Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19) and Tinnitus

I liked this story...

173 years, $170: Why Irish people are donating to help Native Americans hit by coronavirus
"Sending the actual amount of $170 personally after 170 or so years felt like the right tribute across the ages."


Vehicles line up for COVID-19 testing outside of the Monument Valley Health Center in Oljato-Monument Valley, San Juan Co., on April 17, 2020.

May 6, 2020, 6:24 AM PDT / Updated May 6, 2020, 8:02 AM PDT

By Alyssa Newcomb

It was a gesture born of suffering and kindness carried over generations.

In 1847, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma sent $170 to Ireland during the Great Famine — a time of mass starvation on the island. More than 170 years later, Ireland has returned the favor, helping to raise more than $2 million for the Navajo and Hopi nations, which have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic...

 

That’s a great story. I think we need to hear more about positive stories like these but we all know that bad news sells better.

 

Looking at the effectiveness of the lockdown in Wuhan vs failure other places -- I think it comes down to both moving very, very fast using processes already in places since SARS, and being an absolutely authoritarian regime that can just decide to do something, enforce it, and disappear anyone who dissents (there is some evidence of this happening around COVID-19 specifically).

100%? If someone makes the choice to not vaccinate their kids against MMR/polio, then I sure don't want them in a school with mine. My state agrees.

Ah. Another one to watch out for that's making the rounds is "PlanDemic"; as with any of these things, 60 secs of google will convince any rational person it's astroturfed garbage featuring a crazy lady, but the target demographic for these things are not people who are prone to even trying to understand source credibility.

https://www.businessinsider.com/cor...hief-says-high-death-toll-was-surprise-2020-5

 

I agree with you there. There’s no way I’d let my daughter attend a school with kids that were mostly unvaccinated. It’s ridiculous how the world seems to be regressing just lately.

I suppose what I meant by agreeing with “my body my choice” is that nobody should be forced to do anything against their will, but the paradox here is that vaccination affects us all as I said in my previous post. It’s a selfish choice, but a choice nonetheless and forcing people against their will feels a bit too totalitarian. There needs to be better education on the subject. People nowadays are so easily influenced by social media that you can pretty much get them to believe just about anything. A mere picture with a bit of text added is often taken as gospel.

Ah plandemic, another cornerstone of the postings that seem to constantly pop up on my feed. Of course, there’s no evidence, but there’s plenty of memes and other such irrelevant materials to convince the masses. Why would countries around the world want to crash their own economies? What would be the point?

The conspiracists would tell you that there is a secret cabal of satanic elitists that sit around plotting the demise of the world whilst sacrificing a child. It’s all very convenient and any time anything bad happens, it’s always because of them. It’s the new world order. I think it’s safe to say that many of these people also believe that the Earth is flat and that we’ve never been to the moon.

There is certainly corruption in the world, however, and there always will be.

 

I know I shouldn’t be sharing this, but it further highlights the utter nonsense that is being shared on Facebook right now. About 3 weeks ago this man was telling people that COVID-19 didn’t exist and that those who were becoming ill were succumbing to the effects of 5g. Well, now that it’s no longer flavour of the month he has moved on to inform people that we already have COVID-19 within us from the flu! And that watching the stressful TV campaigns put out by the media (who are part of the NWO) activates it!

Why do people swallow this horseshit? It’s utterly mystifying to me. He also claims that the deaths are highly exaggerated to amplify the stress effect. I think I might just remove myself from Facebook as it’s becoming a cesspool of misinformation and utter bullshit.

If you’re interested, watch from 15:00 onwards to hear the nonsense that’s being spread around but do not share it any further! It’s nuts and is a good insight into how cults are formed.

I hope that common sense prevails.

 

Mr. Trump on Wednesday speaking on testing,
“The media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do, by far the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So , in a way, by doing all this testing , we make ourselves look bad.”

Trump doesn’t understand how we can use testing to manage the virus.

 

Common sense will likely not prevail in our nations, the UK and the US.

 

This is an interesting article:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp....ing-data-reveals-a-complex-reality/a-53365771

 

Is there a choice in the States?

 

What do you mean?

 

Hopefully nobody uses the higher all cause mortality to justify their past support for the lockdowns - the lockdowns that might be the actual reason for this higher all cause mortality...

 

That’s interesting, Bill, but it must be known that Edwin Mora is affiliated with the far-right organisation, Breitbart.

Did he link to the studies or provide citations? I’d be interested in seeing how the data was analysed. At the moment it’s very difficult to extrapolate meaning from the numbers because of the differing ways in which countries are collating data.

There is quite a statistical difference between countries and I believe we’re still at a stage where no convincing conclusions can be drawn.

 

don't worry, they used a cubic, it's very standard

I agree, but decisions have to be made, regardless. So, I think we're going to draw convincing conclusions by counting body bags at the end, it's going to take years, and that's the best reason to watch out for people trying to control or politicize mortality data.

I think what happens with schools and preschools is ultimately the biggest deciding factor, because they're fundamentally necessary, they're tremendous vectors for disease spread between families and communities, and it's laughable to imagine compliance with any kind of social distancing or disease-control measures among small children or school children.

 

I agree. It’s a difficult task to understand what is affecting what, and to what degree.

 

I’m of the opinion that lockdown should end sooner rather than later in the UK (not that it ever really got going over here). There’s only so long one can live without an income and at some point we have to return to some form of normality. We can’t hide away forever.

A second wave is likely inevitable, so it’s how we deal with the fallout from that whilst maintaining the economy. Lessons should have been learned which should make the transition slightly easier. All in my opinion of course as I’m a joe nobody.

 

I believe there's an argument to be made that a lockdown which is kneecapped at the gate in terms of not ever being intended to lead to actual eradication, necessarily needs to be time-limited to slowing the curve. However, this means acceptance that the virus is endemic, which also means acceptance that subsequent distancing measures may be called for on an ongoing basis in places, as ICUs start to stack. Over time, if we don't get a vaccine, I would expect that ICU capacity is gradually scaled up, but, also that overall longevity numbers start to take a hit from this as it chews up the elderly every year at a substantially faster rate than the flu (order of magnitude, at least, for that demographic, maybe two).

So -- we don't have an end of the world virus scenario, by a long shot. This is much closer to "fire drill" than it is to "28 days later". But, it's also not a flu, it's catastrophically more dangerous for several reasons. So, how do we manage that catastrophe? The management of public health emergencies and catastrophes is nothing new, and it's a fundamental function of government.

I think the "reopen everything and kill all the grandmas people are absolutely unhinged. At the same time, the idea that we can't reopen anything until there's 0% chance of transmission just seems unreasonable to me, when in fact there are any number of super scary weird viruses bouncing around every year. So, COVID-19 is in this weird gray area between "really bad cold virus" and "society-warping catastrophically virulent and transmissible" virus. It is very transmissable, but, as much as we argue about virulance numbers -- if we go by the highest estimates of 2-3%, I'm sorry, that's still not "society ending". If you got to something that killed fully 10% of the population and we just had stacks of body bags piled along major highways for months, that might be enough to effect radical social change, but I think whatever happens here, this is not a significant enough event to shake the deathgrip that entrenched powers have on the global economy... and therefore, it will give them opportunities to tighten that grasp.

Posting this again, because it's super appropriate. Also Bob Paige is Elon Musk.

"Deus Ex" HD Intro (1080p)

"Why contain it? Let the bodies pile up in the schools, in the churches, in the streets. In the end, they'll be begging us to save them"

 

I would also suggest -- if we do end up in a situation where it's just the norm in some urban zones for masks to be more or less ongoing, some distancing measures to be expected and then rolling waves of more intense "please stay home as much as you can", this is going to mean that parts of the service sector in those areas just never come back.

I also imagine there are a good number of 50-1000 person sized companies, who were well equipped to go remote based on the kind of work they do, who are suddenly realizing "hey, we've managed to do this with only a ~15% hit to production, which is trending back towards normal. Do we really need that $250,000/month office lease? What if we just started spending $8k/month to have meeting spaces, and then let people largely remain remote?"

This is not going to be true of every business, or even a large minority, but I think it is going to happen. So, there are all kinds of economic impacts to this we can only begin to guess at now.

 

I completely agree. Ending the lockdown has to be a phased transition, and the comparisons to the flu are absurd. A balance has to be found as I believe this is endemic now and there’s no going back. The horse has well and truly bolted from the stable at this point, and it has demonstrated how unprepared the world is for a pandemic of this nature. Governments were too slow to react and if it were a more deadly strain then we’d be in some serious shit right now. Lucky for us that the more deadly something is the less likely it is to spread.

I hope the world leaders take note and ensure that future events are met with more vigour.

 

@Ed209, you might find this interesting: When Hillary Clinton moved to the mostly rural state of Arkansas with Bill, she discovered the state had one of the worst educational systems in the country. While Bill did his governor duties, Hillary went to work behind the scenes, doing everything she could to change things for the better. By the end of Bill's time as governor many years later, Arkansas's educational system had catipulated itself to one of the best in the country. Say what you will about the Clintons, but they (and Democrats in general) believe in government institutions and bureaucracy to achieve positive results.

The Republicans on the other hand, don't believe in this, and continually do everything they can to weaken and/or destroy the very institutions that give the U.S. much of of its resiliencey and strength--and ability to lead the world when matters like a pandemic come up. Note Obama's response to the ebola outbreak in Africa (for which he was criticized by Republicans), and how it's almost diametrically opposite to how Trump & Co. have approached the COVID-19 crisis. The Trump admininstration's "American first" mantra is a significant contributing factor in the U.S.'s inability to lead the world at this time. Calls from foreign countries to U.S. major health agencies are apparently going unanswered.

My own belief is that if Hillary Clinton had been the U.S. President at the outset of this pandemic back in November or December, she would have immediately gotten on the phone with Xi Ping of China, encouraging and/or pressing for transparency, and making various offers of assistance on how they might work cooperatively to overcome any bureaucratic hurdles to mounting a vigorous response. -- The U.S. already had a comprehensive pandemic response system in place when Obama left office, with many bureaucracies having been synced to work together in the event of a pandemic. Trump & Co. began dismantling, defunding, and weakening it from the outset. In short, I believe if Hillary Cliniton had become President in 2017, this cataclysmic pandemic would almost certainly have been largely avoided.

 

I am not disputing your other points (I am not a Clinton fan but it's very clear Clinton > Trump) but having been to Arkansas, I'm going to need a source on it having one of the best school systems in the country.

 

@Lane I generally agree with your assessment, but I think we'd see the same resistance to masks and freedoms infringement along partisan lines, and that might mean that real containment would still be impossible because we have such massive interstate travel and we now believe you need ~80% mask compliance to drop to R<1.

This is generally true but as far as I can tell it's also true that it was only blind luck that this particular virus isn't as lethal as SARS (2004). That is, the incubation period here is much longer than SARS, sufficient to have allowed for widespread release prior to anyone having a head's up. We now know that this was in Paris before the end of 2020, probably as a result of holiday travel.

To me, that means that if a SARS-COX virus emerged that had the incubation period of COVID-19 and the mortality of SARS, then yes, we're looking at exactly the kind of "complete societal breakdown" scenarios you're thinking about, and I really do think it's just blind luck and random RNA bits being flipped which kept the mortality of this thing from being SARS level.

@Ed209 these last few posts have caused me to realize you're in the UK; somehow I always thought you were American. So, from my perspective here -- this is all sort of interesting, because the people behind Trump have focused on, among other things: changing relations with China, jamming through as many Heritage Foundation approved judicial nominees as possible, and generally dismantling the federal government's power and functionality.

The net effect of the first and second points here is going to take decades to play out, but, COVID has caused the third thing to sort of backfire and also play out much more rapidly. Lacking a competent Federal response, you've had a lot of power grabs by state apparatus, in states that are both well funded and politically aligned against the Trump administration.

One upshot of this could be a sort of disease-oriented Balkanization, that causes a breakdown in what we've thought of as sanctified interstate activity, for a long time. For instance, my friends in Seattle tell me they believe Washington is doing an acceptable job reducing the virus, and they fully expect that by the end of the summer there are going to be license plate scanners and potentially quarantines etc for visitors from states that still have raging case counts.

The ability of states to do this, long term, will be tested in the courts in terms of various Federal statutes ensuring various kinds of interstate freedom. However, we know that enforcement and the threat of enforcement has a chilling effect; even if some actions are subsequently deemed to be unconstitutional, short term it's not hard to imagine state troopers telling people to turn around or come in for questioning at state borders.

I think we can still avoid that level of polarization, but the clock is ticking. Also, gun sales are at a historic high; more background checks for a firearms purchase were peformed in March 2020 than in any month in US history afaict:



That's a little over 1 gun bought per hundred people here, in one month (assuming only one firearm per NICS check, which is dubious as many of these no doubt reflect the purchase of several or many guns at once).

 

I’m definitely from the UK according to my passport

There’s been a rumour/guess floating around in my city (for a long time) that the virus got here in December. This is based upon many people coming down with an illness that included the symptoms of COVID-19. What makes it more interesting is that none of these people (that I know of) have caught anything since. Of course, they could easily have caught it and been asymptotic, but that’s nowhere near as interesting of a story!

For example, my brother had this mystery illness along with his wife and kids from Christmas Day onwards. My hairdresser (who came to my house) also had it in early January along with her mother, and so did many of my students. This is the interesting part, I was in close contact with my brother during the week when I would have been infectious and I also had my hair cut a day before I started coughing. Neither my brother or my hairdresser showed any symptoms, whatsoever, but my mother was hospitalised. My brother is also a key worker so he has been exposed to a lot of people without any PPE. None of his immediate family have been ill since their December episode. Even stranger, my hairdresser then informed me (after I told her I likely had it) that she had been told by another client that she was at risk because they had been confirmed, and this was not long after they were in contact. None of her immediate family came down with anything, including herself.

The other people I know of who had this illness in December and January (it was everywhere) haven’t caught anything since, either. I kept tabs with them all. It’s certainly interesting as an anecdote. Because of stories like these, there’s been a rumour circulating that the illness people had in December and January could have actually been COVID-19.

EDIT: I forgot to add that one of my cousins’ family had this illness over Christmas as well. She see’s my mom a few times a week and she didn’t catch anything either, and neither did anyone in her household (in terms of showing any symptoms). It’s certainly interesting, but completely anecdotal.

 

Of course:
On
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/...0x-lower-than-estimates-that-led-to-lockdowns
there is a link to US Senate's Committee on Homeland Security's site
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/covid-19-how-new-information-should-drive-policy
Ioannidis' testimony starts at 1hour 27 minute mark. You can see the links to Ioannidis' and Atlas' testimonies at the bottom of that page, below the video of them talking.

Now you need to ask yourself why the "centrist" news sources that you have been trusting haven't been reporting this, whereas those biased far right sites had reported it.

 

@linearb -- You're more optimistic than I am. I think those right wing nut jobs who've been agitating for decades to play out their fantasies could use this "opportunity" to do just that. When you have a President whose essentially giving them the green light, that doesn't help.

I think a major risk is if the Democrats win the presidential election. Will Trump continue with his flamethrower ways, and call on his supporters to "contest" the election results--which is what I expcect. How will those nationalists, racists, and nutjobs feel about not having their man in office any longer--and what will they do? I'm not optimistic, especially if the economic hardships continue unabated.

 

Is it because, unlike the flu, the majority of COVID-19 patients don't even know that they are sick with it?

 

I meant, it appears there is no option but to unlock and fast. No other option for managing the crisis has been put forward, I.e. something like South Korea does.

 

French stockpiled wine and cheese as the crisis unfolded. We bought more guns in the US.
The future doesn’t look good, I hope we are wrong. The images from the state house in Michigan are mind boggling.

 

Most of these guys like to talk tough and own closets full of weaponry, but have zero interest in actually getting killed by the cops



We're seeing escalations, though. In Michigan last week, white militia types tried to force their way into the statehouse; this week, citing "inadequate security", one member of staff has been seen using heavily armed civilians as her own guard



US history makes it pretty clear that lawmakers get real worried about gun control suddenly when it's minority folks milling around with firearms, so, we'll see where this all goes? It's quite different when it's a lawmaker bringing the armored armed people into the statehouse, afterall.

(Black Panthers protesting gun control, 1967, a move that triggered the NRA to support the legislation).

 

@FGG -- I first heard this from a PBS documentary during the 2016 election. I just did a quick search, and this is the first article I clicked on [from the Huffington Post]: -- In Arkansas, Hillary Clinton’s Legacy Remains Potent -- Below is a snippet, with the ranking I first heard about in the PBS documentary mentioned toward the end (I bolded it). I can't say this article will definitively confirm what I wrote, but it does seem to at least somewhat support it.

I remained puzzled why Hillary Clinton is derided and despised by so many. It seems clear to me from what I've heard that she's been an almost tireless advocate for children and the less fortunate in our society since her college days. I think her single-minded focus and determination to make a positive difference was not only a strong catalyst in her life, but motivated a lot of Bill's accomplishments. Quite honestly, I don't think Bill would have ever become President without Hillary by his side.

Some people will likely shout out something like, "Well, what about those emails?" To which I would say, "What about them". I spent a number of years working in Records Management, and given my experience and insights, I have yet to see where she did anything that could be considered immoral or unethical, much less illegal. I saw a woman in a group interview once who said she had a very negative opinion of Hillary, which was in line with what most of her friends felt. But she started to get a little skeptical about certain things that didn't add up, and did her own research. Only to discover--as she put--she [Hillary] really didn't do anything wrong.

It goes to show the power of a charismatic personality (though I don't see it) to define somebody else in a negative manner, and have a large group of people (tens of millions) believe it without question. I heard that of people who disliked both Clinton and Trump in the 2016 election, 70% ended up voting for Trump. Why people would vote for a hardcore narcissist, failed businessman, and violent sexual predator over somebody who devoted their life to service still puzzles me to this day. -- Is Hillary a perfect person? No, I see her faults as well as anybody else. But I don't think her faults would have ever led us to the national crisis we face today.
..............................................................

...Clinton developed her curiosity — and ultimately her expertise — in the issues that would define her tenure as first lady of Arkansas before she moved to the state with the future president.

Following her graduation from Yale Law School in 1973, Hillary Rodham spent a year conducting postgraduate work at the Yale Child Study Center, during which time she published a widely cited article in the Harvard Educational Review examining how children were viewed under the law, and offering significant proposals for reform.

She also landed a job working for the Children’s Defense Fund, where she worked to expose discrepancies between census data and school enrollment — a time she recalled at the first public event of her 2016 campaign in Monticello, Iowa, this April.

“I was knocking on doors saying, ‘Is there anybody school-aged who’s not in school?’ and finding blind kids and deaf kids and kids in wheelchairs who were just left out,” she recalled. “And I was able in Arkansas to work and try to improve education there and give more kids chances who really deserved them.”

Hillary Rodham’s path to improving education in Arkansas began in 1974 when she moved to Fayetteville and became just the second female faculty member at the University of Arkansas Law School. Bill Clinton lost his bid for a U.S. House seat the same year.

After she married the following year, retaining her maiden name, Bill was elected attorney general of Arkansas, and the couple moved to Little Rock. Meanwhile, Hillary’s own career took off upon joining the high-powered Rose Law Firm, where she took on pro bono children’s rights cases.

In 1977, Hillary co-founded and drew up the articles of incorporation for the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families — a group that for nearly four decades since has fought for expanded opportunities in early education, juvenile justice reform, increases in state funding for child health care and other major initiatives.

“She was a very forceful advocate to say the least,” recalled Jim Miles, who worked with her to create the group and develop its mission. “I think Arkansas Advocates is one of the nation’s premier child advocacy organization. They have tremendous peer respect.”

After Bill Clinton was sworn in as governor for the first time in 1979, he appointed his wife to be the chairwoman of Arkansas’ Rural Health Advisory Committee — a group that worked to expand health care access within the state’s large rural population.

Around the same time, Hillary became a board member of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where she helped establish the state’s first neonatal nursery while she was pregnant with Chelsea. The facility has since expanded several times over.

Meanwhile, after reading about it during a trip to Florida, Hillary brought to Arkansas a program called Home Instruction for Parents for Preschool Youngsters, or HIPPY, which trains parents of at-risk children in early education methods.

It wasn’t until after Clinton lost re-election in 1980 and then won his 1982 comeback bid that the newly minted political wife (who now made it known that she would henceforth be known as “Hillary Rodham Clinton”) made what is widely regarded as her most significant and lasting contribution to public policy in Arkansas.

Shortly after he reassumed office in 1982, Bill Clinton named his wife as chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, an entity with the daunting task of reforming the state’s public education system, which was ranked at or near the very bottom of all 50 states in just about every measure.

To get a sense of how dire the situation had become, consider that a majority of Arkansas’ 365 school districts at the time offered no art or chemistry classes, and almost half had no foreign language program to speak of. And teacher training in some districts was fourth-rate.

Don Ernst — who was a social studies teacher at Southside High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas, before joining Clinton’s education policy staff — recalls walking into his school’s biology lab and seeing two dozen unopened microscopes in storage. When he asked the biology teacher why the instruments weren’t available to her class, she responded that she was afraid her students might break them.

Still, as Ernst recalls, school reform in Arkansas was not an easy sell.

“It was doing the right thing,” he said. “But we also had to figure out how to deal with the politics of an anti-tax state and a state that has never been particularly fond of intellectuals and education.”

Hillary spent months traveling the state to sell her proposals for reform — which included boosting course offerings, reducing class sizes and implementing testing requirements for both students and teachers — while soliciting ideas from parents and teachers.

In the end, the administration tied the package to an unpopular initiative to boost the state sales tax by 1 percentage point.

Though she faced heated pushback from the teachers’ union and a related group, Hillary largely won over lawmakers in the end.

Political operatives in the state still laugh about the thunderstruck reaction that Rep. Lloyd George, a colorful state representative with a syrupy drawl, had to her presentation: “I think we’ve elected the wrong Clinton!”

Though Bill Clinton received most of the credit nationally for the reform package that he signed into law, Skip Rutherford, who has served for the last decade as the dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, said it was Hillary who “took Arkansas to a completely different level educationally.”

“She was really saying, ‘Look, when our students graduate now, they’re going to be competing in a world economy,’” he said. “She was very visionary. She did it not for immediate gratification but for long-term success.”

In recent years, Arkansas’ public school system has been ranked by education groups as high as fifth in the nation and as low as 45th, as relatively low achievement levels have struggled to keep up with the high standards that Clinton implemented.

But in spite of the continued challenges, education in Arkansas is no longer the national laughingstock that it was when a common lament among self-conscious policymakers around the capitol was, “Thank God for Mississippi.”...​