Coronavirus

[nw30]

[isobars]

I gotta say, though ... he does deserve an acting Emmy. Anyone just coming out of a 10-month quarantine in a cave or just now rising for air from some sports channel might almost believe Cuomo didn't kill 7,000 people in nursing homes and then deny it. THAT'S the kind of "man" Biden is considering for AG?

[mac]

Jees, you guys are lazy as well as dumb. Outbreaks in meat packing plants and prisons go unnoticed on Fox, so you guys ignore that--only to hate on Democrats.

[isobars]

I watched a short interview with three professors of epidemiology billed as the top three in their field in the world.
Sunetra Gupta of Oxford
Jay Bhattachary of Stanford
Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (also a biomedical statistician)

Their bottom line regarding the coronavirus is an emphatic “LOCKDOWNS ARE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE”. Their high points are:

Current LD policies are producing devastating long and short term effects on public health. The quickest and safest way to stabilize this pandemic and protect lives is to let the non-vulnerable live normal lives while we protect the most vulnerable. They fully agree on promoting widespread immunity (“herd immunity is as certain as gravity”) by:

Opening all schools to in-class education.
Fully, normally opening ALL businesses.
Ditto ALL sports, cultural, music, cultural, church, etc. activities.

Defund testing and tracking and put that money into protecting the vulnerable (old, obese, ill, frail, etc.)

They issued these statements just this week, and on the same day >500 public health and medical official and >500 MDs endorsed their recommendations.

In addition to thwarting this coronavirus, these measures will save countless lives by encouraging people to get back into doctors’ offices to get diagnosed, inoculated, and treated for other dangerous diseases already surging because people are afraid to venture out. Part of that is having leaders who will encourage, rather than scare, the public and who will engage in the protocol above rather than shutting us down again.

There are many reasons there’s no point in debating it here, as none of us knows more than these professors, we don’t get to determine policy anyway, most of the left’s and some of the right’s positions favor politics over science, even Fauci can’t make up his mind, etc.

Personally, my usual (and usually successful) solution when “experts” disagree is to do my own homework and make my own choices. In a case this broad, however, that doesn’t work. One or a million individuals choosing to shop 'til they drop, dump the masks, and/or party hearty isn’t going to achieve these professors’ goals. They’re talking the vast majority of people in the world following their principles, beginning, I guess, with 330 million of us in the US doing so.

Until that happens, I’ll getting my vaccination ASAP, following the usual personal protocols BUT NOT MY LOCAL GOVERNORS’ BASELESS AND EXTREMIST BS (e.g., heavy police enforcement and jail time if we eat turkey with our ailing grandma or exercise outside our own basement, but it’s OK to protest by the thousands), going windsurfing, wearing my N95 mask with the exhalation vent plugged, and avoiding crowds. Maybe the first and loudest protests should be against Biden’s (deadly?) promise to completely lock down the entire nation indefinitely.

[vientomas]

I can find a source to advance my opinion too! The internets are neato.

https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/

[isobars]

I wonder who Biden's coronavirus scientists/doctors are. The only one with a name I recognize, so far, is one of the most frightening, to ANYONE, (in)humans on the planet: Zeke Emanuel. What we've seen so far indicates Biden's and his team's total disagreement with the professors cited above, and one of Biden's guys (the one we see most often speaking for Biden's team, so maybe he's its leader) admits he's never treated a Covid patient. None of us has a legitimate clue which camp is right, so tens of thousands of lives remain in the hands of politicians.



None of us peons can significantly influence the global, national, or local impact of the disease. Each of us CAN, however, have an appreciable impact on people we come in contact with and probably a very significant impact on ourselves and our immediate families. The protocol advocated by the very persuasive epidemiologists cited above would have to come from the top down, with facts, persuasion, and enforcement, so national level voluntary individual compliance with them is not feasible under weak and/or misguided leadership. Thus if they're right, we're screwed at least six ways from Sunday: commerce, health, fatalities, the economy, the very existence of giant manufacturing corporations and neighborhood candle shops, personal and public recreation, and many more ways. The primary beneficiaries, sad to say, will continue to be Amazon, Google, et.al.

Until that dust settles or is settled at the national level, my primary focus will be on protecting myself and my wife and going windsurfing, as I described earlier. Nothing else makes any sense to me. Fortunately, now that we can't fly into LAX without a 14-day quarantine, I can still work with my LA oncologist electronically.

[mac]

[mac]

For those who said Trump's job was to prevent panic--not infections--people are now dying at a rate of one per minute. Nearly 100,000 Americans are in hospitals. Not the flu--but approaching the impact of the 2019 flu.

[Riptide]

History repeats itself.

[mac]

After three weeks of shutdown, the UK has bent the curve. Boris isn’t that bright, but he managed to figure this out. Fat Donny? He doesn’t care, it doesn’t put money in his pocket.