Westerly

so are we going to hit 300k daily cases after new years or what? we got close, but we couldent muster the effort to take it home. maybe 2021 will be the year of setting records. it actually looks like we have been going slightly down in the last few days. i think people are losing focus of the goal here.

whatever, that is so far in the future it's a waste of brain power even thinking about it. pointless discussion. CNN is just looking for hard drive space to take up.

Trump is such a fucktard. He tries desperately to cheat his way into a win and then when he fails he accuses the honest party of cheating. What a fucking clown.

I have been traveling for work and found that in the past few weeks, most people just dont give a fuck. I got so many weird looks when I was wearing a mask in public and when I requested those preparing my take-out food wear a mask while interacting with me or my food, I basically get told off. I dont get it. I dont understand if people just dont get it, like the science behind wearing a mask is just too complicated for them to understand, or if they just flat-out dont give a fuck. Pretty sure it's both. I had to go to some of the worst-infected states in the nation and when talking to some of the locals they werent even aware that they were living in a state with record-setting infection rates. Like they were amazed when I told them their state has been all over the news for the last two weeks for out of control infection rates. Either way it makes me wonder if we would be better off just opening everything up and saying fuck it, let dumb people face the music and learn the hard way. Let there be 1m or 2m deaths or however many and then all the idiots can learn they were wrong. Of course the downside is all the collateral damage of the innocents who will die in the process and that is too much to grasp as much as I feel like all these anti-masker clowns should learn this lesson the hard way. Either that or we go the other direction and shut everything down, and I mean freaking everything that is not truly non-essential. Then keep it closed until the tune of the music changes and people wise up. Let people lose their jobs, businesses and homes. The price of being an idiot and not taking it seriously. I guess I am tired of interacting with idiots who ask me why I am even wearing a mask... like they are totally unaware that we are in the worst pandemic in the last 100 years.

Looks like a new strain is in the UK and it’s even worse than the ‘OG’ Covid virus. I guess it’s time to start working on the new new vaccine for version 3? Wouldn’t that be great. Two different Covids at once. Awesome.

The CDC has a card for it. My wife already got the vaccine and they stamp a card proving it.

Yea, but the difference is you guys keep talking about IFs and COULDs and MAYs. I am talking about what actually happened. As in what is real life here. What actually happened was nothing happened. There were no major safety consernes revealed during the test so while something COULD have happened, nothing actually did happen which is what matters. So yea, lots of things COULD have happened. None of it actually did happen. Hypothetical dont matter, results do. Go tell the families of the 250k dead that 'good thing we waited to look for a reaction that never actually happened'. In the end, if the goal is to identify safety concerns and no concerns were identified, then it was ultimately a waste of time. Nothing useful came from it, but a lot of bad sure did.

the main bullshit about the vaccine is that we waited so long to approve it. i said it two months ago and I was exactly right. I said that what will likely happen is the vaccine will be determined to be safe and effective and all the testing would have been for nothing. well that is EXACTLY what happened. the report came out today. it's highly effective, less than 0.5% of people have a severe reaction and not ONE single person died from the vaccine. so imagine if we would have just skipped the testing and just started production right away. we would have already made tens of millions of doeses by now and who knows how many tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. but what do i know. i guess I was right by sole chance, right?

This is the only thing I agree with the OP on. College is an investment. Some colleges are expensive and offer a poor value for your money. Others are much cheaper and offer good programs for reasonable costs. Its up to the student to figure out the best deal for his money. If someone decides to spend $100k on a B.A. in liberal arts which gets them a job flipping burgers, that's on them. The only exception should be if someone goes to college and then they are no longer qualified for their job due to no fault of their own. E.g. they are a pilot, but then find out they have a medical condition that doesent let them fly. Maybe if people actually had to pay cash for their college classes, they would be more smart with what degree they get and where they go to school. It's easy to spend money when it's not you money that you're spending.

Well there are about 1.5 million people so far who wont ever get the chance to go to another party, so there is that. I guess something about listen to the advice of the medical doctors and scientist dosent really ring home to some people.

People will still get together the same as they did on Thanksgiving and Halloween. People are tired of dealing with the pandemic and feel the risk is worth the reward at this point. For some people their choice will be correct, but for others it will result in them greatly regretting their choices. To me, this shit is going to be done and over with soon enough. The vaccine is coming soon and once I get it it's a done deal for me. So there is no reason to risk getting sick now when I can see the finish line. But most people dont think that way, either because they dont want the vaccine or just dont care in the first place. This story has repeated itself over and over. Experts warn the public to take this shit seriously, they dont, then they end up in the ER wishing they had. It is the same thing over and over. It wont ever change. Sometimes the hard way is the only way.

225,000 cases a day. It was looking like it might level off, but nope. I bet 300k by X mass. I wonder if we will get to 400? I have a feeling that by the time that Covid is no longer a thing and the pandemic is done and over, a whole lot of people are going to regret some of the choices they made. Mark my words, if you want an in demand job, choose anything in medicine. I think all medical professionals will be in demand for the coming years.

You realize that 80% of the diseases on the CDC's list are completely manageable in many cases and have little or no effect on the normal lifespan of the individual, right? For example, asthma is not usually considered life threatening and would have zero effect on how long someone lives when properly managed. So to argue that someone with asthma or high blood pressure was going to die anyway, would be highly naïve. Many of those diseases are not life threatening when correctly managed. I would also remind you that more than 50% of the population has at least one of the diseases on those list. In America alone, 1 in 3 are obese and almost 1 in 2 have at least prehypertension.

Humans in general do a really bad job of forgoing short term benefits for long term gain, even in cases where the short term benefit to risk ratio is not appropriate. It's just complacency plain and simple. People think, oh Covid may be bad, but that would never happen to ME, so I am okay and I can travel and ignore all the rules. They might be right, but there are also millions who learned the hard way that they were quite wrong. There are also still a lot of people who think it's just overblown BS. One of my coworkers is super adamate that Covid is just a fake flu that is rarely harmful, even though this person is clearly in the high risk group. Unfortunately, sometimes the hard way is the only way.

You are right, it does infect fewer people which is good. This Christmas is going to be bad. I wonder if we will top 300k a day.

So how many cases are we going to get to after Christmas and New Years? I bet that will be the spike of this entire pandemic from start to end.

Sure, but that is besides the point. I dont think anyone is advocating that everyone goes out and gets infected. That's retarded beyond belief, although if the guestamate that 100m people are already infected is accurate, then by the time the vaccine is out it wont really serve much purpose as everyone will already have been infected anyway by that point. Personally, I dont believe that figure is accurate. I think most people that get Covid do in fact have symptoms and the number of those who were completely asymptomatic is less than the number of those who were symptomatic. But that's just my guess. If you look at other SARS viruses, most of those who got it were highly symptomatic and the outcomes of other SARS is pretty similar to that of Covid. My original argument was that I dont fully buy into the previous claim that many people who are completely asymptomatic are now suddenly having serious organ damage. If they were asymptomatic in the first place, then most likely the virus dident cause much or any damage to their body. I am sure there are exceptions, but I think that if you did get infected and dident have any symptoms, then most likely you can correctly assume you escaped harm. However, for those who were symptomatic, that is an entirely different story. I can completely believe that those who suffered severe symptoms are now suffering from long term damage. That we already know is true and somewhat common.

Yes, but the big question here is how many? Are we talking 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 2? Big difference.

Well we will see. There is still too much unknown. We dont even know how many people are asymptomatic. That figure has changed from 90% to 10% and everywhere in between at some point in the last six months. Safe to say no one really knows. Some people develop long-term complications, that is true for sure. But how many, what percentage, and what percentage develop permanent long term complications, that's hugely unknown.

Sure but correlation doesn't equal causation. now, if you end up in the ER with covid, have breathing issues in the ER, then have chronic lung issues after--the cause is pretty obvious. But for a lung issue that suddenly just appears randomly (as most medical conditions do), with no symptomatic condition of COVID and nothing other than a positive antibody test, I dont think you can say COVID was the cause just because you happened to have a positive antibody test (which may not even be accurate).

But how often are asymptomatic and lightly symptomatic people actually experiencing organ failure? Like what is the percentage of known asymptomatic cases to known long term organ failure? I suspect this is not that common. If the virus only has a fatality rate of 0.02% among those under 40, including ALL known preexisting conditions, it seems unlikely it would cause a lot of damage to that age group as well unless they spent a lot of time in the hospital. In any case, if what you say is true and 25% of the population did in fact get infected, then it's very reasonable to believe that we will be at 50% by the end of the year or early spring and 75% by the time everyone is fully vaccinated. So at that point there is nothing you can really do about it regardless. Your example of HIV and Herpies don't apply because those are active infections that never go away. Once you have HIV or herpies, you have it for life because the immune system is not capable of killing those viruses. The immune system is fully capable of killing COVID and once it does so you are no longer infected. You talk about people having health issues after infection, but what is the percentage of people who DO NOT have any health issues after or during infection? I bet that number is much, much higher than those who do.

Yea, it's also 'possible' that COVID is an alien weapon sent from another galaxy to soften humans up prior to the arrival of the mother ship. I wont exactly hold my breath on that one. The FACTS at the moment is that there are 13m infections known. Some amount higher than that exists, but to what degree is highly debatable and widely unknown. As I said, the CDC claims that 4 in 5 infections produce symptoms so if you believe the CDC then the whole 25% figure is way off. At best, no one knows how many infections there actually are so it's kind of pointless discussion. It's all just guesswork.

Where is the evidence that asymptomatic people are suffering long term organ damage? How would you even know the damage is caused by the virus if they were never tested and never sick? There is no way to medically link those together. I find it hard to believe that an infection can be minor enough to not cause any symptoms but somehow cause end state organ damage. There are no other viruses capable of that and coronaviruses are quite common--having infected many humans overtime. It's just that this one is NEW, but it's not largely different than the other ones that have existed. At some point all the other ones were new too. As far as causing damage to people who got very sick, that's easily believable. ANY infection of any virus can cause organ damage if you spend several days in the ICU. That's not new news at all. Also the whole 25% of the USA had it is highly suspect. That is a guess at best. There is no way to know that and the estimates are HIGHLY conflicting. For example, one source says that for every 1 confirmed infection there are 10 unconfirmed ones. However, not that long ago the CDC said that only about 25 - 40% of infections are asymptomatic and they have further revised that number to now only about 20% of infections are asymptomatic. All we know is confirmed infections.

so what are we going to get up to after the holiday weekend? 200k by next week?

You are right on most of those points, but there is a difference between loosing your life due to your own choices and loosing it because it was taken from you. Skydiving kills people. More than a thousand people have died skydiving since the inception of the sport, but the government doesent ban it. Accidental deaths in the case of someone being unsafe is not really any different than a skydiver dying because he was being unsafe. Sad, but entirely the fault of the person who died. Suicide is an issue, but again not having access to firearms does not eliminate suicide. If you look at the top 10 countries for suicide rates (USA is down in the 30s), most of them dont allow any firearms. As far as the argument for preventing crime, the only people who follow laws are law abiding citizens. I hope I dont have to explain how making it illegal to carry a weapon does not in any capacity deter criminals from carrying them. I dont think just anyone should be able to walk into a gun show and buy a gun no questions asked, but for competent people who are properly trained, responsible and of sound mind and judgement, they absolutely should be able to own a gun, including all the 'scary' looking rifles.