Coronavirus Thread

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kg01

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Yes, but as I said, that is true only on the short run. In the long run once treatments and vaccines are developed, this will be no big deal.

When will this be?

ETA: Kinda like saying, "Meh, once we cure cancer it'll be no big deal."
 

WreckinGT

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How do you figure that?
Thousands of people have emergencies on a daily basis that require someone driving a car to get them care. They can't all be handled by ambulances. How are you going to get thousands of pregnant women to the hospital per day? How are you going to get regular people who need regular life saving treatment to their appointments every day? How will people pick up prescriptions? How will people with coronavirus even get to the hospital to be diagnosed? There are many more examples. Outlawing driving by private citizens would cause a major public health crisis.
 

John

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It'll be great if those that understand the new politics discussion rule refrain from quoting/replying to those that break it and just report it. Otherwise I may need to add this as one of the requirements of allowing access to the politics forum.

Will make the cleanup easier for the mods.

Thanks.
 

takethepoints

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What's lurking under the surface …

Talked to a friend last night with many former students in the nursing profession in a region of this state. One of them called him. What she said was that there was an entire floor at her hospital full of patients who sure do look like they have COVID-19. Problem = they don't have enough tests to find out. So they've isolate them and are doing what they can. She also said that the ER was averaging about 18 patients a day who fit the symptoms for the virus. They only test what look like the most severe cases and either admit or, more usually, send home to self-quarantine the rest. Why? Again, too few tests available.

What this should tell us is that the number of tests available is still far too limited, especially outside of major cities. What I fear is that we are spending far too much time and resources trying to get a test that gives an answer quickly. Problem = such tests are one at a time. The more common tests allow mass testing and, as a consequence, can get a lot more results in each batch; i.e. the same lab worker who tests one cassette at a time every 15 minutes can do 100 mass tests in the same time.
 

GTRX7

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The experiment in Sweden may be coming to an end. News this weekend was that the government was putting the finishing touches on new strict measures. Their death count is higher than their nordic neighbors all combined. Stockholm has built a new mobile field hospital and they are prepping the convention center to be used as well. A few days ago a group of 2,500 academics in the country sent a public letter to the government imploring a lockdown.

Japan, the other example cited, is moving that way as well. Looks like they will announce a state of emergency tomorrow. While still short of a national lockdown: "The measure, to go into effect for about a month, will enable local authorities to urge people to stay at home except to shop for food, seek medical care, go to work if necessary, and take daily exercise." They are still at only around 3,600 cases, but it is continuing to look exponential there, just like everywhere else.
 

bobongo

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Yes, but as I said, that is true only on the short run. In the long run once treatments and vaccines are developed, this will be no big deal.

When enough people are vaccinated it will become virtually nonexistent.
 

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Japan, the other example cited, is moving that way as well. Looks like they will announce a state of emergency tomorrow. While still short of a national lockdown: "The measure, to go into effect for about a month, will enable local authorities to urge people to stay at home except to shop for food, seek medical care, go to work if necessary, and take daily exercise." They are still at only around 3,600 cases, but it is continuing to look exponential there, just like everywhere else.

I don't want to sound morbid, nor wish bad things on anybody, but I was really hoping someone like Sweden or Japan who took a different tact would see it through to completion, even if the results were bad. As of right now, I can't really see a difference from one country to the next in terms of outcome. And so many countries or doing things a bit different. I don't understand how they all look the same. With the exception of South Korea of course...but they track people's GPS, credit card transactions, surveillance videos around town, and publish positive test results on the news and on websites and police-enforce quarantines...not something most countries will do. I am also quite frankly starting to doubt South Korea's data. How is it possible for an entire month to hardly have any variability from one day to the next? How can you not keep flattening the curve, or have a few bad days or a few good days here and there? Having a nearly completely constant-sloped line in a global pandemic for an entire month sounds a bit nonsensical to me.
 
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It'll be great if those that understand the new politics discussion rule refrain from quoting/replying to those that break it and just report it. Otherwise I may need to add this as one of the requirements of allowing access to the politics forum.

Will make the cleanup easier for the mods.

Thanks.
Exactly how do we report things like that? I think I know, but just to be sure .....
 
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I don't want to sound morbid, nor wish bad things on anybody, but I was really hoping someone like Sweden or Japan who took a different tact would see it through to completion, even if the results were bad. As of right now, I can't really see a difference from one country to the next in terms of outcome. And so many countries or doing things a bit different. I don't understand how they all look the same. With the exception of South Korea of course...but they track people's GPS, credit card transactions, surveillance videos around town, and publish positive test results on the news and on websites and police-enforce quarantines...not something most countries will do. I am also quite frankly starting to doubt South Korea's data. How is it possible for an entire month to hardly have any variability from one day to the next? How can you not keep flattening the curve, or have a few bad days or a few good days here and there? Having a nearly completely constant-sloped line in a global pandemic for an entire month sounds a bit nonsensical to me.
Do we have any reports from Hong Kong? I never hear them mentioned at all, unless I have just missed it. I know that Taiwan has done pretty good, or at least as of 2 weeks ago, but nobody reports on that either.
 

Deleted member 2897

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Exactly how do we report things like that? I think I know, but just to be sure .....

As a reminder to the new rules:

* Political references outside of the political topics forum will result in the thread/post being removed and a friendly reminder being sent
* Subsequent posts will result in regular warnings being sent

Quite a few folks are well down this path now...
 

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I take the exact opposite view to yours which is, show me where the CDC expressly told the WH and Congress that they should not implement more strict measures.

Because on the Sunday shows and what-not, folks like Dr. Fauci were asked many times over the last few months if quarantines and lock downs and things like that should be done. He always answered "We're not there yet." None of them ever leaked those things to the press (we've been trying to convince Trump and Governors and X to implement shelter in place orders), penned any op-eds, or said anything at the press conferences. Barely more than 1 month ago Dr. Fauci wouldn't even say it was a pandemic.

BTW, I'm not complaining AT ALL about CDC not implementing more severe lock-down processes. I actually said the opposite - nobody would have gone along with that way back then. I'm complaining about how they have apparently no framework to make exceptions during pandemics for accelerated testing and supply ordering stuff. And my complaint to the political peanut gallery was show us something the health experts advocated for that our government ignored. I have yet to see anything.
 

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Neither of us has recordings of those private meetings between the CDC and the WH in February. But, given the number of times the WH has expressly contradicted the science community regarding the potential threat ("we have it under control"), the timeline ("cases will be zero soon"), the severity of the virus ("just like the flu"), projections ("I think we will be okay to open by Easter"), etc., I just don't find your assumption that the CDC is the one at fault to be a reasonable one.

I sold off all my investments something like 6 weeks ago too. I don't need recordings of any of those meetings - nothing proprietary is ever alleged to have been said inside those meetings - those are large bi-partisan attended meetings.

If you go look back at the timeline for when those different things were said and the context they were said in, they don't really contradict anything.

"We have it under control." In January when he first said that, we had 0 community cases in the US. He repeated that comment again in February, when we had 51 total cases across the entire country. When he said the cases will go to zero and the virus will eventually disappear, he's correct. We will get through this. Trump compared the coronavirus to the flu in terms of what we go through every year without shutting the country down. I mean, we can split hairs with stuff all day long. But Monday morning quarterbacking going back to a time when there wasn't an outbreak, and parsing every sentence out of context is a zero sum game. We can do the exact same thing with other politicians in different parties, both sides of the media, and even the health experts. The most important thing is did Trump actually not do something the health experts wanted him to do? I may have missed it, but I've never seen them ask or recommend something that he has then ignored.

The point I was trying to make is that the CDC has 1 job. (They don't, but they kind of do.). They've been around for a very long time. I just don't understand how they don't have a framework that if a pandemic hits, here are the key things you need to worry about - volume of tests, volume of PPE, what type of gatherings and social events do you need to stop, and so on. It is apparent to me there are huge holes that they have never addressed.
 
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