46 minutes ago, birdguy said:

Ya know, I hear you guys bantering back and forth about this study and that study and we should do this and we should do that I have to ask the question are you guys experts in the field?  Or do you select the study that sounds best and go with it?

No, I'm no expert.  However, I know how to read.  A lot of times that's all it takes, really - just doing a bit of reading and research. 

You are absolutely right that this thing has been politicized, which makes what most of the mainstream media says about it untrustworthy.

Anyway, if we just listened to the majority of doctors, epidemiologists, infectious disease experts, etc., then we would all stay locked down at home for the next 6 months and watch the world collapse around us.

22 million have filed for unemployment in the U.S. over the past month, and counting.  Soon it will be 50 million, worse than the Great Depression.  This cannot go on much longer.

Dave

Edited April 21, 20206 yr by dave2013

19 minutes ago, birdguy said:

 

Of course I may be all wet here and I'm the only one that doesn't know what all that means.  But I remain terribly confused.

And Kevin AU in a county that spreads over 6,000 square miles with a population of 61,000 and 21 cases how man people am I going to contaminate?  And how likely is it I will catch the virus?  Now if 2 or 3% instead of 0.03% of the people in my area had it I would be concerned.  But until that happens I will ignore the Chicken Littles.

Noel

 

I don’t know how many. It will depend on how many other people you encounter at the store or restaurant you go to and get close to without a mask.

It’s not a matter of being chicken little. When a society is under a collective threat, the society has to respond as a society. Leaving the decision of whether or not to partake in a collective response to a collective threat will render the collective response ineffective. You may think you know better than everybody else and therefore you can make your own decision about whether to partake or not. But do you trust the 60999 other people around you to make that assessment 100% correctly? And if you can’t say yes to that question, then wouldn’t allowing everybody to choose to cooperate or not then just increase the potential for increasing the number of infections?

Why do people here always capitalize both letters of my last name?

Edited April 21, 20206 yr by KevinAu

20 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

No, I'm no expert.  However, I know how to read.  A lot of times that's all it takes, really - just doing a bit of reading and research. 

You are absolutely right that this thing has been politicized, which makes what most of the mainstream media says about it untrustworthy.

Anyway, if we just listened to the majority of doctors, epidemiologists, infectious disease experts, etc., then we would all stay locked down at home for the next 6 months and watch the world collapse around us.

22 million have filed for unemployment in the U.S. over the past month, and counting.  Soon it will be 50 million, worse than the Great Depression.  This cannot go on much longer.

Dave

Wear your mask.

27 minutes ago, Alan_A said:

Andrew Kaufman is not a virologist - he's a psychiatrist.  He's also a conspiracy theory wingnut.  Please read this critique from Jonathan Jarry at the McGill Office of Science and Society.  And please don't link to Kaufman or help him find a bigger audience for this idiocy.

It was pretty obvious from the video. Even having never heard of him before, I felt my eyebrows getting higher and higher! 🤔

EDIT: As a personal aside, i've been following a growing number of stories about people defying this virus and ending up deceased. I keep thinking I should collect them, but I'm not quite that morbid (or bored) yet.

Along the same line, I do notice a meme that started out slowly about a week ago, but now I see people posting it everywhere.

Edited April 21, 20206 yr by HiFlyer

Since 200,000 to 400,000 people in Los Angeles have the anti-bodies and are therefore immune I would assume most of us are immune.

Enough of us are not immune to bring the number of cases high but even then the deaths are low.  And if the Los Angeles County models are correct that explains the population density effect.  If you look at the John Hopkins map of Southeast New Mexico Chaves County (Roswell) with a population of 61,000 and 21 cases is an island surrounded by counties with smaller populations and 0 to3 cases.  And no deaths have been reported in SENM.

 

Assuming that anybody who came in contact with a carrier would catch the virus was in error?

 

Noel

 

9 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

No, I'm no expert.

...

Anyway, if we just listened to the majority of doctors, epidemiologists, infectious disease experts, etc., then we would all stay locked down at home for the next 6 months and watch the world collapse around us.

So what you seem to be saying is, "I'm no expert.  And the experts are wrong."

Do you really mean we shouldn't listen to the majority of qualified, credentialed medicine and  public health professionals about a medicine and public health problem?

Medicine and public health are fact-based in the same way that aviation is fact-based.  Do we stop listening to the captain when he disrupts our trip and claims it's for our own safety?

We all need to beware of confirmation bias.  The authors of the Stanford study - the one that you keep citing, the one that argues that covid is no deadlier than the flu - published an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal well before they issued their study, making the same argument, but in an opinion-based, politicized setting.  Politicization works both ways - it's not just a matter of "I don't like the conclusions of this study, therefore it's politicized and unreliable."  The Stanford authors might be building stats against a conclusion.  Or they might just be sloppy or rushed.  The determination is in the numbers and in the methodology.

I have to keep repeating this - no one arguing for a lockdown is trying to minimize the impact of that or saying it's a good thing.  They're arguing for the greater benefit - including the economic benefit - of avoiding killing massive numbers of people. I've linked to this study before but I'm going to link to it again, because it really deserves reading: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560

We've all got to be careful with numbers and biases.  The other week a member was arguing here that we should just let covid roll through, because the world economy snapped back after the 1918 pandemic and after mass death in World War II.  The economic effects of the 1918 flu are cited in the paper above.  The argument about "snapping back" after WWII made it seem as though that was a natural, spontaneous phenomenon - not one that involved the European starvation winter of 1946-47, international aid through newly created vehicles like the International Monetary Fund, and eventually the creation of the Marshall Plan.

I mostly try to link to studies, because those allow you to hear the full argument and see the authors' work.  I'd encourage friends here to be fact-based and data-driven. 

I apologize Kevin.  I wasn't aware that I was capitalizing both letters or that Au was your last name given there is no space between Kevin and Au.

Noel

3 minutes ago, birdguy said:

Since 200,000 to 400,000 people in Los Angeles have the anti-bodies and are therefore immune I would assume most of us are immune.

Please read the reactions to the Stanford study. It's deeply flawed and those conclusions aren't valid.

14 minutes ago, KevinAu said:

It’s not a matter of being chicken little. When a society is under a collective threat, the society has to respond as a society.

This reminds me of something @angrystaffofficer - a rather elouquent Army engineering officer with a very good blog and a Twitter presence - tweeted the other day, namely that in the two great crises of the past century - WWI and WWII - there was a massive collective response.  Industries were nationalized and there was a draft.  We like to talk about the greatest generation as a paragon of individualism and self-reliance and those qualities were certainly in evidence.  But we tend to forget that the society came together as a society in both of those case.

33 minutes ago, birdguy said:

As a layman I have no idea what that means.

No, that's actually a big challenge.  The authoritative stuff is hard to read.  The easy to read stuff (media coverage) can be inaccurate.  So it's a tough balancing act.

"Rt" refers to how contagious the disease is.  Rt=1 means that each infected person infects one other person.  Higher numbers mean you get multiple cases from one source.

Higher up in this thread, there were some good definitions posted. They're too far back now to be useful - when I get a chance later today, I'll try to pull some links together.

If it's any comfort, we're all getting an education out here - no matter what background you bring to it, there's lots of new stuff to process.

35 minutes ago, Alan_A said:

Andrew Kaufman is not a virologist - he's a psychiatrist. .

I was only saying that I wasn't a virologist and didn't mean to imply that Dr. Kaufman was one. Nor did I think I was spreading him like a virus, my apologies.

Laurie Getter. OK thanks I'll check her out. 

9 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

It was pretty obvious from the video. Even having never heard of him before, I felt my eyebrows getting higher and higher! 🤔

I defer to your greater intuition in that regard. His conclusions about the virus not being isolated seemed to be as believable as the other side of the coin that we know what it is and will be able to vaccine it away. In being prepared to listen, I guess that I listen to the wrong people as well as the right.

1 minute ago, HighBypass said:

I was only saying that I wasn't a virologist and didn't mean to imply that Dr. Kaufman was one. Nor did I think I was spreading him like a virus, my apologies.

Laurie Getter. OK thanks I'll check her out. 

You can start with Laurie Garrett's website here.  And this is a link to her Twitter feed.

You know, the thing with experts, especially on video, is that all of us, myself included, tend to respond favorably to calm voices.  We like to think the expert is somebody that knows something more and by virtue of that isn't getting alarmed.  A couple of weeks ago there was a video that went viral by a New York hospital physician telling people that there was no need to worry about aerosoloized transmission, "here's all you have to do," etc.  It was very reassuring and lots of people sent it to me.  I spent an afternoon polling MD friends and found out it was mostly bad advice.  People were reacting to tone.  I didn't have the background to judge that one so it took some research to confirm or deny.

The problem with this emotional need we all have is that we tend to ignore people who are telling us to panic.  No expert would do that, right?  Well, they might - if it was appropriate.  I try to remind myself about the NYPD officer standing at the corner of Liberty and West Streets as the second Trade Center tower came down, yelling at people over and over, "Just effing run!"

That, under the circumstances, was expert advice.

 

So, Alan, are you saying most of us are not immune?  That study not withstanding the fact the percentage of cases is a small fraction of the population in a given area getting the virus would indicate immunity?  Obviously many people who came in contact with those who were contaminated walked away with not effects.  While some family members caught it from other family members most did not.   Isn't it safe to assume that there is an immunity factor?

Isn't it possible that all these precautions are overkill?  If one person in a grocery store does carry the virus is he going to pass it on to everyone else in the grocery store, separation not withstanding?  Aren't most people in the grocery store immune?

Noel

I would recommend going to Google Scholar and typing in COVID just to see the level of research that is occurring. You don't have to understand the science behind it, but just seeing the research articles should put to rest a lot of questions regarding what is known about this virus so far, and what will need to be determined going forward.

There is currently no successful human vaccine for any of the corona viruses. Part of the problem is that SARS-COV-2 in humans is primarily a lung infection and biologically that area of the body doesn't elicit a strong immune response. Neither one of the earlier Corona outbreaks in humans, SARS-CoV (2003) and MERS-CoV (2012) ever had a successful vaccine, in part because the epidemic died down before clinical trials could begin. Given the global spread of this virus it's unlikely to disappear like SARS and MERS did.

Martin 

 

 

Carefully, no matter what we do the virus is here and it will stay here for long, it will slowly blur into all regions, even with all the restrictions on. Virologist Christian Drosten and epidemiologist Michael Meyer-Hermann a Helmholtz researcher warns of a second wave in the winter time, infection chains in all places at the same time, this sounds not very good.

It is too early for optimism in the corona crisis

 

But some good news too, an interesting read about Covid – 19 Deaths caused by pulmonary embolism?

A Swiss researcher gives hope in the fight against the pandemic

 

( The original links are from german / swiss sites, but i searched for english websites for you and find some,

i checked them and they have the same information.)