Coronavirus

Discussion in 'West Mall' started by Clean, Jan 28, 2020.

  1. WillUSAF

    WillUSAF 500+ Posts

  2. Joe Fan

    Joe Fan 10,000+ Posts

    Worst conclusion ever?

    This is ABC News attempting to deal with the results of a study that shows "majority white counties" in the US have "significantly fewer COVID-19 cases" And this must be because of racism.
    Really?
    You cannot think of any other possible explanation than that?

     
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    Last edited: Aug 14, 2020
  3. Horn6721

    Horn6721 10,000+ Posts

  4. horninchicago

    horninchicago 10,000+ Posts

    Haven't watched the interview yet. Did he let Fauci get away with the answer about it being a bad idea to let the virus run its course and infect everyone?

    Interesting how people who have let themselves go to the point of Type 2 diabetes and heart issues that he referred to as well as obesity are the people we now need to protect. What a crock of ****.
     
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  5. Joe Fan

    Joe Fan 10,000+ Posts

    The number of people currently hospitalized with coronavirus in TX continued to decline today, now at lowest level since June 30

    [​IMG]
     
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  6. horninchicago

    horninchicago 10,000+ Posts

    This is very cynical maybe, but hospitals are hurting like every other businesses. Are they admitting people for Covid when it may not be necessary just for the money?
     
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  7. theiioftx

    theiioftx Sponsor Deputy

    Hospitals make money through the OR. They are most certainly coding for Covid when it is present. Too much incentive not too. However, the hospitals I work with have clear criteria for who is admitted and who is not.
     
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  8. horninchicago

    horninchicago 10,000+ Posts

    Okay, thanks. So, you are saying the hospitalizations for Covid are necessary.
     
  9. theiioftx

    theiioftx Sponsor Deputy

    Some are depending upon underlying conditions and how the virus is affecting the patient. Most are not. Patients are told to quarantine at home.
     
  10. theiioftx

    theiioftx Sponsor Deputy

    Fauci says today that temperature checks are not reliable for screening. It's August numbskull. Why did you not state that months ago?
     
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  11. mchammer

    mchammer 10,000+ Posts

    Reliable or useful? They are not the same.
     
  12. horninchicago

    horninchicago 10,000+ Posts

    [Leslie Nielsen] Okay...now we are getting somewhere. [/Airplane!]

    So, the underlying condition thing is there again. I'm still saying why do we have to protect people who don't take care of themselves?

    By the way, I don't think you are saying that, so it isn't directed at you. It's for Fauci when he reads this thread.
     
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  13. theiioftx

    theiioftx Sponsor Deputy

    Patients coming into the hospital for anything are tested for Covid in most cases at most hospitals I have worked with over the last 7 months. A patient could arrive due to a car wreck. Let's say they are asymptomatic, but test positive. They are going to code as Covid for reimbursement.
     
  14. horninchicago

    horninchicago 10,000+ Posts

    I gotcha. So, the charts of Covid hospitalizations driving places like Chicago to implement travel restrictions are based on nonsense in many cases.

    :whiteflag:
     
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  15. Vol Horn 4 Life

    Vol Horn 4 Life Good Bye To All The Rest!

    My son has was diagnosed with 'Rona yesterday. He was born with a congenital heart defect having surgery at 10 days and 1 year old. He's about 6 days into this and only has symptoms of a tight chest with slight difficulty breathing. With all the crap he's seen in the media he panicked last night and went to the emergency room thinking he's dying. The doc joked with him and said he is very mild and nothing to worry about then sent him home. Suddenly today he is feeling much better.

    This media over blown crap just cost me $650 in unnecessary ER expenses.
     
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  16. Horn6721

    Horn6721 10,000+ Posts

    Vol
    We support
     
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    Last edited: Aug 15, 2020
  17. Joe Fan

    Joe Fan 10,000+ Posts

    Wow, I do think the over-hyping by the cornona-bros is causing all sorts of unintended problems.
    Anyway, best wishes to your son
     
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  18. horninchicago

    horninchicago 10,000+ Posts

    @Vol Horn 4 Life thank you for sharing that. Glad he is on the mend and particularly with that condition.
     
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  19. OrangeShogun

    OrangeShogun 500+ Posts

    Yeah, probably around 0.01% of those bikes are about to "flood" the market. :rolleyes1:
     
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  20. mchammer

    mchammer 10,000+ Posts

    Best $650 you ever spent. Your boy’s health is paramount.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  21. nashhorn

    nashhorn 5,000+ Posts

    Darn Vol, scary stuff for sure. Did you say how old he is? Hoping everything works out well.
     
  22. Driver 8

    Driver 8 Amor Fati

    This is one of the best things I have read about COVID

    Paying for an epidemic of stupidity

    We’ve handed control of our lives to a clown car packed with idiots who have wasted billions trying to defeat this virus. They will never admit it was all for nothing.

    Back in the good old days, the average person used to take pride in having a robust grasp of basic maths: enough mental arithmetic not to be overcharged at the shops, enough skill with pen and paper to make more complex calculations.

    Not any more, it seems. Many of our finest minds are infected with a new innumeracy that, in today’s fevered environment, distorts our understanding of, and response to, the coronavirus threat.

    In early April, as the disease was just beginning to bite, the team manning the ABC’s coronavirus news website promised to answer questions about the pandemic.

    When a reader asked for help in interpreting some infection-rate statistics, it provoked a cheerful response, broadcast to the world: “This just sparked a heated newsroom discussion in which we all outed ourselves as being terrible at maths.” You don’t say.

    They’re only — some might say barely — journalists, however. They don’t need the mastery of figures that our leaders display so magnificently. So for a moment of light relief, let’s examine the numbers that currently unnerve them. If we cancelled Victoria’s lockdown immediately, and its cases were permitted to grow at 1000 a day, the whole state would be infected in no time. By “no time”, of course, I mean 18 years. No wonder they’re frightened: at that rate it could sweep through the entire country in little more than 70 years. Luckily, in recent times we have been adding 1000 people to our population every day. Phew. Dodged a bullet there.

    [​IMG]
    Palice patrol past essential workers and a resident along an eerily quiet Bourke Street during Melbourne’s stage four covid-19 lockdown.

    Worldwide, excess deaths from COVID-19 (generously assuming every victim died from, rather than just with, the virus) are around 700,000. Given the roughly 60 million deaths the world records each year, it’s as though 2020 had 369 days in it, rather than 366.

    If that thought chills you, congratulations! A lavishly pensioned, undemanding and unaccountable career in politics beckons.

    The ultimate showcase of political innumeracy is the quasi-religious ritual of The Reading of the Cases. Witnessed and recorded by the faithful in the media (who love to have their work handed to them on a plate), it has become a farce within this bigger farce. The sombre, priestly arch-buffoon blesses reporters with fodder for their blog updates, sprinkling them with numbers that look like information but withstand no scrutiny.

    Cases, as a moment’s reflection reveals, do not equal sickness, much less hospitalisations. Until we are entrusted with the knowledge of how many are the results of tests on people who show no symptoms, they serve only to strike terror into the innumerate.

    Indeed, why do we need to hear these figures at all? We don’t get daily updates for any other diseases. They serve no useful purpose, as we are not given sufficient detail to make our own assessment of their significance, decide on the level of risk they represent and tailor our activities accordingly.

    Their primary purpose seems to be to post-rationalise our leaders’ devastating, simple-minded lockdowns and border closures, and to panic people into sporting their masks of obedience should they be sufficiently reckless as to leave their homes.

    [​IMG]
    Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews at one of his daily breifings.

    Perhaps the announcements, if they must continue, could give us real information: “There have been 637 new cases today, but happily 480 were young people who had no symptoms and didn’t know they’d been infected. Oh, and only two of today’s cases were serious enough to need to go to hospital.”

    Maybe for context they could dilute their irresponsible scaremongering by including details of the other 450 people who die in Australia each day, including the victims of lockdown: the suicides and those who, too frightened to visit a doctor or hospital, are dying avoidable deaths through lack of screening and treatment (Britain anticipates as many as 35,000 extra deaths in the next year from cancer sufferers presenting late with correspondingly advanced tumours); and the people tumbling into despair, depression and other mental and physical illnesses.

    Perhaps the premier could hand over to the state’s treasurer, who would read out the number added daily to the jobless lists, the businesses forced into bankruptcy, the mortgages foreclosed.

    Then someone from social services could talk about the growth in homelessness, the “huge increase” in domestic violence reported by victim support groups, the marriage breakdowns.

    But they won’t because of a mathematical and behavioural curiosity we’re all familiar with, if not by name: the sunk costs fallacy.

    Imagine that last month you bought a ticket for a concert tonight. You’re tired, it’s pouring with rain, and you dread dragging yourself into town. The money’s gone whatever you decide, so logic says you should cut your losses and stay in, but instead you pull on your raincoat and call a taxi. The urge is irrational, but almost irresistible. The whole vile pokies industry is built on it.

    Now imagine how much harder to alter course if your investment was enormous and everyone was watching, poised to ridicule you for changing your mind.

    [​IMG]
    Majority of Melbourne’s retail businesses remain closed as residents are only allowed to leave home to give or receive care, shopping for food and essential items, daily exercise and work under.

    Here’s where our politicians find themselves, unable to admit their response to the virus — the ultimate blunt instrument of lockdown, brutally enforced — hasn’t worked, and will never work.

    They can’t do so because it would mean all they have done up to this point has been in vain. How could anyone who had wreaked damage on this cataclysmic scale ever admit to themselves, let alone to the nation, that it was all for nothing? Instead, like the pokie addict, they have doubled down to unleash a runaway epidemic of stupidity. They’ve destroyed our economy and put thousands out of work; they’ve refashioned many of our famously easygoing population into masked informers; and we’ve handed control of our lives to a clown car packed with idiots.

    If there is a clearer demonstration of the insidious overreach of the nanny state, infantilising and sinister, and the shameful acquiescence of its legions of time-serving bureaucrats, I’m not aware of it.

    What’s more insulting, each day we are chastised for “disappointing” our leaders, as though they are our superiors and it is the citizens’ duty to please them. The infected are singled out, vilified and shamed as sinners, their scandalous movements — three pubs on a Saturday night! — tracked and condemned. It recalls the attitude towards AIDS victims in the 1980s, a divine judgment visited on wicked libertines.

    But attempt to argue that the cost of our response has in any way outweighed the impact of the virus and expect to be labelled a virus denier. Then expect to be asked, accusingly, how many deaths you would find acceptable. No matter how often or how emphatically you declare “We should protect the vulnerable”, some will hear those words as “Let’s throw the old people to the wolves”.

    [​IMG]
    A pop-up Covid-19 testing clinic at Carlingford Drive in Sydney.

    On April 4 in these pages I wondered when life moved from being precious to priceless. An exaggeration, but more than four months on we’ve set the opening bid pretty high. Turn the question around and ask what we are prepared to pay to protect the elderly with comorbidities. Let’s assume we’d let the disease run its course, as Sweden did, and had suffered the same death rate. We might have lost 10,000 of the old and sick earlier than in a normal year. We’ve kept that figure down, but at what cost?

    On this week’s numbers our governments have spent more than $220bn and put 750,000 people out of work; some of that burden would have been incurred whatever path we had followed, but most of it is self-imposed.

    Is it callous to suggest that’s too high a price to prolong what in some cases were lives of no great joy? What good might we have done with just a fraction of that $220bn, artfully applied? Would it not have been far better to spend a smaller, but still significant, sum on protecting and caring for the vulnerable and elderly to the very best of our abilities, and then, crucially, offering them the choice whether to accept that care?

    We could allow them, like sentient adults, to make a simple calculation: do I live a little longer in safe but miserable isolation, or do I spend my remaining days at some risk but embraced by the warmth of family and friends?

    That’s not a decision for any politician, even a wise one, to make. It’s a matter of choice for the individual, or, if incapacitated, for those responsible for them.

    Governments don’t exist to tell us how or when we can die; but if life is measured only by length, not quality, this is where we end up: imprisoned, supposedly for our own good, on the basis of flawed statistical modelling and even worse interpretations of that modelling.

    Undismayed by the models’ failure to predict the future when the virus first appeared, self-styled experts have now contorted their fears into absurd, illogical predictions of a parallel present: if we hadn’t acted as we did, they say, then tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands more would have died. How can anyone possibly know?

    As the statistics, and yes, bodies, pile up around the world, we are getting a clearer picture of the virus’s course and virulence, and the more data we have, the more similar the curves appear. If we accept Australians are not exceptional in their resistance to disease, then it appears we have some heartbreak ahead of us, no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

    New Zealand is lauded as the perfect example of how to crush the virus, but would anyone be surprised if it too has to pay the price somewhere down the line? Four new cases locked down the 1.6 million inhabitants of Auckland this week in a monstrously excessive overreaction that would be comical were it not so destructive.

    Meanwhile, the rest of New Zealand has shut down so completely it has effectively removed itself as a nation from the international community. It’s as though the country had never existed. Soon it will be reduced to a fading Cheshire Cat image of its Prime Minister’s saintly sad face.

    Let’s hope for the Kiwis’, and everyone else’s, sake a vaccine is found soon, although the World Health Organisation now warns we may never have one. It’s a tired line to repeat, but even after 40-odd years of searching we don’t have one for HIV-AIDS.

    Which, if anyone needs reminding, still kills 2600 people a day.
     
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    Last edited: Aug 15, 2020
  23. Horn6721

    Horn6721 10,000+ Posts

    • Funny Funny x 2
  24. Garmel

    Garmel 5,000+ Posts

    I can't forgive Fauci for his HCQ stance. He knows damn well that it works. He recognized HCQ's effectiveness against coronaviruses until Covid-19 showed up. He has blood on his hands as far as I'm concerned.
     
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  25. Vol Horn 4 Life

    Vol Horn 4 Life Good Bye To All The Rest!

    Well, yes we never go on the cheap for medical advice and work considering his past. In this particular situation he got tested the day before and they said his lungs sounded clear. Then he got the positive result and freaked out at about 11pm. We had already talked with him about getting a Dr appointment the next day if he still felt bad vs ER due to expense. He was having such a panic attack we just finally said go.


    He's now 21 years old. Last night he called us and he's definitely doing fine. They put him on a steroid and decongestant although he doesn't really have any congestion.


    Thanks all for the support!!
     
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  26. Joe Fan

    Joe Fan 10,000+ Posts

    [​IMG]
     
    • WTF? WTF? x 5
  27. theiioftx

    theiioftx Sponsor Deputy

    See 14 posts above. It happens every day.
     
  28. Joe Fan

    Joe Fan 10,000+ Posts

  29. horninchicago

    horninchicago 10,000+ Posts

  30. Joe Fan

    Joe Fan 10,000+ Posts

    These cities really need a Dem president
    They are deperate
    I think they are willing to do anything to get one
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
    Last edited: Aug 16, 2020

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