Topic: Coronavirus outbreak

My brother-in-law was hospitalized yesterday (not with COVID symptoms). Really not excited about that.

@Heavyarms55 Well, apparently hospitals in the harder hit areas have been seeing slower growth in hospitalization rates, so hopefully that's a good sign. But it doesn't matter too much, because numbers will still be high for a while, and even if the "curve is flattening," that'll change once restrictions ease up.

Between this gd disease and our unemployment numbers expected to hit greater highs than the Great Depression, life is going to suck until scientists rush through a vaccine. And even then, we'll likely have to deal with some unfortunate side-effects of that down the road, since vaccines usually take way longer to make.

Maybe we'll have a good, old-fashioned world war at the end of this to help carry us out of this economic downturn.

@Ralizah It's true that it seems like a lot of people don't realize that the curve flattening just means the rate of infection has just stopped increasing - that if the curve flattens at 30k a day, that still means 30,000 more people are testing positive each day...

Still though, It's a very big difference between the curve actually flattening, or just hitting the limit for max amount of tests that can be done in a single day.

@NEStalgia That sounds like a US problem to me. I don't have to pay anything if I had to be hospitalised, healthcare will cover that for me.

Anyway, the point of lowering the curve is to prevent the hospitals from getting overcrowded, and resulting in unnecessary deaths on top of it all. That's not really hard to follow now, is it?

I'm in Thailand and it's now law to wear a mask when outside. In my city, they're handing out 100,000 baht ($3000) fines and/or 1 year in jail for anyone caught without one. 2 days ago, 3 locals were jailed for 3 months for being outside after the 10pm curfew. They actually got off lightly as the police chief said violators face up to 2 year in jail and you will be punished without exception.

My city was totally sealed off from the rest of Thailand 2 weeks ago and 2 days ago they started sealing off parts within the city. Army are patrolling the streets at night.

@HobbitGamer Heck even commercial suppliers, even for wholesale has nothing in those categories.

@Ralizah "Second Great Depression", "Worse than the first", "WWIII is essential and inevitable" - Someone's been doing their homework! I remember not long ago when @Heavyarms55 and just about everyone else thought I was crazy for saying such things.

@Heavyarms55 The whole "flat curve thing" is a misnomer to begin with given that the whole population isn't tested (and can't be repeatedly tested forever anyway). It's the wrong metric. We don't know how many infections there are, only how many people seek medical attention and include getting tested. The number I think that matters more is getting a handle on what percentage of infections lead to hospitalization and where the hospitalization numbers are. The infection numbers are guesstimates at best and, as you say, limited by testing, whereas hospitalization numbers are hard data. I mean the real ideal would be that the disease spreads freely but hospitalizes nearly nobody. It doesn't seem fast at mutating though - good for vaccines, bad for it adapting to be less dangerous naturally.

I think they're currently thinking it hospitalizes about 20% (and 1/4 of those needing ICU.) If that's true, lock-down can never end. A fifth of the population needing hospitalization is simply not possible ever, no matter how slow the curve. Though if the lockdown doesn't end at least a fifth to half of the population is dead either way, and once finances get that desperate everyone will ignore lockdown leading to max hospitalization anyway. "Risking death is better than guaranteeing it no matter how many others you kill along the way" will be the standard, and not really incorrect, thinking.

@Octane Yes, it's a US thing. Insurance, even pretty good insurance will cover up to a certain amount of money, after a certain amount of money. You're likely in for $10,000-30,000 debt plus if you're hospitalized for a lengthy time. And that's if you have pretty good insurance. And you already pay thousands of year for that insurance.

If you followed US politics, remember the hoopla a decade ago about the healthcare bill and "affordable coverage"? What that really meant was regulating insurance policies and selling really cheap ones (or free as a welfare program) that cover next to nothing, then mandating that everyone must buy one because previously many people didn't. The policies have loaded caveats like "covers 80% of hospital room fee up to $300,000 year, after the first $30,000. (Covers 100% of prenatal & maternity care!)" If you can't afford to drop $30k, then the insurance is effectively like having none at all, but you spend thousands a year on it - you're paying out of pocket. Unless it all gets classified as ER which is usually more covered....figuring that stuff out is Hobbits game if I'm not mistaken. I had one of those dismal plans. A lot of people do. It's way of saying you "have insurance" but you know you can never ever actually require medical care. But your level of coverage is tied to your job/employer. Buying it yourself you'll spend fortunes and get garbage. Your job determines your healthcare. So when you see "unemployment" numbers here, remember that also means "people that now have no medical coverage" during a plague. Now some of the unemployed still have medical through a 30/70 insurance copay (if their employer is still in business), some are still covered by their employer while on furlough. Many never had it to begin with if gig working or part time. If you're poor enough and thoroughly unemployed there's Medicaid which is a welfare program for the very poor that works a bit more like you're insurance...though you still need a policy from the government, and it's still handled by an insurance company. If you're old, there's Medicare, that's kind of a permanent "we cover a percentage, and you definitely can't afford the rest, but you're old so the debt only partially matters to you." It's really sucky and the wealthier retirees buy "real" insurance to go along with it to make it actually useful.

My current plan is definitely better than the garbagiest ones, but I still can't afford to actually USE it. DON'T GET SICK is the general rule of medical/insurance here. They technically dropped the mandate to buy it at all in the past few years. But it doesn't help the actual insurance.

This is a country where 60% of the population can't afford a $1000 unexpected emergency. Now with 20% unemployment, and medical they don't have or can't afford to use. But overall this country just can't afford a plague that sends people to a hospital. It needs to be made to "go away" because it can't be endured at all. We're not set up for it. That comes with a secondary problem. Money > Health. You can't keep your heath if you have no money. Sheltering only works if you have money to do it while doing it. So the worse employment gets, the more people will just go out and about and not really give a care who else they infect because they're just trying to survive. The more companies will just ignore any lockdowns if doing business is worth more than the fines and the workers are beating down the doors to get in even at sub-China prices. And misery loves company.

@OorWullie I'm curious to see where your numbers end up. That's very harsh, but I can't help but wonder if it's actually very smart. If that level of extreme actually DOES contain the disease in short order, then it means you guys did it right and we've all done it very very wrong.

Ugh, don’t remind me. I’m dealing with CMS and HHS and GA on almost a daily basis now. Thankful for work, but it definitely has increased.

I want these lights on store credit/debit card readers. I pasted the video so it plays at the time stamp where they show the lights.

Just found this randomly while being bored out of my skull during the lockdown. George Carlin did a whole thing on Germs and the media years ago and you know something. He raises a good point! The media really goes out of their way to scare people and well it's definitely working.

I swear to god, there could be literal zombies walking the streets, and people would still be posting ooc Carlin clips telling people not to believe the "media scaremongering."

@Ralizah But he never got sick!*

*other then the heart attacks, arrhythmia, and congestive heart failure.

@Zeldafan79 Normally, I'd definitely enjoy a bit of George Carlin, but in this instance, it's rather misplaced.
I can understand that you're probably going stir crazy by now, and most of us are, what with all the commotion and restrictions and all, but I've now seen you post several comments that seem to lean quite heavily towards not believing that there's actually a real threat or something serious to worry about.

Well, considering the daily rising number of victims, and now even daily mass burials in New York, I'd strongly suggest you'd reconsider your view on things, because this IS bad and we ARE in a crisis, so better get with the plan and see to it that you take all the right precautions, so you won't get sick.

I've had several members in my family who have already gone through the symptoms, and some, among which my own sister and her husband, were also quarantined, but luckily they got better. Still, that definitely wasn't a great experience to have gone through, if you don't know the outcome...

@WoomyNNYes I'll look into it. The best bet are medical PDF of clean technique. People posting these things aren't licensed medical workers. I'd just Google "clean technique" it should show the proper way to do it. Look up clean technique for nurses or doctors and get something off of a medical site, not a mommy blog.

@Zeldafan79 I understand the humor, and I feel the media misinforms people rather than scare them. This pandemic is real and scary, and as a nurse, I can tell you it's real. There's a lot of misinformation and politics involved when there shouldn't be. It may seem boring right now, but lockdowns are for the best.

@ivory_soul Oof, yeah, Google, or somebody, needs an official medical source filter. I wish searching .edu & .gov sites was more effective.

@Zeldafan79 I like George Carlin. He funny.

Yeah, media profits more with emotion. And it's to the general public's detriment. Truly educating, even if interesting, telling the whole story to inform, NEVER sells as well as making everything emotional or scary. Look at Science channel, Learning channel, history channel. I'm totally over politics. So I loath cable news now. There's too much garbage. That's why I love watching NHK World & Create TV. Their business model isn't to scare you 24hrs a day.

I've not paid attention to a lot of the media (because that's a bad idea in general), but I've seen plenty of times where you wouldn't think people couldn't be hyperbolic about something, and yet somehow they're still hyperbolic to the situation. I notice this a lot whenever a video game does something I agree is terrible, people will somehow make it worse than it is.

Point being, as serious as this whole situation is, I'm sure media people (and media executives who don't care about people, let's be honest) are more than willing to find a way to make this situation seem even worse than it is.

@kkslider5552000 Considering the actual numbers so far, I don't think the media has to do all that much to make it seem even worse than it already is in real life...

@Zeldafan79 That one joke about the lethal injection. I've heard it before, and decided to do a Google search. And this random post on a random website brings up a good point:

''There are several reasons for this. Apart from its usefulness as an antiseptic, alcohol causes blood vessels to rise to the surface, making it easier to insert the needle. More important, there’s a chance the prisoner’s sentence might be delayed or commuted at the last minute.

It’s happened before. In October, 1983 condemned murderer James Autry was strapped to a gurney for an hour in a Texas prison with saline solution dripping into his arm. (He was awake the whole time, incidentally.) At about the time he was scheduled to die he was told he’d received a stay of execution. He was returned to his cell and not executed until the following March. Whatever you think of the death penalty, you wouldn’t want the guy to die of sheer carelessness.

Which brings us to what I think is the real reason for swabbing the arm — it allows the executioners to think of themselves as professionals doing a job rather than killers.

Interviews with members of execution teams reveal that they place great stock in following proper procedures.''

don't worry, they can find a way. Now, I don't know if they can escalate the same way some gamers escalated Mass Effect 3's stupid original ending to somehow being literally the worst thing ever. Media would have to predict human extinction to escalate things to that degree.

I mean in America, they can just treat it like they treat socialists making light jabs at media elites on the internet, and the hyperbole should just naturally follow.