Covid-19 outbreak at US table tennis tournament

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These are scary things, and if you live long enough chances of encountering one of these are substantial enough to justify that. However, right now the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is the more imminent threat, I'd say.

Anecdotal, but since it concerns myself I can attest to its truth and am willing to share.

I contracted Covid-19 end october/early november - one of my children picked it up in a clinic where she had been residing for a while, and was forced out upon an outbreak. I had her in isolation at home, yet two weeks after she was symptom free I nevertheless ran up a fever, and was out of it for a few days with mild symptoms.

At that point, I considered myself to have gotten off easy. Then the leg cramps started (a common thing that covid patients suffer), and I couldn't walk for a few days. As that subsided, I still thought, well, that's that then. But then an excruciating pain started shooting down from my right hip, with the right leg cramping up and pain flaring up to unprecedented high levels. Docter says it's probably a nerve being pinched somewhere near the lower back - and he thinks it's caused indirectly by the burden posed by the post-covid leg cramps.

Right now I can't walk at all, or sit, and am waiting for an MRI while looking for options to deal with the pain. So, anecdotal, but I can attest: covid-19 is no laughing matter — even though what I went through is considered to be a very mild case.

TL;DR Covid-19 is real and serious, even in so-called mild cases, and I'm surprised to see it downplayed so easily and often.

Sorry to hear about your case. What do you think you could have done better to avoid/improve your condition?
 
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i have no doubt Covid-19 can be very deadly, one of my relatives was in the coma for weeks because of it. But there are plenty of other diseases, many of which we cannot cure, some fatal, some not fatal but with dire consequences.

Humans are not immortal nor immune to sickness. This epidemic is bad but its not the bubonic plague either. The shock treatment of shutting down all businesses indistinctly, and putting some stupid rules instead of being more pragmatic is IMHO having even worse consequences for the economy and also for the people who are suffering from other diseases than Covid

said another way, the response to the epidemic is worse than the epidemic itself.

Putting hundreds of milllions of people out of jobs, wasting hundreds of billions in a futile war against death, ruining our already weak and fragile economies. I'm afraid this is just going to accelerate the demise and the decline of the Western civilization, nothing less.

Like NL said, forcing people to eat healthily, making cigarettes and sodas illegal, stopping junk food would make so much more sense than all this circus
 
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Sorry to hear about your case. What do you think you could have done better to avoid/improve your condition?

Actually, nothing, realistically. I think at some point one has to let go of the illusion of control. I shouldn't have contracted it from my daughter 14 days after she was in the clear; but I did. She shouldn't, unexpectedly, have been forced out of the clinic she was in; but she was. Could I have refused to take her in? Theoretically, yes. Realistically, no. She shouldn't have contracted Covid-19 there; but she did.

It's a chain of bad luck. I notice Takkyu Wa I. saying things about a healthy lifestyle - which is what I have, living in moderation, eating healthy, exercising, getting lots of time outdoors (and still taking vitamin D supplements); and I've been living a seclusive life as of early march. Covid probably didn't cause my exact current condition, but created the circumstances that triggered it - or just added the last few drops, who knows. I am particularly averse to the "blaming the victim" school of thought (which I think is a folly stemming from the need to retain the notion that we're in control of our own fate).

Either way, it's a bad place to be in.
 
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There have been studies showing it's very difficult to prevent spread of Covid-19 within a single household once one person is infected.

The long term effects are not well enough understood at any level to know why some people are more prone than others (but it doesn't seem to be entirely correlated with respiratory severity). Yoass, we don't know what causes muscle cramps at all, let alone in Covid-19.

So for sure there is an element of luck to this, and if you live with other people, your odds of infection will be dependent on their behavior too -- just as they are dependent on us.

All you can do is try to do what you can -- several things -- to move the odds more in your favor. It's a stochastic process. We are always talking probabilities, not absolutes.
 
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There have been studies showing it's very difficult to prevent spread of Covid-19 within a single household once one person is infected.

The long term effects are not well enough understood at any level to know why some people are more prone than others (but it doesn't seem to be entirely correlated with respiratory severity). Yoass, we don't know what causes muscle cramps at all, let alone in Covid-19.

So for sure there is an element of luck to this, and if you live with other people, your odds of infection will be dependent on their behavior too -- just as they are dependent on us.

All you can do is try to do what you can -- several things -- to move the odds more in your favor. It's a stochastic process. We are always talking probabilities, not absolutes.

There’s definitely luck involved, my partners daughter, Nicola, who has a heart condition (hole in the heart) is classed as ‘being at risk’ and has therefore virtually been a total recluse since March, her live in boyfriend is a Police Officer, he tested Positive and they had to self isolate for 14 days in the same flat. Nicola didn’t contract COVID. How she didn’t catch it, is difficult to say. But one things for sure, she a lucky girl!! No rhyme or reason with this. You just do what you can and hope you’re going to be ok.
 
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There is an old concept in virology called the "inoculum" which is basically the dose of virus that initially infects the person. And not surprisingly, a century of work (including on other coronaviruses studied in animals) the larger the inoculum (dose) the more severe the symptoms are likely to be. The simple explanation is that a huge dose is more likely to overwhelm an immune response, whereas a smaller one can be dealt with by immune systems before much damage ensues (unless you over respond, in which case your own immune system messes you up). And this is just one step where the randomness comes in -- at many levels.

For example, some people appear to be super-emitters of SARS-Cov-2 particles. Why? It's not known for sure. But maybe you are unlucky and you stand too close to one of those people and get a big dose instead of the small dose you might have received from someone else, or maybe your mask lets in enough from the super-emitter to infect you, whereas the same mask would have protected you 99% of the time from the more typical asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 positive person.

There are all sorts of other random things that could come into play too, including maybe your own genetics, your stress levels during that previous week, the direction the air was moving, etc.

All you can do is implement behaviors that are most likely to protect you (good masks worn properly, really careful social distancing, various other health measures). Put the odds as far as possible in your favor.


My frequent observation is that people are not always well attuned to things that might be risky, or maybe they have too much faith in their loose fitting cloth masks. (This includes people who really ought to know better).

Example, the other day I had to pick up a package at a DHL office, and there were several people witing in this tiny room for the one guy at the desk to take care of them. Every body had a mask but the guy behind the desk had his nose sticking out. I bloody well waited outside until it was my turn to get my package. Got in and out as quickly as I could, wearing a surgical mask on top of a KN95. I keep hand sanitizer in my car, as soon as I got the package I go to the car, first thing I do is sanitize my hands carefully and only then do I take off my mask to drive home. As soon as I get home, wash hands again.

Paranoid? I live in Texas. You have to be Covid-paranoid here!
 
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More on the DHL office. I waited my turn outside. Another guy came and politely asked if I was waiting and I said I was waiting outside because it seemed safer. He said, "oh yeah, good idea", because he had never really thought about it before. He waited until I was done and then he went in. Maybe, just maybe, this guy (late middle age, moderately overweight) learned something that might help him. Anyway, my goal was to spend the absolute minimum amount of time possible in that small confined space that had held lots of people. (I was also pretty pissed off that DHL wouldn't deliver to my house and made me come to pick it up).
 
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The American Diet (catch-all for big-sugar, big agro GMO corn/soy, big modified oil, chemed up sweeteners, big-flour), Cigarettes, drugs, and shytty sleep from people's bad habits of late nite TV or internetz just gotta account for the large majority of USA deaths a year that happen too early.
 
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One day or another, the companies pimping all this added sugar in drinks and food, the companies pimping it to the max to docs to prescribe this addictive sunstance, the companies that pimp modified seed oils, the companies pimping GMO crops... been conjuring up science that supports their position, but one day, we the people are just gunna have enough, quit believing their line of Scheize, will quit buying their crap.. and THEN they will get it. Maybe right around then govt will have had enough, because we the people held govt accountable. Well, good to believe enough would do that anyway.
 
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Bad diet and sedentary lifestyles take a toll especially in the US. This is true every year. If you've ever tried to cut carbs to lose weight, and then stroll through a grocery store and look at nutritional labels itbis pretty horrifying.

With that said,,this year, since Feb. 1, CDC reports there is an 11% increase in number of deaths from all causes in the US compared to expectation based on previous years. Most of these are Covid-19 (with or without a positive test). Maybe some people avoided a doctor out of fear (or loss of job and insurance) and died of something else, maybe some people who got depressed during a lockdown got drunk and crashed their car, etc. Even crime victims are increased this year. A pandemic on this scale is overwhelming at many levels, a sociocultural tsunami that affects poor people worst. The last time was 1918. In the US right now, a growing number of hard hit places have almost no ICU capacity left.

These deaths are part of the toll from Covid-19, but only part, because there will be significant ongoing health problems in some people who survived but who are messed up.

Then there are the horrific economic consequences ( which will include closure of too many TT clubs).

The best thing any of us can do is stay healthy. That means being mindful.
 
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Bad diet and sedentary lifestyles take a toll especially in the US. This is true every year. If you've ever tried to cut carbs to lose weight, and then stroll through a grocery store and look at nutritional labels itbis pretty horrifying.

With that said,,this year, since Feb. 1, CDC reports there is an 11% increase in number of deaths from all causes in the US compared to expectation based on previous years. Most of these are Covid-19 (with or without a positive test). Maybe some people avoided a doctor out of fear (or loss of job and insurance) and died of something else, maybe some people who got depressed during a lockdown got drunk and crashed their car, etc. Even crime victims are increased this year. A pandemic on this scale is overwhelming at many levels, a sociocultural tsunami that affects poor people worst. The last time was 1918. In the US right now, a growing number of hard hit places have almost no ICU capacity left.

These deaths are part of the toll from Covid-19, but only part, because there will be significant ongoing health problems in some people who survived but who are messed up.

Then there are the horrific economic consequences ( which will include closure of too many TT clubs).

The best thing any of us can do is stay healthy. That means being mindful.

Does Covid19 cause teenage suicides? Work related depression? There seems to be this idea that lockdowns were the only way to contain covid19. Your post aboive continues this idea.
 
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Since Baal is the expert (and any other experts is free to defend him), where is the science on lockdowns in the literature on handling pandemics for influenza? What analysis does one perform to determine whether lockdowns are the best approach to containing a virus like covid19? Obviously policy isn't 100% science, but it would help to know what considerations make lockdown recommended for this virus and not say other viruses that we have had experience with.
 

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Does Covid19 cause teenage suicides? Work related depression? There seems to be this idea that lockdowns were the only way to contain covid19. Your post aboive continues this idea.

I am very sure Covid 19 has caused some excess teenage suicides. Sometimes the reason will be isolation/lockdown exacerbating existing mental illness. And sometimes the reason is being trapped with abusers who are also also now possibly home 24*7, and there is no work or school to offer an escape.

I'm bad at maths, but isn't it possible that 11% understates the excess Covid mortality due to other major causes being reduced? Car accidents and shootings spring to mind as ways to die that are less likely to occur when everyone stays home. There may be others. I have no idea if the actual Covid is the exact 11% or more or less. It would make no difference at all to my response. Just asking to find out.
 

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Does Covid19 cause teenage suicides? Work related depression? There seems to be this idea that lockdowns were the only way to contain covid19. Your post aboive continues this idea.

Since Baal is the expert (and any other experts is free to defend him), where is the science on lockdowns in the literature on handling pandemics for influenza? What analysis does one perform to determine whether lockdowns are the best approach to containing a virus like covid19? Obviously policy isn't 100% science, but it would help to know what considerations make lockdown recommended for this virus and not say other viruses that we have had experience with.

Did anybody serious suggest lockdowns are the best way to control Covid? I thought we had general agreement that lockdowns are either
a) what you do in a small area for about 14 days with 100% mandatory compliance, followed by rigorous and thorough test and trace

OR

b) what you do as a last resort on and off for months, wuen your society is too stupid and dysfunctional to do a.

I mean, China had some lockdowns. Did they work? Sure seems like they worked.

So if lockdowns didn't work in a lot of other places, does that invalidate lockdowns as a damage-minimizing strategy, or is it something about those other places?
 
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To ask it another way, wasn't it the resistance to lockdown at the start that caused the eventual lockdowns to be so long, destructive, and yet unsuccessful?
 
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Does Covid19 cause teenage suicides? Work related depression? There seems to be this idea that lockdowns were the only way to contain covid19. Your post aboive continues this idea.

Not if you have basic reading comprehension skills. I was throwing out possibilities to explain this year's massive increase in deaths. I am allowing that not all of them are a direct result of that dead person being infected with SARS-COV-2 (300 K are, though, at least). I said nothing about lockdowns (but I think in extreme cases like now in parts of the US certain restrictions are called for).

You are the guy who has a history of posts here implying that: masks are bad, restrictions are bad, only old people die, or if people get sick it's because they eat too much sugar. Your attitude is clear. Shouldn't you be back watching Fox or Newsmax or wherever you're getting these ideas? You are certainly not doing anybody here any good, and yes I have a professional basis for understanding the details of most of these studies, and I read hundreds of them, I don't cherry pick them, and I am often able to assess where they fall short (not always but often).

I am not debating you on this anymore. I have run out of patience.
 
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I was throwing out possibilities to explain this year's massive increase in deaths.
What massive increase in deaths?
https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19
I don't see a massive increase in deaths.

In my county there are about 4000 deaths per year from all causes.
So far there have been 127 deaths attributed to the CCP-virus. 127 confirmed and SUSPECT.
Suspect?
Surely these cases are not using all the hospital beds compared to the people dying of other things.
The media would have you think that the CCP-virus alone is causing the hospitals to be over run with sick and dying.
Mean while our state despot has made unconstitutional edicts that have ruined the economy.
If the vaccine works then the damage to the economy by the shut downs and rent moratoriums will have a much greater negative effect.

I feel bad for the small business owner that is told to shutdown and is arrested by jack boot thugs if he doesn't.

The CDC has lost all credibility long ago.
I would throw them all in jail.

I have been updating an Excel spread sheet with data from ncov2019.live since June. The CCP-virus started to get much worse in mid October. My spread sheet has been pretty good at predicting what the dead count will be about 5-6 weeks into the future. It will be interesting to see if the vaccine changes all of this.
 
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What massive increase in deaths?
https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19
I don't see a massive increase in deaths.

In my county there are about 4000 deaths per year from all causes.
So far there have been 127 deaths attributed to the CCP-virus. 127 confirmed and SUSPECT.
Suspect?
Surely these cases are not using all the hospital beds compared to the people dying of other things.
The media would have you think that the CCP-virus alone is causing the hospitals to be over run with sick and dying.
Mean while our state despot has made unconstitutional edicts that have ruined the economy.
If the vaccine works then the damage to the economy by the shut downs and rent moratoriums will have a much greater negative effect.

I feel bad for the small business owner that is told to shutdown and is arrested by jack boot thugs if he doesn't.

The CDC has lost all credibility long ago.
I would throw them all in jail.

I have been updating an Excel spread sheet with data from ncov2019.live since June. The CCP-virus started to get much worse in mid October. My spread sheet has been pretty good at predicting what the dead count will be about 5-6 weeks into the future. It will be interesting to see if the vaccine changes all of this.


There are clearly excess deaths. 300K deaths is quite a bit so the issue becomes about cause and whether the approach taken to address covid19 made thing better or made things worse. But I will discuss this later when I have time. Right now I am being accused of watching TV channels that I never watch.
 
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To ask it another way, wasn't it the resistance to lockdown at the start that caused the eventual lockdowns to be so long, destructive, and yet unsuccessful?

This is a good theory. What science do you have to back it up? I will give an outline of some of the issues I have with it.

We can discuss alternate scenarios in good faith. There have been a variety of tests of sewage or blood samples, some more reliable than others, that have shown that covid19 was either in the USA or Brazil or whereever it was tested by November/December 2019.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140731v1
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-...cember-2019-cdc-scientists-report-11606782449
They might not be reliable tests but if you accept that they are, what would a lockdown in the middle of March do to affect the results of having the virus circulating so early?

But maybe you think the virus came in later. But it was already widespread at the time of the lockdown. Just about every country where test and trace has been attributed as being a driver of success has other confounders when you look at comparable countries in the same region.

One of the issues that critics of the lockdowns have had is that on just about every analysis of the impact of the virus before a shutdown, you almost always see it slowing down by the time gets lockdown gets introduced, either by analysis of the time from infection to symptoms being displayed to deaths, or by just looking at the first and second derivatives of the curves.

So these are some of the reasons why I am broadly skeptical about the ability of NPIs to impact the spread of the virus. I think most of the impact of the virus comes down to how many people are susceptible, and how well it can it spread in the weather are experience. But things that purport to slow it down radically when people are allowed to interact, from handwashing to social distancing to masks, I don't doubt they can help in specific situations. But their justification as effective mandates is quite questionable if just about every city practicing them is still forced to lockdown during the winter again. The flip side is also the impact of these things on schools and businesses especially. The problem is that criticism of lockdown measures were associated with Trump - I still don't see for the life of me how one can consider wanting kids to go to school to be a Republican issue. And while I have a history of Black conservatism/libertarianmism in the tradition of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams (RIP), I have never been a Trump supporter. I always assess issues based on what I see and try to take contrariam positions to keep people honest.
 
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Did anybody serious suggest lockdowns are the best way to control Covid? I thought we had general agreement that lockdowns are either
a) what you do in a small area for about 14 days with 100% mandatory compliance, followed by rigorous and thorough test and trace

OR

b) what you do as a last resort on and off for months, wuen your society is too stupid and dysfunctional to do a.

I mean, China had some lockdowns. Did they work? Sure seems like they worked.

So if lockdowns didn't work in a lot of other places, does that invalidate lockdowns as a damage-minimizing strategy, or is it something about those other places?
I am very sure Covid 19 has caused some excess teenage suicides. Sometimes the reason will be isolation/lockdown exacerbating existing mental illness. And sometimes the reason is being trapped with abusers who are also also now possibly home 24*7, and there is no work or school to offer an escape.

I'm bad at maths, but isn't it possible that 11% understates the excess Covid mortality due to other major causes being reduced? Car accidents and shootings spring to mind as ways to die that are less likely to occur when everyone stays home. There may be others. I have no idea if the actual Covid is the exact 11% or more or less. It would make no difference at all to my response. Just asking to find out.

The truth is that no one really knows whether lockdowns worked in China. Or do you know people who were falling down on the streets of Florida or New York while walking? One issue with China when it comes to the science of lockdowns is that you will struggle to find any documentation of what is required to implement a lockdown that works. And while some trust the data that came out of Wuhan and think it is credible, others think it was made up.

Moreover, the East Asia region (some would saw the basin of that whole region), other than Wuhan, has largely escaped large death tolls regardless of the precise measures taken. I believe that is the primary reason why most people support NPIs because most people attribute the success of those countries to the NPIs. That said, there are studies that show some evidence of spread in those countries (Korea, Japan) despite the lower death tolls, spread that isn't fully accounted for by testing and tracing.

The stronger arguments for lockdowns to me are New Zealand and Australia. That said, both are wealthy islands and have some advantages when it comes to controlling international travel. But for me the main thing is that very little testing of the kind that investigates whether there are other causes for the success of those countries is being done. Most of the analysis is limited to political/human actions and very little is done on seasonal/climactic factors and the potential for pre-existing immunity etc.

Lockdowns (quarantines of healthy populations) are a 2020 thing. They were frowned upon by the WHO in all its pandemic management literature before 2020. So something changed. The usual public health advice before that for influenza pandemics (yes, covid19 isn't influenza, but it is an influenza like illness) was to try to keep society functioning as much as possible even when introducing restrictions to address the disease.

What should you do to address the disease? Things grounded in science that make a difference. While I might not take the vaccine, a vaccine is grounded in science. The science around many of the mandated measures as means of controlling spread in societies is very weak. A lot of this will make sense hopefully when we get past the political phase of all this nonsense if people can investigate other causes and arrive at a coherent view of how to manage these diseases.
 
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