You can have control arms of healthy individuals though, right? Otherwise, where is the baseline? It can't be a doctor saying, "I've never seen this before." For in vitro stuff, again, you can damage cells with a lot of otherwise innocuous substances in vitro and not be able to draw any conclusions. You can also do autopsies of very sick people and find very damaged organs. We have to have something to compare this to in order to make claims about covid in particular.

It infects any organ with ACE2 receptors, right? Aren't there a lot of viruses that do that (other coronaviruses at least)? Again this isn't an argument that covid isn't worse, but I don't know that flu or other viruses don't do this. And it is hard to find out if we're overfocusing because it feels like anyone who is trying to have this discussion is labled a denier or accused of wanting to downplay the virus for political purposes. That is absolutely not my intention in posting these different twitter discussions, but I've seen more than one doctor/virologist/epidemiologist/cardiologist in my feeds disappointed with the volume and rate of literature publication and state of review.

Sorry that was an imprecise term. I should say questioned the conclusions based on the data in the paper. I will have to go back down my rabbit trail to find those articles/threads, but at least a few cardiologists questioned the assumptions and methodology and I'm not even remembering right now if there was a control arm. These are people who are fully on board with distancing/masking/think covid is definitely bad/etc. It's also important to note that we're making societal changes/decisions with real costs based on these preprints and headlines and alarmist stuff associated. And I get a general sense that it is right and good to be skeptical about something like HCQ but not okay to be skeptical about other non-randomized papers with no control arm in the same way. That the doom and alarm (but not proven) papers carry more weight than anything potentially (but not proven) helpful papers around here. Just my feeling, not a scientific statement. 😉

Did you read any of the cardiologists who have asked for revisions, questioned the conclusions, etc.? Who are also experts in their field? Above you seem to be saying this should be taken at face value because the authors said it should because they personally had never seen this before (which in and of itself seems to be a simple appeal to authority, not science or systematic review of literature).

And many other cardiologists have debunked that paper over and over, or at least called it out for significant errors and it has been revised. And it was a preprint. I honestly don't understand the sentiment that we want fully vetted RCTs for something like HCQ but a preprint with a lot of errors should be taken on, "Well, the authors said..."

I think part of the issue is layman's understanding of terms like "damage", "inflammation", "dysfunction," etc., which are all very specific terms in medicine that headlines don't necessarily parse out. You shouldn't need a Twitter account to read the threads.

Can you cite which one you're discussing? NM, I figured it out. Yes, there is quite a difference in damage to organs on autopsies of people who died from the disease and healthy asymptomatic patients. The in vitro thing makes me feel meh because we can also destroy the virus itself with a lot of compounds in test tubes but those things are not effective as treatments in the human body. In other words, I could damage or destroy (in this case) heart tissue or cells in a test tube with a substance that wouldn't damage my heart cells if it were injected or ingested into my body.

I would guess not because wouldn't cardiologists have written the original paper? I have not looked for a response from the original authors to critiques. There seems to be disagreement and a discussion with a cardiologist who disagrees in that third twitter thread I linked.

This one is a much better explainer, minus sarcasm.

Well, I was assuming (perhaps wrongly) that terms like edema, inflammation, myocarditis, etc., were medically standard terms used by cardiologists. So what I got from that paper is that those things are seen after common colds and even sometimes before in the baseline images. The cardiologists who posted this posted it because it's the same stuff, is my understanding. I do rely on cardiologists explaining these things because I don't know what everything means, but I can read the data and conclusions fairly easily and compare with other literature. In any case, given the errors in the previously discussed papers that caused alarm, and the couple of studies like this where athletes have these things show up on MRI, I thought it might be somewhat of a better context, certajnly better than the first headlines about heart damage that had a lot of people here very worried. Also, I know about as much how to read this stuff as I do the original paper that led to a lot of people really being convinced and/or concerned and scared that covid caused heart damage (which I've since learned is a specific term in cardiology) even in healthy asymptomatic people. Here are two interpretations from cardiologists (fair warning of heavy sarcasm, if you can read past that I find all of this very helpful specifically as to your post above about how to evaluate these things).

Don't exactly know where to put this but it provides some context re cardiac stuff seen on MRI after the common cold (edema, inflammation). The study is from 2009. https://jcmr-online.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1532-429X-11-S1-O3

I wonder how HIPAA applies with personal medical information being shared with law enforcement. Also given recent false positive news and being otherwise healthy, it seems like a recipe for a lot of problems. Before anyone goes there, please don't read this post as condoning covid parties. I just wonder about giving law enforcement this info and civil rights.

I am reading of anti-lockdown protests and government retaliation in Colombia. Hoping @Lanny is okay.

So it is weird because even given China's obfuscation they saw it ramp up quick. Posted link to Twitter thread about timeline below where I'm getting my dates and rise in cases. I mean, that is a pretty much 100% Asian population and they had a problem, no? So I don't understand the Asians being less susceptible thing.

But given 20k people, that is a ton, in my mind, to not lead to a lot more in the subsequent weeks even giving lockdown on March 9th, I think it was. 20k people not staying home with cold symptoms, no one using special ppe around them, etc. And yet...I don't think we ever got to true overwhelm or catastrophe of the NE. It's been awhile since I've check to see where we are, admittedly. I'm not arguing anything specific by the way, a lot of this just doesn't make sense to me.

I don't know. I don't assume it has spread *all* around, but since looking at the timelines more closely lately, it seems that over 200k people left Wuhan before the first of the year, maybe a lot more than that. Obviously not all of them went overseas, but some did and I think at that point, with a virus that looks like flu or common cold being spread during cold and flu season...the west coast had some of it. I don't see how we didn't, honestly. In a lot of places, too, there was a surge of hospitalizations, but they didn't go over capacity and were able to use existing surge plans for transferring patients regionally and such that happen occasionally during high usage periods (obviously for most regions this has occurred over the summer instead of normal flu season). So if that sort of thing happened in a region during normal flu season with an un-id'd respiratory bug it would certainly look like stress on the hospital system, but if we weren't looking for covid at the time, would we know about all the milder cases and asymptomatic cases?

Maybe, but also we wouldn't know necessarily because people don't go get tested for cold or even flu symptoms a lot of the time and definitely don't get tested when healthy like colleges are doing. I don't think we have a good baseline to work from, honestly. The other day I was looking at data from AZ? (I think) and their reports of Covid Like Illness (CLI) ER visits are lower than when they started tracking it, but obviously they are still having cases and will continue to have cases even when CLI visit rates are lower than before we knew of covid.

Drills, IME, can be a 5-10 minute exercise as a warm up to doing BA as the main curriculum if needed. What I personally have done is very traditional math programs in K-2 and then started BA mid-2nd grade or 3rd grade. I find having good readers with quick, basic fact recall has been helpful for doing BA.

What I find is that the "practice" is different than with other math curricula. It doesn't look like repetition or spiraling back over things directly, but concepts learned are integrated into overall problem solving and thinking, probably more subtly than people are used to. It took me awhile to realize BA/AOPS is just an almost completely different way of thinking about review/practice and approaching math problems in general. So that when a kid sees a problem, even if they don't have a direct algorithm to reference to apply (although those are taught!), they have a way to think about the math and approach the problem. Make sure if you use BA that you and your child are using the hints and solutions as part of the reading and work every day.

That sounds like a hand foot and mouth type virus or there are a a lot of viruses that my kids have gotten pre-covid that come with a viral rash.

Second time of pausing the trial.

Just as example of irresponsible reporting and narrative crafting are using this paper.

For anyone interested.

People keep saying this as though protestors never go inside anywhere and that there was anything close to 100% masking. It's like protestors somehow are covid saints.

Despite the snarky first tweet, here's some data.