Some Covid-19 thoughts

POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Monday, September 29, 2025 18:59
VIEWED: 301579
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SECOND

Thursday, February 18, 2021 7:23 PM

U.S. Life Expectancy Falls by a Full Year

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thursday showed that life expectancy in the U.S. dropped by a full year in first half of 2020, yet another reminder of the devastating toll Covid-19 has exacted. The one-year drop in the average number of years an American, at birth, can expect to live to 77.8 years (down from 78.8 years in 2019) is the largest decline since World War II. That data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which is part of the CDC, only accounts for the first six months of 2020, which means the decline in life expectancy, a measurement of the nation’s health as a whole, will likely plummet even further, as the pandemic turned more deadly as the year wore on.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR10-508.pdf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, February 18, 2021 10:11 PM

Sure it has.


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A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

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1KIKI

Friday, February 19, 2021 3:15 AM

The fourth wave - probably, due to the Super Bowl and especially variants.




The original source is here.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 19, 2021 6:00 AM

lol


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A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

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1KIKI

Friday, February 19, 2021 11:32 AM

Quote:

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]Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fourth Wave? When the Feck was the Third Wave?

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SECOND

Saturday, February 20, 2021 5:28 AM

During the summer of 2020 the pandemic dies down in Europe but keeps shooting up in the US. By November we're doing worse than all but four or five European countries.

Why? Because Donald Trump insisted on reopening the economy too soon. Unlike Europe, we never crushed the virus to near zero. Instead we kept on killing people all through summer, and when winter came we were starting from a higher base. I think it's safe to say that this one mistake probably cost a hundred thousand lives or so.

This is why I rate our overall response to the pandemic as "pretty good." We really didn't make as many deadly mistakes as people think, and overall the CDC and FDA did a fairly reasonable job. The one big mistake we did make came down to a single sociopathic man whose motivations, as always, were beyond human ken. Electing Trump president was our only real mistake, and we did that long before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19.

NUTSHELL VERSION: We mostly responded fairly well to the pandemic, especially given how new it was and how the science behind it was changing rapidly in real time. On the vaccination front, our response has been all but miraculous.

We made only one big mistake: allowing Donald Trump to be our president. My take is that this is not enough to condemn the entire US response. It's only one thing. On the other hand, it was a big thing and we did elect the man. If you think it's sophistry to say "it was only one thing" when the result was so catastrophic, I can't really blame you. I think it's important to understand just where we went wrong, but I'm less concerned with how you then describe it.

https://jabberwocking.com/heres-why-i-think-our-covid-response-has-bee
n-better-than-people-think/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, February 20, 2021 9:45 PM

Wall Street Journal

We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

https://archive.vn/92pKH

Quote:

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Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

Antibody studies almost certainly underestimate natural immunity. Antibody testing doesn’t capture antigen-specific T-cells, which develop “memory” once they are activated by the virus. Survivors of the 1918 Spanish flu were found in 2008—90 years later—to have memory cells still able to produce neutralizing antibodies.

Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that the percentage of people mounting a T-cell response after mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 infection consistently exceeded the percentage with detectable antibodies. T-cell immunity was even present in people who were exposed to infected family members but never developed symptoms. A group of U.K. scientists in September pointed out that the medical community may be under-appreciating the prevalence of immunity from activated T-cells.

Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. would also suggest much broader immunity than recognized. About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection.

In my own conversations with medical experts, I have noticed that they too often dismiss natural immunity, arguing that we don’t have data. The data certainly doesn’t fit the classic randomized-controlled-trial model of the old-guard medical establishment. There’s no control group. But the observational data is compelling.

I have argued for months that we could save more American lives if those with prior Covid-19 infection forgo vaccines until all vulnerable seniors get their first dose. Several studies demonstrate that natural immunity should protect those who had Covid-19 until more vaccines are available. Half my friends in the medical community told me: Good idea. The other half said there isn’t enough data on natural immunity, despite the fact that reinfections have occurred in less than 1% of people—and when they do occur, the cases are mild.

But the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in.

My prediction that Covid-19 will be mostly gone by April is based on laboratory data, mathematical data, published literature and conversations with experts. But it’s also based on direct observation of how hard testing has been to get, especially for the poor. If you live in a wealthy community where worried people are vigilant about getting tested,

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