Coronavirus Thread

[Techster]

Mrs. kg01 loves talenti. Do you eat it with your pinky poked out too, dt?



Something tells me, this thing goes much longer, you boys'll drop them high-class ice cream standards.

Don't confuse "good ice cream" with "high class ice cream". They're not mutually exclusive.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

 

[684Bee]

Seriously, the fact that I don’t see crews out repairing all the damn pot holes around ATL right now tells me all I need to know about how they do things. It is the perfect time. All it takes is a truck with a crew of 2 or 3, and they could knock out several in 1 day.

 

[Techster]

Seriously, the fact that I don’t see crews out repairing all the damn pot holes around ATL right now tells me all I need to know about how they do things. It is the perfect time. All it takes is a truck with a crew of 2 or 3, and they could knock out several in 1 day.

There's not enough cars on the road right now to create a traffic jam. Come on, it's not real road work unless you can cripple half the city in a traffic jam.

 

[RonJohn]

“More and more recovered people testing positive again.”
https://thehill.com/policy/healthca...-testing-positive-again-after-recovery-report

Could this be caused by tests with too many false positive and false negatives? Could a person who tested negative and was labeled as recovered actually have still had the virus but a false negative?

Could it be that the CDC and FDA requiring accurate tests was actually a good thing? Is it possible that throwing out as many "tests" as possible because of panic actually creates more problems than it solves if those tests are not accurate?

 

[GCdaJuiceMan]

If the 400/285 interchange looks the same the next time I make my way into the office, there will be blood. And that’ll be awhile, because my company is very capable of wfh.

 

[Supersizethatorder-mutt]

Supply chain issue or food choice/life style issue? I went to Kroger yesterday for my drive-thru grocery pickup and could only get diet sodas, milk & carrots. They were out of Cheetos, ice cream, grape jelly, and Spam.

Thank God my Kroger has had plenty of Cheetos every time I have been since this all started. I couldn't live without my Cheetos. LOL

 

[RonJohn]

Dr Fauci said we shouldn’t ever shake hands again. If you’re a germophobe, I could see this anyway. But man, what kind of a statement is that? He also said it’s a conspiracy that we’re over counting deaths because every person with a positive test is listed as a COVID-19 death. I’m losing respect for this guy. That’s not the answer of a scientist. A scientist would say he doesn’t think that’s a material issue because x% is probably a reasonable estimate or something like that. It’s not a conspiracy theory to simply repeat a policy. Nobody’s out there asserting our deaths are 2x as high as they should be or something like that. They’re merely stating the policy is questionable and leads to questionable results. You have to wonder what he’s really about if he gets mad discussing that.

If we don't shake hands, keep hands clean, and don't cough/sneeze into the air, we can save 10s of thousands of American lives every single year due to flu. Do those lives not matter? Do only COVID-19 deaths matter?

Dr Fauci responded to a question from Acosta who labeled that concern as a conspiracy. His answer was that in such a social event there will be all kinds of rumors, conspiracy theories, and scams.

As to counting too many COVID-19 deaths, he said that he doesn't have an issue with counting people if they have the virus. I asked you earlier, if a person has a heart condition and the virus causes issues which then contribute to a heart attack: Do you count this person as a COVID-19 death? Do you only count him as a heart attack death? Would he have had the heart attack at this time if it hadn't been for the virus?

Also, the numbers at the moment are all wrong. The number of infections is very far off. The number of people hospitalized is probably close, but there are probably other people who should be hospitalized but aren't so that number can be misleading. The number of deaths in NYC might include a small number who could be argued to not have had COVID-19 play a part. If the number of deaths if off by 0.5%, what does it affect? Also, there could be a number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the apartments and haven't been discovered yet, so the number of deaths could be low by a small percentage.

What is the number of deaths being used for that makes it important to have a zero percent inaccuracy? All of the numbers in this situation have uncertainty. You cannot use the exact numbers for analysis. You can use trends. You can use rough numbers. We will never know exact numbers, and even if we did it wouldn't help anything.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

If we don't shake hands, keep hands clean, and don't cough/sneeze into the air, we can save 10s of thousands of American lives every single year due to flu. Do those lives not matter? Do only COVID-19 deaths matter?

Dr Fauci responded to a question from Acosta who labeled that concern as a conspiracy. His answer was that in such a social event there will be all kinds of rumors, conspiracy theories, and scams.

As to counting too many COVID-19 deaths, he said that he doesn't have an issue with counting people if they have the virus. I asked you earlier, if a person has a heart condition and the virus causes issues which then contribute to a heart attack: Do you count this person as a COVID-19 death? Do you only count him as a heart attack death? Would he have had the heart attack at this time if it hadn't been for the virus?

Also, the numbers at the moment are all wrong. The number of infections is very far off. The number of people hospitalized is probably close, but there are probably other people who should be hospitalized but aren't so that number can be misleading. The number of deaths in NYC might include a small number who could be argued to not have had COVID-19 play a part. If the number of deaths if off by 0.5%, what does it affect? Also, there could be a number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the apartments and haven't been discovered yet, so the number of deaths could be low by a small percentage.

What is the number of deaths being used for that makes it important to have a zero percent inaccuracy? All of the numbers in this situation have uncertainty. You cannot use the exact numbers for analysis. You can use trends. You can use rough numbers. We will never know exact numbers, and even if we did it wouldn't help anything.

I wasn't referring to Jim Acosta. Dr. Fauci said those words on the Today Show this morning.

I also don't really have any interest in playing split the hairs with you. I'll just concede to you that a million examples you come up with for something COVID-19 could make worse might fall into a grey area, and I'm totally fine with that. I gave you the example of a neighbor whose father-in-law fell and broke his hip, had internal bleeding problems, then got an embolism and died. Earlier on upon admittance, they tested him for COVID-19, presumably to know which part of the hospital was the right fit. He tested positive but had no symptoms of it. He died from the embolism. He counts as a COVID-19 death. That's idiotic. You then continue on with more silly questions. "What if the number of deaths is off 0.5%?" FANTASTIC. What if its off 5%? 15%? 0.01%? I'm not saying its a conspiracy or that it is causing all kinds of accuracy problems necessarily. I'm just saying its stupid, because since they don't keep detailed records on it, we'll never know what the truth is, and that's a big problem.

 

[RonJohn]

I wasn't referring to Jim Acosta. Dr. Fauci said those words on the Today Show this morning.

I also don't really have any interest in playing split the hairs with you. I'll just concede to you that a million examples you come up with for something COVID-19 could make worse might fall into a grey area, and I'm totally fine with that. I gave you the example of a neighbor whose father-in-law fell and broke his hip, had internal bleeding problems, then got an embolism and died. Earlier on upon admittance, they tested him for COVID-19, presumably to know which part of the hospital was the right fit. He tested positive but had no symptoms of it. He died from the embolism. He counts as a COVID-19 death. That's idiotic. You then continue on with more silly questions. "What if the number of deaths is off 0.5%?" FANTASTIC. What if its off 5%? 15%? 0.01%? I'm not saying its a conspiracy or that it is causing all kinds of accuracy problems necessarily. I'm just saying its stupid, because since they don't keep detailed records on it, we'll never know what the truth is, and that's a big problem.

I asked about that case you spoke of previously. Are you absolutely 100% certain that that embolism would have occurred if he didn't have the virus? Is it possible that his white blood cells were fighting the virus and that delayed stopping the internal bleeding, which caused the embolism to break free and travel. Is it possible that without the virus, possibly in his lungs, that his body might have worked through the embolism or at least kept him alive long enough for the doctors to do something about it?

As far as it being stupid that they don't keep 100% accurate records: This isn't an engineering problem. In industrial controls, we would put more sensors to gather more information and know every single piece of information possible about a machine or process. Compare that to this case: It isn't possible to do detailed autopsies on every single person who dies, not even during normal times. Epidemiologists don't have detailed exact information like engineers. What they have is more between what engineers have and what marketing people have. They don't look at numbers like 31.623%, the look at 1/3 or 30%. It isn't possible to collect exact information.

 

[kg01]

Haagen Dazs is normally also in my freezer but I ate it last weekend.

Welp, guess you'll have to slum it with Mayfield.

“More and more recovered people testing positive again.”
https://thehill.com/policy/healthca...-testing-positive-again-after-recovery-report

Does that mean they never recovered in the first place then?

 

[MountainBuzzMan]

“More and more recovered people testing positive again.”
https://thehill.com/policy/healthca...-testing-positive-again-after-recovery-report

I have to admit, with the rush for the tests and the questionable quality we have seen, I have to wonder if the test is detecting something, but the person is still not contagious. I saw something similar a few days ago but I take it with a huge grain of salt. My gut says the odds are high they are not able to infect new people. Or at least my glass half full personality desperately wants it to be true.

 

[YJMD]

I was referring to medical doctors treating patients on the front line.

In that case, it's one of the things I try to get trough to my trainees. Defensive medicine is not just bad for patients but it is bad for you too. Basically just say no if your inclination is to protect yourself and not your patient.

I will have to disagree about medical research. My father was in charge of qualifying research medicines for public consumption and the extraordinary measures they needed to clear to make sure the drug that would benefit 99.9999% of individuals using it was not beaten to a bloody pulp in court for the 1 person that too a topical ointment and rammed it up their rectum or administered an adult dose to a newborn, etc. Crazy what damage well intentioned regs due to progress.

As far as FDA approval for a new drug application goes (there are some exceptions), benefit only needs to be shown as statistically significant in 2 pivotal phase 3 trials, and you can run as many as you want. There was a time where you didn't even have to publish your negative trials. The safety side of things is a different animal, and one I'm a lot less familiar with.

In this particular case, hydroxychloroquine is already an FDA-approved treatment. It's use for COVID is off-label. A drug manufacturer could perform clinical trials and seek an FDA-indication and exclusivity, but if it's essentially the same drug/dosing as already exists for other indications, they probably wouldn't have much to gain trying. Instead, clinical trials need to be funded somewhere and go through an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to decide upon whether the proposed protocol is ethical in terms of risk to patients. It's not necessarily easy, but that is a much better situation for getting data on whether something works. Of course, that wouldn't be performed by a drug manufacturer seeking an FDA indication, so the funding becomes a big hurdle for a lot of research. But this is a pandemic. Funding and IRB approval for COVID-related research is easier than it otherwise would be. Not saying easy and fast enough to wait for results in all cases. Before that level of data is available, it's sometimes appropriate to use case data to support a treatment. As I said, I'm not in the right field of medicine to be in the know about the quality of the actual evidence -- just to help frame a broader picture and recognize that this particular treatment 1. has serious risks in itself and 2. is being denied for people with severe chronic illness (principally lupus) as result of shortages for whom clear benefit is well-established. Those things warrant caution.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

I asked about that case you spoke of previously. Are you absolutely 100% certain that that embolism would have occurred if he didn't have the virus? Is it possible that his white blood cells were fighting the virus and that delayed stopping the internal bleeding, which caused the embolism to break free and travel. Is it possible that without the virus, possibly in his lungs, that his body might have worked through the embolism or at least kept him alive long enough for the doctors to do something about it?

I mean who knows right? When someone dies in a car crash, we don't put down Diabetes as the cause of death. Because I mean honestly, without being overweight and having poor overall health, who is to say he might have survived the crash otherwise? We should probably start changing that. Like the picture I posted of the guy who jumped out of a plane and forgot his parachute - perhaps if he didn't have Diabetes, he'd have better less plaque in his arteries, better blow flow to his brain, and would have been able to think more clearly. Clearly Diabetes should go on his death certificate too.

 

[takethepoints]

If a room in my house is on fire I don’t need to wait until a million tests are run to verify that water will likely put it out but will damage some of the house in the process. Give me the hose & I’ll put the fire out, then deal with the water damage to the room. I don’t need to wait until 6 months after the house is burned to the slab for you to return the report that I should have used water.

These so called expert doctor scientists are taught a protocol & they almost never deviate from it for fear of lawsuits. There’s lot of discussions about these protocols the experts love are negatively affecting infected patient’s immune response putting those patients bodies in severe risk of destroying themselves as their systems warp into hyperdrive.

You’d think after waiting failure after failure these experts would take a step back & realize they’ve been wrong all along, then consider the symptoms and responses to treatments as they are learning how to best combat this virus. Reality is they cannot because they’re more fearful of a lawsuit & being ostracized by their employers/insurance companies than they are prescribing improper protocols for their patients. This weakness among medical professionals & these big bloated medical “drive thru McDonalds” type megabusinesses are now on display for all the world to see & it ain’t a pretty sight.

Nah. That's not it. They really do want to know what actually works, without, you know, making their patients worse off. Doctors have SOPs for the same reasons everyone else does (or should); they allow us to do things efficiently and with as much benefit and as little loss as possible. With COVID-19 there aren't any SOPs because it's brand new and the health pros are flailing around trying to stop people from dying. If they all had the fear of lawsuits you maintain, they'd sit on their hands and not try anything new. As it is, of course, they are throwing the kitchen sink at the disease with little thought of legal consequences.

You have to remember to that being an MD is different from being almost any other specialist: when you screw up people die needlessly. And don't blame the doctors for the weaknesses of the present health system. Blame the corporations that put a relentless search for profit in front of our health and the politicians who aided and abetted them.

 

[LibertyTurns]

@YJMD I’m certainly no doctor but was listening to the radio. Guy on said typical protocol for someone in respiratory distress is O2 and/or a ventilator which basically forces air into your lungs. He claimed to be successfully treating patients by O2 and some sort of steroid or something to relax the patient. His premise was along the lines of more pressure in the lungs actually damaged the lungs making more treatment necessary and what was actually needed was just O2.

He also mentioned the hydroychloriquine but said it was combined with the wrong drug in those with cardiac issues. Again he alleged if doctors would take a step back they’d realize why that combination failed and move from the bad combination to another more favorable one.

Seems like with hundreds of thousands of cases, doctors would be compiling notes and there would be a handful of likely combinations of treatments worth pursuing. Nightly broadcasts and media reports make it seem like there’s more people preventing any testing (really it should be experimenting real time with lives albeit in a educated fashion) than trying to anything besides using the same low percentage options currently advocated by the experts.

Maybe I’m thinking it looks easier on paper than it is in real life?

 

[RonJohn]

I mean who knows right? When someone dies in a car crash, we don't put down Diabetes as the cause of death. Because I mean honestly, without being overweight and having poor overall health, who is to say he might have survived otherwise? We should probably start changing that.

We don't? If a diabetic person crashes a car because his blood sugar is low and he is not coherent, it will likely be listed on the crash report and maybe the death certificate. If a person who is having a heart attack dies after the ambulance taking him to the hospital crashes, is his death because of the crash or the heart attack? There are differences in criminal matters. If a person shoots and kills someone with leukemia that wouldn't have died if they didn't have leukemia, the person who shot them is still held liable for the immediate cause of death. However, should the fact that someone shot them cause their leukemia to not be counted in statistics that show how extensive and dangerous leukemia is? There are differences in situations that make immediate cause of death important. I would say that in epidemiology and a pandemic, it isn't as important as in a murder trial.

The bigger question is what difference does it make. If the numbers are inflated by a factor of 3, or under reported by a factor of 3, then that would be a big deal and would matter to epidemiologists. The current numbers are about 14,800 in the US. What difference would it make if it is actually 14,400 or 15,200? I am sure that epidemiologists are going to use uncertainty in their models and predictions. That uncertainty along with many other uncertainties are the reason that the IHME model shows a range of 939 to 4,023 deaths for today. I am not an epidemiologist, but I am certain that they understand there are not 100% accurate ways to measure any of the numbers they use.

Again I ask, if the actual number of deaths in the use is 14,672 instead of 14,814 what would you be doing differently? What should the government be doing differently? Why does the difference between 14,672 and 14,818 matter?

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Sweden's problems continue to accelerate. Had their worst day by far yesterday.
https://time.com/5817412/sweden-coronavirus/

Their death rate is really high, and they have 2x as many deaths as Norway and Denmark combined, despite having equal total populations.

Meanwhile, Norway states they have it under control and has their single lowest new case diagnosis yesterday since almost before the start of the entire pandemic.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102246/coronavirus-cases-development-in-norway/
They actually had a negative result yesterday, because more people were listed as having recovered yesterday than new cases reported.

 

[takethepoints]

This is for FredJacket.

I'm sorry. I replied to your post in haste late at night and didn't consider what you were actually saying. I try not to do that to anybody, but this time I screwed up royally. Part of the reason for my kneejerk reaction is that I occasionally run into that kind of thinking at conferences. When I do, I try - and usually succeed - to come down on it like a ton of bricks. You're right: this is "Part of the Problem".

But everybody here could get something out of the review of Mayo. Reading the book would be even better.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

We don't? If a diabetic person crashes a car because his blood sugar is low and he is not coherent, it will likely be listed on the crash report and maybe the death certificate. If a person who is having a heart attack dies after the ambulance taking him to the hospital crashes, is his death because of the crash or the heart attack? There are differences in criminal matters. If a person shoots and kills someone with leukemia that wouldn't have died if they didn't have leukemia, the person who shot them is still held liable for the immediate cause of death. However, should the fact that someone shot them cause their leukemia to not be counted in statistics that show how extensive and dangerous leukemia is? There are differences in situations that make immediate cause of death important. I would say that in epidemiology and a pandemic, it isn't as important as in a murder trial.

The bigger question is what difference does it make. If the numbers are inflated by a factor of 3, or under reported by a factor of 3, then that would be a big deal and would matter to epidemiologists. The current numbers are about 14,800 in the US. What difference would it make if it is actually 14,400 or 15,200? I am sure that epidemiologists are going to use uncertainty in their models and predictions. That uncertainty along with many other uncertainties are the reason that the IHME model shows a range of 939 to 4,023 deaths for today. I am not an epidemiologist, but I am certain that they understand there are not 100% accurate ways to measure any of the numbers they use.

Again I ask, if the actual number of deaths in the use is 14,672 instead of 14,814 what would you be doing differently? What should the government be doing differently? Why does the difference between 14,672 and 14,818 matter?

LOL, I rest my case. Like I said, this guy below has diabetes. It should be listed as the cause of death, because he might have remembered to take his parachute if not for diabetes.