Asking for stories about COVID.
I'm in the habit of collecting information about stuff. I've been frustrated about the lack of information I've been able to glean about how ordinary people get and experience COVID. I just read an interesting thread about a woman who got COVID while leaving her apartment almost never. People suggested ventilation in the apartment building. That's the kind of thing I want to gather into my personal database.
My closest connection with anyone who got COVID is that my granddaughter's roommate found that she had it over Christmas vacation. But no info about how she might have gotten it. Do you have first hand stories that have this kind of detail?
- How did the person find out they had COVD? The roommate just has "sniffles," so why did she get tested?
- Do they have any good hunches about how they got it?
- What were their precautions? Masks? What kind? Large gatherings? etc., etc.
TIA for contributing to my personal database.
= new reply since forum marked as read
He had images up a while back on how multi-dwelling ventilation can spread the virus.
Dr. Ding is a Harvard epidemiologist. I have been reading his twitter for nearly 2 years. He is always WAY ahead of public health agencies on precautions & has been 100% correct.
Link:
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
I doubt those were Dr. Ding's conclusions as he posts expert opinions from various disciplines.
If it were me, I would make a Corsi box or purchase a high powered air purifier.
Covid’s Cassandra: The Swift, Complicated Rise of Eric Feigl-Ding
The scientist has gained popularity as Covid’s excitable play-by-play announcer. But some experts want to pull his plug.
https://undark.org/2020/11/25/complicated-rise-of-eric-feigl-ding/
snip
But as Feigl-Ding’s influence has grown, so have the voices of his critics, many of them fellow scientists who have expressed ongoing concern over his tweets, which they say are often unnecessarily alarmist, misleading, or sometimes just plain wrong. “Science misinformation is a huge problem right now — I think we can all appreciate it — [and] he’s a constant source of it,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University and the University of Arizona who serves on FAS’ Covid-19 Rapid Response Taskforce, a separate arm of the organization from Feigl-Ding’s work. Tara Smith, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Kent State University, suggested that Feigl-Ding’s reach means his tweets have the power to be hugely influential. “With as large of a following as he has, when he says something that’s really wrong or misleading, it reverberates throughout the Twittersphere,” she said.
Critics point to numerous problems. Not too long after his “holy mother of God” tweet, for example, Feigl-Ding took to Twitter to discuss a titillating but non-peer-reviewed paper that some readers interpreted as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab; once the authors retracted the pre-print, he deleted a series of tweets from the middle of the thread. In March, Feigl-Ding tweeted a CDC graph as evidence that young people were “just as likely to be hospitalized as older generations,” but failed to mention an important detail about the age ranges represented in the graph’s bars, which didn’t actually support that claim. In August, he tweeted his support for a proposition to allow people early access to a vaccine. After criticism from epidemiologists, bioethicists, doctors, and health policy experts, Feigl-Ding deleted a few tweets at the beginning of his thread, saying they were “confusing” and “murky.” (He also argued that his critics were “spreading misinformation about what they think I said.”) More recently, Feigl-Ding wrote a thread about coronavirus particles in flatulence, which drew criticism from researchers.
Even when his public exclamations are technically accurate, Feigl-Ding’s critics suggest that they too often invite misinterpretations. In a thread about the first study of a Covid-19 outbreak on an airplane, for example, Feigl-Ding failed to mention the important caveat that researchers suspected all but one case occurred before people got on the airplane. In another, Feigl-Ding appeared to summarize a Washington Post piece on a coronavirus mutation, but omitted crucial phrases — including the fact that just one of the five mentioned studies was peer-reviewed. It wasn’t until the sixth tweet in the thread that Feigl-Ding mentioned the important detail that the “worrisome” mutation doesn’t appear to make people sicker, though it could make the virus more contagious. To Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, this represents a pattern. “[T]his is his MO,” she wrote in an email. “He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and [retweets] roll in.”
Such critiques of Feigl-Ding’s particular brand of Covid-19 commentary are by no means new, and previous articles — in The Atlantic as far back as January, for example, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer in March, the Chronicle of Higher Education in April, and in The Daily Beast in May — have explored questions about his expertise in epidemiology (his focus prior to Covid-19 was on nutrition) and whether his approach to public health communication is appropriate or alarmist. But as his influence has grown, and as the pandemic enters a much more worrying phase, critics have continued to debate whether Feigl-Ding, for all his enthusiasms, is doing more harm than good. Some complain that Feigl-Ding’s army of followers can be hateful when other scientists publicly disagree with his tweets. Others say that Feigl-Ding himself has been known to privately message his critics — a tack that some found unwelcome.
snip
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. He is an alarmist hype-master, trafficking in panic and fear.
He was a major misinformation pusher on American telly about Sweden. He (and several other misinfo merchants) falsely said we were going for herd immunity (which I have debunked now so so many times for ages) and had no restrictions (ludicrously false) and even worse he said we were tracking to at least 150,000 to 250,000 deaths by spring/summer of 2021 and that we would have thousands upon thousands of dead schoolchildren.
For the entire pandemic we have had a total of 15,310 deaths. We have dropped from the 2nd highest deaths per million on the planet near the beginning of the pandemic to 57th (and dropping) now.
We were at 21 times the rate of deaths per million versus Norway in April 2020, now we are at 6.3 times. We were at 12 times the rate of Denmark, now at 2.7 times. 96% of deaths have been 60yo and up, almost 90% have been 70yo and up and 67% have been 80yo and up.
For the youngest half of the population (so around 5.1 million out of 10.2 million) we have had a total of 92 Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic.
For schoolchildren ages 5 to 19yo, we have had 9 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
9 school age deaths since the start versus Feigl-Ding’s ludicrous 'thousands upon thousands' number, and that despite most of our schools never closing, other than the majority of high schools for a spell in 2020.
Folkhälsomyndigheten (our public health authority)
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa
Total deaths by age group
Cases per day (Omicron came here around the 3rd week of November)
Deaths per day (the highest on this chart is 12 on September 16th, 2021)
(the highest on this chart is 10 on December 18th, 2021)
What is he "selling?" I've never seen anything on his twitter.
I'm sure corporate sponsers detest him for cautioning people to distance & take precautions.
