDC, the TSA, or the CEO of your company. |
A reminder:
Remote temperature sensors are
a) inaccurate
b) only measure surface temperature, not core temp.
And Kung Flu
c) is asymptomatic in (30%, 60%, 90%, you tell me) of infected persons
d) incubates for 2-21 days before symptoms present, during some of which time period the infected person is fully contagious.
So for anyone with more sense than the Almighty gave any jackass in Christendom, anyone, anywhere using any sort of temperature-reading device as a means to screen people for Kung Flu is a thorough-going moron, of the type in the last century usually screened out by attempting to place an iron ring of a given diameter over their cranium.
Because if your head would fit through said ring, clearly there was insufficient space inside to support a brain big enough to breathe, walk, and chew gum without a handy guide, and/or regular reminders for any one of the listed functions - or even all all three - by means of regular applications of a stout stick somewhere between your head and your thighs, as a helpful reminder.
So anywhere you see, hear, or read about anyone using temperature scanning in any form to screen out Kung Flu:
1) the people actually doing it are dumber than a bag of hammers.
2) the people who decided to have people do that are dumber than a bag of dicks.
3) 99.9999% of people infected and fully contagious with Kung Flu are being admitted to the premises as if they were "healthy". That will turn out well.
4) Anyone involved at any level make phrenology and astrology seem rational and scientific by comparison.
5) This practice is akin to hiring Stevie Wonder to drive your bus, and RainMan to drive your car.
We dun tole ya all this, long since, but seeing recent idiot newsmorons (but we repeat ourselves) covering the latest surveillance-state gee whiz face-scanning stormtrooper helmetry,
whatever the point of the exercise, clearly screening out Kung Flu infectees is exactly 0.0000% of the actual rationale; and apparently some people's heads are afflicted with sphincter-induced hypoxia.
Secondly, for those still addicted to the Tinfoil and Black Helicopter Hopeium-Huffing Theory Of Kung Flu, the following notations and explanations are in order.
Someone, somewhere, (we'll let you follow the breadcrumbs yourself) posted the following, which was picked up in our regular read of Ol' Remus at this week's Woodpile Report
"Doctors have been instructed to list Covid-19 as a cause of death if the deceased had any of the symptoms associated with Covid-19. They receive $13,000 from Medicare for each Covid-19 patient and $39,000 for each patient put on a ventilator."Any number of people will treat this out-of-context factoid as their "A-HA! J'Accuse!" moment of Kung Flu clarity. But before you get on your horse bassackwards, and ride off the cliff, a couple of wee notes to temper such blisteringly stupid jackassery.
1) The average COVID patient thusly diagnosed is in hospital for 10-21 days, at an average cost of $2K-$5K/day. For those who only know Common Core mathematics, that would be $20,000-$110,000, just for the hospital, before fees for doctor, laboratory, imaging, etc. are added to the bill.
2) The average intubated COVID-19 patient gets the same course of treatment, except in the ICU, at a cost of $5K-$10K/day, which would run $50,000-$210,000, plus the aforementioned doctor's fees, laboratory fees, imaging fees, etc.
3) So, for anyone thusly diagnosed and treated, you've just informed me that Medicare has, per their paradigm, agreed to pay an amount somewhere between about 20% and 85% of the hospital bill. Which considering their usual M.O. is to pay only about $0.03 on the dollar for all care received, is, for them, the height of fiscal largesse. With other people's money, as usual.
4) Medicare only kicks in for those over 62, and who have it; it pays NOTHING for those under that age, EVER. If this were a presumed inducement, there should be zero cases diagnosed for anyone under that age, and thus not on Medicare.
5) The money is by way of reimbursement for treatment; it is not, entre nous, distributed as a fat wad of money in a briefcase, as if the doctor in question had just brought a coyote hide to local sheriff's office for the bounty money.
6) Doctors, unlike bounty hunters, practice under this quaint form of practice known as absolute liability, which means that risk management, utilization review, best practice, and the entire American bar Association, (along with an army of accountants, doctors, nurses, administrators, second-guessers, Monday Morning Quarterbacks, and other assorted paid medical/fiscal proctologists, in a quantity that would embarrass the planners of the Normandy D-Day invasion) will be expected to crawl and dig through every bit of the record of care, like dung beetles searching out the smallest molecule of fecal material (and with roughly the same scruples and sense of humor), to find any small thing that was out of norms for practice, standard of care, insurance coverage, payment, or medical justification.
Without naming any names, one might expect that a website purportedly dedicated to making sense, and alleging some facility with numbers, especially financial numbers, would have been a little more circumspect than to burp the preceding load of utter horseshit off as anything like a moment of "Gotcha!" theater, when all it really is, is government doing what it does, i.e. underpay for service, by handing you some of your own tax money back, after gathering it at confiscatory rates, and acting like they're doing you a favor by f**king you out of the full price, after they skim their own fat-ass non-productive salaries right off the top, in perpetuity. And then turn around and tax you AGAIN for the money they just underpaid you, out of part of your previous taxes. (Government is not the Tooth Fairy, and while they can print fiatbux out of thin air, they can't actually create nor earn money, as if they produced something and earned a profit on their labors. EVER. They are always and only just the middleman, slapping an extra cost on something you could have gotten without them, for less money, had you the means and wherewithal to go straight to the source.)
If anyone thinks that you're going to get doctors to do something, particularly falsifying medical diagnoses, by promising to underpay them, kick them in the balls, then add a bonus of a punch in the nose (before we even mention getting them sued and/or criminally prosecuted for malpractice and fraud if they do it), and that those same medical professionals will thus be overwhelmingly fiduciarily inclined to take you up on the deal in droves, I have a bridge to sell you, cheap (as long as you don't mind the crotch kick and punch in the nose I'll give you as icing on the cake).
When people who should know better overlook something so ass-chappingly obvious, they're either morons, or blinded by the same sphincter-induced hypoxia.
Sorry, but there is no third option there.
Fucktards gonna fucktard.
And we remind all and sundry that we cannot, using facts and logic, argue any person out of a position or predicament, that did not use facts and logic to get into that position or predicament. More's the pity.
----------
I told you all that to tell you this:
The tests for Kung Flu, because of the incompetent government @$$holes at the CDC (but I repeat myself again), Suck Balls. Bigly.
The swab tests report an inordinate number of false negatives, and the antibody tests (which AFAIK no one has reliably demonstrated yet are specific to COVID-19, as opposed to all coronaviruses, like the common cold) throw out false positives, like a drunk spilling pocket change staggering down the street.
This leads to undercounting those who do have it, and overcounting those who never had, both of which inexorably undersell how many people are infected who we think have it, and oversell how deeply it's penetrated this society. The latter is a number less than 5%, and probably less than 2%, nationally, at least anywhere outside the Five Boroughs.
Which has inevitably led medical professionals, contrary to the jackassical suggestion above, to use y'know, a clinical medical approach to making a diagnosis of presumptive Kung Flu.
"Like what, Aesop?"
Wee quaint little diagnostic tools like, say, X-rays, kids. (Common Core history grads, look up Marie Curie. #medicine # X-rays #actual things.)
For laymen, esp. those who didn't pay attention in middle school science class, here's what an average normal chest X-ray looks like:
Bog-simple, no problems. Spiffy, right?
What does it look like when you have ordinary pneumonia?
Mini-anatomy lesson: you have two lungs, R and L. You have 5 lobes; 3 on the right, 2 on the left. Upper, middle, and lower on the right, upper and lower on the left. (Your heart is part of the reason there's no Left Middle Lobe.) So, look at the pic above. The red arrows in the original stolen (Fair Use, btw) image came with it. See that area of schmutzy stuff all over the right middle lobe? That's RML PNA: Right Middle Lobe PNeumoniA. The opacity (the blurry part) indicates fluid in the alveoli (little air sacs) in the lung, which is why you can't breathe: your lungs filled with water don't work well underwater, because they're lungs, not gills. That's what bacterial pneumonia, the kind that antibiotics will treat well, and that a shot will help prevent, looks like. In elderly people, pneumonias of the lower lobes, from less physical activity, prolonged immobility, etc. are the most common, and nota bene: as in this illustration, only on ONE side. (Gunny Hints:You will see this material again.)
So what?
So, let's look at a typical CXR (Chest X-Ray) of a Kung Flu patient:
WHOA!
Not typical.
Not even typical pneumonia.
There's schmutz EVERYWHERE.
Schmutz? = "Ground glass opacity".
Bilateral multifocal pneumonia.
Like you won't see in bacterial pneumonia.
Like you'd expect to see in pneumonia caused by a respiratory inhaled virus, and/or virus-induced coagulopathy, and/or both. (Pathologists, chime in anytime.)
Which fits only Kung Flu.
You have fluid ALL OVER your lungS, plural, (and pleural! See what I did there?) on BOTH SIDES, which is why people who have this symptomatically can't effing breathe.
Their lungs, as in the whole contraption, is full of fluid.
And if you're hypoxic (too little oxygen in your blood stream) on room air, or worse, even on supplemental oxygen, like a nasal canula, or a face mask, you're pretty f**ked.
If you have that, and a fever from the infection, and a cough, and this CXR, and your blood tests fit the pattern, neither I, nor anyone witrh MD or D.O. after their name, needs a gorram broke-dick CDC-approved COVID test to tell you, me, Yellow Dog, or Medicare, that you have Kung Flu!
They can see it for themselves, with their own lying eyes, and they're not going to falsify it for some pittance of chump change from Uncle Sugar.
Go back and read the AAR from the ER doc in Nawlins (like every one of the ER MDs I know and work with did, long since): clinical indications = Kung Flu. Period. A test, good, bad, or half-assed, is a nice confirmation, but the CXR and other clinical indications are diagnostic (that means a lead-pipe cinch sure thing). Testing, at that point, is a luxury, and if it comes back opposite the clinical indications, will be completely and rightfully ignored. Because the tests are all so much bullshit, courtesy of The Usual Gang Of Idiots at CDC, plus Typical Government Incompetence.
BTW, none of these are my actual patients' X-rays, but #3 was what the CXR looked like on my guy from this past weekend. (One of six COVID-positives I cared for, BTW.) He's in his early twenties, kids. Not 80+. Not 70-80. Not even over 40. Barely old enough to legally buy a beer. Full coronavirus bilateral multi-focal pneumonia.
What does this mean for you?
1) Temperature screenings are going to get everyone infected.
2) Getting everyone infected means you can expect orders of magnitude more sick and dead people (from Kung Flu, not with Kung Flu, if you're that particular brand of Coronatarded) than you've seen so far.
3) Lockdowns largely stopped this, but
a) we cannot, and weren't intending to, lock everyone down forever until the economy was in total flames, nor would we wish to continue the experiment
b) some of you were too smart to pay attention to what worked, because "muh paycheck!"
c) TANSTAAFL
4) You (for any value of that term) have essentially decided to throw everyone who dies from this under the bus, in order to preserve the economy.
a) You did it, are doing it, and want to. Own it.
I'm not judging which is better, but don't try and soft-soap and sugarcoat the decision you made, and the consequences as a direct result.
b) Don't yap and yammer about your anti-abortion creds, if you're willing to kill people at the end of life as casually as the Governor of Virginia is willing to kill them at the beginning.
Like Esau, you've sold your credibility there for a mess of pottage, and there are consequences to that sale. As noted in one tale, "we've already established what sort of person you are; now we're simply discussing the price".
c) There was a right way to do this, but most of the country couldn't wait for that.
Suture self. And tell granny and gramps you loved them, and will miss them.
5) Get used to your masks, unless you like bilateral multifocal pneumonia.
a) Unless you're Mary Mallon.
b) And deserve her fate.
6) You have no wild idea who's sick, and who's healthy, never did, and probably never will.
a) You DGAF, never did, and probably never will.
b) You have not hired Helen Keller as your crossing guard on the freeway.
c) EVERYONE is Helen Keller crossing the freeway.
d) Kung Flu is the 5000 busses upstream from you.
7) Good luck with your choices, and may the odds ever be in your favor.
8) I told you before, you're not going to get what you like, and you're not going to like what you'll get.
9) This is a virus. It's real. It kills people. There's no recognized effective treatment, and no vaccine, and neither truth will change, probably this year, at least. There's no evidence - none, nada, zip, niente, bupkus - that getting this confers any immunity to re-infection or that any such thing as "herd immunity" will ever be achieved. Not least of which because it's been genetically altered with SARS, Ebola, and HIV sequences in the gene. (Thanks, Dr. Frankensteins!)
Luckily for you, it "only" kills about 1-3% of people who get it. That's 1/30th-1/90th of Ebola. It's 20-30 times worse than the flu. But it can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with, it'll just keep coming.
Bonus: Getting it symptomatically creates permanent damage to the lungs and other organs, even if you survive.
And as you're seeing now, (and 30-50% of those reading this will totally ignore, no matter how many times we tell it to you) the deaths from this virus are the least of your worries in the grand scheme of things, compared to the other 5000 consequences to life in society.
10) This virus doesn't give a flaming bag of dogsh*t what your politics are, what whackdoodle conspiracy theories you espouse, who you voted for, or for the Constitution and Bill of Rights. People on both sides politically are so full of sh*t about this crisis their eyes are brown, and stupidity is no exclusive province for either side. (No, really. And I can show you their blogs and press releases.)
11) You ain't seen nothing yet.
You're not crawling out of this.
You're not even close to the crawling-out-of-this stage.
You're still in the crawling-into-it stage.
You have no idea how deep this swamp is, and while one can only ever walk halfway into such a swamp, you had no idea how big it was when you walked into it, thus when the halfway point was will only be determined after you come out the other side, retroactively.
Hurts, don't it?
55 comments:
As usual, Arabs have more money than sense.
What we DIDN'T do was an actual quarantine, what we did(more or less) was a lockdown of everyone. A Claymore mine approach, where a rifle was called for.
How about an actual quarantine of obviously ill people. Also isolate those who have had contact with said sick folks for a set time period, say, 14-21 days, if they show no symptoms, and let other folks continue keeping the economy going.
You know, kind of like quarantines were done for centuries past.
https://thedispatch.com/p/what-if-we-tried-a-real-quarantine
Just a thought.
Termite
You mean doctors won't just lie for money, and they can use circumstancial evidence to diagnose Kung Flu?! Say it ain't so!!
People on sites with the usual tilt have been screaming about this for weeks, as though it's the smoking gun. I can give people half the deaths in my state, full in stop, in case my state is as corrupt as these people willing to murder every one else so they can go back to work, half the deaths, just in case, and Kung Flu still left regular flu behind in the dust. By the end of week 3.
Eventually people stop being skeptics, and turn into deniers. They don't seem to realize that this has happened to them yet. They weren't prepared for this and therefore the government is out to get them.
~Rhea
PS: if we can put people in prison on circumstancial evidence - and that happens a lot - but Dr's can't make a diagnosis based on it, then maybe we need to stop convicting people based on it in the courtroom.
My first laugh after the medicare payment story was those not paying attention will get pissed. I did not think about the 62 age thing. If you are lucky enough to have medical insurance they to will pay the hospital as well, probably more than medicare. The rest of us pick up the tab on those that don't. Lot of distractions people just like this weeks slow joe revalation and rice's email to herself (until hitlary perp walks take a nap). Aesop continue to stay safe. I still have to go out for project supplies so doing the best I can.
sure, fear and panic and all, but 1,628,661/330,000,000 = .004. No matter how you slice it. more simple math - 91,038/330,000,000 = .0002. That is your actual chance of dying. Numbers are numbers.
Ya... Stay upwind of EVERYBODY. Wash your damn hands. FREQUENTLY! Stay right with whatever deity you worship. Avoid crowds. Use the free warning of impending doom and collapse to prepare yourself, family and associates for the coming hard times. Some of us are going to die. But we're all going to die anyway. You may as well spend your time building some good social capital. In a hundred years none of this will matter to the vast majority of us. The only real legacy a person leaves is the lives we touch. Do good, refrain from evil. Enjoy life, such as it is.
Bigtube6@gmail.com:
I work for a state veterans home - long term nursing care facility for veterans. We are screening for the beer virus with temporal scanners for all staff coning in or out of the facility. This scanning is absolutely effective for its intended purpose. The purpose is not to effectively screen for the beer virus ... but instead to give the impression that we are doing "something" to address the current situation. It is political theater. The purpose is to show the public that we are doing everything we can to ensure the safety of the veterans in our charge. We are also restricting the veteran's contact with the outside world. A very real quarantine of our facility. No visitors. No veterans leaving the facility. Only limited trips to the VA medical center or local hospital for medical treatment. 2 week quarantine for veterans returning from that medical care. Masks for all staff. These measures will be effective in keeping our at risk population safe from possible exposure to a virus that will kill them if it gets into our center. In our political world it is not enough to do the right thing. It is important to be viewed as doing the right thing. Optics. It sucks but it is the world we live in ...not the world we wish we live in. So ... As stupid and ineffective as it is it 'looks' right. And the scanning will continue for the foreseeable future.
On the laser thermometer-to-the-forehead thing, I kinda expected someone with a medical degree would have pointed out by now that skin surface temp is not core temp, and that skin is expected to be cooler then the core, since one basic function of skin is to aid in control of body temp through radiation, convection and evaporation. Meaning skin temp should be quite a bit cooler than core temp except in extreme conditons.
There may be a forehead temp-to-core temp conversion chart somewhere but I've heard no mention of it, and if it does exist I question how reliable it is. Even if it is reliable, a skin temp check at 0800 is pretty meaningless much past 0801. (If forehead-to-core temp ratio is reliable, a stick-on thermal indicator label on the forehead might be somewhat useful, if it's sensitive, accurate and reliable enough; so far, though, I'm not aware of any that would fit the requirements. An accurate alternative might be headgear of some kind with a constant-on LED temperature display connected to a rectally-inserted thermistor or thermocouple....)
And, in many cases, particularly with the elderly, normal temp will be lower than 98.6, so unless it's just a "feel good" exercise intended to differentiate the "on fire" from the "cold as a corpse" why bother?
@jwoop,
Numbers are numbers, yes. Which clearly aren't your thing, are they?
The equation you've set up isn't anyone's "actual chance of dying".
330,000,000 people haven't been infected by this.
Nor have 1.6M died from it, when last I looked.
The equation you've actually set up, since it escaped your grasp, is your chance of getting the infection in a US-sized population within just the first 90 days.
And your decimal is two places too far to the left.
1,628,661/330M is a 0.4 percent chance, not a 0.004 percent chance.
(It is a 0.004 batting average for 90 days, however.)
So you were only off by two orders of magnitude, where a value of 1 means you're getting this no matter what.
You have to keep going to express the problem as a relevant number, like percent.
Maybe you were sick that day.
(Also, the current ArcGIS stat at the JH site list 1,528,661 persons confirmed infected in the U.S., not 1,628,661, so you also muffed your set up by 100K cases. Maybe using a cell phone with chiclet keys, or just slipped on the keyboard, but either way... Just saying).
If you want chances of dying, you'd have to tell me how long this pandemic will last (good luck with figuring that out), then multiplying that times the above number for every 90 days, than add in the exponential growth factor, then divide that number by actual deaths, then add in that exponential growth factor, to come close to a reasonable SWAG.
I know I may make this look easy sometimes, but seriously, if you don't understand the basic mathematics, pandemic exponential growth, and so on, you should probably just go about your business and all.
But kudos - really - for at least stepping up to the plate and whiffing.
Most reporters on the news aren't even that brave.
Your chances of dying from this were 1/330,000,000 on January 21st, IIRC.
Your chances now are about 92K out of maybe 3,000,000.
If the entire country gets it, they're somewhere between 1 and 3 chances out of 100.
So the longer we keep half-assing how we deal with this, the worse they get.
We're at almost 92K dead now, with probably about 3M people infected by it.
If we manage to spread it nationwide, absolute worst case deaths is looking like up to almost 10M dead, which is 3% of 330M people.
IOW, only a paltry 7.5 times worse than you miscalculated, as of today.
Let me know when that penny drops for you.
For comparison, a pandemic annual flu that infected 100% of the country (like the flu never has, btw) would be 330,000 dead, given its 0.1% mortality rate.
If Kung Flu continues to spread, we'll hit that well before Christmas. Perhaps far sooner. Time will tell.
But the consensus seems to be "Let's see how stupidly we can do this, and find out how many people we can kill with a Maximum Gilligan Effort."
Wish: granted.
The cards are being dealt as we speak.
And deaths are still the least important factor to be looking at, but they're also the least arguable actual effect, because dead is dead.
Just remember that the covid-19 pandemic did not make us do anything. The psychopathic politicians made us shut down. I assert that 80% of the people who died from coronavirus would have have died within 5 years or less anyhow due to their poor health or old age. People are responsible still for their health, by and large. The nation is chock full of fat and diseased people who daily destroy their health. You may be of the opinion that we should destroy the economy for them, but a famous person once said, "the constitution is not a suicide pact."
Dumb question here, but does any kind of herd immunity even apply here, (a) new zoonotic natural virus and (b)new un-natural" bioengineered gain-of-function? Those are the questions that bother me and go unanswered.Haven't read or heard anything even remotely definitive.
Any sources of info appreciated.
Barb Waltrip, ret. RN
@Gruelie
You would have made a wonderful Nazi or Communist.
Useless eaters & burdens on society, that's how you view them.
Next should be the handicap & the retarded.
Those with too high of an IQ or is that too low of one.
You fellows can never be too careful.
Maybe you could be a guard on the next cattle car ride.
Of course, you Comrade, made be something something that should have you put out of our collective misery too.
What a glorious future you will behold!
Aesop,
I am not a virologist or an immunologist and about the only formal training I have in medicine is a first aid course.
Yet, you seem to make a compelling case.
The forces that are mobilizing to re-open this country are not going to be stopped, however, and I, myself, think that the country needs to give re-opening a try.
A little history here: Commanders of armies and their soldiers hated sieges. They were uncomfortable and expensive, and disease often broke out in the ranks and it took a heavy toll, a situation that was usually a result of unsanitary conditions in the camps.
I forget where I read it, but it may have been Grant in his Vicksburg Campaign who figured out that a frontal attack on the Confederate positions at Vicksburg was unlikely to be successful, but that his soldiers needed to see how bloody it was going to be in order to get them to understand and accept the necessity of a long siege.
In a similar fashion today, it may well be that the only way to deal with the strife and contention over shut-in orders is to allow those who want to re-open businesses, and those who want to patronize them, to do so. If the results are that a massive second wave results, then the strife over the shut-in orders will become very muted. An individual's concern for self-preservation will likely trump his eagerness to exercise his constitutional rights.
I found the following at Seniorliving.org concerning life expectancy of men:
"In 1900, the expectation for white men was to live to age 47 and 12 percent of those born in 1900 would make it to age 65. In contrast, an African American man born in 1900 was only expected to live until the age of 33 and of those born in 1900, only 10 percent of them would live to reach age 65. For both white and African American men born in 1900, a mere four percent ( for each) would reach age 85...[In the interest of brevity, I won't quote similar figures concerning women.]
Per CBS News: The average male lifespan stood at 76.1 years in 2017.
A salesman tried to sell me a long term care policy several years ago. One thing that I remember from his presentation is that the average nursing home resident lived there for an average of two years before they died.
My point here is to place historical life expectancy in perspective when considering the toll of the Chinese Virus that has killed mostly older people, particularly those over 60 (Full disclosure: I fall into that category), and particularly those living in nursing homes. Nobody has a constitutional right to live to 85, and very few of humanity did so until recently.
The decision about opening up the country for business again, when balanced against the massive economic destruction being inflicted on the economy, is a decision that should be made from a perspective of just how many people will die and how old they are. "Nobody's gettin' outta here alive."
While the death of anyone's father, grandmother, or even themselves will be a tragedy, after a certain point, we should decide that "life goes on" and accept the fact that the "new normal" is that most people will be at risk for dying earlier than they did, say, just five years ago. Unless and until an effective vaccine is developed, the stark and fatal consequences of slipping into what might be a New Dark Age that will trash our economy for a decade--or decades--should be avoided at all cost.
I, personally, intend to trim my sails and to restrict my activity more than normal for the immediate future. Nevertheless, for those who want to end the shutdown, to go back to work, and to take their chances, more power to them if that is what they want.
To a considerable extent, I will keep wearing my mask and watch them mostly from the sidelines.
(I meant to plant this comment here, not the old meme thread.)
Aesop, what is the current thinking about the permanence of or recovery from "ground glass opacity" in the lungs of children and relatively young adults? Does GCO "go away" or is it permanent?
I just did a search for "Covid-19+ground+glass+opacity+lungs+capacity+prognosis" and limited it to the past week. There are dozens of articles, here are just a few that caught my eye.
The "flu-bros" might not be so casual if they have reason to believe their lungs can be permanently ruined even after they "recover" from Covid-19.
[Given that they already don't give a damn if everybody over 65, or diabetic, or with a cardiac or pulmonary history etc. dies of it.]
Interim Clinical Guidance for Management of Patients with Confirmed Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html
Chest CT imaging characteristics of COVID-19 pneumonia in preschool children: a retrospective study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7232932/
Clinical Features, Diagnosis, and Treatment of COVID-19 in Hospitalized Patients: A Systematic Review of Case Reports and Case Series
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.00231/full
It may be possible that folks are truly confusing WuFlu hoaxing with the Kabuki Quarantine to get the kind of head up the fundament "Let's be Sweden" because Muh Economy" you're seeing go round.
They run in parallel. The lies and bad information about the disease (droplet transmission vs. aerosol, fragility of the "spikes", hydroxyQ+zinc, evolved vs. lab made, fecal-oral transmission etc.) leads to the Wuhan Gurgling Death becoming the Magic Virus.
The Quarantine Hoax is much worse. Jammed subways and buses, never cleaned. Sending the CCPsick into nursing homes to #FightStigma. Air travel flying the contagious around the country from outbreak hot zones. Free range homeless. Maskless, in-your-face cops sending folks to prisons from which the criminals have been released. Washington was one supreme court vote away from turning The Green River serial killer and his super-max cohort loose. On-again-off-again masks for the cameras and now: temperature theater!
Plus yummy police-state Stasi goodness!
You can only wish it's short-sighted libertards shrugging off increased infections of the ChiCom herpes and the concomitant deaths.
It's people starting to die from treatable cancers. It's two suicides last week in my little bitty town - both of them young, none of them over 40. Do the math on the suicide rate from Muh Economy collapsing (and that without a lock down) per 100k Mr. Aesop. Who owns those deaths, if you please?
And try to percieve that people could come to the conclusion: what the hell, we're going to go down anyway, the "safety" measures are bogus, why not go down and die free, instead of cowering at home?
The hoaxing is what you're fighting, Mr. Aesop, and all the powers that be with their little optical temperature tests are against you.
P.S. Hospital administrators lie like rugs and connive with bureaucrats "But doctors don't fib for a pittance from the gummint" is just more CoronaChan gas-lighting. Everyone does it to impress her. Worst girlfriend, ever.
P.P.S.
The only chap who got seriously ill and died on the Theo. Roosevelt ship was queer as a three dollar bill. Your 20 year-old had no "comorbidities"?
P.P.P.S. Do you remember where you found the asymptomatic recovered with organ damage reports/papers? Sounds interesting.
@MB,
"Ground glass opacity" is merely how radiologists describe the foggy look on the lungs of CXR, during infection, because of fluid.
That goes away when the infection does.
The scarring of the lungs does not, by all accounts.
I haven't seen any "After" CXRs of people who had this, all the way to intubation and ICU stays, and recovered.
What I hear anecdotally from the docs I work with is it's permanent damage.
The open question is whether infection once confers any immunity whatsoever from future re-infection, which will determine if "herd immunity", or a functional vaccine, are even ever possible.
If not, like the common cold, chicken pox, herpes, and AIDS, this sh*t is forever. And like Granny's leftovers, it just keeps coming back.
Please disregard that last P.P.S.
And thank you, upstream commenter.
@Survivorman99,
What you're overlooking is that nursing home residents does not = all 70+ y.o.s.
People go into nursing homes, at any age, because they are no longer able to care for themselves, due to a host of conditions, and at ages as young as the late 30s.
Telling me we'd kill all nursing home residents because of Kung Flu would be bad.
Killing all 70+ year olds because of Kung Flu is jackassical and catastrophic.
All you've done is take the plot of Logan's Run and ratchet the upper age limit back a couple of decades.
So, at the end of the day, who decides at what age we may begin loading the boxcars?
That's a slippery slope we oughtn't explore IRL.
Not least of which because we all know where the boxcars get unloaded.
There are ways to open things up that are orders of magnitude more wise and circumspect than just throwing open the floodgates.
We're not doing any, or at best, many, of them.
We'll be noticing the folly of that when the casket shortage and the cemetery shortage makes way for the rise in gas prices due to running crematoriums at higher rates.
Lockdowns work in the short term, exactly as intended. CA has 1/10th the casualty count of NY, despite being 3000 mi. closer to Wuhan.
But the point was to use the respite gained to do things better.
Nobody took that to heart.
NY didn't do it at all, and Gabbin' Nuisance, et al, latched onto shutdowns as a permanent solution, which they were never intended to be.
Zero thought was given to what to do next, or how.
The idiots on the other side of the aisle still think the shutdowns were unnecessary too, so they're going full-bore NYFC, at flank speed.
And if we're going to go all nostalgic for life expectancies before antibiotics and modern medicine, all I ask is a return to the Code Duello as standard public policy, abolishing the entirety of standing police forces, making judges and court trials once-in-a-blue-moon occasion, and allowance of lynching and gunfights at large as S.O.P.
Then, at least, we can get a lot closer to ridding society of the vermin, starting in the legislatures, and moving down to the seedier parts of town, and the next time there's this sort of a thing, quarantines will look like it did in the 1500s, and village idiots will be the ones learning to swim with millstones tied about their necks by a stout cord.
Get the life expectancy of Gilligans and the criminal element down to about 25, and the rest of society can blossom again.
When civilization collapses, that's what you're going to get anyways; why not avoid the rush, and kick it off now, on a trial basis, for a decade or three?
"The open question..." comment you made is the better framed question. I really thought thats what antibody tests were specific to, this sarscov2 virus not just any recent non specific infection. So best options are: dont get it but wait until you do maybe more info by then so hope... get it and recover with possible lifelong lung damage, get it and die, or get it and have mild sx but in all situations dont know if theres any conferred immunity and if that, maybe temporarily. All the above have some aspects that suck.
Barb
Aesop,
You went off on several tangents in your reply. You also included a couple of straw man arguments.
"Telling me we'd kill all nursing home residents because of Kung Flu would be bad." All I did was point out that nursing home residents had only a short time to live, and even then, they were far ahead of all but a few of their ancestors. In the game of life, they had already won compared to great mass of humanity that lived before them. If a higher percentage of them die because of the WuFlu, it will be better than having the "Great Depression" re-named "Great Depression I," just as "The Great War" became
"World War I" twenty some years later. I seriously expect that more people will die from Depression-related poverty, social upheaval, and violence than would be killed by the WuFlu in the time it takes to develop a vaccination or cure.
"Killing all 70+ year olds because of Kung Flu is jackassical and catastrophic." I didn't say that all 70+ year-olds should or would be sacrificed. If so, I would be totally screwed. In any event, we are talking about what, in the big scheme of things, is likely to be a relatively brief period before a vaccination or even a cure is developed.
"So, at the end of the day, who decides at what age we may begin loading the boxcars?" I suppose that it would be Mother Nature via her new child, the WuFlu, and each person who decides how they want to live their life and which risks they are willing to expose themselves each day. As I indicated, I will reduce my exposure by staying home more. I will religiously wear masks when I do venture out.
"There are ways to open things up that are orders of magnitude more wise and circumspect than just throwing open the floodgates." Agreed.
"The idiots on the other side of the aisle still think the shutdowns were unnecessary too, so they're going full-bore NYFC, at flank speed." I won't call them idiots, but I do recognize that, right or wrong, they are part of a political movement that cannot be stopped. While a recent poll showed that most Americans are apprehensive about lifting the shutdown orders too quickly, a poll that is limited to those who haven't drawn a paycheck since this catastrophe began or who own/work for small businesses that have been shutdown for several weeks would likely have produced much different results.
All but a few in my age bracket, those most at risk, have the luxury to hunker down because they are retired. If I am "the master of my fate, the captain of my soul" I can choose to continue greatly restricting my activities, and, therefore, reduce my chances of infection--or not.
So, as they say (or more accurately, used to say) "It's a free country." I will watch closely what the results are as the states open up and people go back to work and, in three months, I will be able to express an a relatively informed opinion about who made the right decision here.
Keep up the good work. I enjoy reading your blog.
I'm in the take it serious crowd. I know what this plague can do to people even after recovery. Forex it can create havoc in the liver among other nasty things.
However you can't fight a plague without an economy and you can't keep everyone locked up for endless months nor can you keep social distancing on forever and have a society.
You've seen the lines at food banks I assume, think 1931 level bread lines.
The economy is DOA and will prema-decline around 35% after this will all gains going to as usual the 1%
This level of destruction will result in an end game for us and keeping people in "quarantine" to avoid facing the problems is going to act like vaporized gas on a fire.
What we need to do is to get back to manufacturing, stat. We can't make steel. chemicals for medicine (or most medicines) precursors for ammo (no ammo for you gweilo) , tritium for nukes (in 15 years no H Bomb) and have an increasingly brittle food distribution system and after that cut off everyone from trade, immigration and tourism.
This is impossible do to money flooding Congress among other things and so, we are screwed, so is Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and Korea as soon as China feels like it.
So yeah, baring someone able to force order into the system, best case Russia under Yeltsin comes next.
There are no straw men, and no tangents.
1) This thing kills people over 70. That's not all nursing home patients, nor are all 70 year olds in nursing homes.
2) Killing people because they're old is evil. Period. This isn't "nature taking its course" when we're deliberately spreading it around like petals at a wedding march.
3) There may never be any vaccine, nor cure.
4) Reducing your exposure puts all the onus on you. That's bassackwards.
You're infected? You reduce your exposure by staying your ass at home.
We catch you outside without proof of being virus-free? The term for that lockdown is prison.
Let's start at 1 year the first offense, and double for each subsequent one. I could give a fuck about anyone feeding their kids or running their business as an excuse. Gang bangers have kids and businesses too; we still run their asses into prison.
You're healthy, and can prove it, because you've been tested? You're a free citizen. Period. Go about your business as you see fit.
You get sick? Doctor's exam and test.
COVID becomes public-health reportable, just like HIV, TB, and VD.
Quarantine.
Anybody against that is against common sense going back centuries, and the Bill of Rights is not in conflict with it either.
5) The most at risk does not equal everyone at risk.
As I indicated in the OP, I put a 20-something in the hospital this weekend, with full-blown Kung Flu. He's got an even chance of getting worse and dying, or getting better and recovering. Not 80. Not 70. Not retired. Barely old enough to buy a beer. Because some fuckwit that didn't know they had it, or didn't give a fuck, spread it to him.
Can't stop that movement? Let's try bullets. I bet it works with 100% effectiveness, but I'm willing to be proven wrong, once we're out of ammo. The loss of millions of jackasses that will result is still a net win to humanity, and probably a continent-wide 20 point average IQ jump, going forward.
And freeway traffic will be commensurately lighter as well.
But no, we won't do that either.
So instead, we're using the most vulnerable members of society as coal mine canaries for the Gilligans.
Who already know what they're doing, and as expected, don't give a shit.
Frankly, given how the Left is using this pandemic for their own ends, I'm surprised they're not leading the charge to push everyone back to work faster, to kill off as many working-class productive people as possible, and leave the stay-at-home welfare queens the bulk of all votes, in 50 states, in perpetuity.
But when they realize that, and suddenly get behind opening everything up, faster, harder, despite the second wave of infections, don't be a bit surprised.
They can't be expected to stay stupid forever.
Frankly, I'm amazed they didn't fall all over themselves already, and go whole-hog Cuomo the minute the federal suggestions expired.
If it fizzled, they're heroes.
If everyone gets sick, they could have blamed Trump.
there's no down-side, other than another batch of tens of thousands of dead people, but even that just creates more Democrat voters forever.
"Who owns those deaths, if you please?"
--given that suicide is the ultimate personal thing, only the suicide "owns" those deaths. If someone else is responsible, then you have manslaughter or murder, not suicide.
--why should I consider the one who made the choice as any more important or compelling that the millions who didn't, many in the same or worse circumstances?
--if you're worried about suicide from personal reasons, please get help. Sincerely, there are people who can help. If not, then you're just concern trolling, which I find offensive especially when coupled to a complete lack of concern for any of the older people who have already 'had a good life' and should just accept that their lives are forfeit so someone else can make the payments on their $60K truck and credit cards. You're talking casually about killing almost everyone I know, most of whom are still happy and productive humans who manifestly DON'T want to die.
--the economy was headed for a collapse anyway, so what's the big deal? So it happened a bit earlier than you were ready for, why should I care? You've had more material success than 99% of people who ever lived. If you weren't getting ready, that's on you as the signs have been there for years. And this attitude conveniently matches your attitude about old people, so it should be a good fit for you, so why the complaining?
--metaphorical "you" in all of the above.
--we sure went from 80K to over 90K pretty quickly. And I'm not sure what news is hammering away at the mortality figures, because that's not what I'm seeing. I'm seeing that the bigger this gets, the less detail gets reported.
--anyone is free to do what they like, including moving to a place where the local politicians better reflect their attitudes toward lockdowns and isolation. I didn't build this lifeboat just to scuttle it at the first opportunity. My family and I will continue to watch the impatient and improvident dash themselves on these rocks, and if we're wrong, it won't do us much harm to wait a while and see. If we're right? I'm not gonna celebrate your death, but I'm not gonna mourn much either.
nick
Dr. John Campbell (who as we know is a retired nurse and educator with a doctorate in nursing) has some good news today, quoting some new South Korean studies.
"Good News, Reinfection Unlikely" May 20, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uATMbGK__Tg
Good information on the how and why (and why it matters) of immune response, antibodies, false positives mistaken for reinfection, etc. Worth watching.
If surviving the disease doesn't confer immunity through antibodies, and if a vaccine can not be found, then we have two options:
1)a hard lockdown. Not this wishy washy essential-worker and you can still go to the grocery store and Lowe's and get takeout sorry excuse for a lockdown, but an actual four week quarantine where everybody stays shut in their homes, and whoever's alive on the other side is fine and the disease is gone and all incoming air traffic lands in a quarantine field somewhere in the desert to prevent a repeat.
2) we accept this as the new normal and go about without any lockdown and lose ??? thousand people per year to it, like the influenza epidemics of the past.
Or we could do option 3:
No real quarantine, but a halfassed lockdown that doesn't stop the disease at all, and also crashes the economy worse than the great depression, for as long as it takes for a sufficient part of the population to get hungry and broke enough to riot and destroy what's left of the country.
Aesop, this plague has turned you from a freedom fighter to part of the problem.
Given that we don't have reliable accurate test kits in any numbers, aren't entirely sure that masks work well or at all , don't know exactly how contagious or how dangerous to who this disease is, why and the hell do you want to give the government draconian powers?
This government at every level cannot be trusted to do anything right up to and including public health. There are a few exceptions in smaller towns and rural areas, a few bigger ones run tolerable utilities for example but by and large, government and its bunky buddy, the corporation are the problem not the solution.
Its all a power grab, loss of privacy, economy and freedom for our own good. So screw that.
As far as a twenty something casualty , well sure. There are millions of young people in California. One or two with C19 is nothing in the bigger picture , its an anomaly. Well unless you are telling me the wards are full of youngsters.
Ultimately our insistence on global free trade and its cheap goods, cheap labor adherents are responsible for the losses not the occasional Gilligan.
As far as deaths. This sucks but from what I can tell most of them are people in nursing homes. Maybe we should concentrate on making those places safer and not make things worse for everyone.
As for we the people gladly gave the authorities two weeks to get it together, to crush the curve.
Instead they taken nearly three months, printed nearly enough funny money to ruin a market economy, transferred most wealth to bankers destroyed 1/3 of the economy, pushed privacy and freedom destroying measures and turned the US into a wall to wall prison.
That isn't worth the saving in lives at all. We'd have spent more lives gladly in a war for far less and no one would be blaming anyone for getting conscripts killed either.
Is it fair or just. No. Is it medically wise to open up the economy? No one including you or any expert knows?
In the end, it must open, it will open and unless there is an irrevocable date or somehow we can trust expert or the political class, we've gone past the customary 40 days from which the word quarantine comes from. Might as well open up and take our lumps
As far as things we can do that work, disinfect spaces , wash hands, avoid touching faces that we know can be done cheap and without turning the US into a pandemic police state.
DOCTOR AESOP,
PLEASE REIN IN A BIT.
WE NEED YOUR PERSPICACIOUS ANALYSIS AS WE NAVIGATE THESE UNKNOWN WATERS. IMHO NO ONE KNOWS "the right thing to do" and I am not envious of the person who has to make the decisions on the macro scale of things. I try to encourage my patients to "sit tight", following the statistics according to age, even in spite of the anomalies of the younger population that has sucummbed to the COVID 19.
Aesop,
You mentioned that this virus has been altered. Is there evidence for that?
It wouldn't surprise me, but it doesn't agree with the anecdotal info I've heard. That info suggests that this was a natural virus from a rural area; that the ChiComs were investigating/tinkering with it at their Wuhan lab, and it got out 'cause someone broke protocol.
Once it was out, they decided not to let a good crisis go to waste, and used it as a bio/economic weapon against the West.
Termite
You had me till the 1% that 3% fatality rate. The WHO came out with that by dividing the total infected buy the total dead. If people got sick in the morning, then died that evening that might work. If people die 21 days later not so much.
When I wondered about this it was doubleing every three days. Funny thing about exponential functions is not only is the current interation larger than they were the last interation, the current interation is larger than all previous interations combined. If you double 2 you get 4, and if you double 4 you get 8; which is larger than everything that came before 2+4=6 That holds to infinity and beyond. stick as many zeros as you like behind those and it's still true, least that's what my teacher taught me in new-math.
So, you would to compare today's death total to the infected total 21 days or 7 doublings ago to get semi accurate data. 3% times 7 doubleings = 21% Some people live longer, and some are never even counted.
Aesop,
You wrote, "1) This thing kills people over 70. That's not all nursing home patients, nor are all 70 year olds in nursing homes." Of course, not.
You wrote, "2) Killing people because they're old is evil. Period." Whoever said that it wasn't? This was a classic straw man argument. From Wikipedia.org: s
"The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition (i.e., "stand up a straw man") and the subsequent refutation of that false argument ("knock down a straw man") instead of the opponent's proposition."
You wrote, "This isn't 'nature taking its course' when we're deliberately spreading it around like petals at a wedding march." Other than a few deranged individuals in highly publicized incideents, who said that anyone was deliberately spreading WuFlu around? This is another straw man argument.
You wrote, "3) There may never be any vaccine, nor cure." That is possible. If true, that is precisely why we need to accept the New Normal and make our best attempt to live with the WuFlu, just as in earlier days people lived with polio. The federal government can't keep writing stimulus checks for money printed out of thin air. It can's pay unemployment insurance forever. When/if EBT cards become useless, we'll see violence that this country hasn't seen since the Civil War--and perhaps ever. Something's gotta give.
You wrote, "4) Reducing your exposure puts all the onus on you. That's bassackwards.
You're infected? You reduce your exposure by staying your ass at home." How did this issue enter the discussion? It certainly wasn't from something I said. I thought that I made it obvious that I believe that if I stay here at the FOB Survivormann, I had a better chance of avoiding infection. Anyone who is actually infected and knows that he is should be horsewhipped for mingling with others.
You wrote, "We catch you outside without proof of being virus-free? The term for that lockdown is prison. Let's start at 1 year the first offense, and double for each subsequent one. I could give a fuck about anyone feeding their kids or running their business as an excuse. Gang bangers have kids and businesses too; we still run their asses into prison" Once again, I didn't address this issue. Nevertheless, as I said, it is easier to put up with the lockdown if you are still receiving a paycheck. And gang bangers go to prison for the felonies they commit, not because they have kids and businesses to run (unless those business are engaged in felonious activities).
You wrote, "5) The most at risk does not equal everyone at risk." I really don't understand what you are trying to say here, so I don't know if we disagree.
About the Left not leading the charge to push everyone back to work faster, it is no coincidence that the Blue State governors are forcing people to stay at home, or that Red State governors are opening their states again. Democrats understand that their only salvation in November is if the re-opening of the states results in a huge rise in deaths, in which case they will say, "We tried to protect you, and it's the Republicans who failed you. Vote Democrat in November."
On a battlefield, a general purchases victories with the lives of his soldiers. The concept of "acceptable losses is one that you are familiar with as a former Marine. Acceptable losses are a better choice than watching the country get mired in a monstrous depression for the next ten years. Better that a higher percentage of grandparents, and great grandparents who have "already lived their lives" lose a little longevity than that no country be left for their grandchildren to inherit.
...on television news this evening; as Vegas gets ready to start to open up. "We have the latest forehead temperature scanners at the hotels, casinos, as well as at the airport..." Yep. Geniuses. And, coming later, is one of the reasons behind this - mail in voting.
And I fought three combat tours for this horseshit. So proud...
4) Reducing your exposure puts all the onus on you. That's bassackwards.
You're infected? You reduce your exposure by staying your ass at home.
We catch you outside without proof of being virus-free? The term for that lockdown is prison.
Let's start at 1 year the first offense, and double for each subsequent one. I could give a fuck about anyone feeding their kids or running their business as an excuse. Gang bangers have kids and businesses too; we still run their asses into prison.
I am not your human shield Mr. Aesop. Nor are my parents.
You want to be the Head Gestapo of the Covid Prison Camps that's on ypu.
I do NOT consent.
@To Whom It May Concern,
Go back up and read the title of the post. Then look in the mirror.
@OH,
So you're part of the problem children that wants infected people running around free, so you can use everyone else as your human shield.
Noted. So, how'd that work out in NYFC?
But you'll get your wish. Reap the consequences.
Alternatively, you can explain how testing you out of lockdown, once, is using you as a human shield, which beggars all logic.
@Dan,
You're barking at dog whistles again.
Coronavirus in the wild enjoys a 1-5% CFR, since ever, and long before this pandemic was even a thing. I suggested 3% as the mean arguendo 3 months ago, and AFAIK, it hasn't sunk below 1%, nor risen above 3%. QED.
And the incubation period is 2-21 days. Death is 1-21 days after that. What the breakdown is for that 3-42 day bell curve I leave to science historians. It's a matter of complete indifference for planning purposes. Numbers today aren't final, but they are working estimates, and they fall within the noted 1-3%.
All of which places this 10-30X as bad as annual flu, ever, anywhere.
That's how it works.
You want rock-solid 100% accurate numbers, you'll have to be promoted to omniscience. Society cannot wait until someone achieves such lofty perfection.
@Termite,
The unaltered virus is a bat virus. Scientists in multiple places experimented to achieve a gain of function.
That is suddenly exploded within the very Chinese city with two biowar labs isn't happenstance, nor coincidence, and multiple reports noted finding the additional gene sequences within the samples tested.
It's a frankenvirus.
The ChiComs are thus the most dangerous scientists, in the tradition of Frankenstein and Jurassic Park: they knew how to make something this dangerous, but not how to control it and keep it in the lab.
The closest admission to that was a speech by Xi in January, for internal consumption, when he mentioned that China needed to "ensure better security for our research laboratories". And then we had videos of Chinese people dropping like flies in the street, entire apartment buildings having the doors welded shut by PLA soldiers, then China shut their Internet down, and in the interim, crematoriums in Hubei Province were running 24/7 to get rid of the human toll evidence. The last so that no one down the road can go uncover mass bulldozed graves and pin this on them. Meanwhile, they left the barn door wide open, and their asymptomatic carrier expats took it around the world, to Bergamo, Iran, NYFC, and Hongkouver, along with everywhere else, because unlike West Africans with Ebola, Chinese can afford a plane ticket out.
@5stonegames,
1) Get tests that work.
2) Masks work. Always have. Stop listening to reporters using their 3rd-grade understanding of science to "simplify" a five minute lecture down to a bullet point, and .Gov PIO press flacks doing the same thing, and start reading scientific reports and listening to actual experts explain it to you for the4 full 5 minutes (like the Surgeon general did, before CNN runcated his briefing to "SG says masks don't work".) Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
A surgical mask stops 60-80% of incoming, and about 95% of outgoing virus. You wear those for other people more than yourself.
An N95, worn properly, stops 95% of incoming virus. That's actual protection.
Handwashing, correctly, is foolproof since Lister in the mid 1800s.
Don't touch your face.
Problem solved, QED.
3) The r-naught on this is documented in blistering clarity. It's 5-8, BTW.
That means every one person infects 5-8 others. When you get to about 50 infected, people start dying, with statistical precision, and it goes up from there.
4) I want to give government no such draconian powers. I just want people to be sensible and responsible, which is altogether different, and about ten times more unlikely than government showing any sense. The only thing stupider than government, is the people who voted it into being. They revert to the lowest common denominator, they do not rise to the peaks. Always.
5) A 20 y.o. with COVID is not an anomaly. It's how a pandemic works.
6) Gilligan has been driving the pandemic bus every time it happens since Adam & Eve were kicked out of the Garden, or australopithecus formed his first tribe, depending on your worldview.
Exactly like the three non-negotiable components of the Fire Triangle, there are two components to every disaster in human history, whether individual, or international:
1) Intractable Forces of Nature
2) Gross Human Stupidity
Both Gilligans and Government can - and frequently do - provide the latter.
Watch any episode of Rescue 911, and see for yourself.
Remove either one, and you have no tragedy.
Some of government is always incompetent.
All government is not always incompetent.
Otherwise we wouldn't send firemen and helicopters to pluck people out of raging rapids or burning buildings, nor send cops to bank robberies.
If you thought you were going to beat a virus with a known incubation period of up to 21 days, with a two-week stay-at-home, you're not as bright as you think you are.
A lockdown has to last XX days after the last case, or else you're just feeding your leg to the crocodile an inch at a time.
If no one explained this reality to you explicitly before now, I'm sorry to break it to you, but there it is.
That approach is EXACTLY, PRECISELY what's being done now.
As I said, you won't get what you like, nor like what you'll get, but the crocodile will dine on you all, by and by.
Own that.
And yes, the economy must be fed, as well as the crocodile, because doing it the smart way was too hard for the Nation Of Gilligans. Consequently, YOYO. The exact measures I and you noted are now the only things that will protect you from both the Gilligans, and the Government. Any failure to abide by them are likely to make a paltry 92K dead (i.e. double a bad flu year) just a fond memory of happier times, before year's end.
Common sense is called common sense because when the phrase was coined EVERYBODY had that much sense. If they didn't they culled themselves out of the gene pull via hostile indigenous peoples, food poisoning, serious injury and/or infection.
I was raised to wash my hands frequently and to habitually address hygiene in my environment. Nowadays, restaurants have to put signs up instructing employees to wash their hands. That's a sad commentary on the intelligence and hygiene of our country. And it's partially why we have rampant spreadof infectious diseases! Dirty people get sicker with more frequency than clean people. Generally speaking about being clean...
Common sense also dictates that you spend less than you earn and save/invest some so that you've got some resources when life goes sideways. Like now...
Common sense also tells me that nefarious individuals (some are politicians and LEOs) will try to use COVID 19 to deprive me of something.
Gotta throw it all into the equation for EVERY decision for the foreseeable future. Stay at home and starve? No, gotta generate revenue. Not a lot but some. Shake everybody's hand every day??? HELL NO! Take a lunch from home to avoid the public restaurant risk. Carry soap in my truck to wash my hands before I carry disease home.
You can't avoid all risk. Just manage it. Stay away from elderly people you care about. Be clean. Don't be so greedy that you infect people for a few measly dollars. Etc. And be ready to modify your plans and behaviors when something worse comes along. Lots nasty diseases out there just waiting for an opportunity. It might be an African virus next time.
@ Survivorman99,
It was your suggestion that old people won't live forever, and had a good run, as fatalistically acknowledging that COVID should be forgiven for taking them all.
Pointing out such fatalism isn't any such straw man argument, when in reality we've done everything in our power to foist it onto them, short of having them lick the handrails at the subway stations in NYFC. And the "few deranged individuals" happen to be governors of several of the most populous states, and their exact health care minions.
That's like saying Auschwitz was the work of "just a few deranged individuals" too, without noting that those individuals were Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Borman, Heydrich, Eichmann, et al.
That's men, in both cases, and no straw anywhere to be found.
I'M NOT ARGUING FOR MAINTAINING A PERPETUAL LOCKDOWN.
Nor any 57 other things that have been done stupidly during it.
What we're doing now is moving on to 57 Stupid Ways To End That Lockdown.
The body count is liable to be commensurately higher than it has so far, precisely because of that stupidity.
I feel like Malcolm in Jurassic Park:
John Hammond: "Yes, yes, but we've solved all those problems."
Malcolm: "Right, John. Now you've moved on to creating new ones."
IDGAF is no one locked down because they're infectious is receiving a paycheck. I care that they're locked down, either at home, or in prison. Dealer's choice. If anyone can't live within those guidelines, society should be happy to provide them three hots and a cot, for a year, minimum, and a handy felony conviction as a parting gift.
There are no "acceptable losses" in a pandemic. Citizens are not pawns to be sacrificed. Period. Paragraph.
That error is the exact slippery slope that has seen the greatest slaughters of the 20th century, by governments, and yet people who would claim to recoil if it were done with gas chambers are salivating at letting a pandemic accomplish the same thing. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
The first duty of legitimate government is to protect the lives of its citizens.
Without those lives, there's no liberty, and no pursuit of happiness.
We have many morons that can't grasp that obvious fact, or else who would willingly grease the machinery of society with the entrails of some good number of their neighbors, so they can pay their credit card bills and go to Disneyland.
It's all fun and games for them until they and their family is being put in the grease bucket, and they act shocked that anyone would suggest such was ever possible, or likely, when in fact it becomes inevitable, once you first start down that pathway.
Anyone expressing that sentiment aloud needs a punch in the dick.
Anyone actually carrying it out needs shot in the face.
People want to look at the wrong things.
They want to understand how WWII started.
Or our own Civil War.
This isn't that.
It's Germany in 1932, and France the day before they stormed the Bastille.
Tread carefully.
You're about to get a doctoral dissertation lesson in the madness of crowds.
It doesn't end well.
But there will be blood. And no end of tears.
@Aesop, not only is the CDC content to have multiple lousy tests on the market, it's diddling with the way it reports the results, too:
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.
"This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.
"Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this.
"The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.
“'You’ve got to be kidding me,' Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. 'How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.'"
Evidence is beginning to accumulate that yes, an antibody response consistent with immunity can result from exposure to the virus... and also that many unexposed people have antibodies that react to the virus, probably because of cross-reaction from prior coronavirus infections that weren't SARS-CoV-2. We don't yet know what this actually means.
Big Pharma drug development scientist Derek Lowe's excellent In the Pipeline blog discusses a recent paper; to get to the point where it makes some sense he also provides as clear an introduction to the underlying immunology as I've seen:
"...in the unexposed patients, 40 to 60% had CD4+ cells that already respond to the new coronavirus. This doesn’t mean that people have already been exposed to it per se, of course – immune crossreactivity is very much a thing, and it would appear that many people have already raised a response to other antigens that could be partially protective against this new virus. What antigens those are, how protective this response is, and whether it helps to account for the different severity of the disease in various patients (and populations) are important questions that a lot of effort will be spent answering. As the paper notes, such cross-reactivity seems to have been a big factor in making the H1N1 flu epidemic less severe than had been initially feared – the population already had more of an immunological head start than thought.
"So overall, this paper makes the prospects for a vaccine look good: there is indeed a robust response by the adaptive immune system, to several coronavirus proteins."
Reactive isn't necessarily protective.
I work with people who have a positive reaction to TB tests, and have to get a chest Xray every year, but have never had TB. I suspect a similar reaction is taking place with COVID, and explains the antibody titers they're observing, albeit in mortally and tragically flawed testing models.
Studying this bitch is going to take years of focused research.
Aesop,
"There are no 'acceptable losses' in a pandemic. Citizens are not pawns to be sacrificed. Period. Paragraph." Seriously? Why should pandemics be treated any differently than other issues in society. If we wanted to end traffic deaths, we would set a 25 mph speed limit nationally. We don't do something like that because people have to conduct business, to live their lives, and to get things done. The powers that be know this and apply the "acceptable loss" concept. I will give the PTB the benefit of the doubt and assume that when a speed limit is set for 70 mph they know that some people will die, but that they expect that the greater good for society is to allow that to happen if it does.
This concept can be applied to several other parts of society where we accept the fact that we are not absolutely safe because of economics and social efficiency.
Once again, you have used a straw man argument when you said, "It was your suggestion that old people won't live forever, and had a good run, as fatalistically acknowledging that COVID should be forgiven for taking them all." Just when did I say that COVID should be forgiven for taking them all? You add an extreme issue or absurdity to my argument and then knock it down so as to give the impression that you've "won."
You come from a healthcare background and I fully understand your attitude. I certainly don't mean that you are a "kid," but I am reminded of the expression, "Give a kid a hammer and everything looks like a nail." With your healthcare background, you are, understandably, applying a healthcare approach to the problem (although some others with a healthcare background strongly disagree with you). The pandemic, however, is not just a healthcare problem, and it should also be viewed as an economic, educational, law enforcement, and supply chain, etc., problem affecting the very core of society.
Once again, I don't know how this opening up of America is going to turn out. We can't sit idly by and continue to allow the economy to be strangled. People have generally lost faith in the so-called experts. As a result, a great many people have arrived at a place where they believe that "the experts be damned," and that the country has to open up again. So much crap has come out of the CDC and the WHO that little from these organizations can be, or should be, believed.
Of course, if a half-million people die between now and the end of the year, you can take a victory lap at the "I Told You So International Speedway." Fewer people will be arguing that the lockdown was a mistake, but then we'll all be screwed at that point when we're forced to hunker down for an indeterminate period of time while waiting for a vaccine or a cure to appear, if it ever does.
The reality is that it doesn't really matter what I think or what you think about the issue. The "Open Up Movement" is powerful enough to ensure that the country is going to move toward normalcy, and we'll just have to wait two or three months to see what the results are.
and the antibody tests (which AFAIK no one has reliably demonstrated yet are specific to COVID-19, as opposed to all coronaviruses, like the common cold) throw out false positives, like a drunk spilling pocket change staggering down the street.
Abbott, and a guy at Roche praising their first antibody test, and no others, think they have an amazingly specific test. They tried it on > 1,000 samples of blood taken prior to SARS-CoV-2 roaming the earth, and got one (false) positive.
That's a lot better than the claimed floor of 4% for these types of tests, and as implied by the above, the Roche guy trashed all the other antibody tests at the time.
Although perhaps a bigger problem is that almost all the ones I know about are doing a horrible job of testing a random population.
And if you're hypoxic (too little oxygen in your blood stream) on room air, or worse, even on supplemental oxygen, like a nasal canula, or a face mask, you're pretty f**ked.
Another weird thing? This, maybe not in patients quite as bad as that X-ray, has been seen with people being able to get rid of the CO2, what triggers the breathing process. This is absolutely not a "normal" pneumonia.
some of you were too smart to pay attention to what worked, because "muh paycheck!"
I see a lot more people talking about how they're free, live in a free country, etc. A Nation of Gilligans wouldn't have so many stone cold genocidal socipaths.
If [immunity doesn't happen], like the common cold, chicken pox, herpes, and AIDS, this sh*t is forever. And like Granny's leftovers, it just keeps coming back.
"The common cold" is forever first and foremost because there's over 200 virus strains that produce it. There are reports that the coronavirus subset of it doesn't infer immunity, we've got to learn if that's correct (it's generic biomedical research, i.e. at least 1/2 chance it's wrong), and if SARS-CoV-2 follows that pattern. And the Nth order effects of the PRC gifting the world with an eternal lethal virus ... won't be good.
We have a perfectly fine live virus vaccine for the chicken pox, and a 4X dose of that for shingles if you're 60 or older, and I just read there's a recombinant vaccine for those over 50. Why it and other herpes viruses can hang out in the body is well understood, and beyond the complexity and age of SARS-CoV-2. AIDS is eternal because it's a retrovirus, it literally inserts it's DNA into your's, and deals with the immune system in several ways, like hiding out behind a coat of sugars.
Your personal beef with vaccination doesn't mean they're are bogus, or that we won't be able to make one for SARS-CoV-2. As a matter of policy, for now we'd best assume we can, to preserve lives if so.
Lockdowns work in the short term, exactly as intended. CA has 1/10th the casualty count of NY, despite being 3000 mi. closer to Wuhan.
No city in the US has the close contact that counts for COVID-19 transmission like NYC. CA also quietly withdrew their order to put positive patients back in nursing homes after a couple of days of outrage.
Frankly, given how the Left is using this pandemic for their own ends, I'm surprised [Blue States are] not leading the charge to push everyone back to work faster, to kill off as many working-class productive people as possible, and leave the stay-at-home welfare queens the bulk of all votes, in 50 states, in perpetuity.
But when they realize that....
Or that they're running out of tax "revenues", and Trump may not bail them out.
Dumb question here, but does any kind of herd immunity even apply here, (a) new zoonotic natural virus and (b)new un-natural" bioengineered gain-of-function? Those are the questions that bother me and go unanswered. Haven't read or heard anything even remotely definitive.
It's too early to get anything "even remotely definitive," but the assumption, with all that implies, is that these details won't matter, or might even be good for gaining immunity (it's not well adapted to humans (yet)), and that people who's antibody titers are high enough will have immunity; see the mentioned South Korean research for example. For how long, we can't know, novel virus is novel, and not enough time has elapsed.
Note I'm assuming this is a generic gain of function experiment accidentally released, vs. a deliberate bioweapon development. Although they're pretty hard to distinguish, but this appears to have come from a nominally civilian lab now officially under military control, from people who publish their very dangerous research, not something biological warfare are known for doing. And the PRC/CCP does have real bioweapons labs, and is believed to have accidentally released pathogens from them in times past.
We can't make steel. chemicals for medicine (or most medicines) precursors for ammo (no ammo for you gweilo) , tritium for nukes (in 15 years no H Bomb) and have an increasingly brittle food distribution system
Actually, we can do all of the above, our masters have just decided we won't do a lot of them, or very much. For example, we're in full production of tritium using one government TVA nuclear power reactor (somehow that's better than a 100% civilian reactor to the non-proliferation types who worry about "dual use"), some of its rods are filled with lithium-6, and after a refueling they're sent to the Savannah River Complex to extract the tritium. Which is also where the British designed and built warheads get their tritium replenished. The issue is that we need to get another power plant doing this, and that of course is mired in endless friction.
I see no evidence we "have an increasingly brittle food distribution system," and live in the farming heartland. We've got logistics issues we're working out, which wouldn't be the case if it was "brittle." But maybe other parts of the country this is getting worse? I just see my local Walmart system doing better and better after things got dicey for a while.
Don't know if or how much primary steel we make, but we do reprocess a lot of scrap steel, which isn't always good for all uses. We certainly can start making more medicines and precursors for them ... or maybe you're right. With the Greens calling the shots, the CCP/PRC willing to undercut others to gain control over 90% of the world's pharmaceutical supply chain, right now we can't do this. And likely won't unless and until we experience shortages that kill a lot of people.
Precursors for ammo? Come again, we don't make nitric acid, sulfuric acid, cotton of the right sort, glycerin, or the ingredients that go into primers? Copper and zinc for brass? Lead? Maybe so, but I'd like some citations.
On the other hand, we have a stunning example right now of how we can make cargo rockets better than anyone else in the world, we're in the set of countries that make jet engines better than Russia, and a lot better than the PRC, etc. We manufacture a lot stuff, a fair amount well. Just don't go flying in any recently build Boeing jet liner....
I'll apologize on the 2 weeks since the incubation period is 21 days and I bungled the math like a politician.
Still politically we'd have been better served with a semi fixed quarantine. This virus has a 21 day incubation and science says X says will suffice with an option to extend a couple of weeks for medical reasons.
Better communication and preparation for the inevitable economic Armageddon the shutdown would also have been nice but so would millions of dollars and a panacea for aging and all disease.
Its one of the reasons why I suspect this lockdown keeps dragging on. So long as the lock down is on, they can ignore the economics and that states aren't broke and liberal style spending is not DOA.
Lastly, it amazes me anyone could possibly in good faith think the virus is natural. I have only a basic knowledge of biology but one look at that thing and its characteristics and a consideration of where its from. it screams man made.
@Survivorman99,
Yes, seriously.
There are no "acceptable" losses in a pandemic. There are inevitable ones, but you don't just write people off unless you have no other choices. We're a civilization that sends 1000 people out looking for one lost guy. That doesn't go out the window because we're not feeling it today.
Traffic deaths aren't a pandemic; and for reference, just the vehicle code in my state is about three inches thick, in fine print, and weighs about 4 pounds. Multiply that times 50 for the country. That's before we talk about driver's ed, state testing, federal regulations, local municipal codes, metric fucktons of traffic lights, painted lines, and signage, and thousands upon thousands of people who do nothing but enforcement and prosecution of traffic offenses. In short, if COVID infection was regulated the way driving is and has been every day you've been alive, you'd all have shit fits and blow a head gasket. Maybe you want to suggest another example.
I'm applying the healthcare axiom "First, do no harm."
That's a global proscription, for all the areas it affects in a patient's life, not just a physical one. But the physical takes pre-eminence, logically and necessarily, because if you kill your patient, their other problems tend to rapidly diminish in importance. (Don't believe me; check your appointment calendar a week after your dead, and tell what your most pressing business is, at that point.)
As to the CDC, and collateral geniusii like Fauci, I started out figuring they were idiots; I have not been disappointed. But people throwing out the baby with the bathwater are why the next round of this will probably improve on Round 1. That's the Gilligan Effect. I can suggest we avoid that approach until I'm blue in the face, but I cannot outvote the multitude of Gilligans.
And I agree we need to re-open, but yet again, there are smart ways to do that, and quick and stupid ones. (Movie production wisdom: "Fast, cheap, and good; you can pick any two.") The country seems to have settled on going for quick and stupid, because reasons. That will pay obvious and domino-stacked consequences, and only one of them will be paid for at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. At that point, "I Told You So" will be cold comfort, but we're all along for the ride, whether we want to be or not.
What troubles me is both the absolute number, and the ideological fervency, of the drooling mouth-breathers salivating for the stupid approach. C.S. Lewis' quote cuts both ways:
"The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
@TWBT,
Re: Roche. Uh huh. Aren't they the ones where someone just independently rated their test 20% inaccurate?
I have no personal beef with vaccination, per se. I just know, far better than Joe Average grasps, what a Powerball Lotto winning ticket moonshot that is, not to mention the timeline for it. Let's don't take my word for that: There's a couple of hundred thousand former military types who can tell you how well that "experimental" anthrax shot worked before GWI. People who say otherwise are usually PR reps for Big Pharma companies, but the clinical doctors tend to hedge and weasel-word at 300wpm when you try to pin them down. Like they should. it's a longshot, and anything but certain if, let alone when, we might get one. If it happens, I'll be properly ecstatic. Just like if I win the lotto. the only thing that makes a vaccine a slightly better statistical prospect is that I only have one lotto ticket, but there are dozens of researchers trying to come up with a vaccine. That only guarantees that most of them will fail, but not necessarily all of them.
As noted, doing nothing is bad, doing bad things is worse, and NYFS did both.
Califrutopia, not so much. QED. Gabbin' Nuisance's latest stupidity is eclipsing his earlier success at finding an acorn with a blind hog. It appears that was a one-off, surprising absolutely no one in CA.
Now, if only Orangeman will cut off the tax-and-squander states, and watch their leftist frutopias (not a typo) crash and burn, we could flip several battleground states for decades, and cripple the former blue hive powerhouses for some good time as well. A broke NY, CA, and IL, is a powerless set of political roadkill waiting to happen to the DemoCommunist Party.
Be still, my beating heart.
@5stonegames,
Agree on all points.
Sigh. The comment on Roche is bogus in nature and wrong on the facts, and your inability to distinguish between an anti-bacterial vaccine which is almost entirely unneeded outside of a biological war context, and vaccines against viruses that would otherwise infect zillions shows you just aren't able to think clearly about this.
I mean, surely you know you need a TDaP booster every 10 years, 5 if someone shows up in your ER with a penetrating wound (that's for the toxin produced by tetanus, plus the bacteria which cause diphtheria and pertussis (whooping cough)), vs. none for viruses except for shingles, a unique situation where you've got nerve cells with the virus hiding out in them if you had chicken pox long ago, and probably other weirdnesses from it being a herpes virus?
Given all the successful vaccines we've developed, you're doing your audience a disservice by insisting the odds of developing one are "a longshot", statistically only slightly better than winning the lotto with one ticket. I say it's the way to bet, probably better than 50/50, without assuming or depending on it actually happening, we won't know for some time.
Get off your high horse, calm the fuck down, and switch to decaf.
I have no such "inability to distinguish", smartass, I merely point out for the record that not every vaccine performs as advertised. Whether it's for a bacteria or a virus is wholly immaterial to the central question. To deny something that obvious is asinine in the extreme.
The odds of creating a vaccine for something that's probably been genetically altered, and is hitherto unknown to research scientists at large, and per multiple reports including spliced-in genetic material from multiple other viruses, including one notably impossible to create a vaccine for to date for decades, despite spending billion$ of dollar$ in the attempt, is absolutely germane and on point.
Given all the successful vaccines we've developed ignores two things: the time it took to get any one of them, usually measured in years, and the serial failures, both with the ones we have a vaccine for, and the vastly greater number for which we still do not.
We may be able to develop a vaccine for this that's safe and effective.
Someday.
We will not have one anytime soon enough to prevent the complete collapse of civilization if we sit around wishing and hoping for it.
As I said, in a year, or five, if ever, when we get a functional vaccine, I'll be properly ecstatic.
I'm simply not holding my breath, because we're nowhere close, timewise, to any such thing, and there's no guarantee whatsoever that we ever will be, and it's absolutely certain that we won't have one this year.
As to the Roche test specifically, it turns out it was not part of the report I referenced, but those that were included were found to be wrong with false negatives 10% of the time, and false positives somewhere between 5-16% of the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/health/coronavirus-antibody-tests.html
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.25.20074856v1.full.pdf
That's probably actually worse for Roche, since the only validation on their test is internal and self-generated. Call me when they or anyone else has a test that's independently validated as accurate, let alone to <1%. At this point, all we have in support of that is their sales brochure.
FTR, here's a website list of 22 or so diseases for which a vaccine exists:
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/vaccine-development-testing-and-regulation
STDs encompasses a couple of more under one heading, mostly bacterial, and Ebola could reasonably be added to the list with the development of rVSV-ZEBOV.
So maybe 25, total.
A total of 13 exist for viruses.
The average period for trials and approval is 6-15 years, assuming it works.
Even allowing for accelerated interest and effort with COVID, 12-18 months is the probable minimum, if anyone of the 95 currently under development is successful.
WRT opening back up, whatever that really means, we have plenty of evidence of what will likely happen.
Everywhere we let people continue working together, we get large numbers of cases in those groups. Healthcare, police, meatpackers, churches, hair stylists, grocery workers, amazon warehouses, etc. Right now that is only happening in the 1 in 20* workplaces that continue to be workplaces.
If everyone tries to go back to work tomorrow, we'll very likely see the same thing we see in subway drivers, and all the rest-- they get sick. In groups and in large numbers in those groups.
Right now we're coping with the number of sick people, by and large. Add 15% of the other 19 of 20* businesses, and we're no longer coping.
And THAT is the issue, and why trying to go back to the way it was all at once is folly.
nick
*or whatever the actual numbers are, 1 in 30? 1 in 100? 1 in 10? It's late, the internet is big, and if you want to know the number start by looking at current unemployed filings vs total employment figures, do some math about the percentages of SMB vs Large businesses and how many each average as employees, and get back to me. If "everybody" is laid off, then when "everybody" goes back, that 15% or 20% or 17% of each workplace will start getting sick, all at the same general time. And that will suck.
Get off your high horse, calm the fuck down, and switch to decaf.
No inclined to when your extraordinary bias against vaccines, to the point of claiming the prospects for COVID-19 are effectively nil, necessarily color everything you advocate for in responding to the disease. If we have a reasonable prospect for one in 12-18 months (really, subtract a few since development started January 11th, when a lab at the Shanghai Public Health Clinic Center deliberately broke the CCP’s embargo on publishing genomes and got permanently shut down the next day for "rectification"), and we're going full Manhattan Project in manufacturing in case we can, what a lot of people should do significantly changes.
Whereas the hellscape you paint of no vaccine, even throwing shade on the prospects of immunity (which, I grant you, is not proven, but again is mostly based on your own personal experience), results in a much more apocalyptic forecast, including being prepared to or actually completely withdrawing from society on your own homestead. Which will never be the right solution for some fraction of your audience, some of us can not survive very long without modern medicines for example.
But you've got your unyielding position, which this being your blog I'll respect going forwards.
I have no such bias against vaccines.
1) The chance of one this year for COVID is 0%.
That means for any planning purposes, it's the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
What a lot of people do now changes not a whit.
2) The chances for one someday improves down the road.
3) You're pulling the "apocalypse" scenario wholly out of your own ass.
I'm working in the COVID pit at work every week, now, and have been for three months. My experience with this bitch is thus not theoretical.
Masks, gloves, and handwashing work. Continuing to shutter people at home waiting on a vaccine which may very well never arrive, is thus sheer lunacy, well beyond mere mental retardation.
4) That makes a vaccine "nice to have", some unknown distance down the road, if ever, but functionally inconsequential to what people should be doing before there is one. It has no bearing on anything between now and next spring, and it may not have any bearing on anything anyone does until well beyond that.
5) If and when we get one; and it works; and it has few, if any, serious side effects; and it's widely available in 330M dose quantities, then we can talk about what that means for day-to-day behavior.
Right now, it's a campfire ghost story, and as relevant to any discussion as the finer points of Vogon poetry.
And we can no more safely speed that timeline up inside of a year than we can grow carrots faster by pulling on the stems.
So bring it up in 12 months, and let's see where that discussion stands.
you're part of the problem children that wants infected people running around free, so you can use everyone else as your human shield.
No. You are the one who insists that anyone who cannot PROVE he is virus-free be locked up. In a world with no accurate testing with a virus that appears to have a huge asymptomatic cohort.
WuFlu. Stasi.
Those of us who will be circling the drain if we get the Wuhan Gurgling Death refuse to sell our children's futures down the drain for a fantasy covid-prison camp scenario which cannot work to stop us getting zick but CAN and will be used to lock down our country forever...
You don't get to use our risk, and when it comes, out deaths to sell that brand of snake oil.
Please wake up and smell the coffee. Do your own math on the CCP Herpes hospitalization and kill rates between San Diego County and Orange County. Both have about the same population size. Both are bordered by Mexico. But *something is different*. I wonder what?
And if that special something which also gave you the difference in pre-Winnie the Flu Hep C and Typhoid infection rates couldn't be stopped to save lives THEN why do you imagine your draconian Gestapo-camp policies will work outside of Orange County?
The cohort of individuals on which such a plan MIGHT work is probably less than one third of the people living between Mexico and Canada.
Any plan that does not take into account the U.S.A. equivalent of Les Zones Urbaines Sensibles (look it up) is just more gaslighting.
you're part of the problem children that wants infected people running around free, so you can use everyone else as your human shield.
No. You are the one who insists that anyone who cannot PROVE he is virus-free be locked up. In a world with no accurate testing with a virus that appears to have a huge asymptomatic cohort.
WuFlu. Stasi.
Those of us who will be circling the drain if we get the Wuhan Gurgling Death refuse to sell our children's futures down the drain for a fantasy covid-prison camp scenario which cannot work to stop us getting sick but CAN and will be used to create a police state.
Or more of one. That may be inevitable too. Hmmm...Is that your calculation?
Sure, on an optimistic day, I could back you on this DGAF [if] no one locked down because they're infectious is receiving a paycheck.
If you're known sick with an incurable infectious disease you should be locked down... Okay. Key word is "known". Sou, just "suspected". And remember, kiddos! Selective enforcement might be the norm pre corona-chan, but maybe, this time it will be different?
Please wake up and smell the coffee. Do your own math on the CCP Herpes hospitalization and kill rates between San Diego County and Orange County. Both have about the same population size. Both are bordered by Mexico. But *something is different*. I wonder what?
And if that special something which also gave you the difference in pre-Winnie the Flu Hep C and Typhoid infection rates couldn't be stopped to save lives THEN why do you imagine any draconian Gestapo-camp testing-and-control policies will work outside of Orange County? It's not even a felony to deliberately infect someone with AIDs, but this time, it'll work?
The cohort of law-abiding, pro-civic individuals is probably less than one third of the people living between Mexico and Canada.
Any plan that does not take into account the U.S.A. equivalent of Les Zones Urbaines Sensibles (look it up) is just more gaslighting.
So wash your hands. Stay home if you're sick, keep your distance, wear masks when you can't and go live your lives. Build a future. If (more likely when) I get sick and die you have my blessing.
Better to go down fighting.
I let you have both whacks at that tree, because apparently the first one wasn't enough.
1) Not "locked up". The word you're avoiding is "quarantined".
Test negative? You're sprung. Problem solved. L.A. is offering the tests at drive-thrus now.
If you're arguing against a medical concept as old as time, and against locking up the infectious, you've departed sanity.
If you can't show you're not infected, upon what basis do you claim the right to be treated as healthy, in a pandemic with a yuuuuuge cohort of asymptomatic carriers?
Your entire argument is "That's too hard".
Boo. Frickin'. Hoo.
It's also too hard to dig millions of graves needlessly because people can't wrap their heads around common sense.
And even stupider to throw gasoline on the fire by ignoring all the asymptomatic carriers you'd cheerfully turn loose in society.
Yet again: How'd that clever approach work out in NYFC?
2)Consult a map. Orange County is not "bordered by" Mexico.
3) You're chipping around some sort of point best known to yourself with the rest of that paragraph. Spit it out, man.
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