Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Multiple reasons for differing countries ranging from strict immigration leading to less people requiring care, healthier populations with less obesity and diabetes (which largely results from personal choices and culture), lower standards of care, all sorts of things.

 

Less people requiring care would increase the costs associated with medical care per person. You would have fewer patients over which to divide fixed costs.

 

OK but Medicare is usually viewed to work fairly well. How it it different than single payer?

Also all of those things you listed already increase health care cost. It's not like single payer would make it worse.

 

This follows the patterns observed in India, Israel and the UK. The spike lasted the longest in India due to low vaccination rates, but once they maximized vaccination in their outbreak hotspots, within weeks the the numbers began dropping. And yes.....I freely am admitting that in Maharashta the timing of the ramp up in vaccination pretty much overlapped with the regional governments distribution of Ivermectin, so no, we will not ever know if there was one, two or even more key factors that let to the delayed, yet rapid declines in new cases. In any case, good things happened for those people.

 

I have a friend who took his son to Colombia (his wife's native country) so they could afford his follow up treatment for the heart problems he has after covid.

 

From what I have read and heard (again, no expert)
(1) immunity from early infections appears to remain robust. As is exepcted, neutralizing antibodies decline over time, but since no one knows what the protective levels need to be, no one knows if there is anything bad about the drop off. Memory B/T cells continue to appear to be strong out to almost 1 year.
(2) Beyond that of infection or vaccine alone. Mounting evidence from multiple papers now showing infection followed by vaccination with mRNA vaccine (even a single dose) is producing an effective adavance evolution of antibodies. In many cases antibodies are sufficiently evolved to neutralize SARS-CoV and well as other Sarbecoviruses in vitro. No indication on if/when this will diminish.
(3) No.
(4) No.

 

Medicare works well, but is skewed in how well because it turns out people are biased in favor of "free" services. Medicare is also limited in coverage. People love "free" services until you tell them how much they're actually paying for it.

Also, yes, they already increase healthcare cost... and single payer would make it worse. The notion that it can't get worse just because it's already a problem is simply incorrect.

 

ah, california, home of do as i say, not as i do. home to hair salon nancy, french restaraunt newsom, maskless mayor of san francisco, emmy's, we dont need no masks here. people rag on desantis for his anti-mask policies, at least he is upfront about it, not a democratic, liberal-socialist hypocrite

 

The real question that I have, is for the people who are fully vaccinated and are going about their daily lives, does the potential constant exposure to infection continue to broaden a vaccinated individuals immunity without them developing symptoms? It is something that Ron Fouchier hinted at on a podcast but did not elaborate on and I have never heard more about. So, if a vaccinated person gets exposed, possibly has a running nose for a few days, never knows he/she is infected before the immune system neutralizes the invaders, does that immune system become more broad based than what is originally provoked solely from the vaccine??

 

Possibly, I think some pediatricians would disagree, and their arguments/evidence deserve to be heard. I can say this, before I'm on board with any mandating of vaccinating children, our pediatrician will need to endorse it, and there should be publicly accessible panel of pediatricians with opposing views (if they still exist) discussing the issue. If there's no uncertainty left after those two things happen, I'm all in.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

but how can that be desantis is dead set on killing people, or so the democrats say.

 

George Holliday, the man who recorded the Rodney King beating in 1991, dies of covid after one month in the hospital.
...

Shot in grainy black and white, the video of King’s beating was played and replayed on hundreds of television stations, seared into the national consciousness as the police officers went on trial and parts of Los Angeles went up in flames. The video was an early example of the power of citizen journalism, in which a bystander with a camcorder or cellphone could document a historic event that might otherwise be overlooked.

It was also one of the first videos to capture an act of police brutality, specifically against an unarmed Black man, and expose it to a wide audience. “The Rodney King video was the Jackie Robinson of police videos,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told the New York Times last year. In June, the Pulitzer Prize board awarded a special citation to another citizen journalist, Darnella Frazier, whose cellphone footage of George Floyd’s murder sparked a national reckoning over racial justice and police misconduct.

Mr. Holliday said he had no grand intentions when he picked up his new Sony Handycam on the early morning of March 3, 1991. He had been awakened around 12:45 a.m. by police sirens and a low-flying helicopter and went out on his apartment balcony in Lake View Terrace to see what was happening, bulky camera in hand. “You know how it is when you have a new piece of technology,” he later told the Times. “You film anything and everything.”

 

That does not make sense as a comparison across countries. Yes, if the # of patients dropped in a given country, technically the full per person goes up due to fixed costs, but that analysis is silly as FC are not really the incremental (relevant) cost. Your example seems to incorrectly assume the fixed costs are the same across countries.

 

He was discussing this from the point of view of immigration causing an increase in per capita health care spending (not total healthcare spending). His theory was essentially because we have immigrants, our costs are higher per person. That is backwards to how the math would likely work. If an area gets an uptick in immigration, certain fixed costs could be divided amongst more people.

 

At the end of August there are posts in here linking sources that said FL would peak mid September after hitting some level of herd immunity. It seems like the predictions were pretty accurate.

 

Oh, then it makes sense. I thought he was comparing immigration across countries.

 

Agree, although I’m sure it’s not deliberate. Fla is currently number 1 in country for deaths per capita over last 14 days. Desantis did a awful job this summer.

 

However 14 day hospitalization trend is down 33%. Deaths are a lagging indicator.

 

Good. Almost ended up tattooed!

 

In that case, I will make one recommendation for someone to follow.

Paul A. Offit, MD, is Director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is not the be-all, end-all of Pediactric Infectious Diseases, but is one of the nation's recognized experts. He is also on the FDA's Committee for Vaccines. He might be one voice in the chorus of opposing opinions that you are looking for.

If you are interested, here is a recent TV interview where he gave his opinion on boosters and then children at the end.