From a friend, who will remain nameless… His ‘experience’ highlights the ‘issues’ with the current games being played…
I’m just wiped. I first started having symptoms on Sunday, Nov 30. Fatigue and coughing…almost continuous coughing. Appetite went down the tubes. Sweet things (iced tea, cokes) suddenly became too sweet. Salty things, too salty. I weighed 264 before the 30th. I now weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 248. Pants literally falling off.
My wife has it, too. But her symptoms are light, almost non-existent. Makes me a bit jealous.
The weekend was rough. Fever, coughing, more coughing, little sleep. I had run into the medical mafia when trying to see my doc. 1. You have to be tested first (?) Testing is scheduled twice a week by the county medical department. You have a choice of Wed or Thurs for half a day—by appointment. The local pharmacies, CVS/Walgren/etc. are controlled by the county. Once y9u’ve had the test, you wait 2-4 days for the results. If you have it, they’ll call and tell you you’re in a 14 quarantine. If you don’t, no call.
Now once you’ve been tested and found positive, you can call your doc—and get immediately shuffled off to the covid group. Earliest appointment was eighteen days off.
Screw this shit! When to our local ER. Told’m my wife and I thought we had covid. We followed a nurse off to the hospital’s garage which had been converted into a dozen or so partitions for a mini isolation center. I was taken to one and seated in a comfortable chair. (Side chairs from hospital rooms, I think.)
Wife and I were swabbed for covid. Doc came by and interviewed me, symptoms and all. Because of my near continuous coughing, he sent me off for a chest x-ray. Yep. Covid pneumonia. Wife is fine.
We’ve lost some friends from covid—not so much from the disease, but because of the delays getting treatment created by the medical mafia. (bold mine, but true!)
No see Doc without test.
Get positive result, then make appointment with doc—2-3 weeks in future. Then. Standard treatment is amoxicillin (to prevent bacterial pneumonia. I got my pneumonia short a couple of years ago.) and a nebulizer if you get short of breath.
No wonder people are dying. From the onset of my symptoms, nine days ago, now, a person couldn’t receive treatment for three week. Hint: screw the bureaucrats. Just walk in to your local ER.
And that whole mask thing… Back in March it was “No mask, not needed, save them for the professionals; just social distance!” Then it was ‘any mask’ works… until the actual size of the virus came out… Then it was ‘particulate’ matter was the issue… And you got it through nasal passages (Which is a mucus membrane, just like the eyes, but I don’t hear/see anyone saying anything about protecting your eyes) And there’s THIS….
Oh, and stop singing… And put your mask on between bites while eating, and wear your mask in your house. But don’t go to church. But it’s okay to go shopping, etc…
And now that the vaccine is days away from being certified, “Oh, the vaccine won’t be enough, you must continue to mask/social distance until (the 12th of never maybe?)…
Sigh…
My son had the beer flu back in April. The hospitals and clinics were all closed. He called a doctor, who told him he most likely had it (no tests available there/then), and to stay home and rest. He’s 19, so he was fine after three weeks of wheezing.
The point is, no medical professional would see him, or even allow him in the building. No medication prescribed, and even if it had been, the pharmacy wouldn’t have let him in the door to pick it up.
The plague was weaponized by politicians, at which point, all control, all logic, all standards of care, vanished. The recovery rate with new therapeutics is well over 99%.
It’s not the Bubonic Plague. It’s miserable. It’s highly contagious, but unless you’re really ill going into it, you’ll likely be fine.
This is a virus, so there is no pill to treat it, you are getting any medication to treat the symptoms, the only treatment is time, in other words, to wait it out. Time, fluids, rest. And if you are short-of-breath, you may get various meds to help open the airways, or even oxygen.
The only way to treat this virus is to prevent getting it. Which means basic respiratory precautions–mask, goggles, and to WASH YOUR HANDS as well as sitting your butt home if you have any symptoms AT ALL. Folks don’t realize how many times every hour they touch their face/eyes/nose/mouth.
It is a respiratory virus, which means every time someone coughs, or sneezes, or yells, microscopic stuff is ejected out. Up to 12-15 feet out. So, yeah, 6 feet spacing is pretty worthless, except it is further apart than many folks stand.
The major issue that I see is that none of us have ever been alive during a pandemic. So, although we were taught as a 2-5 year old to cover our mouth when we sneeze or cough, to wash hands before we eat, before we handle food, after we sneeze, cough, or use a tissue/handkerchief, and after we go to the toilet, and to stay home if we are sick, many folks don’t. Especially these days.
We are all pretty pouty about not being able to do what we want to do. To go where we want to go. When we want to.
The whole mask/CDC issue was because we got caught with our pants down as a country–NO one was prepared to have to deal with a major respiratory infection across this country. The states, hospitals, medical offices/groups…NONE of them had enough PPE, especially back in the late winter/early spring. Which was why CDC said the common Joe/Jane on the street didn’t need to wear a mask…because there was literally not enough masks/gowns/gloves/face shields/hand sanitizer/soap for the doctors/nurses/health care folks to wear in the hospitals/medical facilities/offices. You think you all were looking hard for Toilet Paper–you should talk to someone whose job it is to find supplies for any medical facility you can think of.
So, yes, the average man on the street were deemed to have to wait their turn until production could be ramped up. Needs of the many outweighed the few. And the reason there STILL is NOT enough PPE yet–medical professionals are STILL being rationed on how long we use the PPE we can get. Pre-2020 respiratory precautions were you took everything off and threw it away when you were done in the patient’s room…you didn’t save the N95 mask for the next time you went into that room, or you didn’t just wear it all day to see all of your patients…there were NO rules for “cleaning” or “sanitizing” or “reusing” masks. There are now.
Does a handkerchief really give you protection? Not in my opinion. If you sneeze, or cough, or talk, you are still expelling microscopic crud, so any cotton mouth AND NOSE covering may slow stuff down a bit, but I wont bet my health, or those of my loved ones, on it. The blue procedure masks are supposed to be a good second option to an N95, and they are being sold in supermarkets for about $10 a box of 10-50. Buy a box or two, use them. Toss them after you have worn them for a while.
Wash your hands. Frequently. Often. Every couple of hours, just for laughs and giggles. When you go to the store, the pharmacy, to get gas, someplace someone else may have gone, and touched stuff…wash your hands. As soon as you get home with soap and water. With hand sanitizer as soon as you get back into the car. For decades the health experts have been saying handwashing is THE BEST WAY to prevent getting colds and the flu…which are, wait for it…all corona viruses.
The one thing I am thankful for about the Covid-19 virus is…it is not Ebola. There are worse bugs out there. Bugs that can and will kill you quicker, with much more pain. Where respiratory precautions are much stricter. For EVERYONE, not just medical folks.
Suck it up, put on the adult panties, wash your hands, wear the damn mask, and sit your happy butt HOME. And, yes, don’t rub your eyes or touch your face. No hugging/kissing folks. That increases your chances of not getting this crap. And in a few months, when it is available for the average person, get the vaccine. So, hopefully, next year, we might be able to resume life as we used to know it.
Grumpy nurse getting off the rant box…
This is a nice rant, except for one part. There are 45 years worth of studies, from nations around the world, that show that masks do absolutely nothing to stop or even slow the spread of any respiratory virus. N95 masks do nothing to slow the spread of SARS/COVID. Nothing! Viruses don’t need droplets. Viruses hang out in the air for 20 minutes. Masking is just another version of “security theater”, and a political tool to see how many hoops our overlords can get us to jump through.
Children are being raised in a world without faces. Children are being raised in a world without play groups. This is child abuse of the highest order. (The only good part is showing how bad and unnecessary public screwels are.)
Pasteur, Lister, and Semmelweis are laughing at you from the Great Beyond. I work daily – and have for 10 months running – with people with full-blown COVID, at bad breath distance, wearing nothing but mask, gloves, and a plastic bib. I have 400 co-workers in the same situation. Those masks that don’t work seem to be doing quite an effective job for all of us.
But put some skin in the game: go work with sick symptomatic COVID patients with no mask, and garner the same results. Then publish.
When you find a hospital that forbids masks in the OR for all staff, give a holler.
Until then, the “masks don’t work” line is pure nonsense.
Some masks work better than others, absolutely.
And masks -ALONE – aren’t intended to solve everything, so if you skip the rest, it isn’t going to be enough; the virus only has to get lucky once.
And no mask will matter if you ignore all the rules when you’re not at work.
But “masks do nothing”?
Horse droppings.
I pity the medical profession. Apparently, some nurses suffer from selective blindness. Here is a healthy dose of reality. Mad Mike has done the research so you don’t have to.
https://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/cms/index.php/612-fact-checking-at-fecesbook
https://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/cms/index.php/610-a-summary-of-the-covidian-threat
https://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/cms/index.php/608-here-s-the-science-on-covid-masks
The science looks good. Actually the science looks great. Thanks for finding those three posts for the rest of us.
Disavow of science in 3…2…1…
Yet I have known many a medical person who doesn’t apparently understand germ-theory or follow Lister’s concepts.
It got so bad in real medicine that people were dying in Australia, England, Germany and here in the US of A during the late 70’s to late 80’s because medical professionals wouldn’t wash their damn hands between patients. Even when PPE was available. Seen it, have a loved one who barely survived several incidents of medical stupidity (even in 2008…)
So… No… Trust medical people? When the number of medical related deaths is so darned high?
Yeah…
45?
Studies from *1920* showed masking was _useless_ in the 1918 flu.
Many a commercially available mask has in very small print “This stuff don’t work for Covid, Yo!” or something like that.
So these warnings are only to stop lawsuits?
Then why have so many, who have taken precautions, come down with Covid?
To you I will listen.
I am not state-of-the-art aware on anti-viral meds, but unless something has popped recently, there is no medication for most viruses. You can’t kill it, because it’s not really alive.
Chattahoochee Way Patterson experience. During OUR last quarantine event (we had three, since the first week in August), I verified this with my doc, county health department, and my insurance company helpline. There is no treatment available for the virus itself; there are precautions against secondary infections, like pneumonia; and then, there is: quarantine/isolation.
Our 28-year-old daughter’s experience. Isolation, in a hospital, almost killed our youngest daughter & mother of three grandchildren. She had an initial manifestation of lupus (the butterfly rash) in February, but didn’t get really ill until March. Her husband and I rushed her to the emergency room; this was just as the “enthusiastic” treatment for COVID-19 was initiated. At that time, the fast diagnosis for C-word wasn’t available at her hospital, so they stuck her in isolation.
She was a VERY sick young lady, but in good overall health, and that either that, or her mama leading the prayer assault, is what saved her life. She was disoriented already, due to the lupus attack, but in her brief waking moments she found herself alone, strapped to a bed, with flashing lights and beeping sounds. Things got worse. For a month, things got worse.
Do not get sick with anything else when a medical facility is utterly focused on a plague.
There are SO many bad things that have resulted from the outbreak, but one of the worst, in my opinion, is that many other medically significant issues have been ignored.
And I can’t help but believe that the isolation “treatment” our 28-year-old daughter received would have killed my blessed 92 year-old-mother.
to top it off, there are indications that you may not need some fancy new vaccine. A study group just noticed that folks with a high measles titer (from the MMR vaccine) are way way way less likely to end up seriously sick from covid. The MMR vax is a very safe and well studied vaccine and we KNOW all the side effects and who can take it and who can’t.
“none of us have been alive during a pandemic”
You mean other than the ones in 1957, 1968, and 2009?
Oh, nobody noticed? Interesting.
Also, just in case anyone wondered, they didn’t come up with a vaccine for the Spanish Flu until 1942, 24 years later.
Don’t forget the 1977 flu pandemic. And 1992 SARS. And 1998 flu. And 2017 flu.
And Polio, and TB and and and.
Heck, a lot of us here were given vaccines against stuff that was epidemic outside of the US of A but not inside because we cleaned up our act early as a nation.
Unfond memories of going to the immunization hallway at local military hospital and depending on where you were going outside the USA depended on how far down the hallway you had to go. Germany or England or Hawaii? First table. Japan, Italy, Spain, Turkey? Second table. And so on and so forth. 2nd to Last table was for Central Pacific. Last table was for SE Asia and I think they just gave you a gun and a bullet to shoot yourself with if you were going anywhere near Central or Southern Africa…
Dumbest thing I ever did was lose my shot record. That thing said I was basically safe from everything not from SE Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. Used to roll up at school on enrollment, the parental units would drop that sucker on the desk and the shot-nazis would just clam up. Those were the days…
And the 2002 seasonal flu was far deadlier than Corona-chan. But because we let it burn out and didn’t shut our economy down, well, we got over it.
I remember that outbreak because my wife’s gall bladder tried to kill her, and she was on a bed in the ER hallway for 2 days waiting for a bed to open up upstairs. While fighting a raging case of infection with high fever and all the fun stuff, on IV antibiotics and and and. In the hallway. Because people were upstairs coughing their lungs out from ‘just flu.’
I sympathise with Grumpy’s frustration. And more to the point, I entirely agree that good sanitation, minimizing contacts, and so on are entirely reasonable. One can be as thorough about all that as one wants.
The problem isn’t that. The problem which has occurred is two fold, and both folds are the result of the way governments have reacted. First, perhaps more up Grumpy’s alley, is that in my State at least all elective procedures and all medical visits, unless one had proven Covid-19, were ordered cancelled. This resulted in considerable distress and death from other diseases and problems. That was in February. They are still severely restricted — by the State, not by actual medical capacity (this problem is much worse in Canada and Great Britain, by the way).
Second, in many States — such as mine — the Governor invoked emergency powers, which are supposed to be reviewed by the Legislature and renewed only by authority of the Legislature. The Governor has used those powers to enact regulations and restrictions without review, without explanation, and without any reasonable or even vaguely comprehensible rationale — and has refused to relinquish them.
In a third world country, this would be called a “dictatorship”. In my State, it’s called “expedient for public health” — and we are a one party state (not California) so the legislature (Dem. supermajority) happily rolls over and barks on command of the governor (Dem.).
There is something wrong with this picture, and it is no wonder that some people who actually value freedom get a bit fractious.
1) Stop getting “medical” advice from the TV.
2) Yeah. “Just go to your ER.”
Lemme know how that 20-hour wait works out for ya when all your friends and neighbors try that. If you’re not too sick to walk 10 feet, don’t effing bother, because we’ll throw you right back out so fast your head will spin.
We’ve doubled the amount of hospitalizations this week over last week. The ICU is full up. So is the refrigerated conex box with the dead bodies. If you’re well enough to send an e-mail, you probably ain’t getting past the outside COVID tent. If you’re desatting on room air, and have a COVID+ chest x-ray, you won’t be getting a prescription; you’ll be getting hospitalized. If you aren’t that bad off, you’ll be kicked the eff out. Don’t waste our time and yours.
Might want to rethink that cunning “just go to the ER” plan.
3) What Suz said.
4) We swab every person suspected of COVID for that, AND for seasonal flu. Starting in September.
It’s now December.
We have seen, to date, 0 cases of influenza.
This is what happens when most people wash their hands and cover their faces so they don’t touch them.
COVID pandemics are what happens when the 10% of society who are Gilligans treat a virus that’s 30 times deadlier than flu and several times easier to catch, as if it doesn’t really exist, nor matter.
Check your bank account, and let me know how that approach is working for you.
I told people back in February:
COVID is real.
Don’t get it.
Wear a mask.
Wash your hands.
None of that has been overtaken by events.
5) The vaccine should be given in the following order:
a) Everyone over 65.
b) Then first-line responders. (It’s stupid to risk possible side effects after you potential wipe out all your cops, firefighters, paramedics, doctors, and nurses. It takes 20 years to make more of those, and twice that to make enough more.)
c) Then everyone over 40 who wants it, and anyone under 40 with conditions predisposing them to being at risk.
d) Everyone healthy and under 40 should be told to come back later in life, and everyone 55 and over should get it, like a pneumonia shot.
Do it that way, and by Easter, this is a total nothingburger, and deaths drop to the same level as those from snakebites or getting crushed by a toppled coke machine.
Therefore, TPTB won’t do it that sensibly, and will continue to screw this pooch until there’s nothing left of it but dusty bones.
Best Wishes.
If mask wearing worked, the epidemic would already be over. If mask wearing worked, the number of infections would be dropping, not rising. Modern medicine is based on science. Science is based on math. The math says you’re wrong. 45 years of studies say you’re wrong about masks. That means that masks are politics or witchcraft, not medical science.
Oh, and denying people care until they’re critical, for a disease that is relatively easy to treat, is, um…
Have you looked at vaccine availability for your state? I’ve looked it up for my state and the nearest neighbor – at the maximum number of doses these states are allowed to request, there will be enough for 1/3 of the population to get vaccinated over the next year, IF the companies can sustain production at the level they hop. There are already signs that Pfizer promised production levels it can’t meet.
I plan on putting off getting it as long as possible – I suspect there are more side effects than we know about since production and testing has been so rushed.
Interesting side note: this vaccine is coming out under an EUA, Emergency Use Authorization, from the FDA. They will issue a ‘normal’ approval after ‘enough’ data has been collected and side effect and efficiency has been documented. This will probably take years – and in the meantime, no government (in the US at least) can make the vaccine mandatory without an FDA approval.
There’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government program, tax, or position.
I’m glad I live in a very rural area. I went to a doc. Got a nasal swab. Clear and clean. So far, anyway.
And it all boils down to…
If you get it and it’s mild, meh.
If you get it and it isn’t mild, quick treatment for the pneumonia and other secondary infections and issues is a must. Quick! Pronto! Immediate!
Which is where this Covidiocracy is failing so many. There is no ‘immediate’ response allowed unless the person is sooooo screwed that they do need heavy lifting by med professionals.
There is no “Yup, you got it, it’s semi-bad trending to bad, but not ‘stick you in the hospital to die or not’ bad, so here’s your drug regime and keep us in touch.” There is only “yer mild, go away unless yer really bad” or “yer really bad, come wait in Death’s lounge while we see if you kick the bucket.” For the longest time there was no mid-treatment done quickly and effectively.
And that’s the issue. For a virus that most people literally sneeze at, at most getting mild symptoms, ignoring the little bugger is fine. It’s the unlucky ones where it somehow goes full viral freakout that are screwed. The very ones that, if you treat the secondaries right away, the body can kill the Wu Ping Cough relatively easily (for most people.) And that will leave the minority of the minority who are just plain screwed by Chinky Pox to take up the medicos attention and underutilized hospital space.
Meanwhile, all that ‘critical PPE’ was used up doing dance routines for Tik-Tok, recreating ‘The Last Supper’ and other stupid attention grabbing things. During the great PPE shortage of 2020. Don’t deny that didn’t happen.
Here in Gainesvillek, FL, during the beginnings of the great Mask-Outs and Fear-Mongerings, while we poor dirt-people were told to mask up, wash hands, stand 6′ apart, and to rat on each other like either good little Nazis or East Germans or pod people, it was very common to see a gaggle of nurses/doctors/techs to come wandering in to the local stores wearing obviously worn scrubs, without masks, gloves, sanitizing hands, changing shoes from work, and doing so in groups of 3-8.
I asked some of these groups and they told me and everyone else the Mask-rova was just that. All Potemkin-village level cosplay. Except if you’re in the critical group, and then you should be doing that during flu season anyways. A couple DRs, nurses, some brainiac from infectious diseases something-something (total nerd-looking brainiac type person..) All said the same thing.
Yes…
Masks and precautions work for some people.
But, overall, this was a huge friggin powergrab by many local, state and national politicians. Many who, at the beginning of this, said that Corona-Chan was safe, come out to celebrate Chinese Lunar New Year with actual ChiComs because it’s safe. And only after ‘Impeach, Impeach, Impeach’ failed bigly did suddenly these same politicians whip around 180 degrees and started saying ‘Mask up, Mask up, Mask up’ and ‘Close everything down’ with a side serving of ‘It’s Trump’s Fault.’
Yeah…
Sure, precautions in some places need to be higher. But not ‘let’s put sick people into nursing homes’ like Cuomo and Wittmar did.
If masks and hand washing and 6′ distance and close and shutter and stay away worked… This would have been over in May. Masks and hand washing and distancing and closing and destroying and violating everyone’s Constitutional Rights obviously didn’t work. Since we still have it going around.
Meanwhile, hospitals are running at reduced capacity in many areas, just like the above example. The people to be treated are treated away from the main facility and sent home, unless they’re critical and sent to ICU, but those critical are so few in comparison, well…
Washing hands is a good thing. Covering your darned mouth is a good thing. Cutting off beards and staches to keep a clean face is a good thing. These are all things we used to help combat Spanish Flu, TB and Polio before there were effective treatments for the secondaries of SpanFlu and the bugs of TB and Polio. Still common sense. Which, of course, today, is uncommon.
Y’all in the med profession? Y’all see the worse. Y’aint seeing the normal like we’un dirt people see. Which is ‘it’s a bad bug for some, but for most, meh,’ and ‘we’uns see this as a ploy by a certain political party to destroy and control us’ (which, yes, it is.. a ploy.. to turn us from citizens to subjects…)(Prove me wrong.)
Well said! Hear, hear!
To further waste our host’s space…
All these precautions? Keeping hands clean, washing oneself and changing clothes before getting around loved ones, etc? Any of us dealing with people on the edge have been doing this for years. And we didn’t need masks unless there was an active infection in our loved ones.
Been doing disease precautions for 20 years now for my wife who is somewhat lung compromised, during the sickly seasons. It’s just common sense.
It’s not common sense to use the fear of all of this to destroy the US economy and to clamp down on personal freedoms.
I think at this point, it is likely that publicizing the vaccine was only permitted because they thought people would buy the scam of Biden’s election fraud. Now that it appears that Trump may serve another term, they are back to pushing eternal lockdown stuff.
The bureaucrats pushing lockdown are effectively claiming expertise in all domains of a problem that covers wildly different domains. Actual physical costs of an infection (MDs are competent here), statistics, implementation of statistical models on computers (IT/Computer Science/Electrical Engineering/’they will be made to understand what a Kalman filter is’), economics and how well people are going to follow a policy dictated from the center. The last domain or two is serious fly in the ointment, and probably what the other guy was discussing when he was talking about the AMA, etc., being run by leftists.
These people are not experts in the last domain, which among other things means that they do not realize that being lying sacks of shit will immediately develop into long term problems with policy compliance. Even if the centrally planned protocol is a good one, that weighs all information to provide a level of protection that is appropriate for what it costs.
If you are trusting any information about covid that does not have a chain of sourcing free of any sources that are consistently claiming that there is no ambiguity in whether Biden won on election night, you are a fool. A source that will consistently lie to you about whether it was plausibly fraud will also lie to you consistently about other things of partisan interest.
When you exclude anything that might have come through a possible Chinese information warfare asset, you are left with rumor and anecdote. Rumor and anecdote are not enough for a national policy based on consensus. But what about graduate texts on virology that well predated the current mess? Aren’t some facts there admissible? No, I’m familiar with some of the sorts researching AWG. A scientific consensus/establishment that would conceal that level of obviously unsound work could be concealing other stuff just as untrustworthy.
No one has any moral right to tell someone else how their behavior relates to impacts on public health, because there is no defensible common ground to start reasoning from.
I have as much right to say, “No, it is all /your/ fault, for not originally executing the people we have in prisons.” Kill everyone in prison from the violent felons to the white collar criminals and the drug offenders, 3 million teachers is not too much to imprison, do so to prevent pedophilia, and kill all of the pot smokers walking around free. That policy based magic talisman is as valid as any other.
“Just go to the ER?” I guess, if you feel bad enough. The emergency rooms in our state have become gigantic welfare clinics for dindus and illegal aliens. If you don’t have COVID going in, you’re likely to have it coming out!
As for believing the “authorities,’ I’d find them easier to believe if they were believable. As it is, the CDC has been whipping back and forth like a windvane in a hurricane. “Follow the science” doesn’t pass the smell test either. I can’t go to church with the locals, but I can go to the casino three miles up the road and swap atmosphere with total strangers and “outsiders.” I can also sit, nuts to butts, with a sampling of the world’s germs on an airplane. I can stand in a line that goes to the back wall of Costco, but I can’t stand in line at the polling place.
I guess the best thing anyone can do is take Ol’ Remus’ advice; avoid crowds…
I agree – I believe the virus does exist and can be serious for some people, but not many – and even then, most people survive.
In my state, the government is freaking out because positive test results are using 10% of the hospital beds in the state… of course they don’t put it that way; they talk hospital and ICU percentages, failing to tell you that hospitals shut down if they are less than 75% full, s 85% isn’t that big a deal…
Please keep it civil folks. Yes, there are MANY different opinions, as we see above. Doesn’t mean anybody is wrong. Just means there are different approaches folks are taking.
It is full blown propaganda theater. My son-in-law, who has allergies to cedar, went to a medical facility to get tested as he is a paramedic and must be tested if he exhibits ANY symptoms that are related to Covid-19. He was tested at a facility and his test came back negative but the health care provider declared that even though negative she was going to report him as positive because of his symptoms. He had 3 further and different tests done on following days which were all negative.
I am going out on a limb but probably not too far and guess that the health care provider leans politically left. This with previous reports of people going to get test but having to leave before actually getting tested then they get letters that they tested positive, leads me further to believe that we are in Lockdown Theater.
And as to the delays in getting care, the Left has said that they want all Conservatives to die. Why not just prevent them from getting care?
Some places are saying you have to quarantine longer with negative test than you do with a positive test!
Covid 19 is no different than influenza. Different virus, essentially same physiologic response. There is no meaningful treatment form the virus….antivirals are at best only marginally effective. Treatment is palliative and supportive to keep you from developing complications able your body kills the virus. This is how ALL viral respiratory illnesses are deal with. And just like influenza, no matter how careful you are you WILL be exposed to it and either get sick or learn you are already immune. NOBODY escapes this virus. Everyone is eventually going to get it. This virus would be NO BIG DEAL….If it wasn’t being used by unscrupulous criminals to destroy our freedom. How do I know this? 4 decades in Healthcare….with most of that dealing with ER patients. The virus is NOTHING compared to the insane overreaction to it. It is no more…and no less… dangerous than the flu. For 90% of us it is not a mortal threat. For 10% it is a real risk and for about .1% of us it will be lethal. That is not much different than a virulent strain of influenza.
Bill- That is what seems to be happening in some locations… sigh
Covid Reality:
It’s a tool break the economy and steal an election.
Everything else is chatter.
Over 3000 deaths listed as being from Covid-19 on Wednesday in the USA.
I wonder how many were due to curable pneumonia.
Or heart disease, or cancer, or suicides, or car accidents, or blunt instruments, or opioid overdoses…
So, if the deadly pandemic resides in my mouth, and any old kind of dish rag blocks it, why do I have to have a swab shoved so far up into my sinuses that it practically makes me a democrat?
So much to address. Let’s try a bullet-point format.
MAIN POINTS
1. COVID19 (c19 for brevity) is a real disease, not some whole-cloth hoax.
2. That said, SOME people are very badly affected by c19, MOST are not.
3. We should be concentrating on trying to identify the factors (probably genetic) that are associated with bad reaction to c19. We (medical profession, and as a society) are not doing that. Instead we are locking everyone down. To me, this is a mixture of genuine stupidity and deliberate power grab by The Usual Suspects.
4. As to mask wearing. Sorry Aesop (and anyone else that says universal mask mandates help), I don’t buy that. Decent habits and some consideration for others helps. Mask mandates are a mix of idiot “Do Something!”ism and, again, power grab.
5. What IS happening with the c19 panic is that people having heart attacks are afraid to call 911, lest the EMT “catches them the coof”. Presentation rate of STEMI (serious heart attack) was down by more than 40% in a recent study across nine major academic hospitals. Its’ not that there are fewer heart attacks, it’s that people are now dying at home instead of getting their blockages opened up in the cath lab. Similarly, because routine health screenings have been canceled over fear of the coof, new cancer diagnoses are down 40-45% across six of the most common cancer types. Because people have had their mammograms, colonoscopies, etc cancelled. Masks are NOT protective against heart attack or cancer. The over-focus on COVID is going to bite society’s ass in a BIG way.
Here separately to keep the original main points not overly long.
DISCUSSION
1. COVID19 is a strange illness. In addition to the respiratory problems, it causes other problems. One of these is hypercoagualation, inappropriate blood clotting (there’s more, but it’s what *I* see in my corner of the medical world). My point here is that c19 is a real, novel infectious agent; it’s not a fictional thing.
2. I had c19 early/mid-February, with multiday general malaise, upper respiratory symptoms, and loss of taste for several days. I was probably exposed end-January on a redeye flight from LAX to BOS where I was forced to sit next to a thick-hick Chinese woman (mainlander) for 6+ hours. She had a mask on the whole time, incidentally, but she was very shouty, and she had a poor sense of personal space. I continued to work throughout (this was before anyone was talking about c19). I generally pretty much keep to myself as possible, but several people were in my small office for hour-long stretches. I was not actively coughing or sneezing during all this period, though I did feel like hammered dogshit. Exactly zero of those people got c19 or symptoms thereof. We have typical American habits regarding cleanliness (decent) and personal space (lots of it, as possible).
For anyone who says “the plural of anecdote is not data” that is in some sense true, in that anecdotes will never become a randomized clinical trial (RCT). But enough anecdotes in the same direction ARE data. A few and you have a case series. A lot (with reliable reporters/ascertainers) and you have a population study. I’m happy to discuss, but this is one of the things I do for a living and I know what I’m talking about.
3. Death certificates are not very reliable when it comes to actual cause of death. They are used in public health research because that’s what we have, but they are far from perfect. Both as a family member of people who have died, and as a physician who has filled them out, the stated “cause of death” is often incorrect. Both my parents’ death certificates are inaccurate, for example (see comment on anecdotes above).
The “co-morbidities” people generally talk about (old age, obesity, smoking, pre-existing lung disease, pre-existing heart disease, diabetes) are risk factors for all-cause (not just c19) mortality, and significant morbidity (problems that impair your function and both perceived and actual health). Those are not surprising. What we need to learn about is what are the specific factors that cause an apparently healthy 30-year old to end up in ICU on ECMO. I hear nothing about that.
4. Masks and other infection control protocols DO help some, but mostly are theater in the general population. First of all, ordinary surgical masks don’t protect the wearer from anything. They are to keep you from spitting or snotting onto the patient. Fine. Even though studies have shown no significant difference in peri-surgical infections regardless of whether OR staff was masked or not. These were studies done in the UK in I think the 1950s. Such a study could never be done now, for liability reasons.
More importantly, what may be appropriate or even needed *in a hospital where there is a high concentration of sick and sickly people* is not applicable to everyday life. Formula One drivers benefit from Nomex suits, special harnesses, and those neck-brace things. But to mandate all those for someone driving around at 30 mph to the grocery store is foolish. I wore a radiation dosimeter when I was in the cardiac catheterization lab, but it’d be silly to wear one on the street.
All- Thanks for the comments AND for keeping it civil!