Coronavirus prep

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  • stevehenderson776
    stevehenderson776 Posts: 324 Member
    ReenieHJ wrote: »
    Ok, so someone posted this on another site I visit which I've copied/pasted below. This sounds like a bunch of hooha to me but I'm the first to admit I haven't kept up nearly as well as most of you have. Any opinions on this??

    "No ..No...No...look up reports on virology. Merck..stopped making it...Moderna has had way too many oops!!!! This was a natural occurring virus...the Chinese tampered with it....The Fake news is telling you its ok. Do your own research..please...!!! our government is lying to us....and the masks....our children will have side effects..Fauci worked with the chinese govt and has invesments there.....CDC is in bed with big.pharma."

    I don't know about any of that. I doubt that the Chinese government tampered with the virus, but their abhorantly lax live food handling regulations definitely led to the outbreak.
  • Psychgrrl
    Psychgrrl Posts: 3,177 Member
    lynn_glenmont wrote: »
    rheddmobile wrote: »
    ahoy_m8 wrote: »
    T1DCarnivoreRunner wrote: »
    I also can't see why schools are not considered to be a risk. My assumption is that it is because most children do not get severe illness. This idea ignores teachers and support staff, family members of those teachers and support staff, and family members of students who bring it home after catching from a fellow student. How is that not a concern?!

    Agree with all you have said. I'll take a stab at how schools are not considered a risk (although I personally do not agree with that conclusion).

    My hypothesis starts with the assumption that the school transmission data available is skewed by disproportionate representation by private schools, I.e.:
    • more school resources
    • less classroom crowding
    • vastly fewer special needs kids that might have distancing difficulty or require close contact
    • ability to immediately expel/suspend kids who don't follow rules
    • comparatively wealthy student body, where wealth correlates inversely to probability of infection (more likely to WFH, less likely to need public transportation or have public facing jobs, less dense living circumstances so better able to isolate within the home)
    Furthermore, public schools are more likely to be in-person where spread is low, so that also skews the in-person data towards lower risk populations.

    Hence, in-person school data is overrepresented by kids less likely to show up at school infected. Remote schooling data overrepresented by kids living in conditions where they are more likely to become infected. So while it appears in-person compares favorably to remote schooling, what is really going on is you see the effects of comparing a disproportionately wealthy population to a disproportionately poor one. The outcome has more to do with the risk profiles the groups you are comparing, not whether they attend in-person or remote.

    I think you may be on to something. In Israel schools were indeed a severe factor in community transmission, so the idea that children don’t transmit the disease can’t be accurate.

    Locally in Memphis, they are claiming schools are not a risk but school sports are a major factor. However, over 65% of our cases, the contact tracing fails to identify where it came from, so how do they know enough about anything to even make remarks like that? Clearly they are missing something when more than half of cases come who knows where.


    Thanks, I didn't know what that number was, but it's what I always wonder about when some institution (like gyms or restaurants) claim they haven't had any COVID transmissions at their business/facility. I always think, "not that you know about."

    It's much easier to trace transmissions to households, coworkers, or events like weddings and funerals, where you know who was exposed to whom. If you pick it up from a stranger on public transportation, in a bar/restaurant/gym or from an asymptomatic child who brings it home from school where they got it from another asymptomatic child who got it from an adult in their household with a mild case who never got tested and convinced themself it was just a cold or an allergy so they could continue sending their kid to school ... well, those would be the transmissions I would expect to fall into the 65%.

    What our county CT has encountered is people unwilling to cooperate. They won’t give information about where they’ve been or who they’ve seen. Makes it really difficult to limit spread.

    On campus, the students have to cooperate. And they’ve been really good about following policies and working with the tracers.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,883 Member
    SModa61 wrote: »
    kshama2001 wrote: »
    My 83 yo mother FINALLY got an appointment for next week for the vaccine. My sister and I had been trying every day at 4 locations on our state's website. Mom had a mammogram at the local hospital recently and THEY called HER to give her a number where she could call to make an appt. This location is NOT on my state's website.

    Congratulations @kshama2001 My parents (86 tomorrow and 84) have received emails (MGH, my father, and Beth Isreal, my mom) stating invitations to sign up. They are waiting to hopefully get two from he same medical organization so they can do it at the same time together.

    Thanks! Mom's call was from Beth Israel.
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,876 Member
    Sounds like most NM school districts will be going back to in class learning on a hybrid model at the end of February...not APS though. They just had a vote last night and determined they couldn't effectively manage things across the district. It is the largest school district in the state and actually one of the largest school districts in the country and there have been discussions for years that it needs to be broken up into something more manageable.

    Our kids' elementary school was pushing the district to leave it up to individual schools...which I understand from their point of view, but also understand why the district wouldn't want to go down that path and lose control. Our school is a bit of an oddity within the district...we are part of APS, but we are not Albuquerque...we are our own township/village. All other APS schools are either in Albuquerque or unincorporated Bernalillo county...we aren't even in the same county as all other APS schools.

    Our school is very small as we are a small community with a total population of about 8,500. The majority of our population is older adults at or near retirement. Our school feels much more like a small private school than the other behemoths in APS. We have also had only three reported COVID cases in our village since last March...I just feel so bad for my kids. They were very excited at the prospect of getting back to class.

    The only possible silver lining is that APS is considering sending K, 6, 9, and high school seniors back to in person...doesn't help my kids at all, but at least it's something for others.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    lynn_glenmont wrote: »
    kshama2001 wrote: »
    Well, coronavirus prep has translated to less winter storm prep needed. Normally the shelves would have been bare and stores mobbed yesterday and the day before, but we must be all stocked up here in Massachusetts.

    I placed a grocery order to be delivered a day ahead of the storm, because I hadn't shopped or ordered for four weeks. For the first time since about last May, I encountered a paper goods shortage. Out of a whole page of various brands and package sizes for paper towels, there was only one that wasn't out of stock when I placed my order. And by the time they filled my order, even that option was out of stock. I assumed/hoped it was because of the storm and not a new pandemic shortage.

    Yeah, same here. I ordered a bunch of stuff from HD and tried to add toilet paper and they were low, although I'm supposed to get what I ordered (will see). Can stillget a 4-pack at my 7-11 no problem, however.

    I did find that the snow is affecting grocery delivery. Instacart is fine, but amazon from WF has been much worse than usual. It's clearly weather-related here.

    I'm thinking that a shortage must be localized, whether storm-related or otherwise. Here (mid-Michigan) Costco was heavily stocked with the full range of paper products, many brands/types, when I was there on Friday 1/29. (We didn't get major snow in our forecast over the weekend.) I was in two other stores, one of the WF, the other a similar local store. For sure the latter had paper products, but I don't remember being in that aisle in WF.

    I haven't noticed a shortage in actual stores (I haven't looked at Costco), just when trying to include it in a curbside pickup order from a specific HD. So I don't know how much there's an actual shortage here vs maybe a small increased demand that the store was unprepared for pre snow.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,959 Member
    ahoy_m8 wrote: »
    Psychgrrl wrote: »
    lynn_glenmont wrote: »
    rheddmobile wrote: »
    ahoy_m8 wrote: »
    T1DCarnivoreRunner wrote: »
    I also can't see why schools are not considered to be a risk. My assumption is that it is because most children do not get severe illness. This idea ignores teachers and support staff, family members of those teachers and support staff, and family members of students who bring it home after catching from a fellow student. How is that not a concern?!

    Agree with all you have said. I'll take a stab at how schools are not considered a risk (although I personally do not agree with that conclusion).

    My hypothesis starts with the assumption that the school transmission data available is skewed by disproportionate representation by private schools, I.e.:
    • more school resources
    • less classroom crowding
    • vastly fewer special needs kids that might have distancing difficulty or require close contact
    • ability to immediately expel/suspend kids who don't follow rules
    • comparatively wealthy student body, where wealth correlates inversely to probability of infection (more likely to WFH, less likely to need public transportation or have public facing jobs, less dense living circumstances so better able to isolate within the home)
    Furthermore, public schools are more likely to be in-person where spread is low, so that also skews the in-person data towards lower risk populations.

    Hence, in-person school data is overrepresented by kids less likely to show up at school infected. Remote schooling data overrepresented by kids living in conditions where they are more likely to become infected. So while it appears in-person compares favorably to remote schooling, what is really going on is you see the effects of comparing a disproportionately wealthy population to a disproportionately poor one. The outcome has more to do with the risk profiles the groups you are comparing, not whether they attend in-person or remote.

    I think you may be on to something. In Israel schools were indeed a severe factor in community transmission, so the idea that children don’t transmit the disease can’t be accurate.

    Locally in Memphis, they are claiming schools are not a risk but school sports are a major factor. However, over 65% of our cases, the contact tracing fails to identify where it came from, so how do they know enough about anything to even make remarks like that? Clearly they are missing something when more than half of cases come who knows where.


    Thanks, I didn't know what that number was, but it's what I always wonder about when some institution (like gyms or restaurants) claim they haven't had any COVID transmissions at their business/facility. I always think, "not that you know about."

    It's much easier to trace transmissions to households, coworkers, or events like weddings and funerals, where you know who was exposed to whom. If you pick it up from a stranger on public transportation, in a bar/restaurant/gym or from an asymptomatic child who brings it home from school where they got it from another asymptomatic child who got it from an adult in their household with a mild case who never got tested and convinced themself it was just a cold or an allergy so they could continue sending their kid to school ... well, those would be the transmissions I would expect to fall into the 65%.

    What our county CT has encountered is people unwilling to cooperate. They won’t give information about where they’ve been or who they’ve seen. Makes it really difficult to limit spread.

    On campus, the students have to cooperate. And they’ve been really good about following policies and working with the tracers.

    On topic of college tracing, one daughter lives in a very small off campus apartment (1 bathroom) with 3 other girls and across the hall from another 4 girls. They lived together last year, and the 8 consider themselves a single living group. They have been in the habit of coordinating their testing. After exposure to another living group, one of the 8 woke with a fever and tested positive. The college health center contact traced the other 7 and administered PCR tests within 3 hours. The results took another hour or so. By that time, the remaining girls were already isolating and had had rapid tests, but it was nonetheless reassuringly fast action.

    All the other roommates have tested negative.... except for one. That one had covid in May and received 2 doses of the Pfizer vaccine in early December (Mass General nurse, first dose was I think on first day vaccine was approved for public). She nonetheless is now testing positive (PCR). Again. Thankfully, she is completely asymptomatic. Not sure if it suggests anything about the vaccine being protective vs. sterilizing, but it is an unusual data point.

    Do PCR test actually test for the presence of the virus, or do they test for antibodies? If the latter, could it just be detecting the immune response from the vaccine?

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