Medical Discussion of Coronavirus

[StarTrekDoc]

Well call me the oracle.

SCOTUS -- split decision on mandates

- OHSA - over reach -- overturned
- Medicare -- authorized to restriction on mandate.

[Jaqen Haghar MD]

On the covid front- my dad caught covid in a rehab facility and just passed away this morning. He was boosted last month after breaking his hip. But.. the dementia, and poor appetite plus limited mobility due to the hip probably did him in w covid being the icing on top. The nurses told my sister he was oxygenating and urinating fine until yesterday, but who knows what "fine" meant to them. So PE from covid or from lack of mobility? General death from malnurishment? Heart attack? Aspiration? Who knows. Nursing staff there was reportedly more in the chin diaper than proper masking camp, but again, dunno nor do I care if covid was the lethal blow or just the icing on death's cake. I did wish that all proper precautions were taken though to minimize the risk even if it doesnt eliminate the risk of COVID, which I cant say happened in my dad's case.

Sorry to hear about your dad. Mine died too, of COVID recently. I talked a little bit about in in past posts on this thread. He was in a private nursing home that was super-strict, and went beyond most normal precautions. Made it almost 2 years into the pandemic, but the result was the same. I’m not sure that anything more could have been done beyond what they were doing. My condolences to you and your family.

[billy]

Sorry to hear about your dad. Mine died too, of COVID recently. I talked a little bit about in in past posts on this thread. He was in a private nursing home that was super-strict, and went beyond most normal precautions. Made it almost 2 years into the pandemic, but the result was the same. I’m not sure that anything more could have been done beyond what they were doing. My condolences to you and your family.

Sorry for your loss as well.

[Jaqen Haghar MD]

I’m a registered independent, and try to avoid politics in general. I don’t mean this as a political thing, but I am interested in the different ways the virus travels, and the effects of various policies on virus spread. The Wall Street Journal piece today on Florida’s COVID policies was a pretty good summary of what we have been seeing this wave. Much different than many of my friends and those on here describe in other geographic areas at this time.

To me, it is interesting how these waves move through and effect different geographic areas in the US.
And it’s hard to honestly analyze what is really working in todays political climate.

Even “freedom” is an inflammatory word these days. I wish they had omitted it from the title.

Sorry if this is a paywall for some of you. It wasn’t for me a few times and now it is. Perhaps clearing the history resets your freebie allotment @WSJ.

[nephron]

Politically, neither party can claim to be the party of "science". They are just two political parties doing whatever they think their base wants. That's one reason our current president has such low approval ratings, they have focused so much on getting everybody hyper about the virus under the premise that if people did what they were told, the virus could be eradicated. I think that China did the best with "eradicating" the virus with their draconian measures, but even then, we live in a connected world so unless you are on an island with those draconian measures, the virus is going to come back at some point. I think that 10-20 years later, people will look back and see one of the biggest mistakes was how we treated our children during this pandemic. There was no reason for the mass school closure/disruption to kids lives. Obviously, death is not the only metric by which covid does harm, and we have more data now then what we had on the start of the pandemic, but you really have to wonder if you have more kids dying from gun shots in a single city vs the entire country from covid or more accidental deaths in swimming pools then from covid, if you need to close the schools to "protect" the kids:
https://www.wistv.com/2021/11/03/cov...lth-dept-says/
https://www.vox.com/22699019/covid-1...lization-death
You could argue about protecting the teachers who were unable to obtain n-95 masks early in the pandemic but now post vaccine development, I think that the argument for school closures becomes even more absurd.

[StarTrekDoc]

nephron - totally agree. Yes, China and New Zealand did the most efficacious containment of Covid. China did it at huge scale -- of course with huge civil liberty costs; but it DID save lives. It's kind of amazing when we went to China back in summer 2019 and had private tour guide; had great discussions on this and the pros/cons of their system -- it's amazing what many youngsters think there and in their opinion some of the crazy things the US allows and view us as almost chaotic/lawless. -- really different points of view from different perspectives at the ground level.

It's still hard to reconcile how we could have done things with schools and kids. I believe our private school muddled through it as best as possible with hybrid models and constantly shifting -- but we had resources and fair weather of San Diego. Do that in Chicago in February? Much harder as seen currently happening in Chicago.

[CordMcNally]

nephron - totally agree. Yes, China and New Zealand did the most efficacious containment of Covid. China did it at huge scale -- of course with huge civil liberty costs; but it DID save lives. It's kind of amazing when we went to China back in summer 2019 and had private tour guide; had great discussions on this and the pros/cons of their system -- it's amazing what many youngsters think there and in their opinion some of the crazy things the US allows and view us as almost chaotic/lawless. -- really different points of view from different perspectives at the ground level.

Do you believe that China has only had 104,580 cases and 4,636 deaths? There's a lot of things I don't trust but numbers and stats surrounding COVID coming from China is pretty high on that list.

[StarTrekDoc]

Do you believe that China has only had 104,580 cases and 4,636 deaths? There's a lot of things I don't trust but numbers and stats surrounding COVID coming from China is pretty high on that list.

-One can say the same of some of our reporting agencies.
-Sure, add a few hundred thousand. cases. Add a million add 100,000 deaths.

-The number of deaths is greatly lower than ours by several logs and not insignificant.

USA :

Cases 64.5M

Deaths 847K

New Zealand: and we don't call out our allies for funny math?

Cases 14,947

Deaths 52

				case	death
	population	cases	deaths	per 100k	per 100k
new zealand	5000000.00	15000.00	52.00	300.00	1.04
china	1402000000.00	140000.00	4636.00	9.99	0.33
usa	329500000.00	64500000.00	847000.00	19575.11	257.06

I do believe they pay a heavy price for this, yet at the same time recognize that they can successfully contain and pivot in ways we cannot.

[HikingDO]

China did it at huge scale -- of course with huge civil liberty costs; but it DID save lives.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very pro-vaccine (by individual’s choice), but I prefer the Mexican Revolutionary Zapata’s thoughts- “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees”.

[CordMcNally]

-One can say the same of some of our reporting agencies.
-Sure, add a few hundred thousand. cases. Add a million add 100,000 deaths.

-The number of deaths is greatly lower than ours by several logs and not insignificant.

USA :

New Zealand: and we don't call out our allies for funny math?

The things you're trying to compare aren't similar.

[Jaqen Haghar MD]

It’s pretty well established that China’s numbers are 100% fabricated. The early numbers in Wuhan were made up. Funeral home data, gravesites, on the ground reports from people who could get information out tell a completely different story. They had months and months of “zero” cases in the entire country as their official government reporting during the early part of the pandemic. The virus ran wild there for a long period of time early on when mortality was very high. The real total early deaths in Wuhan were many times the country’s entire “official” total death count for the whole pandemic.

I’m sure that they are better % wise than our’s due to the absoluteness of their containment measures….
But the pandemic isn’t over yet. Especially for those with less immunity and inferior vaccines.

Either way, information will be contained even better than the virus.

New Zealand is a tiny island nation with little population density. Much easier to control. The whole country is about half the population of South Florida. China has ultra huge, densely populated cities.

[Tim]

StarTrekDoc
”but we had resources and fair weather of San Diego. Do that in Chicago in February? Much harder as seen currently happening in Chicago. ”
Thriwing shade at Chicago? I went to kindergarten in Chicago. Not once did regret two block journey in the snow. Must be something else. Kindergarteners can endure adversity. Siuck it up.

[burritos]

So long as China makes "our" stuff what does it matter what happens there. Americans are incapable of making our stuff at the price that Americans want to pay for.

[snowcanyon]

Korea has done very well, so have Western Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand. The UK, despite being an island, has done poorly.
I'm sorry for everyone's losses.
It didn't have to be this way- some countries have decided to center the frail, the disable, and the elderly. Others, like the US and parts of Europe, have decided to center their particular brand of freedom. I prefer the former, others prefer the latter.
When we are sick and frail, America won't care about us either. I find that tragic. Others may find it a reasonable price to pay.

[StarTrekDoc]

StarTrekDoc
”but we had resources and fair weather of San Diego. Do that in Chicago in February? Much harder as seen currently happening in Chicago. ”
Thriwing shade at Chicago? I went to kindergarten in Chicago. Not once did regret two block journey in the snow. Must be something else. Kindergarteners can endure adversity. Siuck it up.

Lol. As a Michigander - always love the opportunity for such.

I cited Chicago as a particular challenge as they are going through now with the teacher's union rebellion on covid/staffing opening schools. It's not so simple equation for politicians to just throw the doors open and say 'xxxx public instituation is open'. SO many interested parties and a very hard needle to thread. All politics are local. What works in FL clearly doesn't in Chicago.

As for covid -- we're still buzzing along at 10k daily cases yesterday. It's lower thankfully off the highs of 18k but still x3 of the delta peaks. Proof is in the pudding for next week. We canceled our MLK weekend at Disneyland today --- set for Valentine's day though!