Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[PB]

lots of unprotected sex

Was gonna say furious masturbation, but yer prolly right.

[Benny Profane]

Good resource.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

[jono]

If the problem is the antibody response after the infection is cleared that would be very worrisome as far as the safety of a vaccine.

Curious about this. I had been thinking this might mean I'd really, really rather get a vaccine than deal with this stuff. Are you saying this could be just as likely with a vaccine or more that this is one thing to watch out for safety-wise?

[skifishbum]

There has been a bit of spike lately here in UT. Starting this week I've seen a lot of back-to-normal outings.

Attachment 330723

200 of those cases are from 1 single bear valley meat packing plant outbreak
as we flattened the curve the peak moved to june/july
still at a ~8% hospitalization rate and under 120 deaths
one of our employess had his roommate test positive
but his test was negative but hes out for 14 days regardless

[jgb@etree]

Sitting eating lunch in downtown SLC while waiting on my wife's dr appt (no visitors), and a group of 8 guys walks in for a business lunch, then proceeds to have a fucking 8 way handshake. We are so fucked as a species.

You've been watching groups of hundreds to thousands of people roaming the streets of cities across the country protesting, looting & rioting for nearly a week, and you think we're fucked because some people shook hands? Alrightey then.

[huckbucket]

So how does a +65yo A+ male increase their antibodies?

I'm going to assume this is a serious q. Your antibodies in this case are linked to your blood type. While it's a spectrum and you may have some anti-glycan antibodies, there's no known way to the ones you have. Maybe at some point in the future you will receive a vaccine directed against either the virus or some other target that results in your body making protective antibodies, but that's still months away. Maybe also at some point you will be infused directly with antibodies that are directed against these targets, but that would only happen if you were actively infected. The general advice about immune health is ALWAYS relevant here. Sleep, diet, etc.

[huckbucket]

You've been watching groups of hundreds to thousands of people roaming the streets of cities across the country protesting, looting & rioting for nearly a week, and you think we're fucked because some people shook hands? Alrightey then.

I remember a time when you were cool. WTF happened to you?

[gravitylover]

I remember a time when you were cool. WTF happened to you?

I was thinking the same and I actually know the guy.

[riser4]

lots of unprotected sex

Pitching, not catching.

[jgb@etree]

Heh. If 8 people failing to socially distance is problematic according to sa91, you'd imagine several hundred people standing shoulder to shoulder in the streets - no matter what activity they are engaged in - would be a far greater concern. But apparently some people here think that protesting/rioting/looting is the undiscovered covid-19 vaccine? Okey-dokie.

[snowaddict91]

Heh. If 8 people failing to socially distance is problematic according to sa91, you'd imagine several hundred people standing shoulder to shoulder in the streets - no matter what activity they are engaged in - would be a far greater concern. But apparently some people here think that protesting/rioting/looting is the undiscovered covid-19 vaccine? Okey-dokie.

Where did I say hundreds of people standing shoulder to shoulder wasn't a huge fucking problem?

[glademaster]

I was thinking the same and I actually know the guy.

Stop buying into the fallacy that everyone here is cool because we share some common interests. I've met numerous people from this forum who I've thought were total shitbags IRL. And on the flip side, I've met people who present as assholes and contrarians on here who are solid IRL.

[jono]

That's. Wow. Thanks for posting.

[gravitylover]

Stop buying into the fallacy that everyone here is cool because we share some common interests. I've met numerous people from this forum who I've thought were total shitbags IRL. And on the flip side, I've met people who present as assholes and contrarians on here who are solid IRL.

Well yeah I bet that's happened to a lot of us, I mean at least with you we've known you since you were still a pup so we know you're screwy but we had become friends. It's strange how some things escape regular conversation and two people can appreciate each other until... There's another old EC mag that I became good friends with that went off the deep end not too long ago and we almost never communicate anymore.



So I was about to get back on the road next week and restart the sales rep gig but now with all of these protests I'm pretty sure the virus is more common now than it was 10 days ago and if it's not yet it will be any minute now. I can't decide what to do.

[old goat]

Curious about this. I had been thinking this might mean I'd really, really rather get a vaccine than deal with this stuff. Are you saying this could be just as likely with a vaccine or more that this is one thing to watch out for safety-wise?

I'm speculating. From the article "It’s not clear why this happens. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale, offers three possibilities. Long-haulers might still harbor infectious virus in some reservoir organ, which is missed by tests that use nasal swabs. Or persistent fragments of viral genes, though not infectious, may still be triggering a violent immune overreaction, as if “you’re reacting to a ghost of a virus,” Iwasaki says. More likely, the virus is gone but the immune system, having been provoked by it, is stuck in a lingering overactive state."

It seems to me that if the virus can stimulate a lingering overactive immune state, the vaccine could do the same, since the goal of the vaccine is of course to produce an immune response. But I don't think scientists know which features of the disease are caused directly by the virus and which if any are caused by the immune response. And if an overactive immune system is part of the problem what part of the virus triggers it? Might be the same antigen that is in the vaccine or that the vaccine produces or might be different. And if a vaccine does produce an overactive immune system other vaccines might still be ok.

If people in the vaccine trials do develop features of the disease the researchers will have to figure out whether the symptoms are from the vaccine or from Covid 19 infection the vaccine fails to protect against.

Please, don't anyone take my fantasizing as a reason not to take a vaccine if there is one. I'm not a virologist or immunologist and I'm good at thinking up bad things that could happen that never do.

[jono]

I understood you were speculating, and of course so was I, so I was just curious about your line of thought. Thanks!

[Ottime]

well, this country is already fucked; so we are goo there; but if that is your overall feeling; you can move out of it.

always interesting the disdain some have for the place but stay in it; many live like kings in costa rica for the average expenses here.

It is not so much the land here but the imbeciles like you in it we disdain. Perhaps you could move away and make America great again, eh?

[Benny Profane]

Well yeah I bet that's happened to a lot of us, I mean at least with you we've known you since you were still a pup so we know you're screwy but we had become friends. It's strange how some things escape regular conversation and two people can appreciate each other until... There's another old EC mag that I became good friends with that went off the deep end not too long ago and we almost never communicate anymore.



So I was about to get back on the road next week and restart the sales rep gig but now with all of these protests I'm pretty sure the virus is more common now than it was 10 days ago and if it's not yet it will be any minute now. I can't decide what to do.

Bike biz is real healthy these days. Bikes and booze stores did well in the shutdown.

[KQ]

Got my Threadless.com masks yesterday. The are stretchy 2-ply polyester, lightweight, very soft and fit well with some slack. My face measures 10in from ear to ear over the bridge of my nose. My neighbor also got some and his face is 11.5in ear to ear. The mask obviously wasn't as slack on his face but wasn't stretched to it's limits either. All designs reverse to black so it's like two masks in one.

Because I searched for mask manufacturers I now get a TON of ads for masks in my FB feed. No biggie. I check them out everyone once in a while and along with them I look at comments to see what people are saying about different manufactuers. Sadly they are not reviews of the products. Instead there seems to be an army of people (bots?) posting in almost every ad I see that wearing masks is a sign of weakness and far left stupidity and "it's just the flu."

Sigh.


On another note that this virus is just a conspiracy of the left, The East Oregonian posted an article on locals who had recovered from the virus but experienced three different levels of pain and suffering from not much at all to middle of the road to hospitalization. Ages ranged from 40s to 60s with everyone still being in the workforce. I think they were trying to help people understand the randomness and unpredictability of the virus but the comment section only proved people are full on owning their ignorance with chants of "it's only the flu."

Double sigh.

[XXX-er]

From what I've read KQ ^^ you could be asymptomatic and just pass it on, or have mild flu or bad flu or bad flu that lasts 2 months or maybe you die regardless of how old you are altho older is more likely to die ... its a real box a chocolates

Bike biz is real healthy these days. Bikes and booze stores did well in the shutdown.

The guy I talked to said new bike sales are up 30%, he is completely out of HT's and its only the beginning of June ... who would have thot ?

[gravitylover]

Bike biz is real healthy these days. Bikes and booze stores did well in the shutdown.

Yeah but it's all curbside, nobody in the store so us reps aren't welcome.

[KQ]

From what I've read KQ ^^ you could be asymptomatic and just pass it on, or have mild flu or bad flu or bad flu that lasts 2 months or maybe you die regardless of how old you are altho older is more likely to die ... its a real box a chocolates

Yup. Something I've believed for some time from all my reading and yes the flu can be the same way but this is a much more tenatious adversay and we still have the flu to deal with. This Fall/Winter is going to be interesting.

Here is the article:

Local experiences with COVID-19 show a range of symptoms


HERMISTON — As COVID-19 spreads locally, stories from Umatilla County residents who have had the virus show its effects can run the gamut from inconvenient to deadly.

As of June 5, Umatilla County Public Health has announced 124 confirmed cases and six presumptive cases of COVID-19, with 112 of those people considered recovered, and three patients who have died.

A severe case

Sara Barnett’s experience falls on the more serious side. The 53-year-old Hermiston woman’s doctors have told her she is lucky to be alive after two weeks in the hospital. She was discharged on June 2, but is still on oxygen.

“Today, I got up to make lunch and said, ‘This is too hard,’ and went back to bed,” she said the next day.

Her symptoms started on May 10.

“At first I felt achy — everything ached — and I had a bad headache and cough,” she said.

Her first test for COVID-19 came up negative, but since her husband and her father tested positive, she was told it was likely a false negative or that the virus wasn’t at a detectable level yet when she was tested.

Seven days after her first symptoms, she woke up struggling to breathe and drove to Kadlec Medical Center in Richland, Washington, where she was admitted and took a second COVID-19 test, which later came back positive.

Things went downhill from there. First they put her on 2 liters of oxygen, then 4 liters, then 30, before putting her on a machine that she said “blew air so hard my mouth was wide open and I couldn’t close my mouth.” Hospital staff couldn’t get her fever below 102 degrees for days. When she continued to deteriorate, she was rushed to the intensive care unit, where her doctor told her husband they were trying everything they could to keep her from needing to be put on a ventilator.

Barnett had already been taking hydroxychloroquine, the drug touted by President Donald Trump as a possible cure, for arthritis. She said another experimental treatment she was given was plasma from a patient who had recovered from COVID-19.

“A nurse came to me and said, ‘We’ve given you everything we can,’ and I asked, ‘What can you do?’ and she said, ‘Basically the best we can do now is keep you comfortable,’” Barnett said.

Fortunately for Barnett, she did eventually begin to recover and have her oxygen use stepped back down to 2 liters, which she is on now at home as she recovers from the pneumonia that is one of the side effects of her illness.

“They’re hoping it will just be a couple of weeks, but it could be forever, or months,” she said of her need for an oxygen tank. “They told me it could easily take three to six months for me to feel like a human again.”

Barnett said she hopes her tale can be a cautionary one for people who think COVID-19 isn’t very serious. She and her father, who both have underlying health conditions, had been “hiding out at home” for weeks, which she said means that her husband brought the virus home to them — something he obviously didn’t intend to do. He had serious symptoms but was never hospitalized, while her father was hospitalized for four days.

She said she worries now what her future will look like, as no one knows the long-term effects of COVID-19, but she is also extremely grateful to have a chance for more years with her husband, grandchildren and other family.

Barnett said it is hurtful to see people write dismissively on social media about the victims of COVID-19 as “just” people who have underlying health conditions, which include commons conditions, such as asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and a history of smoking.

“I’m 53, and yes I have some preexisting conditions, but to my family, to my friends, to my church, I am very valuable,” she said. “When people say, ‘Oh, she’s old,’ or ‘Oh, they had underlying health conditions.’ ... What if that were your mother or grandmother or sister?”

A mild case

On the other side of the spectrum of experiences are Teresa and Timothy Curtis, both 62.

The married couple lives in Hermiston and recently returned to work after recovering from a mild case of the virus.

“We want people to know it isn’t a death sentence,” Teresa Curtis said.

Timothy Curtis first started to have some concerns that he may have been infected when he started feeling “off” and heard that someone he knew, and may have recently been in contact with, had tested positive for COVID-19.

“He said he just didn’t feel quite right,” Teresa Curtis said.

Though he thought it could be attributed to inhaling some drywall dust at his work with the Umatilla County Housing Authority, Timothy Curtis got tested May 15 and was officially diagnosed with COVID-19 on May 18.

As he awaited his results, Teresa Curtis started developing some of her own symptoms and was fairly confident she had the virus when she got tested on May 19. That confidence was confirmed in a couple days time when the positive test result came in on May 22.

But for the roughly 10 days that she and her husband had symptoms of the virus, it never progressed to more than fatigue and some minor body aches “like if you worked too much in the yard for a day,” along with a loss of their senses of taste and smell.

“That was the weirdest part,” she said.

The process of getting a test was fairly simple for the couple, Teresa Curtis said, and they paid no out-of-pocket costs for the swab test they received while sitting in their cars at the Mirasol Family Health Center in Hermiston.

“The hardest part was the waiting for the results,” she said.

The two spent a majority of their time isolating from the rest of the community inside their home and only left to go on an occasional drive together. Following their experience with COVID-19, Teresa Curtis said they found it wasn’t as frightening as they expected.

“I had more fear before I got it than when I actually had it,” she said. “The thing I was most afraid of was spreading it to somebody else.”

A moderate case

Stacie Borgaard falls somewhere in the middle.

She found out on a Thursday that a co-worker had COVID-19, and the next Tuesday, May 19, she “kind of woke up not feeling myself.”

“My taste and smell were off, but I thought it might just be one of those days,” she said.

A few hours later she had a tickle in her throat and had started to cough, and that progressed to other symptoms that included aches and pains, chest tightness, chills, fever and a complete loss of all sense of taste and smell.

She ran a fever of between 99 and 101 degrees for six days, and said during that time she was so tired that just walking from the couch to the bathroom exhausted her.

“It kind of feels like when you get the flu, but this was a whole other level,” she said.

At one point, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, convinced her lips were starting to turn blue, even though her husband assured her they looked normal.

“Your brain goes to the worst possible scenarios,” she said.

Borgaard drove to a clinic for her test, but other than that she and her husband, who so far hasn’t displayed any symptoms, stayed home, in contact by phone with Umatilla County Public Health officials who tracked their symptoms and offered advice.

After a full week without running a fever, she said she feels mostly better, other than tiredness and a cough.

Borgaard was quoted by the East Oregonian in March for a story about weddings affected by COVID-19, when she and her new husband were trying to decide what to do about their upcoming nuptials. They ended up getting married with only a handful of people in the room, 6 feet apart with masks on, and having a virtual wedding reception by playing games with friends and family over video chat.

She said it was frustrating that she ended up getting sick anyway, but the decision not to have a gathering was also to protect other people. She said she hopes people take COVID-19 seriously.

“I hear people say, ‘It’s just a little worse than the flu,’ and I say, yeah, if you’re healthy and if you’re lucky,” she said. “I’m a healthy person, and I still got it pretty bad.”

[Core Shot]

Yeah but it's all curbside, nobody in the store so us reps aren't welcome.

If sales are up 30% no need to rep.
Just sit at home and cash the checks.

[XXX-er]

oh and the testing is not really ironclad

[XXX-er]

If sales are up 30% no need to rep.
Just sit at home and cash the checks.

well those were all bikes & products ordered last fall which are now sold

There are still things for a rep to do just saying hey, dealing with ongoing sales issues

and most important getting them to buy more product whatever it might be instead of that other brand