Formerly DT: COVID-19 - Featuring Lots of Politics, now CR because political talk not going away

[Newdoc 3439]

19 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

How about eat better, get some exercise, and lose some fucking weight?

The CDC has gone politically correct. We don’t have the balls to call it like it is in this country.

https://khn.org/morning-breakout/obesity-is-key-driver-of-a-nations-covid-death-toll-global-study-finds/

10 frickin times higher death rate in overweight countries. That’s us. We could have done a lot of things better in our response but we were a ticking time bomb set up for failure.

[BradInATX 9208]

Remember when Trump overturned efforts to put better and healthier foods in schools and all of you guys screamed from the rooftops about how important health and BMI are?

I don't either.

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

5 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

Remember when Trump overturned efforts to put better and healthier foods in schools and all of you guys screamed from the rooftops about how important health and BMI are?

I don't either.

No one is getting fat off of school lunches

[Neonmoon 38129]

2 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

No one is getting fat off of school lunches

You can't get fat if you eat shitty food 1 out of 2 meals a day? 

Edited March 8, 2021 by Neonmoon

[gmr548 16576]

How about eat better, get some exercise, and lose some fucking weight?
 

Are you new to America?

[BradInATX 9208]

4 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

No one is getting fat off of school lunches

Sure they are. They consist of close to half of their daily calories. It's also habit-forming.

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

5 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

You can't get fat if you eat shitty food 1 out of 2 meals a day? 

School lunch isn't an "all you can eat buffet". If you kid is obese, it's because you are letting him eat McDonalds / Cheetos / Coke and watch TV until bed time.

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

2 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

They consist of close to half of their daily calories

Wait. I was told kids were starving. Now they are getting too much food? 

[BradInATX 9208]

Just now, Cheeseweasel said:

Wait. I was told kids were starving. Now they are getting too much food? 

I've never said kids are starving. Who are you arguing with?

 

[Incredulity 11665]

There are federal calorie limits on school meals.

[BradInATX 9208]

That doesn't have anything to do with anything. Eating habits are developed in your formative years. Unhealthy school lunches promote bad eating habits. This is all accepted and boxed-up science that you're trying to distract and obfuscate away from.

LOL at ya'll suddenly slinking away from the "healthy eating habits are important!!" thing you won't ever shut up about when confronted with the fact that the guy you voted for destroyed regulations meant to teach kids better eating habits and combat obesity.

You can't have it both ways.

[dcar00 14181]

3 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

That doesn't have anything to do with anything. Eating habits are developed in your formative years. Unhealthy school lunches promote bad eating habits. This is all accepted and boxed-up science that you're trying to distract and obfuscate away from.

LOL at ya'll suddenly slinking away from the "healthy eating habits are important!!" thing you won't ever shut up about when confronted with the fact that the guy you voted for destroyed regulations meant to teach kids better eating habits and combat obesity.

You can't have it both ways.

you get fat because you consume too many calories and don't burn enough off with exercise.

[BradInATX 9208]

6 minutes ago, dcar00 said:

you get fat because you consume too many calories and don't burn enough off with exercise.

 

Cool biology lesson. What do you think you've contributed to the conversation here?

Edited March 8, 2021 by BradInATX

[GringoSalado 1651]

Brad gonna brad

[BradInATX 9208]

3 minutes ago, GringoSalado said:

Brad gonna brad

 

Hypocrites going to hypocrite.

[InkaUtexas 25907]

Surly gonna Surl. 

[MNLonghornFUKM 8817]

Shouldn’t we be blaming Hoover, FDR and Truman for poor eating habits of the old and heavy that are dying?

In all seriousness it’s sad seeing kids at a young age look so big along with their siblings. I could drop a few winter pounds but I went bought an exercise bike and do a ton of outdoor stuff this spring. Most of the country had the perfect chance to better themselves all of last year

[BradInATX 9208]

2 minutes ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:

Shouldn’t we be blaming Hoover, FDR and Truman for poor eating habits of the old and heavy that are dying?

In all seriousness it’s sad seeing kids at a young age look so big along with their siblings.

 

There's a lot of blame to go around. A lot of it is on parents. The corrupt FDA and the corrupt agricultural industry promoting incredibly poor eating habits like the original food pyramid. A lot of it on politicians. Some of it on weak food labeling laws. Some of it on the eating habits they learn in school. 

We're supposed to care about the health of society and its children all of the time, not just when it's politically expedient to do so. 

Edited March 8, 2021 by BradInATX

[GringoSalado 1651]

9 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

 

Hypocrites going to hypocrite.

Or, you could say that a good portion of the blame for obesity is misguided govt. policies. Some folks want to fix that with more govt. policy and act surprised when other folks question that logic.

[Newdoc 3439]

Obesity is actually incredibly complex so arguing about school lunches is a distraction from the overall problem.

[GringoSalado 1651]

Just now, Newdoc said:

Obesity is actually incredibly complex so arguing about school lunches is a distraction from the overall problem.

Dude this thread is about a pandemic and how to control it. What could be simpler?

[BradInATX 9208]

4 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

Obesity is actually incredibly complex so arguing about school lunches is a distraction from the overall problem.

 

Covid is actually incredibly complex so arguing about obesity is a distraction from the overall problem.

[BradInATX 9208]

"FAT PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM WITH COVID"

"Remember when the guy you voted for repealed laws meant to fight childhood obesity and teach better eating habits?"

"LET'S NOT TALK ABOUT FAT PEOPLE ANYMORE"

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

9 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

Obesity is actually incredibly complex so arguing about school lunches is a distraction from the overall problem.

It's math, so I understand why our children suck at it compared to the rest of the world.

[fattyflattie 4639]

1 hour ago, Cheeseweasel said:

I'll eat what I want!  Wait, wut. 

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

7 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

"FAT PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM WITH COVID"

"Remember when the guy you voted for repealed laws meant to fight childhood obesity and teach better eating habits?"

"LET'S NOT TALK ABOUT FAT PEOPLE ANYMORE"

No one said that. Are you arguing with yourself?

[BradInATX 9208]

1 minute ago, Cheeseweasel said:

No one said that. Are you arguing with yourself?

Nobody has actually addressed the point about Trump in a serious way. 

[Guest Lobo]

Dude, we all know Trump is fat...but I don't think it was from the lunches he had a at school.  What's your point again?  

[BradInATX 9208]

BTW, my point is actually that I agree that obesity and public health is a major problem. The problem is that there is one political party actively fighting any measures to try to help it. Obamacare had funding to prevent childhood obesity. Trump overturned the healthy school lunches work that Michelle Obama did. 

If you guys were serious about it, you'd demand better from your politicians. But you're not actually serious about it as a national problem, you just like using it to deflect and distract from the terrible job our country(#bothsides) has done re:Covid.

Edited March 8, 2021 by BradInATX

[babysdaddy 2721]

1 minute ago, BradInATX said:

BTW, my point is actually that I agree that obesity and public health is a major problem. The problem is that there is one political party actively fighting any measures to try to help it. Obamacare had funding to prevent childhood obesity. Trump overturned the healthy school lunches work that Michelle Obama did. 

If you guys were serious about it, you'd demand better from your politicians. But you're not actually serious about it as a national problem, you just like using it to deflect from the terrible job our country(#bothsides) has done re:Covid.

whatever fatty. don't be so fat with your hot covid takes

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

5 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

BTW, my point is actually that I agree that obesity and public health is a major problem. The problem is that there is one political party actively fighting any measures to try to help it. Obamacare had funding to prevent childhood obesity. Trump overturned the healthy school lunches work that Michelle Obama did. 

If you guys were serious about it, you'd demand better from your politicians. But you're not actually serious about it as a national problem, you just like using it to deflect from the terrible job our country(#bothsides) has done re:Covid.

This might be your worst take yet. Children aren't dying of Covid because they eat too much lunch at school. OLDER people are dying at larger numbers in the US because they are fatter than other countries. Everything isn't political. People make choices. Personal responsibility.

Edited March 8, 2021 by Cheeseweasel
Fuck OU

[gyroprotagonist 2592]

1 hour ago, Newdoc said:

The CDC has gone politically correct. We don’t have the balls to call it like it is in this country.

https://khn.org/morning-breakout/obesity-is-key-driver-of-a-nations-covid-death-toll-global-study-finds/

10 frickin times higher death rate in overweight countries. That’s us. We could have done a lot of things better in our response but we were a ticking time bomb set up for failure.

saw an article today that the US and UK have 2 of the oldest populations so that is why the death numbers (per capita) are so bad vs the world.  Said it was 16% for the US and 20% for the UK, while some others like India and some African countries were much lower at ~3% or so.  Then combine that with the fact that Americans are fat and sit indoors all day and there you go.

I was commenting (either to my wife; no pics or rambling to myself) yesterday just baffled how we suck so bad at death rates.  Yes, we probably report it more accurately, but there has to be more of it.  Age could explain a good portion of that.  We also keep our old people centralized in long term storage meat lockers all crowded together, which does not favor the US in this situation.  anyway, NYT article below.

Spoiler

‘An epidemiological whodunit’

It’s one of the biggest mysteries about Covid-19: Why has the death toll been relatively low across much of Africa and Asia?

The virus has killed a fraction of as many people on those continents — despite their relative lack of resources — as it has in Europe or the U.S.:

By The New York Times | Sources: Health agencies and hospitals, World Bank

This isn’t how public health emergencies usually work. They tend to inflict their worst damage in poorer places, which is indeed what’s happening within the U.S., where the toll has been higher in many minority and low-income communities.

Globally, though, Covid has been different. In a recent New Yorker article, the physician and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee described it as “an epidemiological whodunit.”

Other than in Mukherjee’s article, the pattern has received surprisingly little attention in the U.S. It’s one of those instances when good news is being overlooked. I want to devote today’s newsletter to the mystery and its most plausible explanations.

Is it a statistical mirage?

Almost certainly not. Some portion of the pattern probably does stem from an underreporting of deaths by less developed medical systems. But much of the pattern is real, many epidemiologists believe.

In India, for example, major cities keep statistics on overall mortality — regardless of cause — and it has risen less than it has in many richer countries. The data suggest that both Delhi and Mumbai have “a much lower Covid death rate than in the U.S.,” Dr. Prabhat Jha, who runs the Center for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, told me.

In Mukherjee’s article, he described a temporary hospital that local officials in Mumbai set up last year in Dharavi, a sprawling slum there. They closed it after Dharavi suffered far fewer deaths than expected.

Health care workers waited for vaccinations in Karachi, Pakistan, last week.Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Poorer countries are younger

Covid is usually harder on older people: More than 80 percent of U.S. deaths have occurred among people who are 65 or older.

Across Africa and much of Asia, the population is younger. Birthrates are higher, and other health problems more frequently kill people before they reach old age. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 3 percent of the population is 65 or older. In Pakistan, only 4 percent is. In the U.S., the share is 16 percent, and it’s 20 percent in the European Union.

A related factor may be the fact that nursing homes — where Covid has often spread from one resident to the next — are more common in Western countries. Outside the West, older people often live in multigenerational households.

Still, age does not seem to be the full answer. Statistical models that include age still find unexpectedly low death counts in many poor countries.

Fresh air helps

Daily life tends to better ventilated in warmer, lower-income countries. People spend more time outdoors, and windows are often open. Covid spreads less easily in these settings than it does in poorly ventilated indoor spaces.

There’s a lesson here for Americans: Schools, stores and workplaces can reduce the spread of Covid by improving their ventilation.

Immunity may not be uniform

Many researchers suspect that this is an important part of the answer. If previous coronaviruses spread more widely in some countries, people’s immune systems there may be better prepared to fight Covid. “There is a lot of circumstantial evidence,” Salim Abdool Karim, a South African epidemiologist, told Reuters, “but there is no smoking gun.”

Similarly, a team of Indian researchers have argued that deaths “are lower in countries which have a higher population exposed to a diverse range of microbes,” as the BBC’s Soutik Biswas wrote. The large share of asymptomatic infections in India is consistent with this hypothesis, Dr. Gagandeep Kang, a virologist in the southern city of Vellore, told The Financial Times.

If the hypothesis is correct, it could help explain why deaths are lower in Africa and Asia than in much of Latin America.

A woman was vaccinated in Rwamagana, Rwanda, last week.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Policy matters

Rwanda quickly and aggressively enforced social distancing, mask wearing, contact tracing and mass testing. So did several Asian countries. Ghana, Vietnam and other countries restricted entry at their borders. And a consortium of African nations collaborated to distribute medical masks and rapid Covid tests.

“Africa is doing a lot of things right the rest of the world isn’t,” said Gayle Smith, a former Obama administration official.

Again, though, this seems unlikely to be the main explanation for the relatively low Covid death toll. Several Asian and African countries, including India, have had much more scattered policy responses — as the U.S. and Europe have had.

The full answer to this mystery surely involves multiple explanations. Whatever they are, it’s one of the few ways in which Covid has not been as bad as many had feared. Hundreds of thousands of people across Africa and Asia have still died of this terrible disease. But many others are alive today for reasons that are both unclear and marvelous.

 

[BradInATX 9208]

4 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

This might be your worst take yet. Children aren't dying of Covid because they eat too much lunch at school. OLDER people are dying at larger numbers in the US because they are fatter than other countries. Everything isn't political. People make choices. Personal responsibility.

The politicization is the problem. The only time I've ever seen anyone lament our obesity problem on this board is when they feel like their politicians are being attacked for their Covid response. It's a scapegoat, not something that anyone truly gives a shit about.

Edited March 8, 2021 by BradInATX

[Eskimohorn 5633]

Wait. I was told kids were starving. Now they are getting too much food? 

US kids are simultaneously obese and malnourished. And COVID and joblessness have put more kids in jeopardy. If all you get is fast food, canned food from Dollar Tree and frozen dinners, that takes a toll.

[Armybrat 40832]

40 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

Obesity is actually incredibly complex so arguing about school lunches is a distraction from the overall problem.

Complex? Yeah, so many avenues to choose from...

 

 

[BradInATX 9208]

May 2020, you're just a little past the expiration on that baking soda, Brat.

[Armybrat 40832]

2 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

May 2020, you're just a little past the expiration on that baking soda, Brat.

Thanks, Mrs. Brat has now been notified.

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

16 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

US kids are simultaneously obese and malnourished. And COVID and joblessness have put more kids in jeopardy. If all you get is fast food, canned food from Dollar Tree and frozen dinners, that takes a toll.

Shitty parents are shitty. Film at 11.

[MNLonghornFUKM 8817]

Is putting baking soda in the freezer a Texas thing?

[workswithseed 2102]

1 hour ago, Cheeseweasel said:

School lunch isn't an "all you can eat buffet". If you kid is obese, it's because you are letting him eat McDonalds / Cheetos / Coke and watch TV until bed time.

This hits a little too close to home.

[workswithseed 2102]

17 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

Complex? Yeah, so many avenues to choose from...

 

 

Nancy Polosi? 

[Armybrat 40832]

11 minutes ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:

Is putting baking soda in the freezer a Texas thing?

Being an ex-smoker (she quit in 1976), Mrs. Brat is hypersensitive about any kind of odors, even slight, almost imperceptible ones. Hence the baking soda in the freezer and the fridge.

Not to mention all our laundry products, deodorants, room sprays, etc. are of the “free” or “neutral” variety.

She even tears the perfume & cologne ads out of the new magazines she gets before reading them.

Plus she keeps a large supply of GasEx handy for yours truly after I have dined on TexMex or BBQ.

[Newdoc 3439]

1 hour ago, BradInATX said:

 

Covid is actually incredibly complex so arguing about obesity is a distraction from the overall problem.

Actually no. Especially when obesity is the number one risk factor for dying from Covid aside from being super old. And obesity is much more complex than the pandemic. Obesity is it’s own pandemic. It’s just not directly contagious.

[gmr548 16576]

Complex? Yeah, so many avenues to choose from...
 
 

Do you just have blizzards in the freezer ready to go? That’s awesome.

[BradInATX 9208]

51 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

Actually no. Especially when obesity is the number one risk factor for dying from Covid aside from being super old. And obesity is much more complex than the pandemic. Obesity is it’s own pandemic. It’s just not directly contagious.

The number one risk factor for Covid death is catching Covid. And yet here a certain 5-6 of you are, constantly harping on obesity while the politicians you vote for actively encourage our citizens to do things that put them in danger of catching the virus. Every single person on this thread knows that the obesity thing is a deflection from other conversations that a certain subset of people don't want to have. We all know the country is fat. That doesn't change that we fucked up our Coronavirus response terribly and killed people that didn't need to die.

Edited March 8, 2021 by BradInATX

[Trey3216 15346]

On 3/5/2021 at 9:34 AM, Judge Roybeanbag said:

They have a lot of Catholics or something?  I don't understand the logic of turning down a vaccine.

Mayor is trying to weed out the immigrant Muslim population 

[BradInATX 9208]

Death Rate actual vs. expected based on obesity rates. Dotted line is expected death rate (deaths per 100k people) based on obesity rate.

Above the dotted line is bad.

 

 

 

 

So we don't get to use obesity as our excuse. Even accounting for that, we're one of the worst performing countries in the world. The countries directly above and below us in terms of obesity rates have 14% and 25% of the deaths per capita that we have. But hey, we did better than Sweden at least.

Edited March 8, 2021 by BradInATX

[GringoSalado 1651]

Brad is Covid Derka

 

 

edit: siap

Edited March 8, 2021 by GringoSalado

[GRHorn 105]

This may some surprise some people here but I mainly blame fat people for their fatness. 

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

Just now, GRHorn said:

This may some surprise some people here but I mainly blame fat people for their fatness. 

No. Government's fault. Try again.