Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

DeSantis will show back up after the cases complete the cycle and drop. And take full credit for it.

 

Soccer isn't dangerous, playing with Myocarditis is. I think routine checkups for all players should be common place. It could be from getting covid, getting the vaccine, or a combo of both. But for sure we don't have 4 young soccer players dying on a yearly basis.

 

You think 4 young soccer players dying is normal? So what's changed in the past 2 years? Covid and a vaccine. Both known to cause myocarditis. I don't claim to know the answer but anyone thinking this is coincidence might have ulterior motives.

 

Trying to find the vaccination statuses of each player, and the only thing I could find is an unconfirmed report the Croatian was "fully vaccinated" in June, 2021. Nothing on the others except for conspiracy theory stuff.

Interesting to note, we've had probably a 75% slate or more of sports being played here in the US, and how many players have recently died from heart attacks domestically? We also have all major leagues requiring vaccination, and yet, as far as I can tell, no increase of instances of heart troubles in professional or semi professional athletes in the US.

The cause very well may have been myocarditis. But that doesn't necessarily mean the vaccine is to blame. If the Croat was fully vaccinated in June, he very well might have picked up Omicron as a breakthrough, and that could have been the trigger for the myocarditis. We just don't know.

 

"Likely most of that in rural areas"? That's speculation, of course. However, even if true, even a minority of the 30% can cause massive problems with a virus as contagious as Covid. And there are not just two options here: urban and rural. There is a third option called "suburban". I would bet that the vast majority of the anti-vaxxers are actually suburban people. The percentage of truly rural people in the U.S. has been trending downward for decades. Suburban people are shopping in malls and large (and busy) grocery stores, eating in restaurants, going to church, and interacting with other people on a daily basis. They do not spend all day on the farm, felling trees in the forest, or on the front porch waving at people who ride by on horses. You seem to be about two centuries behind the rest of us--try to catch up.

Less than 5% of Florida has tested positive for Covid in the last two years. Assuming 3% of the cases require hospitalization, then less than 0.15% of the state has been hospitalized. If the average hospital stay is two weeks, then on average, 0.003% of the population is in the hospital with Covid. Covid hits the population in waves, however, so let's assume that the peak hospitalization is five times the average. That means that 0.015% of the population is in the hospital during the worst parts of the pandemic. We do know that most states have trouble finding hospital beds for people when the worst parts of the pandemic hit. And that is a very serious problem, because the death rate for people who need hospital care and cannot get in can be as high as 10%. What I am driving at here with these numbers is that a very small percentage of the population with a dangerous virus can be a disaster for the health care system. So your attempt to dismiss a subset of the population (30%!, which is YUGE as your hero would say) as having no effect on the spread of the virus is completely absurd.

The anti-vaxxers have been instrumental in keeping the virus alive, whether they personally have gotten the virus or not. And they have kept it alive long enough to develop a more deadly variant (Delta) as well as a more contagious variant (Omicron). It's only a matter of time before a more deadly and more contagious variant develops. Willful ignorance is not a valid excuse.

I have trouble having a reasonable conversation with someone who makes a decision based on unnamed fears, and then manufactures an entire line of reasoning solely to justify their decision, modifying science, mathematics, and sociology as needed to get the equations to balance in their minds.

 

Game. Set. Match.

 

Don’t assume please. Multiple confirmed reinfections. Tested. One who was on a respirator last year for over a month who went to the hospital when he had symptoms. One third time. 2 guys from the synagogue I go to who were at the superspreader I went to. Please stop reinventing facts to suit a narrative.

 

Viruses do not know ideology. They do what they do.

 

Look at this article from 2012. About *70* young athletes die suddenly every year from a cardiac event.

Some of those (not all) may be related to myocarditis as well. But 4 individuals doesn’t really establish anything, considering the expectation would be at least ~70 in a normal year. If covid or vaccines were causing an increase, you’d expect to see a statistically significant # of excess deaths beyond the 70.

Can Sudden Cardiac Death of the Young be Prevented? | Blogs | CDC

 

Sure, just a coincidence...

Those are mostly undiagnosed conditions. These weren't. If you can't see that difference than I don't see a reason to continue the conversation.

Man, some people will rationalize anything I guess. Show me any year where 4 Professional athletes died of heart attacks within 6 months of each other. Oh, and within recent vaccine/covid time period. I'm not saying its the vaccine or covid itself. We don't know that yet. But dismissing it as normal is the definition of head in the sand.

 

Those numbers would make a compelling case if they were true, but... Florida hasn’t posted updated numbers since June, and since DeSantis changed the way Florida’s COVID numbers are reported we can’t trust them anyway.

 

One huge flaw in your theory is "anti-vaxxers have been instrumental in keeping the virus alive". That isn't true at all. Until we vaccinate the whole world, which we aren't close to doing, then variants will keep popping up. But we are more concerned about getting our booster/upcoming 4th shot in the US. Means zero when many countries can't get decent supplies of the vaccine to help the elderly. Plus the vaccine only lasts a few months now, so efficacy is waning quickly so it's not just the anti-vaxxers that are at fault. My view is all adults should get the vaccine unless they have had covid already. Then vaccinate the rest of the world first. Only kids with underlying conditions should be vaccinated. IF we really cared about stopping covid, that is the way to do it. But it's obvious that we don't. The rest is just grandstanding.

 

I literally just showed you that *70* athletes die every year. That’s more than 4 every 6 months.

I’m aware of several pro basketball players just off the top of my head, the former FSU basketball player OJO died last year during practice and it was blamed on myocarditis from COVID. I have my suspicions about our own player Keyontae Johnson, although they said his incident was not technically myocarditis.

70 athletes <39 die every year from cardiac event. A lot of those probably are myocarditis related, people who had the flu and whatnot and don’t realize it damaged their heart. Again, you can’t draw conclusions from 4. You need to see the big picture. If in a normal year you expect 70, and you get 70 then it is not “dismissing it as normal”, it *IS* normal. On the other hand, if there were excess deaths above the “expected” (say 100 or 200) there is something that warrants further study. Of course each individual death gets looked at by a medical examiner.

 

Professional athletes is the key. Show me 4 in 6 months. Many young people are UNDIAGNOSED. How hard is this to understand. Most pro athletes have had extensive physicals by their clubs. Not so in sports up until and including college. Since you can't see that just keep your head in the sand. These weren't fat OL or the random kid dying from training in the off season. Amazing I have to explain this.

 

I am not reinventing anything. The data shows reinfection is rare. In fact extremely rare. So an increase of a very rare thing does not mean that it is all of a sudden common.

Now breakthrough cases on the other hand are not rare and have not been rare for some time now.

 

So nice to hear the Florida Surgeon General today speak without inflicting fear but instead on how to move forward. He is absolutely right that we have to stop living and planning life around testing...

DeSantis sees COVID test shortage, testing methods could change | wtsp.com

 

Here's a study looking at 6-year pattern (2007 to 2013), all pre-COVID, tracking the causes of deaths witnessed in 214 active or recently retired football (soccer) players. 39 of the deaths were from suspected cardiac issues. That's 6.5 a year.

Four in month is an anomaly, for sure, but what was the overall 2021 total? Wikipedia lists active football player deaths, and lists 8 deaths from cardiac issues for the year 2021. Over the average, but only 1.5. It's not a big spike at all. The list also includes a 45-year old playing in a friendly (exhibition) and a 54-year old, also playing a friendly. Both were officially retired, and may not have counted in the previous study. And a death from a cardiac event in January, 2021, which eliminates the vaccine as a cause. To be fair, some of the deaths listed just say collapsed, and give no underlying cause.

A clump does not necessarily mean a pattern. If 2021 was on par to be an average year before the last week. We will see what 2022 brings us. We also cannot rule out that COVID, which is also known to cause myocarditis, isn't the reason for some of these cardiac events in professional athletes. Especially with Omicron, which seems to do a good job evading immunity given by both vaccine and previous infection.

 

What you are saying is not what the data is showing at all. Reinfection with Omicron has shown to be 5.4X greater than with Delta.

The new report (Report 49) from the Imperial College London COVID-19 response team estimates that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant is 5.4 times greater than that of the Delta variant. This implies that the protection against reinfection by Omicron afforded by past infection may be as low as 19%.
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Same study also shows Omicron does a good job at evading immunity from 2-doses of the vaccine, and those with a booster have the best chance of not getting infected. Good news is both prior infections and 2-doses of vaccine seem to do a good job at keeping Omicron cases relatively minor.

 

You know, if everyone in the U.S. were vaccinated and there were few or no Covid cases in the country, we could spend some of the billions of dollars we spend on health care and booster shots on developing a system of quarantine hotels to isolate people who come here from other countries for a week or two, and prevent the virus from coming here from other countries. Hotels are a lot cheaper than hospitals. We could also send more vaccines overseas to immunize the rest of the world. Don't you think that would be a faster way to get rid of Covid?

BTW, Taiwan uses quarantine hotels (you need to have a Q-hotel reservation before you buy your plane tickets), as well as social contact tracing and mask wearing, and they have only had 16k people test positive for the virus and less than a thousand die from it. Florida and Taiwan have about the same population, both have large cities (Taiwan has less land), and both are tourist destinations. Taiwan started receiving vaccines several months after Florida did. Florida has had over 4 million test positive, and 62,000 die from Covid. Which one do you think is doing better at fighting Covid?