tdhoosier

How far off do you think the reporting is? You post informative stats almost daily from worldometer. I look at the NY Times daily report. The NY Times numbers are a few thousand lower, but they generally are the same. I think the fight over reporting is fighting over peanuts. Whether off a little in either direction shouldn't change how we generally view the pandemic. I honestly think the debate over this stuff is trivial, keeps us rolling around in the mud, and hinders us from seeing the big picture.

At least they're adding 8 channels I don't watch.

But there’s a way to slow the spread, contact trace and safely open up everything while we wait for a vaccine. And then you avoid tens of thousands deaths...if America can just take this seriously and take the necessary precautions. Health aside, slowing the spread is good for the economy too. Even if the Government doesn’t shut down everything, during spikes businesses will have to temporarily close on their own because of outbreaks in offices, factories, warehouses, etc. Schools will need to shut down because of outbreaks and parents will be forced to take off work because their children will be home. Even if we let this run rampant we still aren’t going to get out of this until next year and I believe not only will that lead to many unnecessary deaths, it will destroy our economy even more. Remember, we are 4 months in and it still has only infected about 10% of the population. We are still much closer to the beginning than the end. I posted a couple of pages back, one person’s irresponsible behavior set off a chain of events at my wife’s company. 8 employees were forced to take off work (a financial hit for them) and the company shut down 2 PT clinics (a financial hit for the company). And the patients who needed Physical Therapy had to postpone their appointments. This is just one tiny example of the economical and health implications of just 1 case. This happening on a Macro scale, across the country is going to devastate the economy. It will happen more if cases continue to increase. I appreciate you @mrflynn03 and genuinely enjoy chatting with you on a whole host of issues, but i think you are dead wrong on this one. Other countries are deciding it’s the best option to slow the spread. Scientists say it’s best to slow the spread. Many Economists are now saying it’s best to slow the spread. AND we still don’t know how long antibodies last. What happens if it’s only for 3 months? That makes reaching herd immunity a whole lot harder and has fatal consequences.

I mentioned this a couple pages back but the death curve is about 15 days behind the cases curve.People don’t die the day they are diagnosed. At this time late next week if it stays down then I’ll consider that good news. Unfortunately I have a feeling it will be increasing.

Not the whole story but definitely a correlation between mask wearing and R

I don’t think you’ll find those numbers because the ‘died from’ number would be zero based on how you phrased the question Somebody can correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t believe anybody technically ‘dies from’ coronavirus. The virus attacks the red blood cells which cause inflammation. So for example if this inflammation happens in the lungs; that is pneumonia...and pneumonia is what people ‘die from’. if the virus hits an already medically compromised person the inflammation accelerates the symptoms of their condition that causes death.

Bold statement alert. Best Michael Jackson song ever. Man, that kid could sing.

Question for you @NotIThatLives So I've used it twice and the actual temp keeps shooting past the temp I set it at. So, if I set it at 350....it will go past it all the way to 400.....stay there for 10-15 minutes and then gradually go down. Does yours do this? It's not a problem with the internal probe because I'm getting relative the same readings on my external iGrill probe. It seems odd that it'd be part of the pre-heating process.

ugh. My wife got sent home from work today. An aid at their clinic got a positive test result after having symptoms last week. My wife can't go back to work until 14 days after last contact, which will be next week Tuesday. She hasn't had any symptoms yet - it's been 8 days, so we are pretty sure we're in the clear. But apparently the aid was not being careful, going out like normal, hanging with friends, etc. Kinda goes to show you how your actions don't impact just yourself, they set off a chain of events. In this case, the employees she came in contact with can't work and are forced to take PTO (if they have any left after all of this), another employee has a husband who is very compromised at home and the company now has to shut down 2 clinics temporarily for deep cleaning. I'm sure the aid feels horrible, it's not like she's a bad person....but prior careless actions can't be taken back after you test positive.

The map below shows increases and decreases in cases. One thing somebody speculated on a podcast that i haven’t thought of is that cases are rising in the south because the heat of summer is bringing people back into the air condition where the virus seems to thrive. Who’s going to dine outside in Phoenix right now? It’s much easier to social distance when the weather is mild.

True...the goal was to flatten the curve and that did happen. There was no ‘next step’ though.

Got it last week @NotIThatLives. Still haven’t cooked on it yet. Hopefully tonight, weather permitting.

Completely understand, but I also view it as a gigantic political opportunity. A legacy defining opportunity, in fact.

Sorry, I just have been thinking about this. Can't a task force or whomever declare the overall goal to be (for example): fully reopen the economy safely by November 30th? and to do this (I'm just spitballing)..... - we need to implement contact tracing by 10/1 - but we can't accurately contact trace until we're down to a level of 20k active cases -we get down to 20k active cases by having each state decrease their numbers by X% -the states decrease numbers by X%, by having counties identifying hotspots and containing them -counties with better numbers get more relaxed guidelines. -counties will achieve more successful results by encouraging face masks on a local level. Discourage indoor mass gatherings, etc. etc, Again, I'm just spitballing, but there should be a series of broken down benchmarks to achieve by specific dates. And a "carrot on the stick approach" wouldn't hurt either. The ultimate carrot being reopening the economy (which is what everybody wants), but you could also have a series of smaller carrots along the way like: reach X number and we can open up restaurants at 50% capacity. Reach x number and we can begin team sports. The message needs to be that everybody is part of the solution and that we're all in this together. Everybody loves to claim patriotism by pointing to insignificant actions like wearing flag printed board shorts on July 4th, but isn't something of this magnitude the ultimate test of patriotism? When the result of your responsible actions positively impacts the lives of your neighbors health, sanity, ability to have fun, etc.? I don't know, call me naive, but this is better than doing nothing or hunkering down until a vaccine is created. just venting once again. haha.

I was actually trying to find a breakdown by age (knowing that 80+ is a smaller demographic), so thanks for doing the math. Even at 18% we still have a lot of vulnerable elderly. Hopefully in these last 4 months we've learned how to protect them better.

I feel like that much of the time we are arguing in circles, debating numbers, debating how bad is bad, etc. Ultimately we always come back to this same conclusion; we need an answer or a clear plan. And you can't have a plan without a goal. so, first, what's the goal? And then how do we as a country get to that goal?

This is the USA....there's a plenty of 'low hanging fruit'. I hope you forgive me as coming off equally as crude. 😀 And being older makes one more likely of dying from the virus, not catching it. There's a lot of high risk elderly who haven't been infected. The graph below is from 6/16: source: https://www.scdhec.gov/infectious-diseases/viruses/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/sc-demographic-data-covid-19

This doesn't surprise me.....just the results of increased testing, which slowly is giving us a clearer picture. Those younger people with milder symptoms probably couldn't even get a test in March and April. My friend was diagnosed with 'likely COVID' by his doctor in early April; his symptoms weren't severe enough to get rationed a test at that time. Thus, never officially was counted as a positive. However, in a perfect world where all cases are reported accurately and instantaneously, I still think the cases reported and deaths reported ultimately follow the same trajectory....it's just that the deaths reported is 10-15 days behind. Kinda like riding a roller coaster with a really long train on a line graph, with the front car being 'cases reported' and the rear car being 'deaths reported'. While the font car may be ascending on a new peak, the rear car may still be descending from the previous peak. This may be a reason why the deaths are going down while cases rise. Conversely, it's also probably the reason that when NYC's cases began to fall last month people were wondering why the death rate was still climbing - it was because the back of the train was still working its way over that peak. Ultimately the 'deaths' followed the same path as the 'cases' and began to descend.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29340521/sources-mlbpa-delays-vote-proposal-wake-spring-training-outbreaks I just can't help thinking that we won't see any team sports in the near future unfortunately. If baseball, which is about as socially distanced as you can get, is already having issues then what will other sports do? I don't think it's necessarily a matter of being overly cautious, I think it's going to come down to teams not being able to play an equal amount of games. The virus doesn't abide by agendas or guidelines; it will hit some teams harder than others, causing cancelled games and ultimately unbalanced records by the season's end. If I was a betting man, I'd put money on the major sports leagues' seasons either not happening or being cut short until a vaccine is developed. Really hope I'm wrong.

Silver lining... Donald McNeil who seems to know his stuff said that it's likely people will develop antibodies, they just don't know for how long. Similar Coronaviruses antibodies last 1 to 2 years. He seemed to insinuate that any studies about antibodies would be premature at this time; it will be a while until scientists know for sure because it hinges on using accurate antibodies tests. And to his knowledge none have been created yet....they're still producing too many false positives and false negatives. So they really don't know with any accuracy, who has and who hasn't been infected. This disclaimer was mentioned further down in the article: "Based on their research, they said antibody tests may not be enough to tell whether someone had been infected"

Just wondering, have you tried youtube tv? Hulu's interface drives me mad, but I love the interface on youtube tv because you can customize the order of your guide. When it comes down to it I maybe only watch 20 channels (and that's being generous)...and I have those 20 channels listed first. Add to it that you can what you are fast forwarding through, so you can stop exactly where you want....makes recorded basketball games a breeze to watch quickly.

Looks like I'm in the market now too. My Traeger smoker is 7 years old and the fan isn't regulating the temp consistently anymore. I was already going to update the control panel, but now with this new issue I'm just going to get a new smoker. Been doing a lot of research and think I'm going with a Pit Boss, which is almost half the price of a Traeger. I shared that 'Pit Masters FB group' a couple of pages back and apparently people on it love their Pit Bosses. And they have a sliding heat shield for flame broiling and built in meat probes. Kinda works like a gas grill and smoker all in one. Anybody have one of these?

I read an article on The Hill that was dated yesterday that said we now have the ability to test 4 million per week. But the number is beside the overall point. I think that the idea is to get closer to having 'real time' results. So even, if we're testing 750k per day, 4 million, or 20 million we need to a) make sure labs have the capacity to administer results for the high amount of tests coming in b) make sure they can get results back in a timely manner and c) get to the point we're proactively testing, not only reactively testing cases with symptoms. It seems we are close to having the ability to making a test available for symptomatic people requesting one, and as a pre-screener for those who are having medical procedures. However, IMO, if this is our goal, it seems like a reactionary plan and is only a recipe for stagnation at best. The whole point for mass population testing is to be proactive, catch asymptomatic people and reduce R (reproductive rate). Keeping R in check would create economic confidence: people would be more likely to travel, go to restaurants, etc. Real time testing would also make contact tracing more feasible (if that's a route we decide to take as a country). So, technically if we're testing 10 million people a day, but aren't doing it effectively that number doesn't matter if the goal is decreasing R. A number shouldn't be a benchmark for success or failure. I read few articles yesterday because I was intrigued about the idea of mass testing and the logistical obstacle right now isn't distribution of test kits, it's testing the tests. As we test more, the bottleneck of tests coming into the lab would create a delay for results, which is counterproductive, if the goal is to catch cases early. That said, companies are working on at-home test kits that give results in minutes.

Another good podcast from The Daily from Friday with Donald McNeil....just going over the things we learned in the last month. Learning that surface transmission isn't as spreadable as initially thought, promising news on the vaccine front, asymptomatic people can spread COVID despite what WHO said and then later retracted/clarified. However, what got me thinking and frustrated is when he cited an idea by Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize Winning Economist, which basically is that we test every person in the country bi-monthly (30 million tests a day). In theory this will allow us to safely reopen the economy, identify hot spots, catch asymptomatic cases early and reduce the spread. This would cost $1.5 billion dollar a week, which is super expensive, but much, much less than another stimulus package. Granted the logistics to make this happen would be extremely hard to implement and McNeil even admitted the idea is a little 'crazy', but maybe crazy enough to work. Even if you don't think a bigger and more deathly second wave will hit in the fall, isn't it responsible to have some sort of 'insurance policy' in place. Not that I'm endorsing the idea above specifically, but it frustrates me that there still doesn't seem to be ANY plan and we're 4 months in. Now is not the time to shy aways from big ideas. The record for a vaccine to come to market is 4 years and we are on track, due to the a mass combined effort of scientists and the private sector, to bring a vaccine to market in less than a year! This is extraordinary. 3 months ago many scientists didn't think this couldn't be possible. This alone is proof, we can implement something on a grand scale to hold us over, avoid many deaths and another potential economic collapse while we wait for the vaccine to become available. Urgency makes the seemingly impossible, possible. Quite a few pages back I linked an article about how scientists have developed a way to contact trace on a mass scale AND not violate our privacy. This too, would allow us to reopen the economy safely and limit infections. Yet, it's just throw in a huge 'idea box' that never seems to get opened. I know it's easy for me to sit behind my computer and type about inaction, but it seems every step along the way we've been reactionary as a country. When are our economic, scientific and political leaders going to step up, put on a unified front and be proactive by putting a solid plan in place? Is it even possible at this point? I just feel like the country is a dog chasing its tail right now. ...just needed to vent.

Got ya. I thought you were saying that overall they were less abundant right now. I keep on saying it will be interesting when/if we eventually learn why this effects some more than others. Interesting story related to this. I found out I’m a genetic carrier for Hemochromatosis, which is a disease that is responsible for an increased absorption of iron from the gastrointestinal tract. You’re more likely to be a carrier if you ancestors of Northern and Western European descent. The reason for this dates back to the Bubonic Plague because most of those who survived the plague had hemochromatosis. Europeans who were not yet stricken by the later problems of hemochromatosis were able to fend-off the bubonic plague by absorbing all of the iron and keeping it in cells, leaving little for the pathogen. ...eventually we’ll find out why some are asymptomatic and others get hit hard. It could be something as random as increase iron absorption.