No shows

Re: Depends on where you live

Bill Howatt

I don't think it has been demonstrated that getting the virus and surviving is a certain way to avoid getting it again. This has happened but IIRC the second time the virus wasn't exactly identical to the first virus. To me this raises a concern about the length of time a vaccine will be effective but nobody knows yet.

I live outside and a bit away from a major city in Ontario and our infection rate is very low but recently all it took was a visitor from a large city with a high infection rate to trigger about 30 cases. Mayors of small towns are pleading with people from outside the area not to visit their towns. Some of this desire is that due to lesser restrictions in the rural areas the people from the towns can get services that are restricted where they live.

Anyway, it is very obvious this virus is not to be toyed with and can cause very serious problems and some of them persisting for months. For extra concern it seems males are 3 times more likely to have significant issues and even though people with existing conditions like asthma are at high risk people who are in top shape do not always avoid it.

A saying I like is: "If you don't like wearing a mask, you really aren't going to like a ventilator!".

Bill

The persistence and turning...

David Weaver

..the prior line into "we can't afford that" - it reminds me of ken carver selling insurance in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

The mortality rate if it spreads indiscriminately is somewhere just south of 1/2%. I don't think that's no big deal, but I think this conversation is better had with relatives that you don't want to have around again after their next visit.

Relatives

Mark Mandell - Gone Round In New Jersey

Good or bad, ain't shading our door until after the second dose of the vaccine for all of us.

And when that second dose is effective for me

Bruce, a MN Galoot

I won’t be at home for months. I’ve got a lot of traveling to make up for, visiting to do, grandkids to see.

Sounds

Mark Mandell - Gone Round In New Jersey

Like a great plan!!!

A different existence

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

If you read what I actually wrote you will see that we are all equivalently unsafe, absent a vaccine. We have less restrictions and our infection rate is higher than places that have more restrictions. However, places with restrictions delay the inevitable, unless you get vaccinated. It is way beyond my pay scale to tell someone how to balance risk and the reward of a near normal life. I can control my choices.

Over Christmas 2019, my wife and I were in Austria and Germany enjoying the Christmas markets - the festive crowds, music, mulled wine and beer, and local cuisine. While I can read some German, I do not speak it, and did not watch TV news. Internet from hotels was terrible. The first we heard of Covid was when we returned to Perth in mid-January. Looking back, we were a couple of weeks ahead of its transmission.

About two weeks after our return, news began to hit the headlines in a big way. The Australian government responded immediately. Credit must go to our prime minister ( soooo different from Trump in every way) and my state premier ( the equivalent of a governor in the USA): the PM closed the borders of Australia to the rest of the world, and our premier closed the borders of Western Australia to the rest of Australia. In Perth we went into semi-lockdown, with restaurants and all other public places closing. People were encourage to work from home. My private practice moved 99% to Telehealth (I continued to meet with one little old lady, who I reckoned if she could make it up my stairs to my office, she must be well!). Perth became an island inside an island.

Other states were not as quick to isolate, and suffered higher rates of infection. There was social outrage when some ignored the rules for social distancing. By-and-large, Australians took this seriously. After a while, the social distancing ended, and most went back to a “normal” life. This did highlight just how dangerous and how easily transmitted Covid can be - since it was only caught via someone coming into the country, all returning to Oz were placed in quarantine for 2 weeks in special hotels. The state of Victoria had a second wave as a result of a hotel worker socialising with a returnee, and then infecting others at a local pub. The premier of Victoria placed the state in lockdown, not as quickly as he should have, but it had the desired effect, and rising infection rates stabilised, reduced, and stopped.

My wife is an avid plane spotter, and can tell what plane is flying overhead and where it is bound. (No, I don’t get it either ... other than her interest is traveling the world .. more expensive than buying tools, which is why I can buy tools!). Anyway, she showed me a video of air traffic around the world made several months ago: while planes were flying around the world, and very, very few to Australia, certainly none between Australian cities, in the USA the plane travel had not altered one iota. Clearly the Trump Administration had not heard of social distancing and the dangers of social transmission!

At this time, all state borders in Australia are open to one another, and all socialise freely. Business is getting back to pre-Covid days. The economy here is picking up, especially in Western Australia.

The downside of isolation is just that. Isolation. My mother lives in Cape Town, and at the age of 95 was in 6 months isolation in her apartment with only a carer for company. No visitors permitted. I have lived in Australia for closing in on 40 years, and would visit her every year (yeah .. I could have equipped a new workshop every year for the cost of travel!). Family are the most important thing we have. Over the past 6 months all we could do was talk on the phone. No one could show her how to use Facetime. Finally, when her isolation was recently lifted, this was possible, and I had a wonderful chat with her face-to-face. A week later she went rapidly downhill with septicemia, and passed away 4 weeks ago. I could not attend the funeral and watched it on Zoom. Very surreal. We live in strange, strange times. Role on vaccines and a return to life.

Take care and stay well my friends.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Not the point...

David Weaver

Rather than badgering people here, save it for relatives. Regardless of when it is. Most of the members here moved out of their mothers' houses, and probably aren't logging in to the Messages forum to find another one.

Re: Not the point...

David Weaver

My apologies for being a bit stiff. Like many, I have followed the rules and been reasonable in the covid era. We haven't done much. I have a little bit less fire for telling other people what to do, though, or as we've gotten from a lot of our friends, unnecessary attempts at creating some kind of perfect consensus. It's not very friendly in my book.

Sorry....

David Weaver

to hear of the loss of your mother, Derek, especially with the no-travel restrictions.

Re: The persistence and turning...

Jack Dover

That's just the mortality though. While mortality is higher in certain groups than in others, disabilities as a long term consequences are common and severe. There's a recommendation brochure issued by some EU country that has a checkup list for someone going through. The list is insane, there's more than 20 major health problems, every single one would probably bankrupt an average American or could make a person incapable of performing job duties. There's permanent lungs damage, fibrosis, trombosis, neurological and neurovascular disorders and so on. The latter is the scariest, can't imagine suffering a mental degradation to the point of not being able to perform even basic "office" jobs.

I had a college friend who was very unlucky to get complications from a regular respiratory disease. It was a very long time ago and it's a very rare case, but it happened to him and it was a real disaster. Two heart surgeries, yet a heart attack and a stroke one year later. Used to be a brilliant fellow, he can barely walk and talk now. Lost most of his memories, and this is especially heart breaking, 'cos we were besties and he doesn't even recognize me now so I can't even visit him once in a while - he gets agitated around strangers. An effect this had on his family is immense too.

This is anecdotical evidence, and I'm not writing this to scare or persuade people. It's just many things can't be related to unless witnessed, and when reading that brochure I realized that COVID is a from that group of diseases and that I've seen one of the possible risks myself. And then I thought that it's an easy fallacy to focus on just one aspect (e.g. mortality) and forget all the others.

Re: I believe they and everyone else...

Jack Dover

From my personal experience dealing and working within big entities I don't think they really made a bet in a sense of taking a risk choosing a particular option.

There's usually no "them", governments or big companies are uniform and integral maybe from an observer point of view, however internally it's a set, often disjointed, of smaller groups or even individuals. They often compete, not cooperate. Often grand decisions could be tracked down to a particular individual going with intuition, even more often decisions can't be tracked down to anyone, they just happen in a sense of a natural process, similar to a tree shedding leaves - a tree doesn't decide to do it, it just does. There's more structure in societal structures of course, the more specific the branch the more structure is there, but on the grand scheme many outcomes didn't have a mindful decision behind them.

Also it would imply that the government built models, outlined strategies (e.g. vaccines in 30 weeks, vaccines in 90 weeks, no vaccines ever), calculated potential outcomes, weighted all this and made a decision with a certain degree of risk. I doubt they could do it in such a short time with such limited information they had. I would rather believe Sweden government realized they couldn't enforce a strict lockdown within their legal system or police forces were insufficient, but just framed this as if they could potentially do something else.

Re: A different existence

Mark Nowicki

My story is similar.

I last saw Mom and younger daughter in December and enjoyed the Christmas markets of Gdansk and Brussels in the process,

The plan for 2020 was to alternatively with my brother to visit our Mom every six to eight weeks. He missed his turn in Feb, I was planning for early April.

I was leaving room for WA, the Gloucester fire lookouts are on my Bucket list

He is rich and my cost of a trip to Europe, thanks to my wife's work and retirement benefits, is less than a LV #4 so it was a good plan with the added bonus of a regular break from Canada.

Unfortunately, our Federal and provincial leadership was a couple of steps behind Trump, so our economy is trashed, with no end in sight of the knee jerk reactions and threads of heavy fines.

I do get to travel again this Wednesday, though

Our mom, who at the age of 89, was still taking her 3 hour. Nordic walks in November, started complaining about heartburn and my cousin noticed some jaundice. The diagnosis we got last week is incurable liver cancer, with not much time left.

Thankfully, I became a Polish citizen again last year, presently that exempts me from travel restriction to Poland or quarantine upon arrival.

I am not looking forward to having to arrange end-of-life care for our Mom, but am happy knowing she is not going to die in Canada.

Thanks, David.

morbidity...

David Weaver

We always talk about mortality, but morbidity doesn't get talked about as much because there's a level to discuss. Dead is dead. What's disabled, and what's a disabling amount of morbidity?

I think there will be a lot of morbidity following covid, but it's hard to tell what the impact will be because that's easier to figure out after the fact (and even that, it can be a little sketchy sometimes if someone with an agenda is measuring it - for example, a study being touted by a disability law firm with their own doctors on staff).

The second aspect of morbidity with covid is that more of it will be serious reduction in quality of life for people who are closer to end of life. It doesn't make it nothing, but the stories won't be relatable on a large number scale to a large part of the population.

I have no idea what the overall "right answer" is with all of this, it's above my pay grade. I do know that we tend to, as a society, sort of gloss over the folks who are dealing with significant morbidity because we think it's not relatable to us and we don't see those folks at work or out and about every day.

I'd bet their...

David Weaver

national government has a generalized infectious disease model that allows modeling of the spread of the disease. I think this is pretty common, and I'm sure the CDC and other gov. agencies here can do the same.

The problem is, you're still running a model. What happens after the origin date is a series of adjustments and then perhaps complex behavior that changes by time and region. You can run 50 different series that have very different outcomes and not be sure which one will occur.

The thing that complicates it (and it's realistic to say) is if you shut down an economy several times and you can also measure the loss of businesses and hear from other modelers independently modeling loan defaults, then the problem isn't single faceted.

Every single municipality, county, state and large corporation has some interest in the level of the stock market and in keeping loan defaults down. If those can't occur, the outcome is potentially catastrophic (though the effects may be felt more long term).

Like I said below, it's beyond my pay grade, but it isn't as simple as some folks like to believe ("shut it down, the talk of potential money problems are make believe and you just have to take it out of the top X% later"), just as the opposite side of "it's just a cold" is farce. The thing that makes the whole situation so difficult (and frankly, not even worth talking about with anyone) is the fact that nobody has a great grasp on any of the long-term tipping points.

The early idea that you can just completely shut an area down and there's an end of a tunnel not that long from now where no virus will be introduced later (just to experience the same thing at a later date) is completely unrealistic. That is, when you hear the news stories about "we could have eliminated this by now if __". No, absolutely not. It can't be eliminated until:

1) nobody has it

2) it some how stops spreading

3) we're all immune or little affected by it

When nobody agrees what the goal is, then it's awfully difficult to agree on a solution (and there may never be agreement).

Two things have become very clear, though:

1) don't expect that the economic situation won't change and you can solve money problems later

2) anyone sitting on poor health habits feeling like they'll get a chance to solve them later - maybe not.

Re: A different existence

Hank Knight

Derek, I'm sorry about your mom. What an awful way to say goodbye! Yes these are strange times, and sad. We have a close friend in Brisbane who has kept us posted about Australia's success battling COVID. I must say I am envious. Good, decisive leadership is the key.

Thanks Hank