COVID-19 Thread

[jjfanec]

This all seems like a bit of an overreaction. What kind of person do you think was rushing to the pub on Wednesday night in Sheboygan? Probably someone who didn't have a lot of respect for the order in the first place. Honestly, think Evers should have just relented on the non-major cities himself to save a bit of face on a ruling he was bound to lose anyway.

 

This is like the 8th time I've mentioned Home Depot. But anyone who's been to one recently wouldn't be too concerned with a few townie pubs opening doors.

 

 

I have spent a lot of time in Home Depot and a lot of time in a bar and comparing the two is apples to oranges for me. The amount of contact with other people, the duration in the building, the ability to control behavior, etc are very different in my mind. We can agree to disagree.

 

The issue isnt opening up. It is opening without a plan. Florida, Georgia, etc had fairly strict guidelines in place. The Supreme Court ruling and the lack of an agreed upon plan after the ruling was the mistake. The republicans thought there would be a stay so they could negotiate. They were wrong. Read their comments leading up to the decision. They were saying this would force the two sides to come together on a plan.

 

Evers doesnt have to save face because the majority of Wisconsinites - almost 70 percent - approved of Safer at Home. He still had a 64% approval for how he is handling the virus and a 59% overall. I dont have a strong opinion on Evers but polling wise he is doing better than a few other leaders

[Machu Peach]

I haven't worked directly with any vaccine development, so I maybe unaware of side effects that have scuttled more recent vaccines, but generally the issue is efficacy and strength of the immune response not safety. Vaccines are very well understood in terms of additives and extraordinarily safe. The typical 'bad reaction' is swelling pain and a mild fever. There are some exceedingly rare more severe reactions that can happen, but they are on par with the exceedingly small goofy chance of having a serious complication from any kind of disease (even a cold!). So I would be pretty confident that even a rushed vaccine will be safe as they would catch any noteworthy complications in the early safety trials in all likelihood. I would be slightly less confident if it was a vaccine based on some of the newer technologies, just since they are newer. I doubt it would change my willingness to get vaccinated. The more likely issues would be how long does the immunity last and how effective is it at generating an immune response. Many vaccines only generate a good response 80-90% of the time, which is why you get multiple shots.

 

I've worked extensively in vaccine development so I can probably give a little insight. There are a lot of reasons that candidate vaccines fail in pre-clinical and clinical trials. Sometimes it's safety (though this is almost always in the pre-clinical phases), sometimes it's the inability to generate a large, long-lasting response, sometimes it's that the response that generated isn't protective, but most of the time it just isn't worth vaccinating the general population even if the vaccine is effective. One thing to keep in mind is that there are already vaccines for the easy-to-vaccinate diseases, so the vast majority of current work is on hard-to-vaccinate diseases. It's not known where COVID19 falls on the spectrum, but it doesn't have any of the known characteristics that make diseases like flu and HIV hard to vaccinate.

 

I do want to point out that the reason some vaccines require multiple shots is not because they are only 80-90% effective. The vaccines that require multiple shots do so because the immune system requires multiple exposures to generate a good, long-lasting response. It is very important to get the entire series of shots or you likely will have a suboptimal or short-lasting immunity.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

This all seems like a bit of an overreaction. What kind of person do you think was rushing to the pub on Wednesday night in Sheboygan? Probably someone who didn't have a lot of respect for the order in the first place. Honestly, think Evers should have just relented on the non-major cities himself to save a bit of face on a ruling he was bound to lose anyway.

 

This is like the 8th time I've mentioned Home Depot. But anyone who's been to one recently wouldn't be too concerned with a few townie pubs opening doors.

 

 

I have spent a lot of time in Home Depot and a lot of time in a bar and comparing the two is apples to oranges for me. The amount of contact with other people, the duration in the building, the ability to control behavior, etc are very different in my mind. We can agree to disagree.

 

The issue isnt opening up. It is opening without a plan. Florida, Georgia, etc had fairly strict guidelines in place. The Supreme Court ruling and the lack of an agreed upon plan after the ruling was the mistake. The republicans thought there would be a stay so they could negotiate. They were wrong. Read their comments leading up to the decision. They were saying this would force the two sides to come together on a plan.

 

Evers doesnt have to save face because the majority of Wisconsinites - almost 70 percent - approved of Safer at Home. He still had a 64% approval for how he is handling the virus and a 59% overall. I dont have a strong opinion on Evers but polling wise he is doing better than a few other leaders

 

We'll disagree then because my Home Depot has been Walt Disney World during Christmas. Minimal masks, staff talking to people 6 inches from their face. The idea that the virus isn't a "threat" there is laughable. It also has 1000x the daily traffic of a local pub, which is really the major difference that would indeed make it "apples to oranges" - a big box with 3,000 hand prints a day is worse.

 

FVF has discussed the flaws with polling, but the public support for Safer at Home has been declining quite rapidly. It would probably poll 50/50 by June 1.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

To clarify, my issue is with the selective reasoning. The logic used to discern what is "dangerous" is completely inconsistent. My local pubs have 10 customers a night. There is no rationale for that being more dangerous than Walmart. It has nothing to do with my politics, which again skew left, but there is just no way anyone can believe that.

 

We are not talking about something like a Brother's in downtown Milwaukee. The broad-brush approach to this in a country of 325 million spread across an entire continent was dumb from the get-go. Wisconsin alone is half the size of Germany.

[jerichoholicninja]

If you have COVID and need to be hospitalized, you'll be in a negative pressure room and attended to by people wearing hazmat suits. If you have COVID but only feel like you have a cold you'll be told to take yourself back home and stay there for two weeks with whoever you live with. This has boggled my mind since the start.

[homer]

A bar is not really as important as a place where you can buy groceries, clothes, etc. I can see the difference from a policy standpoint. And in regards to Home Depot if you are going to allow construction you have to allow the big hardware places to stay open. A ton of contractors go to HD every day.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

A bar is not really as important as a place where you can buy groceries, clothes, etc. I can see the difference from a policy standpoint.

 

Absolutely, but they have been playing pretty fast and loose with that. Home Depot, the whole place has to be at full operations? Frozen custard? The consistency has been a problem. How much non-essential crap did Walmart get out of this? How many pairs of underwear that would have been purchased at Kohl's, etc.

[homer]

Edited my post to include Home Depot. Contractors rely heavily on it.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

What about Menards, where no contractor should be shopping?

[DuWayne Steurer]

What about Menards, where no contractor should be shopping?

 

SiCk BuRn~!!!

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Truthfully I shop Menard's all the time because the lumberyard seems to blow Home Depot away. It's the tools that I just walk past most days.

[owbc]

If you have COVID and need to be hospitalized, you'll be in a negative pressure room and attended to by people wearing hazmat suits. If you have COVID but only feel like you have a cold you'll be told to take yourself back home and stay there for two weeks with whoever you live with. This has boggled my mind since the start.

 

What happens if the hospital care providers catch COVID and all of them get hospitalized/sent home for 2 weeks?

[jerichoholicninja]

If you have COVID and need to be hospitalized, you'll be in a negative pressure room and attended to by people wearing hazmat suits. If you have COVID but only feel like you have a cold you'll be told to take yourself back home and stay there for two weeks with whoever you live with. This has boggled my mind since the start.

 

What happens if the hospital care providers catch COVID and all of them get hospitalized/sent home for 2 weeks?

 

I get that. But let's just send everyone home so they're free to infect their family and they in turn infect people and so on and so on? Anyone that tested positive should have been quarantined from the beginning. Not the people that don't have it.

[Samurai Bucky]

If you have COVID and need to be hospitalized, you'll be in a negative pressure room and attended to by people wearing hazmat suits. If you have COVID but only feel like you have a cold you'll be told to take yourself back home and stay there for two weeks with whoever you live with. This has boggled my mind since the start.

 

What happens if the hospital care providers catch COVID and all of them get hospitalized/sent home for 2 weeks?

You are missing something -- what happens to those who have been exposed to a COVID patient? The person may be a carrier. Do we send them home, too?

[FVBrewerFan]

If you have COVID and need to be hospitalized, you'll be in a negative pressure room and attended to by people wearing hazmat suits. If you have COVID but only feel like you have a cold you'll be told to take yourself back home and stay there for two weeks with whoever you live with. This has boggled my mind since the start.

 

What happens if the hospital care providers catch COVID and all of them get hospitalized/sent home for 2 weeks?

You are missing something -- what happens to those who have been exposed to a COVID patient? The person may be a carrier. Do we send them home, too?

 

No, we send them to the bar.

[LouisEly]

If you have COVID and need to be hospitalized, you'll be in a negative pressure room and attended to by people wearing hazmat suits. If you have COVID but only feel like you have a cold you'll be told to take yourself back home and stay there for two weeks with whoever you live with. This has boggled my mind since the start.

 

What happens if the hospital care providers catch COVID and all of them get hospitalized/sent home for 2 weeks?

 

I get that. But let's just send everyone home so they're free to infect their family and they in turn infect people and so on and so on? Anyone that tested positive should have been quarantined from the beginning. Not the people that don't have it.

Where else are they supposed to go, and who will pay for that?

 

Most of the people who I heard tested positive and were sent home locked themselves in a bedroom or other spare room for two weeks and stayed away from their family. Others... don't live with anyone else.

 

And have we established that everyone who has tested positive has the same strain, and that people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic don't have a mutated weaker strain that isn't lethal?

[jjfanec]

This all seems like a bit of an overreaction. What kind of person do you think was rushing to the pub on Wednesday night in Sheboygan? Probably someone who didn't have a lot of respect for the order in the first place. Honestly, think Evers should have just relented on the non-major cities himself to save a bit of face on a ruling he was bound to lose anyway.

 

This is like the 8th time I've mentioned Home Depot. But anyone who's been to one recently wouldn't be too concerned with a few townie pubs opening doors.

 

 

I have spent a lot of time in Home Depot and a lot of time in a bar and comparing the two is apples to oranges for me. The amount of contact with other people, the duration in the building, the ability to control behavior, etc are very different in my mind. We can agree to disagree.

 

The issue isnt opening up. It is opening without a plan. Florida, Georgia, etc had fairly strict guidelines in place. The Supreme Court ruling and the lack of an agreed upon plan after the ruling was the mistake. The republicans thought there would be a stay so they could negotiate. They were wrong. Read their comments leading up to the decision. They were saying this would force the two sides to come together on a plan.

 

Evers doesnt have to save face because the majority of Wisconsinites - almost 70 percent - approved of Safer at Home. He still had a 64% approval for how he is handling the virus and a 59% overall. I dont have a strong opinion on Evers but polling wise he is doing better than a few other leaders

 

We'll disagree then because my Home Depot has been Walt Disney World during Christmas. Minimal masks, staff talking to people 6 inches from their face. The idea that the virus isn't a "threat" there is laughable. It also has 1000x the daily traffic of a local pub, which is really the major difference that would indeed make it "apples to oranges" - a big box with 3,000 hand prints a day is worse.

 

FVF has discussed the flaws with polling, but the public support for Safer at Home has been declining quite rapidly. It would probably poll 50/50 by June 1.

 

Makes sense if you have had a different experience than me. Home Depot has been really easy to navigate for me and people arent getting intoxicated there so they are a little easier to control

 

I havent read the polls discussion. I will say when people dont like what polls say they say they are flawed. When they do like their results they trust them. But I completely agree that support will keep going down but there was also a very good possibility that Safer at Home restrictions were going to be loosened in the near future. Wisconsin has followed a similar path to Minnesota. It is hard to argue what they have decided to do - expand gathering to 10 and make a plan to reopen businesses June 1 with restrictions - isnt a whole lot better than what we are in right now which is chaotic and unclear because local governments are scrambling

[jerichoholicninja]

 

I get that. But let's just send everyone home so they're free to infect their family and they in turn infect people and so on and so on? Anyone that tested positive should have been quarantined from the beginning. Not the people that don't have it.

Where else are they supposed to go, and who will pay for that?

 

Most of the people who I heard tested positive and were sent home locked themselves in a bedroom or other spare room for two weeks and stayed away from their family. Others... don't live with anyone else.

 

And have we established that everyone who has tested positive has the same strain, and that people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic don't have a mutated weaker strain that isn't lethal?

 

We just gave away, what was it, 2 trillion dollars and we're looking at tens of millions of people on unemployment for months if not years. Take those dollars and book or buy some hotels to quarantine the infected but not sick and I'm sure we would have come out ahead in the long run.

[FVBrewerFan]

We just gave away, what was it, 2 trillion dollars and we're looking at tens of millions of people on unemployment for months if not years. Take those dollars and book or buy some hotels to quarantine the infected but not sick and I'm sure we would have come out ahead in the long run.

 

Problem with that is most people who were/are infected don't even know it. Especially during the first couple months it was here. It's pretty simple, NY should have had a more strict lockdown, and sooner. Ditto for senior living facilities. Do both of those things and this situation would look much better.

 

Silver lining in all this, I'm getting a haircut tomorrow.

[igor67]

Fast moving thread so catching up.

 

1) Thank you Machu Peach for the insight. My intent was to use the word 'effectiveness' in a general sense as a stand-in for the number of people who mount a full robust long term immune response. I believe my original understanding of this comes from the Respectful Insolence blog, but it's been about 10 years since I put together my lessons on anti-vax so I can't source it 100%.

2) Chorizo, claiming that lawmakers at any level should not work on legislation and bills when not in power is a complete violation of their oaths and jobs. You draft bills and plans and try and build support for them. Especially for something like this you force the veto and the discussion that goes with it to actually provide real alternatives for the public to discuss. It is hard work to develop good policy, but that is ultimately the point of government at every level. Every other philosophy people come up with after that is discardable in the face of "but does it work?" And yes I understand this has never been completely true in terms of how people reason, but willful abandonment of getting policy that actually works should just not be acceptable at all.

3) Which leads into this point I will assume you are just unaware the casually stating scientists/physicians intentionally cooked their numbers to get a predetermined political result is at best blatantly offensive. As has been stated elsewhere mistakes happen all the time it's why open and vigorous critique is so critical to actual progress. Even getting subtly influenced by funding sources can bias results in sneaky ways. But straight-up data manipulation to a predetermined outcome is unforgivable (my view), the nature and circumstances cause actual penalties to vary widely but loss of grants (which often then means your job is toast) is pretty common. Many times it flat out (as it should) ends the persons career permanently. At a minimum loss of credibility is a huge impact as word gets around. I don't know for a physician what the impact on their license might be. Though the infamous Dr. Andrew Wakefield lost his license in England for ethical violations of research standards.

I recognize there is not a simple logical train of thought from #2 to #3, but it comes down to this loss of awareness and faith that public servants or all types are trying to act in the public good and with a variety of ethical requirements is corrosive to society.

 

4) Home Depot, bars etc. My starting point for this one is to recognize that a population of 330 million means you need 330 million different solutions. That is the rational way of understanding why government can't solve all problems. It is also true particularly for a problem like a pandemic that the actions of others impacts your risk. This is a big part of why good policy is hard, the more specific and tailored the longer it takes to develop. It also becomes harder to communicate out (well as you can clearly see on page 597 of the bill shopping in sauk county for business on the even side of the street will be MW and every other Friday save for the essential business identified....) From a government standpoint compliance is something they are aware for healthcare professionals understanding compliance rates is crucial to effective treatment. So a overly general solution has draw backs as well.

All of this seems to be impacting perception. I ended up at a Menards on a day the parking lot was completely full, yet between the masks and flow inside the store maintaining distance was not a struggle. I tried to support a local bar (they have really good food) that was doing takeout some weeks ago and was way more dangerous. The orders were way behind so people ended waiting inside to the point the place was half full, I was the only person with a mask. I don't have any idea how to handle that level of variability in a policy. It does seem to be the case though that restaurants are more dangerous both because for eat in you have to remove the mask and the stationary confined space allows more droplets to accumulate and spread compared to walking through a store where you movement cuts down on any one place becoming highly infectious (it is still possible.)

[FVBrewerFan]

2) FVR, claiming that lawmakers at any level should not work on legislation and bills when not in power

 

I don't know where you got that from, I never said that. Or most of the next long paragraph, if you were referring to me at all there.

[LouisEly]

We just gave away, what was it, 2 trillion dollars and we're looking at tens of millions of people on unemployment for months if not years. Take those dollars and book or buy some hotels to quarantine the infected but not sick and I'm sure we would have come out ahead in the long run.

You think any hotel is going to want to be known as the place where COVID-19 infected people were housed at? That's a good way to permanently kill their business. As for buying hotels... how many do you think they are going to have to buy? It ain't just one - it's all over the country. How much is that going to cost? Buying hotels to house people with mild symptoms instead of giving that money to unemployed people or businesses struggling to stay afloat... that will go over real well.

 

Just go home and lock yourself in a room. If you're infected, the virus is already in your house - going home isn't going to make a difference.

[igor67]

Gah, terribly sorry FVbrewerfan. It was Chorizo. Like I said fast moving thread..

[RobertR]

I'm hopeful, but probably going to be disappointed, that people will have gotten it out of their systems and realize that just running willy nilly into a packed bar isn't smart. Especially when we've a long ways to go.

 

Needless to say, I'll let other people be the canary in the coal mine for a few weeks. I expect that I'm not going to like the results, but maybe there will be some sense.

[FVBrewerFan]

Gah, terribly sorry FVbrewerfan. It was Chorizo. Like I said fast moving thread..

 

No problem, I understand!