2020 Boston Marathon Thread (Read 408 times)

 

Yes. I am. There are more than 2.97 million people out of work right now. It has nothing to do with running down the streets of Boston. Somehow we have 1.5 million cases of COVID 19 and somehow almost 300,000 people have recovered. Without a vaccine. 92,000 have died. Somehow Cambodia has all of their 122 cases recovered without a vaccine without any deaths. I'm sure it's data manipulation.

Brewing Runner,

Since I don't know you, would you and your family mind being part of the 2.97 million statistic so we can wrap up this pandemic and I can go get my latte? 2.97 million is just a number, but when it impacts the people you care about, then it becomes a tragedy.

I have not been affected by COVID-19, but I know some people on RA have. Your comments are insensitive and hurtful. The numbers you cited are incorrect. You are contributing to the confusion and anger that we're experiencing. Please let the medical and scientific professionals advise on policy. The rest of us should just run more, if it can be done safely.

eric

 Yep, hunches and anecdotes beat the combined efforts of the real epidemiologists, hands down.

What epidemiologists? What my message had to do with epidemiologists?

You bring your kid with high fever and long lasting cough (don't get me even started on why you have to drag your sick child to a healthy doctor when in other, less "developed" countries a healthy doctor usually comes to a sick child) to a doctor and that doctor just says - oh, it's just a cough - here is your inhaler. What? How about high fever? Oh, that stuff happens - just buy kid's ibuprofen. Awesome - no wonder you Mr Doctor is paid so well - you can determine stuff without making a test. Three weeks later, when kid still coughs the whole time like crazy and has a fever for a few times, you are getting worried and bring your sick child to a healthy Dr again. The Dr says - oh, still coughing and some fever? It's a flu then - here is your antibiotic. You are asking - how about a test? You don't need test - Dr says, it's a flu - I can see that. Still, can we do a test - I hear people are freaking out about covid. Mr Dr., more persistently - you do not need a test! I am very experienced Dr. Just awesome - I wonder if something happened to my kid, would this experienced Dr be responsible? Antibiotic didn't help, my kid was coughing for another month, scaring everybody. Btw, I was taking him to school and can guarantee that the half of the kids from his class were coughing sometimes unstoppably. And I am absolutely sure they were not giving tests too.

What it has to do with hunches and experienced epidemiologists? When you do tests only for people whom you see almost dying and then base your death statistics on that number of tests, you are not taking tests from people who are not too sick in your opinion. Just trying to say - your statistics, your 6% or 66% only as good as the data you are basing you analysis on. And don't tell me about "real" epidemiologists - sure, some of them real and some of them money and politically driven - and you see there is a difference in the opinion of "real" epidemiologists - depending on what resource you are visiting - CNN or FOX.

The car analogy in this is not a good one as others have pointed out.

 

However, you know what is? The flu. This is much worse than the flu, most people can see that. However, why as a society have we decided that 30-50K people dying every single year from the flu is something we don't even bat an eye at? We don't have a perfect vaccine for that either (often 50% efficacy or worse) and yet we continue to go to concerts, sporting events, and other mass gatherings where the flu spreads easily.

 

That's something society is going to have to grapple with here. This isn't going to be a choice between 0 deaths and 3M deaths, or as it has been portrayed, "I'm not picking the economy over my grandma" even though we have done that every year in the past. But everybody is too afraid to say "I'm okay with X people dying annually" which is the most likely outcome here: this will become endemic and folks will continue to die. Maybe we'll be lucky and we'll find that lifelong vaccine. But most of the research out there doesn't seem to indicate that is the most likely outcome here.

So you DID pick up on my point. Justified seasonal cleansing of the gene pool because we feel safe knowing there is a vaccine. No government assistance for the flu, Boston Marathon has been held after flu season, and I could recover from it without making people feel like I've accomplished a challenging life task.

Sorry Eric   I'm not one of the "at risk" people who are over 60 with other mitigating circumstances like "living in a nursing home" or having cancer. Yeah that's right. Someone who battled cancer of 5 years recently died...from COVID 19. I'll wait for you to provide me more accurate information. All I can find is what Bing is telling me the national numbers for the virus are.

So to keep this going. After those 2.97 million people DON'T die everyone here can get back to marathon training for Boston 2020 in September and walk around with their 2020 jacekts. Maybe we'll get some of those cool ribbon looking pins to commerate surviving COVID 19 and it will be like the year of the bombing. "oh man, that was the year of the pandemic. How does it feel to be a finisher in such a challenging time?"

EDIT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/coronavirus-cases-deaths.html

EVen the New York Times says we should have done more. Only 2,700 people in New York would have died. Drop in the hat compared to 23,000 they've witnessed. There is you 1% and 0.1% of people dead.

LA? Well they go from 1,200 to 450. Practically back to an acceptable death toll for March to May.

I just hope they run it so the 2021 125th anniversary race can happen. I need a jacket so I can talk about "that time I retired from running after running the Boston Marathon. wasn't impressed. About as long as the other ones I've run." to my friends and family.

I must interject that, in over 12 years of using this site, I think this is the first time I've ever noticed Eric wade into any discussion (other than technical aspects of the site).  Congratulations on that.

.

 

Sorry Eric   I'm not one of the "at risk" people who are over 60 with other mitigating circumstances like "living in a nursing home" or having cancer. Yeah that's right. Someone who battled cancer of 5 years recently died...from COVID 19. I'll wait for you to provide me more accurate information. All I can find is what Bing is telling me the national numbers for the virus are.

 

I am considered high risk for a serious case of this disease, as is my partner.    "High risk" is not a categorization limited to the frail in nursing homes.  It includes some of your friends.

FWIW, even though I am one of those who gains the most from the shutdown (being high risk) and loses the least (being a telecommuting white collar worker) I'm still in favor of opening up stuff as soon as we can with reasonable safely.  Of course, the "as soon as we can with reasonable safety" is about impossible to determine.  There's just too much damage being done to so many.  The long term costs of this shut down in terms of economic, social, and public health are staggering and will linger for years.

The problem here is that we have very very bad data - inaccurate and incomplete.  And a ton of smart people (and not so smart people) analyzing and discussing it past death - layering interpretation and reinterpretation onto this bad data.  With the whole thing being fueled by social media.  I suspect this pandemic would have played out very differently 20 years ago.

[I have to admit, my own conspiracy theory is that a lot of the social media storm in the US is being fueled by sources outside of the US, with divisive graphics being seeded in Facebook in a way similar to the interference with the 2016 presidential election.]

I personally think that it's important to remember that nobody knows the answer.  Nobody.  We just don't know enough.  And we may never know.  And our leaders are placed in the horrific position of deciding which lives get ruined or ended, based on (again) incomplete and error-riddled data.

I defer to epidemiologists on assessing the true and immediate public health risk from this virus, simply because making assessments based on incomplete data is in their wheelhouse.  At the same time, epidemiologists can only assess one side of the equation.

The only thing I'm sure of - if you think there's an easy and obvious answer, you're wrong.

Not even a point replying at this point. The discussion is more about COVID 19 than the Boston Marathon. There should be a General Discussion area for these kinds of things. That is, of course, if Eric doesn’t kick me off his website or put me on timeout for an extended period of time.

https://www.baa.org/124th-boston-marathon-be-held-virtually