|
Any and all updates regarding the COVID-19 will need a source provided. Please do your part in helping us to keep this thread maintainable and under control.
It is YOUR responsibility to fully read through the sources that you link, and you MUST provide a brief summary explaining what the source is about. Do not expect other people to do the work for you.
Conspiracy theories and fear mongering will absolutely not be tolerated in this thread. Expect harsh mod actions if you try to incite fear needlessly.
This is not a politics thread! You are allowed to post information regarding politics if it's related to the coronavirus, but do NOT discuss politics in here.
Added a disclaimer on page 662. Many need to post better. |
I'm a little late to the party, but I do have a comment on the "public health failure" topic. We've obviously had to learn a lot as we go, and hindsight is clearer, so there's a lot that can be forgiven in terms of incorrect facts, or being too cautious or not cautious enough. But there is at least one topic for which I can cleanly say that the public health officials in the US fucked up in a way that was ill-advised and entirely avoidable: the entire initial waffling on masks.
The reality on masks at this point looks to be something like respirator-quality (N95 and up) >> surgical > cloth, and while there's some question as to how effective the latter types of masks are, the recommendation has become quite widespread in terms of using them. But apparently it was supposed to be a good idea to say that masks are a bad idea, because they were worried that people would go out and hog all the good ones. Well it clearly didn't do much good, since the "good ones" are still in remarkably short supply eight months later, and mask skepticism is much larger than it might have had to be with consistent messaging. That's some clear bad policy.
American safety nets being utterly terrible in a way that forces people to go out and work despite the risks is another big problem, but that's a much harder problem to solve.
|
I can absolutely agree with the idea that health authority messaging on masks was bungled, there was clearly a disconnect between getting neutral expertise-driven info on masks out to the public and stemming discontent early on when masks were hard to find.
|
|
|
My impression of the early mask messaging was that it was entirely due to scarcity and the need to ensure hospitals can stock up first. No matter how you slice it, hospitals needed masks more than individuals. If I knew everything I do now, and I was Fauci in January, I would discourage people from buying masks so that hospitals got them. It is possible that encouraging people to make cloth masks would have worked, but it may have just made everyone buy all the masks they can anyway. The number one priority was getting as many masks to hospitals as possible. That is how you save the most lives. That being said, that needed to be done way quicker. But I still maintain from a maximization of life perspective, disinformation to prevent mask hoarding is correct. It is not a good choice, but it appears they had no good choices at the time because our country simply wasn't prepared at all.
The actual failure was our country having insufficient PPE infrastructure and inventory. Disaster preparedness is important, as we can see. $10 on prevention is worth $1000 in repairs. Fauci shouldn't have needed to preserve mask stocks, they should have been stuffed full.
Fauci explained the early advice against masks by saying: "The public-health community — and many people were saying this — were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply."
N95 masks are higher-grade equipment than ordinary masks and mainly used by medical workers.
He added that the government did not want healthcare workers "to be without the equipment that they needed ... We were afraid that that would deter away the people who really needed it."
The government also knows more about the effectiveness of different types of masks than it did at the beginning, he said.
"Now we have masks, and we know that you don't need an N95 if you're an ordinary person in the street," he said. "We also know that simple cloth coverings that many people have can work as well as a mask in many cases."
https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-because-doctors-shortages-from-the-start-2020-6
|
Tactical dishonesty plays really badly for public messaging; that's not defensible. They didn't want people to take all the good quality masks so they decided to lie about it - don't be surprised if that has consequences.
Oh and people still stocked up N95s because they logically understood that those are the good quality masks. So on top of the consequences of lying it's also a huge fail for obtaining more PPE.
|
On October 09 2020 22:02 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On October 09 2020 21:41 farvacola wrote:
There are tons of hidden premises in your criticism that you seem unaware of. The solutions to the harms of people losing their jobs incident to a pandemic, including medical professionals suffering downstream effects of reduced consumption of elective medical procedures, do not deal solely in open or not open, they also implicate wage insurance and other safety net programs that are bogeymen here in the States. The presence and efficacy of those very programs is one of the biggest points of contrast between the US and nations that did a better job managing the pandemic. The PPP was a really shitty placeholder and, surprise surprise, the boatloads of CARES Act corporate welfare didn't really help anyone but the corporations and their shareholders.
As for the notion that what has been done is why we are "fight[ing] the flu and coronavirus simultaneously at their peak," I think you need to take a harder look at the ebb and flow of this pandemic and how pandemics are understood generally. It is absolutely possible, if not likely, that the measures already taken have softened the peak and given the medical establishment time to prepare for what was always going to be a rough Fall and Winter. Okay that's not really relevant to my argument - even if the USA had the most robust social safety nets on the planet my position would not change even in the slightest. Also trying to rephrase the laying off of doctors and nurses during a pandemic as "suffering downstream effects of reduced consumption of elective procedures" is completely disingenuous. I work in the Emergency Department. Our hospital laid off every single PA and nurse practitioner that was working for us. They also laid off every travel nurse and cut the shifts of several staff nurses. We don't tend to do many elective procedures in the emergency room and I can assure you staff would not have been laid off if there were patients to see, regardless if the hospital was not making less money from elective procedures.
PA's and NP's aren't doctors. Get your story straight.
Travel nurses are contracted and easily replaceable.
I also want to call BS on your argument. I too have extensive experience working in an emergency department (among other emergency medicine settings). Not a single hospital in my metro area cut any emergency staff during the lockdown. They only furloughed non-essential medical services. The problem wasn't the lockdown, it was your shitty hospital that made bad management decisions.
Furthermore, layoffs and furloughs occurred because patient volume cratered. This either 1) would have happened as people hunkered down even without lockdown orders because they were scared, or 2) patient volume would've gone up and "jobs would've been saved" only because countless more people would have been dying and hospitals would've been even more overrun than they were.
Also, ClutZ's take on experts should get him laughed out of the room. Not only does it make me skeptical that he has any experience with any true expertise in any field, but it shows an astounding lack of understanding of the medical field in general. He also fails to give any specifics on how Fauci is wrong "time and time again", suggesting that, as others have mentioned, he's just mad and wants to keep complaining about something to validate his feelings regardless of the truth of the matter.
|
On October 10 2020 01:45 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On October 09 2020 22:02 BlackJack wrote:On October 09 2020 21:41 farvacola wrote:
There are tons of hidden premises in your criticism that you seem unaware of. The solutions to the harms of people losing their jobs incident to a pandemic, including medical professionals suffering downstream effects of reduced consumption of elective medical procedures, do not deal solely in open or not open, they also implicate wage insurance and other safety net programs that are bogeymen here in the States. The presence and efficacy of those very programs is one of the biggest points of contrast between the US and nations that did a better job managing the pandemic. The PPP was a really shitty placeholder and, surprise surprise, the boatloads of CARES Act corporate welfare didn't really help anyone but the corporations and their shareholders.
As for the notion that what has been done is why we are "fight[ing] the flu and coronavirus simultaneously at their peak," I think you need to take a harder look at the ebb and flow of this pandemic and how pandemics are understood generally. It is absolutely possible, if not likely, that the measures already taken have softened the peak and given the medical establishment time to prepare for what was always going to be a rough Fall and Winter. Okay that's not really relevant to my argument - even if the USA had the most robust social safety nets on the planet my position would not change even in the slightest. Also trying to rephrase the laying off of doctors and nurses during a pandemic as "suffering downstream effects of reduced consumption of elective procedures" is completely disingenuous. I work in the Emergency Department. Our hospital laid off every single PA and nurse practitioner that was working for us. They also laid off every travel nurse and cut the shifts of several staff nurses. We don't tend to do many elective procedures in the emergency room and I can assure you staff would not have been laid off if there were patients to see, regardless if the hospital was not making less money from elective procedures. PA's and NP's aren't doctors. Get your story straight. Travel nurses are contracted and easily replaceable. I also want to call BS on your argument. I too have extensive experience working in an emergency department (among other emergency medicine settings). Not a single hospital in my metro area cut any emergency staff during the lockdown. They only furloughed non-essential medical services. The problem wasn't the lockdown, it was your shitty hospital that made bad management decisions. Furthermore, layoffs and furloughs occurred because patient volume cratered. This either 1) would have happened as people hunkered down even without lockdown orders because they were scared, or 2) patient volume would've gone up and "jobs would've been saved" only because countless more people would have been dying and hospitals would've been even more overrun than they were. Also, ClutZ's take on experts should get him laughed out of the room. Not only does it make me skeptical that he has any experience with any true expertise in any field, but it shows an astounding lack of understanding of the medical field in general. He also fails to give any specifics on how Fauci is wrong "time and time again", suggesting that, as others have mentioned, he's just mad and wants to keep complaining about something to validate his feelings regardless of the truth of the matter.
"It didn't happen near me so it must not be true." Absolutely absurd thinking. The laying off and furloughing of medical professionals, including emergency and urgenct care workers, during the lockdowns is well documented, you don't get to just deny that it happened or that it only happened at "my shitty hospital."
Thanks for pointing out that mid-level providers are different from doctors and that travel nurses are replaceable but those distinctions were not as important to my argument as you seem to think they were.
|
On October 09 2020 23:22 farvacola wrote:
Thank you for missing yet another opportunity to support your criticism with anything other than your previous complaints, it says a lot about what folks critical of the response of health officials are working with. Make no mistake, though, the problems with your tack have been laid bare; you haven't set forth an actual alternative to what happened, nor have you addressed how or why your criticisms do not implicate a fantasy world of your own imagining. I provided you with a direct and substantive argument on why your criticism is unfounded, that it turns on unsupported premises. Rather than support those premises with some evidence that, for example, consumption of health services could have been buoyed by an approach that would have prevented massive layoffs by medical systems, you misidentified my posts as pure appeals to authority and entirely ignored the meat of the discussion, that it's very likely we all were and are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario where the best anyone could possibly do was make the best of a terrible situation. There's also the problem of claiming to be concerned with the economic effects of pandemic measures while also being certain that any and all safety net changes are irrelevant, but I digress.
If you are so sure that the government messed up and that there exists an alternative timeline where health authorities could have done something better, feel free to explain how and why that alternative timeline is rooted in reality.
I don't need to add more substance to my criticism simply because it was the same as my criticism 6 months ago. Are you trying to penalize me for being consistent? My position is the same as it has always been: There are only 2 ways out of this pandemic, either 1) Wait for a vaccine or 2) Let it burn through. Economies are reopening and cases and deaths are rising so it would seem that the world is choosing not to wait for a vaccine. In that case it's better to have a slow burn which means opening things back up as much as possible without hospitals being overrun.
You can call this speculation and some "magical timeline" but as I mentioned before when I first entered this thread we have obvious real-time examples. I used to live in Florida, and now I live in California. In Florida things are almost fully open. DisneyWorld has been open for 2 months. In California our governor just announced there are no plans and there is no rush to open DisneyLand in the near future. Yes, this pandemic is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario" and it's about picking the least terrible scenario. My argument is that Florida chose a better scenario than California. Florida has more deaths per capita than California. Florida has more cases per capita than Californa. Florida, in my opinion, is still doing better than California.
|
On October 10 2020 01:10 LegalLord wrote:
Tactical dishonesty plays really badly for public messaging; that's not defensible. They didn't want people to take all the good quality masks so they decided to lie about it - don't be surprised if that has consequences.
Oh and people still stocked up N95s because they logically understood that those are the good quality masks. So on top of the consequences of lying it's also a huge fail for obtaining more PPE.
Definitely interesting to read, especially since I see the problem as too much honesty. The messaging I saw in actual public health sources since day 1 was that cloth masks were probably not going to keep you from being infected if you were in close contact with an infected person but almost certainly reduced your chance of transmitting to other people, especially when symptomatic. N95s on the other hand could. Even in March I saw cloth masks being specifically branded as CPE (community protective equipment) in presentations from people in public health.
That was, and as far as we know is, pretty much true. The issue is that telling governors and other policymakers that information didn't make them impose mask requirements in communities with high levels of spread. The alternative of saying "community mask requirements are good" and stopping there to let people believe the fantasy that it would help them personally, would be tactical dishonesty to me.
|
|
|
Bisutopia19286 Posts
On October 10 2020 07:23 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On October 10 2020 06:51 BlackJack wrote:On October 09 2020 23:22 farvacola wrote:
Thank you for missing yet another opportunity to support your criticism with anything other than your previous complaints, it says a lot about what folks critical of the response of health officials are working with. Make no mistake, though, the problems with your tack have been laid bare; you haven't set forth an actual alternative to what happened, nor have you addressed how or why your criticisms do not implicate a fantasy world of your own imagining. I provided you with a direct and substantive argument on why your criticism is unfounded, that it turns on unsupported premises. Rather than support those premises with some evidence that, for example, consumption of health services could have been buoyed by an approach that would have prevented massive layoffs by medical systems, you misidentified my posts as pure appeals to authority and entirely ignored the meat of the discussion, that it's very likely we all were and are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario where the best anyone could possibly do was make the best of a terrible situation. There's also the problem of claiming to be concerned with the economic effects of pandemic measures while also being certain that any and all safety net changes are irrelevant, but I digress.
If you are so sure that the government messed up and that there exists an alternative timeline where health authorities could have done something better, feel free to explain how and why that alternative timeline is rooted in reality. I don't need to add more substance to my criticism simply because it was the same as my criticism 6 months ago. Are you trying to penalize me for being consistent? My position is the same as it has always been: There are only 2 ways out of this pandemic, either 1) Wait for a vaccine or 2) Let it burn through. Economies are reopening and cases and deaths are rising so it would seem that the world is choosing not to wait for a vaccine. In that case it's better to have a slow burn which means opening things back up as much as possible without hospitals being overrun. You can call this speculation and some "magical timeline" but as I mentioned before when I first entered this thread we have obvious real-time examples. I used to live in Florida, and now I live in California. In Florida things are almost fully open. DisneyWorld has been open for 2 months. In California our governor just announced there are no plans and there is no rush to open DisneyLand in the near future. Yes, this pandemic is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario" and it's about picking the least terrible scenario. My argument is that Florida chose a better scenario than California. Florida has more deaths per capita than California. Florida has more cases per capita than Californa. Florida, in my opinion, is still doing better than California. But there are also WAY WAY better places you can compare too than California. If you look outside of the US you will see there are many countries, states and provinces that have done as good a job as Florida at opening things up, but also done WAY WAY better at keeping cases and deaths low. If you have a consistent message from all your politicians and leadership, not a president and various Governors disregarding it, and police chiefs saying they won enforce and so on. You end up with a populous who does a much better job at following all the rules and keeping the case numbers, deaths, future issues. And if you only care about the costs, they also keep the HUGE cost of healthcare down. And don't think you in the states won't pay for it in your taxes as your government spends basically the same per person as ours does in healthcare. And a lot of the people getting sick are those without coverage, not to mention all those with long term issues are either going to be uninsurable or have super high premiums to your government. There is no way someone can look objectively at Florida and say "they did a good job". You can piece some anecdotes and use confirmation bias. But if you just look at data and compare things especially outside of the US borders where the leadership did way better it is not even close.
Ironically, the most blue counties in Florida are the worst areas of the state. I'm not saying that's the reason, just adding that for the California vs Florida debate. Parts of Florida have done really well voluntarily btw. Early on every store in my county decided on mandatory masks without a county mandate within a month of the lock downs and that hasn't stopped to this very day. We are doing great as a county/area. My neighbor county of Duval/jacksonville Fl has really done a solid job too considering its size.
|
|
|
On October 10 2020 08:51 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On October 10 2020 07:23 JimmiC wrote:On October 10 2020 06:51 BlackJack wrote:On October 09 2020 23:22 farvacola wrote:
Thank you for missing yet another opportunity to support your criticism with anything other than your previous complaints, it says a lot about what folks critical of the response of health officials are working with. Make no mistake, though, the problems with your tack have been laid bare; you haven't set forth an actual alternative to what happened, nor have you addressed how or why your criticisms do not implicate a fantasy world of your own imagining. I provided you with a direct and substantive argument on why your criticism is unfounded, that it turns on unsupported premises. Rather than support those premises with some evidence that, for example, consumption of health services could have been buoyed by an approach that would have prevented massive layoffs by medical systems, you misidentified my posts as pure appeals to authority and entirely ignored the meat of the discussion, that it's very likely we all were and are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario where the best anyone could possibly do was make the best of a terrible situation. There's also the problem of claiming to be concerned with the economic effects of pandemic measures while also being certain that any and all safety net changes are irrelevant, but I digress.
If you are so sure that the government messed up and that there exists an alternative timeline where health authorities could have done something better, feel free to explain how and why that alternative timeline is rooted in reality. I don't need to add more substance to my criticism simply because it was the same as my criticism 6 months ago. Are you trying to penalize me for being consistent? My position is the same as it has always been: There are only 2 ways out of this pandemic, either 1) Wait for a vaccine or 2) Let it burn through. Economies are reopening and cases and deaths are rising so it would seem that the world is choosing not to wait for a vaccine. In that case it's better to have a slow burn which means opening things back up as much as possible without hospitals being overrun. You can call this speculation and some "magical timeline" but as I mentioned before when I first entered this thread we have obvious real-time examples. I used to live in Florida, and now I live in California. In Florida things are almost fully open. DisneyWorld has been open for 2 months. In California our governor just announced there are no plans and there is no rush to open DisneyLand in the near future. Yes, this pandemic is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario" and it's about picking the least terrible scenario. My argument is that Florida chose a better scenario than California. Florida has more deaths per capita than California. Florida has more cases per capita than Californa. Florida, in my opinion, is still doing better than California. But there are also WAY WAY better places you can compare too than California. If you look outside of the US you will see there are many countries, states and provinces that have done as good a job as Florida at opening things up, but also done WAY WAY better at keeping cases and deaths low. If you have a consistent message from all your politicians and leadership, not a president and various Governors disregarding it, and police chiefs saying they won enforce and so on. You end up with a populous who does a much better job at following all the rules and keeping the case numbers, deaths, future issues. And if you only care about the costs, they also keep the HUGE cost of healthcare down. And don't think you in the states won't pay for it in your taxes as your government spends basically the same per person as ours does in healthcare. And a lot of the people getting sick are those without coverage, not to mention all those with long term issues are either going to be uninsurable or have super high premiums to your government. There is no way someone can look objectively at Florida and say "they did a good job". You can piece some anecdotes and use confirmation bias. But if you just look at data and compare things especially outside of the US borders where the leadership did way better it is not even close. Ironically, the most blue counties in Florida are the worst areas of the state. I'm not saying that's the reason, just adding that for the California vs Florida debate. Parts of Florida have done really well voluntarily btw. Early on every store in my county decided on mandatory masks without a county mandate within a month of the lock downs and that hasn't stopped to this very day. We are doing great as a county/area. My neighbor county of Duval/jacksonville Fl has really done a solid job too considering its size.
Its not ironic. Coronavirus has the largest risk of spreading where population densities are highest, which are always the bluest regions in any state because Democratic Party support is always tied with level of education attainment. People with high education attainment generally pack themselves in urban areas as that is where the work is. If you believe the leaks regarding Kushner, the initial mishandling of the spread was done to intentionally harm Democratic leaning regions the hardest...until it predictably spread everywhere else.
The major problem with coronavirus is that it doesn't discriminate. If some morons choose to get infected with coronavirus, its going to spread hard and fast. If you're in a more rural environment, its easier to control due to lower population densities. In an urban environment, you can't do anything if people are taking public transport and not masking/social distancing. That's the key problem with California's coronavirus spread and really America's inept handling of the pandemic. There's too many people who don't see it as a risk or don't believe in doing mitigation strategies at all because our government spent most of the first few months downplaying the virus and amplifying any sources that would claim that the pandemic would be over by summer. You cannot stop the spread in heavily populated regions because a large chunk of people in those regions refuse to maintain vigilance at all reasonable times.
The solution was to get cases low enough during the initial outbreak and then implement mitigation strategies so cases would be low enough to have everyone operate at a decreased but generally self sustainable level. Some businesses, like airlines and tourism, will not be self sustainable at decreased operations but that's the whole point of federal governments and financial assistance legislation. Airlines are fucked no matter what you do, you cannot make people fly and travel during a pandemic.
But ultimately nothing was done so we're doing the solution where everyone does their own thing and pray for the best when we could have been Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan or even Japan (whose government handled this extremely ineptly but everyone and businesses seemed to have enough brains to do the right thing to minimise spread) where business is more or less normal in most parts of their respective countries. We're trying to do the same except we're also dealing with massive numbers of people are getting sick, getting hit with injuries to organs and deaths from coronavirus (and that's ignoring excess deaths).
|
No offense Clutz but a biomedical engineer wouldn't flip a quarter to see if a molecule would be successful. The success rate is something along 0.001%. It's the equivalent of throwing paint at a wall to see if anything sticks. Then you gotta do it again for the next phase of testing.
Also please do not link Fauci with Dr Phil. At this point you're just vomitting Trump's propaganda.
|
Why is California being used as some sort of shining example of how to handle the coronavirus spread? With a constant waffling between massive lockdowns and immediately keeling over and reversing it the moment that big businesses complain, it’s hard to imagine a state that did it worse. Besides, perhaps, Florida, but maybe not even then.
|
On October 11 2020 00:09 LegalLord wrote:
Why is California being used as some sort of shining example of how to handle the coronavirus spread? With a constant waffling between massive lockdowns and immediately keeling over and reversing it the moment that big businesses complain, it’s hard to imagine a state that did it worse. Besides, perhaps, Florida, but maybe not even then.
Besides the Elon Musk thing what waffling are you referring to?
|
27k new cases in France today, 11% positivity rate.
Hospitals and ICU continue their slow rise. We have about 1 month left before shit hits the fan. If it doesn't go the other way in the next 2/3weeks, expect tough decisions.
|
Just noticed France has had a total of over 700k cases, but it lists 585k as still active. Only 100k recovered. I guess it's some kind of error, where many recovered people didn't report it?
|
On October 11 2020 07:59 arbiter_md wrote:
Just noticed France has had a total of over 700k cases, but it lists 585k as still active. Only 100k recovered. I guess it's some kind of error, where many recovered people didn't report it? I assume many get tested positive (and therefor counted) and then go home and tough it out until they feel better and then get on with their life. Never going back for another test to get a negative result.
|
The situation in the netherlands has gone completely out of hand and we are now one of the worst hit countries in the whole world.
New meassures are expected on tuesday at the earliest.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
