Coronavirus: Miles away from ordinary.

I think you and others are overreacting. Texas isn't alone. I live in Florida (who wasn't alone either) and we didn't have a statewide order from the jump. Matter of fact, you look at the numbers and I would wonder why this is a thing still. California (or other highly populous locked down state) v. Florida in terms of the impact of a mask mandate (amongst other requirements) both positive and negative is dubious at best.

 

I think that you are wrong.

Idiot republicans are a giant problem.

So are the people who insist on defending them while offering nothing but a jumble of nonsense words that look superficially like arguments in their defense.

 

Yeah those trustworthy numbers from Florida. Not like they deployed a swat team to stop someone releasing real numbers.

 

Unsure what anything beyond your first sentence has to do with anything but what metrics would you point to in order to demonstrate that I'm wrong?

Are you referring to Rebekah Jones? If so, I think you should read a little deeper on who she is; if there is something else though, I would be interested to hear it.

 

A LOT of my clients have had hair loss due to Covid. It seems like it comes back because they all have baby hair growth like postpartum style.

 

You are a waste of our time.

Zach pointed out a very specific example of Republicans in Florida abusing their power to hide how they lied and you just dismissed it and demanded different examples.

I don't need to prove you wrong, you have to prove that your nonsense is correct.

Which is impossible.

Stop wasting everyone's time.

 

You come around once a month to troll and contribute nothing of substance or meaning to the board. Just fuck off already.

 

Fuck that, lay off, the name of the board is "idiot" after all. Bad faith arguments and stupidity go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

There's a prevailing fallacy that X or Y state's numbers weren't so bad, so let them do what they want. Like a virus stops at the Georgia/Florida line because one side has a mask mandate. This is one of the worst cock-ups of the early-stage response: let's report numbers by states, because then we can track the virus by zip code! It enables states to compare their countermeasures erroneously: Florida didn't have a mask mandate and Georgia did, or they both did on this date/that date, blah blah blah. Every other country and even regional groups avoided this horseshit because it doesn't work: you don't stop this by pushing it down to a lower level of control. That's an abdication of responsibility. This required a global response, and among several other fuckups of truly history-making proportions, we squandered an opportunity to lead that response. If the masterminds of the response had thought a bit beyond fleecing the taxpayer, we could have responded on a global scale: masks, respirators, vaccines, data, countermeasures, research. That's the role we've played with the CDC in front for decades, and we lost it.

It's a fucking VIRUS. It's a human problem, not something that a state trooper patrolling a border can do fuck all about.

For the gazillionth time, the numbers are not the virus, it's not like the person standing at the door at Costco with a clicker every time someone gets infected. The numbers are the tests, and how each individual hospital, local and state reports up to CDC, with all the bullshit we'd expect from FL, NY, and anyone else who couldn't avoid coloring a Goddamned pathogen with a political or virtue signaling brush. It's the best indication we have, and we could have done better.

29 million cases and 527,000 dead in a bit over a year. Those numbers are staggering for the day and age we live in. That's on par with ALL cancers for a year's worth of deaths. Like, every possible body part that gets a tumor and kills you, in unimaginable complexity, horror and pain combined, is only slightly ahead of an airborne virus from a family we used to associate with a wicked cough. It'd be like if next year, a random venomous star fish killed more people that gun violence, car accidents and suicide combined.

This will continue to be a thing for quite a while.

I'm watching the excess mortality studies very carefully, as that will be the closest thing to a "real" count we'll have of the human cost. Those and the trackers who utilize some of the health billing codes that can cluster together as "COVID-likely" with a high degree of confidence, and some of the studies on the long haulers.

Lastly, I've stayed out of the bubble and focused on my new gig. I see some of the work being done on the vaccination sites, and it's staggering. We had the capacity to do this kind of thing since Day 1, we lacked the vision, will and leadership. Progress on this is not automatic, it's a heroic effort to get to this point of having it under control.

 

I'll just remind all of you that most here and in the media said Florida would be a smoking hole in the ground because they weren't listening to Saint Fauci. Florida didn't create the same statewide protocols that many other States did. Florida has one of the oldest population per capita. The statistics relating to this virus are pretty clear - COVID kills older people first and foremost. So age then comorbidities create a multiplicative effect in how outcomes look. That is exactly why everyone said that Florida would be overwhelmed by death in the early days of this thing. I get why people would think that based on what we know. Well, as we look back over the course of roughly a year - looking at responses to the virus and the outcomes based on responses; the prophecies of doom didn't happen. You can't look at the countermeasures taken by other States and say it was worth it or not, that's why I think at best it's a push.

The other half of this equation, the lockdown variables within haven't even been defined yet. Deaths relating to suicide, overdose, spousal and child abuse, cancer outcomes negatively impacted, educational opportunities lost, economies destroyed, or plain old days not lived still need to be quantified before we can say any of this response was worth it.

 

....Florida also has the most transient populations, meaning they don't stay put throughout the year, and the most overloaded infrastructure....going back to the original point that just because states were left to do things independently doesn't mean the virus obeyed any particular governor's orders.

500k dead is fucking doom, bro. And it could've easily been 2+ million. Again, all the work we did might not have sent everyone home with a "someone saved my life today by wearing a mask" ribbon, but the fact that it was expected to be worse and wasn't due to all the shit we did doesn't mean the shit we did wasn't worth it. You're making the definition of hindsight closer to "trying to look with one's head up one's own ass."

You know what, I'll trade the thousands of deaths of despair over the millions of death by COVID, coupled with the millions more suffering from long-term health implications we're just now beginning to understand, plus the added risk of mutations and strains that are worse than the good old COVID-19 we've come to know and love. And you can counter that with the millions more hours spent with families, millions less miles commuted, pollution averted, skyrocketing savings rate & home values, and one of the first large-scale experiments on UBI in the US.

Again, dude, if you want a place where government is ineffective and stays out of your business, go to Ethiopia.

This response was a shit show from start to finish, but it could have been worse. The fact that it wasn't worse is not an indicator we did too much.

For the record, Florida accounts for 6.4% of the US population, 6.7% of the COVID cases treated in-state, and 6% of the total deaths. Dead ass average.

I was one of the people saying Florida was going to be a shit show, because I was seeing the assinine shit Florida's governor was requesting from the federal government, and it's astronomical costs.

TLDR: Sorry more people didn't die to prove you right.

 

How it could have been worse? How could you have possibly had a nation leader that was more in denial about the entire epidemic than your previous president? He flat-out told the public it did not exist. He said it was a hoax AFTER becoming sick with it. The people in charge of your nation could not have fucked up more perfectly. The only thing that could be worse is a more powerful and contagious disease.

...Which is in the mail, either for tomorrow or a hundred years from now. This shit is just a warm-up for the one that will eventually kill us all, which we are FULLY prepared to, and WILL lose to; because attending church and house parties is just so much more important than the actual quality of life.

 

Some of us knew better than to listen to him.

Trust me, it could have been worse. You didn't hear the things we talked them out of.

 

Didn't we have entire states having to pull Mission Impossible capers just to secure PPE that the feds would've interdicted otherwise? Didn't we have the President's own advisors pushing the "make everyone get it" version of herd immunity?

They really did more to thwart the response than if they'd just stood aside and done nothing at all.

 

It's been a month and a half since I survived COVID. I found out a few days ago that during my time having covid, my wife was having discussions with my mother, multiple times per day, on if they should call 911 yet. It wasn't if, but when. Eventually I made it through though and they didn't have to pull that trigger.

I just got off a telemed appointment with my doctor where he prescribed me advair due to ongoing breathing issues. Prior to this I was running 3-4 miles per day, 4-5 days a week. On the phone with him, I went from one end of the house to the other to take my blood pressure on a machine we have, and it shot my readings through the roof. At work when I go up a flight of stairs now, I have to sit down for a few minutes to catch my breath. My work schedule has had to completely changed because I get tired so easily and the last thing we want is for me to be far away from the house and have an issue.

Anyone who says this is no big deal, or the restrictions weren't worth it, is very lucky. Lucky they don't know anyone who has died from this, as I've sadly known. Lucky they haven't experienced the effects from it, which I could well be living with the rest of my life. If it just impacts you for not wearing a mask or for opening everything back up and getting all touchy feely again, then great, go ahead, do whatever you want. But your misguided decision could kill someone else. So if you're doing it, get correct or stay the fuck home.

 

I'm not arguing against the seriousness of this in any way and I fully admit that I have absolutely zero medical understanding. As a complete idiot over here though it's just crazy to me how different this seems to affect people. I get when it hits old or fat people more seriously, but the different experience between seemingly normal healthy people just seems so wide. About thirty guys at the neighboring farm got hit with it last spring. The worst report out of them was the 500-pound guy who works the spray equipment had to take two fulls days off work. Everyone else simply complained that anything more than a 12-hour workday really zapped them so they had to keep hours limited to that.

We've been as diligent as possible with making sure if it shows up here that we aren't spreading it to each other. In the past year, we've had three cases, all of which knew they got it from a family member, and even though two of them had a few days on-site before they found out they had it we didn't have any internal spread. One of which was a 77-year-old guy whose only complaint was he didn't get to go to the hunting cabin because he had it.

Living in a very 'muh freedoms' area I catch flak pretty much weekly for enforcing and following current recommendations to the best of our abilities.

The fatigue with dealing with it is definitely high around here and I'm really looking forward to a day where we aren't watching death totals on the news daily, living in fear of getting the business shut down again, and people being able to interact again. Hopefully, I'm not being stupidly optimistic that we'll see something resembling normal again at some point. We had five people out sick last week, all tested negative for covid, but the emotional toll waiting to find out is a bitch.

I'm not overly encouraged by the fact that to the best of my knowledge only 5 of the 40 people here currently have signed up to get the vaccine as soon as one is available for 'em.

 

Your whole post is exactly what the issue is around the country. Almost everything you said points to why this hasn't been taken seriously, the things needed to be done to stop the spread at the beginning weren't done, and where we currently are in the country. Unless personally affected in a majorly negative way, people can't/don't sympathize with any sort of illness. People didn't take this seriously from the beginning and all the way up to the president downplayed exactly what was going on and the effects of the virus. Now, it's been so long since the start of this, people are sick and tired of the half measures and "misinformation" they've turned to just not caring and wanting to get on with their life. It's to the point where people aren't going to get a vaccine for a deadly virus because....who knows why.

The biggest things needed right now are a little more patience to get to the other side of this. A completely ramped up vaccine program where we are trying to get as many people vaccinated as soon as possible (I understand targeting of some sort to start, but I shouldn't be in a position to not even have a chance of getting the vaccine until late summer because I'm white and not too old). We need people to do the bare minimum to get us to a point where most people are vaccinated, mainly wear a mask, social distance enough to not be in direct contact with people for long periods of time, and don't congregate in large numbers in closed in spaces.

It's like another 3 or 4 months and we'll be pretty good to go, but we can't even get out of our own way to get there. It's kind of sad really.

 

also would have helped if they said literally anything about trump getting the vaccine before he left the WH