SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

because of covid-19. i'm not sure i really understand what you are trying to say, or what your question really is.
you have stated that you are vaccinated, so you either believe the virus is real and dangerous, or you had to do it for work or some other reason.

 

sending children back to school full time this summer/fall is going to be more great experimentation with peoples lives.
we will have a variety of different groups to follow.

1) those with masks (if they can keep them on)

2) those without masks

3) a mixture

4) those required to be vaccinated if applicable age

5) those not required (a mix of both likely)

6) those going part time in person, part time remote

7) those fully remote

8) waning vaccination protection

9) booster shots

10) all with a variant we did not have going into last fall

11) i'm sure there are others

 

The news (mainstream, even!) was exactly where I read about the newly-erected tents in Harris County, and got the link that I supplied.

The world on January 26, 2020, when this thread started:

• WHO had not yet declared Public Health Emergency of International Concern. That was four days later, on January 30th.
• 6000 cases reported in post #1, representing 3/4 already of the entire course of 2003 SARS. DAS mentioned in #1 the contrast between SARS's "hours" of communicable latency and this one's "~ 10 days ... that would stand as a large distinction".
• DAS mentioned in #1 how a virus making such a jump is expected "to evolve different patterns of infectivity and lethality", including new selective pressures and possible gene swapping inside human hosts. Opined (what else could most people do in Jan 2020?) that it "would only improbably be by such stirring that 2019-nCoV could become that whopper ...." but made sure the possibility was acknowledged.
• US tested and detected cases stood at 5 on that day.
• That count took 9 days to double.
• 26 days to double again. (It was in this quiet period that Pelosi went to Chinatown, and Trump said in India that the virus was under control here. The calm before the ...)
• Two days to double again.
• Two days to double again.
• Two days to double again.
• Two days to double again (tenfold increase in seven days).
• and whee, off we went, learning how this one was going to compare to 2003 SARS.
• ... long before the further (but not unforeseeable) emergence of action-packed sequels like Delta.

Over 500 days ago, we were sitting ducks, short both on knowledge of the threat and on defenses. Fish-slapping might have been an apt term for calling each other out based on who got hit by more falling anvils beyond their control.

Today, we have a variety of anvil deflectors and we know how to use them. States are making different choices about using them, and state data from the deflector-equipped period reveal the choices affect outcomes. This is not what "cherry-picked" means. The outcomes affect the risk for everybody, including the risk of keeping the surroundings 'hot' enough to put vaccinated individuals back at nontrivial risk (of infection, replication, and transmission, even if not severe illness), and the risk that the selective pressure of replication within the vaccinated gives rise to vaccine-evasive variants that push us all back in the sitting-duck direction.

To maximize our chances of avoiding reruns of the kind of real disruption that our short memories have already forgotten so much of.

 

I would counter (respectfully) that NOT sending children back to school based on the numbers that we could agree on would not fall under the category of 'great experimentation' but rather.....gross misfeasance on the part of those "in charge."
How many children died in car accidents last year versus Covid deaths and (presuming that it's IN ANY WAY proportional to the expected number of car deaths!) when are laws going to be enacted that outlaw school aged kids in cars?
---or even 100+-year-old technology....like...seatbelts be used in SCHOOL BUSES?

Speaking of misfeasance....


Interesting that now, even government funded radio is pointing out certain "inaccuracies" in the some of the CDC's public announcements.
Interesting article following an even more interesting story.

Hope they don't get blocked or deplatformed.
(sorta)

R0 values.....
Things that make you go....HMMMMMM.....

 

there are a lot of arguments both ways, even among experts. i'm watching from the sidelines, even with a grandchild starting preschool in a few weeks. (although selfishly, i will not get to interact with him or his brother anymore on the advice of my doc)
i think the car accident and other causes of death of humans has been made by anti-vaxxers for over a year, and i find it to be a deflection of the concern at hand.
i don't see how one has anything to do with the other, except that i agree with you about seatbelts (and probably better bus driver vetting as well)

 

Because it has only 1.5% of the population of Harris County, and is basically a suburb of Shreveport Louisiana?

Harrison County, TX -- population 66,000
Harris County, TX -- population 4,700,000

 

I'm sure that's it.

 

Some people were not able to follow their doctor's advice about staying away from their grandchildren, lest the child's parents be left with the choice of which career gets truncated....although to be fair, LAST year the littles were not really super spreaders.
This year may be different.....

I respectfully disagree.
I'm the most pro-vaccine person I know, and I do not personally think that an examination of the TRUE risks to our children (and their teachers, grandparents, parents) is in any way a "deflection."
It's a risk-reward thing.

Let me deflect it another way.
HOW many people won state lotteries last year and how many children died FROM Covid?

Humans are poorly suited to do risk assessment, which is why we have lotteries in the first place.
In the military....we try to practice risk management, NOT risk avoidance.
Risk matrix - Wikipedia

The last quoted numbers I got (again, from government funded radio) there have been 30 'with Covid' deaths over the last 18 months among 1.4 (they said 1.5) million souls...on active duty.

NOT a lot of these folks got enhanced benefits to stay at home and QUITE a lot of these folks were in close quarters, with their co-workers for long periods of time.

I sorta trust the numbers to be FROM Covid rather than WITH Covid, since dot.mil gets the same money from dot.gov and they pay the same death benefits regardless of the cause of death.

 

thanks. i understand the risk management part, but i'm still not following you.

imo, cdc has been doing risk management to keep hospital beds available. i think they understand that this bug won't be squashed, and it is up to the individual to assess their own pain tolerance.

when it comes to children, every parent likely has a different level of risk tolerance. but not everything in this life is under parental control, for better or worse.

i can only say that i'm glad i don't have to make this decision for my kids, because i do not find it to be an easy one, and i'm glad i don't have to follow someone else's decision for them that i may disagree with.
i feel bad for parents today, it has probably not been much tougher than this.

 

To step back for an even broader view, we're even worse at doing risk assessment when we try to make comparisons between familiar hazards, whose risk is pretty much stable and on the books, and new hazards whose risk is less well understood, or actually changing, or both.

In this from 16 months ago, the progress of the COVID-infection comet across the fixed stars of other familiar risks was shown.



Because we did jump off the doubling-every-twoish-days trajectory we were on back then, the COVID-infection dot moved much more slowly rightward after that. Vaccines let us move it leftward some, if used. That drawing doesn't show deaths, but it's logarithmic across; the deaths dot would be following around a couple columns to the left of the infections dot. Vaccines and improved treatment protocols let us stretch the deaths dot a bit further to the left of the infections dot.

We are still not merely assessing risks by comparing where they'd be plotted on a risk chart. We're still influencing—and not all of it deliberately or with understanding—where these new dots will go.

 

Use a window:

• Incubation interval - 10 days
• Initial symptoms interval - 14 days
• Acute interval - 28 days

Rough numbers, 7 weeks, to evaluate if public health measures are working. These intervals are impressions of these phases but those with better data than my layman’s understanding could be more precise.

Bob Wilson

 

...Risk of a car crash - 1:107 which is highly moderate or moderately high, depending on how you read the obscurogram above, which means that most people have this unfounded belief that the car (or bus) ride TO school will be more dangerous than their exposure to the 'vid.

The 2 parts we're not concentrating on are the (still not reported) REAL WORLD risk to the kids that we all say we're trying to protect and (B) the downrange consequences of interrupting a third school year.

The final voted have not been counted on either one, but.....

 

The deafening clang of the plausibility checker forces a back-of-the-envelope on that one: 1 in 107 of 330,000,000 Americans would be how many, and how many times higher is that than the known highest risks, heart disease and cancer?

Possible explanations could be: that's an all-crashes, not deaths, number; or, it's a lifetime, not annualized, number, or even maybe both.

Finding the explanation would be easier given a source, but anyway it's Google-able.

The answer is b. 1:107 is a figure for death from car crash, but over an entire lifetime (the comparable numbers for heart disease are 1:6 and cancer 1:7).

To place the dot on the above chart with the annualized risks that are shown there, taking 78 to be US life expectancy, my simpleminded back-of-the-envelope conversion:

Code:

1/expm1(log1p(1./107.)/78)

comes to 1:8384 for a single year. Another online source, which might have used a less actuarially simpleminded method, gives the one-year odds as 1:8303, which doesn't make me feel too far off the mark. It's not quite very low but might be lowly very, depending on how you read the chart.

... so it's not so much that the chart is obscure, it's that a person can manage to obscure anything by comparing incomparable numbers and not saying so.

 

Maybe I'm just cynical but I don't feel as bad for parents, today. Outside of Florida and a handful of places, at least we have a choice for this school year. We can choose to send our kids to school or keep them home. Last year, I felt bad for and as a parent. Again, outside a handful of locations and those who can afford private school, there was no choice. Schools were closed. I applaud choice. Yeah, I'm a glass half full kind of guy.

 

Perhaps we need split schools: (1) masked vaccinated, and (2) DeSantis schools.

Bob Wilson

 

Absent your search for the source of his mis-stated figure, I was going to suggest that it was the annual risk of an ER visit (overwhelmingly nonfatal) due to motor vehicle crash. But it turns out that this motor vehicle / ER risk is a bit worse than that ...

 

our local hospital:
37284777
a slow steady rise in covid hospitalizations, but i'm not sure what is causing this action. whatever it is, it is unprecedented to my knowledge

 

Yeah, I think I was doing something more like an interest rate calculation with the 1p's and m1's.

I should have just thought "1:107 is your life ends with car crash, so 106:107 is it doesn't, and you get there by not dying in a car crash for a year, and doing that 78 times."

Code:

1/(1-exp(log(106./107.)/78))

1:8307 that way; my earlier scribbles weren't hugely different, but this is definitely closer to what the other source gives.

 

As it turns out, I grabbed the 1:107 number from a slip and fall lawyer's site, so.....yeah. I should have have checked my source a little more carefully.
UNLIKE CNN, I'll make a full and unconditional public correction.

However (comma!) pre-K thru 12 is more than one year in most states.
AND my underlying point is somewhat valid.

Risk:Reward

We have been watching Delta since 2020, and there are data to mine.
India's data suggests that nearly all of the littles are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic with Delta, and this in a nation that is vax deprived.

I'm not really as concerned with Adults, all of whom should be vaccinated by now, absenting other risk:reward factors, but one SHOULD remember that you have to do SOMETHING with the littles while schools are closed.

OTHERWISE....
It's the economy, stupid.
Or.......have we already forgotten 2020?

FORTUNATELY...we have 52 laboratories of democracy, and people are keeping tabs.
During my loooooong 3 mile commute to work I had to stop several times while the cheese wagons picked up the little darlings for school.

...I didn't mind a BIT!