SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

agrre on medical advice. maybe it's different out here, but most recommend following cdc guidelines.

of course, the head of the cdc was the head of virology at mass general. but nothing has changed in local medical advice since she took over.

must be different in the wild west:
73-84483144-df29-4caa-a205-fe2959616cf9


watch

 

Late Dad physician and pathologist; Mom retired RN; brother Dave actuary for Medical Insurance company; brother Will x-ray tech and; brother George ER nurse.who had COVID. Everyone is vaccinated and has no use for the anti-vaxx idiots. But me . . .

It seems to infect a lot of Republicans and similar thinkers. They are the COVID carriers and deserve the consequences they volunteered for.

Bob Wilson

 

Ok, that happened, and (as might have been expected) with no explanation or follow-up on the straw men of #5602.

It did include an interesting riff on listening to actual physicians and nurses instead of politicians and journalists, which of course completely sidesteps the fact that even the politicians and journalists were not saying what they were falsely asserted in #5602 to have said.

I would be delighted if you could like every post I ever write (whether or not you technologically 'like' it, which has always struck me more as a social media gimmick in search of a problem). But if in #5613 I have written something you can't like, I'll take my lumps.

I am wholly sincere when I say I admire your unflagging patience and willingness to redirect and engage on the technical matters. There are parts of that approach I can embrace wholeheartedly, and parts that I can't.

That seems sensible for a lot of situations and for a lot of reasons. Even for a situation where a 'firebrand' consistently, with a practiced patter, targets the forum with deceptive posts—not copy/pasted, not retweeted, but freshly composed with his own fingers on the keys. Compared to someone who maybe innocently encountered such arguments elsewhere and is here hoping to discuss or learn about them, that's a whole different kind of thing. Arguing with the 'firebrand' isn't likely to achieve much, but that doesn't mean there's nothing important to learn from looking at the post.

Consider an alternate scenario where a person's way of endangering others is by targeting them with a gun instead of deceptive posts.

We might still agree not to spend words in vain on the gunman himself, when they could be spent helping the quiet others learn from the situation. The occasion could be a springboard for lots of genial discussions of the literature on gunpowder formulas, force and acceleration, kinetic energy, ballistic trajectories, and so on.

But if we have not also said to the quiet others "duck behind that wall because you see that gun pointed at you there? remember what that looks like to recognize it again" then we have failed them in an important way.

So what are some things we can recognize in a post like #5602?

One big one: any time somebody offers you a half-dozen-long list like "'they' said X, but X is a lie", what they have given you is a full dozen checks to make. Each item on the list has two:

1. so, did 'they' in fact say X?
2. so, is X a lie?

When check 1 fails, there's been a lie from the author of the post, and no need to spend time on check 2 for that item.

It's self-protective to be able to recognize that kind of a post.

If you find any items that do survive check 1 (fourth down the list in #5602 is one, we really were told lockdown would slow the spread), then there is an opening for the genial discussions about what the evidence shows on that question.

We did some of that already, over here, which showed that early on (late February through late March 2020), US cases were adding another digit every week or so (16 on 2/27, 172 on 3/5, 1600 on 3/12, 16,000 around 3/20), according to the JHU dashboard at the time, about as pretty a picture of exponential growth as you can draw without gnuplot. 3/26/2020 was the date by which about half the US population was covered by stay-at-homes, and something happened. 160,000 still came pretty much right on schedule, but we didn't hit 1,600,000 until July-ish, and not 16,000,000 until much later that year. Those could be seen as blessings worth counting.

 

When I was a VAX/VMS System Programmer in the 1980s, I found:

• 3-4 week lag from hallway conversations at a symposium, pre-universal e-mail
• 3-4 month lag from magazine articles
• 9-12 month lag from peer reviewed papers presented at symposiums

This remains my impressions although e-mail and online forums have significantly shorted the early publishing delay at a loss of quality. There is an inverse ratio of 'salt' needed versus 'speed.' So I appreciate the CDC and FDA taking time to test what is going on. The anxious and sometimes unskilled observers are quick to make claims that sound 'too good to be true' ... and sadly often are.

Bob Wilson

 

without knowledge, i agree with the article. but like climate change and other things beyond our control (due to inability to agree as a human race) we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our fathers.

 

@John321
Thanks for serving.

What basic training SHOULD have taught you about MOPP gear is that it WORKS when the proper gear is properly used at the proper time.
That’s why they usually call those rooms something like “confidence trainers” or something similar.
When we were in the sandbox for refresher training we just used a conex box…..
We DID the refresher training in case anyone missed out in Boot Camp or otherwise needed a refresher (I missed mine but got “caught up” during CPO initiation! )


They DO that expensive and unpopular training for a reason.
IF, for example, they shouted at you to wear your cotton underwear over your mouth to protect yourself against NBC attacks (the other kind of evil NBC) THEN your confidence in this ‘protection posture’ might wane a little when cigarette smoke, perfume, halitosis, etc blows right through the mask, or when there otherwise doesn’t seem to be a difference between those who did and did not use this protection measure.

Surgeons always use surgical masks in a surgical suite while doing……surgery.
I’m not aware of Any of them using cloth diapers, and (in the long ago) they used to take the masks OFF after surgery…..just like you used to “probably” take the gas mask off after the end of the training period.
Besides….IIRC the filter canister for the M40 (now being replaced) was about 8 hours under combat conditions.
IIRC the filters were good for twice that, and unlike a cloth diaper….they DID provide some notional protection against bio-weapons.

There’s a time and a place for masks.
A CLEAR EYED and APOLITICAL review of the science and data to date might surprise some folks who are forcing their kids to wear COVIDs version of the crucifix.

Folksy Anecdote:
I put my crucifix on yesterday while at HD buying some hardware for my ad-hoc reloading bench.
HD is nice enough to give me a military discount and there was a young lady who had put up a hand lettered sign thanking folks for wearing a mask. I watched her serve several unmasked patrons as politely as can be, and was impressed by her lack of overt disapproval for the unmasked.

She thanked me for my service and for wearing a mask and in the conversation that followed I told her that I mentioned that I was also vaxed and boosted….NOT that this would prevent SPREADING covid.
Her (minority) family was not vaxed. I advised her that in that case she needed to wear a non-cloth mask and urge her parents to strongly reconsider the vaccine.
I told her (without irony) that the military does not generally waste money or time on “stupid stuff” and vaccines are an important part of that history going all the way back to the late 1700s.

Minorities are over-represented in many bad things unfortunately….and vaccine participation is one of them.
That’s something that a certain political/party ought to consider.

Sometimes?
Saying “please” works.

 

Below is the latest published vitamin D study, which rhythms with what was posted here over a year ago.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0263069

Conclusions :

"Among hospitalized COVID-19 patients, pre-infection deficiency of vitamin D was associated with increased disease severity and mortality."

"From the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing vitamin D deficiency as a risk factor was the aim of many investigators. It was subject to much debate in the general public and multiple medical journals [46]. Our study contributes to a continually evolving body of evidence that suggests a patient’s history of vitamin D deficiency is a predictive risk factor associated with poorer COVID-19 clinical disease course and mortality. The use of historical results obtained before the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a public health survey enabled us to suggest vitamin D deficiency contributes to the causal pathway of COVID-19 mortality risk and disease severity. Our study warrants further studies investigating if and when vitamin D supplementation among vitamin D deficient individuals in the community impacts the outcome of an eventual COVID-19 episode."

Starting a thread that addresses over the counter preventatives/cures might actually help members.

 

i have read that there has been a large scale deficiency in vitamin d since we began recommending less sun exposure.
it is not part of regular blood tests, but should be. mine was fine a while back when checked for other medical issues.

 

do you have a link to any of those mask studies? i have looked in the past without much success.

 

wow, you're really not getting the point here...

you just nominated yourself as first to go, again.

whether you want to admit it or not, when you submit power to others to choose who gets the camp vs the freedom, THEY DECIDE who goes, not you.

"your current vaccinated status is twenty hours past due mr wilson, you're going to need to go to camp paradise for the next three months to guarantee the safety of the others"

yup, that's exactly how it will work

 

I hate to burst your safety bubble, but everyone from the manufacturing, shipping, receiving, delivering, stocking, picking/placing, and cashier's are coughing and sneezing on your soft drinks/receipts/cash/ATMs/card readers/grocery cart/shoulder/car/door/and yes, even that stupid plexiglass thing at drive through windows they had to cut a hole in because
... you know...
it's_a_window_n_stuff, lol.

 

you don't know the difference between mustard gas and regular old irritants ?

yikes!

 

I hate to burst your bubble, but out in the open, the Covid-19 virus crumbles very rapidly, and transmits very very poorly from all those surfaces.

 

Great! We'll meet face-to-face.

Bob Wilson

 

Bringing the thread back on topic, & looking at China deaths at the height of covid deaths was kind of intriguing.

49th cause of death. Is that as dramatic as what people may think?
Then there's this;

Looks like most deaths are above age 80 - but in the US - isn't average death age ~ 78?
.

 

no question older folk are getting hit harder. they are naturally immune compromised due to age, even without other known comorbidities.
cdc warned of it from the get go. but younger people should take cold comfort from statistics, as plenty have been hit hard with hospitalizations, long recoveries, death, and long covid.
and, they spread it to more vulnerable populations.

i wouldn't compare many countries to china, they can pretty much dictate everyones behavior. just look at the olympics for a glimpse