Officiating Post COVID-19 ???

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by SNIPERBBB

It's just another problem filled with problems.

While 100,000 deaths is pretty bad, the worse part of COVID-19 is that one can walk around with the virus for several days, maybe a week, while being completely asymptomatic and unaware that your'e sick and can infect others. That's not the case with many other infectious diseases, including influenza, (you get the influenza virus, don't know that your'e sick and spread the disease for only a few days, get sick, stay home from work or school, and stay in bed). Not so with COVID-19, with this disease one can infect dozens, maybe hundreds, before one even begins to feel sick.

Because of this, with no vaccine (maybe never, best chance is a very modern MRNA vaccine), our only defense as a society will be social distancing and masks because this virus can spread very quickly, killing the old and elderly, the sick (diabetes, asthma, emphysema, high blood pressure, heart disease, immunodeficiency disorders, etc.), cancer patients (chemotherapy), even some of the young and healthy, and maybe a few children.

Of course we can all wait for active immunity (due to surviving the disease) as the disease travels all over the world, killing millions, but that may take a very long time (luckily viruses have evolved to limit their carnage, if they didn't they would kill all their hosts and viruses die with no hosts).

COVID-19 isn't influenza, it's not a cold. It may not be the worst infectious disease, or have the worst symptoms, or the deadliest, or the most widespread, or the easiest to spread, or the easiest to catch, but it's still pretty bad.

I have a feeling that, like our Chinese, Korean, and Japanese friends, we'll (at least those that care about our family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and complete strangers) be wearing our masks for a very long time, it might even become the new normal.

[SNIPERBBB]

Asymptomatic spread has been shown to be a myth .

I'm off to play golf with 30 fellow hospital employees, none will be wearing masks.

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by SNIPERBBB

Asymptomatic spread has been shown to be a myth .

Citation please.

The British Medical Journal Thorax (British Thoracic Society), and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), both say otherwise.

[SNIPERBBB]

Originally Posted by BillyMac

Citation please.

The British Medical Journal Thorax (British Thoracic Society), and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), both say otherwise.

I don't see anything from the former in the news that points to anything to the contrary other than the cruise ship issue. The AMA shows nothing in the news and they aren't especially trustworthy on anything that is a political issue. CDC as of three weeks ago doesn't point to anything definite.

[sdoebler]

This thread has gotten so off topic from officiating it should be locked. Take your political and medical opinions elsewhere.

[JRutledge]

Originally Posted by sdoebler

This thread has gotten so off topic from officiating it should be locked. Take your political and medical opinions elsewhere.

Unfortunately, this has been politicized by the people at the top that want to complain because of who is making some of the decisions. The reality is that this is going to be bigger than a governor making a decision. There will be local authorities that will decide what their school districts are going to do and if they participate in events based on their local health concerns. We are not going to talk about even "masks" if there are not games in several districts by the time the school year starts because there are schools not even open. But people like in Illinois have tried to make this about the governor and his positions politically, while in Indiana they did the very same thing and schools were shut down for the rest of the year before Illinois made such a decision. And we have a leader that wants to make wearing a mask a bad thing, but has not figured out how to get this under control. So politics is all around this issue and clearly coming out in this conversation.

Peace

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by sdoebler

This thread has gotten so off topic from officiating ...

Agree. However, JRutledge recently posted some great comments bringing us back to the topic of officiating.

For my part, I was just trying to debunk some health myths with the intent of keeping us all safe, and hopefully moving us closer back to normal, even if it's a new normal.

Good news. Next week (for the first time since mid-March) I'm going to church and I'm going to get a haircut.

I'm starting to look like a Beatle, the good looking Beatle.

[Rich]

Originally Posted by sdoebler

This thread has gotten so off topic from officiating it should be locked. Take your political and medical opinions elsewhere.

Agreed. Sorry for falling asleep at the switch.

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by SNIPERBBB

The AMA shows nothing in the news and they aren't especially trustworthy on anything that is a political issue.

Journal of the American Medical Association
May 27, 2020
Comparison Of Clinical Characteristics Of Patients With Asymptomatic Vs Symptomatic Coronavirus Disease 2019 In Wuhan, China

... For the study, the researchers from Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University in China, where the virus was first identified, analyzed data from 78 cases of confirmed COVID-19. The cases were linked with 26 people exposed to the Hunan seafood market -- where the outbreak is believed to have originated -- or close contact with others who had been infected ...

... Although patients who were asymptomatic experienced less harm to themselves, they may have been unaware of their disease and therefore not isolated themselves or sought treatment, or they may have been overlooked by health care workers and thus unknowingly transmitted the virus to others ...

... Asymptomatic patients also shed virus, were contagious, for eight days, compared to 19 days in patients with outward symptoms, they said ...

... Although patients with milder, asymptomatic COVID-19 … may suffer less damage to their immune systems, they may still be contagious, but for less time than those with more serious illness, the authors concluded ...

... Therefore, identifying and isolating patients with asymptomatic COVID-19 as early as possible is critical to control the transmission of COVID-19 ...

[Raymond]

Originally Posted by SNIPERBBB

Asymptomatic spread has been shown to be a myth .

I'm off to play golf with 30 fellow hospital employees, none will be wearing masks.

1) That citation you provided was very good reading

2) Good for you. Do you want a medal? Does that make you brave or something? I played golf outside without a mask over a month ago. Not sure what your point is. I rarely wear a mask outside.

Some people just need attention I guess. Now we know who announcers are talking about when they say "that official is making it all about himself".

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

[SNIPERBBB]

Originally Posted by Raymond

1) That citation you provided was very good reading

2) Good for you. Do you want a medal? Does that make you brave or something? I played golf outside without a mask over a month ago. Not sure what your point is. I rarely wear a mask outside.

Some people just need attention I guess. Now we know who announcers are talking about when they say "that official is making it all about himself".

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

Just pointing out that most of the medical community outside the quacks and media grifters that haven't seen a patient in years consider the.masks and the lockdowns are a joke. Our hospital system would be back to no masks if it weren't for liability lawsuit fears.

[SNIPERBBB]

Originally Posted by Raymond

1) That citation you provided was very good reading

2) Good for you. Do you want a medal? Does that make you brave or something? I played golf outside without a mask over a month ago. Not sure what your point is. I rarely wear a mask outside.

Some people just need attention I guess. Now we know who announcers are talking about when they say "that official is making it all about himself".

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

Just pointing out that most of the medical community outside the quacks and media grifters that haven't seen a patient in years consider the.masks and the lockdowns are a joke. Our hospital system would be back to no masks if it weren't for liability lawsuit fears.

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by SNIPERBBB

Asymptomatic spread has been shown to be a myth. I'm off to play golf with 30 fellow hospital employees, none will be wearing masks.

Not COVID-19, but typhoid fever (a bacterial infection).

In New York's fair city,
Where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Mary Mallon,
As she wheeled her laundry barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying,"Why are all my employers dying?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, or was he golfing?

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by BillyMac

While 100,000 deaths is pretty bad, the worse part of COVID-19 is that one can walk around with the virus for days, maybe a week, while being completely asymptomatic and unaware that your'e sick and can infect others. That's not the case with many other infectious diseases, including influenza, (you get the virus, don't know that your'e sick and spread the disease for only a few days, get sick, stay home from work or school, and stay in bed). Not so with COVID-19, with this disease one can infect dozens, maybe hundreds, before one even begins to feel sick.

Actually that's been the case with viral pneumonias, which have been among the leading killers of old people (especially in nursing homes) since forever. How could it possibly be getting into nursing homes, other than by being spread from the general population?

Pneumonia isn't caused by a single agent, but we don't know how many it is caused by. It can be caused by a bacterial infection, by influenza, or by other viral diseases. In most cases of pneumonia, even the fatal ones, the causative agent isn't even explored. Other than influenza and tuberculosis, nobody tries to control the spread of pneumonia agents in the general population, and usually the infection isn't even traced. We just know pneumonia agents circulate in the general population, and sometimes cause pneumonias there, but manifest as life-threatening ones in the debilitated. Influenza at least makes most people sick, and we do try to control the spread of tuberculosis -- which tends to infect some people for a long time, and has a lot of carriers who are asymptomatic or have only occasional symptoms -- but for the most part we try only to protect debilitated persons and health care personnel from these agents.

Covid-19 to me is just another viral pneumonia agent, no different from what we presume to be many others that are always circulating and cause most people little harm. It seems the only reasons efforts are being made to control its spread in the general population are: that it was discovered close to its apparent origin of human transmission, and there was a brief chance to prevent its breakout; and that it was associated with a far more severe version of SARS. But the time its breakout could've been stopped has long passed, and it's now known to be much less of a threat than SARS was. I think efforts to control it in the general population are futile, and that control efforts should have been aimed at isolating nursing homes, not the general population.

Of course nursing homes have always been bad on average at keeping pneumonia from going around; some have viewed such pneumonias as a merciful end where euthanasia was not practiced. But as we know, in various places around the world perverse policies were followed that seemed to deliberately increase the chance Covid-19 would go around such facilities, snipping off lives faster than the usual run of pneumonias would have.

We could all have been trying to live like this for the past century for all the medical justification there was, given what we know about pneumonia, trying to keep these respiratory agents from going around because in a few cases they will kill old, debilitated people. But we would thereby have crippled all of society to try to save those few.

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by Robert Goodman

Actually that's been the case with viral pneumonias ...

I've just about finished reading The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry, about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Most deaths were caused by pneumonia, but at the time they thought it was bacterial pneumonia. Of course back then they didn't know much about human viruses, the viral cause of influenza wasn't determined until 1933.

From what I understand, X-Rays of pneumonia in the lungs of COVID-19 patients are quite nasty compared to other types of pneumonia.