Coronavirus

[AlanSubie4Life]

Perhaps a re-opening can be staged to start with the youngest, and then expand if successful.

You did mentioned prevalence of C19 as being an issue...the question is the acceptable level required to proceed with a limited reopening.

In the context of extremely low rates of community transmission (consistently at much less than 1 case per 100k I would say), I think that is probably a good approach. But with higher rates of transmission, you're asking teachers/parents/custodians/cafeteria staff/administrators to take an unacceptable risk, unless you can devise a way to only expose young & healthy & fit employees to the children, and have zero exposure for all of the people over 40 to both the children and the young teachers.

 

[SageBrush]

Gov J. Polis of Colorado, around the time he pivoted from saying that the state cannot mandate mask use to now issuing a mandate:

The emerging scientific data is clear: wearing a mask doesn’t only protect others, it also significantly reduces your own risk of getting Coronavirus. So if you’re a selfish bastard and wearing a mask to protect others isn’t enough of a reason to do so, then maybe protecting yourself is ?

 

[Webeevdrivers]

Anybody know where the world meter site no longer having a reliable source of info on American Covid cases, deaths etc, where do they get their info now or is just “this our best guess” sceenario. Would the WHO even bother trying to track American info or are they in the same boat?

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Anybody know where the world meter site no longer having a reliable source of info on American Covid cases, deaths etc, where do they get their info now or is just “this our best guess” sceenario. Would the WHO even bother trying to track American info or are they in the same boat?

The debate has been about hospitalization data primarily. But media tracking sites & worldometer still compile all the case/hospitalization/etc. data at a county & state level. At the moment there hasn't been any change in what is visible at that level from what I can see.

It's really a change in whether the hospitalization info is reported through HHS (Health & Human Services) or through the CDC, from what I understand. They wanted better control of this data, allegedly, to be able to more precisely distribute therapeutics to affected hospitals.

All quite terrible to take responsibility from the CDC, of course.

 

[Webeevdrivers]

The debate has been about hospitalization data primarily. But media tracking sites & worldometer still compile all the case/hospitalization/etc. data at a county & state level. At the moment there hasn't been any change in what is visible at that level from what I can see.

It's really a change in whether the hospitalization info is reported through HHS or through the CDC, from what I understand. They wanted better control of this data, allegedly, to be able to more precisely distribute therapeutics to affected hospitals.

All quite terrible to take responsibility from the CDC, of course.

Thank you. Can you clarify HHS?

 

[S4WRXTTCS]

can someone explain to me why the data can't go to both agencies?

I see the trump view - he wants to control it and suppress it. we all see that. but what is the legal reason for making hospitals choose only ONE place to update, for their data?

and what kind of punishment would happen if a hospital refused to comply? and if they choose to dual-submit like I'm suggesting?

One way of looking at it is that it's simply a Republican looking to the private sector to solve a problem. That problem is enabling fast reporting offered by a more modern system.

But, then if you look into who handles that data for HHS you'll see that it's a company called Palantir Technologies. It just happens to be cofounded by Peter Thiel who was an early Trump supporter.

So is Trump trying to hide the data or is he rewarding friends?

I don't have enough understanding of everything to really say.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/16/21323458/palantir-ipo-hhs-protect-peter-thiel-cia-intelligence

 

[SMAlset]

One way of looking at it is that it's simply a Republican looking to the private sector to solve a problem. That problem is enabling fast reporting offered by a more modern system.

But, then if you look into who handles that data for HHS you'll see that it's a company called Palantir Technologies. It just happens to be cofounded by Peter Thiel who was an early Trump supporter.

So is Trump trying to hide the data or is he rewarding friends?

I don't have enough understanding of everything to really say.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/16/21323458/palantir-ipo-hhs-protect-peter-thiel-cia-intelligence

Did not know about Thiel being the co-founder. Interesting. An article I read in the last few days said that when this government contract came up a few months back it got approved with no bidding on it. Hmm.

There's another interesting area that Palantir is involved in beyond the Covid records according to this Business Insider article - ICE. HHS is paying Peter Thiel's Palantir $24.9 million to track coronavirus. Lawmakers want to know if it's using that data to help ICE deport people.

Here's a July 1 letter a number of Senators/Congress members sent to HHS Secretary Azar on questions about the "HHS Protect" project: https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.06.30 Letter to HHS on COVID-19 data privacy.pdf Kind of eye opening about some of the info reportedly being collected on people and stored in Palantir's megadatabase. A read of this letter given what's stated therein is quite alarming given what is being collected.

Thank you. Can you clarify HHS?

Department of Health and Human Services.

 

[NikolaACDC]

Thank you. Can you clarify HHS?

United States Department of Health and Human Services - Wikipedia

 

[wdolson]

I was hoping my question would catch your eye, you seem to be very knowledgeable. I'm honestly and curiously asking. not trolling or bs etc. maybe speculating yes.



Correct. I'm just an engineer, and ethics is rarely a factor when solving problems in my lane of expertise. Think wall street. A thought that came into my mind is, that similar to war, (voluntary) soliders are sent to die (at least proportionally, not necessarily all of them), a similar service/occupation could apply to pandemics.



Your president is not a factor either, where I live. However, I think a study is needed to explain why the disease is rampant in some places more than others, though I would assume that most people act more or less responsibly (at least comparably). For example, USA and Asia are the only places where masks are stronglty advocated (you can check this from webcams around the world), are they only useful after a certain threshold of cases per capita?



As an engineer, I would be interested in details such as at what distance do you really need a mask. Do you benefit from a mask when jogging? When shopping? Shopping mall? What are the tipping points of statistically significant difference. I simply would be curious to know those things, I'm not advocating aginst using them as precautionary measures regardless of their exact effectiveness. It's more about "where the rubber meets the road", or in this case, where the protection of using the precaution exceeds the shame of wearing the mask.



That's a more binary discussion, whether it's going very well or quite badly in these areas. I don't have open questions there.



It's quite frustrating, when you are researching for a product on (for example) Amazon, and someone says in the review "This product is crap, while there are perfectly working alternatives out there." without caring to tip on the alternatives. Would you bother to summarize, in your eyes, the answer for the second set of questions (or parts of it)? All data I have found is bundled in such a way that those particular vectors are not tanglible.



Hell no I wouldn't volunteer to be a cannon fodder either. But I don't believe finding volunteers would be a problem, it would be a honorable service to the mankind.

If a society has very few cases, or none detected combined with an effective case tracing system, they can relax the rules because the odds that the people you run into don't have COVID is extremely high. In a society with a lot of cases going around, people have to be more cautious because anybody you encounter could have it and they might not even know it.

It will be interesting to see what the Republicans Stooges in the Senate and Congress who worship at the altar of the Cult of Personality that is Donald Trump will do when their states and counties are told to fly blind and where information is actively suppressed. It's obvious that His Orangeness believes that if he suppresses the information the problem will go away. It's sort of like magically cutting the cases in half by cutting the testing. Then the cases will go way down, just fade away, and he will get reelected. It's astonishingly foolish and corrupt but then again Trump sets benchmarks everyday for things we have never seen before. God save us from this f****** idiot.

Authoritarian regimes run on keeping the people in the dark. Information is hidden from view as much as possible. In liberal democracies, most information is freely available. When people are kept in the dark, it makes it tougher for any opposition to the dictator to organize and generally makes it easier for the dictator to stay in power.

But in a pandemic, the free flow of information is key to shutting down spread. Playing hide the ball with the information just gives the disease an open lane to spread out of control. In this pandemic, the countries with the worst outbreaks are those run by authoritarians. The US is the best reported disaster because it's being run by an authoritarian, but still has the free press of a liberal democracy. China, Russia, Brazil, and other authoritarian regimes are lying about their outbreaks and getting away with it because their media can't report on the discrepancies between the official reports and reality.

The US may still have the worst outbreak in the world too. Other authoritarian regimes are making concerted efforts to shut down spread of the virus, even if they aren't telling people the truth. The US government is both lying about things, and undermining efforts to control the spread.

It's on the web so it must be true...saw some comments last night in this Reddit thread
Warnings of Possible Cover-Up in Progress as Trump Orders Hospitals to Stop Sending Covid-19 Data to CDC : politics

------
"soveraign / Kansas

I am one of the people that reports to this system.
If we don't report to the system we will not receive relief funds or medications
There is no method to continue reporting to the old system
We also used to report directly to the state, now the state says they will pull data from HHS. We publish our numbers publicly, as many other hospital systems do. I'll be keeping an eye on official state numbers to see if they match up with what the systems are reporting.
...
Edit to address a few questions: The data regarding new cases, inpatient totals, and deaths are public and picked up by local media regularly. This is generally true for any hospital that publishes these data. We also directly report to our local county, so it would be a lot of effort to suppress our numbers from the public. In that sense we do have some checks on the system. My understanding is that groups like Johns Hopkins and 1point3acres scrape state and county reports to capture their numbers independent of those published by the CDC. We are also just one of like 6000 hospitals in the U.S. and unless there is some edict that tells us to stop reporting to the public it will be difficult to hide stats without A LOT of people noticing.

Q's about county data: coronavirus.1point3acres.com has been very useful for tracking local trends. There are others as well."
-----
"Silent_Lightning

I’m an epi analyst for the NHSN system.
Piggy backing to say that we’ve basically shut our Covid reporting module down, so point 2 above is very true. HHS Protect is the only national data system available now."
-----

In the US keeping this sort of information secret is not going to work. Watch Trump try to classify it.

Unfortunately IOM's foolishness on this continues to be parroted including by outfits like consumer labs. I'm still astonished that they've dug in their heels on this and that vitamin D toxicity which they present as a kind of Boogeyman frankly is presented as just as great a danger as vitamin D deficiency. That's total bull****. Don't listen to that kind of crap. It's very hard to actually get toxic vitamin D levels defined as greater than 100 nanomoles/mL. You'd have to take ~10,000 IU every day.

I sometimes take vitamin D in the winter when its dark for days on end, but I need to be careful. I will take 200 IU a day and at that level I've developed overdose symptoms. Though it usually takes weeks to build up enough in my system.

My genetics come from north of the European continent and when I did genetic testing my Y chromosome originated in northern Scandinavia. Because of the long dark winters, I'm genetically programmed to store vitamin D very efficiently. My partner on the other hand has most of her genetics from the tropics and she needs a couple thousand IU a day to keep her vitamin D levels up.

I've essentially run the vitamin D overdose experiment three or four times on myself. I get a very specific symptom, my body loses the ability to retain water. I will get severely dehydrated and it all gets pumped out immediately. Every time it's happened, I've been on a vitamin D supplement for at least a few weeks, and it does away in about a week after I quit taking the vitamin D.

Obviously. People in the Ebola areas were smart enough to be afraid of the disease. Covid-19 is puny compared to Ebola, but the public response to it has turned it into an international train wreck.

Ebola is more fatal and pretty devastating to the body, but the incubation period is short and people are only contagious when they are clearly sick. It's pretty obvious when someone has ebola. It has less ability to travel around than COVID. With COVID a lot of people can have it and not know it and while there is some evidence that asymptomatic cases may be less contagious, we really aren't sure yet.

Ebola has never had many cases escape Africa and the few that did were isolated and contained very quickly. COVID has made it's way around the world and back at this point. China is having another outbreak and it appears to be the European strain this time. Though getting straight news out of the Chinese is difficult.

 

[Webeevdrivers]

United States Department of Health and Human Services - Wikipedia

Thank you. We are Canadian but have a winter home in Riverside county. We are not up on all the American acronyms.

We have been drilling down thru the worldmeter site to keep an eye on our home location. We volunteer in our community there and hope to provide info on wether we will be available this year. Obviously we can’t trust any info that is routed through the whitehouse and can’t seem to find a link directly to any Riverside county data. No decision is required for a couple months yet and we have family that will be there by then to hopefully give us a better idea what it’s like on the ground. Available facilities etc. Not a good idea to go to an area that is already over stressed either for ourselves or for the residents and members of our community who live there. Time will tell.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

No decision is required for a couple months yet and we have family that will be there by then to hopefully give us a better idea what it’s like on the ground. Available facilities etc. Not a good idea to go to an area that is already over stressed either for ourselves or for the residents and members of our community who live there. Time will tell.

In the current situation it seems not advisable, but I guess it depends on how things go.

coronavirus

 

[NikolaACDC]

I guess you say what they pay you to say

McEnany: 'Science should not stand in the way' of schools reopening

"'Science should not stand in the way' of schools reopening, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany says"

"White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday emphasized that schools reopening this fall shouldn't be contingent on science surrounding coronavirus, but then claimed the "science is on our side here" as the pandemic continues unabated."
"The science should not stand in the way of this,” she added, saying it is "perfectly safe" to fully reopen all classrooms."
-------------------
"She also quoted former Stanford Neuroradiology Chief Dr. Scott Atlas, who has appeared on Fox News to call the debate around reopening schools "hysteria."

Neuroradiology...not quite an epidemiologist, but I agree, it's a brain problem...


"McEnany also said that doing virtual learning in the fall would make the United states an outlier" among other Western countries."

Correct. That is so because:

"...the U.S. is one of the only Western nation still setting daily records of new COVID-19 cases and deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Total Coronavirus cases in the U.S. passed 3.5 million Thursday."

 

[Webeevdrivers]

In the current situation it seems not advisable, but I guess it depends on how things go.

coronavirus

Agreed. Oh and thanks for the link.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Thank you. We are Canadian but have a winter home in Riverside county. We are not up on all the American acronyms.

We have been drilling down thru the worldmeter site to keep an eye on our home location. We volunteer in our community there and hope to provide info on wether we will be available this year. Obviously we can’t trust any info that is routed through the whitehouse and can’t seem to find a link directly to any Riverside county data. No decision is required for a couple months yet and we have family that will be there by then to hopefully give us a better idea what it’s like on the ground. Available facilities etc. Not a good idea to go to an area that is already over stressed either for ourselves or for the residents and members of our community who live there. Time will tell.

Riverside County has double the number of daily cases as Canada right now with a positive rate of ~20% vs. ~1%.
I would stay in Canada unless we keep the California COVID party going and manage to achieve our herd immunity goal before winter.

 

[N5329K]

"'Science should not stand in the way' of schools reopening, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany says"

So qualifying for the Heaven's Gate honor roll.
And what is hiding in the beautiful ionized tale of Comet NEOWISE anyway?
Robin

 

[dhanson865]

 

[dhanson865]

I sometimes take vitamin D in the winter when its dark for days on end, but I need to be careful. I will take 200 IU a day and at that level I've developed overdose symptoms. Though it usually takes weeks to build up enough in my system.

My genetics come from north of the European continent and when I did genetic testing my Y chromosome originated in northern Scandinavia. Because of the long dark winters, I'm genetically programmed to store vitamin D very efficiently. My partner on the other hand has most of her genetics from the tropics and she needs a couple thousand IU a day to keep her vitamin D levels up.

I've essentially run the vitamin D overdose experiment three or four times on myself. I get a very specific symptom, my body loses the ability to retain water. I will get severely dehydrated and it all gets pumped out immediately. Every time it's happened, I've been on a vitamin D supplement for at least a few weeks, and it does away in about a week after I quit taking the vitamin D.

Did you mean to say 2,000 IU or are you really talking about 200 IU or maybe you were thinking 200 mcg? I've been using 1,000 IU in the summer and 2,000 IU in the winter.

A random google result took me to Office of Dietary Supplements - Vitamin D

 

[wdolson]

Did you mean to say 2,000 IU or are you really talking about 200 IU or maybe you were thinking 200 mcg? I've been using 1,000 IU in the summer and 2,000 IU in the winter.

A random google result took me to Office of Dietary Supplements - Vitamin D

View attachment 565441

I just checked. It looks like it's getting hard to find, but it was 400 IU.

- Swanson Health Products

 

[dhanson865]

Veteran dies of COVID-19 complications after posting on Facebook that he refused to wear a mask | myfox8.com

Richard’s family says he tested positive for COVID-19 on July 1 and died three days later.

The 37-year-old reportedly did not have any pre-existing health conditions.

 

[linux-works]

Thank you. Can you clarify HHS?

His Highness, Supreme.

that's where we are now sending the numbers.

to His Highness. the bigliest. the huuugest. only the best numbers.