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

Ok, you also need institutions like protection of private property (as opposed to communal ownership), people not worrying that their savings will be wiped out by inflation, protection of intellectual property (the patent system), etc for growth and civilization.

Well, they Are benefiting from the work done by the people in those societies (i.e, the hospitals, computers, cell phones, etc. make their lives easier). I see that life expectancy in Laos was below 50 years as late as 1980 (and just over 40 years in 1955), and of course even that would have been lower without the benefit of the innovations in those other societies.

Many of us think that physical labour is harder than an office job.

In any case, don't get me wrong - I will never understand all of those billionaires who keep working long after they can afford to pay for a comfortable lifestyle. But a certain minimum standard of living has to be met...

Whenever I see one of those great medieval cathedrals (as well as Neolithic sites such as Stonehenge), I feel horrible about all of the effort that had been wasted there. However, a modern hospital, the electrical grid, etc. - those seem to be, in fact, great.

No dark humor?

I think you have conveyed it, and if I were to see a fictional hunchback who were to remind me of me or someone I knew, I can see myself enjoying that a lot too.

Cool! I remember Carl Pilkington (a UK TV personality) saying how free the country of Mexico felt to him when he visited it.

When it came out, I read the synopsis. I ended up not watching it, because it is my understanding that Elysium falls, becoming a hellhole like Earth.

You can't make everyone rich, but you can easily make everyone poor. The original poor get even poorer, but it is the cost some people are willing to pay to ensure that other human beings are no longer happier than them.

Many of them really do have a chance of getting better and relatively soon (2-3 years)...

 

Great to hear from you Daniel, and that things sound... largely good/well for you, in these crazy times? That's also great to hear.

Being so remote, and so relatively safer from the virus and also able to go outside and walk/motorcycle for miles and not see other people is a tremendous blessing. If tinnitus hadn't steered me hard towards moving out of the city, we might well in the same situation as friends trying to endure all this from condos in concrete towers sitting next to highways. Ugh. Also, we're in an area where this just isn't being very politicized: mask compliance is basically 100% where required, and even when I do typically "hillbilly" stuff I've noticed a big change. I happened to ride my motorcycle past a gravel pit where people shoot, and stopped for a few minutes. There was a group of 4 young to middle aged men shooting. They made friendly conversation, complimented my bike, etc -- but no one attempted to approach it, no one came closer than about 12' to me, and no one said "hey, do you want to shoot this random gun I have that I am very proud of?" -- all of those things would have been "normal" parts of this interaction a year ago. So, up here, even the boys at the unofficial range with illegally silenced rifles, are keeping their distance and being respectful. Not having to deal with any social toxicity over this, and feeling like we and our actions are broadly aligned with our community, is much nicer than not.

@Bill Bauer your fly / blows up house image has been stuck in my head. I don't entirely disagree, I'm just flailing to understand what a more reasonable model would have been. In my book, definitely not Sweden.

Known left-wing shill pot "The Wall Street Journal" published this; it's an Op-Ed but has some hard numbers and citations. Also note that the person who wrote this was Trump's FDA commissioner from 2017-2019.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sweden-shouldnt-be-americas-pandemic-model-11598822005

I'm glad that I'm not the person who had to make the go/no go decision on blowing up the economy. On the other hand, there's a number of non-authoritarian states which had wider mask and distancing adoption without politicization early on, which at least at the moment appear to be handling things much better than the US in terms of balancing economics vs health concerns. At the moment is sketchy, though, because the world is a reservoir of this virus now but other than that, nothing about the virus has changed since last December.

Also, I think local compliance and confidence matters a lot. All of the restaurants we used to go to are still in business and operating as curbside now. Some places have not managed to find a way to stay open at all, but in the two small towns and one mid size town I go to, > 80% of retail and service businesses that were operating a year ago, are still operating. It seems like the more internally divided a region is, and the more it's also been subjected to mass civil unrest during all this, the worse its doing overall?

We've had a lot of peaceful protests here but the cops didn't start shooting at anyone or gassing anyone, so there wasn't any escalation or violence.

 

Check it out

And check this out too

I got the graphs below from the interesting series of tweets above:

 

IFR numbers are all over the map but Brazil's infrastructure is terrible, their reporting is terrible, and so I'm pretty suspicious of a single paper that concludes an IFR that's less than half the lower estimate from other research.

We also don't know if we're going to have a wave of heart attacks among otherwise healthy recovered young people in the coming years. Just looking at pure mortality numbers now seems a little cart-before-the-horse until we know if a significant number of survivors will suffer radically excess mortality or have expensive problems inflicting personal and economic damage. The US insurance infrastructure is already stretched paper thin and extremely expensive; I don't know that it could survive a sudden wave of 40 year olds that need expensive heart treatments for the rest of their lives.

Of course, maybe those side effects only occur in .005% of people (though given the number of college athletes showing cardio stuff, I think that's pretty optimistic).

It's a whole lot of unknowns, so, I'm sticking with "y'all do you, I don't want cardiac problems or to kill my parents, so I am going to keep doing everything in my power to avoid getting sick".

Naval gazing about what would have happened if we'd just ignored this globally, or had a radically different, well prepared response doesn't seem useful. Maybe people should be looking at that in terms of the next event like this; on the other hand, the next one could be a lot more minor, or it could be so Captain Tripps grade severe that no response matters and it just destroys human civilization. The far end of these contingencies you can't really plan for unless you have a hidden underground bunker (no comment).

 

Normal 2020 things.

 

I take this to mean that you have one. Yes?

 

Here is a cardiologist with a history of being biased in favour of the hysteria, providing words of reassurance. He states his conclusion at around 7 minute and 15 second mark.

 

No, constructing one is very loud.

 

Hi @Bill Bauer,
I was curious if you modified your resplendent beard because of COVID-19 or have heard of any antidotes related to beards?

 

My mom has an abnormal ECG since having covid which needs to be investigated with a 24-hour trace. She’s still on the waiting list for this. Her kidney GFR also dropped to 55 post covid but it has slightly recovered to 62. There’s no way of saying with any certainty that these were the result of having the coronavirus, but it’s awfully coincidental. She has regular blood tests because of the medication she is on so her kidneys have been tracked for a long time and so has her heart.





She is now part of an NHS study on the effects of having coronavirus in the longterm which indicates that they believe it's most likely linked.

 

@Ed209

Good to see you back, I was a bit worried about you.

How are your Mom, wife, daughter, yourself doing after COVID-19 besides the abnormalities?

 

Today I had been wearing a mask. (It wasn't because of COVID-19. I was trying to not breathe in those 2.5 particles in the soot in the air. The soot was present in the air around here in large quantities because of those major fires in Oregon.) Unfortunately I wasn't wearing an N99 mask. It was a surgical mask. Usually when one wears a regular surgical mask, some air comes in on the sides of one's face. My hope is that my beard acted as a filter! (Portions of it were located right at the two mask's vulnerable spots.)

 

I’m not too bad other than my health. Just waiting for the results of my knee X-rays amongst other things. I’m also a proud father again; my son was born on June 7th.

My wife is doing ok. Incidentally, we both tested negative on an antibody test whilst my mom tested positive. However, the test was done 3 months after we had the symptoms and so the results are unreliable. The doctors I’m in contact with are still totally convinced that we had it. For example, a colleague of theirs at the hospital swabbed positive for Covid-19 but was negative on the antibody test, and this was not an isolated case.

My mom on the other hand has been hit really hard by it. She still struggles to breathe under exertion and mentally she’s terrified of catching it again. She has had to change her diet by cutting out protein because of what’s happened to her kidneys. She’s really worried about her heart as well. There are also staff members at my wife’s school who are having abnormal heart activity.

About a month ago I was talking to a Dr (who is a friend of a friend) at a party and he was telling me that many of his patients are showing longterm effects after having the virus. He said he’d never seen anything like it. This is precisely why the NHS is studying the longterm ramifications.

Anyway, enough of the doom and gloom, I hope you’re all ok.

 

My wife and I are considering getting tested for the coronavirus, along with our kids.

I don't think we have it, and instead think we all have colds, i.e. due to the change of weather here, daughter going back to school and being in contact with other kids, going outside inadequately dressed and so on.

But who knows, may be better to get tested.

 

Our city has been locked down again.