COVID-19/corona virus mega thread/prepping thread

[fifth_column]

She says' "targeted community by community door to door outreach to get remaining Americans vaccinated". That sounds like, or at the very least be interpreted, as knocking on doors to me.

Sounds like knocking on doors to me too. Personally, I expect whatever "outreach" they make will be just as ineffective and wasteful as all the others. And I don't expect they'll get many answers at those doors unless they're also giving away donuts . . . .

[kgbsquirrel]

It says they can: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/disclosures-public-health-activities/index.html

An obamacare alteration if I recall correctly.

[Jim147]

I wonder what they will think when I come out in shorts sandals and a big 45 gun belt?

[WLJ]

I identify as vaccinated

[RoadKingLarry]

Wouldn't surprise me to see blm/antifa being the chosen community action groups tasked with going door to door. Just make sure you've got an American flag on your house and they'll be too triggered to knock.

[WLJ]

Wouldn't surprise me to see blm/antifa being the chosen community action groups tasked with going door to door. Just make sure you've got an American flag on your house and they'll be too triggered to knock.

Neighbor has a BLM sign and is also flying an American flag

[MechAg94]

I heard a new nickname today that may or may not be new:  Branch Covidians. 

The comparison doesn't really fit especially since it is definitely NOT a cult. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U77MA42hrHA

[fifth_column]

Yup. They're going to hire a bunch of temporary people at $30/hr from whatever special interest/racial/whatever groups they currently favor and those people will be going door to door with "educational materials". Probably not much different than when they do the census. I won't be surprised if half the people they hire just sit at home and collect the paycheck without ever going out knocking on doors.

This is what I expect also. Thing is, there's bound to be a database somewhere of those that have been vaccinated and those that have not. Just another list I guess . . .

[ConstitutionCowboy]

I just posted this on Oklahoma Shooters in the thread about this same topic. It might fit here as well.

Hey, it just dawned on me. This could simply be a way to find and recruit likely candidates willing to go door to door to do more than just promote and/or dispense a vaccine. Brownshirt wannabees for things like identifying and locating those unwilling to "go along." To locate those who might possibly have militant tendencies.

Too much is being done in the name of this overblown pandemic. It worries me. Makes me wary of just about everything coming out of the mouths of some congress critters, the WHO, the administration, suspect health officials and the health department. Business has suffered as a result. Dependence upon government has increased - even shoved down our throats with those "stimulus" payments.

Bread - soon to be followed by circuses. Goons masquerading as clowns. Disarmament. Actual threats from the President of the United States revealing his inner motives that are no longer masked by his failing facade.

Keep your head, stay alert, and keep your powder dry. Never surrender your arms. If you find this advice objectionable or unwarranted, go talk to a Holocaust survivor, or someone who escaped the old Soviet Union, or Castro's Cuba, or anyone lucky enough to survive a gun-free zone siege.

Woody

Woody

[zahc]

And still only about a tenth of the population have contracted it at all.  So a 90% chance to not get it at all compounded with a 99.997% survival rate for my medical categories.  There is no vaccine on the planet that can improve those numbers, the odds of a major negative reaction to the vaccine are substantially greater than the odds of infection and complication from infection.

Do you have a citation for the 1/10? I did some quick calculation a year ago, and figured we were way over 10% even then.

Besides, this is the typical "problem" with vaccines.. they are victims of their own success if they work well. If half the country got covid naturally, and the other half all get vaccinated, the disease will stop spreading and never get any more widespread. Which is what you want, but gives the opportunity for people to say "see, the disease isn't really that bad"... which is true, because of the vaccine. We had up to 50,000 polio cases per year in the 50s and it's effectively eliminated now, so you could point out that polio vaccination is pointless because polio is nearly unheard of... because of polio vaccination.

If we had a time machine and could go back to 2020 and forcibly vaccinate everyone in the US, with a vaccine with a 0.01% death rate (which would be a pretty bad vaccine), then we would cause 40,000 vaccine deaths and almost nobody would have died from COVID. So you could conclude the vaccine was not worth it or even counterproductive because people are dying from the vaccine while practically nobody died from COVID. This analysis ignores the 500,000 people who would have died without the vaccine.

As the covid vaccines achieve saturation in the categories of people vulnerable to COVID, that is old people and obese people, COVID will look more and more like a nothingburger. If we just vaccinated older people and never even tried to vaccinate younger ones it would pretty much wipe out the seriousness of the disease. The virus will continue to circulate and there is no hope of eliminating it, but that's a different goal and one which might not be realistic.

[dogmush]

Do you have a citation for the 1/10? I did some quick calculation a year ago, and figured we were way over 10% even then.

If you go by the Johns Hopkins Dashboard ( https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map ) as of June 20, 2021 there have been 33.7M confirmed cases in the US.  the Census population clock says 332M people.

Close enough to 1 in 10 for government work.

[WLJ]

If you go by the Johns Hopkins Dashboard ( https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map ) as of June 20, 2021 there have been 33.7M confirmed cases in the US.  the Census population clock says 332M people.

Close enough to 1 in 10 for government work.

Where was it I saw someone babbling on about 33 million dead from covid in the US?

[dogmush]

And still only about a tenth of the population have contracted it at all.  So a 90% chance to not get it at all compounded with a 99.997% survival rate for my medical categories.  There is no vaccine on the planet that can improve those numbers, the odds of a major negative reaction to the vaccine are substantially greater than the odds of infection and complication from infection.

You do you, and vaccinate or don't, I don't really care, but I have to point out that the quoted statement isn't strictly true.

The first glance, non age adjusted data on COVID is about a 0.18% chance of getting and dying from COVID.  (10% to get it X the 1.8% fatality rate in the US).  The vaccines have severe (life threating, but not necessarily fatal) side effect rates between 0.0025% and 0.05% depending on which vaccine and which sever side effect.  So at a wide look the vaccines are an order of magnitude safer then just winging it.

Of course that COVID fatality rate goes way up or down based on age and comorbidities, but likewise so does the severe side effect rate, and since there are three available vaccines you can trim that side effect rate down further by picking the one that is safer for your demographic.

In either case, we are talking about pretty dang low risk options for a healthy adult.  Driving, crossing the street, and telling your wife those pants make her butt look big are all riskier than either COVID or the vaccine, and it should 100% be an individuals choice which risk to accept.  Making the argument that the vaccines are the riskier choice is a losing argument however.

[zahc]

If you go by the Johns Hopkins Dashboard ( https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map ) as of June 20, 2021 there have been 33.7M confirmed cases in the US.  the Census population clock says 332M people.

Close enough to 1 in 10 for government work.

Agreed if you only want to count confirmed cases, but CDC itself estimates that official counts are undercounted by a factor of 4.3, which seems reasonable to me, which makes 115 million infections in the US. That means about 43% of everyone in America already got infected, on a raw numbers basis.

Combine the fact that 40% of everyone already got it and are moderately immune (or dead), plus a huge chunk of those who didn't get it got the vaccine and are now strongly immune, and basically the pandemic is over.

Your odds with the vaccine are still better; although your chances of getting the virus are dropping fast, we are not at the point where the disease is eradicated.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html

[dogmush]

Agreed if you only want to count confirmed cases, but CDC itself estimates that official counts are undercounted by a factor of 4.3, which seems reasonable to me, which makes 115 million infections in the US. That means about 43% of everyone in America already got infected, on a raw numbers basis.

Combine the fact that 40% of everyone already got it and are moderately immune (or dead), plus a huge chunk of those who didn't get it got the vaccine and are now strongly immune, and basically the pandemic is over.

You would think that, but the midterm campaigning season is about to start, so.......

[Ben]

Combine the fact that 40% of everyone already got it and are moderately immune (or dead), plus a huge chunk of those who didn't get it got the vaccine and are now strongly immune, and basically the pandemic is over.

I will preface by saying that if I didn't catch the bioweapon, I would have likely gotten the vaccine.

That said, I have been following the research, and the last I saw - the peer reviewed research from Washington Medical University published in Nature last month - indicates that my natural immunity is as strong or stronger than immunity via the vaccine.  I realize that you can find research stating exactly the opposite as well, but my understanding is that in general, the natural immunity of the survivors of any virus is going to be better than immunity via vaccine.

[Perd Hapley]

I can confirm the pandemic is over. The super-paranoid guy at work, who had the disease AND a vaccine AND 3 masks on all day? He only occasionally wears a single mask now.

[JTHunter]

If you want to talk about "skewed numbers", just look at all the fatalities that are listed as caused by covid-19 while the actual cause was an already existing and underlying health condition.  This could be cancer, heart disease, COPD, etc., BUT because they were a SUSPECTED covid-positive (not confirmed!), they were added to the ranks of covid deaths. 

[zahc]

Even if they were proven COVID positive, in many cases they should not have been counted as COVID deaths. The CDC used "special pandemic criteria" to judge them as COVID deaths even though they would not have been counted as e.g. flu deaths if that same person would have died of the flu. There's no doubt about that; you can read about it on the CDC website. So yes I take the number of COVID deaths with a big grain of salt because really it's a matter of definition. You could ask the question of why did we need special pandemic criteria. Could be we needed them to effectively track a global pandemic. Could be that they were needed to make sure the pandemic looked as bad as possible. I don't know the precedent, oh wait COVID is "unprecedented" so we have to use new rules...

[Perd Hapley]

I don't know the precedent, oh wait COVID is "unprecedented" so we have to use new rules...

Yup. You see, there was no sickness, disease, or death, until Trump was elected. He's like the anti-Jesus. The antichrist, if you will.

[MillCreek]

You've heard of long COVID. Get ready for limp COVID:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-06/can-covid-19-cause-lasting-erectile-dysfunction

[WLJ]

You've heard of long COVID. Get ready for limp COVID:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-06/can-covid-19-cause-lasting-erectile-dysfunction

I'm putting my money on this as  the main reason

Depression and anxiety from the pandemic may contribute

[Bogie]

And then there is selection bias...
 
There are a lot of people in some economic/cultural sectors who have tested multiple times. Some of them actually think that getting tested, and wearing gloves and several masks, will protect them. Generally nasty gloves, because they don't change them. Same with the masks.
 
And a large percentage of the people who were tested were actually tested because they were showing symptoms.
 
So the "positive case" number is way the hell skewed... The truly sick people were the folks who were Really Darn Sick, and so forth.
 
In addition, a lot of people caught it, and beat it like a red-headed pretend stepchild (have any of you seen the demographics of pornhub lately - it's truly freaky...), and never showed symptoms, never got tested, and so forth.
 
Here in St. Louis, in the City portion, we're at about 0.167% overall fatalities. And we'll likely remain around that number. Something significantly over 50% were patients in skilled nursing facilities, including hospice facilities, many with Do Not Resuscitate orders on file.
 
To contrast, murders in STL are at about 0.113%.
 
I'm guessing we're going to see a significant trough in geriatric mortality over the next year...

[WLJ]

[K Frame]

I think that picture's from somewhere in the middle east, not the United States....