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
To balance out my frustration of yesterday here's how my Sunday is going so far.
It's a beautiful, cold day in the woods. My wife keeps feeding me fresh hush puppies and the kids are cleaning without even being told to. The 9yo even put on a mask to "not smell stuff" while cleaning and wandered off talking about how awesome masks are.
Not sure what I did to deserve such a nice Sunday, but I'll take it.
@robin@social.igotout.de @augieray
In the end it's all about fit. If you can do a home fit test on your mask of choice I highly recommend it. Most people will recommend against double masking, but, I will say that in my case the best fit I ever found was a particular N95 with a neck gaiter and I'm sure that wouldn't be the same for everyone.
I'm also a weirdo who in the early days when N95's weren't available and everyone was wearing cloth masks I bought layers of electrostatic polypropylene and jerry-rigged my own masks, so, I'm not against messing with it to make it right.
Wow. "COVID's damaging effect on the heart" right in the first sentence. You don't see that honest of coverage every day.
At first glance it seems to track pretty well with this fairly recent paper, too. Always nice when results aren't all over the place.
It's a pretty exciting technology. I suspect it's a pretty long ways away from being rolled out anywhere, but, these are the types of scientific results we need if we're ever going to get out of this mess.
For anyone interested, here's PNNL's news release on it:
https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/covid-causing-virus-air-detected-high-tech-bubbles
You're right. It's hard to have much of a social circle at this point. I'm sure most people who see the problem understand how hard it is to condone the poor behavior. People I never thought of as particularly selfish have definitely revealed themselves over the last couple of years. I know I'll never see a lot of people the same way that I did before.
@franktaber@mas.to
You make a really good point. "Here's a great scientific article" or even "Here's a review article in Nature" isn't for everyone.
Given their geography I'm betting they listen to the crew at UCSF, but that's just a guess.
Yes, it's sadly that. I'll give a shred of credit that she took the time to test, but putting any effort into it beyond that was clearly a bridge too far. I definitely gave her too much credit to think that she wouldn't just take some Tylenol and go infect other people. Lesson learned. In all likelihood she will be fine from this infection and will go back to blissful ignorance, at least until the next one.
I totally understand what you're saying. I feel stupid for falling for it again, but I really thought she wanted the truth. We already decided that if she comes back later and unfortunately ends up with further issues and has more questions we will not fall for it again. It's now between her and her doctor.
I guess I left out that the "We're not doing any of that" was after consulting him. He's apparently perfectly fine with being infected. I guess if there was something that required practically zero effort they might have attempted it.
And there, is the bottom line for so many things. Including, but not limited to, COVID and the climate crisis.
@neilasaurus@mastodon.social
Phew. I guess people just can't deal with reality.
I think it's frustrating to me at this point because I know that nearly everyone feels the same way they do, so I don't bother, but they reached out to *ask the questions* and then didn't want the answers. It's like falling into a trap that you fell into before. No one to blame but yourself.
Before it comes up, I feel the need to say, too, that this woman and her husband are college educated, west coast liberals. We're not talking the southern Republicans that I live around. We're so far from having the right discussions around COVID and the future.
I know I've said it before, but I never try to convince people in my life that COVID's serious anymore. It just always leaves me frustrated.
So, that said, my wife best friend just texted to say she's got COVID for the first time and she knows we "keep up with COVID" and wanted to ask some questions. Sure, no problem.
She was on a flight last weekend and asks if it's possible that she just tested positive now. We tell her that RAT's are supposedly around day 5-11 now, so that's totally possible.
She asks if we know what the workplace rules are for her, and sure we send her a link. She says that's not at all what her boss said, but OK.
She asks if it's even possible to not give her husband COVID. We go over ventilation, filtration, masks, etc and this is where it really starts to go off the rails. She's just like "Yeah, we're not doing any of that."
She asks if long COVID "is real" or if there's anything else she should know and we're like yeah, it is, there's a lot that's unknown. We're sending you some links about what is known with long COVID rates, the things to look out for, what you can try to do in the meantime, etc. and she reads it and goes "Ummm, yeah. That all looks super sketchy. If any of that were real I'm sure the news would be talking about it. I'm sorry but I think you guys have fallen for some hoax or something here. I have a fever, a runny nose and muscle aches. I'm going to take some Tylenol. We have a birthday party to attend tonight, a kid's party tomorrow and my boss wants me back at work on Monday. Thanks anyway."
I give up.
My wife, former classroom teacher of over 15 years, laughed and said "Ain't that the truth."
Genealogy is one of those deeply personal things that you have to have an open mind about when you go into it. I was actually once a certified genealogist as a side-gig and got out of it because while I found my own research into my own family endlessly fascinating I found otherwise rational people who I'd known for years would suddenly become unhinged when you told them about their own family if it wasn't exactly what they believed going into it.
As of last week the latest data showed this(from another post of mine):
The raw data shows a little over 220,000 excess deaths in the US from the beginning of 2022 until the last data date which is November 6th, 2022. That's 308 days so it ends up at ~714 excess deaths per day, from this data set, in the US.
So through 2022 there's actually been over 700 excess deaths per day when compared to pre-pandemic years.
Generally speaking about half of those have been attributed to COVID, but there's a lot of caveats there. Depending on where you live in the US your county's medical examiner might not believe in COVID. Often there's pretty strict requirements that won't allow COVID to be on a death certificate if it happened a certain number of days after the infection, even if the patient never recovered. If COVID triggers other incidents like strokes or heart attacks those won't be attributed to COVID.
Long story short, over 700 people per day are still dying, only half of those are called COVID deaths, but there's virtually no situation in which that's all that are actually due to COVID if we counted them the way we do the flu, for instance.
I think they're showing evidence where a persistent COVID infection, traveling the cardiovascular/endothelial system, is essentially in hiding as the patient won't test positive any longer. In older patients it probably often leads to death(I've heard anecdotally older patients die ~6 weeks "post infection" frequently) whereas in younger patients it leads to some of the "classic" long COVID symptoms that we know of.
Any time! Don't over do it with the moving van today, please. The writing process is a process for a reason. I delete and redraft more than I'd like!
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
