***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.”

[TLO]

Originally Posted by O.city

New cases were likely higher because of testing issues then. Or atleast it would seem that way

I saw an article on CNN today that said likely 80% of virus cases were likely missed in March, FWIW.

[O.city]

Originally Posted by TLO

I saw an article on CNN today that said likely 80% of virus cases were likely missed in March, FWIW.

At best we caught one in 10, more likely 1 in 20.

One has to hope that paired with the serology testing and the fact that mild cases don’t seroconvert, were farther along in this than we think

[Bearcat]

Originally Posted by eDave

I feel like a lot of people like living this way. Those giving me dirty looks for complying with our ordinance are doing nothing to help get us out of this.

Leave aside your opinion on what got us here and help get us out. Because the defiant ones are keeping us down now. And when we get shut down again, to a greater degree, who's going to complain first?

I want my life back but I need help.

Exactly.

[O.city]

https://twitter.com/ballouxfrancois/...660909056?s=21

So you could be missing 53% of cases with serology testing

[eDave]

Originally Posted by Bearcat

Exactly.

I posted this emotional rant on FB last night.

Dear fellow Phoenix residents,

One of the things I love most about this city is you. But I'm not feeling that right now.

We are screwing up this ordinance without thinking of anyone but ourselves. Our personal
actions now affect countless people and as a result, this ordinance - placed into affect as
we go parabolic and headlining national news due to our casual, outgoing nature - is DOA
after 2 days!!! It's irresponsible, selfish, and embarrassing.

And please stop giving me dirty looks for complying. I know it's out of defiance but I'm doing
this for you and the law as well. I'm going to lose it because the next shutdown is going to be
a lot worse for all of us. We can resume fighting each other later.

Think of your hair if nothing else. That seemed awfully important to everyone last time.

I want my life back. But I need your help.

[lewdog]

Originally Posted by tk13

We've rang the bell for about a week now, but Texas is heading in the wrong direction. Today their leaders are finally starting to acknowledge it. Starting to lay the groundwork for taking action.

"The way that hospitalizations are spiking, the way that daily new cases are spiking, surely the public can understand that if those spikes continue additional measures are going to be necessary to make sure that we maintain the health & safety of the people of the state of TX"

— Houston Chronicle (@HoustonChron) June 22, 2020

Where's Bleeding Red to tell us about the 28,000 hospital beds in Texas?!?!?

[stumppy]

Originally Posted by lewdog

Where's Bleeding Red to tell us about the 28,000 hospital beds in Texas?!?!?

He was by earlier with the old 'you should see how many die from heart disease' line.

[lewdog]

Originally Posted by eDave

I feel like a lot of people like living this way. Those giving me dirty looks for complying with our ordinance are doing nothing to help get us out of this.

Leave aside your opinion on what got us here and help get us out. Because the defiant ones are keeping us down now. And when we get shut down again, to a greater degree, who's going to complain first?

I want my life back but I need help.

Originally Posted by eDave

I posted this emotional rant on FB last night.

Dear fellow Phoenix residents,

One of the things I love most about this city is you. But I'm not feeling that right now.

We are screwing up this ordinance without thinking of anyone but ourselves. Our personal actions now affect countless people and as a result, this ordinance - placed into affect as we go parabolic and headlining national news due to our casual, outgoing nature - is DOA after 2 days!!! It's irresponsible, selfish, and embarrassing.

And please stop giving me dirty looks for complying. I know it's out of defiance but I'm doing this for you and the law as well. I'm going to lose it because the next shutdown is going to be a lot worse for all of us. We can resume fighting each other later.

Think of your hair if nothing else. That seemed awfully important to everyone last time.

I want my life back. But I need your help.

Best post you've had. Those continuing to chant "freedom" and defy orders in this state will be the ones pushing us into another lockdown. No one wants or needs that. Do your part in mitigation efforts and we can at least maintain some assemble of choices for normal life activities for those wanting to partake.

The mental health factor of this is not lost on me either. It's a very serious feeling to be forced into another lock-down. The first one was hard enough, but a second could be devastating for many. While having a family skews my need for social/entertainment activities during this, those who are single honestly need them. I couldn't imagine how hard a lock-down and working in healthcare through all of this would be without a family to come home to. I didn't mean to rag on you about going out in previous posts, I am just asking you to go out and do it safely, with a mask.

I wish everyone would just take it seriously in this state. We are in big trouble if this is what the end of June is like. I never thought it would be this bad for hospitalizations this far into it here. Banner Good Sam, the biggest hospital in the state has 150 COVID patients. They've opened up 3 additional wings since the start of June to manage all of them. Just this week they also secured out of state nurses to help with staffing issues. It's not just beds, you need staff and equipment or the care sucks!!!

[dirk digler]

Originally Posted by Bearcat

IMO, it could do without the "bunch of idiots"/"desperation" rhetoric, that stuff makes it all sound just like the worst of the media, which seems to be the opposite of what's intended.

Originally Posted by DaFace

And biased. Which is fine, but it makes me take everything with a small grain of salt.

I tried to give this guy a chance but then I went back through his twitter feed and he has been saying this was a hoax,fabrication, and data manipulation pretty much from the get go. Also stated numerous times they were withholding test kits for whatever reason. He is a nutter.

If you were a follower of The Ethical Skeptic, you knew before anyone that test cases and test kits were being withheld to force a state of emergency release of funds. https://t.co/FiDhwpcgaj

— Ethical Skeptic ☀ (@EthicalSkeptic) March 24, 2020

[displacedinMN]

This shows how much people suck. Verbally attacking public health officials. Many are walking away.

For Lauri Jones, the trouble began in early May. The director of a small public health department in western Washington State was working with a family under quarantine because of coronavirus exposure. When she heard one family member had been out in the community, Jones decided to check in.

The routine phone call launched a nightmare.

“Someone posted on social media that we had violated their civil liberties [and] named me by name,” Jones recalled. “They said, ‘Let’s post her address … Let’s start shooting.’ “

People from across the country began calling her personal phone with similar threats.

“We’ve be doing the same thing in public health on a daily basis forever. But we are now the villains,” said Jones, 64, who called the police and set up surveillance cameras at her home.

Public health workers, already underfunded and understaffed, are confronting waves of protest at their homes and offices in addition to pressure from politicians who favor a faster reopening. Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said more than 20 health officials have been fired, resigned or have retired in recent weeks “due to conditions related to having to enforce and stand up for strong public health tactics during this pandemic.”


Although shutdown measures are broadly popular, a vocal minority opposes them vociferously. There have been attacks on officials’ race, gender, sexual orientation and appearance. Freeman said some of the criticisms “seem to be harsher for women.”

Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said attacks on health officials have been particularly awful in California, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

This month in California, Nichole Quick, Orange County’s chief health officer, stepped down after she faced threats and protests at her home for requiring face coverings in many businesses as cases rose. The mandate, issued May 23, was softened to a recommendation a week later.

Andrew Noymer, a professor of public health at the University of California at Irvine who is part of a county task force, said it was not the first time Quick had been undermined.

On March 17, Quick issued a strict lockdown order; a day later it was amended to add exceptions.

“It was couched as a clarification, but it was a walk back,” Noymer said, because of pressure from business leaders.

Quick’s departure is part of an exodus of public health officials across the country who have been blamed by both citizens and politicians for the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody resign for the kinds of reasons we’ve seen recently,” Plescia said. “We are very concerned that if it continues to get worse it’s going to have major implications for who will be willing to have these jobs.”

Ohio’s public health director, Amy Acton, shifted to an advisory role after enduring months of anger against the state’s preventive measures, including armed protesters at her home bearing messages including anti-Semitic and sexist slurs. One Republican lawmaker linked Acton, who is Jewish, to Nazi Germany; another called her a dictator.

Georgia’s public health director said last month that she receives threats daily and now has an armed escort.

Pennsylvania’s secretary of health, who is transgender, has come under fire for the state’s handling of the pandemic, including from a county official who resigned after saying at a recent meeting that he was “tired of listening to a guy dressed up as a woman.”

Four public health officials in Colorado have left their jobs recently.

A day after telling political leaders in Weld County, Colo., that their insistence on a speedy reopening despite a high case rate and widespread transmission was giving him “serious heartburn,” Public Health Director Mark Wallace got a 7:30 p.m. e-mail: He had until 9 a.m., it said, to weigh in on guidelines for reopening businesses — “churches, salons, restaurants, etc.”They would go public an hour later.

Wallace, who declined to comment for this article, retired soon after.

Theresa Anselmo, executive director of the Colorado Association of Local Public Health Officials, said 80 percent of members had reported being threatened and more than that were at risk of termination or lost funding.

“It’s exhausting to be contradicted and argued with and devalued and demoralized all the time, and I think that’s what you’re seeing around the country,” Anselmo said. “We’ve seen from the top down the federal government is pitting public health against freedom, and to set up that false dichotomy is really a disservice to the men and women who have dedicated their lives … to helping people.”

Not everyone has left willingly. In Colorado’s Rio Grande County, Emily Brown was fired, she says, after advocating a more cautious response to the virus.

“I think I just finally pushed too hard,” she said. “There was resistance to taking steps as quickly as I felt they needed to be taken or move in directions I thought we needed to.”

She had been in her position for six years and valued being part of a close-knit rural community. But during the pandemic, she said, she began getting threatening messages online from people she considered neighbors, including one Facebook post that referenced hanging. She became worried about who she might run into at the grocery store.

“I’ve been surprised at who professes that vitriol so vocally on platforms like social media,” she said.

Derrick Neal, who runs the public health department in Round Rock, Texas, and is past president of the state public health workers’ association, said given the virus’s impact on daily life, public health was inevitably tied up in politics. “But a community has to be healthy in order to be economically solvent,” he said. “That’s been lost in the politics of all this.”

Public health workers in California have also been battered publicly by business groups, ordinary citizens and elected officials. Several have resigned.

“Half a dozen county health leaders are leaving their positions in the coming weeks. All of them have served with distinction and in the interest of public health,” California Medical Association president Peter Bretan Jr. said in a statement. “We are deeply concerned that politics may be trumping public interest.”

After Los Angeles County health official Barbara Ferrer held a news conference on May 13 saying some stay-at-home restrictions may remain in place for three more months, a doctored photo of her with dark circles under her eyes made its way across social media. One tweet, liked or retweeted more than 100,000 times, called her “the most unhealthy looking person I have ever seen.”

In a full-page ad in the local newspaper, a business council accused Santa Clara County’s public health officer, Sara Cody, of “cratering our economy” for being the first in the nation to impose a shelter-in-place order. The local sheriff is now investigating threats against her.

People in the field worry that many of these vacant positions will be difficult to fill.

“This is the beginning of a wave of people leaving,” Anselmo said. “Who would want to go work as a director in a public health department when you have a target on your back?”

[tk13]

That's the world we live in now. It's pretty clear that dude is not using facts to come to a hypothesis. Sure looks like he's the type to come up with a hypothesis and then find the facts to support it. People have been doing that for months.

It's not possible that experts who've spent their lives studying this could see the storm coming over the hill to declare an emergency. No, it's a conspiracy involving every medical expert, doctor and nurse, in conjunction with every Republican and Democrat governor and public health official in 50 different states... plus the equivalent officials in about 100 other countries in the world.

[Chief Pagan]

Guns, germs, steel, and internet trolls.

[BigCatDaddy]

Originally Posted by displacedinMN

This shows how much people suck. Verbally attacking public health officials. Many are walking away.

Sounds a lot like another profession right now.

[BigCatDaddy]

Anybody disputing his facts yet? So far all I see is people complaining about motive and him saying mean things.

[stumppy]

Originally Posted by BigCatDaddy

Anybody disputing his facts yet? So far all I see is people complaining about motive and him saying mean things.

Looks like the kind of guy you're anxious to believe. Let's face it, when you call yourself "Ethical Skeptic' it's about like someone calling themselves a stable genus.
So yea, you should build yourself a little soap box out of his info and post away.


The results should be hilarious.