COVID-19/Coronavirus thread

[Big Hurtin]

11 hours ago, greg775 said:

Kansas football has ZERO positive cases of COVID-19 in its football program as of 4 pm. today. I mean Kansas State had 30 last week. WTF is goin on? I know sometimes college coaches and admins lie, but not for something this serious.

LOL

[Quin]

12 hours ago, greg775 said:

Kansas football has ZERO positive cases of COVID-19 in its football program as of 4 pm. today. I mean Kansas State had 30 last week. WTF is goin on? I know sometimes college coaches and admins lie, but not for something this serious.

Brother, do I have college rape scandals to tell you about.

[greg775]

4 hours ago, Quin said:

Brother, do I have college rape scandals to tell you about.

You'd think if they were lying about number of positives they'd just say they had 2 in the program. To say zero and be lying would be weird. As long as the government lets private schools say whatever they want and hide behind HIPAA law, the public will have no way of being a watchdog and checking.

[Quin]

5 minutes ago, greg775 said:

You'd think if they were lying about number of positives they'd just say they had 2 in the program. To say zero and be lying would be weird. As long as the government lets private schools say whatever they want and hide behind HIPAA law, the public will have no way of being a watchdog and checking.

Correct. You'd make a fine reporter.

[StrangeSox]

On 9/23/2020 at 9:42 AM, bmags said:

Good news, and the knee-slap pile-on for U of I despite them being the most well-planned college re-opening in the country was (unsurprisingly) too harsh. Mass testing does not mean no outbreaks can happen, it means you can respond to it quickly. 

FWIW

 

 

[bmags]

57 minutes ago, StrangeSox said:

FWIW

 

 

Yes that might happen. COVID is in Illinois and all over US. Maybe they should focus their time and energy yelling at the universities who re-opened with zero mitigation efforts, not the one who built a scaled up rapid testing program and making flip comments about a working group trying to make incredibly hard decisions. Or better yet, rather than using U of I as the stand-in for the failures of the US response to COVID, they could focus on the Federal and State governments. Bars are still open in champaign-urbana, everything is open around it. 

[StrangeSox]

It's a U of I prof talking about the effectiveness and wisdom of the decisions and plans made that were within the control of the University. Should U of I gone ahead with their reopening plan if they knew 10%+ of the student body would become infected? 

[Texsox]

Bottom line there has to be some personal responsibility. The best plans fail when people ignore them. 

[gatnom]

1 hour ago, StrangeSox said:

It's a U of I prof talking about the effectiveness and wisdom of the decisions and plans made that were within the control of the University. Should U of I gone ahead with their reopening plan if they knew 10%+ of the student body would become infected? 

What percentage of the student population would have become infected had they stayed off campus?

[Balta1701]

35 minutes ago, Texsox said:

Bottom line there has to be some personal responsibility. The best plans fail when people ignore them. 

Bars are open and we encourage you to go to bars. However, you have to be responsible and not go to bars. If you go to the bars I encourage you to go to go to, I will give you a stern lecture about personal responsibility for going to the bar that I told you to go to. How could you be so irresponsible as to go to the bar that I told you to go to? Shame on you.

[Texsox]

18 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

Bars are open and we encourage you to go to bars. However, you have to be responsible and not go to bars. If you go to the bars I encourage you to go to go to, I will give you a stern lecture about personal responsibility for going to the bar that I told you to go to. How could you be so irresponsible as to go to the bar that I told you to go to? Shame on you.

LOL. Have you ever taken a position that wasn't at the extreme end of something? What a sad binary world you try to live in. 

I get it. Being at a bar with close family members, staying socially distant from others, leaving your mask on unless you are actually taking a drink, and washing your hands frequently is the exact same as dancing in a large group, not washing your hands, and never wearing a mask. Shame on me for thinking people should know the difference. I forgot what a low opinion you have of the average person. 

What was I thinking? Personal responsibility? Forget about it. If the government allows you to drive, that means travel 75 mph down side streets. If the government allows you go grocery shopping in the store, take off your mask, lick all the produce, and cough on everybody. We can't possible ask people to be responsible. 

[Dick Allen]

1 hour ago, Texsox said:

LOL. Have you ever taken a position that wasn't at the extreme end of something? What a sad binary world you try to live in. 

I get it. Being at a bar with close family members, staying socially distant from others, leaving your mask on unless you are actually taking a drink, and washing your hands frequently is the exact same as dancing in a large group, not washing your hands, and never wearing a mask. Shame on me for thinking people should know the difference. I forgot what a low opinion you have of the average person. 

What was I thinking? Personal responsibility? Forget about it. If the government allows you to drive, that means travel 75 mph down side streets. If the government allows you go grocery shopping in the store, take off your mask, lick all the produce, and cough on everybody. We can't possible ask people to be responsible. 

If you are going to be with family members, my question would be why do you have to be at a bar exposing yourself to others? If you are so careful to always wear a mask except when taking a drink, washing your hands constantly, and staying away from people, it makes no sense you would want to do this at a bar, where, if you are there long enough, someone is sure to slip up.

[Texsox]

53 minutes ago, Dick Allen said:

If you are going to be with family members, my question would be why do you have to be at a bar exposing yourself to others? If you are so careful to always wear a mask except when taking a drink, washing your hands constantly, and staying away from people, it makes no sense you would want to do this at a bar, where, if you are there long enough, someone is sure to slip up.

It is one of our local wineries. Great views. Excellent service. Beautiful drive through Texas hill country.  I don't see why we should destroy their business when they can operate with reasonable measures in place. 

 

[Balta1701]

On 9/26/2020 at 8:47 AM, Texsox said:

LOL. Have you ever taken a position that wasn't at the extreme end of something? What a sad binary world you try to live in. 

I get it. Being at a bar with close family members, staying socially distant from others, leaving your mask on unless you are actually taking a drink, and washing your hands frequently is the exact same as dancing in a large group, not washing your hands, and never wearing a mask. Shame on me for thinking people should know the difference. I forgot what a low opinion you have of the average person. 

What was I thinking? Personal responsibility? Forget about it. If the government allows you to drive, that means travel 75 mph down side streets. If the government allows you go grocery shopping in the store, take off your mask, lick all the produce, and cough on everybody. We can't possible ask people to be responsible. 

So first, I hope someone reading this  appreciates the irony of you defending restaurant visits on a Baseball forum and also talking about personal responsibility in the same post, where the last issue with restaurants in MLB was a team banishing 2 players to the minors and trading one because they went to a restaurant after a game and the team judged that such an outrageous betrayal that they would not play with those players again.

Second, this is a damned lethal, dreadfully harmful virus. 300,000 Americans will die of it in 2020, maybe more if we keep opening more things up. Please tell me how on earth the binary “this is bad” is the wrong thing. Is a good middle ground more dead Americans than that? Come on. We are witnessing the worst mass casualty event for Americans in a single year since the civil war right now. You want to complain about me being an absolutist about literally hundreds of thousands dead and millions seriously damaged where they will be affected for who knows how many years being awful and something we should not just be ok with? Go ahead. This is awful and that is my binary position. Argue that I’m being too absolute about that. 

Third...going to a restaurant or a bar, you are not being personally responsible. The Cleveland Indians recognized that. You are relying on everyone else being responsible and keeping masks on, not going out if exposed. If they don’t do that, you could do everything right and still get it. You literally added the “unless they are taking a drink” exception to your post, and if a person has it, that’s plenty to infect you in that enclosed building. And then you become a transmission vector. You kept your mask on, but someone else took a drink and now you got it, so where were you irresponsible? When you went out in the first place, which you just excused and justified to defend your favorite winery. That’s the horrible part of this. If you want to be personally responsible then you can do nothing. You cannot visit your favorite bar, because you already made a risky choice. And if even one of your relatives or neighbors does the irresponsible thing of going to a bar or restaurant, your personal responsibility lecture does nothing, because they can get you.

And that’s where the contradiction comes in. You are so used to blaming people for their failures with the personal responsibility trope that there’s no context for a problem that only is fixed if we all do the right thing. You need communal responsibility. You need someone else to do the right thing. If you only care about what you want to lecture about, your individual responsibility, then going out is a mistake. We can demonstrate this statistically that people going to restaurants get sick. 

And there is the problem. I don’t want your favorite restaurant to die, but I also don’t want another 14,000 Texans to die this year from it. Restaurants are not safe if there is uncontrollable transmission. Every time someone else gets it, that is another reason for me to not visit any site as a high risk individual. My money can help keep these places open but I havent had restaurant food in 7 months. The right answer was the same one in April. You love a restaurant? They are not a safe place to be during uncontrolled transmission. They have to close. Even outdoors is a risk. But keeping them from failing is now a community responsibility. People die when they open and I hope you are not seriously going to try to justify those deaths as some middle ground. So restaurants have to rely on takeout and the government has to spend money to keep them from failing completely. That keeps being included in the bill Democrats want passed, but Republicans specifically are blocking aid to restaurants. Is it a binary to note that Democrats passed that aid in May and nothing has happened because the Republicans don’t care?

 End uncontrolled transmission then you have a shot at keeping those places open, but again that requires far more work and far greater restrictions, and the idea that we need to control this is just labeled an “extreme position”, so this person with a compromised immune system will continue being as responsible as they can be and hope that they can leave this community before they get him sick. And if your restaurant fails...well you can’t lecture me about personal responsibility.

So in the end, Texas has opened stuff up again, half their restaurants will fail anyway because a lot of people are being responsible and there is no support, and we will hear lectures about personal responsibility when that trope means everyone must stay inside until community transmission stops. 

So ironically, you get to choose. Which is important to you. Do you want to lecture people about personal responsibility, or do you want every public gathering and restaurant to shut down? Because just like for the Cleveland Indians, that's the binary you set up. If you're ready to accept that this is a communal, nationwide problem that we all have to solve together then we have a way out. Get case loads down to a reasonable number where every one can be tracked and traced. Create a legitimate tracking and tracing program where opening new things doesn't lead to new transmission. When cases pop up, treat every one as a challenge. Isolate people who are sick and provide them available health care. Pay to keep businesses from failing while we develop this system. Or alternatively, lecture people about personal responsibility while trying somehow to justify behavior that is demonstrably irresponsible, and just look the other way as the body count climbs...like we're doing right now. I hope that this isn't the middle ground you want.. 

[Iwritecode]

7 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

Create a legitimate tracking and tracing program where opening new things doesn't lead to new transmission.

Whatever happened to this? It seems like there was a ton of talk about creating one a few months ago and now it seems like we've sort of lost interest in doing it.

[StrangeSox]

20 minutes ago, Iwritecode said:

Whatever happened to this? It seems like there was a ton of talk about creating one a few months ago and now it seems like we've sort of lost interest in doing it.

It was part of the IDPH's requirements for Illinois to move to Phase 4, but it was completely ignored. Chicago is maybe going to get around to hiring a fraction of the contact tracers they originally planned. Part of the problem is when caseloads are as high as they are, contact tracing becomes exponentially more difficult. So, like so much else, everyone in charge shrugged their shoulders, gave up, and opened everything up instead.

[Iwritecode]

1 hour ago, StrangeSox said:

It was part of the IDPH's requirements for Illinois to move to Phase 4, but it was completely ignored. Chicago is maybe going to get around to hiring a fraction of the contact tracers they originally planned. Part of the problem is when caseloads are as high as they are, contact tracing becomes exponentially more difficult. So, like so much else, everyone in charge shrugged their shoulders, gave up, and opened everything up instead.

I feel like that's sort of where we are headed. Everyone is just tired of dealing with it and wants to move past it and forget about it. So we are just slowly going back to normal without actually fixing anything. Then the number of people that are still getting sick and dying from it will just become second page news.

[Balta1701]

4 hours ago, Iwritecode said:

Whatever happened to this? It seems like there was a ton of talk about creating one a few months ago and now it seems like we've sort of lost interest in doing it.

Here in Texas, the governor granted a no-bid contract to a company that couldn't do it for reasons that have never been explained, presumably some sort of corruption that people have been too busy to deal with and will probably never fully investigate. They had no skill at it and haven't done much if anything, but someone got paid.

That was only part of the problem - the other part was that once cases shot up, there wasn't enough money or resources to do it effectively. If there's a hundred cases statewide, then you can assign 3 or 4 people per day to each case, find out everyone they contacted for the previous week, call them a dozen times until they pick up, email them, call their neighbors, go to their houses, and get them tested. If there's 10,000 cases a day statewide, then each person who tests positive might get one phone call asking them to list a few close contacts, each of those close contacts might get one phone call, if they don't pick up or they refuse to go get tested you don't have time to spend on them because you have 9000 other cases to get through that day.

There might have been some national steps that could have been taken, such as developing a full tracing app in cooperation with tech companies that would have dramatically expanded the ability to do that, but that would have taken national leadership. That's why other countries (South Korea in particular) were able to do that and we couldn't, because we have no national leadership.

And finally, having the resources to track and trace and test everyone...costs money. Our local health department stopped reporting numbers in the same way in August because they were out of money to keep compiling them.

Edit: oh and it's only useful anyway if you can get test results quickly. If a person shows symptoms and their positive test doesn't come back for 8 days, then contact tracing is pointless since they've already done all the spreading they are going to do and it's on 2 generations down the road. In June/July when cases were surging nationwide, the average test for anyone not in MLB was taking 4-5 days to come back, and there's almost no use in tracing with that long of a wait.

[Jerksticks]

Been a while since I bonered up this thread.  
 

Where those dead Swedes?  Next week?

[StrangeSox]

In the ground or cremated, presumably. Lot more dead Swedes per capita than their neighbors, and for no economic gain anyway. Turns out the obviously dumb plan was dumb.

[caulfield12]

15 hours ago, Jerksticks said:

Been a while since I bonered up this thread.  
 

Where those dead Swedes?  Next week?

 

27.  Sweden  5,880 deaths   10,115,000 total population=0.00058

28.  Philippines 5,448 deaths  109,581,000 total population=0.0000497   (11.67 times better than Sweden for a 3rd world/developing country)

67.  Denmark  650 deaths  5,797,000 total population=0.000112   (about FIVE times better than Sweden)

82.  Finland  345 deaths   5,543,000 total population=0.00006224    (about NINE times better than Sweden)

88.  Norway  274 deaths   5,431,000 total population=0.00005045     (about ELEVEN and 1/2 times better than Sweden, also consistently one of Top 5 countries in the world on PISA exams for Math/Science)

 

USA  209,815 deaths   328,240,000=0.0006392   (USA 1.10 times worse than Sweden)

UK   42,001 deaths    67,886,000=0.0006187  (UK 1.067 times worse than Sweden)

Edited September 29, 2020 by caulfield12

[Jerksticks]

36 minutes ago, caulfield12 said:

 

27.  Sweden  5,880 deaths   10,115,000 total population=0.00058

28.  Philippines 5,448 deaths  109,581,000 total population=0.0000497   (11.67 times better than Sweden for a 3rd world/developing country)

67.  Denmark  650 deaths  5,797,000 total population=0.000112   (about FIVE times better than Sweden)

82.  Finland  345 deaths   5,543,000 total population=0.00006224    (about NINE times better than Sweden)

88.  Norway  274 deaths   5,431,000 total population=0.00005045     (about ELEVEN and 1/2 times better than Sweden, also consistently one of Top 5 countries in the world on PISA exams for Math/Science)

 

USA  209,815 deaths   328,240,000=0.0006392   (USA 1.10 times worse than Sweden)

UK   42,001 deaths    67,886,000=0.0006187  (UK 1.067 times worse than Sweden)

Everybody understands those obvious numbers though.  Why cite that?

 

Isn’t the actual debate on whether one believes, after 7 months, most of the Swedish population has been exposed to the virus or not?

If your common sense tells you that most of the Swedes have avoided exposure and you want to cite antibody levels, then yes it looks bad.  
 

If your common sense tells you that due to the infectiousness of the virus and lack of social distancing that you’d figure the vast majority of Swedes have come into contact with the virus, then the total lack of any exponential rise in deaths is maybe a good sign for the world. 

Edited September 29, 2020 by Jerksticks

[caulfield12]

5 minutes ago, Jerksticks said:

Everybody understands those obvious numbers though.  Why cite that?

 

Isn’t the actual debate on whether one believes, after 7 months, most of the Swedish population has been exposed to the virus or not?

If your common sense tells you that most of the Swedes have avoided exposure and you want to cite antibody levels, then yes it looks bad.  
 

If your common sense tells you that due to the infectiousness of the virus and lack of social distancing that you’d figure the vast majority of Swedes have come into contact with the virus, then the total lack of any exponential rise in deaths is maybe a good sign for the world. 

Because we can't make comparisons with developed countries featuring high-tech/subsidized health care systems and countries like India, Brazil and Mexico, for one.

COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on rural communities, people of color, women, those with pre-existing or underlying conditions.   What exactly can we extrapolate from mostly the city of Stockholm and a bunch of rural/outlying areas that will help the rest of the world deal with this?

 

https://reason.com/2020/08/14/did-sweden-accidentally-blunder-into-covid-19-herd-immunity/

This article is from August, and posits they might have accidentally blundered into herd immunity...if that was the case, it definitely hasn't been in the UK, and they're a lot better example to follow than Sweden in terms of being analogous to the US on a smaller scale.

Or maybe all we have to do is look at Florida, where DeSantis is opening EVERYTHING up wide open as of about a week ago, damn the consequences.

If he doesn't kill off or hospitalize 1/4th those in assisted living, do we then consider it a success?    What's the opportunity cost trade-off?   How much is sacrificing each individual life for a parallel version of Texsox's local entrepreneurs with restaurants on the verge of going under without emergency loans or a significant new government stimulus package?

 

[StrangeSox]

 

 

[StrangeSox]