I wonder what percentage of people with that condition end up switching to a different insurance during their lifetime. Insurance changes seem common enough for that to be a factor in their decisions to approve or deny treatment. I would think that many profit-focused companies would choose the existing treatment for now and hope the patient becomes someone else's problem later. Someone could have a parent's insurance until their mid 20s, one or more insurances through employers during career years, and then be treated by Medicare if they make it to retirement age. The new treatment doesn't seem like a good bet for insurers at this price.

The article you posted states that the death prediction you claim was based on if citizens made zero lifestyle changes in response to the pandemic.
"in an UNMITIGATED epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GBand 2.2 million in the US"
Things like the shutdown, self isolating, social distancing, and mask wearing are all mitigating factors that drastically reduced the severity of the pandemic. If anything, it looks like they underestimated since we've still had so many deaths and other negative outcomes despite hundreds of millions of people making major lifestyle changes to try to slow the spread.

I agree that gathering for the protests was extremely hypocritical and, though most protesters wore masks, many didn't and contributed to the spread of the virus. That said, you should look into how many choirs had many of their members catch the virus. Singing projects tiny water droplets containing the virus much farther than talking does (though shouting at the protests would be similar - and I saw many clips of that happening in close proximity to others). Blocking those droplets is why wearing masks does so much to protect people from getting sick.

I hope you can understand how many factors of the pandemic you are not considering when you make claims that downplay its significance. The pandemic can be defeated, but people have to be on the same page and understand how to fight it if they want to make much progress. Life could get closer to normal more quickly with less damage to the economy if people wore masks in public areas, particularly indoor areas.

That would be a fair comparison if multiple other witnesses didn't already confirm the initial accusation. It's more like if several people witnessed a murder and the defendant's legal defense strategy was to demand hearing from every last person and to pretend that it'd be an unfair trial if only a few witnesses testified. Also, I wish it were unambiguously morally not okay to retaliate against witnesses like Trump did, but his enablers don't have such morals. He proved peoples' concerns accurate and valid.

The number 16 stands out to me after playing No Man's Sky. This story is probably meaningless, but it would make an excellent social media post for them.

May be unsafe, but I get the feeling that a good deal of people will read this info and think "Oh, so this many people were able to catch up on sleep while their car drove them home? I can skip my commute? Yeah, I'm buying one of those."

That has been my experience as well. The fear-based content in my area is minimal, especially when compared to posts about found/lost pets, looking for contractor/petsitter/babysitter, harvest sharing, and city information/politics posts. And I've had great transactions through the free and for sale section. I haven't been on the site for more than several months, but I've been pleasantly surprised with what gets posted / talked about!

I can understand the sentiment, but that's not how science works. Many of the smokers and former smokers with COPD and lung cancer that I helped treat in hospitals and nursing homes thought the same as you. There are few situations more depressing than being reliant on supplemental oxygen to be able to breathe at rest and still not being able to get enough air to walk 10 feet to the bathroom without being terrified of passing out. The sound of people desperately struggling to get air really stuck with me...

But I sincerely wish you the best with avoiding issues like that in the future. They're life-changing :(
Hopefully genetic testing will help give people more accurate personal risk assessments in the next few decades.

In other news, this story was posted today:
https://www.webmd.com/smoking-...

I haven't read further to see if they controlled for latent effects of prior smoking (which would presumably explain most of the increased risk for the subset of vapers who had switched from smoking to vaping), but researchers recently found that people who vape (but don't smoke) had a 71% higher risk of stroke, 59% higher risk of heart attack or angina, and 40 percent higher risk of heart disease.

The sample size is impressive: "The researchers included nearly 66,800 people who said they had ever regularly used e-cigarettes, comparing them with about 344,000 people who'd never tried the devices."

And they controlled for some major factors: "The increased health risks linked to e-cigarette use held strong even after Ndunda and his colleagues accounted for other potential risk factors, such as age, excess weight, diabetes and smoking."

But this study would be far more compelling if it compared people who vape but have not smoked to people who do neither. I hope you found it interesting anyway.

That's a great point for this particular fire and some others. But the idea is that climate change is increasing the intensity of most fires in the state regardless of who starts them. Major (often record breaking) fires seem to happen every year. And climate change has led to those fires being much larger and damaging/expensive than before.

I had to remove a ")" character from the end of that link to read it, but it was fascinating. Thanks for sharing it!

Those are good points. I strongly dislike where they're headed with those ideas. The marketing against those industries seems to hit new moms especially hard since things like organic, non-GMO, and natural remedy businesses frame shunning the status quo for their products as being healthier. They suggest that parents are hurting or even killing their children if they don't make the switch, and people on all sides don't do enough research to be less vulnerable to that. The right ignores science for a lot of fields/areas, but I stand with them on the topics you mentioned and am glad to have them as allies.

Thank you for pointing that out to me.
I'm surprised that the list doesn't seem to appear in the study itself, which appears to be much more expansive. I'm guessing that it was because it was only a small part of how they identified domains with a tendency to share objectively false information. The link still shows a clear distinction between objective falsehood and opinion and persuasion pieces, but I sure hope that a lot of pieces labeled real news were borderline as if to be examples of things that sound fake/useless but are at least supported by their authors with facts instead of lies. It's depressing that content like that is shared so much more prolifically than content without a narrative, but I can understand why it is. The arguments can be compelling, but pieces like that typically leave a lot out that moderates and "the other side" wish would be there.

I'm thankful that most people I'm close to who are in the 65 and over age group don't post to Facebook; but the number and extremity of falsehoods in e-mails some of them forward is astounding. Right-leaning organizations are far better (or less morally inhibited) than left-leaning organizations when it comes to targeting elderly people with fearmongering falsehoods. I've seen some pretty out-there anti-Trump stuff too, but that mostly comes across as overly hopeful instead of being filled with blatant lies designed to inspire fear and distrust of large groups of people.

You should read the actual study if you think it's based on who Buzzfeed doesn't like instead of on what is objectively blatantly false. Have some integrity.

Did you expect the websites to be up forever with no repercussions for the site owners? It's still possible to sue for libel, you know?

They made their excellent profits and moved on. And now that organizations care more about fact checking, those sites have been banned from most social media sites for having too many blatantly false stories. Spreading obvious lies for clicks doesn't pay as well as it used to on those platforms.