***NON-POLITICAL COVID-19 Discussion Thread***

[JakeF]

A couple of reminders...

Originally Posted by Bwana

Once again, don't come in this thread with some kind of political agenda, or you will be shown the door. If you want to go that route, there is a thread about this in DC.

Originally Posted by Dartgod

People, there is a lot of good information in this thread, let's try to keep the petty bickering to a minimum.

We all have varying opinions about the impact of this, the numbers, etc. We will all never agree with each other. But we can all keep it civil.

Thanks!

Click here for the original OP:

Spoiler!

Apparently the CoronaVirus can survive on a inanimate objects, such as door knobs, for 9 days.

California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says
By SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA, JACLYN COSGROVE
FEB. 26, 2020 8:04 PM

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what could be the first case of novel coronavirus in the United States involving a patient in California who neither recently traveled out of the country nor was in contact with someone who did.

“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown. It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States,” the CDC said in a statement. “Community spread means spread of an illness for which the source of infection is unknown. It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected.”

The individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County, according to the state Department of Public Health.

The CDC said the “case was detected through the U.S. public health system — picked up by astute clinicians.”

Officials at UC Davis Medical Center expanded on what the federal agency might have meant by that in an email sent Wednesday, as reported by the Davis Enterprise newspaper.

The patient arrived at UC Davis Medical Center from another hospital Feb. 19 and “had already been intubated, was on a ventilator, and given droplet protection orders because of an undiagnosed and suspected viral condition,” according to an email sent by UC Davis officials that was obtained by the Davis Enterprise.

The staff at UC Davis requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, but because the patient didn’t fit the CDC’s existing criteria for the virus, a test wasn’t immediately administered, according to the email. The CDC then ordered the test Sunday, and results were announced Wednesday. Hospital administrators reportedly said in the email that despite these issues, there has been minimal exposure at the hospital because of safety protocols they have in place.

A UC Davis Health spokesperson declined Wednesday evening to share the email with The Times.

Since Feb. 2, more than 8,400 returning travelers from China have entered California, according to the state health department. They have been advised to self-quarantine for 14 days and limit interactions with others as much as possible, officials said.

“This is a new virus, and while we are still learning about it, there is a lot we already know,” Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California.”

It is not clear how the person became infected, but public health workers could not identify any contacts with people who had traveled to China or other areas where the virus is widespread. That raises concern that the virus is spreading in the United States, creating a challenge for public health officials, experts say.

“It’s the first signal that we could be having silent transmission in the community,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It probably means there are many more cases out there, and it probably means this individual has infected others, and now it’s a race to try to find out who that person has infected.”

On Tuesday, the CDC offered its most serious warning to date that the United States should expect and prepare for the coronavirus to become a more widespread health issue.

“Ultimately, we expect we will see coronavirus spread in this country,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “It’s not so much a question of if, but a question of when.”

According to the CDC’s latest count Wednesday morning, 59 U.S. residents have tested positive for the new strain of coronavirus — 42 of whom are repatriated citizens from a Diamond Princess cruise. That number has grown by two since Messonnier’s last count Tuesday, although the CDC was not immediately available to offer details on the additional cases.

More than 82,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported globally, and more than 2,700 people have died, with the majority in mainland China, the epicenter of the outbreak.

But public health leaders have repeatedly reminded residents that the health risk from the novel coronavirus to the general public remains low.

“While COVID-19 has a high transmission rate, it has a low mortality rate,” the state Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday. “From the international data we have, of those who have tested positive for COVID-19, approximately 80% do not exhibit symptoms that would require hospitalization. There have been no confirmed deaths related to COVID-19 in the United States to date.”

CDC officials have also warned that although the virus is likely to spread in U.S. communities, the flu still poses a greater risk.

Gostin said the news of potential silent transmission does not eliminate the possibility of containing the virus in the U.S. and preventing an outbreak.

“There are few enough cases that we should at least try,” he said. “Most of us are not optimistic that that will be successful, but we’re still in the position to try.”

[DJJasonp]

Originally Posted by chiefzilla1501

Hospitals are overwhelmed at a time when health care workers are burnt out.

I saw my doctor yesterday, and for what it's worth, he said hospitals are overwhelmed right now because:

1. 18 months of quarantining had thousands of patients putting off routine/semi-routine visits to the doctor

2. They have not been allowed to hire more to accommodate the demand


Two weeks ago, I was told I needed to make an appointment for a follow-up - 3rd week of September was the nearest appointment.

[Chief Roundup]

Originally Posted by DJJasonp

I saw my doctor yesterday, and for what it's worth, he said hospitals are overwhelmed right now because:

1. 18 months of quarantining had thousands of patients putting off routine/semi-routine visits to the doctor

2. They have not been allowed to hire more to accommodate the demand


Two weeks ago, I was told I needed to make an appointment for a follow-up - 3rd week of September was the nearest appointment.

Mercy, UAMS, and many other hospitals are canceling all elective and non-emergent procedures with no projected date to have them done because the hospitals have as many or more Covid hospitalizations as they did last year.

[Sure-Oz]

Originally Posted by Chief Roundup

Mercy, UAMS, and many other hospitals are canceling all elective and non-emergent procedures with no projected date to have them done because the hospitals have as many or more Covid hospitalizations as they did last year.

See it's this shit that gets ****ed with cause people can't do the right thing.

[dirk digler]

Saw in an interview tonight of a RN on the Covid Unit of a large Jacksonville hospital and she said they had 74 patients all unvaccinated and 65-70 were on vents. She said some of them prior to getting incubated asked to be vaccinated.

Your chances are low if you have to go on a vent. So get vaccinated people if you haven't.

[wazu]

Originally Posted by dirk digler

Saw in an interview tonight of a RN on the Covid Unit of a large Jacksonville hospital and she said they had 74 patients all unvaccinated and 65-70 were on vents. She said some of them prior to getting incubated asked to be vaccinated.

Your chances are low if you have to go on a vent. So get vaccinated people if you haven't.

It's maddening. There is absolutely no talking somebody into getting the vaccine. But there is damn near nothing worse than not being able to breathe. I've been there, and worse yet I've seen somebody I love be there. That shit will humble someone in a hurry.

[TwistedChief]

Originally Posted by wazu

It's maddening. There is absolutely no talking somebody into getting the vaccine. But there is damn near nothing worse than not being able to breathe. I've been there, and worse yet I've seen somebody I love be there. That shit will humble someone in a hurry.

In this thread, getting a vaccine has been compared multiple times to wearing a seatbelt.

If I ever didn't wear a seatbelt, got into an accident, and died, so be it. It's done and over quickly.

But if I didn't wear a seatbelt, got into an accident, and had to live paralyzed for the rest of my life, knowing that if I had just put the seatbelt on things would've been different, that would be the most painful experience of all.

I cannot imagine how some of these people feel in their last moments with that very simple thought. That alone would push me toward getting vaccinated if I were ever on the fence.

And all of the above isn't even considering that getting vaccinated is actually doing a societal good. Actually being patriotic. Actually sacrificing if your initial inclination is to avoid it.

[Pasta Little Brioni]

Mask mandate including vaccinated in St. Louis. Is KC next? So ****ing stupid.

[wazu]

Originally Posted by Pasta Little Brother

Mask mandate including vaccinated in St. Louis. Is KC next? So ****ing stupid.

Ugh. Why does St. Louis have to be so full of bitches?

[Pasta Little Brioni]

Originally Posted by wazu

Ugh. Why does St. Louis have to be so full of bitches?

You know Q is jerking it to that. Now he can try to justify it.. It's a coming.

[stevieray]

Originally Posted by Pasta Little Brother

Mask mandate including vaccinated in St. Louis.

I'm supposed to work in St Louis this fall.

Oh well.

[Saulbadguy]

Originally Posted by Pasta Little Brother

Mask mandate including vaccinated in St. Louis. Is KC next? So ****ing stupid.

This is a good reason why there is disdain for the morons who willingly decline the vaccine.

[MahomesMagic]

Breaking the Seal on Drug Research

Dr. Jefferson had conducted a Cochrane review of Tamiflu’s effectiveness a few years earlier, concluding that the drug reduced the risk of complications from the flu. He assured Dr. Doshi and other researchers on his team that the update would be fairly simple.

But just as their work was getting under way, a simple comment arrived on the Cochrane Web site that changed the course of the research and would ultimately fuel a worldwide effort to force drug companies to be more transparent.

The author of that comment, Dr. Keiji Hayashi, had no connection to the Cochrane group; he was a pediatrician in Japan who had prescribed Tamiflu to children in his practice, but had come to question its efficacy. He was curious about one of the main studies on which Dr. Jefferson had relied in his previous analysis. Called the Kaiser study, it pooled the results of 10 clinical trials. But Dr. Hayashi noticed that the results of only two of those trials had been fully published in medical journals. Given that details of eight trials were unknown, how could the researchers be certain of their conclusion that Tamiflu reduced risk of complications from flu?

“We should appraise the eight trials rigidly,” Dr. Hayashi wrote.

Reviews by the Cochrane group are known for being among the most thoroughly researched medical analyses available. But in trying to answer the pediatrician’s question, Dr. Jefferson realized that there was a flaw: they relied too heavily on the assumption that the articles published in journals accurately represented the results of all clinical trials that had been conducted.

As he tried to track down the authors of the Kaiser study and the two published trials, Dr. Jefferson said he hit dead ends: One author said he had moved offices and no longer had the files; another said he had never seen the primary trial data, instead relying on a summary analysis provided by Roche. All the authors suggested that he contact the company.

“We took it on faith — on trust,” Dr. Jefferson, 59, said recently in a phone interview. Dr. Hayashi’s question had tested that faith. Dr. Jefferson began typing each new discovery in a private journal he called Hayashi’s Problem, which, he said, “charted my transformation from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.”

Dr. Doshi said that medicine “relies on hierarchies of trust.” He added: “A patient is not going to be in a position to review the entire evidence base themselves. But they trust that there is a watchdog out there.”

As they dug into the Tamiflu research, Dr. Doshi said, he realized that such a watchdog didn’t exist. Instead, he said, “we have partial watchdogs who see part of the full picture.” It became his mission to see the full picture.

Having struck out with the authors of the disputed Kaiser paper and the two other published trials, Dr. Jefferson approached Roche itself, asking for the underlying data from the missing trials. But when he declined to sign a confidentiality agreement, Roche decided not to cooperate with the researchers.

Without more complete data about the clinical trials, the Cochrane group decided that it could not include the disputed study that summarized those results. In December 2009, the team reported that Tamiflu could not be shown to reduce complications like pneumonia or hospitalizations.

The British Medical Journal, which printed the team’s conclusions, also published its own investigation, showing that Roche had hired ghost writers to author some of the articles involving Tamiflu, and that those writers had said they were under pressure to highlight positive messages about the drug. Roche responded that hiring such writers was common industry practice at the time of the articles, and it rejected the idea that they had been pressured to write positively about the drug.

The articles in the British journal created a sensation, and the Cochrane Collaboration’s efforts became a cause célèbre. “Everyone knows about publication bias,” said Dr. Steven Woloshin, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and an advocate of more widespread sharing of clinical trial data. “But they just had so much energy and they brought so much attention to it.”

The group’s efforts seemed to make a difference: After the articles in the British journal, Roche turned over partial copies of study reports, amounting to a little more than 3,000 pages. Then, in 2011, the European Medicines Agency turned over more than 22,000 pages of documents for 19 trial reports to Dr. Jefferson and his team.

The door had been opened. As they read through the records, the researchers discovered the importance of documents called clinical study reports, which are thousands of pages long and contain details as varied as descriptions of trial protocol and design and the ingredients of the placebo pills.

“We used to know that there was a published paper and there were data behind it,” said Dr. Fiona Godlee, the editor of the British Medical Journal. “But people haven’t talked about these things, like clinical study reports, that are now being talked about a great deal.” Last fall, the journal said it would publish the results of clinical trials only if drug companies and researchers agreed to provide data upon request.

In April, Roche said it would make available to the Cochrane researchers clinical study reports for all Roche-sponsored trials of Tamiflu. Dr. Jefferson, Dr. Doshi and their colleagues hope to complete another update to their review of the drug by year-end.

Some said it was a shame that it took this long for the company to relent. “All these years later, and we still don’t know if Tamiflu is effective,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, the Yale cardiologist who oversaw the review of Medtronic’s bone treatment. “It’s perplexing to have a billion-dollar drug, and you’re still not willing to share everything you’ve got to know whether this thing is effective and safe.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/b...-research.html

[carlos3652]

https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2...Testing_1.html

Can someone explain this to me because the news hasn’t told me what to think yet…

Is this really saying that the rapid PCR lab test that people are taking are getting positive due to having the flu?

[Swanman]

Originally Posted by DaFace

I ask this question sincerely:

What is your reaction to stories like that? Do you salute the guy because he died without compromising his beliefs? Figure God just decided it was his time? Assume he's an outlier?

You often characterize those of us who are strongly in favor of vaccines as not caring about our fellow man, but it's those stories that make me even more frustrated that people continue to refuse to get vaccinated. I'm sick and tired of good people dying. I'll never understand why you think the people in favor of reducing death are the ones who don't care.

My reaction is play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It's a shame for his friends and family and that's on him.

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[Swanman]

Originally Posted by DaFace

No amount of self-discipline is going to cure a smoker's lungs or cure someone's diabetes. Your best hope is for things to slowly get better over decades.

And while, yes, I'm sure people understand that smoking and overeating are bad for you, it's tough to know where the line is between "indulgence" and "excess."

I also think it's wildly inaccurate to compare a lifetime of addiction to something that is a choice requiring an hour of your time.

You are not going to change his mind. He is willing to twist himself into a pretzel with his false equivalencies to justify his idiotic anti-vax standpoint.

It has become abundantly clear in the last 18 months that the country is infested with stupid and easily manipulated people. I wish there was a vaccine for stupidity but the dumbasses wouldn't take that one either.

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