6,000,000
You're usually more perceptive than this. There is 100% a national response.
One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.
The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.
That might work if getting the disease once gives you immunity for life or at least until a reliable, effective vaccine is available to the general public. There is already evidence that, due to the virus' ability to mutate, a person can contract the disease again just a few short months after getting it the first time.
joan_crystal said:
That might work if getting the disease once gives you immunity for life or at least until a reliable, effective vaccine is available to the general public. There is already evidence that, due to the virus' ability to mutate, a person can contract the disease again just a few short months after getting it the first time.
What do you tell the people who may live with the effects for their whole lives? Thank you for being part of our herd immunity program?
Our teen was diagnosed with covid-19. Months later, the headaches remain.
What about those who are asymptomatic or seemingly cured while having heart damage? It may not be obvious now because asymptomatic or mild cases are not heart tested. But when they get older and hearts are weakened with age with addition of COVID damage will they be wheezing in nursing homes at age 70?
An intriguing new study from Germany offers a glimpse into how SARS-CoV-2 affects the heart. Researchers studied 100 individuals, with a median age of just 49, who had recovered from Covid-19. Most were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms.
An average of two months after they received the diagnosis, the researchers performed M.R.I. scans of their hearts and made some alarming discoveries: Nearly 80 percent had persistent abnormalities and 60 percent had evidence of myocarditis. The degree of myocarditis was not explained by the severity of the initial illness.
Covid-19 Is Creating a Wave of Heart Disease
We don't enough about COVID-19 to be cavalier about it, to throw ourselves at some "herd immunity movement."
Through a co-worker I know of a young man who developed a viral cardiomyopathy while infected with COVID-19. The virus is gone, the cardiomyopathy remains. No indication if his heart will recover.
An attempt to create herd immunity by allowing the infection to run rampant through our population would a) kill hundreds of thousands more people and b) leave us with millions of survivors with unknown long term health problems.
Hopefully there will be a vaccine developed and hopefully there will be a massive production and distribution effort to get it out to everyone. It will cost billions but the ultimate healthcare bill for this pandemic could run into the trillions without large-scale vaccination efforts.
The medical expert referred to in the quote drummerboy posted is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist. Who frequently appears on Fox News.
Neuroradiologists are not who you call when there's a viral pandemic.
mrincredible said:
The medical expert referred to in the quote drummerboy posted is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist. Who frequently appears on Fox News.
Neuroradiologists are not who you call when there's a viral pandemic.
Well, maybe not who you'd call, but you're not the Prez, who knows best.
Didn’t that Boris guy in England first plan on people getting sick so they could have herd immunity? How’d that work out for them? 
Didn’t Boris land in the ICU about a week after he promoted herd immunity?
some commentary on the herd immunity approach
Donald Trump’s new pandemic adviser is pushing a “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus—a stance has concerned health experts and underscored White House officials’ use of the coronavirus crisis to win political influence. The Washington Post reports that Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who was brought on to advise Trump on COVID-19 earlier this month, is spearheading the herd immunity approach, which involves lifting restrictions on social and business interactions to spread the virus through most of the population, protecting the vulnerable while the healthy build up resistance to the disease.
Atlas “does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology” and was reportedly hired “to argue an alternative point of view” from Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, two central members of the White House coronavirus task force “whom the president has grown increasingly annoyed with for public comments that he believes contradict his own assertions that the threat of the virus is receding.” Atlas apparently caught Trump’s attention as a regular on Fox News, where he has appeared 20 times since the end of April to voice unproven claims and incorrect predictions, many of which support Trump’s insistence on a return to normalcy. Atlas reportedly meets with Trump on a near-daily basis, more than any other health official, and is “advocating policies that appeal to Trump’s desire to move past the pandemic and get the economy going.”
The idea behind herd immunity is that enough people become immune to COVID-19—either through mass vaccination or prior infection—that the disease slows its spread. But scientists are still racing to answer questions that make this strategy untenable, like how long immunity lasts and who is most vulnerable to infection. It’s also unclear how much of the population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity, though the Post notes it may necessitate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Atlas has argued that the herd immunity approach would not lead to more deaths if the vulnerable are protected and said, in a July appearance on Fox News, “When younger, healthier people get the disease, they don’t have a problem with the disease. I’m not sure why that’s so difficult for everyone to acknowledge.” Infectious-disease experts contest both claims: more than 25,000 people younger than 65 have died of the virus in the United States, per the Post, and the high rate of obesity and heart disease in the U.S. means more people overall are vulnerable to it. Not to mention Atlas and Trump are pushing for a return to schools, which could put older people who don’t live in nursing homes at risk.
The administration has already started to embrace policies in line with Atlas’s approach, as evidenced by the abrupt change in CDC testing guidelines last week that undercuts the risk posed by asymptomatic carriers, a decision reportedly made while Fauci was undergoing surgery. Fauci told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta that he “was under general anesthesia in the operating room and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations,” which suggest people without symptoms may not need to be tested, even if they’ve been in close contact with an infected individual. “I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern,” Fauci said. “In fact it is.”
I wonder why it is that the only industrialized nation without universal health care is being hit hardest by Covid-19?
yahooyahoo said:
6 million cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and still adding 10s of thousands cases per day.
What's it going to take for a national response?
That number is staggering.
When reading the following story, why would anyone assume that sitting in a classroom, dining room or living in a dorm is safer?
A passenger on one of the buses had recently dined with friends from Hubei. She apparently did not know she carried the coronavirus. Within days, 24 fellow passengers on her bus were also found to be infected.
It did not matter how far a passenger sat from the infected individual on the bus, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Tuesday. Even passengers in the very last row of the bus, seven rows behind the infected woman, caught the virus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/health/coronavirus-bus-china.html
Maybe they weren't masked. But is it smart to assume that kids sitting in a classroom for hours will keep always keep their masks completely on, covering both mouth and nose?
Floyd said:
When reading the following story, why would anyone assume that sitting in a classroom, dining room or living in a dorm is safer?
A passenger on one of the buses had recently dined with friends from Hubei. She apparently did not know she carried the coronavirus. Within days, 24 fellow passengers on her bus were also found to be infected.
It did not matter how far a passenger sat from the infected individual on the bus, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Tuesday. Even passengers in the very last row of the bus, seven rows behind the infected woman, caught the virus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/health/coronavirus-bus-china.html
Maybe they weren't masked. But is it smart to assume that kids sitting in a classroom for hours will keep always keep their masks completely on, covering both mouth and nose?
It's crazy. Anyone who has ever taught in a classroom would wonder how this will work. I'm imagining high school kids in rest rooms following these mandates. And what about lunch rooms, hallways, staircases, locker rooms?
I'm remembering Art's High and trying to get how dance class, music class, voice class will work.
Morganna said:
Floyd said:
When reading the following story, why would anyone assume that sitting in a classroom, dining room or living in a dorm is safer?
A passenger on one of the buses had recently dined with friends from Hubei. She apparently did not know she carried the coronavirus. Within days, 24 fellow passengers on her bus were also found to be infected.
It did not matter how far a passenger sat from the infected individual on the bus, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Tuesday. Even passengers in the very last row of the bus, seven rows behind the infected woman, caught the virus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/health/coronavirus-bus-china.html
Maybe they weren't masked. But is it smart to assume that kids sitting in a classroom for hours will keep always keep their masks completely on, covering both mouth and nose?
It's crazy. Anyone who has ever taught in a classroom would wonder how this will work. I'm imagining high school kids in rest rooms following these mandates. And what about lunch rooms, hallways, staircases, locker rooms?
I'm remembering Art's High and trying to get how dance class, music class, voice class will work.
It's only a matter of time before we read about outbreaks at local NJ schools that are having in-person instruction.
At least one bit of hopeful news is that US deaths were only 261 yesterday.
Also, the NJ projection graph is looking pretty good:
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/new-jersey?view=total-deaths&tab=trend
I'm cautiously optimistic - as long as people wear their masks! Too bad they didn't mandate masks on a national level, seemed like a no-brainer.
jamie said:
Too bad they didn't mandate masks on a national level, seemed like a no-brainer.
You're a comedian so I have to assume you know what a straight line is.
Floyd said:
When reading the following story, why would anyone assume that sitting in a classroom, dining room or living in a dorm is safer?
A passenger on one of the buses had recently dined with friends from Hubei. She apparently did not know she carried the coronavirus. Within days, 24 fellow passengers on her bus were also found to be infected.
It did not matter how far a passenger sat from the infected individual on the bus, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Tuesday. Even passengers in the very last row of the bus, seven rows behind the infected woman, caught the virus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/health/coronavirus-bus-china.html
Maybe they weren't masked. But is it smart to assume that kids sitting in a classroom for hours will keep always keep their masks completely on, covering both mouth and nose?
Nonsense. How are the first grades gonna pick their noses with a mask on?
Read the New Yorker article. To summarize, it’s highly unlikely that a vaccine will be the “silver bullet”. Even regular flu vaccines are not 100% effective. What I gathered from reading this, is that a combination of therapeutics and a vaccine may be the answer. More like a cocktail than the one shot polio prevention inoculation that most people hope for.
Formerlyjerseyjack said:
Nonsense. How are the first grades gonna pick their noses with a mask on?
Happy days. A tradition that I happily partook of.
Floyd said:
Happy days. A tradition that I happily partook of.
Speak for yourself. I’ve never picked a first grader’s nose.
Just over 3 months after my original post and we are at 13,881,620 cases in the United States.
1 out of 24 Americans have contracted the virus.
yahooyahoo said:
Just over 3 months after my original post and we are at 13,881,620 cases in the United States.
1 out of 24 Americans have contracted the virus.
Yeah, check out the death stats in SD, ND and RI. Greater than 1 in 1,000 state residents dead.
bikefixed said:
yahooyahoo said:
Just over 3 months after my original post and we are at 13,881,620 cases in the United States.
1 out of 24 Americans have contracted the virus.
Yeah, check out the death stats in SD, ND and RI. Greater than 1 in 1,000 state residents dead.
Wow!
Assuming that the vaccines roll out as planned and are effective as reported, we are almost miraculously lucky despite how bad the next few months may be. When this started, if you told an expert that a vaccine would be ready for approval by say April 2021, the expert would say you were delusional given the multi-year process of developing vaccines historically. But imagine if we had to wait until April for the vaccines to start rolling out? The additional suffering and economic devastation we might be dealing with?
My cousin is a doctor in RI. He was hoping they were going to get through it. Now a lot of his co-workers have tested positive and he's working almost everyday.
6 million cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and still adding 10s of thousands cases per day.
What's it going to take for a national response?