OMG, I wasn't aware that care was being denied to older patients? I'm, 65, but my mom is 97. If I got her genes, I can look forward to another 30 years. Having someone say I don't get treatment because I'm "too old" is ridiculous. No doctor can tell by age how many years a person has left. I'm glad they rescinded those orders, but what moron approved them in the first place? Sharon
-----Original Message----- From: h-costume [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Lavolta Press Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2020 12:26 AM To: Historical Costume Subject: [h-cost] Masks etc. Just because we don't have truly reliable Covid-19 tests (many false positives and negatives) for either the active disease or antibodies, does not mean we never will. Or that we don't have some good tests developed already. It's just that disorganization, shoddy production, lack of quality control, and in some cases poor test administration--even mixups at the lab--have rendered many test results unreliable. Obviously, the tests have to be carefully, well, tested, then the reliable ones mass produced, and then administered on a wide scale. We can find out how long antibodies last by using a truly reliable antibody test and then keeping track of the people with proven antibodies. I don't believe that most people in the US who had flu-like or cold-like symptoms in the fall actually had Covid-19. Just because we don't have an effective treatment (other than trying to support the patient with oxygen and hoping their body fights off the infection) does not mean we never will. Remdesivir (which prevents the virus from replicating) has only provided modest improvements in ICU patients. I am hoping it is more effective if administered early in the disease, before the patient is ill enough to need the ICU. I understand that Remdesivir is being tested for early use, also different ways of administrating it. And many other drugs are being developed and tested. I am also hoping that administering oxygen early, with the kind of machines used for sleep apnea, will be something of a game changer. Treatment is new and as far as I can tell, the epidemic went on for weeks before doctors discovered that merely flipping the patients onto their stomachs provided their organs with significantly more oxygen. Just because we don't have a vaccine now doesn't mean we never will. There are over 100 currently at some stage of development and even testing. Plus there is some hope an old tuberculosis vaccine will help. Flu is a coronavirus, and there are effective flu vaccines. They have to be administered annually, but so what? As far as I can tell, there are no effective vaccines for the common cold because they would not be profitable enough to develop. There will be huge profit in developing an effective Covid-19 vaccine, which is a good incentive for drug companies. So, we will eventually get effective testing, contact tracing, treatment, and vaccines. I don't think masks are any kind of substitute for social distancing, but they are useful *in addition to* social distancing. I'll believe the disease is transmitted by aerosols until it's proven otherwise. I'd wear an N95 mask if I could get one, but I can't, so I have to make do with homemade cloth masks. And yes, I want other people to wear them too. Anyone can have Covid-19 and be asymptomatic. I am not one of the people who claims that no one will get a serious case of Covid-19 unless they are old, or younger with an immune system problem. That is clearly not true. However, deaths are highly concentrated in those groups. Though many young, otherwise healthy people have died too, and a few very old people have survived. It is not clear to me how common long-term damage to the body may be (from things like blood clots and organ damage from insufficient oxygen) but some people are experiencing damage even after "recovery." I am healthy but I'm 65; my husband is healthy but 68. The immune system declines with age. We're at high risk right there. Also, deaths are skewed to the over-60 group because of triage. Overwhelmed hospitals in many places--even New York from what I hear--are simply refusing to treat older patients, and in some cases disabled patients. So yeah, most of those patients die. And the more cases there are in the community, the less likely people like me will be to get any treatment. And the more cases there are in the community, the less likely *anyone* will be able to get treatment for any other diseases. So I am all for sheltering in place. It's really quite comfortable. My husband and I sold our San Francisco house in 2016 and moved to a house in the Sacramento area with 4,800 square feet of living space and 1.8 acres of landscaped grounds. We have fountains, numerous beds of roses, covered patio, mature trees, everything. The price was an exact trade for our San Francisco house. It's not a dense area, at all, and we are right across the street from a golf course. We can run or walk around the neighborhood at any time of day, and not encounter anyone. I work on my business. My husband has a to-do list of home improvement projects. We both do lots of reading. I sew. We have a very large personal library of books and DVDs, many years' worth of them to enjoy for the first time. We do everything we did before Covid-19 except go out to restaurants--which we seldom did anyway. We can do great cooking at home. We aren't going to the dentist for checkups, but we didn't do that for fun, and our dentist is open for emergencies (though only for emergencies) if we have any. We don't go to the hairdresser. But I only have my hair cut once or twice a year, I always dye my own hair, and I can cut my husband's. And we order groceries online from any of four local stores and get curbside pickup. They put the groceries in the trunk, no contact. The local hardware stores also offer curbside pickup. Ever since there was an Internet, we've done most of our other shopping online, including for fabric, so that's nothing new. So I'm not "cowering in place." Life is just like usual. I'm more likely to survive than if I insisted on personally picking out my produce in the grocery store--which isn't much fun anyway. I'm not looking forward to the "second wave" of Covid-19 in the fall, because I don't think there will be a vaccine by then. But Governor Newsom is doing a sensible job of handling sheltering in place in California. (Though even he approved triage guidelines to deny medical care to both older people and disabled people. Those guidelines were taken down after several anti-discrimination groups protested, but I don't know what is being used instead.) There are a number of other states where I really, really don't want to be during a pandemic. Because that second wave will come, in fact in some states the first wave just won't go away. Not looking forward to the death counts. I care more about lives than the economy, but a high death toll is also bad for the economy. Fran Lavolta Press www.lavoltapress.com _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] https://indra.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/h-costume _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] https://indra.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
