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Covid 48: The Long March


Darzin
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Think this was discussed above but this article lays out things a bit more cleanly.

So we knew that COVID increased heart-related issues. Some randos pointed out all the heart issues people have been facing recently (especially in younger people, athletes, etc) is way up, and therefore vaccines are bad. Well, no, actually. Vaccines aren't perfect in stopping those but they are significantly better than not having them at all:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/unvaccinated-more-likely-to-have-heart-attack-stroke-after-covid-study-finds/

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Overall, the researchers found that being vaccinated—fully or partially—was linked to fewer cardiac events in the six months following a case of COVID-19. After adjusting for demographics, comorbidities, and time since the pandemic began, the researchers found that being fully vaccinated reduced the risk of having a major cardiac event by about 41 percent, while being partially vaccinated reduced the risk by about 24 percent.

This also speaks to the general problems that COVID causes people long after their primary infection ends. The virus can and does linger and continue to create problems, especially in major organs. 

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On 2/21/2023 at 2:21 AM, mcbigski said:

 Pharma corporations have always been about profit, not healing.

Sure.  People have been saying forever that the solution to these huge corporations is better government/regulation.  Not taking life saving medicine because you want to deprive them of more profits certainly isn't the solution. :)

On 2/21/2023 at 2:21 AM, mcbigski said:

I wonder the numbers are one year over one year.

The article says that it is comparing the second year of the pandemic against the "predicted rate" (i.e. pre-COVID).  So 2021 against normal 2019 (more or less).

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Three Years Into Covid, We Still Don’t Know How to Talk About It
Most Americans think they know the story of the pandemic. But when a writer immersed himself in a Covid oral-history project, he saw how much was missing.

There is the option to listen to the story, as well as reading it. The photos by Ashley Gilbertson are more than evocative of the time before the vaccines that has become a blur for many of us.  I was thinking of that time again last night -- from March 2020 until the first innoculations.  How different it is this year -- we'd returned from a restaurant (still go early to avoid crowds as muc as much as possible) birthday celebration, from whence we proceded for dessert to a different spot, where we are well known by the staff and the staff is well known to us --for decades in fact! -- which was much more crowded, but began soon to clear out, so again, we felt relative secure to sit together at the bar and going through photos and videos on our fones of New Orleans, and Spain. 

In Covid winters of 2021 and 2022, instead of being there for mid-Mardi Gras season (this is the first full Mardi Gras since covid, and we were there for a lot of it, just like we were there for the first Mardi Gras after Katrina), Partner ran a three weekend virtual via Zoom project of immersive music and cultural experience, including cooking and dance classes.  Everyone who performed and worked on NOLA Reconnect got paid -- the Travelers paid for this, though they couldn't travel.  But this year, we did it there and everyone again got paid, but a whole lot more this time around!  Whereas March 2020 was all about learning to use Zoom, teaching via Zoom, and whatever else one could do with the limitations that virtual-Zoom imposes.

Right now, here, unlike pre-Covid, people are liking to go out early these days. Also bad weather, which we are currently having like everywhere else, though not as severe,  has people wanting to get home early too. Right now, here, our covid numbers, along with flu and that other thing are very low -- though the covid numbers by far outnumber the other two. But even last February we wouldn't have spent an evening like this, even though Partner was going out aqain, cautiously, to music events. This February Partner was even at packed out Madison Square Garden with tens of thousands of screaming latinas, for a sold-out Marc Anthony concert.

Also, we do recognize our incredible privilege that allowed our covid experiences to be what they have been, instead of what millions of others have suffered.  Nevertheless we too lost dear ones, particularly in New Orleans to covid that first year specially.  And others too, as well as those who we lost due to covid making it impossible for them to get diagnosed and treated in time for a return of cancer or other medical conditions. That was the worst for us, I think.  We were privileged and lucky; that didn't didn't happen to Partner and I, nor did we get covid, thanks again to our privilege of being able to isolate and bubble for so long. When Partner did get covid, it was after 5 innoculations, getting paxlovid immediately, and an extremely mild and short bout -- and I never got it myself!  But we still have home tests here and use them whenever feeling a bit iffy.

Things have really changed.  Thank you, all of you, who made the vaccines and got them to us. 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/22/magazine/covid-pandemic-oral-history.html

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NOTICE YOUR RESISTANCE to reading the next several thousand words. They’re about the necessity of looking back at the pandemic with intelligence and care, while acknowledging that the pandemic is still with us. They raise the possibility that when we say the pandemic is over, we are actually seeking permission to act like it never happened — to let ourselves off the hook from having to make sense of it or take seriously its continuing effects. As we enter a fourth pandemic year, each of us is consciously or subconsciously working through potentially irreconcilable stories about what we lived through — or else, strenuously avoiding that dissonance, insisting there’s no work to be done. And so, with many people claiming (publicly, at least) that they’re over the pandemic — that they have, so to speak, restraightened all their picture frames and dragged their psychic trash to the curb — this article is saying: Hey, hold up. What’s in that bag?

One excellent place to start rummaging, if you’re still with me: The NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive, established at Columbia University in March 2020. Within weeks of the first confirmed Covid case surfacing in New York City, an impromptu collective of sociologists and oral historians assembled virtually and began interviewing, over Zoom, roughly 200 New Yorkers to document their individual experiences of the pandemic as it unfolded. People spoke to the interviewers for hours about what they were seeing, doing and feeling and about what they expected, or feared, might happen next. The researchers talked to those same people again many months later, and again after that, conducting three waves of interviews about pandemic life from the spring of 2020 to the fall of 2022. During that time, unintelligible experiences became more intelligible or remained defiantly unintelligible. The anguish of the pandemic heightened and dulled. During that time, time itself smeared.

The archive, which will eventually be made public by Columbia, bulges with revelations, anecdotes, anxieties, blind spots, big ideas and weird ideas. A father of two, in the Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood of the Bronx, predicts, in April 2020, a permanent end to the custom of shaking hands (“It just seems like a really stupid thing to do — and unnecessary”) and suspects everything will start going back to normal by the end of May. Another father of two, still adrift in the doldrums of the pandemic nine months later, hears his 11-year-old daughter cry out, “I want homework!” and realizes how desperate for structure she has become. Those working in hospitals report feeling menaced by constant auditory stimulation — the beeps, the alarms, the calls for respiratory therapists, Stat! — while outside the hospitals, well-meaning New Yorkers mark time by leaning out their windows, screaming and banging pots.

You get the picture. The archive contains a stupefying amount of lived experience, material that the Columbia sociologists who initiated the project, Ryan Hagen and Denise Milstein, could theoretically spend the rest of their academic careers examining. But it’s also material that, as noted, most people seem to feel great resistance to revisiting. Even many of the project’s participants told the interviewers, at different points, that they had no desire to look at the transcripts from their previous interviews, and some who did read through them reported feeling shaken, as though they’d been plunged back into a bad dream. When it came time to conduct the final round of interviews last summer, dozens of people declined. (They would say, “ ‘Wow, just even getting this email from you is bringing so many feelings back,’” one of the interviewers explained.) Many just ghosted the project altogether.

Impatience with the pandemic. A compulsion to move forward. A lack of interest — or maybe just some kind of block — when it comes to looking back. These aren’t just characteristics of the current mood. They are themes you would have noticed surfacing in even the earliest interviews in the archive if it had been you, instead of me, who spent a chunk of last summer and fall reading transcripts and listening to hours and hours of recordings. If it had been you who traveled back in time, through the portal of those testimonials, while sitting at your desk, eating lunch, folding laundry, driving, squinting at your laptop in the sun beside a swimming pool while the other parents gossiped and laughed loudly and asked you why you weren’t joining in. And, when you told those parents why (“I’m reading a few hundred oral-history interviews about Covid in New York City”), they gave you looks of incomprehension and pity, the way you would look at a rehabbed animal being returned to the wild, an animal finally free to gallivant and graze but that, instead of bolting through the open door of its cage, burrows deeper into the cage and says: No, thank you. I’m taking some time to further examine every aspect of this fascinating cage.

You would have noticed in those interviews, for example, how people’s inclination to process what was happening to them seemed to weaken and narrow as time went by. Many people re-evaluated the lives they’d been living in their prepandemic pasts, and many thought, with hope or dread, about a post-pandemic future. But the pandemic-present could seem unanalyzable. It exhausted people. It thwarted their powers of concentration. It was traumatic, probably, but also too big or too boring to do much with. And so it was as if people subtly discounted the lives they were living: “A timeless moment,” one woman calls it in May 2020; “lost years,” another says, in mid-2022. All you could do was move on, even though you weren’t actually moving. Because what could be accomplished or understood in such a messy present anyway? (“Like, I can’t sit there and cry for very long,” one working mother explains. “I have a child kicking me in the back or trying to do Spider-Man on top of me or something.”) Literally or figuratively, we were trapped, impatiently punching around inside the deflated balloons of our lives. Maybe, on some level, people were just waiting around for the air to rush back in. ....

 

Much, much more, and as mentioned above, the photos are a big part of this report.

Edited by Zorral
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https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-intelligence/index.html

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The US Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely came from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report.

Guess it's no longer a conspiracy theory, huh?

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I mean, from the article

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Two sources said that the Department of Energy assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.

 

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I think most importantly from the article:

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“Right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question,” Sullivan told CNN’s Dana Bash. “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”

Point being that we don't know yet. Having said that, there have been so many people who like to shout that it's case closed on the whole matter and tar anyone who suggests otherwise. From what I've seen there is more than enough evidence for it being a lab leak for the question to still be out there.

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1 hour ago, Raja said:

I mean, from the article

 

Meaning that they aren't 100% sure, but that available evidence points to lab leak as the far more likely theory of the two, otherwise they wouldn't commit themselves.

I don't think it's controversial to state that:

1. Lab leaks happen in virology labs all the fucking time.

2. It's a pretty big coincidence that the pandemic started in a city with a major virology lab out of all places.

3. PRC's totalitarian regime acted very suspiciously in the beginning of the pandemic, being pretty desperate to cover things up.

Yet stating these undisputed facts and connecting the dots to make a logical conclusion is somehow treated as an act of anti-Asian racism.

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23 minutes ago, Raja said:

Yeah, you've gone off the deep end.

The crazy just goes on and on. According to my sister-in-law, the anti-vaxxer, everyone she knows in Poland who had the vaccine is now seriously ill with terrible effects on their bodies and minds. Her aunt and uncle got vaccinated and have since descended into illness and madness, and her own sister is now deathly ill (she’s not).
 

I saw my cousins for the first time since 2019 and watched the three of them discuss the horrors and cruelty of making them wear a mask. My SiL says wearing a mask makes her want to vomit, so she has to take it off so she can breath again. I mentioned the terrible Covid numbers in Poland and the deaths (they were there when 30,000 cases a day were being reported) and my cousin told me not to believe the case numbers because the government gave more money to hospitals that reported cases, something governments around the world did and obviously fueled the spread of the lies, and the fact every death was reported as a Covid death so really very few people actually died of Covid.

I ended the conversation there. I just don’t have the strength to deal with the raving mad anymore. 

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41 minutes ago, Raja said:

Yeah, you've gone off the deep end.

No, there is still no proof at all for the market/wild animal theory. So with the years that gets less and less likely, while the theory of a lab leak of the foremost chinese S4 bat /sars research lab 2 km away from the first cases makes so much more sense.

thats also no proof, but if you lived 2 km from such a lab and people start getting sick and dying wouldnt you want to investigate that?

This investigation is important to be able to  learn  how to avoid other similar  events in the future.

 

To shut these questions down because they are supposed to be xenophobic (which they aren't) is dangerous for the future of mankind.

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I wouldn't be too dismissive of the reports that it was a lab leak. There's conflicting evidence and no sensible person can believe the Chinese government. Frankly the entire world should have put a lot more pressure on them to be honest about what exactly happened. 

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5 minutes ago, Raja said:

I'm dismissive when we're presented with low confidence reports compared to the evidence and primary research presented as it relates to the Huanan market, which the posters above haven't even read.

What is the level of confidence of the contrasting theory?

I'll give you the answer:

 

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2. That’s how many intelligence agencies, the Department of Energy and the FBI, have determined Covid-19 was leaked from a lab, according to the Journal. The FBI came to its conclusion in 2021 with “moderate confidence.” Four agencies have reportedly determined with “low confidence” the virus was transmitted naturally through animals. The CIA and one other unnamed agency remain undecided between the two origin theories.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2023/02/26/timeline-how-the-covid-lab-leak-origin-story-went-from-conspiracy-theory-to-government-debate/

Edited by Heartofice
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15 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I wouldn't be too dismissive of the reports that it was a lab leak. There's conflicting evidence and no sensible person can believe the Chinese government. Frankly the entire world should have put a lot more pressure on them to be honest about what exactly happened. 

Well anything is possible. But:

  • There have been multiple well documented cases of respiratory viruses suddenly jumping from animals to humans before Covid.
  • Many scientists had been saying for years that it was very likely that such a jump was going to cause a really dangerous pandemic before long. (Including one or two that I know personally, and to the extent that they had done some limited prepping for it.) There had been several near misses before Covid.
  • The Wuhan market was just the sort of insanitary environment where such a jump is likely to occur.
  • The Chinese hierarchical setup is one where cover up at all levels is the instinctive reaction to any situation. So their response to the outbreak proves nothing.

 

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There's also no primary research or evidence to read here, compared to the primary evidence presented regarding the Huanan market being the epicenter and origin of the pandemic. It's a good paper & excellent research, people should read :)

No interest in what the FBI determined in 2021 when these papers have been released in 2022.

Edited by Raja
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