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

[GringoSalado 1,651]

 

[GHOSTUSER 361]

The US and any Western country would never go along with the police state tactics that East Asian countries with a culture of obedience were able to use. This disease has progressed in a similar pattern to countries comparable to our own. Cherry picking Iceland with a population of 500K and their ability to test on a much more widespread level does nothing to add to the discussion except to score points politically in this thread.

[DDD Dad 14,251]

19 minutes ago, GringoSalado said:

What "entities" are "pushing" the lab theory?

 

I mean, I've posted about it, but I'm not "pushing" it. I guess you could say I'm an "entity" though....

 

edit: forgot to ask, so what is my agenda? IMO it is to find out the truth about where this came from. Your agenda seems to differ somewhat.

Department of Defense, perhaps?  Republican members of Congress?  (no cr, just answering the question about a subject that by its nature is begging to drag politics into the discussion)

Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley:  "There's a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, blog sites, etc.  It should be no surprise to you that we have taken a keen interest in that, and we have had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at it."

Tom Cotton (in February):  "We don't know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that.  We also know that it's just a few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases."

I will reiterate: 

None of this has anything to do with finding a cure or minimizing negative medical and financial outcomes.

Edited April 17, 2020 by DDD Dad

[atomheartbevo 89,416]

2 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

GI Joe Kung Flu grip. 

Thanks for reminding me that my son has recently broken the thumbs, feet, or pelvises on about a half-a-dozen of my G I Joes from the 80s.  

The only saving grace is that Hasbro is bringing back the classic G I Joe line this summer.    So i can buy him those and box up my originals..  

[HoffaJimmy 316]

6 minutes ago, stone oak said:

This thread:

 

Yeah it would be nice if the regulars that hang out in the CR would fucking stay on that board and post in that thread instead of shitting all over this one where people are actually trying to have a mature discussion. 

It's like two fucking kids having a slap fight in the back seat. 

 

[stork642 4,498]

1 hour ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

Is this a joke? It has everything to so with everything. The source of this disaster is China. Their negligence in lab protocols or hygiene-pick your poison caused this mess. Is this some lab modified virus that was released versus completely naturally occurring. I’m no epidemiologist but I assume that matters. How we handle our national defense and immigration from China matters from the source. So is a demand for reparations.

Not to mention if they allowed this to happen once and then they proceeded to cover it up what exactly will prevent this from happening again if we don’t address this in an aggressive manner.  WHO won’t be doing much to force China to do anything.  Demand the truth out of them and make sure changes are made to prevent future occurrences.  But at the end of the day China will say fuck everyone else as we saw quite clearly in this case.   

Edited April 17, 2020 by stork642

[Sgt Hulk 13,647]

39 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

The point went right over your head or you're just being willfully ignorant.  Comparing what other countries did to what the US response was, and  is perfectly fine, and part of this thread.  We acted too slowly at first just as most other countries did.  

Trying to paint the picture that the US was the outlier in acting too slowly is BS, and has been a political smoke screen.

Wasting breath this dude swallows CR lol

[KYHorn 16,862]

8 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

So the only reason I see for continuing this discussion is to lay blame on someone else and divert attention from more pressing issues.

Perhaps it is because you're so desirous of doing the opposite of this?

You truly see no purpose in figuring out how this started other than diverting political attention?? So we shouldn't bother discussing the origins of the pandemic, it's just some frivolous misdirection? 

You political people seriously cannot accept the premise that some people genuinely do not care about which political party or figure ends up benefiting from every singular fact or theory. 

[Hmmm 155]

15 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

 

So the only reason I see for continuing this discussion is to lay blame on someone else and divert attention from more pressing issues.

you can try to cure a disease while looking for the source.  not sure why anyone would think otherwise.  why would you not want to discover the origin of a virus and learn from your mistakes?

[atomheartbevo 89,416]

2 hours ago, DDD Dad said:

Could someone remind me again why it matters whether the virus outbreak originated in a lab

Because a bunch of us are within 90 miles or so of College Station.

2 hours ago, DDD Dad said:

or a wet market

Because a bunch of us are within 325 miles of the Oklahoma border.  

[dcar00 14,035]

58 minutes ago, pacman said:

and almost total economic shutdown 

I know and under pure chaos as well.  crazy aint it?

[Hmmm 155]

16 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

yeah dude, clearly we're all out to get the Chinaman.  fuck those guys and their squinty eyes.

[stone oak 639]

9 minutes ago, GringoSalado said:

 

"hundreds of thousands"

[Dahobbs 17,444]

6 minutes ago, justhookit said:

I don’t care if we have the capability to test every single person in the world right now. If people won’t stay the fuck at home when they feel sick, and healthy people stay away from sick people, and self quarantine if they have been exposed to a sick person, then it doesn’t matter. And that ignores the slow incubation/onset of symptoms. The fact is this virus is going to be around and we need treatments and then a vaccine. Until that happens we are pretty much stuck with dealing with it as we are now. 

So someone on here who is yelling about testing please explain how fixing that to even “perfect” fixes anything. You don’t have 1 or 5 or 30 idiots in your neighborhood who either won’t get tested or won’t stay home if they are sick or won’t stay home if someone in their house is sick?

 

(1) Part of testing means setting up ways to identify people regardless of whether they self-report or not. I think one option is setting up temperature checkpoints in more high traffic public places (I think grocery stores are a decent starting point). You have to get scanned before entering, and if you have an elevated temperature, you must get tested. Infrared thermometers could be used for speed and to avoid issues with surface contamination. 

(2) You don't need to identify and isolate every single infected person in order to have a large effect on the spread of the disease. For instance, if normally every infected person infects 3 more people, isolating just 2 of them (66%) effectively prevents exponential growth of the disease (total number of currently infected stays the same as opposed to escalates). If other measures reduce that spread rate to something under 1 (i.e., each infected has a less than 100% chance of infecting another person), then the disease slowly dies out. 

[atomheartbevo 89,416]

2 hours ago, Macanudo said:

I've been saying for WEEKS that you should add zeroes to all of Chinas numbers.

A bunch of us have been saying add zeroes going back to February.   There were too many urns in those photos.   They will keep revising their counts upwards for the next several months.

[DDD Dad 14,251]

4 minutes ago, KYHorn said:

Perhaps it is because you're so desirous of doing the opposite of this?

You truly see no purpose in figuring out how this started other than diverting political attention?? So we shouldn't bother discussing the origins of the pandemic, it's just some frivolous misdirection? 

You political people seriously cannot accept the premise that some people genuinely do not care about which political party or figure ends up benefiting from every singular fact or theory. 

I just don't see the point of making it the focus of what should be an apolitical discussion of an ongoing crisis.  How does chasing down theories of its origin help us find a vaccine or successful treatment protocols?  What does it do to advance our understanding of how to address pandemics in the future other than to say that China is a bad actor?  We already know that.

3 minutes ago, Hmmm said:

you can try to cure a disease while looking for the source.  not sure why anyone would think otherwise.  why would you not want to discover the origin of a virus and learn from your mistakes?

Sure, I'm genuinely curious as to how the outbreak started.  But I don't see any point in it being a focus of this discussion.

[B00M 6,280]

32 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I mean, when I look to my right and left, and see folks who have figured out how to work the problem so that they are in a much less shitty place than I am, and I still fail to try to copy what they're doing, I'd think that was stupidity on my part, but who knows, maybe I'm a secret genius who has a secret plan that will make those guys look like suckers. 

Classic brisket analogy. Not your best work though, kinda mailed it in: 4/10

[dcar00 14,035]

36 minutes ago, Foosters said:

Point out the lack of evidence?

Look, I'm not saying it didn't come from a lab

 Only that at this point there has been no evidence that is has. The entities pushing the lab theory, as far as I'm concerned, have an agenda to do so. Just as China would have an agenda to hide that fact.

Theories are great. Theories without proof should not guide the discussion and should be dismissed until evidence can be provided.

2 knowns - it is not synthetic and it came from China.  so Fuck China.  if it was found out it was synthetic then Bombs Away motherfuckers!  thank goodness it is not.

[XYZ 2,154]

54 minutes ago, Mitch Cumsteen said:

NYT Article on obesity and Covid-19 spoilered below.

There has been a bit of chatter around here about why it's hitting some people really hard and others are asymptomatic, and it's something I'm really interested in beyond age and underlying immunosuppressed conditions. There's probably some genetic component that isn't understood at this time or most likely, a combination of factors driving the variable responses to the disease, but it appears that the Rona is hitting fat folks the hardest.

 

  Hide contents

Obesity Linked to Severe Coronavirus Disease, Especially for Younger Patients

Young adults with obesity are more likely to be hospitalized, even if they have no other health problems, studies show.

 

 

 

 

A patient arrived at Elmurst Hospital Center in Queens, N.Y., this month.Credit...Kathy Willens/Associated Press

By Roni Caryn Rabin

• April 16, 2020
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Obesity may be one of the most important predictors of severe coronavirus illness, new studies say. It’s an alarming finding for the United States, which has one of the highest obesity rates in the world.

Though people with obesity frequently have other medical problems, the new studies point to the condition in and of itself as the most significant risk factor, after only older age, for being hospitalized with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Young adults with obesity appear to be at particular risk, studies show.

The research is preliminary, and not peer reviewed, but it buttresses anecdotal reports from doctors who say they have been struck by how many seriously ill younger patients of theirs with obesity are otherwise healthy.

No one knows why obesity makes Covid-19 worse, but hypotheses abound.

Some coronavirus patients with obesity may already have compromised respiratory function that preceded the infection. Abdominal obesity, more prominent in men, can cause compression of the diaphragm, lungs and chest capacity. Obesity is known to cause chronic, low-grade inflammation and an increase in circulating, pro-inflammatory cytokines, which may play a role in the worst Covid-19 outcomes.

 

Some 42 percent of American adults — nearly 80 million people — live with obesity. That is a prevalence rate far exceeding those of other countries hit hard by the coronavirus, like China and Italy.

Obesity is defined by a measure called body mass index, which is based on a formula that divides one’s weight in kilograms by the square of one’s height in meters. Someone who is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 203 pounds would have a B.M.I. of 30, which is considered obese.

 

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The new findings about obesity risks are bad news for all Americans, but particularly for African-Americans and other people of color, who have higher rates of obesity and are already bearing a disproportionate burden of Covid-19 deaths. High rates of obesity are also prevalent among low-income white Americans, who may also be adversely affected, experts say.

More than half of Covid-19 deaths in the United States so far have been in New York and New Jersey, but the new findings mean the coronavirus could exact a steep toll in regions like the South and the Midwest, where obesity is more prevalent than in the Northeast.

“If obesity does turn out to be an important risk factor for younger people, and we look at the rest of the United States — where obesity rates are higher than in New York — that will be of great concern,” said Dr. Roy Gulick, chief of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We may see a lot more younger people being hospitalized.”

 

Dr. Gulick’s review of data from the first 393 Covid-19 patients admitted to NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital identified obesity as a risk factor for admission. He also found that among adults under the age of 54, half live with obesity, though the New York City obesity rate is only 22 percent.

 

One of the largest U.S. studies to identify obesity as a prominent risk factor analyzed data from more than 4,000 Covid-19 patients who sought care at NYU Langone Health between March 1 and April 2.

“Obesity is more important for hospitalization than whether you have high blood pressure or diabetes, though these often go together, and it’s more important than coronary disease or cancer or kidney disease, or even pulmonary disease,” said Dr. Leora Horwitz, the paper’s senior author and director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science at NYU Langone.

Obesity also appears to be a factor for higher risk of death from Covid-19, though to a lesser degree, Dr. Horwitz said

She cautioned that the findings were preliminary, noted that some of the data was still incomplete and emphasized that the paper had not been peer reviewed.

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Scientists are still somewhat puzzled by the impact of obesity on the course of the disease, but Dr. Horwitz said the implications for patient care were clear.

“It means that as clinicians, we should be thinking a little more carefully about those patients with obesity when they come in — we should worry about them a little bit more,” she said.

 

Another NYU Langone study, which focused on patients under the age of 60, found that those with obesity were twice as likely to be hospitalized and were at even higher risk of requiring critical care. The association between obesity and more severe disease was not seen in patients over the age of 60.

The severity of the illness often comes as a surprise to younger adults, and “provides another layer of shock to this disease,” the paper’s author, Dr. Jennifer Lighter, said.

Studies highlighting the risks of obesity have been conducted in other countries as well.

Though most of the early reports from China pointed to risk factors like Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, which are common in people with obesity, scientists in Shenzhen, China, reported in The Lancet this month that Covid-19 patients with a high body mass index were at more than double the risk of severe pneumonia than those with a lower B.M.I.

Another study from China, which looked at outcomes among a group of 112 Covid-19 patients, reported that of the 17 patients who died, 15 were either overweight or obese.

More recently, a French study reported that nearly half of 124 Covid-19 patients in Lille, France, had obesity, twice the rate of a comparison group of intensive care patients hospitalized for other reasons last year. The study also reported that the need for mechanical ventilation increased with higher body weight.

At Ochsner Health, a system with 41 hospitals in Louisiana and southern Mississippi, Dr. Leo Seoane, the company’s senior vice president, said that 60 percent of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 had obesity and that obesity appeared to nearly double their risk of requiring a ventilator.

“We in the U.S. have not always identified obesity as a disease, and some people think it’s a lifestyle choice. But it’s not,” said Dr. Matthew Hutter, director of the Weight Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and president of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. “It makes people sick, and we’re realizing that now.”

 

Conventional wisdom has traditionally explained excess weight as a simple caloric imbalance that can be addressed by eating less and exercising more. Prominent medical groups have reconsidered their approach, however, and now recognize obesity as a medical disorder caused by a complex web of underlying factors, which in turn predisposes people to other serious medical problems.

Some doctors consider obesity a marker of poor health associated with poverty, reflecting a combination of social and economic factors, from inadequate education and limited job opportunities to impoverished neighborhoods where access to healthy food, medical care and opportunities for exercise are scarce.

Obesity’s link to chronic diseases is well known, but the experience with H1N1 influenza in 2009 revealed that people with obesity are also more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Studies have also shown that they do not get the same protection from influenza vaccinations that others do.

Physicians say patients with obesity can be harder to manage in the hospital setting. They require special beds and imaging equipment, and they are harder to intubate and harder to assess when removing a ventilator.

Advocates for people with obesity say they may also delay seeking care, deterred because they have been treated poorly by health care providers in the past.

“They worry: ‘If I go to the hospital, am I going to be triaged based on my body mass index? Is the skinny person next to me going to get the ventilator, not me?’” said Dr. Donna Ryan, associate editor in chief of the journal Obesity.

Doctors in the trenches treating critically ill coronavirus patients say they expected to see old and elderly patients become acutely and critically ill, but the young patients becoming severely sick have unnerved them.

 

Of the 14 Covid-19 patients recently in Dr. Sanam Ahmed’s critical care unit at Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side, she said, 12 were at least 50 years old and had complex medical problems. The two younger patients, who were in their 30s, had obesity and no other diseases.

“It looks like, for them, obesity is the risk factor,” Dr. Ahmed said.

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The USA doesn’t have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. It has THE highest.

[LABEVO 928]

On 4/15/2020 at 10:10 AM, Royalfan5 said:

We are still swamped with pork to the point of pork working into export channels for the cost of packaging. We rebounded sharply slaughter runs yesterday as well, even with that plant down. 

 

[RDCanecutter 26,250]

4 minutes ago, XYZ said:

The USA doesn’t have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. It has THE highest.

That's muscle. All-Murican muscle. Now help me jump-start this Rascal.

[dcar00 14,035]

4 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

I just don't see the point of making it the focus of what should be an apolitical discussion of an ongoing crisis.  How does chasing down theories of its origin help us find a vaccine or successful treatment protocols?  What does it do to advance our understanding of how to address pandemics in the future other than to say that China is a bad actor?  We already know that.

Sure, I'm genuinely curious as to how the outbreak started.  But I don't see any point in it being a focus of this discussion.

"What difference, at this point, does it make!"

we can do things and discuss things in parallel. maybe try the what ifs and hypotheticals thread.

[B00M 6,280]

2 minutes ago, XYZ said:

The USA doesn’t have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. It has THE highest.

 

[Coelenterate Fuccboi 13,010]

I see the CR addicts were in serious need of a fix and we obliged.

[dcar00 14,035]

36 minutes ago, GabrielsHorn said:

Hey, actual things to discuss instead of shit flinging!

itll be interesting to see how widespread it actually was spread based on that testing as it seems like most states are pushing for these quick tests to figure out when to re-open. We’ll hopefully have more data on this in the US than previous viruses, which should really help recalibrate our models for both this outbreak as well as future ones. 

the strange thing is the article says 2.5 to 4.2% were infected.  If they tested 3300 why is there a range?

[T&T’s Dad 32]

39 minutes ago, rpspeed said:

This thread moves pretty quick, has this been discussed?
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibody-research-coronavirus-widespread/story?id=70206121

Antibody research indicates coronavirus may be far more widespread than known

 

If this holds true and 50 fold more people have had it than has been tallied...  That means +/- 33 million have/had this?  I get that its an extrapolation but thats mind boggling.
Also, doesnt this make the death rate significantly less, if true?

[GopherRock 1,765]

I was wrong about the number of cases at the JBS plant in Worthington: I said 1, it's actually 19.

 

https://m.startribune.com/first-covid-19-case-confirmed-at-pork-plant-in-worthington-minn/569731152/

[dcar00 14,035]

52 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

No, the stupidity is that 1) we've got strong examples of a path that works (yep, it involves having widespread testing) and 2) it sure looks like we still haven't materially advanced towards following that path.  That sure seems stupid to me.  I mean, when I look to my right and left, and see folks who have figured out how to work the problem so that they are in a much less shitty place than I am, and I still fail to try to copy what they're doing, I'd think that was stupidity on my part, but who knows, maybe I'm a secret genius who has a secret plan that will make those guys look like suckers.  But I doubt it.

What's done is done.  What still ISN'T being done is all we can focus on now.  But, you know, I won't talk about that.  Because it might be taken as criticism of leadership that hasn't worked towards that goal up till now.

I don't give a fuck if you shout amen.  I don't give a fuck about you at all, actually.

why would we ramp up testing if on March 1st we should go about our business. wait, never mind, what's done is done.

[dcar00 14,035]

1 minute ago, T&T’s Dad said:

If this holds true and 50 fold more people have had it than has been tallied...  That means +/- 33 million have/had this?  I get that its an extrapolation but thats mind boggling.
Also, doesnt this make the death rate significantly less, if true?

IMO we are probably at 20M+ right now.  trending to 25M+

[Cheeseweasel 26,437]

11 minutes ago, Casual Encounter said:

I see the CR addicts were in serious need of a fix and we obliged.

Seems like it. The Circle Jerk must have become boring.

[dcar00 14,035]

1 minute ago, GopherRock said:

I was wrong about the number of cases at the JBS plant in Worthington: I said 1, it's actually 19.

 

https://m.startribune.com/first-covid-19-case-confirmed-at-pork-plant-in-worthington-minn/569731152/

 

 

[justhookit 4,178]

6 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

(1) Part of testing means setting up ways to identify people regardless of whether they self-report or not. I think one option is setting up temperature checkpoints in more high traffic public places (I think grocery stores are a decent starting point). You have to get scanned before entering, and if you have an elevated temperature, you must get tested. Infrared thermometers could be used for speed and to avoid issues with surface contamination. 

(2) You don't need to identify and isolate every single infected person in order to have a large effect on the spread of the disease. For instance, if normally every infected person infects 3 more people, isolating just 2 of them (66%) effectively prevents exponential growth of the disease (total number of currently infected stays the same as opposed to escalates). If other measures reduce that spread rate to something under 1 (i.e., each infected has a less than 100% chance of infecting another person), then the disease slowly dies out. 

1. So this person with a fever is already out wandering in public. Stay home. But this isn’t the test we are arguing about anyway.

2. I understand the math and virology well enough, thanks though. My point was that a positive test isn’t some magic bullet that makes a sick person stay home or their household members stay home, doesn’t account for people that don’t get tested, etc. Sure it will slow the spread a bit.

Again, the single best thing this country can do is stay home if you or anyone you are in contact with gets sick. It’s really that simple. Testing doesn’t get us out of this social distancing, random guideline bullshit we are in. 

[stone oak 639]

2 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Seems like it. The Circle Jerk must have become boring.

[NeverMarryAStripper 21,781]

28 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

I just don't see the point of making it the focus of what should be an apolitical discussion of an ongoing crisis.  How does chasing down theories of its origin help us find a vaccine or successful treatment protocols?  What does it do to advance our understanding of how to address pandemics in the future other than to say that China is a bad actor?  We already know that.

Sure, I'm genuinely curious as to how the outbreak started.  But I don't see any point in it being a focus of this discussion.

It might tell us how we can fucking keep this from happening again.

[T&T’s Dad 32]

7 minutes ago, dcar00 said:

IMO we are probably at 20M+ right now.  trending to 25M+

So 25M+ and 29K dead.    Doesn't that make the mortality rate pretty close to regular flu territory? 

 

Edited April 17, 2020 by T&T’s Dad
typo

[DDD Dad 14,251]

5 minutes ago, NeverMarryAStripper said:

It might tell us how we can fucking keep this from happening again.

How?  

Seriously.  How does knowing that it may have leaked from a lab tell us anything?  Install better safety protocols in the lab?  We already know that.  

I'm all in favor of a discussion that involves critical thinking, but this ain't that.

Edited April 17, 2020 by DDD Dad

[Sbbruin 21,721]

4 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

Will offices reopen too? 

They better.  All I’m doing is dealing with tenants who claim they shouldn’t have to pay rent because they are forced to stay home.  We make it clear the buildings aren’t closed.  The order has nothing to do with us.

[MNLonghornFUKM 8,799]

54 minutes ago, rpspeed said:

This thread moves pretty quick, has this been discussed?
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibody-research-coronavirus-widespread/story?id=70206121

Antibody research indicates coronavirus may be far more widespread than known

 

Holy shit...

[Cheeseweasel 26,437]

Just now, DDD Dad said:

How?  

Seriously.  How does knowing that it may have leaked from a lab tell us anything?  Install better safety protocols in the lab?  We already know that.  

It will tell us where to point our nukes.

[justhookit 4,178]

2 minutes ago, T&T’s Dad said:

So 25M+ and 29K dead.    Doesn't that make it the mortality rate pretty close to regular flu territory? 

 

He’s pulling numbers out of his ass.

[dcar00 14,035]

1 minute ago, T&T’s Dad said:

So 25M+ and 29K dead.    Doesn't that make it the mortality rate pretty close to regular flu territory? 

 

IMO more like 20M now 30K so .15.  High side of flu but transmits faster that seasonal flu and slams the old pretty hard.  hospitalization seems much longer.

[DDD Dad 14,251]

Just now, Cheeseweasel said:

It will tell us where to point our nukes.

[closetojumping 62,230]

1 minute ago, DDD Dad said:

Did you finally get the answer you were looking for? Or do you need to keep playing stupid on this thread about the occasional sidestory here of the corona origins and China's involvement?

[Wulaw Horn 18,980]

44 minutes ago, GringoSalado said:

 

We drive past 50,000 traffic fatalities every year on the way to work and "walk past" 30-70k flu deaths every year on the way to work and nobody gives a shit.  Is his contention that we can't fade 200,000 deaths?  Or that if the standard death rate for a year increases by 7% that America will revolt?

That's so absurd. It's like baseball- you can't tell the difference between a 280 hitter and a 300 hitter by watching them- you just can't. You have to categorize and write down the information  and compute it b/c it works out to about 1 extra singe every other week throughout the course of a baseball season.

Same here- if deaths in America went from 3,000,000 a year to 3,200,000 a year absofuckinglutely nobody would notice and it wouldn't affect jack shit b/c we aren't capable of noticing such a change through our senses. It would have to be something we counted to figure out and there sure as shit wouldn't be corpses stacked up in the street.

Now, the what if it's a whataburger line is pretty awesome.

Note- for those who refuse to do reading comprehension- I'm not arguing 250,000 extra deaths this year don't matter- I'm arguing that in a country as big as the USA there's no way the average guy on the street would fucking notice the difference with the naked eye and it wouldn't be a harbinger of zombie invasion. 

[DDD Dad 14,251]

1 minute ago, closetojumping said:

Did you finally get the answer you were looking for? Or do you need to keep playing stupid on this thread about the occasional sidestory here of the corona origins and China's involvement?

I believe I've sussed out one agenda but am still waiting for someone to offer a substantive response.  

If you have something to offer I'm happy to listen.  Or you could just insult me.

[Dahobbs 17,444]

3 minutes ago, justhookit said:

1. So this person with a fever is already out wandering in public. Stay home. But this isn’t the test we are arguing about anyway.

2. I understand the math and virology well enough, thanks though. My point was that a positive test isn’t some magic bullet that makes a sick person stay home or their household members stay home, doesn’t account for people that don’t get tested, etc. Sure it will slow the spread a bit.

Again, the single best thing this country can do is stay home if you or anyone you are in contact with gets sick. It’s really that simple. Testing doesn’t get us out of this social distancing, random guideline bullshit we are in. 

I mean, I agree people should stay home. But I also think we should have a mechanism to identify those they aren't doing so, either because they don't know they are sick or because they're intentionally ignoring the directive. The former may actually be a sizable part of the population, and is one of the reasons we needed expanded testing capacity. And, testing allows us to identify those folks need to continue to stay home versus those that don't. And it allows us to direct efforts like contact tracing to those individuals that are actually confirmed positive. 

I don't thinking testing is a magic bullet, but it is a prerequisite to enabling the sorts of plans that'll allow us to reopen in a responsible manner. 

[NeverMarryAStripper 21,781]

6 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

How?  

Seriously.  How does knowing that it may have leaked from a lab tell us anything?  Install better safety protocols in the lab?  We already know that.  

I'm all in favor of a discussion that involves critical thinking, but this ain't that.

Treat them like a child and demonstrate that there are consequences for their actions

[South Austin 52,141]

Fuck this thread!

[MNLonghornFUKM 8,799]

19 minutes ago, GopherRock said:

I was wrong about the number of cases at the JBS plant in Worthington: I said 1, it's actually 19.

 

https://m.startribune.com/first-covid-19-case-confirmed-at-pork-plant-in-worthington-minn/569731152/

shit thats not good.

[dcar00 14,035]

6 minutes ago, justhookit said:

He’s pulling numbers out of his ass.

the FDA commissioner in the article said they think right now it is about 5% nationwide.  thats 16.5M or so and he says could be higher in places like NYC.   when the crazies were saying this is hundreds of thousands will die I said about 80K to 120K.