COVID-19, Part 4 - what happens next?

[Kingspoint]

I used to live there, now a rich bedroom community for sure with beautiful tree lined neighborhoods and sprawl malls as your only outlet to shop for 90% of the community. Not worst place to stay at home, not the best either. I'm certain that SAT is affecting us all in different ways, dying over it seems counterintuitive

Lived there, too. Just two blocks from downtown. Put in the rebar for the Nordstrom there. Played softball in the Winter time. Because it was at the neck of the two mountain ranges, the clouds swept north and south of Walnut Creek resulting in rain just two weeks a year. Actually saw snow once. Except for the ghastly wind (and that Ygnacio Valley Rd was literally a fault line), it was paradise there. It was the last place I lived in California, so much better than it's neighbors Concord, Pleasant Hill, Lafayette, Alamo and Danville.

[Rojo]

Fart Noise

Heh?

[Kingspoint]

This from San Francisco:


That's a tremendous impact. We need to look at much more than C19 deaths

What happens in Walnut Creek, California is not similar condition-wise to anywhere else in the country (not San Francisco as you tried to report even though it repeated it a dozen times in the article that it was a Walnut Creek hospital and doctor and suicide attempt report). Every area needs to look at their own variances between the effects from opening things up and closing things down. Different places are not comparable.

[Rojo]

Isn't it natural to ask oneself what kind of pandemic features furloughs of doctors and nurses?

[RedTeamGo!]

France was on the brink of revolution. For all the "French-as-pussies" bull-**** we do in the Anglophonic countries, the French aren't afraid to take to the street and change things.

And we have no idea how or why those 100,000 Americans died.

The French have been taking to the streets over everything for decades. Why does this time differ?

You are saying because the French took to the streets one too many times the world shut down and used a virus as cover?

Ok.

[RedTeamGo!]

Isn't it natural to ask oneself what kind of pandemic features furloughs of doctors and nurses?

It blows my mind people think this is a “gotcha” question.

[Sea Ray]

Yep. Mental health has been ignored, as have the most vulnerable in the nursing homes. People here have even said these people are useless and less valuable. The best friend of my gf finally went to visit her mom and dad after not seeing them since Mar 15th. They are in their early 80's, and her dad has always been very meticulous- he still balanced the checkbook, paid the bills, watched baseball and knew all the players. Today? He didn't know who she was. He had enough self awareness to pretend he should know her, but he really didn't. She came back in tears because he's "gone" now. Throwing people into "solitary" (which is exactly what this was for many) is very harsh on people, and there were no provisions for health workers to check on people like that. Even I lost track of time and forgot what day it was. Imagine what is like for someone with anxiety or needed a very predictable schedule to get through the day.

Oh well, maybe CNN can compare the deaths to those who were killed in the Teutoburg Forest next.

That's horrible. I know you didn't ask for my advice but here goes:

My parents are currently 86/83 in independent living. One time I dropped by and we "social distanced " an hour of conversation on their back patio. We later had them over for a nice dinner on Mother's Day. Your GF's father can likely be "brought back", he just needs mental stimulation. I suggest you two or just her spend some social distancing time with him before this loss becomes permanent. I hate hearing stories like that.

As for nursing homes, I think the governor needs a plan to protect them. Something along the lines of testing all workers right away for antibodies. From there have a system where all workers are tested for active C19 regularly, like maybe every week. If there's a positive test then everyone who they come in contact with are tested immediately and appropriate action is taken. I think this sort of due diligence towards our elderly has been largely lacking across the board in this pandemic.

[Sea Ray]

What happens in Walnut Creek, California is not similar condition-wise to anywhere else in the country (not San Francisco as you tried to report even though it repeated it a dozen times in the article that it was a Walnut Creek hospital and doctor and suicide attempt report). Every area needs to look at their own variances between the effects from opening things up and closing things down. Different places are not comparable.

The news was from a Bay area tv station. I mentioned SF because that's a place we all know. Most of us, including me, has no idea where Walnut Creek is. So why is it important to distinguish that this is Walnut Creek and not SF? The point is that this is a story from a doctor on the ground. It doesn't matter if it's SF, Walnut Creek or Portland. The point is that it's happening

[BernieCarbo]

That's horrible. I know you didn't ask for my advice but here goes:

My parents are currently 86/83 in independent living. One time I dropped by and we "social distanced " an hour of conversation on their back patio. We later had them over for a nice dinner on Mother's Day. Your GF's father can likely be "brought back", he just needs mental stimulation. I suggest you two or just her spend some social distancing time with him before this loss becomes permanent. I hate hearing stories like that.

As for nursing homes, I think the governor needs a plan to protect them. Something along the lines of testing all workers right away for antibodies. From there have a system where all workers are tested for active C19 regularly, like maybe every week. If there's a positive test then everyone who they come in contact with are tested immediately and appropriate action is taken. I think this sort of due diligence towards our elderly has been largely lacking across the board in this pandemic.

It isn't my gf's parents, but a friend of hers. But the point still stands. She and her sister and various grandkids are going to visit daily and sit on the porch and talk, and hopefully he improves. They are also going to try to get tested so they can go in the house so it's a more familiar setting for him. Like a lot of couples, the mom was the "social butterfly" and handled all the phone calls and emails and things like that, and he was the guy that would sit and talk for hours with his son in laws and grandkids when they came over. But when the visits had to stop, he wasn't getting that anymore, and the decline was precipitous. Obviously he wasn't 100% before, but when I met him a few months ago he was witty and knowledgeable and on the ball and talking about the upcoming baseball season, and dementia wasn't on anyone's mind.

[Roy Tucker]

Let's face it: blue state liberals hand degrees to each other and congratulate themselves on something they like to think of as "intelligence".

I say this as a blue-state liberal:

I’m not sure what your point was posting this article (my rojo pointer is broken as usual). But our national infrastructure being vulnerable to cyberattack is a very real problem.

[WrongVerb]

What happens in Walnut Creek, California is not similar condition-wise to anywhere else in the country (not San Francisco as you tried to report even though it repeated it a dozen times in the article that it was a Walnut Creek hospital and doctor and suicide attempt report). Every area needs to look at their own variances between the effects from opening things up and closing things down. Different places are not comparable.

Searching online I haven't been able to find anything about the actual number of suicides that have occurred. I mean, there's a difference between having an expected 4 suicides while seeing 6 -- a 50% increase, which sounds dramatic without the numbers, and seeing 80, which would indicate a significant issue that needs to be addressed.

Also, you are right in that what may be happening in a single community can't possibly be extrapolated over the entire US. It's a ridiculous point for anti-maskers to make.

[Sea Ray]

Great editorial here. I'll point out this part as very astute:

Shutting down the private sector (which is where all wealth is created) is truly dangerous even though many of our leaders suggest we shouldn't be scared of it. Another round of stimulus is not what we need. Like a Band-Aid on a massive laceration, it may stop a tiny bit of the bleeding, but the wound continues to worsen, feeding greater and more elaborate intervention. Moreover, we are putting huge financial burdens on future generations because we are scared about something that the data reveal as far less dangerous than many other things in life.

A shutdown may slow the spread of a virus, but it can't stop it. A vaccine may cure us. But in the meantime, we have entered a new era, one in which fear trumps danger and near-term risk creates long-term problems. It appears many people have come to this realization as the data builds. Hopefully, this will go down in history as a mistake that we will never repeat.

https://www.ftportfolios.com//blogs/...with-dangerous

We can never respond to another virus like this again. Never

[Sea Ray]

Disney World is opening in July:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/27/media...rus/index.html

Pretty amazing when you think of it.

[Kingspoint]

The news was from a Bay area tv station. I mentioned SF because that's a place we all know. Most of us, including me, has no idea where Walnut Creek is. So why is it important to distinguish that this is Walnut Creek and not SF? The point is that this is a story from a doctor on the ground. It doesn't matter if it's SF, Walnut Creek or Portland. The point is that it's happening

You are always extremely careful about your word choice. No word gets choosed by you accidentally. You intentionally tried to change the specifics about the article to imply that the suicide attempt increase was from a major world metropolitan area. As you yourself said, you don't know where Walnut Creek is, so why change the location of the story and the location of the hospital if not for a reason? There was only one reason and it's not the made up one you are trying to hide behind...you were trying to change the size of the story by changing the size of the population it effects. Nevermind as I said that Walnut Creek's conditions have nothing to do with any other area of the country, but you tried to compare all areas of the country with one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, even though, that, too, would be irrelevant. As westofyou said, you can't scream the knowledge of contagious infections by scientists in the field being inferior to your knowledge (stayed at a Holiday Inn recently?), and then spread your opinion about how wrong the closures have been because one doctor in a town you don't know anything about states that he thinks the quarantine has lasted too long in his area because he's seen (the article posts no numbers, btw, for yearly or for the four weeks) a huge spike in suicide attempts at his local hospital.

[Kingspoint]

Searching online I haven't been able to find anything about the actual number of suicides that have occurred. I mean, there's a difference between having an expected 4 suicides while seeing 6 -- a 50% increase, which sounds dramatic without the numbers, and seeing 80, which would indicate a significant issue that needs to be addressed.

Also, you are right in that what may be happening in a single community can't possibly be extrapolated over the entire US. It's a ridiculous point for anti-maskers to make.

When I lived there in the mid-80's, they did a study and found that one out of ten cars were convertibles. The two neghboring towns to it's south, Alamo and Danville (ranked 7th in the U.S. in income-per-capita when I lived there), were very affluent. Blackhawk to the southeast is extremely affluent. Lafayette, it's bordering neighbor to the west (where one of my ex-Raider Brothers-in-Law has lived for the last 50 years and where I would see a famous rockstar get his beer at the 7-11 late at night) is also fairly affluent. Walnut Creek has bee headquarters to some of the largest companies in the world over the last 40 years. It is fairly affluent with low suicide numbers so, yes, a small increase could see a huge spike.