Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[Gorsameth]

Going into a lockdown for 2 years is not viable. The economic impact and effects on mental health are already severe.

No shit, the point is that no one is arguing anyone should while some are trying to argue this is the position of people saying the US should go into a lockdown for a few months.

And yes the US gone into a lockdown before, that everyone ignored and opened up way to soon so it didn't do anything.

That is what some people are not getting, its not about a constant lockdown. Its about doing it correctly once. Which the US has utterly failed at.

[Shadowferal]

Hmf...I believe what's ongoing in most states if not all, all the hashing and rehashing, finger-pointing, bluster, small regional closings...everything, is for the sake of appearances...until a vaccine is finally produced.
But we won't see anymore statewide total lockdowns. It's all about management now.

[Edge-]

https://www.ajc.com/politics/politic...EZJNKFOJIALR4/

“This is what’s so frustrating about pandemic politics and leaked reports. We’re glad to talk about these numbers every day,” Kemp said, adding: “I will tell you that the media only focuses on the bad numbers. They never focus on the good numbers.”

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who is doing his best to start schools back up to spread the virus amongst children, was not pleased with the leaked reports and criticism from the Trump campaign. His target for blame? Media, because they're only focusing on the "bad" numbers and not the "good" numbers.

[Trifle]

Not sure if this has already been posted (didn't see anything the last few pages), but I saw this in the news:

A new study adds to growing evidence that children are not immune to Covid-19 and may even play a larger role in community spread than previously thought.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and MassGeneral Hospital for Children found that among 192 children, 49 tested positive for the coronavirus and had significantly higher levels of virus in their airways than hospitalised adults in intensive care units, according to the study published last week in the Journal of Pediatrics.

Bolded for emphasis. While they don't suffer as much (usually), they can sure spread the hell out of it.

[Breccia]

Dr. Fauci will be silent for a while due to throat surgery.

I am sure he'll follow doctors' orders to the letter. We all wish him a safe recovery, even if it means staying at home, rather than risking permanent damage.

[Yunru]

You guys gona love this one:


Of 3000 people there only 1/4 had masks. And no distance from each other (wich makes maskes usless). This area is very small tho.

If there was a single person that went there from Croatia,when there was the infection, well .....

[PhaelixWW]

Not sure if this has already been posted (didn't see anything the last few pages), but I saw this in the news:

A new study adds to growing evidence that children are not immune to Covid-19 and may even play a larger role in community spread than previously thought.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and MassGeneral Hospital for Children found that among 192 children, 49 tested positive for the coronavirus and had significantly higher levels of virus in their airways than hospitalised adults in intensive care units, according to the study published last week in the Journal of Pediatrics.

Bolded for emphasis. While they don't suffer as much (usually), they can sure spread the hell out of it.

This particular study is new, but it mirrors the findings of another one that we talked about a few weeks ago.

[Rasulis]

This particular study is new, but it mirrors the findings of another one that we talked about a few weeks ago.

You are preaching to the deaf.

[Forogil]

I love people that pretend most of the world didn't successfully implement a lockdown for several months to push viral levels down before re-opening and claim that going into lockdown for 2+ years is not viable.

It is doubtful that most of the world did that. Many countries did, but many didn't.

India implemented a severe lock-down (score 100/100) for months and then begun re-opening. The infection rates kept climbing during the lock-down - possibly the rate would have been even higher without a lock-down (but it might also have spread the disease as lots of day-workers went to home towns), but it still matches previous predictions for what would happen without a lock-down.
It seems doubtful that most of Africa implemented successful lock-downs (S. Africa began easing their lock-down May 1st and rates have then increased).
Some other countries seem to have skipped severe lock-downs and still see reported cases decreasing such as Egypt and Belarus, unknown why.
I don't know what Brazil is doing, but they don't seem to have it under control.

Obviously many countries also got it under control, even some less developed countries.

[Gorsameth]

It is doubtful that most of the world did that. Many countries did, but many didn't.

India implemented a severe lock-down (score 100/100) for months and then begun re-opening. The infection rates kept climbing during the lock-down - possibly the rate would have been even higher without a lock-down (but it might also have spread the disease as lots of day-workers went to home towns), but it still matches previous predictions for what would happen without a lock-down.
It seems doubtful that most of Africa implemented successful lock-downs (S. Africa began easing their lock-down May 1st and rates have then increased).
Some other countries seem to have skipped severe lock-downs and still see reported cases decreasing such as Egypt and Belarus, unknown why.
I don't know what Brazil is doing, but they don't seem to have it under control.

Obviously many countries also got it under control, even some less developed countries.

that fact your trying to compare the US to India and Africa is probably telling enough.

[Forogil]

Bolded for emphasis. While they don't suffer as much (usually), they can sure spread the hell out of it.

It's not a study of the spread, and I cannot see that the study found that children "had significantly higher levels of virus in their airways than hospitalised adults in intensive care units", instead they similarly as previous studies found similar loads in children and adults; and similar changes over time (there are large variations), or as they write "Pediatric patients displayed no apparent difference in viral load compared with adults requiring intubation for severe SARS-CoV-2 infection when stratified by time."

However, they state "Viral load in children in the asymptomatic/early infection phase was significantly higher than in hospitalized adults with severe disease with over 7 days of symptoms", or in other words that children had more viral load early on than adult patients had later on, which is comparing apples to oranges. That sentence is a bit weird and I understand that it might be misrepresented in that way.

[Edge-]

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tr...=mw_latestnews

So...I guess the CDC is taking back control of the coronavirus data in the US. I mean, it's better than having HHS potentially ratfuck the data, but it's still fucking dumb that they're playing hot-potato with this this.

Granted some of the states are bullshitting their numbers anyways, so who the fuck knows.

[Jastall]

I love people that pretend most of the world didn't successfully implement a lockdown for several months to push viral levels down before re-opening and claim that going into lockdown for 2+ years is not viable.
Funny how no one is actually doing that but hey, its easier to win an argument when you argue against a non-existent stance.

Seriously now. Most Western countries have the virus under a reasonable amount of control; nothing is perfect obviously, people are still dying, there are still restrictions, one still has to be careful, but it's a far cry from what is happening in parts of the US right now. And that is because these countries took said virus seriously earlier (even if still too late to avoid many deaths in some cases), adopted measures, and imposed a lockdown before things got out hand. Whereas most of America pretended it was somebody else's problem while being told otherwise by people in the know until it was much too late and they now need more drastic measures than ever.

These people remind me of myself while I was early in university, being told that I should start working early on my assignments rather than botch them at the last minute. Of course I ignored the people who knew what was up, of course reality bit me in the ass, and of course I was stuck with sleepless nights and mediocre grades while better students could both study parts of the day and party all night and get As. Humans can be so stupid that way. But at least my stupidity only affected my life, not that of countless numbers of my countrymen.

[Forogil]

that fact your trying to compare the US to India and Africa is probably telling enough.

I didn't mention the US, but if I had been attempting to compare the US to India and Africa it seems I wasn't merely trying but succeeding.

[Cynep]

Just a little public information drop brought to you from 1918:



I like the parts that specifically deal with people that don't believe and/or understand that they are not immune and they do not get special treatment

History repeats itself. I liked the last line, written in all caps.

[Forogil]

History repeats itself. I liked the last line, written in all caps.

The 8th(?) line made me curious, but unfortunately it seems that gargling doesn't seem to help for covid-19 (whether it helps for the common cold or flu is less clear): https://www.webmd.com/lung/qa/can-ga...te-coronavirus

Similarly the 3rd line seems too close to the idea that hot baths are good against covid-19 - and listed in WHO's myth list - https://www.who.int/emergencies/dise...h-busters#bath

[PhaelixWW]

The 8th(?) line made me curious, but unfortunately it seems that gargling doesn't seem to help for covid-19 (whether it helps for the common cold or flu is less clear): https://www.webmd.com/lung/qa/can-ga...te-coronavirus

Similarly the 3rd line seems too close to the idea that hot baths are good against covid-19 - and listed in WHO's myth list - https://www.who.int/emergencies/dise...h-busters#bath

Hurray for 100+ years of the advancement of medical knowledge.

[Masark]

And here comes the Sturgis Surge. 7 cases and counting.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...raska-n1237484

[Rasulis]

Birx Stokes Hopes That Key Hospital Data Tracking Will Soon Return To CDC

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working "to build a revolutionary new data system" for COVID-19 hospital data collection that the CDC will run upon completion, according to Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Birx's comments this week come a month after the Trump administration mandated that hospitals sidestep the agency and send critical information about COVID-19 hospitalizations and equipment to a different federal database managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC.

The July decision was met with an avalanche of criticism from medical institutions and public health groups. Weeks after the new reporting system was rolled out, the data were shown to be rife with inconsistencies and updated erratically.

The announcement sparked hope among some public health advocates that the current, controversial system of reporting hospital data around COVID-19 would soon be canceled and that data collection would be restored to the CDC.

Birx made the remarks Monday during a visit to the Arkansas Governor's Mansion, but she did not provide a time frame for the change.

Having the CDC run data collection again "would help us tremendously in getting back on track with respect to reporting and understanding what's happening with this pandemic across the region, the state and the nation," said Dr. Vineet Chopra, chief of the division of hospital medicine at the University of Michigan and a member of a federal advisory committee on hospital infection prevention.

Last month, the White House told hospitals to stop reporting critical data into a CDC system they had used since the beginning of the pandemic, which was analyzing the data and posting thrice-weekly updates on a CDC website. Instead, hospitals have had to start reporting information on how many intensive care beds were available, for example, and how much personal protective equipment was in stock to a newer system built by a private contractor, TeleTracking, or directly to their state health departments. Both tracks bypass the CDC and provide the data directly to HHS.

Hospitals were given a few days' notice to adopt the reporting change. They were told that compliance with the new reporting tools would determine their access to the federal supply of remdesivir, one of the few drugs proven to work against COVID-19.

"Many hospitals, ours included, have struggled to use the new system," Chopra said, "and also to understand how best to extract data from it and use it to understand capacity, use rates [for protective equipment], and the prevalence of infection."

HHS officials insisted the new system would be quicker and provide more complete data. But an NPR analysis showed that weeks after the data collecting change, information posted to the public HHS site was spotty, incomplete and riddled with errors.

Birx said Monday the information collected through the HHS reporting system is proving useful. "For the first time every day, I can see every new admission across the country, and that has been extraordinarily important," she said.

Still, she described the reporting system as "interim." When the final system is ready, she said, that "[the data reporting function] can be moved back to the CDC, and they can have that regular accountability with hospitals relevant to treatment and PPE."

HHS said Birx's comments do not constitute a shift in policy. "The process for COVID-19 data reporting has not and is not changing," said a statement from Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, in an email to NPR.

Last month's abrupt change in data collection caused ruptures to the validity and accuracy of the data during a critical time in the pandemic, said Lisa M. Lee, former chief science officer for public health surveillance at the CDC and now an associate vice president at Virginia Tech.

If the CDC were put back in charge of the data "for the long haul, we would have a much better system," she said, "[because] we have professional surveillance scientists at CDC and public health professionals who have the expertise to handle data that are this complex."

This administration is run by a bunch of morons. In the first place, who in their right mind would change decades old reporting system, flawed as it was, in the middle of a freaking pandemic. Now they are going back to the old system because their new one sucks.

Covid-19 Data Will Once Again Be Collected by CDC, in Policy Reversal
Hospitals will return to reporting new cases to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump administration says, after shift to Health and Human Services led to delays and data problems

[PACOX]

We switched to the new saliva test kits at work. They are horrible, IMO. Takes longer to collect the same, easier to mess up and there's restrictions before you can collect a same. Turn around time is the same if you have access to a lab without a backlog.

Rather just stick the q-tip up my nose and be done with it. Though I saw a post on reddit where a guy try to do his own and ended up with a stuck swab in his nose.

- - - Updated - - -

And here comes the Sturgis Surge. 7 cases and counting.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...raska-n1237484

Only 7 right now? Those people are running from the tests. Unfortunately college campuses are seeing clusters from less crowded situations.

Meanwhile Floridaman at FSU is trying to add even more football games when most of the major conferences and practicality all the ninor/junior ones have canceled their seasons. Tailgating. FSU thinks it can pull off tailgating.