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You’re Invited: COVID-19 News for the Rest of Us
Ricochet is launching an online symposium to chronicle the effects of the coronavirus and its associated lockdowns on average Americans. We need your help to make it work. (Not a member? Join today!)
The coverage surrounding COVID-19 is mostly pundits, politicians, and policy wonks yelling at each other. If you want to end the lockdown, they say you want old people to die. If you want to extend the lockdown, they say you want to destroy the economy.
This leaves out the rest of us: that vast majority of everyday people who want to protect our physical health along with our economic health. Teachers, nurses, small business owners, and parents from coast to coast are being ignored. And we want to give all of you a voice.
We are accepting submissions on our member portal or to our email. Any member can submit their story (between 500-1,000 words, ideally) for the member feed, and we will choose a select few to go on our website every day. Your entry may be edited for length or clarity.
In addition, we will be hosting a weekly video symposium via Zoom where participants in our written symposium can share their stories. Live participation will be limited to Ricochet members, but video will be available on our website the following day.
The first episode will take place live on Zoom on Sunday, May 17. All Ricochet members can join the call, ask questions, and provide answers. We plan on this being a weekly show as the world learns how to deal with this pandemic.
We want to feature a couple of outsiders each week, including Ricochet members. How are Coronavirus and the restrictions affecting your job, your industry, your kids, and your physical and mental health? Let us know in the comments what message you want to share that is being ignored.
Published in General
What the hell is Newsome even saying there??! I hope when they hire all these people they don’t give them that as their marching orders. They’ll all be milling around for months before they figure out what they’re doing.
The correct response to that is MYOB: “Mind your own business.”
What they will be doing is collecting a paycheck while they amuse themselves as best they can, in other words the primary function of any government employee.
Boy, that sounds like an oxymoron . . .
Like the tag line in a Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “I take my chances, I take my chances every chance that I get.”
Great song, BTW . . .
HIPPA is another genius idea, onerous regulation that has the effect of burdening families and caregivers rather than protecting privacy. What we mainly need is protection from the prying eyes of the government! Instead we’re going to get an army of government functionaries whose job is to know where you’ve been and who you’ve talked to. We can only hope they’ll be typically incompetent.
And it arose from the AIDS crisis. Hard cases always make bad law. Expect more of it. Just yesterday on my little neighborhood listserve there was a notice that the Commonwealth of Virginia is hiring tracers who will be working remotely. Contact tracing is great for STDs. In this case it will be a great way to extend the lockdown and who knows what other controls will come out of it.
And of the 10% who tested positive for Covid, how many actually died of the Covid part?
If two old people have heart attacks and they both die, then one of them is found to be positive for Covid, that’s a Covid death. Why?*
If two old people have heart attacks and they both die, and one of them is found to have a cold sore, do they count that as a Herpes Simplex-1 death? Why not?
If two old people have heart attacks and only one dies, then the survivor tests positive for Covid, though asymptomatic, do you count the first one as a Covid death? Of course! Because*
*Though knowing these people, they’d count both as Covid deaths because both patients appeared in the same Ricochet posting.
Two word, “contact tracing”. They’re the latest buzzwords of our oppressors. In Pennsylvania, the governor is establishing a giant army of contract tracers called the CCCC (I can’t even remember what the letters stand for, I couldn’t get past all the communism).
Governor Wolf has touted this as a great jobs program. Get it? Put everyone out of work and then start a government jobs program. What could go wrong? Once they “track down” (because that is what it is) someone with COVID-19, your friendly CCCC soldier will then trace his/her/zir contacts and these people will be made to quarantine themselves. If some of these individuals live in large households, well, obviously the potential infected person can’t remain there so they will be sent to……jail Hell? Nursing homes? Pish, don’t worry about the details, it’ll all work out great in the end.
It always does with command and control types.
“CCCC” is too close to “CCCP” for me. If I do get sick, I’m self-isolating at home instead of having a scarlet C put on my digital forehead . . .
@jeannebodine, you are my hero.
Fantastic. Cracked Me up.
Don’t worry about the US economy. The State Department’s got it!
Evacuees like the infected Diamond Princess passengers, overruling President Trump’s directive:
Which came this close to crashing the US hospital system.
When I was a Junior in high school (1976), my family moved. I left a small school where I was a very happy kid with friends I had known most of my life. The new school was very big. So big that nobody noticed the new kid, he was just another kid that you didn’t know. I spent my days going to classes with no communication from anyone. I became depressed to the point of being suicidal.
For some reason, social interaction is very important to youth. Don’t make light of the problem. I’m not saying you are, just saying don’t.
The thing that saved me was keeping busy. I bought an old car that needed work. Fixing cars takes money so I got a job. Then I got another job. My Senior year I was working 50 hours per week during the school year. Getting homework done wasn’t a problem. Even then, if you didn’t socialize, you had plenty of time to get your work done in school.
I have had an incredibly wonderful life. I credit that car with saving it. I still have that car, and drive it regularly.
Help you daughter to find a project to keep her busy. Good luck.
Read this as $$$$. . . Your tax dollars at work. Imaginatively.
There’s one huge difference: you are using a figured based on unreliable infection data. Wherever you got that number (and I’ve heard upwards of 20% mortality rate for those above 70), if we have all been exposed to COVID-19 by this time next year, then we’ll have reliable infection data, and then we’ll know what that mortality rate really is.
You don’t know that your elderly loved ones have a high probability of being killed by the disease. You just know that it is more likely for them, than other age groups, if they do catch it.
VERY STRONG LANGUAGE BUT INSPIRATIONAL lol
*https://twitter.com/FedPorn/status/1259808975421390852?s=20*
Bwhahahahaaa!
My sentiments after attending church yesterday, although a little less. . . inspired!
That was so perfect it was like a script for a movie done by a professional actor. Pure art. lol
Me too. Let those who fear the Wuhan virus continue to shelter in place and let the rest of us get on with our lives.
The information we most need right now is what a positive test for this virus actually means in asymptomatic people. We don’t know how long they have been carrying the disease, which is why the money we are spending on contact tracing seems a bit foolish. We also don’t know if they have developed antibodies. To use a quarantine-shutdown system to contain a virus that we have so little understanding of is ridiculous.
There is no useful quarantine period that we can assign to people who test positive. Initially, people were quarantined for two weeks, but that turned out to be a joke. Nothing changed in those two weeks. So now the contact tracing could lead to indefinite periods of quarantine for individuals.
Many viruses like chicken pox remain apparently forever in the human body until an allergic reaction to something stimulates the virus to wake up from where it has taken up residence at the base of the nerves to produce the shingles pain. Warts are a skin virus that can live for decades. I know that because a friend of mine has a few on her hands that have defied topical treatment and being burned out or surgically removed. The Herpes virus is carried by people for the rest of their lives. In other words, we manage these viruses while we live with them.
Why is it taking so long to get the information we really need on this particular virus? I think it may be a virus that is always with us. So quarantining people is a useless strategy given how infectious it is. We need to focus on how to live with it.
We need answers. Yesterday.
I had chicken pox, like everybody. Then I had a crazy bout of shingles during a stressful job (it was during Bush/Gore/Chad).
Then a few years ago I had an incredible, unrelenting pain in my side. Lasted for months. A lump developed there, as though I had swallowed a baseball. Two MRIs and a CAT scan revealed nothing was there. If I tighten my stomach muscles and concentrate, it goes away.
It was finally theorized that it is an attack of shingles in my spinal column. The virus damaged my nerve endings to that particular muscle group in my abs, and the “lump” is simply my guts pushing against a section of muscles that can’t contract and hold it back. (Jesus, does it never end?)
So I’m lumpy. Vanity, what’s that? We all get lumpy, and hairy, as we get older.
I just hope if I die of anything, the current powers that be will stay logically consistent and ascribe my demise to Chicken Pox, since that virus is present at time of death.
Neuroscientist Dale Bredesen and others consider herpes virus to be one of the causative factors for Alzheimer’s disease, which like most chronic diseases with input from genetic (multiple genes with interconnected expression and regulation) and epigenetic factors such as lifestyle choices, chronic inflammation, past medical history can be thought of as “network illnesses” needing network interventions. Single drugs are inadequate.
With SARS-CoV-2’s propensity for attacking the central nervous system, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s eventually added to the list of dementia promoters.
I wouldn’t be surprised either.
Good connection to draw.
We make so much progress on Ricochet in our debates.
I’m just positive it is our healthcare system that needs more discussion and open-mindedness. I think our healthcare system is dysfunctional. I have and will always have undying respect and gratitude to the doctors and nurses who have helped me and my family nd friends. But as a system, I think there is something deeply wrong with how they work in terms of research and development and problem solving. I think they are squelching out-of-the-box ideas that they need to listen to.
Just the thing nationalizing it all and turning it over to the government will fix – NOT!
So this thing jumped from bats to people. We think it is transmitted by droplets exhaled by infected persons.
Is there any indication that it has infected other mammals, such as the pets of Covid patients?
What is the probability of persons living in the same house as an infected person contracting the disease? I assume that number is high, but less than 100%.
Does anyone here know the answers to either of these questions?