You had 40 people over this weekend to what party? Sharing that in this thread is altogether hilarious.
I've never changed my stance on this. In fact we're looking to do a White Elephant party in December.
I don't know what your "stance" is. But good luck, this virus statistically affects older people the most obviously. Also, I presume people with a lower IQ are also affected more on average because of carelessness and/or willful ignorance, etc.
Such a stupid statement. I'd say 75% of folks who came were in the higher tier of income & education, with three being in the Hospital industry. Every day. What is your background? BTW, there is no such thing as willful ignorance. You either know or you don't. I'm guessing you were ignorant of that.
Jim, why don't you try, just for a bit, to not be the guy that tries to be all "IN YOUR FACE" and just act like a normal human being? I love the quote above, btw.
@Roscoe Arbuckle Get your COVID antibodies checked. Seriously. If you really have been not giving any effort about self mitigation and you live in Houston, you may have had it and been asymptomatic or it was mild you didn’t notice. COVID is Russian Roulette. Roughly, 50% are asymptomatic/minor of cases, 30% are mild, and 20% require hospitalization. Of that last 20%, 1/4 of those require ICU care which lasts 2 weeks. In my experience most patients in the ICU who need intubation after failing high flow oxygen or BIPAP are most likely to die. Then there complications beyond pneumonia. Strokes, blood clots to the lungs, and heart inflammation. Personally I have not had it. I follow the rules because I have a high risk person living at home. I follow the rules because I do not want pneumonia. I like being able to breath regardless of my <0.1% chance of dying compared to the 0.6% for this virus. As of this morning, I know about 30 people now personally who have had COVID. Most were under 40 and they had mild courses. Fever, sore throat, or loss of smell. One was 20 and needed to be hospitalized. 3 died: two men in their 60s and one woman in their late 20s. My parents each know at least 3-4 people their age that died. I hate wearing the mask. I hate social distancing. I miss doing fun things. But I made a choice, like the majority of society, that it is worth doing to dampen this pandemic until a vaccine is available. The moral hazard with all this is that while you may be fine and live your life as if nothing has changed, you will still encounter people whose friends and family are at risk and you can effectively be the link in the chain of transmission that harms or kills their loved ones despite you being wholly unaffected. I am not trying to fight you on this, but COVID is real. It sucks. And it will not be forever.
I have had two friends who caught it this past week. Both are quarantining. One has mild symptoms while they other one is experiencing moderate symptoms but they are bad enough that she bedridden and lost all sense of smell and taste. She is trying to quarantine from the rest of her family but is worried that other members of her family might've caught it too.
Again, I don't really get what your "stance" is. I don't see what is wrong with taking some precautions regarding COVID. I don't cower daily in fear over it, but there is a difference between living your life responsibly and throwing up a middle finger at the virus. Btw, COVID skews especially catastrophic towards obese people. Just thought you should know that.
Talking about having 40 people over in a thread full of scared Karens demanding authoritarian rule to prevent people from living their lives? Brave. Managers will be contacted.
I learned today that the Russian government has their vaccine behind a paywall of an antibody test. Non medical personnel will have to fork over the equivalent of $50 to test their antibodies and if the antibodies are negative then they are eligible for the free vaccine. Not so free. But the limited data looks very promising. For all the major vaccines out there. I think the Oxford one will be the one everyone uses in the end.
Not trying to pick at you but I just wanted to say that those percentages are very old estimates. Hospitalization rates are much lower and hospital stays are shorter. Hospitalization rates are well under 5% (likely under 3%) as a whole and obviously that is very dependent on age. It is kind of difficult to track down that data for the entire US, but you can look by state. Florida for example has a 5.7% simple hospitalization rate, but we know that a large percentage of cases were not detected. The antibody serology reports from FL seem to indicate around 10%+ positivity. If that's somewhat accurate then the adjusted hospitalization rate would drop under 3%. Additionally, the age plays a major factor. Under 55 simple hospitalization rates for FL are 2.4% (possibly closer to 1% if they are adjusted for antibody serology. The younger the age group the higher the % positive for antibodies). The simple hospitalization rates for the other age groups are 55-64 at 7.7%, 65-74 at 14.62%, 75-84 at 24.4% and 85+ at 31.7%. You can likely cut those percentages in half for an antibody adjusted rate. http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_p...rmation/state-report/state_reports_latest.pdf http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_p...-results/serology-reports/serology_latest.pdf If we look at Massachusetts then it seems hospitalization rates are even lower, but they only give data for the past 2 weeks from what I saw. https://www.mass.gov/doc/weekly-covid-19-public-health-report-november-19-2020/download I wanted to look at the Cali data but their layout is a mess. Texas data kind of sucks with the layout as well. https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/23...higher-rates-but-surge-could-roll-back-gains/ Data show hospitalized Covid-19 patients are surviving at higher rates, but surge in cases could roll back gains Patients hospitalized with Covid-19 are surviving at higher rates than in the early days of the pandemic, gains that data and interviews with experts suggest are driven by a more refined understanding of the disease and how to treat it — and, crucially, less strain on hospitals that had been inundated at times. Other factors have contributed to the improved outcomes: Steroids that help save some lives are being used more widely, and people infected after the initial surge were, as a whole, younger and arrived at the hospital earlier in the course of the disease. But clinicians warn that this progress won’t withstand what happens when crushes of patients again overwhelm hospitals, as is now occurring in dozens of U.S. states. With the country setting new records of hospitalizations daily, care is getting threatened, and death rates — not just deaths — could increase. “We’re going to have lives lost that shouldn’t be lost,” said Kelly Cawcutt, an infectious diseases and critical care physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Comparing mortality rates from one point of the pandemic to another is challenging. Testing was so limited in the early days, with many more cases being missed than now, that it inflated how deadly the coronavirus seemed. But some studies and other data have started to show patients sick enough to need care at the hospital are more likely to survive now. An analysis prepared for STAT by the independent nonprofit FAIR Health found that the mortality rate of select hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the U.S. dropped from 11.4% in March to below 5% in June, a threshold the rate has stayed below since. In September, the most recent month available, the mortality rate was 3.7%, according to FAIR Health’s data, which are based on hospital coding information for approximately 100 million people with private insurance, including Medicare Advantage plans. Patients have also been leaving the hospital faster, according to the data. The average length of stay declined from 10.5 days in March to 4.6 days in September. The FAIR Health data in this analysis do not account for patients’ age and underlying health conditions. It’s also likely that death rates for patients without private insurance are higher than for those with commercial plans. But studies — some of which have controlled for such factors as age, race, and baseline health — have also found improvements in survival over the months. “Mortality was significantly and progressively lower over the course of the study period,” researchers in New York wrote in one paper, which looked at the death rate in one health system from March — when it was 25.6% — to August — when it 7.6%. In an English study, survival among 5,715 ICU patients increased from 58% in late March to 80.4% by the end of June. Another study out of New York City estimated the infection-fatality rate for the city’s entire population dropped from 6.7% at the beginning of April to 4.2% by the end of May for people 65 to 74 years old, and from 19.1% to 10.4% over the same period for people 75 and older. The trend has been seen elsewhere as well, as medical teams worldwide have built an understanding of how to treat the illness, which wasn’t seen until a year ago.
All true points and appreciate the fact checking, I was referencing my and everyone else’s April experience. We are not at April even now.
So there is a big Vaccine Advisory Committee meeting December 8-10 to discuss Pfizer (and possibly Moderna's) emergency vaccine request. That's still like 2 weeks away. Like...shouldn't they be flying these people in on military planes or setting up a Zoom call to have this meeting as soon as possible to approve? Why wait? Also, just found out my sister in law tested positive. She's a teacher. Some other teacher that doesn't think COVID is a big deal brought it to school as "allergies". Now my 37 year old, perfectly healthy sister in law is on oxygen and is struggling to breath. As mentioned before, our "death total" is up to 7 people we know. Three 70+ year old former classmates of my parents, including 2 they still get together with at "lunch bunches have died. Two of them had very severe underlying conditions. My 78 year old Great Aunt's best friend...both she and he husband got it. Husband came home from the hospital after 3 days, his wife died two weeks later. A former coworker of mine with severe chronic conditions died in the UK at 68. The two most alarming: a very healthy 48 year old bricklayer that worked for my Dad got it at a small family gathering from someone that was asymptomatic and died in Methodist at the medical center 2 weeks later. No underlying conditions. 52 year old former roofer of my Dad's business, son in law of the owner of the roofing business died after his kid brought it home from day care...they think. No underlying conditions. All in the last 6-7 weeks.
Sorry to hear about your sister-in-law, but thanks for sharing that. I've known other folks in that age range get pretty sick, so people should understand it can happen. The "allergies" thing makes my blood boil. On the committee, I think they do a lot of homework before they get together at those meetings to make their decisions, and I also think they get more data on the existing trials over these two weeks. But I hear you.
