Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[MacCruiskeen]

url=http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=685028#p685028]Belligerent Savant » Sat Mar 28, 2020 11:23 am[/url]"].

"HUNTING DOWN".[/quote]

We are all viruses now. It is us they are "combatting". Sic.

[guruilla]

If it was disseminated that wearing your underwear over your clothes stopped the spread, people would virtually stampede over one another to adopt and cheerlead that.)

Wallmartians discovered to be ahead of the curve.

[MacCruiskeen]

Could we please all refrain from posting Funny Memes about "Walmartians" or any other deplorables or expendables or useless eaters, i.e. humans. Those days are gone. We are all prey now, all deplorable, all viruses, all there to be terminated with extreme prejudice. Thanks.

[brekin]

Could we please all refrain from posting Funny Memes about "Walmartians" or any other deplorables or expendables or useless eaters, i.e. humans. Those days are gone. We are all prey now, all deplorable, all viruses, all there to be terminated with extreme prejudice. Thanks.

Right, poor form and all at the brink, the levity has forthwith been paused. Back to work conspiro tragedians!

[Belligerent Savant]

.

As alluded here by others. The Stern Big Father here to assure the lowly folk -- for our own good. Per the NY Times, conditioning their demo, as they do. And the target demo will dutifully absorb, as they do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opin ... virus.html

WASHINGTON — It’s no wonder that watching Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings can make some people crave Chianti and meatballs.

Besides coolly explaining the facts in this terrifying and stultifying plague season, the governor of New York evokes the feeling of a big Italian family dinner table.

And that is the intended effect.

“Call it psychological,” Governor Cuomo, phoning from Albany, tells me. “Call it feelings. Call it emotions. But this is as much a social crisis as a health crisis.”

Often in the past, when people called Cuomo patriarchal, it was not meant as a compliment. It was a way to describe his maniacally controlling behavior, his dark zeal to muscle past people and obstacles to get his way. The Times’s Adam Nagourney dubbed him the “human bulldozer,” and a former adviser once put it this way: “The governor thinks he’s a hammer. So everyone looks like a nail.”

But now, the darker the zeal, the better, if it secures you a mask or ventilator. Given the White House’s deathly delays and the president’s childish rants, America is yearning for a trustworthy parental figure — and a hammer.

The warm, fuzzy feeling for the cold, calculating pol that developed among many Democrats in the past week was summed up by Bill Maher, who told me: “I see Cuomo as the Democratic nominee this year. If we could switch Biden out for him, that’s the winner.” He added, “He’s unlikable, which I really like.”

Progressives still have problems with Cuomo’s stances on Medicaid and the criminal justice system. And some people thought that he waited too long to totally button up New York, although the governor maintains that his systematic rolling closure was designed to prevent panic in the streets.

But even Jezebel blew him a kiss with a post by Rebecca Fishbein headlined, “Help, I Think I’m in Love With Andrew Cuomo???,” chronicling how, solo in her Brooklyn apartment, she has become addicted to Cuomo’s briefings and morphed from intense distaste for him to admiration for his “measured bullying.”

Then the governor actually called her to check in. On his own, after his 2005 divorce from Kerry Kennedy and his split last year from the TV chef and author Sandra Lee, he’d been thinking about the isolation of singles.

“You know, it was sad, the piece,” he tells me. “Being alone in your apartment for virtually 24 hours a day for days and days in this fearful situation and there’s no one to lay on the couch with and watch TV with, and no one to hold. That’s terrible.”

To the surprise of many who did not associate the name “Andrew Cuomo” with the word “empathy,” the governor has become a sort of national shrink, talking us through our fear, our loss and our growing stir-craziness.

“This is going be a long day, and it’s going to be a hard day, and it’s going to be an ugly day, and it’s going to be a sad day,” he told officers from the New York National Guard on Friday, charging them to fight this “invisible” and “insidious” beast and “kick coronavirus’s ass.”

Because New York is at the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States, with 519 deaths and 44,635 confirmed cases, as of noon Friday, Americans have their eyes on the state. Cuomo knows this. “New York is the canary in the coal mine,” he said during one of his passionate televised pleas for the president to provide more ventilators.

It is more than passing strange that in this horror-movie moment, with 13 people dying on Tuesday at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens and a refrigerated truck parked outside to collect the bodies, the nation’s two most prominent leaders are both Queens scions. Both men grew up in the shadows of their fathers, the hard-working sons of European immigrants.

The Trump family is a model of bad nepotism — noblesse oblige in reverse. Such is their reputation as scammers that congressional Democrats felt the need to put a provision in the coronavirus rescue bill to try to prevent Trump-and-Kushner Inc. from carving out a treat of their own.

Cuomo-style nepotism at least has better values. Donald Trump got his start with his father discriminating against black tenants in their housing complexes; Andrew Cuomo left his job as a political enforcer for his father, Mario Cuomo, also a three-term governor of New York, and created a national program to provide housing for the homeless.

More at link.

[identity]

From a slight fever to pneumonia and heart damage, the symptoms of COVID-19 can vary wildly from one person to another.

But the patients who land in the care of Dr. John Granton are typically on the most severe end of the spectrum.

Granton, an intensive care doctor at Toronto General Hospital and head of the respiratory department at Mount Sinai and University Health Network, is among Canada's doctors fighting the disease on the frontlines of the pandemic.

Here's what he's learned about the disease so far.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: What does a severe case of COVID-19 do to the body?

A: It's early days but we do have experience with similar coronaviruses, SARS being one and MERS as well. This is a new virus, however, so we're learning on the fly.

What we do know is that it can range in severity from being very mild and people not recognizing that they have the condition to people who have to become hospitalized because they're sick. And in some instances people become critically ill and have to be put on life support.

Q: What do those severely ill patients experience? What is the damage that's being done to the body?

A: People most commonly present when it's severe. They develop a severe fever, a severe cough and the important one we worry about is shortness of breath.

When we see patients in the emergency department, we see that they're short of breath, that their oxygen levels are low and that they require additional oxygen to help their lungs to work properly as the virus is infecting their lungs.

For some patients, unfortunately, the amount of oxygen you can provide outstrips the resources on a regular floor and they have to go on a breathing machine to support their breathing and they have to be kept sedated and kept on life support until hopefully they recover from that illness.

We're also recognizing that this virus oddly seems to involve the heart in some instances and can lead to dysfunction of the heart so it's not pumping properly. In some instances, unfortunately, that has taken the life of some patients due to not only the lung problem but also the heart problem.

Q: What happens to someone's lungs or body that makes them feel shortness of breath?

A: It sounds like an easy question but we don't always understand why people feel shortness of breath. There's probably some irritation of the lungs, as well as not getting enough oxygen. So what it feels like is the things you do day-to-day feel more difficult. It can feel like you're running, you're panting doing minimal things.

Q: What's the outlook for someone who has to be put on a respirator or on oxygen?

A: At present, we know no treatments for this particular virus, there's no vaccine to prevent it and there's no treatment specifically for it.

What we do in critical care is we kind of cradle people through their illness, we support them on life support until their bodies can recover; their lungs can heal, their heart gets better and the other organs that may have been suffering secondary damage can recover to the point where they can be liberated from those machines.

And so therein lies a bit of the problem. Because there's no specific therapy and we rely on the body's recovery, that means that people who have underlying medical conditions, people who are older … may be more susceptible to developing a severe pneumonia or heart problem.

I don't want to frighten people, but people have been trivializing this saying 'I'm young, I'm not going to get sick,' but half of the patients in intensive care units are under the age of 60 with this condition.

Nobody's immune from this particular illness.

Q: Why is it that some people seem to be more susceptible to this? What do we still need to learn about the virus and how it works?

A: Most of us will not get this virus, let's be clear. And most of us who get the virus will be fine. This is an uncommon condition but still it's coming at us in a wave that's causing problems and stress on the system.

We really don't understand a lot of things. We really don't understand why certain people get more severe disease than others. Is it a property of the virus? Or is it a property of the person? We all have different genes and different responses to infection.

This is not unique. We know some people can get very trivial infections from the flu, and other people get severe flu and end up on life support, it's really not different in that regard.

[We] don't understand why some people have severe disease and others do not. But again, if you have an abnormality in your health or you happen to be older, your immune system is not as robust as it used to be. As a result, your ability to fight infections and recover from those illnesses is diminished.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-john-granton-1.5512804

[alloneword]

The study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 20042291v1

This makes more sense of the pattern in the data that shows the percentage of tests performed that yield a positive result appears fairly static (~15% - certainly true in the US and UK).

UK similar at ~14%, apparently Germany 6 - 7% (machine translation).

Does anyone know the criteria for testing in the US? In the UK, it's 'requiring admission to hospital' plus symptoms (those not deemed in need of hospital treatment are 'not prioritised'). Reports of shortages of testing kits would seem to indicate that only those in the higher priority groups are being tested.

So, does this mean that around 120,766 people have been admitted to hospital displaying ILI symptoms (since we started testing for covid-19) of which 103,687 (~86%) tested 'negative'? Quite how many - or what percentage - of those non-corvid ILI sufferers succumbed to the 'old man's friend' we don't yet know. But previous years offer a clue.

But that number looks outrageously high to me.

Historic figures on the number of people admitted to hospital (inc non-ICU/HDU) for ILIs isn't readily available (as not all data is collected, it would seem), but we can get an idea from the 'Rate of Admissions per 100,000 in the Trust catchment area' - which looks to have peaked at around '10' (0.01%) in early 2018. Crudely extrapolate that out for a population of 66 million and we get 6600 hospital admissions for Influenza per week (this would be the peak of a bad year, 26,400 deaths).

If we take this 'crisis' to have started in the UK on 1st Feb (first case reported on Jan 31st) - a mere 8 weeks ago - and crudely divide that number of non-corvid ILI hospitalised people (103,687) we get a figure just shy of 13,000 per week (every week, for 8 weeks).

Can anyone point out where I've gone wrong, or does it look like there are an insanely high number of non-Covid19 ILI cases occurring?

[stickdog99]

Frankly, none of us can be sure whether this specific crisis is being overblown or understated, but in many important senses, this question is totally beside the point. Since at best all we are doing by hiding from our fellow neighbors in the face of any communicable respiratory disease is "flattening the curve" of our population infection rate at the expense of our quality of life and the entire economic livelihoods and financial reserves of millions of individuals, the priority of any rational government would have been to ensure the ability of its healthcare system to respond to the effects of any especially deadly flu pandemic long ago. Had this somehow not been done long ago, the current situation would of course force these steps to be implemented right now on an emergency basis.

My personal assessment about shelter-in-place regulations for COVID-19 is that it is typical of the socialism for oligarchs and rugged individualism for working people political system all Americans live in. Focusing on the USA in particular, our debate has been limited to whether we should all listen to Democratic "leaders" like Governor Cuomo and Governor Newsom and hide in our houses for the next 18 months while depleting all of our life savings in our desperate efforts to hoard toilet paper or whether we should instead heroically sacrifice our lives in order to keep supplying our cheap labor to further enrich our oligarch bosses' portfolios.

This is perfectly emblematic of the Demopublican choice we are constantly offered at the ballot box. Should average Americans further sacrifice (1) our standard of living and political rights or (2) our very lives to enrich our oligarchs? Depending our exact locality, our political choices have devolved into "risk death to enrich our bosses or starve" or "risk arrest by violating the conditions of our perpetual home imprisonment or starve." We are asked either to join a death-cult that explicitly seeks to sacrifice the lives of millions on the altar of hypercapitalism or an authoritarian cult that demands we sacrifice our economic, social, and privacy rights, as well as our right to assemble and protest, on the altar of "one less" COVID-19 victim. While we debate the Procrustean choice we have been presented, our one Demopublican party is unified only in its rush to use yet another (at least largely) manufactured crisis to open the gates of our treasury to each and every one of our oligarch masters. No Lobbyist Left Behind.

Note that under no circumstance are we allowed to ask anything of our government to do anything significant to help us. No, the onus is instead almost completely on each and every average American struggling to survive. If we can't afford the outrageous cost of health insurance, then that is our fault and we deserve to die. If we can't afford the outrageous cost of hosing, that is our fault and we deserve to live in the gutter. If we can't afford the necessities of life, that is our fault because we didn't plan far enough ahead. If we can't earn a living and manage to survive comfortably while hiding away in our houses indefinitely, that is our fault for not having sufficiently prepared for ourselves for the cybernetic dystopian future that Hollywood unceasingly warmed us about. If we contract COVID-19 and get seriously ill or die, that is our fault for interacting with other humans or objects touched by other humans without immediately dipping our hands in the precious cytoplasmic membrane exploding chemicals we should have known to stockpile.

On the other hand, our joblessness and the loss of half of our retirement savings and all of our rainy day savings while we weather this storm by hiding at home are nobody's fault because, of course, nobody could have possibly predicted the genesis of a slightly more deadly form of the flu because, of course, nobody could have possibly predicted the genesis of a slightly more deadly form of the flu.

The ill effects of this crisis and to a large degree the entire governmental response to this crisis have been offloaded on us by our government leaders to become the personal responsibility of each individual American. The role of our government leaders in this crisis is limited to maximizing their investment returns through their insider trades while arresting any of us who dare breach our personal responsibility to keep our fellow citizens healthy by imprisoning ourselves indefinitely.

However, in reality, this whole situation is roughly equivalent to a corrupt Chicago mayor who tells everyone to stay at home until spring because "nobody could have predicted this bad of a snowstorm" and then proceeds to use the crisis to allow his cronies loot the city's treasury while enlisting his political machine to deliver a single turkey to the families of each of his previously reliable voters.

[liminalOyster]

Thank you Stickdog, for perfectly summing up our current Schrodinger's apocalypse and so much of what I've been struggling to put in words of late.

[Nordic]

This is a hell of a thing:

Mike Pompeo Admits COVID-19 Is a “Live Exercise,” Trump Retorts “I Wish You Would Have Told Us”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/secretary ... us/5707223

[Joe Hillshoist]

Thanks for the links. I was in here early saying I didn't care much about bioweapon origin stories or bat soup origin stories, but as this has worn on, having spent a lot of time reading about previous coronavirus iterations, it's pretty obvious this one is radically different. The longer incubation time, the heavy viral shedding while asymptomatic / low symptoms, as well as the long tail of shedding & multiple infection routes...

Factor in the fact our governments are planning for a peak in the middle of August -- the opposite of flu season -- as well as the firsthand stories from clinicians about patients suffering through ARDS, and there's a clear disconnect between planning responses and the notion this is just another version of the flu. Gain of function is the key to that. Looking forward to digging into the article.

And, unless the virus mutates significantly in the meantime, if your immune system kills it you won't get it again (until it mutates).

I think it's too early to believe that our immune systems will make a difference when there have been consistent incidents of reinfection being reported in every country this has hit so far. That may wash out as a persistent testing error (false negative in patients who had it the whole time) but it also may not.

I missed this bolded bit at the end.

If your body fights off this infection, and there is no other way to get rid of it apart from that, drug and vaccine trials aside, then you will have an adapted immunity. Even if you get reinfected your body will be able to deal with it quickly and efficiently.

I was wrong to say you won't get reinfected but effectively that's how it will be.

Your bodies immune response will be faster and more effective. You can get the same cold twice but the second time it's a minor issue compared to the first. Odds are very high, I'd say 95% at least that a secondary infection with this virus won't be an issue if you get thru the first one. This virus can overwhelm your systems faster than your bodies immune system can respond, mostly because it's new and your body needs to build its reaction from the ground up.

Once you've had it once you don't need to start from scratch. So you may get again, or still have it but it won't last anywhere near the 10 days it takes to fuck your lungs up. This isn't some arcane magical virus, it's a corona virus like the many others we have on the planet.

Over time your immune response will take longer to regenerate, but that takes years.

And if the parts your body targets change thru mutation then obviously your body will have to start again if you get infected with the changed strain.

But that is as far as it goes.

[DrEvil]

This is a hell of a thing:

Mike Pompeo Admits COVID-19 Is a “Live Exercise,” Trump Retorts “I Wish You Would Have Told Us”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/secretary ... us/5707223

"We're in a live exercise here to get this right". Sounds more like a poor choice of words to describe the ongoing situation.

[alloneword]

The guy that was previously discussed here, interviewed a couple of days ago: Perspectives on the Pandemic | Dr John Ioannidis of Stanford University | Interview


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw

[kelley]

was anyone reading here ill during the period of late December or early January through the month of February and into the first week of March

and if so what were the symptoms experienced

[Blue]

was anyone reading here ill during the period of late December or early January through the month of February and into the first week of March

and if so what were the symptoms experienced

Feb 3 I suddenly had a very bad headache and chills then extreme fatigue set in. Fever only lasted a day then a sore throat with burning in both ears. Turned into a regular cough by the end of a week. Unbelievable fatigue and a lingering cough lasted another 3 weeks. I was in bed for most of Feb. Worst sickness I've ever experienced. I normally have a good immune system but had slacked off on the Vit D and C before this hit. Found out an employee at my gym had the exact same thing a week before I became ill. Glad I got through whatever it was and sure don't want to experience it again.