Official Covid-19 Discussion Thread

[dohboy_24]

Imagine essentially writing "research for yourselves, sheeple" in 2020 lol.

Would you rather I sustain myself on the drivel you post? Only reason I even bothered to post in the first place...

[dohboy_24]

lol, the **** are you even talking about?

When I am speaking to you, I will quote you. Otherwise you can go back to your Twitter feed...

[Fairview4Life]

Cool, very interesting. Here's something for you to research: https://art19.com/shows/why-is-this-happening-with-chris-hayes/episodes/05b8b733-f841-453f-ad6a-e279e6a03928

[ItsDanger]

^ David Roberts (non-intellectual) of Vox speaking about media manipulation by "conservatives"? LMAO. Most media these days are propaganda outlets including NBC & Vox. Oh the irony.

[Fairview4Life]

^ David Roberts (non-intellectual) of Vox speaking about media manipulation by "conservatives"? LMAO. Most media these days are propaganda outlets including NBC & Vox. Oh the irony.

No, actually. It sounds like you could use to listen to it too.

[mintsa]

So the school board is taking the nfl/mlb approach I see......fantastic.

[Courtside]

^ David Roberts (non-intellectual) of Vox speaking about media manipulation by "conservatives"? LMAO. Most media these days are propaganda outlets including NBC & Vox. Oh the irony.

The irony of this post is delicious indeed.

There are are of course patterns in media, but when it comes to party driven or party affiliated manipulation of the media content, the Republicans lead this by a mile at the moment even if the number of outlets that speak the opposite outnumber them (most of those come to their decisions independently, even if they end up on the same page).

[execoftheyear]

lol so what was your point? What was the point in comparing it to MERS when you knew that?

That's like people having a debate on who the NBA GOAT is and you bring 13 game Bargnani into the discussion.

There are many layers to an onion. You need to peel away all of the layers to find the core in the middle.

so what are you getting at? That these lockdown measures aren't necessary because of the "low" mortality rate? Mortality rate can vary depending on circumstances and how it's dealt with. That's why there's different mortality rates for different countries. Covid-19 is highly infectious, there's no denying it at this point, if you don't take the necessary measures to at least contain it, hospitals will get overrun and patients that do require treatment won't be able to get it leading to more deaths, thus a higher mortality rate. This is a very treatable virus but the issue is managing the amount of people infected at the same time so hospitals aren't over capacity and treatment is available to those that need it. I don't get why people can't grasp this simple concept.

[MadDogSHWA]

Imagine taking a phrase that is obviously ridiculous hyperbole such as: "economy closed" and then when google doesn't have matches you think that indicates something.

Seemed to be a particularly valid response when Fairview4Life was using it to suggest the virus had been isolated without the addition of foreign genetic material, why is it suddenly not as valid when I choose to apply the same hyperbole?

I haven't paid close attention to your exchange. Apologies.

[Fairview4Life]

Imagine taking a phrase that is obviously ridiculous hyperbole such as: "economy closed" and then when google doesn't have matches you think that indicates something.

Seemed to be a particularly valid response when Fairview4Life was using it to suggest the virus had been isolated without the addition of foreign genetic material, why is it suddenly not as valid when I choose to apply the same hyperbole?

I haven't paid close attention to your exchange. Apologies.

Lol, he's misrepresenting it, like it's statistics or something.

[omar36]

So apparently kids are going back to school in the fall? Israel did that, and now they're knee deep in a second wave (worse than the first one). We're easing up on restrictions way too early. Cases are going to spike hard in a month or two, prompting another closure.

Stephen Lecce is a boob. He has no idea what he is doing. I guess there will be no physical distancing enforced in kindergarten? No mention of reduced class sizes, adjusted hours, increased staff for sanitation. I don't want to get covid from my kid. **** that.

I honestly feel sorry for young kids who will get poked in the nose and throat for those awful covid-19 swabs many times throughout the school year. The moment your kid develops a fever, the sniffles, a sore throat or cough...they WILL be directed to get tested.

My child started at a summer camp a couple of weeks ago...complained of a sore throat by day #3 and according to the Ministry of Health's covid assessment tool...a sore throat is a reason to get tests. She was terrified after getting a swab in each nostril and deep into the throat. Fortunately she was negative...but there will be a lot of testing done because during cold and flu season...kids just get these symptoms and it may or may not be covid.

unless they speed up the results, lots of kids are going to be missing days if they are suspected with covid. a kid says his throat hurts thursday, tested and then get his results a week later so hes already missed out on a week of learning. now the kids a bit behind and teacher needs to plan for that. now imagine that for 5-10 maybe more. sucks to be a teacher rn lmao

[Raps in 4]

So apparently kids are going back to school in the fall? Israel did that, and now they're knee deep in a second wave (worse than the first one). We're easing up on restrictions way too early. Cases are going to spike hard in a month or two, prompting another closure.

Stephen Lecce is a boob. He has no idea what he is doing. I guess there will be no physical distancing enforced in kindergarten? No mention of reduced class sizes, adjusted hours, increased staff for sanitation. I don't want to get covid from my kid. **** that.

I honestly feel sorry for young kids who will get poked in the nose and throat for those awful covid-19 swabs many times throughout the school year. The moment your kid develops a fever, the sniffles, a sore throat or cough...they WILL be directed to get tested.

My child started at a summer camp a couple of weeks ago...complained of a sore throat by day #3 and according to the Ministry of Health's covid assessment tool...a sore throat is a reason to get tests. She was terrified after getting a swab in each nostril and deep into the throat. Fortunately she was negative...but there will be a lot of testing done because during cold and flu season...kids just get these symptoms and it may or may not be covid.

unless they speed up the results, lots of kids are going to be missing days if they are suspected with covid. a kid says his throat hurts thursday, tested and then get his results a week later so hes already missed out on a week of learning. now the kids a bit behind and teacher needs to plan for that. now imagine that for 5-10 maybe more. sucks to be a teacher rn lmao

I wonder how they will accommodate at-risk teachers. I've had plenty of teachers who were old or diabetic growing up. This is a substantial health risk for them, even if they are given PPE.

[JN]

Stephen Lecce is a boob. He has no idea what he is doing. I guess there will be no physical distancing enforced in kindergarten? No mention of reduced class sizes, adjusted hours, increased staff for sanitation. I don't want to get covid from my kid. **** that.

I honestly feel sorry for young kids who will get poked in the nose and throat for those awful covid-19 swabs many times throughout the school year. The moment your kid develops a fever, the sniffles, a sore throat or cough...they WILL be directed to get tested.

My child started at a summer camp a couple of weeks ago...complained of a sore throat by day #3 and according to the Ministry of Health's covid assessment tool...a sore throat is a reason to get tests. She was terrified after getting a swab in each nostril and deep into the throat. Fortunately she was negative...but there will be a lot of testing done because during cold and flu season...kids just get these symptoms and it may or may not be covid.

unless they speed up the results, lots of kids are going to be missing days if they are suspected with covid. a kid says his throat hurts thursday, tested and then get his results a week later so hes already missed out on a week of learning. now the kids a bit behind and teacher needs to plan for that. now imagine that for 5-10 maybe more. sucks to be a teacher rn lmao

I wonder how they will accommodate at-risk teachers. I've had plenty of teachers who were old or diabetic growing up. This is a substantial health risk for them, even if they are given PPE.

Parents will still have the option to have kids take all school courses online. As a result, there will be a demand for teachers to offer on-line teaching. Teachers that are at high risk for in class teaching will be offered the ability to teach online, which they will be required to provide.

[beanbag]

What is being added to a test is what it is. What is relevant here is the reason said substance is being added to the test.

If you are adding Coca-Cola for fun, then obviously one would not trust the validity of that test. That however, doesn't mean that in this specific case, the addition of genetic materials doesn't serve a purpose.

Which purpose could or does it serve to add genetic materials to any blood, urine, or saliva sample prior to testing?

Also, this has nothing to do with my initial question to you about the previous diarrhea of stats you posted last week. What was the point of those?

Another member posted this tweet along with their comment that it was "the direct cause and effect of ignoring science" and my response was to illustrate how the stats have constantly experienced an increased number of tests, cases, hospitalizations, deaths, etc. on the date of the week the article was published - Tuesday, July 7, 2020.

Read on Twitter

As hankscorpioLA noted in his reply, "The numbers go down on weekends because some entities do not report on weekends and some facilities are closed on weekends. That's why there is always a spike on Tuesdays."

So... while other members of this forum might wish to spread misinformation that would suggest the spike in hospitalizations were the "direct cause and effect of ignoring science", the reality of the situation is that there has typically been a spike on Tuesdays because "some entities do not report on weekends and some facilities are closed on weekends".

In addition, should one download the latest data on hospitals in each Florida county and calculate the available capacity for both the normal and total staffed bed capacities, you would have found then, and will still find today that a few hospitals have as much as 50% of their ICU beds empty, but most are between 60-70% full and about 25% of them have less than 10% or fewer ICU beds sitting empty and available to accommodate a new patient.

Even today, close to 20% of the ICU beds in the state of Florida are empty and while those numbers could be better than they are, should a similar article be posted next Tuesday or the Tuesday after that, I would hope the members of this forum remind themselves what is being reported and what it truly means rather than belittle their own intelligence and the intelligence of the rest of this forum by posting the kind of harmful, misleading, and inaccurate information as was posted here a few weeks ago.

Should you choose to be so open-minded, you might gain a more balanced and well-rounded perspective on the reality of the situation, rather than resort to neanderthal attempts at social and political dogma, insults, and character defaming comments (present company excluded) meant to distract attention away from the discussion at hand.

The virus is real and some hospitals have hit capacity, but just because CNN posts an article on a Tuesday that shines a light on the same patterns experienced the past 3 weeks beforehand, it doesn't mean it's now "the direct cause and effect of ignoring science", the result of "Ford not being as bad as DeSantis", or something you'd "thank heavens the antimask crowd are just a very small minority of idiots here" as others would like to suggest.

Again....what are you arguing?

I still have no clue. Are you saying things could be worse?

Are you saying we should be handling things in a different manner?

Can you just in plain english give me an idea as to what YOU would be doing if you were in charge?

[Vaclac]

So contrary to what I was told in this thread, Sweden actually did do better economically as a result of its decision not to lock down. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53664354.
Also, the pandemic there has died out, despite not engaging in lockdowns or significant masking (I actually think masking is a good idea, but that it's not the silver bullet some seem to think it is). And it died out with comparable deaths per million to other Western nations with 570 deaths per million compared to 682 for the UK, 617 for Spain, 582 for Italy, 484 for the US, and 464 for France. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries. It hasn't reached anywhere near the supposed 60-70% threshold for herd immunity, at least as measured by antibody surveys. And yet it has had a grand total of 3 covid deaths in the past week - the 7 day moving average on worldometers is actually 0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/. This 60%-70% threshold is just wrong and does not fit the data. The middle of this article explains why heterogeinity (ie that some people are both much more likely to get it and to spread it than others) matters and makes the threshold much lower, more likely 20%. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/herd-immunity-coronavirus/614035/. I cite this because last time I made this point I was told that I was somehow making this up or some other bizarre notion. It is the clear implication of the math both on a theoretical level, and in fit to the actual data, not only in Sweden, but elsewhere too.

[Fairview4Life]

So contrary to what I was told in this thread, Sweden actually did do better economically as a result of its decision not to lock down. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53664354.
Also, the pandemic there has died out, despite not engaging in lockdowns or significant masking (I actually think masking is a good idea, but that it's not the silver bullet some seem to think it is). And it died out with comparable deaths per million to other Western nations with 570 deaths per million compared to 682 for the UK, 617 for Spain, 582 for Italy, 484 for the US, and 464 for France. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries. It hasn't reached anywhere near the supposed 60-70% threshold for herd immunity, at least as measured by antibody surveys. And yet it has had a grand total of 3 covid deaths in the past week - the 7 day moving average on worldometers is actually 0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/. This 60%-70% threshold is just wrong and does not fit the data. The middle of this article explains why heterogeinity (ie that some people are both much more likely to get it and to spread it than others) matters and makes the threshold much lower, more likely 20%. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/herd-immunity-coronavirus/614035/. I cite this because last time I made this point I was told that I was somehow making this up or some other bizarre notion. It is the clear implication of the math both on a theoretical level, and in fit to the actual data, not only in Sweden, but elsewhere too.

Yes, when compared to Italy, Spain, France etc. that were harder hit by the outbreak, they did better. You don't find it odd she focused on those countries and not Sweden's immediate nordic neighbours? Other than these 2 throw away sentences at the end of the article that essentially give the whole game away?

That is less than other countries hit hard by Covid-19, such as Italy, Spain and the UK, but still similar to the rest of Scandinavia.

Sweden's unemployment rate of 9% remains the highest in the Nordics, up from 7.1% in March.

What was pointed out to you earlier in the thread is that Sweden did worse than their neighbours like Denmark, Finland, Norway etc.. That hasn't changed. A lot more people died for no economic benefit.

[Vaclac]

Yes, when compared to Italy, Spain, France etc. that were harder hit by the outbreak, they did better. You don't find it odd she focused on those countries and not Sweden's immediate nordic neighbours? Other than these 2 throw away sentences at the end of the article that essentially give the whole game away?

That is less than other countries hit hard by Covid-19, such as Italy, Spain and the UK, but still similar to the rest of Scandinavia.

Sweden's unemployment rate of 9% remains the highest in the Nordics, up from 7.1% in March.

What was pointed out to you earlier in the thread is that Sweden did worse than their neighbours like Denmark, Finland, Norway etc.. That hasn't changed. A lot more people died for no economic benefit.

No, I don't find it odd at all. I don't think anyone disputes that lockdowns suppress the spread while they are in place and if you begin them before there is a particularly large presence of the virus in the community, you can keep overall levels low for as long as you maintain the lockdown.
But we were told something quite different, that a choice not to lockdown would cause millions of people to die, way higher than in the places already worst hit. As it turns out, the places worst hit were already too far along to effectively reduce the spread much, and so yes it is a useful data point to say, actually a simple no-lockdown strategy does not actually cause outcomes worse than the worst hit areas. We do not need five times the current levels of infection and death to reach herd immunity in those places, and yet we are constantly told that by endless articles parroting the simplistic, and inaccurate, threshold of 60-70%, and that even NYC must stay locked down forever.

As to economics, we don't have their nordic neighbours Q2 GDP growth yet, but all of their Q1 was worse and I'm willing to bet Q2 will be too when it comes out - we will see. Unemployment rates especially right now depend immensely on policy differences with little substance. If one country tells companies they can temporarily lay people off and supplement unemployment benefits, and another tells companies their employees don't have to work but should stay technically employed and then pays the companies those wages for the people not working, then that is in substance the same thing, but will have wildly different implications for stated unemployment rates.

[Oakville_Raptor]

So the school board is taking the nfl/mlb approach I see......fantastic.

It's astonishing that school is back on in September

[Fairview4Life]

If the Swedes hadn't let people go skiing in the alps in March, they probably could have had exceptional numbers and we'd all be touting what geniuses they were and pointing to whatever policy preferences we like that they implemented as the sole reason for it. But they did, and then they decided to let the virus spread and it caused a whole lot more people to die. That's not really in dispute. The best comparison we can make today is to it's immediate and fairly comparable neighbours. Sweden is heavily export reliant as well, so their GDP was more than likely going to take a big hit regardless of what they did. But the fact they aren't actually doing better economically, their own internal financial people are saying they are going to be screwed anyway because of how dependent they are on exports, and the fact that a whole lot of their citizens are now dead that didn't need to be, and I really don't see why you're trying to spike the football here.

[Vaclac]

If the Swedes hadn't let people go skiing in the alps in March, they probably could have had exceptional numbers and we'd all be touting what geniuses they were and pointing to whatever policy preferences we like that they implemented as the sole reason for it. But they did, and then they decided to let the virus spread and it caused a whole lot more people to die. That's not really in dispute. The best comparison we can make today is to it's immediate and fairly comparable neighbours. Sweden is heavily export reliant as well, so their GDP was more than likely going to take a big hit regardless of what they did. But the fact they aren't actually doing better economically, their own internal financial people are saying they are going to be screwed anyway because of how dependent they are on exports, and the fact that a whole lot of their citizens are now dead that didn't need to be, and I really don't see why you're trying to spike the football here.

I've pointed to the fact that they actually are doing better than their neighbours economically, but sure you can just keep asserting the opposite.
I'm not spiking the football - I'm just pointing to further evidence that the herd immunity threshold of 60-70% that people think of is wildly inaccurate, and that has policy implications, at the very least in all those places already hard hit and having a large percentage of their population already having gotten it. Continuing to lockdown in those places for fear that it could be so much worse, despite having actually evidence that a place that never locked down actually didn't do worse is madness. And your idea that lockdowns just don't have human costs is insanity, but go on believing that if you like I suppose.
I also don't understand your theory of the virus when you say their numbers could have been great if people didn't go skiing. Is your theory that if they did that, then Sweden would have locked down like everyone else instead of the strategy they actually pursued? If not, then those people would eventually get infected anyway, since what stops the spread is either the lockdowns, or herd immunity. If you don't lockdown forever you will eventually reach herd immunity. This is the other advantage of never going into lockdown - you don't have to worry about how you exit it. Whereas if you succeed via the lockdown then you have to worry about reopening - whenever you do, cases will pick back up again because you don't have a substantial proportion of the population being immune yet.