interesting Spin to support COVID Vaccines

[CAAdmission]

3 hours ago, Reality Check 2 said:

Flawed data, wrong timing............. comparing green apples to red apples in different seasons

Politifact? Instragram? Timing? No clue what you are talking about. Remember that "Science!" and "Data!" that is so awesome? The numbers I presented were from Johns Hopkins current as of this week (if not today).

Did you even look at the numbers or did you just jump right on the offensive? One could smugly gloat that Florida had a million more cases than NY. It's odd that they don't seem to have much excess death, in spite of having a significant elderly population. I wonder why that is. Luck?

[Reality Check 2]

New York was pre vaccine during an onslaught without sufficient PPE and little knowledge of any effective treatments. 

Florida was much much later and should have learned from New York if anything. And a vaccine is more available.

If Florida was making mistakes MONTHS after NYC - then that is DUMB.

Failure to learn and progress and improve is DUMB.

Have a good night..............................

[MediMike]

Here is the data from the last month.

New York vs. Florida

,

[Reality Check 2]

New York test positivity vs Florida - 

look at peak months….

look at vaccine rates…..

New York

 

Florida

Edited September 28, 2021 by Reality Check 2
Graphic correction

[MediMike]

@CAAdmissiondid you have any thoughts on the FL vs NY shots which were posted? The discrepancies you mentioned were addressed by RC in that NY was the first and hardest hit, they definitely seemed to have learned from it while FL doesn't seem to have.

I'm curious if you have a different take on these numbers?

[CAAdmission]

1 hour ago, MediMike said:

I'm curious if you have a different take on these numbers?

Sure, just be forewarned that you won't like it. 

Corona is here, and it's not going anywhere, probably ever. People are acting like everyone gets a shot and it magically goes away like smallpox. That's not happening. This is more akin to the cold and the flu. We already had other endemic corona viruses among our cold-causing viruses. 

I think there is a strong genetic component in terms of both overall susceptibility to this infection, and in terms of mounting a terrible inflammatory response to the infection. This virus will continue to sweep through the population until it finds everyone it is going to kill and kills them. Vaccinations will attenuate this a bit. Masks won't do squat but delay the inevitable and act as a source of conflict and virtue signaling. Any areas that didn't get hit when NY got hit will get hit now, like Florida. Or some time later. Thinking otherwise is hubris. NY didn't learn anything, the virus burned through the population the same way it did (or will) everywhere else. Eventually corona will become another boring, indolent upper respiratory virus. 

Someone up above was decrying the lack of faith in public health authorities. From an "Average Joe" perspective, that's comical. Remember "two weeks to flatten the curve"? Fauci denied it, but it seems US dollars were funding Chinese viral research? Government officials ignoring their own mandates? No one believe these people any more.

 

Edited September 29, 2021 by CAAdmission

[MediMike]

23 minutes ago, CAAdmission said:

Sure, just be forewarned that you won't like it. 

Corona is here, and it's not going anywhere, probably ever. People are acting like everyone gets a shot and it magically goes away like smallpox. That's not happening. This is more akin to the cold and the flu. We already had other endemic corona viruses among our cold-causing viruses. 

I think there is a strong genetic component in terms of both overall susceptibility to this infection, and in terms of mounting a terrible inflammatory response to the infection. This virus will continue to sweep through the population until it finds everyone it is going to kill and kills them. Vaccinations will attenuate this a bit. Masks won't do squat but delay the inevitable and act as a source of conflict and virtue signaling. Any areas that didn't get hit when NY got hit will get hit now, like Florida. Or some time later. Thinking otherwise is hubris. NY didn't learn anything, the virus burned through the population the same way it did (or will) everywhere else. Eventually corona will become another boring, indolent upper respiratory virus. 

Someone up above was decrying the lack of faith in public health authorities. From an "Average Joe" perspective, that's comical. Remember "two weeks to flatten the curve"? Fauci denied it, but it seems US dollars were funding Chinese viral research? Government officials ignoring their own mandates? No one believe these people any more.

 

So you've got nothing to say about those numbers specifically. The numbers you were trying to spin. Got it.

A simple admission that you were wrong would have gone real far there man. 

[CAAdmission]

3 minutes ago, MediMike said:

So you've got nothing to say about those numbers specifically. The numbers you were trying to spin. Got it.

A simple admission that you were wrong would have gone real far there man. 

Perhaps I didn't use small enough words.

Florida will get hammered, simply because they didn't get hammered before. The same will happen to other areas. It's a pretty simple concept. 

[MediMike]

12 minutes ago, CAAdmission said:

Perhaps I didn't use small enough words.

Florida will get hammered, simply because they didn't get hammered before. The same will happen to other areas. It's a pretty simple concept. 

Ah. So the point of your initial post wasn't to say that Florida who per you didn't shut down was doing better than New York? 

Maybe those words are a little too big. Kinda like "false equivalence" maybe has too many syllables for you? 

Standard procedure. Make a hyperbolic or blatantly false statement, attack those who counter it, deflect once evidence is presented. Maybe move some goal posts while you're at it? Never back down either, that must be part of the creed too.

Think I'm about done in this thread, I can go flip on FOX if I want to hear these regurgitated talking points.

[CAAdmission]

5 minutes ago, MediMike said:

Ah. So the point of your initial post wasn't to say that Florida who per you didn't shut down was doing better than New York? 

Not at all. My contention is that in 10 years if we look back at places that did crazy lock downs and places that didn't, there won't be a significant difference in terms of outcomes. "Equivalent" is different than "better." 

[LT_Oneal_PAC]

8 hours ago, CAAdmission said:

Not at all. My contention is that in 10 years if we look back at places that did crazy lock downs and places that didn't, there won't be a significant difference in terms of outcomes. "Equivalent" is different than "better." 

You cannot compare lock down versus no lock down in different years,  in states with vastly different population densities, vastly different climates,  beginning versus mid-pandemic, and most importantly vaccine versus no vaccine.

[CAAdmission]

41 minutes ago, LT_Oneal_PAC said:

You cannot compare lock down versus no lock down in different years,  in states with vastly different population densities, vastly different climates,  beginning versus mid-pandemic, and most importantly vaccine versus no vaccine.

Sure I can - I just did. You are of course free to question the validity of that comparison if you like. 

But if I run with your line of thinking, there's probably no need for Florida to lock down. The climate is different so people are not stuck together inside. As you note, the population is less dense. And most importantly, there's a vaccine. So why do people have their panties in a bunch over what Florida does?

Is it ok to compare quality of life? I've been to both Florida and NY several times during the pandemic, and will be going again. NY is like something from a dystopian movie, Florida is like normal life (honesty, this might have been the case pre-pandemic). There's people reading this that wear N95 masks sitting alone in their own car. I'll be thinking of them when I'm on a roller coaster at Universal Studios in a couple weeks. 

You want to hear something really terrible? I believe there's lot's of people - including healthcare providers, probably some on this board - that are hoping something bad happens in Florida so they can say "I told you so."

[Reality Check 2]

I think 700,000 dead Americans speaks loudly enough.

We could have done much better and should have.

A 56% national vaccination rate is pathetic.

Children dying is pathetic.

 

[ventana]

3 hours ago, CAAdmission said:

Sure I can - I just did. You are of course free to question the validity of that comparison if you like. 

But if I run with your line of thinking, there's probably no need for Florida to lock down. The climate is different so people are not stuck together inside. As you note, the population is less dense. And most importantly, there's a vaccine. So why do people have their panties in a bunch over what Florida does?

Is it ok to compare quality of life? I've been to both Florida and NY several times during the pandemic, and will be going again. NY is like something from a dystopian movie, Florida is like normal life (honesty, this might have been the case pre-pandemic). There's people reading this that wear N95 masks sitting alone in their own car. I'll be thinking of them when I'm on a roller coaster at Universal Studios in a couple weeks. 

You want to hear something really terrible? I believe there's lot's of people - including healthcare providers, probably some on this board - that are hoping something bad happens in Florida so they can say "I told you so."

Fl might not be as dense population as NYC but they are all going into bars and restaurants like nothing is going on.   This is just stupid with a capital S - and I agree there is not a valid comparison as the two states are so vastly different in their approach (and not so much density beyond the density of their politicians.....)

[rev ronin]

Masks for the vaccinated are not an evidence-based intervention. Or for the unvaccinated, for that matter. While there's some evidence masks restrict droplet spread, what's the NNT? Where's the evidence that masking a population makes an appreciable dent in R0?

Boosters for the previously vaccinated is not an evidence-based intervention.  Again, what's the NNT?

Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and whatever Mercola's selling at the moment are not evidence-based interventions.

Vaccines are evidence-based, with an NNT that varies based on the underlying risk per patient, and which outcome (infection, hospitalization, death) that you're looking at, but I think it's less than 2.

Remdesevir is an evidence-based treatment with an NNT of like a thousand or something and a cost per quality-adjusted life year saved that makes it a stupid thing to do from a public health perspective.

Monoclonal antibodies are an evidence-based treatment, but their NNT is not really all that great either, is it? Prednisone is an evidence-based treatment for those who have severe disease with good efficacy and reasonable cost.

 

While you may not like what CAAdmission is saying, anyone with any education in basic statistics and/or epidemiology has known that when the R0 of ~4 and asymptomatic transmission were validated in initial studies, two things were going to happen:

1) everyone on planet earth was going to be exposed to it sooner or later with attendant morbidity and mortality, and

2) appropriate social order demanded distracting the populace from #1 until a vaccine was ready.

Delta, with an R0 of 5-9, just made the above even more true.

Public health messaging has been a combination of optimism to the point of dishonesty, political point-scoring, profiteering, and intentional disinformation spread by hostile nation states.

I masked for 9 months, always using procedure masks, and why did I get Covid?  Because my sweet then-15 year old daughter brought it home from a church youth group function where kids (none of the rest of whom ever became symptomatic as far as we know) took off their masks to eat and socialize.  By the time she was symptomatic, the rest of the household had it. Can I prove that? No, but I'm willing to say that's where we all got it on a more-probable-than-not basis.  My elder son's family dodged it, as far as they know, until they got vaccinated.  My younger son's family got it, and they have no idea where.

Why?  Because everyone will be exposed... that's just math.  No matter how careful we are, no matter how many vaccine refusers there are or are not, no matter any of that.  "Flatten the curve" was not a bad idea, but people don't realize that with an R0 in that ball park, that still means that everyone gets exposed eventually. 700,000 Americans would likely still have died no matter what, but by spacing things out a bit we cut the case fatality rate by not overwhelming the hospitals on the way, and giving some people (not me) a reprieve until the vaccines arrived. Which, remember, totally out-of-the-park homerun.

We have essentially done everything we can for Covid-19: developed several absolutely kick-ass vaccines in record time without compromising safety or quality. The people who aren't vaccinated?  They're really only hurting themselves, because it really doesn't matter how many of them there are: everyone will be exposed eventually.

This red-state vs. blue-state finger pointing is stupidly pointless in the face of inexorable facts: everyone will be exposed, and everyone in the United States has had ample opportunity to choose vaccination.  The ones who get it and die? We dance the supportive care treatment dance, but there's still very little we can or will do for the outcomes; for most people who die, the root cause of their mortality will have been vaccine refusal.

It's sad, it's tragic, but let's not pretend masking now is anything more than public health theater.  Well, and a really good countermeasure against influenza.

[sas5814]

4 hours ago, rev ronin said:

This red-state vs. blue-state finger pointing is stupidly pointless

I wanted to stop your quote where I thought it was most pointed. I'm as tired of COVID as anyone. I'm tired of fighting about vaccinated and not vaccinated. What I am ABSOLUTELY exhausted form it the political bickering and the political finger pointing.

When they finally prove this was a manufactured virus that accidentally got loose in Wuhan we can all hold hands and gang up on China. The sooner the better. OK... that may or may not ever happen but it would be nice to have someone to blame that actually is responsible.

[rev ronin]

On 9/29/2021 at 2:18 PM, sas5814 said:

When they finally prove this was a manufactured virus that accidentally got loose in Wuhan ...

The most plausible explanation (or "conspiracy theory," if you prefer) is that an experimental animal of some sort was sold from the Wuhan lab into the wet market by a low-level janitorial employee. I can't find the blog post that pointed out that bioisolation measures are at the mercy of the poorly paid functionaries who do the job, and that selling lab animals into food markets was not an uncommon lapse that had been previously documented in other PRC settings.

Doesn't require any intentional evil on the PRC scientists' part, just a governmental cover-up, and hey, everyone does that all the time, right? All we have to posit is that they were studying coronavirii at Wuhan, which is, as I understand it, well within their documented scope of research.

[CAAdmission]

On 9/29/2021 at 5:18 PM, sas5814 said:

What I am ABSOLUTELY exhausted form it the political bickering and the political finger pointing.

The saddest thing is that fighting this infection was the one thing that might have united the country (heck, perhaps even much of the world). Instead, it just heated up the Cold Civil War.

[Reality Check 2]

This caught my eye this morning.............

==========================================================

When patients tell Dr. Vincent Shaw that they don’t want the COVID-19 vaccine because they don’t know what’s going into their bodies, he pulls up the ingredient list for a Twinkie.

“Look at the back of the package,” Shaw, a family physician in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “Tell me you can pronounce everything on the back of that package. Because I have a chemistry degree, I still don’t know what that is.”

He also commonly hears patients tell him they haven’t done enough research about the vaccines. Rest assured, he tells them, the vaccine developers have done their homework.

Then there are the fringe explanations: “They’re putting a tracker in and it makes me magnetic.”

Another explanation left him speechless: “The patient couldn’t understand why they were given this for free, because humanity in and of itself is not nice and people aren’t nice and nobody would give anything away. So there’s no such thing as inherent good nature of man. And I had no comeback from that.”

People who get sick with mild cases insist that they have natural immunity. “No, you’re not a Superman or Superwoman,” he tells them.

He said one of the biggest issues is social media, as evidenced by the many patients who describe what they saw on Facebook in deciding against getting vaccinated. That mindset has spawned memes about the many Americans who got their degrees at the University of Facebook School of Medicine.

“I am like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ I shake my head, ‘No, no. That is not right, no, no. Stop, stop, just stop looking at Facebook.’”

[CAAdmission]

10 minutes ago, Reality Check 2 said:

Stop, stop, just stop looking at Facebook.’”

Good advice for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Throw in Twitter and Instagram and all the rest.

[CAAdmission]

But if you are going to use the internet, Project Veritas is always fun. This is what good-old investigative journalism used to look like:

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/pfizer-scientist-your-antibodies-are-probably-better-than-the-vaccination/

They are not saying anything that we as clinicians don't know, but some of the public is probably surprised. I'm wondering why people are so dead-set on vaccinating people that had Covid.

[rev ronin]

19 minutes ago, CAAdmission said:

I'm wondering why people are so dead-set on vaccinating people that had Covid.

Procrusteanism runs rampant in public health. I mean, you sorta feel sympathetic for them if you consider how able to deal with nuance most of the public is not...

But then you consider how muddled their messaging has been, how many revisions and flip-flops, and think "No, they actually own how many anti-vaxxers there are, because their messaging made this mess"

[Reality Check 2]

The level of immunity from COVID disease varies - notably - the worse the infection, the higher the rate of antibodies and we don't know how long they last. Early on, some folks with mild disease had no detectable antibodies at 3 weeks out from infection. The body "might" still be able to respond but we don't know. 

A minimal infection of COVID - minor, brief symptoms - benefits greatly from a vaccine.

The concept of hybrid immunity is gaining a lot of traction as the body knows the spike protein AND the real virus and doubles down on resisting it - studies suggest it will help with mutations. 

So, if someone had COVID - get the vaccine.................. It CAN Help and thus far has not shown to be dangerous or harmful.

If you have never knowingly had COVID - get the vaccine.

Over 90% of DEATHS are in unvaccinated folks of all ages and health spectrums.

It really isn't that hard.

[ventana]

4 hours ago, rev ronin said:

Procrusteanism

Sorry lost me with that one. 

[rev ronin]

48 minutes ago, ventana said:

Sorry lost me with that one. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes