Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Sitting at 547 deaths on the day with 4 and a half hours to go and most states reporting. Looks like that trend might be broken...

 

the dreaded kiss of death, no pun intended.

 

I den't understand what you are saying here. T cells can differentiate into killer cells or memory cells as part of our innate immune system, but the T memory cells don't last that long, maybe a few years at best. Do you mean B memory cells, part of our adaptive immune system, that reside in the bone marrow and can last for decades? These are the cells usually stimulated by vaccines with long-lasting effects. Also, as I understand it, mRNA is a fairly new technique used in the manufacture of specified proteins. It's a specially built strand of genetic material injected into a cell that uses the ribosomes to produce a bunch of proteins. The normal process of making a vaccine is to grow virus cells in a culture and then use parts of the virus cells to inject and cause an immune response. That process can take many months to manufacture, and thus years to test. What mRNA promises is to use a person's nice healthy cells injected with these blueprint strands in order to take over their protein factories to turn out only the proteins needed in a matter of a few weeks, and thus only months to test. That is, the "spike" on the virus that does a "handshake" with other cells will be present, but not the virus itself, causing an "alarm" and an immune response. Still in the experimental stage, what is there about it that does not lead to a full immune response? I would be interested in reading up on that and learning more.

 

The problem with that CDC report is the Flu can lead to pneumonia which kills more kids than anything.

Pneumonia (for Parents) - Nemours KidsHealth

https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-resources/resources/top-pneumonia-facts.pdf

This is the real problem. And we don't shut down schools because of this nor mandate all get a flu shot.

 

Yeah, it just jumped to that. We'll see where we finish, but considering we've been 40,000+ new cases for three weeks straight, it would be pretty encouraging if we stay under 1,000 today.

 

wherever and whenever they can do so safely.

You seem to be missing the most important part of their statement. This is not surprising that you seem to omit or dismiss the details like that. Doing so safely does not mean everybody back to classrooms everywhere. Spacing, alternate days, no busses, Ro under 1 in the school zone are all part of doing it safely. CDC has guideliens but POTUS doesn't like them because not many places will be able to bring them back safely, but you already know that don't you?

 

not under this POTUS, hopefully that changes soon.

 

lot of state and local gubmnt failures too

 

It is very difficult to take some of you guys seriously when you reflexively but Trump!! with every other post. We clearly had no idea what was about to hit us. Fauci, the CDC and yes, other politicians not named Trump. Hell, Cuomo was sending senior Covid patients to nursing homes in April.. how crazy and delusional does that look now? None of them knew nearly enough and so to act like Trump is supposed to figure it out in January is silly. There are plenty of things to criticize Trump about, but this isn't one of them.

 

I hate our President, but you didn't know that did you? Trying to be a wise guy on the internet usually leads to egg on the face. No buses? Yeah, how do you suppose most kids get to school? Walk? Ride a bike? Have mom and dad take them and pick them up every day? That isn't going to work. Alternate days, so who is watching the kids when mom and dad work? Just hope they don't burn the house down? All good theories by you but not ones that work in the real world. We are where we are thru the incompetence of our Govt, the CDC and the WHO. We need to move forward with kids returning to school and if some want to remote learn, than great. Make accommadations as needed.

 

I voted in Texas’ primary.

November 3rd Vote

 

The buck stops at the President's Desk. Unless it's Trump, and he takes no responsibility. Then the frantic search for a scapegoat begins and never ends, because Trump himself said he takes no responsibility. Some leader.

Found this story out of Tucson about a teacher who caught the virus this summer. She's actually an acquaintance of mine. We were in the U of Arizona Marching band together, but only overlapped her senior year and my freshman year. She just turned 51 this summer, and is a runner. Was otherwise in good health.

Put teachers in a room full of virus machines that are kids, and you increasing their exposure to COVID-19. Even with masks and social distancing. Reopening schools in hot zones are putting school staff at a risk they didn't agree to, especially given their pay rates and lack of support otherwise.

If we reopen schools, more and more teachers will quit, and those left to teach the kids will be ill-equipped to handle it. Then what have we really gained?

 

No, Trump has been horrible throughout this ordeal. He has intentionally politicized it with the mask issue and with his calling for people to liberate their states and with rejecting and contradicting his own administration's health experts. His main concern is the economy so he can get reelected. We could not have had a worse leader to get us through this.

 

Covid is vastly more deadly than typical flu is. It's not even close. And just think how much worse it would be if we hadn't shut everything down, with sports arenas still full, schools, bars, conventions, et al, all still going full blast. Not even close.

 

Seems like the people you know working on the vaccine only backs the fact that once your body fights this off, Memory cells will be there to quickly create antibodies again. This is not like HIV where its killing off and hiding from memory cells.

 

Not for children it isn’t. I see you glossed over that little caveat.

 

Not really directing the response as a whole at you. More just frustration about the fact that every other advanced country can figure this out and we can't.

There are right and wrong answers. A 2% decrease in false negative rate wasn't worth months of delays. We were arrogant enough to think we could do better than that and wrong. That arrogance and wrongness has cost somewhere around 100K lives and counting.

The other problem is that nobody in government, other than Fauci, is willing to discuss, in public, the screw-ups and how to make up for them now. We still don't have a quarantine system like you mentioned. You are absolutely right, we should have had it by mid-February at the latest (it isn't even Monday Morning QBing, because the Red Dawn emails were showing people screaming for it then). Why don't we have it in Mid-July?

We have ramped testing somewhat, although doing so later in the curve resulted in an unprecedented need for even more testing. However, we still have no tracking system through random testing, so we are left reading tarot cards about case numbers, positive testing rates, number of tests, etc. We should have had a monitoring/random testing protocol months ago. Nobody has been willing to do the hard work to step out in front of this thing and deal with it as it is at any point in time. They are just trying to get to tomorrow. The problem is that doing that has resulted in an endless set of tomorrows in which we are still infected at an almost unprecedented rate.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but an effective response needed to start at the top with proper infrastructure and an overarching strategy for how to get this under control. The lockdown bought time, but they wasted that time putting out fire after fire that came from the initial poor response and nobody dedicated the time to the next stage and developing an effective workable strategy. We are currently dealing with the failures of late April-early June after dealing with the failures of February and March. Honestly, dealing with the failure of late June and July (and they are piling up right now) is going to be really fun in August and September.

 

Not for children it isn’t. I see you glossed over that little caveat.

 

He also let the states pretty much do whatever they wanted which is the way it should be. If they called him for supplies from federal stock piles or massive ships (that didnt even get used), he sent them. That is what federal government is supposed to do.

CDC, surgeon general and Faucci were so all over the place. All three in my opinion did poorly.

By the way, at least Trump didn't order over 6k sick patients back into nursing homes... you know where it does the most killing.