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buzzsaw
 Rep: 423 

Re: Covid 19

buzzsaw wrote:

The conspiracy theory is what the media has been feeding people.  Just wait.  Truth is starting to trickle out and people are going to be pissed as more and more comes to light. 

People are responsible for themselves.  Stay in if you feel the need to stay in, you're in the at-risk category, or you're responsible for people in the at-risk category.  Everyone else needs to just make the decisions that make sense for them...as long as the at-risk are protected, it really doesn't matter how many others get it.  Plenty have it or had it already and never knew.  The key (as I've said from the beginning) is protecting the at-risk groups.  Had we done that, we'd be in a much better situation across the board.

mitchejw
 Rep: 130 

Re: Covid 19

mitchejw wrote:
buzzsaw wrote:

The conspiracy theory is what the media has been feeding people.  Just wait.  Truth is starting to trickle out and people are going to be pissed as more and more comes to light. 

People are responsible for themselves.  Stay in if you feel the need to stay in, you're in the at-risk category, or you're responsible for people in the at-risk category.  Everyone else needs to just make the decisions that make sense for them...as long as the at-risk are protected, it really doesn't matter how many others get it.  Plenty have it or had it already and never knew.  The key (as I've said from the beginning) is protecting the at-risk groups.  Had we done that, we'd be in a much better situation across the board.

Oh good...the narrative is ‘media has...conspiracy theorist good.’

Man this gets exhausting.

Neemo
 Rep: 485 

Re: Covid 19

Neemo wrote:

Buzz ... The whole "do whatever the fuck u want" mentality is what is making things worse...stay home unless absolutely necessary

Cases are doubling every 5 days in canada...not sure about other countries...but more than 700 folks died yesterday in NYC alone and that city has more cases than all of canada combined...u are delusional if u think this is a government hoax

Everyone is responsible for the at risk people...its called 3 degrees of separation

buzzsaw
 Rep: 423 

Re: Covid 19

buzzsaw wrote:
mitchejw wrote:
buzzsaw wrote:

The conspiracy theory is what the media has been feeding people.  Just wait.  Truth is starting to trickle out and people are going to be pissed as more and more comes to light. 

People are responsible for themselves.  Stay in if you feel the need to stay in, you're in the at-risk category, or you're responsible for people in the at-risk category.  Everyone else needs to just make the decisions that make sense for them...as long as the at-risk are protected, it really doesn't matter how many others get it.  Plenty have it or had it already and never knew.  The key (as I've said from the beginning) is protecting the at-risk groups.  Had we done that, we'd be in a much better situation across the board.

Oh good...the narrative is ‘media has...conspiracy theorist good.’

Man this gets exhausting.

Not my narrative son.  Pay attention.  Stop selectively picking out little pieces and ignoring the rest of it...that's what's made you an idiot in the first place.

Neemo
 Rep: 485 

Re: Covid 19

Neemo wrote:

^no insults buzzsaw ... please and thank you

buzzsaw
 Rep: 423 

Re: Covid 19

buzzsaw wrote:
Neemo wrote:

Buzz ... The whole "do whatever the fuck u want" mentality is what is making things worse...stay home unless absolutely necessary

Cases are doubling every 5 days in canada...not sure about other countries...but more than 700 folks died yesterday in NYC alone and that city has more cases than all of canada combined...u are delusional if u think this is a government hoax

Everyone is responsible for the at risk people...its called 3 degrees of separation

Nope.  Read about herd immunity and why it's important.  Thank me later.  You protect the at-risk and the people responsible for the at-risk protect themselves.  The rest of us develop the immunity to make it a non-issue.  That's how science works.

buzzsaw
 Rep: 423 

Re: Covid 19

buzzsaw wrote:
Neemo wrote:

^no insults buzzsaw ... please and thank you

It's not an insult, it's the truth.  He has to wear the hat he's been wearing for years.  If he's going to pick one little piece of what I said while ignoring the rest of it, he's going to wear the hat.  It's his fault, not mine.

buzzsaw
 Rep: 423 

Re: Covid 19

buzzsaw wrote:
buzzsaw wrote:

From the same site:

____________________________________________________________________________________
Why are we ignoring all the contrarian scholars on COVID-19?


A few months into the coronavirus panic here in this country, and one thing is clear: People love bad news. Headlines obsessively chart each new case and each new death; medical doctors are constantly on television and in news media warning us that “the worst is yet to come,” that “the fight is just beginning,” that this is the “new normal” and that we won’t be able to resume typical social conventions “for a long time.”

You might think it’s a universal consensus that this disease is both world-ending and here to stay. Yet many scholars—a growing amount of them, more and more every day—are sounding the alarm on what they’re calling a major overreaction to this disease: epidemiologists, public health officials, preventative medicine experts, professors and numerous other academics have all been raising red flags regarding the draconian, ongoing response to the coronavirus outbreak here, namely by pointing out that lockdowns are ineffective, unwise and destructive policy that will put millions out of work while doing little to halt the spread of the disease.

Why is nobody paying attention to them? Are they less credentialed, more inexperienced, less trustworthy? None of those things are true. There are, rather, likely two elements here: In the first place, much of the media are largely invested in terrifying, scary headlines and news stories meant to shock and frighten readers with seemingly grim and dire predictions: Readers, for whatever reason, will often keep returning to news sources that scare the living daylights out of them. We’re a strange species.

Government officials, too, are very much invested in promoting doomsayer scenarios, simply because that’s what they’ve been doing all along: We’ve been told from the beginning that this is a once-in-a-century pandemic that could result in literally millions of deaths if major, disruptive, open-ended government measures are not taken to combat it. It would be humiliating, and in some cases politically suicidal, if they were to entertain the less-panicky models and projections, let alone endorse them. Better to just keep heralding the end of the world even as the data get better on a daily and sometimes hourly basis.

There are differing, dissenting opinions on this pandemic from scholars and academics who can be trusted. They’re worth listening to. Don’t be afraid to seek them out.

Read or shut up.

buzzsaw
 Rep: 423 

Re: Covid 19

buzzsaw wrote:
buzzsaw wrote:

Maybe an expert from Stanford can open some eyes...probably not, but I'm going to post it anyway...you know, science!  Let me know if you find this guy's credentials unacceptable...

______________________________________________________________________________________

“If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR [virus] tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.”

This was not written by some right-wing crank claiming coronavirus is a conspiracy to deny President Trump a second term, or an excuse to bring down capitalism.

It’s from a sobering and illuminating essay by Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis, co-director of its Meta-Research Innovation Center, published in the life sciences news site STAT.

The coronavirus-driven crackdowns on public life by state and local political leaders are being made in a data vacuum, Ioannidis warns, and extreme government measures to prevent infections may actually lead to more deaths.

“The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic,” he says. “But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco,” with policymakers relying on “meaningless” statistics based on unreliable samples:

Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population. …

Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.

The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

The general ignorance of journalists when it comes to reporting scientific research is making the response worse.

Consider the complicating factors when trying to project that one cruise ship’s mortality rate “onto the age structure of the U.S. population”: It’s based on seven deaths, in a population (tourists) that “may have different frequencies of chronic diseases” than the general population.

The “reasonable estimates” for the general population range from 0.05 percent to 1 percent (the elderly tourist cruise line death rate), Ioannidis writes:

A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

The Stanford scientist notes that “mild” coronaviruses (not COVID-19) have much higher case fatality rates when infecting “elderly people in nursing homes” (the main cluster of cases in the Seattle area), and account for up to a tenth of respiratory hospitalizations.

Ioannidis further notes the difficulty of nailing down what might have killed a person with multiple infections, citing an autopsy series of elderly victims of respiratory viruses: “A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.”

His own “mid-range guess” for the COVID-19 mortality rate – 0.3 percent of the general population – would produce 10,000 deaths, but that would not even register a blip “within the noise” of estimated deaths from “influenza-like illness.”

Without better data (and yes, the Trump administration irredeemably botched the testing), policymakers are using “prepare-for-the-worst reasoning” to impose “extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns”:

Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work. School closures, for example, may reduce transmission rates. But they may also backfire if children socialize anyhow, if school closure leads children to spend more time with susceptible elderly family members, if children at home disrupt their parents ability to work, and more. School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.

The conventional wisdom to “flatten the curve” – managing the load on the health system through social distancing – could even backfire, Ioannidis writes:

Yet if the health system does become overwhelmed, the majority of the extra deaths may not be due to coronavirus but to other common diseases and conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, trauma, bleeding, and the like that are not adequately treated. If the level of the epidemic does overwhelm the health system and extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, then flattening the curve may make things worse: Instead of being overwhelmed during a short, acute phase, the health system will remain overwhelmed for a more protracted period. That’s another reason we need data about the exact level of the epidemic activity.

He warns policymakers to consider the consequences of “lockdowns of months, if not years, [where] life largely stops.”

If we’re going to risk the “financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric” caused by such extreme measures, “we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.”

Many pixels have been spilled mocking the Trump administration for its indifference to rigorous science, with some criticisms more fair than others.

But Ioannidis’s analysis should be taken the most seriously by state and local leaders, who actually have the power to destroy their economies and civic life, and the scientifically ignorant media who feed them doomsday coverage.

Unless you're prepared to tell the expert from Stanford that he doesn't know what he's talking about, I suggest you stop hurling passive aggressive insults at me...I won't be passive aggressive in return.

IRISH OS1R1S
 Rep: 59 

Re: Covid 19

IRISH OS1R1S wrote:

That Stanford expert is one voice of thousands. Turn on any channel and everyone is saying isolation is working.

Oh and the herd immunity. If you stepped out of that bubble you live in you would know the British tried the herd option. It didn't go to well.

You do not go for herd immunity immediately, it is something that needs to be brought in gradually to avoid pressure on the health systems.

Don't know why I'm even engaging with you, you are a complete fraud and bully to match.

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