General COVID-19 Talk #4 MOD Warning

[Sol]

Lt. Dan...Careful. You might start another "conversation"

You guys believe in the moon...? If only you knew. It's just a deathstar.

 

[Bandit]

You guys believe in the moon...? If only you knew. It's just a deathstar.

 

[Sol]

View attachment 425392

LMFAOOO thank you

 

[Master Yoda]

Not really, it's quite the opposite. On April 1, Texas had 410 new cases and a rolling 7 day of 557. A few days ago it was 3,341 new cases and a 7 day of 3,863. They had over 4500 cases yesterday, they are starting to rise at pretty good clip. They had 82 deaths yesterday and it's been rising, higher than us despite having 10 million less people.

About 3 weeks after lifting restrictions cases started rising again, which makes sense. I'm pretty sure they only opened areas with lower case rates, which is saving them right now. Had everywhere opened they would be spiking.

Not sure where you're getting those numbers. The ones I found had 7 day average of 3,312 as of yesterday(4/21) and 3,697 on 4/1, and 4,909 on 3/10 which was the date everything opened back up. Number of deaths have been pretty steadily falling until this week where it looks like it's pretty much the same as last week. I'm getting these numbers from the worldometer website and from a google search.

We're now 6 weeks in and even if we see slight increases in the coming weeks, I don't know if you can say there's been a spike like the experts were expecting.
People didn't suddenly stop wearing masks because they weren't forced to and most businesses still require masks to be worn inside anyways.

 

[Schrute farms]

I think Master Yoda is correct on this one:

 

[Schrute farms]

Duplicate

 

[Lt Dan]

Duplicate

I have two avatar suggestions

and

 

[KINGS17]

The worst thing is it's almost a no-win battle. There are so many people now there aren't enough services, and the way our health insurance is set up here can result in barriers as well. This isn't the last pandemic like situation we are going to have, as population grows they will become more common. We can all see the problems but coming up with solutions is going to be very difficult, and likely expensive.

People are also more open now and more socially aware, but along with that comes a lack of mental toughness. Not with everyone, but it's a general trend - people just aren't as resilient and don't deal with things as well as they did 40 years ago. We are kind of coddled, to be honest, life is a lot easier than it used to be.

 

[KINGS17]

I will bet any amount of money that Fauci's predictions over the last year would have been far more accurate than any you made

My issue with Fauci's predictions is he has admitted to misleading the public early-on in the virus on the wearing of masks. He has not been a straight shooter with the American public, and the information he provides is at times designed to create a desired behavior. As Bill Maher recently said, "Just give it to me straight Doc."

The other problem I have, and Fauci has stated it isn't his job to focus on anything but the spread of the virus, is elected officials have given too much weight to "virus spread only" with little regard to the long-term impact their policies and decisions are having on the economy, mental health, and the education of our children.

The goal posts have been moved out of the stadium by some people now. If deaths and hospitalizations are under control, it's time to move forward.

 

[Lt Dan]

My issue with Fauci's predictions is he has admitted to misleading the public early-on in the virus on the wearing of masks. He has not been a straight shooter with the American public, and the information he provides is at times designed to create a desired behavior. As Bill Maher recently said, "Just give it to me straight Doc."

The other problem I have, and Fauci has stated it isn't his job to focus on anything but the spread of the virus, is elected officials have given too much weight to "virus spread only" with little regard to the long-term impact their policies and decisions are having on the economy, mental health, and the education of our children.

The goal posts have been moved out of the stadium by some people now. If deaths and hospitalizations are under control, it's time to move forward.

Totally agree with the bolded portion. That was handled very poorly


Covid is still raging in a few places

We are almost done , just not yet.

I think a good analogy is a pot of water. We have a few bubbles of water at the bottom, but we can't keep lifting the lid the lid to check on it.
We are close, but we just need to be patient for another six weeks- 2 months.

these are the changes to the map since Monday. There is more bad than good in the color movement

Michigan is back to the lighter red from the darker red

From orange to red:
Illinois


From red to orange:
Mass
Conn

From yellow to Orange:
'Bama
Louisiana
Kansas

 

[Lt Dan]

0.5 % positives today
Hosp down 10 from yesterday and at 100!
ICU at (I think) the lowest since we have been tracking his shit . down from 22 yesterday


Rolling 7 day cases
Fri-65
Thu-69!
Wed-53
Tues-127
Mon-63
Sun-79
Sat-80


Avg of 76.57 down from 83.29


Rolling 7 day death count

Fri-8
Thu-8
Wed-2
Tues-4
Mon-0
Sun5
Sat-5

Avg of 4.57 down from 5.85

And for reference on how far we have come. This is from 7/28

I think it is safe to say that it is time to do the dance of joy!

 

[Bandit]

I saw the second one first and was like “what happened???” Whew.

 

[Lt Dan]

I saw the second one first and was like “what happened???” Whew.

I hope the dance of joy cleared up any confusion

 

[Lt Dan]

For the "It's over open everything up without restrictions crowd"

Researchers are investigating if a COVID-19 with multiple mutations found in India is more deadly and resistant to existing vaccines


India is getting wrecked right now. And they have another variant. Here is the scary part

The Times of India spoke to Vinod Scaria, a researcher at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in India, who said the triple-mutant was also an "immune escape variant" — a strain that helps the virus attach to human cells and hide from the immune system.

He added that it could have evolved from the double-mutant variant — which experts say is likely behind the recent surge of COVID in the country.
Sreedhar Chinnaswamy, a researcher from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in India, told the Times of India that the variant also carried the E484K mutation, a characteristic found in the variants first identified in South Africa and Brazil.
"In other words, you may not be safe from this variant even if you were previously infected by another strain, or even if you have been vaccinated," Chinnaswamy said.

The good news

"Singapore researchers have done some work trying to link the mutations with clinical outcomes and transmissibility and have found no link between more severity or more transmissibility with newer mutants compared with the original lineages of SARS-CoV2," Tambyah said.
Other scientists studying COVID have detected quadruple- and quintuple-mutants in samples as well, he said, without it necessarily affecting how well vaccines work.
"There is good data suggesting that the immune system, not just antibodies, can respond to multiple different mutants," Tambyah said.

But look at India and realize that could still happen here or nearby in Mexico or Brazil and spread here

 

[Fishhead]

Not sure where you're getting those numbers. The ones I found had 7 day average of 3,312 as of yesterday(4/21) and 3,697 on 4/1, and 4,909 on 3/10 which was the date everything opened back up. Number of deaths have been pretty steadily falling until this week where it looks like it's pretty much the same as last week. I'm getting these numbers from the worldometer website and from a google search.

We're now 6 weeks in and even if we see slight increases in the coming weeks, I don't know if you can say there's been a spike like the experts were expecting.
People didn't suddenly stop wearing masks because they weren't forced to and most businesses still require masks to be worn inside anyways.

I got it from the Bing widget which compiles data from many different sources. Microsoft Bing COVID-19 Tracker

The cases are on the right. There will probably be some significant variation between websites because the Texas data sites are very lacking in detail like we see out here. That's probably by design. Even conservative estimates are seeing around a 6% increase in cases over the last 2 weeks, and their tests per 100K people are less than half of what we do out here.

I think their opening was official on March 10, so yeah about 6 weeks. According to the site I was on, things started trending upwards 3 weeks after the opening. As I mentioned, Texas data is sketchy compared to other places. Look at the graphic they released a couple days ago:



Notice the cases data is not in easy to read chronological order, it's confusing as hell to read and it looks like cases are dropping. But look at the cases on the 20th and 21st, they are way higher. It's hard to trust their data when it's presented in a misleading way like that. So probably not a devastating spike like predicted, but they are definitely not staying flat and things could get bad quickly if vaccination is slowing there like has been reported.

 

[Master Yoda]

For the "It's over open everything up without restrictions crowd"

Researchers are investigating if a COVID-19 with multiple mutations found in India is more deadly and resistant to existing vaccines


India is getting wrecked right now. And they have another variant. Here is the scary part






The good news



But look at India and realize that could still happen here or nearby in Mexico or Brazil and spread here

I'm more in the "let's open things up and have people/businesses decide for themselves what is appropriate for them, but still encourage people to be cautious" crowd.

But it just sounds like the researcher is speculating that the vaccine maybe won't be effective against this variant.
One thing to note is that India has nowhere near the vaccination level as the US, less than 10% has had at least 1 shot and only about 1.5% are fully vaccinated.
So it's hard to argue that India is getting hit hard because this variant is a "immune escape variant".

 

[Lt Dan]

So it's hard to argue that India is getting hit hard because this variant is a "immune escape variant".

India is getting hammered because it's India. Large population density. Hard to mitigate. Very poor parts. Sanitation, etc.

The fact they have multiple variants is the concerning part

 

[Master Yoda]

I got it from the Bing widget which compiles data from many different sources. Microsoft Bing COVID-19 Tracker

The cases are on the right. There will probably be some significant variation between websites because the Texas data sites are very lacking in detail like we see out here. That's probably by design. Even conservative estimates are seeing around a 6% increase in cases over the last 2 weeks, and their tests per 100K people are less than half of what we do out here.

I think their opening was official on March 10, so yeah about 6 weeks. According to the site I was on, things started trending upwards 3 weeks after the opening. As I mentioned, Texas data is sketchy compared to other places. Look at the graphic they released a couple days ago:



Notice the cases data is not in easy to read chronological order, it's confusing as hell to read and it looks like cases are dropping. But look at the cases on the 20th and 21st, they are way higher. It's hard to trust their data when it's presented in a misleading way like that. So probably not a devastating spike like predicted, but they are definitely not staying flat and things could get bad quickly if vaccination is slowing there like has been reported.

Yes, the Texas DSHS data looks strange not being in chronological order (looks like it is arranged in Mon~Sun order) but it's really just another way of showing the 7-day trend/average.

And the Bing numbers show 0 cases for 3/29 & 3/30, which is obviously not true, so that's probably why the 7-day average is so low on 4/1.
It says Bing collects data from multiple sources and the worldometer site I think get their numbers from government sites.
And a google search, taken from New York Times, gives you a different set of numbers, albeit similar to the worldometer numbers.
I have no idea how all these sources could have different numbers though.

 

[Master Yoda]

India is getting hammered because it's India. Large population density. Hard to mitigate. Very poor parts. Sanitation, etc.

The fact they have multiple variants is the concerning part

Agreed. To me it's more of a surprise that they weren't hit harder before.

 

[Lt Dan]

Agreed. To me it's more of a surprise that they weren't hit harder before.

So much this.

It almost seems like every place gets it's wave.
Canada was heckling us for a while and now it's their turn

 

[fivehole32]

I'm not sure if you saw Robin Lehners comments regarding vaccinations, he said the NHL basically told the players if you get the vaccine you will be able to get back to normal as far as with your teammates. He said after many have gotten it, the NHL says no it would give a competitive advantage to teams that can get the vaccine. As Lehner said, "Its immoral to do that." As many here have echoed before Lehner brings up the mental aspect of lockdown how its going to cause a Pandora's box of mental issues going forward, not just for players, but for communities as a whole.

 

[Lt Dan]

Big increases in hospital and ICU today

 

[Papa Mocha 15]

My issue with Fauci's predictions is he has admitted to misleading the public early-on in the virus on the wearing of masks. He has not been a straight shooter with the American public, and the information he provides is at times designed to create a desired behavior. As Bill Maher recently said, "Just give it to me straight Doc."

The other problem I have, and Fauci has stated it isn't his job to focus on anything but the spread of the virus, is elected officials have given too much weight to "virus spread only" with little regard to the long-term impact their policies and decisions are having on the economy, mental health, and the education of our children.

The goal posts have been moved out of the stadium by some people now. If deaths and hospitalizations are under control, it's time to move forward.

I don't know. I'm gonna disagree some here on a few fronts.

First, I think it was the people who decided not to lock down when needed screwed it up for everyone else. There was a good chunk of people out there who decided they weren't going to mask up, social distance and ended up killing a lot of people. A lot of people went to work, held COVID parties in spite of any health recommendations. If they just masked up, I would argue our economy and schools would have been open much sooner. Many of these surges were timed with holidays like 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, XMAS and New Years.

I remember in the 80s, Reagan coined the phrase, the worst thing you will ever here is "I'm from the Gov. and I'm here to help". Basically, casting a painted brush of don't ever trust the gov and any programs and what they can do and that has perpetuated to this day as a platform and if we continue to shovel crap, people will continue to eat it. It has resulted in such a fierce level of independence that places like Texas got themselves off the grid and then their electric grid collapsed. So now, anytime a recommendation comes up, there is that cry to run the other way because of oppression regardless of the cost. There was a pretty intense fight against masking and social distancing and I\in this case, it was 500,000 lives. Significantly more than most other countries. In fact, we're pretty close to 1st in number of deaths here. Now it's moving onto antivaxers and vaccine hesitancy which is causing an increase in some states. It's really no wonder the states that are blowing up are largely those that feed into that kind of rhetoric.

Third, The White House at the time sat on the fact that they knew this was airborne and left the hospitals to fend for itself, which decimated the health care work force. More than 1400 nurses have died which is more than multiple wars combined. They knew the info but our CDC, which was taking direction from the WH instead of acting independently, was stifled and gave out crap guidance. I remember well being told to take off my mask in the hospital because they were afraid of scaring patients. Many of us were told NOT to wear masks because the CDC hadn't said so yet and to find out later that the WH knew all along this was Airborne put a lot of people 6 feet under.

I think Fauci was put in an no win position. He did some pretty crazy things such as contributing to our HIV cocktail which we still use today and kept EBOLA off our shores. I don't think he was allowed to work effectively and was painted as indecisive because 45 needed someone to blame was used as rhetoric to compete in an election.

I think that the economy was taken into account, as well as schools, but human life comes first. We've sort of sucked here. We have handled this whole pandemic pretty poorly and could have/should have done much better given the right leadership was in place.

Hope you have a good day though. Always fun to disagree.

 

[Lt Dan]

 

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Third, The White House at the time sat on the fact that they knew this was airborne ....

Hmm, first time seeing/hearing this - is there a link/source for this, by any chance? Incidentally: not being combative (FWIW, I agree with a good portion of your post); really am curious here...