So… he basically said what a lot of people have been saying all along - masks can serve a purpose, but that purpose isnt universally applicable.
No, masks don’t “also cause problems”. The cdc, scientists, and economists have pretty much universally been saying that universal masks (all the time in public) are the cheapest (least $$, least inconvenience) way to address the situation. Other widespread mitigation options (shutting classes of businesses, reducing in person schooling) that are all that’s available when things are out of control are incredibly costly.
Trump is feeding the anti vaxxers and alt-right (Confederate flag wavers) because they’re key to any chance of him being reelected, just like they were key groups for his election in 2016.
Edit: I clearly did not say those groups made up the bulk of the people who voted for Trump in 2016. I was merely indicating that they did likely make up much more than the narrow margins that determined the election outcome.
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The Democrats are feeding the pro-reparations BLM looters and alt-left (Antifa flag wavers) because they’re key to any chance of Biden being elected.
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Spot on. It is no wonder a large portion of Oregon seeks to detach from that state’s scary northwest region and hook up with the people of Idaho, who remain sane.
By… Refusing to advocate defunding the police?
Are they also attracting wealthy donors by campaigning to raise taxes on them and remove the new loopholes and tax cuts passed for the ultra-rich?
They must also be planning to pardon felons with political connections who were justly tried and convicted by juries, that fits with supposedly being against “law and order”, right?
Courting the racist vote is not a (national) “Republican” thing, it’s Trump campaign specific
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There are extremists on both sides.
I get you’re making a point, But come on thats a pathetic stretch to try and equate the confederate flag with the antifa flag. If the # of flags is representative of the problem then you just poorly lost your argument.
I mean honestly who here’s ever even seen an antifa flag in person?
And is anti-vaxxer really on the same level of logical or moral footing as reparations BLM?
(I’m disregarding the ‘looter’ bit)* You really think those are both equally ‘bad’ or ‘good’ arguments objectively? One group is afraid of needles and doesn’t believe science and the other dislikes seeing black people murdered by the police.
Communism and facism are at opposite ends of the political spectrum and both are bad.
anti-vaxxer is not on the political spectrum. racism shouldn’t be either.
(* yes looting is clearly bad )
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a) I recommend you watch a few episodes of Portlandia. Its a documentary about actual life in Portland that will dispell your notions of it being ‘scary’. Portland is really all quite harmless and really no more ‘scary’ than anywhere.
b) its not as if any other state has had a few dozen crackpots ever made a pointless and obviously futile attempt to cut itself in half before :
Yes exactly. Its a much harder to try and do remote/home learning for elementary school kids vs high school. Lots of reasons there.
I don’t know anyone with kids under the age of 10 who would say their kids “did just fine” in the Spring myself included. (assuming they’re being honest, frank)
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That’s why so many tried to get the infection rate under control and move to a containment phase before we got to the fall (like has been done in many other countries), so that schools could largely go back to normal and we could use surveillance testing to take targeted action during containment and only temporarily close schools when there are small outbreaks detected.
On the other hand, this administration has argued the exact opposite, until now…
Removing various regulations and standards from applying to online schools, especially the subset of those with questionable quality, and diverting public funds to them instead of the physical public schools.
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“It’s past time to ask some of the questions that often get labeled as ‘non-negotiable’ or just don’t get asked at all,” DeVos said during a 2018 speech. Among them: “Why do students have to go to a school building in the first place?”
DeVos also touted “high-quality virtual charter schools” as “valuable” option during her confirmation process. She and her husband previously were investors in K12 Inc., one of the nation’s largest virtual school companies.
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Proven by research actually. In 2012, study was published saying that the left was more prone to not doing vaccination than the right. Book was called Science Left Behind. That same year, a study of data from the CDC showed that States who voted for Obama had higher rates of nonmedical vaccination exemptions. One thing came up is that the highest proportion of anti-vaxxers were from people identifying as very liberal (who objected because they thought vaccines were unsafe) and very conservative (who objected because they thought parents should be offered the choice not to vaccinate).
I imagine that elementary school kids could struggle especially with keeping their attention and learning from online material. Plus they’re not at an age where you can leave them alone at home. So this is definitely a much tougher situation if neither parent has the opportunity to work from home. Fortunately, spread seems slower/less with younger kids.
But from middle school on, I think it gets a bit easier. Even if we weren’t working from home, the kids can stay at home by themselves without getting into too much trouble. Plus, by now, they’re very proficient with use of electronic media since they’ve been doing their homework electronically for a few years (on district provided devices) and all their books are in electronic format already. Yes some classes are just better than others. Music, art, and PE were almost as good as cancelled. But less hands-on classes were pretty much the same, just covered a bit differently. Same with our daughter in college. They sent her home two months early basically and she continued remote classes mostly unaffected except for labs.
So maybe the point is that different school levels may not need to return to in-person teaching as badly as some others. Elementary school definitely would need to. But especially HS and college, a healthy dose of remote access would not hurt the learning too much IMO.
As initially pointed out, it’s not really a republican/democrat issue (at least in recent times). It’s a new “Republican” issue only after/with Trump. Despite once in a while making weak statements in support of vaccines (in the usual “both support and deny both opposite sides of a position”), Trump and his campaign (and appointments) intentionally court the anti-vaxxers.
About twice as many Trump supporters were anti-vaxxers vs Hillary Clinton voters.
That extra 10% of “support” was more than enough to hand him the election. The racists and anti-vaxxers (both together) more than replaced the reasonable Republicans who balked at the conman rather than holding their noses. Trump even lost the Republican Primary in Texas (which was still deep red 4 years ago), after he already basically “had the nomination”… That’s a lot of Republicans intentionally voting against him, and was a pretty tall and unexpected feat to manage that loss.
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Ivermectin is an old anti-parasitic drug that also has some antiviral action against RNA viruses such as covid. A recent FL study showed dramatic improvements in very serious covid patients given this treatment, to the extent of halving their risk of death from 80% to 40%, often with very rapid recoveries in 1-2 days from treatment.
Good news certainly, but perhaps more interesting is a proposed theory about why this works so well, since after all antivirals like remdesivir, HCQ(?), etc are generally thought to work by stopping the virus early on to allow one’s immune system to win the race against the virus before it became too widespread. Why would this work so well on late stage cases and not on sooner ones?
Briefly, the idea is that the blood clotting issues associated with covid (and that lead to lung and kidney damage, strokes, etc) are not, or not entirely, caused by the virus attacking the ACE2 receptors on the blood vessel walls (which could trigger clotting responses due to damaging these cells by the virus and the immune attack on them), but rather from the virus accidentally trigger an inadvertent immune clotting type response in the blood. Covid can also attach to CD147 receptors, while not as well as the more commonly mentioned ACE2 ones, but these CD147s are on many blood type cells and in very high numbers so the virus could bind to these and trigger clots to form once the virus was sufficiently widespread in the blood. Ivermectin binds well to these CD147s, suggesting it could break up clots formed this way and/or prevent this blood clotting mechanism.
This theory among other things is consistent with observed blood group effects on disease severity (type O does much better, less prone to this), as well as with the long delay and then sudden worsening of disease after a week (when viral levels reach a high enough point to trigger this blood response), and of course that those with poor circulation (old, diabetics, high blood pressure, obesity) would be more prone to clot formation and hence the dangerous consequences of that.
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The liability proposal, drafted by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and senior Republican John Cornyn of Texas, promises to shield employers when customers and workers are exposed to coronavirus by moving lawsuits to federal court and limiting legal liability to acts of “gross negligence or intentional misconduct,” according to a draft of the plan obtained by the Associated Press.
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In the courts, gross negligence amounts to “reckless disregard” for the safety of others, which is a high standard to meet. Ordinary negligence, by contrast, would occur if a business owner failed to take reasonable precautions to protect people from the COVID-19 threat. The GOP’s proposed standard would apply retroactively to when the coronavirus began to circulate in December and would extend through at least 2024.
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Kids (10-19) appear to be spreading the virus in households the most
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Do any of you have an opinion on this:
Stories we are seeing point to persons recovered from COVID-19 infection having immunity which lasts not all that long, perhaps a few weeks or a couple of months; certainly not for a year.
Does this mean it never will be possible to have an annual COVID-19 shot, like we have available today an annual flu shot?
Cause if that is so, I’m not getting all the focus and hype these days about a vaccine. Who needs a vaccine that only lasts for a couple months? That’s not gonna work!
If a real vaccine is impossible, focus should be on therapeutics instead.
where are you seeing that ?
I think the jury is still out on whether or not you can get it twicce.
We have been seeing stories of people who are allegedly infected more than once. But in my opinion those stories are rare enought that they could just be errors in testing. I mean whats the error rate in the tests? Whats the human error rate of he people doing the tests?
accuracy of the tests could be less than we think…
John Hopkins report saying might be up to 20% false negatives :
So you ahve the virus then test negative so think its over and then test positive so you think you got it twice. But the negative test might have been a false negative and maybe you never shook the virus and only had it one time for several weeks.
I dunno. Just a theory. we might have no antibodies for this thing but I don’t wanna think about that.
Jury is still out officially.
And its getting worse at the worst time for the worst reasons :
Republicans Nearly Three Times More Likely Than Democrats to Refuse Coronavirus Vaccine: Poll
There are certainly anti-vax crazies on both sides.
And theres absolutely varying levels of anti-vax. Theres the full on 100% crazy people who think vaccines are a plot by Bill Gates and George Soros and full of mercury and RFID tags. Then theres people who aren’t crazy but maybe dont’ think vaccines should be mandated by the government.
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Yeah I was not seeking to be controversial when I wrote that. I mean, it is pretty well known already. Consider:
For some viral diseases such a measles, overcoming the sickness confers immunity for life.
But for RNA-based viruses such as Sars-Cov-2—the scientific name for the bug that causes the COVID-19 disease—it takes about three weeks to build up a sufficient quantity of antibodies, and even then they may provide protection for only a few months, Vivier told AFP.
But there are many other confirming sources. Seek and ye shall find. What I wrote is really not controversial.
I’m just not understanding how it can be that, if actual recovery from the disease does not impart immunity, you can get it done with some sort of shot (i.e., a vaccine).
This makes no sense to me but, be on alert, I’m not a doctor so I simply might not really understand this stuff. That is why I was reaching out for input.
Yeah I’d agree with you here. In person school would be more critical for elementary and much less for high school.
Someone (forget where, was it here?) was saying their schools were doing in person school for elementary and keeping high school kids remote but then using the high school buildinds and classes for elementary such that there would be double the classroom space to facilitate social distancing.
That seems like a good plan to me for the Fall at least.
We had our two boys doing remote school. 1st and 3rd grade. I WFH and my wife is a SAHM
THe remote school did not go well at all. And this is with the luxury of a SAHM. Nobody I know with kids that age thought it went well. Theres a number of reasons why its all worse for the youngest kids.
They don’t know computers/tech as well.
I also don’t think the teachers at the 1-3 level know tech as well as those at the high school level are likely to.
They rely on teacher instruction more
They focus better with peer pressure of a couple dozen kids
The are the least mature, which makes this disruption harder in some ways
Youngest kids aren’t able to socialize outside of school & direct contact as much as older kids (no cell phone for a 7 year old)
One single mom we know had to drag her kid to work with her at a hospital. I can’t imagine how they handled that. There was no childcare and i think he just sat around the waiting room or something all day. We gave him a spare tablet so he could at least play Minecraft.