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Corona Virus - How bad is it going to be?

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15 hours ago, halfmanhalfbronco said:

 

Yep, aside from the 10,000,000+ years of lost life in 2020-21, there are a lot of people in their 40's 50's and 60's that will suffer from reduced quality of life.  

There are 152 MILLION Americans who have (46.7 of the population) one of the 6 most common  comorbidities associated with increased risk of death from COVID-19.

 

nah halfman if you have high blood pressure you lose the right to live

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Pre-Omicron as I understand so unsure if this holds for the big O or past peer review, but @halfmanhalfbronco this might be why your prior infection  did result from a Costco expedition?  Airborne infectivity levels diminish fairly rapidly.  90% after 20 mts. in this measure.  Indoors where relatively populated plus length of time key factors in spread.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.08.22268944v1

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8 hours ago, wolfpack1 said:

The head of COVID at UCSF in this article does a great job of smashing the narratives of the right-wing and overly cautious left re: Omicron.

For the right wingers who are saying on here and elsewhere that none of the measures taken thus far have done anything to improve on COVID, and that California and Alabama are faring the same with Omicron so clearly this is a failure of the Biden admin and blue state governors...

"The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations,"

But fewer people are hospitalized with COVID today in California compared with this time last year. And, especially in highly vaccinated areas, few of those patients are actually in the hospital because of COVID illness.

There is not nearly as much of a COVID crisis in the Bay area as there has been in past waves. Why? Highly vaxxed population, highly cautious population. Guarantee any and all places where serious illness and death numbers are relatively high will be low-vax, low caution (red) populations.

For the overly cautious (read: almost always left winger) who are STILL arguing for a severe ratcheting up of enforced COVID protocols similar to past variants, and who are using examples of overrun hospitals as the reason we should shut down k-12 and college campuses again (and the reason I almost guarantee my campus and other California college campuses will be remote at least until mid-February)...

Indeed, for the past few weeks, San Francisco hospitals have been in dire straits. But it’s not because people are sick — it’s because of staffing shortages driven by overly strict state quarantine rules, the director of COVID response at UCSF's emergency department said.

After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons.

"The real COVID crisis that our hospitals are facing is a severe staffing shortage that is compromising the quality of our care," Noble said Friday, shortly before the policy change was announced. 

"The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines. … The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance."

Policies encouraging people to take a test whether or not they’re sick, and to stay home just because they were near someone who tested positive, may be doing little to slow the virus; in San Francisco, four times as many people are testing positive every day than at the peak of last year’s winter surge. But isolation policies have strained hospitals, shuttered restaurants, disrupted public transportation, reduced capacity at testing sites and sent some kids back to virtual education, some experts say. Punishing quarantine measures have compounded already-existing staff shortages driven by large numbers of health care providers quitting in the past year. 

Noble said that when she reviewed the charts on Jan. 4 at four UCSF campuses (UCSF Parnassus, Mission Bay, Mount Zion and Children’s Hospital of Oakland), she identified 44 hospitalized patients (both adults and children) with COVID. Of those, just 13 were admitted because of COVID. “I do not expect that number to increase substantially, or become unmanageable in the coming week," she wrote. “The death rate in California is actually falling. And the predicted peak of cases is only about a week away.”

“[Emergency departments] are flooded with the worried well that are simply seeking testing and reassurance,” she added. “I have not intubated a single COVID patient during this Omicron surge.

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Planning is an exercise of power, and in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom. The agents of planning are usually boring; the planning process is boring; the implementation of plans is always boring. In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.

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10 minutes ago, smltwnrckr said:

The head of COVID at UCSF in this article does a great job or smashing the narratives of the right-wing and overly cautious left re: Omicron.

For the right wingers who are saying on here and elsewhere that none of the measures taken thus far have done anything to improve on COVID, and that California and Alabama are faring the same with Omicron so clearly this is a failure of the Biden admin and blue state governors...

"The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations,"

But fewer people are hospitalized with COVID today in California compared with this time last year. And, especially in highly vaccinated areas, few of those patients are actually in the hospital because of COVID illness.

There is not nearly as much of a COVID crisis in the Bay area as there has been in past waves. Why? Highly vaxxed population, highly cautious population. Guarantee any and all places where serious illness and death numbers are relatively high will be low-vax, low caution (red) populations.

For the overly cautious (read: almost always left winger) who are STILL arguing for a severe ratcheting up of enforced COVID protocols similar to past variants, and who are using examples of overrun hospitals as the reason we should shut down k-12 and college campuses again (and the reason I almost guarantee my campus and other California college campuses will be remote at least until mid-February)...

Indeed, for the past few weeks, San Francisco hospitals have been in dire straits. But it’s not because people are sick — it’s because of staffing shortages driven by overly strict state quarantine rules, the director of COVID response at UCSF's emergency department said.

After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons.

"The real COVID crisis that our hospitals are facing is a severe staffing shortage that is compromising the quality of our care," Noble said Friday, shortly before the policy change was announced. 

"The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines. … The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance."

Policies encouraging people to take a test whether or not they’re sick, and to stay home just because they were near someone who tested positive, may be doing little to slow the virus; in San Francisco, four times as many people are testing positive every day than at the peak of last year’s winter surge. But isolation policies have strained hospitals, shuttered restaurants, disrupted public transportation, reduced capacity at testing sites and sent some kids back to virtual education, some experts say. Punishing quarantine measures have compounded already-existing staff shortages driven by large numbers of health care providers quitting in the past year. 

Noble said that when she reviewed the charts on Jan. 4 at four UCSF campuses (UCSF Parnassus, Mission Bay, Mount Zion and Children’s Hospital of Oakland), she identified 44 hospitalized patients (both adults and children) with COVID. Of those, just 13 were admitted because of COVID. “I do not expect that number to increase substantially, or become unmanageable in the coming week," she wrote. “The death rate in California is actually falling. And the predicted peak of cases is only about a week away.”

“[Emergency departments] are flooded with the worried well that are simply seeking testing and reassurance,” she added. “I have not intubated a single COVID patient during this Omicron surge.

That mirrors my read of Twitter. People are saying stuff like "If we don't send everyone home for a month with 4k paid, THIS COUNTRY WILL COLLAPSE. IT IS THE END TIMES".

You were right, again, goddamnit. There came to be a point where the quarantine culture came to rival the harm caused by the virus. People saw that 3 month period as a post work utopia instead of, well, as lawlor said, a few months of communism (more or less) to save the world economy. 

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1 hour ago, smltwnrckr said:

The head of COVID at UCSF in this article does a great job of smashing the narratives of the right-wing and overly cautious left re: Omicron.

For the right wingers who are saying on here and elsewhere that none of the measures taken thus far have done anything to improve on COVID, and that California and Alabama are faring the same with Omicron so clearly this is a failure of the Biden admin and blue state governors...

"The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations,"

But fewer people are hospitalized with COVID today in California compared with this time last year. And, especially in highly vaccinated areas, few of those patients are actually in the hospital because of COVID illness.

There is not nearly as much of a COVID crisis in the Bay area as there has been in past waves. Why? Highly vaxxed population, highly cautious population. Guarantee any and all places where serious illness and death numbers are relatively high will be low-vax, low caution (red) populations.

For the overly cautious (read: almost always left winger) who are STILL arguing for a severe ratcheting up of enforced COVID protocols similar to past variants, and who are using examples of overrun hospitals as the reason we should shut down k-12 and college campuses again (and the reason I almost guarantee my campus and other California college campuses will be remote at least until mid-February)...

Indeed, for the past few weeks, San Francisco hospitals have been in dire straits. But it’s not because people are sick — it’s because of staffing shortages driven by overly strict state quarantine rules, the director of COVID response at UCSF's emergency department said.

After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons.

"The real COVID crisis that our hospitals are facing is a severe staffing shortage that is compromising the quality of our care," Noble said Friday, shortly before the policy change was announced. 

"The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines. … The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance."

Policies encouraging people to take a test whether or not they’re sick, and to stay home just because they were near someone who tested positive, may be doing little to slow the virus; in San Francisco, four times as many people are testing positive every day than at the peak of last year’s winter surge. But isolation policies have strained hospitals, shuttered restaurants, disrupted public transportation, reduced capacity at testing sites and sent some kids back to virtual education, some experts say. Punishing quarantine measures have compounded already-existing staff shortages driven by large numbers of health care providers quitting in the past year. 

Noble said that when she reviewed the charts on Jan. 4 at four UCSF campuses (UCSF Parnassus, Mission Bay, Mount Zion and Children’s Hospital of Oakland), she identified 44 hospitalized patients (both adults and children) with COVID. Of those, just 13 were admitted because of COVID. “I do not expect that number to increase substantially, or become unmanageable in the coming week," she wrote. “The death rate in California is actually falling. And the predicted peak of cases is only about a week away.”

“[Emergency departments] are flooded with the worried well that are simply seeking testing and reassurance,” she added. “I have not intubated a single COVID patient during this Omicron surge.

Omicron finally gave the anti-vaxxers the version of Covid that they had deluded themselves into believing was the case from the beginning. The severity of Omicron really does seem to compare more closely to a more transmissible version of the flu than the killer of previous variants. And many of the public health measures the overly cautious are arguing for now are doing far more harm than good. 

Opinions are all so entrenched that they are incapable of accepting new information about this variant and make adjustments. What a wild world we live in. 

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1 hour ago, happycamper said:

That mirrors my read of Twitter. People are saying stuff like "If we don't send everyone home for a month with 4k paid, THIS COUNTRY WILL COLLAPSE. IT IS THE END TIMES".

You were right, again, goddamnit. There came to be a point where the quarantine culture came to rival the harm caused by the virus. People saw that 3 month period as a post work utopia instead of, well, as lawlor said, a few months of communism (more or less) to save the world economy. 

I didn't expect it to take as long as it has, though. I specifically recall walking around my neighborhood in Anytown, USA I believe the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day 2020 and it was like super bowl weekend or something. People out everywhere, BBQ smoke thick in the air, neighborhood block parties, etc. I was like, yea that's about right... be people would abide by the prohibitions on commerce, in-person communication and physical connections for about 3 months and then they'd be done with it.

The things I didn't really expect?

- The extent to which @thelawlorfaithful's great leap forward to the couch program would really, really slow inertia to go back into work and society for a lot of people on whom the modern economy depends in much of the country. 

- The summer of discontent/reckoning/etc., and its shifting the national political focus away from COVID as the #1 topic. I predicted a kind of summer of discontent related to COVID, and I think the protests and riots of 2020 were in fact related in a lot of ways. But the winter surge of 2020/2021 was practically a new event again, as the protests/riots, then the election and then the Jan 6 insurrection attempt took our national focus (or at least the national media's focus) away from COVID and also served as a kind of release valve for COVID angst that made people more receptive and willing to hunker down "one last time" in a lot of places that winter (or continue the restrictions in some places).

-The extent to which COVID responses became ideological and geographically polarized, and the extent to which that created two distinct reactions and realities in the country. I knew it would be politicized, I wasn't surprised that masks and schools and bars became symbols around which the worst impulses of the two sides would calcify. But I was honestly surprised at the extent to which vaccines became part of that. I honestly assumed that when vaccines became available for everyone, that the discursive fight over COVID protocols would operate under the assumption that we were all vaccinated now, and that there would be an incentive on the right to get vaxxed so that you could really push back against onerous COVID protocols. I didn't expect to see many of my right-wind friends, neighbors and family members refusing to get vaxxed and still blaming Gavin Newsom for COVID.

-The relationship between that ideological fight and the two sides digging in both through the Delta surge and the current Omicron surge. The lines have been drawn, and so with those lines drawn and the political stakes made clear re: the scientific reality of COVID, the incentives are such that we have two unbreakable discourse communities driving proposals and policies: over-cautious and anti-cautious. And political interests of those discourse communities now subsume all scientific knowledge and policy recommendations. The ideological position now informs the data, not vice versa. Thus, all these COVID fights are less and less about COVID and more and more about the same thing that drives fights over books in schools and whether or not the guys who get killed by cops deserved to die. This last one is absolutely predictable, especially looking backwards, but the other things needed to fall into place first and I didn't expect them to do that.

Lesson - you can't be too pessimistic about the American electorate or the people they elect. 

Planning is an exercise of power, and in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom. The agents of planning are usually boring; the planning process is boring; the implementation of plans is always boring. In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.

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6 minutes ago, Bob said:

@SJSUMFA2013Maybe you can get one of these for your mother in law or whoever you think is going to kill your kids

 

decent pooper on her tho

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10 minutes ago, smltwnrckr said:

I didn't expect it to take as long as it has, though. I specifically recall walking around my neighborhood in Anytown, USA I believe the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day 2020 and it was like super bowl weekend or something. People out everywhere, BBQ smoke thick in the air, neighborhood block parties, etc. I was like, yea that's about right... be people would abide by the prohibitions on commerce, in-person communication and physical connections for about 3 months and then they'd be done with it.

The things I didn't really expect?

- The extent to which @thelawlorfaithful's great leap forward to the couch program would really, really slow inertia to go back into work and society for a lot of people on whom the modern economy depends in much of the country. 

- The summer of discontent/reckoning/etc., and its shifting the national political focus away from COVID as the #1 topic. I predicted a kind of summer of discontent related to COVID, and I think the protests and riots of 2020 were in fact related in a lot of ways. But the winter surge of 2020/2021 was practically a new event again, as the protests/riots, then the election and then the Jan 6 insurrection attempt took our national focus (or at least the national media's focus) away from COVID and also served as a kind of release valve for COVID angst that made people more receptive and willing to hunker down "one last time" in a lot of places that winter (or continue the restrictions in some places).

It's funny, a lot of things had been building to a boil before covid. Wages falling vs costs, racial grievance politics police militarization. The quar just gave everyone... time to think about it. time to get pissed off and do something. Time to plan. 

 

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10 minutes ago, happycamper said:

It's funny, a lot of things had been building to a boil before covid. Wages falling vs costs, racial grievance politics police militarization. The quar just gave everyone... time to think about it. time to get pissed off and do something. Time to plan. 

 

While I won't take exception to this one, I will insert an argument I've had on here (and others) in some of our back-and-forths of the past... that wages and arguments of richer rich and poorer poor don't do a very good job of encapsulating the experience of the lower middle class and working poor in comparison to the lived experience of the same relative group in the past.

The fact is that one of the reasons a lot of people have been willing to put up with a lot of this for so long is that they can. Having an cheap smartphone, a cheap flat screen, an A/C unit, modern conveniences, some basic OSHA regs, improved health care, sanitation and building codes and a massive food supply chain apparently is a good way to prevent famine and unrest on a massive scale. Being poor today is not the same experience as being poor even 100 years ago.

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Planning is an exercise of power, and in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom. The agents of planning are usually boring; the planning process is boring; the implementation of plans is always boring. In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.

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10 minutes ago, smltwnrckr said:

While I won't take exception to this one, I will insert an argument I've had on here (and others) in some of our back-and-forths of the past... that wages and arguments of richer rich and poorer poor don't do a very good job of encapsulating the experience of the lower middle class and working poor in comparison to the lived experience of the same relative group in the past.

The fact is that one of the reasons a lot of people have been willing to put up with a lot of this for so long is that they can. Having an cheap smartphone, a cheap flat screen, an A/C unit, modern conveniences, some basic OSHA regs, improved health care, sanitation and building codes and a massive food supply chain apparently is a good way to prevent famine and unrest on a massive scale. Being poor today is not the same experience as being poor even 100 years ago.

Sure, but nobody knows what it was like 100 years ago.

Being working class today isn't the same experience as it was 20 years ago, let alone 40, and people can see and remember that. If you're making 20 bucks an hour and live in Portland, home ownership is out of the question. Now it is out of the question in Boise and Bozeman and Missoula, too. Smart phones are nice, but the inability to build wealth and feeling at the mercy of landlords, who represent a kind of new latifundia, is a distinct regression in the median economic experience. 

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5 minutes ago, happycamper said:

If you're making 20 bucks an hour and live in Portland, home ownership is out of the question. Now it is out of the question in Boise and Bozeman and Missoula, too.

Yes. 

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15 minutes ago, happycamper said:

Sure, but nobody knows what it was like 100 years ago.

Being working class today isn't the same experience as it was 20 years ago, let alone 40, and people can see and remember that. If you're making 20 bucks an hour and live in Portland, home ownership is out of the question. Now it is out of the question in Boise and Bozeman and Missoula, too. Smart phones are nice, but the inability to build wealth and feeling at the mercy of landlords, who represent a kind of new latifundia, is a distinct regression in the median economic experience. 

That's a good point.  I have a relative in his mid 70s who told me that he got a job out of HS working full time.   He got married and his wife was a grade school teacher.  He said they lived like kings and health care was paid for.  His first job worked for a mining company.  He never went to college.  They ended up raising 2 kids, no money issues.  It's probably much harder to get started nowadays and into that first home, and I am guessing there is no comparison on health care costs.  The middle class has certainly changed.  I was going to reply that you should be able to get a home in Missoula with $20/hour.  But you are probably right.  

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2 hours ago, smltwnrckr said:

The head of COVID at UCSF in this article does a great job of smashing the narratives of the right-wing and overly cautious left re: Omicron.

For the right wingers who are saying on here and elsewhere that none of the measures taken thus far have done anything to improve on COVID, and that California and Alabama are faring the same with Omicron so clearly this is a failure of the Biden admin and blue state governors...

"The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations,"

But fewer people are hospitalized with COVID today in California compared with this time last year. And, especially in highly vaccinated areas, few of those patients are actually in the hospital because of COVID illness.

There is not nearly as much of a COVID crisis in the Bay area as there has been in past waves. Why? Highly vaxxed population, highly cautious population. Guarantee any and all places where serious illness and death numbers are relatively high will be low-vax, low caution (red) populations.

For the overly cautious (read: almost always left winger) who are STILL arguing for a severe ratcheting up of enforced COVID protocols similar to past variants, and who are using examples of overrun hospitals as the reason we should shut down k-12 and college campuses again (and the reason I almost guarantee my campus and other California college campuses will be remote at least until mid-February)...

Indeed, for the past few weeks, San Francisco hospitals have been in dire straits. But it’s not because people are sick — it’s because of staffing shortages driven by overly strict state quarantine rules, the director of COVID response at UCSF's emergency department said.

After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons.

"The real COVID crisis that our hospitals are facing is a severe staffing shortage that is compromising the quality of our care," Noble said Friday, shortly before the policy change was announced. 

"The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines. … The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance."

Policies encouraging people to take a test whether or not they’re sick, and to stay home just because they were near someone who tested positive, may be doing little to slow the virus; in San Francisco, four times as many people are testing positive every day than at the peak of last year’s winter surge. But isolation policies have strained hospitals, shuttered restaurants, disrupted public transportation, reduced capacity at testing sites and sent some kids back to virtual education, some experts say. Punishing quarantine measures have compounded already-existing staff shortages driven by large numbers of health care providers quitting in the past year. 

Noble said that when she reviewed the charts on Jan. 4 at four UCSF campuses (UCSF Parnassus, Mission Bay, Mount Zion and Children’s Hospital of Oakland), she identified 44 hospitalized patients (both adults and children) with COVID. Of those, just 13 were admitted because of COVID. “I do not expect that number to increase substantially, or become unmanageable in the coming week," she wrote. “The death rate in California is actually falling. And the predicted peak of cases is only about a week away.”

“[Emergency departments] are flooded with the worried well that are simply seeking testing and reassurance,” she added. “I have not intubated a single COVID patient during this Omicron surge.

I just flat out disagree with this stance that “if you are healthy you shouldn’t test”. There are times when it makes sense to take a test to ensure you do not have a disease, even if you are not presently sick. This is one of those times. As far as the staffing issues at hospitals, I am ok with asymptotic people coming to work and only dealing with COVID positive patients. But that is a very narrow solution to a problem in one particular industry. Sending asymptomatic people to work immediately after a positive at a restaurant or store, for example, with some shitty cloth mask is stupid; but people are going to read what this doctor is saying and apply that to every other industry. 
 

There is certainly data out there that supports ending certain mitigation strategies we have been using. But at this point a large subset of people are just anti-doing LITERALLY anything they didn’t have to do before March 2020; whether the science backs that up or not. It is what it is, I guess.

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