Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

Being a true or pure independent, I refuse to watch the partisan silliness. Pomp and circumstance mean nothing to me. Empty promises and scathing reviews don't sway me. Entreaties to vote blue or red fall(literally) on deaf ears.

But I read a headline that said this years ratings were the lowest ever. Nobody really cares about Joe Biden or his Jamaican/Desi running mate.

Particularly when "just-flu-sayers" discover their aspiring high school athlete kids are not up to snuff because of permanent lung scarring. We have a lot of reserve lung capacity, because we started off running our prey animals to exhaustion while hunting. The only time we approach anywhere near our true capacity is in athletic events. They don't notice shortness of breath in day-to-day activities. But the lung damage is there: Researchers CAT scanned a bunch of asymptomatic kids who had Covid-19, and the scans don't lie.

Yep. Apparently we need more idiots getting it and surviving and then becoming the Covid Continuously Ill to act as examples before any of them will get it.

I see that New York now has clinics devoted to Long Haulers. They are now thinking that there are more than 3 million Long Haulers (more to come) and they are all going to need special help in the years to come (they no longer think that those with problems are likely to be all that much better).

This is, I think, just one more reason that our healthcare is going to need a complete overhaul to deal with our healthcare in the future. Hopefully, before any big changes are made, the whole thing gets studied to death and experts stand up to lead the way. I mention this because of what is happening in Seattle. They have a really leftist city council and they decided to just cut the police force by over 100 officers and take the money - no plan, no clue. The mayor stopped it and told them nothing happens before they have a plan!

A plan is good: Maybe they need to plan to demilitarize the police and cut back on SWAT. Make it a firing offense to aim rubber bullets at people's faces, and prosecute those who do. Same with tazing, beating, or kicking people in handcuffs already. Body cameras with continuous cloud upload that can't be shut off.

Been watching a few funny YouTube videos where cops do all sorts of bonehead things. Like arresting lawyers, when they can see the lawyers chuckling over all the lawsuit money they are going to collect.

There have been several police department which have actually replace some police with people trained to deal with specific problems. One is dealing with those with mental problems and another is dealing with family disputes (very dangerous). The cry used to be that police simply had too much on their plates that should be handled with people trained to do that. Some have tried to train the police to deal with this stuff but trying getting the emergency operators to learn who/what to distribute specific calls to seems to be the answer. Making the police responsible for every and all things just isn't fair. For too long have we been sending our insane to prison instead of a place that can help them. The prison solution is to just stick them in a little room and give them food once a day. This, I think, says something about our society as a whole.

The first thing we have to do is to train the emergency operators. This, I think, isn't going to be real easy or fast.

I have a friend who got a job as an emergency operator. He lasted about 3 months and quit. He simply couldn't deal with the pain and suffering. Being an emergency operator, I think, is not a real easy job to do?

Being a cop or EMT is a tough job. To do it you've got to be able to turn off any empathy or compassion you have to deal with seemingly impossible circumstances.

I think the Emergency Operators need to send social workers out to answer many calls. With Firemen and EMTs sent to most of the rest.
These other folks answering calls would have immediate police backup if needed.
Cops are like the Cavalry...they tend to come in with guns blazing.

Dealing with donor's family's pain was a strong incentive to change careers back when I was a transplant coordinator. I wasn't a nurse, so the other coordinators dealt with patients getting a kidney. All I got to see was the cadaver donor candidates. These were all healthy young people who had some tragic accident just days before, and were now brain-dead. Never had any problem seeing the donors, studying their charts. etc. Talking with their families was the hardest thing I've ever done. They were desperate for anything. All I could offer them was a chance their loved one's organs could help save other people. Thin comfort.

Trump is desperate to come up with an October surprise, and is talking about having a vaccine approved for election day. Here are the Phase III trial lengths from Trial Site News:

Pharma Phase 3 COVID-19 Vaccine Study Duration (Start date to Est. Primary Completion)

Moderna (mRNA-1273).....................15 months
Pfizer/BioNTech (BNT162)................12 months
J&J (Janssen) (Ad26.COV2.S).............30 months
China National Biotech...................7 months
Sinovac (CoronaVac).....................14 months
University of Oxford (same as AZ).......15 months
AstraZeneca (AZD1222) in USA............3.5 months

Trial Site News

Even if AstraZeneca works like crazy, their completion date is December 2, 2020. Trump fan anti-vaxers are going to have a meltdown: Serve as a guinea pig for an untested vaccine, or disobey their orange lord and master.

I think I heard, last night, of one of the vaccines, in phase 3, failing. The problem was that, after 3 months, it stopped doing its job. It went by too fast to get the facts (sometimes, when tv runs, my mind seriously wanders)

Probably they said after three months antibody levels dropped, just like people who had the actual disease. It doesn't say anything about immunity, because those people probably had activated memory T-cells that could get B-cells to crank out antibodies very quickly if exposed to corona virus antigen. Pretty normal. Since that is how people respond to the disease, I would not be surprised if all the vaccines work that way.

I guess the good safe test would be to expose them to a little corona virus antigen and watch their antibody levels over a few days.