First man, my condolences and I hope you and yours are staying safe. I think this thing has only started in terms of the kinds of fallout we will see, unfortunately.
I read this, but we don’t have any study data to analyze it with yet. They used a different test than the santa Clara study, which likely has a different sensitivity and specificity and that could skew things seriously (or not).
The more I read the Santa Clara study the less I believe it is accurate. Which I hate to say because an author I really like was involved in it. It’s also gotten a lot of statisticians upset over the methodology.
I am seriously sorry to hear that mate. Keep yourself safe! This is exposing a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people.
That’s what has had me concerned from the get go. The unknowns between how this disease attacks, what it affects, and the vast numbers of people walking around with undiagnosed conditions that may be vulnerable.
Certain people in specific categories know to be careful, but then there’s the rest of them.
That’s why I can’t understand this careless and often twisted up attitude people have toward this. Between their ability to deny, distort, and politicize, it’s a wonder to me that it hasn’t been an unmitigated disaster.
They don’t go outside except to drive slow in your way in a giant car, or golf cart, depending. My wife is from there, I lived there for 4 years. I was never outside, it’s the whitest I’ve ever been.
A high proportion of ‘get off my lawn’ old folks sitting on the porch with shotguns?
I did also hear tell of a report that there are more virulent strains in different parts of the country. They could have had the upside of a viral mutation maybe?
This. I suspect this is why I’ve heard of cases of some healthy, young people dying and others having mild symptoms. And as said or implied, there are people pushing the notion that only people old people close to death die from it. But, there were old people trucking along even with comorbidities with no signs of deterioration and likely with years of life left that died. Having a few years or a decade or more of life left isn’t knocking on death’s door. The family friend Who passed away had morbidities but had an alright quality of life. She was not hobbling along with a walker and barely mumbling words. In fact, the only observable morbidity was overweight. So she could have loved many more years, maybe decades.
People are saying truly dismissive and callous things. And it’s partly why I’ve temporarily disabled FB and IG.
I have a friend that’s on this bandwagon. Quite frankly, he is on my last nerve. I have held my tongue but he is one more bullshit, conspiracy theory video away from the block button
Neither do I…and whether what is being done is “right” or “wrong” will probably be left for history to decide (as you alluded to, Steel).
I do know that Cyberspace is littered with critics galore (many very understandable, if you are being crushed financially). I don’t even mind people venting their frustrations. What I hate are the instigators; whom are stable financially; who throw out all of the criticism about how this Pandemic has been approached…with very little in the way of how they would have approached it. And if they do offer a “solution”…they have no idea on how they would have practically implemented it.
One thing I’ve become aware of more recently with regard to health and age is that a “healthy 75 year old” is vastly different than a healthy 25 year old. Seems obvious, but I had to visit the ER in February for pretty severe breathing difficulty (some kind of non-flu viral syndrom) and there was a particular metabolite or enzyme reading that was at like 400+, indicative of heart failure in general, but normal for people age 70+.
So, as a natural consequence of living long, age does change the health markers, and some degree of heart failure does seem to be expected as we age.
I know it seems stupidly obvious and don’t mean to come off as tedious or condescending but there are some discrete factors that can become obscured by the word or classification of “healthy” without further context.
I know of a guy who died from the virus. Early sixties, played tennis basically every day. Despite being more physically active than most of the people of his age, when he died he was listed as having a preexisting condition because he had high blood pressure.
I’m an advisor on a massive infrastructure project in a large European country whose commercial viability depends on consumers being physically present at the premises. Needless to say, the investors are very worried about the massive hit on the projected ROI and have formed a team of data scientists to crunch the numbers from all over the world to analyze potential scenarios.
Now, without getting into too much details I’ll just say a bit about Belarus, the only country that hasn’t got any Covid-19 related restrictions in place. So the last communist dictatorship in Europe is per far-right yardstick the only free country on the continent.
Their state media is in full denial mode as not to “alarm the population” and their President claimed that one can kill the virus by drinking vodka and driving a tractor (he’s a morbidly fascinating character and deserves much more attention but I digress)
What’s that got to do with anything one may ask? Well, despite total media control that minimizes and ignores the risks associated with Covid-19, all of their service industry and retail metrics have nevertheless plummeted - amount of foot traffic in shopping malls, number of in-store retail transactions, restaurant and bar visits etc.
So this means that the public health vs. the economy is a false dichotomy - there’s no fucking way that all people will resume their behavior patterns from a few months back as if by magic if everything reopens tomorrow.
