Coronavirus discussion thread - NO POLITICS, or "POLITICS by PROXY"

Broad brush comment: It seems to me that the gorilla in the room with these medical topics, and COVID in particular, is that the population at large is suffering from inconsistent and misleading information. The internet, which was imagined as a means to improve general understanding, has in fact made the situation worse. Much worse.

Science is based on the Scientific Method, in which hypotheses are tested, and adjusted / accepted / disproven using controlled experiments. The scientific community generally does their best to understand often complex multi variable problems. Public policy is generally best served by not directly contradicting scientific understanding, for obvious reasons.

That said, much of what is purported to be information, which is available without subscription on the internet, is too often sensationalism as opposed to journalism; and is actually intended to somehow further ulterior purposes. The internet tends to support confirmation bias rather than align the general understanding with actual fact based information. Indeed, the very definition of what is a fact has been excoriated nearly beyond recognition.

The result is that we are running home to momma in terms of our tendency for tribal behavior, rather than making truly informed decisions. It is a truly sad state of affairs. I suppose we will either recognize and change that behavior or suffer the consequences.

Moving along….

 

Devo was right.

 

The comparisons to background radiation are good. It's easy to forget just how much we're exposed to at ground level, let alone at an airliner's cruising altitude.
I'm not lining up to be the next Bruce Banner, but the occasional diagnostic zap isn't anything to lose sleep over.

However, this does bring back fun memories of the hard-core "anti-nuke" brigade in Sydney yelling and screaming about the OPAL reactor at Lucas Heights. It's a research reactor, and one of its functions is to generate isotopes for medical purposes - the only weapons-grade things you'll find in there are the researchers' intellects.
Reasonable concern about a serious risk is one thing, but this bunch parted ways with reason a long way back, and weren't the kind to let inconvenient facts to get in the way of a really exciting leaflet campaign ("You are standing 2.4Km from a nuclear reactor!").

One of them cornered the director in an interview for a "grilling" and demanded to know how many megatonnes of orphan-killing radiation would be released if a dastardly terrorist sneaked inside and triggered a meltdown.
The director prevaricated about how hard it is to get a reactor of this design to go critical, and the fact that anybody close enough to get irradiated would be too busy getting dismembered by flying masonry.
"Yes, but how much radiation would they get?"
After a bit of mental calculation, he estimated that it'd be roughly equivalent to a CAT-scan.
The response was a triumphant "Aha! And that's one CAT-scan nobody needs!"
That's true, yes...

 

Last year, mask mandates came down from the state level. People complained, but it took the decision out of the hands of local governments and school boards. In their infinite wisdom, the state legislature took away powers from the governor and health department. Now the governor is imploring cities and schools to use masks because he can't make it so. The legislature is considering laws to prevent anyone from requiring vaccination or masking in any situation.

Insanity rules.

 

And this is exactly why healthcare is a different kind of animal from any other part of society. People like you get randomly struck by cancer and other diseases through no discernible mechanism other than fate. It's a little like getting struck by an uninsured driver who jumps a curb. Anything as random like that doesn't respond to the usual inputs. I hope this didn't wander into forbidden territory. It's close, I know, but it is an important point to make. Especially now.

 

Yikes. That escalated quickly.

Not surprising. Looking at the bus stop this am, no one wearing marks, incl parents - then standing around gabbing for a half hour after the kids are gone. Gaggles of kids walking to and from school no masks. After hours kids roaming the neighborhood in groups with no masks. No matter what the schools do or don’t do, the risks are still out there circulating. Granted, that’s all outdoors but that’s not an entirely fail safe option.

 

One of my aunts had breast cancer 30, 40 years ago, and she's fine. In the case of my ex it was inflammatory breast cancer which was then (20 years ago) pretty much terminal for people as soon as you found the lump . It may be better now.

 

People aren't so much stupid as habitual and resistant to change. I suspect there are good evolutionary reasons for that, but that kind of behavior and thought work hard against us in a pandemic where our knowledge of what is going to solve problems changes regularly with new information. When we started out with this pandemic, everything we knew then was potentially very wrong. If you track the treatments for the disease, they have evolved into more effective treatments very rapidly. Jamming a ventilator down every sick person's neck was the state of the art back when, and with bad results. Now, it's the last resort. We didn't know what was last resort and when the last resort was necessary 18 months ago. Now we know a whole lot more. I have been fascinated by watching the evolution of treatments, directives, and everything else. But, I'm probably an outlier because I'm not a completely habitual person and change in some things is just fine with me.

Now, when it comes to my neighborhood, I'm highly resistant to change. Don't ask me to be consistent!

 

Agreed - the distinction between Covid and cancer is one of foreseeability and mitigation. The former is pretty clear to me, the latter not so much.

 

Lockdowns were at the start of the year. May is when restrictions were being lifted again. There might have been one or two very local temporary lockdowns in specific locations, maybe, but if so I don't recall them.

 

I'm pretty happy to live in Washington state. We have pockets of insanity, but the insanity isn't institutionalized for the most part.

We are seeing the new case numbers tapering off again now, but they are still close to 4000/day on a rolling 14 day average. That's far higher than the worst of the big spike last winter. Deaths are not as high, which points to the fact that it's younger and healthier people getting sick as well as improvements in treatment. But, it's still really bad. Peak daily death in this spike is probably pretty close. Maybe the winter will be OK. Until Thanksgiving and we have all forgotten that it's a pandemic again. Then around we go.

 

We still don't really know why someone who has never smoked and stayed fit and did the right things still ends up with lung cancer and someone like George Burns lives to 100. The research continues.

 

I'd love to hear more about it.

 

There is a really good book by Dan Gardner called "Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear".

 

COVID funding versus cancer: I would hope that the COVID funding is a one-time deal... a once-in-a-century event, more-or-less.

 

I supposed you could lump funding for previous mRNA research into it?

 

In terms of colon cancer and diet, my relative who died of cancer had a good diet. My grandfather, who liked offal fried and burned to a crisp, cooked in a pan that was never cleaned, survived colon cancer and died of heart disease two decades later. Whether diet contributed to his cancer, I cannot say. I've only had four blood relatives that have had cancer, which is quite surprising, as I have a lot of relatives.

 

I would also hope that COVID research leads to insights into cancer as well. That kind of scientific cross-pollination seems to happen on a regular basis. COVID is currently battlefield medicine. It may be shifting away from that a little, but there's still a massive number of sick people and a whole lot of last ditch experiments going on because there's nothing to lose. Cancer is more of a long, grinding climb, with lots of blind alleys and setbacks, but it isn't the avalanche of very specific problems that COVID is. I'm a pathological optimist, so take my optimism that mRNA and the rest of COVID research will pay off in dealing with other problems just as HIV research has. It all goes into the bucket of human knowledge, and good will come of it with time.

 

This kind of information is horrifying to me, ha. I have had the luxury of being diagnosed with both a UPJ obstruction and EoE. Both substantially benign conditions without bad prognoses. But to arrive at those diagnoses, I was zapped like crazy. In a 4 year span, I presented at the ER with 10/10 kidney stone like pain probably 5 times, and of course they zapped me with a CT scan every time to rule out other issues. Only eventually getting diagnosed with a spasming/blocking upj. Similarly, not much earlier in life, I presented to the ER a couple times with awful chest pain that radiated up into my back and shoulders and such, and again was more than once zapped with a CT looking for obvious issues. Only later, after a barium radiological test (inconclusive of course) did they do an endoscopy and find my esophagus was one cm in diameter instead of two, and covered in eosinophils. In my late thirties and I've had a silly amount of radiation. Another reason I'm always on high alert RE cancer.