Just what we need: more ammunition for the recalcitrant and bellicose denier crowd.
If your general covid argument is to listen to the science when the science is in favor of your personal goals and desires, I think that's not called science.
We should be open to questioning apriori assumptions and our subsequent practices. Especially when the apriori had very little ground to stand on considering we're 9-12 months removed from the discovery of this virus and 6 months removed from the implementation of mitigation procedures. There is truly very little evidence and so new approaches or viewpoints should not be dismissed outright like this. You risk being labeled as recalcitrant and bellicose...
What do we see now? We're getting close to the same per-capita rates of Sweden, which had a much more liberal policy (although they still locked down quite a bit).
All the facts so far makes it seem like this was a gorse overreaction. Yes a lot of people got sick and died. NYC was bad, but it also showed we should have focused on isolating the elderly and high risk instead of shutting down everything.
I wrote this a few months back and still stand behind it:
https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/covid-19-is-two-disease...
History will not look back kindly on this year.
Here in Florida when cases spiked, patients were having to be sedated with drugs not originally meant for sedation, due to etomidate, ketamine, and propofol supplies running out. There was no PPE, everyone was reusing masks and gowns. Doctors got sick, some died. Everyone was working 60+ hours and I know many hospitals were offering $100+/hr with multi thousand dollar bonuses per week to get staff to come in. Staff still turned down these offers, due to the stress.
Advent Health setup a dedicated hospital for COVID in every major city to try and efficiently use PPE, they were quickly overwhelmed and the covid patient's flooded every hospital, resulting in even less PPE availability.
One ICU nurse I know summed it up best "We went from working 2-3 patients that each had one problem, to work 5-8 patients, each one with a myriad of problems. I want to go back to the simple patients, I have to code patients several times a week now."
Sure maybe if our government was effective we could have come up with a better plan, but implementing a "segregation" of elderly from the general population simply wasn't going to happen. The efforts to "lower the curve" were 100% necessary and didn't go far enough or last long enough. Now we get the worst of everything, mass death, continuing outbreak and a damaged economy.
Also: These weren't small podunk hospitals, these were the Advent Health's, Baptist Health, Cleveland Clinic size health systems, it's not a lack of money or trying that this all went down, it was a real crisis.
In order to beat this thing back, we need to use the tools our ancestors did - quarantine and isolation - and complement them with modern strategies. In the US, we still have approximately 40k additional infections a day, and we're drowning in a sea of comorbidities.
Re-opening to let however many people die so we can get back to normal isn't a strategy, it's giving up.
More about the modern strategy that we could have used instead: https://youtu.be/VK0Wtjh3HVA
E.g. the drastic differences in infection rates and mortality in different countries in Europe with nominally similar strategies gives us an indication that there is a lot more to learn.
Additionally, we don't know the long term consequences of this thing yet - it's possible that it's going to cause chronic issues a lot of people who would've otherwise been healthy.
> Additionally, we don't know the long term consequences of this thing yet - it's possible that it's going to cause chronic issues a lot of people who would've otherwise been healthy.
That is a risk I understand and am completely willing to take. Instead, a bunch of people with medical degrees have banned me from making this choice, hiding behind “informed consent” doublespeak (and pernicious nonsense in this case - nobody is informed, the risks from an unprecedented year-long lockdown are unknown too, and those are simply the stakes) while taking a giant dump all over the Hippocratic Oath. The reckoning can’t come soon enough.
I thought the figure was 6% had no comorbidity, which would be ~12K people.
One figure I'd like to see is what percentage of people don't have some comorbidity. I mean, 1/3 of the US population is obsese and another 1/3 are overweight. 10% or so of us are diabetics. 20% or whatever smoke.
I suspect it is rather high, which would mean your 6% statistic isn't as indicative as you might think.
How many Americans have other comorbidities? Especially Americans over the age of 55?
I don't see how that follows. In fact the bulk of US cases and deaths right now are happening in states with limited mitigations very much along the lines of what was happening in Sweden. The US has stricter rules in some areas, and most of those (in particular the northeast) are showing much better control of the outbreak than Sweden.
Currently, the average daily cases is 5x higher in Rhode Island than in Sweden, 3x higher in Connecticut than in Sweden, and 2x higher in Massachusetts than in Sweden. The current daily covid-19 death rate in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island is higher than in Sweden.
How the hell can you claim that that is "much better control" with a straight face?
(And I didn't even need to bring up NY or NJ to find US states in the northeast that are doing much worse than Sweden.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/connecticut/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/massachusetts/
It's so sad to see this narrative take hold even here. But hey, at least you got the technical description correct, and it's only us fatties who are running the risk, so let's just discount the 95% of the deaths, right? The perspectives here, in my opinion, are incredibly skewed when you remember we're supposed to be a society whose goal is liberty and justice for all.
This teacher needn't have died: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/south-carolina/artic...
I'm curious about your opinions: What is the point of civilization if not to work at minimizing death and suffering (or to maximize well-being and liberty, same-same)? What is of higher value to you, and what do you see as the point of all this?
I can't tell you how many people I've found who are still convinced hydroxycloroquine cures Covid-19.
Not picking a fight as I feel that evidence based analysis is paramount.
There are some good studies that show that HCQ+ ( HCQ with Azithromycin and Zinc ) is quite effective at PREVENTING serious outcomes in many cases as it seems to interfere with portions of the viral replication lifecycle. There haven't been large scale double-blind trials yet, but there should be. The few double-blind trials there have been have focused exclusively on HCQ without the additional viral inhibitors and were done at toxic doses when the virus had largely already replicated and the patients had progressed to a "serious illness" with the accompanied "cytokine storm". Lots of bad information out there, 'politically' deployed with little information behind it.
This isn't and shouldn't be the only treatment available, but we shouldn't discount things because they don't fit with our worldview or because our 'enemies' promote them. Facts are stubborn things. We should strive to do better collectively.
I'll leave speculation of motivations behind on why more types of treatments haven't been tried. We're in a strange time when a lot of the institutions that have failed the public are still being weaponized against people who desperately want the best outcome for folks.
See, this is a complete misconception based on a conspiratorial mind. I'm not blaming you specifically for it - I used to think the same way myself - but it's something I've seen repeated over and over by people as if it's fact, when in reality there's plenty of proof it isn't.
For example, there's several trials being done on common anti-inflammatory drugs to prevent the cytokine storm [1]. Dexamethasone - a very cheap corticosteroid - has been found to be effective in reducing risk for people with severe cases [2]. There's a bunch of other almost over-the-counter drugs being trialed.
Are companies interested in making a ton of money by developing a new drug? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean the scientific community is just 'sitting this one out'.
[1] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/04/417196/clinical-trial-test...
Not true.
July 30, 2020, Research Update
Spanish RCT of Hydroxychloroquine for Patients with Early, Nonsevere COVID-19 Finds No Benefit.
July 29, 2020, Research Update
United States/Canadian RCT of Hydroxychloroquine for Patients with Early, Nonsevere COVID-19 Finds No Benefit
>Lots of bad information out there, 'politically' deployed with little information behind it.
Ironic because you're the one believing and spreading the misinformation.
>I'll leave speculation of motivations behind on why more types of treatments haven't been tried. We're in a strange time when a lot of the institutions that have failed the public are still being weaponized against people who desperately want the best outcome for folks.
Can you explain why India(where HCQ is widely used for malaria) would lock itself down and suffer severe consequences to make Trump look bad? Modi and Trump are buddies and Trump was invited to and visited India just in Jan or Feb.
Why would Europe give a flying fuck about Trump getting re-elected? Four more years would barely make a difference to Europe, surely whatever the impact is, isn't worth a 10% drop in GDP?
>Not a scientist or doctor, but have taken a lot of time to understand how I can protect my family if needed.
If you really took a lot of time to look in the right places, you'd have found that promising observational studies happen all the time in drug discovery which are eventually found not to have any effects.
This explains it well, and it was quite early on:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/06/hy...
It's sad that so many smart people believe and are misled by misinformation that started with Fox News pushing badly done research studies to push a political agenda. The mistrust intentionally cultivated against scientists will harm us for generations.
I rely on facts, not belief. Integrity is important and in short supply in our age.
The author of the article you sent made a great point near the end of his article:
<quote> I called it “potentially very interesting” and called for more data to see if it was real. That’s where I still am. </quote>
I completely agree with this, let's disprove it and strike it off the list, but the studies that I have read so far don't seem to do a good job of disproving.
I appreciate the link and am happy to read what people send, keep sharing information! I am always interested and want to get the best information possible to help the people I know if at all possible. Thanks again for taking the time to share with me.
Here's a link to a pre-print that seems like it holds a pretty promising review of existing studies.
https://www.palmerfoundation.com.au/hydroxychloroquine-is-ef...
That's not how science or research works. The onus is on the ones that are claiming something works to prove it works. So far they have failed. Otherwise one could come up with zillions of alleged treatments that are assumed to work unless someone disproves them.
Anyway, he wrote that in early April. If you read his writings in the next few months he think HCQ doesn't work.