quote:

Well, I didn't vote for the bastard!

Neither did I; neither Queen Andy nor Mayor McBikeLane. I don’t vote for idjits nor DemonCraps, but that’s redundant by saying that.

quote:

Hoosiers should be grateful that the Ohio River is saving them from DemoCrap stupidity.

We are. And the imaginary lines that separate us from Michigan and Illinois. Our "lockdown" was pretty soft, even when it was in effect. At least around here, most businesses are still open with reduced hours and extra distancing. Our county only has 36 cases and one death (and as I understand it, that gentleman was in his 70s with several underlying conditions). Based on how many people I see out and about, I don't imagine we see much of a spike here as things open back up.

I appreciate that Governor Holcomb is looking at the situation county by county and not treating everybody across the board like the big urban centers.

Letter from a local physician to our governor:

https://www.evergreenfamilymedicine.com/copy-of-april

At this time, public policy decisions and disease modeling are based in large part upon the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”. This means that much of our information about the prevalence and incidence of COVID-19 is still not reliable. As a result, there have been and there will continue to be unintended consequences of these policy decisions. It is time to account for them.

As a Family Physician in Roseburg, Oregon, I have already seen the harm of well-intended executive orders and public health policies that adversely impact the patients for whom my group provides care. Here are some examples:

An elderly man with diabetes had intermittent loss of consciousness and low blood sugar readings. He had an insulin pump but he had no access to his regular physician. Because he lived in an assisted living residence that was in “lock down”, he did not know where to go for help. Our staff visited him at his facility and decreased his basal insulin dose. He was referred for a telemedicine visit with our endocrinologist. We drew labs and informed him about his newly recognized heart murmur. Many more seniors will suffer decline or death due to neglect of their chronic conditions. Many patients in nursing homes and assisted living facilities have limited access to care.

A man that I admitted to the hospital had profound anemia and needed a blood transfusion. His “elective” endoscopy was canceled weeks before due to Oregon’s executive orders forbidding elective procedures.

Another man was hospitalized for worsening of his chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD). He explained that his daughter and ill granddaughter had recently moved in with him because his daughter had lost her job due to the closure of her employer’s “non-essential business”.

A patient needed to have his painful, broken abscessed tooth extracted. However, he could not see his own dentist because his Medicaid contracted dental office was closed to save PPE. Sometimes antibiotics and pain medication alone simply aren’t enough. We were able to secure a non-contracted dentist to provide his care.

An elderly woman living alone and was afraid to step outside her home for a walk or to schedule her mammogram. She had anxiety and was panicking due to the daily media headlines -assigning a number to every new COVID case and death.

A patient with a nephrostomy tube and a 2 cm kidney stone remains in pain because elective lithotripsy is not available.

A woman with moderate dementia, new to her memory care facility, whose behavior changed from a happy demeanor to violent requiring increased sedative medication after social isolation requirements separated her from her daughter.

A son providing care to his 95-year-old mother, who has recurrent urinary tract infections, reports that she is ill with temperature over 103. They are afraid to access the health care system due to COVID-19 fears.

In the last month, our local hospital lost 9 million dollars and had to furlough the equivalent of 350 employees. These job losses resulted from current restrictions on elective procedures and from patient fears of entering the hospital or visiting outpatient diagnostic sites.

I am trying to provide a sense of increased morbidity not related to COVID-19 but related to the executive orders and “shelter in place” policy, which was intended to flatten the curve and to avoid overwhelming hospitals. This policy was reasonable especially in New York City where they have closed nearly 20 hospitals due to underfunding over the last decade. However, Oregon is not New York and Roseburg is not Seattle. Most physicians understood that these social distancing measures would not eliminate COVID-19 in our population but would only reduce the rate of spread of this disease.

The opinions and recommendations of Dr. Anthony Fauci deserve respect but there have been other valid opinions and approaches to this pandemic. I refer readers to the link below to an opinion piece from Dr. John Ioannidis, professor of medicine, of epidemiology, of population health, and biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University. https://www.statnews.com/2020/...thout-reliable-data/. The article appeared in “Stat” on March 17th. He identified many of the unintended consequences of the current policy implemented to control the pandemic.

The data gap remains a problem today. Current models used to project future peak disease activity and mortality rates have not been accurate. The daily headlines reporting confirmed COVID cases represent increased testing capability but the reports do not speak to the actual prevalence of the disease in our population. The widely publicized WHO and CDC mortality rates are based upon extrapolated numbers from biased testing protocols that adversely select for the most ill individuals with SARS-CoV-2. Even determining the cause of death in this pandemic has proved challenging. We are not differentiating between those that die with and those that die from SARS-CoV-2. Going forward, antibody testing will provide better information in regard to the true prevalence and mortality rates.

I am not questioning whether measures taken to date have been well-intended and worthwhile. Public authorities and Governors must consider medical, economic and social risks in real time. There are no risk-free choices. Unfortunately, we will never have enough epidemiologic data or a golden process that will result in “zero” COVID-19 deaths by June as proposed by some officials. Remaining sheltered in place while waiting for a vaccine is not a viable option and doing so, would devastate the economy, health systems, families and the health of citizens. The Oregon tax base would be even more severely compromised. My hope is that future alternative approaches will not be suppressed, dismissed or deemed dangerous by those who are seeking to project virtue. Those who propagate fear without sufficient data need to take a backseat to those who are seeking real solutions to this complex problem.

Physicians have the duty to question policy when other aspects of patient health have been adversely impacted. The demographic most at risk with COVID-19 is not the same as the pandemics of 1918 or 2009. I recall multiple patients under the age of 30 on ventilators in our local ICU in the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and we did not take the types of public health measures then that we are taking now. Yes, there may have been some latent community immunity and a relatively ineffective flu vaccine in 2009 but there were also discussions about the using APACHE scoring systems to ration ventilators. Fortunately, the unthinkable did not occur. We have much better intensive care capacity now.

Death and human suffering have occurred and will continue to occur as a result of the unintended consequences of current isolation measures and restriction of hospital services. The extreme measures to close schools, businesses, parks, and enforce social distancing were a cost that most were willing to accept in the short term. The pause allowed time for the development of local systems and resources to meet our community’s needs. Douglas County has risen to meet the challenge. In my view, it is time to change our approach in a targeted, rational way.

To this end, I have the following recommendations:

Allow hospitals and communities that have adequate capacity and systems in place to manage a COVID surge to resume normal operations – including elective procedures while continuing stringent and practical measures to prevent virus spread. This action would serve to maintain hospital system solvency and reemploy critical health workers who were furloughed due to the current circumstances. We have been fortunate that hospitals have not been overwhelmed by patient volumes. However, at this time, these policies are restricting access to essential medical care, causing harm and benefitting no one.

Reopen all businesses, parks and recreational opportunities in areas where the hospital(s) and the community have the ability to address capacity issues during a COVID surge. This move would soften the already devastating blow to our Oregon economy and reduce the level of unnecessary public anxiety.

Reopen schools and colleges to reduce achievement gaps and develop additional herd immunity among the young and healthy. This step may ultimately protect others who are elderly and with chronic conditions as they choose to resume their normal activity.

Continually monitor the impact of relaxing these isolation measures with active testing and ensure that adequate healthcare capacity remains as the virus activity vacillates – indefinitely.

My plea is that our political leaders and policymakers also seriously consider the importance of other health, economic and social issues. We can continue to be vigilant and fine tune our approach as needed. In Douglas County, it is now time to begin relaxing hospital restrictions and extreme public isolation measures. It is time to acknowledge the unintentional harm of our current policies. Going forward, I am confident that independent Oregonians will be able to make informed choices based upon their own risk tolerance and hopefully, better data.

John Powell MD

4/18/20

Please watch the videos I mention in this post. The first is an update from Stanford physician and epidemiologist, Dr. John Ioannides and the second is Dr. David Katz, a professor of Medicine and Public Health from Yale University. As the public may be coming to realize, science is not a democracy but rather, a skeptical discipline. Ultimately, it will self-correct as data evolves. This is a healthy process and should be not be suppressed. The pandemic response will require a balancing of science, economics and politics. In my view, they should be prioritized in that order.​

Dr. Ioannides – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPqmLoZA4s

Dr. Katz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...3YC10umcr1J7y9Un8msA

quote:

Originally posted by wreckdiver:
Damn Cuomo is treating the whole state like NYC. Here in WNY we have less than 40 cases in the county, last count only 3 deaths and 4 cases still infected, all others have recovered.

Still his law makes us wear face coverings, even though the CDC says healthy people should not! We are not NYC here!!!

Tomorrow I say enough, I'm going out without face covering, arrest me if you want, but enough is enough!

We're not part of his NY. He only ever talks about upstate and downstate.

quote:

Originally posted by az4783054:
GILEAD is donating 1.5 million doses of its drug Remdesivir. Every drug company in the US should be following suit...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news...ug-for-140-000-cases

It doesn’t work that way.
GILEAD has the patent.

This is crazy. Stillwater Ok (Oklahoma State University) Mayor has no backbone.

I can’t embed this, you’ll have to follow the link.

Report: Stillwater mayor alters mask order after physical threats

Link to story

^^^ So you're ok with mandated mask orders?

quote:

Originally posted by old rugged cross:
How much has anyone thought about how all this is going to get paid for.

Step 1: Treasury obligations issued to borrow/suck money out of the private sector to make the expenditures in the first place.
Step 2: The Fed buys all of the above, and issues freshly printed USD in exchange.

Step 3 is an either/or:

Either
3A) eventually the USG taxes someone extra to pay off the new Treasury obligations, or
3B) the USG drops other expenditures enough to free up cash within existing tax structure (as if), or
3C) Nothing happens, the cost of 'all this' gets bolted onto the existing $Trillions of the national debt, and the extra dollars issued in step 2 bounce around, causing inflation.

Noting that almost every recent upward tick in the stock market has followed incremental 'stimulus' announcements, it seems to me that Wall Street is anticipating 3C. More dollars chasing the same amount of shares of stock ->higher prices.

You have to be ready to take advantage of fear and panic and make a buck:
You have all by now seen the late night TV ads hawking socks and gloves that are "copper infused".
And now we have: The Copper Wear Mask!
Reusable! And copper infused! $29 bucks.
But wait... Order now and you get a second mask free!
www.CopperWearMask.com

I have a friend in Oregon who says Governor, Kate Brown, just arbitrarily extended her shutdown order for 60 more days, until July 6.

The shelter in place- We were supposed to stay at home for 3 weeks. Those that had COVID-19 would get sick and be identified. Those that didn't have it wouldn't get sick and after 3 weeks be free to go about their lives. The spread was supposed to be contained \ minimized.

2 months out and there's no real change and they're extending it another month But there's No End Game after the next extension.


Economically the effects are local to the people directly effected. Shortly the non-payment of rent, credit cards and tax revenues will build and spread.

We Flattened the Curve at the hospitals But moved that ominous curve to the economic realm.

Thankfully Florida is run by reasonable people at the State level and we are resuming semi-normal medical operations this coming week and lots of other businesses can re-open. Not to mention localities have had a lot of latitude at managing things.

Lots of other businesses / services have been doing home visits (barbers, hair-stylists, etc) under the table, because well thats what people fucking do when the choice is to sit at home and go hungry or get out there and survive.

We all know that the real curve they want flattened now is the chances of all Republicans in the upcoming 2020 elections.

^^^^^
Apparently not all Florida residents are pleased at the reopening of the beaches. A Walton county resident who happens to be an attorney is dressed as the Grim Reape to protest the reopening. He did get the attention of the local news. It did look like a really nice beach day.

Mississippi is pretty reasonable here. Our beaches are open and elective surgeries were back on last week. Yard waste hit a high of 800 extra tons per week as folks were doing a lot of yard work.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyl...virus-215640425.html

More than 1 million people have recovered from the coronavirus, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University, a marker of success that can be traced to various factors. Ventilators, experimental drug treatments and a better understanding of the virus all have surely helped saved many lives.

But there’s an even simpler solution that’s quietly being implemented in emergency rooms across the globe, one that doctors say could be saving countless lives: proning.

Proning, a technique that involves having patients lie on their stomach, is actually more complex than it sounds, requiring six people to pull off safely. A well-known method in intensive care units, it’s long been used to improve the breathing of those suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Now being used in many ERs, it’s proving to be a low-risk, highly effective way to improve the breathing of COVID-19 patients early on — and prevent many from having to be put on ventilators.

According to one resident at an emergency room in Chicago (who requested anonymity because of his job), his team is now “proning as much as possible” with COVID-19 patients. While it may seem puzzling that simply being on your stomach could improve oxygen flow, the resident explains why it’s highly effective

“When we’re laying on our backs, our diaphragm is pushed up by our abdominal organs and our lungs don’t expand as much as they could, especially the back part of our lungs,” he tells Yahoo Life. “When we prone patients ... you're allowing the diaphragm to sink low, because the abdominal organs are kind of falling with gravity, which allows the lungs to expand further and allows the back part of the lungs, which are normally being compressed when you're on your back to expand more, to allow for ventilation. So you're basically opening up more of the lungs to participate in gas exchange.”

The rise of this technique in New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, can be traced to Dr. Nicholas Caputo, associate chief of the ER department at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx, one of the hardest-hit hospitals in the nation. Caputo says that when COVID-19 patients first began flooding the hospital’s critical care units in early March, proning was not part of the protocol.

“The sort of paradigm at the time was to intubate early,” Caputo tells Yahoo Life. This made sense for patients who were clearly experiencing respiratory distress. The problem was, many patients arriving to the ER weren’t clearly in distress — they were experiencing what’s referred to as “silent hypoxics,” or breathing trouble with no symptoms. This means that despite appearing normal, their oxygen saturation level, or the amount of oxygen in the blood (normally between 95 and 100) has fallen sharply.

“These people would be on their cellphones, or just having a conversation, [seemingly fine but] with oxygen saturation in the 70s, 60s or even 50s . ... These patients were getting intubated because everybody didn't know how to approach them,” says Caputo. “So nurses were freaking out, doctors were puzzled and it was chaos.”

Given the high mortality rate of those put on ventilators, Caputo and his team began thinking of other options to prevent having to take that step. Inspired by a study conducted in Italy in late January in which physicians there showed positive results from proning COVID-19 patients, they began to try it. “We thought maybe that would help, so we started proning in the emergency department pretty early on.”

Within minutes of turning patients with low oxygen saturation on their stomachs, they saw oxygen saturation levels jump back into the normal range. “Patients who were coming in with oxygen stats in the 70s ... once we proned them, after about a few minutes, they'd be up in the low 90s,” says Caputo. “That sort of brought the temperature down in the room, we could kind of take a step back and breathe.”

Caputo immediately began tracking the progress, publishing the first clinical report of the progress on April 22. The report showed that proning improved the oxygen saturation levels among 50 individuals with COVID-19 — some of whom had oxygen saturation levels as low as 69. After five minutes of proning, the mean oxygen saturation level was 94.

The technique soon spread in New York, Caputo says, which he believes is one of the reasons that the seriousness of infections has decreased. “I’ve heard from physicians around the world, they've been trying this and they've been having pretty good success with improving oxygenation and holding off on intubating patients,” he says. “And I think the numbers within New York City back that up. Late March, early April, we were intubating several hundred patients a day; then we started doing this and it caught on in the rest of the city, that number dropped to a few dozen a day.”

Caputo is careful to note that the technique is not perfect. Not everyone in his clinical review responded the same way. But overall, he hopes it is something that emergency rooms continue to adopt nationwide. “It’s not a panacea, it’s not a cure-all,” he says. “But it’s a way to buy time for some patients, and other patients, it’s a way to prevent intubation — cause we know this: If you get intubated, your odds of having a poor outcome in terms of mortality is around 50 percent.”

Many of the beaches here in N.C have opened or announced openings next week. They had all been closed to even being on the beach and any home rentals but they must be realizing now just how much this crap is costing their towns in lost revenue. Most will be totally open for rental properties, public beach access, fishing etc. with groups of 10 or less, but I did see one that is still refusing to allow chairs, sitting or sunbathing. How damn stupid are these people?
I think the video of the retired Navy guy protesting in uniform also helped make most of them see how stupid they were being but some insist on that path.

UK dead now at 28131.

Australia has 93 dead.

What the almighty **** has gone wrong here?

Simple - the UK didn't close the ports and airports.

The Australians totally prohibited ANY Chinese returning or visiting Australia. Period.

Heartbreaking stuff, folks. Truly.

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:
The shelter in place- We were supposed to stay at home for 3 weeks. Those that had COVID-19 would get sick and be identified. Those that didn't have it wouldn't get sick and after 3 weeks be free to go about their lives. The spread was supposed to be contained \ minimized.

2 months out and there's no real change and they're extending it another month But there's No End Game after the next extension.


Economically the effects are local to the people directly effected. Shortly the non-payment of rent, credit cards and tax revenues will build and spread.

We Flattened the Curve at the hospitals But moved that ominous curve to the economic realm.

Our commie Gov. Inslee just ordered the destruction of thousands of businesses and bankruptcies of a few million individuals in the name of "saving lives"!! Spokane County has 10 current cases of COVID-19 in the hospital with half of those being released by Monday. TEN!!

This is what you get when you elect a lifelong liberal Democrat politician that has no experience in working for or owning a business to a position of power.

Jim

quote:

Originally posted by tacfoley:
UK dead now at 28131.

I don't believe that number for one single second, and neither should you. Your government is lying to you about the number of dead, just as our government- Federal, state and local is lying to us. The well-meaning half-wits in state or local government are one thing; people making decisions with no qualifications to do so, but the state governors and the various branches of our Federal government, are manipulating data in order to increase their power and influence. They have already succeeded in making us less free. They despise us, discount us, look down on us, and they should pay. Somehw]ow, some way, they should be made to pay for their abuses of power and their utter disregard for the people of this country, and for the lives they have ruined so casually.

Ask anyone in this forum- I'm the most skeptical person on the planet when it comes to conspiracy theories, but this- well, this is in our face, daring us to figure it out. You cannot believe a word they are saying about this fiasco. Not one single word.
the press, the so-called journalists and their employers- they are gleefuly complicit in this conspiracy, and they, too, hate us and want to destroy us. Think I'm exaggerating?

Anyone know why the bank parking lots are over flowing this morning?

quote:

Originally posted by BigSwede:
Anyone know why the bank parking lots are over flowing this morning?

Certain U.S. Banks have finally decided to support/process the Federal SBA loans, would be my guess.