Coronavirus **personal experiences** thread

Corporate IT department won’t let you upgrade?

I found those Hank’s affiliated links kind of odd too. Now we know why, he was “contact tracking” you. :smiley:

Wow this guy was a researcher in 1980s?? That actually means something to me. That means he knows his stuff, he doesn’t just Google Sh…t like most people today. That’s before any of these phony”fact checkers” were even born.

Interesting, that makes sense that covid is more infectious than flu. I think the first covid tests where just testing if you have Flu or a Cold. If they found flu that means you are fine, because you can’t have Covid.

Actually there has been at least a claiming someone had influeza virus and sars-cov2 virus at the same time.
Their reasoning is rather odd, because more than one virus can be easily present in someone.

What I find interesting is that around here because of the use of masks, people are not really having a cold like last year when everyone was coughing by this time, well obviously not everyone is wearing a mask and some chose not to go out in public maybe, but especially on construction sites no is wearing a mask and other less obvious places I have seen large collectives not wearing a mask. Not that tons of improper mask wearing and improper sanitation habits wouldn’t be a common thing anyway.

I mean a mask seems to even have esoteric-like proprieties for some, something like a superstition almost, for example elders around here constantly wearing the mask on their chin only, they feel great because they have a mask so they are protected, yet that mask is not doing anything for them, neither for the others around them.

Oops. They mistakenly gave some people half-strength vaccine, and got better results from that group.

EXCERPT

^ That whole debacle sounds like a hot mess of mistakes. Yikes.

That’s because Covid was supposed to be rare at the beginning and early symptoms/mild cases can be confused with colds and the flu. If 1 in 10 had the Flu and 1 in 1000 have Covid, if the odds are independent then still only 1 in 1000 Flu cases also have Covid and the other 999 only Flu, you may have very bad luck but wasting limited tests on a 1/1000 chance was overkill. The odds are not really independent because they are transmitted the same way but for low rates it doesn’t matter much, when the rate of Covid increases it becomes a different matter.

OTOH infections may indeed interfere with each other, the most basic way is that once an infection is detected the inmune system will become more active but there are more sophisticated mechanism that I don’t really understand.

https://www.axios.com/confusion-remains-over-astrazeneca-vaccine-f0a2e7c1-5ab8-49aa-ab38-6449f7bebb41.html

Unfortunately, that is just going to add fuel to the conspiracy believers.

FYI

Johns Hopkins reports a study on COVID19 deaths in their News Letter. Johns Hopkins COVID19 deaths report

Then the study is removed with the comment:

JH Study

and

JH_Study

Merry Christmas

The reason that report was pulled from the student newspaper website at Johns Hopkins (yes, it was posted by the student newspaper, not by the medical center) is that the conclusions provided by the economist who wrote the report are based on very limited data and speculations that are dubious at best. For example, the report suggests that the data show that the percentages of various age groups who have died during the pandemic have remained relatively stable compared to previous years - and then goes on to assert that data prove that the virus hasn’t killed many people. However, that conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the data cited. The normal death rates among various age groups might have remained relatively constant during the pandemic, contrary to initial expectations that older people would disproportionately die in greater numbers than young people, because a lot of young and middle-aged people have died from the virus, as well as older people. Whatever the explanation for the data, and again, the very limited data cited in the report at issue, it does not prove that few people have actually died of Covid-19.

Moreover, the other major dubious assertion made in the report, and I suspect another major reason for the report being removed from the website, is the assertion in the report that Covid-19 must have killed far fewer people than previously thought, because reported death numbers from other causes have decreased compared to previous years. The report suggests this is evidence that deaths attributed to Covid-19 were, in fact, due to other causes. Again, that conclusion is based on an assumption that the numbers of reported and actual deaths due to non-virus causes are the same - an assumption with no evidence to support it. In addition, the report also assumes that the fact that deaths from non-virus causes went down in 2020 compared to previous years proves that many deaths attributed to Covid-19 were in fact caused by other conditions. The report provides no evidence to support that assumption, either. Another obvious possible reason for non-virus deaths declining would be that the virus killed a lot of people with co-morbid conditions, therefore ending many peoples’ lives before the other conditions could kill them. But the report doesn’t entertain that possibility at all, for some unknown reason.

Then, there are the independent analyses of the excess deaths in the USA during 2020, which have uniformly come up with a figure roughly approximating the number of Covid-19 deaths cited by the major sources of data, like the CDC, and have also concluded that the official figures almost certainly undercount the true number of deaths caused by Covid-19. You can’t just assume those analyses away, especially since they’re based on a larger data set.

Happy holidays to all.

As someone observed years ago, if you laid all of the economists out in a row head to toe, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.

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Apparently someone infected can buid up enough virus toreliably be detected in just 7 to 10 days, rather than needing to wait the full 14 days before the test will detect the virus.

Hat tip to Soylent News:

“Post-acute COVID-19 Syndrome”: COVID “long-haulers” suffering symptoms months after initial diag…”

[video: "Post-acute COVID-19 Syndrome": COVID "long-haulers" suffering symptoms months after initial diag… - YouTube width:500 height:300]

No, it doesn’t affect only the elder and the “non-healthy”…

Stay safe folks! Really!

From 60 Minutes video:
> “Have any of your patients made a full recovery?”
>> “Not full…”

As many of us have been saying, a 99.5% chance of survival is NOT a 99.5% chance of it just being a flu that you get over.

Regarding excess deaths I have heard the argument from many that somehow this isn’t real. Do not understand how that could be a reasonable assumption given the appearance of temporary morgues and mass graves all over the world. Probably spent too much time looking into this but FWIW, here is an overview of a variety of studies on the topic.

https://jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi=10.1001/jama.2020.20717

Denial is a coping mechanism. Feeding it is big business.

Well said

Nevermind, what I originally posted here turns out to be arguable but not appropriate to think about here.

EXCERPT