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Topic: Coronavirus / COVID-19 (Read 256116 times)
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Fraeg
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1015
Mad skills with the rod.
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I was just waiting for my body to go back to normal and thought of things I normally do after being hit by a regular flu or common cold and make sure to not do that stupid shit this time. My voice, sense of taste and smell is slowly recovering.
Your sense of smell is coming back? Nurse friend is 6 weeks on recovery and still zero sense of smell.
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"There is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile."
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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NY started the phase 1 of reopen yesterday. People have lost their minds, it seems like the popular opinion is that all restrictions are lifted and people are throwing parties everywhere. This will go well. We're phase 3 or 4, so I expect to get back to working from the office in about 3 years.
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Sir T
Terracotta Army
Posts: 14223
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I was just waiting for my body to go back to normal and thought of things I normally do after being hit by a regular flu or common cold and make sure to not do that stupid shit this time. My voice, sense of taste and smell is slowly recovering.
Good to hear it. Hopefully you will have some immunity after all this. Ireland is starting "phase 1" lifting of restrictions on monday. I fully expect Pubs to open (which should be happening stage 4) and be having parties and me sidestepping vomit Tuesday morning. People are stupid.
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Hic sunt dracones.
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15163
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The consistency of odd symptoms like the loss of taste/smell really worries me about this disease--I have a really bad feeling it's doing things nobody fully understands and that the third act of this play is going to be about grim chronic afteraffects. It's very clearly not an ordinary respiratory disease, not even on the model of SARS or MERS.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23626
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Last week researchers in England (pre)-released the largest study to date examining risk factors in COVID-19 deaths using UK NHS health data. Press release bullet points: - Largest study to date, analysing NHS health data from 17.4 million UK adults between 01 February 2020 and 25 April 2020, has given the strongest evidence to date on risk factors associated with COVID-19 death.
- Among the 17.4 million adults in the sample, there were 5,707 deaths in hospitals attributed to COVID-19.
- People of Asian and Black ethnic backgrounds are at a higher risk of death and, contrary to prior speculation, this is only partially attributable to pre-existing clinical risk factors or deprivation.
- Key factors related to COVID-19 death included being male, older age, uncontrolled diabetes and severe asthma.
A deprived background was also found to be a major risk factor: this was also only partially attributable to other clinical risk factors.
Preprint (non-peer reviewed) paper: OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death in the linked electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients."Deprived" is this case means lower-income as measured/classified by patients' postcodes. Every patient, based on their postcode, was classified between 1 and 5 with 1 being highest-income / "least deprived" and 5 being lowest-income / "most deprived". Fatality risk in the paper is reported using "hazard ratios" or HR. So 1.0 means baseline / reference risk, 2.0 would be double the reference risk, 0.5 half the reference risk, etc. E.g. for risk by gender, female is set at 1.0 and male has an adjusted risk of 1.99 in this study. So men have double the risk of dying from COVID-19 than women, at least in the UK according to the study. One weakness of this study to me is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn't include SARS-CoV-2 infection risk factors like occupation in the data analysis. E.g. in a country like the UK with shelter in place orders "essential workers" are presumably at higher risk for infection than non-essential workers. And any risk factors that are more common in people with those types of jobs would likely increase the HR of those risk factors. Most of the risks identified in this study have been reported in other studies with a few notable exceptions: - Hypertension is a slightly lower risk, fully adjusted (0.95) compared to Normal blood pressure (1.0).
- Current smokers have lower risk, fully adjusted (0.88) compared to those that have never smoked (1.0). Ex-smokers have slightly higher risk (1.25).
- The aforementioned increased risk for lower-income patients (a risk factor that usually isn't examined in other studies)
- The significantly higher risk for Asians and Blacks, even after being fully adjusted (Asian 1.62, Black 1.71).
Hypertension is often reported as a comorbidity in other studies but there's been disagreement whether or not it is an independent risk factor because, for example, in places with less-than-ideal diets (which is pretty much all of the industrial world), increased age in linked to increased blood pressure. So if you don't take that association into account you may get misleading results. E.g. this editorial in the American Journal of Hypertension calls into question whether or not hypertension and the medications commonly associated with its treatment are risk factors. The smoking result is interesting. There's been conflicting data on whether or not smoking is a risk factor. A small meta-analysis of five early studies in China concluded that, "smoking is most likely associated with the negative progression and adverse outcomes of COVID-19". However they weaken their own conclusion by also admitting a limited amount of data and "the above results are unadjusted for other factors that may impact disease progression". A much larger more recent meta-analysis of 19 papers concluded smoking is a risk factor for progression of COVID-19. Note that neither meta-analysis attempted to calculate the fatality HR like the UK study did. The race results in the UK study, while adjusted for the other risk factors included in the study like income, does not appear to take occupation into account like I mentioned above. Looking at the UK ethnicity data by sector we see that Asians are disproportionately employed in the "Distribution, hotels and restaurants" and "Transport and communication" sectors (unfortunately this site rolls up multiple sectors into one category in many cases) compared to Whites. And Blacks are disproportionately employed in the "Public admin, education and health" sectors compared to Whites. So if any of those sectors employ a disproportionate number of "essential workers" that could account for at least some of the higher HR for those races.
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« Last Edit: May 16, 2020, 09:47:19 PM by Trippy »
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NowhereMan
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7353
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The consistency of odd symptoms like the loss of taste/smell really worries me about this disease--I have a really bad feeling it's doing things nobody fully understands and that the third act of this play is going to be about grim chronic afteraffects. It's very clearly not an ordinary respiratory disease, not even on the model of SARS or MERS.
Obviously totally anecdote rather than data but my experience of (almost certainly) this thing was totally not a respiratory type infection. I basically had fever, tiredness for a day or so and total loss of my sense of smell but no cough or breathing issues. My fiancee didn't even have fever, basically just felt shitty and sore for a couple of days and then lost her sense of smell. She had actually been symptomatic and over the weekend when we went for a hike and visited a friend of mine (!) but assumed it was general soreness from the gym or something (I would say she's the fucking worst public health professional if the head of the Imperial college research unit hadn't gotten caught breaking lockdown to go shag his mistress). Between the symptoms and the studies suggesting it might actually function by binding to haemoglobin in red blood cells, I think it's quite likely this is actually a very different kind of disease to what we are used to with influenza and other coronaviruses but there isn't a lot of point worrying about long term effects just because we have no fucking idea.
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"Look at my car. Do you think that was bought with the earnest love of geeks?" - HaemishM
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jgsugden
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3888
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The consistency of odd symptoms like the loss of taste/smell really worries me about this disease--I have a really bad feeling it's doing things nobody fully understands and that the third act of this play is going to be about grim chronic afteraffects. It's very clearly not an ordinary respiratory disease, not even on the model of SARS or MERS. That is pessimistic, but fortunately no hints of that being true. One of the struggles I'm having is not assuming the absolute worst. I mean, there is plenty of shit that is the worst, with so many people ignoring the reality that this thing is out there. I expect to see slow building of numbers as a percentage of the population, at least, is trying to limit the spread - but we will see some areas explode. The consistency of odd symptoms like the loss of taste/smell really worries me about this disease--I have a really bad feeling it's doing things nobody fully understands and that the third act of this play is going to be about grim chronic afteraffects. It's very clearly not an ordinary respiratory disease, not even on the model of SARS or MERS.
Obviously totally anecdote rather than data but my experience of (almost certainly) this thing was totally not a respiratory type infection... This is not the only bug out there and it has a lot of overlap with other bugs. As this thing manifests differently in different people, it is hard to guess whether you had it or something else unless you get a test. A lot of us have had some form of health issues in the past few months and thought we had it. My wife and both kids had fevers, off and on, over the past few weeks. Could have been the virus, but very likely something else.
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2020 will be the year I gave up all hope.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23626
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« Last Edit: May 17, 2020, 03:31:14 PM by Trippy »
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Mandella
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1236
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This is not the only bug out there and it has a lot of overlap with other bugs. As this thing manifests differently in different people, it is hard to guess whether you had it or something else unless you get a test. A lot of us have had some form of health issues in the past few months and thought we had it. My wife and both kids had fevers, off and on, over the past few weeks. Could have been the virus, but very likely something else.
That reminded me that I don't think I checked back in with the antibody test results I mentioned earlier. Both the results from my wife and my friend (who was absolutely certain he had it) were negative. Now I know that the tests are not conclusive (and said friend makes that point every time it comes up), but it strikes me that going to the trouble and expense of getting a test and not going forward accepting the results of that test doesn't make a lot of sense. So I'm assuming that I haven't had it, and plan to keep up good sanitary practices (distance, washing, masks, and constant sanitizing) going until I get it or get a vaccine.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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If your wife didn't have it, you probably don't. But I'm sure you already know that.
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jgsugden
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3888
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If you or someone you know tests positive and gets through it - do not assume you're immune. It is likely that your antibodies will protect you, but that is not a lock, yet. We don't know what percentage of people are protected by antibodies, and we don't know how long that protection will last. Better safe than the fucking idiots I see every fucking day. Those fuckers keep it up, and they'll realize how deadly this fucking virus is because I'll fucking k... Ahem.
I appreciate the intelligence on these boards as I see people getting informed. Understanding how it transfers (as much as we can), what it does to the body and how tp play it safe are things that way too many people can't seem to fathom.
Are people watching South Korea and China? They are telling thousands of people to get tested based on cell phone location data if they were near a pocket - and they're still seeing resurgence in the reopening economy. We're still having trouble getting tested if we think we're sick and we're practically fucking each other on the streets already.
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2020 will be the year I gave up all hope.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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i mean china is just megafucked regardless, so it's kind of moot in regards to how they handle it
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15163
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There was still a flu strain around this winter, and people as usual got it--and almost everyone who did thinks they had covid-19 instead.
As my neighbor pointed out, you could get something like Lyme disease this spring and think it was covid unless you got lucky and spotted the bullseye rash, which doesn't always appear. Etc.
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Mandella
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1236
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There was still a flu strain around this winter, and people as usual got it--and almost everyone who did thinks they had covid-19 instead.
As my neighbor pointed out, you could get something like Lyme disease this spring and think it was covid unless you got lucky and spotted the bullseye rash, which doesn't always appear. Etc.
I do know a smattering of folks that did test positive, but they were all from mid Feb at the earliest. It does look like late January flu was, indeed, just the flu.
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jgsugden
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3888
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Nobody remembers all the tables comparing allergies, the flu and COVID - do they?
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2020 will be the year I gave up all hope.
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Tale
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8562
sıɥʇ ǝʞıן sʞןɐʇ
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If you or someone you know tests positive and gets through it - do not assume you're immune. It is likely that your antibodies will protect you, but that is not a lock, yet. We don't know what percentage of people are protected by antibodies, and we don't know how long that protection will last. Yep, also you can be just fucking lucky. On page 1 of this thread, my parents (in their late 70s) were quarantined after spending several hours with an infected friend on March 9. A few days later, the friend was admitted to hospital, and died the next week. My father sat next to the person at lunch. The person gave my mother a lottery ticket in an envelope, which she took home. When the person's Covid-19 was diagnosed, my parents were quarantined for 2 weeks back in mid-March, swabbed and tested negative. Last week (mid-May) my father developed a cough that alarmed his doctor, but tested negative again.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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well, blood test done, now we wait
til friday
fingers crossed I didn't spend 5 weeks coughing for no reason whatsoever
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MrHat
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7432
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
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well, blood test done, now we wait
til friday
fingers crossed I didn't spend 5 weeks coughing for no reason whatsoever
Maybe you're allergic to sourdough starter.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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well, blood test done, now we wait
til friday
fingers crossed I didn't spend 5 weeks coughing for no reason whatsoever
Maybe you're allergic to sourdough starter. i'd be fucking dead then
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slog
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Posts: 8232
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Friends don't let Friends vote for Boomers
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jgsugden
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3888
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There is absolutely no news here. We've been told for two months: Use proper precautions and your risk of being infected by surfaces is low. That is the same thing they're saying now - just with different wording. Journalists see those guidelines and report: The virus does not spread easily in other ways
COVID-19 is a new disease and we are still learning about how it spreads. It may be possible for COVID-19 to spread in other ways, but these are not thought to be the main ways the virus spreads.
From touching surfaces or objects. It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes. This is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, but we are still learning more about this virus. And ignore: The virus spreads easily between people
How easily a virus spreads from person-to-person can vary. Some viruses are highly contagious, like measles, while other viruses do not spread as easily. Another factor is whether the spread is sustained, which means it goes from person-to-person without stopping.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is spreading very easily and sustainably between people. Information from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic suggest that this virus is spreading more efficiently than influenza, but not as efficiently as measles, which is highly contagious. If you read them together, it actually says 'Hey, Fuckheads. Stop hanging out together. This shit transmits easily from person to person. The only reason people are getting sick is because you assholes can't follow social distancing. The new cases you see are generally not because someone touched a doorknob or received a package from Amazon. Well, the fuckheads that take no precautions could get sick that way (if not already getting sick by being close to the people that infected the object), but seriously - know the fuck off with your hanging out together and we'll knock this virus down a lot and give ourselves a chance to get a vaccine before we hit herd immunity the hard way. Just use sensible precautions when you're handling shit and you'll be fine.'
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2020 will be the year I gave up all hope.
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Sir T
Terracotta Army
Posts: 14223
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Looking at that, wouldn't it be a good idea to test whether if you inject yourself with bleach or shove a UV light up your ass, would that cure the corona?
Just referencing an occasion where corona spread on surfaces may have been mentioned.
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Hic sunt dracones.
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jgsugden
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3888
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Looking at that, wouldn't it be a good idea to test whether if you inject yourself with bleach or shove a UV light up your ass, would that cure the corona?... (shhhh… you'll ruin the chances of convincing our special friends that glow in the dark condoms are UV emitters…)
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2020 will be the year I gave up all hope.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23626
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A pre-print study estimating global COVID-19 IFR by estimating country IFR values based on their CFR and testing rate / sample prevalence was released a few days ago. The authors' maths and number crunching results in a global IFR of 1.04%, with the 95% Confidence Interval range being 0.77% to 1.38%. If I understand their methodology correctly, what they are claiming is essentially as more of a population is tested over time (testing rate / sample prevalence) a country's CFR will converge on its IFR so we can look at the CFRs and testing rates among different countries, which currently vary widely, and estimate what value(s) is being converged on across all of them. Estimating the Global Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23626
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And another pre-print study using a similar concept as the one above, but looking just at the US data, where if you extrapolate out declining CFRs over time you end up with the "IFR-S" (IFR for symptomatic people). Estimating The Infection Fatality Rate Among Symptomatic COVID-19 Cases In The United StatesUsing data through April 20, 2020, we fit a statistical model to COVID-19 case fatality rates over time at the US county level to estimate the COVID-19 IFR among symptomatic cases (IFR-S) as time goes to infinity. The IFR-S in the US was estimated to be 1.3% (95% central credible interval: 0.6% to 2.1%).
IFR-S will be greater than IFR cause it's not including all the asymptomatic people. The author estimates IFR to about 20% lower than IFR-S based on the data from the Diamond Princess outbreak.
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SurfD
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4035
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For "how fucked are we" comparison sake, How does an IFR-S of 1.3% for Corona stack up vs something like the standard Flu?
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Darwinism is the Gateway Science.
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MahrinSkel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10858
When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was bullshit!
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For "how fucked are we" comparison sake, How does an IFR-S of 1.3% for Corona stack up vs something like the standard Flu?
Flu is 0.1%, so X13. In the article, they do the calculations for COVID hitting as many people in the US as the flu. 33.5 M X 1.3% = 435,500. That's kinda a best-case scenario, since the flu is constrained by both collateral immunity from closely related strains and extensive immunization campaigns. None of the normally extant coronaviruses that cause things like colds are closely related to SARS-COV2. You can run it backwards to get an estimate of how many people have actually had it, 93,533 / 0.013 = 7,194,846 (compared to the official case count of 1,570,583). --Dave
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--Signature Unclear
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23626
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The figure that's most widely quoted for the IFR of regular influenza is 0.1% like Dave posted above. However, in the US, at least, annual flu death numbers are *estimated*, not directly counted, and the reported estimated deaths are inflated significantly by the CDC to account for cases that aren't counted by traditional means. I can't find where I read this at the moment (I'll add to the list below when I do*) but one thing I saw suggested the CDC *way* overestimates the number as a way to encourage people to get a flu shot. So it's likely that at least in the US that actual influenza IFR is significantly lower than 0.1% which makes SARS-CoV-2 even more deadly in comparison. JAMA: Assessment of Deaths From COVID-19 and From Seasonal InfluenzaScientific American: Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges* Edit: it's commentary from one of the authors of the JAMA article linked above made to Medscape Medical News which requires a (free) log in view: Medscape: Comparing COVID-19, Flu Death Tolls 'Extremely Dangerous' (log in required to view) "It's apparent [the CDC has] been overestimating," Faust said. "If you publish a number on the higher end of the estimate, people might take your public health messages more seriously, such as, it's important to get your yearly flu shot."
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« Last Edit: May 21, 2020, 03:21:25 PM by Trippy »
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Salamok
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2803
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With their very first sentance of the first article they are already getting bendy with the truth. "As of early May 2020, approximately 65 000 people in the US had died of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19),1" Then you see via the footnote showing the data is from April 28th. And if the number was 65k on April 28th then in the last 25 days or so we have seen nearly a 45% increase, camparing it to a years worth of Flu deaths while ignoring that sort of progression is beyond reaching for a conclusion to support some wishful point.
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RhyssaFireheart
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Posts: 3525
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So I just found out that I get to have a C-19 screening to prepare for my upcoming medical procedure on 19-June (yay, for avoiding a colonoscopy for this long). Which considering I can count the number of times I've interacted with someone other than my husband on one hand, I certainly hope I don't have it.
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Mandella
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1236
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Silver linings dept: Except for allergies, this has been the most healthy spring in my memory for both me and the wife. No spring colds, stomach flues, or other contagious crap. It really looks like all these masks and plastic spit guards and hand washing and social distancing might be making a difference in just the regular stuff.
On the other hand, now I'm worried that we're losing overall immune system health, since that does need to be exercised by exposure...
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Silver linings dept: Except for allergies, this has been the most healthy spring in my memory for both me and the wife. No spring colds, stomach flues, or other contagious crap. It really looks like all these masks and plastic spit guards and hand washing and social distancing might be making a difference in just the regular stuff.
On the other hand, now I'm worried that we're losing overall immune system health, since that does need to be exercised by exposure...
I have a pretty healthy immune system, even before I spent the last 20 years working directly with the public at the library. The health factor I've noticed improved significantly? My sinuses have been clear for the entire lockdown. I normally wear breathing strips and have constant stuffiness and have been certain for years it was due to the shitty air in our office. Goes back to my dislike of engineers. Engineer told our maintenance guy that the HVAC we installed years ago supplied fresh air to all spaces. We have a ceiling unit in our office and all the windows are sealed. The maintenance guy never cleans the filter. I wonder why I have respiratory issues in a closed office with no airflow and a dirty HVAC filter that just keeps recycling the same air all day.
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15163
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It's real clarifying about where your colds and minor illnesses come from.
I don't know if there's any research on this, but I genuinely doubt that an immune system that's trained on normal volumes of social interaction loses its 'training' in a single period of six months or so. It's clear that there's always a vulnerability to novel social interaction--it's why people get so sick when their toddlers first go to school (interaction with a novel population of adults--not just the families of the other children but all the people those families interact with) and why they are prone to get sick when travelling far away, but I think in your own social worlds, your immune system's training has to be pretty vigorous even when there's some months of relative isolation.
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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My favorite local restaurant is reopening. They sent a nice email about all the stuff they're doing, 'industry-leading' methods, like distancing the tables.
All I can see is that infographic about the guy sitting by the AC that infected half the entire room.
I continue to be a harbinger of we're all fucked on this one.
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HaemishM
Staff Emeritus
Posts: 42632
the Confederate flag underneath the stone in my class ring
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We're most of us fucked. Business owners, especially larger corporations or smaller, less scrupulous ones will make a whole lot of noise about how they are looking out for their customers but push comes to shove, they won't bother.
More worrisome are the fact that the average mouth-breathing fucktard out there sees their leaders telling them to reopen to save the economy and automatically think everything is safe. See the crowds of jackwagons out and about in Wisconsin and Ohio, assholes to elbows in bars and restaurants without a mask among them, loudly celebrating the return of their "FREEDOM!"
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