A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
Never really heard of her before, but had a look through a bunch of her articles and they mostly seem to have a quote and spin from people at UCSF. Given their COVID track record I guess that makes sense.
I've been around and around this so many times the last few years and it always goes something like this:
Internet rando: Masks don't work!
Me: Yes they do. Here's tons of scientific proof.
Internet rando: The issue isn't whether or not they COULD work, it's whether average people use them properly and they don't.
Me: Seems like a personal problem.
@tylerblack32 has been keeping tabs on this for years. It doesn't look like he ever got active here, but you can look him up elsewhere if you want to find a lot of good data on the subject.
I'd forgotten I wrote this about her. My wife was telling me earlier in the week about how her husband's on strike(they live in LA) and won't wear a mask anywhere anymore, but it's mostly OK because "it's mutated so it can't kill people anymore."
She was bragging about how she'll still wear a mask to the grocery store and the doctor, because immunocompromised people need to be there...but nowhere else, I guess...My wife didn't congratulate her for her behavior, so I guess she got upset about it.
All I could really think is that if this is what passes as California leftist behavior these days they're really not that different than the people of Florida. They just act more polite about their behavior.
Long way of saying that you're correct. It's mass delusion, or at least mass willful ignorance so as not to be inconvenienced.
My wife opened up Zoom today a bit before a meeting with her remote work force coworkers and I watched this unfold:
Coworker: I'm SO sick(barely able to talk). I don't know why I get sick EVERY time I go on vacation lately.
My Wife: You think it's COVID?
Coworker: No, definitely not. The whole family has it, too, so it might be something viral?
Other Coworker: Sounds like allergies.
*30 minute discussion of just how bad everyone's allergies are breaks out while my wife just sits there...silently...with a horrified look on her face*
@catladyactivist@ohai.social
Thank you for the reminder on this! I'd checked in with my school district previously, and they told me that they wouldn't be providing that information until September 2024. However, when I looked through the government reporting site this time(https://oese.ed.gov/offices/education-stabilization-fund/elementary-secondary-school-emergency-relief-fund/stateplans/) they have some numbers in now.
Unfortunately, what they spent it on in terms of air quality and HVAC is extremely vague....simply that they will "perform ductwork renovations" and "improve air quality through filtration." Honestly, I have no real idea what that means to them and they have no publicly stated goals. Knowing many of them I suspect they have no idea what it means, either. They likely just handed the money off to business owning friends and/or family who told them they'd take care of it.
They budgeted 35% of their COVID relief funds to it, overall, on the surface. A deeper look showed that 65% of that 35%(~23% of the total received) went to completely replacing non-functioning HVAC systems in just 2 schools, meaning the other 32 schools shared about a third(~12% of the total) of the money.
Sometimes in science you have to rediscover something you already knew, often under a different set of circumstances, in order to move forward again.
Just noted my oversight and who I'm talking to there. Geez!
This article by @jljcolorado is one of my favorites of the COVID-era.
I'm really not invested in this and I honestly try and avoid it as much as possible. I guess it just doesn't matter to my daily life whether it's zoonotic or some lab created Frankenstein. In the end I'm going to do everything that I can to avoid it.
What I don't get, though, is why people who believe it's an evil lab creation are so eager to get it over and over again, and then make certain that everyone gets it repeatedly. I'd gladly let them write that it was a lab creation straight into the history books if they'd commit to stopping its rampant spread and start helping people who are suffering from its after effects.
@catladyactivist@ohai.social
I've said this before, but, the biggest shock of the whole school mess was/is that from both my wife's perspective as a teacher, and my perspective as a parent with kids in our district, the local school district and the administrations in charge could not have cared less at all about the kids or teachers. No decisions were made with theta health in mind and it was laughed off when mentioned. The decisions were all made 100% from the perspective of how they could get the most money into the district through "butts in seats." The moment the state reduced school payments for zoom logins from the kids and switched it back to a count of butts in seats, all of the pretense disappeared and it became urgent to get the kids back.
In a lot of these little fiefdoms there's a "industrial complex" of sorts in which money is doled out to friends and family for jobs to work with and maintain the school district and they're not at all willing to give that up, even when risking the health and safety of the kids and employees.
I have no wastewater data, either, so I'm pretty much forced to just assume everyone else has COVID. Seems like my only cautious option given the complete lack of data.
Except that's there's very little testing compared to previous times. It's apples and oranges. Deaths and hospitalizations are essentially meaningless now. I wouldn't think that's a good way to measure out your choices. The only two numbers that I can see still being meaningful are wastewater testing(although that has limitations) and excess deaths(which are lagging).
We have a hospital basically across the street from us. On the last day of August, 2022, they decided that they didn't have to keep reporting COVID numbers if they didn't test anymore. They haven't done a single test since. Officially, that means we have zero cases for the last 10 months. Those zero cases get averaged into the data for the CDC's whole area data, bringing down the numbers for a whole chunk of central Florida.
It doesn't have to be that extreme where you are to give a totally false sense of what's going on.
The resulting article:
Long COVID patients in Colorado are still struggling as the world moves on: “We’re fighting for our lives”
https://www.denverpost.com/2023/06/25/colorado-long-covid-patients-research/
I totally understand. Akimasa Hirata was directly quoted in the article, which is why I'm making the assumption(perhaps wrong) that he's agreeing with the numbers as reported.
I understand what you're saying, but not everything is a scientific paper. This may be part of a larger study, but by itself I wouldn't expect that to be published as a lone review of insurance data. My guess is that he's using the insurance data to check his team's projections, but that's just a guess at this point. As you can see Akimasa Hirata has done other research on COVID infection/reinfection projections. For example:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36992217/
Personally, I'm taking it for exactly what it says until further notice one way or another. Insurance codes show that people are testing positive, on average, every ~4 months in a country where they're still testing. The earlier wave(s) data shows pretty much exactly what we've seen and expected. Dropping to 4 months looks pretty dramatic, but it's definitely not unexpected. If we weren't going about this so backwards in the US we'd be able to verify it with another data set, but that ship's sailed.
While this appears to be unpublished insurance data, the researcher, Akimasa Hirata, is a legitimate COVID researcher who works in this field. If he put his name to it, I'd wager it's correct.
@begrudging_recluse @beige_alert
Glad you understood even though I somehow put mental facilities rather than faculties. Need to stop typing so fast before the caffeine hits :)
Even worse, my dad had COVID, spent months terrified of us getting COVID after he had severe brain fog, but after recovering "enough"(he is a former academic who I have never seen mis-spell a word, but now writes me e-mails that I'm often convinced can't have possibly come from him...but they did...) and now he's out there maskless again and I'm just waiting for him to tell me he's got COVID again and can't remember anything. I don't understand the "need" to get it over and over again.
@ixtility@urbanists.social @begrudging_recluse
I absolutely know we're not, but within our county of 200,000 people, we actually might be. Other than a single chin diaper last year I haven't seen a mask on another person in at least 18 months. I at least get where they're coming from, even if they're severely wrong.
We have taken some road trips to get out of this rural bubble, but I bet very few others have.
@beige_alert @begrudging_recluse
It really is weird, right? Amongst my in-laws, some of the ones pushing this, there's very clearly severe decline in health readily apparent in some of them, including my MIL whose mental facilities are slipping terrifyingly fast. There's nothing we can tell her that she will remember the next time we talk, and she often has very wild stories in her head about what's going on around her. When my wife brought this up to my FIL he just said "That's what happens in your mid to late 60's, right?" Gosh, I hope not...
Anyway, I could go on and on about what I see amongst people I've known for a long time, but, yes, I can't help but think of it as the classic sci-fi story plague sometimes where the infected keep telling you how awesome it is and you should just give in and go along.
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
