Coronavirus and the Heart

Right. Let them decide. Most people are terrified, so they will.

Forever? What's the exit strategy for that>

And bankrupsies.

Ditto. The biggies are gone already. I buy all my clothes and shoes from Amazon. Except ski boots; you've got to try them on, and take them back to be tweaked a couple of times.

Of course not. But about 1/4 of the population will, and about all we can do, at huge expense, is change when that happens.

You can get a second-floor studio apt on this street in downtown Providence for under 1k/month, look at all this shocking urban decay. Why you might be jumped by a vegan at any time!

Buddy Cianci the Republican/Independent/whatever mayor pumped a ton of crooked funds at the construction unions in the 80s and 90s for urban renewal projects in exchange for votes or whatever. Despite the kickback-schemes though (and him going to jail for racketeering eventually) they did a pretty good job on the projects

We took a walk yesterday in the old Bernal Cut, which is now San Jose avenue. It's surprising how many of the overpaid downtown apartment dwelling lumbersexual brogrammers never get away from the dense, concrete, expensive parts of town.

That door was somehow inspired by a passage in Steppenwolf, which book I never made it through.

Neither did I.

I really liked "Magister Ludi" though.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Impossible to tolerate that drivel without being on an LSD trip.

Jeremiah actually had a lot of positive things to say. For real negativity you have to go to Greta or Moore or Soros. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I have recently had a heart checkup because I have had open-heart surgery and have an implanted pacemaker. It is quite clear from the use of the word "asymptomatic" in the report that it means I am not aware of a problem. Not that if I were to run a marathon I would not have any handicap. Or that all sorts of atypical operation cannot be discovered by use of ultrasound and electrocardiogram. My understanding is that I do not have what is usually meant by "heart disease"!

A symptom is something the patient reports, such as fatigue or shortness of breath. A sign is what a doctor or other onlooker reports, such as cyanosis or lassitude. If those exhausted the possibilities, we'd need no medical tests.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The virus has certainly taken on near-mythological properties that are a bit much for even this "leftist" to swallow.

"subtle internal organ damage" happens all the time from many causes and is repaired. Even more serious impact on internal organs occurs from e.g. starvation! Holocaust survivors eating starvation-rations for months and years isn't good for the internal organs either but as far as it's been studied long-term mortality among survivors doesn't appear particularly worse than the general population:

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many of

Interesting but irrelevant. Damage to the endothelium, which occurs during infection with the corona virus, will lead to atherosclerosis.

Give it another shot. It's one of the most beautifully-written books I've ever come across and well inside my personal top ten of novels.

I reckon at some stage we'll all be exposed to it as the economic imperative will inevitably require. So best we build up a herd immunity. Let the young people go out and spread it if they're happy to take the risk. The quicker we reach that critical level for herd immunity, the sooner we can all go back to - what will be anything but - normal.

Cowardice is a Liberal value

I have both, haven't read either, but "Siddhartha" was a fave when I read it, ages back.

Cheers, James Arthur

Costs lives. It doesn't save people from dying, only changes the date. Plus it adds lots of deaths from previously preventable causes.

Cheers, James Arthur

WHO is not supposed to worry about economics.Their interest is in human hea lth.

It shouldn't. You should relax lock-down until you are reasonably confident that there aren't any infections people running around within your communi ty. You may be wrong, in which case you will have to find all the contacts for the new infectious person and quarantine them all for 14 day, but that isn't re-imposing lockdown.

Australia has just released the CovidSafe app for mobile phones, which woul d automate the contact-finding task.

John Larkin doesn't read and probably couldn't understand if he did read.

China did lockdown, and seems to have got away with 4,633 deaths. The US di dn't do it right and has had 55,413 deaths so far (with a smaller populatio n to infect). Australia has had 83 deaths and is unlikely to have all that many more - it has a smaller population than the US but that is 3 deaths pe r 1 million people (same as China), and the US is at 167 and rising.

Cursitor Doom's opinion is as worthless as ever.

ut the dragged-out way this is being handled is going to have damaging and even ruinous economic consequences for a huge proportion of people all aro und the world.

When lock-down is badly handled, as happening in the US, each new case seem s to be able to infect close to one new victim on average, and it doesn't a nything more than prolong the epidemic at a level the health services can c ope with.

If it is done properly - as it seems to have been in China and is in Austra lia, the each new case has (on average) a 50% change of less of infecting a new victim, and the number of new cases per day drops rapidly. Contact tra cing can concentrate on getting all the contacts of the most recent diagnos ed case into isolation before they have much of chance to infect anybody el se.

That way you only need to lock down for a month or six weeks. If you do con tact tracing right - as in South Korea - you don't seem to need lock down a t all. South Korea has only had 5 deaths per million inhabitants.

That kind of response isn't economically ruinous, nor anything like it. The US response is both killing people and wrecking the economy. It's best des cribed as incompetent.

There's a difference between courage and being a self-absorbed arrogant ass.

Self-absorbed arrogant assess do tend to believe they're immortal and are naturally surprised and amused that many others think they aren't.

Tough-talkin' arrogant asses are a dime a dozen.

Yep, along with an impressive number of scientific publications on the topic:

Thanks. That article will be handy.

I would agree that the long term effects of a starvation diet did not produce Holocaust survivors that would drop dead randomly from "subtle internal organ damage". Both my parents and my step mother were survivors of various camps in Poland. My father died at age 86, my mother at 53, and my step mother at 80. Various relatives mostly made it into their 80's, with a few exceptions dying much earlier.

When I lived in Smog Angeles, my parents (and I) were members of what was then called "The 1939 Club". It's now called "The 1939 Society". and was at the time composed mostly of Polish Holocaust survivors. Through this organization, I met many other Holocaust survivors. They are now long dead, but as I recall, most were quite old (70's and