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Newdoc

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Everything posted by Newdoc

  1. Couple pieces of cardboard. Nothing else on the outside walls is insulated besides the thick stone base so insulated barrier won’t make a difference. Trying to avoid cold air from blowing through the space. 102 year old house so insulated only where remodeled which is above the pier and beam, not under. Power bill is going to suck big time if the power happens to stay on.
  2. Guilty. Some are insulated. Vents are blocked off now and my hvac vents under house leak a little to unintentionally condition the short crawl space but faucets will be running starting Sunday. I know I’m good down to about 15-20 degrees without running the water.
  3. Why are so many people out on the roads???? This is awful!
  4. Yeah, It’s not like the guy’s dangerous to the general public. Haunted by his ignorance and stupid decision making most likely.
  5. My stomach hurts from laughing so hard. Definitely viral worthy.
  6. I would like to see some numbers normalized for our current state of health versus other countries. Obviously we are spending way too much no matter how you take out the variables but damn, we are an obese, lazy, unhealthy nation. And that is one of the reasons our Covid hospitalization and death numbers are so high.
  7. No, they’re certainly culpable. It’s just that with the legal responsibility of insurance companies to pay usual and customary fees for emergency room visits at a clip of 70%, including out of network, the environment is ripe for abuse.
  8. There’s taking opportunity to stay busy and make a decent profit while helping the public during Covid and then there’s price gouging and taking advantage of legalese payment rules for ED’s. The article shows an opportunistic cash grab by playing the gme within the law but hurting the system overall. It’s legal greed so make your moralistic opinion wherever your conscience lies. I don’t agree with it because it’s not price transparent. I’ve provided the same service for the last 10 months at a tenth the price with the same or better quality. I’m not bitter because almost any doctor can ignore ethical gray lines and make a quick buck. I have passd up several opportunities because they aren’t good medicine. I and a majority of doctors choose to make a decent reimbursement and try to save the patients healthcare funds when reasonable (i.e., most value for work-up, equivalent generic therapies, etc.). It’s not entirely the freestanding ED’s faults. The system was set up for this “opportunity”. They take advantage of the current laws that nobody wants to do anything about despite patients not realizing their insurance is getting charged $1800 for little Susie’s strep throat.
  9. The turtle out front should have told you, “Winning is hard.”
  10. How does one exist in this society and think it’s okay to let your mind collapse all morality then act on it?
  11. Yeah, that’s a big deal. Crazy who doesn’t get in. Congrats.
  12. The last 2 minutes has me very worried about the rest of the season in crunch time. That was very poor basketball from Texas when faced with better coaching and more discipline. Coaching and playing. You can’t athlete yourself into a hero ball comeback. There is no Kobe or Curry on Texas’s bench.
  13. Love the stock photo of what is probably an Ebola patient in transport. Good Lord. The fear mongering from the media will never stop. That whole story was a mishmash of incomplete data and conjecture. It it is dealing with mostly hypotheses at this point. We will need to know what the vaccine efficacy is against serious and severe Covid disease when the South African is present. And even if the efficacy drops to approximately 50%, then we are still looking at significantly reducing continuous spread if we can get vaccination rates between 80 and 90%. It would be also good to know what kind of disease presentation happens when somebody with the original Covid infection encounters a second infection with the South African variant. At the hypothetical herd immunity point, maybe we can stop getting these escape variants in such high numbers.
  14. Correlation doesn’t mean causation. IMO too early for vaccine effect. This drop is because families started finally behaving because they didn’t have to go see grandma in January. I think we will still continue to see some decent spread in unimmunized populations for a while but I am hoping the hospitalization and death numbers will drop precipitously and that would be partially from the vaccines.
  15. The brain cancer made have made the guy mentally unstable (which brain tumors pressing on the wrong spot are known to do) or he could just be unstable anyway. Absolutely tragic. Being a physician and healthcare worker is actually associated with a significantly increased risk of being a victim of violence.
  16. I think we just wait and stay careful but not fearful until we have the data. I am also hopeful, even confident, we will develop anti-virals in oral form like Tamiflu and Xofluza for influenza that can mitigate viral replication and minimize both symptoms/severity and transmission once sick. We have some incredible scientists around the world and if government red tape and greed can get out of their way, they can do amazing things.
  17. Holy crap. This thread is turning into a Facebook comment section. The mRNA "shots" are indeed vaccines. The argument lies in efficacy. And the theoretical complete immunity vs asymptomatic infection and spread panties in a wad debate is theoretical at this point. We just don't have enough data yet. If we can achieve herd immunity then we can drive R values down significantly and reduce the chance of sustained spread even if the vaccine fails in certain individuals or for those who cannot receive the vaccine. This is the way most vaccines have worked since the mid 20th century. Most likely, based on preliminary data, the mRNA vaccines will prevent most people from becoming infected with Covid 19 and subsequently spreading the disease. And even if the disease is spread then others who are vaccinated have a much lower chance of serious Covid infections. Mutated strains MAY change this but not a given despite all the hand wringing articles from the MSM that cherry pick statements from "officials". Get off your Google News feeds, Fox and MSNBC and start doing your own research.
  18. COVID took MLK off. It’s part of the postal service. It will take a couple of days to catch up.
  19. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.15.21249885v1.full.pdf Here's a link to the study because Yahoo News and the stupid English news site didn’t bother to link it. Just throw out some scary numbers without context. The study is not peer reviewed and a pre print and the authors admit there are several limitations to their analysis. Remember the jizzing everybody got from “studies” about the miracle drug Plaquenil for COVID? It didn’t pan out. Preliminary studies lead to larger better controlled studies after peer review. Same thing needs to happen for this data. I looked through the data tables and there are several problems. I’m not going into them here. Do we need to be vigilant about long COVID? Absolutely. I will wait to run around with my hair on fire when good science tells me so. There’s nothing you can do about it on here anyway so please lay off the ire.
  20. And this was a study done on a select group of people who have been hospitalized most likely because of undiagnosed and chronic underlying conditions. This is not a subsection of all 65 year olds across the nation. When you get myopic in a study group and normalize for all of these unhealthy people then it’s gonna look very bad when the death rates come around. Covid is not necessarily creating all these conditions. It has unearthed a lot of people who have never been to the doctor in the last 10 years and COVID had perhaps accelerated the conditions and a few others that may have developed these same kidney, heart and other issues in the next five years.
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