COVID-19 (Aka China Virus)

[BashiChuni]

3 minutes ago, VMFA187 said:

Of those 600,000, weren't 80-90% obese? Let's not act like the virus targeted everyone equally - And yes I am completely skeptical of that number of 600,000. Did that many people die? Yeah probably, but did that many people actually die from covid? I have doubts.

Maybe it is "risky" living an unhealthy life every single day of one's life? Maybe to save fat people we just simply don't let them order certain foods and drinks at restaurants and grocery stores, I mean its for the betterment of everyone - Right? Many people seems willing to force me not to have a choice...

 

Spot on brother. Spot on. 

[Prozac]

43 minutes ago, VMFA187 said:

Of those 600,000, weren't 80-90% obese? Let's not act like the virus targeted everyone equally - And yes I am completely skeptical of that number of 600,000. Did that many people die? Yeah probably, but did that many people actually die from covid? I have doubts.

Maybe it is "risky" living an unhealthy life every single day of one's life? Maybe to save fat people we just simply don't let them order certain foods and drinks at restaurants and grocery stores, I mean its for the betterment of everyone - Right? Many people seems willing to force me not to have a choice...

 How many people does obesity kill every year? Probably more than 600,000 - Why isn't there a war on obesity? Or what if the increasingly likely probability that it was released from China, and covered up, caused a majority of those deaths? What then?

 

So we’re ok with the argument that an obese person’s life is worth less than a healthy person’s now? How much less? Is an obese person worth 1/2 a healthy person in our society? 3/4? What is the value you would place on an obese person’s life? Honest question. Not saying encouraging healthy living shouldn’t be a goal in our society. I’m 100% on board with ending the obesity epidemic in our country. But writing someone off ‘cause they’re fat? Seems pretty jaded, cold and inhumane. 

[Prozac]

47 minutes ago, bfargin said:

Not to be argumentative and I know it's a serious illness to many  but, No, 600K did not die from Covid19. If you're going to call out people then be more honest in your claims as well.

 

Cool. So what’s the number? ~600k is the official number the United States claims dead. Making a claim that it’s any other number seems to be the more dishonest tack to me. 

[tac airlifter]

9 minutes ago, Prozac said:

So we’re ok with the argument that an obese person’s life is worth less than a healthy person’s now? How much less? Is an obese person worth 1/2 a healthy person in our society? 3/4? What is the value you would place on an obese person’s life? Honest question. 

Good questions, I’ll have to chew on them.  But crushing my freedom to maybe help an obese person have a slight edge isn’t moral or fair.  Forcing me to comply with restrictions for the benefit of another who placed themselves at risk is antithetical to freedom and opposite my values.

[VMFA187]

13 minutes ago, Prozac said:

So we’re ok with the argument that an obese person’s life is worth less than a healthy person’s now? How much less? Is an obese person worth 1/2 a healthy person in our society? 3/4? What is the value you would place on an obese person’s life? Honest question. Not saying encouraging healthy living shouldn’t be a goal in our society. I’m 100% on board with ending the obesity epidemic in our country. But writing someone off ‘cause they’re fat? Seems pretty jaded, cold and inhumane. 

I never said that an obese persons life is worth less than a healthy person's life. But yes, if it were personal choices that individual made to cause them to be unhealthy, and all other variables were equal, then yes that is an assertion I would make. How much money does obesity cost the United States each year? Is someone who takes less valuable than someone who provides? The question to that is unequivocally "yes."

Regardless, that was not the point. My point was that people who have harmed themselves by living their choice of lifestyles and then expecting me to subsidize their poor lifestyle choices by way of taking away aspects of my life which I enjoy to make them safer is something I don't agree with. 

I write off people who are fat all the time, so does anyone who is moderately fit and/or attractive. So does the military. You probably do too. 

Edited June 29, 2021 by VMFA187
Added text.

[Prozac]

12 minutes ago, VMFA187 said:

I never said that an obese persons life is worth less than a healthy person's life. But yes, if it were personal choices that individual made to cause them to be unhealthy, and all other variables were equal, then yes that is an assertion I would make. How much money does obesity cost the United States each year? Is someone who takes less valuable than someone who provides? The question to that is unequivocally "yes."

Regardless, that was not the point. My point was that people who have harmed themselves by living their choice of lifestyles and then expecting me to subsidize their poor lifestyle choices by way of taking away aspects of my life which I enjoy to make them safer is something I don't agree with. 

I write off people who are fat all the time, so does anyone who is moderately fit and/or attractive. So does the military. You probably do too. 

So if someone refused to wear a helmet and was injured in a motorcycle accident would you be ok with withholding medical care from that person due to the choice that they made? What if that person was a family member or close friend? The truth is, we deal with situations like this every day in our society. People make stupid or ill advised decisions all the time. The rest of us pay for those decisions by way of public emergency rooms, insurance premiums, restrictive public safety measures, etc. it’s part of the compromise that comes from living in a society. We don’t submit citizens to a death penalty because they make poor choices. With regard to writing off overweight people, two points: 1. Not giving an unattractive person a second look is not the same as standing by as they suffer what may be a preventable death. 2. Don’t knock fat chicks if you haven’t tried one. Everybody needs love bro. 🍻

[brabus]

12 minutes ago, Prozac said:

So if someone refused to wear a helmet and was injured in a motorcycle accident would you be ok with withholding medical care from that person due to the choice that they made?

But he’s not talking about withholding medical care, he’s talking about taking from him personally against his free will, to help the person who made a poor choice. In this analogy, dumbass wrecks his bike wearing zero PPE while going 69 mph, so Prozac is pulled out of work to donate an asscheek of skin to graft onto dumbass’ fucked up body. Yeah hyperbole, but so is this entire analogy. 

[VMFA187]

7 minutes ago, brabus said:

But he’s not talking about withholding medical care, he’s talking about taking from him personally against his free will, to help the person who made a poor choice. In this analogy, dumbass wrecks his bike wearing zero PPE while going 69 mph, so Prozac is pulled out of work to donate an asscheek of skin to graft onto dumbass’ fucked up body. Yeah hyperbole, but so is this entire analogy. 

Thanks bro, now I don't need to respond.

I appreciate that some people read what is written and take it as such without trying to morph it into something completely different. 

[Prozac]

4 minutes ago, brabus said:

But he’s not talking about withholding medical care, he’s talking about taking from him personally against his free will, to help the person who made a poor choice. In this analogy, dumbass wrecks his bike wearing zero PPE while going 69 mph, so Prozac is pulled out of work to donate an asscheek of skin to graft onto dumbass’ fucked up body. Yeah hyperbole, but so is this entire analogy. 

Not quite. These asscheeks aren’t going anywhere. I’m affected though as my tax dollars get used to fix up out hypothetical motorcyclist (who doesn’t have hypothetical insurance). I would agree that getting a vaccine is a higher level of commitment than paying taxes, but it is a much, much lower level of commitment than donating a (finely toned) ass cheek’s worth of skin. 

[HeloDude]

22 minutes ago, Prozac said:

Not quite. These asscheeks aren’t going anywhere. I’m affected though as my tax dollars get used to fix up out hypothetical motorcyclist (who doesn’t have hypothetical insurance). I would agree that getting a vaccine is a higher level of commitment than paying taxes, but it is a much, much lower level of commitment than donating a (finely toned) ass cheek’s worth of skin. 

I agree—get the government completely out of paying for healthcare.  Can’t afford your care, plenty fo charities willing to help out.

Something tells me you’re not willing to not allow the government to take my wealth in order to care for someone else…

[Prozac]

16 minutes ago, HeloDude said:

I agree—get the government completely out of paying for healthcare.  Can’t afford your care, plenty fo charities willing to help out.

Something tells me you’re not willing to not allow the government to take my wealth in order to care for someone else…

Correct. You and I likely have a fundamental disagreement on the role society should play/not play in making life better for all people. No worries. 🍺

[HeloDude]

16 minutes ago, Prozac said:

Correct. You and I likely have a fundamental disagreement on the role society should play/not play in making life better for all people. No worries. 🍺

Sure do!  Let me know when we can all stop working and receive free health care!  You know…because that will equate to making life better for all people!

[jazzdude]

I agree—get the government completely out of paying for healthcare.  Can’t afford your care, plenty fo charities willing to help out.
Something tells me you’re not willing to not allow the government to take my wealth in order to care for someone else…

How do you feel about DoD reducing it's healthcare services, with the plan of kicking dependents off base to the private providers/Tricare? In theory that's fine, in practice there are many locations where it's difficult to get added as a new patient off base, which would effectively deny routine healthcare access to dependents.

Should retiree Tricare be eliminated? Any service related issues could be handled by the VA. Need coverage transitioning to your second career? There's always COBRA. Shouldn't the pension be enough of a thank you for a full career of service, similar to what the private sector offers in retirement plans? Can't afford your care of for that of your family? Well, there's plenty of charities...

Even if you don't go to those extremes, should the premiums for Tricare coverage for dependents be raised to be on par with private sector HMO rates?

[HeloDude]

3 minutes ago, jazzdude said:

 

How do you feel about DoD reducing it's healthcare services, with the plan of kicking dependents off base to the private providers/Tricare? In theory that's fine, in practice there are many locations where it's difficult to get added as a new patient off base, which would effectively deny routine healthcare access to dependents.

Should retiree Tricare be eliminated? Any service related issues could be handled by the VA. Need coverage transitioning to your second career? There's always COBRA. Shouldn't the pension be enough of a thank you for a full career of service, similar to what the private sector offers in retirement plans? Can't afford your care of for that of your family? Well, there's plenty of charities...

Even if you don't go to those extremes, should the premiums for Tricare coverage for dependents be raised to be on par with private sector HMO rates?

 

I do enjoy it when people compare military healthcare (as a part of compensation for military service) to taxpayer funded healthcare to those just because they have a pulse.

So are you legitimately wanting to have a discussion about military/retiree healthcare or is your post due to my back and forth with Prozac regarding taxpayer funded welfare?  If it’s the former, we can probably have that conversation on a different thread.  The only reason I mentioned taxpayer funded healthcare is because Prozac brought it up wrt covid.

 

[jazzdude]

I do enjoy it when people compare military healthcare (as a part of compensation for military service) to taxpayer funded healthcare to those just because they have a pulse.
So are you legitimately wanting to have a discussion about military/retiree healthcare or is your post due to my back and forth with Prozac regarding taxpayer funded welfare?  If it’s the former, we can probably have that conversation on a different thread.  The only reason I mentioned taxpayer funded healthcare is because Prozac brought it up wrt covid.

They're both related, but I'll stay on the latter point. The question is where to draw the line on the public good.

Should I have to bear the cost of hospitalization of someone who catches COVID and needs ICU care, but had believed COVID was fake news, ignored CDC recommendations, and believes the vaccines contain microchips?

Even with private insurance, if the insurer is paying out more for medical services, you can count on premiums going to go up the next year so your still going to take it out of hide to pay for someone else's stupidity. After all, the insurer is in the business of making money, and generally has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to deny care whenever allowed by contract/coverage terms. And most people do not have the money to pay medical costs directly themselves, so that means pooling resources with others to mitigate financial risks. That can be with government, or with private organizations, both of which can screw you as the individual in many different ways.

We benefit from decent healthcare in the military, and for retirees I'd say great healthcare for the price that you couldn't get in the private sector. Oddly enough, you never hear that come up as a factor when taking about compensation packages (pilot pro pay vs bonuses, etc), it's just taken for granted because that's just the way it's been. So it makes it easy to justify why we get government healthcare and others don't-because that's how it always has been.

[ThreeHoler]

Statistics of small numbers but interesting. Vaccinated but still reading what is out there.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/heart-inflammation-after-covid-19-shots-higher-than-expected-study-us-military-2021-06-29/


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[Guardian]

Lab made

[ThreeHoler]

Lab made

Dr Muller…physicist. Seems legit.

[Guardian]

Justification based on career title?

Guessing you are a pilot. Should you never have an opinion with anything else? Even if you are very experienced in it?

[Swizzle]

6 minutes ago, ThreeHoler said:

 

Dr Muller…physicist. Seems legit.

 

Did you say Dr. Mulligan? As in lab oops, sliced that a little much right...? Or took that one home with me, oops?

[Prozac]

Even though you might occasionally hit the target, shooting from the hip is seldom a wise idea. Agreed the lab leak seems more plausible now than it did a year ago. Let’s do the detective work and see what we dig up. Let’s say it was a leak/mistake from the wuhan institute of virology. What then? Sanctions? Sue in the world court? War? 

[Guardian]

It was plausible a year ago. People just didn’t want to believe it for whatever motivations they had. There was evidence to investigate then.

What then? Depends on what’s found or determined.

[Lawman]

Even though you might occasionally hit the target, shooting from the hip is seldom a wise idea. Agreed the lab leak seems more plausible now than it did a year ago. Let’s do the detective work and see what we dig up. Let’s say it was a leak/mistake from the wuhan institute of virology. What then? Sanctions? Sue in the world court? War? 

I mean just spitballing…

- immediate expulsion from both the G7 and the security council…

- 5-10 trillion dollars in reparations to the world bank or some other entity…

- All the concessions in literally any economic negotiation for the near future…


Look if China built this thing and then F’d up or more to the point in the CCP, reviewed their options and chose to go with “deny this in the WHo so everybody goes down with me,” either way they are F’d and deservedly so.


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[Prozac]

If it turns out Chinese negligence is responsible for COVID-19, I’d love to see all the consequences listed above and then some levied against them. I doubt any of that is realistic though. Lots of Chinese trading partners with a lot to lose. IMO, the Chinese have already lost a lot of face and there is a significant backlash already going on regarding Chinese soft and hard power. I don’t think the Italians are nearly as keen on belt and road as they were two years ago. As unsatisfying as it is, that may be all the repercussion China faces. I suspect it’ll at least be a while until Chinese tourists are welcomed as warmly as they (and their money) were pre-pandemic. 

[ViperMan]

Interesting video - got me going down the rabbit hole a good bit.

Here are some interesting tidbits from one paper (published in May '20) in particular that really stood out to me. In short, when we first noticed SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) it was already highly adapted to humans. This pattern is divergent from that of our earlier experience with SARS-CoV, wherein that virus underwent rapid and dramatic evolutionary change in the early (~3 month) phase of that outbreak. This is important because in the early stages of an outbreak a novel disease has very high "evolutionary pressure" to adapt to a new host, which results in rapid genetic change.

"Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV."

"There is no evidence of a more virulent strain of SARS-CoV-2 emerging despite passage through more than 3 million human hosts by the time of this analysis."

Quote

"In comparison to the SARS-CoV epidemic, the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic appears to be missing an early phase during which the virus would be expected to accumulate adaptive mutations for human transmission. However, if this were the origin story of SARS-CoV-2, there is a surprising absence of precursors or branches emerging from a less recent, less adapted common ancestor among humans and animals. In the case of SARS-CoV, the less human-adapted SARS-CoV progenated multiple branches of evolution in both humans and animals (Figure 1, Figure 5). In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 appeared without peer in late 2019, suggesting that there was a single introduction of the human-adapted form of the virus into the human population. This has important implications regarding the risk of SARS-CoV-2 re-emergence in the near future and the severity of its consequences."

No other "progenitors" of SARS-CoV-2 have been found, nor have their been large populations of Chinese found in Wuhan that have antibodies against such a virus that would indicate a previously undetected outbreak that could represent the missing phase of the outbreak.

"To look for clues regarding intermediate hosts, we analyze recent key findings relating to how SARS-CoV-2 could have evolved and adapted for human transmission, and examine the environmental samples from the Wuhan Huanan seafood market. Importantly, the market samples are genetically identical to human SARS-CoV-2 isolates and were therefore most likely from human sources."

What probably happened? China collected samples of Bat CoV viruses in the wild back in 2012 and were conducting research on them to understand their danger to humans. This virus (or viruses) adapted to humanized mice during testing and somehow escaped into the wild. Blaming it on the wet market was a convenient cover for the CCP while they tried to control it and stop the spread.

Note, also, that the WIV deleted a database of genomic data that contained ~8 other genomes for CoVs. My money is on the notion that the genome for SARS-CoV-2 is in that database which is why it was taken down and is why it's not being shared.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1.full.pdf

It's also totally possible that the early part of the outbreak was just missed, and that a new CoV just happened to coincidentally infect the major city where CoV research is conducted.