Westerly

The cruise industry is Blockbuster of 2021. No one is going to go aboard a Covid ship. The industry is dead for now. It may make a comeback in the future, but not anytime soon.

12 hours ago, lippy said:

Where did that number come from?

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations

50% of adults have been vaccinated with at least one dose. Kids dont count because they are not eligible to receive the vaccine in the first place.

6 hours ago, gowlerk said:

US vaccination of at least one shot is now nearly 40% of the population. And now the uptake is slowing down and more and more work will need to be done to reach the procrastinators and convince the doubters.

 https://us.cnn.com/2021/04/18/us/covid-vaccine-slowing-us-demand/index.html

The Canadian rate stands at about 22% but with far fewer 2nd shots administered. I was predicting we would be about 30 days behind, but now I'm thinking it may be a little less.

Actually it's 50%. The US has vaccinated half of adults with at least one shot effective today.

Also, Covid deaths are misleading because the number will always be much higher than reported. For example, all the people who now have heart or lung damage. How many people who were in the ICU back in March, April, May have since died from complications arising from the long term damage from Covid? How many more will die next year from diseases that are now progressing thanks to Covid initiating them? Those could all easily count as Covid deaths becasue that was the first underlying cause, but they wont be counted as such as they were not infected at the time of death. But it doesent change the fact that they are now dead solely because they got infected with Covid, just they dident die in weeks, they died in months or a year.

11 hours ago, wmw999 said:

For a short while, and not that many doctors.

The thing is, it doesn't impact westerly in the least, what headoverheel's friend does. Except that it gives them an "opportunity" to make cheap fun of someone. And if it makes h/h's friend more comfortable with managing his health, then who cares? Frankly, the interchange says a lot more about westerly than to h/h's friend.

I soaked my greens for awhile (never did wipe down boxes etc). But then I grew up overseas, and soaking the greens was something we just did anyway, because everyone else did, and people who soaked their greens generally didn't get sick.

Wendy P

I am not making fun of anyone, I am pointing out that popular and factually correct are rarely the same. When the virus first came out there was this rush to buy cleaning supplies because people thought that if they dident clean every surface in their house at all times then they might get sick. The science now says that cleaning surfaces has little to no effect on the likeliness of you getting infected. Avoiding other people can singularly reduce your risk more than all other factors combined.

20 hours ago, headoverheels said:

 sanitizing all groceries

I have to laugh at that one. There seems to be two groups of people. Those who dont even think the virus is real and it's all some made-up bullshit conspiracy by the dems to de-thrown the rightful leader (Trump) and those who think that if they dont drink bleach and sanitize every surface of their house every 30 minutes they will surely die.

Wiping down your groceries accomplishes absolutely nothing. The virus does not spread that way. It spreads by airborne contact from another infected human. The chances of you getting Covid because someone infected touched your pizza box and then you touched it is next to zero. The majority of the cleaning agents people are using to sanitize their surfaces are harmful to humans. Not if you have proper PPE, but if you dont and you're using that stuff every day, it absolutely can harm you. I personally know of a patient who developed serious lung disease from spraying disinfectant at work all day on a daily basis for months.

41 minutes ago, Phil1111 said:

18 March 2021 “We’re moving away from the idea that we’ll hit the herd-immunity threshold and then the pandemic will go away for good,”...He said that reaching a herd-immunity threshold was looking unlikely because of factors such as vaccine hesitancy, the emergence of new variants and the delayed arrival of vaccinations for children.

Herd immunity was always a pipe dream. The problem is the virus is a lot better at doing what it does than we are at doing what we do. It moves fast, it mutates fast, and it greatly outnumbers us. Our vaccine efforts are just flat-out too slow. Regardless if we are doing everything we can or not, it's just not good enough. Really, for us to stop the mutations, we need everyone to be vaccines by the end of this month. It needs to be done NOW, not the end of the summer, not winter, now. That wont happen and so the virus will continue to mutate, we will react, but as with the first attempt our reaction will be too slow and it will mutate again and again. We just arnt fast enough or good enough at what we do to realistically stop it.

On 4/9/2021 at 9:48 AM, billvon said:

Nope.  Doesn't seem to make sense during a pandemic.

Well the pandemic is over, so... Pandemics are temporary. Covid is not going away, not ever. Endemic.

9 hours ago, sfzombie13 said:

it is very true so far.  nobody in the world who has had a vaccine has died after getting covid.  if you find one that does after hundreds of millions of vaccinations, i will call that close enough to zero to be zero.

There is a nurse in my unit who had both Covid vaccinations and got Covid several weeks later. She was sick out of work for four days. She was not hospitalized, but for sure she was not asymptomatic. She said she felt like shit. The vaccine is not an absolute guarantee.

16 hours ago, Phil1111 said:

What are you're thoughts on this one?

Nearly 40% of Marines have declined Covid-19 vaccine

Nearly 40% of US Marines are declining Covid-19 vaccinations, according to data provided to CNN on Friday by the service, the first branch to disclose service-wide numbers on acceptance and declination.

As of Thursday, approximately 75,500 Marines have received vaccines, including fully vaccinated and partially vaccinated service men and women. About 48,000 Marines have chosen not to receive vaccines, for a declination rate of 38.9%.

Doesent matter. Vaccines in the military are mandatory and as soon as that EUA ends and the vaccines get full FDA acceptance, you can bet your ass the DoD will make them mandatory on day one.

On 4/1/2021 at 6:02 PM, billvon said:

 the new spike looks like it is due to people deciding the pandemic is over, and it's time to throw away the mask and give up on distancing.

People decided that on the downslope of the 2nd wave. No one has given a crap about Covid in months. Florida dident give a shit from the beginning, so this is nothing new from them.

The pandemic IS over. Covid is now endemic. There is no point where Covid will ever go away.

1 hour ago, lippy said:

You do realize that COVID happened to come along at a time when people were able capitalize on years and years of research into mRNA vaccines, right?  

Great, so where are all these other lovely vaccines that are piggybacking on mRNA tech for other disease? Oh, that's right, there arnt any. mRNA existed long before Covid ever came around. There was plenty of time to use that tech on other things.

23 hours ago, mistercwood said:

No I understood 100% you were being sarcastic. We both agree there are improvements to be made, but I disagree with your initial implications that these problems aren't being fixed primarily because we haven't thrown enough money at them yet.

And just to be completely clear, I'm putting to one side the specific failings of the US healthcare system when looking at this. Cancer and heart disease are still pretty much the biggest natural killers for developed nations.

Sure, but still COVID vaccines were developed at a world record pace. Name any other vaccination for a disease as deadly or worse than Covid that was developed in three months? There are none. Zero. It's never been done before. It was done now because no one wanted to be that company that did NOT get that world-wide multi-billion dollar contract so all the companies took a 'blank check' approach to solving the problem. Literately everyone was working on a solution all in tandem. If we took that same approach to heart disease and other issues, we'd be way better off solving those problems than we currently are. I mean, even with Covid-19 in existence, heart disease still killed nearly twice as many Americans as Covid did. But how often did heart disease make it in the news? Never. Half the people out there probably dont even know what a cardiologist does. Covid was on the news 24/7 all year though.

17 hours ago, mistercwood said:

No disagreement there. The idea of travelling to the States and getting sick is terrifying for someone from a country where you pay zero out of pocket (or close enough) for general or emergency care.

 

There's plenty of room for improvement, that wasn't my point at all.

On 4/2/2021 at 12:55 PM, mistercwood said:

If there are advancements in treating sub-sets and side diseases, but not in the big ones, the logical conclusion (like Olof said) is that the big ones are by far the hardest problems to solve, not that the will or effort isn't there.

The secondary part of this is also that by definition, the ailments that are the hardest to treat or cure are going to be the most common ones that kill us off.

Don't make me tap the sign again...

Except that some of these supposedly 'unsolvable' issues are easily solved in other countries. Take bone cancer for example. In the USA you get a well, I hope your will is updated message. But in AUS, they can cure you completely of it in some situations. What is worse, many doctors in the USA apparently dont even know about these treatments. How can you be an expert in your field but completely unaware a cure to the very disease you treat exists in other countries? That is laughable at best.

In general, medicine in the USA is shit. My ex had a form of lung disease and she complained to countless doctors about her symptoms. Over 10 if I recall right. No one would take her seriously. She was sure that she had sarcodosis, but not one doctor would listen to her. It always was 'oh, that's probably just anxiety ' or some bullshit like that. Well guess what, she was right. Someone with ZERO medical training who literately just 'Googled it' got it right, but 10 doctors got it wrong. It had to get to the point that she was coughing up blood in person in front of a doctor at the ER before someone decided that maybe she actually is experiencing a problem. She was also cleared by two different pumanologists before the 3rd identified and diagnosed the issue. So yea, we're doing great. No room for improvement for sure.

It would be extremely easy to falsify. There are already copies of that CDC card on the Internet that you can just print out and fill in as you wish.

6 hours ago, nwt said:

I'm both a computer engineer and a medical doctor, and I'm completely lost as to the connection you're trying to draw here.

The connection is I am claiming that other sectors, like IT technology, have drastically outpaced the medical sector. What used to take up an entire building 20 years ago now can be worn on your wrist. However, the leading causes of death in America are largely still unchanged and the prognosis for them is also largely unchanged. Yes, there have been advancements in specific subsets of certain disease, but less so in treating the most common diseases. Take cancer for example. Just as it was 20 years ago, cancer is still most often found in the latest stages, distant-end, because of the lack of symptoms in earlier stages. Someone who develops stage 3 or 4 cancer of any form is largely still not much better off now than they were 20 years ago. Yet, that's the 2nd leading cause of death and still we've made little to no progress in improving late-stage cancer. But yet we can build a supercomputer that can fit in my pocket, we can put a man on the moon and we can develop a rover that can take and transmit 4k video from another planet.

14 hours ago, nwt said:

 

However, it's because curing disease is hard, not because people and companies don't want to invent cures. When people and companies are able to invent cures, they do. We have them for lots of things.

 

Contrast. Almost as if it were a different disease and was being tackled with more primitive technology than we have today. Different situation, right?

And yet we were able to build a machine that put a man on the moon back at a time when seat belts in cars were considered optional upgrades. Just in the last two decades we built cell phones with CPUs in them that are more powerful than computers that took up an entire building 15 years ago. Yet when we look at the leading causes of death like heart disease and COPD, we haven't made it that far. Your chances are not much better today then they were 15 years ago. You might get six months, a year more now than two decades ago. I wouldent exactly call that a marvel of modern medicine. Yes there are some breaking edge cures out there that can solve some of these problems for good. But 99.9% of people don't have access to them, so they are largely pointless. Kind of like when Trump went all high and mighty about how great the treatment for COVID is when he got it while simultaneously ignoring the fact that his dedicated team of cardiologist, pumanologists and ER doctors standing by his bedside 24/7 represent specialists that most people have to wait months for just to get a single appointment.

On 3/29/2021 at 6:01 AM, nwt said:

What makes you think we aren't?

 

Well how long do you have? I could write a book. For one, I work in a hospital so I see what these 'treatments' look like on a daily basis. Actually, I work in the cardiopulmonary lab and so I especially get a first hand look. In short, the medical industry is a money making industry like any others and they dont make money on cures, they make it on treatments. They are incentivized to keep people sick to keep things expensive. Anyone who thinks that medicine is all unicorns and pixie dust and every doctor does it to help the betterment of his fellow neighbor is naive beyond definition. There are a lot of really shitty doctors, a lot of shitty nurses, a lot of shitty hospitals and an otherwise shitty industry. Many of the treatments that do exist are largely bullshit. They are not real treatments. They are are more like a slight prolonging of your life and maybe slight reduction in symptoms, but many treatments do little or absolutely nothing to actually address the disease.

COVID-19 vaccinations occurred in record speed becasue there was record world-wide pressure and competition for them. Everyone on the planet was in a race for what they knew would be a world-wide market with unlimited purchasing power and an unlimited supply of demand. So companies fronted endless amounts of cash to develop a vaccine and develop it RIGHT NOW. Look at HIV by contrast. It took over 30 years to develop a treatment that is effective against HIV. Yet we developed a vaccine that has a near perfect efficacy rate to a virus we have never seen before in only 100 days.

Mankind has the ability to solve the other problems at stake if we were motivated enough. There are cures to forms of cancer that exist in other countries that dont exist in the USA. I personally saw a patient who had a rare form of bone cancer and all the doctors told him he was going to die and nothing could be done. He found about a treatment option in Australia that completely cured him. But in America, no one even wanted to tell him about it....

The funny thing is that COVID is still not the #1 cause of death. It's not #2 either. Heart disease and cancer still killed more people than COVID did, and they will continue to by a large factor for this year. Heart disease alone kills 650,000 Americans per year. Imagine if we put as much effort into solving those issues as COVID, I feel like we'd have a cure to cancer already.

On 3/25/2021 at 8:01 AM, SkyDekker said:

New study shows that a proper reaction by the US could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-economy-idUSKBN2BH1DK

That's funny that you need a study to know that. You could have just asked literately anyone who's not a total dunce and they would have told you that.

2 hours ago, JerryBaumchen said:

Hi folks,

CDC update:  New US guidance says fully vaccinated people can meet without masks - BBC News

Jerry Baumchen

Just putting out what I said 2 months ago. Big surprise, people who cant get infected are not very likely to infect others. Not exactly NASA-level genius here. At this point the pandemic is over and it's now endemic. Covid is never going way, not ever. We cant keep pretending like we just need to hold out a little longer and it's almost over. Just wear your masks a bit longer, social distance a bit longer, we're almost there! No it's not almost over and it never will be. There is no end to this. We need to start looking at abandoning temporary measures and integrating permanent ones.

15 hours ago, billvon said:

There are wide degrees of sexual harassment that are not criminal but are absolutely not something you want to see at a DZ with students present.  Please don't make me give you examples; I am sure you are smart enough to figure them out on your own.

No, it's not the issue at all.  No one is proposing that.

That's like saying that getting stoned and doing tandems isn't something some arbitrary USPA dude decides is bad based on a few emails.  They should go straight to the police; it's a criminal matter!  Nothing to do with USPA.

USPA has a charter to promote safe skydiving, good instruction and responsible/ethical conduct towards the public.  That includes setting standards for behavior.

Getting stoned and doing tandems is a federal offense under FAA regulations and it is a safety issue. Making a slued comment is not a safety issue. The two are not analogous of each other.

Sexual harassment is a criminal offense that needs to be handled at that level. The USPA is not a law enforcement organization. So what exactly, some girl sees a guy wink at her after checking out her butt, so she calls the USPA to complain about sexual harassment and they revoke his license/ rating? That's the issue here. Criminal matters need to be handled in criminal courts where the legal rights of all parties are fairly executed. Not by some arbitrary dude the the USPA who makes a decision based on a few emails about what someone said happened.

13 hours ago, wmw999 said:

 

It's expensive to work on

It's a hell of a lot cheaper to work on than virtually any serious chronic illness--which is something that most people get eventually. Even the everyday common breast cancer can cost more to treat one patient than it would cost to treat 30 suicidal patients.

More people die from suicide than gun crimes by a factor of three. More people die from suicide than automobile accidents. More people in the military died from suicide than in actual armed conflict. I have know two skydivers who killed themselves. Especially in the USA, there is such an immense stigma against mental health that reaching out for help regarding mental issues will label you as a defect that warrants close monitoring and little trust. We still view mental health as something exclusive to the defective, which is ridiculous as mental health issues are absolutely no different than physical health issues. We view heart disease caused by a lifetime of unhealthy habits as acceptable and normal, but mental challenges as atypical and unusual which is ridiculous as mental health is the one challenge that virtually every human that lives more than a few years will for sure experience.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/28/asia/japan-suicide-women-covid-dst-intl-hnk/index.html