~*Official #COVID-19 Thread of Doom*~ Revenge of Omicron Prime

[marioandsonic]

People still buy Walkmans?

 

I can't tell if that post is being serious or not. 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

You should be banned for posting content from natsec ghouls like Asha Rangappa

[Joe]

6 minutes ago, marioandsonic said:

People still buy Walkmans?

 

I can't tell if that post is being serious or not. 

 

He made it more clear for you:

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

7 minutes ago, marioandsonic said:

People still buy Walkmans?

 

I can't tell if that post is being serious or not. 

It is absolutely not being serious.

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

Sure, we're not at capacity

This is literally the only part of your post that matters in relation to the point being made. The goal of flattening the curve was explicitly to prevent deaths because our healthcare system ran out of capacity, not to prevent deaths generally from people getting infected. But we didn’t have that problem, even when it was raging through NYC with Cuomo and DeBlasio doing everything they could to make things worse.

 

So maybe we don’t need to continue lockdowns as they’ve been practiced? Especially when it looks increasingly like a majority of deaths in the US and the rat of the west will have been nursing home deaths. Fixing the nursing home situation is actually easy now that we know what happens when Covid gets into one.

[Chairslinger]

3 minutes ago, marioandsonic said:

People still buy Walkmans?

 

I can't tell if that post is being serious or not. 

 

 

I am trying to conceptualize what they even mean by Walkman. Do they mean a Discman, an MP3 player, or a machine that literally plays old cassette tapes. I was skeptical that they even produce and sell the latter anymore and was curious enough to do an Amazon search and it seems that, amazingly, there are still some cassette Walkmans available.           

 

8 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Who do you think is working in these field hospitals? You think states like New York and Massachusetts just have tons of extra doctors and nurses just sitting around just in case there's a new hospital opened up in a college somewhere they now have to manage? Sure, we're not at capacity at these cases because we're running medical staffs on double and triple shifts to keep up with demand.

 

 

Didn't quite a few doctors and nurses also travel to New York to help tackle the crisis there? That won't be an option if lax isolation habits cause a ton of rural and secondary urban locations to explode all at once. And like you said, we have to consider that these medical professionals aren't just an infinitely renewable source. Over months and months of unending shifts, watching patients die, watching colleagues die, worrying they are going to die you are looking at having a worn down force to continue a fight we have decided is fine to have plateau'd where it has and, at best, just let it stay there for the foreseeable future.

[Jason]

9 minutes ago, Chairslinger said:

Didn't quite a few doctors and nurses also travel to New York to help tackle the crisis there? That won't be an option if lax isolation habits cause a ton of rural and secondary urban locations to explode all at once. And like you said, we have to consider that these medical professionals aren't just an infinitely renewable source. Over months and months of unending shifts, watching patients die, watching colleagues die, worrying they are going to die you are looking at having a worn down force to continue a fight we have decided is fine to have plateau'd where it has and, at best, just let it stay there for the foreseeable future.

 

Yes but have you considered that sblfilms wants to reopen his theater? 

[PaladinSolo]

The tell is that he went into "Sears".

[Joe]

1 minute ago, PaladinSolo said:

The tell is that he went into "Sears".

 

There were like 5 different tells, but sure lol.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

Yes but have you considered that sblfilms wants to reopen his theater? 

I actually closed my theater before required and haven’t reopened even though I can  

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

Why the sole focus on deaths? There's very real, very serious damage reported to the cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological systems of the body of survivors, even young survivors. Enough to overwhelm hospital systems by itself 

 

Not to mention the 15+% of deaths between the age of 45-65 per CDC.

[TheLeon]

17 minutes ago, Chairslinger said:

 

 

I am trying to conceptualize what they even mean by Walkman. Do they mean a Discman, an MP3 player, or a machine that literally plays old cassette tapes. I was skeptical that they even produce and sell the latter anymore and was curious enough to do an Amazon search and it seems that, amazingly, there are still some cassette Walkmans available.           

There's something special about the audio you get out of a cassette, especially when it's clipped to your belt. Only true audiophiles get it. 

[Joe]

I don't think we should focus on the virus not being "as bad" as was predicted. But it's reasonable for people to get annoyed that there is very little guidance right now for what the future holds.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

Just now, Jose said:

I don't think we should focus on the virus not being "as bad" as was predicted. But it's reasonable for people to get annoyed that there is very little guidance right now for what the future holds.

Failure of leadership from top to bottom

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

Why the sole focus on deaths? There's very real, very serious damage reported to the cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological systems of the body of survivors, even young survivors. 

 

Not to mention the 15+% of deaths between the age of 45-65 per CDC.

Because the marketing campaign for lockdowns was flattening the curve to prevent deaths due a lack of capacity in the healthcare system.

[CitizenVectron]

A hot take from me: Perhaps lots of companies should fail because people were spending too much money before and are now realizing it. On my account, I am finding that I was spending way too much money on eating out and getting coffee, clothing, etc. I think a lot of people are realizing the same thing. So when we open back up, demand may not return to the same level as before partly because people aren't going to spending as frivolously. You can't legislate people to spend like they were before if they don't want to.

[Joe]

3 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

A hot take from me: Perhaps lots of companies should fail because people were spending too much money before and are now realizing it. On my account, I am finding that I was spending way too much money on eating out and getting coffee, clothing, etc. I think a lot of people are realizing the same thing. So when we open back up, demand may not return to the same level as before partly because people aren't going to spending as frivolously. You can't legislate people to spend like they were before if they don't want to.

 

We've somehow saved several thousand dollars and I am dumbfounded.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

4 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

Because the marketing campaign for lockdowns was flattening the curve to prevent deaths due a lack of capacity in the healthcare system.

And it did that, though we are still straining from a lack of ppe and other equipment apparently, not to mention the manpower issues.

 

From what I've read, what should have been done with that time (and time before that during travel restrictions) is ramping up testing (which we've done, but not to the extent we probably need to based on tests per population) and getting contact tracking in place so that the outbreak can largely be contained, and normal life somewhat continued(among other proven effective measures). But instead we got reports like this and denials like this shit from two months ago today:

 

 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

And it did that, though we are still straining from a lack of ppe and other equipment apparently, not to mention the manpower issues.

NYC is the closest we ever got to overrunning capacity, and it wasn’t particularly close to doing so. 
 

So why can’t we make behavioral changes (mask wearing, capacity limitations, extending work from home for those who can, etc) while also changing policies for the real hotbeds like nursing homes?

 

For as much heat as DeSantis gets for not doing enough, Florida also never had healthcare capacity issues. He is still obfuscating the death toll, but nobody is dying in Florida because the healthcare system couldn’t cope with it.

[Ghost_MH]

50 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

This is literally the only part of your post that matters in relation to the point being made. The goal of flattening the curve was explicitly to prevent deaths because our healthcare system ran out of capacity, not to prevent deaths generally from people getting infected. But we didn’t have that problem, even when it was raging through NYC with Cuomo and DeBlasio doing everything they could to make things worse.

 

So maybe we don’t need to continue lockdowns as they’ve been practiced? Especially when it looks increasingly like a majority of deaths in the US and the rat of the west will have been nursing home deaths. Fixing the nursing home situation is actually easy now that we know what happens when Covid gets into one.

 

How long do you think we can continue running medical staffs at 90 and 100 hour weekly schedules? Those people are being overworked, so unless you think it's sustainable for that to be their new normal for the next year we're clearly above capacity.

[CitizenVectron]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-days-of-the-pandemic-the-us-government-turned-down-an-offer-to-manufacture-millions-of-n95-masks-in-america/2020/05/09/f76a821e-908a-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html

 

One of the last N95 production facilities in the US offered to reopen closed lines in Jan and provide a secure supply to the US government instead of taking the mounting orders from foreign buyers. The owner reached out to contacts in the administration, but the government declined.

 

Quote

It was Jan. 22, a day after the first case of covid-19 was detected in the United States, and orders were pouring into Michael Bowen’s company outside Fort Worth, some from as far away as Hong Kong.

 

Bowen’s medical supply company, Prestige Ameritech, could ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week. He viewed the shrinking domestic production of medical masks as a national security issue, though, and he wanted to give the federal government first dibs.

 

“We still have four like-new N95 manufacturing lines,” Bowen wrote that day in an email to top administrators in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation.”

 

But communications over several days with senior agency officials — including Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and emergency response — left Bowen with the clear impression that there was little immediate interest in his offer.

 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

12 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

NYC is the closest we ever got to overrunning capacity, and it wasn’t particularly close to doing so. 
 

So why can’t we make behavioral changes (mask wearing, capacity limitations, extending work from home for those who can, etc) while also changing policies for the real hotbeds like nursing homes?

 

For as much heat as DeSantis gets for not doing enough, Florida also never had healthcare capacity issues. He is still obfuscating the death toll, but nobody is dying in Florida because the healthcare system couldn’t cope with it.

A lot of curve flattening occurred before official orders, and this is true just about everywhere, and in Florida's case after a week of the deaths per day in Italy tripling in a week.

 

Conservatives writ large see mask wearing as culture war bullshit so we won't go down that path. Just look at the protests to open up and the president himself 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

Like we'd realistically need to go down the road of collective mask wearing and gradual social distance lessening and other measures but don't forget these astroturfed open back up protests are taking cues from the president/ from a lack of material help from the federal government/from the socioeconomic (read: racial) imbalance in those that have died, and more than likely will die for opening up. 

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

How long do you think we can continue running medical staffs at 90 and 100 hour weekly schedules? Those people are being overworked, so unless you think it's sustainable for that to be their new normal for the next year we're clearly above capacity.

We are moving people around the country to hot spots to spell those who live there. This is not a difficult issue you solve. I personally know medical professionals who have taken work in NYC. They are all coming home because the demand is subsiding. And you know what would have avoided that in the first place? Not shrinking the train schedules (DeBlasio) and not forcing Covid positive patients back into nursing homes (Cuomo). 
 

2 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

A lot of curve flattening occurred before official orders, and in Florida's case after a week of the deaths per day in Italy tripling in a week.

 

Conservatives writ large see mask wearing as culture war bullshit so we won't go down that path. Just look at the protests to open up and the president himself 

 

Yes, it turns out people make choices to avoid risk even before government orders them to do so, like when I closed up our movie theater and continue to keep it closed because I don’t know that I have a good system to limit virus spread there.

 

You also don’t need everybody to wear masks to get a benefit from it. And notable you only picked one (and a minor one at that) potential behavioral change to be disagreeable about  

[SuperSpreader]

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/ivanka-trump-personal-assistant-test-positive-coronavirus

 

Ivanka assistant got the 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

9 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

We are moving people around the country to hot spots to spell those who live there. This is not a difficult issue you solve. I personally know medical professionals who have taken work in NYC. They are all coming home because the demand is subsiding. And you know what would have avoided that in the first place? Not shrinking the train schedules (DeBlasio) and not forcing Covid positive patients back into nursing homes (Cuomo). 
 

 

Yes, it turns out people make choices to avoid risk even before government orders them to do so, like when I closed up our movie theater and continue to keep it closed because I don’t know that I have a good system to limit virus spread there.

 

You also don’t need everybody to wear masks to get a benefit from it. And notable you only picked one (and a minor one at that) potential behavioral change to be disagreeable about  

It...really doesn't appear to be a minor one. It can absolutely reduce the degree of transmission in carriers of the virus, asymptomatic or not. And either way you still need robust testing and tracking because it isn't a perfect method. Masks and distancing are an easy way to keep the virus from spreading as quickly because of what we actually know about how transmission occurs.

 

But take your pick of behavioral changes required and there's significant pushback from conservatives, or at least a significant amount of whining, compared to normal people.

[Anathema-]

49 minutes ago, Jose said:

 

We've somehow saved several thousand dollars and I am dumbfounded.

 

We've also saved a ton of money despite shelling out what seemed to be an extreme amount in preparation and other goodies.

[Ghost_MH]

20 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

We are moving people around the country to hot spots to spell those who live there. This is not a difficult issue you solve. I personally know medical professionals who have taken work in NYC. They are all coming home because the demand is subsiding. And you know what would have avoided that in the first place? Not shrinking the train schedules (DeBlasio) and not forcing Covid positive patients back into nursing homes (Cuomo). 

 

It's a good thing reopening won't lead to another spike in cases where we'll need the help. It's also great that we're guaranteed to not see multiple spikes pop up in multiple places that need these very limited numbers of traveling medical professionals.

 

I mean, it would have been nice if there was more guidance at the federal level to contain outbreaks into regions allowing limited supplies and staff the flexibility to move around where needed. It would have been real nice.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

It...really doesn't appear to be a minor one. It can absolutely reduce the degree of transmission in carriers of the virus, asymptomatic or not. And either way you still need robust testing and tracking because it isn't a perfect method. Masks and distancing are an easy way to keep the virus from spreading as quickly because of what we actually know about how transmission occurs.

 

But take your pick of behavioral changes required and there's significant pushback from conservatives, or at least a significant amount of whining, compared to normal people.

 

It is minor relative to other behavioral changes. This is clear. Physical distancing for example is significantly more effective (see the almost complete lack of transmission in outdoor activities as compared to indoor activities) that mask wearing. But it is one more layer of protection that we can add, and it doesn't even require everybody do it to lower transmissions to the extent that mask wearing does. I was actually surprised by how many people I've seen in my very Trump-y county wearing masks, even with our county Judge (the Mayor of the county) going on FB and saying he wouldn't order a mask requirement because CONSTITUTION or something.

I think there is significantly more whining from conservatives than liberals, but there doesn't seem to be significantly different behavior patterns in regards to be out and about. Pretty sure it wasn't just conservatives flooding the parks in NYC or the beaches in SoCal.

1 hour ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

It's a good thing reopening won't lead to another spike in cases where we'll need the help. It's also great that we're guaranteed to not see multiple spikes pop up in multiple places that need these very limited numbers of traveling medical professionals.

 

I mean, it would have been nice if there was more guidance at the federal level to contain outbreaks into regions allowing limited supplies and staff the flexibility to move around where needed. It would have been real nice.

 

Except that even with our useless federal government we never had an issue moving people around to deal with spikes. For all the negatives of our healthcare system, our healthcare providers are actually really competent and can allocate personnel quite well. Spikes are asynchronous, temporary lockdowns should be as well.

[Guest]

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients
 

About those field hospitals that we needed according to @Ghost_MH because the system truly was over capacity.

[Jason]

 

Spoiler

What do you want me to do?  LEAVE?  Then they'll keep being wrong!

 

[CitizenVectron]

 

The only reason I don't want the entire administration to catch the virus and die is because they would take so many innocent people with them.

[Jason]

14 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

The only reason I don't want the entire administration to catch the virus and die is because they would take so many innocent people with them.

 

I dunno, sacrificing grandma to getting these assholes out of office seems more noble than sacrificing grandma to the stonks.

[emalider]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2020-04-24/traffic-jams-border-while-officials-in-both-countries-examine-coronavirus-spikes%3F_amp%3Dtrue

 

There was discussion in the last page about shortages. I can't speak for other areas in the US but south San Diego is currently going through a crisis. Tijuana is a major hot spot and the impact is starting to be felt across the border. One of the hospitals has converted at least one step down unit into a covid icu. There's active transfers of patients to help offload the volume of covid patients. There's already a shortage or anticipated shortage of thermometer probe covers, IV tube extensions, and medications (ex propofol) in my area. There's a huge focus on PPE (100% understandable) but the increasing demand for one-time use supplies, medications, and equipment like PAPRs is being overlooked (imo).

[skillzdadirecta]

7 hours ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Who do you think is working in these field hospitals? You think states like New York and Massachusetts just have tons of extra doctors and nurses just sitting around just in case there's a new hospital opened up in a college somewhere they now have to manage? Sure, we're not at capacity at these cases because we're running medical staffs on double and triple shifts to keep up with demand.

Also volunteers from OTHER states. We have a ton of doctors and nurses from all around the country who have flown in to the New york/New Jersey area to help out. Anyone who thinks that NY and NJ overstated the emergency here is either an idiot or has an agenda or both. These hospitals were at the brink here and now is definitely not the time to "open back up".

 

When we're shutting everything down again in August and September remember this... because NO STATE in this country has met any of the metrics that successful countries have in reopening their societies and economies, much less Trump's own guidelines. NOT A ONE. People advocating for opening back up are thinking with their wallets now which is valid, a lot of people are hurting, but understand that that is what it is and don't try to downplay the severity of what we're going through because it suits your particular agenda. We are going to open up, more people are going to die than was probably necessary, and we're going to prolong this epidemic because this current generation of Americans is impatient and used to quick fixes... at least a very vocal minority is. The majority of the public thinks we're opening up too fast.