Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

So here's a guy from Port Clinton, near CP, who was a die-hard never-masker, and he is now dead. He was 37. These stories seem random enough, but common enough to not screw around.

https://www.cleveland19.com/2020/07/10/year-old-port-clinton-war-ve...urth-july/

Question regarding reporting of cases: if someone tests positive and then goes a couple weeks later for a return-to-work test, but tests positive again, does it count as two cases? I ask because one of my coworkers here in Florida has probably gotten himself tested four times since contracting the virus and is now awaiting results from his fifth test. I'm just wondering if he counts as one case or four, based on Florida's reporting. If the latter, it does raise some questions on the overall data and spread.

ApolloAndy said:

?
I'm not trying to be a d*ck or anything. He proposed a possible approach. I considered it because it seemed plausible. The data backed it up for a while. The data is now beginning to undermine it.

Sorry. Seemed like you took a friendly shot at Gonch by calling him out. I took a friendly shot at you.

OhioStater said:

I just spent 20 minutes trying to explain to someone why lower death "rates" are nothing to get excited about.

I must be missing something.

Let's say I am an evil scientist that creates two viruses, Virus A and Virus B. They are the same in every way, except the death rate for A is 5% and for Virus B it is 1%. Are you saying that the difference in death rates between the two is not important?

Just biting my tongue until it's time to not bite my tongue. 😃

I'm still not seeing an overall increase in deaths yet that stays at the mortality rate of the virus in the early stages. Also, more time. A few days ago we were staying there was a two, three or more week lag for the data to be relevant. Now we're saying, it's clear that the peak exists after just a couple of days.

A lower mortality rate is very exciting...because less death. Because maybe enough less death that with some changes in behavior we can make the risk as acceptable as many of the other risks of disease we tolerate daily. (I'd still argue that for someone under 50 with no compromises, we're already easily there - but God forbid you suggest that)

That's not to abandon the run for a vaccine or drop all precautions tomorrow. It's to continue to look for answers and understand. To continue to look for the bestway through this. A possible better way. I'll never understand why anyone would be so eager to shoot that down.

Sometimes it's so tiring to post here.

I think mortality is important and decreasing mortality rate is super good, but transmission rate is equally, if not more important, and we're obviously sucking big balls on that. Mortality wouldn't matter if we could stop transmission. It seems like you've resigned yourself to the idea that everyone is going to get it and so you're worried about mortality and not worried about transmission rate?

The recent spike in death is important to me because it means young people are transmitting it to old people who are in turn, dying.

Mortality rate outside of transmission rate is meaningless. If an infected person infects 1 other person, that's a lot different than infecting 10 people. In the latter case, there's more death if the mortality rate is constant. This weird "it's not as deadly as we thought" narrative is a pretty odd thing to hang on to. No one says, "This herpes isn't as itchy as I thought."

By the way, the dude I mentioned above who died yesterday was one of the Put-in-Bay revelers from a few weeks ago.

ApolloAndy said:

I think mortality is important and decreasing mortality rate is super good, but transmission rate is equally, if not more important, and we're obviously sucking big balls on that. Mortality wouldn't matter if we could stop transmission. It seems like you've resigned yourself to the idea that everyone is going to get it and so you're worried about mortality and not worried about transmission rate?

Transmission doesn't matter if the mortality rate is low enough. If people don't die, then who cares? I tend to believe, right now at least, that we've overstated the actual real-world individual risk to a large segment of the population.

I know this isn't going to be a popular thing to say, but if I'm Beach Bro Brad - a 20 year old kid of good health - I'm not changing ****. In fact, infect me. The sooner the better. Realistically, the risk just isn't there.

Two sides of the same coin, but yes. I think there's truth in your POV of my take.

I said it on the podcast we did on March 28th. I was under the impression that we would all (mostly) be infected at some point. I think you have to think this way. There is no current path that eliminates transmission. We're trying to reduce it. We decided from the start that we weren't locking down in a meaningful, let's-eradicate-the-threat kind of way. That was the argument then, if you remember - lower the curve. Slow (not stop) transmission so that hospitals could deal with everyone. Somehow, somewhere along the way that message changed, but our actions didn't - in fact, they went the other direction.

I don't know what else to say. You guys (some more than others) seem almost hilariously scared and so pessimistic that conversation is hard to have. I'm trying. But even just tossing out ideas or "look at the bright side" type stats or a "here is positive development" kind of article is met with the "Hope is not a strategy!" mantra. Then, dude, I don't know what to tell you. It's going to be as miserable as you let it be. My next try might just be posting "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!" in all caps repeatedly.

Clearly we can all find statistics and anecdotes to back our perceptions. You can look at one guy on Facebook that didn't buy a mask and say, "See!?" or you can look at the extremely low mortality rate among the younger and healthy and consider it's possibly even 1/10th of that in reality if the CDC's suggestion that infections are 10x what we know is true and see some potential light. Choose your path.

I think we all have the same goal - don't die from COVID-19. I can't imagine how many individual paths will ultimately lead to that goal. No single one of them more "right" than the next.

CDC now estimates that 40% of the infections are asymptomatic (was 35%). Infectiousness of asymptomatic is estimated to be 75% that of people with symptoms (had been 100%). Percentage of transmissions prior to onset of symptoms is estimated to be 50%. Best estimate of R-naught is 2.5. All just estimates based on what is known at this point.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html

Also has info about median times from onset of symptoms to hospitalization and from onset of symptoms to death. And percentages of hospitalizations that end in death. Each by different age groups.

I agree with Gonch. And so does this guy.

That's sort of rewarding bad behavior though. It may be the case that at this point, there's no going back, but we're only at this point because leadership failed us in the first place. "Yes, given that you got us into this mess, there's maybe not be a better way out, but let's not have delusions about who got us into this mess and that it was largely avoidable (see: Ohio, for instance)."

It is. And we absolutely should have handled March and April different. If we had, we'd be having a much more normal summer. But that ship sailed. That's like saying I should have handled things with my ex differently and more responsibly after she's married to someone else and has two kids.

Given the current circumstances, we will be living with these numbers for a while and coexisting with the virus indefinitely. Another pretend lockdown isn't going to do anything at this point. Responsibly partaking in life makes the most sense to me.

Beach Bro Brad is gonna give it to other people, unknowingly, and that puts others at risk. That's wholly uncomplicated. It's also disingenuous to suggest a fit person can just get it over with. There's quite a spectrum between asymptomatic and death, and it's pretty gnarly. There's an awful lot of long-term damage for survivors.

Gonch: I take issue with the suggestion that this is fear-driven. "That's a suboptimal outcome that I can hopefully avoid" seems like common sense, not fear. But I do worry every day about what it could do to my wife or kid, which is another good reason to be pretty annoyed with the pathetic response of this country. So much of the push back to mitigation tactics falls firmly in the "I don't wanna" category. I don't wanna stay inside for a hurricane, or even brush my teeth some mornings, but I do because it's good for me and others.

Like I said, I'm all for coexisting with the disease in the safest way possible. We're not even doing close to that.

Lord Gonchar said:

A lower mortality rate is very exciting...because less death. Because maybe enough less death that with some changes in behavior we can make the risk as acceptable as many of the other risks of disease we tolerate daily. (I'd still argue that for someone under 50 with no compromises, we're already easily there - but God forbid you suggest that)

That's not to abandon the run for a vaccine or drop all precautions tomorrow. It's to continue to look for answers and understand. To continue to look for the bestway through this. A possible better way. I'll never understand why anyone would be so eager to shoot that down.

Sometimes it's so tiring to post here.

It is good news. I'm all for a lower mortality rate.

When I posted my comment about discussing the death rate to a friend, the context was this; it's an older gentleman that I generally respect in our community who I came across in our local Giant Eagle. We were both looking for fun beer. But then, he made an off-the-cuff remark about why I was wearing a mask in the store (he was not).

Mind you, while I'm getting pretty tired of being one of the 20% in my town that does wear a mask, I'm not a dick about it. It's your choice. I may wish you were making a different choice, but it's your choice. At least in our county in Ohio.

Long story short, he went off on a rant about how the death rate is so low, we're doing awesome as a country (guess who he voted for?), and it's basically all coming to an end, because if the death rate is going down, we're all good, right? So when he asked me why I was wearing a mask, I told him 1) because I want my daughter to be able to run cross-country in the fall, 2) because it would be great to see the Buckeyes play some college football, and 3) because we all need to figure out how to live with this **** until there is a vaccine, and 4) because I feel really bad for all the new businesses in our small town that are dying a slow death.

I get it. Most of us here are intelligent enough to understand that a lower death rate is both 1) good news, but 2) not enough good news to mean we can just go back to normal and not do anything to keep it at bay...because let's be honest, Beach Bro Brad has a very punch-able face and a completely under-developed frontal lobe, so he isn't making any good decisions anytime soon. In my hometown, the "lower death rate" has been trumpeted as "evidence" that this is all a hoax conjured up the deep state to undermine Trump.I guess I was triggered?

I'm going to ask again... how does one get excited about a reduced fatality rate when there are more fatalities? Should this in some way change behavior to be less careful, not wear masks, or what?

So here are the Florida numbers, and as a percentage of confirmed cases, sure the fatality rate is down. But more people died on Thursday and Friday than any day previously. How is this reassuring, again? If death continues to be the lagging indicator, as it has without fail, I would expect that even a modest improvement in fatality rate is still a whole lot of dead people.

America didn't mitigate the pandemic, it just got bored with it.

I'm over in Marco Island tonight, in Collier County. The positivity rate is higher here yet masks are not mandatory. I've done takeout every night and walked into restaurants where social distancing was questionable, at best. People waiting outside to get in? No distancing and few masks. This pandemic isn't going to get better until there is equal response to it across the state and across the country for that matter.

BrettV said:

I agree with Gonch. And so does this guy.

So, on the down-low, my pen name is Joseph Semprevivo.

The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic

Jeff said:

...I'm all for coexisting with the disease in the safest way possible.

What is the safest way possible to coexist with the virus? I suspect that there are quite a few personal opinions as to what is deemed safest.

Thanks for the link Gonch. I suspect many/most/all of us are familiar with cognitive dissonance (because we're so much smarter than other people and there's nothing anyone can say which will convince me otherwise) but it's always good to get a reminder.