Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[lineygoblue]

They could easily make an ICU room at the WH. I’ve made one in a trailer when I worked Katrina.

And I could make a canoe out of a cement truck, but would you want to ride down the river in it?

Just sayin' .. a real hospital is probably better ... and stuff

[Dr. Strangelove]

And I could make a canoe out of a cement truck, but would you want to ride in it?

Just sayin' .. a real hospital is probably better ... and stuff

You're not wrong that it's definitely better.

But the narrative this morning was that Trump was feeling great and working hard as ever. By afternoon he was taking experimental drugs and decided to go spend multiple days at the hospital "just to be safe". It seems reasonable to think he's feeling worse and is further along in the disease than they were initially admitting.

And part of the problem is that even most of the WH staff isn't in the loop. At all. Congressional leadership from both parties have said the WH has given them zero updates.

[AlabamAlum]

And I could make a canoe out of a cement truck, but would you want to ride down the river in it?

Just sayin' .. a real hospital is probably better ... and stuff

It’s just personnel and equipment. A vent, an IV pump, an ABL 90, a Cobus u 411, a PCXR, drugs, and staff. Hospitals are convenient for Covid, but It’s not some magical place where...But hey, you’re right...what do I know? Hospitals confuse me. I’m sure you have the real 411 on this.

[lineygoblue]

Awww... don't get mad, AA. I just think a hospital is a better place to treat Mr. Trumps' condition than the WH is.

Had he chosen to stay at home in the WH it would have been fine with me as well.

Strangelove - I remember when the attempt was made on Reagan's life, I believe we got 1-2 medical updates per day, and that was it. When the President is ill, its very common to release as little information as possible. There will be all sorts of speculation. I choose to believe that Mr Trump was moved to Walter Reed because they have everything they need within hand's reach to take care of his condition.

But, I concede you could be right. This Covid thing has had times when patients have taken a sudden change for the worse. I hope that has not happened with Mr. Trump. He may be a real asshole, but he doesn't deserve this.

[AlabamAlum]

Liney,

Mad? You don’t know me if you think this is my mad. I am pretty good at verbally poking people with sharp sticks when the “I’m mad” mood strikes.

My point was and is simply this: he’s fairly sick if they carried him to Walter Reed. Any less and you could set up a nice FIHR-72 or better with a few hundred grand in equipment and some staff.

[lineygoblue]

Trump's condition may have worsened. If he's running any sort of temperature, I'd imagine that given his age and physical condition, they want to act with an abundance of caution and get him into a hospital. Walter Reed has special facilities for the President.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Kellyanne Conway now too. If you see pictures from last Saturday’s event, she’s sitting near Melania, Mike Lee, and the Notre Dame president who all tested positive.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Here's a good quote from the Economist - a news feed I receive by subscription and with some of the most unbiased and accurate reporting around:

We will not know what effect the president’s diagnosis or his health status has on America’s mood until the results from high-quality polls come back in the middle of next week. My Twitter feed is already full of hot takes on what his COVID infection means for him and for the race, most of which will turn out to be wrong.......until we know the details about how Donald Trump is feeling, his medical assessment from doctors, everything is speculation.

Having said that, he received Regeneron's version of an antibody infusion yesterday. This, as you may remember, was hot stuff a couple of months ago as it was reported that in small scale trials it reduced COVID symptoms and shortened hospital stays. It's packed RBCs and blood plasma derived from previously infected individuals. It works best when it is administered to persons that have not yet mounted an immune response. If you want to see details of the most recently concluded Regeneron trials and get the facts about what it does read the link and don't listen to anything from the media.

https://investor.regeneron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/regenerons-regn-cov2-antibody-cocktail-reduced-viral-levels-and

[Dr. Strangelove]

People known to have been either at last Saturday's SCOTUS event or the Debate that have tested positive in the past 24-48 hours

[Jeff Buchanan]

I wrote yesterday about how the media loves to take a regional "spike" and generalize it to the entire US to continue to advance the "dire consequences" narrative re COVID that they are now fully invested in and have to continue to advance. Wisconsin was my example of that.

The reality is actually objectively different. There are stories of success in dealing with and containing the virus - you'd never know about it if you are a consumer of COVID news in typical sound bite form. This problem with brevity applies to print sources of COVID news too. Google is a remarkable tool for revealing COVID facts, available from multiple sources, that tend to offer balance if not upend the media's false COVID narrative entirely.

Case in point: Colleges have seen success in controlling the spread of the virus while conducting in person learning with enrolled students enjoying normal college life. The way this is being done is with high frequency testing and aggressive tracing. Duhhh. None of this is rocket science. None of this is new science. Sometime very early in the pandemic, the importance of testing and tracing became obvious. Nations that implemented such programs succeeded and continue to succeed. Nations that didn't, continue to experience high daily new case numbers. We're seeing success with reducing the prevalence of the virus with aggressive testing protocols along with layered mitigation measures that don't involve restricting social mobility like lock downs and business closures do in several areas. Pro-and college-sports are two of them.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/28/campus-life-sans-covid-a-few-colleges-write-the-playbook-for-pandemic-success-422010

Unfortunately, here in the US, the glitches in testing and tracing are well documented. They are also easily fixable .... and some locales have put emphasis on aggressively undertaking testing and tracing. The results are good for these locales. Problems continue to be access to test kits, the reagents and supplies needed to run them in the quantities required with turnaround times of 24h or less. If there was ever a need for a national war-time strategy to be directed at the federal level, this is the time. Yet, from what I can tell, the administration appears to be enamored with vaccine development and time lines along with medical therapies.

Anyway, there is way out of this thing. To me it is as clear as day and most importantly, regardless of better medical therapies and management becoming available to treat the seriously ill and at risk populations, regardless of the coming of a vaccine, testing will continue to be the bulwark upon which SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are subdued.

[Jeff Buchanan]

People known to have been either at last Saturday's SCOTUS event or the Debate that have tested positive in the past 24-48 hours

A very likely super-spreader event ...... and let's make sure we know what that actually is. One person infects a disproportionate number of other individuals.

It's not the event itself but that the event is a congregate setting then one fucker attending has a very high viral load and is spewing SARS-CoV-2 virions in droplets (> 10 microns in size) and aerosols (< 10 microns in size) from his respirations - all of them (breathing, talking, singing, yelling - all of it).

It's believed that only 10% of infected persons account for a whooping 80% of all infections. It's an important distinction one that is generally not made by the media to do so makes the virus a lot less fearsome.

This helps to explain why those of us here remain virus free. Few people are actually spreading the virus. We are wearing masks, we are distancing, we are avoiding congregate settings where risk of viral transmission from one of these fuckers is high. Not hard.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...id-19-spread1/

[Dr. Strangelove]

Well I hope they are keeping a very close eye on Pence. He was sitting right by at least 5 people who tested positive in the past 2 days. That's Kellyanne in the white dress behind Melania. And I believe the Senators between Lee and Tillis are Josh Hawley and Ben Sasse. Lindsey Graham (wearing a mask) is on the other side of Tillis.

But to be fair, all these people probably participated in the indoor VIP receptions as well and maybe that's where the actual spread occurred.

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[Jeff Buchanan]

Good stuff DSL.

[Dr. Strangelove]

And now breaking that Sen. Ron Johnson (WI) has covid. He's not on the Judiciary Committee so I don't know if he was at the SCOTUS event or not. I imagine all Republican Senators were invited but didn't get seats up front.

If this continues it could make it very difficult to confirm Barrett before the election.

EDIT: Barrett, btw, reportedly had covid over the summer. So she herself should be immune.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I keep looking at that picture and 100s of people, albeit outside yet still not distancing, unmasked.

In the big scheme of things, certainly invited guests to this event were in some way believed to be Trump supporters. That's why the got invited. Because masking has become virtue signaling in support of wearing masks and Trump, from the beginning, doesn't think they are necessary, attendees in the picture are showing their support for this bufoonery by not wearing masks.

Hate it that those reportedly infected during one of the nominating events will suffer various consequences of becoming infected. But if this remarkable turn of events has even a little bit of impact on people who previously didn't wear masks to wear them, it's a net positive.

....... and to be clear, masks are considered to be necessary in all the places that officials say they should be worn in South Florida. I had to say that because FL and particularly Governor Desantis gets pummeled by the media for never mandating them. Mayors and commissioners in all three S. FL counties mandated them in accordance with the Governor's office authority to do so.

FL citizens and visitors are uniformly depicted in the news as wildly irresponsible. It's that alternate reality of complete irresponsibility and disregard for SARS-CoV-2 in S. FL that is so wrongly presented to people who live elsewhere and think FL is hot-spot for COVID-19. It's not. FL is among the many US states that for the last 2 months has had an R(t) value of 1.0 or less.