Trappy

The problems with the healthcare system are the cost related, not quality of care. America is also too fat and our culture is unwilling to stigmatize obesity.

Duffman

I really doubt the issue is social justice warriors. I've never met a doctor who'd hesitate to tell someone they're overweight.


Also, American health care is the most expensive, globally, yet it isn't even in the top 10 of quality by the rosiest analyses and it's ranked in the 30s by a lot of outside organizations that aren't trying to justify the cost.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ure_per_capita

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/...ex-rating-2016

https://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/pub...em-performance


I think the issue with US health care is for-profit, private insurance and biopharma, where jacking up rates has been highly incentivized. Insulin is $400 in the US and $40 in Canada, for example. Your insurance is also usually tied to your job, so if you lose your job, you lose your insurance, then if you require medical care while you're already down, you have to pay a blank check for care because most hospitals don't post any of their prices and most insurance companies privately negotiate fair prices with teams of lawyers ahead of time. Whereas you likely aren't doing that if you're unconscious in an ambulance. That's probably why 2/3s of bankruptcies cite medical issues as a causal factor. The current insurance system has created a system with tons of loopholes and cracks that could literally bankrupt anyone. Parroting the sales pitch that we have a great system just enables these problems to continue. Yes, Americans are by and large fat, eat garbage food, and don't have enough self respect to work out regularly, but that doesn't indemnify our government from allowing this system to happen, or worse, being proponents of it.

AntiPeter

What makes science different than other forms of theory is that it ideally uses explanations that are testable. Medicine and health are more difficult to measure than "hard sciences", but there still is a lot of usable data that is available, certainty is tough when human behavior is put into the mix, but at the very least we can establish probabilities and correlations.

The current consensus public policy was based on the premise that only a few of us (at most) were already immune to COVID-19 and that the disease was much more fatal than it is. The current public policy was based on model forecasts that were inaccurate.

We know now that about 1/2 of us were already immune to COVID-19 (1/2 don't even show an immune response in the form of measurable antibody production). We also know that there is at least a functional or imperfect immunity response from those that are either primarily immune or develop immunity -- they no longer transmit the virus to others.

If masks made a big difference then the places in the US that don't wear masks would have much higher hospitalizations and death rates than those that don't. Mask use varies even intrastate, so counties that have less mask wearing can be compared to those where mask use is more pervasive. Do they?

If public policy made a big difference, then the places with the most stringent lockdowns, most stringent restrictions on business would have much less hospitalizations than those that don't. Do they?

We know that obesity is the number one factor for an adverse COVID reaction (there is more of a correlation than even elderly age). Has their been a public policy initiative undertaken to reduce obesity in the 6 months COVID has spread?

There are reasons why Dr. Fauci used data from April in his most recent Congressional testimony (6 months obsolete).

There are reasons why Dr. Redfield from the CDC says 90% of Americans are still susceptible to COVID when we know now 50% of Americans were never susceptible to COVID to begin with.

There are reasons why Fauci doesn't put the deaths into context, that 1/2 of the people that die from COVID are already within one year of death by other natural causes and are morbidly obese. 1/2 of the deaths are from nursing homes and hospice.

There are reasons why Dr. Redfield doesn't acknowledge the country with the least amount of COVID case increase and the country with the least amount of COVID death is now Sweden.

There are reasons why the media and self described "experts" no longer talk about Kawasaki syndrome in kids, ICU overcapacity or infectious fatality rate. Because if we looked at an ever increasing amount of data, we would realize the sources that we trust are full of elephant dung.

We know that heart disease, even with pervasive treatment is about 4-5 times more deadly than COVID. Why is heart disease "strongly encouraged" in our culture vs. self-destructive chaotic and arbitrary decisions in attempt to prevent a disease (COVID) which is much less fatal?

As more and updated data become available scientists change their theories to adapt to an ever confident reality. The truth becomes more and more apparent.

People that don't change their minds ever, Fauci, Redfield and Cuomo, for example, aren't very good scientists. They are even worse liars.

Obese people don’t do well with COVID and the vaccines currently in production aren’t going to help them much either:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/h...gtype=Homepage

Perhaps COVID isn’t the problem after all. Perhaps it’s obesity?

GeeWizDriver

Heresy!

But absolutely accurate.

Prepare to be cancelled....

Duffman

I see a lot of issues with your assessment.

First of all, the places with the strictest rules largely got hit first, before we even knew there was a pandemic, so their high death rates were a result of them not taking any precautions while the virus was spreading. They were largely the canaries in the coal mine. About 3 weeks after they enacted strict public health guide lines, their daily case loads began dropping, in almost every case.

I'll need a citation to this:
"... when we know now 50% of Americans were never susceptible to COVID to begin with."
That's a big 'fact' to hang your hat on and it needs a lot of supporting evidence.

Third, yes the virus wiped out nursing homes, but about 80k deaths have been people below 64. That's still more deaths than Vietnam and approaching as many deaths as WWI in working age adults.

Obesity has always been an American problem and I'm sure it contributes to our high death rate, but I don't see how it invalidates masks.

It's no mystery why some places do better than others. You can only catch the virus if you come in contact with an infected person and they infect you. Things like distancing, mask wearing, hand washing, and ventilation really help mitigate that risk. Look at the airlines for example. We're packing planes full of the general public (obese, old, wheelchairs, etc) and planes don't appear to be massive vectors, so whatever we're doing, it's working. Why advocate against it? Nobody likes the rules, but they're largely what's helping air travel demand return and this would be a lot easier if people accepted that masks during this pandemic are like seat belts in a car or DUI laws. We'd get a lot less passengers flipping out on FAs and probably less virus transmission.

TaylorPilot

That is awesome! Congrats. What was your secret?

TaylorPilot

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-...ize-sars-cov-2

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people...ry?id=71969896

This is exactly what Senator Paul (who is also an MD) was blasting Fauci about the other day live in a hearing and Fauci got ****ed and said he would discuss it later because it was complicated...if you watched any mainstream media outlets, they edited out half of the content and made it sound like Paul was a nut, but if you watched the rest, he explains that although they had a 20ish % infection rate, the CDC wasn't including the already immune from other forms of the flu that their own people admit may be up to 50% of the population...That is when Fauci said he would have to explain it to him later because it was complicated....Fauci is a hack, and someone would have to be completely out of the mind to believe a word that comes out of his mouth at this point...

Although to your other point, typically liberally run area that would have more strict lockdown procedures, but they also tend to be more densely populated, so the virus would be able to transmit easier. I live outside Houston and everyone (but me) wears masks all the time. Drive through east Texas and stop at a gas station and even the cops aren't wearing them. They aren't having any rise in cases, but they are much more spread apart, so that could account for the difference.

AntiPeter

Getting back to “are travel bans effective”? Was it worth it to destroy the airline industry...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72175-4

The answer is “nope”. They really are nothing than fear based political propaganda. They have very little effect compared to other methods of attempting to reduce the spread.

AntiPeter

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2598-9

An article about the study:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...-from-covid-19

Duffman

Ok, so these are the direct quotes:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-...ize-sars-cov-2

"Previous studies have reported that 20–50% of people who hadn’t been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 showed T cell responses against different parts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus."
“We have now proven that, in some people, pre-existing T cell memory against common cold coronaviruses can cross-recognize SARS-CoV-2, down to the exact molecular structures,” Weiskopf says. “This could help explain why some people show milder symptoms of disease while others get severely sick.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people...ry?id=71969896
"Dr. Antonio Bertoletti, a professor of infectious disease at Duke – NUS Medical School in Singapore, found that more than "50% of healthy patients have T cells able to recognize SARS-CoV2," which may promote a form of protection and immunity against the novel coronavirus."

The way I read it, if you've had a coronavirus cold, then your body will likely have an easier time fending off COVID19 and about half the people have those antibodies. How effective they are is still anybody's guess because it looks like the studies just came out in August. I generally don't watch sensationalized 24 hour news channels, so I didn't see what happened, but I definitely wouldn't call Dr. Fauci or Sen Paul hacks. I can safely assume they were dueling in front of media, which from both sides, was looking for ways to discredit and sensationalize. The last thing Fauci needs is for every American who thinks they're a special, genetically superior snowflake to conveniently assume they're immune to COVID19 because they had a cold last winter, especially when it's just as likely the T cells may offer very short term or limited protection. But, because the best case scenario would be very convenient, I could see a lot of problems arising from a headline reading "Dr Fauci Says Half of Americans Immune to COVID", so I can absolutely see why he would evade a GOP senator's targeted yes/no questions. He's gotten burned and misquoted by the politics before, so don't tell me you'd do anything different in his position.

Hopefully this means they can grow lesser coronaviruses in a lab and we can just get a cold instead of taking a fast-tracked vaccine, but that'll likely require a lot more than 2 months of research.