The message forum is an ongoing dialogue between classmates. There are no items, topics, subtopics, etc.

Forums work when people participate - so don't be bashful! Click the "Post Message" button to add your entry to the forum.

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

David Mitchell

With no explanation whatsoever, the information on the sign seems pretty useless. 

If I read the last line   "....Scenario 5  Current Best Estimate", I must assume there was a "Scenario 1, 2, 3, and 4 also. And what did they indicate?          And when was this "current"?

Mark Schweickart

Dave -- Very cool, your posting of the socially distanced Buckeye Battle Cry.  And speaking of sports, how about my hometown Dodgers taking it to the Tampa Bay Rays so far in the World Series? The boys in blue are looking quite formidable. 

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

https://off-guardian.org/2020/10/08/who-accidentally-confirms-covid-is-no-more-dangerous-than-flu/?fbclid=IwAR0eK02Z_sTfpyuVxyUR7-28R0UzW_6onkXzxwVtVO8bWE5YM0huiTnuEBc

David Mitchell

Just 1,344 fans in the "Shoe" today (and they were relatives only) - smallest crowd ever in the "new" Ohio Stadium since it was built in 1922 - with the help of my then 11 year-old dad and his buddy Howard, who rode their bikes down from 10th or 11th Ave(?) to play in the construction site.

Imagine, good little Catholic boys disobeying the "No Entry" constrution fencing signs. 

I wonder how that compares to thee very first game ever, played - in a field next to the campus at Ohio Weslyan University (where Univesrity officials gave "special permission" for co-eds to attend - ahem!

Can you just hear the roar of the crowd?

Go Buckeyes!  

Fight on you Battling Bishops!

(give this 20 seconds till the content begins)

Mary Clare Hummer (Bauer)

Who knew our dear home town is ranked 11th in the top 100 livability cities for 2020? Not I, for sure. But we had a couple of beautiful days this week that definitely gave credence to the claim. If you didn't get to travel to your favorite fall color spots, here's a weak peek at Columbus' peak week!!!

Northwest Boulevard

East North Broadway



Oakland Park

Northmoor Park

Now it's time to rake all those leaves!!! Enjoy.  
Clare

James Hamilton, M. D.

Clare, 

Beautiful autumn shots! Especially liked the photo of Northmoor Park since I spent many summer evenings fishing off the rocks that lined the Olentangy River there. But hey, did you catch any pictures of those Clintonville Ravines which should be in awsome fall splendor about now?

Thanks for the memories of October in Columbus!

Jim

Timothy Lavelle

Great pictures bring back memories of fall in Columbus. But who knew the blue in the sky there was bluer than any blue anywhere else? You should bottle that sky and sell it on the interweb. The colors you get...damn, that's gorgeous. Fabulous Clare. 

Hey, how about the final seconds of the World Serious! Amazing playing and turn about.

Michael McLeod

wow thanks so much for all the autumn leaves photos. awww jeeze. love it down here but miss the sight and the smell of those leaves in the fall.

And yes Jim brilliant insight. I shall take it as a compliment if I come down with Covid. 

David Mitchell

 Clare,

What, no pictures from down by the "casting ponds"? 

(I thnk I saw an article in,,,maybe The Atlantic Monthly (?), about a year ago labeling Columbus as "America's" most intersting city  - seriously)

Mark,

About those Dodgers. You were saying something.......

I'm listening.

David Dunn

And then Dave, (from yesterdays post), OSU football played on places like the lawn near 15th and High, until eventually, they built the stadium in 1922

Btw, they (OSU) sure have transformed Mirror Lake into something that looks like it never was. They have changed everything about that lake so many times!  It now has milky brown murky water, with a large "fountain", fake wetland, almost no trees, and the original spring has been "relocated" to a bank on the north side.

Mark Schweickart

Apologies to all – I guess my choice of adjective for the Dodgers ( I think I said "formidable") was shown to be hopelessly inaccurate. I can hear all of your jeers shouting, " Count them, my man, count them – Not  one but two errors in a single play with two out in the bottom of the ninth, to let the scoring run slide head-first to the plate." All I can say is, "Yikes."

Maybe tonight will have them return to better form. On the other hand, the constant exchange of leads did make for one hell of a game.

Mary Clare Hummer (Bauer)

It was probably my fault, Mark.  I only watched to cheer your team on since I really didn't have a dog in this year's fight. My luck with cheering teams on to victory is usually aided by my hiding under the covers.  But it all happened so fast.  I, like the Dodgers, didn't see it coming.  Sorry.  I promise not to watch tonight!! 
Clare

Michael McLeod

Well I guess the man I interviewed who almost died from Covid19 and the woman who recovered but may have permanent damage to her heart and the doctor who told me she cried the day she lost her first patient to it and the epidemiologist who told me how dangerous it was were just crisis actors.

Ok enough with that. This from npr. Note that the study was just a single health system, though a large one. But let's give credit to the doctors who have gotten better at treating the disease and not fool ourselves that it's just like the flu. It's not.

Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness.

"We find that the death rate has gone down substantially," says Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, which looked at thousands of patients from March to August.

The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance.

That's a big improvement, but 7.6% is still a high risk compared with other diseases, and Horwitz and other researchers caution that COVID-19 remains dangerous.

The death rate "is still higher than many infectious diseases, including the flu," Horwitz says. And those who recover can suffer complications for months or even longer. "It still has the potential to be very harmful in terms of long-term consequences for many people."

David Mitchell

I cannot get the following video to play here on the forum. So to see it, you will have to plug it in to your browser yourself - if that works - I hope? 

It is on one of thoes short features called HumanKind that they show every day on USA Today's site. It's about a little girl named Ana, who has a rare disease, and after many surgeries, is finally beginning to walk. It reminded me of how fortunate I am. She is so mature as she sits next to her mother and comments about her conditon. It's quite humbling. 

Isn't this a great time to stop all the noise for a few moments and appreciate what we have?

("What we take for granted every day")

https://www.usatoday.com/videos/life/humankind/2020/10/21/toddler-takes-first-steps-after-multiple-surgeries/3716235001/

If the link does not work I urge you to take a moment and goodle up "HumanKind - Toddler takes first steps after multiple surgeries". It's about 4 minutes and absolutely worth your time.

(p.s - Ana looks so much like my 12 year-old grand daughter at that age I was sort of caught off guard). 

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

"What exactly is this current surge? Is it a surge in positive tests, cases, hospitalizations, or deaths? A positive test alone is not a case, according to the CDC. The “case definition” of COVID is a positive test and symptoms. People who might have had a mild case a month ago may still have dead viral particles in their noses, triggering positive tests.

Over a million tests per day are performed in the US with acceptable positive rates of under 5 percent. That means 50,000 positive tests per day but most not infectious or symptomatic. More tests mean more positive results, what the media calls “cases.” If the US didn’t offer tests on demand as we do now, this so-called surge would go away. According to the New York Times,

The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.

Conveniently, this current surge is in positive tests. Despite a rare moment of honesty and clarity from the New York Times, their current headline is, “US sets coronavirus case record amid new surge.” CNN is singing in harmony, “The US just reported its highest number of Covid-19 infections in one day since the pandemic's start.”

No one speaks of false positive tests, likely inflating the test numbers." 

John Jackson

MM, there is no question that high case rates can in part be explained by increased testing.  And of course there are not only the false positives that you mentioned but also false negatives (which you ignored), which understate the number of cases.

But there are two pretty objective indicators of whether the virus is waxing or waning – the number of hospitalizations and the number of deaths, and both of those are lagging indicators because initial case increases tend to occur among the young (who think they’re invincible, and to a significant degree, they are). But after a few weeks, the young start to infect people in more vulnerable age groups so the rate of hospitalization lags by several weeks and the death rate lags by an additional week or two.   

In New Jersey, new cases are up by a factor of three (and rising steeply) and hospitalizations are up by a factor of two since September 1.  Available intensive care (ICU) bed utilization and death rates have also doubled.   Rising hospitalizations, ICU utilization and deaths are indicative of something real – they don’t come from increased testing.

A really good site with easy to understand graphs/statistics for each state (and each county in each state) is https://covidactnow.org/?s=1202293.  I’d urge you to look at it because it’s a good way to judge how much you might be willing to do (going to the grocery store, eating out) depending on where you live (and I definitely think what is reasonable to do depends strongly on what's happening where you live).  This site doesn’t show hospitalization rates, but it does show ICU utilization which is more or less proportional to hospitalizations.  

From this site you can see that the case rate in Ohio has doubled since Oct. 6 and its ICU utilization has also doubled (although the ICU rate is still fairly low).  The test positivity rate has gone from 3.2% to 5% in the same period so even if Ohio is testing more, a greater proportion of those tested are infected.   Franklin County with 17.9 cases per 100,000 is doing a little better than Ohio as a whole (20 cases per 100,000).

Unless you cherry pick and take statements from NYT, CNN, etc, out of context there is no way you can argue that “this current surge is in positive tests” only - rising hospitalization and death rates (both lagging indicators) are stubborn facts that refuse to go away.

And the trend lines pretty much everywhere are in the wrong direction.

John Jackson

New Washington Post Article on rapidly rising hospitalizations.  Admittedly these examples are hotspots but cases AND hospitalizations are rising pretty much everywhere:

In Texas, authorities are scrambling to shore up resources in El Paso, where intensive care units hit full capacity on Saturday and where covid-19 hospitalizations have nearly quadrupled to almost 800 in less than three weeks. In Utah, the state hospital association warned that if current trends hold, it will soon have to ask the governor to invoke “crisis standards of care” — a triage system that, for example, favors younger patients.

WP is providing all COVID articles for free so you should be able to read the full article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/25/coronavirus-cases-hospitalizations-surge/

Michael McLeod

Taking a break from the disinfo battle to recommend: If you like chess or even if you don't and you have netflix i recommend " the queen's gambit," a series about a young woman who is raised in an orphanage and becomes a chess genius. Beautifully done series. Makes chess cinematically exciting and is at the same time extremely realistic on that score, which is quite an achievement. But a great story and a brilliant actress. Based on a novel- I forget the author.

And back to the battle: Hey let's see those incriminating Hunter B emails! If they are so damning why aren't they showing them to everybody? Don't recall every seeing any Hillary email that was in any way incriminating or compromised national security, either. Hmmm. I have dirty tricks deja vu. Worked the last time. Think people are catching on this time around?

David Barbour

Dear Mike,

This will sound dumb but, I have to know and you are my most trusted source.  John, otherwise known as the 

"kid" ( 37 yo.) is back from China to stay..  Political climate is deteriorating!  The kid has been reading  the NYT

over a couple years but has been immersed in the Chinese info wars also and we have had arguments over

whether Dr. Fauci insisted in Feb. that masks don't work..  I can't remember my own name most days so

don't remember this.  I have a hard time believing it, he also swears  Obama said this!  I'd appreciate your

confirmation or denial on this.

DB

PS  No ptsd but he is just as annoying sometimes as he was 8 years ago when he left!

Michael McLeod

I believe the quote was from very early on when Dr. F. was referring to the high end masks that health care workers needed and he wanted to make sure there was not a run on them by the public that would have deprived the people who needed the masks the most. I do not think he said masks don't work. He just said the public shouldn't buy them. I have not had time to check this just doing it by memory.

Mark Schweickart

Mike – Thanks for the recommendation for The Queen's Gambit. I just read a review yesterday in the L.A. Times which also praised this highly, so you are not alone in your assessment. Speaking of new stuff on NetFlix, be sure to check out, if you haven't already, The Trial of the Chicago 7, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. We all remember this event of course from when it happened, but if you are anything like me, back then I am afraid I was pretty unaware of what the actual details were, other than that the judge appeared to be senile and out of control, (and of course the image of Bobby Seale being bound and gagged in the courtroom at one point). Sorkin does a terrific job weaving through the various characters and through what had happened during the riots during the '68 Democratic convention. Really great use of cross-cutting story-telling here, although far removed from the trademarked "Sorkinese" long-winded walk-and-talks he did so brilliantly in his West Wing episodes to deliver both funny and cogent exposition. Instead , the dialogue here is usually in very short bursts, but delivered in such a way that leaves one smiling in appreciation, saying to oneself, "Damn, that was a smart way to put that." He's the best.

Michael McLeod

This makes me sad:

They are not going to broadcast peanuts holiday specials on broadcast tv this year.

Always have had such a tenderness for Charlie Brown and company. 

It's just amazing the heart Charles Schultz had.

I once called him because I was writing a column about unrequited love and wanted to talk to him abut Charlie and the little red headed girl he had a crush on - which I'd heard was based on a real crush Schultz had.

But he wouldn't talk about it. In later years she did surface and do interviews.

Anyway just now thinking about it - about that comic strip - I don't know about you but I get the same old feeling, inside, at the thought of it.

https://www.change.org/p/wildbrain-studios-bring-the-peanuts-specials-back-to-broadcast-tv/psf/promote_or_share

David Mitchell

One of my favorite songs of all time. 

Jerry Jeff Walker pased away just days ago. This song just does something to me. Don't know what it is but it just gets me. Simple, but yet deep. And written (while in) in jail.

He was one of those Texas songwriter/singers that was probably more well known for his song writing than his singing. He stumbled through one of those off-beat artist/musician hard lives. He once fell down on the stage in the middle of a song - too drunk to stand up. Funny how someone so out of sink could create anything so spot on.

Maybe we all ought'a dance more.

James Hamilton, M. D.

Mike McL., 

​​​​​ Peanuts has always been one of my favorite comics strips, but I think that millions can make that statement. Charles Shultz lived here in Colorado Springs for a while and, several years ago, a woman who was living in that same house stripped off some wallpaper during remodeling. On the old walls were sketches of the comic characters drawn by Schultz. That probably increased the real estate value of her home!

Rumor has it that he modeled some of his characters after people he knew here. For instance, Lucy VanPelt was supposedly a take off on a Broadmoor (the "old money" wealth neighborhood of the Springs) society lady. 

Jim