***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.”

[RaidersOftheCellar]

Originally Posted by lawrenceRaider

When you can't even read/comprehend properly, let alone vet sources, why are your concerns valid?

If you say it, it must be true.

I was pointing out that many thousands of doctors, scientists and other experts, including the inventor of the technology, have the same concerns. Did you miss that part?

[dirk digler]

Originally Posted by RaidersOftheCellar

There are thousands upon thousands of doctors and scientists voicing concerns about these things, including the inventor of mRNA technology, yet you act as if it's just me.

At this early stage in clinical trials, what makes you so confident in its safety? What makes you think that all of their concerns are invalid?

Remember, I'm the one who is just saying there are factors that might deserve more consideration. You're the ones who are adamant that the risks are low.

It is ok to be cautious but you also support all kinds of experimental treatments etc for Covid-19 except the vaccines. It doesn't make sense to me. People have been taking this vaccine for well over a year now don't you think we would know if there were mass problems with it? There isn't because all the people dying are unvaccinated while the vaccinated barely get any symptoms most of the time.

For me personally, I would rather put my trust in the science than take a chance with Covid. No one knows the long term consequences of that either.

[lawrenceRaider]

Originally Posted by RaidersOftheCellar

If you say it, it must be true.

I was pointing out that many thousands of doctors, scientists and other experts, including the inventor of the technology, have the same concerns. Did you miss that part?

Thousands of "scientists" also say Climate Change is a hoax.

ETA: Robert Whatshisname isn't really the inventory of mRNA despite his recent claims. He was involved in the early, early research and that's about it. In fact he or one of his associates altered Wiki to add his name to it right before he started making the claims with no backup. Then the Wiki entry was reverted to what it was before on a fact check, and then he claimed people were trying to silence him by deleting his name.

[Chief Pagan]

Data published by Israel’s Ministry of Health in late July suggested that the Pfizer shot was just 39 percent effective against preventing infection in the country in late June and early July, compared with 95 percent from January to early April. In both periods, however, the shot was more than 90 percent effective in preventing severe disease.

Experts warn that these early assessments have not been scientifically proven: The small numbers of cases involved, Israel’s testing policies and a host of other biases could have skewed the results.

A preliminary study released Wednesday by Maccabi, an Israeli health-care provider, found that a booster shot of the Pfizer vaccine provided 86 percent effectiveness against infection in people aged over 60, a week or more after receiving the third dose.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/w...s-booster.html

For what it's worth...

[Marcellus]

This shit is so confounding to me.

People used to say they weren't scared of covid because it had a .2% mortality rate. (count me as one of them)

Now they point at a possible .0006% mortality rate for the vaccine and call it dangerous.

I know hundreds of vaccinated people if you count employees here, none have gotten severely ill from it or had anything but side effects making them feel like shit.

I know of 6 unvaccinated employees hospitalized since July 1, 3 in ICU at one point and a friend who almost died of it at 30 years old. That's 7-0 keeping score.

I mean the data is right in front of me yet I keep seeing people thinking shit that's just crazy. A friend of mine calls the vaccine the "poison death shot".

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by Marcellus

This shit is so confounding to me.

People used to say they weren't scared of covid because it had a .2% mortality rate. (count me as one of them)

Now they point at a possible .0006% mortality rate for the vaccine and call it dangerous.

I know hundreds of vaccinated people if you count employees here, none have gotten severely ill from it or had anything but side effects making them feel like shit.

I know of 6 unvaccinated employees hospitalized since July 1, 3 in ICU at one point and a friend who almost died of it at 30 years old. That's 7-0 keeping score.

I mean the data is right in front of me yet I keep seeing people thinking shit that's just crazy. A friend of mine calls the vaccine the "poison death shot".

There will be PhD dissertations written about this situation for the next 50 years, that's for sure. It's complicated, and frankly there are way too many conversations about it in social media, which is an inherently bad place to have a discussion about a complex topic.

[wazu]

Originally Posted by DaFace

There will be PhD dissertations written about this situation for the next 50 years, that's for sure. It's complicated, and frankly there are way too many conversations about it in social media, which is an inherently bad place to have a discussion about a complex topic.

Yes, and even better is people reposting meme after meme that they believe makes their case. So many zingers!

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by wazu

Yes, and even better is people reposting meme after meme that they believe makes their case. So many zingers!

I just think that social media has dulled our ability to consider nuance in anything. Everyone feels some weird tribal need to be right all the time, and they exaggerate everything to try and prove a point. So you often end up with very reasonable questions that quickly become shit fests because people can't handle the grey areas.

The recent discussion from the Raiders vaccine mandate thread is one example. Will there be mandates about a booster shots in the future?

The answer is, "We don't know."

But instead of just leaving it at that, people conclude that, since it's possible in the future, there's no point in getting a vaccine now. Or they say that since immunity fades (which has some nugget of truth) the vaccines don't really help anything (which ignores the fact that the vaccines are still very effective at preventing serious illness for at least a year).

I could probably come up with a list of 20+ points where there's an answer in the middle somewhere, but every discussion you find about it tries to paint it in black and white.

[KCUnited]

Nothing new or unexpected but we're going back to an indoor mask mandate here in Chicago until cases fall consistently under 400 per day.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-r...011708645.html

"The highest case rate has been among unvaccinated people who are 30-59 years old, followed by people ages 18-29. Both the highest hospitalization rate and the highest death rate have been among unvaccinated Chicagoans who are 60 years or older. Arwady said that the hospitalization rate is “really striking where we look at our Chicago data and how much that risk is falling on people who are unvaccinated.”

More than 60% of eligible Chicagoans have received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine. While there are “breakthrough” cases of vaccinated people getting infected, Arwady said that about 99.7% of vaccinated Chicagoans have avoided a COVID-19 diagnosis after receiving their shots. For the unlucky people who are vaccinated but still get the virus, 99.99% have not needed to be hospitalized.

[Pitt Gorilla]

Originally Posted by DaFace

I just think that social media has dulled our ability to consider nuance in anything. Everyone feels some weird tribal need to be right all the time, and they exaggerate everything to try and prove a point. So you often end up with very reasonable questions that quickly become shit fests because people can't handle the grey areas.

The recent discussion from the Raiders vaccine mandate thread is one example. Will there be mandates about a booster shots in the future?

The answer is, "We don't know."

But instead of just leaving it at that, people conclude that, since it's possible in the future, there's no point in getting a vaccine now. Or they say that since immunity fades (which has some nugget of truth) the vaccines don't really help anything (which ignores the fact that the vaccines are still very effective at preventing serious illness for at least a year).

I could probably come up with a list of 20+ points where there's an answer in the middle somewhere, but every discussion you find about it tries to paint it in black and white.

This. Absolutely this.

[carlos3652]

Originally Posted by DaFace

I just think that social media has dulled our ability to consider nuance in anything. Everyone feels some weird tribal need to be right all the time, and they exaggerate everything to try and prove a point. So you often end up with very reasonable questions that quickly become shit fests because people can't handle the grey areas.

The recent discussion from the Raiders vaccine mandate thread is one example. Will there be mandates about a booster shots in the future?

The answer is, "We don't know."

But instead of just leaving it at that, people conclude that, since it's possible in the future, there's no point in getting a vaccine now. Or they say that since immunity fades (which has some nugget of truth) the vaccines don't really help anything (which ignores the fact that the vaccines are still very effective at preventing serious illness for at least a year).

I could probably come up with a list of 20+ points where there's an answer in the middle somewhere, but every discussion you find about it tries to paint it in black and white.

+1. And i think both sides take it to the extreme, while both sides do have an argument to be made. I think where you lose most of the people in the middle, is when this is dictated as a mandate when there are still so many questions to be answered.

Seems like a no brainer to me for high risk, health compromised people, while there is a point to be made for not being needed for low risk, younger, healthier people.

When 99.9 % of the population survive and the medium age of the .1 is 77 years old). These numbers would be less now due to vaccines and treatments that are available.

I would like more numbers surrounding Long Covid to compare it to other diseases that cause issues long term.. say Pneumonia / Bronchitis etc

But my opinion is that we are now at extremes vs being more middle (like I think most of the people in this thread are) We let the extremist make too much noise.

From Hoax to the Worst Virus ever.

[InvinciBill]

Originally Posted by DaFace

I just think that social media has dulled our ability to consider nuance in anything. Everyone feels some weird tribal need to be right all the time, and they exaggerate everything to try and prove a point.

I agree with you 100%, and anyone who disagrees with you must be euthanized immediately in order for humanity to succeed.

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by carlos3652

+1. And i think both sides take it to the extreme, while both sides do have an argument to be made. I think where you lose most of the people in the middle, is when this is dictated as a mandate when there are still so many questions to be answered.

Seems like a no brainer to me for high risk, health compromised people, while there is a point to be made for not being needed for low risk, younger, healthier people.

When 99.9 % of the population survive and the medium age of the .1 is 77 years old). These numbers would be less now due to vaccines and treatments that are available.

I would like more numbers surrounding Long Covid to compare it to other diseases that cause issues long term.. say Pneumonia / Bronchitis etc

But my opinion is that we are now at extremes vs being more middle (like I think most of the people in this thread are) We let the extremist make too much noise.

From Hoax to the Worst Virus ever.

I kind of hate the 99% numbers whether we're talking about COVID risk or vaccine risk or anything else. I've generally found that most people don't even understand what the numbers mean, let alone how they relate to anything tangible, yet people love to throw them out as proof of something.

My favorite example recently was that a county commissioner here in Colorado recently said that kids are more likely to die from being hit by an asteroid than they are to die from COVID. I get the gist of what she was trying to say (that kids are relatively unlikely to die from COVID), but she was trying to compare the likelihood that the Earth would be hit by an asteroid in the next 300 years to the likelihood that a kid has died from COVID in the past year. (And...uh...not many kids have died from asteroids, so there's that.)

Shit like that happens all over the place, and it adds next to nothing to the conversation. Yes, you're relatively unlikely to die from COVID. Yes, you're even less likely to have an adverse affect from a vaccine. But saying that 99% of people are fine in either situation implies that it can't happen, when the reality is that 1 out of 100 people dying would be a **** ton of dead people. Because of that, there's a ton more to discuss than "99%" of anything.

[carlos3652]

Originally Posted by DaFace

I kind of hate the 99% numbers whether we're talking about COVID risk or vaccine risk or anything else. I've generally found that most people don't even understand what the numbers mean, let alone how they relate to anything tangible, yet people love to throw them out as proof of something.

My favorite example recently was that a county commissioner said that kids are more likely to die from being hit by an asteroid than they are to die from COVID. I get the gist of what she was trying to say (that kids are relatively unlikely to die from COVID), but she was trying to compare the likelihood that the Earth would be hit by an asteroid in the next 300 years to the likelihood that a kid has died from COVID in the past year.

Shit like that happens all over the place, and it adds next to nothing to the conversation. Yes, you're relatively unlikely to die from COVID. Yes, you're even less likely to have a "short term" adverse affect from a vaccine. But saying that 99% of people are fine in either situation implies that it can't happen, when the reality is that 1 out of 100 people dying would be a **** ton of dead people. Because of that, there's a ton more to discuss than "99%" of anything.

Agreed. You can spin statistics to either side. What I bolded is also my opinion without any numbers. I added short term because we don't know the long term consequences of the vaccine (and we probably wont know for awhile).

"when the reality is that 1 out of 100 people dying" is also something that could be broken down much further, because to your point 1 out of 100 children ages 0-17 dying would be much different than saying that 0.000846% of the Covid deaths since the pandemic started were for that age range. It would be more like what, 1 in every 300k?

I really do think breaking down the statistics by age / region / health / vaccine status would really show who are vulnerable and what we need to do. Comparing Vax vs Unvaxxed without the context of you are still unlikely to get this and die regardless what you are is what kills me.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by carlos3652

+1. And i think both sides take it to the extreme, while both sides do have an argument to be made. I think where you lose most of the people in the middle, is when this is dictated as a mandate when there are still so many questions to be answered.

Seems like a no brainer to me for high risk, health compromised people, while there is a point to be made for not being needed for low risk, younger, healthier people.

When 99.9 % of the population survive and the medium age of the .1 is 77 years old). These numbers would be less now due to vaccines and treatments that are available.

I would like more numbers surrounding Long Covid to compare it to other diseases that cause issues long term.. say Pneumonia / Bronchitis etc

But my opinion is that we are now at extremes vs being more middle (like I think most of the people in this thread are) We let the extremist make too much noise.

From Hoax to the Worst Virus ever.

Regarding the bolded, I keep seeing people repeat this. But the reality is that you cannot simply vaccinate a small part of the population that really needs it and ignore the rest. Unless you physically put those people in a bubble, you might as well not even bother. A vaccine will never be anything close to effective with that kind of strategy, and it just gives the virus that much more of an opportunity to mutate into something potentially worse.