I lost my job in the first shut down. Then my house. Had to move back in with family. I remember the fear people had of it. The bafflement over the Toilet Paper. How Western Australia shut down its borders and didn't get as bad as everyone else did. And I remember the people who had been travelling through the state forced to stay put. Getting a new job at an Aged Care home and how horrid it was to work in a COVID ward.
That my wife and I had an excellent St Patricks day meal of corned beef and cabbage the young man who was our waiter was great took good care of us and had a lot of personality, we gave him a very generous tip and thanked him for the great service. The next week Covid shut down all the restaurants I told my wife that young man just lost his job and felt bad for him!
I was a senior in high school. I had just found out the guy I was dating was also dating some other girl who was way too young for him. Her and I actually became friends after that because she had all of my interests.
Our class was trying out Google Hangout before Zoom became a thing in schools. It was a fun time, everyone was just funnier at home. They told us that school would only be out for a month then shortly after it got closed for the rest of the year.
I used to take a college class during my senior year of high school, the professor who was teaching it also worked in a hospital. We got an email that she got covid and passed away. That always felt unreal, she was a really nice person. I remember when I did my presentation about dentistry and i got everyone tooth brushes. She requested a blue one and said she always has to have a blue toothbrush. May she rest in peace.
I knew I'd had it in December, but didnt know at the time. I thought because I'd had it i was immune to getting it again. I was a key worker so carried on working, but living separately from my partner. A couple of times a week i was dropping off food for him as being an asthmatic he was terrified. I felt very alone and afraid
I remember stockpiling staple foods like dry beans & rice. I remember all the medical people I knew taking it very seriously. I remember various comments by tRump.
“Looks like by April, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” “very much under control,” “We’re going down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up.” “...when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” “And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
@Thinkerbell That's the most severely affected cohort. What of those who only missed one or two months of work?
A study in the UK found that 10% of employees with Long COVID experienced long-term absence from work, defined as lasting four weeks (one month) or more.
Of 206299 participants (mean age 45years, 54% female, 92% white), 15% were ever labour market inactive and 10% were ever long-term absent during follow-up.
Wow, 10% to 15% is not an "outlier." For your normal distribution question, the top 15% of lost work is 1.04 standard deviations above the mean, while the top 10% is 1.28 standard deviations above the mean. AND. According to multiple sources, an outlier is generally defined as a data point that falls more than 3 standard deviations from the mean (the top & bottom 0.3%). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12912702/ https://methods.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-communication-research-methods/chpt/outlier-analysis https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103113000668
It turns out your use of the word "outlier" is way off base; that's some sloppy work🤣😂😝🤣😂
There is no "official" definition of an outlier. In very precise work in physics, for example, one may want to go out to 4 or 5 sigmas, but in epidemiological work, which depends much more on imprecise tests and diagnoses, 2 sigmas are plenty.
To illustrate your quibble, the part of a normal distribution you wish to use in the "outlier" range is contained in the red circle in the diagram below. Mine is in the green circle.
I will leave it up to any readers who may be interested to decide for themselves which is more appropriate for an epidemiological study.
@Thinkerbell You introduced statistics and the question of how many standard deviations away from the mean the missed-work long Covid cases were.
Since you introduced that measure, I provided you with three separate references which refer to statistical outliers of normal distributions as 3 standard deviations from the mean (you'll also find it in wikipedia). Let us go back to the source on missed work; you'll see that missed work cases fall less than two standard deviations above the mean.
A study in the UK found that 10% of employees with Long COVID experienced long-term absence from work, defined as lasting four weeks (one month) or more. Of 206299 participants (mean age 45years, 54% female, 92% white), 15% were ever labour market inactive and 10% were ever long-term absent during follow-up. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11161149/
For your normal distribution question, the top 15% of lost work is 1.04 standard deviations above the mean, while the top 10% is 1.28 standard deviations above the mean.
In short, a month or more of missed work occurred in 10% of cases; less than 1.3 standard deviations above the mean. NOT an OUTLIER!!!
It was scary. All these people getting sick, going to the hospital, being put on ventilators. But the scariest part of all was the people who were in denial of how serious it was, right up until they got sick and had to be put on ventilators.
On a personal note, I remember one person in particular. My dad had hired a subcontractor to work on the remodel of our duplex in southeast Portland. This guy sat down and talked to me on his smoke break, telling me about how the medical mask mandate was completely pointless, and he wasn't going to be observing it, because it was a test by the US government to see if people would take the mark of the beast without question. He just went on and on about how COVID-19 was made up, and kept telling me about details he was getting wrong and why they didn't make sense.
Then, just a few days later, he called me up and told me to tell my dad he wasn't going to be able to work because he was having flu-like symptoms, and he'd lost his sense of taste and smell.
@LordShadowfire my brother in law died after 3 weeks on a ventilator. He was the first person i knew personally who died from it. When people tell me covid wasnt a huge killer i turn them off as either blind or brainwashed by the ignorance of the MAGA crowd
@samueltyler2 I get irrationally angry at these people. I find it massively disrespectful the way they cling to their narrative. I'm willing to bet you've had the absolutely horrible experience of having one of these prize lunatics tell you that either you made up the story about your brother-in-law, or he died from something else somehow.
@LordShadowfire my grandads brother survved the ww1 trenches then died of spanish flu (a form of covid) on the way home on a train, id guess made by germany, i their last ditch o survvie
I was working in a care home at the time. I remember I was watching the weird illness on the news in China for weeks at that point maybe even a couple of months, on a night shift but not thinking it would reach the western world. The day we were put on lockdown in the UK I had just finished work that evening and I watched Boris Johnson’s announcement on tv, I was in my parents living room. My dad came home 20 minutes later to say the police came and thrown everyone in there out of the pub because it had to close.
Mass hystria. work was busy. It kills me that people still believe the lies we were all told and that cloth masks can stop a virus. All this plexiglass can stop air and germs from moving around. People at work walked around with a stick 6 foot long measuring keeping people 6 feet appart. I knew from my 5th grade health class that 6 feet was complete BS!
The covid tests sold at stores are bogus. I still have friends that will test weekly to see if they are sick even though they feel great. One of the symptoms of being sick is feeling great!
The swab test was rigged to come up possitive. The guy who created it said it was only to test for strain, not used to determine if some one was sick.
People come to work now sick with covid. No 6 feet, no one cares if you are sick. You still have to come to work. No worry every one else is going to get sick. I have pointed out over and over we used to believe all the lies told to us in 2020.
@Confined It also turned out that many people were diagnosed with the Chinese Flu only after having died from car accidents, heart attacks and angry wives.
We hadn't had any or just a very few cases for a very long time. I watched charts almost every day. Many people treated lockdowns as a vacation and they finally had time for stuff they were putting off for years. I heard that at some point it was hard to find some gardening stuff. We made cloth masks, some people took it as a chance to turn it into fun or fashion. All grocery stores started smelling so bad of hand sanitizers that even plastic bags for bread and pastry smelled of it. For a while we were actually putting bread to the oven in case someone touched it with filthy hands or sneezed on it. 😅
@samueltyler2 Here it's seen the same as flu now. So older people and people with serious illnesses are considered high risk patients but otherwise it's not even tested. The testing and most restrictions more or less stopped in summer of 2022.
from that week? try years! how it changed our whole life. how we look at people who are sick now that we are STILL getting the lab rat disease. i just had it last week again for the 5th time. How it isolated us. but many of us learned new talents and skills and i sure got lots done. you have to like your own company.
My mom had just died, I had a full time kindergartener all of the sudden, my family dumped me and my son and I were doing his school from the back of our van because we had no wifi at home. It was a flipping mess for me.
I remember enjoying driving as the highways were almost empty. I remember it became difficult to find liquid hand soap and toilet paper. I remember our grocery stores taped arrows to the floor so you'd only walk in one direction. I remember paper masks with holes several times larger than the virus. Not a great time in human history.
It’s very easy to remember. My mother passed away 9 March and the world shut down the day of her service. We couldn’t hold the luncheon that we planned thanks to Big Blue.
I had a heart attack as we were confined (unrelated) and it meant I had complete rest immediately afterwards and I was free of worry about cancelling my plans.
I asked my boyfriend at the time it I could move in with him and his family during lockdown but he didn't let me cos he didn't know how to explain our relationship to his wife and kids
I took pictures of the local newspaper, knew it was gonna be a big deal. And I remember walking around town, kids had drawn health PSAs with colored chalk on the sidewalks. There was a kind of optimism in the early weeks (at least where I live) that eventually died in political ugliness and disinfo campaigns. The general attitude locally towards the pandemic situation was night and day between Feb-March and the end of the year.
I just remember feeling utterly terrified. Watching the news as the death toll crept up I wondered if I would be able to keep my family safe. It was horrible but now it seems long ago.
I bought a small house and had to only bump elbows with the real estate agent and then do the whole legal work over zoom which thankfully my friend helped me with
Bob raises the following question: Are the Covid death numbers the result of mis-classification of other causes of death?
Here in the table are US death numbers for the top ten causes of death for six years ending in 2020. Notice how there are 20% more deaths in 2020 than the average of the previous five years? Doing the math, that's 500,000 excess deaths in 2020.
Notice how, in 2020, 345,000 of those 500,000 excess deaths are classified as Covid? Notice how almost all causes of death rose in 2020, including cancer & heart disease?
If there's any validity to the claim that lots of deaths have been mis-classified as Covid, why did almost all causes of death increase in 2020? Wouldn't mis-classification produce a reduction in those other causes? The evidence says mis-classification is a red herring.
I remember that week well. I work in the grocery business so I was watching the crazy sales numbers as people started hoarding. The effects rippled through the business for a couple of years.
As airlines were cancelling flights globally, I texted a couple I knew who were on vacation in Egypt for 4 weeks, telling them to get on a plane and get back to Toronto ASAP before all flights out of Europe and UK westbound were cancelled. They were standing beside a pyramid when they received my text.
Acting promptly, they went back to their hotel that day, packed up and flew from Egypt to London Heathrow, then directly to Toronto, arriving back home only 48 hours after I'd texted them.
Upon arrival in Toronto, she got sick immediately and was admitted to hospital, now diagnosed with Covid-19 and becoming the first person in Canada to actually contract the disease. In fact they both had Covid-19.
They believe they got Covid while in Egypt or somewhere in transit, but 8 months later she was dead from committing suicide after being diagnosed with 'long Covid' and unable to cope with it's debilitating side effects. 🇨🇦
@whowasthatmaskedman they know how to prevent spread, how to take public health seriously, so much for behind "undeveloped!" They were well on their way with immunizations, and HIV/AIDS with USAID help, until you know what!
@JimboSaturn dude same we need to have another pandemic, but like instead of dying if you catch the illness, you lose 30 pounds and you become a fit bikini model😅
@Thinkerbell Actually, back in the pre-vaccine days, flu & Covid could often be differentiated by the sudden loss of taste or smell, which was unique to COVID-19 and affected up to 80% of those infected by Covid. https://www.ama-assn.org/about/publications-newsletters/loss-smell-post-covid-how-severe-it-and-how-long-can-it-last
"In this cohort study, 1,111 of 1,393 SARS-CoV-2-infected participants who reported loss in or change of smell or taste a mean of two years after infection (80%) had hyposmia on formal testing, a total of 321 (23%) had severe microsmia or anosmia, and the mean age- and sex-standardized score was at the 16th percentile. Hyposmia was also present in 1,031 of 1,563 participants (66%) with prior infection but no self-reported change or loss (mean: 23rd percentile).
Meaning: These findings suggest that occult hyposmia following infection with SARS-CoV-2 is common, and olfactory testing should be considered after infection to diagnose olfactory dysfunction and counsel patients about the risks of smell loss."
It doesn't say anything about a smell test distinguishing COVID from flu as part of an initial diagnosis.
About 80% of people with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection during the original and Alpha waves of the COVID-19 pandemic reported losing their sense of smell. That olfactory loss is not just a nuisance, it can lead to weight loss, worsen patients’ quality of life and impedes their ability to identify dangers such as gas leaks, smoke or spoiled food.
BUT WAIT!! THERE'S MORE!!!
Is loss of sense of smell a diagnostic marker in COVID‐19: A systematic review and meta‐analysis Olfactory dysfunction has been shown to be the strongest predictor of COVID‐19 positivity when compared to other symptoms in logistic regression analysis. In patients who had tested positive for COVID‐19, there was a prevalence of 62% of OD. In populations of patients who are currently reporting OD, there is a positive predictive value of 61% for a positive COVID‐19 result.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7436734/
The whole thrust of all your claims here is that Covid could not be distinguished from the flu; not by severity nor by symptoms. Those claims are not supported in the medical literature.
Also see:
Loss of taste and smell and COVID-19 FAQs
Q: Is loss of taste and smell a symptom of COVID? A: Yes, loss of taste and smell, also known as anosmia and ageusia, is a common symptom of COVID-19. Studies have shown that many people with COVID-19 experience a loss of taste and smell, often without other symptoms such as fever, cough, or difficulty breathing. In some cases, anosmia may be the only symptom of COVID-19, particularly in mild cases or asymptomatic individuals.
Q: When does loss of taste and smell occur with COVID-19? A: While loss of taste and smell can occur at any stage of COVID-19 infection, it’s commonly reported as one of the early symptoms. In general, the median time from the onset of symptoms to the development of loss of smell and taste is 2-3 days in COVID-19 patients.
