Covid-19 | Coronavirus August 2020

Roxxsmom

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A new month and no end in sight.

I've run across a couple of articles in the Atlantic this week that summarize something that's been bugging me for a while. The evidence points more and more to this virus being spread primarily through the air via contact between people, particularly in indoor spaces. But there is still so much emphasis on cleaning surfaces. Not that hand washing and cleaning surfaces has no benefits, and heck, it probably reduces transmission of other diseases. But it's far from sufficient for safety with a disease that spreads mostly via droplets and aerosols.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...king-more-about-airborne-transmission/614737/

So all those gyms, bars, airlines, restaurants, theaters, amusement parks, public transit, and so on that assure everyone that they are deep cleaning and disinfecting? And the reassurances that the schools will be sanitizing surfaces? It's creating a sense of false security that does more harm than good. Why should I be reassured that my gym has sanitizes their equipment every hour when I'm not going to be licking the exercise bike and would wash my hands after I use it (if I went to the gym, which I have not been since this started). It's the people huffing and puffing in the same room, breathing the same recycled air who are most likely to infect one another--especially since the WHO says you should not work out with a mask on and gyms would therefore get exemptions for mask orders.

I'd feel far more safe if businesses and public agencies provide some detailed descriptions of the air flow, ventilation, filtration units etc. and by there being partitions and strict limits on how many are allowed in at the same time. Of course, that would be more complicated and expensive than sloshing everything with disinfectant.
 

MaeZe

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Thank you for refreshing the topic.

It's going to take a vaccine for the US, Brazil, India and maybe Sweden for various reasons. Other countries seem to understand the principles a tad better than we in the US do. :cry:
 

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I suppose the fixation on cleaning and disfecting surfaces is maybe because it's a thing that you can do to protect yourself. There's very little you can do about somebody else's breathing and potential viral load. We like the idea of being in control of things, even if it's often an illusion.

I have been reading headlines that other diseases have had a smaller spread that usually, but whether that is because the improved hygiene practises or the limited human contact due to the lockdowns is up for debate.

As for the vaccine, I reckon that's what it's going to take for all of us. Even countries that went through succesful lockdowns and even eliminated the virus for a while now can still face sharp rises in contaminations. It's clear COVID doesn't need much to get out of control.
 

Roxxsmom

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I think the surface cleaning was something that made people feel a bit in control early on. It may do some good, but if people are expending all their time and resources on surface cleaning instead of other mitigation efforts, it also may be counter productive. We were meticulously cleaning grocery packaging with bleach early on, but after countless experts pointed out that no known clusters originated from contaminated food or packaging people brought home from stores, well, we decided it wasn't the best use of our time.

There's also the issue of this fixation on environmental contamination driving some poor decisions, not just about opening schools and gyms etc. and thinking surface cleaning is adequate, but the opposite--forbidding situations where there is little risk of airborne infection. For instance, our college district just sent a memo out that faculty will not be able to get special permission to come to the (closed) campus to record lectures or labs in the classrooms, even though this would lead to better quality videos than we can do at home. There is virtually no risk of transmitting the illness if people coordinate so they aren't in the facilities at the same time and wear masks indoors and so on, open windows etc., but I get the impression they feel they would need to repeatedly "deep clean" the rooms if people are coming to campus to record class material. Plus there's that whole liability paranoia we've seen over the years from our district, where administrative (and sometimes even pedagogical) decisions are increasingly made by lawyers.

This is one of the reasons there is some resistance to the mitigation efforts and closures. Inconsistent safety procedures and policies that aren't always based on the most recent scientific data. Of course, people also have trouble grasping that the "best practices" suggested a month ago may need to be updated, and that can make them frustrated too. Then there's plain human cussedness.
 
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Maryn

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My state tracks data by a number of factors, among them age groups. The 20 - 29 year olds in my county account for more than a third of all cases, but the university where our daughter and her husband teach is opening for business in September, with emphasis on social distancing (larger classrooms for the same number of students) and masks required.

This isn't a university with the brightest and highest motivated. Lots of partying students will soon be arriving, and even if they keep six feet away and wear masks in the classroom, they're going to infect one another on their own time, guaranteed, and in turn infect some of the faculty.

Our daughter is already talking about not seeing us in person during the school year because we're in a high risk age group.

Maryn, with a little sob
 

Kat M

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Oh Maryn, I'm so sorry! This virus blows. :Hug2:

(This should have been a rep comment but it's not working for me today, alas)
 

ChaseJxyz

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I'm really, really hoping that colleges change their minds and don't stay open all year. There's no way that this is going to be viable. A coworker has twins that are supposed to start their freshman year, and he was telling me their plans for move in (staggered at different times, but my school did that in 2009 so that isn't too weird) and how you're not allowed to hang out/visit people on other floors? There's no way that's going to be enforceable, or if they do students are going to find ways around it.
 

Roxxsmom

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Well, this should be interesting. Wonder if it will work, or if the "covidiots" will happily continue to party in the dark.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced on Wednesday that he is authorizing the city to shut off water and power service to properties hosting large house parties, which he said had "essentially become nightclubs in the hills."

In a briefing, Garcetti expressed concerns about reports of large parties and gatherings that violate public health orders, often taking place at homes that are vacant or being used as short-term rentals.

Starting Friday night, he said, houses, businesses and other venues hosting "un-permitted large gatherings" will face tougher consequences.

https://www.npr.org/sections/corona...S&utm_campaign=nprblogscoronavirusliveupdates
 

frimble3

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No, the Covidiots are going to bring tiki torches, candles and sparklers, so that not only can they spread COVID, they can start wildfires.
Actually, if Los Angeles has any water-bombers on hand, they might want to make a few 'training runs' over loud, festive locations.
 

Roxxsmom

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No, the Covidiots are going to bring tiki torches, candles and sparklers, so that not only can they spread COVID, they can start wildfires.
Actually, if Los Angeles has any water-bombers on hand, they might want to make a few 'training runs' over loud, festive locations.

That's actually a fine idea!

It also occurred to me that these morons will just shit and piss outside and make it likely they will spread diseases other than Covid-19 too.

The selfish idiocy of some people is amazing (not in a good way). The English language needs a special word for that combination of self-confident ignorance and oblivious selfishness we have so much of in the US. "Selfidiocy"?
 

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I see future dead people...

'It's just madness': bikers throng South Dakota town despite Covid threat

The Guardian said:
At least 100,000 people are expected to attend the 10-day annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota’s Black Hills from Friday, as opportunities for the local economy have overridden concerns it could become a coronavirus superspreading event.

...

Yet on Friday, a worker at the event told the Guardian the crowd seemed larger than in previous years – and warned that Sturgis attendees were paying little heed to medical advice.

“I’ve not seen one single person wearing a mask,” said Jessica Christian, who is working at a bar at the sprawling event.

“It’s just pretty much the mentality that, ‘If I get it, I get it.’”

...

“The rally is going to stay the same in many respects,” said the Meade county sheriff, Rob Merwin. “It’s going to be a lot of people and a lot of motorcycles all over the place. People are tired of being penned up by this pandemic.“

...

I worked for a mid-sized software company in the early Oughties, that was bought by A Giant Company. We made software tools for other software developers. Parts of our product were complex and hard to evolve, largely because the problems they solved were thorny and hard to solve.

Suddenly, we had AGC managers transferred in over us, who had no experience with our products nor the technical issues they solved. They’d sometimes expect us to quickly make changes that sounded easy, unless you understood why they were actually quite hard, or even impossible given the history and limits of the product. “It shouldn’t take this long!” was a frustrated cry I heard from them multiple times, or the related complaint, “It shouldn’t be this hard!”

Except, that it did, and it was. Because it Just Was. Their desires were understandable. From a business perspective, maybe even true. But reality had rules that didn’t care about those desires or needs.

The virus doesn’t care if people are tired, or don’t believe it exists. This event will sicken and then kill many people. It Just Will.
 

CathleenT

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Not to diminish the health risk of people gathering in ND, but I wanted to post an update that I've found significant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoTGl2mggMo It's Peak Properity's latest, and in it, I've found the first hope that I've felt I could really hold onto in a long time. Perhaps this Covid thing is more widespread in the population than has been previously thought. It may actually be waning in many areas.

Chris Martenson has a PhD in pathology, so he has the background knowledge to read the research directly, and he seems to be pretty apolitical, which is important to me.

He's proposing it only as a hypothesis at this time. If I had school-age kids, I'd keep them home for the next couple of months to make sure. Ditto with work if you can get away with that. I still wear my mask on the rare occasions that I go out.

But maybe, just maybe...we can all go back to normal before too long, a real normal, and 2020 will fade into the distance as The Year We Can't Believe Was So Crappy.

I find it ironic that I'm desperately hoping to put all this in past tense. That even the possibility of doing so has made me stronger and less afraid. I was really getting beaten down with all the stress and hopelessness. Maybe my daughter in law won't die because of her type one diabetes. Maybe most of us will survive this thing.

Maybe we'll have a real, no-kidding election where all the votes are actually counted. One side can cry and scream and then we can all get over it and get back to life, like we do after every other election.

I'm so bone-weary of all the fear porn. I need some hope in my life. It would really be nice if this turns out to be true. I'm sharing it here in case it is. : )
 
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MaeZe

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Just from the beginning of that it sounds specious.

Paraphrased: I didn't make my case last time. I have a tendency to jump ahead.

Translation: No professionals believe me, I didn't explain it right.

I'll do some checking around. I don't want to listen to 42 minutes of a crack-pot theory that goes against all the science we have without getting some background on this guy.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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But maybe, just maybe...we can all go back to normal before too long, a real normal, and 2020 will fade into the distance as The Year We Can't Believe Was So Crappy.

I sympathize, I really do, but we can't go back to what used to be "normal". "Normal" is what got us here.

Recently I read a sobering article in the Atlantic Monthly, "How the Pandemic Defeated America" by Ed Yong, in which he explains how the "normal" state of the US led directly to this catastrophe.

[A]lmost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.

Heck, even building design contributed to the disaster. Hermetically sealed "energy efficient" buildings erected over the last fifty years exacerbate and incubate diseases like coronavirus. "Sick building syndrome" is way more serious than people thought.

We can't go back to that. Whatever the US will be like after the pandemic, it will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
 
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CathleenT

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Brace yourself, Alessandra. As a waterproofer (we also do air barriers), we've seen this over-sealing happening with buildings for a long time. Very few commercial buildings just spec in a wrap like Tyvek. Most go with a bitumous peel-and-stick that won't let the building breathe at all.

Construction is still happening during the pandemic, at least in California. We're still using the same building code standards. There's not even any discussion about changing them. Too many people make too much money with the standards the way they are. Architects don't want to change their systems. Grace (a waterproofing manufacturer) definitely doesn't want to waste all the work they've put into shmoozing architects up to this point.

I'd love to be wrong, but business as normal seems to be the most likely outcome in this area. Inertia plus profit motive is a hard obstacle to overcome.

I certainly don't want to see a normal that doesn't take into account the lessons that we've learned during the pandemic. At a bare minimum, we need better stockpiles of PPE. Moving our pharmaceuticals back to the US (or your home country) seems like an excellent idea. I'm sure there are other excellent ideas, so that if we face a similar situation we can get our response organized in a better fashion.

I'm just talking about a normal that we'd all recognize as such. Not like what we're living with now.

And Maeze, mostly Chris Martenson reports on stuff pubbed in medical journals. He's been reporting on Covid since January and calling for wearing masks since February. He's chastised both the left and the right (my kind of guy). He no longer pursues a career in the discipline in which he trained, but he was published in Nature back when pathology was his day job. My standards are fairly high. I was trained as a social scientist. He's made and discarded a few hypotheses over the course of the pandemic, although most of them have been correct. He may be wrong with this idea, which he admits, but he's not a crackpot. Just in case that helps.
 
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MaeZe

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Aaaaannd that didn't take long after I had dinner and fed the dogs.

From his webpage, Peak Prosperity, he's definitely not a credible medical researcher or scientist. He peddles crap, beginning with two books and a "crash course".

He and his partner have a couple of fantastic bios without much of anything backing the claims up. They were executives in Fortune 300 companies before quitting to follow "their path" and now they want to share it with everyone.

Martenson's bio:
Chris Martenson, PhD (Duke), MBA (Cornell) is an economic researcher and futurist specializing in energy and resource depletion,... As one of the early econobloggers who forecasted the housing market collapse and stock market correction years in advance, Chris rose to prominence with the launch of his seminal video seminar: ... Chris’ insights are in high demand by the media as well as academic, civic and private organizations around the world, including institutions such as the UN, the UK House of Commons and US State Legislatures.... I am not an ivory-tower economist. Instead, I’m a trained scientist, having completed both a PhD and a post-doctoral program at Duke University, where I specialized in neurotoxicology. I tell you this because my extensive training as a scientist informs and guides how I think. I gather data, I develop hypotheses, and I continually seek to accept or reject my hypotheses based on the evidence at hand. I let the data tell me the story.

It is also important for you to know that I entered the profession of science with the intention of teaching at the college level. I love teaching, and I especially enjoy the challenge of explaining difficult or complicated subjects to people with limited or no background in those subjects. Over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at it....

Once I figured out that most of the (so-called) better colleges place “effective teacher” pretty much near the bottom of their list of characteristics that factor into tenure review, I switched gears, obtained an MBA from Cornell (in Finance), and spent the next ten years working my way through positions in both corporate finance and strategic consulting. ....

So let's see, he gets a PhD and attends a post-doctoral program at Duke University, where he specialized in neurotoxicology. You don't get those credentials without publishing something. He doesn't even reference it, let alone name anything.

Then he is disillusioned, (possible), and obtains an MBA from Cornell (in Finance), and spends the next ten years working his way through positions in both corporate finance and strategic consulting... in other words rises to the top, I guess.

So he has a PhD plus he did post doctorate work, at least begins working as a professor, goes back and gets an MBA then works 10 more years. How many years does that add up to? :rolleyes:

Then he gives all this up to peddle books and a seminar.

Is there anything in that bio that backs his story up?

Then there is his partner:
Adam is the President and Co-Founder of Peak Prosperity. He wears many hats, but his basic job is to handle the business side of things so that his fellow co-founder, Chris Martenson, is free to think and write.
He only has one book, Taggart wrote the other one.

Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA.

... he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the ‘startup thing’ (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch.
VP at Yahoo, investment analyst at Merrill-Lynch?

At least the VP at Yahoo is something we can check, but I can only easily find past CEOs and not VPs.

On to the books: Taggart's book, not great reviews or sales.

Amazon: Finding Your Way To Your Authentic Career Paperback – June 5, 2013 Kindle sales are no better.

There are only 9 reviews, note published date. This review fits my confirmation bias:
This book reminds me of the episode when Brian the dog on Family Guy writes a self-help book. The book is basically a workbook which asks the reader to answer various questions to gain insight. In the episode, the book goes on to become a best-seller. I predict this book will not go on to become a best seller. If you want to follow your bliss, great, do it, but you don't need this book to do that.
I admit I've not read the book.

On to Martensen's publication: Better reviews and sales. Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting Kindle Edition

Here's my confirmation bias selected review (I'm admittedly not big on self-help books):
I read this in 2018, the book was written in 2015, and it is then clearly visible that the authors played the typical fear element to sell this book which basically promote their website.
The forecast (apocalipse) it never happened and actually reality is just opposite of what they have been forecast in this book, interest rates are down, oil price went very low ( now increasing again). They try to predict in a very simple way a future which is not simple at all, and although their way of thinking makes sense it is so simplified that reality proved it wrong. Obviously there will be many crisis in the future but that we will ever reach the level they talk in their book and we need to be back to be farmers and consume locally is a step back in progress and evolution that never happened and it has low possibility to happen. This book is more focused on USA economy, which it has huge risks for sure, and USA readers who are prone to fear and prepping. (ps oil reserve at the moment can last for 50 years and Venezuela and Brasil have still large quantity to extract, it is important to protect the environment but i dont like people who make money selling fear)

Bottom line: I don't see one thing about these guys that even remotely suggests a background in epidemiology or infectious disease. I'm not interested enough to listen to a 42 minute podcast based on what I see. Take what these guys are selling with a big fat grain of salt. It doesn't fit what we know about this virus. It is not going away anytime soon.

When some of my medical friends weigh in I'll post an update.
 
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MaeZe

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...

And Maeze, mostly Chris Martenson reports on stuff pubbed in medical journals. He's been reporting on Covid since January and calling for wearing masks since February. He's chastised both the left and the right (my kind of guy). He no longer pursues a career in the discipline in which he trained, but he was published in Nature back when pathology was his day job. My standards are fairly high. I was trained as a social scientist. He's made and discarded a few hypotheses over the course of the pandemic, although most of them have been correct. He may be wrong with this idea, which he admits, but he's not a crackpot. Just in case that helps.
You got a link to that Nature article, or even the title? I'd like to look at it.

"[H]ypotheses over the course of the pandemic" and logical guesses from someone who doesn't know epidemiology are two different things. Which of his hypotheses have been correct? Or just a couple of examples?
 

CathleenT

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Maeze--here you go on the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/366066a0. Fast axonal transport is required for growth cone advance.

Chris Martenson has a PhD in pathology, not epidemiology. He never claimed to be doing the research. He's just better able to translate a lot of it into simpler English. I'm pretty intelligent, but I had trouble following things sometimes. And I can't even give you concrete examples because it's the kind of thing that I could barely follow along with while he was explaining it. Some of it had to do with ADE receptors and cytokine storms.

Don't know if he peddles crap or not. He told people to buy gold, but seriously, everyone's been telling people to buy gold. I don't pay much attention to the financial stuff, but I also remember a warning to get out of the stock market before it plummeted.

The hypothesis I remember that he proposed and rejected is that for a while it looked as though Covid favored certain environmental conditions. It turned out that it spread regardless of temp ranges. Non-Wuhan-like weather was no safeguard.

He was also concerned about what mortality rates were going to be in Sweden, since they decided not to wear masks. They ended up doing better than he thought they would.

At this point you've put more effort into vetting the guy than it would have taken to watch the video. I've been watching his reports since late January, and I'm very glad I did. I bought a lot of staples well in advance, wore masks early on, stayed in whenever I could (while some of my friends were seriously planning on taking a cruise!), paid some serious attention to bolstering my health, (although some of that was also Dr. John Campbell, the English nurse) and stayed away from a lot of the hysteria.

YMMV.

ETA: The above were all behavioral recommendations, not hypotheses. But he said early on that this thing was serious, that it was going to spread, and that the r naught was a lot higher than that of the flu. As far as an actual hypothesis that was vindicated--he went over some research out of Stanford and said that it was seriously flawed. It was later retracted. Although it would really help if I could remember exactly what the research was. I believe it was about the therapeutic value of HCQ, but I'm reaching back a few months, so I'm not certain. He also predicted the Covid spikes following the protests from the right and the left, but really, that's in the same league as saying that gold is probably a safe investment. Anyone who was paying attention could have predicted it.
 
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MaeZe

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Maeze--here you go on the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/366066a0. Fast axonal transport is required for growth cone advance.

Chris Martenson has a PhD in pathology, not epidemiology. He never claimed to be doing the research. He's just better able to translate a lot of it into simpler English. I'm pretty intelligent, but I had trouble following things sometimes. And I can't even give you concrete examples because it's the kind of thing that I could barely follow along with while he was explaining it. Some of it had to do with ADE receptors and cytokine storms.

Don't know if he peddles crap or not. He told people to buy gold, but seriously, everyone's been telling people to buy gold. I don't pay much attention to the financial stuff, but I also remember a warning to get out of the stock market before it plummeted.

The hypothesis I remember that he proposed and rejected is that for a while it looked as though Covid favored certain environmental conditions. It turned out that it spread regardless of temp ranges. Non-Wuhan-like weather was no safeguard.

He was also concerned about what mortality rates were going to be in Sweden, since they decided not to wear masks. They ended up doing better than he thought they would.

At this point you've put more effort into vetting the guy than it would have taken to watch the video. I've been watching his reports since late January, and I'm very glad I did. I bought a lot of staples well in advance, wore masks early on, stayed in whenever I could (while some of my friends were seriously planning on taking a cruise!), paid some serious attention to bolstering my health, (although some of that was also Dr. John Campbell, the English nurse) and stayed away from a lot of the hysteria.

YMMV.
My goal is not to offend anyone, rather I hope to pass on critical thinking skills here in addition to the COVID 19 evidence. I have no doubt you are intelligent or that you don't think critically. But sometimes people have not been exposed to everything, myself included. But I've seen many people like Martenson.

I have to pay to read the Nature article but it's not important. It doesn't list the authors' credentials or degrees but that's not important. Google Scholar doesn't turn up anything else by Chris Martenson except the books he sells. That's important for establishing this is probably the author we are talking about. The article was written in 1993. That's important. This guy's claim to biology credentials/knowledge is 27 years old and what he's done since has nothing to do with any biological sciences. Science in biology 27 years ago was primitive compared to today's standard.

In my narrow field of occupational infectious disease and infection control (now call infection prevention), I can't tell you how many times I've encountered well qualified medical persons who didn't understand epidemiology or infectious disease transmission. So yes, I'm not interested in a 42 minute sales pitch unless I can establish there is a reason to listen to the video.

And as for the critical thinking issue, COVID 19 aside, I'm very familiar with people who peddle snake oil. I've spent my career battling bad medicine along with my practice. I'm a member of what used to be the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) since 2005 (Randi retired and we are now the ISF) and I joined related skeptical groups a couple years earlier. I've seen many snake oil peddlers and this guy meets all the red flag criteria.

So with that background let's look at a couple things.

Yeah, telling people to buy gold, that's pretty common. Predicting the Stock Market would crash, that's really a no brainer for anyone paying attention.

He thought the virus favored a particular climate than rejected that hypothesis, again a no brainer.

I beg to differ with you on the outcome in Sweden, they're doing horribly. And they thought by ignoring the virus and going by their governments' expert, Anders Tegnell, meant their economy would be spared and even that didn't happen. No, compared to all the Scandinavian countries, Sweden is a disaster.

The latest data:
Wednesday:
Coronavirus - countries (Worldometers, Aug. 5, 2020)
Deaths per million (Total deaths)
Sweden: 570 (5,760)
Denmark: 106 (616)
Finland: 60 (331)
Norway: 47 (256)

There's a good reason to vet a person before listening to them as an expert in a case like this. Like I said, the video started with read flags.

You should keep doing what you've been doing. And it's fine to have an optimistic POV. Just be careful that optimism doesn't result in prematurely letting down your guard. Keeping up that guard is the thing that is going to get us through this.
 
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Roxxsmom

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I'm getting really frustrated with headlines that actually misrepresent what the article actually says. These days, they tend to start with "Dr. Fauci Says..." and then it will be the opposite of what last week's headline is. The most recent is the one where the headline reads that Dr. Fauci says any vaccine will likely be ineffective.

Except that's not what he said at all. He said a vaccine is likely to be less than 100% effective, which is absolutely not the same as saying it will be ineffective. No vaccine is 100% effective, and even vaccines that are only 50-60% effective save lives, reduce spread, and may also reduce the severity of the disease in many who do get it. But of course headlines like that make it so more people won't get the vaccine when it becomes available, and then it will be 0% effective.
 
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MaeZe

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... ETA: The above were all behavioral recommendations, not hypotheses. But he said early on that this thing was serious, that it was going to spread, and that the r naught was a lot higher than that of the flu. As far as an actual hypothesis that was vindicated--he went over some research out of Stanford and said that it was seriously flawed. It was later retracted. Although it would really help if I could remember exactly what the research was. I believe it was about the therapeutic value of HCQ, but I'm reaching back a few months, so I'm not certain. He also predicted the Covid spikes following the protests from the right and the left, but really, that's in the same league as saying that gold is probably a safe investment. Anyone who was paying attention could have predicted it.
All of this was consistent with the medical experts that weren't rejected by Trump. So far so good. But going by the pattern you've described, predicting the virus was about to fade away naturally is going to be one of those hypotheses he conveniently retracts. His video in the meantime gains attention, all the better to sell books.
 
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cbenoi1

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Five million cases.

US tops 5 million Covid-19 cases, with five states making up more than 40% of tally
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/09/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html

The number means the country holds about a quarter of global cases of the virus and also tops the list with the most reported deaths in the world.

The US is well on its way to hit a third of World cases. My bets are some time after Labour Day weekend.

At this rate you can do it.

-cb
 

shakeysix

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I have been dealing with a family crisis this past month. My 18 year old grand daughter in Ft. Lauderdale has been hospitalized off and on since mid July. She graduated high school in June, with double cords. It was a lot of work but Bella did it. When school was called off in March Bella was on spring break and did her part and more of beach partying. Her parents finally rounded her up and saw to it that she stayed home and rescued her GPA from the dust bin. in April Several of her friends tested positive for Covid. They were sick but not so sick as to be bedridden. Bella did not get sick in April. In May she did have a sore throat but didn't say anything about it.

The graduation was virtual. We had been planning a big family party but that was called off. Instead there was a small family dinner--less than ten people. Bella's other grandmother is a nurse and saw to it that no one was careless. But the day after the party Bella's ten year old niece had a slight fever. Bella's grandfather also had a fever and ended up in the hospital (He is 72.) Bella also had a fever. Everyone tested-- no positive Covid --just a nasty case of strep for Bella and walking pneumonia for grandfather. He was in the hospital for a few days and is now at home.

All through July Bella could not kick the fever. She had doctor visits and 2 trips to urge-care. She developed a pain in her lung. X-rays showed that she had a strange mass in her right lung. They sent her to the hospital in an ambulance. Her mother could not ride with her, could not go in with her. The Hollywood hospital, where her grandmother and aunt work, was too full. She was taken to a hospital farther away from home and knew no one there. No one could visit. She cried. Something she has not done for years.

Still no Covid. The infection is bacterial--pustules in her lung--not viral. But what a bitch of an infection. She spent a week on iv drips. They finally found an antibiotic that killed the fever but she has to be on it for a month. She is at home now, with an iv drip and in bed. Her last doctor to see her was an epidemiologist. He was concerned about what had weakened her immune system so drastically and so fast.

The kid is no weakling. She played varsity Lacrosse this last school year. She swims and dances--or she did, anyway. Now she can't start university of Florida next month--something she has worked for since 8th grade. She will take 4 hours online at a Community College.

Her grandmother suspects that the doctors suspect that exposure to Corona somehow weakened her. --s6
 

MaeZe

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Oh man that sucks, Shakey. Yay she's home. Yay the antibiotic is working. Yay she saw a specialist. Hopefully she'll only miss a semester (or a quarter). Some bacterial infections can be a nightmare. But finding an antibiotic that the organism is responding to is most of the battle. I don't know where she lives but if it's a smallish town and if she relapses get her to a university hospital or a large hospital someplace. There's a lot of data that show for complex problems, it does make a difference.
 

Roxxsmom

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Oh, Shakey, I'm sorry. It's certainly possible she had a case of Covid-19 that weakened her. However, strep throat can be nasty too, and it sounds like she had it for a while before telling anyone her throat was sore. It will spread to other parts of the body. And some strains are very drug resistant these days. Glad they found an antibiotic that is working, even if it's one of those ones that are dreadful to take.

Whatever the cause, this is a really awful thing for your family to be going through right now, and your poor granddaughter. Hope she kicks this soon and feels much better!