Coronavirus

[unclevlad]

41 minutes ago, Tom Cowan said:

hmm

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/the-cdc-changed-its-advice-about-kids-and-coronavirus-right-before-recommending-schools-reopen-181605702.html

 

The Yahoo story is very seriously slanted.  I'm not saying the advice isn't suffering from a heavy dose of Politicization, but that article doesn't give the whole story.  It's...complex.  

Quote

 

But the package is actually a hybrid of sorts. Beyond the political-sounding opening statement, it included checklists for parents, guidance on wearing face coverings, mitigation measures for schools to take and other information that some epidemiologists described as useful. This more technical guidance generally did not counter the agency’s earlier recommendations on school reopenings, such as keeping desks six feet apart and keeping smaller-than-usual groups of children in one classroom all day instead of allowing them to move around.

 

The guidance suggests schools take measures like keeping students in small cohorts, having one teacher stay with the same group all day and using outdoor spaces. It also suggests planning for how to handle when someone in a school tests positive, including developing plans for contact tracing. It also includes strategies to support students of various ages wearing masks. For parents, it suggests checking their children each morning for signs of illness before sending them to school and talking to them about preventive measures.

 

 

By the same token tho...the re-open push is from a totally different part of HHS...and the impetus to water it down is clearly coming from the White House.  If the text later in the Times article

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/health/cdc-schools-coronavirus.html

 

is right then this really is NOT a CDC statement, it's an HHS statement.  But we've already learned to be very, very leery of anything issued by basically any agency in this administration.  The more it pushes Trump's agenda...the more suspect it is.

[Ranxerox]

1 hour ago, Tom Cowan said:

hmm

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/the-cdc-changed-its-advice-about-kids-and-coronavirus-right-before-recommending-schools-reopen-181605702.html

 

 

To avoid talk of the GOP convention that might be overly political for this thread, jump to 1:13 video to get into the school reopening part.

[archer]

My wife is home. She has a heart murmur (in one of the lower chambers of the heart) which they don't think is terribly serious and which in any case, they don't want to deal with right now. She is still having trouble breathing. They wanted to put her in a breath rehabilitation center, which functionally is like a nursing home.

 

My response to that amounted to, "Seriously? In the middle of a pandemic where being in a nursing home is close to a death sentence?"

 

They instead taught her some of the breathing exercises (which she'd already been taught a number of times before) then sent her home.

 

A CAT scan showed shadows on her lungs which makes them think that she was on the verge of developing pneumonia before they hit her with antibiotics. They did blood testing looking for some factors which usually show up in COVID patients just before they get seriously ill but didn't find any. That's as much or more of a relief to the doctors as getting a couple of negative COVID tests.

 

My daughter is still at home in isolation with COVID. She can't shake the cough she has but she isn't having shortness of breath all the time like she was. I'll take that as a good sign rather than the calm before the storm.

 

Thanks for all the prayers and good thoughts sent in our direction.

[archer]

9 hours ago, unclevlad said:

 

The Yahoo story is very seriously slanted.  I'm not saying the advice isn't suffering from a heavy dose of Politicization, but that article doesn't give the whole story.  It's...complex.  

.

.

.

 

By the same token tho...the re-open push is from a totally different part of HHS...and the impetus to water it down is clearly coming from the White House.  If the text later in the Times article

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/health/cdc-schools-coronavirus.html

 

is right then this really is NOT a CDC statement, it's an HHS statement.  But we've already learned to be very, very leery of anything issued by basically any agency in this administration.  The more it pushes Trump's agenda...the more suspect it is.

 

Remember the original CDC guidelines from back in May, which the Trump administration squashed before they were published, had a flow chart. On it, the first item was (paraphrasing), "Is there significant community spread in your community so that the community is having to take some sort of mitigation efforts?" If the answer to that is "yes" then you weren't supposed to open. The Associated Press did a series of articles showing the changes between the CDC-written guidelines vs what went out to the public. There's very few places in the US which could meet that original standard.

 

As far as this latest "CDC" publication, CNN showed the head of the CDC today clarifying that publication (which said a key considerations for school administrators is COVID-19 transmission rates in the immediate community and in the communities in which students, teachers, and staff live).

 

The head of the CDC said that having a 5% positive testing rate (and 95% not positive rate) in a community is too much for schools to be opened. CNN went on to note that California, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Arizona, and most other states don't meet that standard. And the expert which CNN was talking to as I was watching stated that the nationwide positive testing rate is 8.8%

 

So even with the, twice now, watered-down standards for opening schools, we apparently still don't meet the standards nationwide.

 

Everyone who is shocked, raise your hand.

[death tribble]

We are almost at 10 million recoveries from the virus.

[Starlord]

[Starlord]

Overwhelmed system leads to Coronavirus tests mishandled, delayed

[ScottishFox]

Looks like things are about to settle down.  We may have seen the peak.  The deaths will continue to climb for another couple of weeks, but this last week is showing a hopeful trend.

 

I cannot wait for this !@#$ to be over.  The stress this has been putting on my immuno-compromised wife has been non-trivial.

 

 

[Starlord]

I don't think things will 'settle down' until we have a majority of the population inoculated with a fully tested and effective vaccine.  Heck, they're still having outbreaks in China.  The second anyone says things are settling down, then everyone flocks to the bars and the beaches, etc. and/or runs around without masks.  Either way, IMO it is not about deaths, it is about overloading the health care system.

[Cygnia]

[archer]

12 minutes ago, Starlord said:

I don't think things will 'settle down' until we have a majority of the population inoculated with a fully tested and effective vaccine.  Heck, they're still having outbreaks in China.  The second anyone says things are settling down, then everyone flocks to the bars and the beaches, etc. and/or runs around without masks.  Either way, IMO it is not about deaths, it is about overloading the health care system.

 

Realistically, we could be a decade or more without a vaccine. That's happened with many other diseases.

 

If enough people keep dying over a long enough period of time, people will adapt grudgingly to a new reality. By attrition if nothing else: Just think of it as evolution in action.

 

 

Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.

-Heinlein

[Starlord]

16 minutes ago, archer said:

 

Realistically, we could be a decade or more without a vaccine. That's happened with many other diseases.

 

If enough people keep dying over a long enough period of time, people will adapt grudgingly to a new reality. By attrition if nothing else: Just think of it as evolution in action.

 

 

Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.

-Heinlein

 

 

Except there only seem to be two or three countries in the world overcome with that stupidity....

[Cygnia]

[Lord Liaden]

1 hour ago, Starlord said:

Except there only seem to be two or three countries in the world overcome with that stupidity....

 

I'm guessing you haven't traveled much?

[Cancer]

Bat virologist in China speaks out about the lab escape theory

[ScottishFox]

5 hours ago, archer said:

Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.

-Heinlein

 

The risk with illnesses that primarily take out the very old is that the evolution never occurs.  You can be a complete idiot and live long enough to never realize there's a problem.

 

The kind of stupid that is self correcting has to take people out before they've raised their young to adulthood.

 

I think we're going to suffer this one until Herd Immunity or a vaccine are in place.  Even leaving out the large group activities (beaches, churches, protests, etc.) there are far too many people just not wearing their masks.

[TrickstaPriest]

2 hours ago, ScottishFox said:

The risk with illnesses that primarily take out the very old is that the evolution never occurs.  You can be a complete idiot and live long enough to never realize there's a problem.

 

This.  Exactly.  It also wholly presumes you are going to be subject to punishment (somehow) for your failures - all too often, that is deferred to someone else.  Or at least, co-shared.

[unclevlad]

Actually, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's taking them out *before* they have kids in the first place.  Or better yet...IIRC, sickle cell anemia is actually linked to malaria resistance.  Malaria kills you at ANY age;  sickle cell, after you've had kids.  So it favors reaching the age to become a parent.  

 

There would be some evolutionary disadvantage with a disease that takes the parents out before the kiddies can do much...call it, what, 8, 9 years old, something like that.  Maybe a little less.  But after that?  Genes have passed on.  

At this point, tho, human evolution in response to diseases may well have stopped, because we do an end run on evolution.

[Ragitsu]

9 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

At this point, tho, human evolution in response to diseases may well have stopped, because we do an end run on evolution.

 

Technology will eventually pick up the slack.

[Lord Liaden]

I worry that we've become too dependent on the technological fix, to the point that we all too often don't consider it necessary to change our reckless, wasteful ways.  We just assume someone will invent something that will let us keep on the same way.

[archer]

40 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I worry that we've become too dependent on the technological fix, to the point that we all too often don't consider it necessary to change our reckless, wasteful ways.  We just assume someone will invent something that will let us keep on the same way.

 

My brother-in-law tried to argue to me that there's no such thing as over-population since you could have everyone in the world live in a space the size of Texas if that area was as densely populated as Hong Kong.

 

I started out by asking him if he'd ever been to Hong Kong to see how they lived. Then I went on to talk about water shortages, lack of arable land, fertilizer shortages, pollution from industry which is necessary to support the population, what to do with trash created by people....

 

There's a near infinite amount of resources, for all practical purposes, if we were to spend the money to harvest all the resources. Growing food inside cities. Windmills and solar panels on every roof. Tidal power. Thorium reactors. Recycling. Going into space to get resources from asteroids. Financially supporting people in their old age in every country so they don't feel the need to have a huge family in hopes that one of their offspring will be able to support their parents (that's a huge driving force for over-population).

 

On the other hand, we don't have infinite resources if we're exploiting the planet like we're still living in the 1800's.

 

< /rant >

[archer]

.,.,.,

[Ragitsu]

  

2 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I worry that we've become too dependent on the technological fix, to the point that we all too often don't consider it necessary to change our reckless, wasteful ways.  We just assume someone will invent something that will let us keep on the same way.

 

Hell of time for you to drop the Gandhi signature.

 

1 hour ago, archer said:

On the other hand, we don't have infinite resources if we're exploiting the planet like we're still living in the 1800's.

 

< /rant >

 

Let's wait until we can reach celestial bodies, yeah ?

[TrickstaPriest]

3 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

  Let's wait until we can reach celestial bodies, yeah ?

 

 

(Not on thread topic, but any excuse to post this)

[unclevlad]

15 hours ago, ScottishFox said:

Looks like things are about to settle down.  We may have seen the peak.  The deaths will continue to climb for another couple of weeks, but this last week is showing a hopeful trend.

 

 

 

Don't be satisfied.  Don't feel we've achieved anything.  It's a very bad, very dangerous process, in that the next step is, well GEE, we're doing better so we can relax things, right???

HECK NO.

 

We're still at 1 new case per ~ 5000 people *every day*  Every single stinkin' day.  Saying that's "settling down" is looking at it through rose-colored glasses.  Sure, it's better than last week, but that's like saying a tornado is less damaging than a hurricane.  The infection rate is OUTRAGEOUSLY high.  A bit of spreadsheet work with the WorldOMeters data from yesterday (so a closed data set now), the US has the second highest new infections per capita rate in the world;  only South Africa is worse, and that...not much.

 

Built this chart just now...hope it come thru.  Countries are on the Y axis.  The X axis is per capita new infections, so SHORTER is BETTER.  I copied the data for about the top 70 countries in the world by population, but had to take out around 10 because they reported no new cases.  This is the first 21 rows...I lost Ukraine in the formatting, they're the next up at 1 per 47000 people.  

EVERYONE ELSE IS 1 case per 50,000 people OR BETTER.  Even if there under-reporting in some countries, due to inadequate testing, politics, data collection issues...at most that might mitigate this a tiny bit.  

I'll say we're starting to see things improve when we have more like 15,000 to 20,000 new cases a day...CONSISTENTLY...for at least 2 weeks.  Mind, that's still gonna be high...on the order of 1 case per 15-20,000 people.  STILL bad, but showing maybe, just maybe, we're growing up.  That said, the American people have given me no reason to think this'll happen any time this year.