Coronavirus General Discussion

[WiseOne]

To be fair, there WAS a pandemic in March and April, with a large spike in excess deaths from about mid March to early May in most places. Some places got that same bump just with a delay, like parts of the US and South America.

This guy is quite the conspiracy theorist, isn't he? Not so sure it's that so much as an inability on the part of those in key leadership posts to cut through the mountains of confusing information. Plus maybe an element of not wanting to give up on a narrative that's providing them with a nice career boost.

A lot of my colleagues raced to publish papers and write grants on COVID based on clinical observations. I kept thinking that this was a waste of time....because the only issues of any real interest are developing treatments and vaccines, and the whole thing was bound to be a short term flash in the pan. I'd hate to be stuck with a 5 year grant investigating something that no one cared about any longer. So I spent the time focusing on my own research instead.

[flyingpylon]

Does anyone here follow Chris Martenson? He's an economist/toxicologist who for many months through the spring and early summer put out one oh-so-serious presentation after another about the "unprecedented" CoVid threat. It made me so exasperated that I tuned him out for several months. It seems that at some point during that time, he, also, began to doubt the official narrative. Now he's putting out videos that not only debunk the narrative, but that "connect the dots" in the big picture. You know, you have to give him a lot of credit for doing a 180 like that when he ultimately realized he had been misled.

Take a look at what he's got a vice grip on today: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ ... we-realize

I stopped reading Martenson years ago because I came to the conclusion that he was simply a fear pornographer. That might not be entirely fair and maybe he could be right about some things but it sure is depressing to read that stuff all the time.

[doodle]

Thanks for the shout-out Maddy!

To anyone who is still listening....I actually came to the same conclusions as Ivor Cummins did independently, by examining data & literature myself. The research I did wasn't as extensive as what Cummins presents in the video, which includes long lists of papers gleaned from years of research - mainly due to lack of time. (it blows my mind that anyone would call this "cherry picking"). Ivor Cummins' special talent is combining his extensive research with outstanding presentation skills, which is why I offer up his videos instead of trying to explain the concepts myself.

Doodle, perhaps you could offer up a refutation that consists of something other than "I don't believe it therefore it can't be true"? i.e. is there a FACT in the video that you can refute? Because, if you can't refute the facts then the logical conclusions of those facts remain standing. You may be upset about that, but that says more about you than about the science.

I already posted that WiseOne. If you took time to read this analysis of his analysis perhaps you wouldt be so sure in your 'irrefutable facts'.

https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/ ... viewpoints

[Maddy]

I stopped reading Martenson years ago because I came to the conclusion that he was simply a fear pornographer. That might not be entirely fair and maybe he could be right about some things but it sure is depressing to read that stuff all the time.

I got pretty annoyed with him myself when he was all on board with the CoVid narrative. His conversion, however, appears to be genuine, and although much of what he's now talking about is speculative (how could it not be), his observation that the emergence of the virus was perfectly timed to correspond to the collapse of the financial system,and that it has been used to usher in a New World Order replete with a preordained set of technocratic objectives, makes a great deal of sense.

[Maddy]

. . .
[moved to Politics]

[yankees60]

Would you buy one?

https://www.vyzrtech.com/products/bio-vyzr

If price was not a concern would you wear it?

I'm wondering if it'd meet the compliance required by the supermarket I was in yesterday whereby it required the wearing of a cloth mask?

Vinny

Capture.JPG (79.88 KiB) Viewed 5097 times

[Hal]

Would you buy one?

https://www.vyzrtech.com/products/bio-vyzr

If price was not a concern would you wear it?

I'm wondering if it'd meet the compliance required by the supermarket I was in yesterday whereby it required the wearing of a cloth mask?

Vinny

Capture.JPG

Why not go the whole hog and use a NBC suit
They have the added benefit of making those unwanted pounds disappear because they are so hot!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_suit

[Tortoise]

Despite Emperor Newsom's ongoing business closures and restrictions here in CA, I get the distinct impression that people here -- at least in my neighborhood and social circle -- are psychologically returning to normal life.

Last night, my wife and I went over to our next-door neighbors' house so that they could meet our baby girl (about 3 1/2 months old now). We're relatively new in the neighborhood and don't run into our neighbors very often, so it was our first time in their house. We showed up without masks, our neighbors weren't wearing masks, and they invited us inside without any hesitation. We sat together in their living room maskless for almost two hours talking like normal human beings.

And when I went grocery shopping today, I noticed that some of the "one-way aisle" stickers on the floor have been completely scraped off by the employees. And the customers in the grocery store seem less paranoid than they used to be about their personal bubbles and putting things on the conveyor belts at the checkout counters. Other than wearing masks, the customers seem to be acting more relaxed and natural, similar to how they did before February of this year.

This all seems very promising to me. I'm liking this trend.

[doodle]

Can someone explain to me like I'm five why the huge disparity in cases and deaths toll between Korea and Japan and the United States and western europe?

[I Shrugged]

Fauci says Positives from PCR cycles of 36+ are false. Me: But apparently many states and nations are using them.

https://twitter.com/vegsource/status/13 ... e-false%2f

[I Shrugged]

Can someone explain to me like I'm five why the huge disparity in cases and deaths toll between Korea and Japan and the United States and western europe?

One theory is that they got the original Chinese version, while we and Western Europe got a mutated, more virulent version.

[Maddy]

Can someone explain to me like I'm five why the huge disparity in cases and deaths toll between Korea and Japan and the United States and western europe?

Differing genetics.

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/a ... 20-01673-z
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7294766/

[Mark Leavy]

Tight borders vs. porous borders.

[Cortopassi]

FYI, another 4 people last week tested positive at my company (of about 35 people). Rapid test today on a group of us who had contacts with them all came back negative.

I don't know what is supposed to be happening in the US or Illinois with contact tracing, but that sure isn't happening in these past two situations, other than the tracing back by the person themselves of where they though they might have got it and who they came in contact with.

All four range from no symptoms to fever to loss of smell/headache/fever. No one has had any issues breathing as far as I know.

[Xan]

FYI, another 4 people last week tested positive at my company (of about 35 people). Rapid test today on a group of us who had contacts with them all came back negative.

I don't know what is supposed to be happening in the US or Illinois with contact tracing, but that sure isn't happening in these past two situations, other than the tracing back by the person themselves of where they though they might have got it and who they came in contact with.

All four range from no symptoms to fever to loss of smell/headache/fever. No one has had any issues breathing as far as I know.

My understanding is that it now looks like some 90% of infected people will not spread the virus to basically anybody, and that 10% of infected people spread it a LOT. There's some unknown biological reason for that.

That means that contact tracing makes a lot of sense backwards: if you can go back and find the spreader who infected you, then you can take a spreader out of circulation.

[yankees60]

FYI, another 4 people last week tested positive at my company (of about 35 people). Rapid test today on a group of us who had contacts with them all came back negative.

I don't know what is supposed to be happening in the US or Illinois with contact tracing, but that sure isn't happening in these past two situations, other than the tracing back by the person themselves of where they though they might have got it and who they came in contact with.

All four range from no symptoms to fever to loss of smell/headache/fever. No one has had any issues breathing as far as I know.

How many now cumulative out of 35?

Vinny

[yankees60]

HEALTH
When it comes to airborne COVID-19 transmission, droplet size matters
But this doesn’t rule out the danger of inhaling tiny particles.

Kate Baggaley
November 2, 2020

https://www.popsci.com/story/health/cov ... ce=twitter


The researchers observed that a person’s chances of becoming infected were highest if they entered a room right after a high emitter coughed. “We have kind of had that intuition for some time, but this has put a numerical refinement to it,” Clapp says. “Now we can look at these data, and look at this model, and kind of get some understanding of what that means in terms of a relative risk.”

Bonn and his colleagues caution that the findings should not be interpreted too literally. “Importantly, our results do not completely rule out aerosol transmission,” the researchers wrote. “What is acceptable as an infection probability is beyond the scope of this paper.”

One limitation of the research is that it’s not known how many virus particles a person needs to be exposed to before becoming infected with COVID-19. For their calculations, Bonn and his colleagues assumed that this amount is similar to that determined for the coronavirus that caused the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s.

The researchers also only measured secretions produced by healthy people. “My guess is that based on biological responses from the lungs and from the rest of the body that you’re going to see more fluid production...when they’re sick with something like COVID,” Clapp says. “It could [be] that the numbers that they came up with here may change based on a person’s output when they’re actually sick.”

Matthew Meselson, a molecular biologist at Harvard University who was not involved with the research, says that aerosols may actually contain more virus particles than larger droplets because they come from deeper within the lungs. If this is true of the novel coronavirus, the new findings would underestimate the threat of airborne transmission. “It’s very important that one take account of this difference, because the high titer of virus is likely to be down deep in your lungs,” says Meselson, who investigated a 1979 anthrax outbreak in Russia, and concluded that it was primarily fueled by airborne transmission. “What we really need is [more] measurements of the amount of [SARS-Cov-2] RNA in the aerosols that people produce when speaking.”

More research is still needed to determine how risky airborne transmission of COVID-19 is under different circumstances, Bonn says. “Our conclusion is that if you’re in a well-ventilated room in a modern building, for instance, that you don’t need to worry too much about getting aerosol infections, but if you’re in ill-ventilated rooms—small meeting rooms, elevators, public restrooms—you should worry,” he says. “The trouble with the message is that it’s not a yes or a no, it’s not a ‘no, aerosols are not dangerous,’ and it’s also not, ‘yes, the aerosols are very dangerous.’”

While there are some precautions you can take to avoid spending time in stuffy spaces, such as taking the stairs instead of a cramming into an elevator and opening your windows, the new findings underscore the importance of good ventilation. “[This] is probably going to be a key element as we enter the winter and people are moving to indoor spaces,” Clapp says. He and his colleagues have recently begun investigating how effective air purifiers are at removing small particles like aerosols from the air. So far, he says, their preliminary data are encouraging.

Still, Clapp says, the most important precautions against COVID-19 continue to be wearing masks and social distancing. “I can’t emphasize enough that people should continue to wear masks,” he says. “In doing that we limit the number of large and small particles in the air that we’re all sharing.”

[Cortopassi]

FYI, another 4 people last week tested positive at my company (of about 35 people). Rapid test today on a group of us who had contacts with them all came back negative.

I don't know what is supposed to be happening in the US or Illinois with contact tracing, but that sure isn't happening in these past two situations, other than the tracing back by the person themselves of where they though they might have got it and who they came in contact with.

All four range from no symptoms to fever to loss of smell/headache/fever. No one has had any issues breathing as far as I know.

How many now cumulative out of 35?

Vinny

5

[Cortopassi]

The researchers observed that a person’s chances of becoming infected were highest if they entered a room right after a high emitter coughed.

I understand they are maybe better able to model this now, but I think for 1000 years this should have been pretty obvious!

[yankees60]

The researchers observed that a person’s chances of becoming infected were highest if they entered a room right after a high emitter coughed.

I understand they are maybe better able to model this now, but I think for 1000 years this should have been pretty obvious!

Agree. Seems intuitively obvious.

Vinny

[doodle]

Now Trump is going to have to fire Birx as well..maybe we can replace her with a doctor of english literature to craft up some great fairy tales.

Dr. Deborah Birx sounded an alarming note about the state of the coronavirus in an internal White House report, saying the US is entering its "most deadly phase" yet, one that requires "much more aggressive action," according to The Washington Post.

[WiseOne]

Can someone explain to me like I'm five why the huge disparity in cases and deaths toll between Korea and Japan and the United States and western europe?

Yes, there are several reasons.

1) The US is a major international travel hub. That's why NYC was hit first. South Korea and Japan have much less travel exposure.

2) Data from NYC indicate that Asians are least susceptible to COVID - neighborhoods like Flushing have had the lowest COVID rates in the entire city. If all of the US had the same rates of moderate/severe illness as Flushing, Fauci and the others would be crooning about how awesome the US response to COVID was.

3) Conversely, Black and Hispanic populations appear to be highly susceptible to COVID, and that may be independent of co-morbid conditions. (Take a look at countries like Peru, they are getting slammed.) These comprise a big chunk of the US population. Haven't looked it up but I would guess that they are a negligible percentage of the population in the two countries you indicate.

4) Thanks to the USDA food guidelines, the US population has a much greater prevalence of co-morbidities known to worsen COVID prognosis than is the case in Korea/Japan.

Bottom line is that you can't straight-up compare countries without accounting for these sorts of population differences. Sweden for example has a worse COVID rate than its Nordic neighbors not because they didn't lock down or mandate masks, but because they took in a large Somali refugee population that their neighbors didn't. The Somalis in Sweden were hit much harder than the native population, at something like 5x the case rate.

Hope that answers your question. And that you read my message instead of trying to firebomb it because you don't like the answer.

[WiseOne]

My understanding is that it now looks like some 90% of infected people will not spread the virus to basically anybody, and that 10% of infected people spread it a LOT. There's some unknown biological reason for that.

It's called indiscriminate testing. A lot of those "infections" are straight-up false positives. Still others are detections of viral remnants from exposure that could have occurred months previously. The test will also pick up other coronaviruses with similar protein structures, and there are lots of those in circulation. The CDC has put out a statement to the effect that PCR tests are way too sensitive for the way they're being used, and that the tests should be made less sensitive. I have no idea why this hasn't been done.

[Kriegsspiel]

2) Data from NYC indicate that Asians are least susceptible to COVID - neighborhoods like Flushing have had the lowest COVID rates in the entire city. If all of the US had the same rates of moderate/severe illness as Flushing, Fauci and the others would be crooning about how awesome the US response to COVID was.

I called it, in the conspiracies thread!

Genetic weapon

[Cortopassi]

Well at least my kids are half Chinese...