You Don’t Need Glasses To Read That One
The last doctor on Planet Earth Or Thereabouts to go along with herd immunity and Trump’s vision of lovely, announced that everybody else is all wrong about Thanksgiving plans.
DR. SCOTT ATLAS: This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told don’t see your family at Thanksgiving. For many people this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not.
Holy crap, you idiot, if they get Covid it most certainly is their last Thanksgiving. I believe that.
Look, my family has postponed Thanksgiving until the weekend of May 8th – that’s also Mother’s Day – We’re doing it on Saturday – turkey and all that stuff – and then the kids can go to their significant others’ on Sunday for the real Mother’s Day.
It was nice to see that Stanford University distanced themselves from Atlas and was obviously embarrassed by his sucking-up behavior.
There’s a reason the US leads the world in every bad statistic on coronavirus- 70 millionish deniers listen to the likes of Trumpf and his crack task force quack Dr. mr atlas.
1Wish we had a way to tell who they are (well some are obvious) so we could stay 20 feet away from them. If they’re wearing a mask, it’ll be under their chin.
Let them go ahead and get sick then find out there are no hospital beds for them.
And let’s not forget this same quack told Michigan residents to “rise up” against governor Whitmer on Sunday.
We had 2 birthdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas celebration last week
Because it was 70 and we could eat outside.
Never had Thanksgiving outside before.
2It breaks my heart that I will not be seeing my kids for a few months…
But I will live to see them!
I am an Elderly. I will not be having Thanksgiving with friends/family, although I expect a plate to be dropped off by one or more people. I do not look on this as a tragedy, “Dr.,” I look at it as my family and friends caring about my health and safety. So, blow it out your stethoscope.
3I’m not that good at math, but experts say that herd immunity would require 70 percent of the people to catch COVID. That’s 245 million Americans. Now, let’s be overly optimistic and assume the fatality rate would be only one percent. That’s 2.45 million Americans dead.
Obviously, this little exercise has a number of issues I’ll outline below.
1) The fatality rate for the total number of infected Americans is actually closer to two to 2.5 percent. A one percent estimate would be based on improved treatment over time. That presents a few problems described below.
2) Herd immunity is based on the assumption that your body builds up immunities. We do not know whether you can get COVID again or whether it remains in your body and can be activated again like shingles.
3) We do not know the long-term effects. People may recover temporarily but damage to the lungs, kidneys, or other organs may manifest themselves later and while they may not be COVID related deaths in the future you could point to the damage caused by COVID itself.
3) We don’t know what effects a massive increase in positives would have on the hospital system. Most may avoid hospitalization, but if we see a proportional increase in the rate of people needing hospitalization then you would surpass 100 percent capacity almost overnight. Thus, I don’t think you’d keep your precious one percent fatality rate.
Ergo, your one percent fatality rate might be closer to 2.5 or 3 percent all things considered. Are you willing to sacrifice six or seven million people to get herd immunity? It doesn’t sound so good when you put it in those terms does it?
4@Nick Carroway
Too right. Also, herd immunity is not what they think it is. It refers to the level of distribution OF A VACCINE in a population that confers overall immunity. Wrong words. Wrong ideas. Oh, so Republicanite.
5Depending on who you class as elderly, you can use CDC (or insurance company) mortality tables to estimate how many of the elderly will die before Thanksgiving 2021.
It is going to be a low number given that under ordinary circumstances Americans live to be 80ish, on average. Even most people who are 90 do not die within a year. (About 1 in 20 will.)
Atlas is a fraud. Dunno if he was always a fraud or if being near the center of power has gone to his head.
6In any other administration in history, this quack “doctor” atlas would have been escorted out of the WH for what he’s said that is so against all medical experts (that aren’t associated with Fox). And then to go so blatantly against the lawful governor of Michigan this week who was taking actions based on experts in the field for the safety of her citizens, you’d think he’d lose his license. Samuel Alito basically said similar things last week. This time is like a bad unbelievable dream.
7Let’s see … this is a NOVEL coronavirus. We don’t have experience with it before the very end of last year.
Despite world-wide illness and world-wide medical and research work, this amateur — who reads about it mostly in the popular press and dips a toe into some of the linked science stuff — doesn’t know
* how many people in the United States actually have had the disease. We know the number of confirmed tests, but also know there are some who are asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic who never got tested. Follow-on blood tests for antibodies have not yet reached a sufficient level to insure a representative sample of the population.
* why some people don’t get sick, and others do; why some experience the different symptoms and others do not; why some respond to treatments and others do not.
* if those who have had the disease reliably develop immunity.
* if those who develop immunity have a nearly full immunity, a partial immunity that lasts over time, a partial immunity that fades;
* what the long-term implications for health might be.
* and virtually nothing about the effectiveness of the various inoculations when given to a broad swathe of the population.
If I’m going to take risks, it will be AFTER doctors trained and experienced in infectious diseases AND public health weigh in. Not someone chosen by Trump, because Trump saw him on TV.
8As bad as this was, I think his tweet was worse: “The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters #StepUp,” A pretty blatant call for violent resistance to public health efforts. I hope he loses his medical license.
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