COVID-19/Coronavirus Information and Support Thread (see OP for useful links)

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Then I guess the reason why Twitter took the other video down and didn't ban Benny was that he could claim to be a *snort* accredited news source reporting on someone else's point of view while they didn't know the other source from Adam and thus for all they knew it was trying to recommend an untested cure to the public. It sounds like YouTube's approach was algorithm based and they were blocking the video across the board.

Neither platform wants to be sued if something bad happens to someone because they heard Immanuel's rant and started ingesting HCQ willy-nilly is my take.
Trump retweeted that and it got taken down. Trump Jr. posted it and got a 12 hour ban from Twitter.
 
Trump retweeted that and it got taken down. Trump Jr. posted it and got a 12 hour ban from Twitter.
I really don't get what point you're trying to make. Which of the two categories I talked about do you think they fall into? Reporters or opinion pushers? Do you even know the difference?
 
I really don't get what point you're trying to make. Which of the two categories I talked about do you think they fall into? Reporters or opinion pushers? Do you even know the difference?
I am not really trying to make a point. I'm just stating facts.
 
She goes against everything research has found though, especially with putting her staff on Hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic. All research to this point has found that Hydroxychloroquine does not work as a prophylactic and is potentially harmful to patients. The risks do not outweigh the non-existent rewards.

I hope the Texas Medical Board investigates her and ultimately removes her license to practice medicine. What she's doing is dangerous and borders on malpractice.
As always Joey, a valuable & thankful source of info for us.


I'm likely already repeating what medical experts were asking months ago, but here's my concerns with her. Okay, so we'll accept she treated 300 patients with Hydroxy. And I think we can safely assume 99% were patients with mild cases (since a more severe case would obviously be at a hospital).
-What is the likely hood that those 300 patients would've gotten over Covid regardless of taking Hydroxy.; did it have any affect or was it more of a placebo where she & the patients believe it cured them.
-Did she re-evaluate any of these 300 patients? Did she find new damage caused by the Hydroxy.? Did they report any side-effects to her?
-Is she willing to turn over those 300 patients' records & contact info to an authorized medical board to follow-up with them to verify the current conditions of those patients (assuming it's even a legal undertaking)?

B/c to me, I see her claiming this (like the other latina Dr. from Dallas), but they don't actually verify the details of those patients. "I used this and it worked", sure, but did it come at any cost to the patient's health & can we be sure the patient wasn't going to recover anyway? Did these Dr.s give out a drug that actually did nothing but cause more harm to the patient?
 
https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/08...uses-attention-and-the-fda-may-pay-the-price/

statnews.com
The study that sparked the latest controversy was anything but randomized. Not only was it not randomized, outside experts noted, but patients who received hydroxychloroquine were also more likely to get steroids, which appear to help very sick patients with Covid-19. That is likely to have influenced the central finding of the Henry Ford study: that death rates were 50% lower among patients in hospitals treated with hydroxychloroquine.
 
The Henry Ford Health System did a study and says hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate in half.



https://www.henryford.com/news/2020/07/hydro-treatment-study

Yes, but the man behind it also issued caution.
Dr. Marcus Zervos division head of Infectious Disease for Henry Ford Health System
Dr. Zervos also pointed out, as does the paper, that the study results should be interpreted with some caution, should not be applied to patients treated outside of hospital settings and require further confirmation in prospective, randomized controlled trials that rigorously evaluate the safety and efficacy of hydroxychloroquine therapy for COVID-19.

“Currently, the drug should be used only in hospitalized patients with appropriate monitoring, and as part of study protocols, in accordance with all relevant federal regulations,” Dr. Zervos said.
Basically, it worked for their study, but the results of the study should not be seen as a current solution-for-all. They apparently had strict measures in place when they originally conducted their study, and it's likely, their findings so far would only really benefit those who fall within' the same variables.

Dr. Stella does not have hospitalized patients as do none of the few other doctors I've seen continuing to push the drug.
 
I'm likely already repeating what medical experts were asking months ago, but here's my concerns with her. Okay, so we'll accept she treated 300 patients with Hydroxy. And I think we can safely assume 99% were patients with mild cases (since a more severe case would obviously be at a hospital).
-What is the likely hood that those 300 patients would've gotten over Covid regardless of taking Hydroxy.; did it have any affect or was it more of a placebo where she & the patients believe it cured them.

I think that's the main issue. Person A comes in with B disease/issue. They give them C treatment. Person A recovers. Was C treatment effective in treating B disease? We don't know without a controlled study. Same goes for the other anecdotal stories in the news.

I've heard this before too. People talking about have an issue and they took x and it helped them recover, but there's no proof that x would help.
 
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I think that's the main issue. Person A comes in with B disease/issue. They give them C treatment. Person A recovers. Was C treatment effective in treating B disease? We don't know without a controlled study. Same goes for the other anecdotal stories in the news.

I've heard this before too. People talking about have an issue and they took x and it helped them recover, but there's no proof that x would help.
But the skeptics argue "you can't prove x didn't help either!" :rolleyes:
 
Here I might quibble a bit - I certainly wouldn't consent to HCQ if I had a severe case! Why would you when it appears to do more harm than good at that point? That said, it could well be that some of the adverse in HCQ use at that stage is from the high doses given (>1000mg per day, compared to <400mg p.d. for arthritis, and ~400mg per week as a preexposure anti-malarial).

I think if I was in a dire situation, I'd consent to anything that has a slight chance of helping. But, thankfully I've never had to be in a situation like that for myself or with my family so I suppose I don't really know what I'd do.

All I'm trying to say is that overstating possible harm isn't a proper counter to people overstating possible benefits, IYSWIM.

Yup, I totally get what you're saying and I do agree with that statement.

The Henry Ford Health System did a study and says hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate in half.



https://www.henryford.com/news/2020/07/hydro-treatment-study


There is a huge difference between a family doctor prescribing a drug to a patient to take at home or as a prophylactic and having a hospitalized patient take a drug. Several research and academic-based hospitals are currently doing studies to see the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine combined with other drugs. When enrolling in a research study, these patients or whoever has power of attorney, are given a ton of information and have to give informed consent to be apart of the research. They then need to sign legal documents stating their willingness to participate. Typically these studies are double-blind too where the doctor or the patient does not know whether they're getting the drug or a placebo.

We also haven't done enough studies yet to say for certain whether hydroxychloroquine combined with other drugs is the sole reason for a reduction in mortality. There are thousands of other factors in play and it will take time to determine whether or not it's the drug giving the desired effect or something else.

Family doctors should not be doing this and their patients shouldn't be uncontrolled test subjects either.
 
One of the school districts near me released their findings after a summer of intense investigation into the effect of COVID on school in the fall. I've been accusing a lot of school districts of being lazy on this, and a lot of them are, but this one wasn't, and they came up with an excellent option for school. Before I get into the option for school, I want to share a few of their findings:

- During summer school (limited attendance for summer activities not involving the typical teacher staff), three of their employees tested positive for COVID. This resulted in a 14-day quarantine for all exposed students and staff. No further COVID cases resulted from exposure to those staff members, and no student cases were reported all summer across all schools. People "exposed" are people who had contact with individuals who tested positive any time within 48 hours of testing positive.

- Based on 2 or 3-day in-person schedules (for fall), the expected attendance for students can be determined, and based on infection rates within Colorado and specifically the Denver area, they can run numbers to estimate how many and what percentage of the school they expect to be in quarantine during the fall. What they found was expectation of a substantial quarantine at each school on the order of once per month.

- Based on 2 or 3-day in-person schedules, students can be expected to interact with a larger number of other individuals from outside the classroom. They explained that some "public health officials" think that exposure for the community will increase for a hybrid (2 or 3 day in-person schedule) compared to going all in-person because of the mixing during remote days. For example, consider the scenario where a student is masked for 5 days per week with the same individuals, compared to masked 2 days per week and then unmasked and interacting with other individuals for the remaining 3.

- Based on a 2 or 3-day in-person schedule, teaching difficulties are pretty significant. Teachers repeat instruction each week as they swap between who is in class on a given day and who is not. But on remote days, teachers are not available to help teach class because they're busy teaching the half of the class that is in-person.

- The school is committed to, at minimum, a remote learning option for parents so that they're not required to bring their child to in-person learning if it's not something they're comfortable with based on their particular circumstances. This means that all of the teachers have to prepare a remote learning curriculum, and use all of the remote tools regardless of the plan for in-person learning.

So all of that appears to be stacking up for full-time remote learning right? Well, the school takes socialization, supervision and in-person access for students with special needs pretty seriously. So the answer is no on that one. But it did cause them to reject the hybrid option. What they're going to do is have the students that want to, or need to, come to school each day and be supervised by an expanded version of the staff they use for after school programs and the summer program. These people don't have to try to teach the children, they can be masked the entire time, and can maintain some level of distance. What they have to do is make sure that kids are in the right place at the right time and not disrupting the rest of the class. Students will be sectioned off in small groups (which many contain mixed grade levels), and will be taught remotely by teachers who are not at the school. This will obviously present a challenge for the existing building and staff, but they're staffing up, and they don't expect 100% interest in kids actually coming in to the school. For one, about 35% of surveyed parents in the district said they want to keep their kids home for the fall. Of the remaining 65%, some of them won't be interested given that the teachers won't be there. The school thinks they can accommodate about 50% capacity with this plan, and I think they have a shot at giving a slot to just about everyone who wants one.

This is a great plan.

It allows parents to go back to work, kids to socialize, and continued learning without spending half of the year repeating coursework between two groups. It gives options for families that don't have internet or computers at home. It gives options for families who aren't comfortable sending their kids to school, but doesn't require teachers to prepare to teach both ways. All of the students are on equal footing with their teacher. And all of the teachers can participate regardless of their particular health circumstances. It enables students to come back to in-person as they're ready, and does the same for teachers. It can be expanded (number of kids at school increased) based on evolving COVID statistics, and can transition gracefully back to the old way of doing things if a vaccine becomes available, or can transition to a sustainable new way of doing things if it doesn't. And they've been practicing most of the new aspects of this all summer in their summer programs already. So they have experience with how to run it.

Honestly, my hat is off to them. And I wish that many other school districts around the country took exactly this tactic. Don't play politics, don't check out, look honestly at the situation and problem solve.

Well done to these fine folks.
 
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I'm not suggesting that testing creates the virus, I can believe that you thought it though, see link below. Simply, if you take double the tests then you would get double the number of cases(I know it's not exact, but the gist is correct).

As for the link https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf

Admittedly, Kekst only asked 89 Scots, so it’s a tiny sample, but the polling company asked 527 women across the UK the same question and they think that 9.91% of the population have succumbed to the virus. Men are less pessimistic – they believe 3.45% of the population have died – but the mean figure is 6.76%, or four-and-a-half million. And in the US, the mean is a whopping 9%! That’s twenty nine-and-a-half million.

This throws some light on why the British public has been so compliant with lockdown restrictions and are so keen on mandatory face coverings. (According to Kekst, 65% of the UK population is in favour of compulsory face masks in indoor public spaces.) They’ve effectively been completely terrorised by the Government and the mainstream media. Not bed-wetters, just hopelessly misinformed.

Needless to say, the real Covid death toll is <0.1% of the UK population.
 
Simply, if you take double the tests then you would get double the number of cases(I know it's not exact, but the gist is correct).

This isn't even remotely correct and more than one person has given you solid proof.

This throws some light on why the British public has been so compliant with lockdown restrictions and are so keen on mandatory face coverings.

I'm not sure how many times people need to tell you this, but lockdowns are not there to prevent people from getting COVID or even dying. They're in place to give health systems a fighting chance at managing their patient load.

Face coverings aren't there to prevent you from getting COVID, they're there to prevent you from spreading it to others.

Needless to say, the real Covid death toll is <0.1% of the UK population.

The mortality rate isn't the biggest problem, more than one person has told you this. The bigger problem is the long term effects of COVID and what it could do to someone's respiratory, neurological, or cardiovascular system. Sure you survive COVID, but do you really want to live a life where you need to wheel around an oxygen tank?
 
I'm not suggesting that testing creates the virus, I can believe that you thought it though, see link below. Simply, if you take double the tests then you would get double the number of cases(I know it's not exact, but the gist is correct).

We knew what you meant. It's just that you're wrong about that as well!

I, amongst others, replied to your post with the UK testing and cases graph, explaining why you were wrong.

As for the link https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf

Admittedly, Kekst only asked 89 Scots, so it’s a tiny sample, but the polling company asked 527 women across the UK the same question and they think that 9.91% of the population have succumbed to the virus. Men are less pessimistic – they believe 3.45% of the population have died – but the mean figure is 6.76%, or four-and-a-half million. And in the US, the mean is a whopping 9%! That’s twenty nine-and-a-half million.

This throws some light on why the British public has been so compliant with lockdown restrictions and are so keen on mandatory face coverings. (According to Kekst, 65% of the UK population is in favour of compulsory face masks in indoor public spaces.) They’ve effectively been completely terrorised by the Government and the mainstream media. Not bed-wetters, just hopelessly misinformed.

Needless to say, the real Covid death toll is <0.1% of the UK population.

Easy to say **** like that when we've had restrictions and lockdown suppressing the virus for months. Much harder to prove that COVID deaths would have been as low without those. Had there been half a million deaths would you dismiss it as being <1%?
 
Try Sweden then.No lockdown and lambasted by all mainstream media.

SwedishCovidMW-600x510.png


The mortality rate isn't the biggest problem, more than one person has told you this. The bigger problem is the long term effects of COVID and what it could do to someone's respiratory, neurological, or cardiovascular system. Sure you survive COVID, but do you really want to live a life where you need to wheel around an oxygen tank?

No, what I want is for the whole world to conform to my way of thinking, to keep me safe. I don't want to live my own life, I want to be told what to do, when to do it, I want 94 year olds to be turned away from shops because they don't have a debit card and only carry 'dirty cash'.
 
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Try Sweden then.No lockdown and lambasted by all mainstream media.


SwedishCovidMW-600x510.png

So by turning to Sweden you admit that your previous arguments have been countered?

Sweden isn't a haven for non-mask wearing types such as you, you know. The main reason they avoided a full lockdown is because people followed the recommendations for social distancing etc. And of course they did place quite strong restrictions on travel, large groups of people, and banned visits to care homes. Hardly the COVID-denier utopia you dream it to be.
 
No, what I want is for the whole world to conform to my way of thinking, to keep me safe

So you want the world to turn into COVID deniers to keep you safe? I don't think I understand your reasoning here.
 
This isn't even remotely correct and more than one person has given you solid proof.

I'm not sure how many times people need to tell you this, but lockdowns are not there to prevent people from getting COVID or even dying. They're in place to give health systems a fighting chance at managing their patient load.

Face coverings aren't there to prevent you from getting COVID, they're there to prevent you from spreading it to others.

The mortality rate isn't the biggest problem, more than one person has told you this. The bigger problem is the long term effects of COVID and what it could do to someone's respiratory, neurological, or cardiovascular system. Sure you survive COVID, but do you really want to live a life where you need to wheel around an oxygen tank?
While I know this is completely up to the staff, constantly posting the same incorrect information after being told multiple times it's incorrect has be towing this line at some point.
You will not knowingly post any material that is false, misleading, or inaccurate.
 
https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeat...exists-we-need-start-using-it-opinion-1519535
Newsweek Opinion, Harvey a. Risch, MD, PHD, professor of epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health:
I am fighting for a treatment that the data fully support but which, for reasons having nothing to do with a correct understanding of the science, has been pushed to the sidelines. As a result, tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19 are dying unnecessarily. Fortunately, the situation can be reversed easily and quickly.

I am referring, of course, to the medication hydroxychloroquine.
I have seen news reports from even CNN, recently, that it is an effective treatment. If that is true, just think of the thousands of people that have died needlessly because of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Just let that sink in.
I'll add this also.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/
 
To prescribe hydroxychloroquine to any patient with COVID-19 is ignoring science. There's a scientific method that needs to be followed and have the proper research done on it. We don't know if "thousands are dying" needlessly or not because we COVID-19 hasn't been around long enough for us to fully study what works and what doesn't.

People aren't dying because of Trump Derangement Syndrome either. They're dying because Trump fumbled the pandemic badly and spouted nonsense like "it's a Democrat Hoax!"

I fully believe we should be researching drugs that are currently on the market to see how they could be repurposed to treat COVID-19. Ignoring the research stage though is dangerous and could inadvertently kill more people than it saves.


SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are different. What works for one virus might not work for another. It does give us an idea of what we might want to research, but it's not a smoking gun that points to hydroxychloroquine being the miracle cure.
 
To prescribe hydroxychloroquine to any patient with COVID-19 is ignoring science. There's a scientific method that needs to be followed and have the proper research done on it. We don't know if "thousands are dying" needlessly or not because we COVID-19 hasn't been around long enough for us to fully study what works and what doesn't.

People aren't dying because of Trump Derangement Syndrome either. They're dying because Trump fumbled the pandemic badly and spouted nonsense like "it's a Democrat Hoax!"

I fully believe we should be researching drugs that are currently on the market to see how they could be repurposed to treat COVID-19. Ignoring the research stage though is dangerous and could inadvertently kill more people than it saves.
Oh, I had no idea you too were an epidemiologist. Maybe you should write an op-ed in Newsweek rebutting this guy.
SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are different. What works for one virus might not work for another. It does give us an idea of what we might want to research, but it's not a smoking gun that points to hydroxychloroquine being the miracle cure.
There are similarities, I assume, in Coronaviruses. That study was about SARS. It mentions the use of chloroquine, not hydroxychloroquine. I am not an epidemiologist like you, so I do not know the difference.
 
Oh, I had no idea you too were an epidemiologist. Maybe you should write an op-ed in Newsweek rebutting this guy.

I'm reading what you quoted and what you quoted is bad science. Anyone with a basic understanding of the scientific method knows you need to study something before claiming it to be a miracle cure for something. Institutions across the world are researching hydroxychloroquine. There's no big cover-up or people pushing the study of the drug to the side because of Trump. The research just hasn't made a conclusion yet because it takes some time to do.

There are similarities, I assume, in Coronaviruses. That study was about SARS. It mentions the use of chloroquine, not hydroxychloroquine. I am not an epidemiologist like you, so I do not know the difference.

I assume you have access to Google. You can search for the following statement "What is the difference between SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2?" and get an answer. You don't need to be an epidemiologist to figure that out.

Here's an academic paper regarding the difference:
Differences and similarities between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-CoronaVirus (CoV) and SARS-CoV-2. Would a rose by another name smell as sweet?
The knowledge we currently have on SARS-CoV-2 is scarce, and most of it comes from deductions more than actual data. SARS-CoV-2 is a betacoronavirus belonging to the 2B group8 . It shares around 70-80% of its genome with SARS-CoV, but it shows to have the highest level of similarity with a horseshoe bat coronavirus1,8. Therefore, it is thought to be a recombinant virus transmitted from bats to human hosts by the mean of an intermediate host9 . Being an RNA-virus with an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RNRP)-based replication, mutation and recombination are not infrequent events9 . Moreover, despite the name and genetic similarities, SARS-CoV-2 shows genetic and clinical differences with SARS-CoV.
 
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