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My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

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Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#121

Post by enchiridion »

dghughes wrote: post #62
76543210 wrote: post #15

So is there a way to prepare our bodies for getting sick? Me and my wife and our 8 month old live 40 hours a week in public, so it's going to happen. We already eat healthy, me and the wife workout. But the kid? Not sure how to prepare him.

I'd say you're doing the only thing a person can. You see many people speak of "boosting your immune system" but it's pure quackery. A person's immune system is many layers and types, a system, it's not a single thing that can be adjusted at will. The way I see my immune system is a 100 liter tank of water. You can't overfill it but it can be low. At most it can only be 100 liters. Your immune system can only be as g…

Zinc + vitamin c

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#122

Post by anonsivalley652 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #113
mnm1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CT scan is fairly standard procedure for diagnosing many things. Why do doctors and hospitals need CDC permission to use it to test? This seems like a bad movie where the CDC is not doing much due to political pressure. Why can't doctors act in their patients' best interest on their own?

A CT has a pretty high radiation dose. As far as I understand, for every 2000 people given a chest CT we expect 1 person to get a fatal form of cancer due to the CT. Compared to the natural incidence of getting a fatal cancer in your lifetime (about 400 in 2000), this is a very low. And for serious conditions, a CT can literally be a life saver. But if you apply chest CTs to screen for a disease with (let's say) a 0.…

It's ~29000 deaths / 70M CT scans per year.

That's 414 micromorts, which is almost exactly as risky as skydiving once on average.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

Source: US NCI 2007

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#123

Post by enchiridion »

themagician wrote: post #107

This helps highlight just how much of this is nothing more than FUD. The CDC counts real flu deaths and estimates infections. It doesn’t test for them. As a result you get a relatively low fatality rate. But for COVID-19 we are using only confirmed deaths and confirmed tested infections to come up with a fatality rate that seems much higher than it actually is because most infections go unreported. This is just a rea…

I keep seeing similar arguments. Does that mean China's response is based on FUD? If it is really just a flu, then why the drastic measures?

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#124

Post by wool_gather »

takeda wrote: post #115
Barrin92 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If this event is half as bad as all the literature out of China is suggesting, panic is the least of our worries No. The risk of dying from this disease is negligible for most American adults. The real issue with the corona virus is economic disruption and overburdening of the healthcare system. All of which is significantly exarbarated by panic.

Say what you want, but 2% is not negligible. That's 1 of every 50 people. With 330,000,000 population that's over 6.5mil people. Yes, the mortality changes with age younger people are about 0.2% but older are close to 15%. Having health issues such as cardiovascular or diabetes increases the risk further, and Americans aren't the healthiest people.

You are mixing up several different measurements.

First, parent was talking about the risk to an individual adult person; you yourself note that varies with other parameters including age. This isn't comparable to the 2% figure.

Second, the mortality figure is 2% of people who are infected, not of the total population. So it's substantially less than 6.5 million people, unless literally everyone in the country catches the bug.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#125

Post by LolWolf »

empath75 wrote: post #96
prostheticvamp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During flu season. That line is always left out of this: the CDC doesn’t want to test just anyone with cold and flu symptoms ... during flu season. The false positives are basically guaranteed to absolutely swamp the true positives at this time, and demolish any attempt to target the sick.

They are supposed to only test people with flu like symptoms that test negative for flu. Which this person did.

Still, the test specificity (or more generally, its predictive power) is likely to be quite low simply due to the sheer number of flu cases.

Otoh, this doesn’t really explain why there would be regulations against developing in-lab tests (as another of the sibling comments mentions).

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#126

Post by takeda »

dgacmu wrote: post #45
tejohnso wrote: post #42

> At this point, the hospital called the CDC requesting permission to perform the COVID-19 testing. The CDC denied the request on the ground that I did not have the most life-threatening symptoms Two questions: 1. Why would the hospital require permission to run a test? 2. Why would the CDC not want to test suspicious cases before severe symptoms present? From what I've read, the virus is contageous whether severe sy…

Because it's a CDC test in limited supply, and they're doing their best to try to balance the available supply with detecting as many cases as possible. The challenge is that the spread is changing rapidly enough that the guidelines will inevitably be a day or two behind periodically.

They are also banning hospitals from doing their own tests. All hospitals have equipment to test for virus presence. In fact we learned about first case of local virus spread, because a hospital ignored CDC and tested the suspected patient anyway.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#127

Post by aliceryhl »

hutzlibu wrote: post #86
seraphsf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core problem is that the CDC (and country) has had the capacity to test only a few hundred samples per day. Meaning, they don’t have the ability to test everyone with flu-like symptoms. Nobody thinks it’s right to NOT test every potential case. It just wasn’t possible. Good news: Just today, they released new rules that should increase testing capacity by 400x.

"Good news: Just today, they released new rules that should increase testing capacity by 400x" How can new rules increase testing capacity? All you can do, is adjust the rules to the existing capacities ...

Presumably they have obtained more resources and have updated the rules to reflect that.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#128

Post by obituary_latte »

endorphone wrote: post #31
obituary_latte wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those paper masks do little if anything to help the wearer from taking in anything. They do not filter the air—they are far too porous and loose-fitting to filter. They do help prevent the wearer from spreading their germs and touching nose/mouth as you said, but they are not an effective air filtration device.

As mentioned by others, surgical masks don't filter, but N95 masks absolutely do and are what health care workers are being equipped with. N95 masks just look like cheap little paper things that you stick on your face.

No they don’t. N95 are solid looking and sometimes have a plastic square housing on the front [0] and surgical masks are paper and pleated [1]

[0] https://images.app.goo.gl/RZAgMSssThGJQrnf6

[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/fRW2dmSxUo1Lm1Dh8

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#129

Post by takeda »

76543210 wrote: post #15

So is there a way to prepare our bodies for getting sick? Me and my wife and our 8 month old live 40 hours a week in public, so it's going to happen. We already eat healthy, me and the wife workout. But the kid? Not sure how to prepare him.

Everything I read so far about it is saying that the virus is nothing special for anyone under 10 year old.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

Also you can read about SARS which is similar.

Seems like what kills most people is the immune system overreacting.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#130

Post by takeda »

redwood wrote: post #85
dghughes wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you're doing the only thing a person can. You see many people speak of "boosting your immune system" but it's pure quackery. A person's immune system is many layers and types, a system, it's not a single thing that can be adjusted at will. The way I see my immune system is a 100 liter tank of water. You can't overfill it but it can be low. At most it can only be 100 liters. Your immune system can only be as g…

Get enough sleep.

Yes, this is often understated. Not enough sleep and stress makes our body not protect itself as well as it could.
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