So Senator Ted Cruz trying to win points. TLDR a group of abortion protesters were peacefully protesting abortion in Charlotte NC (I live in one of the suburbs). They were arrested because the group was 50 people which violates the stay at home order and group size. It's not just Cruz protesting and saying the arrest is unconstitutional because it is violating free speech. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article241776291.html
I say let them be. Most women that get abortions commit suicide around 10 times more often then women that do not. Maybe nature taking its natural course of things. Some tiger in the bronx has contracted the coronavirus. this could be very bad as animals immune system will handle the virus differently. This jump could cause the virus to look far different coming out then when it went in. Which could mean another new novel coronavirus. A few pets have also tested positive in china and germany.
Yes, things enter body one way and go out a different way. It's all about pathways. And no one wants shit that's found the natural pathway out of a tiger.
Finland has discovered how to bring people back to life. Or they are dealing with zombies while everyone else is dealing with COVID.
A week later from my previous graphs. A week ago Sweden had 150% of Finland's per capita cases, now they have 170%. If it weren't for the fact that Swedes are dying from this experiment this would make an interesting comparison of flattening the curve - taking action and not really doing much anything. Scientifically it has as much value as the study comparing the loudness of traffic noise inside the house versus outside the house. We already know the result. Those unnecessary deaths won't be coming back to life when the vaccine comes out. They will stay dead. I'm seeing some fatigue to this quarantine in the capital. The quarantine of the capital is hardly in place anymore as the police force simple appear to have grown tired of even trying to make a show for it with already videos spreading where they let anyone through who has any paper with some police not even taking a look at the paper - in one video the police officer just has this "I'm sick of this shit" expression and just lazily waves the car to pass through. Considering overwhelmingly most cases are in the capital this will ensure that it will spread at increasing rates from beyond the capital, so in this sense even Finland's case is not a perfect case for a "tough measures" approach - while we provincials are having companies go under and can't do jack with only ~20 cases reported in our whole province the folks down south seem to have just given up and don't care about if it spreads here, undoing our work and sacrifices. That does not make me a happy camper and while I'm glad our government did not fall for Sweden's model I'm still not happy about the half-cocked approach our government has on all the measures, nothing is well prepared, on time or overly successful.
Here in North Carolina I don't think the police care to much if vehicles are on the road (everyone who can is working from home anyways) unless you do something to cause them stop you or it's a vehicle that can hold more than 10 people. They are breaking up groups of 10+ people and I know things like basketball hoops in parks are being taken down (because people are dumbasses and going "oh. I'm outside. I'll be fine playing a game of basketball". Also people are still having outdoor parties/picnics.
I'm starting to question if we should even have this lockdown as is. First, if we hadn't locked down, what would the death rate actually be? One thing all of the news reports I've seen fail to mention is just how many people die per day normally. It's quite a bit more than from this virus. Also, look at Germany's numbers. Why is the death percentage so low in comparison to places like Italy? All I'm saying is just be a little more skeptical about things. There's some things here and there that just don't seem to add up.
In germany if you have a comorbidity they list that instead of the virus. The problem is with the virus overwhelming hospitals. If around 15 to 20% of a given population has to be hospitalized for up to 3 weeks with being on a ventilator for 1 to 2 weeks to live that can very quickly get out of hand. Even more so when the other 80% show little to no symptoms and unknowingly give it to people that it can easily kill. If a hospital is overrun with patients then they have to do what Spain did and have to choose who dies. In spain if you are over 65 and have to be put on a ventilator they are just sedating them and let them die. This is because they simply cant do anything for them. Once a hospital is overrun the amount of care that can be given to allow someone to live drops drastically.
While yes, you are correct, the same thing happens every year with just the flu. I can almost bet that you, I, and pretty much everyone that has been infected with influenza and passed it on, either directly or indirectly, to an old person that exaggerated their already frail health(with multiple conditions). I seems like Italy has been doing the opposite of Germany, and listing every death where co-morbidity is more of a factor, they just count as a coronavirus death if they test positive for it at all(Source). To me, from where I 'm sitting, it almost seems.... contrived. And the thing about Italy's current situation, there seems to be two things everyone is forgetting about this. First, medical care is a finite resource. It's why there's such a thing as medical triage. And yes, while it's sad for people to die, the vast majority have been 65+. The second thing people seem to be forgetting with this whole thing is, death is inevitable. We're all going to die sometime or another, and many of us in messy ways. Should we live in fear because of that knowledge? Or embrace the risk that comes with living a life? The reason I've been skeptical, is because outside of the medical need... there has been an astonishing amount of what I consider to be government overreach in this situation. Instead of isolating those that are actually vulnerable to this virus(elderly, immuno-compromised, etc.) our governments decided to universally shut down our economies, then pump billions of dollars into them by simply printing money. This will have an adverse effect on everything, up to and possibly including a recession, just on a global scale. As they say, never waste a good crisis. I know it sounds kinda tinfoil-y, but I'd rather be skeptical and proven wrong than believe and be shocked by what may come.
Well we spent entire last year listening to "oh I WISH that something awful would devastate the economy". Well, now something IS completely crushing the global economy assuming we'll wait until the risk groups are fully vaccinated and if this takes something like a year or more. And while this is on the frontpage all manner of shit gets legislated that gets a tiny thumbnail one-paragraph at the last pages. That's not being tinfoil-y, it's about a universal proverb: "don't let a good crisis go to waste". Gotta spin that shit somehow - and we've all seen the "So, NOW FINALLY will people finally agree for: - More taxes! - Less taxes! - Global government - Less globalism - Spartan barracks communism - More liberty - More cats as pets - Less cats as pets - Roll the toilet roll over the top - Roll it from below" Oh yea, more than one groups are capitalizing on this thing. As for what the death toll would be - if we're still correct about roughly 1% on average then it would be Mortality%*Infected% * Population + CriticalStress Mortality%= 1% Infected% = something like 60-80% of populace getting it eventually, let's say 80% Population = say, 5 million CriticalStress = how much the health services become overwhelmed and how many extra deaths it brings from when they rush in a guy who was in a car crash and he misses treatment due to rush and another one of the wounded gets the disease and dies of it. Let's say 5000 From this we get a simple 0.01 * 0.8 * 5M + 5,000 ~~ 45,000 So, what event would be comparable? For Finland ~150,000 people died in WW2 and the population was 3.3 then, so ~250,000 by today's per capita. So, it would be roughly as bad as a short high intensity war in terms of numbers. Many of the dead would have had long lives ahead of them and many of the older people could have had easily two to three decades of life ahead of them but unlike a war this thing indeed does hit the older segments the worst whereas wars hit the young people who are about to start forming their families. Bible does not give me a direct answer to whether we should quarantine heavily or not... But it does state very clearly how a good Christian ought to behave: The Plague of Cyprian (249–262 AD) was a lethal pandemic that, at its height, caused upwards of 5,000 deaths a day in Rome Spoiler: Religious So, as always it's more about what you can do than pointing fingers. It's about helping others with little care about how this impacts you yourself. Literally, instead of sitting at home and ranting about what government did or did not do - going out there and doing what you can to help. Possibly financing this by selling some of your property. Yea, the bar is set quite high. Little wonder that this attitude has made such an impact on so many people through ages; it is noble and pleasant in the eyes of the Lord and we can feel this ourselves, the sheer awe towards such saintly people. It is also good to remember that while this was going they were going through Decian Persecution - the Emperor had decreed that all Christians should engage in blasphemy or face death. Many Christians were thus murdered and many more went into hiding. Yet when the plague struck they did not think of themselves but rushed to help. My apologies if this offends anyone. I am working under the assumption that no one is insulting anyone here and that we are at this level where we can discuss such things - but then again there's a specific sub forum for these kinds of issues. As I did not know how my figures at the start would form out before I started calculating them, I did not anticipate the direction my writing would take. I will spoiler-tag some parts of this just in case. I have no desire to offend anyone.
So because people were being dumbasses and still picnicking, picnic shelters and basketball courts (so not social distanceing and having parties at these picnic shelters) the county is closing the gates at all parks to vehicle traffic. Guess that means no kayaking for me l. You can still walk and bike to the parks if you are lucky enough to live near one. And all the boat ramps really are in parks here.
I have chosen to live outside the big cities and to live in a house that has the forest right outside the door. You can try and keep me locked indoors - won't work. There are no rabid humans in the forest to catch a disease from. Though at this rate I don't see our province implementing any harsher restrictions anytime soon. At this rate I think we'll have ~200k infected out of 5.5M a year from now assuming the rate stays the same.
I'm late to the party, but... Just a general disclaimer/reminder to no one in particular: Got no real problem with the discussion, but if you guys want to talk politics and conspiracy theories, take that to the taboo section. Please try to keep it to relevant and reliable information here.
We're currently at 19 cases in our city so far, we have roughly 100 people infected in Finland daily. Sweden has roughly 100 people dying of this daily and the rate seemed to be further picking up speed as it has so far. I hope it would stall. Our psych ward doctors are reassigned to scrubbing masks. My friend was told to assign for Covid-19 treatment training. Going to get assigned to treat the infected - and they said they are "not promising that they will be able to provide any protective gear". My friend belongs to a risk group. Said "the day they'll tell me to go there without anything is when I walk out the door". Regardless of what people say of "oh, everyone who died of it was going to die the next day in shower anyway" - even reasonably young people die of it too - at least if you happen to have risk factors then you will be at much greater risk as per the very definition. Even people without risk factors have been hospitalized by it. Someone asked why Italy has had worse deaths, one suggestion was their lack of TB vaccination program which some have linked to providing partial resistance to this. Another factor could be that they just had such an explosive initial rate of infection and because Italy is one of the countries that have had bad practices with antibiotics and have more antibiotics resistant strains of various diseases than many other places such as Germany or the northern Europe. But once you run out of those oxygen masks and hospital beds, even people who would survive with a mask are at great risk if infected and having to make do without treatment. https://globalnews.ca/news/6781910/youngest-covid-19-death-alberta-woman-canada/ On positive side I've been reading a lot about chloroquinine being effective treatment for some of the patients. A friend posted just the other day that his friend was hospitalized but was doing OK within a day of being administered chloroquinine. There's been a lot of talk about chloroquinine but my friend assured me that it's been in use for ~65 years and that he took it himself while in Africa and that it's side effects are well known and primarily relate to long term use and not short temporary episodes. @MagnusEffect - yes, apologies, sticking to the topic.
So I'll just address this from the perspective of someone who works for a hospital system, my wife is an Emergency Department doctor, and has multiple residency friends in New York currently working in trash bags instead of actual medical equipment and are confirmed COVID infected (one of whom just had her diabetic heart issue father be admitted for COVID). Not saying this as an angry note, but just so you understand my perspective. The isolation and stay at home quarantine isn't to stop people from dying, per se. Its to slow the rate of people getting sick. Hospitals in New York are at capacity, people are literally dying at home because they can't get inside hospitals. Would those people die anyway? Some might, some wouldn't. There are a number of people actively dying because the hospitals don't have capacity to treat them. If everyone stays home, in the short term, we can slow down the rate at which sick people arrive at our hospitals to a level that the healthcare system can handle it, and yes it will save lives. Will we all probably get COVID19 at some point in the next few years? Probably. But if we all stay apart you'll have a hospital bed to take you if your personal symptoms are bad enough that you're gasping for breath as the virus savages your lungs. Suffocating isn't a fun death. Is our economy going to be uber fucked up? In the US sure looks like it, Canada seems to be smarter with their liberal handouts to the working class. But its an easy statement to say that the economy is more important than a few lives when it isn't your life your risking. I personally like my parents and grandparents. Lastly, people are fucking dumb monkeys. Selective quarantine isn't going to work. The human species works mostly on emotion and ego, and if you try to quarantine a bunch of old people when everyone gets to do whatever they want, we're back to square 1 and the hospitals get crushed, the healthcare workers get infected with a fucking megaton of viral load, they all either get sick and die or quit from PTSD, and now you've got no functioning healthcare system.
My guess would be that they were among the first countries to get a virulent patient before the alarm was raised. They had a massive outbreak before anyone even knew what was going on and their hospitals were massively hit and overwhelmed and couldn't treat most of the population. You'd be surprised how easily a hospital can be overwhelmed. For example, my hospital that I work for, has about, on a normal day, 28 intensive care unit beds and about 215 regular inpatient beds. If a patient needs to be intubated / ventilated, they need the ICU (Assuming there's enough ventilators, but lets say there are same as beds). Now with advance warning you could maybe double the ICU count and add another ~100 or so beds, but hard to do without some advance planning or time. Lets say all of a sudden an outbreak happens, and you're unaware until your hit with it. The virus spreads around for a week or two, but suddenly in week 3 to 4 you're suddenly getting a surge of people coming to the emergency room, and at the beginning you're getting 4 people admitted per day to the hospital, out of which 1 ends up needing a ventilator in the ICU. Ok, 1 a day isn't that bad, but they can stay anywhere from 2-3 weeks in the hospital before recovery. And the infection rate is ramping up, so you might go 1 a day for a week, but this stuff is doubling in 3-4 days. So you're going 1,1,1,1,2,2,3,4,4,5,6,8 (= 38). To fill those 28 beds takes maybe a week and a half, and nobody has been discharged yet to make room. Your vents are full. That's only 28 people. Italy had 20,000+ people die and it lasted for weeks.
Okay, fair enough. And I wasn't saying that like "Fuck old people", I too, love my grandparents. And yes, I get the reason behind this, it's to keep the curve below ICU beds and such. And how short term is 'in the short term'? Here in Canada they are talking about keeping the current measures in place until July. Or even until a vaccine is developed. I'm pretty convinced at this point that if this is going to be the case, Canada is going to have a recession, or even a possible depression. Again, I hope I'm wrong, but the setup is there for it. I'd almost argue that causing the country to descend into that type of economy will have a far larger and worse impact that the virus itself. Suicides will spike, death from hunger, foreclosures, etc. However, the economy isn't as simple as "The government is doing liberal handouts". That money has to come from somewhere, and it's either going to be higher taxes for everyone afterwards.... or it's printed. If it's the first one, then everyone will be spending less because they'll have less to spend. If it's the latter, inflation has the same effect. The money that's currently in circulation becomes devalued and purchasing power goes down. We might have saved the Health care system only to have it all collapse anyway. But I've been wrong before, and I'll be wrong again. Hopefully this will be one of those times. EDIT: BTW, all of this skepticism on my part is just that, skepticism. I'm not advocating for everything to just be lifted, I'm not suggesting that what we are doing won't have an impact. What I am suggesting is that everyone not take things at face value, from news, government or anything really. Trust, but verify. Also, Food for thought
Well, I don't think this'll be a one and done thing. My area's department of education is saying they won't reopen schools without 4 straight weeks of zero cases. That could take years and its unworkable. Things have to be opened in phases and I agree the economy and other aspects of society probably can't handle a full lock down for many more months. Even if it could, COVID will come in waves like a seasonal flu again in the future, once the main crisis has passed I'm for lifting restrictions but also keeping the general mindset of social distancing and avoiding large gatherings for the foreseeable future.
And to your point, even if we lift restrictions, I'm a-okay with continuing physical distancing and limiting gatherings... but to me that should be up to the individual to make those choices for themselves.
Taiwan started inspecting and quarantining travelers in December. The rest of us got caught our pants down despite 3+ months of heads up notice and warnings. And now we're going to all get to involuntarily re-enact the 20's Great Depression. And I won't here go into what all followed from it, y'all know what it resulted in and it wasn't purdy. This is the dilemma we face: all of our countries except a few failed the big test. Completely blew it. Now it's damage control. "Where will the fire spread, will it hit the fuel lines? Can we get this and that out or can we extinguish it". This is what fog of war looks like in the moment without the benefit of hindsight. Many projections with high swing, not a whole lot of confidence.
