The Coronavirus Thread

I stopped reading at the "It's all One Big Conspiracy™" part. I appreciate the out of the box 'systems' angle on human biology and medicine, but where is the payoff? Where is the real practical therapy? Show me the money. Show me how your average clinician can help someone (even just a little bit) with the Big Idea, instead of profering explanations (e.g. diabetes is but a Big Conspiracy of...what exactly, modern life?) with no actual evidence.

On the one hand the conspiratorial, us vs. them, "they" are out to get us (e.g. Big Government, Big Medicine, Big Modern Life) thinking is to be expected, but I admit I have been pleasantly surprised it has not been worse than it is. With so many unknowns, there will be real harm no matter what we do in all sorts of domains including economic, personal, familial, governmental, "social capital", etc. Yet most folks have have wanted to do the right thing regardless, even if it means real sacrifice of one sort or another...as the lady said the veil of civilization may be thin, but not all that lies behind it is savage.

 

I think you missed the main point, which is that the pandemic is being used to shift even more global wealth to the 0.01%.

This is long overdue and I'm so relieved. The 'climate change' conspiracy to shift it all to the Socialist World Government has been doing far too well lately.

 

Never believe anybody who needs to tell you about their PhD.

But worse. The name rang a bell, and yes! You guys don't remember Mr Shiva Ayyurdyrai? He's the guy who invented email... according to him. He's as full of shit as a septic tank.

 

Ha-ha-ha. We are taught that the "world government" is imperialist.

In fact, there are signs of global regulation. In particular, this applies to information about UFOs. Real information is carefully destroyed, and fakes are widely distributed instead

No, I'm not crazy. I served in the air defense in the past.

 

You called it. The guy is running for senate and trying to get Fauci fired. Time to block that Mercola site in my firewall so I don't accidentally read more of that.

 

Ha! Funny how that works, whether Rome burns or Rome rules the known world the aristocrats (the .01%) somehow always make out. At least Cosby is in prison

 

German chancellor Angela Merkel explaining virus reproduction factor and why deciding when to lift a lockdown is such a complex issue (English subtitles):

 

Without people like her the EU will crumble like a old tasteless pie. Italy wants a Covid19 "bail-out" and NL and DL have some conditions. Here is the problem, Italy is loaded with debt and cannot ever pay it back. Italy does not want conditions and accuses NL and DL among others of not having solidarity. Solidarity does not imply charity and "go your merry way."

The Covid19 outbreak is exposing the EU again. The internal break-lines are becoming visible under stress. After the financial credit crisis and Brexit now this. Helping a neighbour is good. Helping a neighbour who keeps making things worse, you have to be careful. In a crisis you start to count your pennies.

These kind of struggles will take place all over the world. I am fortunate to live in NL. If you live in a country with less financial reserves, count your pennies twice. This year can be rough.

 

The predictions of deaths and hospitalization ratio used in the early and even later models are just being shown to be plain stupid* by the studies from Stanford and other places, but new "normal" based on those models is already here.

My wife works for a large network of teaching hospitals in Toronto, one of the areas the hardest hit in Canada. There are, depending on the day 60-70 Coronavirus patients, in the isolated area, otherwise the hospital is empty. Psychiatrists can see their patients on Zoom, you can get your doctor on the phone, but all tests, procedures are cancelled. Of course emergency unit is working but most of the people are just seating doing nothing. My cardiac tests were cancelled and will not be rebooked I was told until...that part they did not tell me. The same with my wife, and few neighbors. No one is panicking though.
Mind you that's Canada, in the US the hospital staff is just being laid off.
If that is how overwhelmed health care system looks like, overwhelmed by what or whom is the fair question to ask.

Where I see the panic is among the members of political class who are reminded by the media that they will be guilty of murder if they even think about maybe smarter way of living in the society affected by Coronavirus, smarter than to devastate economy, suspend healthcare, and keep everybody at home, from coast to coast to coast as they are saying in Canada.
And I understand they did not know much about CV when it began, but what is surprising is that as we learn, the media keep moving the goalposts: from flattening the curve we moved to "the vaccine must be available before we can do anything".

*I call the models predictions stupid not because they were grossly inflated, that can happen, but because the researchers used the method to estimate the death/hospitalization ration that contradicted their own models. They predicted huge number of infections and then assumed that the # of confirmed cases equals the # of infections. That was as stupid a month ago as it is today and should be obvious to anyone other than credentialed idiots. But that's exactly why they could proclaim the death rate 10 to 20 times higher than from the flu. ​

 

The political class (this is in our country, perhaps the same situation in other countries) is primarily guilty of destroying the mobilization of the state system of medicine and creating only a commercial model that is overloaded when there are patients above average.
Paradoxically, such an epidemic would have been quickly contained during the cold war. At this time, there was a mobilization model of medicine, when 9/10 of medical equipment was in warehouses and waiting for an ambulance, and each medical worker had a military rank, regularly underwent retraining in a military specialty (surgery or countering bacteriological warfare) and could be drafted into the army overnight.
Drivers, construction workers, and signallers were conscripted along with medics. During the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in the late 80's, my father, a construction worker, was drafted into the army at night. Returned home two months later.

 

In Canada there is a single payer system I would not call the Canadian system a commercial model. If you are referring to the preparation for pandemic I do not know any country that was not caught flat footed. The question is how we move forward and they are saying... "shut up and stay at home, all of you." How long? Well... "shut up and stay at home". Very convenient way of governing.

 

This is still a model closer to the commercial model. In the former USSR, stocks of medical equipment and medicines, field hospitals or facilities for creating hospitals were based on the entire population of the region. There were also quarantine plans and the procedure for the region's leaders to act on these plans.
It was like the Navy, with lifeboats designed to simultaneously rescue all the crew and passengers, not a partial evacuation.
Probably this was the case for all countries involved in the cold war.

 

Stabilize the patient, then see what life supports you can start removing, one step at a time, while monitoring to see if patient remains stable. At this point, dealing with such an unprecedented event, this approach seems reasonable to me.

Also, I doubt anyone in government finds this situation “convenient” by any stretch, and many of them are working 24/7 to try to keep people safe, fed and housed.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is sustainable, and it must start to be relaxed, when, where and how it makes sense. And not next year either, that’s not tenable. But letting us fall into the situation of Italy, Spain, NY, etc is not an option.

The govt/health resources at this point have been focused on “containment”, and things should hopefully start to shift to “management”, and dealing with local outbreaks as they occur. But “normal” is not going to come along until the vaccine is here, lets be honest. Do you really think parents will want their kids going back to school while this is still being spread? But that doesn’t mean a lot of other things can’t start being relaxed once things stabilize a bit more, again, where it makes sense.

 

What do you get when you have flocks of dunderheaded asswits flouting lockdown? Military intervention and possibly the return of martial law!

https://www.cnnphilippines.com/news/2020/4/19/afp-leaked-memo-preps-lockdown.html

 

Take care. Be careful out there.

 

Damn straight.

This is stupid.

 

This is one of those damned if you do damned if you don't choices for politicians. If the crisis is not as bad as possible they will be accused of overreacting. If the crisis is as predicted they get accused of not doing enough. Few people will say this porridge is just right.

Here in MB we are doing fine, we only have 10 or 12 people total hospitalized with COVID and a lot of people are saying this shutdown is crazy. Thing is this virus is so virulent it can go from zero to hospitals overwhelmed in a week. The video with Merkel above says it all. With an R0 of 1 or less, everything will be good. With an R0 of 1.1, hospitals get overwhelmed by October, 1.2 in August, 1.3 in June. What I have read so far is the "business as usual" R0 for this virus is around 3.........

My elderly mother is in an assisted living facility (I was in the process of moving her to long term care but that is all on hold for now). I'm not allowed to visit right now and that is really hard on her, but when I look at Quebec where half of their COVID deaths are in care homes I totally understand. I'd rather err on the side of caution than end up like Quebec, even if our hospitals are empty.

Of course we can't live like this forever. I expect in the coming weeks we will carefully start opening up, while keeping a very close eye on that R0. Non urgent surgery will probably start up again, some non-essential stores may reopen, sports teams are talking about resuming play (in empty arenas and stadiums). Slow and steady is going to be the order of the day.

 

You realize it does not mean anything right? A bit more...

That message of governments, particularly Canadian governments, federal and provincial, working tirelessly to keep us safe is wearing pretty thin. Working 24/7 to keep us fed? By still allowing farmers to grow food and deliver it to the cities? Allowing food stores to remain open? That must be hard.

Going back to health care and empty hospitals. In the province where the wait time for hip surgery is 6-12 months it will be 12-18 months. Not my case but I talked to people who were rescheduled well ... indefinitely. People are being asked not to die of any other reasons but Coronavirus. So if in a two years you see the statistic for 2020, 2021 showing a spike in cancer, heart attack, stroke related deaths, do not be surprised.

And I will go along with all this but give me a good reason, not grossly inflated mortality rate based on fake estimates.

 

On the topic of data, this is another interesting look at the data focused exlusively on the Rt value (a.k.a. reproduction rate). The data comes from the Covid-19 tracking project. All this is U.S. centric, fyi. Apologies to all of our global friends.

https://rt.live/