btq96r

I grieve with thee. You and your family will be in my thoughts.

Looks like you both have the time on your hands to meet up. Congrats, Greg. I'm pretty far away from retired, so the only advice I can give you is to enjoy yourself and whatever hobbies you put your time into.

Why don't they just make a plate that looks like the state flag? I hate the tnvacation.com thing too...I have a plate that was issued before it, and I'll for sure try to hold onto it if I switch vehicles. Stupid thing to have in the TCA.

If all the rain is what it takes to give summer the boot and usher in some cooler fall like temps, I'm fine what we're going through this week.

If it's good enough for Dolly Parton, it's good enough for anybody.

Loved watching him on SNL in the 90s. Any interview he did for a TV or radio show was great as well. Sucks cancer took him before his time.

Hoping for the best outcomes for your family. Folks are going to be getting released earlier than otherwise might be recommended. I know you'll be keeping an eye on your daughter, just wanted you to know she might have had a few more days of recommended observation if the bed/staffing situation was pre-COVID levels.

Regarding the Titans...it's Week 1. A lot of teams (and bettors) get their assumptions punched in the mouth the first week of the season. No cause for alarm yet. I don't think they do better than they ended up last year, but I doubt they'll revert to the scrub level of years past. As for Vandy...don't expect football results from a baseball school. Texas administrators, coaches, and players ares going to love the money from being in the SEC...their fans when it comes to the win/loss record, not so much.

I was a PFC in the barracks at Fort Campbell putting on my boots after PT and a shower so my roommate and I could go to breakfast. My platoon sergeant ran into my room in a frenzy telling us to put on CNN then went to the next room with a TV. Nothing was the same anymore. Four and a half months later I was in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

I'm strongly suspecting the multiple union contracts are a big reason. Especially since the American Postal Workers Union contract is approaching expiration in less than two weeks and some crunch time negotiations are in progress. Would be very bad to try and address this so late in the game. https://apwu.org/news/contract-update-union-management-“locking-down”-ahead-september-20-expiration

Government actively restricts access to safe and proven drugs all the time; that's what prescriptions ensure. For better or worse, we've set the rules in this country that only licensed clinicians get to prescribe certain medicine. You may want ivermectin, but if your physician isn't in agreement with it as a proper course of treatment, they don't have to just acquiesce to you. But the good news is, you can shop for physicians as easily as you do restaurants. Don't like your PCP, keep trying new ones until you're satisifed. A PCP should be on the same level as your barber or mechanic with people you trust and feel a level of comfort around...moreso even.

Yeah, I've seen that and can believe that a great many physicians would read it and think if they go counter to it, they'll either be not giving the best treatment based on their knowledge base, or opening themselves to litigation for ignoring it. Maybe it's because I work in administrative side of a physician practice and have been privy to debates on (non-COVID) policies and protocols during meetings, but the ivermectin debate is really overblown to me. If your physician has read up on it, understands the pros/cons, that's when I'd be fine having it recommended if I were a patient. Now, not many physicians get sufficient admin time to be well versed to the point of an opinion in something so debatable. So for them, recommending it without due diligence on their part, or just because a patient is clamoring for it wouldn't be cool in my mind. Everyday doctors are very smart and can digest information in medical journals a lot faster than us who aren't trained as such...but they have a limited amount of working time, and most of it is spent on clinical shifts, not admin time or research to dive into the details of what amounts to experimental efforts. I have no problem believing plenty of physicians don't understand ivermectin well enough and don't feel comfortable prescribing it counter to official warnings from the FDA, CDC, or their professional associations.

I can absolutely believe facility authorities are doing such. Local CMO's are probably skeptical, or just afraid to step out from cover. My experience in working with physicians is they generally don't like to deviate from guidance their applicable professional association puts out on high button issues. Having what an accrediting body says the standard is helps defend against malpractice in courses of treatment. I'm just unaware of government restrictions as RefeerMac talked about.

What restrictions are there on legal prescriptions of ivermectin? I know there's a lot of medical literature boo-hoo'ing it, but those are references and quite frankly, peer pressure, not prohibitions.

Ivermectin and Hcq are being used as treatments insofar as I know, same as monocular antibodies. Vaccinations are preventative. Two different efforts in the same fight; both need to be tailored to the individual. I still see everything telling us that vaccinations are the best step for an initial defense against the virus. After that, treatments for breakthrough cases take over. I'm fine with whatever folks are using for treatments, I just hope they're doing so in consultation with their physician. Taking ivermectin as prescribed by a doctor make sense. Buying it at the feed store in a package that has a picture of a horse and self medicating is something else.

The language in the EUA has three conditions: there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative. Just because Pfizer is adequate and approved, it doesn't mean it's available in sufficient quantities. I know it sounds like a stretch, but this is why we had multiple companies pushing to make a vaccine...none of them alone could produce sufficient quantities for mass vaccination efforts to the population at large.

Where pray tell is the approval lacking? https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-covid-19-vaccine https://www.fda.gov/media/151710/download As I said, the other two are probably coming soon enough. But with one FDA approved, the legal avenue exists for employee mandates in states without restrictions on it.

If this is going to be the internet story where you link this to forced medical experimentation...that implausible to being with reasoning is completely done for any vaccines with FDA approval (currently Pfizer, presumably soon to be Moderna and J&J).

Thinking of you and the family, @E4 No More, hoping some more positive thoughts help.

@Erik88 hoping your Dad's COVID experience is only an inconvenience.

The death rate is what the media gets to make sensational stories about. I don't want anyone to die, but fell the death rate from COVID as it is today isn't anything society can't handle. That's a broad statement as crass as it sounds; I know each death is a tragedy for the family and friends, so I don't want to belittle that. My worry since March of last year was the contagion of this and how stretched out the entire economy is with regards to what we deem essential services. Staffing in organizations has been tweaked for efficiency and cost savings with the minimal number of people possible, not flexibility by having folks ready to pick up more work, or take over from others. Even if you're 99.99% likely to recover from COVID over time, that doesn't mitigate the risk of your being taken out of the workforce for however long it takes for that recovery to happen, or even if you're asymptomatic, to not be contagious anymore. White collar work from a computer at home can be done in many cases, but we all know society is truly kept running at the first two stages of Maslow's hierarchy of needs by folks who go into work and make things happen, not guys like me who spend most of their day in email and excel spreadsheets. Like other examples I've probably given across the prior 156 pages here...how many nurses and doctors can a hospital lose before they can't see patients...clerks at the grocery store before they can't keep shelves stocked...truckers to deliver products to the aforementioned hospitals and grocery stores before supplies run out. The answer to that question is not very many. Our economy and government services are not ready to absorb casualties like a military unit can still function at some level. Every measure for COVID has been to keep this thing spread out enough so it doesn't overwhelm our systems. I hope they hold, because we're still stress testing it all.

True enough when it comes to death...but there's no denying how contagious it is, and the risk of too many people being so sick they can't safely work at one time for orderly functions as we know them (think truckers or police working at 75% availability).

If we're getting a <0.01% chance of something become the driver of headlines, we're just not going to make it as a society.

Even small impacts of climate change (man made or natural) are a big deal to anyone who produces our food supply, so it should matter to us down the line as consumers in every sense of the word. When those at the production stage are worrying, it's not good. I've not tried the faux meat yet, and don't plan on it anytime soon. But remember, large innovations often enough are shunned by the current generation, then adapted by the next one. This is a generational move underway, so any grumblings on our part may be short lived.

Not the praying type, but would Iike to add all my hopes for your wife to recover and your getting to take her home soon.