The Covid-19 Pandemic Thread

[ZoWie]

Yeah, whatever happened to "no one under 65 has anything to worry about?" That's what first did it to my mental health when this thing started, 2 years ago now, and we're still doing it.

It's stupid. Age has some relevance due to immune system changes, but it's not the whole answer and never was. Mostly it just made an ageist culture even more ageist, and now that's a big part of the problem that makes covid just so damn maddening.

[carmenjonze]

In the long run, it's on the public, but they won't change their behavior and/or priorities unless they have to, and even then some will go for their guns. Indeed a check in the mail would help, but you'd still have an awful lot of kids not handling online learning well and falling behind.

If I could answer that one, I would run for president.

Online learning sucks for kids. One of my bff's kids, my godniece, is getting ready to go to hospital because of all the stress, depression, upheaval, etc., so I am watching this in real time. Anecdotally: none of the teachers I know want online learning, either, if only because practically, it's a TON more work for them, AND, they have to monitor/deal with their own kids while they themselves teach online. Same for my friends/colleagues in higher ed who have schoolage kids and have also been forced back into unsafe work conditions because some parent wants their kid to have "the college experience" -- they have all been trying to balance this for the past 2 years.

What's annoying to me is that mitigation, PPE, proper ventilation, testing, masking, etc., are not considered "work conditions," even though that's what the teachers' unions are talking about. It just gets folded in with all that "selfish teachers who don't want to work" propaganda.

[ZoWie]

^That^ one pisses me off too. Just spend the fucking money. The military can wait a year for 200 new bombers or whatever it is this time, and we'll still have a perfectly good defense program.

[ProfX]

Some people seem to care only about deaths. That to me has always been stupid. Not naming any names, but it's stupid. The two key co-variables for deaths seem to be age, and pre-existing conditions. The big problem is on the latter, those pre-existing conditions are found in a LOT of contemporary Americans under 65.

But even if you don't die, I guess a couple weeks to 2 months in the hospital is just a joyous picnic, eh?

The kids are not more likely to die from Omicron, but they seem to be developing more upper airway complications that require 2-3 days in the hospital. This should be avoided. I don't think I need to tell the parents experiencing this.

Some children seem to be developing what's called "long COVID". We still don't know who develops this and why in any age group, but why run such a stupid and unnecessary experiment? Worse for them, it could probably affect their growth and maturation into adulthood.

Further, anyone of any age group who gets infected, is essentially helping insure new mutant variations will appear.

Come on, people, the goal should be reducing infections, in all age groups. Anybody arguing otherwise frankly is going against what most of the public health experts in this country are saying, and I agree with their consensus.

[ZoWie]

Agreed. We need to lower the overall resting-level between-surges case count. We need a practical idea on how. Voluntary compliance with isolation measures for an indefinite period possibly up to years to protect the public health is never ever going to play with the American public, or in most other countries for that matter. Ageism is just stupid.

[carmenjonze]

Yeah, whatever happened to "no one under 65 has anything to worry about?" That's what first did it to my mental health when this thing started, 2 years ago now, and we're still doing it.

It's stupid. Age has some relevance due to immune system changes, but it's not the whole answer and never was. Mostly it just made an ageist culture even more ageist, and now that's a big part of the problem that makes covid just so damn maddening.

I still see people peddling this nonsense. I believe ProfX mentioned this before, but it's creating a long-term disability and healthcare monster.

Covid may raise the risk of diabetes in children, C.D.C. researchers reported. - NYT

It may. Okay well, let's hope it doesn't.

CDC: Record Number of Kids With Coronavirus Are Hospitalized - US News & World Report

Children and the Spread of COVID-19 - Harvard Medical School

[Drak]

Tucker Carlson is now flogging Viagra as a covid cure. How much stocks do these guys have in it? They seem to flog it a lot.

https://www.salon.com/2022/01/08/tucker ... rs-viagra/

[carmenjonze]

To my mind, we have a much deeper problem than mayors like Lightfoot or my own mayor London Breed. Biden appointed literal eugenicists to the CDC. Worst problem is, when Trumpist rightwingers said this, people rightly had a fit. Now that it's Rochelle Wallensky saying it, whose appointment we all lauded, it gets a free pass.
__________

Rochelle WalenskyMatthew Cortland, JD
@mattbc

Today, @CDCDirector said: "The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron."

This is eugenicist.

[VIDEO]
__________

All of us know a ton of people who have "at least" 3 or 4 socalled comorbidities, or have them ourselves. This is a real problem. F. her.

[Libertas]

Some people seem to care only about deaths. That to me has always been stupid. Not naming any names, but it's stupid. The two key co-variables for deaths seem to be age, and pre-existing conditions. The big problem is on the latter, those pre-existing conditions are found in a LOT of contemporary Americans under 65.

But even if you don't die, I guess a couple weeks to 2 months in the hospital is just a joyous picnic, eh?

The kids are not more likely to die from Omicron, but they seem to be developing more upper airway complications that require 2-3 days in the hospital. This should be avoided. I don't think I need to tell the parents experiencing this.

Some children seem to be developing what's called "long COVID". We still don't know who develops this and why in any age group, but why run such a stupid and unnecessary experiment? Worse for them, it could probably affect their growth and maturation into adulthood.

Further, anyone of any age group who gets infected, is essentially helping insure new mutant variations will appear.

Come on, people, the goal should be reducing infections, in all age groups. Anybody arguing otherwise frankly is going against what most of the public health experts in this country are saying, and I agree with their consensus.

I assume you are referring to one of the cons here about only caring about deaths. I usually think of death first as what to avoid and then if possible I like to avoid massive suffering and not being able to breathe.

[ProfX]

I assume you are referring to one of the cons here about only caring about deaths.

Not just someone here, but yes. The problem in looking at death rates is it's not the whole picture. Therapeutics ARE improving, and that is NOT a bad thing, but ... well, somebody tell Guv Ron the monoclonal antibodies are not a magic elixir that can help everybody ...

Once again, the problem isn't just people dying. It's that our hospitals are again getting flooded with COVID patients, to the extent that resources they might need to deal with other patients with other emergencies are getting strained. I know you know this - you mentioned already being impacted by it.

In some worst case scenarios, it's leading to other patients with other problems dying, who didn't need to ...

[Libertas]

Not just someone here, but yes. The problem in looking at death rates is it's not the whole picture. Therapeutics ARE improving, and that is NOT a bad thing, but ... well, somebody tell Guv Ron the monoclonal antibodies are not a magic elixir that can help everybody ...

Once again, the problem isn't just people dying. It's that our hospitals are again getting flooded with COVID patients, to the extent that resources they might need to deal with other patients with other emergencies are getting strained. I know you know this - you mentioned already being impacted by it.

In some worst case scenarios, it's leading to other patients with other problems dying, who didn't need to ...

Yes, exactly. At first I thought maybe you meant yours truly because I do tend to tell family members all the time "No, please dont come over, I dont want to FUCKING DIE!"

But yes, right now I am supposed to get colonoscopy and maybe I wont, now. I am supposed to do my monthly PTNS and maybe I wont, I am supposed to see an ear doc for my deaf ear and a skin doc for what might be issues with moles etc.

Dont know what PTNS is?

https://urologyaustin.com/urology-speci ... tion-ptns/

Has improved my urology issues, give it a try! Or am I the only guy here who has to get up at 2 am and 5 am to pee?

[Motor City]

Schools all over are now experiencing what a lot of poor districts have been experiencing all along, overcrowded classrooms and no teachers, and no real regard for the students safety, just letting unsafe situations linger without end.

and the articles are mostly business oriented having to do more from the viewpoint of a business than human beings

This is pretty brutal': Metro Detroit restaurants hit hard by omicron surge

Omicron explosion spurs nationwide breakdown of services

In Kansas' Johnson County, paramedics are working 80 hours a week. Ambulances have frequently been forced to alter their course when the hospitals they're heading to tell them they're too overwhelmed to help, confusing the patients' already anxious family members driving behind them. When the ambulances arrive at hospitals, some of their emergency patients end up in waiting rooms because there are no beds........

....In downtown Boise, Idaho, customers were queued up outside a pharmacy before it opened Friday morning and before long, the line wound throughout the large drugstore. Pharmacies have been slammed by staffing shortages, either because employees are out sick or have left altogether.....

....In Hawaii, where public schools are under one statewide district, 1,600 teachers and staff were absent Wednesday because of illness or pre-arranged vacation or leave. The state’s teachers union criticized education officials for not better preparing for the ensuing void. Osa Tui Jr., head of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, said counselors and security guards were being pulled to go “babysit a classroom.”

“That is very inappropriate,” Tui said at a news conference. “To have this model where there are so many teachers out and for the department to say, ‘Send your kid’ to a classroom that doesn’t have a teacher, what’s the point of that?”......

This is mostly about administrators refusing to break from the model of wealth and resource hoarding to meet the public safety and human needs of this time.

[ProfX]

Remote learning is really turning out to not work well for K-12, especially K-6. Young children are really not dealing well with being isolated from their peers, it's causing all kinds of psychological issues, and they are having big problems learning math and other subjects outside a classroom. Weirdly, some so-called "educational reformers" touting this long before COVID are starting to change their tune.

... now at the university level, I would argue things were moving that way long before COVID, but that is a separate digression ...

And yes, we also have all the poor families dependent on things like the school lunch sometimes being their kids' best meal of the day, or the school clinic being their best access to medical services. Plus let's face it, many families already strained by the crisis were also not ready for child care and supervision to become 24/7 either.

In short, I get the dilemma. Nobody wants to go back to remote learning, and I understand why. But the teachers' unions are being anything but selfish in insisting schools then live up to the other part of the bargain, which is proper staffing and mitigation protocols must then be followed. Because as I keep saying, it's not just the teachers' lives and health that are at stake.

[ProfX]

All of us know a ton of people who have "at least" 3 or 4 socalled comorbidities, or have them ourselves. This is a real problem. F. her.

... obesity and being diabetic or pre-diabetic is on that list ... hope everybody knows how many Americans that affects. Without getting into why, but ... that is a lot of people.

... then there's people being treated for cancer, particularly by radiation and chemo ... hoo boy, once again, a huge number of people.

... then there's folks with auto-immune disorders and congenital conditions ... I think blood type is still in the mix, there, too ... these are things not in any way under "lifestyle control" ...

Omicron appears to be less deadly even for the unvax'd than Delta because it doesn't seem to get as deep into the lungs, but again the thing that irritates me is people tend to assume these waves just sort of magically replace each other. Just because Omicron is surging doesn't mean the deadlier Delta has suddenly disappeared.

And given how piss-poor this country is at genetic testing/sampling what people have, we really have no way of knowing that all the new cases are Omicron, Delta, or Alpha.

[ZoWie]

I think that the most expensive tests, the ones that you don't get back for three days, can actually sequence the RNA and tell which variant, or even if it's some other virus. I know that the presence of Omicron in water samples is the smoking gun that proved to us that the variant was already spreading in the US before its "discovery" in Thanksgiving week. It was certainly in LA waste water by then. They could tell Omicron from Delta, which at the time was 90-something per cent of cases.

Remote learning gets even more iffy for early grades when the family can't afford the hardware and early training in language skills to do it right, and no one can baby-sit the kids to make sure they aren't just playing video games with the stuff. Plus you can't eat bit streams.

It would be nice if every family was issued terminals as soon as kids turned school age, and even nicer if the rich temporarily paid maybe 2% more in taxes on an emergency basis so we could retrofit schools for both live data comms and healthier environments, but that would be socialism, say our conservative friends.

[carmenjonze]

The death rate is also now exponential.

Early Data Hints at Omicron’s Potential Toll Across America - NYT

The extremely transmissible Omicron variant is spreading quickly across the United States, making up a vast majority of U.S. cases after becoming dominant in the week before Christmas.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said that it is still too soon to predict the full impact Omicron could have on deaths and illness across the country. But data in some of the earliest-hit cities is beginning to show what the future could hold.

In cities hit early by Omicron, Covid deaths have begun to spike

Death trends are sharply up in these three cities but are not approaching last winter’s peaks quite as fast as increasing case rates. The chart below shows death rates shifted by three weeks to allow a clearer comparison of the peaks and dips in cases and deaths.

[carmenjonze]

ChicagoTeachersUnion
@CTULocal1

While Mayor Lightfoot continues her lockout against Chicago public school teachers, clinicians, PSRPs, librarians and other educators, refusing to implement much-needed safety protocols as COVID-19 surges through schools, her staff continues working remotely. #LoriLockout

https://twitter.com/CTULocal1/status/14 ... 9094641665

[Libertas]

The death rate is also now exponential.

Early Data Hints at Omicron’s Potential Toll Across America - NYT

Remember when Joe was caught off mic saying "big fucking deal" to Barack about ACA?

I had a similar idea, I mentioned here. I have now emailed Thom Hartmann about it.

High profile democrat like Adam Schiff or Ted Lieu, Katie Porter etc accidentally but on purpose lets expletive fly while telling Americans (in an interview on CNN or MSNBC) they have to insist trump accept his loss, gop governors do the right thing via Covid and even the WH do more for folks like free masks to fight Covid, stimulus payments etc.

Made the mistake of trying to find someone on DU who has connections to mention this to someone because the usual group who NEVER offer alternatives but only criticize, made me wish I had never posted there ever. Done there in fact, now.

Maybe this wouldnt work, maybe nobody would do it. What is not maybe though is if something DRASTIC doesnt happen and NOW, we wont survive.

[Number6]

Yes, exactly. At first I thought maybe you meant yours truly because I do tend to tell family members all the time "No, please dont come over, I dont want to FUCKING DIE!"

But yes, right now I am supposed to get colonoscopy and maybe I wont, now. I am supposed to do my monthly PTNS and maybe I wont, I am supposed to see an ear doc for my deaf ear and a skin doc for what might be issues with moles etc.

If I have what you describe above I would go ahead and keep the appointments. Medical treatment facilities, other than hospitals, are IMO pretty safe since they have a smaller footprint to disinfect. I've gotten dental care a couple of times over the past 10 months and saw what precautions they took. Also, I just had an eye exam and they cleaned the equipment in front of me using isopropyl alcohol pads.

Dont know what PTNS is?

https://urologyaustin.com/urology-speci ... tion-ptns/

Has improved my urology issues, give it a try! Or am I the only guy here who has to get up at 2 am and 5 am to pee?

I'm 71 and don't have that problem. I can understand your reluctance to get treated but I have no doubt the needles and the area they're inserted are sterilized. Again, I'd recommend you keep the appointment.

[Number6]

Okay, this is a little change from talking about COVID but about wearing masks. I wear glasses and have a hard time not having my glasses fogging especially when bowling. I recently bought some one-inch, double-side medical tape and I cut a strip the length of the mask. I'll attach the tape to the top inside of the mask, put it on and then press down and smooth the tape. I tested it this afternoon wearing the mask and tape around the house, on a walk to the library, and inside the library. Result, no fogging. Looks like I have a solution to my eyeglasses fogging.

[carmenjonze]

Thread by G Peters /deliberately uninspiring - Threadreader app

Not the biggest fan of Threadreader, but this is one is worth a read.

"A mathematics exercise from a Nazi school textbook discriminating against disabled people. The exercise is titled "What is the cost of care for the hereditary sick?" The exercise aimed to show schoolchildren in Nazi Germany that disabled ppl were a financial burden on the state"



Disabled children were not only not protected, they were among the first victims.

A society that does not protect its children is most certainly brutal. Should not the protection of children be the basis upon which it operates?

Never believe white conservatives like Nazis, confederates, and GOPers when they claim to be "prolife". They are not "prolife." They are government-forced childbirth authoritarians, and that's all that is.

And now we're in a situation where the head of the CDC actually said on live television that "the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 per cent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities,” is "encouraging news."

Well f. you, a-hole.

Then the HUD secretary, Marcia Fudge who I generally like, comes out with this statement:

Secretary Marcia L. Fudge
@SecFudge

The United States is the only major economy in the world where the economy as a whole is stronger now than before the pandemic.

https://twitter.com/SecFudge/status/1479894984807657481
__________

The HELL kind of metric is this, when this country has lost 800,000 people in the course of two years due to a preventable disease?

We are in a really dangerous situation. Had Trump administration people said these things everybody would rightfully be beside ourselves. It's incredible to me that this is getting a free pass just because it's likeable Biden administration people.

[Libertas]

Agree...

[carmenjonze]

Look at this a-hole. Dem mayor who talks as if he the owns people who do the work, and now the children who attend public school.

IDGAF about his demographics. Black cops, a lot like white-aspirant white-ethnics, often have the most to prove. This ex-cop clown is a conservative authoritarian in the same mold as Giuliani. Week 2 in office, and he's already well on his way to being a one-termer.

F. this guy.
___________

The Recount
@therecount

CNN’s @jaketapper: “Wouldn’t mandated weekly testing for students, teachers, faculty be the safest way to keep the schools open?”

NYC Mayor Adams: “Because ideally that would be the safest way to do it … But I need my children in school.”

[VIDEO]

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1 ... 4383099909

[ProfX]

And now we're in a situation where the head of the CDC actually said on live television that "the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 per cent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities,” is "encouraging news."

I of course agree with you. Over on DU, there's a thread where people are like, "so all the people who died were obese". Yeah. OK. This reminds me of arguments with tritumi. "They chose to be fat". Did they? Are we really gonna have this discussion in a vacuum, without talking about the U.S. food system, food deserts, restaurant portions, all the systemic issues involved here? Also that, yes, genetics, metabolism, matter, sometimes not everybody can just go out and hit the gym in the middle of a pandemic? People really do gain weight from things not totally in their control ... gosh honest!

What you call "health elitism" is definitely at play. "Well, if they just got more Vitamin D, were vegan, drank spirulina, did lots of goat yoga and jazzercise, and had a healthier lifestyle they would have been fine". Maybe, maybe not, personally it reminds me of those Shingrix ads where they point out the shingles virus doesn't give a f**k how healthy a lifestyle you live. This "well it's only taking out the unwell anyway" as if we just need to shed "fat and unhealthy" people like social excess is ... SOCIAL DARWINISM. And I don't care who's mouthing it. Right wingers, "spiritual celebrities," or the CDC director.

Obesity was one of those major comorbidities she was talking about, but so are things that are inarguably not in peoples' control, like various congenital disorders. Saying "it only culls the weak and unhealthy" is eugenics thinking. I also wanna keep pointing out people might have some of these comorbidities without knowing it as they haven't been detected until they got COVID.

Sigh.

[Libertas]

Okay, this is a little change from talking about COVID but about wearing masks. I wear glasses and have a hard time not having my glasses fogging especially when bowling. I recently bought some one-inch, double-side medical tape and I cut a strip the length of the mask. I'll attach the tape to the top inside of the mask, put it on and then press down and smooth the tape. I tested it this afternoon wearing the mask and tape around the house, on a walk to the library, and inside the library. Result, no fogging. Looks like I have a solution to my eyeglasses fogging.

I don’t know what your eye situation is but laser eye surgery changed my life; it wasn’t cheap but boy I could go on for hours about how fantastic it has been.