All things Chinese CoronaVirus

[6ftstick]

Basic but grim arithmetic implies that if we move from lockdown even 20 percent of the way back to normal life, the epidemic will again be potentially explosive. (For example, if we are currently at an R0 of 0.9, and assuming that the R0 without any distancing is 2.5, then returning to 20 percent of normal would take the R0 to 1.22, clearly in the danger zone.) This is very worrying as the president and many other political leaders seem to be encouraging substantial reversals in lockdown policies.

Summers is right that there is currently a pretty small operating range for re-opening at this point.

Out here in Colorado, the phase 1 "stay at home" order reduced social activity down to 25% of normal. So 75% social distancing was achieved. We just started phase 2 "safer at home." The goal for phase 2 is to allow 65% social distancing (i.e. 35% of normal). It is not all that different.

The CO models say 65% social distancing would avoid a second peak. 55% SD would still preserve ICU capacity, but would create a second peak in late September. And if you miss the targets by a little bit, then it heads south.

FWIW, the models assume some level of increased testing but not contact tracing measures.

Quick some optimistic news about our future lives—STEP ALL OVER IT IMMEDIATELY.

[CU77]

i don't share your opinion that we slammed brakes on the economy to build capacity. and even if we did, i truly don't believe people understand the scale necessary to have that capacity.

We gave $50 billion to the airlines (who are refusing to refund the two tickets I had bought but now cannot use).

I think $50 billion is plenty enough to build, equip, and staff enough new labs to test everyone once a week.

We have the money, we have the expertise (broadly diffused). What we don't have is the leadership.

But we do have the leader we deserve.

Despite everything, Trump's approval rating holds steady at around 43%. He has an excellent chance of being re-elected. Plenty of posters here (you know they are) defend everything he says and does, without question or dissent of any kind.

Mass death of American citizens in the homeland, and the cratering of the economy and all the suffering that entails, is not enough to dissuade the cult lemmings from following their pied piper over the cliff, taking the rest of us with them.

[6ftstick]

i don't share your opinion that we slammed brakes on the economy to build capacity. and even if we did, i truly don't believe people understand the scale necessary to have that capacity.

We gave $50 billion to the airlines (who are refusing to refund the two tickets I had bought but now cannot use).

I think $50 billion is plenty enough to build, equip, and staff enough new labs to test everyone once a week.

We have the money, we have the expertise (broadly diffused). What we don't have is the leadership.

But we do have the leader we deserve.

Despite everything, Trump's approval rating holds steady at around 43%. He has an excellent chance of being re-elected. Plenty of posters here (you know they are) defend everything he says and does, without question or dissent of any kind.

Mass death of American citizens in the homeland, and the cratering of the economy and all the suffering that entails, is not enough to dislodge the cult lemmings from following their pied piper over the cliff, taking the rest of us with them.

There are posts on facebook and tweets from liberals saying—BIDEN COULD RAPE MY DAUGHTER and I'd still vote for him!

BIDEN COULD RAPE ME and I'd still vote for him. Talk about derangement.

[wgdsr]

there is a complicated calculus going on (as you well know), and the reality is this calculus doesn't have a preordained answer. many people think they know the answer, but they don't because they cannot.

Agree completely. There is no such thing as the right answer when it comes

i don't share your opinion that we slammed brakes on the economy to build capacity.

Sure we did. We're short on everything. Why do you think I've been working for coming up on two months straight making hand santizer? That was the ENTIRE point to shutting down. Capacity.

-free up beds, and allow the National Guard to build/plan place to take folks if/when hospitals are overwhelmed
-allow more stockpile of masks and other PPE. Hospitals don't have anywhere near enough p95's, let alone for folks going back to work.
-build more touchless thermometers , both handheld and stationary so building security can check for fevers
-testing, so we can find and isolate asymptomatic folks before they're allowed to spread it
-get our food supply in order, and all the shifting logistics
-more time to get our vaccine infrastructure together. If we find a cure, do we have the ability to mass produce the vaccine? I'm betting no. Someone needs to build that infrastructure.

If we haven't been doing these things? We're royally F'ed if the disease spreads because of reopening. Our current hopes are entirely pinned to the idea that this virus isn't as bad as we thought it was 2 months ago. Not exactly a comforting thought, but here's hoping....

and even if we did, i truly don't believe people understand the scale necessary to have that capacity. much less execution. willingness, we already know about.

I do. I designed and operate a factory. Brother has a BS in Industrial Engineering out of Northwestern. This is what we do as a company.

we slammed the brakes because of the unknown, and to get answers. of course not be overwhelmed. to live to fight with more tools, info (what we call "data"... hah). so much is still unknown and will only evolve, but the question next is how we use what we know. and maybe most importantly, how well our people react.

Yes. But the biggest thing is that with each passing day, Docs learn how to fight it, and keep people out of ICU. And we edge closer to a vaccine/effective treatment.

yup. on what day will we have slayed the dragon? maybe we can hold out until then.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/23/nearly- ... ities.html
that article was from a year ago. when we had one of the best employment situations going. majority less than $1,000, 25% using debt to buy necessities, 70% difficult spot if paycheck delayed a week. a survey in the last week came out, 10-12% said they don't know if they have ability to buy food within weeks.
pretty precarious situation. even with an economy "opening up", many (most?) people aren't getting rehired right away, demand (and safety) is the driver... what will that do to continued pushing off of other medical needs, depression, crime, etc.?

on capacity... we may just be talking about different things. i was and am speaking specifically about testing capability, levels, tracing. i agree we have been able to replenish many other needed areas, hopefully with what will be necessary. and seems we might have plenty of ventilators finally, hopefully they're never used.

[Peter Brown]

Obesity kills, and if you are obese, you can expect to not go back to work until you shed the pounds.

very few people want to discuss this, but obesity is 50% of the deaths here.

https://nypost.com/2020/05/05/obese-bri ... wn-lifted/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/arti ... esity.html

[wgdsr]

i don't share your opinion that we slammed brakes on the economy to build capacity. and even if we did, i truly don't believe people understand the scale necessary to have that capacity.

We gave $50 billion to the airlines (who are refusing to refund the two tickets I had bought but now cannot use).

I think $50 billion is plenty enough to build, equip, and staff enough new labs to test everyone once a week.

We have the money, we have the expertise (broadly diffused). What we don't have is the leadership.

(from bolded) if you can show me how this is at all possible, i'm all ears. company releases? i think the way to go in scale to start off with would be serological tests, which can be cheap and give results right there. if you are positive at any point, you would then maybe need a pcr test going forward to see if it's active at the time?

abbott says they can do 20 mill a month by june (end of june i'm assuming as they'll only be able to have 4 mill by the end of may). roche says they can do several multiples of that, though they are a swiss company, so unclear to whom that is going to.

test everyone once a week is 800 mill to 1.3 billion per month between serological and pcr. everyone that is positive pcr would then be taking any number of pcr tests until they are negative again (and then presumably going forward until we are sure there's immunity?).

who else can get tests out? by when?

here's a list of some of the serological companies up for production/approval:
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org ... ID-19.html
note even the best of them aren't very accurate until after 5, 6, 7 days of symptoms (what about asymptomatic?), and if you're doing it every week or so you are finding people that have had x number of days (10? 14?) to spread it to someone else. or many someone else's. and so on. that's if it's even accurate.

[CU77]

There are posts on facebook and tweets from liberals saying—BIDEN COULD RAPE MY DAUGHTER and I'd still vote for him!

Posts on facebook! Oh my!

By people with zero power. Unlike Trump.

BIDEN COULD RAPE ME and I'd still vote for him. Talk about derangement.

Trump has raped lots more women than Biden.

And of course, your response mentions not at all any of the horrible things Trump is doing to us all, such as refusing to invest in the testing regimen that is necessary to avoid hundreds of thousands of citizen deaths in a fully open economy.

But you don't care! There's an accusation against Biden!!! Never mind the ~20 similar accusations against Trump. Those don't matter, because Trump is awesome. Such a fine specimen for us all to emulate!

[Peter Brown]

So take it for what it's worth.

Been deleted from Youtube a few times now.

For whatever reason. This is what truth OR disinformation looks like:

This is fascinating, and maddening at the same time. If that lady was held by the feds and issued a gag order, with no ultimate charges brought, I do hope she sues someone.

[CU77]

if you can show me how this is at all possible, i'm all ears. company releases? i think the way to go in scale to start off with would be serological tests, which can be cheap and give results right there. if you are positive at any point, you would then maybe need a pcr test going forward to see if it's active at the time?

abbott says they can do 20 mill a month by june (end of june i'm assuming as they'll only be able to have 4 mill by the end of may). roche says they can do several multiples of that, though they are a swiss company, so unclear to whom that is going to.

test everyone once a week is 800 mill to 1.3 billion per month between serological and pcr. everyone that is positive pcr would then be taking any number of pcr tests until they are negative again (and then presumably going forward until we are sure there's immunity?).

who else can get tests out? by when?

here's a list of some of the serological companies up for production/approval:
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org ... ID-19.html
note even the best of them aren't very accurate until after 5, 6, 7 days of symptoms (what about asymptomatic?), and if you're doing it every week or so you are finding people that have had x number of days (10? 14?) to spread it to someone else. or many someone else's. and so on. that's if it's even accurate.

The point is we're currently throwing ZERO federal dollars at the problem (above baseline CDC, NIH, etc funding). Testing EVERYONE is likely not optimal, but we're currently doing zero to figure out what is. The scale of the economic problem is large enough to justify HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS, POSSIBLY TRILLIONS of federal dollars. But that takes leadership and intelligence at the top, which we completely lack.

[old salt]

Opinion article from Lawrence Summers in the Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

Similarly, investments in contact tracers for those who identified with covid-19 would have an extraordinarily high return. Suppose the total cost of a contact tracer is $400 daily, and that 300,000 tracers are needed to follow up on all newly discovered positive cases. The cost would only be $600 million a week, less than 1 percent of the cost of the Cares Act.

The same kinds of calculations make the case for much more spending on masks, on potential therapies and on pursuing production of plausible but still unproven vaccine candidates.

Amounts of money that are small compared to the economic losses we are suffering are immense relative to battling the virus. They should be the first priority going forward."

Public schools are out of session & likely closed for this school year. Are teachers still being paid ?
To earn that pay, they could serve as members of the contact tracer force.
I'm sure the teachers unions would enthusiastically support this initiative.

[a fan]

yup. on what day will we have slayed the dragon? maybe we can hold out until then.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/23/nearly- ... ities.html
that article was from a year ago. when we had one of the best employment situations going. majority less than $1,000, 25% using debt to buy necessities, 70% difficult spot if paycheck delayed a week. a survey in the last week came out, 10-12% said they don't know if they have ability to buy food within weeks.
pretty precarious situation. even with an economy "opening up", many (most?) people aren't getting rehired right away, demand (and safety) is the driver... what will that do to continued pushing off of other medical needs, depression, crime, etc.?

This is why I think the bailouts thus far are a joke....and that Congress is shorting people on purpose, to force people back to work. People can't afford to keep sheltering in place, as you point out.

We have one hope, and one hope only: that this virus turns out to be not as deadly as we thought, and we as a nation figure that out, and figure that out FAST....and people change their behaviors within a matter of weeks, if not days.

If we see massive spikes from what PeteB is describing in Florida? We're screwed. If we see no increase in cases/deaths? We're set.

As I keep saying...there are no "right" decisions because we're flying blind, because we can't shelter in place forever. Pete isn't right or wrong. He's making his best guess based on what precious little info. we have. I'll be the first to cheer if he's right, believe me!

on capacity... we may just be talking about different things. i was and am speaking specifically about testing capability, levels, tracing. i agree we have been able to replenish many other needed areas, hopefully with what will be necessary. and seems we might have plenty of ventilators finally, hopefully they're never used.

I think we are simply talking about different things, yes. We're on the same page.

[old salt]

i just read it in the larry summers piece. was it just spaghetti on the fridge, not a goal? it wasn't backed by analysis, but used to frame his argument.
harvard white paper said as much as hundreds of millions per day.

what's the goal?

Testing everyone once is a stretch, let alone everyone once a week.

Testing should be prioritized based on utility.

[a fan]

Obesity kills, and if you are obese, you can expect to not go back to work until you shed the pounds.

very few people want to discuss this, but obesity is 50% of the deaths here.

https://nypost.com/2020/05/05/obese-bri ... wn-lifted/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/arti ... esity.html

You do know that about 40% of Americans over 30 are obese, yes?

So it's not exactly what I'd call surprising that 50% of all deaths were obese. Seems like moving that from correlation to causation is a thin proposition.

Pardon the pun.

[CU77]

Testing should be prioritized based on utility.

Fine idea, but nobody is doing the utility calculations because your Dear Leader has delegated testing authority to the 50 states, totally precluding any nationwide optimization.

#MAGA

[old salt]

Distinguishing the NYC Metro Outbreak from the Rest of the Country

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/di ... he-country

From the beginning of the COVID19 epidemic in the United States the epidemic has been dominated by an outbreak in the New York City metropolitan area. That outbreak is distinct from the progression of the disease in the rest of the country. It has its own intensity, timeline, arc. The New York City metro is an integrated economic, transportation and population reality – and thus a distinct epidemiological reality – even though it is spread over three different states. So to understand the NYC metro outbreak and the progression in the rest of the country it is helpful to separate them out visually.

For point of comparison, here is the nation as a whole.

The uptick in testing which starts in the last week of April broadly lines up with the rise in cases. A closer look at individual states and the percentage of tests coming back positive suggests the growing number of cases is a mix of actual epidemic growth and the growth in testing. There’s no simple way to disaggregate these two realities.

I included the last quote to note that number of tests keep rising, so you have a difficulty knowing whether the increased number of tests are responsible for detecting cases previously not seen due to lack of testing, or actual case numbers rising.

Again the logical fallacy of using total new cases as the metric. The more you test, the more positives you discover.
Testing resources were directed to NY earlier, the rest of the country is now catching up.
The metric should be the % of new subjects tested who are positive, not the total new positives.
MSNBC, TPM, Larry Summers & other partisans are selectively choosing the metrics.

[RedFromMI]

So take it for what it's worth.

Been deleted from Youtube a few times now.

For whatever reason. This is what truth OR disinformation looks like:

There is a comment I made in the Facegram/Instabook thread about this video. She is a crackpot who was fired after ethical lapse led to a withdrawal of a paper in Science (premier science journal in US). Arrest was related to her reportedly taking proprietary information from the employer who fired her. Charges were later dropped.

Absolute disinformation from an antivaxxer.

[RedFromMI]

Distinguishing the NYC Metro Outbreak from the Rest of the Country

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/di ... he-country

From the beginning of the COVID19 epidemic in the United States the epidemic has been dominated by an outbreak in the New York City metropolitan area. That outbreak is distinct from the progression of the disease in the rest of the country. It has its own intensity, timeline, arc. The New York City metro is an integrated economic, transportation and population reality – and thus a distinct epidemiological reality – even though it is spread over three different states. So to understand the NYC metro outbreak and the progression in the rest of the country it is helpful to separate them out visually.

For point of comparison, here is the nation as a whole.

The uptick in testing which starts in the last week of April broadly lines up with the rise in cases. A closer look at individual states and the percentage of tests coming back positive suggests the growing number of cases is a mix of actual epidemic growth and the growth in testing. There’s no simple way to disaggregate these two realities.

I included the last quote to note that number of tests keep rising, so you have a difficulty knowing whether the increased number of tests are responsible for detecting cases previously not seen due to lack of testing, or actual case numbers rising.

Again the logical fallacy of using total new cases as the metric. The more you test, the more positives you discover.
Testing resources were directed to NY earlier, the rest of the country is now catching up.
The metric should be the % of new subjects tested who are positive, not the total new positives.
MSNBC, TPM, Larry Summers & other partisans are selectively choosing the metrics.

No. Look at the deaths. They are still going up for the non NY metroplex. Completely unrelated to testing issues.

[old salt]

Testing should be prioritized based on utility.

Fine idea, but nobody is doing the utility calculations because your Dear Leader has delegated testing authority to the 50 states, totally precluding any nationwide optimization.

#MAGA

...& the situation in each state (county, city & zip code) is different. CDC tracks the data.
State & local PH officials access that data & advise their govt officials.
Testing resources can be directed where needed.
Some jurisdictions will be able to move to contact tracing sooner that others, after more critical subjects have been tested.
The WH TF laid out the 3 Phase criteria.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/ ... ion-237612

[youthathletics]

So take it for what it's worth.

Been deleted from Youtube a few times now.

For whatever reason. This is what truth OR disinformation looks like:

There is a comment I made in the Facegram/Instabook thread about this video. She is a crackpot who was fired after ethical lapse led to a withdrawal of a paper in Science (premier science journal in US). Arrest was related to her reportedly taking proprietary information from the employer who fired her. Charges were later dropped.

Absolute disinformation from an antivaxxer.

Not defending the video, Did not watch it all?. She said she was not anti-vax when asked.