Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[Danno]

So why is the mortality rate in Singapore so much lower than the US? That has nothing to do with a plan, social cohesion, mask wearing, early action. It's simply the percentage of people who die who have the disease. To me, the explanation for this is the people who contract the virus in Singapore are, on average, much healthier and younger than those who have contracted the virus in the US.

If Singapore has robust testing and contact tracing, wouldn't that mean they are capturing a much larger number of asymptomatic people and mild symptom people, which would drive their mortality rate down? Any analysis/comparison has to account for that, at least.

[Timberridge]

Canada has social cohesion,

Vive la Canada.

[The AD]

I would agree that, as a whole, Canada has more of a plan, social cohesion, better public health than a US. But is there really much different between say, BC and Washington State? Washington State is as liberal and educated as BC. 80% of WA citizens think alike. Sure, we have small conservative towns in Eastern WA but BC has Merritt. I have been to BC hundreds of times in my life and find very little difference between BC and WA. BC has a higher percentage of Asians and South Asians. WA has higher percentage of Latinos and African Americans. But more or less, they are the same (wealth, health, education, politics). I don't think WA has a higher COVID rate and death rate than BC because of people from Mississippi coming to WA and giving it to us. And I don't think WA can blame Trump for all of its problems. It seems it came down to luck and early action. Washington state did take early action, relative to most places in N America, and continues to do so. In retrospect, the virus was much more prevalent in WA than BC in the early stages. This wasn't attributed to strong action by BC and lack of action by WA. Both Seattle and Vancouver are gateway cities to Asia but for whatever reason, more Asians who had the disease traveled to Seattle than Vancouver in the early states (again, dumb luck).

I agree. I think there's a certain amount of smugness in BC that they've handled this better than their neighbors to the south, but I don't really see anything they've done that has been radically different from what Washington has done. And when I read social media posts it's very clear that there are just as many idiots flouting social distancing and mask wearing in BC as there are in Washington. Perhaps the biggest difference is BC has kept Americans out...

[DJSapp]

I see this more as a capitalism/pricing outrage. For any given item, it can be sold if it can be produced for less cost. For any given item, it can be purchased if the buyer can extract more value than the cost. Sometimes the range between production cost and buyer value is very high. For example if it's your life or buy this item, you'll pay a high price. That doesn't make high prices ethical, right, or a social good.

By Gilead's reasoning, a lifeguard should demand $100,000 before throwing a life ring to a drowning man. We should live in a better world

Gilead could have/should have just kept their heads down. Raising prices on medicine during a pandemic is a bad look regardless.

I'm more concerned of what the global pharama co's will do with vaccine prices. Salk didn't patent the polio vaccine because he understood the threat to mankind. Now polio is pretty much globally eradicated. I don't think big pharma will be so altruistic.

[Mod Team]

BTW,

i'm of German ancestry; so of course i'm down with my fellow Nazi's here.

you understand many posts I do is to openly mock tgr.

There is nothing funny about what the nazi's did or believed.
This is unacceptable and will not be tolerated here

[LeeLau]

I would agree that, as a whole, Canada has more of a plan, social cohesion, better public health than a US. But is there really much different between say, BC and Washington State? Washington State is as liberal and educated as BC. 80% of WA citizens think alike. Sure, we have small conservative towns in Eastern WA but BC has Merritt. I have been to BC hundreds of times in my life and find very little difference between BC and WA. BC has a higher percentage of Asians and South Asians.

I've seen the bolded quoted comments from Americans innumerable times and declined to comment but since you've asked I will.

Your experiences are as a visitor and therefore not as someone who lives in Canada. I only lived in the US (Ohio) for a year and a bit so that's my frame of reference. Canadians seem to be culturally the same but are quite different in significant ways. When we (the family) moved from Malaysia to Canada, I thought that Canadians and Americans were pretty much indistinguishable so the mistake is understandable

The overwhelming majority of Canadians (80%+) trust the government and trust the authorities. IMO that's because, by and large, the government/authorities have earned that trust. Merritt, Vancouver, Whistler, Quesnel, Revelstoke, Valemount may live differently but underneath the surface there's a general (call it banal if you will) sameness. Call that social cohesion if you will.

The last polls I saw for the US (Gallup as of a month and a bit ago) had 57% of Americans in the camp of the fear of COVID is overblown. Primary sources here

[Timberridge]

Uh oh, the Mod Squad just showed up.

[LeeLau]

I agree. I think there's a certain amount of smugness in BC that they've handled this better than their neighbors to the south, but I don't really see anything they've done that has been radically different from what Washington has done. And when I read social media posts it's very clear that there are just as many idiots flouting social distancing and mask wearing in BC as there are in Washington.

"Flouting social distancing and mask-wearing" is highly reported. There's less of that then one may think in BC. The incidences are highly reported. We even jokingly refer to it as COVID police. It's a bit overbearing sometimes but it's tolerated.

Agreed on the unjustified smugness with respect to differences between WA and BC where the numbers aren't hugely different. However, (and this is a big however) the concern is the US as a whole as WA is not, in and of itself, an entity with capability to control its own borders

[The AD]

"Flouting social distancing and mask-wearing" is highly reported. There's less of that then one may think in BC. The incidences are highly reported. We even jokingly refer to it as COVID police. It's a bit overbearing sometimes but it's tolerated.

I obviously don't have any firsthand experience since I can't enter the country, but based on the Whistler Facebook group there's plenty of morons using the same anti-mask arguments there as I see on this side of the border. Maybe the difference is they're all talk there. Here they berate store employees who tell them to mask up.

And you've got puregravity, so there's that

[jono]

So why is the mortality rate in Singapore so much lower than the US? That has nothing to do with a plan, social cohesion, mask wearing, early action. It's simply the percentage of people who die who have the disease.

Your opening premise should take into account the relative positive rates of tests. If it did you would see that the actual number of infections is much higher in the US, meaning the lower rates in those places do in fact benefit from "a plan, social cohesion, mask wearing, early action." Because the percentage of total people dying from the disease is being calculated from a much more accurate estimate of the total number of cases than that in the US.

[concretejungle]

Skoug, i am really failing to see where you think it’s funny or cool to post shit like that. You keep trying to be the ‘bad guy’ but you’re coming off like a fool instead. Why bother?

Because dip shits respond to him.

[XXX-er]

" I would agree that, as a whole, Canada has more of a plan, social cohesion, better public health than a US. But is there really much different between say, BC and Washington State? "

but isnt that everything ?

I rmeebr talkign to a TGR person on here who said yeah universal HC would be great but i don't want to pay for that fat guy who doesnt work out

I don't remeebr the wording exactly but buddy pretty much didnt understand what the word " universal " meant

[Deebased]

Well Skoug and Deeb and Jayp et al prolly need a little entertainment for their otherwise miserable lives, so why not allow them to take the minuscule satisfaction of ineffectually "owning the libs" with dumbfuck troll links from idjit rightwing websites? Think of it as therapy for the microcephalic.

If that's how you deal with being chronically wrong so be it.

I've been saying there's no way to avoid this pandemic since it was found in a half dozen countries.

Would you prefer a microphallus or chronic ED?

I'd gladly take a useable appendage over a flab of skin that hangs down to my ankles.

[Buster Highmen]

There's no us in US.

[The AD]

" I would agree that, as a whole, Canada has more of a plan, social cohesion, better public health than a US. But is there really much different between say, BC and Washington State? "

but isnt that everything ?

It might help, but it's not everything. If the virus is out there people are going to get infected and universal healthcare isn't going to stop it.

[LongShortLong]

Basically, Mina says regulation and bureaucracy are holding us back. FDA would regulate speedy at home tests as diagnostics, and as such they need to be as good as rtPCR. Since people might make decisions based on test results, the tests must report results to the healthcare bureaucracy. Both these requirements add to test costs, making any US test not cheap. He talks about some of the specific roadblocks.

To review, the central idea is that sick people must have a certain level of virus before they can effectively transmit it. By using a cheap at home test daily, we could eliminate transmission by detecting who among us is transmissible before work/school. On a population/stop the virus/public health basis, the cheap test given frequently would be far more effective than rtPCR given rarely.

If the US can't get it done, maybe another country will do it first and we can follow?

[Mofro261]

We have been asking for months why certain countries are able to achieve extremely low death rates vs. what as happened in the US and other European nations. We have questioned whether different strains are more virulent, whether differences in the infected population have underlying genetic predisposition either towards more severe disease or protection, higher levels of comorbidity and question the average age of the infecting population.

But as for masking, this recent publication draws a correlation between masking and increased asymptomatic infection within a population due to a lower initial infectious dose, resulting in more mild disease, thus leading to greatly reduced death rates. : Masks Do More Than Protect Others During COVID-19: Reducing the Inoculum of SARS-CoV-2 to Protect the Wearer. Journal of General Internal Medicine (August 2020).
https://link.springer.com/content/pd...20-06067-8.pdf

Abstract:
Although the benefit of population-level public facial masking to protect others during the COVID-19 pandemic has received a great deal of attention, we discuss for one of the first times the hypothesis that universal masking reduces the “inoculum” or dose of the virus for the maskwearer, leading to more mild and asymptomatic infection manifestations. Masks, depending on type, filter out the majority of viral particles, but not all. We first discuss the near-century-old literature around the viral inoculum and severity of disease (conceptualized as the LD50 or lethal dose of the virus). We include examples of rising rates of asymptomatic infection with population-level masking, including in closed settings (e.g., cruise ships) with and without universal masking. Asymptomatic infections may be harmful for spread but could actually be beneficial if they lead to higher rates of exposure. Exposing society to SARS-CoV-2 without the unacceptable consequences of severe illness with public masking could lead to greater community-level immunity and slower spread as we await a vaccine. This theory of viral inoculum and mild or asymptomatic disease with SARS-CoV-2 in light of population-level masking has received little attention so this is one of the first perspectives to discuss the evidence supporting this theory.

Increasing rates of asymptomatic and mild infection with COVID-19 have been seen over time during the pandemic in settings adopting population-level masking. A systematic review of earlier studies, before facial masking was widely practiced, placed the proportion of asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2 at 15%.35 A more recent narrative review of 16 different studies estimated the rate of asymptomatic infection at 40–45%.36 The CDC has now (since article submission) also placed the rate of asymptomatic infection at 40% - the reference is as follows and could this new reference be placed here: “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios. July 10, 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...s.html.” Closed settings, such as cruise ships,can be particularly illustrative when examining phenotypes associated with SARS-CoV-2. For example, one of the earliest estimates of the rate of asymptomatic infection due to SARSCoV-2 was in the 20% range from a report of a COVID-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.37 In a more recent report from a different cruise ship outbreak, all passengers were issued surgical masks and all staff provided N95 masks after the initial case of COVID-19 on the ship was detected.38 In this closed setting with masking, where 128 of 217 passengers and staff eventually tested positive for SARSCoV-2 via RT-PCR, the majority of infected patients on the ship (81%) remained asymptomatic,38 compared with 18% in the cruise ship outbreak without masking.37

A report from a pediatric hemodialysis unit in Indiana, where all patients and staff were masked, demonstrated that staff rapidly developed antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 after exposure to a single symptomatic patient with COVID-19. In the setting of masking, however, none of the new infections was symptomatic.39 And in a recent outbreak in a seafood processing plant in Oregon where all workers were issued masks each day at work, the rate of asymptomatic infection among the 124 infected was 95%.40, 41 An outbreak in a Tyson chicken plant in Arkansas with masking also showed a 95% asymptomatic rate of infection.42, 43

One model showed a correlation between population-level masking and number of COVID-19 cases in various countries, but an even stronger correlation with suppression of COVID related death rates. 9 However, it should be acknowledged that this model could not account for all confounders that led to such low death rates in the regions examined. This group showed that, if 80% of the population wears a moderately effective mask, nearly half of the projected deaths over the next two months could be prevented.9 Countries accustomed to masking since the 2003 SARS-CoV pandemic, including Japan, Hong Kong (Fig. 1a),44 Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and Singapore,9 and those who newly embraced masking early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the Czech Republic,46 have fared well in terms of rates of severe illness and death. Indeed, even when cases have resurged in these areas with population-based masking upon re-opening (e.g., South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan), the case fatality rate has remained low, 47 which is suggestive of this viral inoculum theory.

[Timberridge]

There's no us in US.

Good one.

That's like when the coach said "there's no I in TEAM, kids" then some smart ass kid would say "but there is a 'M' and 'E'"

[LeeLau]

I obviously don't have any firsthand experience since I can't enter the country, but based on the Whistler Facebook group there's plenty of morons using the same anti-mask arguments there as I see on this side of the border. Maybe the difference is they're all talk there. Here they berate store employees who tell them to mask up.

And you've got puregravity, so there's that

It's understandable that the Whistler FB are poor datapoints. There are a lot bored unemployed or lesser employed people on there. In real life (not a knock on you) there's universal masking on WB property, in most grocery and retail stores there's 50 - 80% masking; in transit it looks like about the same ratio. When there's reporting about mass spread events there's almost always shame-faced event attendees later on saying something "yeah we dun fucked up".

Of course we have the puregravity Covidiot cretins (I guess he's still going on? Have him on ignore so whatever..." but they are by far the minority. And we don't have the Covidiots running the government

[Buster Highmen]

Good one.

That's like when the coach said "there's no I in TEAM, kids" then some smart ass kid would say "but there is a 'M' and 'E'"

I have really ugly cheerleaders.

[simple]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xcxt7gUCgKY

Agree or disagree that Jared fucked up Covid response?

[KQ]

Random pondering/question:

I wonder if the pandemic will fuel home remodels and/or change plans for new builds to included more office and/or school room space.

[KQ]

If the US can't get it done, maybe another country will do it first and we can follow?

LOL!!! Good one!

[The AD]

In real life (not a knock on you) there's universal masking on WB property, in most grocery and retail stores there's 50 - 80% masking; in transit it looks like about the same ratio.

We've actually got required masking in public places, both indoor and outdoor, in Washington currently. In reality you'll see almost 100% compliance indoors and much less outdoors.

[LongShortLong]

The last polls I saw for the US (Gallup as of a month and a bit ago) had 57% of Americans in the camp of the fear of COVID is overblown. Primary sources here

That's a scary number, but I don't see it on that page. I see 69% concerned about infection, 87% concerned about economy, and 58% think Trump is blowing it. And a breakdown on Trump by party.