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Coronavirus global pandemic

The thing about the US Military is you are going to be vaccinated. Religious beliefs against vaccination? Washed out. Strong philosophical beliefs against vaccinations. Washed out. I swear, the US Military gives you shots against shots depending on your specialty.

The cities surrounding my Hub are starting $300 fines for people not wearing masks.

Sounds right to me. Protecting others is in my blood. Probably got that shot in the Military too.
 
The thing with anti-vaxxers is that they are like the anti-distancing goons: they don't just threaten their own health, or more commonly their kids' health, but they threaten other people's as well.

Infections diseases are one of the things that best illustrate the flaw in individualist ideologies, because the consequences of an individual's actions are not limited to, and may not even be principally suffered by, the actor: your kid may only suffer a mild illness from measles, but they may be part of a chain of infection that kills someone else. You may only get a mild illness from a sars-cov-2 infection, or even no symptoms at all, but people you infect, or people they infect, may die or end up spending weeks on a ventillator and months recovering from that.

This is simple enough that anyone can understand it. But people are remarkably good at denying realities that conflict with their worldview.
 
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Hadron said:
This is simple enough that anyone can understand it. But people are remarkably good at denying realities that conflict with their worldview.
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No. Not ANYONE. I'm not going to word this as I'd like, because I don't want this moved to P&CA. :o

Suffice to say that when your leader thinks climate change is a hoax--never mind the time-lapse satellite photos of dramatically shrinking glaciers and ice sheets--and stated quite definitively that one day in April, coronavirus would disappear! like magic! poof!, it would be gone, guess what his followers think? :mad:
 
I hear you, @ocnbrze!

But it wasn't just the Lakers. There were many big companies/restaurant chains/etc. that gobbled up the money. That's why it was depleted so quickly. I think they've all returned the funds--but out of being shamed, not because they suddenly had an epiphany.

I'm ashamed of the Lakers, for the first time ever, really. Their storied history has always consisted of not just their on-court accomplishments, but the family-like relationship with the players and all other employees. This soured that for me. But they ultimately did the right thing, so I'll forgive them.

By the way, last night I was scrolling through old stuff on my DVRs, and thought about you when I came to this:

20200429_101527~(1).jpg


I had deleted the majority of the game, only keeping the end. I felt no need to keep all of it. Like game 7, versus Portland, 2000, it was burned into my memory. But I kept the end. I couldn't...just couldn't...have imagined what would happen less than four years later...
 
Statistics are indeed grim. Or, as Mr. Clemens once said, there are lies, d@mn lies, and statistics. Comparing COVID-19 to Vietnam is as much a false equivalency as comparing it to the Spanish flu pandemic. I just finished reading a puff piece comparing the death rate in Norway and Finland to Sweden, the latter of which has been very lax in restricting it's population.

According to the CDC the average daily death rate in the U.S. (2017 data) is 7,708. That's every day. We've been collecting COVID data for a little more than 60 days and according to the CDC right now the death toll for the virus is 57,505. In those same 60 days, assuming that 2020 would be similar to 2017 without a pandemic, 462,480 have died from various causes. What the statistics fail to analyze (because they can't) is what part of the COVID-19 victims would have died anyway, or did die of other causes and only coincidentally tested positive for COVID? And, how carefully and accurately are tests being done and data collected?

Please don't think me among the idiots who want the country opened up. On the contrary, I would like to see some of the distancing and sanitary practices become the new social norm.

Back to statistics ... no one is testing 100% or even 50%. Testing varies widely and many of the infected and infectious will never be tested, so while we can get a general picture from the numbers, drawing any type of conclusion would be irresponsible and most probably wrong.
 
One measure that some people are using is to compare deaths in recent weeks to the typical death rates for the same weeks of the year, e.g. the average of the previous 5 years, and looking at the difference. Of course that doesn't tell you that all of those excess deaths are directly due to Covid-19 - some may be due to some other local factor, some may be indirectly related, e.g. people who suffer the symptoms of a heart attack but don't call 911/999/112 because they are afraid of going to a hospital at the moment (this effect has been observed in the UK). And conversely deaths from some other causes will be reduced by the restrictions (e.g. road fatalities - I just looked at the numbers and on average 3,000 Americans are killed in motor accidents each month. Curiously the equivalent figure in the UK is 150, which is 4 times smaller per head of population, and we have higher speed limits. You are definitely doing something wrong there). So interpreting the "net excess deaths" statistic isn't simple, but it's almost certainly a better measure of the total impact than counting deaths where a doctor wrote the word "covid" somewhere on the death certificate (which for untested deaths in the community is at the discretion of the certifying medic, at least in the UK). And what has been found everywhere that this is done that I've seen is that the total excess deaths significantly exceeds the official Covid death count, and I'd be willing to bet heavily that the majority of the difference is also Covid-related.
 
lunatic59 said:
Comparing COVID-19 to Vietnam is as much a false equivalency as comparing it to the Spanish flu pandemic.
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I think we're seeing the point of the comparison differently.

The Vietnam War was a watershed moment in America's life. Its death toll has long been a sad, bad memory for the US. Think of the Vietnam Memorial Wall, with tens of thousands of names of fallen soldiers on it, and visitors putting paper over their loved one's name, and using a pencil to copy its etching.

"Vietnam" is a thing. Like 9/11. Or the Hindenburg. No need to qualify what you're talking about. It's a term that stirs memories of a very turbulent time, its polarizing opinions about the war, and the tragic loss of almost 60,000 [mostly young] Americans.

I think it's perfectly appropriate to use its death toll as a benchmark, to note that this longstanding bad memory of Americans lost took ≈20 years to reach the number lost to coronavirus in <3 months. It helps put this in perspective. At least it does for me.
 
I want to see Michigan's COVID-19 rates in 3 weeks. An armed protest stormed the state house demanding the state open up.

Meanwhile in my part of America; The City of Cambridge is giving masks to anyone who visits the city and wants/needs one.

COVID-19 is taken very seriously in my neighborhood/area.
 
the interesting thing is now they are realizing that the virus that originated in china has mutated in europe. and what we are seeing here in the U.S. is the mutated strain.
 
rootabaga said:
This really is the craziest virus ever. It is like an onion, lots of layers, and each one makes you want to cry more.
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There have been asymptomatic carriers for other infectious diseases before. Look at Mary Mallon (aka. Typhoid Mary). She was completely asymptomatic and yet managed to infect many others with Typhoid fever, resulting in at least three deaths. While the numbers are minuscule compared to COVID-19, in the 1930's there was considerably less communication and testing about diseases, there are other documented cases of carriers, and I'm sure there are many more that we simply never knew about.
 
rootabaga said:
The asymptomatic thing isn't what I was focusing on since we've seen that before and already knew it. It's the LONG duration for this thing with some people. Add the asymptomatic aspect and it's nearly six weeks someone could be shedding the virus. Sheesh.
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Google (or somebody that Google is ripping off) has named them "super-spreaders" probably because the murder hornets aren't amounting to much yet. ;) What I see is the L.A. times latching on to one study and screaming it from the rooftops to grab those extra ad-revenue-generating clicks. When Kobe died, they opened their paywall, but with corona, you have to at least disable ad blockers ... or better, subscribe ... to see the information. Look up cynic in the dictionary, you'll see my picture next to it.

While I have no doubt that we are learning new things about COVID-19 every day, these types of articles do little to inform (or help). The article didn't state "some" or even "few" it said:

Although studies show that the average recovery time from COVID-19 is two weeks, and nearly all patients are virus-free within a month, “less than 1% to 2%, for reasons that we do not know, continue to shed virus after that”

I think if you were to ask any epidemiologist, they would agree that the following statement was probable, if not truth. "The average progression of infection and recovery with disease X is Y days, although, for reasons that we do not know, 1% to 2% of the population exhibit Z."
 
Good analogy, @rootabaga, an onion. Many layers indeed.

As I've noted before, in China they've seen a phenomenon that raises all sorts of questions and red flags [no pun intended]. Specifically, people who recovered after getting sick from the virus, then had two consecutive negative tests, later--as much as 70 days--tested positive again. And it's not known if they're contagious. *SMH*
 
MoodyBlues said:
Good analogy, @rootabaga, an onion. Many layers indeed.

As I've noted before, in China they've seen a phenomenon that raises all sorts of questions and red flags [no pun intended]. Specifically, people who recovered after getting sick from the virus, then had two consecutive negative tests, later--as much as 70 days--tested positive again. And it's not known if they're contagious. *SMH*
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The false negative rate of these swab tests is not small, and is not constant with time elapsed since symptoms appeared. So particularly if we are talking about small numbers you have to weigh the possibility of reinfection against the possibility that both tests were false negatives.

William of Occam hasn't much to say here: double false negatives certainly will occur, while we don't know how much immunity infection with this stuff grants, so either explanation is possible.
 
Hadron said:
The false negative rate of these swab tests is not small
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I've been looking for a good clinical study on the accuracy of all the test and I couldn't find one. It true medical fashion the "numbers" are represented as general determiners. "Most", "many", "few", etc. don't give an accurate picture of false results from any tests. I have seen numbers of up to 15% for false negatives on the quick swab test, but they were general media sources, so expect them to be more hyperbole than anything else. But, let's take that and be a little conservative and say there may be a 10% false negative rate. That means that as we approach 4 million confirmed cases, there may be another 400k infected people walking around thinking they are not. And, since we've seen that asymptomatic continue to shed the virus as well as hundreds of thousands operating under the assumption that they are not infected ... draw your own conclusions.

In areas like Wuhan and NYC where there are concentrations of infection, you'd expect there to be considerably more testing per capita than in Montana or Tasmania. So it's reasonable to assume that with increased tests there are increased false results. Even if the false positive or negative rates were 1% we should be seeing 35k cases that contradict the accepted paradigm.
 
My Governer has become a smuggler. I still haven't got my direct-deposit stimulus check and vehicles with out of state plates led the Reopen Protest in my state (MA).

Other than that I am an essential worker so I have that going for me.
 
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