GaryPinC

Other than NYC, we did flatten the curve. Here in Ohio, they predicted 8-12k cases a day and we got a max of just over 1300 during lockdown. Seemed like predictions were way off until fall/winter 2020 when they came true. The original lockdown was done to prevent overwhelming our health system and give medicine and science more time to get the necessary understanding and resources to better treat Covid patients. It was painful but successful.

Your relatives are right. When vaccinations began, it was unknown if they would prevent transmission. It was strongly felt they would enable our bodies to at least fight it off more effectively. Before Delta and Omicron, studies showed that the mRNA vaccines did indeed prevent transmission, which was rightly touted by Fauci and the CDC. With our current variants that aspect is greatly reduced or eliminated. It's a virus. The science is changing quickly, unfortunately. Perhaps the most interesting human behavior is the inability to comprehend a rapidly changing situation and only see in two dimensions.

He may not be there long. From flushing Kosar, to Bledsoe, to Stidham, Belli has never been one to ride with a mediocre QB any longer than necessary.

Personal bias. 🙂 Is Cole going to self-report very mild symptoms that could be anything? Or is he going to play through them? I know I would play through them, especially if I felt, as he does, that his symptoms wouldn't stop him playing.

We don't know if he'd be playing or not. He feels like he could play and if he were vaccinated, per the rules, he may never have been tested to discover it. Especially as I doubt he would self report. Regardless, he made his decision and stand up for it. Stop blaming the rules as his decision puts himself over the needs of the team. Even though his team supports him, stop trying the distracting, cowardly deflection. CDC failed all of us not ringing the bell on the booster more loudly earlier this fall. Ample evidence is there that 6 mos is all you can count on for significant immunity.

While I also admire Beasley for standing up for his beliefs/convictions, a true stand-up guy IMO, also knows when to shut up when causing a needless distraction. He is not playing because he knew the rules and stuck by his non-vaccinated beliefs. Now he chooses to blame the rules and not his decision. That's not stand-up.

I think they are betting the season on the belief that most of the vaccinated infected players will be asymptomatic/mildly symptomatic and play through it.

McDermott, more than any coach I can recall, overtly acknowledges using your emotions is a huge part of playing in the NFL. He encourages appropriate individual expressions of those emotions. He appropriately handled the situation.

No, the silly cartoon is not accurate. Conservatives have most definitely not stayed the same and gone equally off the rails as their progressive counterparts.

They were using the Binax Now test. I've used this at home and if you get a positive Covid result it's 98.5% accurate. If you get a negative result it's 84.6% chance it's accurate. So with Trump's negative test, there's about a 15% chance it was inaccurate, for his positive about a 1.5% chance it was inaccurate. Then he got sick and confirmed Covid a couple days later. Sooooo...

Congratulations to Michigan and the B1G for adding some juice back to this storied rivalry. Let's hope it can last!

Congratulations, how much of NY's numbers are due to that Cuomo debacle at the beginning? Wonder how it looks if you take away both Florida and New York's initial surge? But, in all fairness, data is incomplete until the winter surge is over WRT your point about numbers, it's called the delta variant and it's also called lack of boosters, which the CDC has pretty much dropped the ball on IMO. They should have rang the 6 month bell at the end of summer for everyone.

And of course, one of the premier countries whose citizens mostly ignored covid via a very lagging vaccination rate and took little or no precautions until very recently, Russia: Maybe they'll actually get some kind of control over it soon and at least chart an actual baseline.

And here's the total cases numbers (same graphical scales) : Note NY's impressive baselines compared to Florida's. Not sure this justifies the excessive lockdowns in NY though

Keep in mind the scales are different, NY is 3 fold higher making FLA's data appear 3 times relatively larger. But note NY's impressive lack of deaths/hospitalizations with their lockdown summer. Also note FLA's 2020 winter surge was pretty much equal to NY when it should have been smaller because it was technically "off season".

If you want to claim any intellectual honesty, why don't you do apples to apples and compare the death rates of New York to Florida and to NY surge in 2020? Because that makes a strong pro-vaccination case while at the same time contrasting DeSantis's hands-off approach with New York's strict lockdown measures. Biased much?

You're absolutely right about Russiagate, I hope they nail involved political operatives to the wall just as I hope they do the same for the "stop the steal". I guess I differ from you in that I have no problem looking at the two as separate events, but respect the validity of your point. I believe the "stop the steal" ploy would have been employed regardless, Russiagate just made it more believable (and fervently so) to more people.

Last year was such an insane year. It was absolutely appalling in places like Portland the abandonment of law, order, and justice for those protests and the lack of outrage and action by democratic leadership. It was equally appalling Trump's behavior post election, trying to undermine the American process and his role in fomenting and not preventing January 6. Every Republican should have been outraged. But the most appalling and un-American thing in all this is both side's cowardice in admitting fault while more fervently pointing the finger at the other side's transgressions. This is what our enemies want. I'm glad you can admit you don't support Jan 6. Thank you that's a start. Now, can you admit Trump's cowardice in taking action to prevent that riot is THE SAME EXACT COWARDICE as the Portland mayor and leadership for their riots?

Thanks, I'll definitely circle back on it. It's a prime concern and may dictate a strategic change. You both made good points, as I read it. I just felt the source of your disagreement was referring to different efficacies but not recognizing that.

The problem with the data you cite is it needs to be broken out by month of full inoculation. If the immune system is losing efficacy the true magnitude may be hidden given that the sensitivity may diminish a lot from 6-8 months. It seems to me you are referring to vaccine efficacy while Buffalo Timmy is referring to immune system efficacy. I'm afraid the magnitude of immune efficacy and vaccine efficacy loss won't be well quantified until after the winter post-holiday surge. I'm not going to just trust Pfizer's word on it at this point. Just glad my parents got boosted and I'll get mine soon as late January is my 1 yr anniversary.

APB, I understand what you're saying, and certainly in some cases it may be difficult to tease out which problem is ultimately responsible. But let's be clear, you're comparing chronic diseases to an acute disease. The person's health/medical condition is chronically documented and known at the time of Covid infection. While a strong majority of cases have underlying co-morbidities (I saw 70%), there are a minority that don't and all these people seem to die in a similar fashion. Covid seems to kill primarily through the lungs, pneumonia, cytokine storm regardless if there are any patient co-morbidities. So if ANY Covid+ patient dies acutely, in a consistent manner of Covid, the burden falls on proving they died WITH Covid, ie it was mildly present but not the primary factor behind the death.

Ok, sorry to hear about your troubles and glad you have so much expertise. My son was born 3 times at the Cleveland Clinic and took quite a bit of my time to get corrected. Not the hospital nor insurance realizing billing mistakes were made, me. In my case, we didn't have a name immediately picked out and the nurses entered it in to the system 3 times to make sure it got billed "correctly". One way was "baby boy (my last name)", son's SS number, and my son's eventual full name. It was incredibly frustrating. Potential widespread Covid fraud via the motorcycle accident example and hospitals needing to bill every possible case as Covid are much proclaimed by our resident right-wingers. While I have no doubt there will be some billing issues come to light, it seems there is no widespread fraud. With your considerable expertise and firsthand experience, have you personally seen convincing evidence that this is a big problem? Because the motorcycle problem was a resolved mistake and the financial impetus to skew doesn't seem as great as you made it out to be.

No, it makes sense therapeutics take longer as they have a more complex regulatory pathway. Pharmacokinetics and toxicology play a much larger role.

I completely agree with you, but those are separate issues from attempting to claim there's widespread Covid fraud skewing the numbers. Have you considered that federal/state governments allocated funds to help keep hospitals afloat as they did (tried to do) for businesses? https://www.nashp.org/covid-19-federal-funds-for-hospitals-providers-and-states/ https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/funding-for-health-care-providers-during-the-pandemic-an-update/ So, maybe there wasn't so much impetus to skew numbers. Do you really think government wanted hospitals going under during a lockdown pandemic? Also, "skewing" numbers is healthcare fraud. There are strict rules and penalties and anonymous national reporting phone numbers and websites. Given the amount of layoffs in front-line workers, don't you think if there was massive fraud it would have come out? The majority of health-care workers are driven to help their patients and would have low tolerance for something like this. Have you considered all this or do you simply follow blindly what your "trusted" news sources say?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/uh-oh-the-coronavirus-has-been-spreading-widely-in-us-deer/ar-AAQkvDu?li=BBnb7Kz Oh Crap. Who's going to mask and isolate all these deer as rut gets going? Watch out for those hormone-driven antlers! 😂