GaryPinC

And here's the total cases numbers (same graphical scales) : Note NY's impressive baselines compared to Florida's. Not sure this justifies the excessive lockdowns in NY though

Keep in mind the scales are different, NY is 3 fold higher making FLA's data appear 3 times relatively larger. But note NY's impressive lack of deaths/hospitalizations with their lockdown summer. Also note FLA's 2020 winter surge was pretty much equal to NY when it should have been smaller because it was technically "off season".

If you want to claim any intellectual honesty, why don't you do apples to apples and compare the death rates of New York to Florida and to NY surge in 2020? Because that makes a strong pro-vaccination case while at the same time contrasting DeSantis's hands-off approach with New York's strict lockdown measures. Biased much?

You're absolutely right about Russiagate, I hope they nail involved political operatives to the wall just as I hope they do the same for the "stop the steal". I guess I differ from you in that I have no problem looking at the two as separate events, but respect the validity of your point. I believe the "stop the steal" ploy would have been employed regardless, Russiagate just made it more believable (and fervently so) to more people.

Last year was such an insane year. It was absolutely appalling in places like Portland the abandonment of law, order, and justice for those protests and the lack of outrage and action by democratic leadership. It was equally appalling Trump's behavior post election, trying to undermine the American process and his role in fomenting and not preventing January 6. Every Republican should have been outraged. But the most appalling and un-American thing in all this is both side's cowardice in admitting fault while more fervently pointing the finger at the other side's transgressions. This is what our enemies want. I'm glad you can admit you don't support Jan 6. Thank you that's a start. Now, can you admit Trump's cowardice in taking action to prevent that riot is THE SAME EXACT COWARDICE as the Portland mayor and leadership for their riots?

Thanks, I'll definitely circle back on it. It's a prime concern and may dictate a strategic change. You both made good points, as I read it. I just felt the source of your disagreement was referring to different efficacies but not recognizing that.

The problem with the data you cite is it needs to be broken out by month of full inoculation. If the immune system is losing efficacy the true magnitude may be hidden given that the sensitivity may diminish a lot from 6-8 months. It seems to me you are referring to vaccine efficacy while Buffalo Timmy is referring to immune system efficacy. I'm afraid the magnitude of immune efficacy and vaccine efficacy loss won't be well quantified until after the winter post-holiday surge. I'm not going to just trust Pfizer's word on it at this point. Just glad my parents got boosted and I'll get mine soon as late January is my 1 yr anniversary.

APB, I understand what you're saying, and certainly in some cases it may be difficult to tease out which problem is ultimately responsible. But let's be clear, you're comparing chronic diseases to an acute disease. The person's health/medical condition is chronically documented and known at the time of Covid infection. While a strong majority of cases have underlying co-morbidities (I saw 70%), there are a minority that don't and all these people seem to die in a similar fashion. Covid seems to kill primarily through the lungs, pneumonia, cytokine storm regardless if there are any patient co-morbidities. So if ANY Covid+ patient dies acutely, in a consistent manner of Covid, the burden falls on proving they died WITH Covid, ie it was mildly present but not the primary factor behind the death.

Ok, sorry to hear about your troubles and glad you have so much expertise. My son was born 3 times at the Cleveland Clinic and took quite a bit of my time to get corrected. Not the hospital nor insurance realizing billing mistakes were made, me. In my case, we didn't have a name immediately picked out and the nurses entered it in to the system 3 times to make sure it got billed "correctly". One way was "baby boy (my last name)", son's SS number, and my son's eventual full name. It was incredibly frustrating. Potential widespread Covid fraud via the motorcycle accident example and hospitals needing to bill every possible case as Covid are much proclaimed by our resident right-wingers. While I have no doubt there will be some billing issues come to light, it seems there is no widespread fraud. With your considerable expertise and firsthand experience, have you personally seen convincing evidence that this is a big problem? Because the motorcycle problem was a resolved mistake and the financial impetus to skew doesn't seem as great as you made it out to be.

No, it makes sense therapeutics take longer as they have a more complex regulatory pathway. Pharmacokinetics and toxicology play a much larger role.

I completely agree with you, but those are separate issues from attempting to claim there's widespread Covid fraud skewing the numbers. Have you considered that federal/state governments allocated funds to help keep hospitals afloat as they did (tried to do) for businesses? https://www.nashp.org/covid-19-federal-funds-for-hospitals-providers-and-states/ https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/funding-for-health-care-providers-during-the-pandemic-an-update/ So, maybe there wasn't so much impetus to skew numbers. Do you really think government wanted hospitals going under during a lockdown pandemic? Also, "skewing" numbers is healthcare fraud. There are strict rules and penalties and anonymous national reporting phone numbers and websites. Given the amount of layoffs in front-line workers, don't you think if there was massive fraud it would have come out? The majority of health-care workers are driven to help their patients and would have low tolerance for something like this. Have you considered all this or do you simply follow blindly what your "trusted" news sources say?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/uh-oh-the-coronavirus-has-been-spreading-widely-in-us-deer/ar-AAQkvDu?li=BBnb7Kz Oh Crap. Who's going to mask and isolate all these deer as rut gets going? Watch out for those hormone-driven antlers! 😂

I certainly didn't grasp it because most of your post was spent railing on lefties, spewing statistics to try and minimize the extra death burden (while ignoring the overall health burden) this virus has created, then being hypocritically guilty of that which you were railing against, so thanks for clarifying. I have no problem railing on lefties but please stop pretending you are making a cogent argument because you're only fooling yourself. While I certainly agree that some countries and US states were and continue to be over-the-top to varying degrees, protective measures were necessary until medicine and science could catch up to this virus. Your prism is par for the course in Russia. They just had to implement their first lockdown as their mostly nonchalant attitude has created this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/russia/#graph-deaths-daily These are the deaths, mirrored by the case numbers. There are no lags, nor return to a true baseline as of yet. We haven't cancelled every event for 20 months and masking rules have changed. It may be futile to rationally discuss, given your love of hyperbole, but the rules have changed dynamically and will continue to do so as needed.

google search leads to two single cases: Here's your motorcycle crash: https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/man-who-died-in-motorcycle-crash-counted-as-covid-19-death-in-florida-report-07-18-2020 MOST IMPORTANTLY, here's a great article explaining that it was not counted. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify/covid-deaths-car-crash-comorbidities-coronavirus-death-total-counts-john-hopkins-study/65-e3842ed2-f753-4a15-8b97-c2ae75c2b2ce Read it. It's a great article and please stop blowing things out of proportion. Mistakes happen. There are also procedures in place to correct these mistakes.

So, the left looks "through a prism that starts with zero deaths ever happen" while you appear to look through a prism that people die all the time, so what? "The Left is just incapable of reviewing data, particularly cause of death data," "They are likely Old People who are ill and die of....SOMETHING." Way to show those lefties some mind-blowing hypocrisy.

Yeah, again, it's 144 patients in Erie County it could be an anomaly or explanation for the data but it bears investigation. With the holiday season almost upon us, and the corresponding winter surge to follow, it might be good to get boosters to the proper people.

Singapore is around 84% vaccination rate achieved mostly this summer and by early August 2021 with Pfizer and Moderna (ironically not the Chinese vaccines). The vaccines should be working. My point is when do they start to lose efficacy, sometime after 6 months and maybe variable for immunocompromised, aged patients? Point is the CDC/epidemiologists need to be focusing on shoring up specific guidelines for different high risk patients and getting the word out a little more forcefully. People like my parents (around 80) got their second dose in March and are getting a booster tomorrow. How long have they been at increased risk? We need to tease out ineffectiveness for Delta vs need for booster and high hospital numbers (percentages) of fully vaxxed patients across increasing severities should be carefully considered as a top priority.

In an optimum solution, the Dems flush Biden/Harris in 2024 and both parties put up decent candidates for a change. I do favor Nikki Haley and Tulsi Gabbard, though I think Tulsi's out as a serious candidate. I would also support DeSantis after kicking the tires a bit more. Dems are harder for me because of all the socialism. Any Biden replacement will be much farther left, I fear. I voted for Trump the first time and I liked what he was doing with trade, getting us out of wars, negotiating freely and bringing companies back in, etc. It's just his ego and narcissism blew up and he's unelectable in my eyes. No way I could vote for him the second time and all his BS shenanigans post-election proved why. He was and has his own swamp and it's not better than the current one. We need somebody closer to center to stand tall and make the tough decisions like Trump without the rest of his sewer rat personality.

So, a very disturbing tweet for me from Mark Poloncarnz if true: follow up tweet: "Of the 145 COVID-19 patients in the hospital on November 1, 88 patients (61%) were not fully vaccinated, 22 (65%) of 34 ICU patients were not fully vaccinated, and 14 (61%) of 23 patients with an airway assist were not fully vaccinated. 2/2" Very, very, very small numbers but if true nearly 40% of their patients are fully vaccinated and that percent follows through increasing severity! The good news is Pfizer's booster dose restores immunity up to initial levels: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211021005491/en/ To summarize: 10,000 participants age 16 and up, median 11 months past second dose, monitored for covid 7 days post injection with 2.5 month follow up. Looking at the timings, I would estimate the booster study was done in late spring/early June with 2.5 follow-up late summer before concluding study, if so it did hold up against Delta. Bottom line is if you are older or know anyone high risk for Covid on Pfizer vaccine, go get your booster. Protection may be significantly degraded after 6 months. Some evidence Moderna's lasts longer but not sure how much longer. Just a reminder that natural immunity protection will also fade over time, but this may be a CDC fail. 40% is way too large a number, can this be unique to Erie county? If not, the CDC is really dropping the ball IMO.

Yah, and they can pay us fans $12 an hour plus a free game ticket to shovel it off! The next great Bills Mafia videos. Tables were child's play!

For like a game or two at most until the next inevitable injury occurs. No thanks, way too injury prone.

Exactly, thanks for adding this as it's crucial when making conclusions on the bigger picture. And it kills me this attention to these details get whitewashed by the CDC. They should have a higher standard

I don't put a lot of stock in the magnitude of those numbers and this is what drives me crazy about the CDC. The devil is in the details. This study compares myocarditis rates of people, with kids as a subset, who were admitted to hospitals with Covid vs uninfected. Probably in the last 6-12 months. I would think the kids Covid group is a really small number, and what percent of total Covid+ kids are admitted to the hospital? Again, a very small number. When considered against the premise of mass vaccinations of kids, I'm unsure this proves your odds of myocarditis are lower with the vaccines compared to Covid-at-large, and I don't feel it's scientifically honest to draw that conclusion from this study.

Thanks for the kind, thoughts. Yes, it should be just an inconvenience, as were his tight chest and light-headedness his first week back to football. My point is, even in these low risk kids there are risks to contracting Covid and I hope every parent/person carefully weighs the fact that right now your risk of long term effects from Covid far outweigh similar risks from the vaccine. Too often we are fixated by death stats. And I understand reticence about the new vaccine technology, but given the short half life of the vaccine and the epidemiological focus on them, potential toxic effects of any vaccines decades later are highly, highly unlikely and even more unlikely to be traced back to the vaccine. No, the time is now and in the next couple years, but with hundreds of millions of doses administered in over a year, the mRNA's have looked great. With these mRNA vaccines, the biggest risk is inducing an auto-immune disorder, which should be apparent very quickly, as in clinical trials quickly. WRT kids, I'd like to offer my perspective. I really don't see the point of vaccinating kids under 12, given they are less likely to contract it to begin with and be asymptomatic. The newer fact that the vaccinated can still carry and transmit delta means there should be no mandates on all school kids up to twenty-somethings. But I don't fear the vaccines and will talk to my son's doctor about it but hold off for now.

Well, in my research with pigs, myocarditis makes your heart more susceptible to fatal arrhythmias, so it's occurrence shouldn't be minimized. While it occurs because of the vaccines, we don't know what effect Covid would have had on those particular patients. Post- infection, my son had tight chest and light headedness his first week back to football. It may have been respiratory, but the trainer did some pulse ox readings that made me suspect cardiac, so who knows?