Covid-19 #38: As the Worm Turns

[Zorral]

6 minutes ago, HoodedCrow said:

The CDC did not cause this pandemic. My DH just told me about a “ study” that was supposed to come from The World Republican, something like that, that claims that the vaccines have a huge drop to n efficacy and none of the scientists are recognizable and the source of the information was said to be from India. It’s been pulled.

Meanwhile, on the 'legal' side of drugs and personal health, we have the Sackler family almost single-handedly creating the opioid epidemic (still crushing it, I might add, with an estimated 93,000 deaths last year, up 30% from the previous year) and then the legal system giving them a relative slap on the wrist.

[Zorral]

The things we read on the innernezzes -- 

Quote

I have a friend who trains dressage horses. Her stable now refuses to stock ivermectin and the Tractor Supply where she has to buy hers keeps the stuff behind the counter, like Sudafed at the pharmacy, and won’t sell it to anyone who can’t show a picture of themselves with their own horse. So, morons are making life far more unpleasant for animals who don’t deserve this.

I also have a friend who trains (and breeds) dressage Lipizzans.  This is not her. >horse laff< 

   Cruelty to horses!  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

@Zorral - no one is arguing any “whataboutism” on the CDC’s response, which was initially was embarrassingly politicized and frankly, embarrassing. And has now gone the opposite swing of the pendulum.

This is part of what has caused many intelligent people to disregard what the CDC has stated or is currently stating. 

The CDC approving of an honor system method was a truly terrible mistake. There's no way around that. And their messaging has not taken into account that everyday people don't follow what they're saying. It's not surprising that people are checking them out. What is weird is how these same people for the most part are chasing crackpot science they're seeing on social media. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 minute ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

There’s more people than that who have checked them out. I certainly have, and I’m not about to start taking horse dewormer, or putting my rocacea meds on my muffins.

I didn't want to share the secret to the world, but the key is sticking Jolly Ranchers up your ass. Watermelon flavor, goes without saying.  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

I thought that was cocaine. Having someone suck on watermelon flavor jolly ranchers and blow cocaine up the arse.

You put the cocaine on your nipples silly. What a rookie. 

[HoodedCrow]

Not that there aren’t weird treatments. My dad was cured of bladder cancer because someone noticed that people with TB didn’t die of bladder cancer. ( long time use of pipes) He was given the TB bacillium, and used bleach in the toilet so it would be killed. I told an American nurse this and she thought I was nuts. Look it up, I say. The key is in the studies. If intermectin is shown to work by a group reliable with dose related information, I’ll take it. Already, though there are mixed results and harms.

[Clueless Northman]

Vaccinated people are basically the control group for invermectin, just like unvaccinated/anti-vaxx are the control group for the vaccines. It's quite obvious which one has the nastiest side-effects, and there's growing evidence the dewormer is less effective against covid than the vaccines.

About masks, just as with quarantines, lockdowns, vaccines and their rollout, border controls, airborne component of the disease, HCQ, invermectin and most of what's not hardcore science (=first of all efficiency level of vaccine or drug, treatment and the like), a good deal of sense, basic scientific knowledge and actual consideration for the results of genuine and serious scientific/medical studies have served me very well not to take as gospel what this person or authority had to say, but the opposite: I've used what people, media, WHO, CDC, governments, celebs and others said to evaluate if they're sensible or full of shit. Let's just say the "full of shit" group has sizably grown in the last 18 months, even if from time to time they manage to be right or make the correct decision. For instance, WHO said both that masks were useless and risky for common people and that there was no reason to limit wide-scale international travels back in March 2020; their advices are useless as long as they're not backed by very recent covid-related studies and observations and I don't give them any credit by default - like with CDC or what any government says, I consider their advices on my own and check if they make sense, if there's any science that backs them, or if it's obviously bullshit.

So far, over the last 18 months, the only major point where I've been blatantly dead wrong was that I wasn't expecting a vaccine before the end of 2021 but was quite sure that some drug/treatment (probably a tweaked existing one) would be found at the latest in early 2021 that would significantly reduce covid's nastiness and lethality. Granted, I was also foolishly hoping that we would only have one big deadly wave, but that was because I naively expected governments to act more sensibly during last Summer, having learned the lesson of their criminal mishandling of the Spring wave; instead of that, a lot of governments turned out to be way worse and even more criminally incompetent, or corrupt, than I suspected them to be.

[Zorral]

What aboutism is wasting time whipping on dead horses (again, with cruelty to horses!), when there are ongoing deadly 'drugs' being peddled that are ruining and killing vast numbers of people, people peddling anti-vaxxing, anti-masking and doing so violently, and even in schools. Right this minute -- when masks and distance and vaccine are saving people's lives. What's so difficult to comprehend about this?

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

I'm astounded any adult would need to rely on the media to determine that masks would be helpful with protecting against the spread of virus.

It's a Darwin thing to intuitively seek some self preservation. The media nor the government should need to hold your hand and tell one something so very obvious.

Most of the noise around this is very disingenuous or the squawking is coming from a place of extreme ignorance. The kind of ignorance usually reserved for those that have to be told not to stick there hands in a fire. Something even our cat can figure out at the backyard bonfire.

So are you as smart as my cat?

[Padraig]

 

27 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I'm astounded any adult would need to rely on the media to determine that masks would be helpful with protecting against the spread of virus.

Not the media as such.  But the medical people that the media report on.  

The whole western world got the mask thing wrong as far as I know.  I'm not aware of any country in the West that was recommending masks until May?  July?  I can't really remember.  I'm not ashamed to say that I didn't wear them until advised to do so.  (If I was older or more at risk, I may have been more risk adverse but who knows).

Certainly the CDC wasn't alone anyhow.  It may seem obvious now but I suspect that is hindsight.  Didn't they find the very old paper that was wrongly interpreted to mean that masks weren't needed? 

Regarding boosters.  Has the US CDC not approved them?  The US has announced that the booster program is beginning on the 20th Sept.  Was that just a government decision to ignore the CDC then?

But again, the EMA in Europe hasn't approved boosters either.  I imagine the CDC and the EMA will do so once the evidence builds up.  Given what Fauci has said, it does seem to be building up.  Before that, it was mainly the manufacturers that were saying boosters were needed, which had to be viewed with a pinch of salt.  But also, people were thinking "better safe than sorry".  That drove a certain momentum, but that was mainly based on intuition, not science.

3 hours ago, Altherion said:

More recently, they advised more complete re-opening just as it was obvious that the delta variant was about to arrive (thus leading to the current wave).

This is fair though.  I remember thinking at the time that this seems rushed.  I wonder how much pressure it was getting from the Biden administration.  I imagine there is more to that story (and I could easily have missed an expose on that decision).

[Zorral]

If no one was advised to wear masks how in hell did we and our friends learn of it and started doing it before the end of March, whether we had surgical masks or not, were making our own, whether any good at it or not, extremely upset at the lack of masks a well as lack of testing, lack of everything?  All before the end of March?

[williamjm]

8 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Having said that, so much of the research behind Ivermectin and Covid appears to be really poor or outright fraudulent. The claims about its effectiveness are mostly based on one or two studies with serious problems in their methods. At this point there can be no defence of the drug or reason for using it over a vaccine. The evidence simply isn’t there.

I was reading this article a couple of days ago about some of the issues (including one of the supposedly participating hospitals never having heard of the trial) with one of the studies claiming Ivermectin was 100% effective.

[Week]

39 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

As to your first paragraph - one would think, right? However, it’s not the media, it’s the CDC. And it’s infantilizing for the CDC to say, “masks don’t help….so, save them for the medical professionals!”

I don’t think it’s disingenuous to be upset about this, because trust is lost. 

How long is that trust lost for? We're almost 20 months past that mistake which has been acknowledged several times.

As for more recent missteps, the states with the worst spread are due to Guvs and state Legislature that have run contrary to all health and safety advice and effectively doomed many of their own citizens. Where is the CDC's responsibility there? I think that's a good question that would be better answered with more reporting and data requirements -- which is an ongoing misstep IMO. No bureaucratic org is going to be perfect but you'd like to see even more continued improvement.

[The Anti-Targ]

I think with mask discussion we don't want to let perfect get in the way of good. If people keep talking up surgical masks and downplaying any other form of facial covering, that will end up having people form the opinion that if you don't have a surgical mask you might as well go maskless. Any mask is better than no mask, even a bandanna across the face like a wild west outlaw is better than going face naked. It may be of minimal benefit at stopping you from getting COVID-19, but surgical masks are also of limited, though more, benefit too (ref studies showing infection is likely through the eyes - hospital workers with masks and gloves but no face shields catching COVID-19 at higher rates than hospital workers with masks and gloves and face shields). But they are beneficial at minimising the wearer from spreading the virus.

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

As to your first paragraph - one would think, right? However, it’s not the media, it’s the CDC. And it’s infantilizing for the CDC to say, “masks don’t help….so, save them for the medical professionals!”

I don’t think it’s disingenuous to be upset about this, because trust is lost. 

It could be argued that this is not addressing the single issue of COVID-19. Mask wearing by the public at that time was solely being considered in the context of the spread of COVID-19. Mask-wearing in the heathcare setting is about a whole lot more than just stopping the spread of COVID-19, which significantly includes healthcare workers not breathing and potentially passing on any number of microbes to people who are already sick and possibly immunocompromised. It wasn't necessarily wrong to prioritise a limited, or potentially about to be limited resource to the healthcare sector. One might say the messaging was not well done. But in a fast moving situation the CDC was not wrongly motivated to make sure the healthcare sector remained properly provisioned.

Most people have never been in, or ever will be, a situation where decisions need to be made with great urgency that will affect the lives of millions of people with an inadequate amount of information. Me, being in such a job and having gone through such situations (thankfully not human life and death decisions) both in simulations and real emergency responses, I cut agencies a lot more slack with these sorts of decisions than the general public, because the general public pretty much always has unreasonable expectations. We mull over decisions as long as possible, argue back and forth, think about the pros and cons and end up making a decision no one is entirely happy with because we don't have all the information we want and we can't afford to wait until we do. And we have political pressure to make decisions that are biased towards whatever ideology or part of society the govt of the day prefers. And then we have to try to come up with a public message in even less time because we have waited for as long as possible to get as much information as possible to make a decision.

[karaddin]

9 hours ago, HoodedCrow said:

I don’t believe I have really had side effects fully explained to me, especially long term side effects, have you? 

I don't think I've ever had an in depth discussion of them with a GP (PCP in US terms) but my neurologist has been pretty good at giving me a rundown of what to look out for with the various medications we've tried - particularly the one that could have substantial psychological effects (and it did). He's also been pretty good about setting expectations for dependency and withdrawal. I'm not sure if that's an indication that specialists are better at this aspect or just that I have a good neurologist lol.

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

As to your first paragraph - one would think, right? However, it’s not the media, it’s the CDC. And it’s infantilizing for the CDC to say, “masks don’t help….so, save them for the medical professionals!”

I don’t think it’s disingenuous to be upset about this, because trust is lost. 

Managing public health isn't just about making the right medical call, which I'm going to put into IT terms by calling it technical expertise. A huge part of the job is about ensuring that the messaging going out supports the public behaving in the ways that are needed to deal with the problem you're addressing, which is the social expertise part of the job. The social skills are the harder part of the job and it's where the CDC has definitely had some failings and I think it's entirely fair to point these out and ask them to put a higher priority on this aspect of the job in the future.

Other examples of measures where the social dynamics can be at odds with the other factors are things like

1) Heavy enforcement of restrictions from police etc can put people into an adversarial dynamic where they are much less likely to be honest when working with contact tracers and potentially less likely to trust in measures like vaccination

2) The $100 reward for getting vaccinated in Alberta (I think?) could help with the situation right now, but backfire long term if it winds up encouraging people to hold out initially until the government stumps up some bribery. This can be mitigated by making it retrospective but that obviously then makes it a much larger cost. I'd argue it's an investment in long term public health compliance and trust and worth it, but it's a conversion to be had a decision to be made.

Obviously the dynamic in 1) is completely out the window at the point of a group that's already adversarial to the point of abusing service workers for asking them to wear masks and threatening school workers for trying to keep kids safe. It's applicable when you currently have public trust and compliance and are trying to avoid losing it.

[The Marquis de Leech]

21 Auckland cases.... but seven are one family, and only four of those 21 were ever infectious in the community. This will take a while, but things are heading in the right direction.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

^ the messaging outright lied. (Responding to Anti-Targ)

@The Anti-Targ - I message for a living. I write earnings calls. I turn omg shitty quarters of net income into “challenges” and “opportunities”. One NEVER lies. One can spin the truth, but never lie. The better messaging would have been “we have a limited number of “medical masks”. Therefore, please stay home / social distance / make a cloth mask”.

One cannot message one day that “masks don’t work” yet at the same time, “save them for healthcare workers” and then TWO WEEKS later, recommend “cloth masks, even a bandanna will do”.

Shoddy f—-ing messaging.

Goes to the old cliche that trust is hard to gain, but easy to lose. The CDC has done a poor job communicating that they're trying their best, but we're still dealing with something no one could be truly prepared for. This was compounded by all the mistrust surrounding Trump, then by his supports who didn't want to listen to his detractors. It was a prefect storm, really, and just in general Americans are dumb. 

[The Anti-Targ]

The 21 cases was also on the back of almost double the number of tests from the previous day, which means a not statistically significant increase from the previous day, with a statistically significant increase in testing. So even though we have a 1 case increase on yesterday I think this is better news than the last three days with ever decreasing tests and flat case numbers.

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

^ the messaging outright lied. (Responding to Anti-Targ)

@The Anti-Targ - I message for a living. I write earnings calls. I turn omg shitty quarters of net income into “challenges” and “opportunities”. One NEVER lies. One can spin the truth, but never lie. The better messaging would have been “we have a limited number of “medical masks”. Therefore, please stay home / social distance / make a cloth mask”.

One cannot message one day that “masks don’t work” yet at the same time, “save them for healthcare workers” and then TWO WEEKS later, recommend “cloth masks, even a bandanna will do”.

Shoddy f—-ing messaging.

Did they lie? My memory may be faulty but I only recall things like "no evidence that masks work out in the community", which strictly speaking was true at the time. There was no evidence of significant benefit of community mask use at the time, especially not ill-fitting / improperly applied masks. Common sense suggests mask use to limit spread of respiratory viruses should at least be somewhat effective, but hard definitive evidence for it being an important non-pharmaceutical intervention was not available. We are now pretty confident that pretty much any mask over the face and nose is preferable to no mask. I won't disagree that the messaging was shoddy, it was, and I was very critical at the time of the messaging coming from our own health ministry leaders (one example being casting doubt on asymptomatic spread when evidence of it already existed), but outright lying, my memory of those days has me doubting the vehemence of such an assertion. 

Also, and this will be controversial and I am not suggesting it would legit in this case, in a health context lying can be like chemotherapy. It will cause harm and sometimes barely tolerable harm, but the benefit in the right situation is greater than the harm that is caused. It is probably the one time I might tolerate a bit of lying - but only to be used at the utmost end of need. It's like how Grey Wardens are allowed to use blood magic, when it basically condemns other mages to being hunted down as maleficarum (Dragon Age reference). So "never lie" comes with a small asterisk. With financial market reporting lying will get you heavily fined or thrown in prison.

On an even less bright note. Someone around here posted about their story of trying to help a friend out of a conspiracy rabbit hole. This article doesn't provide much comfort in the prospect of being successful. If you are successful at de-conspiracying someone then you are probably one of the few.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-coronavirus-delta-outbreak-jarrod-gilbert-disinformation-conspiracy-theories-and-the-solutions/OLHMMYLWCGS2HIT45YUN46NJEQ/

Quote

If you have a friend or a family member who's fallen into the trap of disinformation or conspiracy theories, it can be very hard to talk them out of it. Conspiracy beliefs can be resilient and self-reinforcing, and experts concede there's no way to go about dealing with them that's guaranteed or, even particularly likely, to be effective.

 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

4 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

As to your first paragraph - one would think, right? However, it’s not the media, it’s the CDC. And it’s infantilizing for the CDC to say, “masks don’t help….so, save them for the medical professionals!”

I don’t think it’s disingenuous to be upset about this, because trust is lost. 

Keep in mind, Many of Americas infectious disease experts and the CDC were regulating their speech so as not to piss off the man child in office so they wouldn't get fired so they could do their jobs managing this pandemic. They still have to deal with his acolytes on that side of the aisle. God knows how many of his cronies are still influencing decision making over there.

Health Canada has been pretty good. just listen to them. 

[karaddin]

Yeah, I want to clarify that I don't think it's an easy job and I'm not trying to suggest I'd do better. They made a choice to prioritize rationing PPE for medical staff over setting up the foundation for widespread public use of masks. In hindsight I think this was pretty clearly a mistake, but a big part of the problem is that they don't exist in a vacuum and the political dynamics at play have not fallen in their favor. Which is probably the understatement of the century.

Also agreed with Chats, misrepresentation is probably the right term.