45catfan

The goalpost moving was directed to the crowd arguing to keep kids home in the fall in the broader context of the COVID-19 dialogue. Notice I didn't say 'you' are moving the goalposts. However it does seem like you are advocating to keep kids home until (if) a vaccine is developed. It has been demonstrated grade school kids fall behind in on-line learning. So by keeping parents home foregoing jobs, or putting them in daycare (how is that more sanitary than school?) in hopes a vaccine is right around the corner seems a bit over the top. The secondary damage done to the body due to COVID-19 is in the exact same demographic that is the most vulnerable, the elderly. I have yet to see where kids are showing signs of permanent damage linked to this disease. Teachers know how to protect themselves, so let's not fain we are protecting teachers here. Positive COVID-19 kids have to stay home until cleared and the schools can't hold it against their attendance (just like jobs can't hold it against employee attendance). What's so hard about that? Kids shed the virus faster than adults, usually 7-10 days. MMR and polio took forever to develop a vaccine. Yes, they are available now, but it's not like they were developed in mere months upon research like we are trying to do with this disease. If we are waiting on a vaccine, the entire 2020-2021 school year (at best) will be lost....on-line, but essentially lost.

Youth hospitalizations are 1% of confirmed cases of >18-years and 4 related deaths according to the stats in that article. So are we keeping kids at home until a vaccine is developed? The goalposts keep moving...first it was deaths, then ICU capacity, then overall hospitalizations and now is squarely on case numbers. Really? I guess people can finally win the case argument because the disease has to basically just go away for that to be a positive indicator.

I agree, but probably for completely different reasons.

The cost of raising kids continues to climb is the main reason. Third world countries still continue to pop out kids like Pez candy because they have limited access to birth control and don't have the means to send their kids to college.

Which is seasonal and not even 100% effective depending on the strain.

This place is so freaking transparent. On one hand, "look at the science!" and then when science is inconvenient, "but the science isn't clear on that!"

60+? Really? I think I may have had maybe two teachers (in grade school) even pushing that demographic. Most were in their 30's and 40's. I had more teachers in their 20's than in their 50's.

Just wow.

Ok.

True, but do we close down schools for the flu? Does the flu not spread from kids to adults? Asymptomatic folks are less likely to be a vector than symptomatic persons. Again, college is a whole different ball of wax, but K-12 should be straight forward.

Should schools be closed this fall to in-person learning? If everyone masks up on on school grounds, what's the problem? Colleges could pose some issues due to on campus living, but what's the issue for K-12?

"For children (0-17 years), cumulative COVID-19 hospitalization rates are much lower than cumulative influenza hospitalization rates at comparable time points* during recent influenza seasons."-CDC

Imagine if higher learning was actually about the student and not sports or lining the PhDs "teaching" students with 6-figure salaries. Just think colleges/universities actually existed stayed financially sound before sports proliferated on campuses 50-years or so ago. Crazy, I know!

Yep, Tuesdays usually are the largest numbers of the week due to processing weekend data. Still looking at ratios for the number of cases compared to deaths and hospitalizations. Obviously it will be somewhat higher, but again, how much so in relation to the increased spike in case numbers?

Americans in general are lazy and want their information spoon fed to them instead of taking some time out of their day to go find information. It doesn't even have to be every day or for some considerable amount of time. However, when it comes to important issues, people regurgitate headlines and sound bites from TV news (usually on in the background) not knowing or bothering to find out if the information they are processing is factual or not. I read articles and sometimes even watch stuff on TV I normally don't agree with so I can cross-reference it for context. I feel really sorry for folks that use social media for their main source of 'enlightenment' about the world. If it's on TV, in a newspaper or even on the internet, it's got to be true, right? I knew we were in trouble years ago when I had room mates that were getting their daily news form the 'Daily Show' on Comedy central. Yes, they thought it was real news just delivered through lens of humor. Sadly, these were graduate students.

Yep and the reason why I made the decision never to get any social media account even from the very beginning. People are increasingly deleting or simply not using their accounts. I have talked to several people lately that has sworn off social media for good. The crap is completely toxic, and like you, saw the writing on the wall long ago. I have zero regrets about abstaining from social media.

Deaths are up slightly over the past 2 weeks, from 9 on a daily average to 11. This coming off record after record of new daily cases for a while. You would think it would be much, much worse. So a string of record number of cases is yielding a slight increase in the daily death rates (lag argument incoming). Hospitalizations are at 1,300 statewide in SC with 2,800 beds still available. That is 3x higher than lock down levels, but we have since hit a case level 10x that of the lock down period.

Not until a universal, reliable test is available. It seems the Spanish study is probably not detecting enough of the prior infected and the Italian one probably had too many false positives. The true answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

"A few weeks ago, the Lombardy region in Italy appeared to be on track to obtain herd immunity. Health officials said this week that of the nearly 10,000 residents in the city of Bergamo who had blood tests done between April 23 and June 3, about 57 percent had antibodies, indicating they had come into contact with the virus." Are antibody tests accurate? This article cited the same antibody findings in Spain, but also noted local antibody findings in Italy. So which one is correct? Are the findings cherry-picked? Are they using the same antibody tests? How accurate are the tests? Is local testing a better indicator than on a national scale?

To achieve heard immunity we need the folks who are responsible for the current spike to continue to get it...the younger segment of the population. As long as the elderly/pre-existing conditions folks wear their masks, social distance and limit their exposure as much as possible, that's what we need to be concerned with. If we limit the exposure of the young and healthy, how do we achieve heard immunity? All we do is drag it out. We have 3 scenarios to get trough this: -The virus burns itself out -We achieve effective heard immunity -A viable vaccine is developed Waiting on a vaccine isn't the answer because it is at best 6 months away. While the virus keeps mutating to an increasing milder form, how long until it's deemed no worse than the common cold? A combination of the first two scenarios is the best answer to get through this. I have no doubt this thing is here to stay, just like influenza A and B, but hopefully a vaccine can help us get past the next outbreak sometime beyond this year. It isn't the answer to get us through the current situation.

You literally have more people getting shot in Chicago, getting struck by lightening in India or drowning in a flood in Japan than dying if 40 years-old or younger in South Carolina from COVID-19.

Why do you even bother anymore? I do commend the effort. "Some dude" posted the video, but complied clips from several medical experts to make the video and it was immediately panned. As you have probably figured out, minds are made up one way or another by now. At this point you could literally spend all day posting link after link and if it does't fit the narrative, it will be somehow discredited. Trenches have been dug, period.

Pence would take over and be put on the ballot in November for the POTUS and a new VP would be added as a running mate. Quick question: can/will the Dims usurp Biden if he were to win, citing his dementia...plugging in an un-elected official of their choice or would the DNC attempt to play puppeteer for four years? Remember (for those old enough) the DNC went bonkers pointing out Reagan was unfit to serve out the remainder of his second term when it was revealed he had early stages of Alzheimers.

Now the truth is coming out...the WHO is taking back that China warned them about the Wuhan virus. In fact it was one of THEIR OFFICIALS (the WHOs) in China became suspicious after reading a headline about a troubling trend in pneumonia cases and decided to inquire about it. So it wasn't the CCP that blew the whistle, it was actually the WHO blew it and initially tried to cover for the CCP. "WHO officials have said for months that CCP officials disclosed the existence of the outbreak to the WHO and repeatedly praised Chinese authorities for their supposed transparency. But a new, official timeline WHO published this week undercuts its earlier claims. The WHO now says that its office in China “picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website” on cases of so-called viral pneumonia in the Chinese city. The office then passed on word of the existence of the virus." -The Epoic Times So the CCP would have kept trying to sweep this under the rug if nobody would have bothered to press them about it.