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Thread: COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

  1. #5051
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    Quote Originally Posted by johnst_nhb View Post
    I’m confused. You said:
    “ Not new this year, it's been the policy for several years now.”

    Then:
    “ If we didn't have a reasonably effective seasonal flu vaccine widely available, you would probably have seen a push for masks before this year.”

    I feel like I’m missing something, can you elaborate?

    Honest questions... Out of my own curiosity. Do you wear masks year round in your hospital? If not, what is the critical mass [for seasonal flu] that determines this policy?

    Is this for every physician/staff at the hospital?

    Are the masks intended to prevent you, hypothetically not symptomatic for the flu, from spreading it, or to protect you from those patients that may have it?

    I am only curious, no ulterior reason for asking.
    At our hospital, and most others in the area that I have visited or worked at, all employees are requested to get a seasonal flu vaccine. Those who choose not to, or are unable to, are required to wear a surgical-type mask while at work in the hospital during flu season (I forget, but it's probably like Oct-April, they may adjust based on local reports of flu activity). The purpose of this is to protect patients from employees who may be carrying flu. Hospital patients have a higher likelihood of flu complications, of being unable to get a flu vaccine, and of being unable to mount an effective immune response to a vaccine or the flu, and it is our job to protect their health, hence the masks. And because hospitals have large numbers of different people in and out 24/7, they are great places for germs to be exchanged.

    I brought this up because someone had raised a point along the lines of "well, if masks are effective why don't we wear them for flu." And I was pointing out that in certain circumstances we do.

    Nobody thinks masks are 100% effective at anything. They do shave the odds of the mask wearer spreading germs, and to a lesser extent from contracting something. In some situations that makes it worth it to wear masks, in other situations it doesn't. You really want your surgeon to be wearing a mask if you're getting cut open. If we all wore masks, we would probably reduce the incidence of the common cold, but nobody I know of thinks the common cold is bad enough to warrant it (even though some vulnerable people do develop pneumonia and die after a cold). If we didn't have a flu vaccine, you might see regular recommendations for public masking in the setting of the seasonal flu.

    The recommendations for masks during COVID have been all over the place, and many people on both sides (as there are now politics involved and people feel the need to "take sides" on masks) seem to have a distorted view of what masks can and can't do and why we would or wouldn't wear them. I was just trying to inject some facts into the conversation.

    PSA: Handwashing is still the best way not to GET something. Somehow it's disappeared from the public conversation, but it's still important. And if you haven't had covid, and you don't want to get it, you should probably wash your hands several more times a day than you normally think you need to.

  2. #5052
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    Quote Originally Posted by Matt Jackson View Post
    Very interesting. One of the things most right-leaning folks don't consder when they blame "the left" is how the demise of the Old Left happened, and how the deep state and organized capital used American intelligence to basically work a huge psyop which did not seek to destroy Marxism, but redirected it, and set it up as something which would not be a threat (i.e - pro-Soviets or effectively working against the interests of capital). In my opinion, what we have is equally terrible - because the corrupt, evil 1% grow stronger, while us little people down on the street have to deal with the consequences of this fashionable anti-whiteness, social disintegration and less law and order.

    Marcuse is just one man who's interesting because of his links to American intelligence during and after WW2, and while he may have made contributions to said psyop along with other members of the Frankfurt School, others figures in the 60's/70's academia are far more responsible than he for directly giving us this SJW, critical theory nonsense which is currently being used to great effect to harm the West.

    He wrote about capitalism's promise of happiness, and when the promise was felt to be broken and it started to produce misery, people would gradually become less willing to fulfill their roles in society, and would start to look for other kinds of social relations. This may be what we're seeing with all of these idiotic young people who have been convinced that destroying their own nation, and civilisation, will give their lives a sense of purpose and meaning.

    Marcuse didn't think this would lead to a collapse, but I think it will, in fact, I think we're seeing it happen now in real time.
    I agree. In fact, it is astonishing to see how the Frankfurt School, Lacan and the French anti-enlightment "philosophers" like Focault, Derrida and gang were able to turn a distinctly down to earth classical economic analysis into a series of cultural misnomers, sexual innuendos, basically a bizzare field where you can't talk about anything with substance, because some asshole will crop up and say "we need to define the word word when we talk about the word word". Pro tip, the last Western philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, warned about this shit 80 years ago, but nobody to date seems to have listened.

    If Marx were to wake up in 2020 and see Volume III played out in real time on a global level, with nobody even attempting to do anything about it, I guess he would be very surprised. He would probably write a series of blog posts trying in vain to detail how the "right wing" voters were the actual people he was writing about who were supposed to start the revolution. I mean, those are the bastards losing their jobs, being made to work harder and harder in increasing uncertainty in order to fund a state apparatus with totalitarian powers far in excess of what Stalin may ever have dreamed of, along with a burgeoning NGO sector staffed by a bunch of useful idiots preventing the other half of the population from even considering their position as next generation capitalist oppressors of their own class, all in the useless hope of feeding the mathematics of compound interest. Who's the proletariat now?

  3. #5053
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    Harshray,
    The paragraph below is from the “expert” article you cited, just an example. It has so many scientific holes in it it’s not funny.
    The data presented does NOT prove that masks do anything. Can you not see this ? Genuinely interested.

    “A recent study published in Health Affairs, for example, compared the COVID-19 growth rate before and after mask mandates in 15 states and the District of Columbia. It found that mask mandates led to a slowdown in daily COVID-19 growth rate, which became more apparent over time. The first five days after a mandate, the daily growth rate slowed by 0.9 percentage-points compared to the five days prior to the mandate; at three weeks, the daily growth rate had slowed by 2 percentage-points.”

  4. #5054
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    If the US response to COVID is the new standard, then we will need to close schools, mask and social distance forever with each new influenza season.

    Another piece by Horowitz that, I don't think, has been presented here.

    Horowitz: If the panicmongers were consistent, we’d close the schools every flu season - Conservative Review

  5. #5055
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    Quote Originally Posted by jfsully View Post
    I will say my answer is based on intuition and some experience, but not on some big study that can prove it.
    That is not very reassuring.
    Quote Originally Posted by jfsully View Post
    If it's not spread at all person-to-person for 2 weeks, maybe a month, it's gone. So if maximal protection measures are used: hand hygiene, masks, social distancing, large-scale testing and quarantining of known positives, that should do it. Why hasn't that happened? Because large pockets of people are not doing these things and are passing it around, creating rolling reservoirs of virus.
    I don’t think this is possible to achieve through voluntary action. I’m not even sure it’s possible to achieve in a totalitarian police state where you shoot non-compliers in the street. It may be possible in small pockets, however by doing this you are short circuiting the method used to deal with coronavirus infections that has been used by humans since there have been coronavirus infections. The result of this is that your population remains completely vulnerable immunologically. You may be able to clear a small pocket town or city effectively, but what happens when a trucker/salesperson/contractor/immigrant, comes to town and an infection spreads all over again?

    Quote Originally Posted by jfsully View Post
    It seems clear to me that this is a fairly contagious virus, on the level of the common cold, and that most people carrying it don't get very sick but can still pass it around.
    I mostly agree that the virus seems to be fairly contagious, though I still do not know anybody at this point that has tested positive for it. Your statement that “most people carrying it don’t get very sick” I believe is one of the most important facts that we should take into consideration when determining the severity of our public policy actions along with the extremely low death rates, (especially when factoring out sending infected people to nursing homes).
    Quote Originally Posted by jfsully View Post
    I suppose you could make the argument "well, since not enough people will follow strict containment procedures to actually stop this thing, we shouldn't bother." That's a defensible position, but to me it feels like surrender. I know that wearing a mask feels to other people like surrender. So, here we are, stuck with half-measures. Better than nothing? I don't know. Let the debate continue.
    That is a good argument and likely correct. However, my position is that slowing the spread is the wrong way to address Covid-19. If the virus spreads easily and “most people carrying it don’t get very sick” and the IFR is extremely low then attempts to slow the spread make no sense.

    Additionally, we should consider the unintended consequences of interfering with natural process that we have used with such viruses. Deaths from other causes as a result have been mentioned before. I am also concerned with the duration of immunity for those who have been previously infected. Immunity to Covid-19 may dissipate in as little as 6 months. A recent study by of Coronoviruses by Edridge et al. (2020) “saw frequent reinfections at 12 months post-infection and a substantial reduction in antibody levels as soon as 6 months post-infection.” By slowing the spread we may actually be creating a condition where the virus never goes away as people begin to lose immunity and get re-infected.

    If herd immunity is a valid defense for this virus, I suggest we get there as soon as possible to get over this. Slowing the spread is the opposite of as soon as possible. If herd immunity is not a valid defense, then based on the low death rate and high percentage of people that have no or mild symptoms, we need to accept that getting sick is a part of life and move on. Either way, mask wearing, social distancing, and closing every business and school should be abandoned as a failed policy after nearly 5 months of “2 weeks to slow the spread”.

  6. #5056
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    Quote Originally Posted by ForbiddenDonut View Post
    A travel Nurse's experience working in NYC during initial surge:

    NYC Covid-19 experience - Megan Watkins - Google Docs
    Thanks for posting this. NYC has serious problems with its government, all of them its own fault. This is one way they manifest.

    A travel nurse shared with me that she had 13 patients her first night in the ER with 4 of them intubated. (NY does not have nurse to patient ratios; in CA its law that an ER nurse only have up to 4 patients, and if they have an intubated patient your ratio is down to 2 patients). There is absolutely no way a nurse can care for that number of patients, especially with that critical of patients. A physician’s assistant shared with me that a patient had been waiting in a bed in the ER for over 13 hours to be seen and when the provider finally went up to them, the patient was dead – cold, stiff dead. This patient was assigned to a nurse who had 13+ patients, and unfortunately got missed. This was the week 800 nurses were sitting in a hotel room waiting to work.
    More importantly:

    There was one patient who came into the ER who had already previously tested positive for Covid and sent home to recover and quarantine. She came back because she felt worse. Her vitals were normal, her labs great, chest x-ray better than the previous visit. She eventually shared as she was hysterically crying that she was scared she was going to die; she “had seen it all over the news that everyone is dying!” I was heartbroken. Not because “everyone was dying”; I was sad because the news was only sharing the worst of the worst of Covid. I’ve seen it! The NYC local news showed the new daily death count numbers multiple times a day – they never cared to show the recoveries! They always played clips of parts of hospitals flooded with people on beds in hallways and some with no beds as they lay “dying on the floor.” Staff have even told me that these news clips were only from one hospital, Elmhurst Hospital, on only the worst day of the pandemic. This young lady who was otherwise healthy with no medical conditions bought the lie of fear.
    Lots of interesting stuff in here:

    Along the lines of FEMA, of course we had all heard the rumors of hospitals and doctors inflating the Covid cases to gain more federal money for each patient in the hospital. There is extra monetary gain from these practices with Medicare patients. A normal pneumonia hospitalization payout to a hospital would be $5000 per patient. For Covid positive hospitalized patients it is $13,000 and $39,000 for Medicare Covid positive patients on ventilators. New York is one of many states that allows “Presumed Covid” as a diagnosis and still gets paid out by Medicare (Fact check: Medicare pays hospitals more money for COVID-19 patients). I can say I did see a death, an obvious death caused by drug overdose, be deemed Covid-related. The patient was coded at home by medics for over 40 minutes. The patient was then transported to us. As soon as the patient was moved from the EMS gurney to the hospital gurney, the doctor checked for any cardiac movement via bedside ultrasound, found none, and called time of death. The doctor stated presumed Covid related death. No labs were taken. No chest x-rays. No nasal swab. Nothing was done to even have a suspicion of Covid.
    It took the hospital until beginning of May to have separated units of positive and negative Covid patients. This is TWO months after the country was placed in a state of emergency for an airborne pandemic.
    Many nurses, even the travel nurses, performed a barely adequate job and exclaimed, “Can’t lose my license over this, Governor Cuomo said no malpractice lawsuits can be claimed during this time!” A staff nurse shared with us that it is very difficult to fire an employee, because all employees at the NYC health and hospital system are government employees – “there’s nothing we can do.”
    If you want to know why the death rate in NYC was so much higher than any other place in the country, and probably the world, this sheds quite a bit of light. Read it while you can.

  7. #5057
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    Quote Originally Posted by MashedTaters View Post
    If the US response to COVID is the new standard, then we will need to close schools, mask and social distance forever with each new influenza season.
    In addition to the mask mandates, it would also be medically prudent to lock the southern border. The conversation will look different when it includes meaningful bi-partisan support of that proposal.

  8. #5058
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    Read it while you can.
    You hear stories like these all over the world. Covid profiteering.

  9. #5059
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    Pro mask supporters point to the mask wearing culture in a successful country like Japan.

    Japan had no lockdown and only so far recorded 985 COVID deaths.

    But why didn't the masks work out for them in 2019?

    Millions in Japan affected as flu outbreak grips country - UPI.com

  10. #5060
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    Quote Originally Posted by ltomo View Post
    "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
    Ecclesiastes. Old school.

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