M Grant - Member - The Prepared

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Thursday, April 23, 2020 Posted April 24, 2020

LOL, thanks for proving my point, Vaylon. By the way, your help is needed on this NYT article which features The Prepared: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/coronavirus-preppers.html The comments on the article are nasty. The overwhelmingly left-leaning commentariat (made worse by selective NYT moderation), is mostly condemning preppers as “rapacious vultures and leeches”, “causing societal collapse”, “frauds and fakes”, “paranoid pretexter” “feeding the reptile part of the human brain” and worse. I posted a couple of supportive comments but they have gone into the NYT moderation black hole. Perhaps you can help out? One thing I did NOT observe on that thread was preppers being condemned by Trump.

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Thursday, April 23, 2020 Posted April 24, 2020

I certainly appreciate the note. If we want to consistently highlight every time a politician speaks imprecisely and inartfully without preparation, then this site would have to spend all its time on Joe Biden and the incredible things he has been saying about Coronavirus and other topics. There’s no point to this kind of gotcha stuff. It detracts from the site. I come here for actionable information, not political partisanship. I can get plenty of that from other sites. And it drives people away. Thanks for trying to keep this site on an even keel.

Reply to: Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work and could even be killing COVID-19 patients Posted April 24, 2020

Didier Raoult has a response to the Magagnoli study: https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Response-to-Magagnoli.pdf Quotes: In this work, it is concluded that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) would double the mortality in patients with COVID with a fatality rate of 28% (versus 11% in the NoHCQ group). The analysis of the data shows two major biases: The first is that lymphopenia is twice as common in the HCQ groups (25% in the HCQ, 31% in the HCQ+AZ group versus 14% in the no HCQ group) and there is an absolute correlation between lymphopenia and fatality rate, which is well known (Tan, 2020) and confirmed here : 28% deaths, 22% and 11% in the HCQ, HCQ+AZ and No HCQ group, respectively. Lymphopenia is the most obvious criterion of patient severity. As the authors acknowledge, the severity of the patients in the different groups was very different, and their analysis can only make sense if there is a selection of patients with the same degree of severity, i.e. the same percentage of lymphopenia. The second major bias is that by eliminating the initial severity at the time of treatment, two tables are shown: one table where drugs are prescribed before intubation, and which shows no significant difference in the 3 different groups, and one table, where it is not clear when the drugs were prescribed, where there are significant differences. These differences are most likely related to the fact that the patients had been intubated for some before receiving hydroxychloroquine in desperation. It is notable that this is unreasonable at the time of the cytokine storm, as it is unlikely that hydrochloroquine alone would be able to control patients at this stage of the disease.

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Friday, March 20, 2020 Posted March 20, 2020

I notice you removed the Twitter feed graphic I posted. It’s your site, you can make it whatever you want. I’ll go elsewhere, where I don’t have to wade through poisonous partisan propaganda to get to actionable information. Please stay safe and healthy.

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Friday, March 20, 2020 Posted March 20, 2020

OK, I checked out the feed and it all makes sense now, thanks. https://twitter.com/cosmicpixle You have saved me one daily site to visit.

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Friday, March 20, 2020 Posted March 20, 2020

Trump asks states to buy their own medical supplies, then outbids them Trumps Administration asks states to fudge the numbers on unemployment TDS does not inoculate against Covid. ThePrepared is supposedly non-political, so what is the reason for this snarky stuff?

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Monday, March 16, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020

Healthcare workers are good people and like all other human beings, just as prone as anyone else to spread gossip, rumors and FUD. Good data with specific and verifiable information is far more preferable than the chain of Facebook group -> anonymous physician. FUD in this situation is even worse than having no information. It will push people to make incorrect decisions.

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Monday, March 16, 2020 Posted March 16, 2020

The article in Science is more interesting, but reading it reveals that the estimate that 86% of all infections were undocumented is based upon a math model of time and geography. I do big data and math models professionally and these models usually work only in narrow and well understood spaces. I find it dubious that COVID-19 is such an animal.

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Monday, March 16, 2020 Posted March 16, 2020

Re: In Private Facebook Groups, Doctors Share Their Worst Fears. We Talked to One of Them. Guys, this source of “information” is: Unnamed closed Facebook groups (allegedly for physicians) -> anonymous physician -> Mother Jones magazine. The credibility is close to zero with this chain. Please pass along useful and actionable intel, not fear mongering.

Reply to: COVID-19: key developments for Monday, March 16, 2020 Posted March 16, 2020

Re: Top White House official in charge of pandemic response exits abruptly The link is from 2018, not this year.

Reply to: IFAK first aid kit list Posted March 10, 2020

Hi folks, many of the Amazon links are out of date, often pointing to other products.