And got blasted?

Seems like a lot of things we said came to be true.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/covid-19-virus-illinois-massachusetts-states-reported-cases

At a minimum....

As the false narratives the COVID fear was built on continue to crumble, I'm more and more convinced my wife and I had it in February 2020, about a week after returning from Disney World. Neither of us had a fever or felt sick, but we did have the aches typically associated with being sick. It went away in a few days and we felt normal again.

planoaggie123 said:

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At a minimum....

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This is what needs to happen. I open TexAgs and immediately see this super special board that is separated from the rest and I can't help but think "I wonder what the official narrative is today?"

If it were moved down to the bottom I would probably only click on it during a really slow day when I'm just that bored. I don't see why staff won't at least move it down. As long as it's set at the top it's going to continue to get unwanted attention.

I came here searching for the Polio and Spanish Flu Boards....can someone help me out???

HEB employees are no longer wearing masks, yet half of the patrons in the store are still wearing them. Geez people.........

dermdoc said:

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And got blasted?

Seems like a lot of things we said came to be true.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/covid-19-virus-illinois-massachusetts-states-reported-cases

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Astrobo said:

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HEB employees are no longer wearing masks, yet half of the patrons in the store are still wearing them. Geez people.........

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Ya. I agree overall. I really try to be "open minded" towards those still wearing them. But when I see 2 young couples meeting each other out in Frisco for a night at a pizza restaurant, who are very healthy and probably easily under 30, fully masked up as they enter and do not remove the mask until they are fully seated then both couples mask back up to leave all while pretty much 99% of the other patrons and all the wait staff come in, leave and walk around the restaurant maskless, I really do have to ask WTF. It's not May 2020. I really don't obsess on it, but it is very strange how many still hold on to these masks...

Where did all the funny responses go??

derm thanks for posting this information. Will you remind me why people were blasting others for postulating this? Thanks, I'll hang up and listen.

OldArmyBrent said:

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Where did all the funny responses go??

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"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. Charles Mackay - "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". For my money, one of the 10 best/most important books ever written.

AggieBiker said:

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derm thanks for posting this information. Will you remind me why people were blasting others for postulating this? Thanks, I'll hang up and listen.

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I honestly do not know except it went against the template.

dermdoc said:

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AggieBiker said:

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derm thanks for posting this information. Will you remind me why people were blasting others for postulating this? Thanks, I'll hang up and listen.

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I honestly do not know except it went against the template.

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I do.

14 days to slow the spread. "Flatten the curve".

If the virus had been here several months earlier, which it most definitely was (the virus cannot be both highly-infectious and also take 6 months to get here when 13 hour flights from Wuhan China had persisted for MONTHS before we detected our first "case"), no one would buy the hypothesis that this is a super deadly disease capable of crippling our healthcare system.

So, they simply waited until we were capable of diagnosing it with a newly created test kit, created patient zero, and used that to shut down everything from the Houston Livestock Rodeo to the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, using the argument that "we dont really know what will happen". "We could be the next Italy" "Look what happened in China!"

Boogey boogey boogey. Fear over facts. Again.

I thought it was well known and established it was here months prior.

The potential problem with the study is that the 7 positive tests in question out of over 24k samples is around 0.03%, which is smaller than some studies have suggested the cross reactivity rate with other coronavirus antibodies is. The issue is compounded by the fact that their sampling to cite dual testing with a specificity of 100% was only 4% the size of their cohort. Let's say the cross reactivity rate or false positive rate is around 0.03%, you could easily test 1000 samples and not detect a single false positive, as you'd only expect a false positive to pop up in only 1/3000 tests or so.

This is fundamentally the problem you run into when trying to catch small numbers in large data sets. And given that it's abundantly clear there was no widespread disease in America that early, it seems unlikely this data actually suggests what the authors claim it does. With what we know about the infectivity of the pathogen in question, it's really not that likely there were individual cases and isolated pockets of unrecognized infection THAT much earlier. We should have seen widespread outbreaks sooner. And this isn't even diving into the fairly definitive generic sequencing data that strongly indicates the virus didn't arrive that early.

That being said, if this is accurate it would be interesting but practically of minimal significance. Regardless of the reality of the study claims, this doesn't suggest widespread circulation long before identification in America.

BadMoonRisin said:

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dermdoc said:

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AggieBiker said:

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derm thanks for posting this information. Will you remind me why people were blasting others for postulating this? Thanks, I'll hang up and listen.

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I honestly do not know except it went against the template.

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I do.

14 days to slow the spread. "Flatten the curve".

If the virus had been here several months earlier, which it most definitely was (the virus cannot be both highly-infectious and also take 6 months to get here when 9 hour flights from Wuhan China had persisted for MONTHS before we detected our first "case"), no one would buy the idiot hypothesis that this is a super deadly disease capable of crippling our healthcare system.

So, they simply waited until we were capable of diagnosing it with a newly created test kit, created patient zero, and used that to shut down everything from the Houston Livestock Rodeo to the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, using the argument that "we dont really know what will happen". "We could be the next Italy"

Boogey boogey boogey. Fear over facts. Again.

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Again, even if this study represents an accurate conclusion, it's of minimal practical significance. It doesn't suggest, and we can conclusively show there wasn't, widespread US circulation this early. This doesn't mean all those people who think they had COVID in November/December actually did. We're talking VERY small numbers here, with almost all still falling well after the first of the year. And without wide spread disease that early shifting the frame of reference in hindsight, this fact wouldn't really change anything. It would represent a highly anomalous and frankly unexplainable epidemiological event, given it would be discordant with literally all other evidence. Which, in combination with the actual math, makes me highly skeptical. But again, that's purely from an analytical view. I really don't care, and it doesn't really matter, if a few isolated travelers managed to be sick in the US that early without spreading it in any significant fashion. It would just be really interesting from an academic perspective.

Infection_Ag11 said:

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The potential problem with the study is that the 7 positive tests in question out of over 24k samples is around 0.03%, which is smaller than some studies have suggested the cross reactivity rate with other coronavirus antibodies is. The issue is compounded by the fact that their sampling to cite dual testing with a specificity of 100% was only 4% the size of their cohort. Let's say the cross reactivity rate or false positive rate is around 0.03%, you could easily test 1000 samples and not detect a single false positive, as you'd only expect a false positive to pop up in only 1/3000 tests or so.

This is fundamentally the problem you run into when trying to catch small numbers in large data sets. And given that it's abundantly clear there was no widespread disease in America that early, it seems unlikely this data actually suggests what the authors claim it does. With what we know about the infectivity of the pathogen in question, it's really not that likely there were individual cases and isolated pockets of unrecognized infection THAT much earlier. We should have seen widespread outbreaks sooner. And this isn't even diving into the fairly definitive generic sequencing data that strongly indicates the virus didn't arrive that early.

That being said, if this is accurate it would be interesting but practically of minimal significance. Regardless of the reality of the study claims, this doesn't suggest widespread circulation long before identification in America.

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So what do we know about infectivity now? Will it pass through a surgical mask like the Faucinator said? Does it live on surfaces? Is it like other coronaviruses?

What I meant was the virus is far too contagious to expect unrecognized introduction into a formerly unexposed population to not initiate at least a large local cluster of infections. These findings would suggest that a relatively small number of people scattered about the country (assuming the few who were positive at an early date in this study were in fact in the US during some part of their illness/viral shedding period) managed to get sick and not spread the virus to any meaningful degree so as to remain unnoticed, and then only later to have the widespread infections begin with a separate introduction into our population. That's HIGHLY implausible just at face value, and coupled with all the other information we haveit just seems like this is more a product of statistical limitations and imperfections in serological studies.

Your conclusions are exactly the ones I reached after seeing this paper. The statistical significance barely even seemed worthy of comment.

Dermdoc, you should know better.

Maybe so. But last March even suggesting there may have been earlier cases brought the wrath of most of the posters on here.

Now it is, well there may have been a few cases but they were not significant.

And it does matter because the timeline was one of the factors that came up with the inaccurate IFR and mortality rate.

I am probably not as smart as you guys but I have been in medicine a long time. There is nothing new under the sun.

But thank God the vaccines are working so well. I am tired of this stuff.

For someone who was postulating back in March 2020 that this was overblown and a nothingburger, and then at least 3 different times in 2Q/3Q 2020 stated "covid is over" are you really looking for credit for something said way back then?

You are no doubt an educated man, far more in the realm of medicine than I will ever be, but as far as those with medical backgrounds on TexAgs go I can't think of a poster who missed the boat more on covid predictions vs how things played out.

Proposition Joe said:

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For someone who was postulating back in March 2020 that this was overblown and a nothingburger, and then at least 3 different times in 2Q/3Q 2020 stated "covid is over" are you really looking for credit for something said way back then?

You are no doubt an educated man, far more in the realm of medicine than I will ever be, but as far as those with medical backgrounds on TexAgs go I can't think of a poster who missed the boat more on covid predictions vs how things played out.

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You sir, are daft if you actually believe what you wrote.

RGV AG said:

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Proposition Joe said:

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For someone who was postulating back in March 2020 that this was overblown and a nothingburger, and then at least 3 different times in 2Q/3Q 2020 stated "covid is over" are you really looking for credit for something said way back then?

You are no doubt an educated man, far more in the realm of medicine than I will ever be, but as far as those with medical backgrounds on TexAgs go I can't think of a poster who missed the boat more on covid predictions vs how things played out.

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You sir, are daft if you actually believe what you wrote.

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Of all the places to read informal British slang; nice!

Proposition Joe said:

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For someone who was postulating back in March 2020 that this was overblown and a nothingburger, and then at least 3 different times in 2Q/3Q 2020 stated "covid is over" are you really looking for credit for something said way back then?

You are no doubt an educated man, far more in the realm of medicine than I will ever be, but as far as those with medical backgrounds on TexAgs go I can't think of a poster who missed the boat more on covid predictions vs how things played out.

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Derm is good people, he's been pretty reasonable in his criticisms over the last year IMO. And the article he posted is certainly worth discussing.

I think OP misremembers how people reacted here. https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3100106/1

Proposition Joe said:

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For someone who was postulating back in March 2020 that this was overblown and a nothingburger, and then at least 3 different times in 2Q/3Q 2020 stated "covid is over" are you really looking for credit for something said way back then?

You are no doubt an educated man, far more in the realm of medicine than I will ever be, but as far as those with medical backgrounds on TexAgs go I can't think of a poster who missed the boat more on covid predictions vs how things played out.

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It was overblown and still continues to be. That's not debatable at this point. You can argue how much overblown. That doesn't mean COVID wasn't to be taken serious, but the course taken was overblown

Did you read Fauci's emails?

Proposition Joe said:

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For someone who was postulating back in March 2020 that this was overblown and a nothingburger, and then at least 3 different times in 2Q/3Q 2020 stated "covid is over" are you really looking for credit for something said way back then?

You are no doubt an educated man, far more in the realm of medicine than I will ever be, but as far as those with medical backgrounds on TexAgs go I can't think of a poster who missed the boat more on covid predictions vs how things played out.

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Link to where I called Covid a nothing burger?

And what was I wrong on?

And I will say you are an excellent poster so I assume I posted Covid was a nothingburger (although I never use that term).

I will say I do not remember that at all and having lost several good friends to it, seems odd.

And last March I predicted we would not run out of vents or I CU beds, that the IFR would be 0.3-0.6%, and that there would be 50-100k deaths. And I was much closer than the 2.2 million deaths predicted by Fauci and Birx.

I think I was pretty spot on except on the deaths but working at the hospitals I am confident that number is wildly inflated.

Question for you, if you do not mind.

Looking at how the states responded(strict masks and social distancing vs the opposite) do you think masks and social distancing made a big difference?

And if so why?

Thanks.

And you were right on Kyle Field seating. Happy it is going to be open and full this year.

dermdoc said:

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Proposition Joe said:

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For someone who was postulating back in March 2020 that this was overblown and a nothingburger, and then at least 3 different times in 2Q/3Q 2020 stated "covid is over" are you really looking for credit for something said way back then?

You are no doubt an educated man, far more in the realm of medicine than I will ever be, but as far as those with medical backgrounds on TexAgs go I can't think of a poster who missed the boat more on covid predictions vs how things played out.

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I think I was pretty spot on except on the deaths but working at the hospitals I am confident that number is wildly inflated.

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No offense, but you're a dermatologist. I haven't seen a dermatologist in the hospital setting in my 10 years in medicine. I'm not sure that someone who is not seeing COVID patients should be confident regarding how many people they believe have died from COVID.

As someone that only works in a hospital, I wouldn't be surprised if the true number is actually slightly higher than 600k deaths. It was rough. I saw a lot of people die and a lot of people that I knew were going to die. We didn't "run out" of ICU beds because in most hospitals around the country, we were using floor beds for patients that at any other time in history, would have been admitted to the ICU, to preserve ICU space.

And as a reminder, if you haven't already had COVID and have not got your vaccine please consider getting the vaccine, COVID is not completely done. In the last 2 days I have had two separate 40 year old, previously healthy unvaccinated patients that I have had to place on high flow oxygen therapy, one of whom will be lucky to make it out of the hospital alive based on how he looked when I saw him. Two cases that were completely avoidable.