quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Sweden simply did what humans and society have always done in times of a pandemic. It is the United States and other countries who have taken the extreme and unprecedented step of locking down their entire economies.

WE are the ones running the experiment here, and it is clearer every day that it is turning into a public policy calamity and moreover a disaster for all of us.

Yeah, well... we handled it that way back in 1918 when common sense still existed.

My understanding is there is a delay of a few days (5 days?) from your contact with an infected person, to the time when you start presenting symptoms yourself, ie covid-19 fever/temperature, coughing, etc.

So, if you're tested on day one when you present no symptoms, couldn't you present symptoms after the test? So what's the purpose of a test unless everyone is regularly?

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Trump shamed them into giving the money back. Good.

Harvard won't 'seek or accept' federal stimulus money after calls from Trump to return cash

Harvard University announced in a statement Wednesday that it will no longer "seek or accept" aid from the CARES Act Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, one day after President Trump demanded the Ivy League school return federal relief cash.

https://www.foxnews.com/politi...trump-to-return-cash

What Harvard wants to keep out of the public's eye is "it already has a $41 billion endowment fund." --- that's the reason they don't want to fight with Trump in public.

a reporter keeps pushing Cuomo

video at

https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313...vid19-economy-video/

A reporter asked Gov. Cuomo what he’d say to New Yorkers who want to go back to work because they’re running out of money, to which he replied, “economic hardship doesn’t equal death”

“You want to go to work? Go take a job as an essential worker” he added

quote:

A reporter asked Gov. Cuomo what he’d say to New Yorkers who want to go back to work because they’re running out of money, to which he replied, “economic hardship doesn’t equal death”“You want to go to work? Go take a job as an essential worker” he added

What a real prick. Economic hardship will end up causing deaths just as surely as this virus. Asses like him need to get sick and drop dead.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
a reporter keeps pushing Cuomo

video at

https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313...vid19-economy-video/

A reporter asked Gov. Cuomo what he’d say to New Yorkers who want to go back to work because they’re running out of money, to which he replied, “economic hardship doesn’t equal death”

“You want to go to work? Go take a job as an essential worker” he added

Great idea, because a bartender can easily get a job as a nurse or paramedic after 1-4 years of school. Especially since all of those essential companies are flush with cash and hiring all comers.

No university, public or private, should be getting a bailout. The top 120 endowments are all over $700 million with the top 83 being over $1 billion.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/d...3.90.asp?current=yes

The Swedish experiment looks like it’s paying off

https://www.spectator.co.uk/ar...like-it-s-paying-off

wo weeks ago, I wrote about ‘the Swedish experiment’ in The Spectator. As the world went into lockdown, Sweden opted for a different approach to tackling coronavirus: cities, schools and restaurants have remained open. This was judged by critics to be utterly foolish: it would allow the virus to spread much faster than elsewhere, we were told, leading to tens of thousands of deaths. Hospitals would become like warzones. As Sweden was two weeks behind the UK on the epidemic curve, most British experts said we’d pay the price for our approach when we were at the peak. Come back in two weeks, I was told. Let's see what you're saying then. So here I am.

I'm happy to say that those fears haven’t materialised. But the pressure on Sweden to change tack hasn’t gone away. We haven't u-turned. We’re careful, staying inside a lot more. But schools and shops remain open. Unlike some countries on the continent, no one is asking for ‘our papers’ when we move around in cities. The police don’t stop us and ask why we are spending so much time outdoors: authorities rather encourage it. No one is prying in shopping baskets to make sure you only buy essentials.

The country’s Public Health Agency and the ‘state epidemiologist’, Anders Tegnell, have kept their cool and still don’t recommend a lockdown. They are getting criticised by scientific modellers but the agency is sticking to its own model of how the virus is expected to develop and what pressure hospitals will be under. The government still heeds the agency’s advice; no party in the opposition argues for a lockdown. Rather, opinion polls show that Swedes remain strongly in favour of the country’s liberal approach to the pandemic.

So why isn’t Sweden changing tack in the fight against the pandemic? ‘The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance’, wrote Albert Camus in The Plague – a book that eerily depicts the suffering of the human condition when a disease sweeps through society. And lately, scientists and observers have ventured that explanation publicly: perhaps Sweden’s refusal to fall into line is because Tegnell and his team are a bunch of philistines?

A group of 22 scientists made that charge in an op-ed last week in Dagens Nyheter, appealing to the government to rein in supposedly ignorant officials at the Public Health Agency. Last week, a piece in the Daily Telegraph ran with the same theme and expanded it to include much of the national population: Swedes have willingly been duped by ignorant authorities and a chief epidemiologist who has been seduced by his own sudden fame. Our faith in government is so big, and our bandwidth for dissent is so small, that we even scold criticism of the government as ‘shameful betrayal of the national effort’. A journalist from French television that I talked to on Sunday admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that ‘it’s almost as if we want Sweden to fail because then we would know it is you and not us that there is something wrong with’.

There is a simpler explanation: Sweden is sticking to its policy because, on the whole, it is balanced and effectual. So far, the actual development is generally following the government’s prediction. On Monday, 1,580 people had died and tested positive for Covid-19. The number of daily deaths has remained pretty stable at about 75 for a while but is now on a declining path. A lot more people will die in the next weeks and months but our death toll is far away from the pessimistic and alarmist predictions suggesting 80 to 90,000 people would die before the summer.

There are also encouraging signs that the growth of reported infections is also slowing down – a development that holds for both Stockholm (by far the worst affected region) and the rest of the country. The estimate from the Public Health Agency is that 100,000 people will show up at a hospital and test positive for Covid-19: the current headcount, just south of 14,800, suggests we are broadly in line with that estimate – if not below it.

Perhaps more important is the situation at our hospitals and their intensive care wards. The main ambition of suppression policies, after all, has been to avoid hospitals getting overwhelmed by patients they cannot treat because of shortages of staff, equipment and intensive care beds. Modellers in Sweden that have followed an Imperial College type approach have suggested demand will peak at 8,000 to 9,000 patients in intensive care per day. But actual numbers are telling a very different story. Yes, the situation is stressful, but – mercifully – the growth in intensive care patients has slowed down remarkably and the number of patients currently in intensive care has flatlined.

We now have about 530 patients in intensive care in the country: our hospital capacity is twice as high at 1,100. Stockholm now averages about 220 critical care patients per day and its hospitals, far from being overwhelmed, have capacity for another 70. Stockholm also reports that it has several hundred inpatient care beds unoccupied and that people shouldn’t hesitate to seek hospital care if they feel sick. A new field ward has been set up in Stockholm for intensive and inpatient care and some predicted it would start getting patients two weeks ago. It hasn’t received any patients yet.

Sweden hasn’t declared 'victory' – far from it. It’s still early days in this pandemic and no one really knows yet how the virus will spread once restrictions are lifted and what excess mortality it will have caused when it’s all over. Sweden doesn’t know the size of its ‘iceberg’ – how many people that have had the virus with only mild or no symptoms. It will remain unclear for at least another couple of weeks if parts of Sweden (especially Stockholm) has developed some degree of herd immunity.

A recent test at Karolinska suggested that 11 per cent of people in Stockholm had developed antibodies against the virus. Professor Jan Albert, who has led these tests, says the rate is most likely higher – perhaps substantially higher. So far they have only tested a small sample of blood donors and they can only donate if they are healthy and free of symptoms. Albert thinks the actual situation isn’t far away from the ballpark suggested by professor Tom Britton in a study that was released this weekend: that between 25 and 40 per cent of the Stockholm population have had the virus and that the region will reach herd immunity in late May.

These results are hopeful, even if they are still informed estimates and not observed reality, and are open to dispute. Nor will they change Swedish policy anytime soon. In fact, all the uncertainties around the future of this pandemic are part of the motivation for Sweden opting for a liberal approach. We have to plan for strong social distancing measures to remain in place for a long time and they won’t work if they are harder than necessary.

Countries like Austria and Denmark are now beginning to ease their lockdown restrictions but the virus is still spreading in their countries, albeit at a slower rate than earlier. Once more of the restrictions have been lifted, they may soon have to be imposed again to control new outbreaks of the virus. No country in Europe has yet figured out how a policy of test, track and trace could be organized on a large scale. We don’t know when a vaccine will be ready. For the foreseeable future, the backbone of every country’s defence against the virus will have to be based on strong social distancing. Sweden’s authorities proposed a liberal approach based on individual responsibility because it can be tolerated for longer and it has the effect of ‘flattening the curve’.

There is also a broader case for it. Lockdown policies harm basic civil liberties: in Sweden these liberties are, with some exceptions, intact. Lockdown policies have huge consequences on public health. And they are profoundly damaging to the economy. Sweden is no exception: our economy has been falling like a stone in the past month. In the city where I live, Uppsala, bankruptcy notices are now put up on many shop windows and I hear every day about friends and acquaintances that have lost their jobs or their small firms. National production has also slipped because global trade has closed. Big industrial stalwarts like ABB and Sandvik are still producing but can’t ship their products to other countries. Carmakers like Volvo and Scania decided to close their factories at an early point in March because they couldn’t get parts and components from other countries.

So everyone was already set up for gloomy reading about the economic outlook when the government unveiled its new budget last week. Still, the experience was grim. In the main scenario, our national output will decline by 4 per cent this year, taking unemployment up to 9 per cent and the fiscal deficit to 3.8 per cent of the gross domestic product.

The only silver lining is that it could have been worse. We are pretty far away from the levels of economic decline predicted for most lockdown countries. In fact, the Swedish economic situation looks sensationally positive when compared to the ghastly reports and scenarios elsewhere. Cash turnover indicators, for instance, suggest that personal consumption in Denmark and Finland has dropped substantially more than in Sweden. Unemployment benefit claims in Norway have shot through the roof and grown four times as fast as in Sweden. Fiscal deficits in the UK and the US are likely to be in the region of 12 to 15 per cent. Last week’s economic scenario from the OBR suggested that Britain’s GDP could drop by almost 13 per cent this year.

So yes: the economy has to be factored into a balanced pandemic response if it is going to last for longer than a few weeks more. No country can sustain suppression policies if they have catastrophic consequences for the economy. Many countries can borrow cash now to pay people that aren’t working and help businesses that are on the verge of bankruptcy. But that isn’t an unlimited option. Debt accumulated now will have to be repaid later. We can hope for a sharp economic recovery but chances are that it will be slow and that it will take years to rebuild national production. And we already know what that means: unemployment will remain high, people will be poorer and there will be less spending on benefits, welfare services and core state functions like the police. Sweden won’t be spared, but our economy will not be as ravaged as elsewhere.

So Sweden isn’t edging closer to a lockdown. Nor is team Tegnell panicking and fighting for its reputation. The vast majority of people think Sweden broadly opted for a balanced and effectual policy and current trends support that view. Everyone is upset about carelessness in nursing homes – that a very high share of our death toll is elderly nursing home residents – and that emergency plans were so poor and medical contingency stocks so small. People will be held to account. Some heads will roll. My guess is that it won’t be Tegnell’s.

quote:

Originally posted by triggertreat:
Where did Doc H go? Its been a while since he posted anything and I miss the info he provided.

I agree, it is always nice to hear from a real doctor, not just someone who stayed at a Holiday Inn last night. That seems to be how it is though, the people with the most knowledge post a lot less than people who don't.

It’s infuriating to me to see how many of my friends and family have been brainwashed over the past 6 weeks to believe that if they keep hiding out *just a little* longer, this virus will go away but it’s all on us to do our duty and hide.

I got into it with a HS friend who fully believes this and refuses to acknowledge that we A. Cannot hide from this into perpetuity while our economy implodes around us and B. We WILL have to eventually come out of hiding and face this virus

All we are accomplishing now is prolonging how long it takes for this virus to burn itself out. I find it very interesting that all the talk of “FLATTEN THE CURVE!” has virtually vanished from social media now.

Have any Forum members or their family members caught this virus?

'benny6' got the 'rona, but he came out the other side a'igh.

He is the only one I've seen post about having it.

I'm waiting for the antibody test to see if I had it back in December.

quote:

Originally posted by Redhookbklyn:
Have any Forum members or their family members caught this virus?

My sister tested positive. She is a Sheriff's deputy in New Jersey and a K9 officer so she is out interacting with the public a lot. She's been doing the quarantine thing for a week now.

She is completely asymptomatic.

GrumpyBiker tested Positive in early April:

https://sigforum.com/eve/forums...35/m/7620097764/p/13

I may not fully understand these charts, but the way Covid-19 deaths are counted takes into consideration deaths from other causes.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm


Table three: 1) Covid-19 deaths, 2) pneumonia deaths, 3) deaths from pneumonia with Covid-19, and 4) flu deaths.

Notes:

1 Deaths with confirmed or presumed COVID-19, coded to ICD–10 code U07.1.

2 Pneumonia death counts exclude pneumonia deaths involving influenza.

3 Influenza death counts include deaths with pneumonia or COVID-19 also listed as a cause of death.


You can get Covid-19, pneumonia, or the flu individually. With pneumonia, you don't have to have the flu or covid-19 - you can have pneumonia on its own with another cause.

These numbers tell me that any death where Covid-19 is involved (whether or not it was the actual cause of death) is counted as a Covid-19 death.

In other words, if you have Covid-19 only and die, its a Covid-19 death.
If your are already hospitalized with pneumonia and going down hill then happen to test positive for Covid-19, it is counted as both a Covid-19 death and a pneumonia death.
If you have the flu and you die of the flu, but also test positive for Covid-19, it is counted as both a flu death and a Covid-19 death.

So, any time Covid-19 is present in a flu or pneumonia victim, even if it wasn't the principal cause of death, it is counted as a Covid-19 deaths.

So, for example, if we see a figure for 5,000 Covid-19 deaths, 5,000 pneumonia deaths, and 5,000 flu deaths, that's not necessary 15,000 dead. It could be 5,000 dead if they had all three at the same time.

If anyone can explain this better or if I'm wrong, let me know. It just seems to me that all these death figures for different things may count a single death multiple times if the death involved more than one illness.

That's basically just an artifact of the way they record cause of death, which uses a labeling system called "ICD-10."

There are a bunch of codes relating to flu, including a number of them that are "flu with pneumonia," so in a patient that dies of flu with pneumonia, they get a single "flu with pneumonia" code rather than a flu code and a pneumonia code.

COVID-19 is new. It wasn't in ICD-10. So they just made up a new code for COVID-19, but it's just one code, for having COVID-19 (well, with two subcodes, one for having a positive laboratory diagnosis and one without a positive laboratory diagnosis but where COVID-19 is still the assumed cause of death). Instead of having a whole bunch of codes with all the other factors added in, they just use the one COVID-19 code plus another code for the other factor.

Also, "pneumonia" basically just means irritated lungs with fluid in them. It can be caused by a lot of things, including COVID-19. So calling someone who dies because they can't get oxygen because of pneumonia caused directly by COVID-19 "a pneumonia death, not a COVID-19 death" is not really reasonable.

Of course, someone with a really nasty bacterial pneumonia who dies while happening to have mild COVID-19 probably shouldn't be counted as a COVID-19 death.

Last fall, Harris County (the most populated county of Houston metropolitan area) elected an inexperienced Millennial to be their county judge (in Texas, County Judge is the emergency manager) by about 1/2% over the man who lead us through Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Ike, and Hurricane Harvey. She is a GDC lemming.

Today, she issued a mask in public order for 30 days. Houston's NBC affiliate added a little Sigmonkey inspired levity: