We may not have reached herd immunity yet, doesn't mean we won't. I'm not sure what to make of recent news: "experts" CDC revising death FROM covid down 90+% to death with covid; "experts" challenging the current method of testing as way too sensitive creating perhaps 90% false positives. Positives where insignificant trace amounts of viral fragments detected but not sufficient to cause symptoms or infect others. I don't know, just the news, but [uck fay]ing huge implications if proven true.
So some thoughts on this: 1) The CDC revised nothing down. Nothing was done in secret. For months now the CDC has listed the percent of deaths that listed only COVID-19 on the death certificate. That number has routinely been less than 10%. This shouldn't surprise us given that COVID-19 has largely killed the elderly - who have incredibly high rates of hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes. Very often these co-morbidities (not even necessarily causes of death) will be listed on the death certificate. Furthermore, a death certificate will often list cause of death as a) acute respiratory distress caused by b) pneumonia, resulting from c) COVID-19. That falls in the 94% of cases where COVID-19 wasn't the only thing listed on the death certificate. But these people typically die of pneumonia-related complications. So a low percentage of only COVID-19 shouldn't shock us. I wouldn't be shocked if the originator of this as a "conspiracy" was a Russian troll shop. It's their MO. Take something that can be verified as fact and then present it in an improper context to a group that you have groomed to eat it up (for example, cultivating a certain mindset of twitter follows through your previous posting history). 2) I've been intrigued by the 90% had very little virus thing. First, it isn't clear to me this is actually a false positive. The study said "very small amounts of virus". That isn't the same thing as false positive. Second, if only 2% of people are testing positive, I could see the "false positives" among those being very high - particularly when it isn't just a classic false positive but you have problems in certain labs with contamination and routinely high percentages of positive tests. However, I am very reluctant to believe that 90% of the positive cases we just saw in places like Texas and Florida weren't actually positives (when 30% of tests were returning as positive). I'll file this one under "need to understand more".
Its running thru UT right now. They will probably send students home then start another wave. I know of 10 or so students with it now, according to their parents.
It’s about damn time. Hopefully college does a good job of keeping politics out of it and we can just enjoy the games
Seems to me it would better for students to stay put. At their age probably not much worse than bad cold.
90% was a speculative number, they should have used a range, bottom line is that people are getting positive results that don't have enough virus to be sick or spread. We need better information. We're acting as if this is catastrophic when it may just be serious and truly risky only for certain segments. If it's not as serious and risky as we've been lead to believe, than we need to get on with life. I don't know, not an infectious disease expert, just trying to sort through all the noise. I am skeptical.
and have you noticed the Florida and Texas case hysteria has largely dissapeared? Did you hear much about spike in deaths or ICU? They tried the ICU angle but that was debunked. The news about Florida and Texas case spikes have gone quiet because there's no so what.
We don't need better information. We need people to make more effort in disseminating and processing information. People who throw things out like "90%" and then "bottom line." And then say things like "skeptical," when its actually more "dismissive." If fewer people are sick enough to "be sick or spread," then the deaths per infections rate is even worse than thought, for those who actually are "sick." I'd also expect to see a lot more second infections if people weren't sick enough to spread, as its unlikely to be enough to promote an immune response, if there isn't enough viral load to even spread. But we don't see a lot of second infections, we see very few. There are false positives, though. That is true of any test.
I think some people mistake the normalization of a new top 5 killer of Americans with it going away. it hasn't gone anywhere, it is just accepted.
I'm not saying Saturday's lineup is the greatest of all time, but I'll probably watch from 1-midnight anyway. http://www.lsufootball.net/tvschedule.htm
We're also going to need some central time zone teams man up for 9pm local starts to we can have our late games that to go 2am as well.
We have to watch it and we have to be grateful for it. Tenny said you only get so many Fall Saturdays, and then some questionable lunch choice in Wuhan took at least 2 of those away already.
