Coronavirus

[biggentleben]

 

Here's what I find funny about this.

 

Agreed. Poor wording. Please accept my apologies. Plenty of back and forth to sort through daily, and that was carelessly worded.

[gunnarthor]

Some idiot crashed a train because he thought the Mercy ship off of LA - put there to help COVID-19 response - was part of some strange deep state conspiracy.  

 

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/02/us/train-derailed-mercy-coronavirus-trnd/index.html

[biggentleben]

 

 

 

It's going to get worse before it gets better. The state legislature chose not to give the governor's office the power to shut down businesses in the state (something not set forth in the state's constitution and even questionable under emergency powers). The governor's office has been encouraging municipalities to do their own stay at home policies and ordinances, and many have put into place ordinances more strict than surrounding states' "lockdown" orders, yet the cities/counties that do not have that authority built into their charters asked for clarification from the legislature and were also denied the power to do so.

 

Oy.

[Craig Arko]

 

Agreed. Poor wording. Please accept my apologies. Plenty of back and forth to sort through daily, and that was carelessly worded.

No animals were harmed in your posts.

[biggentleben]

 

No animals were harmed in your posts.

 

My dogs have been a great source of comfort during all this. Well, more accurately, my pugs have been a great source. They'll cuddle up at night and just lay there. If I pet them, great. If I don't, it's cool, too. Our toy poodle is her typical attention-starved self.

 

I do know it's been hard on my kiddos to get a read on Daddy coming home each day, and I am working hard to reset in the garage before I come upstairs, but sometimes, it's just hard to get everything out of mind and come into the home with a clean slate after a day of dealing with the local reporting on things with this disease...

[Craig Arko]

 

My dogs have been a great source of comfort during all this. Well, more accurately, my pugs have been a great source. They'll cuddle up at night and just lay there. If I pet them, great. If I don't, it's cool, too. Our toy poodle is her typical attention-starved self.

 

I do know it's been hard on my kiddos to get a read on Daddy coming home each day, and I am working hard to reset in the garage before I come upstairs, but sometimes, it's just hard to get everything out of mind and come into the home with a clean slate after a day of dealing with the local reporting on things with this disease...

Yes, it's been tough since we lost the last of our three Goldens, just three weeks ago today. Just as all of this crap was hitting the fan, too. Makes for an empty house.

[biggentleben]

 

Yes, it's been tough since we lost the last of our three Goldens, just three weeks ago today. Just as all of this crap was hitting the fan, too. Makes for an empty house.

 

Understand my like of this post is a "like" in support of sympathy. That really sucks.

[Riverbrian]

 

Yes, it's been tough since we lost the last of our three Goldens, just three weeks ago today. Just as all of this crap was hitting the fan, too. Makes for an empty house.

 

Sad to hear this Craig.

[akmanak]

Yes, it's been tough since we lost the last of our three Goldens, just three weeks ago today. Just as all of this crap was hitting the fan, too. Makes for an empty house.

Sorry to hear that.

[Squirrel]

It’s something ... and what time buys us. Continue to stay home.

 

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/04/01/mayo-clinic-expects-covid19-antibody-test-to-be-ready-monday?fbclid=IwAR2uzj1XiulebuL8PSBoXSDT22hmkfMqk2fX8IVKtWGn9y3KhM5h-ou_Z88

[Richie the Rally Goat]

Yes, it's been tough since we lost the last of our three Goldens, just three weeks ago today. Just as all of this crap was hitting the fan, too. Makes for an empty house.

I’m so sorry

[Richie the Rally Goat]

An interesting historical perspective on US epidemics being catalysts for change.

 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-epidemics-past-forced-americans-promote-health-ended-up-improving-life-this-country-180974555/?utm_campaign=MMS_Newsletter_20200403&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc_The%20safety%20net%20stretches&utm_content=&utm_term=101718923

[akmanak]

Now that they are closing the beaches, cancelling 4th of July festivities,cancelling all concerts, ect, also talking about a nationwide stay at home order, it is starting to worry me that this won't slow down until the majority of people...like everyone gets it.

 

My question is if the nation shuts it doors for the entire summer how on earth is the economy going to survive when the majority won't have work?

 

How are we not just going to collapse ?

[Hosken Bombo Disco]

Now that they are closing the beaches, cancelling 4th of July festivities,cancelling all concerts, ect, also talking about a nationwide stay at home order, it is starting to worry me that this won't slow down until the majority of people...like everyone gets it.

My question is if the nation shuts it doors for the entire summer how on earth is the economy going to survive when the majority won't have work?

How are we not just going to collapse ?

I appreciate that you are of a mind to ask questions.

[Craig Arko]

Pretty much a drop in the proverbial bucket, but a starting place I suppose.

 

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/03/826254936/the-coronavirus-small-business-loan-program-what-you-need-to-know

[Squirrel]

 

Now that they are closing the beaches, cancelling 4th of July festivities,cancelling all concerts, ect, also talking about a nationwide stay at home order, it is starting to worry me that this won't slow down until the majority of people...like everyone gets it.

My question is if the nation shuts it doors for the entire summer how on earth is the economy going to survive when the majority won't have work?

How are we not just going to collapse ?

 

Good questions with no real answers. And then we could look back and say 'if only we had ...' Who's to say what would have, could have been a better course? But given the response made by other countries and the lack of response by other countries should have served as a good example to paths to take that may have produced better results and maybe both lives and economy would have been better off. In my opinion, I think we would have had swifter, serious and definitive action been taken in January, but who's to say ... too much would've could've should've in a lot of this. And now we are where we are. What I've been saying in the last couple of weeks, we are at a point where we just need to bide time, both to alleviate the stress on our medical system, to allow for production of needed and necessary supplies, and to hopefully find solutions and cures. The Mayo Clinic is an example of what time buys. And we may see other things as well ... hoping that blood infusions will help, which is being done in Dallas? other places? ... hoping a drug to ease symptoms will help. We have to remember, this is a new virus, completely new ... no one had immunity, none ... and it is highly, highly contagious and spread quickly. Maybe if we had shut down completely in February, we'd already be on the path to recovery? Who's to say. We are where we are now. My industry, the performance industry, which affects many, not just the performers themselves but all the crews who work behind the scenes, and entire organizations built to promote, sell and create. yeah ... we are going to be down for a while and I have no idea what I will come back to or when. But I see no alternative at this point in time ... except for biding time ... allowing our scientific and medical communities a chance to do what they can do.

[PseudoSABR]

 

Now that they are closing the beaches, cancelling 4th of July festivities,cancelling all concerts, ect, also talking about a nationwide stay at home order, it is starting to worry me that this won't slow down until the majority of people...like everyone gets it.

My question is if the nation shuts it doors for the entire summer how on earth is the economy going to survive when the majority won't have work?

How are we not just going to collapse ?

The only choice is for the feds to keep running deficits ("printing money") to keep individuals and businesses afloat.  Normally that would be some banna-republic tomfoolery, but with the whole world essentially in the same bind, and needing to stimulate their economies through similar means, there shouldn't be any devaluation of any countries currency (which normally be the result of such an action).

[Richie the Rally Goat]

The only choice is for the feds to keep running deficits ("printing money") to keep individuals and businesses afloat. Normally that would be some banna-republic tomfoolery, but with the whole world essentially in the same bind, and needing to stimulate their economies through similar means, there shouldn't be any devaluation of any countries currency (which normally be the result of such an action).

Printing money (the Fed) does not increase the deficit (congress). Printing money eventually raises inflation (how much your currency buys) but we haven’t seen this in practice since 2008. There’s debate on why this is, and may be attributed to the relative stability of the USD on translation (trading currencies on money markets of other nations currencies) or may be that we don’t have a good basket of goods and services on the inflation index. Of course Groceries are difficult to track and what consumers directly spend on services like healthcare is hard to measure at the consumer level. That and childcare/mortgage is a huge chunk of my spend!

 

The other power of the Fed is quantitative easing as we’ve seen the Fed buy up debt to inject cash into constrained markets. They do this by giving US Treasury bonds, of course that requires buyers of US government debt, but there is no safer haven than American treasury bills for your cash, so in a crisis it’s no problem selling Treasuries.

 

Now the FEMA is buying PPE like N95 masks by the million and that is budgeted by Congress and does drive up the deficit. The Fed can’t quantitative ease (monetary policy) us out of this crisis as it isn’t (right now) an institutional debt crisis, it’s a consumer spending and supply crisis. This will require a Fiscal spend like the New Deal to put Americans back to work, which will drive up the national debt. With interest rates at zero, this becomes an issue when buyers of the debt lose their confidence in the US Governments ability to pay its debts.

 

At some point that does become an issue, when we get repeats of interest rates skyrocket in order to entice new buyers of debt, AND inflation skyrockets because we have to print money to keep banks liquid.

 

I don’t think we’re there, and probably won’t get there because everywhere else has the same Coronavirus issues we do and they don’t have the economy size the US has.

[gunnarthor]

Realistically, significant upgrade of unemployment benefits and govt stimulus directly to individuals and families are going to have to happen with some frequency if the stay at home goes for months. Congress should work more from a bottom up idea - get money to individuals - rather than a top down model - rescue businesses so they can maybe loan money or pay workers if they had workers.

 

The news out of Singapore - they had the virus, isolated, stopped isolation and the virus returned - is pretty frightening.

[Richie the Rally Goat]

Realistically, significant upgrade of unemployment benefits and govt stimulus directly to individuals and families are going to have to happen with some frequency if the stay at home goes for months. Congress should work more from a bottom up idea - get money to individuals - rather than a top down model - rescue businesses so they can maybe loan money or pay workers if they had workers.

 

The news out of Singapore - they had the virus, isolated, stopped isolation and the virus returned - is pretty frightening.

I think you need both. Money in the hands of people trapped at home helps UPS and Amazon type companies but doesn’t help movie theaters or churches for instance. The US is a service economy, the vast majority of services happen in-person. The stimulus needs to sandwich in order to keep all of the small businesses afloat.

 

And yeah, there’s something like 5 or more strains of Covid-19 already... terrifying...

[ashbury]

This article by Nate Silver, who knows a thing or two about data analysis, pretty much summarizes my disquiet about conclusions being drawn from available test data on this virus:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-case-counts-are-meaningless/

 

It's worth reading entirely, but let these excerpts suffice as a summary:

 

... data on tests and the number of reported cases is highly nonrandom.. ... [The] goal in testing is often to allocate scarce medical care to the patients who most need it — rather than to create a comprehensive dataset for epidemiologists and statisticians to study. ... You don’t just run the risk of being a little bit wrong: Your analysis could be off by an order of magnitude. Or even worse, you might be led in the opposite direction of what is actually happening.

[Squirrel]

DIY non-sew face masks

https://topdrawershop.com/pages/perfect-for-diy-masks-in-90-secs

[Riverbrian]

 

This article by Nate Silver, who knows a thing or two about data analysis, pretty much summarizes my disquiet about conclusions being drawn from available test data on this virus:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-case-counts-are-meaningless/

 

It's worth reading entirely, but let these excerpts suffice as a summary:

 

Good Article. I've have read a few of the articles that he linked to.

 

He lists great undeniable reasons for pause. 

 

Unless I'm reading it wrong. He is talking about what I've been talking about (Among other things of course). The number of confirmed cases are numerators and what people are reacting to, the number of deaths are numerators.

 

What's the denominator? Tests... Right? 

 

As he says "Put another way: Doing more tests is good, and likely leads to better long-run outcomes, even if it also results in higher case counts that people will freak out about in the short run. I don’t usually like to be so didactic, but I hope you’ll be a more educated consumer of COVID-19 data instead of just looking at case counts ticking upward on cable news screens without context".

 

However, once I absorb all of the excellent information that he provides.  I'm still left with one question. What's the answer then? This is a little time sensitive. 

 

In other words Sundance... It's the fall that'll kill ya. 

[Brock Beauchamp]

 

This article by Nate Silver, who knows a thing or two about data analysis, pretty much summarizes my disquiet about conclusions being drawn from available test data on this virus:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-case-counts-are-meaningless/

 

It's worth reading entirely, but let these excerpts suffice as a summary:

My friend, who is a mathematician, a couple of months ago said that we should probably be multiplying positive tests by roughly 40x (!!!!!!!) to get close to a true infection number because of the lead time, lack of testing, and asymptomatic responses within some people.

 

That's pretty terrifying and given how the rest of his math has been right about positive tests and the curve in the past two months, I certainly can't disagree with him about much of anything.

[glunn]

 

DIY non-sew face masks
https://topdrawershop.com/pages/perfect-for-diy-masks-in-90-secs

That looks easy, except my supply of hair ties is low.

[glunn]

 

Good Article. I've have read a few of the articles that he linked to.

 

He lists great undeniable reasons for pause. 

 

Unless I'm reading it wrong. He is talking about what I've been talking about (Among other things of course). The number of confirmed cases are numerators and what people are reacting to, the number of deaths are numerators.

 

What's the denominator? Tests... Right? 

 

As he says "Put another way: Doing more tests is good, and likely leads to better long-run outcomes, even if it also results in higher case counts that people will freak out about in the short run. I don’t usually like to be so didactic, but I hope you’ll be a more educated consumer of COVID-19 data instead of just looking at case counts ticking upward on cable news screens without context".

 

However, once I absorb all of the excellent information that he provides.  I'm still left with one question. What's the answer then? This is a little time sensitive. 

 

In other words Sundance... It's the fall that'll kill ya. 

It sounds like we need more tests to find the denominator.

 

I am also hoping that we can test for those who have had the virus and are likely now immune to it. Perhaps those people can have reduced restrictions?

[ashbury]

 

My friend, who is a mathematician, a couple of months ago said that we should probably be multiplying positive tests by roughly 40x (!!!!!!!) to get close to a true infection number because of the lead time, lack of testing, and asymptomatic responses within some people.

 

That's pretty terrifying and given how the rest of his math has been right about positive tests and the curve in the past two months, I certainly can't disagree with him about much of anything.

I should have highlighted the other nugget in Silver's article. There's reason to think the percentage of false-negatives is high. The WSJ article he linked suggested 30%. You want terrifying?

 

False-positives merely are an inconvenience. You get put in medical isolation and those around you are quarantined. Then it turns out in retrospect it wasn't necessary.

 

False-negatives mean the infected person doesn't get put at the top of the list for aggressive treatment if the symptoms get worse, and that person also spreads the virus. Double plus ungood.

 

A coin flip is 50%. The exponential way viruses spread, you need that false-negative down below a few percent at most. 30% means you're barely accomplishing anything, if I'm looking at that right. I hope, hope, hope that number is drastically wrong.

 

I'm still left with one question. What's the answer then? This is a little time sensitive. 

Then you fall back on the mathematical models that epidemiologists have been honing for 100 years. Those models are better when you have empirical data to sharpen the parameters (the R factor mentioned in the article for instance), but in the absence of that they will give guidance on what will help more and what will help less.

 

There is no "answer".

 

And there's nothing wrong with us laymen taking a stab at the thought process, but just know that our guesses are almost surely worse.
 

[ashbury]

I am also hoping that we can test for those who have had the virus and are likely now immune to it. Perhaps those people can have reduced restrictions?

An immune person can touch a doorknob and then touch an elevator button and spread the virus to grandma or other vulnerable populations, same as anyone else. Maybe some people can carry around paperwork ("papers, please") showing they have been tested and don't need to wear a mask to reduce the virulence if they benignly sneeze, but crowds of people will still be the same petri dish, I think.

 

[Craig Arko]

What’s wrong with this picture?

 

Hint: a lot.

 

[Squirrel]

An immune person can touch a doorknob and then touch an elevator button and spread the virus to grandma or other vulnerable populations, same as anyone else. Maybe some people can carry around paperwork ("papers, please") showing they have been tested and don't need to wear a mask to reduce the virulence if they benignly sneeze, but crowds of people will still be the same petri dish, I think.

 

Those of us with allergies need to be very cautious .... wear something across our faces when we have to be out in public. I’m waiting for the day I sneeze, covered, and am told to leave a store.