COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19

[Hammy]

I don't find an English language article yet, but a German study from Leipzig University found that air pollution and severe covid-19 cases are likely connected. According to the study, it's not a final proof and needs more research, but a strong indicator. They looked at pollution levels and death rates and found some connection. Especially with regard to Northern Italy.

It would explain why New York seems to have a higher fatality rate.

[Hammy]

Holy crap these people on twitter are dangerously stupid! Fauci is apparently part of the "Deep State" according to Trump supporters on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/va_shiva/status/1252312219653718016?s=20

How is conservatism not classifiable as a mental health crisis at this point?

[Hammy]

Georgia's reopening so I'll just be resigning myself to my inevitable death as my health isn't great.

[Hammy]

Trump is suspending ALL Immigration to the U.S

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1252418369170501639?s=21

He should have done this back in March.

Aside from the fact that we know this is entirely racially motivated, it's going to do absolutely nothing unless ALL travel (including business and tourism) into the US is restricted (especially since his administration isn't doing a whole lot to start with.)

At this point, we're going to keep improving.

I fail to see how removing the only thing that stopped the exponential rise is going to somehow improve anything.

[Hammy]

The good news is we'll probably be more prepared to deal with it, at least at the state level.

This. Hospital capacities will be swelled in anticipation, and treatments will be available, so we might not even need social distancing.

There are not enough hospitals or hospital staff so social distancing will be needed during outbreaks until a vaccine is ready and administered.

[Hammy]

https://mobile.twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1252400233662693377?ref_src=tws...

Patrick went on: "There are more important things than living, and that's saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us.

"I don't want to die, nobody wants to die but man we have got to take some risk and get back in the game and get this country back up and running," he told the Tucker Carlson Tonight host.

These people are sociopaths.

Sociopaths at least have empathy and regret what they do (you're thinking psychopaths.)

And there's a disturbing irony that this sort of thing is coming from the self-declared pro life party.

[Hammy]

The virus apparently causes blood clotting. In at least one young patient, the first symptom was a stroke. NY doctors are now prescribing blood thinners as standard care.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-blood/alarmed-as-covid-patients-blood-thickened-new-york-doctors-try-new-treatments-idUSKCN22421Z

It's a minor miracle that the death toll isn't much much higher than it is, given how nasty corona is.

This collaborates a suspicion. https://vimeo.com/402537849

The virus is literally SARS--people would've taken this a whole lot seriously and we wouldn't be where we are now if it had been referred to such since the beginning rather than an essentially meaningless catalog term. Not saying this to refute the suspicion but in agreement that this virus is far worse than most people are treating it.

[Hammy]

I thought the reason for the new cases was expanded testing.

New hospitalizations and new deaths are also increasing.

[Hammy]

It's not clear to me that we're going down. If you start at March 31 and fit a curve to now it has a negative slope, yes. If you start at April 9, it's almost flat.

There are places where the curve is gradually going down and places where it isn’t.  The troubling thing is that there is no evidence to me that the lockdowns themselves are causing the curves to go down in those places.  These tend to be the places that were already hardest hit, where the decline could purely be attributable to progress toward herd immunity. (I.e. If the curve has declined 25% in NYC, that could just be because 25% of NYC residents were already infected and are now immune.)

TBH, I'm still not convinced by the antibody studies, they haven't been approved fully yet and there have been high rate of false results, there's a good chance I could go and get the antibody test and it would give me a false negative

Imo, I would much rather people have a false negative than a false positive.

So you'd rather cases go undetected so they can spread the virus further?

[Hammy]

I don’t really see how this can be interpreted as evidence the lockdowns are working.  It’s seems just as likely to me that this is an inevitable consequence of approaching herd immunity, with about 25% of NYC’s population already infected.

If lockdowns worked, this decline would have happened much earlier.

Pandemics die down. People build up immunity, the seasons change, and things change.

Do you literally not understand, or simply refuse to, that the whole point of the lockdown isn't to magically eliminate the virus but to keep the numbers steady so the healthcare system isn't overwhemed?

[Hammy]

Why did NY cut off a lot of its testing?

Like Trump and all New Yorker politicians it seems Cuomo is only concerned with optics and making things look like they're getting better, no matter how much it contradicts reality.

[Hammy]

Conservatives rejecting remdesivir, still promoting hydroxychloroquine
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/02/donald-trump-coronavirus-remdesivir-229765

What a shame.
I never understood why hydroxychloroquine was so hyped when Remdesivir was obviously more promising since early February. I guess Trump supporters sometimes can’t think for themselves.

Trump and his followers don't understand the concept of admitting they're wrong--once they decide to get behind something they dig in and no amount of facts will convince them otherwise.

[Hammy]

I would agree with this. Individual businesses should have the right to decide whether or not they will require customers to wear masks while on their premises, but government should not, at least to the extent of fining, jailing, or otherwise penalizing people for not wearing them.

Does government have the right to tell you to cover your genitals in public, including in stores? It's for hygiene right? Because, so is this.

There is a difference between indecent exposure and mask wearing.

I'm OK with an enforceable mask law, but I prefer just encouraging private businesses to provide them to employees and throw out customers who aren't wearing them.  Make it part of the safe harbor guidelines for legal liability.

How do you propose that restaurants require people to wear masks to eat?

Restaurants should not be open at all right now for dine-in for exactly this reason.

[Hammy]

Mask wearing will probably be a common thing, it is what stops most asian countries from suffering as badly from the flu, when I used to work at a restaurant a lot of the asian customers would come in wearing masks

It won't be a common thing after vaccines (and/or effective treatments) roll out. I'm worried about the meantime, after we enter the neutral state after the wave is over when we have 100--300 cases per day nationwide. Wearing masks during that period is still hysteria and I won't have it.

Countries with common sense actually use masks regularly during any sort of viral outbreak, flu included.

[Hammy]

https://twitter.com/cherylbolen/status/1262479713030803458

Has he tested positive and is concealing it?

 I don't see any way that a White House doctor would prescribe him this for no reason at all.

He's clearly lying. He's been pitching it for weeks so of course when facts came out to prove it has no benefit (but in fact makes things worse) he's going to double down and do whatever he can to convince people he was right all along.

The problem for him is its getting harder and harder to prove his lie isn't a lie so now he has to bury himself in even more lies.

[Hammy]

I still think it is reasonable to say that covid is at most approximately the same threat to children as chicken pox prior to the development of a vaccine.  About 50 children died each year from chicken pox (death rate around 1 in 60,000), and several thousand were hospitalized.  But it was still seen as important to expose your child to the disease early because it was much more lethal in adults.

But this is a respiratory virus and something you can catch even if you're far enough away, making this a terrible idea in this case.

[Hammy]

The fact both political parties seem to want to ignore the pandemic shows how far astray America has gone. This is a failed nation, with a failing people. It’s a shame nobody cares that 1k Americans are dying each day from Covid anymore. BLM is a disgrace to America and is complicit in the spreading of this pandemic.

Weren't you arguing against the lockdowns when it was white people going out in droves?

[Hammy]

It doesn’t seem like many people are harshly criticizing California’s response.  And despite locking down very early, they are following the same path as Texas and Florida.

This just seems to me like more evidence that lockdowns alone are not very effective unless they are also bolstered by partial herd immunity.  The reason that places like Italy and Spain and New York were effective last month (and it seems like the UK has been effective a month later) is that they didn’t lock down until a significant portion of their population had already been infected.  But of course, this also resulted in horrible death tolls in all these places. 

So you could definitely make an argument that California locked down too early.  Ultimately, it was impossible for them to stop the spread of cases before enough people had been infected that they had an immunity buffer.  But at least now we have much better testing and treatment that we can identify and treat cases where there is a new surge, resulting in a lot less death than we saw in Spain or NYC.

There is no herd immunity buffer in California--they had a strict lockdown that was enforced and kept it under control, keeping hospitals from getting overwhelmed, and then reopened in phases. Look at New York for example which waited too long to go into lockdown, and ended up with a far higher number of cases and deaths despite having less people than CA.

[Hammy]

I don’t see what the concern is. We know it’s not nearly as fatal as we once believed. And as far as fatality goes overall, most survive, and just like with any illness some of course will die.

You can’t save everyone.

And you can’t put the entire nation in economic jeopardy in order to save a few centennials. I don’t care if it sounds crass, it’s a cost-benefit analysis that must be done.

Roughly a quarter of coronavirus cases require hospitalization--the problem is if you just let it run rampant more people will get it, and the ICUs will run out of room. As the cases keep going up, hospitals become overwhelmed, people who would otherwise survive with treatment die because there's no room, not to mention people with other illnesses or life threatening injuries (car accidents for example) who will die because they can't get into a hospital.

The ONLY reason the number of deaths isn't higher is because so far that's been prevented from happening on a larger nationwide scale because of the precautions. Toss those out the window and the death rate skyrockets.

[Hammy]

DeSantis blaming immigrants for disease, Ohio blaming blacks, and DeBlasio blaming the Jews. It's like we've gone back to the 1930s.

[Hammy]

https://twitter.com/GeoffRBennett/status/1279167084023500801

Is Trump trying to lose this election

He doesn't care at this point--he's probably figured out Dems are less likely to vote the longer this goes on.

[Hammy]

All the things you posted are related to time. That's why we were supposed to quarantine seriously to flatten the curve and buy time.

I totally agree with that!

That’s why I don’t understand why more people who were advocating lockdowns aren’t looking at the current data and essentially declaring victory.
The purpose of the lockdowns was not to reduce the number of infections in the long term.  The purpose was to delay the inevitable surge in infections until we had better testing and treatment.

This is an outright lie--the purpose is to keep the rate of infections steady so that fewer people need hospitalization at any given time. As I've said before, as more people are hospitalized the CFR is not only going to rise as they run out of room, but it's going to kill people who have other diseases that treatment for is now denied due to lack of space.

[Hammy]

All the things you posted are related to time. That's why we were supposed to quarantine seriously to flatten the curve and buy time.

I totally agree with that!

That’s why I don’t understand why more people who were advocating lockdowns aren’t looking at the current data and essentially declaring victory.
The purpose of the lockdowns was not to reduce the number of infections in the long term.  The purpose was to delay the inevitable surge in infections until we had better testing and treatment.

This is an outright lie--the purpose is to keep the rate of infections steady so that fewer people need hospitalization at any given time. As I've said before, as more people are hospitalized the CFR is not only going to rise as they run out of room, but it's going to kill people who have other diseases that treatment for is now denied due to lack of space.

I remember this debate raging two month ago in the middle of the lockdowns.  No one could agree on what the purpose of the lockdowns was.

if the purpose of the lockdown is just to keep infections steady, and you succeed in keeping them steady indefinitely, how do you know when to end the lockdown?

The point of the lockdown is to keep cases low until treatment or a vaccine can help. It was not to "delay the spike" as you claimed--it was all to prevent one and thus prevent the healthcare system from collapsing.

[Hammy]

Honestly, at this point, maybe some level of herd immunity is the only way we can control the virus. As Americans are extremely self-entitled, it’s clear we can’t expect people to act like decent human beings here.
What we should have is a deliberate infection program. Anyone who wants to be able to go out without masks/social distancing can opt to be deliberately infected. They will then be placed under house arrest for several weeks until they test negative twice. Volunteers for this program will not get medical treatment no matter what.
After they are recovered and show antibodies, they will be given a special card that they can show to be exempt from masks.

I worry about some of y'all sometimes

Why?
This seems like a reasonable compromise that gives people a choice without hurting others.
Sure it’s arguably morally wrong, but we crossed that line months ago.

You can't rely on herd immunity for a virus where immunity hasn't even been proven in the first place.

[Hammy]

Sequel to ^^^

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1279847406151106561

That's an insult to people with actual mental illnesses.

I do (seriously) wonder if there is some form of mental illness that can cause people to be more inclined to be susceptible to conspiracy theories, or outlandish beliefs in general.  But I don't know enough about it to have an informed opinion.

There are a number of mental illnesses where paranoid delusions are legitimately symptoms (schizophrenia, paranoid personality disorder, and some variants of dementia for example.)