Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[GiBo]

...So, luckily your healthy relatives got tests to travel and then went and partied. Neat.

Not sure how they got the tests. I think they had to sign up with the State of HI and you go through CVS or something.

My 21 yo niece and I had an exchange where I was told my mom is "smart enough to make those decisions for herself" and "the only one who seems to have a problem with it is you." Entitled, spoiled little shit.

Not sure how CA is doing it, but there are free testing sites all over the place.

[goldenboy]

We had a free testing day a couple of weeks ago, anyone could get tested, with or without symptoms. 850 out of the ~2,000 people that live in Crested Butte got tested. I have been laying low and was negative.

[Conundrum]

This is Boise:

One major hospital.

Due to limited testing capacity and supplies, we are currently unable to accommodate asymptomatic testing under any other circumstances. This includes common requests from asymptomatic patients for pre-employment, return-to-work, or travel purposes. We are working with other community resources to identify alternate pathways for testing.

Other major hospital requiring doc referral.

Your health care professional will evaluate you to determine if you need to be tested for COVID-19.

Looks like the urgent care group just opened up testing for those who want tested. This was not the case last week when I called. Maybe some good news. Only two of their eight locations are accepting asymptomatic folks but it's a start.

We are currently testing:

Patients who have symptoms consistent with COVID-19
Patients with NO symptoms of COVID-19 who desire be tested

Dispatch mobile testing.

Symptomatic Patients: Get results in 20 minutes or less

Asymptomatic Patients: Not currently testing asymptomatic patients

[splat]

All the freelance labs (Quest, etc.) are pimping covid and antibody tests here.
Forget the hospitals. They're jam-packed with dying people.

[old goat]

Hawaii’s strategy for allowing outside travelers to enter the state (negative test 3 days before travel) is problematic. It’ll help reduce some infection into the state, but not eliminate it. Friends of mine that have entered the state (for different reasons) or live there are following similar conservative safety protocols as they would in areas with high infection rates.

Surely if people are going to go anyway, eliminating at least some asymptomatic carriers is better than letting them all in. Imperfect remedies are better than no remedies at all. What got the CDC in trouble with tests in the beginning was thinking that WHO's not-perfect test shouldn't be used while the CDC invented a perfect one (which turned out to be not perfect at all.)

My theory on a lot of the anti-maskers, non-distancers is that they're whistling past the graveyard. They're terrified so they pretend there's no threat. They get mad or laugh at people who act responsibly because those people make them feel scared again.
I learned about that kind of psychology in my climbing days--if I got into a sticky situation I reacted not by being more careful but by being reckless. I'm very lucky to be alive.

[old goat]

All the freelance labs (Quest, etc.) are pimping covid and antibody tests here.
Forget the hospitals. They're jam-packed with dying people.

That was the original purpose of hospitals after all--peaceful places to be made a little more comfortable while you died. The idea of going to a hospital to get well is a very modern and soon to be outdated concept.

[bodywhomper]

Not sure how they got the tests. I think they had to sign up with the State of HI and you go through CVS or something.

My 21 yo niece and I had an exchange where I was told my mom is "smart enough to make those decisions for herself" and "the only one who seems to have a problem with it is you." Entitled, spoiled little shit.

Not sure how CA is doing it, but there are free testing sites all over the place.

Perhaps you may want to share the cdc transmission timeline with your mother (and niece). Many people are still unaware of the incubation/transmission timeline

[XXX-er]

My 21 yo niece and I had an exchange where I was told my mom is "smart enough to make those decisions for herself" and "the only one who seems to have a problem with it is you." Entitled, spoiled little shit.

duno about you but my mother could do amazing things with food but she was never what one would call smart

your niece also seems to have fallen out of the silly tree and hit every branch on the way down

Thot and prayers i guess, stay the course man

[funkendrenchman]

My wife got tested today after skinning with someone who tested positive. She tested negative, but when she was there, someone was getting tested so he could travel to Florida to celebrate an 80th birthday party with family from around the country (great use of resources and an even better idea). The hospital staff told the man, "you may be negative now, but you'll probably get it in Florida with the infection rates there. Good luck."

[neufox47]

My buddy has a compromised immune system and is taking very strict precautions. They created a bubble at the start of this of his Dad and his In-Laws. His in-laws were given the option of being in or out of the bubble, out meant social distanced outdoor interaction only. They opted in and agreed to the rules (no stores, no other interaction with anyone outside the 5 of them, etc.). Yesterday the FIL tested positive for Covid after they spent Xmas together. When pressed on how he got it he admitted to going to the store a number of times and seeing a few friends earlier this month. Buddy is now just waiting for symptoms and to be tested EOW. In-laws also said, well we did t tell you because we thought you were going overboard.

I feel for him, I certainly am less cautious about it then him but I have no major co-morbidities. He’s like fuck, We struggled through 9 months of no child care, his wife may lose her job because of taking care of 2 little kids all to have it blown by his FIL.


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[bodywhomper]

That ^^ sucks. Your friend could be asymptomatic.

[jono]

This is Boise:

One major hospital.

Other major hospital requiring doc referral.

Looks like the urgent care group just opened up testing for those who want tested. This was not the case last week when I called. Maybe some good news. Only two of their eight locations are accepting asymptomatic folks but it's a start.

Dispatch mobile testing.

I'm not sure if this makes it the whole state, but it definitely seems the same up north. Friends/fam here had a kid get sick the night after her cousin visited. A few days later grandparents are sick, cousin and his mom are sick, sister and parents of little patient zero are sick.

Only the symptomatic could get tested and only the kids came back positive.(Thanks to the delay?) I think it was about 5-/3+ among a group that was symptomatic and in contact with each other on the right days.

Health dept actually called one family to tell them they were good to go, no more isolation...then the kid's symptoms returned just in time for ralphing with Ralphy! I'm guessing no one ever calls that nurse back to tell her the guesses could use an adjustment, but who knows?

Seems everybody is feeling better now, so hopefully no more surprises.

[old goat]

My buddy has a compromised immune system and is taking very strict precautions. They created a bubble at the start of this of his Dad and his In-Laws. His in-laws were given the option of being in or out of the bubble, out meant social distanced outdoor interaction only. They opted in and agreed to the rules (no stores, no other interaction with anyone outside the 5 of them, etc.). Yesterday the FIL tested positive for Covid after they spent Xmas together. When pressed on how he got it he admitted to going to the store a number of times and seeing a few friends earlier this month. Buddy is now just waiting for symptoms and to be tested EOW. In-laws also said, well we did t tell you because we thought you were going overboard.

I feel for him, I certainly am less cautious about it then him but I have no major co-morbidities. He’s like fuck, We struggled through 9 months of no child care, his wife may lose her job because of taking care of 2 little kids all to have it blown by his FIL.


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What's worse than stepping out of a bubble you agreed to be part of? Hiding it. At least they didn't lie about it, so your friend knows what kind of people his in laws are?

[riser4]

My buddy has a compromised immune system and is taking very strict precautions. They created a bubble at the start of this of his Dad and his In-Laws. His in-laws were given the option of being in or out of the bubble, out meant social distanced outdoor interaction only. They opted in and agreed to the rules (no stores, no other interaction with anyone outside the 5 of them, etc.). Yesterday the FIL tested positive for Covid after they spent Xmas together. When pressed on how he got it he admitted to going to the store a number of times and seeing a few friends earlier this month. Buddy is now just waiting for symptoms and to be tested EOW. In-laws also said, well we did t tell you because we thought you were going overboard.

I feel for him, I certainly am less cautious about it then him but I have no major co-morbidities. He’s like fuck, We struggled through 9 months of no child care, his wife may lose her job because of taking care of 2 little kids all to have it blown by his FIL.


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I guess they don't watch poker on the tee-vee. All in means all in.

[TBS]

Here's something might make you like them even more. We have a testing shortage. I had an exposure at work and called around to get a test. No test without symptoms and I didn't have any. The best advice I got was I could lie about symptoms to get the test. I sat out for 14 days instead which really wasn't that bad. Missed a couple days of poor conditions skiing and that was it.

On the other hand, our health insurance co. just sent us each a kit with a thermometer, a Covid test and a Tamiflu course.

[bodywhomper]

Regarding the lying friend’s in-laws, when did he get tested, why did he get tested, and what’s the potential for a false positive of the test taken? That information could give comfort for your friend that maybe he wasn’t infected/exposed. Assuming all the family survives this ordeal, the relationship between them will never be the same.

[rideit]

So, I was supposed to take my kiddo to Perú for three weeks around Spring Break.
I don’t know if Perú will let Yanks into the country by then, so I think it will be México.
I wonder if the whole vaccine passport thing will take off.
Oh, the suffering, I know.
Third World Problems?

[bennymac]

[pureantigravity]

An entirely new multi-generation of germaphobes has been created. No double dipping ever again.

[huckbucket]

So, I was supposed to take my kiddo to Perú for three weeks around Spring Break.
I don’t know if Perú will let Yanks into the country by then, so I think it will be México.
I wonder if the whole vaccine passport thing will take off.
Oh, the suffering, I know.
Third World Problems?

International travel. What a great idea!!

[ill-advised strategy]

NYT reporting about rare, scary psychotic covid symptoms.

Almost immediately, Dr. Hisam Goueli could tell that the patient who came to his psychiatric hospital on Long Island this summer was unusual.

The patient, a 42-year-old physical therapist and mother of four young children, had never had psychiatric symptoms or any family history of mental illness. Yet there she was, sitting at a table in a beige-walled room at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., sobbing and saying that she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them.

“It was like she was experiencing a movie, like ‘Kill Bill,’” Dr. Goueli, a psychiatrist, said.

The patient described one of her children being run over by a truck and another decapitated. “It’s a horrifying thing that here’s this well-accomplished woman and she’s like ‘I love my kids, and I don’t know why I feel this way that I want to decapitate them,’” he said.

The only notable thing about her medical history was that the woman, who declined to be interviewed but allowed Dr. Goueli to describe her case, had become infected with the coronavirus in the spring. She had experienced only mild physical symptoms from the virus, but, months later, she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children.

At South Oaks, which has an inpatient psychiatric treatment program for Covid-19 patients, Dr. Goueli was unsure whether the coronavirus was connected to the woman’s psychological symptoms. “Maybe this is Covid-related, maybe it’s not,” he recalled thinking.

“But then,” he said, “we saw a second case, a third case and a fourth case, and we’re like, ‘There’s something happening.’”

Indeed, doctors are reporting similar cases across the country and around the world. A small number of Covid patients who had never experienced mental health problems are developing severe psychotic symptoms weeks after contracting the coronavirus.

In interviews and scientific articles, doctors described:

A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window.

A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City who became so delusional that he imagined his cousin was going to murder him, and, to protect himself, he tried to strangle his cousin in bed.

A 55-year-old woman in Britain had hallucinations of monkeys and a lion and became convinced a family member had been replaced by an impostor.

Beyond individual reports, a British study of neurological or psychiatric complications in 153 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 found that 10 people had “new-onset psychosis.” Another study identified 10 such patients in one hospital in Spain. And in Covid-related social media groups, medical professionals discuss seeing patients with similar symptoms in the Midwest, Great Plains and elsewhere.

“My guess is any place that is seeing Covid is probably seeing this,” said Dr. Colin Smith at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, who helped treat the North Carolina woman. He and other doctors said their patients were too fragile to be asked whether they wanted to be interviewed for this article, but some, including the North Carolina woman, agreed to have their cases described in scientific papers.

Medical experts say they expect that such extreme psychiatric dysfunction will affect only a small proportion of patients. But the cases are considered examples of another way the Covid-19 disease process can affect mental health and brain function.

Although the coronavirus was initially thought primarily to cause respiratory distress, there is now ample evidence of many other symptoms, including neurological, cognitive and psychological effects, that could emerge even in patients who didn’t develop serious lung, heart or circulatory problems. Such symptoms can be just as debilitating to a person’s ability to function and work, and it’s often unclear how long they will last or how to treat them.

Experts increasingly believe brain-related effects may be linked to the body’s immune system response to the coronavirus and possibly to vascular problems or surges of inflammation caused by the disease process.

[ill-advised strategy]

Cont...

Some of the neurotoxins that are reactions to immune activation can go to the brain, through the blood-brain barrier, and can induce this damage,” said Dr. Vilma Gabbay, a co-director of the Psychiatry Research Institute at Montefiore Einstein in the Bronx.

Brain scans, spinal fluid analyses and other tests didn’t find any brain infection, said Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital has treated two patients with post-Covid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices and believed he was the devil and a 34-year-old woman who began carrying a knife, disrobing in front of strangers and putting hand sanitizer in her food.

Physically, most of these patients didn’t get very sick from Covid-19, reports indicate. The patients that Dr. Goueli treated experienced no respiratory problems, but they did have subtle neurological symptoms like hand tingling, vertigo, headaches or diminished smell. Then, two weeks to several months later, he said, they “develop this profound psychosis, which is really dangerous and scary to all of the people around them.”

Also striking is that most patients have been in their 30s, 40s and 50s. “It’s very rare for you to develop this type of psychosis in this age range,” Dr. Goueli said, since such symptoms more typically accompany schizophrenia in young people or dementia in older patients. And some patients — like the physical therapist who took herself to the hospital — understood something was wrong, while usually “people with psychosis don’t have an insight that they’ve lost touch with reality.”

Some post-Covid patients who developed psychosis needed weeks of hospitalization in which doctors tried different medications before finding one that helped.

Dr. Robert Yolken, a neurovirology expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said that although people might recover physically from Covid-19, in some cases their immune systems, might be unable to shut down or might remain engaged because of “delayed clearance of a small amount of virus.”

Persistent immune activation is also a leading explanation for brain fog and memory problems bedeviling many Covid survivors, and Emily Severance, a schizophrenia expert at Johns Hopkins, said post-Covid cognitive and psychiatric effects might result from “something similar happening in the brain.”

It may hinge on which brain region the immune response affects, Dr. Yolken said, adding, “some people have neurological symptoms, some people psychiatric and many people have a combination.”

Experts don’t know whether genetic makeup or perhaps an undetected predisposition for psychiatric illness put some people at greater risk. Dr. Brian Kincaid, medical director of psychiatric emergency department services at Duke, said the North Carolina woman once had a skin reaction to another virus, which might suggest her immune system responds zealously to viral infections.

Sporadic cases of post-infectious psychosis and mania have occurred with other viruses, including the 1918 flu and the coronaviruses SARS and MERS.

“We think that it’s not unique to Covid,” said Dr. Jonathan Alpert, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who co-wrote the report on the Montefiore patients. He said studying these cases might help to increase doctors’ understanding of psychosis.

The symptoms have ranged widely, some surprisingly severe for a first psychotic episode, experts said. Dr. Goueli said a 46-year-old pharmacy technician, whose family brought her in after she became fearful that evil spirits had invaded her home, “cried literally for four days” in the hospital.

He said the 30-year-old construction worker, brought to the hospital by the police, became “extremely violent,” dismantling a hospital radiator and using its parts and his shoes to try to break out of a window. He also swung a chair at hospital staff.

How long the psychosis lasted and patients’ response to treatment has varied. The woman in Britain — whose symptoms included paranoia about the color red and terror that nurses were devils who would harm her and a family member — took about 40 days to recover, according to a case report.

The 49-year-old man treated at Montefiore was discharged after several weeks’ hospitalization, but “he was still struggling two months out” and required readmission, Dr. Gabbay said.

The North Carolina woman, who was convinced that cellphones were tracking her and that her partner would steal her pandemic stimulus money, didn’t improve with the first medication, said Dr. Jonathan Komisar at Duke, who said doctors initially thought her symptoms reflected bipolar disorder. “When we began to realize that maybe this isn’t going to resolve immediately,” he said, she was given an antipsychotic, risperidone and discharged in a week.

The physical therapist who planned to murder her children had more difficulty. “Every day, she was getting worse,” Dr. Goueli said. “We tried probably eight different medicines,” including antidepressants, antipsychotics and lithium. “She was so ill that we were considering electroconvulsive therapy for her because nothing was working.”

About two weeks into her hospitalization, she couldn’t remember what her 2-year-old looked like. Calls with family were heartbreaking because “‘You could hear one in the background saying ‘When is Mom coming home?’” Dr. Goueli said. “That brought her a lot of shame because she was like, ‘I can’t be around my kids and here they are loving me.’”

Ultimately, risperidone proved effective and after four weeks, she returned home to her family, “95 percent perfect,” he said.

“We don’t know what the natural course of this is,” Dr. Goueli said. “Does this eventually go away? Do people get better? How long does that normally take? And are you then more prone to have other psychiatric issues as a result? There are just so many unanswered questions.”

[ill-advised strategy]

Not me, I palm the little pink childrens ball and chuck that bitch sidearm like a discus.
Then I eat some tots out of my cargo shorts.
#healthybowling

[seano732]

Well that’s fucking terrifying......

[ill-advised strategy]

My bowling techniques are divisive.

Men are terrified, ladies swoon, children giggle.
It’s a good time on the lanes.