Thursday, November 18, 2021

The state of Coronavirus, a physician's view

Retired ER doc Tacitus muses about what we have learned about the virus.  His take is clinically rational, and highly recommended:

Right about now we are at the two year mark for Covid-19. There are so many things we still don't know for sure, despite spending time, money and other societal resources in unimaginable amounts, but I think it is fair to say that it started in the last few months of 2019.

I should note up front that there are things that you are not permitted to say in various versions of the Public Square. I'll try not to stumble close to any of them, but to be honest in some cases information has gone from Fake! to Misinformation, to Plausible, to Probable....and back again. I'm going to assume anyone who has bothered to read this far is not the mindless sheep that the Guardians of the Internet assume us to be, and is capable of weighing competing viewpoints and actually pondering them.

RTWT

4 comments:

Aesop said...

Precious little actual insight there, but what little there is, is 24K.

Is Covid gone? Hell no.

Does the vaxx work? Well, it did, once, for a month or three.

Death rate down? Seems to be, but mainly because the low-hanging fruit is already plucked. No one knows what happens if the vaxx destroys all natural immunity. Nor if that happens, or not.

If two shots didn't work, why get three? Or more? Decreasing efficacy, and multiplied chances of side effects sounds to me like a recipe for disaster on an individual level.

What about long-term problems? Ask me when we get to the one-year mark, late next month. And check back again in 2, 5, and ten years out. That could be disaster on a societal level.

You took the jab? You're the beta tester group on this. Best wishes with that plan. No, really.

Come hell or high water, I'll be finishing this year with the same DNA I got from the OEM. I like my odds. And as Doc Tacitus noted, "No one gets out of here alive."

What happens when the jab antibodies enter the gene pool, with regard to possible birth defects? Or blood and organ transfusions? No one, anywhere, has any frickin' idea.

I repeat, best wishes with that plan. Some folks may be the next crop of Delmar Barrys in the next installment of First Blood: "Got killed in 'Nam...didn't even know it. Cancer ate him to the bone."

China has thus insured that we all will live in interesting times.

BobF said...

No surprises, but at least he believes it is a personal decision.

For me, there are too many medical folks believing that way to ignore it all. I'm 76 and had no intention of getting the jab until the wife got it. I figured no good for her if I didn't, so I did. Regretted it ever since, but at my age, what the hell. NO booster for me, however, and interestingly, not for her either.

Tacitus said...

For the suggestion that I might, at my rather advanced age, still contribute to the gene pool I thank you oh Aesop!

Of course there are unknowns in abundance, and the decision tree that I am operating under varies from yours. I think the evidence of complications, i.e. myocarditis mostly, in young people is of concern. And they were not going to get particularly ill from Covid anyway.

But in the end the virus is going to do its thing. There is almost certainly more seasonal variation than impact from anything our politicians do.

Respecting alternative viewpoints seems a radical concept but is at the core of civil society, something only conservatives seem to give a damn about these days.

Tacitus

Goober said...

I'm losing faith in the vaccine by the day. Gibraltar, Israel, Singapore...

It's become obvious that the vaccine is incapable of providing much-vaunted "herd immunity" and the data is compiling more and more that it's really not doing much to prevent hospitalizations and deaths, either.

The powers that be would really do well to stop speaking with such certainty about the vaccines, because it makes them look foolish. Additionally, we really need to consider the cost to benefit ratio of continuing to fire, and to make pariahs out of the unvaccinated. The idea that we should fire people from their jobs because they wouldn't take a vaccine that is more and more looking like it's not working, anyway, is absolutely absurd.