Hang Gliding and COVID-19

[Mario]

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground,
Mother Earth will swallow you,
Lay your body down

What you freedom whiners don’t seem to realize is that your stance may work for you where you live and that the odds of you dying from this virus is actually low, it is that if everyone had your selfish ideals, we would quickly overwhelm the medical infrastructure, endanger more fine medical personnel and kill a hell of a lot more people in the process. And then there are all the long term health issues that will linger for some of the ones that survive. We have over a 1/4 million dead in the US (which include a number of people I knew) and that has been with a fair amount of protocols in place. Imagine if we had just left it all up to personal freedom? There are a number of states regretting that kind of rhetoric. I guess you can’t teach people to give a damn about others when they are obsessed with their own personal freedoms first. It would be fun to see how wars would be fought like that, not really.

I personally am grateful to all that have taken the simple precautionary measures like wearing a mask when needed and not gathering too close in crowds etc. I have rarely found it an inconvenience and it certainly hasn’t stopped me from flying. I believe in common sense and that freedom isn’t free nor is it afforded without responsibility if it is going to last. Driving in a car or flying a hg solo with a mask on is ridiculous, but I won’t stop you. A few running steps and I am as free as a bird, to a point. I don’t fly into someone because I want to be where that person happens to be and I don’t do stupid landing approaches just because I can. Does freedom mean you have the right to be stupid? I find that I can still practice so much of my freedom without f ing it up for others.

Good luck and good health to all. And to my friends (particularly the ones that work on the front line in the medical field), I’m sorry that my fellow American’s don’t understand how their actions affect you. Judging from my observations, that will never change.

[BilleFly]

...

Good luck and good health to all. And to my friends (particularly the ones that work on the front line in the medical field), I’m sorry that my fellow American’s don’t understand how their actions affect you. Judging from my observations, that will never change.

Good post, Mario !!

Bille

[LeadingEdge]

Oh teh dramz!!!

[Angelo]

Great analogy with the dry wood because old, dead wood is mainly what this virus is working on.

Mask or no mask, let's let the green live wood get on about living!!

This comment is so ignorant and wrong I'm not sure where to start. That Covid kills middle aged and young people too? Maybe the idea that "let the green live wood get on about living" is really saying let the green wood recklessly infect everyone around them from their selfish carelessness? I'll bet you believe in eugenics too.

How would you feel if the "old dead wood" dying is your parents and friends?

[LeadingEdge]

#sharpenthecurve

[Joel]

I'm excited about the new T3 being built for me. I had a good flying season this year here in California, where some would have you believe we're not allowed to go outside or something.

It's weird to see a debate about Covid in an obscure sports forum like this??? I will point out though that it's truly repugnant to equate efforts towards health safety and Nazi death camps.

[Fabiano]

Angelo said:

This comment is so ignorant and wrong I'm not sure where to start. That Covid kills middle aged and young people too? Maybe the idea that "let the green live wood get on about living" is really saying let the green wood recklessly infect everyone around them from their selfish carelessness? I'll bet you believe in eugenics too.

How would you feel if the "old dead wood" dying is your parents and friends?

Angelo, even though your question was not directly aimed at me, I beg your pardon as I will try to answer it, even though this will lead to a couple of questions being directed back at you.

Let me explain.

Around 40 thousand americans die each year in traffic accidents.

In the case of traffic accidents, the victims are mostly much younger than the covid fatal victims.
That´s because the death rate on covid, like you seem to acknowledge, is only arguably significant for people that are older than say 75.

Yes, in fact, tn the US about 70% of US deaths are people 70 year old plus.
(source: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/22035)

That is to say, not in isolated deaths, but livable years wasted, the death toll from traffic accidents is much higher than covid.
(Let alone the millions of people struggling, losing jobs, going bankrupt, or suffering from psychological issues, from useless lockdown situations, but I won´t even get into that).

That fact is even more painful when you consider that the overwhelming majority of covid victims were already suffering from other impairing conditions which were already likelier to shorten their life spans anyway, whereas in the case of traffic accidents, so many times the victims are very young and healthy and had their whole lives ahead of them.

So Angelo, I have 2 honest questions for you:

Does your sympathy for tragedy also encompasses those who die of other causes, or are you one of those covid-focused big-hearted wonders that have become popular of late and who seem to think that the only people mourning-worthy are those that die from the corona virus?

And in case you do care for other deaths, when we look at data above, and at the undisputably unfathomable sad waste of human life that is death in traffic accidents, would you pledge to never ride an automobile again?

Thanks.

[Davis]

As a 73 year old hang glider pilot, I'm not at all pleased with the apparent desire of those younger to see all us wiser pilots off to our final flight. This has been an under lying feeling emanating from the herd immunity crowd since the very beginning of this pandemic and it has not let up as we can see from the example above.

[Entelin]

undisputably unfathomable sad waste of human life that is death in traffic accidents, would you pledge to never ride an automobile again?

It's a false comparison. There was nothing inevitable about this, we have defeated diseases before without them becoming pandemics, a number of countries succeeded in preventing covid from becoming a major problem as well. Driving kills many people, it's a problem, one that has been worked on and improved in many ways from engineering improving control and crash survivability to regulation. Eventually nobody will be driving because automated cars will be vastly superior to humans. Personally I'm looking forward to sleeping my way to florida, and having my car chase me while I fly.

The approach to reducing risk differs from topic to topic. The pandemic is a source of additional deaths we didn't have before and one that could have been prevented, one that still has the capability of killing twice as many or more people than it already has.

I guarantee you the economic damage here in the US and other countries that have failed to control this is vastly higher than in those that got to work instead of debating if masks worked or if following health guidelines was akin to nazi oppression. One doesn't even require compassion to understand that the least damaging (in terms of economic damage) way to handle disease is to jump on it hard as early as possible. Instead of all of this damage we could have had a far smaller effort just putting out flare ups.

This isn't some kind of permanent state of affairs, if not driving for one month would end traffic crashes forever then fuck yes, obviously we would do that.

[Davis]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... ed/617156/

Perhaps no hospital in the United States was better prepared for a pandemic than the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. The people on staff had detailed pandemic plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Barack Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases. There’s a reason many of the Americans who were airlifted from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February were sent to UNMC.

In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”

To hear such talk from someone at UNMC, the best-prepared of America’s hospitals, should shake the entire nation. In mid-March, when just 18 Nebraskans had tested positive for COVID-19, Shelly Schwedhelm, the head of the hospital’s emergency-preparedness program, sounded gently confident. Or, at least, she told me: “I’m confident in having a plan.” She hoped the hospital wouldn’t hit capacity, “because people will have done the right thing by staying home,” she said. And people did: For a while, the U.S. flattened the curve.

But now about 2,400 Nebraskans are testing positive for COVID-19 every day—a rate five times higher than in the spring. More than 20 percent of tests are coming back positive, and up to 70 percent in some rural counties—signs that many infections aren’t being detected. The number of people who’ve been hospitalized with the disease has tripled in just six weeks. UNMC is fuller with COVID-19 patients—and patients, full stop—than it has ever been. “We’re watching a system breaking in front of us and we’re helpless to stop it,” says Kelly Cawcutt, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician.

Cawcutt knows what’s coming. Throughout the pandemic, hospitalizations have lagged behind cases by about 12 days. Over the past 12 days, the total number of confirmed cases in Nebraska has risen from 82,400 to 109,280. That rise represents a wave of patients that will slam into already beleaguered hospitals between now and Thanksgiving. “I don’t see how we avoid becoming overwhelmed,” says Dan Johnson, a critical-care doctor. People need to know that “the assumption we will always have a hospital bed for them is a false one.”

What makes this “nightmare” worse, he adds, “is that it was preventable.” The coronavirus is not unstoppable, as some have suggested and as New Zealand, Iceland, Australia, and Hong Kong have resoundingly disproved—twice. Instead, the Trump administration never mounted a serious effort to stop it. Whether through gross incompetence or deliberate strategy, the president and his advisers left the virus to run amok, allowed Americans to get sick, and punted the consequences to the health-care system. And they did so repeatedly, even after the ordeal of the spring, after the playbook for controlling the virus became clear, and despite months of warnings about a fall surge.

Not even the best-prepared hospital can compensate for an unchecked pandemic. UNMC’s preparations didn’t fail so much as the U.S. created a situation in which hospitals could not possibly succeed. “We can prepare over and over for a wave of patients,” says Cawcutt, “but we can’t prepare for a tsunami.”