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Formerly DT: COVID-19 - Featuring Lots of Politics, now CR because political talk not going away


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11 minutes ago, Casual Encounter said:

I don’t even think you know what you’re disagreeing with anymore.

Of course, in an ideal scenario we can magically produce 350 million tests, mail it to everyone, and have facilities set up to immediately confirm the tests upon their immediate return. While you’re living in your fantasy world, the rest of us will operate in real life. There was no way to figure out who needed tests after it has been here for at least a month.
 

We fucked up in the beginning and there was no way to identify the infected in this country once we did duck up. If everyone acts as if they are infected, nobody visits granny, and she doesn’t get suck. The antibody test and interviews will provide all the data we need.

While I agree with you, I want to point out that China fucked up.  The only way that we truely could have prevented this from happening was to know about it from the true patient zero in China, suspend all travel from outside the US including US citizens, and contact anyone that had traveled outside the country or had contact with anyone who had and have them quarantined for 2 weeks and tested.  Outside of that, the cat was out of the bag by the end of the week from patient zero in China.

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40 minutes ago, CHEF DIESEL said:

Hot spots in Dallas County are University Park/Preston Hollow in the affluent part of the county which might mean SMU students or just wealthy folks access to health care. Or they travel a lot and brought it home with them. Interesting it is skewing towards wealthy neighborhoods in Dallas County:

 

Probably a little Column A, little Column B. All of your reasons are sound. Lot more travel, lot more entitlement. They finally had to shut down the tennis courts in Highland Park/UP because people were still meeting their pros and playing tennis (did not look like it was families playing) and full-on, 5-on-5 pickup basketball games in the playgrounds. There was an uproar in a Park Cities FB group where the parents of a teenager allowed a HUGE party to go on in spite of all the warnings to socially distance and stay home.

I should probably get tested but Baylor didn't approve mine because I haven't had a fever. Was in direct contact with a positive Covid-19 patient who wound up on a ventilator (I think he's recovered slightly) and have had symptoms since last Tuesday. Just starting to feel a little better yesterday and today.

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4 hours ago, Larry T. Spider said:

It going to be optional activities for a long time. As soon as it’s required or grades are taken then we have to fulfill special education requirements. We have no capability to do that at this time. We are basically providing resources for kids as well as ways for them to connect with their teachers and each other. 

Thanks for the info.   Adler gave an interview yesterday with the Texas Tribune, where he mentioned that he’d prefer the school districts close for the semester.  Don’t know if he meant going fully online - lot of folks are associating “closing school” with closing physically and going online”, but they don’t make that clear until you drill down.

The thing is, if they keep campuses fully shut, it’s going to drastically impact the attempt to get people back to work.  Half of the daycares in Travis County are shut down already as it is.   

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48 minutes ago, CHEF DIESEL said:

Hot spots in Dallas County are University Park/Preston Hollow in the affluent part of the county which might mean SMU students or just wealthy folks access to health care. Or they travel a lot and brought it home with them. Interesting it is skewing towards wealthy neighborhoods in Dallas County:

 

Woohoo, East of White Rock Lake in the clear!

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6 minutes ago, Hate said:

It was interesting to see Greenspoint's posts around that time.  He was talking about "shit's about to get real" back on the 13th.  I don't know just how busy the IR's in Houston are right now, but I don't quite think we are rationing care or at Italy levels yet.  I guess it's still 2 weeks away (not downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic, only Greenspoint's sky is falling posts from two weeks ago that the sky was going to be falling in two weeks). 

Hospitals around the country are already reporting that they're at capacity, I'd say that's "sky is falling" adjacent especially since we know we aren't testing and treating everyone who needs it. We're still on the very beginning of the window for the spring breakers to start showing symptoms as well.

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46 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

Highland Park HS students travel by getting on airplanes and flying to different countries during spring break. Wilmer-Hutchings HS students travel by walking down to the park during spring break. 

Building on this, I heard at least three HP seniors came home from their spring break trips with positive COVID-19 cases. Not sure which trip they went on as apparently there are three different options.

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2 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Hospitals around the country are already reporting that they're at capacity, I'd say that's "sky is falling" adjacent especially since we know we aren't testing and treating everyone who needs it. We're still on the very beginning of the window for the spring breakers to start showing symptoms as well.

I was speaking specifically about Houston and qualified that I do not know the current capacity of Houston area ICU's (I accidentally type IR's in my original post).  I watch the news and I'm not seeing those stories make it out here yet. I would think if we are rationing care in the Houston are, it would make the news.  His posts were from the 13th of March which was 12 days ago.  We should have seen some care rationing by then based on the way he was posting back then.

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1 minute ago, Hate said:

I was speaking specifically about Houston and qualified that I do not know the current capacity of Houston area ICU's (I accidentally type IR's in my original post).  I watch the news and I'm not seeing those stories make it out here yet. I would think if we are rationing care in the Houston are, it would make the news.  His posts were from the 13th of March which was 12 days ago.  We should have seen some care rationing by then based on the way he was posting back then.

Well, he's not given to hyperbole or anything like that.  /s

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1 minute ago, Captainant said:

Hospitals around the country are already reporting that they're at capacity, I'd say that's "sky is falling" adjacent especially since we know we aren't testing and treating everyone who needs it. We're still on the very beginning of the window for the spring breakers to start showing symptoms as well.

I believe it’s going to be really bad for those areas real soon. Didn’t reports indicate intubation is required for up to three weeks? Those full now will immediately have to start choosing who lives and who dies as new patients come in.

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Just now, Hate said:

I was speaking specifically about Houston and qualified that I do not know the current capacity of Houston area ICU's (I accidentally type IR's in my original post).  I watch the news and I'm not seeing those stories make it out here yet. I would think if we are rationing care in the Houston are, it would make the news.  His posts were from the 13th of March which was 12 days ago.  We should have seen some care rationing by then based on the way he was posting back then.

gotcha, thanks for the clarification. Yeah, Houston doesn't seem to be having a rough time yet aside from the O&G market going tits up. I'd bet we see the spread of this as more of a series of clusters rather than a uniform spread, especially with emphasis on social distancing.

But that's exactly what flattening the curve is. Buying time between new infections to lessen the overall load on the entire system of resources. If things start to get so dire that we're running short on ventilators, but one state is already past the worst of it and is seeing their need decrease, they can help other states with their surplus. That'd be a pretty solid showing for the efforts of social distancing being practiced across the country

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27 minutes ago, Casual Encounter said:

I don’t even think you know what you’re disagreeing with anymore.

Of course, in an ideal scenario we can magically produce 350 million tests, mail it to everyone, and have facilities set up to immediately confirm the tests upon their immediate return. While you’re living in your fantasy world, the rest of us will operate in real life. There was no way to figure out who needed tests after it has been here for at least a month.
 

We fucked up in the beginning and there was no way to identify the infected in this country once we did duck up. If everyone acts as if they are infected, nobody visits granny, and she doesn’t get suck. The antibody test and interviews will provide all the data we need.

Back tracing... we didn't need 350 million test to start.   But I'll grant you that we did need more than we had...   and a plan to use them efficiently.  But that's a topic we can't discuss here.  Not that it matters now anyway.

Agreed on the antibody test...  I brought that test up like 200 pages ago, you know before it was cool.

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8 hours ago, Iceman said:

Pretty much preparing for the worst.  I’ll leave it at that.

That doesn’t mean anticipating it, but being ready.

I’m being vague on purpose, but a buddy who was at a leadership school or some training thing at a post in one part of the country when the ban kicked in, did not think he was going to get back home in time for the birth of his next child.    He said the two posts had differing views on the same issue at one point (sounded like the DOD left a lot of leeway to local commanders).    Until everything was signed off by officers at both posts, he was told in no uncertain terms not to even think about traveling, one of those career-ending kinds of things.    And quarantine/isolation in a specific area (away from everybody)  is involved and he will be checked daily by medical personnel.  He may even get tested.  

He did say that one post seemed more...”relaxed” about it than the other post, but that things changed during his little process to get permission, as in somebody made some phone calls.  

On a related note, he said on at least one post that he’s aware of, they are religiously monitoring those going through basic training and those instructing them, keeping them and those who directly interact with them separate from everybody else.  

I’m getting a really spooky vibe about it.    Then again, outside of the last 6-7 years with little kids in the house, I was never so sick as I was in basic, so I can only imagine covid would tear through those units.  

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Being that a good number of the positives we're hearing about are in people who recently traveled to Colorado for skiing....this would match up with that demographic.

I find it kind of fascinating that both the ski resorts in Italy and in Colorado look to have played an outsized role in spreading this disease.

Cold and dry.  The fatty layer around the virus becomes rubber like in the cold and allows the virus to live longer outside... 

Here is a good article if you want to know more

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200323-coronavirus-will-hot-weather-kill-covid-19

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1 hour ago, CHEF DIESEL said:

Hot spots in Dallas County are University Park/Preston Hollow in the affluent part of the county which might mean SMU students or just wealthy folks access to health care. Or they travel a lot and brought it home with them. Interesting it is skewing towards wealthy neighborhoods in Dallas County:

 

The worst offenders I know are my wealthier friends and their kids. Purely anecdotal, obviously.

Many of them had travel plans for spring break and kept them (while things were still open March 9-13).

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I believe it’s going to be really bad for those areas real soon. Didn’t reports indicate intubation is required for up to three weeks? Those full now will immediately have to start choosing who lives and who dies as new patients come in.

97% are symptomatic before 11.5 days.

https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2762808/incubation-period-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-from-publicly-reported
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1 hour ago, Newdoc said:

This is where the media comes in and it doesn’t matter if it is a left or right bias. Quite frankly they really suck at reporting medical stories. I have been interviewed several times and I have to keep it very simple so the reporters do not screw it up.

You have reporters with journalism degrees, not science degrees and a systematic rush to get news out there that gets clicks and views so we are going to get the most sensational headlines. That does not make for a good combo when looking for accurate data and facts. This is compounded due to the fact that we do not have good epidemiological data on this disease and everybody is trying to pin a tail on the donkey that is moving all over the place.

I would take the doom and gloom with a grain of salt. You’re going to see every emergency room doctor and nurse that winds up sick in the ICU on the news. When has death and worst case scenarios ever been tempered by our national media?  It doesn’t mean that everyone is getting sick. But it still means you still better be careful.

Same thing happens in aviation.  
 

Reporter: “This Boeing 747 miraculously landed with all surviving after an entire was dropped onto a crowded freeway”
 

Aviation consultant: “Bob that was a bird that shit on your car”

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Maybe some more good news...  The home depot ventilator

https://ufhealth.org/news/2020/uf-researchers-lead-way-rapidly-designing-building-low-cost-open-source-ventilator

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Quote

As a University of Florida mechanical engineering student decades ago, Samsun Lampotang, Ph.D., helped respiratory therapist colleagues build a minimal-transport ventilator that became a commercial success. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit and he heard the desperate international plea for thousands more ventilators, the longtime UF professor of anesthesiology set out to build a prototype using plentiful, cheap components that could be copied from an online diagram and a software repository.UF researchers made a ventilator out of common household items.

Lampotang dispatched David Lizdas, Ph.D., the lead engineer in his lab, to Home Depot to gather items such as air-tight PVC water pipes and lawn-sprinkler valves. Along with engineering and medical colleagues at UF and — through a burgeoning open-source network — places as far-flung as Canada, India, Ireland, Vietnam and Brazil, they raced to “MacGyver” these items and other pieces, including a microcontroller board and a ham radio DC power supply, into an open-source ventilator they expect to make publicly available in a matter of days.

“The way I looked at it is, if you’re going to run out of ventilators, then we’re not even trying to reproduce the sophisticated ventilators out there,” said Lampotang, the Joachim S. Gravenstein Professor of Anesthesiology in the UF College of Medicine, part of UF Health, and the director of UF’s Center for Safety, Simulation & Advanced Learning Technologies, or CSSALT. “If we run out, you have to decide who gets one and who doesn’t. How do you decide that? The power of our approach is that every well-intentioned volunteer who has access to Home Depot, Ace or Lowe’s or their equivalent worldwide can build one.”

Lampotang, an inventor with 43 patents belonging to UF, will not try to patent the ventilator, he said. Rather, with UF’s approval, he will provide it “open source” for engineers and hobbyists worldwide as the number of critically ill coronavirus victims continues to climb. His team is working on adding safety features to meet regulatory guidelines and then they will run engineering tests to determine safety, accuracy and endurance of the machine, which can be built for as little as $125 to $250.

Gordon Gibby, M.D., said when his friend and former colleague Lampotang contacted him to help, he was a little skeptical. But then Lizdas used the Home Depot materials to assemble a pneumatic circuit, which Lampotang reviewed via FaceTime to confirm that the design concept — similar to the one he helped build decades before — would indeed work. Lizdas, working in his garage, made a video that was uploaded the same night to the website of UF’s department of anesthesiology, where Lampotang and Lizdas are based.

“I saw what they were doing, and realized it was going to work!!!!” Gibby wrote in an email to fellow members of ARRL, the national amateur radio (known as Ham radio) association.

Gibby, a recently retired associate professor of anesthesiology at UF and an electrical engineer, grabbed an Arduino microcontroller board, the kind used to build small robots or for a student to learn to program. Lizdas raced over to his house and dropped off a sprinkler valve in Gibby’s mailbox. Gibby fired up his soldering iron and built a transistor driver that could handle the current supplied by a Ham radio DC power supply.

Eight hours later, Gibby said, two drivers were built, code was created and tested and they had a working ventilator driving a “test lung” metal contraption from an air compressor that served as a simulated oxygen source. They were able to adjust the respiratory rate with the Arduino-based control software. A video of the ventilator working on Gibby’s dining room table was also quickly uploaded. Now, they are working on other key parameters, he said.

The ventilator’s valves will precisely time the flow of compressed oxygen into a patient with lungs weakened by viral pneumonia in order to extend life and allow time for the body to clear the infection.

“It was really easy for me to write the code to prove this thing’s going to work,” Gibby said.

Volunteers who jumped to help included Patrick Tighe, M.D., who prodded Lampotang to act on his idea; the CSSALT team; code developer Marcelo Varanda in Ottawa (motivated to build ventilators for Canada and Brazil); Gibby’s network, including noted software developer Jack Purdum and transceiver maker Ashhar Farhan of India; and Stephanie Lampotang, Lampotang’s daughter, a University of Southern California computer science junior who evacuated to Gainesville with two of her own Arduino boards in her luggage.

Lampotang and others are working with UF Innovate | Tech Licensing and the UF Health legal team to address legal aspects as the design advances and the FDA alters guidance documents for equipment cleared for use solely during the pandemic.

Already, they’ve translated their site https://simulation.health.ufl.edu/technology-development/open-source-ventilator-project/ into French, and a volunteer is translating it into Italian.

“We want to reach the whole world, and The Gator Nation,” Lampotang said. “We have UF graduates from all over the world. There’s already a network of people who can contribute in disseminating the technology if it’s needed in the next few weeks.”

Once the safety features are added, other researchers at UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering will help run tests to measure and document the safety and durability and whether the accuracy and repeatability meet engineering specifications, Lampotang said.

Nonetheless, he said, his wish is that the ventilator won’t be needed during the coronavirus pandemic.

“When all this comes to pass and the world settles down,” he said, “we hope it will be repurposed for use in underdeveloped countries, so they can build a safe and inexpensive ventilator for themselves.”

 

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Being that a good number of the positives we're hearing about are in people who recently traveled to Colorado for skiing....this would match up with that demographic.

I find it kind of fascinating that both the ski resorts in Italy and in Colorado look to have played an outsized role in spreading this disease.

I was talking to someone about that the other day. Think about those large restaurants on the slopes that get fucking packed. People come in from the cold where they have been exercising, so everybody is stripping off layers and sweat flying everywhere. Then you sit jam packed in rows of tables where everybody is wiping their runny nose and touching their food trays and tables. How often do you think those tables are wiped down. Go through that routine 4-5 times, plus grabbing beers after skiing and it's easy to see how the 'rona could spread pretty quickly.

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3 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I’m being vague on purpose, but a buddy who was at a leadership school or some training thing at a post in one part of the country when the ban kicked in, did not think he was going to get back home in time for the birth of his next child.    He said the two posts had differing views on the same issue at one point (sounded like the DOD left a lot of leeway to local commanders).    Until everything was signed off by officers at both posts, he was told in no uncertain terms not to even think about traveling, one of those career-ending kinds of things.    And quarantine/isolation in a specific area (away from everybody)  is involved and he will be checked daily by medical personnel.  He may even get tested.  

He did say that one post seemed more...”relaxed” about it than the other post, but that things changed during his little process to get permission, as in somebody made some phone calls.  

On a related note, he said on at least one post that he’s aware of, they are religiously monitoring those going through basic training and those instructing them, keeping them and those who directly interact with them separate from everybody else.  

I’m getting a really spooky vibe about it.    Then again, outside of the last 6-7 years with little kids in the house, I was never so sick as I was in basic, so I can only imagine covid would tear through those units.  

They aren't concerned about the disease decimating the troops.  They're young and already been Guinea pigged for 2 different precautionary/ preventative inoculations.Pardon the terminology if incorrect- they got their military style shot for this a few weeks ago. I don't want to hear about the moral dilemma on this one( not at you, but the board,) it wasn't my decision and it damn sure wasn't that of the service people.  

The "shit hitting the fan/ worst case scenarios" involve maintaining law and order, especially in major metro areas.  Yes, domestically in particular

Please nobody freak out and .tell others "martial law is imminent."  That is not the case.  They have to plan though... that's a tough freaking row to hoe for our service people.  The idea itself seems to violate much of the very fiber within the individual who answers the call to serve.

Thoughts & prayers and all that shit.  Like I said initially, I hope it never remotely comes to that.

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So, Idaho is finally on board. Gov. Brad Little issued a statewide stay-at-home order earlier this afternoon, effective for three weeks. Only businesses considered essential to remain open.

https://www.idahostatejournal.com/coronavirus/gov-little-issues-stay-at-home-order-directs-all-non/article_312853a2-dc4e-5d6c-b99e-9ffd4a180784.html

This seems about a week later than most of the rest of the country. My job has me in grocery stores three days a week, and from what I've seen, I imagine COVID-19 is going to hit here relatively hard because too many have been going about their daily routine as if they had nothing to worry about.

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There is a whole bunch of "this could kill everybody", and a whole bunch of "this may not be as bad as we thought" predictions out there.  It's probably somewhere in the middle, but I don't know which to believe.  I know what I want to believe.

It almost has to be significantly more widespread than any testing data indicates. That means the overall mortality rate is probably under the 2-3 percent generally used. Of course, what matters here is raw numbers - even if it's really more like five to 10 percent of cases being serious, with such a large number of cases that's still a ton of people in hospitals, tons of supplies needed, and a lot of people that could die. The latter is compounded by stress on hospitals.

So it's kind of both.
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17 minutes ago, Loco said:

That's f'n awesome. I hope it works.

And if I was in the Federal government, I'd 1) have some folks evaluate quickly whether it works, and can be built on a large scale, and if so, then 2) use Defense authorization to get US manufacturers and their workers building these motherfuckers by the truckload.

It'd be like a WWII scrap metal drive, or converting typewriter factories to building rifles, except we'd have em building ventilators.

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37 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I’m being vague on purpose, but a buddy who was at a leadership school or some training thing at a post in one part of the country when the ban kicked in, did not think he was going to get back home in time for the birth of his next child.    He said the two posts had differing views on the same issue at one point (sounded like the DOD left a lot of leeway to local commanders).    Until everything was signed off by officers at both posts, he was told in no uncertain terms not to even think about traveling, one of those career-ending kinds of things.    And quarantine/isolation in a specific area (away from everybody)  is involved and he will be checked daily by medical personnel.  He may even get tested.  

He did say that one post seemed more...”relaxed” about it than the other post, but that things changed during his little process to get permission, as in somebody made some phone calls.  

On a related note, he said on at least one post that he’s aware of, they are religiously monitoring those going through basic training and those instructing them, keeping them and those who directly interact with them separate from everybody else.  

I’m getting a really spooky vibe about it.    Then again, outside of the last 6-7 years with little kids in the house, I was never so sick as I was in basic, so I can only imagine covid would tear through those units.  

Furk.... 

 

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29 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

That's f'n awesome. I hope it works.

And if I was in the Federal government, I'd 1) have some folks evaluate quickly whether it works, and can be built on a large scale, and if so, then 2) use Defense authorization to get US manufacturers and their workers building these motherfuckers by the truckload.

It'd be like a WWII scrap metal drive, or converting typewriter factories to building rifles, except we'd have em building ventilators.

With a $2-3mm non-taxable gift to the creator 

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5 minutes ago, Mother mopar said:

We have continued the pipeline of air force training through all this as we have been deemed mission essential. We were dreading this day but we knew it was coming. Basic and technical training is a petre dish just waiting to explode.

 

Yep. No matter how much the drill makes you bleach the mops. 

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  • hayden_horn changed the title to Formerly DT: COVID-19 - Featuring Lots of Politics, now CR because political talk not going away


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