Covid-19 #15 : It Ain't Over Until It's Over

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, Galactus said:

The reason they did not recommend for the general public to wear masks at the time was that there was a real shortage of PPE's in many places, and uncertainity in many more (IE: They had enough masks now but couldn't guarantee future supply) and they wanted to first secure supply for the most crucial areas (wards/hospital workers/etc.) 

Hey Galactus! Long time no see. Indeed, I understand they were trying to conserve the masks, but, as I said in my post above, that was not the reason they publicly gave. I can also understand why they did not give that as a reason: if people believe something to be scarce, they will go after it with a will. However, the price of saying that masks are not recommended for the general population is that a lot of people believe it -- and continue believing it even after the recommendation changes.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, williamjm said:

I feel our ideas could easily be combined.

We could also start a conspiracy theory about how Bill Gates and the Obama/Clinton/Biden Deep State are going to use 5G technology to spread vaccines through the air and only masks can protect Real Americans from it, since that's apparently the sort of thing people will believe these days.

You have taken things to bizarre levels. 

I'm very impressed.

 

1 hour ago, Wilbur said:

You are totally correct about the selfishness.  Formerly I would have expected people to be willing to give up some personal freedom to help out their neighbors.  No longer true, apparently.

Think most Americans who eat meat daily would give it up for a few days per week to help others out in 2020?

Of course not.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

The last time I dared to look the anti-5G folks seemed to agree that masks amplify the Bill Gates death rays. 

[Zorral]

We decided to let haircuts go at least through the end of July -- waiting and seeing about spiking cases again here in NYC. There was a .01 increase here in new cases in the last two days, when previous days the number of new cases dropped or stayed the same. People doing the bar hooping and hopping -- plus so many who ran to Florida and their time shares, rentals or second / third homes, are running back here.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/27/us-reopening-plans-reverse-quickly-amid-alarming-increase-coronavirus-cases

Quote

On Saturday, the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, called on state investigators to investigate a coronavirus cluster in the New York City suburb of Westchester, believed to have been caused by a student who returned from Florida.

Right now, this minute, the restaurant across the street has 100 people drunkenly howling so loudly we can hear them all the way back here in our apartment, which is at the back, not street front.

NYers who ran from covid-19 to Florida are coming back, bringing it with them. So are other Floridians.  Yesterday I was in the Gourmet Garage here to buy essentials such as milk.  Masks are mandatory if one wishes to enter GG.  Yes! Otherwise I wouldn't enter.  However, the check out person with whom I've gotten friendly over the years informed me that the day before a couple waltzed in w/o masks and no one noticed until they got to check out.  When called out on not wearing a mask, they said, "We don't need to wear masks.  We just came in from Florida."

As I observed back in April, maybe? This catastrophe isn't a curve, it's a loop. And the loop is global.

Travel isn't safe, for a lot of reasons, by car, particularly because of bathrooms and food, and really, unless one's very own plane, does one want to go to an airport and sit in an airplane? There are signs up in the NY airports now, that say, "If you don't live here you shouldn't be here."

Because of those red states and what's happening there, and what's going on -- or, rather not going on in terms of safety -- I'm starting to feel that same dread that came at the end of February, which then at the second week of March turned into downright fear, and didn't really relax until sometime in May. It was then I started to sleep normally again.

But last night, as I did back then, my dreams were all about being with the people I love -- who have died. Last night again, I spent with P, who died a year ago in February.  During times of danger people I know who have died, visit me in my sleep, giving me advice, providing warning.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

USA deaths from all causes 2017 (latest year available on CDC website as final data):

Quote

• Heart disease: 647,457
• Cancer: 599,108
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
• Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
• Diabetes: 83,564
• Influenza and pneumonia: 55,672
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,633
• Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173

You will see that the first infectious disease to appear is 'flu, but even that is combined with all forms of pneumonia.

After not quite 6 months COVID-19 is 5th, and by far the leading cause of death from an infectious disease. Definitely blowing this thing all out of proportion. Nothing to see here. I expect by the end of the year it will be third, only behind the perpetual big 2. Though if the USA makes a concerted effort to try to achieve herd immunity by infection it can push COVID-19 to #1 with a death rate of just 0.35%

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, Triskele said:

I think that I may have discovered the worst person in the world (and just to clarify, I actually do not mean Dr. Phil).  More here.

Freedum! Freedum! Freedum!

[A True Kaniggit]

5 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

USA deaths from all causes 2017 (latest year available on CDC website as final data):

You will see that the first infectious disease to appear is 'flu, but even that is combined with all forms of pneumonia.

After not quite 6 months COVID-19 is 5th, and by far the leading cause of death from an infectious disease. Definitely blowing this thing all out of proportion. Nothing to see here. I expect by the end of the year it will be third, only behind the perpetual big 2. Though if the USA makes a concerted effort to try to achieve herd immunity by infection it can push COVID-19 to #1 with a death rate of just 0.35%

And what I try to explain to people is that Covid-19 has killed this many Americans in spite of months of lock-down (or at least our attempt at one)

I think the new saying is 200,000 dead at October?

I'm calling September.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, A True Kaniggit said:

And what I try to explain to people is that Covid-19 has killed this many Americans in spite of months of lock-down (or at least our attempt at one)

I think the new saying is 200,000 dead at October?

I'm calling September.

And for more context, the heart disease and cancer you halve that 2017 number for deaths from these causes YTD, so it's 128K COVID-19 deaths vs 300K and 324K. So it's not far from half the number of deaths in those categories. 200K by 1 September is ave. 1200 deaths per day. That's possible. Probably more likely mid-ish Sept with an ave of ~900/day

[ithanos]

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

USA deaths from all causes 2017 (latest year available on CDC website as final data):

You will see that the first infectious disease to appear is 'flu, but even that is combined with all forms of pneumonia.

After not quite 6 months COVID-19 is 5th, and by far the leading cause of death from an infectious disease. Definitely blowing this thing all out of proportion. Nothing to see here. I expect by the end of the year it will be third, only behind the perpetual big 2. Though if the USA makes a concerted effort to try to achieve herd immunity by infection it can push COVID-19 to #1 with a death rate of just 0.35%

One can argue that seven of those top ten (maybe even eight), including the top two, can germinate for years before their ultimate conclusion. So these 2017 numbers, tragic as they are, and to use and analogy are just the year these stocks matured, the funds withdrawn and the accounts closed - but seeding could have been decades earlier. That these did not exist in such numbers in per-industrial times, nor in societies yet to be swamped by the trappings of modernity gives hope they can be reverted - if not for us but for future generations.  
Accidents, Influenza & pneumonia and now Covid-19 are short term accounts without prescience and still worth mitigating in any way possible.

[A True Kaniggit]

14 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

And for more context, the heart disease and cancer you halve that 2017 number for deaths from these causes YTD, so it's 128K COVID-19 deaths vs 300K and 324K. So it's not far from half the number of deaths in those categories. 200K by 1 September is ave. 1200 deaths per day. That's possible. Probably more likely mid-ish Sept with an ave of ~900/day

I'm going on the assumption that all these new cases are because of a drastic increase in the spread of the virus, and not because of an 'increase in testing'. If it was the latter, then that would be amazing, I wish it was the latter.

But if you expect the worst, then in a little over a month the U.S. is going to see a hell of a lot of deaths.

[Which Tyler]

5 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

USA deaths from all causes 2017 (latest year available on CDC website as final data):

You will see that the first infectious disease to appear is 'flu, but even that is combined with all forms of pneumonia.

After not quite 6 months COVID-19 is 5th, and by far the leading cause of death from an infectious disease. Definitely blowing this thing all out of proportion. Nothing to see here. I expect by the end of the year it will be third, only behind the perpetual big 2. Though if the USA makes a concerted effort to try to achieve herd immunity by infection it can push COVID-19 to #1 with a death rate of just 0.35%

I thought I'd do the same for the UK (Well, England and Wales; as ONS really doesn't want to include Covid figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland in an easy-to-digest manner.

 

Leading causes of death; 5-year average (2014-2018) for England & Wales (all genders, all ages):

62,633 - Dementia and Alzheimer disease (F01,F03,G30)

58,360 - Ischaemic heart diseases (I20-I25)

32,858 - Cerebrovascular diseases (I60-I69)

31,310 - Chronic lower respiratory diseases (J40-J47)

30,294 - Malignant neoplasm of trachea, bronchus and lung (C33-C34)

27,955 - Influenza and pneumonia (J09-J18)

1 Quarter of 2020 (March 14th to June 12th)
48,213 - COVID-19 (U07.1 and U07.2)
11,111 - Other Excess Deaths compared to 5-year average

 

Sources:
Leading Deaths: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/datasets/leadingcausesofdeathuk (have to select all genders and all ages)
COVID-19: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending12june2020#deaths-registered-in-the-uk (data downloaded from point 3)

[The Anti-Targ]

I really don't think most people have any appreciation of how big of a deal it is that a single infectious disease is one of the leading causes of death in several developed countries with high quality health care (access varies) and sophisticated public health systems. I wonder if since the advent of antibiotics and vaccines if there has been an infectious disease that has been this deadly within 6 months, in terms of total deaths?

Slow burning pandemics, like HIV, have been more deadly over all and one must not forget the suffering from that disease, and it still goes on in developing countries.

[Clueless Northman]

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I wonder if since the advent of antibiotics and vaccines if there has been an infectious disease that has been this deadly within 6 months, in terms of total deaths?

I'd say this is the worst shit to hit us since the Spanish Flu, if you consider how easily it is spread and how hard it is to avoid infections (as opposed to AIDS for instance, despite the horrendous death rate and total of deaths now). That said, alas, I can easily picture a worse offender appearing in a few decades. And about AIDS, I'm really pondering how serious and thorough the search for a vaccine has been, considering what some say about a possible vaccine against the coronavirus in the next couple of years.

[The Anti-Targ]

6 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

I'd say this is the worst shit to hit us since the Spanish Flu, if you consider how easily it is spread and how hard it is to avoid infections (as opposed to AIDS for instance, despite the horrendous death rate and total of deaths now). That said, alas, I can easily picture a worse offender appearing in a few decades. And about AIDS, I'm really pondering how serious and thorough the search for a vaccine has been, considering what some say about a possible vaccine against the coronavirus in the next couple of years.

Very very different beasts. Having said that vaccines have been developed against feline AIDs which is a similar retrovirus. But possibly the difference is there are fewer strains of the virus and FIV vaccine is only effective against the strain in the vaccine, it's not effective against other strains.

It's likely SARS-COV-2 isn't a fast mutator, particularly for the spike protein which is the target of some of the vaccines.

[Toth]

15 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

I'd say this is the worst shit to hit us since the Spanish Flu, if you consider how easily it is spread and how hard it is to avoid infections (as opposed to AIDS for instance, despite the horrendous death rate and total of deaths now). That said, alas, I can easily picture a worse offender appearing in a few decades.

Yeah, earlier on I heard someone comment that we are already getting our ass handed to us by an easy-mode pandemic (especially in how the failings of our education systems gets highlighted by so much stupid swirling vocally through the ether). If this turns out to be the warm-up boss for the zombie apocalypse, we are screwed...

[rotting sea cow]

 

SARS-CoV-2 detected in waste waters in Barcelona on March 12, 2019

https://www.ub.edu/web/ub/en/menu_eines/noticies/2020/06/042.html?

 

 

 

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

 

https://www.ub.edu/web/ub/en/menu_eines/noticies/2020/06/042.html?

 

Please don't use that obnoxious font size. I can react to the normal size just as well, since I can read.

And I'm not sure that I trust that report. 

[kairparavel]

Moved to other thread. 

[rotting sea cow]

3 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Please don't use that obnoxious font size. I can react to the normal size just as well, since I can read.

 

Apologies, I was in mobile and it's difficult to edit stuff with my thick fingers. I edited it now

3 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

And I'm not sure that I trust that report. 

Well, the authors believe it might be an error. But if the samples are not contaminated it might be telling us something.

From what I understood, PCR are sensitive to parts of the RNA sequence, not to the whole one. This creates the possibility of cross-reaction with something else. It's not MERS, neither other human-coronaviriae. But then what?

Hopefully the researchers will try to sequence the amplified samples and get something out of them. Maybe also check the medical records of nearby hospitals in the hope to find something that matches.

Someone here was also working in a covid-related research with wastewater, so he/she might be interested in chiming in. @Impmk2

 

[Clueless Northman]

11 hours ago, Toth said:

Yeah, earlier on I heard someone comment that we are already getting our ass handed to us by an easy-mode pandemic (especially in how the failings of our education systems gets highlighted by so much stupid swirling vocally through the ether). If this turns out to be the warm-up boss for the zombie apocalypse, we are screwed...

That's what pisses me off the most actually. That one virus is bad enough, but I still think we've been pretty lucky to be hit by that coronavirus and not a far deadlier bastard. All governments should really consider this a test of their and their peope's abilities to face a deadly pandemic, and should fix as soon and as fast as possible every single screw-up, including minor ones, so that they'll never happen again, because the next time, we can't fail or our societies are pretty much toast.

I'd like to see scientists and others push that reasoning way more in the media, and very few are doing it: people should understand it's not just that one virus they're fighting now, they're also practicing and seeing how to organize for that time when we'll face a badder jerk. We have to take all this seriously as if we were facing the Black Plague, because we need to be fully prepared when we'll have to deal with some Black Plague-level pandemic. And right now, all I can say is that if this were the Black Plague, all our modern tech and medicine wouldn't change much and we would be hit just as badly as Europe was back in 1348; for a starter, some people did better and more thorough quarantines back then than the jokes too many countries/areas are doing right now.