Second Turnback This Week Due to Unruly Pax

[BoeingBobby]

Come on TeeVee. Not saying that this didn't happen, but what is the proportion? How many had a car accident and COVID and died?

How many acquittances do you have that died of common cold flu since you have memory (a few decades time range)? How many do you know that died of COVID in the last 2 years (and that it wasn't because of a car accident or anything like that)?

Even when we don't have exact reliable numbers, just by order of magnitude it is clear that the fraction of people that died divided by the fraction of people that got COVID was much higher than with the common cold or flue (at least with unvaccinated people and the pre-Omicron variants). And on top of that, even leaving deaths aside, the hospitals were clogged and overwhelmed with people seriously ill with COVID, to the point that people could not get treatment for other illnesses, surgeries had to be postponed, etc. We will never know how many people died because of COVID without dying OF COVID.

Well said!

[Evan]

And "no exhaust valve".

The problem with the two N95's that I did have a the start of the pandemic was that they both had an exhaust valve. But, as there were no masks available to purchase, I had to use what I had. I don't see them on people anymore. Perhaps they stopped selling them to the general public. Anyway, a lot of people have a larger exhaust valve known as their nose hanging out of the top of their masks. A lot of FA's don't do anything about that.

[TeeVee]

My uncle died from it. My perfectly healthy uncle. That's how I know. He injured his foot, went in for day surgery, caught COVID thanks to all the skeptical, maskless morons throwing themselves upon the mercy of our hospitals and he didn't survive it. It's a horrible, isolated way to go. It breaks my heart, of course, just as it gets my blood up when I hear the sort of tripe you are putting down. I guess you just haven't learned the hard way yet. I hope you don't because it is much worse than you can imagine. And I hope you don't kill anybody's favorite uncle in your heroic attempt to not buy into the obvious.

everyone knows someone that died from covid. no one, especially not i, said people are not and have not died from covid. it is a sometimes deadly disease for sure. i've had it likely twice--once in march of 2020, when despite all the bullsh the cheetoh has saying, i could not get tested, and the second time last september, which was delta. i'm vaxed and boosted. my wife and mother-in-law were both very sick and i tended to them from 6 am to 12 am for 15 days. so i dont need to any of this group to tell me how bad it is. while i have not lost any family members that i know of, i did lose people i knew.

masks dont prevent infection as well as the powers that be would have you believe. airplane hepa filters dont prevent infection. social distancing doesn't work (six feet? really? effin laughable)

[TeeVee]

I have now lost 4 friends. One, a retired Naval aviator, great shape, vaccinated, no underlying conditions and a health nut. My 33 year old son now has it. Vaccinated and boosted. So just keep watching FOX news TVee, remember we have met, you might not make it if you get it!

i do not and have not watched fox news, nor do i listen to right wing lunatics. but i also do not buy into the skewed numbers the left is ranting on about.

an eon ago, i took one university level statistics class. first day, the professor says, "statistics are like a lamppost to a drunk--used for support but not illumination."

read one article that screams out some raw numbers but not in context and you aren't any more informed than you were prior to reading the article.

if we don't test sufficient numbers of people, we dont have a clear picture of the rate of infection or the death rate. do y'all honestly believe that we have a clear picture of the real number of people infected? really? in my tiny little world, i know at least 20 people that had covid but never got tested. i'm just one, small nobody with a very limited circle of friends. extrapolate my 20 cases to the entire population and tell me what happens.

you can ignore the fact that traffic deaths, heart attacks, strokes etc are being chalked up to covid. but denying that the numbers are not accurate is just plain insane.

do y'all really trust the worldwide reporting of the numbers of cases and deaths? really? do you really believe that china's numbers are accurate, 105,000 cases with 1.5 billion people???? russia's? most of the undeveloped world? sht, my friend went to india to be with his dying father in 2020 (not covid), and said the numbers being reported were totally inaccurate. in the town where his father lived, everyone that died was said to have died of covid, even without testing or autopsy. in nicaragua, where i spend half of my time, the govt reports nothing and only permits testing in its own facilities at a cost of $150 USD--a number that is roughly 1/2 the monthly income of the average worker. think their numbers are accurate?

but, let's say i'm full of crap and the numbers are correct. 1.5% is the death rate and that includes lots and lots of places where no one even has a mask.

[TeeVee]

Come on TeeVee. Not saying that this didn't happen, but what is the proportion? How many had a car accident and COVID and died?

How many acquittances do you have that died of common cold flu since you have memory (a few decades time range)? How many do you know that died of COVID in the last 2 years (and that it wasn't because of a car accident or anything like that)?

Even when we don't have exact reliable numbers, just by order of magnitude it is clear that the fraction of people that died divided by the fraction of people that got COVID was much higher than with the common cold or flue (at least with unvaccinated people and the pre-Omicron variants). And on top of that, even leaving deaths aside, the hospitals were clogged and overwhelmed with people seriously ill with COVID, to the point that people could not get treatment for other illnesses, surgeries had to be postponed, etc. We will never know how many people died because of COVID without dying OF COVID.

many of your questions were answered in my previous replies. one of my friends is the dietary director of a large hospital in Long Island NY. he told me first hand what was going on there. a total nightmare. he also told me that the policy of the company that owned his hospital along with four more hospitals was to report cause of death as covid whenever possible. that factoid alone calls into question the legitimacy of all the numbers being reported. to bring this back home to the aviation theme, imagine if the FAA said that the NTSB should report that pilot error was the cause of crash whenever possible. imagine that boeing offered the NTSB a premium for every time it reported pilot error as the cause of a crash.

[Evan]

everyone knows someone that died from covid. no one, especially not i, said people are not and have not died from covid. it is a sometimes deadly disease for sure. i've had it likely twice--once in march of 2020, when despite all the bullsh the cheetoh has saying, i could not get tested, and the second time last september, which was delta. i'm vaxed and boosted. my wife and mother-in-law were both very sick and i tended to them from 6 am to 12 am for 15 days. so i dont need to any of this group to tell me how bad it is. while i have not lost any family members that i know of, i did lose people i knew.

masks dont prevent infection as well as the powers that be would have you believe. airplane hepa filters dont prevent infection. social distancing doesn't work (six feet? really? effin laughable)

TeeVee, to be clear, the 'powers that be' that provided me with the knowledge that masks DO work are technical explanations of how they work. As you know, I research things rather obsessively when I want answers. I don't wait for some talking head to spoon feed them to me. Gabriel also knows how they work, probably better than I do. In a nutshell, when properly fitted, a labyrinth of fibers and an electrostatic charge prevent almost all particles in the SARS-CoV-2 range from reaching your nose and mouth. How is that not preventing infection? They don't work miracles, there is still a very minuscule chance of becoming infected, but that chance is too minuscule to allow a virus to spread enough to sustain itself. When everyone wears a mask in public, properly and earnestly, the pandemic ends. Full stop. The reason the pandemic continues is disregard, apathy and resistance to this simple measure. The pandemic has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that when the real deal arrives, that high-fatality airborne virus that will make Covid look like the common cold, we will not be able to save ourselves from ourselves.

[Gabriel]

masks don't prevent infection as well as the powers that be would have you believe. airplane hepa filters dont prevent infection. social distancing doesn't work (six feet? really? effin laughable)

Masks prevent prevention. They are not 100% effective, cloth masks even not that close, but they are MUCH more effective than not wearing anything.
What you are saying is akin to saying that seatbelts don't prevent car crash deaths.

HEPA filters keep the air in the airplanes very clean of all kind of pollutants including virus-carrying particles. Of course, if the person next to you has COVID, you are likely to breath contaminated air before it is recirculated and filtrated, but the virus of one person will not be recirculated in all the cabin as it would happen if the system did not include HEPA filters. I saw a study like 1 year ago that found that most of the cases of people getting COVID after a flight where within 1 rows and within 2 seats laterally of a person that already had covid.

Social distancing works much better in combination with a mask. If I cough 6 feet behind you without a mask, I am likely to project contaminated particles directly to you. If I have a mask the particles that escape from the mask will leave the mask at a much slower speed and in all (or many) directions and from there the virus concentration will diffuse and dilute more the further you are from the source. In an acknowledged over-simplified model, the volume of the expanding "sphere of influence" increases 8 times every time you duplicate the radius, so the concentration of virus at 6 feet of a contaminated person will be 1/8 of the concentration at 3 feet. And it works much better with ventilation or HPA filtration because that will actually remove virus (and viral concentration) from the environment.

[Gabriel]

but i also do not buy into the skewed numbers the left is ranting on about.

do y'all honestly believe that we have a clear picture of the real number of people infected? really?

Absolutely not. But that's not the point. The point is whether much more people dies from COVID than from flu or common cold, and if the combination of masks, social distancing, ventilation/filtration, increased cleansing and hygiene measures and, in extreme cases, restrictions in the capacity of places, prohibitions of certain activities, lock downs helps (and helped) reduce that number of deaths in more than a negligible manner. And I believe that the answer to that is a categorical YES. Don't you?

(It is very hard to prove either way because of the flawed numbers and because we only have the numbers, flawed and all, of how it went with the measures taken, we don't have the numbers of what would have happened if we had let the pandemic evolve by itself without taking the preventive measures)

do y'all really trust the worldwide reporting of the numbers of cases and deaths? really? do you really believe that china's numbers are accurate. you can ignore the fact that traffic deaths, heart attacks, strokes etc are being chalked up to covid. but denying that the numbers are not accurate is just plain insane.

Nobody is denying that. 1000 is much bigger than 1, even if 1000 is a grossly skewed and totally inaccurate estimation of the real number.

but, let's say i'm full of crap and the numbers are correct. 1.5% is the death rate and that includes lots and lots of places where no one even has a mask.

And your point here is? The % is not so important. The real % is probably much lower because the deaths can be counted much more accurately than the infected persons, due many things: people with no or very mild symptoms that doesn't think they may have covid, people that suspects that they have covid and decide to isolate themselves and do nothing else as far as they don't present bad symptoms and don't get tested, persons that can't get tested because of lack of resources (for example they live far from a testing location, they have to paid for being tested and they can't afford them, or the country has a shortage of test kits). But the point here is that 5.6 million persons have died of COVID officially (the number isn't and doesn't need to be exact). And that is a lot. With measures and all. It would have very likely been much worse without the measures.

[Gabriel]

BTW, I read somewhere that the turn back of this flight bound to Tel Aviv was not due to a masks issue but because a couple assigned themselves to Business Class, refused to show that they belonged there (by showing the boarding pass), and became belligerent and disruptive when the refused to move to what the crew had in records to be their assigned seats in economy.

[Evan]

BTW, I read somewhere that the turn back of this flight bound to Tel Aviv was not due to a masks issue but because a couple assigned themselves to Business Class, refused to show that they belonged there (by showing the boarding pass), and became belligerent and disruptive when the refused to move to what the crew had in records to be their assigned seats in economy.

source?

[Evan]

you can ignore the fact that traffic deaths, heart attacks, strokes etc are being chalked up to covid.

BTW, many deaths are those of people who went into the hospital for those reasons and would have likely survived but then contracted COvid in the hospital thanks to all the unvaccinated, maskless rabble that took over the place. Those deaths are correctly 'chalked up to Covid'.

Meanwhile, the 'powers that be' are NOT claiming to have accurate figures, just valuable approximations.

[3WE]

I think I’m the token biologist here, and the debate is interesting.

My $0.02: So, you have an Uber contagious, truly nasty chest cold. Some people die, most people have a bad cold or better. Unfortunately this was virulent and resulted in a bad body count. Masks do REDUCE spread, vaccines help, but for this bug, it still spreads.

Now politics and human nature: Total cluster. Experts screwed the pooch VERY EARLY, telling us masks wouldn’t work…oops.

And the subject of getting humans to do what they should…why is this any different…speed limits, health insurance, diet,,exercise, safe sex, et al, ad nauseum.

Plus- science and those statistics that TeeVee understands…is there a small fraction of detrimental effects to vaccines for a disease that has a pretty good survival rate?

Is flu analogous? Tons of cool math games there. Likely more deadly WHEN you get it, less virulent, vaccines available, and totally optional, masking and self quarantines? Those would probably help.

The near future: Omicron spread a heck of a lot more, and it looks like most everyone is going to get it…it may now be endemic and with us forever. We (no italics) will be facing some interesting decisions regarding policies.

[TeeVee]

TeeVee, to be clear, the 'powers that be' that provided me with the knowledge that masks DO work are technical explanations of how they work. As you know, I research things rather obsessively when I want answers. I don't wait for some talking head to spoon feed them to me. Gabriel also knows how they work, probably better than I do. In a nutshell, when properly fitted, a labyrinth of fibers and an electrostatic charge prevent almost all particles in the SARS-CoV-2 range from reaching your nose and mouth. How is that not preventing infection? They don't work miracles, there is still a very minuscule chance of becoming infected, but that chance is too minuscule to allow a virus to spread enough to sustain itself. When everyone wears a mask in public, properly and earnestly, the pandemic ends. Full stop. The reason the pandemic continues is disregard, apathy and resistance to this simple measure. The pandemic has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that when the real deal arrives, that high-fatality airborne virus that will make Covid look like the common cold, we will not be able to save ourselves from ourselves.

well, maybe you should research obsessively how infections occur, or in the parlance of medical professionals, "modes of transmission." inhalation is merely one of them.

many, many, many medical professionals that wore better masks than 95% of the population have, got infected, and sadly, many of them died. I read one report in 2020 about airborne infection through the eyes. Do you advocate everyone wear a full on hazmat suit?

[TeeVee]

Masks prevent prevention. They are not 100% effective, cloth masks even not that close, but they are MUCH more effective than not wearing anything.
What you are saying is akin to saying that seatbelts don't prevent car crash deaths.

HEPA filters keep the air in the airplanes very clean of all kind of pollutants including virus-carrying particles. Of course, if the person next to you has COVID, you are likely to breath contaminated air before it is recirculated and filtrated, but the virus of one person will not be recirculated in all the cabin as it would happen if the system did not include HEPA filters. I saw a study like 1 year ago that found that most of the cases of people getting COVID after a flight where within 1 rows and within 2 seats laterally of a person that already had covid.

Social distancing works much better in combination with a mask. If I cough 6 feet behind you without a mask, I am likely to project contaminated particles directly to you. If I have a mask the particles that escape from the mask will leave the mask at a much slower speed and in all (or many) directions and from there the virus concentration will diffuse and dilute more the further you are from the source. In an acknowledged over-simplified model, the volume of the expanding "sphere of influence" increases 8 times every time you duplicate the radius, so the concentration of virus at 6 feet of a contaminated person will be 1/8 of the concentration at 3 feet. And it works much better with ventilation or HPA filtration because that will actually remove virus (and viral concentration) from the environment.

funny how hepa filters didnt prevent the spread of the common cold or flu prior to covid. every honest frequent flyer will admit to have had multiple colds per year. common factor? air travel. my friend the retired airline pilot attested to this. hepa filters or not, long aluminum tubes stuffed with 100's of people are petri dishes. not just the air. the seats, seatbelts, every single surface.

do you buy the bullshit about airlines disinfecting their aircraft? really? it's all bullshit. they did it half-heartedly back in 2020. now, it's business as usual. airplanes are just as dirty today as they were in 2019. and just as full of pathogens.

seatbelts are not designed or claimed to prevent car crashes. they do however, more often than not, save lives, where the mechanism of injury is getting tossed about or out of the car interior. inhaling viral particles is only one mode of infection. so unless you are going to cover your eyes and ears, change your clothes every time you are around people, not touch your clothes or yourself, you can become infected.

this virus and disease are not a joke. they kill. but they kill a small percentage of those infected.

[TeeVee]

(It is very hard to prove either way because of the flawed numbers and because we only have the numbers, flawed and all, of how it went with the measures taken, we don't have the numbers of what would have happened if we had let the pandemic evolve by itself without taking the preventive measures)


And your point here is? The % is not so important. The real % is probably much lower because the deaths can be counted much more accurately than the infected persons, due many things: people with no or very mild symptoms that doesn't think they may have covid, people that suspects that they have covid and decide to isolate themselves and do nothing else as far as they don't present bad symptoms and don't get tested, persons that can't get tested because of lack of resources (for example they live far from a testing location, they have to paid for being tested and they can't afford them, or the country has a shortage of test kits). But the point here is that 5.6 million persons have died of COVID officially (the number isn't and doesn't need to be exact). And that is a lot. With measures and all. It would have very likely been much worse without the measures.

take a look at places like Sweden, where there was no lockdown and no mask requirement. sure they had people die, mostly from high risk categories--same as flu. young, non-immuno-supressed people rarely die of flu. old people? all the time, but mostly they use pneumonia as cause of death because that is one of the most deadly effects of flu.

as stated earlier, i don't trust the numbers being reported. and because i dont trust the numbers i dont believe i have all the facts. and because i dont have all the facts, i cannot agree that anything is necessary and/or effective. what if the true number of deaths directly from covid was 3mm? that would make the death rate ~0.008. do you think the world would be going ape shit? a disease that kills less than 1% of the people infected?

i also have not lost sight of the fact that the transmissibility of covid is higher so the raw numbers will be higher. nonetheless, the individual risk of death remains about the same.