Supersizethatorder-mutt
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Well, they eat both dogs and cats, so who knows?
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Supersizethatorder-mutt
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da ant ???
RonJohn
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The American Red Cross provides blood services (including plasma services which their website is currently touting for COVID-19 survivors), training services such as first-aid training, and disaster assistance services such as finding housing for people displaced by fires and feeding disaster relief workers.
The American Red Cross does not provide medical facilities or services. Their website is advertising for recovered persons to donate plasma that might be useful in treating people who are currently sick. There aren't currently large numbers of people whose housing suddenly disappeared like in a hurricane. There aren't currently disaster relief workers who are in areas with no food service available, like after a hurricane. What exactly of their normal activities should they be doing to support a pandemic? Collecting blood and plasma obviously, but they are doing that.
Supersizethatorder-mutt
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Pretty sure they have always taken a more active part in emergency care during wartime, but if they are actively engaged in collecting plasma, then there is nothing wrong with that. But remember, pandemic or not, we are essentially engaged in a war.
LibertyTurns
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People wok dogs. Never seen anyone wok a cat!
Supersizethatorder-mutt
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The more I think about it, the more I think you're right and I was wrong. I know they eat dogs, maybe not cats.
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Cats & rats in Chinese food is a long time urban legend in NYC.
RonJohn
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Here is a link to what they did during WWII:
https://www.redcross.org/content/dam/redcross/National/history-wwii.pdf
It is all support services. They provided services to help servicemen communicate with their families, understand regulations, etc. They provided volunteers to VA hospitals to provide recreation services, nurses, and nurse's aids. Military hospitals have a red cross on them to designate medical care, but it isn't the American Red Cross that runs them. That red cross symbol in combat was started by the International Red Cross to designate a medic and wounded soldiers, not as a symbol of the organization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_medic#Red_Cross,_Red_Crescent,_and_Red_Star_of_David
According to the charter of the American Red Cross, their purpose is:
- to fulfill the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is a signatory, assigned to national societies for the protection of victims of conflict,
- to provide family communications and other forms of support to the U.S. military, and
- to maintain a system of domestic and international disaster relief, including mandated responsibilities under the National Response Framework coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
I asked what you believe they should be doing because I can't see anything that the Red Cross is built for other than blood and plasma collection that they should be doing. If they try to provide volunteers for support work in hospitals, they would probably just get in the way and use PPE that the medical professionals need. People are scared and feel as though they have no control over the situation. They are looking to blame someone for not doing more, even though they don't know what the "more" should be. If there is some actual activity that you or your FB friends believe that the Red Cross should be doing, reach out to them. You might find out that they currently are doing it, can't do it, or might inspire them to begin doing it.
Supersizethatorder-mutt
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Thanks. That was all information that I was not aware of. It was not a FB "friend" or a personal friend who posted what I saw; it was just some random post that came up on my screen that made me wonder. You have cleared it up, so thanks. I really wasn't even aware that the International Red Cross and the American Red cross were so separate as to have different functions.
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You ain't wrong.
Techster
Helluva Engineer
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Those jokes are actually pretty funny. Not funny because it's hilarious...but funny because it tells you who the racist in the room is.
So I hope people keep telling racist jokes. Makes it easy for the rest of us to avoid the ignorant person in the room.
Supersizethatorder-mutt
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There is nothing racist about saying that people in China, and indeed throughout southeast Asia eat dogs. That's a fact. I would never eat one, but I also said I would never eat a rat or a horse, but I have sampled rat in Thailand and horsemeat in Kazakhstan. Does that make me racist? I certainly don't think so.
Techster
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Re-read what I said. Don't get what I said and what you said confused.
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The President of the American Medical Association was on tonight and asked about the drugs she responded she would not prescribe them for any COVID patients. When asked why, she said because it could kill you.
There was one small scale test in France that was stopped about a week ago due to side effects including death.
We definitely need to keep testing options so that hopefully we hit on one that works for the majority of people safely, but we are not close yet to having something you could distribute on a wide basis. it has to start with small scale studies. If they are successful (and they have to be controlled so you can measure effectiveness), then you have to have larger scale studies.
You have to know exactly the right amounts to prescribe for each drug and you have to know what side effects are for different types of people.
There was one small scale test in France that was stopped about a week ago due to side effects including death.
We definitely need to keep testing options so that hopefully we hit on one that works for the majority of people safely, but we are not close yet to having something you could distribute on a wide basis. it has to start with small scale studies. If they are successful (and they have to be controlled so you can measure effectiveness), then you have to have larger scale studies.
You have to know exactly the right amounts to prescribe for each drug and you have to know what side effects are for different types of people.
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The racist reference is that Chinese Food Restaurants go in to their back alley to cats or rats to then serve it in dishes. Not what happens in foreign lands.
Techster
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There's an interesting theory for spike in flu and other covid related illnesses during cold months:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/coronavirus-covid-19-mers-sars-experts/
Can a warmer climate reduce the spread of COVID-19 and other viruses?
DUONG: With influenza, there is a seasonal pattern – it spikes up in the winter and goes down in the summer. But is it the virus itself or are there other factors? The four factors to look at are the environment, so the temperature and humidity. Then the human factor: we tend to stay indoors, closer to one another [in winter months], and that increases transmissibility. The third is our immune system. There’s some hypotheses that our immune system is lowered in colder months because those of us in the northern hemisphere, we don’t see the sun as much and the sun helps generate something called vitamin D, which is an immune-system booster. The fourth thing is the ability for the virus itself to replicate given the number of susceptible hosts – as the proportion of susceptible contacts declines, the epidemic peaks, and eventually declines.
We have to take all those factors into account. Coronaviruses are enveloped viruses and the envelope itself tends to be a bit more fragile with increased heat and increased humidity. But that’s not the case for all enveloped viruses.
Studies that came out of the Middle East around MERS-CoV, the last coronavirus epidemic, found that it did prefer colder temperatures and lower humidity. With the SARS one, it tended to follow that as well. But it did not go away because of warmer weather, but rather because of the political choices that were put into place to control that epidemic, such as social distancing and isolating cases and quarantining their contacts. And that was the major reason we saw the SARS epidemic go away; SARS did not go away because of the warmer temperature effect. So, with the new virus, the SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, although we could expect it to behave like other coronaviruses, at this point in time, we just don’t know. And we don’t have enough data because it’s so new, so for entire economies or countries to make policy decisions based on the behaviour of other similar viruses would not be prudent or advisable.
POLLACK: Even if it behaves the same as the influenza virus in terms of these factors, that doesn’t eliminate transmissibility, it might just reduce it somewhat. And one major difference between SARS-CoV-2 and influenza is that SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus - no one in the world has any immunity to it. So in the summer months in the northern hemisphere with influenza, the transmissibility goes down for a number of factors, and that’s enough to shut off transmission. And that may be partly because a lot of the population has immunity already, because of vaccination or partial immunity from previous infection. With SARS-CoV-2, even if transmissibility is reduced in the summer, it is very unlikely that’s going to have enough of an effect that the virus will disappear, because there are enough susceptible people to sustain transmission.
Bottom line is we are dealing with a novel virus, so we don't know for sure how it will react in different conditions.
Milwaukee
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A couple of dogs in Belgium were diagnosed recently.
Milwaukee
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