State of the Pandemic

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Hawkeye
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by Hawkeye »

Res Ipsa do you wear an N95, a cloth mask, or a surgical mask?

How many lives would you estimate that the lockdowns, quarantining, masks, and other mitigation measures have saved? What would be the ratio of that number of lives to lost earnings? I have to wonder what kind of quality of life we've saved as well. Even if I were immunocompromised I'm not sure it'd be worth it to me to live locked down the rest of my life.

I remember early on when Gunnar claimed that if Trump had just done a better job with getting sufficient testing kits we could be like Vietnam and have zero Covid. Do you still believe that zero Covid in the US was a possibility if we had a different president at the time?
The best part about this is waiting four years to see how all the crazy apocalyptic predictions made by the fear mongering idiots in Right Wing media turned out to be painfully wrong...Gasoline would hit $10/gallon. Hyperinflation would ensue.
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by Vēritās »

drumdude wrote:
Sun Jul 17, 2022 9:11 pm
It is essentially a certainty that we will look back 10, 20, 50 years from now and see that we made a ton of mistakes.
We don't need to wait that long to know this.

The study’s damning conclusion: “The evidence suggests that ineffective national policies and responses, especially as compared to those of other wealthy nations or compared to the intricate preparation and planning by previous administrations of both parties, have been driving the terrible toll of COVID-19 and its inequities in the U.S.”

The costliest errors were committed in the pandemic’s earliest stages, the study finds. The Trump administration’s initial U.S. travel ban on Jan. 31 applied only to non-U.S. travelers and only to travelers coming from China, though the virus was “already known to be present in Italy, Iran, Spain, Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom.” No symptom screening on arrival was required, nor was quarantining. Later research “found repeatedly” that “the great majority” of the virus introductions to the U.S. came not from China but from European strains.

The U.S. imposed restrictions on travel from Europe in mid-March, but by then it was too late. The virus had already spread so widely in the U.S. that when it arrived in a new state or region, it most likely came from elsewhere in the country. “This shows that any action to prevent introductions would need to be at the national level,” the study finds, “and while the window for effective action was brief, it was missed.”

Several other countries handled the pandemic far more effectively. For example, Australia closed its borders to all non-Australian citizens on March 15, when only 300 cases had been reported, and mandated “14-day, supervised quarantine in a hotel for all international arrivals (including Australian citizens)” plus “aggressive testing and contact tracing.” As of Nov. 12, Australia had recorded 36 COVID-19 deaths per million vs. 773 COVID-19 deaths per million in the U.S., says the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. “This is the difference between establishing effective national border policies and failing to do so,” the researchers say.

Those blunders can’t be corrected, but others can be. The study identifies three workplace policy mistakes that could still be remedied at any time.

Failure to use federal authority and budget to supply PPE. Eight months into the pandemic, over 80% of U.S. nurses report they are still reusing at least one type of single-use PPE, says a recent survey by National Nurses United, the country’s largest registered nurses’ labor union. From the pandemic’s beginning, the Harvard study finds, “supplying PPE was delegated to a variety of actors: state and city governments, large hospital chains, and in some cases small networks of clinics.” Washington could have used its spending power and its authority under the Defense Production Act to secure adequate supplies, if not immediately, then certainly by now.

Failure to require “mandatory universal paid sick leave for those unable to work due to COVID-19.” The Families First Coronavirus Response Act provides for some COVID-related leave, including family and medical leave, but it does not cover most federal employees or apply to employers with more than 500 employees.

Failure to mandate “standards for occupational exposures.” Such standards turn out to be extremely important: The researchers discovered that the volume of worker complaints to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration raising concerns about workplace conditions and exposure to COVID-19 are an excellent predictor of COVID-19 deaths 16 days later. Several states, but not all, have mandated such standards. For example, in July, Virginia issued rules on distancing, face coverings, cleaning, and other factors affecting employee exposure to the virus.

Though the study is discouraging, the researchers find reason for hope: “Despite the understandable dismay at the state of the pandemic in the United States, it is not too late to make a difference, and that difference starts with the implementation of apt policies.”

Among the worst mistakes of the pandemic include:

1. calling it a hoax
2. blowing it off as the flu
3. insisting it was stopped cold because of travel bans
4. having an idiot President who refused to increase testing because testing told us how many people were infected and it looked bad for him politically.
5. having an idiot president who falsely claimed it was already cured with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
6. having an idiot president who let the know-nothings at FOX news dictate his policy. First he was all for mitigation measures, but then that lasted only a few weeks before someone on FOX told him the "cure will be worse than the disease."
7. having an idiot president who mocked the idea of wearing masks and social distancing, despite what the science told us.
I'm just not convinced that anyone knows the right thing to do right now. The fact that we aren't still seeing 3,000 deaths a day in the US is a miracle, and not one that we seem to have had any control over despite all our best efforts and our blunders.
Numerous vaccines and boosters have been developed since those days, so what the hell are you talking about?
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by Vēritās »

Hawkeye wrote:
Mon Jul 18, 2022 7:02 pm
Res Ipsa do you wear an N95, a cloth mask, or a surgical mask?

How many lives would you estimate that the lockdowns, quarantining, masks, and other mitigation measures have saved? What would be the ratio of that number of lives to lost earnings? I have to wonder what kind of quality of life we've saved as well. Even if I were immunocompromised I'm not sure it'd be worth it to me to live locked down the rest of my life.

I remember early on when Gunnar claimed that if Trump had just done a better job with getting sufficient testing kits we could be like Vietnam and have zero Covid. Do you still believe that zero Covid in the US was a possibility if we had a different president at the time?
Gunnar probably never said that. You have a bad habit of lying about what people say in the past, never backing it up with direct links. You do this because it makes you feel good beating up straw man arguments.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by Res Ipsa »

Doctor Steuss wrote:
Mon Jul 18, 2022 5:24 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Sun Jul 17, 2022 3:36 pm
In the US, seasonal flu deaths have ranged from 11,000 to 95,000 per year.

[...]
Unless things have changed over the last decade-or-so, flu deaths are also calculated using a kind of indirect modeling, in lieu of actual coroner coding. I am relying on a 10+ year memory here, but I recall an informal survey that indicated the numbers may be a lot lower (i.e. almost all of the practicing physicians surveyed had never had a patient die of influenza).
The CDC does use modeling to estimate the number of flu deaths. Those were the numbers I cited. I’ve never compared those numbers with data from death certificates or any other figures. I’d assume the CDC has done some type of verification for their modeling, but I’ve never dug into it.
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by Res Ipsa »

Hawkeye wrote:
Mon Jul 18, 2022 7:02 pm
Res Ipsa do you wear an N95, a cloth mask, or a surgical mask?

How many lives would you estimate that the lockdowns, quarantining, masks, and other mitigation measures have saved? What would be the ratio of that number of lives to lost earnings? I have to wonder what kind of quality of life we've saved as well. Even if I were immunocompromised I'm not sure it'd be worth it to me to live locked down the rest of my life.

I remember early on when Gunnar claimed that if Trump had just done a better job with getting sufficient testing kits we could be like Vietnam and have zero Covid. Do you still believe that zero Covid in the US was a possibility if we had a different president at the time?
I wear N-95s. I switched from Cloth to KN 95s once they became widely available. I upgraded to N95s once more data became available that compared the effectiveness of different types of masks. When I’m going to an indoor public space other than home, I mask up before I leave the house. It comes off when I get home, after which I thoroughly wash my hands.

As to the rest, I’m not your unpaid researcher. in my opinion, you consistently and belligerently exaggerate the actual mitigation steps that have been taken on the economy, while completely ignoring the economic impacts of serious illness, disability and death. For some reason, you seem to believe that being dead doesn’t reduce a persons washes or that doctor and hospital bills don’t reduce disposable income. Not everyone gets paid while being laid up with COVID.

You’ve never demonstrated any interest in discussing the actual economic burden of disease and death, so I don’t see any sense in wasting my time on that issue.

It’s easy to talk about what you imagine you’d think if you were immunocompromised. But you’re not. And I see no evidence of you having empathy for immunocompromised folks. If you’d rather die than live than do what immunocompromised people have to do today to stay alive, that would be your choice. But it’s you and others like you that put the immunocompromised in their current position. They didn’t choose it.

I don’t recall what Gunnar may have said in the past. The first substantive post I made about COVID was on Facebook and I don’t remember whether I posted it here. My view at the time was that I didn’t think the US had the political Will and unity that would be required to eradicate COVID. Because the US failed to conduct surveillance testing and abandoned the early plans for quarantining everyone who entered the US from elsewhere, our ability to make use of the tried and true public health measures for eliminating disease.

My state had one of two choices - drastically reduce the rate of transmission or suffer the complete breakdown of our health care system. We had hospitals running out of masks and other PPE, with cases still increasing. Has we not reduced the rate of transmission, we were looking at our ERs and hospitals becoming sources of increased transmission rather than as places to help people survive and recover. My early posting was about the need to help keep the system from breaking by using voluntary mitigation measures to avoid overrunning our health care system.

When we went to mandatory restrictions on business capacities and operations, it meant that we’d failed at eradication. I watched the WHO practically beg countries not to resort to lockdowns and to concentrate instead on cutting off the chains of transmission through testing, tracing, isolating and quarantining. I heard Tedros emplore countries not to let political differences get in the way of fighting the disease. Without unity in our actions, the disease wins. And he was absolutely right.

Although I think Trump acted irresponsibly with respect to the pandemic, resulting in significant unnecessary suffering and death, I don’t think a different president would have been able to eradicate the disease in the US. The fundamental problem is the depth of our political division. If it was ever true that Americans dropped their differences in a crisis and helped each other, those days are long gone. The concept of sacrificing anything for the common good is dead in the US — to the extent that we’d prefer to kill off grandma and the medically vulnerable rather than endure the mild inconvenience of wearing a mask. The notion of being a citizen is dead in the US, and we’ve just started paying the consequences of that loss.
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by drumdude »

It didn’t help that the CDC said early on that masks didn’t work, a “noble lie” to protect mask inventory.


If you want Americans to act responsibly, you should probably treat them like adults. The government has undermined a lot of their own credibility, and you can’t blame the American public for those mistakes.
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by Vēritās »

drumdude wrote:
Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:35 pm
It didn’t help that the CDC said early on that masks didn’t work, a “noble lie” to protect mask inventory.


If you want Americans to act responsibly, you should probably treat them like adults. The government has undermined a lot of their own credibility, and you can’t blame the American public for those mistakes.
The CDC never said that. Dumb lies like this one is the reason we're basically a third world country when it comes to national emergencies. Don't blame government because idiots like Tucker Carlson lie to millions of dumb Americans who are dying to be fed BS about how the government is screwing everything up.
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by Binger »

drumdude wrote:
Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:35 pm
It didn’t help that the CDC said early on that masks didn’t work, a “noble lie” to protect mask inventory.


If you want Americans to act responsibly, you should probably treat them like adults. The government has undermined a lot of their own credibility, and you can’t blame the American public for those mistakes.
It didn’t help to wear a mask that didn’t work either.

It’s a little late for Res to be making arguments that a different President would have eradicated the disease. And sillier still to be pointing to political division as the fundamental problem when the only acceptable solution is for others to accept the one true and correct fundamentals.
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by drumdude »

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what the CDC said in March of 2020.


https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2 ... 9-pandemic

Feb. 29, 2020
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams tweets that wearing a face mask will not prevent the public from contracting the novel coronavirus.

“Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” he wrote in a tweet that was later deleted. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

March 24, 2020
Even as the coronavirus spreads across the United States — shutting down businesses, sporting events and schools — the CDC’s advice around masking remains unequivocal: Healthy people who do not work in the healthcare sector and are not taking care of an infected person at home do not need to wear masks.

“Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers,” the government agency says.

April 3, 2020
After insisting for weeks that healthy people did not need to wear masks in most circumstances, federal health officials change their guidance in response to a growing body of evidence that people who do not appear to be sick are playing an outsize role in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The transmission from individuals without symptoms is playing a more significant role in the spread of the virus than previously understood,” President Trump says when announcing the new advice at a White House briefing. “So you don’t seem to have symptoms and it still gets transferred.”

The new guidelines recommended masks for all people over age 2 who were in a public setting, traveling or around others in the same household who might be infected.
Tucker Carlson is a horrible human being and spreads misinformation but that doesn't mean anyone criticizing the CDC is wrong.
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Re: State of the Pandemic

Post by Res Ipsa »

Binger wrote:
Mon Jul 18, 2022 11:11 pm
drumdude wrote:
Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:35 pm
It didn’t help that the CDC said early on that masks didn’t work, a “noble lie” to protect mask inventory.


If you want Americans to act responsibly, you should probably treat them like adults. The government has undermined a lot of their own credibility, and you can’t blame the American public for those mistakes.
It didn’t help to wear a mask that didn’t work either.

It’s a little late for Res to be making arguments that a different the President would have eradicated the disease. And sillier still to be pointing to political division as the fundamental problem when the only acceptable solution is for others to accept the one true and correct fundamentals.
Your continued game playing with the concept of masks “working” is being silly. There is ample evidence that masks reduce the rate of transmission, with the effectiveness dependent on the type of mask. Reducing transmission is “working.”

If you actually read what I posted, you’d have seen that I didn’t argue that a different President would have eradicated the disease.

And your last sentence literally makes no sense. I’ve no patience for gadflies today.
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