Some Covid-19 thoughts
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Monday, September 29, 2025 18:59
VIEWED: 301579
PAGE 50 of 384
I'm not allowed to go into his building. My old man is, but just to bring in food and stuff my brother needs to live.
I offered to let my brother stay here. That was about to happen until one day they both had a light switch flip because they're watching too much news and they thought he might not be able to go back into his building at a later date if he left it.
And really. What the fuck is there to talk about right now? NOTHING is going on.
Don't you judge my family. Go fuck yourself cunt.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Your father is driving 250 miles one way to bring him groceries? Or is he coming up from Florida to do that?
Here's the thing.
You've spent a lot of time pretending that COVID-19 is just a flu/ cold. The facts say otherwise. The cold doesn't kill people. And yet in under 2 months COVID-19 has killed 53,755 people, so far. In under 2 months, that's more than all the influenza deaths combined in an entire flu year.
Or if you don't believe the numbers, look at the news reports: dozens of trailers stacked with dead people, hospitals overflowing with COVID-10 patients, and mass graves. When did the last cold do that? The answer is never.
But then your logic zig-zags. Despite all the evidence, there's no risk you say -
- except for the old and 'weak'. And they should just be unaccommodated so they don't use up even the smallest bit of your life.
So on the one hand, you claim there's no risk to your family. And on the other hand you allow there's risk for the old and 'weak'. I'd say that category fits your father and brother. But apparently one idea in your brain hasn't run into the other idea. So you're perfectly fine with thinking any risk to the old and 'weak' is not worth doing anything about.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Started a GoFundMe to finans R&D for a mask.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/ultraviolet-pathogen-killer-mask
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
How Scientists Could Stop the Next Pandemic Before It Starts
Researchers believe they could pre-emptively create vaccines and drugs to fight a wide range of viral threats — if they can get sufficient funding.
The real obstacle to making panviral drugs or vaccines has been that no one was willing to pay for their development. For pharmaceutical companies, panviral vaccines are simply a terrible business proposition: Companies have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a shot that people will get once a year at most — and not at all in years when no particular disease is ascendant.
Panviral drug treatments are unprofitable for similar reasons. For one, the course of treatment is short, usually just a few weeks; for chronic diseases (diabetes, high blood pressure), patients take regimens of pills daily, often for years. (One person noted that Gilead’s stock price actually dropped after the company produced a revolutionary hepatitis C drug. Because the treatment completely cured patients, the market for it started to shrink, undermining the company’s bottom line.)
Governments, meanwhile, have been reluctant to fund panviral development — both because it’s expensive and because the rewards can feel remote, especially as many diseases originate in other countries. “We don’t prevent well; we respond well,” Daszak notes. “Remember when Obama got $5 billion for the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and U.S. troops went to help fix the problem? That’s heroic. How heroic is it, three years before Ebola, to say, ‘We’re going to fund a massive program in West Africa to help these poor countries get ready in case an outbreak happens?’ He’d be laughed out of the room!”
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) is running a trial for a vaccine against Nipah virus, a zoonotic virus — one that exists in animals but can infect people — which can cause acute respiratory illness and fatal encephalitis. “This is the classic example,” Daszak says. “So far, there have been only a few outbreaks, so the market is minuscule: a few thousand people a year get it, in Malaysia or Bangladesh. But it infects a wide range of animals, and that means it’s likely to keep crossing over into people. And if it ever broke out, it could be a pandemic with very lethal consequences.”
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, people are going to realize that spending money on organizations like CEPI is a good investment — especially when you realize how much having a vaccine against the coronavirus would have offset the damage and destruction and disruption that we’ve seen.
The big question, according to nearly everyone I spoke with, is whether we’ll manage to maintain this political and financial will over time. Racaniello and Daszak both remember being sure that after SARS and Ebola, pandemic prevention would be a priority; instead, each outbreak was quickly forgotten. And while it’s hard to imagine forgetting the current disaster, researchers worry that funding and attention will once again fade in the face of competing pressures. As Rancaniello observed, the combined 2019 budgets for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation was $47 billion — less than 7 percent of the $686 billion allocated to defense. “I would argue that viruses are just as much a threat as a bad nation would be to the military,” Racaniello said.
Or as Daszak put it: “We don’t think twice about the cost of protecting against terrorism. We go out there, we listen to the whispers, we send out the drones — we have a whole array of approaches. We need to start thinking about pandemics the same way.”
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/magazine/pandemic-vaccine.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Your father is driving 250 miles one way to bring him groceries? Or is he coming up from Florida to do that?
Your mixing up my old man and my step dad. The old man is in the south Chicago suburbs.
Quote:
Here's the thing.
You've spent a lot of time pretending that COVID-19 is just a flu/ cold. The facts say otherwise. The cold doesn't kill people. And yet in under 2 months COVID-19 has killed 53,755 people, so far. In under 2 months, that's more than all the influenza deaths combined in an entire flu year.
It has much more in common with the cold than the flu. The only problem here is that it is "novel". After it kills the people it's going to kill and herd immunity sets in, just like other coronaviruses it becomes just another form of the cold.
Quote:
Or if you don't believe the numbers, look at the news reports: dozens of trailers stacked with dead people, hospitals overflowing with COVID-10 patients, and mass graves. When did the last cold do that? The answer is never.
All in New York, and most of that in the City. Plenty of stories in the media stating that in most places in the country not only are hospitals not even close to capacity, but they've had to furlough workers because of the shut down. It's such a non-secret the media isn't even trying to hide that fact and a simple Google search will give you plenty of articles stating it.
If New York City itself were a state, it would have more deaths than the top 41 states of the union combined.
Stop focusing on New York.
Quote:
But then your logic zig-zags. Despite all the evidence, there's no risk you say -
- except for the old and 'weak'. And they should just be unaccommodated so they don't use up even the smallest bit of your life.
So on the one hand, you claim there's no risk to your family. And on the other hand you allow there's risk for the old and 'weak'. I'd say that category fits your father and brother. But apparently one idea in your brain hasn't run into the other idea. So you're perfectly fine with thinking any risk to the old and 'weak' is not worth doing anything about.
My old man isn't technically "old" yet. He's also quite healthy for a man his age. My brother has a disability, but he's not prone to getting sick.
I'm much more concerned about their mental well being than any small risk of physical problems from a virus that has a near zero chance of doing anything harmful to them. Particularly my brother who had a really bad hand dealt to him in life and has substance abuse issues. Being part of the community down there through church, activities and volunteer work was his life. Now he can't do any of those things, and he's forced to live alone with his thoughts every day.
I can only tell him "you and everybody else" when he starts complaining on the phone about how much he thinks life sucks right now before that starts getting old. It didn't help his state of mind at all when his governor decided to extend the lock down a full month this time until June 1st. At least before the extensions were about 2 weeks at a time, which at least gave the illusion of hope. Now he has to sit there knowing it will be at least 5 more weeks of this bullshit and that it can be extended again at that point.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:It's nothing like a common cold. It has much more in common with SARS or MERS, also coronaviruses. And they're nothing like the common cold either. It's not even in the common cold category, it's specifically a SARS virus, and that fact's embedded its name: SARS-COV-2
JACK:
It has much more in common with the cold than the flu. The only problem here is that it is "novel". After it kills the people it's going to kill and herd immunity sets in, just like other coronaviruses it becomes just another form of the cold.
You're focused on the word 'coronavirus' but you don't understand what it means. So, by way of analogy, it's like saying a shrew has a lot in common with a blue whale because they're both mammals ... and that means a shrew lives in the ocean full-time, and will die outside of it, just like a blue whale, because they're both mammals.
Quote:
Or if you don't believe the numbers, look at the news reports: dozens of trailers stacked with dead people, hospitals overflowing with COVID-10 patients, and mass graves. When did the last cold do that? The answer is never.
Quote:But all those deaths came with a mere 20% infection rate. If NYC gets to 80% infected, what do you think that would look like? If the rest of the country gets to 80% infected, what do you think that would look like?
All in New York, and most of that in the City. Plenty of stories in the media stating that in most places in the country not only are hospitals not even close to capacity, but they've had to furlough workers because of the shut down. It's such a non-secret the media isn't even trying to hide that fact and a simple Google search will give you plenty of articles stating it.
And waiting for herd immunity assumes one does get immunity. While that's a hope, it's not a fact.
Quote:NYC could be the future if SARS-COV-2 becomes epidemic anywhere else. It's a lesson on how bad things could get when 20% of the people get infected in such a short time.
If New York City itself were a state, it would have more deaths than the top 41 states of the union combined.
Stop focusing on New York.
One would hope to learn the right lessons and avoid that future. Right?
Quote:
But then your logic zig-zags. Despite all the evidence, there's no risk you say -
- except for the old and 'weak'. And they should just be unaccommodated so they don't use up even the smallest bit of your life.
So on the one hand, you claim there's no risk to your family. And on the other hand you allow there's risk for the old and 'weak'. I'd say that category fits your father and brother. But apparently one idea in your brain hasn't run into the other idea. So you're perfectly fine with thinking any risk to the old and 'weak' is not worth doing anything about.
Quote:I went looking for case fatality rates by age and found nothing less than a month old. But a majority of deaths occur over the age of 65. As for his health, do you know for a fact he doesn't have one or more risk factors?
My old man isn't technically "old" yet. He's also quite healthy for a man his age.
Quote:Is he on medication? Then that means his systems are unstable, and prone to being knocked off of a precarious balance.
My brother has a disability, but he's not prone to getting sick.
Quote:That sort of bombastic bloviating doesn't earn you any credibility.
I'm much more concerned about their mental well being than any small risk of physical problems from a virus that has a near zero chance of doing anything harmful to them.
Quote:
Particularly my brother who had a really bad hand dealt to him in life and has substance abuse issues. Being part of the community down there through church, activities and volunteer work was his life. Now he can't do any of those things, and he's forced to live alone with his thoughts every day.NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I told you that I talk to them nearly every day.
One of my old man's favorite lines, even before this happened, is "I'm all talked out". He doesn't like talking on the phone. He's a bit more of a captive audience these days, but he still doesn't like talking on the phone.
My brother and I can talk for an hour or two one day, and the next day he doesn't want to talk much at all. It's no surprise. He's bi-polar. He's on meds, but meds aren't everything. He's lost everything that he cares about right now because of the shutdown.
My other brother might go down to visit him once per year, if he begs him enough. He doesn't give a shit.
My old man isn't going down unless he absolutely has to. The legacy media and my youngest brother with OCD have him a lot more paranoid about this whole thing than he'd ever lead on.
My car isn't going to make it down there. I go down there 4 or 5 times a year when my old man does. I was supposed to go last time, but his building told him that I can't. Only my dad can go down, and only to help him stock up on stuff and then he has to leave and can't stay overnight like we usually would.
Section 8 housing in Pritzker land. What are you going to do?
I've already offered that he could come live with me for a while. That offer is still on the table. Not much else I can do.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I gave you a ton of suggestions.
You silently shrugged.
I'm not going to respond to any more of your whinging about your relatives. If you can't be bothered, then neither can I.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I gave you a ton of suggestions.
You silently shrugged.
I'm not going to respond to any more of your whinging about your relatives. If you can't be bothered, then neither can I.
Your suggestions were call them (which I do) and drive down to my brother (which I can't).
My offer for him to live here temporarily is always on the table. They were going to do it and then all of the sudden they got cold feet about it. They're afraid that he can't go back to his place if things get even worse and more locked down in Illinois. His building is nearly all senior citizens outside of him and a few other younger people with disabilities.
It probably wouldn't help him too much if he was here. At least I could make sure he wasn't going to start drinking, but he still can't go to church or really do anything. It would make the old man feel better though.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I gave you a ton of suggestions.
You silently shrugged.
I'm not going to respond to any more of your whinging about your relatives. If you can't be bothered, then neither can I.
Quote:That's your careless reading again. I made a ton of suggestions that don't involve YOU calling them to chit-chat, or driving there.
JACK:
Your suggestions were call them (which I do) and drive down to my brother (which I can't).
My offer for him to live here temporarily is always on the table. They were going to do it and then all of the sudden they got cold feet about it. They're afraid that he can't go back to his place if things get even worse and more locked down in Illinois. His building is nearly all senior citizens outside of him and a few other younger people with disabilities.
It probably wouldn't help him too much if he was here. At least I could make sure he wasn't going to start drinking, but he still can't go to church or really do anything. It would make the old man feel better though.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
And get other relatives to call him OFTEN.
Ask him who's in his church group.
Get THEM to call him OFTEN.
Be observant and proactive. If there's something that he's not doing now that he used to do, find a way to make it happen in some fashion.
Get him out of the house.
Read his favorite bible passages over the phone.
Yes, it'll take time and effort. You may need to go WAY out of your comfort zone and spend a HUGE amount of time and effort.
You'll need to call your relatives and get them on board.
You'll need to suss out his church. You'll need to suss out those people. You'll need to get THEM on board to call him and establish regular, reliable contact - something he can count on, besides you. (ETA: as long as they don't try and cheer him out of his rut, or try to keep up an endlessly cheery facade with the expectation he'll join them. Their conversations should engage him in immediate things that are not COVID.)
If he has a doctor/ neurologist/ psychologist/ psychiatrist you might let them know what's going on. There's always a chance his depression is partially neurology-driven and so you might be fighting against the tide without medical help.
If he's drinking, how is he getting his alcohol? Stinkin' thinkin' and drinkin' can lead him to attempt suicide. It sounds like he's in an assisted care residence. Can you find a way to interrupt the drinkin' by finding out how he's getting it? Can you enlist the residence? Because they may be able to interrupt the drinkin'.
What can he do outside of his dwelling? Does he have a hobby or interest that can take him out of his depressed rut?
Does he have a reliable routine? Can you encourage that? I remember a friend talking to his mother every day when she was depressed. : Ma, did you take your medicine? Did you eat breakfast? How are you doing for food? Tell me, what's in your frig. Did you talk with (relative) today yet? Oh really?! How's she doing? : Being depressed often means you give up on regular daily at-home routines. Reestablishing them can help.
I have far more experience with that situation than I've posted about because (for the most part) I don't intrude on other people's privacy. If I posted about my experiences, I'd be posting about those people, too, which I almost never do (as you may have noticed). But there are things you can do to help. You can't guarantee results, but you can do whatever is in your power, and there's a lot of options.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME