Discussion: Orienteering tourism

Have you heard about tour companies that organizing Orienteering events for small groups? I am looking for one.

Depending on where you want to go, O-travel is great: http://www.o-travel.com/about-us

Just reminder, if anyone visits Finland there is usually plenty of event every day (except wintertime) for the old traditon of O clubs to arrange low key midweek evening events open for everyone not just regular orineteers. I took screen capture yesterday, I had at least 30 evens withing 45min drive from home. Usually there is just 2-5 events every day, but for covid-19 those events are now week long insead of one evening.


Covid-19 has been big boost for orienteering, everything is closed (cinemas, sports events, resturant, night clubs) and there is pretty much nothing to do, except trying orienteering!

Sadly all our orienteering has closed down for that exact same reason. Sadder still is that we cannot visit Finland to make the most of your orienteering. Probably won't even make it out of the country for the WMMTBOC later this year, if it goes ahead. Our country borders will still be closed.

You mean there are countries whose borders aren't closed? Strange concept. There are probably even countries where their national championships are still (nominally) going ahead - but not Australia - and not Spain, where they held a Catching Features Spanish Champs instead.

I heard on the News that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were about to create a bubble (good Kiwi term that) so maybe they can orienteering between those three countries?

I think that most Canadians would be terrified of the concept of a US-Canada bubble.

What Jim said.

Much how Danes feel about Swedes right now.

I wouldn't be comfortable with an all-US bubble either. There are several states I want to stay away from.

I'm assuming no foreign travel, possibly excepting Finland/Denmark this year.

This means that the PWT Cruise from Singapore to Bangkok which takes place in late fall is almost certainly out. :-(

I'm a bit worried for Jögge who's entire business model must be on hold this year. :-(

To judge from the latest news coverage, anyplace in Wisconsin (other than the traditional danger zones of Madison and maybe Milwaukee) should be super safe and so fine.

I'm comfortable with the bubble that consists of my house and Nancy's house.

We do want to exclude those cities- sanctuaries, encircle them with barbed wire and ICE checkpoints

a lot of frightened people on this board.....remember to wear a helmet when you go orienteering....you can never be to safe!

Personally, I'd rather not catch COVID. I may have had it, but probably didn't. But I am not afraid of catching it. And yet, I am taking all of these precautions seriously, Steve.

I am taking this seriously because living my life how I want to is not more important than others' lives and suffering.

....do it for the kids!

I'm not quite as young and healthy as Gswede but I am also not that concerned about personally getting infected. What I am concerned about is getting the outbreak under control in my state. That won't happen if we all travel around willy-nilly with so many people currently infected.

.....there is a pandemic......of virtue signaling!

Or, you know, a pandemic of people my parents’ age dying in large numbers, in a region where 10-20% of the population has been infected in just a couple of months. My wife’s a healthcare worker with some chance of exposure, so until things are under control I don’t get to eat a delicious home-cooked meal at their house. Is that selfish enough?

Btw, ellipses have only three periods.

Looks like we will be making our own orienteering tourism and training this year, unfortunately..
Are any states that open allowed to hold orienteering events? We are so ready for them...
Here in PA we still have Stay at Home order... I find that half of the population isn't following this order - so many cars are on the road these days - way more than in the first 2 weeks of stay at home...
We are getting out to local parks to do permanent courses( while or yellow level)

Ohio will allow non-contact sports leagues to resume as of May 26, with appropriate social distance guidelines. OCIN has 3 events planned for June. June 13 and 27 are pending approval from the city / county park authorities. June 20 in Indiana has been approved; we are now doing pre-registration for that one with a limit of 25 people per 30 minute time slot. For the Ohio ones, if the parks approve, we will be doing pre-registration with a 10 person per 10 minute time slot limit.

Looks like us Michiganders will have yet one more reason to go to OH and IN. That said UsynligO has been a God send and very grateful for SMOC's ingenuity therein. I'm not accustomed to admitting that state to the south does something better than us, but speaking of things outside of orienteering, bravo on a job well done with *pragmatically* handling this virus, OH. :)

Mike, if you have any events 2 days in the row, we would love to come. It is a long drive to come for just one.

angelica>> BOK in North Carolina is putting on events. You could almost certainly camp on the map and have a whole weekend of training. The terrain is very good, the map is pretty good, and there is an updated super-detailed section at 1:4000 that is really fun. See here: https://backwoodsok.org/

About 7.5 hours from you...

Angelica, on the June 27 weekend, Miami Valley O' Club has an event scheduled for June 28. So that might be a possibility if both events happen... watch the schedule as it gets closer. Also, the Camp Tuscazoar Challenge is still on - a 100-control self-serve score-O near Canton Ohio (3-4 hours drive east and north from the OCIN / MVOC events).

My biggest concern with longer distance travel is the various points of contact along the way, most notably restroom stops. I've done some longish day-trips to do the Tuscazoar Challenge and to do trail maintenance on my segment of Buckeye Trail, but have been able to do those without using any services beyond using a self-serve gas pump with a disposable glove.

It's funny--while I'm intellectually so opposed to the PA strictures, and have no personal fear myself (so sue me), I still slavishly adhere to the requirements. Sort of an internal contradiction (one of many) I harbor.

Of course, my impetus to engage in orienteering is so limited in normal times, it is undetectable now.

Re what Boris said, there are 3 separate maps (the event is using one of them), with different access points, all within Birkhead Wilderness

I suppose you might be able to negotiate with BOK having the other maps printed for you as well. They are all worth visiting, for sure.

Amazingly, the forest stayed officially open all the time this spring, even when the whole NC was closed.

Kind of agree with J-man about adhering to at least the intent (if not necessarily the letter) of the regulations. Ohio's Gov has always been adamant about people being allowed to go outside for "essential exercise", and keeping parks open for that purpose. So I probably stretched that a bit by driving 4 hours (each way) to run the Tuscazoar course, or the 2+ hours to the trail segment I maintain, but intent-wise, I saw far less other people while doing that "exercise" than I do when doing a jog around my local park.

Are interstate rest areas closed?

PA open areas: https://www.penndot.gov/pages/all-news-details.asp...

Most rest areas are open. Most states are making extra effort to keep facilities open and clean for long-haul truckers and other essential travel. If you want to avoid the other travelers who are using public facilities (I certainly do), you can always take your own honey bucket.

Wow, you can really tell who has had direct experience with COVID on this thread and who hasn't.

Two young Moms on my small street lost a parent early on. Neither of them had a chance to say goodbye. Of the two nurses in our group who were redeployed to the extra ICUs, one broke down in the middle of our lab meeting after losing three patients in the space of a few hours the night before. All my junior staff were redeployed to essential hospital tasks, and helped young healthy looking people who could barely breathe with their hospital admissions, or directed them to go home and potentially infect their families because they weren't sick enough. No non-urgent procedures have happened at MGH since late March, and they are beginning to resume in two weeks. This is a huge deal. Even if you don't care about people waiting for their knee replacements or kids learning to eat waiting for allergy screenings, this is terrible for hospital finances as most of their income derives from elective admissions. Hospitals will close and services will be removed as a result of this, when the healthcare capacity actually needs to be higher, not lower.

Asymptomatic transmission is a huge problem with this disease. You are more infectious when you are very ill and coughing, but you also breathe out virus when your are asymptomatic and you breathe, talk, or sing. These asymptomatic people are responsible for an enormous number of infections because these people are still moving around as normal everyday, whereas the very sick are usually stuck at home or in hospital.

It is very true that outdoor activities are much safer, especially when done in the barebones style these orienteering meets have been happening in. I have zero problems with these.

What I do have problems with are people driving for hours to go to someone else's meet. You should only consider doing this if you can be completely self contained in your driving unit. No stopping for food, no refuelling, no bathroom stops (bucket in the woods is grand, just actually clean up). We currently have zero idea of how much of the virus is out there. Not a single state is doing enough population level testing for us to estimate without an enormous amount of error. Antibody test results cannot be appropriately interpreted for an individual person without a good estimate of how much disease is out there already - we don't have a good estimate for that currently. We are slowly starting to build these studies, but currently the tools are imperfect.

We know now that there was substantial community spread of the disease way way before we started to see rises in hospital cases and "outbreaks" like Biogen in Boston and the Care Home in Seattle. We pretty much wasted the lockdown period and didn't build an integrated testing system that would allow for sufficient federal surveillance of the disease. So we really are back at mid March right now, just with a little more testing capacity, and a handful of disease tracers. I think MA is ahead on that, but with >1000 new cases per day and only 1000 tracers being brought online, we're not going to be able to trace and shut down clusters. On average each positive case has 35 contacts that need testing, and each phone call takes on average 1 hour. Not very scaleable. Testing data return is also too slow, so things can't be shut down fast enough.

Which is a long way for me to stay - you don't have to stay in your house. But please please please do not go traveling for hours, visiting businesses and exposing yourselves and their staff, when we still have a very very poor grasp of where the virus is currently circulating. Because in most states, with the state of most testing programs, we'll only know about clusters when old people start dying. And by that time community spread in that area is wide.

Orienteering feels essential to our lives but it really isn't. Take up geocaching, run in your local parks, map them if you feel that way inclined. But please don't drive 7 hours across states and risk bringing the disease to them. Especially to rural areas with low hospital capacity. Because we're not on top of this yet, not by a long way. And it is real, it is severe, it is fast, and it is unpredictable. In all likelihood everyone on this board would be fine if they caught it, but it's by no means guaranteed.

Pretty much agree with Becks, I'm personally not ready (or advocating) for using rest areas, gas station restrooms, etc. By myself with a minivan, I can be completely self-contained for a day trip or maybe even overnight. For a family with kids, unless you have an RV, it would be significantly harder.

Well said Becky. Living in another state with substantial numbers of cases, the daily stories of cases and the trauma that goes with each is heartbreaking and terrifying. We live a very isolated existence and don't know of cases as Becky relates. But there are in the news and papers daily.The nature of the disease is unknown at this time. What does it means to survive a case. To survive several weeks on a ventilator. the after effects to the body. Is it really gone or just lying in wait to reappear in a week, a month, a year - like Lyme. And the new child syndrome are even more scary.

Hunker down. Go run in a local park. Use one of the new gps programs to set up variable courses. But stay home! Stay safe! and we hope to see one and all in a safer future.

Thanks for the info on PA Janet, I was wondering as I'll be driving through there. Here in Michigan some have been open the whole time while others were closed--welcome centers especially closed. Just kind of hit or miss it seems.

Are any states that open allowed to hold orienteering events? We are so ready for them...

GAOC just had their last meet of the season over the weekend. Too far to drive...They do not hold events over the summer regardless of virus, due to climate.

I've written this before in other fora: "For the first time in history we have stopped admiring USA, now we just feel sorry for you."

This is _far_ worse than 9/11 when NATO invoked the mutual defense pact for the first and only time, this time we can only watch a horrible multi-month train wreck.

Becks is of course correct. The latest data from Norway where we are at least among the leaders in general population testing, is that Covid-19 has had significantly less spread than originally assumed, i.e. many of the suspected cases have just been the regular seasonal influensa. This is actually very bad news because it means both that C19 is correspondingly more deadly than previously assumed, and building up "herd immunity" is a pipe dream. :-(

We are careful but not paranoid... virus isn’t going to go away anytime soon and seating at home for another year isn’t a plan.. we are experienced at peeing in the woods and eating in the car...
thank you for recommendations...

But the main point here is that we shouldn't be making trips that are anything more than a day trip. We've made progress in the fight against this virus, none of us want to see us take steps back.

The good news is that there are loads of maps that are easily within day-trip distance for you guys. And with GPS punching software we can enjoy the sport despite there not being an event. I'd be happy to explain how to set up an event for you guys, but Peter already knows.

Ditto Angelica.

someone needs to look at NY and Florida and study why Florida's success in fighting the virus has been overwhelming better than NY....fact people....find out why Florida succeeded where NY failed.....google the news on his statement yesterday..

I know a very liberal person very well who supports all the lock down efforts but is traveling this weekend with a young kid to see her Mom and the cousins....social distancing will not be happening.....

Mn Catholic Bishops announced they will defy the Gov order on crowds.....

...did you see the article that stated covid does not spread easily on surfaces......

I see many 20 somethings at our parks gathered in group of 20 and not social distancing.....this was happening last week.....

wearing masks have dropped off......wait till it gets hotter...

its over....people are going to do what they are going to do despite others opinions or govt orders....

but for goodness sakes....stay home and be safe while others arent.........

Ok.

So much for those churches that are opening:
"A church in Houston has cancelled mass indefinitely after one of its priests died and five others subsequently tested positive for the coronavirus."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/19/us/texas-church-cov...

Unfortunately, the irresponsible actions of some morons will mean longer lasting restrictions for everyone else.

Ha!....CNN, a reputable source....and you left out this gem from the article....

It's unknown what specifically caused the priest's May 13 death, the Archdiocese said, and "it is not clear" if Kirchner had been tested for Covid-19. But within the following week, five others he lived with tested positive for the virus.

check out this fact and see how it might guide your future actions.....

Minnesota

Deaths: 809
Deaths among cases that resided in long-term care or assisted living facilities: 663

82% of deaths in Mn listed as covid were in assisted living....

I would not recommend orienteering in a assisted living facility.....

has CNN reported this?

Reading all of this, what are the chances the New England Championships national event actually occurs or will continue to be a sanctioned event? Would like to make travel plans but it just doesn't look like it will happen.

Wow.

I’m not going to justify most of this insanity with any level of response, but a whistleblower who designed Florida’s reporting system just said she was fired for trying to get their real numbers out there after the state tried to suppress them. So yeah, I don’t believe they’re doing a better job for a second.

It’s not paranoia, its about being selfish and choosing not to take care of those people around you. You could be perfectly well and carry the virus from your relatively metropolitan area with high quality hospitals and capacity to a small town with one ICU bed. If you can’t see that that’s a issue then all my arguments all lost on you.

Wow...some heavy-duty virtue-signaling here.

CNN? What about other communist outlets? Any quote from Pravda?

My whole professional life has been devoted to COVID for two months now. It's not virtue signaling, it's reality. You can make your own decisions but you need to be fully aware that you are putting many more vulnerable people at risk by doing so. And I don't have to respect you for making those decisions either, and will continue to say so.

For those reading this who, unlike O Steve!, might actually give a shit about their parents or grandparents or friends in assisted living dying, note that the whole point of reducing the spread in society is to protect the vulnerable (and not overburden our hospitals). It's why healthy people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s get flu shots every year, too. Does getting a flu shot make someone paranoid? Or is it just virtue signaling?

So yeah, in many parts of the country there's not that much risk of you coming into contact with an infected person right now. But there are hotspots (like Boston), and there will continue to be hotspots, and if people are traveling and attending large gatherings then there's a good chance that more vulnerable people will die who wouldn't need to if we just enjoyed some local BYOM orienteering for a little while longer.

We can't test, trace, and isolate effectively while there are still a thousand new cases a day (as in MA). I have hope that we can continue to bring the numbers down, start tracing, and then start doing more O with friends.

I should add that I agree with Cristina that is is possible to do things safely before we get a vaccine. But we need coordinated testing to know where the disease is to get to that point. And currently that’s not happening at an appropriate scale.

Planning is going ahead for the New England Champs (mapping and course setting). Whether the event will happen this October or at some point in the future remains to be seen, depends on how things progress. At this point I don't know that I'd recommend making nonrefundable travel arrangements, but it's five months away.

Deaths: 809
Deaths among cases that resided in long-term care or assisted living facilities: 663

How do you think those vulnerable elderly got sick enough to succumb? Most likely via asymptomatic health care workers or family members who unknowingly carried enough virus there (which those folks' immune systems could probably deal with) to overwhelm those poor nursing home residents. Yes, there may be other problems with nursing home cleanliness and safety, but they managed mostly well enough up to the time when this awful novel disease made its way there.

As for NY vs Florida, have you (O Steve) read about indoor vs outdoor transmission? Floridians spend a great deal more time outdoors than NYC apartment dwellers, especially in winter/spring months which is when this became a crisis. MN may be off the beaten path but is no more immune than the rest of the country unless you keep all travelers out.

I'm not planning to fly anywhere until next year at the earliest, and will think long and hard before taking any driving trips involving overnight stays before a vaccine is available.

Most rest areas are open. Most states are making extra effort to keep facilities open and clean

That varies hugely even within one state. Say, the rest area on I73/74 south of Asheboro NC is clean and appears safe, while the rest area on I95 near Fayetteville NC has ventilation-A/C system down and kinda unkempt -- I left immediately, it felt like the humid stale air inside was full of covid.

Different NCDOT districts, different priorities...

Thanks for the update, Yurets! While my info that "most are open" comes from a variety of sources, I can only confirm a limited number of them by my own direct visual observation, and I did not actually go inside any of them to look at conditions of ventilation, etc, although I did see workers with lots of PPE emptying garbage cans and doing maintenance at a couple of them.

I’m a healthy person in my 40s who has been getting a flu shot for years simply because I want to reduce my own chances of getting flu. And it costs $20 or nothing depending on insurance. No virtue signaling required.

Very simple, the disease poses no risk unless you're over 65. So the rest of us should just resume our normal lives and get the economy running again, we'll all get infected, have no serious symptoms and get it over with, while we isolate the old people to protect them until this all blows over. They'll be safe in the nursing homes and whatnot.

How's that working out for ya? Even with the precautions, we're rapidly closing in on 100000 US deaths in the past two months.That's a rate that's a little higher than heart disease or cancer. It got to those old people somehow. But I suppose we can afford to lose them.

(Hmm, I'm not that far from 65, maybe I should give this more thought...)

Hey Janet....Cuomo's directive for assisted living facilities to accept covid patients wouldnt have anything to do with the massive differences between NY and Florida would it?.....do you think that decision might impact the differences in assisted living deaths when comparing NY and Florida?.......he caused the death of many with that decision.....

Becks....you are aware of this I assume?

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/20/de...

most stories have two sides.......facts and logic over emotions leads to more effective action.....

I dont believe that if we can save "one life" we should do it.....that is absurd......why do we have automobiles?....we choose to use them knowing we kill people by allowing their use....why should we ever fight a war?........I get tired of the lack of honesty and refusal to see reality in the name of "compassion"......

yurets....I wish everyone would read the article you posted with an open mind.....

Well, we have automobiles because they actually bring benefits to our lives. I don't believe anyone is itching to catch COVID.

And should we ever fight a war? That's a worthwhile reflection.

It's just a bit concerning how the author twists the data in that article. He even uses a graph from the BBC that says in the fine print that catching COVID doubles your risk of death. It's just that young people's risk of death is already super low.

And it's not just about the deaths either. I know plenty of people in Spain whose lung function has been severely compromised after catching it, possibly permanently. Others have caught it and been fine, just a bad cold.

But shouldn't we try to avoid unnecessarily harming people like we do with automobiles?

Ultimately, all this makes me wonder why we're all so enthusiastic about a system that is "on the brink of collapse" after a reduction in economic activity for two months.

our response has not caused consequences?....the benefit would have been avoiding those consequences.....no?

We should not have entered WWII?.....people died........we chose to enter a war knowing they would die......what say you on that decision....go on the record please.........I would have decided to go to war and have people die....what say you?

I am glad you at least read the article....at least you have been exposed to another point of view.......

it seems like to answer to these is common sense.....

Maybe, just maybe, as we begin to recover, at least for a while, people will pay a little more attention to things like having some emergency cash and supplies. So many millions have become way too dependent on living paycheck to paycheck. There'd have been a lot less pain if 90% of the population had a reasonable emergency fund, and a couple weeks supply of essentials such as non-perishable food, toilet paper, etc. We don't all have to be Mormans, but everybody should be prepared to be trapped at home for a couple weeks without conveniences and utilities (we're very lucky that for the most part we have reliable power, water, and communications).

Likewise, corporations and businesses have become way over-dependent on cutting inventory costs to zero, relying on global supply chains for just-in-time delivery, and essential components made by a single supplier half a world away.

For the next decade or so, people will probably think more about these dependencies, but likely they'll begin to conveniently forget again long before the next pandemic or other global catastrophe.

So, huge jump to another topic, you brought up one of the few wars that was connected to a justified moral cause. Should we start to list all the other military conflicts that did not have a similar level of justification?

I'm not going to continue discussing this here. It's pretty simple. We a did a short shutdown to make sure we had everything under control while we saw the initial impact of the virus. We've seen that we can reduce its spread with certain measures that require very little sacrifice.

So take those steps and try not to kill anyone. I'll send you a mask if you don't have one.

O_Steve!>> Much like a number of other contributors on this thread, I am open to a fact-based, data-driven debate of the merits and downsides of lockdowns, quarantines, masks, etc. I eagerly read opinions and articles supporting all sides, as long as they are grounded in actual statistics and data.

I am having trouble engaging with your posts because they are not focusing on facts, but rather either stating incomplete thoughts or asking provocative, leading questions. I think it would be helpful for me - and I am truly not stating this in a sarcastic fashion - if you laid out your positions in a coherent argument and tried to explain exactly what you think the federal, state, local, and individual responses to the pandemic should be.

Part of our collective forgetfulness is probably that we've had a really long run of "good" times. Almost nobody still alive has lived through the challenges of the Great Depression or World War II - very few remember living with rationing of flour and sugar and meat, tires, and dozens of other items, kids collecting every bit of scrap metal for the war effort. Nobody has been drafted into military service for decades. We've gotten soft and complacent. Even the last minor national crisis, the Arab oil embargo, was almost 50 years ago - I'm old enough to remember the gas lines and rationing, turning heating down to 50 (10C), wearing sweaters and jackets in school, but even that is ancient history for most. On that scale, 9-11 doesn't even register a blip. And even that has become a distant memory - not even that for the third of the population under about 25. Sure, there have been some regional disruptions to our comfy life - hurricanes like Katrina for example, but pretty much none of us have lived through a real crisis, and for sure very few people were prepared for a major national or global disruption.

Aww, yurets made a friend. That's cute.

I don't know who died of COVID and I hope I don't have too. I know 2 neighbors who died from heart problems because they didn't go to hospital in time ( they were afraid to catch COVID). I know of 3 adults who went to drug rehabs leaving babies behind with strangers because of getting back to drugs after loosing jobs. I know of many people who lost jobs, business and losing homes... No one wants to kill old people, but we can't keep living like this for years ... My old 90 year old neighbor playing bridge with her friends without masks...She said I don't want to live like in jail for a year, I may not make a year.

My coworker had to tell his mother this week that her little sister died from it. His mother is currently in a nursing home after having taken a fall, and he considers it a miracle that it hasn't spread through her facility.

I have one friend that I know of who has gotten it. Health worker, younger than I am. She was flat on her back for a few weeks, now back on the job.

On the plus side, you can all now mass gather in churches should you choose to do so :)

WOW! So churches are open in closed spaces and orienteering ins't....in outdoors...with natural social distancing... something isn't right here..

something isn't right here

True. It was elected in 2016, and it doesn't realize that it doesn't have the authority to do what it thinks it's trying to do. (It also wanted the churches open for Easter, remember?)

Orienteering isn't closed by government decree. Clubs just generally aren't putting on events right now, by their own choice. (Although in a lot of cases, land access probably wouldn't be forthcoming.)

Not going to the hospital on a timely basis has nothing to do with lockdowns so it's unfortunate for anyone to fail to go to the hospital when they need to do so. There's probably no place that is better prepared and takes greater precautions in dealing with Covid-19 than a hospital, and the practice seems to be to keep Covid-19 patients completely separate, including not allowing people with Covid-19 symptoms into the emergency department at my local hospital. For anyone who might hesitate, my experience going to a hospital emergency room a few weeks ago was that it couldn't have been smoother. Instead of the usual packed waiting room, the waiting room was completely empty when I arrived and again when I left. Plus our local hospitals are keeping their parking lot gates raised for free parking so no one has to deal with a machine to pay for parking.

Covid-19 itself is not just a matter of living or dying, but the indication is that it can result in permanent damage to the lungs, heart and kidneys, etc., none of which would be desirable for orienteering, and that's people of all ages, not just the old.

Lots of businesses will close and lots of jobs will be lost, whether or not there are lockdowns, as people reduce their visits to restaurants, cut back on travel and other things, at least until there's a readily available vaccine (and we don't know whether there will be one).

Boris...

-open schools back up, sanitize....wash hands....schools back in Fall..
-open youth sports back up with extra sanitizing and some social distance when possible (it will not always be possible) and special procedures....
-open all stores and businesses with social distancing and masks....let people decide on their own personal risk...
-open bars and restaurants with social distancing....
-close off assisted living from visitors....develop procedures to figure out how to protect the elderly
-conduct O events with social distancing and masks off the course...
-travel in cars for daytrips to see people do O events is good....not sure how to handle people from hot spots (open to ideas here)
-use the state of Florida as a model for effectiveness.....

if you dont want to take risks...stay home and away from others.....If you interact with someone who might be vulnerable, dont do the above or dont see the person with a higher risk situation.....

JJ....2016 was a crushing year for you wasn't it?....and the years that followed......perhaps, you will be over it in a few more years......good luck

I didn’t make it through the RCP article. It is filled with erroneous assumption after erroneous assumption but the one that broke me was that the increased hospital capacity that was predicted was not required. That is precisely because we locked down. It doesn’t disprove the need for a lockdown, it proves exactly how effective it was.

We have learnt an enormous amount since March. I think most workplaces can think about going back in a reduced fashion with careful precautions. The hospital I work for has shown that masks are extremely effective, effective enough to keep non ventilated covid positive patients on the same ward as covid negative with almost no risk of infection. Eating lunch and taking refreshment breaks in a confined space without masks is relatively high risk, even with asymptomatic cases.

We still have to figure out childcare and locations where masks and distancing aren’t possible. I won’t be going to a restaurant any time soon.

But the real thing we need to return with confidence is testing capacity to test a significant proportion of the population regularly. Still in MA you can have definite high risk exposure to a case, and you may not be allowed to go for testing unless you have symptoms. That’s not good enough. And MA is doing well in testing.

In another forum it is being alleged that New York State ordered long term care homes to take in recovering COVID-19 patients and that helped to spike the number of deaths in those homes. Does anyone here know anything about that?

I unfortunately have heard reporting of that from reliable sources too Gord. Not for a few weeks so I don’t know if the story has changed.

Here's a little snippet out of a Vox article.

Melanie Montano, 32, who tested positive for Covid-19 in March, says that more than seven weeks after she first got sick, she still experiences symptoms on and off, including burning in her lungs and a dry cough.

Brennan says symptoms like that occur because “this virus creates an incredibly aggressive immune response, so spaces [in the lungs] are filled with debris and pus, making your lungs less pliable.”

On CT scans, while normal lungs appear black, Covid-19 patients’ lungs frequently have lighter gray patches, called “ground-glass opacities” — which may not heal.

One study from China found that this ground-glass appearance showed up in scans of 77 percent of Covid-19 patients. In another study out of China, published in Radiology, 66 of 70 hospitalized patients had some amount of lung damage in CT scans, and more than half had the kind of lesions that are likely to develop into scars. (A third study from China suggests this is not just for critically ill patients; its authors found that of 58 asymptomatic patients, 95 percent also had evidence of these ground-glass opacities in their lungs. More than a quarter of these individuals went on to develop symptoms within a few days.)

“These kinds of tissue changes can cause permanent damage,” says Ali Gholamrezanezhad, a radiologist at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

There is evidence that this virus messes people's lungs up, and nobody knows how permanent the damage is. This virus isn't just a problem for old people, anyone who catches it is at risk of serious consequences. Sure, the likelihood of me catching this disease right now is pretty low. But the risk is ridiculous, I'm facing up against a permanent and irreparable reduction in lung capacity, probably for the rest of my life if I catch this thing. I have three roommates, one of whom has pretty serious asthma, and will probably die if one of us catches it and it inevitably spreads through our house.

This whole discussion is nuts. I am absolutely convinced that the only moral thing to do right now is to batten down the hatches and stay put. For me personally traveling for leisure is completely out of the question right now. There are definitely things that I would rather be doing this summer, like hanging out with my hometown friends who I haven't really spent time with in four years because I haven't been home for summers in a while, or crossing one or two more national parks off the list. But this year the things I want to do and the things I should do are fundamentally incompatible. It sucks, but that's just the way it is.

If you have kids, for the love of god, stay home this summer. Your decisions this year will affect them for the rest of their lives.

To be frank, I think the US is a bit of a lost cause.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/22/us...

@mikeminium: "So many millions have become way too dependent on living paycheck to paycheck". Yes, an alternative to that would be nice, but it's wishful thinking. Neither public policy nor moral entreaties will really make a dent. It's human existence, even in a socialist paradise.

@mikeminium, p2: "We've gotten soft and complacent." [Sorry for my MSNBC-style excerpt; the entire post is good.] +1

@BorisGr: "I am having trouble engaging with your posts because they are not focusing on facts, but rather either stating incomplete thoughts or asking provocative, leading questions. I think it would be helpful for me - and I am truly not stating this in a sarcastic fashion - if you laid out your positions in a coherent argument and tried to explain exactly what you think the federal, state, local, and individual responses to the pandemic should be." Wow, I've been accused of much the same, but in a much more personally convicting (shrill and caustic, IMHO) manner, and thus chastised, try to spare folks on AP my ravings less my antagonist be triggered. But, you are a wise and reasonable fellow, and a worthy example. [Time for an eponymous reference: James 1:19]

@hillanddale: Once the Guardian card is thrown, I fold.

So many millions have become way too dependent on living paycheck to paycheck

I learned when I got my first full time job not to do this because I knew of so many others who did and were always in financial difficulties. I've learned the value of savings especially over my last four years of un(der)employment where I somehow seem able to survive without an income. Mind you having three siblings in a one income family when growing up really drove home the value of money via my parents.

/high horse

Becks, thanks for being an informed voice in a so far very noisy channel!

The view from here towards all my friends in the US is pretty bleak, it seems like you (as a nation/collective) insists on making bad choices, to the point where I just feel very sad for you. :-(

In Norway we have now done enough randomized/non-symptomatic testing to get a few surprises, the most important being that significantly lower numbers have tested positive than was assumed, i.e. the real numbers have been masked by the flu and other ailments. This means that Cov-19 is correspondingly more deadly, and that "herd immunity" is a non-starter. The only solution is mass vaccinations, until then we'll just have to stay in place, apart form other people as much as possible.

@mikeminium: Quite a few people here in fact witnessed a sudden catastrophic collapse of their society and experienced most (+more) of what you describe. One thing, it gives you immunity from socialist demagoguery, for the rest of your life. Also it gives you vision of early signs of where this country is headed.... 90%+ of the Millennials are socialists. America will rediscover soon that socialism always fails... as Margaret Thatcher put it nicely, 'The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money'

....and as I drove to a park yesterday in South Minneapolis and biked solo yesterday I realized this conversation on this page is moot.....

why?, because people are gathering in groups without masks......just yesterday I saw 8 teenagers (1 with mask) hanging out in a group.... kids, 10 or so in this park in the shutdown playground running around and interacting closely as normal as parents looked on.....4-30 something guys hanging out laughing and talking 1 ft away from each other.......3 20 something guys stopping and talking while on a walk with dogs interacting with another guy with a dog....no one social distancing......talked to a friend that told me he has 10 family members coming over to his house in an hour....a friend of mine traveled 3.5 hours away w/kid visiting their mom for the first time year.....

This was just yesterday....these govt orders that have been issued arent being followed, wont be followed.......adjust your life choices based on your own risk tolerance but know that people are increasingly making their own choices despite what the government orders..... opinions dont change reality, people real life choices do......

Did you also count the people who had decided to stay home and follow the government orders?

I saw people speeding yesterday so I guess traffic laws should be muted too.

I would love it if I could hit mute on some contributors to this discussion. I am guessing that they will also miss the point of this comment

Edit: and now the original post has been edited so my comment makes no sense. Sentiment still stands

TRicky,..... I think you make a important point on living paycheck to paycheck.......I just retired at 62........I started saving the first paycheck i got on my first full time job in 1980.....made decent salary but always lived below my means........and saved.

I tell people in their 20's: "dont worrry about learning how to invest yet...learn how to save"

....live below your means, whatever your means are.....for everyone that says they cant.....realize their are people that are.....they just make different choices...

......and yes, this makes you less vulnerable and desperate when unexpected things happen.....

.....and ultimately, it buys you freedom of choice....

T Rick.....drive knowing that despite the speed limit, people will speed anyway.....factor that in when deciding to drive to an O event a state away or staying home.......your choice....

Perspective, maybe? I found it to be cathartic, if somewhat fatalistic. People in different groups talking past each other with practically no possibility of agreeing on pretty much anything. Of course, this is written from the point of view of one group, so...

https://wrestling-with-philosophy.com/2020/01/08/h...

It would take me three days to drive to an O event a state away.

That's not including the wait for South Australia to put one on and the time waiting at the roadhouse for the border to open.

TRick... : )

TReat???

Thanks for that read Charlie-b.