Coronavirus

[AlanSubie4Life]

How many died because NYC let their subway run? Was it worth the cost? Because that's why they peaked so high.

You do not appear to be stating what would be acceptable to you...please let us know what you would recommend. I know the post was not directed at you, but moving to whataboutism seems like a distraction.

 

[traxila]

How many died because NYC let their subway run? Was it worth the cost? Because that's why they peaked so high.

I agree. I live in NYC. Have no idea how we are supposed to move forward with the subway. Really stumped. Even assuming UVC lights all over the system during the overnight hours, what does that do for the one contagious person in a packed train the next day?

 

[MXLRplus]

I agree. I live in NYC. Have no idea how we are supposed to move forward with the subway. Really stumped. Even assuming UVC lights all over the system during the overnight hours, what does that do for the one contagious person in a packed train the next day?

And buses and cabs and walking crowded streets.

Your life is now ended. Watch TV and call Door Dash until Death knocks on your door. It's the safest thing to do. And you'll be saving other lives, even children's lives, right?

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

I agree. I live in NYC. Have no idea how we are supposed to move forward with the subway. Really stumped. Even assuming UVC lights all over the system during the overnight hours, what does that do for the one contagious person in a packed train the next day?

I think you need a multi billion dollar system supported by the federal government, which eliminates the virus in your community ASAP (or at least drives it to extremely low levels). Unfortunately I think you probably have a couple more weeks of cool down before more aggressively opening up.

Seoul has a subway. There is hope.

 

[traxila]

And buses and cabs and walking crowded streets.

Your life is now ended. Watch TV and call Door Dash until Death knocks on your door. It's the safest thing to do. And you'll be saving other lives, even children's lives, right?

You are attacking me. My question was not directed at you but OK.

I freely admit that I have not protested in the streets over the past few decades about not shutting down the economy during flu season to try and save thirty to sixty thousand lives. None of us were. This was considered that cost of doing business on the Earth.

So now again, what do you consider the acceptable cost of doing business with the COVID outbreak? Yeah, I know we will do our best and social distancing and yada yada, but what ballpark number for you yields an acceptable number of dead? What number would most definitely be off limits to even consider? Where are you at with this?

Or are you going to ridicule my video streaming habits again?

BTW, I am considered essential and have been continuously working, so f*&k you.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Thanks. Excellent article, repeating the same points emphasized here over and over again. To be clear, this method has been known to be the solution since February - it’s a shame we haven’t done it - we could have saved ourselves trillions of dollars - and over 100k lives.

“Following this model, yellow zones would require 2,500 tests for every daily death.”

Was nice to see my favorite metric mentioned. This is definitely the level we need to shoot for - as they say, it works out to 5 million tests per day. Been mentioned many times in this thread.

While we have squandered months already, at least now we can do this and stop repeating the same mistake over and over again (the definition of insanity!) - it will save us a lot of money. I’d recommend allocating four times as much money to the effort ($300 billion), just to be sure it is enough - it’s probably the cheapest insurance we have ever encountered. Any excess can be allocated to surveillance for influenzas, etc. (we could probably eliminate the flu season and save thousands of lives every year through a variety of well funded interventions) and making sure that we have a system that prevents us from ever having this type of problem again.

Only if the tests work, but thats a separate coverup held closely by clinical research efforts. Fact is, you can run an experiment 100 times and get different results bc of variation in all else. Then bury the neg results just like Stormy Daniels to never see light of day. Happens all the time. Notice how many companies claiming promissing results... that's management talking most likely.

 

[traxila]

I think you need a multi billion dollar system supported by the federal government, which eliminates the virus in your community ASAP (or at least drives it to extremely low levels). Unfortunately I think you probably have a couple more weeks of cool down before more aggressively opening up.

Seoul has a subway. There is hope.

Yes, but very different population in SK. And, of course, an efficient and competent response to the outbreak.

 

[dhanson865]

"No beds, packed morgues: Mumbai hospitals near collapse
"They would just give us medicines and leave," Ravi (not his real name) told AFP. Staff in the 1,300-bed facility were "overworked and tired", he said, with sometimes three patients per bed.

Now he too has contracted the virus and is in another hospital -- but only after four facilities refused to admit him. "We don't have the infrastructure for this disease," he said...

No beds, packed morgues: Mumbai hospitals near collapse

And they are just at the start of this thing.

 

[dfwatt]

Surprised there arent more likes on this. This doesnt sound like an open minded Tesla crowd willing to consider the fact that there is no money in Vit C. Ask any doctor how many classes they had on vitamins (vs heart disease). Its been one forever, but I hv older info on this. Certainly nothing on vit for treatment beyond some scurvy discussion.

Let's be clear about what the bulk of the issue is here. No question vitamin C and for that matter vitamin D (which isn't really a vitamin) is essential to immune function. No question that vitamin C is taken up in large amounts by neutrophils (which use oxidative burst in immune attack - unclear what role Vit C might play there whether anti or pro-oxidant). No question that vitamin C is essential to at least 10 to 15 enzymatic reactions and via that essential to our health.

The question is whether IV pharmacologic doses of Vitamin C - in other words hundreds and hundreds of times higher then we would ever take in as a food substance - is a treatment for severe pneumonia/viremia. The bone of contention is whether or not there is adequate scientific evidence to support the claims that these high IV doses are a workable and effective treatment. We are still awaiting the results of double-blind studies on this. That will decide the issue. In the meantime you have claims by several members of the forum and you have skepticism on the part of other people. I'm a skeptical-show-me-the-money (good scientific data) kind-of-guy. The results of those studies will answer the debate. I for one would be thrilled if it turns out that high-dose IV vitamin C is in fact a safe and effective treatment in viral pneumonia/sepsis. But the conflict is about whether or not Claims can be made in the absence of adequate double-blind results.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Only if the tests work, but thats a separate coverup held closely by clinical research efforts. Fact is, you can run an experiment 100 times and get different results bc of variation in all else. Then bury the neg results just like Stormy Daniels to never see light of day. Happens all the time. Notice how many companies claiming promissing results... that's management talking most likely.

You’ll have to elaborate. I’m listening.

 

[mikevbf]

Here is a summary of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital's update from yesterday:

"NYP Broadcasts will change to once a week on Thursdays. We have less news to report all the time. So see you next Thursday!


On the National Scene there is a lot happening across the country. Some states are starting to reopen. They may be opening too fast. Here Cuomo has extended the stay at home order to June 13th. In upstate areas they are starting to cautiously reopen.

Today: we are at 982 patients, 353 of them on ventilators. First time below 1000 since March. The inpatients are quite sick.

Pediatric multisystem inflammatory disease: it’s not covid and its not infection. It is a reaction to covid post.

On the vaccine front: there is a lot of work being done but the likelihood of a vaccine for Fall seems quite remote.

MRNA vaccine through NIH: this is in phase 1 trials.

Testing: PCR test (diagnostic test) Antibody test (tells if you’ve been exposed)

New recommendation if you test positive for Covid is to isolate for 10 days before coming back to work.

PPE: there are not enough small size N95 masks as the other sizes. We have enough today and for the next number of weeks but we are looking out into the months ahead. Continue to conserve masks."

 

[dfwatt]

Because they have a captive audience. We paid full tuition and housing for Zoom classes taught by Luddites. A string between two tin cans is beyond the capacity of most the tenured professors.
They make more money with less staff and still get government COVID money.
And it's political. They are trying to get a 100% mail-in balloting with ballots collected by paid DNC employees.
It's an easy sell when branded as COVID. Shutting down schools is great advertising for the apocalypse. It's hilarious that the colleges in our state saw little to no infections and zero deaths when they closed them indefinitely.

The only thing that might be more useless than our governor is a 2020-2024 diploma from a CalState or UC campus.

We no longer have a toilet paper shortage, we are now told to use the Constitution for that purpose.

Your self-righteousness and claim of any version here of the moral High Ground is just astonishing. This while you are supporting (or at least not critiquing) a grotesquely incompetent bungled and disorganized Federal effort. 15 other countries with far less in the way of resources than the United States have basically beat in the coronavirus with competent epidemiologically informed Public Health practice. We on the other hand have rolled out machismo denial on steroids, botched the PCR testing so that we cannot do the testing at scale, and have not absorbed that if you do not contain this efffectively (and this means testing, contact tracing, and isolation,) you are left with much more Draconian and punitive and economically costly shut down. And when that ends as it must, you then must be able to do what you could not do in the beginning which again is testing at scale, contact tracing and isolation of cases to prevent transmission chains from going exponential once again. Those are the biological facts on the ground. All your ranting does not change them.

Your righteousness and victimization are badly misplaced and misinformed. Here are the facts of what other countries have done with less resources, less technology, and less money. Wake up and stop whining. You're missing the forest (big picture seen below) for the obsessive focus on the trees.

 

[Doggydogworld]

Sorrento finds a coronavirus antibody that blocks viral infection 100% in preclinical lab experiments

Sorrento has a long history of making unfounded claims and using boiler rooms to raise desperately needed cash. It does not have a long history, or frankly any history, of treatments for infectious diseases.

 

[dqd88]

You can get a good idea from this English language report here. It compares Switzerland and Sweden in some detail. Similar sized populations and similar "lockdown" measures with overall quite different results.
The economic consequences are also different. In both countries you have to consider very large regional differences.
Certainly death rates in Sweden (about twice those in Switzerland) may have to be looked at more closely. They are not purely attributable to different accounting methods.

Statistically the difference is not very meaningful.

The big take away is one that people are willfully ignoring. And that is this: You all said if there was no lockdown that there would be mass death and doom. You had no evidence to support that claim.

What Sweden has done is proved you wrong. Now man up and admit it.
With no lockdown, the USA would likely be about where it is now. Not much difference. In the end, we will have caused trillions in economic harm and great human suffering caused by the lockdown itself, with little gained.

Even had we let the virus run rampant we would not have had millions of deaths as you all had screamed about. Crying wolf. You had no evidence to prove it, and yet now we have evidence that you were wrong.

 

[SageBrush]

When they retested antibody samples that had tested positive with the Chinese test that they used in the study with the gold standard Elisa test, just over 50% of them were confirmed by this gold standard.

Yeah ... they should have done that upfront.

Are the conservative quack shows that featured them so prominently the first time around still asking for interviews ?
Did they report the follow-up findings ?
Has it changed their opinions ?

 

[Doggydogworld]

Dr. Bhattacharia, who also was involved in the study, responds around the @49:45 mark

The doctor is lying when he says the Chinese test is good enough to detect 3% infected in Santa Clara. They did not find 3% infected. Only 1.5% tested positive, 3% is their "adjusted" result. Specificity applies to the 1.5% raw results, and 1.5% is within the 95% confidence interval they originally disclosed for that test. Also, the Buzzfeed article indicates almost half of the (self-selected) 1.5% positives they did find failed ELISA confirmation. If true that invalidates all their conclusions.

Elon has a proper view. He knows we have much bigger problems than a virus that kills 1%.

If Elon admitted 1% IFR and honestly argued that we need to accept 2 million US deaths to avoid a few weeks of Fremont plant shutdown I'd at least respect him. Instead he has continually spouted anti-science BS and denialism, e.g. cases to zero by end of April.

 

[dqd88]

I would be fine with your comment if you just came out and said that you consider it an acceptable cost for at least two million of the US population, who would be mostly older and with existing co morbidities, to die so that the rest of us can get on with the challenges we face on this Earth.

If you feel that is an overestimation of the dead from allowing the COVID to burn through the population at a fast clip, then please state the number that you believe it would be. We will not consider the pediatric population for now, although IMO, there have been alarming developments for that demographic.

Just state that so at least we move on with the conversation and dispense with the flag waving.

It depends on "net deaths" on an annual basis. Many of those folks would have died soon regardless. We'll have a wait a year or so to get an accurate picture.

But what I would say is, your logic can be applied to any cause of death, so it's a moot point.

For ex, how many car accident deaths are you ok with? "so that the rest of us can get on with the challenges we face"

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

With no lockdown, the USA

We haven’t had a lockdown.

What Sweden has done is proved you wrong.

Sweden has done aggressive social distancing and if you look at the data, has reduced mobility and interaction substantially. That is how they got Rt to 1!

You know this as well as anyone here.

 

[JRP3]

What it doesn't allow is one party to shut down commerce to suit their political ambitions and rig elections.

Ah, I see you're talking about Trump and the Republicans. I agree.

 

[dqd88]

Great catch on this link. People should read this whole thing. It's stunning. I thought that these guys blew up their scientific reputations at the time but I did not know how bad and how corrupted this study was. When they retested antibody samples that had tested positive with the Chinese test that they used in the study with the gold standard Elisa test, just over 50% of them were confirmed by this gold standard. This might be the worst example of political and financial bias engineering essentially a cooked result that I've seen in a long time, since the scandals in psychopharmacology orchestrated by Michael Biederman at Harvard when he produced cooked data sets that showed that toxic neuroleptic drugs were safe and effective in children.

The Whistleblower complaint at Stanford should at the very least get all three of these jackasses a severe reprimand if not losing their positions. It will be very interesting to see the results. The fact that authors not disclose study funding from someone highly motivated to get a specific result, lied about extracurricular contact with the JetBlue executive, the fact that the JetBlue executive specifically sought them out as researchers who had already expressed positions aligned with his own biases and the fact that all of this escaped various efforts by other players to flag down these three idiots before they put a gun to their own heads scientifically speaking is incredibly damning (including the head of the lab tasked with validating the Chinese antibody test who insisted that the test was unreliable and did not want her name associated with the study in any way). It's a great example of how incredibly important it is in science to be on guard against the distorting effects of your own beliefs and assumptions. We are all vulnerable to those biases, and their distorting effects. These three guys were so arrogant and so overconfident that they were willing to take all the brakes off so to speak around various financial, ethical, methodological, and scientific strictures in order to get a result aligned with their own biases.

I have serious questions about whether Stanford should allow them to ever do any research again.

Yeah, we should all definitely buy into a sensationalized Buzzfeed article by a hack "journalist". Definitely. I'm sure SHE HAS NO AGENDA and is COMPLETELY UNBIASED.

*face palm*