Coronavirus: Already In a Neighborhood Near You

[Edman85]

10 minutes ago, pfife said:

The screenshots in the tweet from unvaccinated folks aren't complainimg about long covid.   They're complaining about restaurants having crappy food.

Okay, I have noticed restaurant food has gone downhill since 2020. I didn't have a confirmed case until August 2022 (after four shots), so noticed this before then.

I have some theories, but one is that I just improved my cooking quite a bit in that time such that spending money on restaurant food is a complete waste.

[chasfh]

45 minutes ago, Biff Mayhem said:

Send me the best one. If it passes the smell test and I'm wrong, I'll admit it.

Passing the smell test with someone who has long COVID seems like a tall order. 😉

[gehringer_2]

46 minutes ago, Biff Mayhem said:

How can that be determined?

Not true. You can look at the percentage of people admitted to the hospital who were vaxxed and compare it to the vax rate in the general population. For instance, in Washtenaw county, during the core of the pandemic the majority of the Wash Co hospitalized were unvaxxed.  The number of hospitalized who were vaxxed didn't begin to approach the number unvaxxed being hospitalized until the overall vax rate in the county was something like 80% (i.e. 4 times more people in the county were vaxxed than unvaxxed before the number of vaxxed in the hosp approached the number unvaxxed). It was trivially easy to see that in the numbers if you were following them. Vaxxed people were clearly protected against the probability of hospitalization.

[gehringer_2]

10 minutes ago, Edman85 said:

Okay, I have noticed restaurant food has gone downhill since 2020. I didn't have a confirmed case until August 2022 (after four shots), so noticed this before then.

I have some theories, but one is that I just improved my cooking quite a bit in that time such that spending money on restaurant food is a complete waste.

Seriously, the resturant business lost a ton staff over the pandemic - a lot of them went on to other lives. A lot of commerical kitchen expertise probably was  lost. 

After the Reagan recession hit the industrial midwest to hard, most of the building trades people who could left MI to go South where there was work and never came back. If you had a home improvement project you wanted done in MI for several years after that good luck.

Edited June 26, 2023 by gehringer_2

[Edman85]

2 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Resturants also lost a lot staff over the pandemic - a lot of them went on to other lives. A lot of commerical kitchen expertise probably was  lost.

That is one. The other theory is a lot of re-org and consolidation that decreased ingredient quality.

[Tiger337]

I haven't really been to restaurants since 2020.  I used to go to restaurants sometimes on the way home from work, but now I work at home most of the time.  

Edited June 26, 2023 by Tiger337

[chasfh]

I think both less available labor and restaurants squeezing margins through downgrading their product are big reasons food quality has gone down, but since a high percentage of restaurant orders now go through Uber and Door Dash, I would bet the rise of ghost kitchens is also contributing to the perception of lower restaurant quality as well. Ghost kitchens is the specific reason I will never use Door Dash for a restaurant order. I don't care what the weather is like, I will go pick up my food at the actual place, thank you. I like knowing where my food was made.

Who knows, maybe that's what the tweeters above were talking about, anyway: Door Dash orders from "restaurants", without making the distinction between that and on-site dining.

Edited June 26, 2023 by chasfh

[romad1]

According to a guy I was on a tour with recently, who is a restaurant owner... He says that The Bear is dead on.  Also says that a lot of places kept afloat by being the local drug dealer. 

[Jim Cowan]

22 minutes ago, romad1 said:

 Also says that a lot of places kept afloat by being the local drug dealer. 

That's funny, there used to be a local barbershop here who could only have survived as long as it did by dealing.

[Biff Mayhem]

3 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Not true. You can look at the percentage of people admitted to the hospital who were vaxxed and compare it to the vax rate in the general population. For instance, in Washtenaw county, during the core of the pandemic the majority of the Wash Co hospitalized were unvaxxed.  The number of hospitalized who were vaxxed didn't begin to approach the number unvaxxed being hospitalized until the overall vax rate in the county was something like 80% (i.e. 4 times more people in the county were vaxxed than unvaxxed before the number of vaxxed in the hosp approached the number unvaxxed). It was trivially easy to see that in the numbers if you were following them. Vaxxed people were clearly protected against the probability of hospitalization.

Where is the data to back this up? I can take you at your word but I prefer "trust but verify".

FTR, I am not trying to be difficult here or tell you that you're all wrong (yet!). I am genuinely curious because there are a lot of things that still get talked about here that are simply not true. But we can deal with those at a later date because the water would start to get muddy. Let's stick with the argument that the vaccine lessened the effects of Covid.

[chasfh]

Restaurants are pretty good businesses to launder money because you can throw out expired food and claim it's been served. Barbershops are even better because you can claim to have cut hair that was never cut, because there's no product to order and sell and thus account for.

The best kind of business to launder money through must be parking lots.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Jim Cowan said:

That's funny, there used to be a local barbershop here who could only have survived as long as it did by dealing.

When I was a kid the local Barber was a nice Italian guy and he ran a little book on the side. The phone, a pencil and a pad of paper were always just as close at hand as the scissors.

LOL - private enterprise and the state have have illegal bookmaking a quaint anachromism today, but drugs would not have been an option in those days.

Edited June 26, 2023 by gehringer_2

[CMRivdogs]

I had an uncle who was a barber. Looking back I'm sure he ran book. Nice house on Pittsburgh's North Side, always a new car. He once called my father claiming to make big bucks on the Notre Dame/Va Tech NIT Championship game in the early 70s when the tournament actually mattered. 
 

Come to think about it both my grandmother's brothers were funny that way..

[oblong]

I had an Italian barber for years.  From the age of 15 until about 10 years ago.  My house now is around the block from where his shop was.  I would run into him at certain catered events "his cousin owned the place" so he was there hanging around... you know the old halls you'd rent for a wedding or grad party or something?  He would give me tomato plants and wine.   Once there was a safe sitting in the middle of the shop.  I asked him about it and he said he got it from someone but they can't open it.  Next time I went in it was open.  I asked him what was in it.  "ah, nothing really".  I left it at that.

Car washes seem like something you could launder through as well.  There's a huge fuss in Dearborn Hts over one being build on Ford road.  The meetings got very contentious and it seems like a lot of effort for a corporation from Ohio to get involved in.  I'll also say that the person I hear is involved is a pharmacist who just bought an old office building from Ford in Dearborn for over $20M. Was going to renovate it into condos and such... now it's being knocked down.

 

[Biff Mayhem]

5 hours ago, Edman85 said:

But anyways... https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccine-effectiveness

Thank you! I'll read it over when I have time. That said, I'm cynical because the exact same CDC said in March 2021 that "vaccinated people don't carry the virus and don't get sick".

 

 

[smr-nj]

“Our data suggests”.

Science is not a static thing.  I seriously think that there was no intent to mis-characterize what was happening with the virus.  What would be the purpose of that???? 
The data AT THAT TIME … suggested…that vaccinated people didn’t carry the virus.  But the message always was that you had a much better chance at NOT ending up in a life-ending situation in a hospital intubated with diminished hope of ever leaving that room.

 I’m not understanding why we are looking to demonize and criminalize scientists.

 I honestly don’t understand this.

[gehringer_2]

10 minutes ago, smr-nj said:

“Our data suggests”.

Science is not a static thing.  I seriously think that there was no intent to mis-characterize what was happening with the virus.  What would be the purpose of that???? 
The data AT THAT TIME … suggested…that vaccinated people didn’t carry the virus.  But the message always was that you had a much better chance at NOT ending up in a life-ending situation in a hospital intubated with diminished hope of ever leaving that room.

 I’m not understanding why we are looking to demonize and criminalize scientists.

 I honestly don’t understand this.

yeah - in truth, science pegged this virus wrong on day one. They used the model of Sars-I, which made perfect logical sense since it was a related virus, but the epidemiology we actually got wasn't SARS-I at all, it was more like the corona viruses that circulate as part of today's 'common cold' panoply of viruses. So while the early science was all based on a premise of heard immunity and eventual extinction of the circulating virus, what we got was a virus that is capable of infecting without causing symptoms and another addition to the inventory of endemic low level infectors. So yeah - it was a learning curve, knowledge at every point is provisional, perfect knowledge is chimerical. That said, it doesn't mean there is no difference between imperfect knowledge and ignorance or political agenda driven pseudo-scientific wishcasting, not by a long shot.

[smr-nj]

36 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

yeah - in truth, science pegged this virus wrong on day one. They used the model of Sars-I, which made perfect logical sense since it was a related virus, but the epidemiology we actually got wasn't SARS-I at all, it was more like the corona viruses that circulate as part of today's 'common cold' panoply of viruses. So while the early science was all based on a premise of heard immunity and eventual extinction of the circulating virus, what we got was a virus that is capable of infecting without causing symptoms and another addition to the inventory of endemic low level infectors. So yeah - it was a learning curve, knowledge at every point is provisional, perfect knowledge is chimerical. That said, it doesn't mean there is no difference between imperfect knowledge and ignorance or political agenda driven pseudo-scientific wishcasting, not by a long shot.

So, are you saying that you’re in the “political agenda, driven pseudoscientific, wish-casting”?

 I find that to be beyond cynical, and unnecessarily damning of very good people.

[chasfh]

I think he might be saying that imperfect knowledge and political agenda-driven pseudo-scientific wishcasting are not necessarily the same, and that the presence of the former is not necessarily indicative of the latter. This was a new disease that displayed characteristics of some known diseases, and so the approaches to it early on were similar to that taken to combat those known diseases while learning more about what made this disease tick, because what else were we to do as people started dying by the thousands?

Unfortunately, COVID also showed characteristics unique unto it, and the failures attended to some of those approaches became known.

Even more unfortunate is that certain people who wanted to do nothing but make political hay off it used those failures, including those borne of honest mistakes, as a way to cast political aspersions on even those health personnel who had no agenda but to defeat the disease, including, incredibly, nurses with feet on the ground. That, to me, was disgusting nearly beyond words.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, smr-nj said:

So, are you saying that you’re in the “political agenda, driven pseudoscientific, wish-casting”?

 I find that to be beyond cynical, and unnecessarily damning of very good people.

no-no. I mean science - as imperfect as it is, is still miles ahead of the Joe Rogans.

[Edman85]

If getting one thing wrong is enough to discredit somebody, I can play that game with literally anybody on the antivax side.

Joe Rogan, 5/14/21 claimed the COVID vaccine has microchips. https://www.mediamatters.org/joe-rogan-experience/spotifys-joe-rogan-falsely-claims-actual-microchips-are-being-injected-your

Any time Robert Malone claims to be the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, he is lying or exaggerating.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/11/tucker-carlson-spreads-an-already-debunked-claim-about-covid-deaths/

 

[gehringer_2]

47 minutes ago, Edman85 said:

Any time Robert Malone claims to be the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, he is lying or exaggerating.

This is the kind of claim that admittedly gets confusing to people, especially when people with an agenda have vested interests in half truths. Malone is like a guy who invented a riveting tool claiming expertise as a building designer. It's not obvious to people that you can be an expert in RNA chemistry and synthesis and know nothing about immunology, but there really isn't any necessary cross-over. Certainly some people know a lot about both, but that's not any logical necessity.

[Edman85]

Yeah, Malone's name was one of ten on an early paper in the late 80's, but he was nowhere near the lead on that paper and punched out of the industry before they unlocked the advances that made mRNA usable/safe in humans.

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

no-no. I mean science - as imperfect as it is, is still miles ahead of the Joe Rogans.

It's miles ahead of politicians too and scientists tend to be more honest (who isn't more honest than a politician?).  Of course, the politicians in the federal agencies can deliberately misinterpret the science which many people confuse as scientists lying.  

[jz68]

Vaccine deniers have been around since 1827 when the Smallpox vaccine was first mandated for school kids in Boston.  They were morons back then and they're still morons today.