Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[Forogil]

It would be one way to reduce the number of those that do not trust the government, including criminal gangs.

But not a good way, as the fatality rate isn't large enough to decimate their numbers - and if the economic consequences are too dire in general they might also get plenty of new recruits.

[Rasulis]

The other facet of Covid in California.

California deploys national guard to hospitals overwhelmed by Covid

The national guard has been deployed to hospitals in rural north and central California, where short-staffed hospitals have been overwhelmed with coronavirus patients – exposing stark disparities within the most populous US state.

Although California has the lowest coronavirus case rate in the country, its agricultural heartland in the Central Valley and its sparse, rural north have case rates that are three or four times higher. National guard medical teams have been deployed to several hospitals in the valley’s Bakersfield and Kern counties, and to two hospitals in Shasta county in the far north.

“This Delta-related surge has been far beyond anything I thought we would be dealing with, especially with the wide availability of the vaccine,” said Mary Lynn Briggs, an ICU nurse at Mercy hospitals in Bakersfield, where a team of 16 national guard have been deployed. She and her colleagues have been beaten down by the constant surge of deaths, including the preventable deaths of unvaccinated younger patients – and a few have recently left, she said. “I don’t know if I can even do this any more,” said Briggs.

In Shasta, which has one of the highest coronavirus case rates in the state, hospitals have also been affected by the nearby Fawn fire – which forced thousands, including medical staff, to evacuate their homes last week, a spokesperson for hospitals in the region told the Record Searchlight. Across swaths of the north and the Central Valley, the introduction of the Delta variant and resistance to vaccines and public health mandates have precipitated a surge of cases that have overwhelmed emergency rooms and intensive departments. Emergency dispatchers have been asked not to send out ambulances to patients unless they meet certain criteria, to avoid pile-ups outside hospitals.

The valley and northern California, which had seen anti-mask protests throughout the pandemic, were the regions with the highest support for a gubernatorial recall campaign that sought to unseat the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, largely over his pandemic business restrictions, vaccine mandates and other public health policies.

Even as the number of new cases begins to taper down in some areas, hospitals remain stretched caring for Covid-19 patients.

Nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists have all been working overtime, in some cases taking on multiple 18-hour shifts in a row. At some hospitals, patients have waited for days for ICU beds, and have had to be treated for critical conditions in the emergency department while waiting. Exhausted and overstretched healthcare workers are constantly worried about making mistakes or failing patients, said Kenny Banh, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at UCSF Fresno and an ER doctor at Community Regional medical center in the valley city of Fresno.

National guard have been deployed in other states with sky-high case rates, including Indiana and Georgia. In California, where high vaccination rates in coastal metropolises have helped quell the Delta-driven surge, the national guard were deployed in the winter to hospitals in the south.

In the valley, agricultural workers – many of whom lack legal status and access to medical care – were the hardest hit as the extra-infectious Delta variant began to circulate, and Latino and Black residents remain disproportionately affected. In rural regions where the number of physicians per capita was already two and a half times lower than in the Bay Area, this latest surge has pushed the healthcare system to the brink. “We’re a long way from herd immunity, and thinking about what lies ahead just scares me to death,” said Mary Lynn Briggs, a nurse at one of the hospitals in Bakersfield, where national guard have been deployed.

Almost 100 doctors from the Bay Area have volunteered to help also. My sister will be in Fresno for the whole month of October. Fresno UCSF rented a bunch of apartments for them.

[Granyala]

"Muh afraid" shows how detached you are from these peoples concerns.

Oh yes, how evil of me to put some responsibility on their shoulders. I know, an unpopular thing to do in this day and age where external factors, no matter how trivial always excuse virtually anything.

[Rasulis]

Tehama, and Siskiyou counties have already passed resolutions opposing Newsom's vaccine mandates. Shasta County board of supervisors, despite the County having one of the highest Covid case and hospitalization rates in the state, will likely do the same. Totally insane.

[PhaelixWW]

Tehama, and Siskiyou counties have already passed resolutions opposing Newsom's vaccine mandates. Shasta County board of supervisors, despite the County having one of the highest Covid case and hospitalization rates in the state, will likely do the same. Totally insane.

California could just, like, let Idaho annex those counties plus Modoc and Lassen. Oregon and Washington could throw in a few counties each, too. It's not the Jefferson they want, but it'd sure make the west coast states a lot more palatable.

EDIT:

I give you... Idahefferson! (Sounds about right)

[Pann]

Hmm... report suggests that Coronavirus was spreading in China much earlier than initially thought.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-ne...claims-report/

[PhaelixWW]

Hmm... report suggests that Coronavirus was spreading in China much earlier than initially thought.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-ne...claims-report/

This is a guess based solely upon increased PCR procurement by China in 2019.

I'll be taking that with a fairly hefty grain of salt for now.

Expect the conspiracy theory crowd to go nuts over it, though.

[Gaidax]

Seems like we are just barely over the hump with our 4th wave, it was dealt with by offering everyone boosters, no lockdowns. About 40% of the population took the boosters so far.

We expect 5th wave in the winter.

[Granyala]

They took responsibility though, and they have a right to be afraid, given that people in their position were pretty much left to die in other countries.

Even for old folks, C19 is far from a death sentence. To be so afraid that you don't dare to leave the house in order to see your doctor and get a vaccine is not "responsibility" its is panic induced paranoia.

Not entirely surprising, given how massmedia hyped this thing up.

[Rasulis]

I called my sister to see how she was faring this morning. She sounded tired.

All the hospitals are operating at over 100% capacity. Fresno Community Regional Medical Center has a giant tent set up in the lawn area in front of the hospital. Shortage of gurneys because they have patients parked in the hallways. Wait time to process incoming patients on ambulance is around 12 hours. Three days waiting time for an open ICU bed. The air ambulance system is totally stressed. They have had to transfer patients to the Bay Area Counties by ambulance which made the ambulance shortage even worse. Some hospitals are very close to implementing crisis standards of care. Something that has never been done in California. Not even during the third wave in Dec, 2020 - Jan, 2021.

On that note.

20 Alaskan Hospitals Rationing Health Care As COVID Surge Overwhelms Facilities

[Forogil]

This is a guess based solely upon increased PCR procurement by China in 2019.

I'll be taking that with a fairly hefty grain of salt for now.

The origin of the story seems to be https://internet2-0.com/whitepaper/p...or-a-pandemic/ (why would an Internet security firm have any special information on this? - but I guess that it's based on the ongoing Australia-China conflict) based on https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Co...med-COVID-case

And apart from the normal salt-taking there are a number of parts that don't add up:

• There are no real signs that it spread further - despite the rapid spread after December 2019.
• And without any major activity to stop the non-pandemic during 2019 in Hubei.
• The procurement seem more consistent with increased research than with a pandemic response (as it seemed more focused on animals).
• All detected covid-virus variant are consistent with an origin around December 2019.

Obviously it could be that some previous less infectious variant was spreading slowly in 2019 - but it didn't take off until it mutated in December 2019. There are also earlier theories that the precursor originated in e.g., Thailand, (both because the specific bats don't seem local and because Thailand had a low spread of covid-19) but that's just a wild speculation.

A more rational explanation (assuming the data is correct) is that they were ramping up their research activity in 2019; and if there is any link with pandemic it is that more animal research suggests that they need more animals and some new bat-catcher was careless and got infected, and that started the pandemic from some virus circulating in the wild. It's likely that we would still have gotten the pandemic at some point, just later, even without that event.

A simpler explanation is that China was dealing with a pandemic in 2019: but it was African swine fever in pigs; https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00362-1 leading to a loss of 0.8% of GDP.

[Edge-]

I called my sister to see how she was faring this morning. She sounded tired.

All the hospitals are operating at over 100% capacity. Fresno Community Regional Medical Center has a giant tent set up in the lawn area in front of the hospital. Shortage of gurneys because they have patients parked in the hallways. Wait time to process incoming patients on ambulance is around 12 hours. Three days waiting time for an open ICU bed. The air ambulance system is totally stressed. They have had to transfer patients to the Bay Area Counties by ambulance which made the ambulance shortage even worse. Some hospitals are very close to implementing crisis standards of care. Something that has never been done in California. Not even during the third wave in Dec, 2020 - Jan, 2021.

On that note.

20 Alaskan Hospitals Rationing Health Care As COVID Surge Overwhelms Facilities

Man, I hate that it's depressingly easy to figure out which counties will be overwhelmed and which counties won't be purely on political affiliation.

If they start packing our hospitals in the Bay Area I'm gonna be beyond furious, especially if it impacts folks like my very old grandmother. We really need to figure out a way to limit the damage this anti-vaxx retards are causing, while limiting the trauma and stress that health care workers have to deal with from all this.

I'm getting to the point where if you're unvaxxed and you get a really bad case of covid, you shouldn't go to the hospital. I'm increasingly fucking done with these people, they rolled the dice in the dumbest game of Russian Roulette, let them deal with the consequences. I'm tired of others suffering because of their shitty, stupid, retarded, selfish decisions.

My tank of empathy for these folks is dry y'all. I don't wish death upon anyone, but this is too fuckin much.

[Forogil]

And in Europe Romania now seem to be really struggling - record-breaking number of cases, no ICU beds available, and deaths also increasing with less than a third of the population vaccinated - https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-coro.../31493978.html

And the government has fallen as well - https://emerging-europe.com/news/wit...es-government/

The following from "true defender" didn't age well:

Romania’s Worldometer Chart shared that coronavirus infections and deaths are a flat line since May.

The virus isn’t gone there, but the numbers are lowered since their peak.
...
However, only 26% of the Romanians are fully vaccinated, which places Romania as the second least vaccinated country out of 33. The mainstream media story is fake!

Romanians didn’t want to get the vaccine in mass numbers, so the government shut down the vaccination punts.
They aren’t vaccinating anymore at vaccination centers, and they are selling the shots to other countries.

https://thetruedefender.com/covid-19...opean-country/
(Yes, I see it's dated August 24th - if they didn't see cases increasing then they clearly weren't looking.)

[Rasulis]

California could just, like, let Idaho annex those counties plus Modoc and Lassen. Oregon and Washington could throw in a few counties each, too. It's not the Jefferson they want, but it'd sure make the west coast states a lot more palatable.

EDIT:

I give you... Idahefferson! (Sounds about right)

That would be a shame. Those are some of the most beautiful places on earth. Unfortunately the inhabitants are cuckoos. Some of those counties tax base is not even large enough to keep their roads open during winter.

- - - Updated - - -

Man, I hate that it's depressingly easy to figure out which counties will be overwhelmed and which counties won't be purely on political affiliation.

If they start packing our hospitals in the Bay Area I'm gonna be beyond furious, especially if it impacts folks like my very old grandmother. We really need to figure out a way to limit the damage this anti-vaxx retards are causing, while limiting the trauma and stress that health care workers have to deal with from all this.

I'm getting to the point where if you're unvaxxed and you get a really bad case of covid, you shouldn't go to the hospital. I'm increasingly fucking done with these people, they rolled the dice in the dumbest game of Russian Roulette, let them deal with the consequences. I'm tired of others suffering because of their shitty, stupid, retarded, selfish decisions.

My tank of empathy for these folks is dry y'all. I don't wish death upon anyone, but this is too fuckin much.

Yeah. It is weird. Once you pass Livermore on 580, it is a completely different world.

[Edge-]

Yeah. It is weird. Once you pass Livermore on 580, it is a completely different world.

Yep. I've spent a fair amount of time in Fresno when I was younger and half of my family are the type that live there (though they live closer). Needless to say that while we only saw each other once every year or two, and politics was a forbidden topic since it was impossible to have polite conversations about it, that I haven't seen them since this all began. And likely won't be seeing them for a while since I know more than a handful refuse to ever get vaccinated - including some of my "younger" (i.e. they're now in their 20's/30's) cousins.

I still remember going to a funeral for one of them I barely knew when I was young and sitting in a corner chatting with my brother and a few cousins we knew, only to have a young girl and two older gentlemen was poetic about Xena, Warrior Princess and that episode where Gabrielle got captured and tied up over a fire to which the young girl excited blurted out "LIKE A HOG ROAST?!" and the older guys chuckled and said, "Yeah, like a hog roast." that's when I learned how popular Xena was in some very unexpected circles.

[PhaelixWW]

That would be a shame. Those are some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Uh, there are pleeeeeeeenty more of "some of the most beautiful places on earth".

[Rasulis]

Yep. I've spent a fair amount of time in Fresno when I was younger and half of my family are the type that live there (though they live closer). Needless to say that while we only saw each other once every year or two, and politics was a forbidden topic since it was impossible to have polite conversations about it, that I haven't seen them since this all began. And likely won't be seeing them for a while since I know more than a handful refuse to ever get vaccinated - including some of my "younger" (i.e. they're now in their 20's/30's) cousins.

I still remember going to a funeral for one of them I barely knew when I was young and sitting in a corner chatting with my brother and a few cousins we knew, only to have a young girl and two older gentlemen was poetic about Xena, Warrior Princess and that episode where Gabrielle got captured and tied up over a fire to which the young girl excited blurted out "LIKE A HOG ROAST?!" and the older guys chuckled and said, "Yeah, like a hog roast." that's when I learned how popular Xena was in some very unexpected circles.

That's totally out of the left field. How is this for crazy. The CalMatters article is a better reading. The Money article has a catchier title.

The nation's hottest housing market? Surprise — it's Fresno

Why is Fresno one of the nation’s hottest housing markets?

The fact that the median price of homes in Fresno is now $331,000 is mind boggling. Updated info, according to Redfin it is now $360k.

[Granyala]

No it's not necessarily a death sentence, but it can also cause long term complications, honestly I dont understand why people are so keen to roll the dice on these things if they can avoid it.

You're aware many of the people I'm talking about are housebound right? They couldnt go visit a doctor if they wanted to, their concern is the people who care for them bringing it into the house.

Ever heard of doctors making house calls? I'm sure they do that for these super at risk, immobile folks where I live.
You yourself stated that you had nurses going into homes to administer shots, so I really don't understand what we are arguing about.
The possibilities are there, all these folks have to do is say "I want the vaccine"

As for "rolling the dice" well our entire existence is rolling dices.
When I walk across a street I might get hit by an idiot driver, when I walk under a house I might get hit by a shingle. There are a million ways to die out there and against most of them, there isn't a fancy vaccine to be had.

- - - Updated - - -

I called my sister to see how she was faring this morning. She sounded tired.

All the hospitals are operating at over 100% capacity.

Sounds rough. Over here, everything seems mostly peachy. I think a lot of medical personnel is actually bored.

[Rasulis]

Ever heard of doctors making house calls? I'm sure they do that for these super at risk, immobile folks where I live.
You yourself stated that you had nurses going into homes to administer shots, so I really don't understand what we are arguing about.
The possibilities are there, all these folks have to do is say "I want the vaccine"

As for "rolling the dice" well our entire existence is rolling dices.
When I walk across a street I might get hit by an idiot driver, when I walk under a house I might get hit by a shingle. There are a million ways to die out there and against most of them, there isn't a fancy vaccine to be had.

- - - Updated - - -



Sounds rough. Over here, everything seems mostly peachy. I think a lot of medical personnel is actually bored.

We are a big state. Different counties have different pandemic experience.

It is Fleet Week in San Francisco. First live one in 2 years and the only one in 2021. My wife went to the opening on Monday with our downstairs neighbor and her 3-year old daughter, and the BART and rail were packed. This weekend will be even worse with the airshow and the Giants' games going on at the same time. Good for local businesses though. With the exception of the ones in SoMa and Financial districts, most San Francisco restaurants and bars are doing better than 2019.

[Edge-]

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2021/10/...sms-tentacles/

A Republican lawmaker in New Hampshire is being denounced by his own party’s leaders for his bizarre claims about the COVID-19 vaccines, which included that the vaccines contain “living organism(s) with tentacles.” And he’s currently blocking millions of dollars in federal COVID-19 aid while he embarrasses the state GOP.

State Rep. Kenneth Weyler (R) emailed a 52-page “report” to his colleagues about COVID-19 and the vaccines with numerous ridiculous claims, including that the pandemic was a plot developed by leaders in the Vatican, London, and D.C. to control people’s thoughts with 5G technology.

...

Weyler’s report also says that “the babies of vaccinated parents are born with pitch black eyes and can stand and even walk at only three months old,” according to his colleague state Rep. Mary Jane Wallner (D), who received the email.

The report called the Catholic Church a “criminal network” that is “highly spiritual in nature, and all who are at the top are involved in dark ancient spiritual practices,” calling the church’s leaders “satanists” and “luciferians.”

Just a reminder, the Death Cult is filled with brainless, retarded conspiracy theorist lunatics that should be ignored as the entire Death Cult should largely be ignored.

These people are unhinged.