CR: COVID-19 --Political Talk

[Anastasis 23,481]

3 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

complete political collapse, potential civil war

[jimmyjazz 46,046]

I don't think Fauci walks on water, but he's one of the very, very few who have consistently breathed air.

[Sawbonz 27,582]

On 12/3/2020 at 8:49 PM, Anastasis said:

China still sub 100k. 

[Sawbonz 27,582]

16 hours ago, trauma babe said:

Our COVID ICU just had a significant number of nurses (4 ≥ x ≥ 10) leave within a two week period. That is crippling to a unit. Guess who gets to pick up the slack??

[mention=2008]BradInATX[/mention] There is definitely a higher bar for getting admitted to the hospital, but at least here in Austin we still have enough ICU beds for frivolous admissions to my (non-COVID) ICU. So we've got that going for us.

JCAHO coming in the next two weeks, despite being utterly useless and harming nurses with their pandemic response earlier in the year. Better not have a snack out on our desks!

Y’all should tell those leeches to fuck off.
 

Thank you for what you are doing and please don’t give up. Y’all are truly heroes 

 

My main hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in the area, just postponed all non emergent surgeries for 2 weeks. The ICU nurses have been taking care of 3 patients each. Just converted both the pre-op and pacu to makeshift ICUs and commandeered the staff. 
 

At least I rarely have a patient calling it a hoax at this point

[Sawbonz 27,582]

1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

I don't really agree, other than the fact that it was a miscalculation.  If the calculus was "we don't want to create a run on PPE" fine.  Just say that.  The N95s on the market were already getting snatched up and gone in early march. I mean, it's all monday morning QB'ing, but why not just be up front. "Face coverings can make a difference.  We need to reserve the most sophisticated masks for our hcps. But for the rest of us, simple cloth masks, gators, etc. can make a difference.  Get use to it guys, cause we are going to need to do it for the long haul." The inconsistency in messaging is more problematic from a public health perspective imo. 

I couldn’t buy fucking toilet paper. You think there would be any masks anywhere after a statement like that?

[Anastasis 23,481]

1 minute ago, Sawbonz said:

I couldn’t buy fucking toilet paper. You think there would be any masks anywhere after a statement like that?

Most reasonable people never ran out of TP. If you had to resort to using your hand or a lawn clippings you only have yourself to blame. 

N95s evaporated quickly, without regard to the messaging from bureaucrats.

That said, consistency of messaging is important. When you waffle between "There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask." and "Everybody should be wearing a mask" it is undermining. 

 

Fauci is far from the greatest undermining factor, but he ain't exactly batting saint hood 1.000  

[pyrohornIII 4,817]

Fauci didn't know how many masks there were anywhere, nor ventilators or anything.   The inventory was a huge mess and numbers were not reliable.  Plus supplies were being shipped overseas.

Fauci also didn't know (but probably suspected) how much the supply chain would be skewed by Kushner and his grifters.

He also knew Trump wasn't going to back mask wearing, no matter how much science was explained to him. 

And while the public might or might not benefit from the masks (due to being able to self isolate, social distance, work from home, etc,) the front line health care ppl would definitely benefit from an adequate supply of PPE due to the shit being right under their noses.

With a diminished and questionable supply of N95 masks and other PPE, I think Brisket's hypothesis holds water.   He knew it was coming, he knew health care workers would definitely need the PPE.    Not making a big public push initially probably saved a lot of front line workers.  

 

[Anastasis 23,481]

Mostly superhero fan fiction. 

[Brisketexan 105,200]

Mostly superhero fan fiction. 

I’m not calling Fauci a superhero. He made a call, it was a reasonable one. But the choices were all bad.

[Bama Chick 28,596]

Yeah this whole year had been a game of “What’s the least shitty option?”.

Also, didn’t the mask guidelines come from the CDC? Fauci is NIH, correct? He’s had to walk a tightrope this whole year on being very careful not to contradict Trump and his goons.

I feel like the initial messaging on masks was partly what’s already been discussed (not wanting to cause a bunch of panic buying by the public) and just part of the learning curve that naturally goes with something like this.

We’re going to see some of that with the vaccine too. A lot of health experts were making statements about how long it might take for us to have one and trying to get the public to be patient just in case it took a while. Now that many have been developed in less than one year, you’re going to find people reluctant to take it for fear that it’s been rushed and might not be safe. (And I’m not going to lie, part of me is worried about that.)

[Aqua Buddha 14,600]

7 hours ago, Anastasis said:

Most reasonable people never ran out of TP. If you had to resort to using your hand or a lawn clippings you only have yourself to blame. 

N95s evaporated quickly, without regard to the messaging from bureaucrats.

That said, consistency of messaging is important. When you waffle between "There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask." and "Everybody should be wearing a mask" it is undermining. 

 

Fauci is far from the greatest undermining factor, but he ain't exactly batting saint hood 1.000  

I can tell you with 100% certainty that the network was completely stripped of all toilet paper.  While you're seeing empty shelves now, there is plenty in the network.  Manufacturers have streamlined production and ramped it up as well as best they can.  Back in March and April, that was not the case and we can produce a lot more toilet paper than we can face masks.

FWIW, I didn't and still don't understand the toilet paper hoarding.

[HenryJames 66,148]

9 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

FWIW, I didn't and still don't understand the toilet paper hoarding.

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/index.php?/topic/318-hey-steel-shank/

[Dnaguy 12,034]

13 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

I can tell you with 100% certainty that the network was completely stripped of all toilet paper.  While you're seeing empty shelves now, there is plenty in the network.  Manufacturers have streamlined production and ramped it up as well as best they can.  Back in March and April, that was not the case and we can produce a lot more toilet paper than we can face masks.

FWIW, I didn't and still don't understand the toilet paper hoarding.

 

I’ll admit it.

There was a time that I was rushed in the bathroom during a peanut butter shit escapade

I didn’t wipe 100%.

The raw itchy asshole feeling that I had to endure during my meeting was horrible.

Yes I went back to the bathroom later to wipe, but the damage was done. Maybe the itchy butthole stoped, but it kind of hurt to wipe.

My story is surely not unique. 

When the pandemic hit and people started to contiplate what it would mean to locked in their house, I like most took inventory of our lives.

We had to stay home.

We all would have running water.

You can go days without food.

But what about our assholes?!

The tp could only go so far..... 

Maybe COVID would kill you, but is it really worth living if your butthole is itchy and kind of hurts when you wipe?

 

 

[Anastasis 23,481]

Didn't everybody go through this phase in March?

[Anastasis 23,481]

Re: PPE more generally, I still don't understand why we never went war powers all over that shit. It was threatened for ventilators, but not PPE unless I missed something. 

[Anastasis 23,481]

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/04/get-ready-for-false-side-effects

Get Ready for False Side Effects

We’re in the beginning of the vaccine endgame now: regulatory approval and actual distribution/rollout into the population. The data for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines continue to look good (here’s a new report on the longevity of immune response after the Moderna one), with the J&J and Novavax efforts still to report. The AZ/Oxford candidate is more of a puzzle, thanks to some very poor communication about their clinical work (which suffered from some fundamental problems itself).

Now we have to get people to take them. Surveys continue to show a good number of people who are (at the very least) in the “why don’t you take it first” category. I tend to think that as vaccine dosing becomes reality that more people will get in line for a shot, but that remains to be seen. I wanted to highlight something that we’ll all need to keep in mind, though.

Bob Wachter of UCSF had a very good thread on Twitter about vaccine rollouts the other day, and one of the good points he made was this one. We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Specifically, if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality. No one would notice. That’s how many people die and get sick anyway.

But if you took those ten million people and gave them a new vaccine instead, there’s a real danger that those heart attacks, cancer diagnoses, and deaths will be attributed to the vaccine. I mean, if you reach a large enough population, you are literally going to have cases where someone gets the vaccine and drops dead the next day (just as they would have if they *didn’t* get the vaccine). It could prove difficult to convince that person’s friends and relatives of that lack of connection, though. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is one of the most powerful fallacies of human logic, and we’re not going to get rid of it any time soon. Especially when it comes to vaccines. The best we can do, I think, is to try to get the word out in advance. Let people know that such things are going to happen, because people get sick and die constantly in this world. The key will be whether they are getting sick or dying at a noticeably higher rate once they have been vaccinated.

No such safety signals have appeared for the first vaccines to roll out (Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech). In fact, we should be seeing the exact opposite effects on mortality and morbidity as more and more people get vaccinated. The excess-death figures so far in the coronavirus pandemic have been appalling (well over 300,000 in the US), and I certainly think mass vaccination is the most powerful method we have to knock that back down to normal.

That’s going to be harder to do, though, if we get screaming headlines about people falling over due to heart attacks after getting their vaccine shots. Be braced.

[HenryJames 66,148]

I’m a white mom who shops at Whole Foods, and I’m just asking questions.

[Guest Lobo]

49 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Re: PPE more generally, I still don't understand why we never went war powers all over that shit. It was threatened for ventilators, but not PPE unless I missed something. 

Because China purposely released a biological weapon into the United States according to Trump and his followers.  Last I checked that was not only an act of war, but an illegal one at that.  If ever there was a time to invoke the War Powers Resolution, this would have been it.  So either he's incompetent or lying.  

[safe sex 11,741]

Would not be surprised if one of Biden's first actions is to invoke the WPA for something.

[hookemATL 11,825]

3 minutes ago, trauma babe said:

Would not be surprised if one of Biden's first actions is to invoke the WPA for something.

Double sided dildos and malt liquor. 

[Anastasis 23,481]

5 minutes ago, hookemATL said:

Double sided dildos and malt liquor. 

I like how you party. 

[safe sex 11,741]

Better than nothing.

[wildcat09 29,364]

1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

Re: PPE more generally, I still don't understand why we never went war powers all over that shit. It was threatened for ventilators, but not PPE unless I missed something. 

It would’ve made it harder to pretend their bullshit about how the states and not the federal government were the ones responsible for addressing the pandemic.

[Sawbonz 27,582]

7 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

Now that many have been developed in less than one year, you’re going to find people reluctant to take it for fear that it’s been rushed and might not be safe. (And I’m not going to lie, part of me is worried about that.)

Other than it’s literally the first mRNA vaccine to be used in humans and outcomes data are < 1 year what is there to be concerned about?

[DDD Dad 14,346]

Mostly superhero fan fiction. 

You seem to choose interesting hills on which to die.

[Anastasis 23,481]

1 hour ago, DDD Dad said:

You seem to choose interesting hills on which to die.

If that’s dying on a hill, you must have missed my other work. Barely a speed bump.  

[Anastasis 23,481]

1 hour ago, wildcat09 said:

It would’ve made it harder to pretend their bullshit about how the states and not the federal government were the ones responsible for addressing the pandemic.

Like the ventilator thing did?

[Mrs Whiggins 13,050]

Bill Nye still going strong.

 

[Sawbonz 27,582]

15 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Like the ventilator thing did?

I don’t recall any of the hospitals going on divert for lack of ventilators. I did have to postpone or move more than one case to a different hospital because no N95 masks available except for life and limb threatening surgeries

 

ETA and that one patient who killed himself because his surgery got postponed no big deal right?

Edited December 5, 2020 by Sawbonz

[Neonmoon 38,130]

Fauci early mask comments being rehashed again? Cool

Let me know when we get to ‘doctors getting paid to make up covid cases’ argument 

 

[Anastasis 23,481]

1 hour ago, Sawbonz said:

I don’t recall any of the hospitals going on divert for lack of ventilators.

Right. And I am not sure how ppe production in similar manner is problematic to anyone’s political messaging or posturing. Which is what I was responding to. 

[CooterBrown 18,022]

[4th&Five 41,575]

 

[NWBuck 8,579]

1 minute ago, 4th&Five said:

 

I hate this guy so very, very much. That was true when he was still just a guy from down the road in Champaign County.... it's only been magnified a gorillion times since then.

[Guest Lobo]

Jim, do you understand the difference between a voluntarily health advisory and an official governmental cancellation?  

For instance, you're in government.  And I think somebody cancelled your brain and your balls.  

[workswithseed 2,109]

Jim must really believe that Fauci will cancel Christmas.

[Neonmoon 38,130]

50 minutes ago, 4th&Five said:

 

Hopefully he cancels covering up sexual assault 

[Degenerate Gardner 4,085]

57 minutes ago, 4th&Five said:

 

Step 1: Become chief cheerleader for a nuclear dumpster fire of a President whose pandemic bungling kills a quarter million Americans.

Step 2: Undermine safety recommendations from qualified, competent public health officials that would limit additional deaths.

Step 3: Profit. No I mean it, line up for your time at the trough, you've earned it.

[Biff Tannen 45,697]

1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

Fauci early mask comments being rehashed again? Cool

Let me know when we get to ‘doctors getting paid to make up covid cases’ argument 

 

This isn't the DT thread.

[Js1 85,490]

 

[Degenerate Gardner 4,085]

3 minutes ago, Js1 said:

 

Finally some good news.

[Anastasis 23,481]

https://thedispatch.com/p/fda-career-staff-are-delaying-the

FDA Career Staff Are Delaying the Vaccine As Thousands of Americans Die

We’ve gone from ‘Operation Warp Speed’ to develop a vaccine to ‘Operation Turtle Speed’ to review It.

[workswithseed 2,109]

18 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

https://thedispatch.com/p/fda-career-staff-are-delaying-the

FDA Career Staff Are Delaying the Vaccine As Thousands of Americans Die

We’ve gone from ‘Operation Warp Speed’ to develop a vaccine to ‘Operation Turtle Speed’ to review It.

"The FDA also reviews manufacturing data from Pfizer on how they made the drug. But not only can that data be reviewed in a few hours, it should have been done months ago when it was available. While the FDA was waiting for Pfizer’s long-term vaccine results to come in, the agency should have anticipated this step and done it early."

what the fuck? Why wouldn't they have not just done it earlier? What has the FDA been doing this whole time?

Edited December 5, 2020 by workswithseed
Fuck me, fuck you, fuck us.

[Brisketexan 105,200]

https://thedispatch.com/p/fda-career-staff-are-delaying-the
FDA Career Staff Are Delaying the Vaccine As Thousands of Americans Die
We’ve gone from ‘Operation Warp Speed’ to develop a vaccine to ‘Operation Turtle Speed’ to review It.

Yeah....this one is a head scratcher and has all the looks of an utter bureaucratic failure.

Fucking maddening.

[Mrs Whiggins 13,050]

Just now, Brisketexan said:

Yeah....this one is a head scratcher and has all the looks of an utter bureaucratic failure.

Fucking maddening.

Head scratcher? This is the same Administration that inserted a shipping magnate and former campaign mega donor into the USPS during a pandemic and prior to the largest mail out and mail in of ballots in a national election. If the WH was intentionally killing Americans versus simply ignoring the pandemic, could you (we) tell the difference?

What appears to be a bureaucratic slowdown  could just as easily be explained by an FDA type Emily Murphy doing what people like Emily Murphy do. How would we know?

[DDD Dad 14,346]

 

This comment was quite pithy:

[jimmyjazz 46,046]

I don't know why Democrats don't hammer Gym Jordan on the Ohio State wrestling scandal 24/7.

Well, actually I do know why.  Democrats are generally pussies.

[4th&Five 41,575]

Now I know I haven’t had it!

 

[Bozo_Casanova 26,521]

Meanwhile, on Texags:

Quote

Faustus

5:31p, 12/4/20

 

 

Let Operation Warp Speed be his legacy. My only regret is that it was even necessary given that we already had HCQ + zinc.

 

Edited December 6, 2020 by Bozo_Casanova

[Dnaguy 12,034]

18 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Meanwhile, on Texags:

 

Now that’s some downright logic thinking.