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Oh Boy...
5 years ago
General
In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into.
My state's governor, Greg Abbott, has decided to lift pretty much all COVID19 restrictions later this month. He's citing "herd immunity" because the vaccines have been administered to 5 million people. Bear in mind, Texas has a population of 29 million. Some people think he's doing this intentionally to cause a spike in cases to distract people from the massive shit show from a couple of weeks ago. I guess we'll see what happens, hopefully the immunity provided by the vaccines will hold even as new mutations come around.
The GoP just keeps making the case that they want to kill as many people as they can.
What's worse is the more the virus spreads, the more likely it is to mutate. Mutations can result in vaccine-resistant strains, which could set us right back to square one.
They can, yes, but it's dangerous to assume that will be the case with COVID19, as the disease is already contagious even before symptoms begin, so it can already spread easily.
The actual death rate of covid is under 1% which is less than many flus and there was no flu reported this year because hospitals have incentive to lie and say any flu cases covid to get extra money from the government.
This is a really dangerous claim to make. Many hospitals had trouble getting enough personal protective equipment for their staff to safely handle the surge of patients. Whether it was the flu, COVID, or whatever, PPE is essential for hospital staff. Some doctors and nurses also contracted COVID multiple times, with every subsequent infection becoming possibly more dangerous.
As far as lying about COVID rates, when the pandemic first started, most facilities didn't even have the means to test patients, so if they showed symptoms they had to monitor them regardless. And Trump did virtually nothing in regards to aid in the pandemic, so there wasn't really any money in it. Add the freezing economy to that, and that claim really makes no sense. Inflate the numbers of an infectious disease to get more money to spend on...what? Supplies that are on backorder? Go out, have some fun, and spend some money at businesses that are closed because they and their colleagues inflated the number of patients suffering from a highly contagious disease?
We are a year into a two week lockdown to slow the spread.
A two week lockdown was the bare minimum for when cases first started appearing. We missed that mark by a wide margin. Lockdown in Texas initially lasted for a couple of months, then restrictions were lifted for a bit. When restrictions were lifted, people stopped following ANY recommendations or procedures to prevent infection and that's when cases surged again.
In Los Angelas and, before that, New York City, they had to load bodies onto refrigerated trucks because of how many people were dying. Less than 1% isn't a lot of people, but when something like this spreads in places with high populations, it does become a lot! But it's made even worse because hospitals were so backed up that people who really needed medical intervention weren't able to get the treatment they needed. So death rates rose. And hospitals aren't built to just take in sick people, but also people with injuries and people undergoing various surgeries, and other treatments. Now anyone who doesn't have a condition that's immediately life-threatening has to be prioritized under anyone showing symptoms of COVID.
If 1,000 patients are admitted with COVID, about 10 of them die. That doesn't sound like a lot, but that adds up. Funeral homes have to deal with those while also taking in bodies of people who have passed from other things including old age and whatever else you can think of. A steady flow of dead bodies gets overwhelming fast. And being unable to get tested or even carrying on with your normal business because you're not showing symptoms (yet) is a big part of the problem.
To also counter your claim that COVID cases have been inflated, Trump himself suggested keeping the numbers down by not testing people. The man said that on camera. It's like a diabetic saying if they don't test their blood sugar, they don't have to say they're diabetic.
A couple of things there:
1) If an error occurs in a test, medical staff will err on the side of caution.
2) At the time, the medical community was finding any way they could to test possibly infected patients. There was a surge of demand (well more like need) and not near enough supply. Again, when Trump was informed there was a problem his response was, at first, to do absolutely nothing and later on he even suggested not testing as many people to keep the number of reported cases down.
>Or the people who were turned away from testing sites because the lines were too long, filled out "we'll test you later" paperwork documents, who then got a "you've got covid!" letter a couple days later?
Long lines filled with people who likely did have COVID. Are you sure the notices sent out said they absolutely did have COVID or that they were certainly exposed? There's quite a difference.
>There's a lot more. I just takes some digging and a willingness to listen.
It would help if you cited all of your sources, particularly ones that don't require a purchase to read the content. Most of the sources I'm finding are saying, by and large, the response to COVID didn't even come close to what was needed, and until enough people can get vaccinated safeguards and restrictions need to stay in place.
In regards to Hydroxychloroquin, the only thing I've been able to find on that is it's still not seen to be an effective treatment. Furthermore, it's a moot point. Masks and social distancing slow the spread, and vaccines are being distributed, both factors are causing a decrease in cases.
Do some digging, and listen to sources that get dismissed by the mainstream.
So, all of the previous things said, this statement here presents some problems. What is the line I need to look for here as far as "dismissals" go? Should I stop listening to doctors and other medical experts? Everyone in the medical field I know, from doctors to nurses, even people who work in housekeeping in hospitals have said that precautions like masks, social distancing, handwashing, etc. help prevent infection.
I agree that can be exhausting, especially after so many false alarms. We haven't had a pandemic like this since the Spanish Flu, and there aren't very many, if any at all, who were alive and old enough to remember that. However that is an important event to analyze with concerns for the current pandemic and similar future issues. The Spanish Flu hit in several waves. The second wave of that virus was the deadliest, with the third and fourth waves being pretty bad as well. The problem with letting the virus mutate into something "less deadly" is that, as with Spanish Flu, new strains and mutations can have higher mortality rates and/or cause more harm to different demographics.
Right now, the highest at-risk groups are elderly people over 80 years old with health problems. At-risk does not meet they're guaranteed to have serious complications or problems should they get it, and it doesn't mean that a young, healthy person won't be killed by it. They have a greater risk though, so caution is needed. After the first wave of the Spanish Flu, that changed. The virus started causing higher mortality rates in younger people, namely children. That's what the concern here is with lifting restrictions.
As to your trust question, who can't be criticized, and who silences any disagreement and/or dissent from the mainstream opinions?
The "experts" who tell us that we're all going to die from the new "mutants" of Covid that appear, despite the trend for ALL prior viruses being getting less deadly over time.
The "experts" like Fauci, who has literally constantly contradicted himself, and who has investments in a company that will (and likely HAS) made millions off of the pushing of remdisivere. Questioning him was and is verboten.
I stopped immediately trusting the "experts" because butter was going to kill us all... until margarine turned out to be worse.
When salt was the killer of all who had heart attacks, until recent studies have shown that low sodium diets guarantee repeat heart attacks.
When sun exposure would kill us all with skin cancer... until recent studies have shown that vitamin d deficiencies from a LACK of sun exposure causes or exacerbates dozens of other issues that are far worse than the risk of skin cancer.
So there's quite a bit to read over there, but I'm getting one thing specifically from these examples. There's a difference between information being outright false and harmful effects being the result of extreme adherence or overindulgence. The dietary example, for instance, is fine on its own. Eat healthier, lose some weight or whatever. But if that particular type of meal is still overindulged, obesity and other health problems are still a risk, and using it as a "cure all" is a moot point, as most reasonable people know that you're not going to eat some kind of magical food that makes cancer go away.
Regarding Dr. Fauci specifically, the inconsistencies and contradictions coming from his reports and recommendations are more "information has changed, here's what we know now.", which can be understandably confusing and frustrating. His changing position on masks, for example, wasn't that they didn't work at all, but initially his position was that people should avoid crowds whenever possible during the mask shortage, since first responders and medical personnel were in desperate needs of them. When private business started making and selling reusable/washable cloth masks, the information changed and he started advocated for wearing masks. That kind of information was also there, if you looked for it.
The bottom line here is that we've got an airborne virus that we had just started to get a handle on. I work at a hospital and our numbers on COVID patients have gone way down. Unfortunately, the lifts on restrictions, Spring Break, etc. is a big problem and we are going to see another surge. The TX governor's not even lifting restrictions because of any evidence that it's not a problem anymore, either, he's doing it because he's feeling the heat (figuratively) from the massive failures during the winter storm that hit, so he's giving everyone something else to worry about to get attention off of that.
Again, though, the theory about the virus mutating in a way so it's less deadly isn't a gamble that should be taken. It already has a long incubation period where's it's very contagious, so that's not a huge factor. What can happen, however, is it can become more resistant to vaccines, cause a higher mortality rate in other demographics, and become even more contagious and less symptomatic initially. Viruses don't become less deadly through mutations as a goal, that's coincidental. A virus mutates to become more contagious and to spread farther, more quickly.
If you don't think it's a big deal, okay. I know a few people who nearly died from the thing, my dad knows a few people who have died from it, and I work with someone who's still recovering from having the virus about a year ago. I'd much rather take extra precautions than risk getting seriously ill myself or getting someone else seriously ill.
As far as I can tell, initially a correlation may have been noticed. While doctors investigated the effectiveness of hydroxychloriquine on patients hospitalized with COVID, they urged caution and recommended people not assume there was any kind of link. For all anyone knew, contracting malaria could have actually been the factor that made COVID less lethal to those patients, stranger things have happened I'm sure. It's also entirely possible there was no connection at all.
The only thing that seemed to boost perception that hydroxychloriquine was particularly effective was Trump saying he believed it to be so. He also suggested that injecting bleach could kill COVID19, so...yeah.
As far as the drug being demonized; compared to what? We have people in this nation who openly and vocally oppose all vaccinations, including the MMR vaccine and others that had eradicated diseases that killed a lot of people, vaccines with a historic effectiveness and that were verifiably safe. It seems in the right circles, plenty of medicines with legitimate benefits are demonized by people with educated backgrounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE this is him, on camera, asking about injecting disinfectant, including into people's lungs.
What if I'm right and hydroxychloroquine and other medicines are effective against covid, but they never got researched because Dr. Fauci and the other bureaucrats were incompetent/blinded by the long since proven false 2 million dead estimate?
How many people died because bureaucrats decided politically instead of based on medical evidence?
The one major problem with that theory is Fauci was effectively deplatformed by Trump. He was removed from his position as a medical advisor in the White House. Anything medical experts tried to say about COVID was shot down by Trump who, again, went as far as to say "If you stop reporting new cases, the numbers won't go up."
I really don't see us coming to an agreement here. All the evidence you're citing is speculative/theoretical at best and misinformed at worst. The thing about the science is that the medical journals are sourced, cited, peer-reviewed, etc. Any issues in the research are pointed out and the information is scrutinized.
One major example I can think of is the Milwaukee Protocol. In 2004, after being bitten by a rabid bat, a teenage girl started exhibiting symptoms for rabies. Unfortunately, since neither the girl or her parents thought anything of the bat bite, they didn't think to get her treated immediately. Of course when someone bitten by a rabid animal starts showing symptoms, there's not really anything that can be done for them.
Dr. Rodney Willoughby Jr. wanted to try a different treatment, which her parents agreed to because death was already certain, so if it could help then what would the harm be, right? A large part of the treatment was effectively putting the patient in a coma and letting her own immune system have a chance to catch up and fight the virus. She survived with some lasting effects, but still functional. Graduated high school and everything.
This treatment is extremely controversial and hotly debated, with some doctors saying any chance to prevent death is worth it, while others think there are too many unanswered questions about why exactly it worked for this woman. It's been used on dozens of patients, but has only saved a very small number of them. The emphasis is that they don't know why it's worked on them, so they're just throwing darts at a board blind and hoping something sticks.
The bottom line with the pandemic is we're lucky we haven't had one sooner, but that gave us all the time to prepare. Even Bush was consulting with medical experts on how to prepare for a pandemic, as did Obama. Trump is the one who ignored all advice and recommendations with his and his supporters' response to criticism being to spread misinformation and refuse to acknowledge fact.
You mentioned the CDC had a study that showed mask mandates were statistically ineffective, when the opposite was true:
https://www.politifact.com/factchec.....es-make-no-st/
You try to evoke mainstream sources when they back up your beliefs, and when they contradict what you believe, you discredit them. You're starting with your opinion and just tailoring whatever evidence you can find to suit your narrative. That's dishonest.
Unblock me if you aren't afraid of being challenged.
Don't talk at me if you're not willing to actually talk.
Compare New Zealand's early, aggressive lockdowns to America's patchwork of states and citizens doing a bit of everything. One country had twenty-six deaths. The other has had over half a million.
Which one worked better?
To be fair, there's never absolute agreement on everything. That doesn't mean dissenting opinion objections are equally valid. The widespread global consensus in the medical community has been to implement measures to reduce the means of transmission of the virus. The more rigorous the measures, like for the entire country of New Zealand, the more lives and quality of life have been spared from experiencing the virus.
And the more people saved along with their ability to be fully-functional and not suffer long-lasting damage because of the virus, the easier economic recovery can be. With half a million dead and millions crippled from the effects of this virus, how long is America going to feel the effects of this pandemic one of their two political parties chose to ignore and make a partisan issue?
"This includes ignoring CDC studies that put mask effectiveness within the margin of error of difference between masks and no masks, [...]"
The CDC has no such study. They do have one on not recommending that cloth masks be mandated for healthcare workers because their effectiveness is likely not as good as N-95 medical masks, but they still recommend the public be encouraged to wear them.
"...and the CDC data on covid deaths pointing to heavy over estimating deaths."
The CDC has information on excess deaths caused by COVID-19, not over-estimated deaths. Excess deaths are the extra number of deaths recorded in a time period compared to the general rate of deaths in that time period. It's how many extra people died because of COVID-19, not over-estimated numbers.
So, you're wrong. Your information is either false or you're misunderstanding something you've heard. And the mask thing is absurd just on the face of it. If masks are basically useless, the medical community been using them for a century for ... what? Fun? :I
You should entertain the possibility that the medical community isn't ignoring sound science in an effort to hurt the public and rather you've just been suckered into conspiracy theories promoted by grifters who are just taking advantage of you.
Same.
"Also, if your grounds for dismissal is "was declared a right wing hack", check who is telling you to dismiss that source for conflicts of interest."
Me. I'm not buying his Amazon book. I'm sorry you're under the misconception that global medical experts are lying to everyone. I just happen to live in a region where lockdowns, masks and vaccinations have worked and can see it has worked elsewhere too, despite what the one person you keep bringing up and the vague suppressed studies you reference but never provide might say.
If you can't handle mild challenges to your beliefs, maybe sticking your neck into a thread with people who live in reality isn't for you, Hariman.