Hang Gliding and COVID-19

[Col.r]

Q: What borders on stupidity? A: Canada & Mexico.

US has a disproportionately high number of Covid-19 cases

The United States accounts for only 4% of the world's population, but 25% of Covid-19 cases worldwide.

"Ode to the pale blue dot". I liked that comment to this video, c'mon people, please feel the big picture..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpn6MCmoK0g

[Fabiano]

Davis said:

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.

Davis, I don´t know if you misread what I meant, but I thought I should reply.

People use statistics to take decisions. and sometimes the numbers sound very cold.
I meant no disrespect, obviously.

I can´t help thinking that I have two kids and how much I´m so very grateful that the young are practically immune.
Else it would be real hell.

I´m not such a young guy myself at 54.

Then again, my father is 80 and he is way very important to me, as you can imagine, and so I had to help him make some decisions this year.

In the early stages I thought he should quarantine and he agreed and he and his wife decided to lock down religiously.

After a coupla months I started telling him he should catch some air.
Then finally after 4 months he told me, "I´m gonna give it one more month, and then I´ll resume my life".

And that´s what he did.
He´s been going to the beach in the morning and playing beach tennis and enjoying his life in the company of others, all younger than him.
His wife stayed in quarantine and caught the virus. She suffered a bit, but gladly she recovered.
(She has to decide on her own whether it was worth to stop her life for 4 months and then contract the virus anyway?)

My father says that when you´re above 80 you must enjoy what you can.
So he wears the mask for whatever it´s worth and keeps on living.
He is not willing to lock-down anymore.
He might change his mind, I don´t know I will totally support his decision one way or another.

I think it´s HIS choice and I´m ready to live with the consequences.

So, just to be perfectly clear:

I think this whole thread as I understand it, is simply about CHOICE.

I´m really not willing to give up my life outside for other people´s fears.
Those who want to isolate should isolate, and hopefully be happy.
IMHO lock-downs are insane and the obvious consequence will be a rise in death from other causes.

-=-=-

So I did a tandem flight this morning and made one guy very happy for flying for the first time.
After the flight he told me he wants to learn.

Then I went back to launch and took off for a surprise afternoon flight to the Christ all by myself, in the prettiest afternoon Rio springtime has to offer.
Came back in, landed, was surrounded by happy people, many a lot younger, some had masks and some not.
I then took care of my glider in the pale sun, had a coupla beers (excellent excuse for taking the suffocating mask off) and then came back home.

Don´t take me wrong for what I wrote before, on the previous posts.
I´m more than a little tired of the virus terror and the general obsession with it.
To me it all seems to be worse than the virus.

[Davis]

"To me it all seems to be worse than the virus. "

It isn't.

[Fabiano]

What´s your criteria?

As for health damage and lifes ruined, the virus still losing, and all other causes of death are always just behind, so life is always dangerous.

But we, as hang-glider pilots already know that.

[Entelin]

What´s your criteria?

Putting long term conditions to side for a moment and only talking about the death rate. With medical care, the death rate is significantly lower than without. Additionally the death rate under medical care has been lowering over time as our ability to treat the disease has improved. In the west for the most part the best we have been able to do is keep hospitals from being overrun. If we did nothing about the virus and just let it burn through the population, effectively nobody would be treated, we would loose twice as many, people would literally be dying in the streets outside hospitals.

Again, we know the economically optimal way of dealing with this, other countries succeeded in keeping it under control to the extent that almost nobody got it and everyone could pretty much go about their lives normally.

the virus still losing

Losing where? This is the point where most people are going to die. One month ago in my state there were about 800 cases / day, today it's 8000. Will the virus eventually go away? "lose"?...... If we did nothing, probably not actually, this could conceivably be a yearly thing. Even with vaccines, this could become endemic unless significant action is taken. I really can't overstate how much we fucked up here, and continue to. Normalization of deviance is in full swing here.

life is always dangerous.

Hanggliding is dangerous, so why bother doing a hangcheck? Driving is dangerous, so why not drive 100mph everywhere? I'm fine with risking my life for fun, that's a decision we all have made with hanggliding to some degree. That doesn't mean I'm universally willing to be reckless for pointless reasons.

[Fabiano]

Putting long term conditions to side for a moment and only talking about the death rate. With medical care, the death rate is significantly lower than without. Additionally the death rate under medical care has been lowering over time as our ability to treat the disease has improved

I´m ok with medical care, and I agree that the knowledge has improved to the point of an estimated 99.95%+ survivability rate, so we´re on the same page here.
Vaccines are coming for those who´ll CHOOSE to take one.

In the west for the most part the best we have been able to do is keep hospitals from being overrun. If we did nothing about the virus and just let it burn through the population~

Yes. Same as with any disease.
Every major country is suffering more or less the same numbers, with the great deciding factor being the quality of the health system.
We´re all humans and the virus has no prejudice, it will take anyone.

other countries succeeded in keeping it under control

No, you´re wrong, apart from very specific small countries with excellent health systems, everybody is getting hit about the same.
Brazil has similar rates than the US. We´re both doing much better than Argentina, a small country that adopted radical quarantine.
Curves look all the same. And they're fitted by the same mathematical equation too.

Losing where? This is the point where most people are going to die.

Man, I can hear the terror in your voice. "This is where most people are going to die". Sheesh…

Yes the virus is still losing when you take into account the rise in other causes of death clearly related to the overall disruption of society.
People not seeking hospitals for fear of covid are getting sick from many other diseases, not doing their regular check-ups and all that you can imagine.
Not to mention that any other cause of death previously related to respiratory issues like pneumonia is labeled as covid, so there´s this artificial inflation of covid and deflation of correlated causes.

The total ruining of a society kills a lot more than a virus so ultimately shutting everything up indefinitely is bound to kill a whole more people than any virus ever could.
That´s just a fact.

Maybe you´re one who hasn't missed a pay check and don´t have a personal financial problem, but that shouldn't stop you appreciating the overall impoverishment of so many people and their families all around and the terrible consequences that ensue. It´s all a chain. You can´t expect to rip the income off half the population and expect State will step-in and give everyone free money.

In my country at least, about half the population just can´t afford the luxury of staying home typing in a laptop, so a lock-down results in this kind of cruel prank upon the poor.
Middle class and upper might be able to stay isolated, but they depend on the work of general lower income workers, riding crowded buses to get back and forth, so they can still be able to order food and everything else from the comfort of their homes. (It'd be funny, if it wasn´t disgusting, watching celebrities preach for lock downs, virtual signaling on social, while they can keep ordering their champagne and caviar from some delivery uber or similar.)

Hanggliding is dangerous, so why bother doing a hangcheck? Driving is dangerous, so why not drive 100mph everywhere? I'm fine with risking my life for fun, that's a decision we all have made with hanggliding to some degree. That doesn't mean I'm universally willing to be reckless for pointless reasons.

If you think that going outside of your house, for fear of covid is being reckless for pointless reasos than I applaud your choice to stay isolated.
By all means stay home!
Cancel your Christmas, Spend new year´s in the company of your cat.

One of the nice consequences of this kind of decision is that it reduces the possibility that I will get to meet terrorized fear-mongers out there.
So when I go places I get to be with the people whose cpmpany I actually enjoy.

[Davis]

Apparently some one did not read the article I posted about the conditions being faced by our hospitals. It has nothing to do with you and your freedom. The fact of the matter is that we are about to overrun our health care system.

[Davis]

other countries succeeded in keeping it under control

No, you´re wrong, apart from very specific small countries with excellent health systems, everybody is getting hit about the same.
Brazil has similar rates than the US. We´re both doing much better than Argentina, a small country that adopted radical quarantine.
Curves look all the same. And they're fitted by the same mathematical equation too.

The facts indicate that this is quite wrong unless you consider Australia to be a small country.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus- ... erSort=asc

[Davis]

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... ge/617150/

More than 1,000 hospitals were anticipating staffing shortages this week, according to new data from Health and Human Services released to The Atlantic. That squares with in-depth reporting by our colleague Ed Yong about the toll that the pandemic has taken on health-care workers, and the fears they expressed to him about the toll to come, for themselves and for their patients. One doctor told Yong that the entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed hospital beds, with more than 3,000 cases being diagnosed every day. Another, in Utah, told Yong of working 36-hour shifts in an ICU treating twice as many patients as usual, as the state records cases at a rate almost five times greater than its summer peak.

Unlike past surges, this one is not localized to a particular region. So many places are experiencing exploding outbreaks that fewer health-care workers can be brought in from other places. Many of these outbreaks are in rural areas where patients cannot easily be transferred to a nearby hospital.

[Davis]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... rs/617091/

The entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed beds, Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa, told me. Worse is coming. Iowa is accumulating more than 3,600 confirmed cases every day; relative to its population, that’s more than twice the rate Arizona experienced during its summer peak, “when their system was near collapse,” Perencevich said. With only lax policies in place, those cases will continue to rise. Hospitalizations lag behind cases by about two weeks; by Thanksgiving, today’s soaring cases will be overwhelming hospitals that already cannot cope. “The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich said. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question.”