Covid-19 miscellany

[bilby]

General levels of corruption in medicine and public health, such as you mentioned of Pfizer rigging their clinical trials leads to a huge amount of public distrust.

But these companies will make good, useful medicine if it makes money AND they will also make shit or marginally effective expensive medicine if they can get away with it. Who knows which is which unless you have a lot of medical training

Do you have a lot of medical training?

Do you have any?

 

[southernhybrid]

Some of the health care workers are protesting the local hospital vaccine mandate. I guess the brainwashing was effective.

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/wellstar-healthcare-employees-protest-vaccine-mandate

- Some healthcare workers at Wellstar Spalding protested outside the facility Wednesday over the health systems decision to require its workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

At noon on 8th Street in Griffin, Wellstar Spalding healthcare workers took to the sidewalk in front of the hospital, to protest their company’s vaccine mandate announced last week. All employees are to get the shot by October 1. These workers said Wellstar is threatening to fire them if they don’t.

Ironically, this is the location where my husband, myself and several of my friends received our vaccines earlier this year. I just hope most of these foolish people aren't professional nurses, but I'm pretty sure that at least some of them are.

Many of the protestors are asking for Gov. Brain Kemp to step in to stop employers from mandating vaccinations in Georgia.

Georgia’s case count continues to rise, with the seven-day rolling average climbing above 5,600 on Wednesday, the worst since Feb. 1. The number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals is also rising rapidly, exceeding 3,800 on Wednesday even as many hospital executives warn they don’t have enough beds and staff to care for surging patients loads.

The seven-day average for the share of positive molecular tests hit 15.7% on Wednesday, far above the 5% average that experts say means there is enough testing to detect most virus cases. The number of deaths is also rising again, getting close to 22,000 statewide since the pandemic began.

Kemp doesn't have the power to do what they want and despite my strong dislike of him and his policies, even Kemp isn't as stupid as these people.

 

[ZiprHead]

Pearl River High School Quarantines 40% Of Students In First Week, District Going Virtual

An entire Mississippi school district is going virtual after Pearl River Central High School ordered 40% of its student body to quarantine after just one week of school. Classes began at the Carriere, Miss., school on Aug. 5 with no mask mandates. Since then, the high school has quarantined 394 members of its roughly 1,000-member student body.

“In person learning will be suspended for all students in the Pearl River County School District beginning on August 16 due to the increased spread of the COVID virus in our schools and community,” the Pearl River County School District Relaunch Plan, revised today, now says. “The suspension of in-person learning will go through August 27 or September 6.”

For the second time this week, the Pearl River County School Board is holding a meeting at 5:30 p.m. to decide how long virtual schooling will last. Board members punted on quarantine plans during the last emergency meeting on Monday, but did reinstate a mask mandate after starting classes without them.

 

[Swammerdami]

... What anybody thought was draconian and fascist just a couple of years ago is now seen as perfectly justified. The demands on justification of force used has gone down, and sometimes evaporated.

If there's no emergency or immediate danger, needlessly infringing on personal freedoms is fascist.

As usual, your feel for the pulse of America is just ridiculous inaccurate. We have counties in the US where 40 to 50+% of the ICU beds have people suffering from the same disease. And you are saying there is no emergency. In Burlington, Vermont, no... no emergency. In Louisiana and Florida, it is endemic at the moment. Some states in the US are seeing their highest Covid case load ever, in large part because of misinformation, lies, and GOP dumbassery.

It's so serious that none of the top news agencies in the world are reporting on it. We're not victims of conservative media in Europe. Yet, this news of the crisis has failed to make it here....

I honestly have no idea what your point is. Could you condescend to attempt again, using simple words and with no sarcasm?

If Louisiana were an independent country it would be #1 in the world right now in new cases per capita! Florida would be #3, behind only Louisiana and European Georgia.

People in Thailand are frightened that the pandemic has finally hit us hard, though new cases per capita are still below the present U.S.level. (The new deaths per capita figure is worse, though we're still behind eight of the U.S. states by that measure.) In the small town near us, masks are not only ubiquitous but many store-keepers are operating behind plexiglass shields.

(In personal news, on the 25th of this month I will be making the long drive to Bangkok — a "red zone" — to get a Pfizer jab donated by the U.S.A. Thank you, I guess, to the US'ers who've refused vaccination, thus making those doses available to us here!)

 

[DrZoidberg]

General levels of corruption in medicine and public health, such as you mentioned of Pfizer rigging their clinical trials leads to a huge amount of public distrust.

But these companies will make good, useful medicine if it makes money AND they will also make shit or marginally effective expensive medicine if they can get away with it. Who knows which is which unless you have a lot of medical training

Do you have a lot of medical training?

Do you have any?

My scientist sister did research at Karolinska for years. Big pharma would help the researchers out all the time with experiments for free, only to build good will. They care a lot about their image in the scientific community. A community able to spot their flaws way better than laypeople. As a rule, laypeople hate Big pharma for the wrong reasons.

A good analogue is UFO's and astronomers. Non astronomers see way more UFO's in spite of watching the sky a lot less.

 

[Shadowy Man]

It's so serious that none of the top news agencies in the world are reporting on it. We're not victims of conservative media in Europe. Yet, this news of the crisis has failed to make it here.

https://www.bbc.com/news/coronavirus

No, it's not. Especially not if you factor in that we're much better at testing now.

I can’t explain why you personally haven’t heard about the emergency covid situations in the USA. That link seems to only have sparse articles about the US situation.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorer...tion=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~USA

Covid-19 is under control in the west. Instead of trying to help people who don't want to be helped, (antivaxxers) perhaps we should now focus on helping the developing world get access to more vaccines?

I don’t understand how you can both show that link and also say covid is “under control”. Did you actually look at the data for the USA in that link? The case rate has gone up an order of magnitude in the last two months! And that’s actually concentrated in just a few locations. Would you claim that’s just due to an increase in testing? How would you explain hospitals running out of beds and equipment? Or Florida asking for more ventilators from the federal government?

 

[Worldtraveller]

If there's no emergency or immediate danger, needlessly infringing on personal freedoms is fascist.

So, to be clear, if there *is* an emergency you beleive it is ok to infringe on personal freedoms, yes?

Yes. For example. China shutting down Wuhan last January was extreme and draconian. Also totally justified IMHO. At that point, for all we knew, humanity was on the brink of going extinct. But even milder things, there's a cost benefit analysis. The Danish authorities demanding people to wear masks on subways and in shops until July this year. I was totally behind that. The minor inconvenience vs the large impact on disease containment is justified.

There's also no hard and fast rule. It's a question of individual judgement where the cut off goes. We all get to decide that.

But I think it looks like we've entered a paradigm where any Covid-19 deaths seem to justify any level of force to get people to vaccinated. And that's where I feel the need to put my foot down

So, what death rate is acceptable to you?

Should we eliminate mandatory seatbelts in cars? Make it an option people have to pay for?

I mean, there are a lot of things that kill less people/year than Covid has that are currently illegal or otherwise mitigated pretty heavily with your "draconian" laws, so let's start a list, shall we? (just off the top of my head)
- drunk driving
- second hand cigarette smoke
- speeding and all other traffic violations
- guns (in the US, maybe the rest of the world should just allow carte blanche gun ownership too)
- flying (let's just eliminate safety regulations, eh?)
- dumping chemicals into the drinking water, rivers, etc.

Which of these should start de-regulating, first?

 

[Worldtraveller]

Exercise is the preferred therapy over statins. If you can keep your numbers good without them there's no reason to take them.

Exercise and diet work well for some people. Bur for others, high cholesterol is genetic. I've known people who were extremely thin--underweight, even, by anyone's standards, and physically very active who had high cholesterol.

https://www.heart.org/en/health-top...-cholesterol/familial-hypercholesterolemia-fh

Statins are an appropriate treatment.

Yeah, that would be me. Not underweight, but when my cholesterol first started creeping up in my mid 30s, I went on an almost all vegetarian diet, and cut out nearly everything I was supposed to, and greatly reduced everything else, for nearly a year, and it had almost no impact on my rate of change. Both my parents have high cholesterol and I've had no issues with statins after nearly 15 years.

 

[crazyfingers]

Pearl River High School Quarantines 40% Of Students In First Week, District Going Virtual

An entire Mississippi school district is going virtual after Pearl River Central High School ordered 40% of its student body to quarantine after just one week of school. Classes began at the Carriere, Miss., school on Aug. 5 with no mask mandates. Since then, the high school has quarantined 394 members of its roughly 1,000-member student body.

“In person learning will be suspended for all students in the Pearl River County School District beginning on August 16 due to the increased spread of the COVID virus in our schools and community,” the Pearl River County School District Relaunch Plan, revised today, now says. “The suspension of in-person learning will go through August 27 or September 6.”

For the second time this week, the Pearl River County School Board is holding a meeting at 5:30 p.m. to decide how long virtual schooling will last. Board members punted on quarantine plans during the last emergency meeting on Monday, but did reinstate a mask mandate after starting classes without them.

There is so much stupidity in that full story. What "both sides" is there about the fact that masks significantly help slow the spread. There is no both sides to that. But what do you expect out of Mississippi?

Photo from the story. How can anyone imagine that this photo from Freshman Orientation is an OK situation?

 

[repoman]

Good interview with Eric Topol who is described as

Eric Topol, MD is the Founder and Director, Scripps Research Translational Institute; and the Executive Vice President and Professor of Molecular Medicine, Scripps Research. Dr. Topol has published over 1,200 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine. He was the first physician researcher to raise questions about the safety of Vioxx and testified against the medication's manufacturer: Merck.

Most importantly his brain is not past the sell by date as will happen to many of us before we shuffle off of this mortal coil. Highly accomplished, but now dementia stricken scientists are kind of dangerous.

 

[TomC]

Don't play this at work.

[TWEET]<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I'm here for this. <a href="https://t.co/GABaLDmEbZ">pic.twitter.com/GABaLDmEbZ</a></p>— Travon Free (@Travon) <a href="https://twitter.com/Travon/status/1425524961029013512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 11, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>[/TWEET]

This video rather puts a chill up my spine.

My m-i-l has a bunch of preexisting conditions, she's very high risk even for 77.
But she's done what she could about C19. Masking and distancing and sanitizer since late winter 2020. Stopped going to church for almost a year, which was a huge big deal for her. Raced to the health department for a vaccination as soon as available. But most of her church and family are cavalier Trumpistas. "It's no worse than a cold" or "The Lord will provide", that kind of nonsense.

If she were to need hospital care, and the hospital was too full of unvaccinated C19 patients to provide proper care to her,

There would be Problems!

I'm not a violent person, but I can get seriously testy. Like, they'll "call security" levels of testy. But here's the thing. I have access to her Facebook. I'd have to go through her kids, but it wouldn't take me half an hour to find a few antivaxxers taking up space in the hospital.
And where they live. I could pay their families a personal visit.
Tom

 

[crazyfingers]

Don't play this at work.

[TWEET]<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I'm here for this. <a href="https://t.co/GABaLDmEbZ">pic.twitter.com/GABaLDmEbZ</a></p>— Travon Free (@Travon) <a href="https://twitter.com/Travon/status/1425524961029013512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 11, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>[/TWEET]

This video rather puts a chill up my spine.

My m-i-l has a bunch of preexisting conditions, she's very high risk even for 77.
But she's done what she could about C19. Masking and distancing and sanitizer since late winter 2020. Stopped going to church for almost a year, which was a huge big deal for her. Raced to the health department for a vaccination as soon as available. But most of her church and family are cavalier Trumpistas. "It's no worse than a cold" or "The Lord will provide", that kind of nonsense.

If she were to need hospital care, and the hospital was too full of unvaccinated C19 patients to provide proper care to her,

There would be Problems!

I'm not a violent person, but I can get seriously testy. Like, they'll "call security" levels of testy. But here's the thing. I have access to her Facebook. I'd have to go through her kids, but it wouldn't take me half an hour to find a few antivaxxers taking up space in the hospital.
And where they live. I could pay their families a personal visit.
Tom

Yes I'd say this is expected all across the south and other hot spots and yes, Covid Vax deniers are starting to and are taking up hospital beds, for something that's nearly completely preventable, such that people who have another medical emergency will not be able to get care.

 

[Trausti]

Don't play this at work.

[TWEET]<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I'm here for this. <a href="https://t.co/GABaLDmEbZ">pic.twitter.com/GABaLDmEbZ</a></p>— Travon Free (@Travon) <a href="https://twitter.com/Travon/status/1425524961029013512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 11, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>[/TWEET]

This video rather puts a chill up my spine.

My m-i-l has a bunch of preexisting conditions, she's very high risk even for 77.
But she's done what she could about C19. Masking and distancing and sanitizer since late winter 2020. Stopped going to church for almost a year, which was a huge big deal for her. Raced to the health department for a vaccination as soon as available. But most of her church and family are cavalier Trumpistas. "It's no worse than a cold" or "The Lord will provide", that kind of nonsense.

If she were to need hospital care, and the hospital was too full of unvaccinated C19 patients to provide proper care to her,

There would be Problems!

I'm not a violent person, but I can get seriously testy. Like, they'll "call security" levels of testy. But here's the thing. I have access to her Facebook. I'd have to go through her kids, but it wouldn't take me half an hour to find a few antivaxxers taking up space in the hospital.
And where they live. I could pay their families a personal visit.
Tom

Yes I'd say this is expected all across the south and other hot spots and yes, Covid Vax deniers are starting to and are taking up hospital beds, for something that's nearly completely preventable, such that people who have another medical emergency will not be able to get care.

Do you feel the same way about obese/unhealthy people or drug addicts?

 

[crazyfingers]

Yes I'd say this is expected all across the south and other hot spots and yes, Covid Vax deniers are starting to and are taking up hospital beds, for something that's nearly completely preventable, such that people who have another medical emergency will not be able to get care.

Do you feel the same way about obese/unhealthy people or drug addicts?

They are not overwhelming the hospitals. Did you forget that point? It's central to the entire issue. Maybe pay attention better.

 

[Trausti]

Yes I'd say this is expected all across the south and other hot spots and yes, Covid Vax deniers are starting to and are taking up hospital beds, for something that's nearly completely preventable, such that people who have another medical emergency will not be able to get care.

Do you feel the same way about obese/unhealthy people or drug addicts?

They are not overwhelming the hospitals. Did you forget that point? It's central to the entire issue. Maybe pay attention better.

Nonsense. Those hospitalized overwhelmingly have co-morbidities, like obesity. If people actually cared about public health it would be the focus of discussion/prevention. But such talk is verboten.

 

[crazyfingers]

They are not overwhelming the hospitals. Did you forget that point? It's central to the entire issue. Maybe pay attention better.

Nonsense. Those hospitalized overwhelmingly have co-morbidities, like obesity. If people actually cared about public health it would be the focus of discussion/prevention. But such talk is verboten.

Why are they in the hospital? Because they are fat or because they refused the vaccine? It's because they refused the vaccine.

 

[repoman]

From here

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/397/tab-pdf

Does this mean that (shudder) natural infection from covid gives more and different protection against reinfection than a vaccine?

I am not one of the people who hung my know-it-all bullshit ego on the contention that the vaccine is better than natural infection - an infection you DON'T want to have but there can always be positives to negatives.

Well, lets throw Manhattan project level resources at nasal vaccines and maybe throw some of the other three viral proteins into intramuscular and nasal vaccines going forward.

Here is another article from Scientific American

To Beat COVID, We May Need a Good Shot in the Nose

Intranasal vaccines might stop the spread of the coronavirus more effectively than needles in arms

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-beat-covid-we-may-need-a-good-shot-in-the-nose/#sa_body

 

[Trausti]

They are not overwhelming the hospitals. Did you forget that point? It's central to the entire issue. Maybe pay attention better.

Nonsense. Those hospitalized overwhelmingly have co-morbidities, like obesity. If people actually cared about public health it would be the focus of discussion/prevention. But such talk is verboten.

Why are they in the hospital? Because they are fat or because they refused the vaccine? It's because they refused the vaccine.

If you’re going to complain about people occupying hospital beds due to their own health decisions, be consistent.

 

[crazyfingers]

Why are they in the hospital? Because they are fat or because they refused the vaccine? It's because they refused the vaccine.

If you’re going to complain about people occupying hospital beds due to their own health decisions, be consistent.

I am quite consistent. People who refuse the vaccine are getting Covid and are filling up the hospitals.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

[TWEET]<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The parking lot after a school board meeting last night in Franklin, the wealthiest place in Tennessee. Parents harassed medical professionals who had spoken in favor of masks in schools. “We know who you are. You can leave freely, but we will find you.” <a href="https://t.co/SzR0uvMeE7">pic.twitter.com/SzR0uvMeE7</a></p>— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) <a href="https://twitter.com/natalie_allison/status/1425449438202548224?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 11, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>[/TWEET]

Threatening physicians for relaying facts at a school board meeting.

Scumpers.

Dr. Zoidberg is right. Those people look quite receptive to input and dialogue.

What's your solution?

I really don't have one. This is a mini-Afghanistan in America, where a bunch of people on Cable News and the Internet and some GOP in the Government said and did things to help promote this tantrum. There really is no way to get through this.

What should be done is to withhold access to things without vaccination, which we are already seeing being done. And masking should be a legal requirement for those who didn't get vaccinated. The trouble will be these misinformed and arrogant people will cause even more harm. I mean in addition to the people dying.

Little else can be done. These people were willingly led to the river of angry/misinformed or partisan dissent. Only they can change their minds. And I'm not holding my breath. I'm just getting my rights restricted by these people who help re-breed Covid-19 into America.