COVID survivors

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adhoc
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by adhoc »

I was doubtful about even writing a comment in this thread, anyway... I'm happy that Sweden has chosen a more reasonable approach to the pandemic, compared to other countries, in my opinion, quite tyrannical restrictions on peoples freedom. We have not had any lockdowns and most people don't wear any masks. I'm however sympathetic to anyone that has been affected by the virus.
Olle
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by ShadowsDad »

I agree with you adhoc. And Sweden didn't destroy it's economy and yet has a similar result healthwise. One can't help but think there is another agenda at play in the countries that did.

But question it and the folks who bought into it get very angry.
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drmoss_ca
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by drmoss_ca »

Now the Swedish model has failed, it's time to ask who was pushing it

The Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster. It Shouldn’t Be a Model for the Rest of the World

Swedish PM says officials misjudged power of Covid resurgence

And Covid-skepticism in general:
The second wave of Covid has drowned the sceptics’ delusions
(to read the Sunday Times you either need a subscription or the Bypass Paywalls extension for Firefox or Chromium-based browsers) Here it is in text form:

The second wave of Covid has drowned the sceptics' delusions

Dominic Lawson

There's an old joke concerning someone sceptical about the effect of gravity. He throws himself off a tall building, and as he falls past each floor, he says, with undiminished confidence: "So far, so good." I am reminded of this by the Covid-19 sceptics (or lockdown sceptics, as some call themselves). When the reported infection rates began soaring at the beginning of winter, their go-to expert, a former Pfizer executive with a PhD in respiratory pharmacology, Michael Yeadon, declared this was a "casedemic" rather than a pandemic: these were almost all "false positives". Then, as the ICUs began filling up at an alarming rate, he asserted that the increased numbers were people with other conditions: Covid-19 was not really the cause of their hospital admission.Yes, any increase must be happening because so many more old people have been falling over and suffering broken hips this winter. Whatever. And this month, as the Covid deaths escalated, Yeadon - who has denounced as unsafe and unnecessary the vaccine made by his erstwhile employer - took to Twitter to assert,"We do NOT have EXCESS DEATHS". To put it most politely, his opinion does not tally with the findings of the Office for National Statistics, which released figures last week showing that in 2020 the number of "excess deaths", as a proportion of the population, amounted to a 12.1% rise over the average of the previous five years. As Sky's outstanding data analyst, Ed Conway, wrote: "That's the biggest leap in any year since 1940 ... the only other years that came close - save for 1940 - are 1929, in which there was a global flu pandemic on top of an economic crash; 1918, year of the Spanish flu; and 1915, during the First World War." But was Yeadon referring only to the winter deaths? Well, the official England and Wales figure for mortality over the last five weeks of 2020 was 59,195, compared with an average of 48,901 over the past five years. Which might explain the inability of some hospital mortuaries to meet demand, and the opening of emergency facilities for storing the bodies. But, confident in the wisdom of Yeadon, Toby Young, the creator of the Lockdown Sceptics website, declared this month: "If you compare mortality in December of 2020 with average December mortality over the last five years, there doesn't appear to be any increase at all." The Conservative MP Neil O'Brien, citing the actual figures, accused Young of lying. This might be to overestimate Young's intellectual grasp of the matter: to lie - as opposed to being merely ignorant - means you understand what the truth is, and choose to deny it. Funnily enough, I had a (courteous) email from Young last week, critical of some of my columns, which had supported the government's policies of mandatory social restrictions and attacked the so-called lockdown sceptics, not least for their dismissing so many victims as old or vulnerable folk who were due to meet their maker soon anyway. Young told me, "I'm not sure you've fully grasped the case [of lockdown sceptics], but I think the case you make is often against a caricature of our position." Well, Toby, you did write, in March: "Spending £350bn to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayers' money." Leave aside the moral issues, he, in common with others of this opinion, never attempts to calculate the counterfactual: what would be the economic consequences, not least for the hospitality industry, of adopting a so-called herd immunity strategy and letting the virus rip. A number of serious economists - free-market ones, not lovers of big government - have done so. I'm thinking of Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute, Julian Jessop of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute. They have all supported the policy of government-mandated social distancing. Of course such calculations involve considerations of the cost of preserving lives. One of the most familiar critiques of the government has been that it "sacrificed the lives of cancer sufferers". It is true that during the first wave of the virus, the NHS, to a much greater extent than was necessary, cancelled thousands of procedures to clear the decks for Covid-19 cases - and the ejection of the elderly from hospitals back into care homes without checking if they were infected was, as I wrote at the time, "protecting the NHS but writing off the most vulnerable". However, we are now seeing exactly what the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, warned about in September : the extent of the second wave - a second wave that Young, along with the rest of the "lockdown sceptics", adamantly insisted would never happen - has led to thousands of cancer procedures being postponed, as hospitals are inundated with those at risk of immediate death from Covid-19. I am interested to know what Sunetra Gupta thinks of this. She is the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, regarded as some sort of goddess by the "sceptics". In March she published a paper with a model purporting to show half the population of the UK had already had the virus, and so we were near herd immunity. In May she said Covid-19 was "on its way out" - later adding that it would not resurge in London - and that the infection mortality rate was "definitely less than one in 1,000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000". When she said this, we had already seen 36,000 Covid deaths. So, even if 100% of our citizens had been infected, we would have to have had a population of 360 million for her low-end estimate to be right. Yet Gupta, the principal academic critic of lockdowns, has never retracted anything and was consulted by Boris Johnson when the PM rejected the advice of Whitty (an epidemiologist himself) to reintroduce a lockdown in October. The point is that journalists such as Young, and others in my trade who take the same line, rely almost entirely on the spurious authority of Gupta and Yeadon for the unshakeable confidence they have in their own opinion. Their now ridiculous articles confidently dismissing the dangers of Covid-19 stemmed not from any original thought but from blindly trusting what they took to be experts. This is quite funny, as it's the same accusation they make about those of us who trusted Whitty. But there are consequences. On the day I heard from Young, I also got an email from a hospital doctor: "Not just me but every doctor I work with in acute care has treated people sick or even dying with Covid-19 who point-blank refused to believe it was real or that they had it, because of what they read or heard on social media or from certain commentators." And there are no jokes to be made about that.
"Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse."
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adhoc
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by adhoc »

Sweden hasn't had Europes lowest nor highest deaths rate by covid but we do have a higher number of deaths compared to our neighbouring countries but the situation is probably more complex than that, Sweden had, for example, an unusual low death rate of influenza caused deaths in 2018 and 2019 and people who "should" have died those years have unfortunately passed away this year instead (I'm not saying that covid is a "normal" influenza virus, it's obviously not). We could absolutely have been taken better care of our elderly in the countries nursing homes for example, but I don't think it's reasonable to shut down the whole society due to a virus that has a 99% survival rate. Not when you look at the long term consequences of these lockdowns, we will probably be seeing a new financial crisis with and an increase in the unemployment rate, mental illness and suicides.

PS. I really don't mean to cause a stir here on the board, rather I just felt like sharing my opinion on this rather touchy subject.
Olle
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by brothers »

I don't know what to think, other than this BS is here and doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. Am I missing something? Somebody says we should wear masks, wash our hands, and isolate. OK , we're doing that. What else? Inoculation? I've had mine. The fact is that nobody knows anything. We're either screwed or not.

My tears and prayers are for those innocents who may or may not have followed any or all of the recommendations/mandates and either did or didn't survive it, and their beloved families.

As my father-in-law used to say - "I wish it was in hell!". We didn't ask for this and we didn't bring it upon ourselves.
Gary

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drmoss_ca
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by drmoss_ca »

I hear you Gary, and I believe the issue is that it takes only a few who refuse to take sensible measures to screw things up for the rest of us. We have been wonderfully lucky here in that NS is small, rural and old-fashioned. Everybody knows everyone else, and is likely related to them. There is a strong sense of owing good behaviour to our neighbours. Combine that with a popular and sensible premier, good public health officials with prompt measures (the rapid testing for anyone even if asymptomatic is a fantastic tool for stamping out a chain of infection before it gets wild. Got a sniffle? Get tested. A thousand to one it will be negative, but you have to catch that one because it will be ten cases in three days time if you don't) - and you have a way to minimise the damage.

From The Globe & Mail:
How Atlantic Canada beat the virus
Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail

On Jan. 10, Nova Scotia reported its daily COVID-19 data. The number of new cases? Zero. As the pandemic's second wave beats down on most of Canada, it is a striking figure: Zero. Nova Scotia's journey started all the way back at the start of the pandemic. When the first wave hit, the country quickly shut down. Atlantic Canada, however, instituted the strictest measures, according to the University of Oxford's stringency index. Canada sort of closed its borders; the Atlantic provinces more tightly shut theirs, including to the rest of Canada. It wasn't always easy. A rural bridge over the Tidnish River between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia saw armed conservation officers stationed there. A second key decision was to maintain strict measures longer in the early going. Provinces outside Atlantic Canada eased up in May, whereas the four eastern provinces held on. They could have opened; there were few new cases. But the Atlantic provinces kept the public-health barricade up until new cases were decisively at or near zero. That approach is what distinguishes Nova Scotia. Other provinces pursued variations on mitigation, aiming for a balance between health and the economy. In some places, such as British Columbia, that has worked reasonably well. Other provinces, notably Ontario and Quebec, constantly fretted about doing too much, too soon, and as a result of which they repeatedly did too little, too late. Nova Scotia went hard and early, and stayed vigilant, reaping long-term returns. Atlantic Canada has some advantages: It is relatively isolated. But there's reason to believe its success has at least as much to do with strategy as geography. Compare Nova Scotia with Saskatchewan. They have roughly the same population. Halifax is larger than Regina or Saskatoon. Yet Nova Scotia has had, as of Saturday, 1,554 total cases and 65 deaths since the start of the pandemic; Saskatchewan has seen 19,985 cases and 212 deaths. In the past week, Nova Scotia booked an average of four daily cases. Saskatchewan is at more than 300 a day. No one is in hospital in Nova Scotia because of the virus. In Saskatchewan, there are 199 people hospitalized . Borders have been central to Atlantic Canada's defence . In July, the Atlantic provinces created a bubble among themselves but the rest of Canada remained shut out and subject to a two-week quarantine, which also applied to returning locals. Widespread support for and compliance with the measures has been repeatedly credited. Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil's declaration in April "stay the blazes home“ became a collective rallying cry. Vigilance is essential. In July, for the first time since the Second World War, the annual Lobster Carnival in Pictou on Nova Scotia's North Shore didn't take place, even as the province was reporting zero cases on most days. Nova Scotia also has never rescinded last March's state of emergency and it has embraced rapid testing for people with no symptoms. In mid-November, after easing in the summer, Nova Scotia reinstituted some restrictions. The reason? It had seen a week with about three new COVID-19 cases a day - and that was enough of a storm warning to batten down. Aiming for zero cases is tough, and there are no guarantees. Late last year, the Atlantic bubble broke apart, and walls are back up between the provinces. New Brunswick is now wrestling with a surge - relative to population, it has about an eighth as many daily cases as Ontario. Ontario's outbreak, adjusted for population, is almost 60 times worse than Nova Scotia's. As result, services in Nova Scotia, from restaurants to schools, are open. Life is considerably less abnormal than in the rest of the country. Protecting public health did not ruin the economy. Research has shown that stricter health measures during the 1918 flu pandemic were associated with better economic outcomes; the East Coast appears to bear this out. In 2020, GDP fell less than in other provinces, according to RBC Economics . In late December, a group of wide-ranging experts proposed 'Building the Canadian Shield.' The Atlantic approach was cited as a model, and contrasted with the rest of Canada. The group also argues that the country remains at risk of a third wave, in the spring. For Nova Scotia, an ounce of prevention has delivered pounds of cure. The province reached zero cases, and has managed to stick close to zero. Strong medicine, delivered early, allowed the patient to return sooner than the rest of the country to something close to prepandemic life.
And the price Stephen McNeil has paid for imposing such hardship on us? A 77% popularity rating - the highest ever seen.
"Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse."
Pierre-Simon de Laplace
brothers
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by brothers »

In just one week from today - January 27th - we have our appointment to receive the second Covid19 inoculations. Looking back to a year ago, now we wonder what will we be doing at this time next year.
Gary

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Sam
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by Sam »

Saw my primary care physician two days ago. He took an Xray of my chest. He compared it to the one when I was admitted to the hospital on 1-4-21. Says my lungs are worse off. Gave me a super high dose of azithromicin(?) which is the Zpack and then a broncho inhaler. That inhaler has muffled my cough and I don't feel like there is as much on my chest and in my lungs as before. The cough is drier, if that makes sense.
ShadowsDad
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by ShadowsDad »

I'm hoping you get better soon Sam.
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CMur12
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by CMur12 »

Sam, I'm sorry to hear that your case of Covid is still so active. I share Brian's sentiments and hope you are soon better.

- Murray
Gene
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by Gene »

Sam - I hope things continue to improve and you recover quickly. Prayers offered up.

I just got the sad news last night that my best friend from our years in Georgia passed away. He and his wife both contracted COVID - she recovered rapidly, he stayed in the hospital for a couple of weeks then went home, only to be rushed back in with COVID-pneumonia. He was on a ventilator, and somewhat responsive - but the news I read last night reported that his lungs were too badly damaged and his body simply failed.
Gene

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Re: COVID survivors

Post by fallingwickets »

Sam: wishing you a speedy recovery.

Sorry to read about your friend, Gene

clive
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Sam
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by Sam »

Gene I too am sorry to hear about your friend. And that is what scares me because I never wanna think that my circumstances cannot get worse. I just had this congestion in my throat that just never seems to leave. I’ve never really had difficulty breathing, but when I get a cough I get it good and deep and loud. It feels like there’s a constant draining in the back of my throat. My energy level seems to return but sometimes I get to the point where I can’t concentrate . Then there are other times when I think a two hour nap would do wonders for me. But when I remember to how I felt when I entered the emergency room on January 4 to where I am today I am so thankful
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by brothers »

fallingwickets wrote: Fri Jan 22, 2021 8:30 am Sam: wishing you a speedy recovery.

Sorry to read about your friend, Gene

clive
Yes -
Gary

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Re: COVID survivors

Post by Gene »

Thanks, all, and to mirror an early comment - it sure seems to hit people differently.

My bother in laws parents - both in their 80's - both contracted COVID. Both recovered fully, and both say it was not much more than head colds for them. All indicators for people that age would tell me we should have lost one, or both, but we didn't.

Personally, I don't know what to believe. To read 5 stories online you get 3 different inputs, each one contradictory to the other. It's doublespeak, for sure (oblique 1984 reference). I am not a fan of masks, but I promise you I am a fan of an active economy and business that stay open. My brother in law hasn't been to a sit-down restaurant since this started. I would rather suffer the the scant few minutes it takes to get in and out and spend money keeping places open. My wife and I are real estate agents, and in Texas deemed essential workers - so we spend a lot of time out in public. Masks and sanitizer for sure - and probably get the vaccine when it becomes available.
Gene

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"People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people."
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fallingwickets
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by fallingwickets »

maybe we'll get to see Gene and this wife on million dollar listing texas :lol: :lol: :lol:

clive
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Pauldog
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by Pauldog »

Sam, I've been away from here for a few weeks, so I only just found out about your situation now.

For your symptoms, it wouldn't hurt - and could help a lot - to try the seed called Nigella sativa, or the oil made from it. It's sometimes called "black cumin" or "black seed" or "kalonji" or "kala jeera," but be careful, because there's another seed also called black cumin or black seed, which is longer and lighter in color. The seed you want is pitch black, small, and more or less pyramidal in shape.

This wouldn't replace what your doctor is recommending, but just something to add. It's used in cooking and baking, mostly in the Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent, and is non-toxic.

Years ago, I had read a recommendation to use it if you felt a cold or flu coming on, and it has a long history as a medicinal plant. More recent research finds some use as an antiviral.

https://www.vitacost.com/Images/Product ... 120011.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com ... SX569_.jpg

Speaking of antivirals, if a virus has a lipid coating, monolaurin (derived from coconut oil) is supposed to dissolve the coating and inactivate or kill the virus. All coronaviruses have a lipid coating.

It also couldn't hurt to use zinc lozenges.

And everyone, doctors included, agree that not having enough Vitamin D is a big risk factor for getting ill from this virus. Once you've gotten sick, though, I'm not sure if taking D could cause an immune over-reaction, so check on that with your doctor or read up on it in general.
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Sam
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by Sam »

I had gone back to my primary care physician on January 19 and he took a chest x-ray and wanted to compare it to the chest x-ray when I was admitted to the hospital on January 4. When he reviewed it with me he said it looked much worse than the chest x-ray when I went into the hospital. He put me on a bronchial dilator/inhaler that has steroids. I still have my cough but it’s mostly a dry cough. There was one night though when I felt the pressure in my chest was so severe and my oxygen went down to 89. I probably should’ve gone to the hospital but I did not because I’m stubborn. Compared to how I felt The day I checked in the hospital I am miles ahead. But I still can’t work out more than five minutes and I do not dare go back on the inversion table. I don’t know if I mentioned that but I tried it one night and after 30 seconds felt like I was going to pass out, whereas I can hang upside down five minutes.

Not only do I hear and read conflicting things about the coronavirus, and now the vaccine for the virus, but it’s not limited to just this pandemic. You can watch one channel and it talks about conspiracy theories and how they are debunked, and you can listen to another channel that is totally opposite. I’m not here to start any political thread or opinions. It’s just that between Facebook and websites and the talking heads on TV , You don’t know who to turn to. I thought about just listening to NPR and the BBC on TV
Barry
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by Barry »

I’m honestly terrified of it. I started a new chemotherapy treatment regimen. I basically stay indoors, get groceries delivered, and take medical transport to all of my appointments.

I might pick up certain prescriptions but outside of that and the above I avoid everything and everyone.
CMur12
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Re: COVID survivors

Post by CMur12 »

I'm lying low, as well. I haven't felt safe to get a haircut since Feb of last year! I wear a mask and disposable gloves when I enter a store, and I have recently started double-masking. As long as I can still breathe, I figure that overdoing it is safer than underdoing it.

Sam, it's discouraging to hear how the virus has hung on so persistently in your case. This sort of thing is frightening to all of us.

As far as sources of information are concerned, I, too, would have suggested NPR/PBS and the BBC as most trustworthy. I also watch a lot of CNN, with the ability to filter their biases in the pursuit of useful information.

- Murray
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