I hate to say it but I work with a couple of people like that.

Yes, it's a very strange experience watching it happen. I keep wanting to ask "what's changed" so that it can now be over. What strange times we are living in. On the other hand, I keep hoping that by some bizarre miracle they're right and it is in fact over. Very strange and uncomfortable to have those 2 very different thoughts in your head.

It's crazy! I can understand why people might make a point about wearing one but why make a point about not wearing one. Just don't wear it. It's like that British atheist, can't think of his name right now, who pays for ads on buses trying to persuade people to not believe in God. What is the point in making the effort about something you don't believe in?

I wish they would be brave enough to stand up and tell people about it because it may persuade other churches to not take the risk.

How crazy it has to come down to politics though! I'm just having such a hard time understanding that. Probably because it makes no sense lol. My dd needs to go in to renew her learner driver permit and I just don't want to go because I know it will be just the same as Regentrude's experience. There is a supermarket around here where the employees don't wear mask at all and I don't go in there now.

Maybe they just aren't convinced by your arguments, just like you aren't convinced by their's (you may well include me also so I should probably say ours instead of theirs). Honestly I think that is ok. It is OK if we don't agree, we can still discuss.

The study is, I think, quite promising though. I have not looked at it in great depth though and should do. There were many things that were recommended at first that turned out to be either useless or possibly even harmful. The avoiding steroid thing came from information from China I think, and I think it was taken on board here initially and so steroids may well not have been widely used. The greatest benefit of dexamethasone was found in the population of extremely sick patients on vents. My experience with my facility in the first round of illness was that, at least initially, we were avoiding steroids. I'm surprised your local hospital used it initially because there was definitely information making the rounds then that it might be contraindicated. We don't used dexamethasone much in usual practice in our ICU, mostly methylprednisone and hydrocortisone. I think dexameth. is sometimes uses in neurology for patients with brain tumours.

My take on this is that there are ways of doing most things safely so that almost everyone could take part if they want. If you choose to take risks, fair enough I guess, but you are thereby excluding those that don't choose to take the risks. If there are 2 ways of doing things, 1 that involves risk and excludes a number of people, and 1 that doesn't involve near as much risk and would include many, if not all, then why on earth would you not choose the safe one. That is what I find hard to understand. My church is choosing the unsafe one. I am not particularly worried for my own safety, if there is spread in my area I work with those patients in ICU so face far more exposure there probably, although with the benefit of PPE, but I have decided that I want to do everything I can possibly do to not make the problem worse and not spread it to anyone if at all possible. So their choices to take risks mean I can't attend. There are things - like meeting outside, sitting spread apart, not singing etc, that might make it possible for me to attend. But that is not what they have chosen so it is what it is. Only time will tell what was the right thing to do, but looking at states like Arizona, Arkansas and S Carolina now makes me nervous. It's also not all about death, it's about suffering and flooding the system. A friend of mine just worked 8 weeks in a NJ hospital. When she arrived there, in a 700 bed hospital, there were over 400 patients on vents. That is a crazy situation no matter how you slice it. ETA I have worked with these patients in the first round of this mess and I can tell you it is not the flu.

I wish they would tell the truth so we could know when we should be panicking lol!

It is so disorienting to read stuff like this! Beijing finds 36 cases and goes into high alert and we have places about to slip into NYC conditions and we’re just carrying on as normal!

Don't know if this helps at all but I was watching a Medcram video about a trial they were doing to see if Hydroxychloroquine helped prevent people, who had had a high risk exposure to someone with CV19 , from getting it. It didn't make a statistical difference in this particular study but the participants in the placebo arm of the trial had an incidence of just under 15% of getting CV19 if they had been exposed. The exposure was to someone who definitely had it. It didn't seem like a high percentage to me so I hope that might be reassuring.

I just watched a video on the BBC news website about patients getting turned away from hospitals in India because of insufficient resources or fear of treating Covid 19 patients. Does anyone know which aid agencies are working in India at the moment? I know Medecins Sans Frontieres are working in various countries.

I also feel that politics is influencing decisions. To be fair, our area has not been hit hard and it is absolutely true that most people around here have not been personally affected yet. I'm finding it hard to understand though, how they are unable to look around at the bigger picture and use at least some of that in their thinking.The cognitive dissonance that you experience when you hear the things they are saying compared to the bigger picture is very unsettling.

I can make no judgement on whether our pastor cares about his congregation. I’m assuming he does but is misguided and quite young. Our church is basically completely as normal, the only exception is that you can get a sticker at the door to put on yourself saying if you don’t want to be hugged. They called to say their plans and I think the whole sticker thing is supposed to be comforting. They have even started up the Sunday school class for older, retired people in person.

Yeah, he was speaking from a medical, epidemiological point of view not a political one.

I came on here to see if anyone had mentioned this. One of the people I’ve been following on FB who is crunching the numbers just said on his page that Arizona needed to be on lockdown now or Phoenix might be as bad or worse than NY in 2 weeks time.

I personally would have thought it was a good idea and why didn't I think of doing that. But my dh is pretty gracious with other people's cooking and wouldn't be trying to be mean about it, which it sounds like maybe was the case for you. Mind you, as with all of us, dh has his share of other faults!

I don’t know quite what they mean by ‘with Covid’ but if Covid is significantly impacting their health at the time than I think it makes sense. From my limited experience those patients who were the ones with a serious case of Covid were seriously ill and If they die they may very well not have if they hadn’t had the Covid symptoms.

Yes they are definitely worth attending! I encouraged my daughter to push herself out of her comfort zone and try something new every day.

I don't disagree with you, but I also think that people can change and that sometimes they get caught up in things without really thinking about it, peer pressure or group pressure. I live in a place where many, many people are very similar to each other in experiences and beliefs and I can easily see a young person just absorb those beliefs without really thinking about them for themselves. I hope that they can grow and change.

There will be a lot of people in the same boat as him though. I'm sure there will be a large number who don't already know someone there. It is really anxiety provoking though, to go somewhere completely new, especially for the moms I think. I know I worried about my dd when she went off to college, but it all worked out and she did well. I encouraged her to go to all the events etc that she could and try lots of different things and she settled in there. She is not an extrovert but she found other more quiet people like herself and has made friends.

Did you ever have a chest CT? It should be possible to see C19 changes on a CT. My mother had ongoing pretty debilitating respiratory symptoms some years ago. She was treated for many different things, infection, asthma etc. She had a CT scan that was suspicious and had further investigations but just could not get better. My mom is one of the most energetic people I know and it was really worrying to see her so bogged down by it. One day she sat on my couch and cried because she felt so bad. We are still not sure what was going on but wonder if it was some atypical infection. She was prescribed an antibiotic by a dr here in my area and after that she seemed to improve and gradually go back to normal. She still has a cough at times but is well, so I think she is just more susceptible to respiratory things than before. She is in her late 70s. It was probably about 10 years ago when this was going on.

Is this the reliable antibody test they were doing? I feel so confused about these tests! I say a post, admittedly from a whacko source, saying that the CDC were saying there was up to a 50% false positive with some antibody test. The person who posted it was using it to say 50% of people diagnosed with CV were falsely positive lol so that part was ridiculous, since a different test entirely, but I have heard a number of different things about the antibody test. I keep hearing people say it picks up antibodies to other corona viruses still. However, when you read how many people are getting tested for antibodies and turning up negative, it must mean something that so many in Bergamo were positive. So probably good news!

You are right those things are different than just getting annoyed and spouting off. I guess that sort of thing is probably people showing their true selves. I tend to hope it’s just that they don’t realize what they’re saying or posting. It’s really depressing.

There is a guy on FB called David Blake Jr who I have been following. He just posted this: The WHO has announced that contact tracers from multiple places have communicated that COVID-19 transmissions from people who never develop symptoms are rare. These have been reported as asymptomatic people, but that is incorrect. It is never-symptomatic people, and that is an important distinction. Around half the COVID-19 transmission comes from pre-symptomatic people. These people caught the COVID19 and have not developed symptoms yet, but will. It is VERY typical for influenza to have a pre-symptomatic transmissible day. COVID-19 appears to have two. And, some of the highest transmission times are the day before symptoms show up. Also, never-symptomatic people can transmit the virus, it just happens more rarely. A young person in China brought it home where he never developed symptoms, but his grandfather died, in some of the earliest contact tracing published. I don't think this in ANY WAY changes the value of wearing a mask whenever you are near any of the three C's. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread-who-bn/index.html