Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: obvert

quote:

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

Coronavirus “Why are so many healthcare workers dying?”
27 April 2020

https://williambowles.info/2020/04/27/coronavirus-fact-check-4-why-are-so-many-healthcare-workers-dying/



"Media reports paint a picture of healthcare workers being hit very hard by the pandemic, but the statistics suggest otherwise"

"The deaths of doctors, nurses and other medical workers has been a major talking point since the pandemic began.

It started in Italy, where a website was set up listing the deaths of doctors who “died on the frontlines”.

Despite being billed as “frontline” doctors, fifteen of the names are dentists. There are also surgeons, psychiatrists, paediatricians and other specialists who obviously would not have been “on the frontlines” treating Covid19 patients."

"When Swiss Propaganda Research noted that many of them were retired, and that average age was over sixty-nine, the dates of birth were removed."

https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/27/coronavirus-fact-check-4-why-are-so-many-healthcare-workers-dying/

---

From the off-guardian report on NHS workers:

Finally, let’s put these numbers in some context:

The NHS is the biggest single employer in the UK. NHS England, NHS Scotland and NHS Wales employ roughly 1.5 million people (Wikipedia estimates over 1.7 million). That’s over 4% of the 38 million working-age adults, or 2.5% of the entire population of the UK.

As such, you would expect roughly 2.5% of the Covid19 victims to be NHS employees (assuming proportionate distribution).

However, the 106 NHS employees represent only 0.58% of the UK’s 18,200 total Covid19 casualties as of April 22nd.

In summary: In direct contradiction of the media coverage, healthcare workers are NOT being disproportionately affected by Covid19. They are actually substantially under-represented.

---

This is interesting.The fact-checker needs some fact checking though. It omits ages when talking about the NHS who have died. Many have been very young.

This is a study of NHS workers who have died. It omitted those retired or those not working currently for other reasons.

https://www.hsj.co.uk/exclusive-deaths-of-nhs-staff-from-covid-19-analysed/7027471.article

As shown in the chart below, there are unusually high ranges of mortality for middle and younger age groups. Working aged people are obviously more often under 70, so you'd likely see more in this range, but I think this is the surprising part not fleshed out by the off-guardian report. You'd really also have to look at ages of people working in the NHS.

UK mortality figures show 12.7% of deaths are in the under 65 age group. So although it's a low percentage of the total UK figures, it's actually a higher percentage, about 4%, of the total deaths for under 65 age groups.

I'd be very curious to see US stats on this and those form Italy and elsewhere. Does virus load at time of infection play a part? Is it stress and low immune system function that puts more younger people at risk in healthcare? What is it?

As a teacher I could be going back in at some point to a high virus load environment without PPE (if infections break out in the teen population and are largely asymptomatic) and I for one would like to know more.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Macclan5

quote:

ORIGINAL: Alfred

quote:

ORIGINAL: fcooke

whoever came up with the term 'excess deaths' should not ever go into a marketing or communications job. crikey.

Would

"Pearly Gate tickets"

appeal more?

Alfred

LMAO - very amusing.

I have a self developed expression (?? perhaps or found / heard in the past)

"I feel sad that I will not see my family in heaven in the afterlife - but its good to know I will have all my close friends with me none the less "

quote:

ORIGINAL: fcooke

I did fess up they were small - but there is power in numbers! Though they are cruddy swimmers. For some reason every dog that has been part of the family has been 'swimming adverse'. I guess I can't blame them when most have had no snout to speak of......

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Great article and a noble, worthy idea to pursue.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lowpe

Here is another Stat article, a good one for all I think.

Scientists who express different views on Covid-19 should be heard, not demonized

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/27/hear-scientists-different-views-covid-19-dont-attack-them/

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

For those of you interested in a real dive into the nitty-gritty weeds of this thing, I found this blog to be very interesting:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/coronavirus-vaccine-prospects

Warning: Very technical.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lowpe

WATCH: E.R. Doctors Urge A Reopening: Lockdown Creating Public Health Crisis, Doctors ‘Pressured’ To Add COVID To Death Reports, Quarantining Healthy ‘Never Seen’ Before

https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-e-r-doctors-urge-a-reopening-lockdown-creating-public-health-crisis-doctors-pressured-to-add-covid-to-death-reports-quarantining-healthy-never-seen-befor

I found this interesting.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

quote:

ORIGINAL: obvert

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

Dan, you just brought in climate change to make a point that doesn't necessarily need that to make it.

We had a long off forum discussion about climate change and I checked every single claim you made about those scientists being "mistreated." What I found was that many were proven to be incorrect in their findings by later studies, but held onto their thesis long after they were obsolete. Others had funding from think tanks with conservative agendas and produced science that supported the goals of the institutions paying their wages. Some others had claims that showed very interesting findings, but that didn't necessarily debunk prevailing climate change consensus, and yet they and others claimed that they did.

So maybe keep climate change out to his thread please. No need to go there.

quote:

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

Latest Computer Model Predicts Between 0 And 12.6 Billion New COVID-19 Deaths By Summer
April 27th, 2020

https://babylonbee.com/news/latest-cdc-computer-modeling-predicts-between-0-and-126-billion-new-covid-19-deaths-by-summer

"U.S.—After several embarrassing and widely divergent revisions to the coronavirus projections of infection, hospitalization, and death rate used by government officials around the world to justify shutting down the global economy, experts at John Hopkins have now deployed a state-of-the-art super-scientific computer model and have now determined that between 0 and 12.6 billion people will contract the disease and be completely dead by summer."

"“It is absolutely vital that no one shake hands ever again. Though after June 1 it won’t matter as much,” he added."

quote:

For the last few years China and the United States have been at war. A polite war, but a war for world leadership nonetheless. Until recently, the combat was economic. The U.S. imposed tariffs — an 18th-century technology — and the Chinese responded with COVID-19, a 21st-century technology that decimated our economy. They won.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, 40 percent of the U.S. economy will be destroyed — as well as over 200,000 deaths worldwide and 50,000 in the U.S. to date and counting. The latest is that meat-packing plants are closing to avoid spreading the virus, which may lead to food shortages.

There is no question that China did this to us and our economy. Some people still want to believe that it was an accident or an innocent mistake. That is naďve, but more important, irrelevant. The adverse effect on our people and our economy is no less real even if we can’t prove that the Chinese did it on purpose.

It cannot be denied that the Chinese government set loose the COVID-19 coronavirus on the rest of the world and that the U.S. and our NATO allies have been especially hard hit. It appears at present that there will be no adverse consequences for them — with the possible exception of paying $30 million more to support their friends at the World Health Organization to replace the contribution that the U.S. suspended. What a pitiful response!


China has shown the U.S. and the rest of the world who is boss by demonstrating what it can do with a virus. U.S. strategic doctrine calls for the U.S. to retaliate with nuclear weapons if we are subject to an attack by biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction. That strategy — if one can dignify it by using that term — is both impractical and antiquated; it is mired in cold war thinking from the nuclear standoff of the 1960s. Who could possibly imagine that a U.S. nuclear strike on the Chinese people in retaliation for a pandemic their government chose not to prevent is realistic — or desirable? No, the Chinese government has figured out how to attack in a way that gives plausible deniability, and consequently there will be no retaliation.

The lesson from World War II is that the major country that is least damaged by the carnage emerges as the new world leader. In 1945, that was the United States; today it is China. Whether they did this to the rest of the world on purpose or it just happened because they didn’t bother to prevent transmission to the rest of the world is largely irrelevant to assessing the consequences for the new world order. The “Chinese century” has begun.

True, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) have proposed a bill to set loose on China our equivalent of their virus: hordes of American trial lawyers bringing lawsuits in U.S. courts. That won’t pass — and if it did, China wouldn’t accept the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts or pay. What could show more clearly how unprepared we are intellectually to respond to an attack of this type than that the only thing we can think of to do about it is to sue the pandemic’s creators.

This is one of the few major attacks in history that was so brilliantly done — intentionally or not — that no one will counterattack. The only thing that comes to mind is the British breaking the German codes in World War II so that they could redirect the radio targeting beams and German bombers would drop their bombs in empty fields rather than over London.

You have to hand it to them: China out-thought us. They are taking credit worldwide for cures and humanitarian aid for a virus that they set loose on the world.

President Trump says he “is not happy” with China. Whoop-de-doo. They must be shaking in their boots. China is supposed to buy $250 billion of our products, and Trump is pleading with them to live up to their bargain, perhaps because he sees that as crucial to his prospects for reelection.


Imagine that the roles were reversed and we had killed 50,000 Chinese citizens with nuclear or conventional kinetic weapons instead of a naturally occurring virus. What would the response have been?

We are fighting a 21st-century enemy with 20th-century weapons. No wonder that they are winning.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

What I don't know, and what would be interesting to know, is whether the updated projections take into account easing of countermeasures in states that have done so. It would be very hard to get this right. In my part of Georgia, only a handful of restaurants have opened their dining rooms (probably less than 10%). As best I can tell, people are assiduously maintaining the social distancing protocols. So an assumption that countermeasure easing would be quite hard to quantify.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

I found my long-lost twin.

Probably it is not permitted to post American Spectator here...but...

https://spectator.org/world-war-iii-is-almost-over-and-china-is-winning/

quote:

For the last few years China and the United States have been at war. A polite war, but a war for world leadership nonetheless. Until recently, the combat was economic. The U.S. imposed tariffs — an 18th-century technology — and the Chinese responded with COVID-19, a 21st-century technology that decimated our economy. They won.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, 40 percent of the U.S. economy will be destroyed — as well as over 200,000 deaths worldwide and 50,000 in the U.S. to date and counting. The latest is that meat-packing plants are closing to avoid spreading the virus, which may lead to food shortages.

There is no question that China did this to us and our economy. Some people still want to believe that it was an accident or an innocent mistake. That is naďve, but more important, irrelevant. The adverse effect on our people and our economy is no less real even if we can’t prove that the Chinese did it on purpose.

It cannot be denied that the Chinese government set loose the COVID-19 coronavirus on the rest of the world and that the U.S. and our NATO allies have been especially hard hit. It appears at present that there will be no adverse consequences for them — with the possible exception of paying $30 million more to support their friends at the World Health Organization to replace the contribution that the U.S. suspended. What a pitiful response!


China has shown the U.S. and the rest of the world who is boss by demonstrating what it can do with a virus. U.S. strategic doctrine calls for the U.S. to retaliate with nuclear weapons if we are subject to an attack by biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction. That strategy — if one can dignify it by using that term — is both impractical and antiquated; it is mired in cold war thinking from the nuclear standoff of the 1960s. Who could possibly imagine that a U.S. nuclear strike on the Chinese people in retaliation for a pandemic their government chose not to prevent is realistic — or desirable? No, the Chinese government has figured out how to attack in a way that gives plausible deniability, and consequently there will be no retaliation.

The lesson from World War II is that the major country that is least damaged by the carnage emerges as the new world leader. In 1945, that was the United States; today it is China. Whether they did this to the rest of the world on purpose or it just happened because they didn’t bother to prevent transmission to the rest of the world is largely irrelevant to assessing the consequences for the new world order. The “Chinese century” has begun.

True, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) have proposed a bill to set loose on China our equivalent of their virus: hordes of American trial lawyers bringing lawsuits in U.S. courts. That won’t pass — and if it did, China wouldn’t accept the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts or pay. What could show more clearly how unprepared we are intellectually to respond to an attack of this type than that the only thing we can think of to do about it is to sue the pandemic’s creators.

This is one of the few major attacks in history that was so brilliantly done — intentionally or not — that no one will counterattack. The only thing that comes to mind is the British breaking the German codes in World War II so that they could redirect the radio targeting beams and German bombers would drop their bombs in empty fields rather than over London.

You have to hand it to them: China out-thought us. They are taking credit worldwide for cures and humanitarian aid for a virus that they set loose on the world.

President Trump says he “is not happy” with China. Whoop-de-doo. They must be shaking in their boots. China is supposed to buy $250 billion of our products, and Trump is pleading with them to live up to their bargain, perhaps because he sees that as crucial to his prospects for reelection.


Imagine that the roles were reversed and we had killed 50,000 Chinese citizens with nuclear or conventional kinetic weapons instead of a naturally occurring virus. What would the response have been?

We are fighting a 21st-century enemy with 20th-century weapons. No wonder that they are winning.

quote:

ORIGINAL: HansBolter

Guess I need to start wearing my Copper Fit compression gloves to the grocery store now.

Here comes the run on Copper Fit and Tommy Copper compression wear.

Better get your orders in now folks!

Just like all forms of long term storage survivalist food this stuff will be back ordered for a year before we know it.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

I found my long-lost twin.

Probably it is not permitted to post American Spectator here...but...

https://spectator.org/world-war-iii-is-almost-over-and-china-is-winning/

quote:

For the last few years China and the United States have been at war. A polite war, but a war for world leadership nonetheless. Until recently, the combat was economic. The U.S. imposed tariffs — an 18th-century technology — and the Chinese responded with COVID-19, a 21st-century technology that decimated our economy. They won.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, 40 percent of the U.S. economy will be destroyed — as well as over 200,000 deaths worldwide and 50,000 in the U.S. to date and counting. The latest is that meat-packing plants are closing to avoid spreading the virus, which may lead to food shortages.

There is no question that China did this to us and our economy. Some people still want to believe that it was an accident or an innocent mistake. That is naďve, but more important, irrelevant. The adverse effect on our people and our economy is no less real even if we can’t prove that the Chinese did it on purpose.

It cannot be denied that the Chinese government set loose the COVID-19 coronavirus on the rest of the world and that the U.S. and our NATO allies have been especially hard hit. It appears at present that there will be no adverse consequences for them — with the possible exception of paying $30 million more to support their friends at the World Health Organization to replace the contribution that the U.S. suspended. What a pitiful response!


China has shown the U.S. and the rest of the world who is boss by demonstrating what it can do with a virus. U.S. strategic doctrine calls for the U.S. to retaliate with nuclear weapons if we are subject to an attack by biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction. That strategy — if one can dignify it by using that term — is both impractical and antiquated; it is mired in cold war thinking from the nuclear standoff of the 1960s. Who could possibly imagine that a U.S. nuclear strike on the Chinese people in retaliation for a pandemic their government chose not to prevent is realistic — or desirable? No, the Chinese government has figured out how to attack in a way that gives plausible deniability, and consequently there will be no retaliation.

The lesson from World War II is that the major country that is least damaged by the carnage emerges as the new world leader. In 1945, that was the United States; today it is China. Whether they did this to the rest of the world on purpose or it just happened because they didn’t bother to prevent transmission to the rest of the world is largely irrelevant to assessing the consequences for the new world order. The “Chinese century” has begun.

True, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) have proposed a bill to set loose on China our equivalent of their virus: hordes of American trial lawyers bringing lawsuits in U.S. courts. That won’t pass — and if it did, China wouldn’t accept the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts or pay. What could show more clearly how unprepared we are intellectually to respond to an attack of this type than that the only thing we can think of to do about it is to sue the pandemic’s creators.

This is one of the few major attacks in history that was so brilliantly done — intentionally or not — that no one will counterattack. The only thing that comes to mind is the British breaking the German codes in World War II so that they could redirect the radio targeting beams and German bombers would drop their bombs in empty fields rather than over London.

You have to hand it to them: China out-thought us. They are taking credit worldwide for cures and humanitarian aid for a virus that they set loose on the world.

President Trump says he “is not happy” with China. Whoop-de-doo. They must be shaking in their boots. China is supposed to buy $250 billion of our products, and Trump is pleading with them to live up to their bargain, perhaps because he sees that as crucial to his prospects for reelection.


Imagine that the roles were reversed and we had killed 50,000 Chinese citizens with nuclear or conventional kinetic weapons instead of a naturally occurring virus. What would the response have been?

We are fighting a 21st-century enemy with 20th-century weapons. No wonder that they are winning.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

I get the gist of your thoughts, Erik, though you could express yourself more clearly. What exactly does "to make a point that doesn't necessrarily need that to make it" mean?

I don't think anybody will want to go there but the point is made, with you helping make it. The thoughts of those contrary to yours on the matter aren't "legitimate."

quote:

ORIGINAL: obvert

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

Dan, you just brought in climate change to make a point that doesn't necessarily need that to make it.

We had a long off forum discussion about climate change and I checked every single claim you made about those scientists being "mistreated." What I found was that many were proven to be incorrect in their findings by later studies, but held onto their thesis long after they were obsolete. Others had funding from think tanks with conservative agendas and produced science that supported the goals of the institutions paying their wages. Some others had claims that showed very interesting findings, but that didn't necessarily debunk prevailing climate change consensus, and yet they and others claimed that they did.

So maybe keep climate change out to his thread please. No need to go there.

quote:

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

Latest Computer Model Predicts Between 0 And 12.6 Billion New COVID-19 Deaths By Summer
April 27th, 2020

https://babylonbee.com/news/latest-cdc-computer-modeling-predicts-between-0-and-126-billion-new-covid-19-deaths-by-summer

"U.S.—After several embarrassing and widely divergent revisions to the coronavirus projections of infection, hospitalization, and death rate used by government officials around the world to justify shutting down the global economy, experts at John Hopkins have now deployed a state-of-the-art super-scientific computer model and have now determined that between 0 and 12.6 billion people will contract the disease and be completely dead by summer."

"“It is absolutely vital that no one shake hands ever again. Though after June 1 it won’t matter as much,” he added."

quote:

ORIGINAL: obvert

Haha! Is that what you think I said? It has nothing to do with legitimacy of anyone's thoughts, just how you expand and spin them into something else entirely.

Please read again. I said no need to bring your personal views on climate change into this discussion as a crutch for another premiss. Not needed.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

I get the gist of your thoughts, Erik, though you could express yourself more clearly. What exactly does "to make a point that doesn't necessrarily need that to make it" mean?

I don't think anybody will want to go there but the point is made, with you helping make it. The thoughts of those contrary to yours on the matter aren't "legitimate."

quote:

ORIGINAL: obvert

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

Dan, you just brought in climate change to make a point that doesn't necessarily need that to make it.

We had a long off forum discussion about climate change and I checked every single claim you made about those scientists being "mistreated." What I found was that many were proven to be incorrect in their findings by later studies, but held onto their thesis long after they were obsolete. Others had funding from think tanks with conservative agendas and produced science that supported the goals of the institutions paying their wages. Some others had claims that showed very interesting findings, but that didn't necessarily debunk prevailing climate change consensus, and yet they and others claimed that they did.

So maybe keep climate change out to his thread please. No need to go there.

quote:

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

quote:

ORIGINAL: HansBolter

Guess I need to start wearing my Copper Fit compression gloves to the grocery store now.

Here comes the run on Copper Fit and Tommy Copper compression wear.

Better get your orders in now folks!

Just like all forms of long term storage survivalist food this stuff will be back ordered for a year before we know it.

Not to mention all the people who are going to swallow copper pennies (which are mostly steel) or make copper powder by grinding pipe and ingest it ...
They should consider that what kills a virus may not be too good for the delicate cells and beneficial bacteria in their gut!