All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (1 Viewer)

[Maxp]

I fear we are really going to be in a bad place due to the obvious cuts to the federal agencies that deal with infectious disease, but also the negative effect the Affordable Care act has had on non urban hospitals. Our front line defenses are ineffectual and our ability to treat the populous is probably at an all time low. Factor in the cost of healthcare and I can see our system crashing. What do you think about the politics of this virus?

 

[MT15]

Also: this is what should happen to these idiots

 

[J-DONK]

Or the big insurance companies which are underwriting public and private employers who may all of sudden have millions of workers unable to get medical treatment because hospitals are full up and they can't work because they're too sick or quarantined.

Even crony capitalism depends on human interaction on just about every level, unless of course we all want to go back to live with zoom in our individual pods.

It's one thing to care for the indigent, poor and "lazy" but when people working, being productive and paying the freight one way or the other can't show up in person....we have to get back to normal but fight any and every mitigation effort to control or mitigate the pandemic.

It's just exhausting stupidity.

The idiots fought the shutdowns, fought masks, and now fighting vaccines. Hoisted by their petardation.

What a shirt show.

I mean the article tells you the reason. It's increased cost. A covid hospital stay is often lengthy. HMO's aren't exactly known for their altruism. I don't think they care if you die waiting on medical care. They don't lose any money in that scenario. An actuary ran the numbers on X percentage of anti-vax employees needing to spend 2 weeks in the ICU.

 

[Optimus Prime]

I don’t even know what to say
=======================
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said President Biden has failed to “end covid” and should follow his state’s lead, even as Florida experiences record-breaking cases, deaths and hospitalizations.


Florida is now reporting an average of 227 covid-19 deaths each day — a state record and by far the highest count in the nation. The daily death count in Florida, fueled by the highly transmissible delta variant, has increased by 613 percent in the past seven days, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.


The state reported more than 26,000 new coronavirus infections Wednesday, and 17,164 people were hospitalized with the virus, nearly tripling the hospitalization rate in the past month, according to federal data. More than 3,600 people with covid-19 are occupying beds in intensive care units, the second-highest total in the nation…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/26/florida-desantis-covid-deaths-biden/

 

[MT15]

This is just horrific. Please be aware, if Covid causes you to crash, you’re going to go quickly. I saw another account of an immune compromised woman whose O2 sats went from 92 to 83 just in the time it took her husband to drive her to the emergency room.

Coronavirus: Florida woman hospitalized with COVID-19 returns home to find husband dead

A Florida woman who was released from the hospital after recovering from COVID-19, returned home to find her husband dead.

www.actionnewsjax.com

 

[MT15]

This is just completely unacceptable, IMO. It’s like they want their followers to suffer a preventable disease and possibly die.

RNS | Covering the world of religion

RNS is an independent, nonprofit, and award-winning source of global news on religion, spirituality, and culture. Founded in 1934, RNS seeks to inform readers with objective reporting and insightful commentary.

religionnews.com

 

[MT15]

This inspires anger, at least in me. This teacher endangered her students needlessly.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

This inspires anger, at least in me. This teacher endangered her students needlessly.

Child endangerment. Throw this dipshirt in prison.

 

[Farb]

https://www.outkick.com/denmark-announces-it-will-lift-all-covid-restrictions-including-passports/

It will be interesting to see if Denmark has the same outcome with regards to break through cases like they are about to print the study from Israel.

 

[The moose]

This inspires anger, at least in me. This teacher endangered her students needlessly.

I have so much respect for people in that teach. The reward certainly is not financially motivated.

For the life of me I can't wrap my head around how any teacher could do that.

 

[MT15]

So, Farb, sometimes I cant understand your posts, maybe autocorrect got you?

But your blog post that you linked was anti-mask, and pointed to the fact that elementary children in UK were never masked during the Delta surge. It even linked a helpful NYT article about it.

Reading the NYT article is interesting. UK did “pods” and strict quarantining of all students in the pod if one student was positive. This was accompanied by lots of routine testing of kids and teachers. It was also noted that UK teachers were 90% vaccinated. Even so, in the UK their cases in children went from 600 daily to 12,000 daily during the school year. And scores and scores of children were sent home for 10 day quarantines at random times, with almost no notice.

Here’s the problem with the anti-maskers in the US though. They won’t go along with any of that stuff either. You think these parents will allow the school to test their children weekly? When they get apoplectic about simply wearing a mask? You think they will tolerate having their children sent home for 10 days at a moment‘s notice? Potentially multiple times a year?

 

[MT15]

Oh, and anti-mask blogger guy says children didn’t wear masks “AT ALL” in UK, in caps like that. But in the NYT article it says that children middle school age and older were masked in certain situations. I wonder if he critically read the article he linked.

 

[Farb]

https://kwng.q-mediadigital.com/par...f-son-until-she-gets-covid-19-vaccine-report/

A Chicago mother says a Cook County judge has taken away her parental rights after learning that she is not vaccinated against COVID-19.

In what all parties agree is a very unusual and perhaps unprecedented step, a judge at Chicago’s Daley Center has stripped Rebecca Firlit of custody because she refuses to get a vaccination shot.

This is the type of governmental over reach that should frighten people. This is also the type of over reach that if allowed to continue will end up with citizens taking back the government.

 

[Dragon]

https://www.outkick.com/denmark-announces-it-will-lift-all-covid-restrictions-including-passports/

It will be interesting to see if Denmark has the same outcome with regards to break through cases like they are about to print the study from Israel.

What that article fails to say is that all children were tested twice a week and that any possives resulted in 2 weeks mandatory quarantine of the entire class and all contacts

Also due to agressive contact tracing the number of infected are kept low- Even with Delta

We have also reached an 80% vaccination of all those eligable status which is why they open more

 

[MT15]

There seems to be a lot of context missing here, Farb.

Maybe it will help if I share my recent experience with context. Yesterday I saw on Twitter that a Republican school board in WI (IIRC) had decided to cancel free student lunches because “the kids would become spoiled” by being provided with free lunches. Outrageous, right? How could a school board decide that kids going hungry is a good thing? The shock and condemnation flowed in the Twitter-verse.

It didn’t make sense to me, so I looked for an article. Sure enough, there was more context, a whole lot more context. The school board had voted to opt out of the unlimited free lunch that was provided for this school year as part of the pandemic relief from the federal government. It provides $4 and change to the school district per meal and any student who applies can have the free lunches. It ends in June, 2022.

The board didn’t end the free and reduced lunch program, they just decided not to participate in this pandemic version. The regular free and reduced lunch program will apply. It’s a little less money, $3 and change per meal. But no kids will go hungry.

It was a deliberate misrepresentation of what the school board did although the idiotic quote from one school board member was real. When you read the statement from the school board president it wasn’t nearly that stupid. They were the only school district in the state to refuse the money, but it wasn’t purely evil as it was portrayed.

I would suggest to you, Farb, that a little critical thinking is in order when you read your “outrage porn”, lol.

 

[RobF]

Oh, and anti-mask blogger guy says children didn’t wear masks “AT ALL” in UK, in caps like that. But in the NYT article it says that children middle school age and older were masked in certain situations. I wonder if he critically read the article he linked.

Yes, in the UK we had a mask mandate for secondary schools that was lifted mid-May, but this still allowed local mask mandates.

(Side note: I'm saying "UK" a lot in this post, but it's slightly different between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, so for "UK" read "UK, and in particular England").

As you say the blog, crucially, ignores the critical question of what actually happened when the UK lifted mask mandates for secondary schools in May, presumably because the answer to that is, "Well, it wasn't great actually." Delta came along and ran wild, over June and July cases in educational settings shot up, and hospitalisations of school-age children, while remaining relatively low in absolute terms, have still reached the same levels as they did in the peak of the January wave.

Children, with the rare exception, haven't been dying (but long Covid is a concern), but the same can't entirely be said for people who may have been further along transmissions chains passing through children. We're back up to around 100 deaths a day now (which is about half the US rate per capita, thanks to higher levels of vaccination, but still clearly higher than it needed to be if we'd kept some basic measures in place).

(Couple of sources: cases over time in England here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=nation&areaName=England and hospitalisation information here:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...es/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/hospitals ).

Schools have now restarted in Scotland, with rising cases, and are mostly about to restart in England next week (a few already started). As @MT15 indicated, we did have isolation measures in place in June and July in terms of classroom bubbles (or pods) and isolating close contacts, but because of the rate of spread we ended up with over a million children off school, so, as we go into September with levels in school age children already at the same point they were in late June, we've come up with the cunning plan of just not having bubbles and not isolating contacts unless and until they actually have a positive test.

Which will inevitably result in even higher levels of transmission within schools as cases aren't isolating until they've already been contagious.

In principle the government guidelines allow for the return of bubbles, but only after outbreaks have already happened.

Basically, the UK strategy is essentially, "There aren't that many people dying, so we're going to 'live with Covid' by just ignoring it and hoping it goes away."

This is a bad strategy. I cannot emphasise enough how bad a strategy it is. Vaccination is great, but it's not magic. It's one measure you use, along with other measures (like testing and tracing, isolating, and masks; not like 'wishing really really hard'). As it is, we're looking at numbers soaring going towards winter, with high levels of community transmission, increased risk of further variants taking hold, increasing burden on hospitals, increasing impact of long Covid...

And none of this really compares with Denmark, who are taking their actions in the context of cases being 16 per 100k daily and fairly stable. Compared to the UK's 51 per 100k and rising. Denmark also has higher levels of vaccination than the UK, and is also recommending vaccination for 12 year olds and up, where the UK still hasn't decided whether to vaccinate 12-15 year olds yet. Denmark is also saying they'll reintroduce measures if they need to, where England has more of a "all over bar the shouting" fantasy going.

If you are going for a "live with Covid" strategy and not a "zero Covid" strategy (which is another debate), you do it by having high levels of vaccination, and appropriate additional measures for the levels of transmission you see in your communities. Which is what Denmark appear to be doing.

You do not do it by having high levels of vaccination, and going, "ah, that'll do, hospitals aren't totally full and what's a few tens of thousands of deaths per year," while cases continue to rise. Which is the delusional course the UK is currently engaged in.

As it is, I'm not convinced it'll go entirely smoothly for Denmark. It's definitely not going to go well for the UK.

 

[MT15]

The internet has really had the unforeseen consequence of making everyone think they’re experts in a field simply by reading a single article or paper. I’ve had at least two relatives tell me that Covid has a 99.98% survival rate, therefore we shouldn’t try to mitigate its spread at all. And that people who want to mitigate it aren’t doing so for real reasons of public health, but rather for some dark desire to destroy our way of life.

My 76 year old sister was one of those relatives who told me that she wasnt afraid of Covid because it has a 99% survival rate. Someone she trusted told her that, and it didn’t even phase her when I told her that the death rate for her age was certainly not 1% at all, and probably closer to 25%. I don’t think she believed me, and I have only texted her since, not spoken to her, because I get so angry that she is being deceived and it could cost her life and I don’t know how to help her see the truth.

She tried to tell me about what was wrong with the testing in the lab. She knows that I have spent my entire career in the hospital clinical lab as both a technologist and manager. Yet she was telling me stuff about testing that wasn’t true and was angry when I tried to set her straight.

I’m going to resolve to be better about understanding what I don’t know, and trying to not sound like an expert in every field. But it does seem to me that the less people know about a subject the easier they are to convince by bad actors, and boy do they seem confident in their opinions based on nothing.

 

[zztop]

This guy again:

Rand Paul undecided on Ivermectin to treat COVID-19, says hatred of Trump hinders research

The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control have warned people against using ivermectin. Paul encouraged more research

www.cincinnati.com

Hatred of former President Donald Trump has kept researchers from looking into the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin and other drugs to treat COVID-19, Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told constituents on Friday.

"The hatred for Trump deranged these people so much, that they're unwilling to objectively study it," Paul said to the 60 people squeezed into the Cold Spring City Council chambers in this Northern Kentucky suburb just south of Cincinnati. "So someone like me that's in the middle on it, I can't tell you because they will not study ivermectin. They will not study hydroxychloroquine without the butt area of their hatred for Donald Trump."

 

[coldseat]

The internet has really had the unforeseen consequence of making everyone think they’re experts in a field simply by reading a single article or paper. I’ve had at least two relatives tell me that Covid has a 99.98% survival rate, therefore we shouldn’t try to mitigate its spread at all. And that people who want to mitigate it aren’t doing so for real reasons of public health, but rather for some dark desire to destroy our way of life.

My 76 year old sister was one of those relatives who told me that she wasnt afraid of Covid because it has a 99% survival rate. Someone she trusted told her that, and it didn’t even phase her when I told her that the death rate for her age was certainly not 1% at all, and probably closer to 25%. I don’t think she believed me, and I have only texted her since, not spoken to her, because I get so angry that she is being deceived and it could cost her life and I don’t know how to help her see the truth.

She tried to tell me about what was wrong with the testing in the lab. She knows that I have spent my entire career in the hospital clinical lab as both a technologist and manager. Yet she was telling me stuff about testing that wasn’t true and was angry when I tried to set her straight.

I’m going to resolve to be better about understanding what I don’t know, and trying to not sound like an expert in every field. But it does seem to me that the less people know about a subject the easier they are to convince by bad actors, and boy do they seem confident in their opinions based on nothing.

I call it the epidemic of Internet Ignorance. It's killed and is killing a lot of people. A full 40 - 50% of the US public does not know hot consume and process information or differentiate between valid information and conspiracy theories.