Coronavirus General Discussion

[yankees60]

I'm pretty much in complete agreement with Elon The Magnificent.

I am going to go with my doctor's recommendation. He a generally a "let's do what the studies say" type person. Not a hunch doctor.

A few years ago he convinced me to forego any prostate testing as the negative outcomes of all their false positives far outweigh the benefits of treatments for the real positives.

Vinny

[Kriegsspiel]

I'm pretty much in complete agreement with Elon The Magnificent.

I am going to go with my doctor's recommendation. He a generally a "let's do what the studies say" type person. Not a hunch doctor.

A few years ago he convinced me to forego any prostate testing as the negative outcomes of all their false positives far outweigh the benefits of treatments for the real positives.

Vinny

Elon The Magnificient, First Of His Name, just shot some humans into space. Need I go on?

[yankees60]

I'm pretty much in complete agreement with Elon The Magnificent.

I am going to go with my doctor's recommendation. He a generally a "let's do what the studies say" type person. Not a hunch doctor.

A few years ago he convinced me to forego any prostate testing as the negative outcomes of all their false positives far outweigh the benefits of treatments for the real positives.

Vinny

Elon The Magnificient, First Of His Name, just shot some humans into space. Need I go on?

Are you going to go to him for medical advice? To perform surgery on you? Prepare your tax return? Fix your car? Put in a new furnace in your house?

Vinny

[Mark Leavy]

Are you going to go to him for medical advice? To perform surgery on you? Prepare your tax return? Fix your car? Put in a new furnace in your house?

Vinny

Me and Elon and Kriegs. We do our own surgery. Bill Gates and your sawbones can suck eggs.

[dualstow]

I’m glad I’d swallowed the last of my coffee before reading these last two pages.

[Mountaineer]

I'm pretty much in complete agreement with Elon The Magnificent.

I am going to go with my doctor's recommendation. He a generally a "let's do what the studies say" type person. Not a hunch doctor.

A few years ago he convinced me to forego any prostate testing as the negative outcomes of all their false positives far outweigh the benefits of treatments for the real positives.

Vinny

Elon The Magnificient, First Of His Name, just shot some humans into space. Need I go on?

Is that what you call a big shot?

[boglerdude]

Reddit's not so excited about lockdowns now that the free money is being reduced

https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/ ... s_with_la/

[Tortoise]

A brilliant idea occurred to me today.

We should exhume the corpses of all famous historical figures who died under suspicious circumstances and test them for Covid-19.

If we use an RT-PCR test with the standard cycle threshold of 35 that's widely used here in the U.S., some of the corpses' tests will return a positive result (since the false positive rate means you never have a 0% chance of a positive result). We can then conclude, as our hospitals in the U.S. do, that the person died of Covid-19.

We will discover that some of our beloved historical figures with suspicious or uncertain causes of death actually died of Covid-19. Mystery solved!

This could be huge...

[Kriegsspiel]

I'm pretty much in complete agreement with Elon The Magnificent.

I am going to go with my doctor's recommendation. He a generally a "let's do what the studies say" type person. Not a hunch doctor.

A few years ago he convinced me to forego any prostate testing as the negative outcomes of all their false positives far outweigh the benefits of treatments for the real positives.

Vinny

Elon The Magnificient, First Of His Name, just shot some humans into space. Need I go on?

Is that what you call a big shot?

I'm just saying, whenever Elon is asked for his race, he writes "Space."

[Kriegsspiel]

I've got a question. We are 10 months into this pandemic and we are still arguing over the effectiveness of wearing a mask. There appears to be an issue of personal rights, efficacy of the mask, as well as the subject has obviously been politicized.

Do we have any high quality studies on the efficacy of the different types of face coverings? I'm speaking of published scientific studies showing what type of mask(s) filter the virus particle, both for receiving and transmitting.

This kind of data just might prove effective in addressing this volatile issue, and minimize "opinions" from Fauci, Trump, Biden, et al.

Also, it seems medical academia would be looking closer at monitoring antibodies in previous Covid patients. There are estimates, all over the place, as to how long a person is immune after the infection. Isn't this really important to know going forward?

At the risk of confirming flyingpylon's post, would you believe a study from China that says that (shocker) only people who are sick/symptomatic spread it, and asymptomatic people don't?

I guess technically, the prior study they cited* failed to replicate in multiple subsequent studies. Surprise surprise, as I've brought up several times before.

* Gandhi, M., Yokoe, D. S. & Havlir, D. V. Asymptomatic transmission, the Achilles’ heel of current strategies to control Covid-19. N. Engl. J. Med. 382, 2158–2160 (2020).

[WiseOne]

I've been harping all along that there's a difference between positive tests and cases - and it's not just semantic.

From the WSJ today: https://www.wsj.com/articles/california ... jem10point

"Foster Farms, a major chicken processor in California, said it reopened a facility in the state after Covid-19 testing demonstrated that about 14% of its workforce there had recently contracted the virus but wasn’t showing symptoms."

So 14% of its workforce tested positive but never had symptoms, according to the article. By definition, these are not cases. This gives you an idea just how much of a problem is the breathless media reporting of positive test results, What percentage of them are symptomatic? It could be a very low proportion indeed. And what percentage of these actually end up in the hospital DUE TO their COVID infection? Some, for sure....but probably far less than advertised, because people hospitalized for any reason are all being tested, and some percentage of them will come up positive no matter what they're in the hospital for.

The only way for the vaccine to cut down on positive test results is, as Fauci says, for nearly all Americans (including both legal and illegal immigrants) to get it. That will never happen. So I'm guessing this could drag on for years - unless the government pushes a change in reporting that lets them declare victory and walk off the field. That's my prediction, but of course we don't know when that will happen. Could be another year, or maybe more.

[WiseOne]

p.s. Pugchief love the cartoon!

[pp4me]

That will never happen. So I'm guessing this could drag on for years - unless the government pushes a change in reporting that lets them declare victory and walk off the field. That's my prediction, but of course we don't know when that will happen. Could be another year, or maybe more.

Isn't that what happened with the H1N1 virus? I remember seeing somewhere that the CDC issued guidelines that routine testing of the whole population should be discontinued. I guess you never know how much of that was politics vs medical science as the two seem to be way too intertwined nowadays.

I remember Trump advocating stopping the testing for Covid in a twitter post. They thought he couldn't be serious but I remember that he followed up and said he was.

[SomeDude]

That will never happen. So I'm guessing this could drag on for years - unless the government pushes a change in reporting that lets them declare victory and walk off the field. That's my prediction, but of course we don't know when that will happen. Could be another year, or maybe more.

Isn't that what happened with the H1N1 virus? I remember seeing somewhere that the CDC issued guidelines that routine testing of the whole population should be discontinued. I guess you never know how much of that was politics vs medical science as the two seem to be way too intertwined nowadays.

I remember Trump advocating stopping the testing for Covid in a twitter post. They thought he couldn't be serious but I remember that he followed up and said he was.

The solution is to stop testing, Trump was right. In fact, if we never tested for it, we might, might have just thought this was a little worse than usual flu season and went on with our lives. We might have avoided this election mess quite frankly but that's a side-bar.

Covid is so bad, the vast majority of people don't know they have it without being tested. Quite frankly, if we rando-testing 100M people every year for the flu, and to this level with these inconsistent tests......we'd probably find 10x as many people contract it per year than is currently recorded.

Stop testing people, treat sick people, move on with our lives. Why is everyone's lives being destroyed by a mild flu. If you're elderly or otherwise unhealthy, take precautions and don't go around people with symptoms, just like usual.

[yankees60]

That will never happen. So I'm guessing this could drag on for years - unless the government pushes a change in reporting that lets them declare victory and walk off the field. That's my prediction, but of course we don't know when that will happen. Could be another year, or maybe more.

Isn't that what happened with the H1N1 virus? I remember seeing somewhere that the CDC issued guidelines that routine testing of the whole population should be discontinued. I guess you never know how much of that was politics vs medical science as the two seem to be way too intertwined nowadays.

I remember Trump advocating stopping the testing for Covid in a twitter post. They thought he couldn't be serious but I remember that he followed up and said he was.

The solution is to stop testing, Trump was right. In fact, if we never tested for it, we might, might have just thought this was a little worse than usual flu season and went on with our lives. We might have avoided this election mess quite frankly but that's a side-bar.

Covid is so bad, the vast majority of people don't know they have it without being tested. Quite frankly, if we rando-testing 100M people every year for the flu, and to this level with these inconsistent tests......we'd probably find 10x as many people contract it per year than is currently recorded.

Stop testing people, treat sick people, move on with our lives. Why is everyone's lives being destroyed by a mild flu. If you're elderly or otherwise unhealthy, take precautions and don't go around people with symptoms, just like usual.

Except that is it not true that while I may not be exhibiting any symptoms I still may have it and, thus, be a spreader?

Vinny

[Cortopassi]

Why is everyone's lives being destroyed by a mild flu.

I don't disagree with most of your comments except the one I clipped. I don't think (am I wrong?) that nearing 300k dead is a "mild" flu.

Just trying to inject myself here and there to try (I am sure it will be a losing battle) to cut the hyperbole in both directions. Meaning, I don't think you need to lock yourself in your house for 9 months, but I also don't think it is mild.

[dualstow]

Why is everyone's lives being destroyed by a mild flu.

I don't disagree with most of your comments except the one I clipped. I don't think (am I wrong?) that nearing 300k dead is a "mild" flu.

Just trying to inject myself here and there to try (I am sure it will be a losing battle) to cut the hyperbole in both directions. Meaning, I don't think you need to lock yourself in your house for 9 months, but I also don't think it is mild.

...

I agree on both counts, Corto.

[Tortoise]

Why is everyone's lives being destroyed by a mild flu.

I don't disagree with most of your comments except the one I clipped. I don't think (am I wrong?) that nearing 300k dead is a "mild" flu.

Just trying to inject myself here and there to try (I am sure it will be a losing battle) to cut the hyperbole in both directions. Meaning, I don't think you need to lock yourself in your house for 9 months, but I also don't think it is mild.

How many of those 300k people died of Covid-19 rather than with Covid-19?

Note the word "estimated" in the chart you shared. Flu deaths are currently estimated using epidemiological models; they are not directly measured using a virus test like for Covid-19. So comparing the number of flu deaths to the number of Covid-19 deaths is currently an apples-to-oranges comparison.

If every dying person in the U.S. were tested not only for Covid-19, but also for the flu, you can be sure that the number of reported "flu deaths" would be much higher than the estimated numbers shown in that chart. The reason is because a lot of those dying people would just happen to have the flu virus in their system, even if it had nothing to do with their cause of death.

Both Covid-19 and the flu are very mild for the vast majority of the population.

Both Covid-19 and the flu are often very deadly for a small fraction of the population, specifically people who are very old and/or comorbid.

[pp4me]

That will never happen. So I'm guessing this could drag on for years - unless the government pushes a change in reporting that lets them declare victory and walk off the field. That's my prediction, but of course we don't know when that will happen. Could be another year, or maybe more.

Isn't that what happened with the H1N1 virus? I remember seeing somewhere that the CDC issued guidelines that routine testing of the whole population should be discontinued. I guess you never know how much of that was politics vs medical science as the two seem to be way too intertwined nowadays.

I remember Trump advocating stopping the testing for Covid in a twitter post. They thought he couldn't be serious but I remember that he followed up and said he was.

The solution is to stop testing, Trump was right. In fact, if we never tested for it, we might, might have just thought this was a little worse than usual flu season and went on with our lives. We might have avoided this election mess quite frankly but that's a side-bar.

Covid is so bad, the vast majority of people don't know they have it without being tested. Quite frankly, if we rando-testing 100M people every year for the flu, and to this level with these inconsistent tests......we'd probably find 10x as many people contract it per year than is currently recorded.

Stop testing people, treat sick people, move on with our lives. Why is everyone's lives being destroyed by a mild flu. If you're elderly or otherwise unhealthy, take precautions and don't go around people with symptoms, just like usual.

Except that is it not true that while I may not be exhibiting any symptoms I still may have it and, thus, be a spreader?

Vinny

I've heard conflicting reports about whether asymptomatic people can spread the virus or not. You could probably say that about every aspect of this virus however. It gets to be like the advice Jack Bogle gave as the most important financial advice - "nobody knows nothin'".

All I know is that I quit washing my hands after going to the store a long time ago. I wear a mask but only started when it became mandatory in my county. I tend to be a social distancer by nature so COVID gave me a good excuse but I have accompanied my wife to gatherings of more than 5 people on a number of occasions sine March. One time we all stayed in the same AirBNB together for a couple of days another time in a cabin.

So that's basically what I think about the risks involved. I could still be proven to have underestimated them and regret it, of course, but that doesn't seem to be very likely at this point. The only co-morbidity I have is my age of 71.

[Cortopassi]

As with most things, it is impossible to come to a 100% bulletproof agreement. I understand that.

It would/will be nice if there is a real post mortem about the whole event over the next 12 months.

Why did we work ourselves up so much about it? Was it the media? Was it China? Was it warranted? At least for some amount of time? How much? Did it get too political? Why? How do we prevent that next time?

And on and on.

Unless again, we (you/me/them) want to believe there is a conspiracy behind everything, I can only go by the numbers provided by the sources that are supposed to have the best knowledge.

At least for this exercise, I do not want to go down the rabbit hole of the data being misreported. If it is, hopefully that will eventually come out and we'll figure out why that happened and try to keep it from happening again.

[yankees60]

That will never happen. So I'm guessing this could drag on for years - unless the government pushes a change in reporting that lets them declare victory and walk off the field. That's my prediction, but of course we don't know when that will happen. Could be another year, or maybe more.

Isn't that what happened with the H1N1 virus? I remember seeing somewhere that the CDC issued guidelines that routine testing of the whole population should be discontinued. I guess you never know how much of that was politics vs medical science as the two seem to be way too intertwined nowadays.

I remember Trump advocating stopping the testing for Covid in a twitter post. They thought he couldn't be serious but I remember that he followed up and said he was.

The solution is to stop testing, Trump was right. In fact, if we never tested for it, we might, might have just thought this was a little worse than usual flu season and went on with our lives. We might have avoided this election mess quite frankly but that's a side-bar.

Covid is so bad, the vast majority of people don't know they have it without being tested. Quite frankly, if we rando-testing 100M people every year for the flu, and to this level with these inconsistent tests......we'd probably find 10x as many people contract it per year than is currently recorded.

Stop testing people, treat sick people, move on with our lives. Why is everyone's lives being destroyed by a mild flu. If you're elderly or otherwise unhealthy, take precautions and don't go around people with symptoms, just like usual.

Except that is it not true that while I may not be exhibiting any symptoms I still may have it and, thus, be a spreader?

Vinny

I've heard conflicting reports about whether asymptomatic people can spread the virus or not. You could probably say that about every aspect of this virus however. It gets to be like the advice Jack Bogle gave as the most important financial advice - "nobody knows nothin'".

All I know is that I quit washing my hands after going to the store a long time ago. I wear a mask but only started when it became mandatory in my county. I tend to be a social distancer by nature so COVID gave me a good excuse but I have accompanied my wife to gatherings of more than 5 people on a number of occasions sine March. One time we all stayed in the same AirBNB together for a couple of days another time in a cabin.

So that's basically what I think about the risks involved. I could still be proven to have underestimated them and regret it, of course, but that doesn't seem to be very likely at this point. The only co-morbidity I have is my age of 71.

Same here. On Monday I had my annual Medicare Wellness with my doctor and we discussed this. He stated my age (4 1/2 months from 70) is my only issue. For that reason he said I'd be far, far, far down the list to be eligible to get a vaccine. Maybe not until next summer.

Vinny

[Tortoise]

Kary Mullis, Nobel laureate and inventor of the PCR technique, calls Dr. Fauci a "liar" in an interview that appears to be from many years ago:

https://youtu.be/5aISPlTLbJo (2-minute clip)

[yankees60]

Kary Mullis, Nobel laureate and inventor of the PCR technique, calls Dr. Fauci a "liar" in an interview that appears to be from many years ago:

https://youtu.be/5aISPlTLbJo (2-minute clip)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

A New York Times article listed Mullis as one of several scientists who, after success in their area of research, go on to make unfounded, sometimes bizarre statements in other areas.[41] In his 1998 humorous autobiography proclaiming his maverick viewpoint, Mullis expressed disagreement with the scientific evidence supporting climate change and ozone depletion, the evidence that HIV causes AIDS, and asserted his belief in astrology.[18] [42] Mullis claimed climate change and HIV/AIDS theories were promulgated by a conspiracy of environmentalists, government agencies, and scientists attempting to preserve their careers and earn money, rather than scientific evidence.[18] The medical and scientific consensus considers these hypotheses as pseudoscience, HIV having been conclusively proven to be the cause of AIDS[43][44] and global warming strongly shown to be caused by human activities.

[whatchamacallit]

This is a large thread to get lost in but something I have wondered since the beginning of outsized deaths occurring.

We now have the baby boomers becoming senior citizens. There will of course be more total deaths than previous years.

Am I thinking of this too simply?

[yankees60]

This is a large thread to get lost in but something I have wondered since the beginning of outsized deaths occurring.

We now have the baby boomers becoming senior citizens. There will of course be more total deaths than previous years.

Am I thinking of this too simply?

We've had Baby Boomers becoming senior citizens since 2000, 20 years ago. Why 20 years later would we now have this huge spike upwards?

Vinny