Black Dog

As far as I know, summer temperatures are not really high enough to actually kill the virus. But UV light definitely will kill it. Also, even though the temperature itself doesn't likely kill it, the overall summer conditions (temp and humidity) make it more difficult to transmit. Further, summer conditions and school closure mean people are outside more and less crowding indoors which also leads to less transmission. The thing is though, it's still there. That's why these closures are so difficult to deal with . it's easy to put them in place but hard to get out of. Once they start to lift them cases will likely creep up a bit. more people will die. Then what? Stay closed forever? We know for a fact that about 40,000 people will die from automobile accidents every year in the US. But we still let people drive their cars every day. Why? Because we have to in order to have a functioning country. Alcohol kills about 80,000. Smoking kills almost 500,000. You can still drive your car to the store and get both, and a cheeseburger to boot. But you can't get a garden hose or a gallon of paint.

Probably, but not known for sure yet.

Sorry that I missed the sarcasm. I guess this has made me a bit tense as well. Peace.

I really hope you're not serious.

And even more

And look, it's not the only one

At least the Ibanez has the handle on it so it'll be easier to toss it in the dumpster.

At least they were smart enough to put the LP on top, as it is clearly the superior instrument...

Doesn't mean you should.

In the midst of all this there are anecdotal reports about people getting the infection twice (or at least testing positive twice, whatever that may mean). It's hard to know what to make of that kind of information at this point. Typically, you lose immunity to things like this because over time your immune system's memory response declines, or the virus mutates. So, there should be at least some short term immunity, but that is not known yet. Vaccines are fine but not always as effective as we would like.

And not only have they admitted that masks help, some places are making it mandatory. It is true that it depends on whether you're trying to keep things in vs out, and the type of barrier and how you use it, but yes, they can help, obviously. It's funny, all the experts acted like since this was a new coronavirus, we had no idea how it spreads. Sure, it was new. Sure, there were many things we didn't know about it. But, we have known for a long time how coronaviruses and other respiratory viruses spread. Some are more contagious, and some more deadly, than others but they spread the same way.

That's weird because from a circuit standpoint, the strings, bridge and tailpeicce should all be the same (presumably ground), unless you had nylon saddles or something. But even then the tailpeice and strings would be the same electrically.

Yep. China has been lying from the beginning. There is no way they've had only 3000 deaths from this. They were hoping to hide the fact that this virus escaped containment from their lab. They also knew about human to human transmission very early. They started secretly buying up PPE all around the world well before they told anyone else about it. The death count fraud in the US has only started. Adding in fake Covid deaths to try to make it seem worse than it is/was. I also wouldn't doubt it if states will get more money from the feds if they have a higher death count. When I used to be a primary care doctor, I was always pressured to fill out death certificates and to list a cause of death when I had no idea what they died from. They would say "well, the guy was 55 years old and there is no evidence of foul play so it must have been a heart attack, right?" I refused and would always list it as "undetermined" and they hated that. You know, they use that data for public health purposes and they want you to just make it up? Garbage in, garbage out. Unbelievable. And, BTW, it is the CDC themselves that are advising doctors to list Covid as the cause of death when that has not been established. The CDC and the NIH have flipped flopped all over since this whole thing started. They have been wrong about many, many aspects of this again and again. The modeling has all been wrong. Military field hospitals sit empty around the country. We have one in my county, it's empty because our hospitals are empty. They closed the field hospital in Seattle because they never had one single patient. Even in New York, the last count that I saw for the 1000 bed hospital ship was that they had 64 patients. They set up the Javits Center for 2500 patients and last count they had less than 100. And the NY hospitals are not even full. Cuomo wanted 30,000 ventilators. He's never had more than 4000-ish patients on vents at any one time in the whole state and he has thousands of ventilators sitting in a warehouse that will never be deployed, but he wants more. This is all ridiculous. If you have symptoms of illness, stay home. If you are vulnerable, stay home. That's it.

Every infectious disease expert that I have heard or read think it's at least 10 times the number that are actually testing positive.

I understand. I also should say that I know I may sound callous talking about death as I do, but I'm a physician and I'm looking at this from that perspective. I am fully aware that each one of these lives lost is devastating for the person going through it and their families. I know people are scared and you watch TV and read the news and it seems horrible, and it is. For people that are vulnerable it has to be very scary. We are living in different times. Truth, reality? That doesn't matter anymore. Everyone is spinning everything for their own advantage. Bad times indeed.

Also, it may not be valid to compare the per capita death rates of Sweden to the entire US since we have vast areas with very low population density where there are virtually no cases. If you compare the per capita deaths rates for New York State and Sweden it's 73.88 for NY and 13.33 for Sweden. Just for another data point the per capita rate for New Jersey is 39.9. So I'm not sure Sweden got it all that wrong.

Yeah, I read the article. If you look at the worldometer website you can see that the daily new cases looks it it may have peaked and is dropping. The daily deaths are going up and down but overall are increasing. but, the deaths will lag behind new cases by about 2 weeks or so. In other words, the people dying today got the infection a couple weeks ago. Maybe more because this infection does tend to drag on a bit and they may have been in the ICU on a vent for a while before they died. Time will tell. I'll tell you this, if the lockdown doesn't lift soon, you better hope it worked because we won't have a health care system left. One of our local health care systems has laid off all of their mid-level providers (Nurse Practitioners and PA's), about half of their nurses and support staff and shut down their walk in clinics indefinitely. That's happening all over.

If I calculated the per capita deaths correctly that would be around 10 per 100k for the US and 13 per 100k for Sweden. That's pretty close to the same. We did everything. Put 22 million and climbing out of work, all for about the same outcome? You continue to refuse to accept that the economic shut down costs lives too. That is a mistake.

Well, I'm truly sorry that your wife has this condition. Chronic illness of any sort is horrible and difficult to deal with in many ways. I hope she gets through all this OK. Yes, people are very inconsiderate when it come to this kind of thing. Sadly you have to try to protect yourself from them. However, all I'm saying is that this shutdown is really harming lots of other innocent people too, up to and including lots of death. That's a reality too. You can't just look at one side.

Actually, the numbers in Sweden speak for themselves. It's a great example. Sweden has only 1300 deaths out of 10 million with new cases going down by the day. Do you have other data?

Probably. What is overstated is the value of widespread shutdowns. What is understated is cost of widespread shutdowns. What is overstated is how sick people are getting from this. What is overstated is the value of testing. Can you tell me what that is clinically vs epidemiologically? And what kind of testing? What do you use it for? What does it tell you in the context of this type of infectious disease and what you know historically about infections/pandemics/epidemics like this? What do you do every Flu season with your eating-out habits? Do you stop in October and resume in May? Do you advocate for shutting down the country every fall for Flu season which kills up to 80k/yr? It's probably not accurate. Look at the trouble we’ve had getting reliable testing up and running in the US. Do you think that other countries, especially third world, are doing better? Do you think that North Korea has had zero cases?? Is Russia being honest? Has China been honest? Do most of these other countries even care? We are actually admitting here in the US now that we are overcounting deaths by just guessing as to what they died from. Anyway, I’ve tried to explain each and every post I’ve made on the subject. I’ve included links to government and other websites for data. I’ve linked to articles from epidemiologists and economists who disagree with the “mainstream”. If you think there is only one credible perspective and interpretation of all this you are not keeping an open mind. You can believe whatever you want. I've heard so many things that are just wrong in all this, I've just tried to offer the perspective of 23 years of clinical medicine experience. Maybe you know better.

They already have it. We all have it. They're just not telling you what you need to know about it.

Except it's not a theory, it's a fact. Sweden is doing quite well with mild social distancing, no shutdown. They're a country of 10 million, about half the size of New York State. They had their first case before New York and right now they have only 1300 dead compared to New York with 14,000 (albeit an inflated number).

And it's actually way, way more than that. We are way under-counting total cases and recoveries. We are also way overcounting deaths. Now in New York they are going back and retroactively counting deaths that they "think could have been" from Covid-19. Yep, people who were never tested are getting counted as Covid deaths. Ridiculous. I have a physician in my group who runs around telling patients they have Covid-19 and when he tests them they're all negative.

Nice looking guitar. Man, that bridge is really high on the treble side.