Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

And a month ago it was certain to have come from a shithole wet market.

I don't think anything is certain with this thing anymore. Poker players never show their cards.

That was the leading hypothesis, it was not at all a certain conclusion at the time.  It may still have originated that way, we don't know for sure now either.

Everything I read technical says it is NOT bioengineered, but it is very possible I think it escaped from that biolab unintentionally.

This was released on the world intentionally. They closed Wuhon to their own, but still let Wuhon travel the world, and the world travel to Wuhon. The CCP knew what it had, and they unleashed it upon the world to bring everyone's economies down to theirs. 

Poker is being played.

There is this notion that South Korea tested aggressively, and early, which may be true, but they did not test even a large percentage of their population early.  There is more to their success than just early testing.

If they had tested only a quarter of a percent of the population by mid-March, that is not to me a sign of wide spread testing.  I'm sure they tested folks who showed symptoms and then did contact tracing to the extent possible, not just rep sample testing.

I am beginning to think we will have to have a treatment with an antiviral that works well, not a vaccine, and not herd immunity. 

I do think that a lot of their early cases were traced to some specific religious sect, which might have helped them by catching the spread within that group before it had hit the rest of the population. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-51877437/the-cult-behind-south-korea-coronavirus-outbreak

But I think the key is more than "widespread testing", it's that as soon as a case was found they did the contact tracing to try to identify where it might have spread from a confirmed case before it could spread much farther. 

And note that South Korea also embraced stay at home very early on, and has continued their stay-at-home efforts. They've just recently started to talk about reopening: https://qz.com/1844946/south-korea-keeps-social-distancing-post-covid-19-containment/

So there's more to it than just the testing. 

I do have friends that work here in Ohio in the medical profession. One is a supervisor of nursing at a hospital in Lorain, Ohio which is just west of Cleveland. According to this person, they number of people being coded as having Covid is much greater than those that actually have the virus. If someone is admitted with ANY of the symptoms, they are immediately coded as having the virus. I asked why this was the case and they confirmed what I had thought all along. Because the hospital gets more federal money for a higher number of Covid patients.

Therefore, if a patient with stage IV cancer is admitted and has a fever, they are coded with Covid. If they die, they are added to the list of those that died from Covid when in fact it was the Cancer that caused the death.

Now that is simply 1 hospital in Ohio. However, based on Dr. Brix stating that they are encouraging hospitals to engage in this practice, what are the odds that other hospitals are doing the same?

This is why I don't trust ANY of the numbers that the government or many others are putting out. There is such a wide range of opinion in the medical profession as to what constitutes a Covid infection vs what doesn't. And with the government incentivizing hospitals to increase their Covid numbers, how much can we really trust this data?

As for donating or supporting local businesses, we have been doing that since day 1. However, that does little to help small business owners of businesses that are not deemed essential and cannot operate. It also does little for the part time servers at restaurants that are not working and do not qualify for unemployment compensation. My youngest daughter is one of them. She is a full time student at the Univ of Toledo and now back home. She had a part time job as a server at a local restaurant and used that money to help pay for her living expenses. She was planning on working full time this summer (with agreement with the owner) to save enough money to pay for her rent and other living expenses for the fall semester. Now that plan is down the drain. But hey, at least she didn't get a cough.

So your friend is a supervisor of nursing at a hospital and in that supervisory position is seeing a high degree of medicare fraud? I look forward to that person doing something and exposing it to the public eye. After all, being a supervisor at a place that is not only committing some fraud but doing so in the midst of a pandemic is probably not a great one. 

I am a little surprise that in the midst of talking with a hospital supervisor, there hasn't been a chance in nuance in your writing about comorbidities. Clearly most parts of that are not in fact galling propagation of the lie of this plague, but a normal part of the way death is determined. It doesn't seem like your friend got into that much. 

Anyway, I ask this at the end, if you don't trust the government, would you deem it possible the government is underplaying the numbers? I don't say that because I have a particular belief that they are, but I do worry when someone says "The numbers are cooked, an they're definitely cooked in a way that matches what I've felt all along."

And I feel sorry your daughter can't be a full-time server over the summer, but I'm glad she had a family with a level of security that she's not in more dire straits. Thankful for that. 

I agree, the combination of keeping everyone home AND providing nothing to the masses has made it a cluster-fuq.  My thing is the lack of testing. 
Hey, wouldn't it be nice if you could get a test and go back to work the moment you were deemed virus free?  No, that wouldn't make things normal and no, it wouldn't totally prevent the spread, but it would be a helluva lot better than what you described.

The lack of testing is truly absurd.

What good is testing. If I test negative for the virus today, who is to say that I won't get it tomorrow. You would have to test every day.


Now if you are talking about the present antibodies (if you can reacquire the virus) that is a different story. 

So your friend is a supervisor of nursing at a hospital and in that supervisory position is seeing a high degree of medicare fraud? I look forward to that person doing something and exposing it to the public eye. After all, being a supervisor at a place that is not only committing some fraud but doing so in the midst of a pandemic is probably not a great one.

When the government is the one encouraging hospitals to attribute everyone possible to Covid, how would that be medicare fraud? They are following government guidelines. The point is that the government is the one that appears to be the entity that is propping up the numbers. The hospital is simply following the guidelines being issued. 

I am a little surprise that in the midst of talking with a hospital supervisor, there hasn't been a chance in nuance in your writing about comorbidities. Clearly most parts of that are not in fact galling propagation of the lie of this plague, but a normal part of the way death is determined. It doesn't seem like your friend got into that much.

When someone with a terminal illness shows symptoms of a cold, flu or any other virus, and they ultimately die, their deaths are not attributed to the cold, flu or other illness. However with Covid, that seems to be the case. Why is that? What is so different about this virus that any and all deaths need to be accounted for as having been a result of this virus? Most likely because having people die of other factors does nothing to spread fear and panic the way that showing high number of Covid deaths does. 

Anyway, I ask this at the end, if you don't trust the government, would you deem it possible the government is underplaying the numbers? I don't say that because I have a particular belief that they are, but I do worry when someone says "The numbers are cooked, an they're definitely cooked in a way that matches what I've felt all along."

That could be a possibility. However based on comments made by both Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci, it would seem unlikely. Both of these doctors appear to be reveling in their new found fame and power to influence public policy. Dr. Birx suggesting to attribute any deaths to Covid just for showing symptoms and Dr. Fauci telling people we should not shake hands but having sex with people you meet online would be ok. (Personally, I think the guy is a quack, but that's just me).

And I feel sorry your daughter can't be a full-time server over the summer, but I'm glad she had a family with a level of security that she's not in more dire straits. Thankful for that.

Yes, she will be ok and we will do what we have to do to make sure that her school bills are paid and that she is able to resume her education when things open up. However, there are many more out there being severely hurt by the shutdown that will never recover. And my guess is that the shutdown of our economy will have a negative effect on far more people that the virus itself ever does.

Anyway, I ask this at the end, if you don't trust the government, would you deem it possible the government is underplaying the numbers? I don't say that because I have a particular belief that they are, but I do worry when someone says "The numbers are cooked, an they're definitely cooked in a way that matches what I've felt all along."

In fact, the argument is that hospitals are feeling very severe economic hits because they're not doing other surgeries. Wouldn't a hospital actually have an incentive to DOWNPLAY the effect of COVID-19 in order to reopen faster?

Wouldn't economic actors (state, federal governments) have an incentive to DOWNPLAY the effect of COVID-19 to reopen their economies faster? 

I find it interesting that world leaders, listening to their own epidemiologists, have basically universally followed the same playbooks on this, at great economic cost to themselves, but people think deaths are being wildly overreported here because of medicare reimbursement rates?

Do we think Spain, Italy, France, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, all of whom have a death rate as a percentage of confirmed cases over 10% (twice what we have in the US) are cooking their books too? What would be the incentive? 

The whole world wants to find an excuse to reopen our economies... Maybe sometimes the easiest answer is to use Occam's Razor: maybe this virus is actually pretty damn terrible, despite that we don't want to believe it.