The US is beginning to see a resurgence of Covid-19 cases. Small household gatherings are helping drive the surge, CDC chief says

Smoking is a choice and not a virus. Pneumonia is either viral or bacterial and has an available treatment and vaccine.

The media through the years has kept us informed of the dangers of smoking, also information regarding pneumonia.

Covid-19 has no safe proven vaccine as yet nor confirmed successful treatment.

Big difference.
By all means, please impart that wisdom to the families of the 41,000+ that died last year from second hand smoke, even those who did not choose to be around it.
 

That 41,000 people died from second smoke last year is a tragedy that continues to be addressed as are pneumonia deaths.

Pointing to preventable and non-preventable causes of death to justify risky Covid behavior doesn't pass the smell test.

If you didn't read this article in an earlier thread, I highly recommend you check it out. I pasted the post below.


For those who are still in denial, who believe in spirit guides, etc., here's another narrative by a person who did not think he was in any particular danger from this virus:


https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/10/coronavirus-denier-sick-spreader/?arc404=true

Voices from the Pandemic
‘What are we so afraid of?’
Tony Green, on dismissing, denying, contracting and spreading the coronavirus


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By Eli Saslow

October 10, 2020


I used to call it the “scamdemic.” I thought it was an overblown media hoax. I made fun of people for wearing masks. I went all the way down the rabbit hole and fell hard on my own sword, so if you want to hate me or blame me, that’s fine. I’m doing plenty of that myself.

The party was my idea. That’s what I can’t get over. Well, I mean, it wasn’t even a party — more like a get-together. There were just six of us, okay? My parents, my partner, and my partner’s parents. We’d been locked down for months at that point in Texas, and the governor had just come out and said small gatherings were probably okay. We’re a close family, and we hadn’t been together in forever. It was finally summer. I thought the worst was behind us. I was like: “Hell, let’s get on with our lives. What are we so afraid of?”

Some people in my family didn’t necessarily share all of my views, but I pushed it. I’ve always been out front with my opinions. I’m gay and I’m conservative, so either way I’m used to going against the grain. I stopped trusting the media for my information when it went hard against Trump in 2016. I got rid of my cable. It’s all opinion anyway, so I’d rather come up with my own. I find a little bit of truth here and a little there, and I pile it together to see what it makes. I have about 4,000 people in my personal network, and not one of them had gotten sick. Not one. You start to hear jokes about, you know, a skydiver jumps out of a plane without a parachute and dies of covid-19. You start to think: “Something’s really fishy here.” You start dismissing and denying.

I told my family: “Come on. Enough already. Let’s get together and enjoy life for once.”

They all came for the weekend. We agreed not to do any of the distancing or worry much about it. I mean, I haven’t seen my mother in months, and I’m not supposed to go up and hug her? Come on. We have a two-story house, so there was room for us to all stay here together. We all came on our own free will. It felt like something we needed. It had been months of doing nothing, feeling nothing, seeing no one, worrying about finances with this whole shutdown. My partner had been sent home from his work. I’d been at the finish line of raising $3.5 million for a new project, and that all evaporated overnight. I’d been feeling depressed and angry, and then it was like: “Okay! I can breathe.” We cooked nice meals. We watched a few movies. I played a few songs on my baby grand piano. We drove to a lake about 60 miles outside of Dallas and talked and talked. It was nothing all that special. It was great. It was normal.

I woke up Sunday morning feeling a little iffy. I have a lot of issues with sleeping, and I thought that’s probably what it was. I let everyone know: “I don’t feel right, but I’m guessing it might be exhaustion.” I was kind of achy. There was a weird vibration inside. I had a bug-eye feeling.

A few hours later, my partner was feeling a little bad, too. Then my parents. Then my father-in-law got sick the next day, after he’d already left and gone to Austin to witness the birth of his first grandchild. I have no idea which one of us brought the virus into the house, but all six of us left with it. It kept spreading from there.

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Green and the five others who were at the get-together he hosted tested positive for the virus shortly thereafter. The 43-year-old says he feels extremely guilty about what happened. (Allison V. Smith for The Washington Post)

I told myself it wouldn’t be that bad. “It’s the flu. It’s basically just the flu.” I didn’t have the horrible cough you keep hearing about. My breathing never got too terrible. My fever peaked for like one day at 100.5, which is nothing — barely worth mentioning. “All right. I got this. See? It was nothing.” But then some of the other symptoms started to get wild. I was sweating profusely. I would wake up in a pool of sweat. I had this tingling feeling all over my body, this radiating kind of pain. Do you remember those old space heaters that you’d plug in, and the red lines would light up and glow? I felt like that was happening inside my bones. I was burning from the inside out. I was buzzing. I was dizzy. I couldn’t even turn my head around to look at the TV. I felt like my eyeballs were in a fishbowl, just bopping around. I rubbed Icy Hot all over my head. It was nonstop headaches and sweating for probably about a week — and then it just went away. I got some of my energy back. I had a few really good days. I started working on projects around the house. I was thinking: “Okay. That’s it. Pretty bad, but not so terrible. I beat it. I managed it. Nothing worth shutting down the entire world over.” Then one day I was walking up the stairs, and all of the sudden, I couldn’t breathe. I screamed and fell flat on my face. I blacked out. I woke up a while later in the ER, and 10 doctors were standing around me in a circle. I was lying on the table after going through a CT scan. The doctors told me the virus had attacked my nervous system. They’d given me some medications that stopped me from having a massive stroke. They said I was minutes away.

I stayed in the hospital for three days, trying to get my mind around it. It was guilt, embarrassment, shame. I thought: “Okay. Maybe now I’ve paid for my mistake.” But it kept getting worse.

Six infections turned into nine. Nine went up to 14. It spread from one family member to the next, and it was like each person caught a different strain. My mother-in-law got it and never had any real symptoms. My father is 78, and he went to get checked out at the hospital, but for whatever reasons, he seemed to recover really fast. My father-in-law nearly died in his living room and then ended up in the same hospital as me on the exact same day. His mother was in the room right next to him because she was having trouble breathing. They were lying there on both sides of the wall, fighting the same virus, and neither of them ever knew the other one was there. She died after a few weeks. On the day of her funeral, five more family members tested positive.

My father-in-law’s probably my best friend. It’s an unconventional relationship. He’s 52, only nine years older than me, and we hit it off right away. He runs a construction company, and I would tag along on his jobs and ride with him around Dallas. I’ve been through a lot in my life — from food stamps to Ferraris and then back again — so I could tell a good story and make him laugh. He builds these 20,000-square-foot custom homes, but he’d been renting his whole life. We decided to go in together on 10 acres outside Dallas, and he was finally getting ready to build his own house. We’d already done the plumbing and gotten streets built on the property. We’d planted 50 pecans and oaks to give the property some shade. He had his blueprints all drawn up. It was all he wanted to talk about.



He was on supplemental oxygen, but the doctors kept reducing the amount he was getting. They thought he was getting better. He was still making jokes, so I wasn’t all that worried. He told me: “They’ve got you upstairs in the Cadillac rooms because you’re White, but all of us Mexicans are still down here in the ER.” I got sent home, and I had a lot of guilt about leaving him there. I called him at the hospital, and I was like: “I’m going to come bust you out Mission Impossible style.” He said he preferred El Chapo style. We were laughing so hard. I hung up, and a few hours later I got a call from my mother-in-law. She was hysterical. She could barely speak. She said one of his lungs had collapsed and the other was filling with fluid. They put him on a ventilator, and he lay there on life support for six or seven weeks. There was never any goodbye. He was just gone. It’s like the world swallowed him up. We could only have 10 people at the funeral, and I didn’t make that list.

I break down sometimes, but mostly I’m empty. Am I glad to be alive? I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that.

There’s no relief. This virus, I can’t escape it. It’s torn up our family. It’s all over my Facebook. It’s the election. It’s Trump. It’s what I keep thinking about. How many people would have gotten sick if I’d never hosted that weekend? One? Maybe two? The grief comes in waves, but that guilt just sits.

eli.saslow@washpost.com

Read more Voices from the Pandemic
 
Or just ignore it. We've been ignoring it since day one, we're all fine. Everyone in my family is an essential worker. My daughter and her husband are also essential workers. She is a nurse in a women's prison that has a ward with active COVID cases for months now. No issues. Besides working for the schools as a librarian, my wife watches their kids several nights a week. My SIL is a FedEx asst. manager in a storefront, constant contact with customers. My other daughter works in a lab setting at U of M. I am a contract administrator for major construction projects, upwards of $40M. I see and speak with Contractors and clients every day.

Every one of us has continued to do whatever. Went to the family reunion, many showed up. No issues. We'll be celebrating the holidays as always, including extended family.

Here's a photo from our recent trip to a specific point of interest. See how many people are concerned?

$(FILE_NAME) by telecast, on Flickr

So you're rolling the dice. Good luck. It may catch up to you or it may not. You went to a family reunion and no issues. You rolled the dice and won.We've all heard of the birthday party for the 85 year old man where 24 people ended up with the virus and he died. They rolled the dice and lost. I'm going to roll the dice as little as possible.
 

We're not seeing a "surge." The thing never really went away and cases are climbing back up.

Humans are humans. We can't cut ourselves off from contact with other people forever. Not everybody can work from home. Children will have to go to school eventually. I'm not sure the Swedish route isn't the best way to go.

There has been a lot of incompetence in dealing with the crisis. But other countries (France, Italy, Spain, UK) are suffering just as much.

No answers here, just observations.
 
The most ignorant side of this whole debacle is the fact that, if you give out your political leanings, it almost follows that your health attitude will follow whoever leads your particular party.

And that is about the dumbest way to treat any health problem and we all have some sort along the way.

If you get a sizeable splinter in your foot, do you continue to wander about telling folks that old uncle Charley had a splinter, never treated it and lived to a ripe old age . Worse than that, you berate anyone who, if they have the same problem, tries to clean it up, use an antiseptic, and put a band-aid on it. The best part in all of this is the fact that when your "leader" changes his or her view, like a puppy on a leash, you will reverse yourself and trot along in a different direction. Pathetic!!
 
We're not seeing a "surge." The thing never really went away and cases are climbing back up.

Humans are humans. We can't cut ourselves off from contact with other people forever. Not everybody can work from home. Children will have to go to school eventually. I'm not sure the Swedish route isn't the best way to go.

There has been a lot of incompetence in dealing with the crisis. But other countries (France, Italy, Spain, UK) are suffering just as much.

No answers here, just observations.
Agreed. However, the simple act of always wearing masks when with people who aren't housemates and not clustering close together can dramatically reduce the odds of spreading this virus.

I visit with people on my lawn - masked and distanced. It works.
 
All true, but consider:

We ignore pneumonia, and we have a vaccine, and we still have over 50,000 deaths every year in the US alone. From the CDC.

Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. Also from the CDC.

Using logic only, no emotion, why do we ignore these and drive COVID into everyone's head? Why aren't we banning cigarettes? What is an acceptable number for deaths per year? It must be something between the pneumonia rate and the COVID rate, because you never ever hear anything about pneumonia on the news. So, it's ok for 50,000 plus people to die every year from that, I guess. Or, maybe it goes as high as the half million who die from cigarettes?

The main difference between these three issues is the amount of media coverage.

The problem with your argument is that you're using faulty logic. You are equating Covid, pneumonia and smoking.

Covid spreads very efficiently in groups and large outbreaks can be traced back to "super spreader events."

If pneumonia spread as efficiently as Covid does I'm sure we would have addressed stopping the spread earlier.

Also pneumonia stats do not distinguish between viral, bacterial and chemically induced pneumonia.

Cigarette smoking has been banned in bars and restaurants in some places. Some multi unit buildings in California ban indoor smoking. So things are happening just not in places that think imposing smoking bans is too much of an imposition or restriction on people.
 
Agreed. However, the simple act of always wearing masks when with people who aren't housemates and not clustering close together can dramatically reduce the odds of spreading this virus.

I visit with people on my lawn - masked and distanced. It works.
It works for me - just as well as visiting my friends indoors without masks. Funny how that works.
 
So you're rolling the dice. Good luck. It may catch up to you or it may not. You went to a family reunion and no issues. You rolled the dice and won.We've all heard of the birthday party for the 85 year old man where 24 people ended up with the virus and he died. They rolled the dice and lost. I'm going to roll the dice as little as possible.

I haven't even taken the game out of the box. :LOL:
 
All true, but consider:

We ignore pneumonia, and we have a vaccine, and we still have over 50,000 deaths every year in the US alone. From the CDC.

Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. Also from the CDC.

Using logic only, no emotion, why do we ignore these and drive COVID into everyone's head? Why aren't we banning cigarettes? What is an acceptable number for deaths per year? It must be something between the pneumonia rate and the COVID rate, because you never ever hear anything about pneumonia on the news. So, it's ok for 50,000 plus people to die every year from that, I guess. Or, maybe it goes as high as the half million who die from cigarettes?

The main difference between these three issues is the amount of media coverage.

Why do we "ignore" pneumonia, I'mnotdeadyet? Who ever said we are ignoring it? Great example of setting up a straw horse.

For all those who are boasting that they are ignoring obvious health guidelines, either out of personal arrogance or for some other reason, I really recommend reading that article I posted. It was re-posted by Starsong. It's about a guy just like you, who didn't think he would ever get it. Until he did.

This is a really, really bad disease. Comparing it to all other diseases, past and present, is meaningless. Each disease (and smoking also) has to be considered individually. And pointing out that there are other bad diseases that afflict mankind proves what about the coronavirus? Nothing. It's like saying, "Coronavirus? So what? People get cancer." No logic at all to that argument.

Your reasoning reminds me of that old satirical comic book, Mad magazine, which some of us may be old enough to remember. Its "spokesman" was Alfred E. Neuman. Here he is:

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News here in Australia is that COVID infections in US are on the rise again and setting records in multiple states. Meanwhile in Victoria, our worst affected state, the second wave is on the way out but it has taken some very tough and unpopular measures to get to this stage. Today it has been announced that in the past 24 hours there has been only one new case and zero deaths. However, there are still active cases in the community, some of which cannot be explained by contact tracing.
 
My sister has been flitting around like nothing's happening, eating in restaurants, even went to bingo and she visits my 96 year old Dad. Just found out she tested positive today. Roll the dice, pay the price.
LOL. I had to look up "Flitting." (I initially thought it was a word you made up). :)
 
Each time a person goes into a crowd with no mask they're basically playing Russian Roulette with their lives and the lives of everyone around them. I don't see how anyone can do that with a good conscience.
Maybe they figure that if a mask offers protection, the other people who are wearing a mask would be protected from those who aren't.
It reminds me of those flu shot ads: "If you don't get a flu shot, you're making others sick." If a flu shot works, no one who got the shot could get the flu from someone who didn't.
 
I've never heard or seen this ad.
Kaiser Permanente in Woodland Hills had a huge banner hanging above their entrance that said exactly that. I don't know if they have it this year, since I'm not a Kaiser member. I only went there for my diabetes support group meetings (which they since cancelled).
 
Well, not all families get along and that's the way it is for our families. We live in Colorado and our families live States away and that's the way we like it. For the last couple of months, we've been doing Zoom with them and that's enough.

Wife's family not getting along with us started after her mother died a number of years ago. She was very much the Matriarch and kept the family together.
My husband mother did not like me from the get go, 😂. I had been married and divorced-the horror of it all. Despite the fact that her daughter was getting married and was pregnant, despite the fact that she was an alcoholic, her husband was an alcoholic, and her sister married for times; my divorce was an issue.

She disinherited him right before she died. Not that we cared, not that she had a lot, just that his brother and sisters were greedy people. Sooo, we refused to answer and they had to wait a year to get their money. And they had to publish the “where are you stuff” in the papers. We never bothered to respond. They live in Wisconsin 😂. The virus is bad in Wisconsin.
 


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