(COVID/ETC CONTENT HERE) China Locks Down 11 Million in Wuhan,

[WillBrink]

I'm not sure how prevalent this is, but how has your churches handled this? I did see a church service ending in predominantly black church close to my place yesterday that was full of people coming out. It's obviously a difficult issue.

Florida Church Packed with Worshipers

The River Church in Tampa was packed to the gills with worshipers who clearly were looking for hope. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who presides over the megachurch and has been reportedly defiant over social distancing, has claimed he'll cure coronavirus just the way he did with Zika.

He has vowed he will never close his church ... despite every doctor and scientist saying social distancing is the only thing that will prevent the disease from spreading even more.

The Pastor boasted his place was white-glove clean, saying, “We brought in 13 machines that basically kill every virus in the place, and uh, if somebody walks through the door it’s like, it kills everything on them. If they sneeze, it shoots it down at like 100 mph. It'll neutralize it in split seconds. We have the most sterile building in, I don’t know, all of America.”

Howard-Browne said on March 17, "We are not stopping anything. I've got news for you, this church will never close. The only time the church will close is when the Rapture is taking place.”

Cont:

https://www.tmz.com/2020/03/29/chruc...virus-worship/

[ramairthree]

That's 5,000 to one funeral home. I watched a news story out of Italy over the weekend about a priest blessing coffins in a church and he brought up a point I had not considered. If you catch this and die in the hospital you do so alone, no family visits and afterwards you go into a sealed casket, family closure issues are likely to be an issue with this evil scrounge.

5,000 Urns Shipped to Funeral Homes in Wuhan Raise Questions about China's True Death Toll

https://pjmedia.com/trending/5000-ur...ue-death-toll/

Photos of thousands of ash urns from Wuhan have been circulating on Chinese social media, raising additional questions about China's "official" death toll from the coronavirus. The Chinese government says the total number of deaths from the virus has been 3300 with just 23 deaths in the last week. New cases, the government says, have slowed to a trickle.

The New York Post reports that 5,000 ash urns were delivered to one funeral home in two days, although it was unclear how many of the urns were filled. Other social media posts about the urns strongly suggest there are far more dead than the government is letting on, and they're threatening the dead people's families to keep them quiet.

That’s one of the sad things about it.

The US is horrible about hospice care and dying at home overall.

Your grannie with a terminal condition that should be at home with pain and anxiety meds for comfort dying with family around her routinely ends up in the ER or ICU with strangers doing a bunch of painful, miserable, undignified, and horrible things to them. At best friends or family could see or visit them before they died. With visitor restrictions, this will not happen. They will die alone, surrounded by strangers, all of which have far more things to do and other patients to manage and there will be no one sitting with them holding their hand when they die.

One thing that keeps coming up is the death rate. People are taking the case numbers and death numbers, and doing kindergarten math.

Originally Posted By M14dad:
FWIW. From everything I can find the survival rate in the U.S. is still better than 98 percent....141,854 cases 2,475 deaths figures out to 1.7 mortality rate.

As of right now.

Feel free to correct if you have better info.

The vast majority of people are not being tested.

I’m not talking about all the people with it with minor symptoms who do not go to seek care.

There are tons of of people that are seen, evaluated, told they might have it, and sent home to self quarantine without a test.

As of now, there are not enough available to test all of these people.

And not everyone admitted is tested.
An ER or hospital simply cannot function if every single person with shortness of breath or a fever is treated as a COVID patient.

It’s not impossible that the skipping dialysis patient shows up again short of breath in volume overload, the still heavy smoking COPD patient showing up wheezing and difficult breathing, the febrile nursing home patient with a raging urinary tract infection, the half dead infected foot non compliant diabetic with a fever, short of breath cancer patient with a huge pleural effusion that keeps coming back after repeated thoracentesis, severely short of breath 87 year old palliative chemotherapy with pleuritic chest pain and a troponin of 1.5, the cystic fibrosis kid with bad pneumonia, the preemie in respiratory distress, and the heroin shooter with massive amounts of bilateral pneumonia all have it. It’s just that there is no plausible way to manage every single patient in the ER or admitted to the hospital as a COVID patient.

They are not all going to be tested or admitted as a COVID patient. They all have other plausible reasons for a fever or shortness of breath. There are not enough tests to test everyone.

So, frankly, there are tons more people with COVID than there are people that have been tested for it.

And dying while COVID positive does not mean you died from COVID. Great Uncle Mike with the cardiac stents, other blockages that can’t be reached to stent, and too many medical problems to survive bypass surgery, that shows up with chest pain and shortness of breath and dies, met his natural end whether C19 positive or negative. Your wife’s great grandmother with end stage COPD and home oxygen that had 22 ER visits and 14 hospital admissions in 2019 that just got an ambulance ride to the ED and coded and died met her natural end whether positive or negative.

For the above and various other reasons,
The number of cases that exist is far, far, less than the actual number of cases documented.
The number of deaths includes huge numbers of people, that when all is said and done, it was their time.

Comparing overall death in 2019 to 2020 in the future will give us some idea of the impact.
With no guarantee that there won’t be some version of this popping up over and over.

[Alex V]

I completely agree with you. I think scientists often fail with responsibly communicating their findings to the media and, in this case, interacting with policymakers. Any work around modeling is particularly suspect and needs to be reinforced as just that- a model with a wide variability of inputs and outputs and one that needs to be updated regularly as new data emerge. And, after all of that, it's still a model. It seems like many focused on the numbers with this particular work rather than the authors conclusions that were primarily focused on epidemic suppression through interventions to flatten the curve.

I would think the architect/scientist analogy in this case would be more akin to drafting scaleable set of plans for a structure between x and y square footage (or volume), with inputs and outputs of varying electrical demand, HVAC, plumbing, sewage, etc. Maybe that's a poor analogy?

At any rate, this type of work and the resulting uncertainty is one of the reasons I'm an epidemiologist working in oncology rather than infectious disease.

I understand that it is difficult to nail down a number due to the numbers of variable. Releasing a study which has a range of a couple million to several thousand just seems half baked and irresponsible.

I detest irresponsible and in accurate Science, especially when done to drive an agenda.

But to be fair, you practice a Newtonian profession, lacking the artistic talent to be a true artist, and the math ability to be an engineer...
(Ok, just parroting some jokes, back to the point)

Architects exist because Engineers need babysitters.

Ask an architect (or engineer) to predict exactly what the energy use of a building will be and the answer will be "it depends". As it does, on many factors in the model, local weather, people load, movement working hours, etc.

If a client asked me such a question I would tell them there is no answer, rather than giving them a BS answer of 5kWh to 5000kWh. See where I am going with this? If your range is so wide, maybe just STFU and don't pipe up until you have more information to give a correct answer.

[ramairthree]

When talking about an official population of 330,000,000 people, another couple of dozen million refugees, illegals, visitors, visas, etc. occupying a contiguous landmass of over 3 million square miles, massive coastlines, massive adjacent land borders to the north and south, multiple land, air, and water travel options, differing population densities, a huge spread of age, disease, or existing medical conditions, vastly differing compliance levels, and some other factors,

A range such as 2 to 7.5 million hospitalizations and 120-650k deaths in a worst case scenario is pretty acceptable.

Keeping in mind there are already going to be 36 million hospitalizations and 3 million deaths a year in the USA with the vast majority of the above numbers were already going to be a part of this.

[chuckman]

I understand that it is difficult to nail down a number due to the numbers of variable. Releasing a study which has a range of a couple million to several thousand just seems half baked and irresponsible.

If a client asked me such a question I would tell them there is no answer, rather than giving them a BS answer of 5kWh to 5000kWh. See where I am going with this? If your range is so wide, maybe just STFU and don't pipe up until you have more information to give a correct answer.

Scientists do this all the time; the difference is in this case, 1) it's dealing with death, and 2) it's being politicized. If someone did not independently crunch the numbers and put it out, someone, some government, some business, someone would hire someone to do it. it is no different than NOAA saying there's a low pressure system off Africa, it will likely turn into a hurricane, and it will take 2 weeks until it hits somewhere between Antigua and New York. The "cone of certainty" is exactly the same spread the the mean and the standard deviations of the research.

It's really a double-edged sword: if no one puts it out, and 50,000 people die, people are going to scream that there was no warning. If you put it out and doesn't happen, people are going to scream fear-mongering.

[Grand58742]

Did anyone ever truly believe the Chinese were telling the truth?

[WickedWillis]

Did anyone ever truly believe the Chinese were telling the truth?

Of course not.

[WillBrink]

Did anyone ever truly believe the Chinese were telling the truth?

Of course not.

That's a negative.

[thopkins22]

I'm not sure how prevalent this is, but how has your churches handled this?

I don’t know of a single church open that isn’t run by Jerry Falwell Jr. or some other extremist. I grew up between Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches and they are ALL closed and broadcasting services on Zoom, YouTube, or in one case radio.

Having faith doesn’t mean you need to disregard science, and I wouldn’t attend a church that asked that of me even in times where there was no pandemic.

Even the hyper conservative Baptist churches here in Houston are closed and broadcasting online as they should be.

I would be interested in learning if the witnesses or Christian Scientists are out there going to church...I bet they are and I’ll bite my tongue on what I think of them.

[glocktogo]

Did anyone ever truly believe the Chinese were telling the truth?

The media did and some of them still do.