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Encouragement Thread - If you need support let’s help


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52 minutes ago, MikeRapp said:

Thanks. Here's hoping that the findings mentioned in that article prove to be correct.

 

10 hours ago, skevinp said:

Thank you N.E. Brasso, for telling me what I just wrote and for arguing with what it doesn’t mean. It’s like he never left. 

Ha!

One funny result of Covid-19 discussions is seeing people who fiercely disagree about many drum corps issues, like garfield and cixelsyd, aligning on this topic. I butted heads with Brasso on some drum corps subjects and agreed with him on others, and I would be curious to konw what he'd make of this matter. 

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7 hours ago, garfield said:

Wait, you mean it WASN'T an invitation to become a keyboard infectious disease Google search expert relating every occurance to the implications of repeating circumstances in the most densely-populated city in the country with the intent of scaring the entire population into staying home and shutting down a vibrant economy strictly to negatively affect the incumbent's chances in the upcoming presidential elections?

And I thought only the Bible had very long sentences.

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5 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

Thanks. Here's hoping that the findings mentioned in that article prove to be correct.

 

Ha!

One funny result of Covid-19 discussions is seeing people who fiercely disagree about many drum corps issues, like garfield and cixelsyd, aligning on this topic. I butted heads with Brasso on some drum corps subjects and agreed with him on others, and I would be curious to konw what he'd make of this matter. 

This article is significant for two reasons.

First, the convalescent plasma study we are running with Mayo now has a pretty short window to get blood donations from recovered patients.

Second, we can now assume that there are likely significantly more immune people than we had previously thought. Antibody tests after three months will be negative whether you had it or not.

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18 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

Thanks. Here's hoping that the findings mentioned in that article prove to be correct.

They are proven to be correct, that was the point of the article. We are now six months down the road from the initial outbreak and scientists can and are now measuring actual outcomes.

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42 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

I butted heads with Brasso on some drum corps subjects and agreed with him on others, and I would be curious to konw what he'd make of this matter. 

Brasso is one person I don’t worry about during the pandemic.  If the Grim Reaper ever shows up at his door, he will argue with him until he forgets why he came and leaves with a headache.  

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53 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

 One funny result of Covid-19 discussions is seeing people who fiercely disagree about many drum corps issues, like garfield and cixelsyd, aligning on this topic. I butted heads with Brasso on some drum corps subjects and agreed with him on others, and I would be curious to konw what he'd make of this matter. 

Have you got several hours of free time?

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Just now, MikeRapp said:

They are proven to be correct, that was the point of the article. We are now six months down the road from the initial outbreak and scientists can and are now measuring actual outcomes.

The Boy Genius Report article you cited rightly says that "more immunity research will be required". The title itself clearly states "new revelations may change everything we know about coronavirus antibodies". It says that "circulating antibodies might be undetectable in blood tests within three months after infection." It regularly uses phrases like "if accurate" and other sensible qualifiers. It cites two different studies published in Nature, one from Chinese researchers who examined just 37 cases. That's about as many as the French hydroxychloroquine study back in Jan.-Feb. that got a lot of people thinking that drug was a miracle cure -- only for numerous later studies to fail to replicate those results, leading our FDA just in the past week or so to withdraw authorization for hospitals to use it against Covid-19. The BGR article tentatively accepts those researchers' findings, but based on the results of the other study of 149 patients (and on a New York Times article), it suggests those finding are being misinterpreted, because "it does appear that even low levels of certain antibodies have potent neutralizing capability ... Low antibody titers don’t necessarily determine whether a patient will be protected from reinfection." That would be great! But what we have are two studies rather tentatively presented.

I would love for us to be sure that more people have acquired immunity against Covid-19 than has previously seemd to be the case. But if the article is right, we'll largely be unable to identify who had it and who didn't, at least on any practical scale, and that's not much help for making public health decisions. (And also, even people who never experienced symptoms can apparently have long-term lung damage, according to your source.) So no, that hasn't been proven, and your linked article doesn't claim it has. Would you feel comfortable telling someone now who believes that they haven't had the disease that, even though tests show they have no antibodies against it, they can feel safe mingling with a large crowd, because they probably did have it and didn't know it? Can they sue you when they subsequently get the disease because you were wrong?

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19 minutes ago, Ghost said:

Have you got several hours of free time?

Did you mean days?  I remember one time Michael Boo mentioned a contest he marched in, and Brasso spent a week telling him he was wrong because he found an incorrect schedule that did not include it.  Never mind that Boo still had the dated personal journal he had written about it in, and remembered it like it was yesterday.  

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9 hours ago, garfield said:

Wait, you mean it WASN'T an invitation to become a keyboard infectious disease Google search expert relating every occurance to the implications of repeating circumstances in the most densely-populated city in the country with the intent of scaring the entire population into staying home and shutting down a vibrant economy strictly to negatively affect the incumbent's chances in the upcoming presidential elections?

I'm sure you'll forgive my not knowing after having to scroll through 168 pages to find your quote.

Eh, from the time we first started discussing the coronavirus at the end of February, my foremost goal here has been to encourage everyone to take this outbreak seriously, and to not complain that the danger was being blown out of proportion by the media ("It’s over hyped - get back to me in 2-3weeks" (all quotes are from DCP posters on Feb. 28); "Shameful on the media's part. 62 cases in the US"); and to not claim that it was going to be just like the flu ("There is ZERO evidence that this strain of flu even challenges 'OUR' flu (the 'American' strain) for people affected, let alone death"; "our flu has killed more than 8,000 people this season and NO ONE calls the 'US flu' a pandemic" ), or that it wouldn't be a problem in this country because we don't eat bats, or because we didn't have a large population of migrant textile workers from China, or because we have better hygiene, and so on, and so on, because I felt that if we listened to those arguments, then lots of people would die. I don't think it's very encouraging to give people false hope that leads to their deaths.

I lost the debate, and people didn't take it seriously enough, and lots of people died. My arguments weren't good enough. They apparently failed to convice you and other skeptics that this outbreak was going to be (at least) as bad as I feared. Therefore I must share some responsibility for the many thousands of deaths that happened. And I'm sorry I let everyone down, not that my apology will bring any victims back to life. (And obviously I don't mean just me or just on DCP, but everyone out there making the same arguments. We failed. With tragic results. We need to do better!)

(As for the idea that we can set aside what happened in "the most densely-populated city in the country" as being largely irrelevant to what will happen elsewhere, it's true that New York City was hit very hard, with more than 17,000 deaths. But that means that the other 100,000+ deaths, so far, didn't happen there.)

And yes, on this subject, I've probably been the most pessimistic frequent poster here -- although Hockey Dad, who started this thread, was actually posting much more dire predictions than I was -- but my big prediction back in April about how many deaths would result from the first wave proved to be far too optimistic.  I guess you can call me a Pollyanna.

But if it cheers people up to think of me as looking like Hayley Mills, so be it.

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Edited by N.E. Brigand
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