WhitinsvilleWX

Just now, dryslot said:

One of the fraud fives.

Yup. along with the old anafrontal.

Although I seem to remember during the February snow blitz in 15 that most got a foot plus from an anafrotnal. But that year, any one of the frauds came through.

40 minutes ago, NorEastermass128 said:

Birds chirping this morning like it’s mid April already. 
 

Just picked some parsley that’s still going strong from last year’s garden . 

My day lilies are starting to sprout as well as the cats mint. The ground isn’t frozen at all. 
Fire up lawn thread. 

3 minutes ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

There is no weather to speak of

 

You got that right!

Cold and dry is no way to go through life, son.

If we don’t see a flake or 2 soon, DIT just needs to fire up the lawn thread. I had new sod put down in September. Still almost as green as the day it was put in. 

If I don’t see some snow soon I may melt. I’d settle for some mood snow at this point.

Wow! 5 point difference and Mahomes is out 

But Tyreek Hill is a beast 

27 minutes ago, DavisStraight said:

Cleveland making a run here, might be a game.

I hope so. But KC is a much better team. 

11 minutes ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

Is he in a facility?  Or in another state? 

God no. He lives alone on the beach in Wilmington NC. Just finished contracting his own house and plumbed it himself. He’s a retired building contractor, plumber by trade. Had both knees replaced in the last 4 years, travels in his motor home. He’s healthy and strong as an ox. Hope to keep it that way. His wife died 2 years ago with dementia. She was 78.

NC has all their facilities done and moved on to 75 and above.

Just now, HoarfrostHubb said:

Bears watching.  But still no definitive link has been established.  I’m curious how many 85+ year olds in the US have been given it and how many have died within a few days.  

My 82 yo father got his first dose of Pfizer today. So far so good.

56 minutes ago, Lava Rock said:

Why don't they just use the rapid test then? Not enough supply, too costly, something else?

Incompetency. Someone at the NIH should be all over this.

And...testing asymptomatic people on a routine basis with an overly sensitive PCR test is bad medicine. You could get 1000 random heathy, asymptomatic people off the street in Boston, do a nose swab and find any number of virus RNA's/DNA's if you had the right primer and probes. 

You probably come into contact with the measles once in awhile. You don't get it because you're vaccinated. But if you happen to do a PCR test when you are exposed, it'll pop positive. Are we testing healthy, asymptomatic people everyday for flu, mumps, polio, measles, etc by PCR? NOOOOOO. So why are we testing asymptomatic, healthy people for covid? Because people have been told that healthy, asymptomatic people are spreading a respiratory virus around infecting others. Maybe this is the first respiratory virus known to man that infects humans, replicates in your respiratory tract with a high enough viral load to infect others at an R0 of 2 or higher, and you are healthy enough to run a marathon and not know you're sick. I doubt it.

The PCR test is the worst thing that was conceived for this whole mess.

26 minutes ago, STILL N OF PIKE said:

I keep convincing myself that Fauci was just obfuscating and  using that number to poo poo the Results instead of just embarrass Oxford and Highlight /mention the REAL reason the results were disappointing and how they fiddled and diddled with the numbers and dosages to show something “good”. Bc otherwise , nobody is gonna have 95% effficacy

Regarding JnJ and some likely good results (as long as Facui doesn’t think 75-85% is not good enough lol ) I just was reading it will be April until they get shots in people’s arms 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestreet.com/.amp/investing/johnson-johnson-jnj-one-shot-covid-19-vaccine-delayed

I realized production was messed up, but I didn’t realize how royally messed up it is, how don’t you have at least some vaccine prepared should this be green lighted in less than a month . They were suppose to have 60 million dosages out by End of April . They are two months behind that at least.

What in the helll is wrong with these companies or was the original time frame just that much of a incompetent lie ?

 

J&J's isn't as easy to manufacture as the mRNA vaccines.

Don't be too hard on them. Drug manufacturing is difficult. When a new drug is anticipated to be approved, there are months to years to get the manufacturing up to speed when its finally approved. There's a lot of QA/QC involved. This "warp speed" science does have limits. It wasn't a "lie", it was a best guess and sometimes they get it wrong.

30 minutes ago, klw said:

 

 

Issue for both could also be that isn't there a lag time between the shot and it being fully effective.  This morning on the radio, an NPR story mentioned a 2 week lag time and when I had the flu shot in the fall the nurse also mentioned a 2 week delay in full protection.

The congressman wasn't sick. No symptoms, felt fine. Had the second shot I believe. 

3 hours ago, Lava Rock said:

Do you think there was any extensive validation into these assays, cause they should harmonize the method, use one accepted method, all with the same Ct.

They didn't validate shit. It's all still EUA. Any validation done so far says Ct values >32-33 aren't infectious. Nothing's standardized. The rapid tests false negative rate is being compared to the PCR tests that are called positive at anything less than 40. Total BS. IMO, if you're negative off the rapid test, you're not infectious. That needs to be validated against viral replication assays, badly, and not PCR.   

1 hour ago, Lava Rock said:

Damn media just sucks. News last night reports congressman tested pos after getting vax. I didn't catch the details, but a couple different ways of interpreting this. Regardless, this doesn't help convincing the public the vaccine is effective

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk
 

I read that. He said he wasn’t sick and felt fine. 
Im telling you it’s that GD, foul PCR test. I’d like to see the cycle number where he tested positive. I’d bet a months pay it fell into the range of “non moribund , non infectious”. 
His immune system took care of it and all that’s left are a few viral particles or strands of RNA left that are meaningless. 
Until that PCR goes away or is modified with respect to interpretation, we’ll have these meaningless “positive” forever. 
Makes me so angry they can’t get this right.

Massachusetts hasn’t done well with getting the vaccine distributed at all. Hard to imagine given the health care system we have here. 
Frickin West Virginia is doing really well. Go figure. 

3 hours ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

I have not seen any evidence of that.  Just more virulent.  

That’s hard to say really. This idea of a more contagious strain is based only on computer  models. Granted there’s been work on sequencing in the population and found that it’s the predominant form in certain areas. Computer models spit out “70% more contagious”. It was run again and it came out to 56%. Some estimated potentially 20%. I think we all know about models and how accurate they can be. 
The reality is there’s been no wet laboratory experiments done to determine if this is actually more contagious or not.  It could be, but so far it’s all based on a computer model.

A cynical person might be led to conclude that maybe the idea of a more contagious strain is out there to explain why mitigation measures don’t seem to really work. 

2 hours ago, STILL N OF PIKE said:

 can’t mention the last one due to new rules . 

 

Actually my experience is that anti vax sentiments transcends "this"^ 

You see it regardless of "That which cant be discussed".

14 minutes ago, Supernovice said:I.e. people who should be hospitalized aren’t because there is no room.

14 minutes ago, Supernovice said:

Ya you’re right. Some epidemiologist said something like hospitalization per some number of cases or something is better to look at.

because what you’re saying is right, the leveling off may be more a function of a significantly stressed medical system. I.e. people who should be hospitalized aren’t because there is no room.

There’s plenty of head room actually, at least in Massachusetts. Boston hospitals only have 15-20% of total capacity that consist of Covid patients. Some outlying hospitals have upwards of 30%. But there’s plenty of room. Back during April, there were 4500 in the hospital.

LA outnumbered is another story. I had no idea there were 10 million people in that one county. Dear god, that’s the population of Massachusetts, RI and Connecticut combined.

28 minutes ago, Supernovice said:

 

interesting to see hospitalizations maybe, sort of, possibly leveling off... fingers crossed.

Some of the decrease, at least in Massachusetts, is more people are being moved to other facilities and obviously going home. One thing you really don’t see reported is WHY there are 2200 in the hospital. Make no mistake, there are some really sick people in the hospital. However, most are in there for 1-3 days getting some oxygen, steroids, and/or Remdesivier and they can go home. However, a lot can’t go home for several reasons. Some live with extended family and they don’t want them back home until they are not contagious,  some live alone and need a little care but not hospital level etc etc. But, LTC facilities (think Spaulding) won’t take them. Sometimes it takes several days or even a week plus to find a place that will take them. Matter of fact, that’s who is in the DCU center or the Lowell field hospitals. I have MD buddies and social workers telling me these things that go on at a lot of area hospitals. So the increase isn’t necessarily because people are stacking up really sick in the hospital for days and days, but because they can’t be transported to a recovery facility.    
I know of one hospital down in southern Mass that calls other facilities daily to get people moved. They’re sending them as far away as the cape to rehab facilities to free up hospital capacity.

2 minutes ago, Supernovice said:

Just to be clear they are not shifting to a single dose which is what the UK is doing. The feds are saying  that should the production supply chain continue to hold up, there is no need to reserve the second dose for those already receiving their first. There will be reserves of course in case of a contaminated batch...just want to clear that up.

Yes, that’s correct. A second shot is imperative, but it can be pushed off a little and as long as the manufacturing chain holds up, there’s no reason to hold it back. We need about a million or 1.5 mill a day to get this done by late summer.

1 minute ago, NorEastermass128 said:

What's your take on releasing the whole stockpile and not holding any reserve back to ensure folks get their second doses within the prescribed 21-28 day period?  

I don’t know, honestly. 
Most vaccines have a booster much later than 21 or 28 days. Hell, childhood vaccines generally go a year plus between primary and booster. The big unknown is....do these vaccines need a booster within a month or 2 to maintain a durable response. I think it’s pretty clear that one shot gives a great response but how soon does that second one need to be given. Normally different schedules would be investigated but this one really only looked at one schedule since time was of the essence.

My feeling is the second shot could be pushed off several weeks or a couple months beyond and it probably wouldn’t make much difference. The good thing about the mRNA vaccines are that they are fast to make. 
All that said, they can’t even get the doses they have given out (even holding back the second dose) much less more. I’m not sure even if they did release more it could be distributed faster. If I had to make the decision, I’d probably release it all if I could make sure the manufacturing process would stay on track.

4 hours ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

Effective vaccines rolling out quickly are what the world needs now...

 

It needs to speed up. It’s still too slow. 
I signed up to get my 83 yo father vaccinated today. He lives in NC. The first round of vaccine they got ran out before he could get through on the phone. I finally got someone on the phone last week at the county health department. She said they only had 3000 doses available and they filled up the appointment schedule in an hour. I got on a text alert system that would text me when the next batch was available. It went off this morning at 11 am. I called immediately and it took me 17 tries before I got through. I was on hold 38 minutes. I got him an appointment Friday. By 2:20 pm I received another text that said they ran out of appointments. 
So in ~3.5 hours they were done. 
There’s got to be a better system here. At this rate we’ll still be in masks this time in 2025. 

17 minutes ago, NorEastermass128 said:

I think it would be news if there weren’t variants circulating. Scientists should continue to watch for them and adapt as/if necessary. 

This^   People shouldn't freak out about this.

A friend of mine who is a med tech in a hospital lab took the Pfizer vaccine about 3 weeks ago. She did a Covid antibody titer on herself a couple days ago. Her titer was higher than the top end on the test. The test is based on total Covid antibodies and is expressed as an index. Her draw before the vaccine tested at 0. Three weeks later it was >10 and the scale is 0-10. She's 70 years old. Who knows what the duration of the response is, but it looks like these mRNA vaccines produce really high titers from some similar anecdotal evidence I've heard.

1 hour ago, DotRat_Wx said:

How much does a solid snowblower run for? How much is a higher end one go for? What are some brands that are good? 

I always look at snow blowers like they are mythical creatures. Don't see many in Southie 

I have an Ariens platinum. One hand turn, heated hand grips. I think I paid $1200

Looks me a little snow starting in Foxboro. Wet mangled flakes.