Posted on 04/03/2020 12:20:03 PM PDT by captain_dave
I am very concerned that the panic is already worse than the disease, and that we are now only hurting ourselves by continuing this exercise in mass hysteria.
A solution to the Wuhan Flu (aka: Corvid19) is available. We can use the hydroxychloroquine protocol (HCQ). A vaccine is beginning to be tested in Israel. And now the University of Pittsburgh has a potential solution: HotAir story, "We might already have a vaccine -- and a safer delivery method, too" (Link: https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/04/03/university-pittsburgh-might-already-vaccine-safer-delivery-method/)
I believe President Trump's initial response was correct. China's reaction to the outbreak with its quarantine of Hebei Province could have indicated a release of a biological agent. However, now we are seeing the Wuhan Flu for what it is: a serious seasonal flu.
The problem we have now is the world is in panic. Irrational decisions are being made in the name of safety, which are causing hardship. The supply chains are being broken. Now, the spector of hunger is starting to visit. This is very dangerous. I don't doubt there are some who rejoice in our panicked self destruction. We're making it easier for them to seize control.
What is needed now is to treat Wuhan Flu cases with HCQ and get our wounded economy back to work before empty wallets and empty shelves result in hunger and riots. We are at a critical decision moment: do we return to America or do we become Venezuela?
The stats say this is an elder issue with underling medical issues.
Young adults are themselves only slightly worse off in regards dying than from a bad flu, but that changes with middle-age and doesn’t take into account the spread.
Why are you upset that there is discussion on a forum site?
The poop in the big city streets.
I’m 57 and still working at my courier job. We’re all still truckin’. It’s kinda sad as I’m driving around and seeing the almost empty spaces in the once bustling DFW business area I work in. Fortunately my main pickup stop is also essential and still cranking out the work for me.
No, if you were wondering we wouldn’t know about it.
You trolled the thread with a spark to light a flame war.
It looks like you can keep going down that road if you want but not too many people are going to take your side.
probably started here in the US in late December..people walked around with it and no one knew,
There do appear to have been a handful of cases that made it in in mid-January.
If you’re going to compare with flus, understand that for those outbreaks, the “beginning’ includes a solid running-start of thousands of cases already out there, which is a large part of why we don’t even try to track them, quarantine them, or even identify them beyond their doctor’s diagnosing them. Those “outbreaks” begin 9 months or so before.
Whether the shutdown here is appropriate, warranted, or wise, these are very different situations, with this outbreak only hitting a hundred folks about a month ago and already approaching 7k and accelerating.
It may seem like forever now, but on March 2 we were at 100 known cases, with evidence that there were not many unknown (that had it long enough to have start of symptoms), and crossed 1000 on March 11th.
I’d like to know why a vaccine can be developed for this virus and all is mutations and one cannot for the regular influenza strain?
The flu has a segmented genetic structure which it swaps out with other varieties of the flu an individual is infected with, creating new versions.
Every year, flu virus samples are collected in China in the spring, and a determination is made of which one or ones appear to be prominent. From these results, the flu vaccine for the fall is prepared. Some years, the variety of the flu which actually shows up in the US in the fall is different from the one predicted.
ABC just mentioned in an article about polio that the vaccine still itself sometimes causes outbreaks of the disease. So another one to refer to when people try to claim vaccines are harmless and no sensible person should be skeptical of them.
That said, many people who get flu shots think they got the flu because the immune-response to the vaccine does cause fatigue and other minor symptoms in a sizeable portion of the population while their bodies process it. They do not get the flu from it.
They want him looking over his shoulder that ever death will be blamed on him.
They may want him to but he won’t.
I would argue that staying at home is what we choose to make of it. The day I found all the gyms were closed for the indefinite future I devised a home exercise program. I have been brushing up on my coding skills and reading all the books I didn’t have time to read before. Far from abusing alcohol I have given it up entirely to keep my immune system strong. If people are getting drunk/high, blood clots, or just bored I think that says more about their lifestyle choices than it does about the quarantine itself.
Yeah, I am sorry to hear that. People are going to die from this as we have witnessed thus far, and will witness in the future. The tragedies from this will go far beyond just this virus too I might add. So what exactly is your point?
Young healthy people should mask up and wear gloves and get back to work!
Easier said than done when you have no masks.
I think you’re absolutely right. This virus is very contagious but not very dangerous. Shutting down our entire economy for this long IS very dangerous. And it’s not necessary.
Quarantining of the sick and all incoming travelers works. It’s worked for centuries. Testing and contact-tracing makes that strategy work even better. And South Korea has shown better than anybody how a government can execute that testing and contact-tracing in the modern era to be very effective, including use of cell phone location data to track where an infected person has been and test others in that area. And, yes, quarantined infected people do not and should not have the same rights as everyone else to their freedom of movement or privacy.
I agree it would have been great if we could have done what South Korea did. Unfortunately the best time for that strategy was in January when the first CV cases started arriving in the US. We missed our window of opportunity. Now we simply have too many cases for that to be practical.
There is no reason to quarantine the healthy or the entire population. Enforcing it is an absurd waste of resources. And it’s an incredible drain on an economy that turns a health crisis into an economic crisis unnecessarily.
The problem with quarantining just the elderly and the sick is that complete isolation is impossible. Have you checked the wait times for Amazon's grocery delivery? More than 3 days for a loaf of bread. So the at-risk folks will need to leave their homes for groceries if nothing else. The more people are out and about the more likely Granny is to catch CV at the grocery store. There is also the fact that while CV is extremely unlikely to kill a healthy young person many young CV patients still require hospitalization.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/03/19/One-in-five-people-under-44-with-COVID-19-experiences-severe-illness/4691584633025/
If our ICUs become overloaded the fatality rate will go up because people who would have survived with proper medical care won't get it. The economy will crash anyway because the dead do not spend money. A recession is coming regardless of what we do now so we might as well choose the option that doesn't involve overloading our ICUs. If there is one secular thing I have faith in it is the ability of the American economy to recover, even rebound, once the restrictions are lifted. There is no recovery from death.
This is a sign of a coddled people, a people cowed by fear, a people who are unwilling to assume any risks or sacrifice for the greater good of their country.
As a healthy 30 year old I am not afraid of dying of the CV because I know I have a better chance of being struck by lightning. I have already lost a fair amount of money in the stock market and been furloughed from my job. Nevertheless if that's what it takes to maintain our health care system and stop me from becoming an asymptomatic carrier to those who are not so blessed with youth and health so be it. You may not agree with my decision but I don't think you can say I'm doing it out of fear or that I'm unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good.
It’s also an attack on basic freedoms. The government should put all the advice and recommendations it can to tell people how to protect themselves. It has done that for centuries. But when it starts forcing everyone to follow them, it turns into a nanny police state on an unprecedented level.
Of course there must be a balance between individual rights and the greater good. The traditional balance between these 2 has been "Your right to stick your arm out ends where my nose begins." You have the right to endanger your own life. You do not have the right to spread infectious disease like a modern-day Typhoid Mary. Unfortunately many carriers of CV display no symptoms for up to 14 days so it is not enough just to quarantine people displaying obvious symptoms.
I think that it’s still practical to use the South Korean strategy outside of New York. New York needs a geographical quarantine strategy now. No one in or out of the city.
The government, charities or volunteers can organize to drop off groceries for the elderly. That is a sensible place for resources to go if we’re going to spend $2 trillion dollars on the current strategy. I do not understand how you think it’s feasible for everybody to be quarantined from everybody else somehow, but you don’t think a much smaller segment of the population can quarantine themselves under Plan B. That’s not logical.
Quarantining the entire country isn’t practical or feasible and doesn’t make a lot of sense. The expense of it gets more astronomical with every passing day yet we are not being given an exit strategy to get back to normal.
Reading about the 1918 Spanish Flu, it actually mutated into a second deadlier form, but people who had had the first form were still immune to the second. So one city that had a huge outbreak of the first form ended up having one of the lowest overall death totals because they were immune to the second, deadlier form in large numbers.
The idea that the current shutdown strategy is logical or healthy is nothing that can be proven. If what happened to the Spanish Flu happens to this one, this strategy could prove disastrous. We have a huge opportunity to allow young people to get this disease in a harmless form and get immunity to it. Then if it mutates or comes back later, they will be protected themselves and also create herd immunity to protect others. Since none of us can predict the future, a less restrictive strategy is just as likely to be the best one as a complete shutdown strategy.
What we are seeing in the current strategy is classic, one-level thinking. Governors are using the most basic, layman’s thinking to put out a simplistic strategy that seems obvious but may be completely wrong when deeper thinking is applied. What I’ve seen so far in the media is them struggling to show evidence that the shutdown strategy is working at all even though their liberal antennae are in love with the strict government controls.
Just a statement. It is real. I had my doubts about how dangerous it is. Now I don’t.
Understood, I too had my doubts. However, I do believe the numbers will be less than they state, primarily because of the actions undertaken. But there is a real threat of hospitals being swamped, especially in big cities.
New York needs a geographical quarantine strategy now. No one in or out of the city.
Completely agree. And if the New Yorkers complain about it ask them if they criticized the Chinese government for blocking off Wuhan.
I do not understand how you think it’s feasible for everybody to be quarantined from everybody else somehow, but you don’t think a much smaller segment of the population can quarantine themselves under Plan B. That’s not logical.
Like I said before total isolation is impossible for everyone, young or old. The idea behind the quarantine is not to stop the spread of the virus entirely but to flatten the curve enough so that our finite number of ICU beds are not all taken up by CV patients. This cannot be done if people are out socializing and partying like those idiot spring breakers. My brother is still going to work because he works in an industry deemed essential. Unfortunately my brother lives with my elderly parents and one of his coworkers was recently diagnosed with CV. So yes even under the strictest of quarantines my parents might get it anyway. The difference is with social distancing there is a greater chance there will be enough medical resources to help them. If that means living off my savings for a few months and taking a hit in my stock portfolio that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
If what happened to the Spanish Flu happens to this one, this strategy could prove disastrous. We have a huge opportunity to allow young people to get this disease in a harmless form and get immunity to it. Then if it mutates or comes back later, they will be protected themselves and also create herd immunity to protect others.
Do we know that CV behaves like Spanish Flu though? If it does then sure it makes sense to change our mitigation strategy to build herd immunity among those who are likely to survive it. But we don't know that. Even those who survive CV often have permanent lung damage afterwards. I'm not risking that and an astronomical medical bill based on a "maybe it's like the Spanish Flu." Because if it turns out that you can be reinfected with a different strain then I will be risking my health for nothing. Unless I hear from someone with an actual medical degree that herd immunity works for this virus I'm not breaking quarantine until the medical professionals say the curve is flattened enough. I don't hire clowns to do my taxes and I don't let businessmen make my health care decisions for me.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-recovery-damage-lung-function-gasping-air-hong-kong-doctors-2020-3
I saw the thing about lung damage before. I am unclear if they’re saying that is something that is also mainly in the elderly patients and ones already deemed to be more vulnerable. It seems likely that damage is only in people with severe symptoms. We know the under-20 crowd are said to almost always have mild symptoms and many others as well. It’s also reasonable to think that physical damage sustained during the infection may heal over time.
I don’t think anyone can say how this virus will behave. But there is also the basic concept of herd immunity. If we have the opportunity to let the virus pass through a population that it is likely to leave unharmed, then there is a big benefit to doing that. They may be immune to future strains and then they create herd immunity that can protect others.
And if we had $2 trillion to spend, it seems that could have been used to set up living quarters for younger people who live with older people to temporarily live in while the virus passes through them.
One of the hugest mistake in all of this was shutting down the colleges and sending those kids back to live with their parents. The colleges were a perfect laboratory in which to start creating herd immunity.
It’s all about relative risk. We may never develop a vaccine. And if we don’t, then this more direct way of introducing immunity into the population would be much more preferable than either a years-long shutdown or never letting young people visit old people. Or having mixed-age families continue living together and living in fear they’ll spread the disease around or trying to hide behind masks and cleansers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.