covid-19

[normiss 800]

10 hours ago, yoink said:

What?

 

Did you get any justification?

Nothing other than apologies. Zero explanation.

[turtlespeed 220]

1 hour ago, normiss said:

Nothing other than apologies. Zero explanation.

Trump personally had that test quashed.

[yoink 321]

2 hours ago, normiss said:

Nothing other than apologies. Zero explanation.

Good job keeping those numbers down! 

[kallend 2,027]

6 hours ago, turtlespeed said:

Do you think in such black and white terms that there is no consideration for the possibility of both faith and science existing simultaneously?

It's pretty sad when the President of the USA says he's "very impressed" (his words) with a doctor with faith who also turns out to be batshit crazy.  

Watch out for that demon sperm.

[JoeWeber 2,720]

5 hours ago, normiss said:

Nothing other than apologies. Zero explanation.

Don't be an an ingrate and project on people. They said they were sorry. That's millennial for "no explanation required." It was like a month later, right? So obviously you didn't need the test and were just clogging up the system. Probably someone else didn't get their apology for 6 weeks because of you. 

[Westerly 61]

10 hours ago, lippy said:

 

A lot's changed since June and I don't know if the 9-day turnarounds we're hearing about are the extreme examples or how prevalent those wait-times are, but at least in one system at one point fairly recently the turnaround times were fairly quick.

Those wait times are common. They always have been. In my state, the wait time has always been upwards of a week. Everyone I know who got a test had to wait several days for the result, and that's if they could even get a test at all. Often the lines are on the order of hundreds of cars long, people show up at like 5 AM and still they find out there wernt enough tests to go around so they dont get tested. This is common. Delays upward of a week for results are common. Contract tracing doesent exist at all in most areas. It exists on paper, but not to any extent in real life.

Same issue with unemployment. There are people who filed for UI back in March who still havent been paid. UI offices dont return calls or emails--ever--and people can never get in touch with someone, even after several hundred call attempts. Of course the offices are closed too. Some people havent even gotten their $1200 payment yet.

These examples are not the rare one in 500 or something. This is more like it happens to most people-level common. The testing sucks, the delays are so long there is little point in even getting tested in the first place, UI is so hard to file for many people just flat-out cant get it at all. Quarantine laws between states are so loosely enforced that basically everyone ignores them. Contract tracing hardly exists at all in the USA and if it does exist, by the time someone is contacted they would have been infected weeks ago anyway.

All the programs that are supposedly in place to help dont really offer much of any help for most people.

Edited August 2, 2020 by Westerly

[ryoder 1,590]

So who is going to the Sturgis Superspreader Rally?

https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/annual-sturgis-rally-expecting-250k-stirring-virus-concerns/

[gowlerk 2,192]

1 hour ago, ryoder said:

So who is going to the Sturgis Superspreader Rally?

https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/annual-sturgis-rally-expecting-250k-stirring-virus-concerns/

I know some Canadians who are "a little miffed" that they can't.

[yoink 321]

5 hours ago, Westerly said:

Those wait times are common. They always have been. In my state, the wait time has always been upwards of a week. Everyone I know who got a test had to wait several days for the result, and that's if they could even get a test at all. Often the lines are on the order of hundreds of cars long, people show up at like 5 AM and still they find out there wernt enough tests to go around so they dont get tested. This is common. Delays upward of a week for results are common. Contract tracing doesent exist at all in most areas. It exists on paper, but not to any extent in real life.

Same issue with unemployment. There are people who filed for UI back in March who still havent been paid. UI offices dont return calls or emails--ever--and people can never get in touch with someone, even after several hundred call attempts. Of course the offices are closed too. Some people havent even gotten their $1200 payment yet.

These examples are not the rare one in 500 or something. This is more like it happens to most people-level common. The testing sucks, the delays are so long there is little point in even getting tested in the first place, UI is so hard to file for many people just flat-out cant get it at all. Quarantine laws between states are so loosely enforced that basically everyone ignores them. Contract tracing hardly exists at all in the USA and if it does exist, by the time someone is contacted they would have been infected weeks ago anyway.

All the programs that are supposedly in place to help dont really offer much of any help for most people.

Yeah, I'm waiting for unemployment checks back from May. 

You can't get through on the phone lines, literally you're on hold from 9am to 5pm - I've tried it, and the email service says 'We'll get back to your question in 4 - 6 weeks'... 

[headoverheels 333]

6 hours ago, ryoder said:

So who is going to the Sturgis Superspreader Rally?

https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/annual-sturgis-rally-expecting-250k-stirring-virus-concerns/

My wife's best friend and her husband are going.  I haven't talked to them, but I would imagine that others are travelling with them from the Las Vegas area.

[turtlespeed 220]

1 hour ago, RobertMBlevins said:

Faith is believing that the universe and the life within it were created by an omnipresent being. God, if you like. Could be true.

Science tries to find out if it IS true. 

Since neither has proven their case, the jury is still out. 

What I am suggesting is that it may be a mix of both.

[kallend 2,027]

8 hours ago, headoverheels said:

My wife's best friend . . .

Where I grew up, "going to shake hands with the wife's best friend" meant going to take a leak.

[DJL 235]

On 8/1/2020 at 10:54 PM, normiss said:

I was tested at CVS drive through. It took 29 days for results. The result? "Test not performed"

 

That could be because you were group tested but if so then they should've told you your group was negative.  If you're not familiar with that (and for other readers) it can be cost and time prohibitive to test every single sample so it's more effective to test a group of X samples.  The plus side is saving 10's of thousands of sample and man hour units but the downside is that you have to retest the 10-20 people in the positive group.  However, that's supposed to solve the issue of month long delays.

[SkyDekker 1,465]

On 8/1/2020 at 7:51 PM, mistercwood said:

This is the part I'm still having a hard time getting past. How TF is the delay still that long, this far into the pandemic? I understand that with the higher numbers/population that this strains resources, but also wouldn't you by that same token have more infrastructure and staff available?

I had to get tested this week as we've had known rogue cases enter my city (QLD, Aus) after we'd effectively hit zero community transmission. Despite the city going from maybe a dozen tests a day to literally thousands overnight, I still got my results back in just over 48 hours.

Didn't the Trump administration spend a fortune on machines that provided a result in 15 minutes?

[murps2000 86]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/

Another good article in the Atlantic today. Yet again, a summary of how the current administration, with some media help, effed it up and effed us all in the US. 

[kallend 2,027]

5 hours ago, murps2000 said:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/

Another good article in the Atlantic today. Yet again, a summary of how the current administration, with some media help, effed it up and effed us all in the US. 

An excellent article.  But it also credits anti-science administrations going back to Reagan, racist attitudes going back to Jim Crow and before,  along with a chronically underfunded public health system.  But primarily an almost unimaginable ineptitude of the current administration.

[kallend 2,027]

We look back at the typhoid and cholera epidemics of the past and realize that the huge number of deaths was primarily due to ignorance.  People simply didn't know how or why the diseases spread.

What will people think in 200 years time looking back at this?  Not professional ignorance, our medical and public health professionals know what's happening and what we should do.  They will see stupidity, stubborn-ness, greed and ineptitude.

[wolfriverjoe 1,523]

3 hours ago, kallend said:

We look back at the typhoid and cholera epidemics of the past and realize that the huge number of deaths was primarily due to ignorance.  People simply didn't know how or why the diseases spread.

What will people think in 200 years time looking back at this?  Not professional ignorance, our medical and public health professionals know what's happening and what we should do.  They will see stupidity, stubborn-ness, greed and ineptitude.

You don't have to look 200 years in the future to see that, Professor.

[Coreece 190]

On 8/3/2020 at 7:11 AM, RobertMBlevins said:

Faith is believing that the universe and the life within it were created by an omnipresent being. God, if you like. Could be true.

Science tries to find out if it IS true. 

Well dark matter is omnipresent, but science couldn't recognize it as an attribute of God even if it was - unless of course they defined Him first -  but how could they do that? Why would they do that?

Also, the official definition of faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

And I think it'd be more accurate to say that "science tries to find out if it is false."

[gowlerk 2,192]

22 minutes ago, Coreece said:

And I think it'd be more accurate to say that "science tries to find out if it is false."

Science can never give us understanding of the nature of our existence. It can only make the questions and the mystery deeper.

[JoeWeber 2,720]

41 minutes ago, RobertMBlevins said:

Science trying to explain the nature of the universe, especially with our present level of technology, is a lot like two ants standing on top of an anthill in the middle of the Sahara Desert...

And trying to figure out what the rest of the world might be like. 

This question also reminds me of an old science fiction story from one of those 50's pulp magazines. I forget the name of the author at the moment, but the story goes like this:

A small farming community in Iowa starts discovering these huge ditches in their fields, that start appearing out of nowhere overnight. No one can explain them. Sometimes they meander in different directions randomly, making no sense and everyone is at a total loss on how they keep showing up. 

Turns out that our whole world is a piece of paper, and someone is writing on it. 

Well, this thread is supposed to be about Covid, so I have a couple of things to offer on that. 

• If Covid doesn't kill us, we may all die of BOREDOM. Living under Covid is about the most boring thing in existence today. 
   
• If I see just ONE MORE television show consisting of a group of people looking at their laptops and flapping their mouths about one thing or another...I swear I will puke.
   
• Let's get an effective vaccine out there ASAP. 

I think you love science fiction too much.

[yoink 321]

43 minutes ago, RobertMBlevins said:

Science trying to explain the nature of the universe, especially with our present level of technology, is a lot like two ants standing on top of an anthill in the middle of the Sahara Desert...

And trying to figure out what the rest of the world might be like. 

You need to read more science. The proper stuff.

[olofscience 480]

3 hours ago, Coreece said:

Well dark matter is omnipresent

It's actually not - dark matter is normally associated with galaxies, but there are a few instances when dark matter has been "observed" to separate from normal matter: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14618-dark-matter-and-normal-matter-divorce-in-cosmic-clash/

"Observed" as in - we can see dark matter distorting the background light (via gravitational lensing) but but we still can't identify what it is exactly. (In addition to other evidence of its existence such as galaxy rotation curves and galactic movement speeds)

[olofscience 480]

However of course dark matter is one thing, covid-19 is completely another thing.

Covid-19 is here and killing people and its existence is still being denied, that video of the 2 guys trying to give out free masks was really facepalm material.

[kallend 2,027]

2 hours ago, olofscience said:

However of course dark matter is one thing, covid-19 is completely another thing.

Covid-19 is here and killing people and its existence is still being denied, that video of the 2 guys trying to give out free masks was really facepalm material.

Wisconsin, last Sunday.
https://www.wisn.com/article/coronavirus-wisconsin-lake-party-draws-criticism-for-lack-of-masks-social-distancing/33502836

Sturgis SD next weekend.