COVID-19 - On the Ground

[Shirley]

Better lock everyone down again and destroy the economy.

Today In: Allowing your ideology to render you dum.

If that's what you took away from that post:

[JKLivin]

I realize that wasn’t the point of your post. Sometimes being a smartass makes me feel better. Thanks for your indulgence.

[jfish26]

Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamain ... le/2807617

Findings In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

Meaning The differences in excess mortality by political party affiliation after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been a factor in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.

[…]

Conclusions Our study found evidence of higher excess mortality for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters in Florida and Ohio after, but not before, COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults in the US. These differences in excess death rates were larger in counties with lower vaccination rates.

[Sparko]

Was going to post the same thing. But it isn't like Randy is susceptible to facts any more.

[defixione]

Deep State.

[jfish26]

Deep State.

Right.

Can’t wait for the loopy explanations. Maybe the government engineered mutations and variants to target those who did not conform with the government control program?

Because it simply cannot be that the vaccines worked.

[Shirley]

For the second week in a row, the number of people being admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 rose significantly, by more than 12%.

An additional 9,056 people were hospitalized with the virus last week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – that represents a 12.5% jump.

The summer wave started a few weeks ago. Last week, the number of new hospitalizations was up 12.1%.

In about two dozen states, the surge in hospitalizations is far more than 12%. Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming all saw more than a 20% increase in new COVID hospitalizations.

New Hampshire saw the biggest jump in a single week – 96%, or a near doubling in the number of people being admitted.

[...]

[twocoach]

Deep State.

Right.

Can’t wait for the loopy explanations. Maybe the government engineered mutations and variants to target those who did not conform with the government control program?

Because it simply cannot be that the vaccines worked.

And if the government was truly all about controlling us then why has the big push to get updated vaccines and boosters stopped now that the numbers have come down to a more manageable level? It's almost as if it was really just about getting numbers back down to a level where society could continue to function without killing a million people...

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Co-worker. Around 50 years old. Long Covid (or something else but was diagnosed with "Long Covid"). Tomorrow is his last day at work. Retiring. Not happy about it.
Not fat. Not old. Not dead - but in other words, someone randy feel should be "fine" despite contracting Covid. He's not "fine". Far from it.

[jhawks99]

My daughter's next door neighbor is about the same age. Runner, really good shape, worked for hours at a time on his yard. Dang near died. Long covid, now he's lucky if he can make it out to pick up the morning paper.

[twocoach]

My daughter's next door neighbor is about the same age. Runner, really good shape, worked for hours at a time on his yard. Dang near died. Long covid, now he's lucky if he can make it out to pick up the morning paper.

My coworker is experiencing a similar problem. She went from doing sprint triathlons to struggling to breathe if she has to load a larger grocery store trip haul into her car. She has tried a few short bike rides as a means to try to get back to it but just can't trust that she won't get far before she cannot proceed. She was quite the covid denier prior to her struggles but has unfortunately now met reality upside the head.

[pdub]

Mentioned above, uncle in law used to run something like 30-40 miles a week, would participate in halfs and full marathons, big part of his life, now has trouble running, at a slow pace, for long distances.

[Shirley]

While still apt, someone needs to update this to include the Covid pandemic, not to mention the decades of republicans being against abortion until their 16 y/o comes home pregnant, and their attachment to privatizing profits, while socializing losses. (Don't get me started.)

[jfish26]

The Ongoing Mystery of Covid’s Origin

We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here's what we do know — and why it matters.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/maga ... start.html

I hesitate to excerpt - I would encourage everyone to read the article and consider the research and raw data - but:

[What’s] tilting the scales of popular opinion toward lab leak? The answer to that is not embedded deeply in the arcane data I’ve been skimming through here. What’s tilting the scales, it seems to me, is cynicism and narrative appeal.

I asked about this in conversation with David Relman, the biosecurity expert who was also an author of the “Investigate” letter with Jesse Bloom. To some extent, Relman agreed. “When you sow the seeds of distrust, or suggest that you haven’t been transparent with what you knew,” he told me, “you’re setting yourself up for a persistent, insidious, continuing distrust.” That inclines people to assume that “there was something deliberate, or deliberately concealed.”

The seeds of distrust have been growing in America’s civic garden, and the world’s, for a long time. More than 60 percent of Americans, according to polling within the past several years, still decline to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John F. Kennedy. Is that because people have read the Warren Commission report, found it unpersuasive and minutely scrutinized the “magic bullet” theory? No, it’s because they have learned to be distrustful, and because a conspiracy theory of any big event is more dramatic and satisfying than a small, stupid explanation, like the notion that a feckless loser could kill a president by hitting two out of three shots with a $13 rifle.

Most of us don’t reach our opinions by fastidious calibration of empirical evidence. We default to our priors, as Jesse Bloom noted, or we embrace stories that have simple plots, good and bad characters and melodramatic trajectories, and that seem commensurate in scope to the event in question. The process of scientific discovery is a complicated story involving data collection, hypothesis testing, hypothesis falsification, hypothesis revision, further testing and brilliant but fallible humans doing all that work. Scientific malfeasance driven by hubris and leading to runaway trouble, on the other hand, is a much simpler story that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, “Frankenstein.”

Carl Bergstrom is an evolutionary biologist and an author of commentaries on scientific misinformation. He ponders, among other things, how students of science are taught — or at least should be taught — about not just what science says but what science is. I asked Bergstrom about the human affinity for dark theories of big events.

There was something about that in Thomas Hardy, he told me. “It’s in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles,’ where Tess is doomed by hapless chance. It really sucks! To live in a world where we are at the mercy of hapless chance.”

I had never read “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” to my embarrassment, so I stuck with SARS-CoV-2. “This is not a contest now, in the public domain, between bodies of evidence,” I proposed. “This is a contest between stories.”

“Yeah!” Bergstrom said. “That’s right.”

[MICHHAWK]

those with their head out know there is no mystery to the origin.

[jfish26]

those with their head out know there is no mystery to the origin.

That’s your opinion. If you have evidence to back it up as conclusive fact, I suggest you show it and make money off it. Your 401k would quadruple overnight. Or more.

[JKLivin]

I predict a lockdown before November 2024 so they can just reappoint Brandon. Could be COVID or climate related “emergency,” but it will be used to keep the globalist end game moving along.

[Shirley]

I predict a lockdown before November 2024 so they can just reappoint Brandon. Could be COVID or climate related “emergency,” but it will be used to keep the globalist end game moving along.

Any chance they'll let us out of these FEMA Camps Obama locked us in, first?

[JKLivin]

I predict a lockdown before November 2024 so they can just reappoint Brandon. Could be COVID or climate related “emergency,” but it will be used to keep the globalist end game moving along.

Any chance they'll let us out of these FEMA Camps Obama locked us in, first?

I think you'll be just fine, Hilfswillige. Right up until you're not.

[zsn]

I predict a lockdown before November 2024 so they can just reappoint Brandon. Could be COVID or climate related “emergency,” but it will be used to keep the globalist end game moving along.

Any chance they'll let us out of these FEMA Camps Obama locked us in, first?

Have you forgotten about the Death Panels or have They already killed you in the FEMA Camps? I’m really having a hard time keeping up with what all They have done to me. As an example, I went to find tin foil for my hats and all I could find were aluminum foil.

They’re coming for me, man!!!!!