Monday, April 13, 2020

FWIW












FWIW (For What It's Worth): Over the last three days, the U.S. Kung Flu death totals have been, roughly, 2100, 1900, and 1600. This could be a hiccup from the weekend and Easter. Or we may have crested the hill, and begun trending downward. It's too early to tell for sure, but it's something to hope for.

It also could also simply mean that the virus has finally killed off the stupidest fraction of New York Gilligans. Because another factoid is that this has gone from being "the Chinese disease" to being "the New York Disease".

Because with a population less than half of all of Califrutopia (18M vs. 40M), and occupying a space of only 302.6 square miles (1/4 the size of Rhode Island), NYFC has 1/3 of the total U.S deaths (6,898 deaths out of 22,861 total U.S. deaths), and the entire state of NY has over 1/3 of all U.S. cases (190K out of 561K) cases.

This is somewhat due to population density (and I mean that both ways), not least of which because Governor Fredo and Hizzoner Mayor DeBozo ignored the potential of this disease to spread and kill in the Empire State and the Big Horse Apple. They decided to hold the open-air Chinese New Year festival, with thousands of people thronging to NYFC's Chinatown, with a large number of New Yorkers rubbing shoulders with relatives of visitors and returnees from ChiComia. (Genius-level move, right there.) And because mass transit - to this day - including the NYFC Subways, remain open and operating, and NYFC natives continue to throng Central Park, thus insuring two major infection loci remain productive, and passing the virus on to such a degree that there are more dead in NYFC than there are infected in the entire state of Ohio.

And Gov. Fredo is the crisis genius the Dumbocrats want to pinch hit for Dopey Joe in the nation's upcoming presidential election ritual shellacking and mole-whacking???
Apparently they couldn't find anyone else willing to strap on the political suicide vest the contest promises to become, even with promises of 72 virgins.
Things in Dumbocrat politics just aren't the same since the departure of Epstein.

So remember to wash you hands. Like Epstein, Coronavirus doesn't kill itself. h/t Peter












  
But for the earnest bozos (the sort of people who want underpants on dogs, and seatbelts on motorcycles) who think "a quarantine is only for infected people" and "we should let all the healthy people out immediately and restart this economy", the host of this party has a couple of rather pressing and pertinent points:



 
Asking for 330M friends...
 
 
 
 
Local notes: While visits, including to the ERs hereabouts, continue to run at record lows, our ICU is completely full, 100%, with intubated patients, all with fever and pneumonia. That means until some of them die, any new ones will be managed in the ER and on regular floors, which increases the risks to patients and staff for infection, and limits our availability to absorb and handle any critical patients from any cause.
 
There may not be one peak to this outbreak. There may instead be 50 peaks.
 
NYFC, by contrast, is a shell-shocked war zone. Reports from friends of my coworkers there in the middle of the outbreak's hardest hit sections are:

"Everyone is on ventilators, patients are on gurneys in all spaces and hallways, and we can't even tell who's coding, because everyone's alarms are going off all the time." 
Once this is over, those people are going to have PTSD for reals, and a lot of them are inevitably going to leave healthcare permanently.

38 comments:

ASM826 said...

I thought hand washing didn't kill it, just removed it if done properly. It would require something that disrupted the virus structure, such as vaporous hydrogen peroxide, quaternary ammonium, or a water based solution of 6% sodium hypochlorite to actually render it harmless.

Ray - SoCal said...

Daily deaths is down for the last 2 days in the US. Friday was the peak at 2037, then 1894 for Saturday, and 1564 on Easter. Hopefully this is due to improved medical care.

Infected tested positive keeps on increasing. Good news is not as fast as before. Test percentage tested positive is still 20%.

Date is from https://covidtracking.com/ that I put into a spreadsheet to tease out trends.

NY is around 50% of all deaths in the US last 3 days. Hospitalized is down, from a high of 3907 on Apr 9, to 1915 on Easter. This may be related to the holiday.

Data from our wonderful state of California is SNAFU. Deaths is probably around 3% of the US, but some days no deaths reported, and next day 110.

My guess is that LA, OC, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties are increasing number of cases, where the rest of the state is pretty flat. Which is why LA City, Riverside County, and San Bernardino County now require face coverings.

My question is where are the new infected coming from? What are the infection vectors?

Orange County is doing a nice job of providing data.
https://occovid19.ochealthinfo.com/coronavirus-in-oc

Riverside, not that great.
https://www.rivcoph.org/coronavirus

Bear Claw Chris Lapp said...

I know your busy. I am very curious about the homeless population in san franshitco. No word from the msm as I would expect anyway, have you seen or heard anything?

ThatWouldBeTelling said...

Pardon me for getting pedantic, but as amusing as the Epstein motivational poster is, and as effectively true as it is for your hands, SARS-CoV-2 will expire on its own. How long it takes depends on the surface, the more porous the worse it is, perhaps to the point of immediately tearing itself apart as too much of it tries to attach itself, and environmental conditions. It probably likes fridges, warm temps not so much (I forget about humidity). About the only thing in our favor, it being an enveloped virus and thus fragile.

My personal guideline, which is more of a guess, is leave packages or their contents alone for 7 days at room temperature. Probably overkill for American cardboard, but maybe not so much for plastic packing tape.

ThatWouldBeTelling said...

I thought hand washing didn't kill it, just removed it if done properly.

That's a general safe rule for pathogens, but enveloped viruses are uniquely fragile to soap and other agents like it, detergents, surfactants, etc. here's some text (didn't watch the video) that jumps all around and can get pretty technical, but it does explain fairly well how soap "kills" enveloped viruses, causes them to fall apart.

Starting with the envelope, which is a bit of cell membrane a virus steals as it buds off the host cell. Compare the structure of a phospholipid in it to soap, you can look at both the diagrams of the molecules, hydrophobic water hating long tail(s), hydrophilic head which loves water. See also the diagram of a micelle, which sort of looks like 1/2 of a cell membrane. Mix these two very alike things together, and they get physically mixed up, and envelope molecules join the general population of soap molecules and the outer proteins get scattered, the rest falls apart, the The End.

Aesop said...

@ASM,

Hot enough water is a big help. Antibacterial soap, too. OTOH, ordinary soap just breaks surface adhesion so you can get it off you.

@Ray,
The vectors are asymptomatic carriers, and the infected are people who didn't think they could get it. As always. A long latency period, and being able to shed virus for 5-6 weeks, is what keeps driving the bus here.

@Bear Claw,
It's in the homeless population in SF and L.A. They're trying to get away from the mass shelter model, and housing them in motels/hotels to separate the infectious from each other.

Aesop said...

@TWBT,

True, the point is to get it off your hands, so that it isn't there to get shoved into you eyes, nose, or mouth.

Also, for those noting lower apparent CFR for the US than other countries:
That's largely because other countries have expended their ability to test further, and are spending their time and money treating actual casualties.
Fewer tests + more deaths = higher apparent CFR.
China, OTOH, simply lies about deaths.
Also, no new tests there = no new cases.
QED

ThatWouldBeTelling said...

and being able to shed virus for 5-6 weeks, is what keeps driving the bus here.

I'm under the impression that people able to shed viable viruses that long are pretty rare; one PRC example I think had a half working immune system, and cleared it when given antibodies.

But I doubt we really know, the problem with figuring this out is you either need to do really strict contact tracing, which is real hard if it's reached community transmission, or you have to distinguish between a patient shedding bits of viral debris, which the RT-PCR tests can false positive detect since they're only looking for small bits of the viral genome, and viable viruses.

A proxy for the latter is being able to get sequences of the whole viral genome, presumably before you started the process it was part of a whole viable virus. I believe this can be done in BSL-2 level labs because one of the first things you do is make damned sure the viruses can't virus, maybe as soon as the swab is put into the fluid of the tube carrying it. Or the acid test of getting it grow in cell culture, as the very thorough German study of 9 mild cases did using two independent labs just to make sure. And those have to be BSL-3, of which there are only so many, one of the probably still ongoing issues with organizations creating their own tests.

Vitaeus said...

Well, I officially got tested for the CCP Flu, today. Did it at my local VA clinic, results in 2 or 3 days, maybe a week. I will update when I know...

Kitsap County WA....

Aesop said...

People keep testing negative afterwards, then a couple of weeks later, it's back again.
43 days may be the right little end of any bell curve, but it only takes one Index Patient to start the ball all over again.

Goose said...

Prior to this event if you went to NYFC you wonder wonder where the Americans went. No one speaks English as their first language and execpt for Boomers and Liberal Elites (who are never seen) there also are few white people. So effectively no American style sanatation. Taxis, Buses and every form of transportation (think about elevator buttons) foul to look at never mind touch. Hospitals except for the older doctors and other older professionals (white, black, and brown - all highly competent if you would know) no English and no North American birth. If you are a patient no one, below professional, who will understand you. Eubonics and Spanglish among are languages in NYFC.

See a line in Mexico or Central America and the people stand chest to back touching each other so no "social distancing" those habits are brought here as the American standards in social situations are rediculed and not adopted. Wait until summer comes to NYFC and the fires will be lit again as the streets will be full of people and TPTB will not be able to clear them.

This and every other disease will find a home here and continue always having new victims as this place is the goal of every unwashed of the masses.

Voice of experence, last visit 1of2020

Bill Quick said...

Re: San Francisco.

Explosive catastrophe’: 70 test positive for COVID-19 at SF homeless shelter

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/explosive-catastrophe-70-test-positive-for-covid-19-at-sf-homeless-shelter/

Anybody who knows anything about San Francisco and its homeless programs (and I do) knows that this means the entire homeless pop is riddled with the Chinavirus.

Now chew on this one: SF's Chinatown is the second largest in the US - nearly as big as Manhattan's) and is full of illegal alien slave laborers shipped in by the tongs and housed ten to a room while they work off their costs of passage in restaurants (waiters/waitresses, bussers, cooks, etc.) and other such low visibility operations.

They are mainland Chinese, and when they get sick, they don't go to the doctor (insurance? AYSM?), they go to one of the local TCM or herbalist practitioners.

Those are the people Pelosi was frolicking with back in February. She dodged a bullet there. Damn it.

Vitaeus said...

Been running a fever for over a month, so it's something.

ThatWouldBeTelling said...

True, the point is to get it off your hands, so that it isn't there to get shoved into you eyes, nose, or mouth.

Indeed. Perhaps more to the point, SARS-CoV-2 isn't the only pathogen out there, now's a really bad time to get sick with anything else. I'm now generally scrubbing my hands a lot more thoroughly, using a scrub brush with a single line of brushes on the top side for under my nails.

People keep testing negative afterwards, then a couple of weeks later, it's back again.

Really wish we had a handle on false negatives, e.g. from sampling problems, and the sort of false positives I previously mentioned, viral debris being shed where the right sequences are intact for ultra sensitive RT-PCR to detect.

And then there are the weird/extreme end of the bell curve cases as you note. With a still almost entirely naive population, there don't have to be many to really "start the ball all over again." Although in many areas maybe for now they're swamped by normal cases infecting others, which of course would be not good at all. My area clearly has had low scale community transmission for a week or more.

We're flying mostly blind, this is not comforting. And as you say, in the places that get overloaded, there's going to be a lot of PTSD. EMTs in NYC are also fully eligible.

Vitaeus said...

I think POTUS just did an amazing jedi mind trick. He had the reporters arguing with him about the limits of the President under the Constitution....with them on the limiting side....

T said...

I suspect we are going to find out that this virus was present in the USA earlier than the official time line; that there are a lot, and I mean A LOT of asymptomatic people who either never new they had it, or thought it was just a bad cold........and that the Goddamn Chinese government is STILL lying their asses off about how and when it got started.

Unknown said...

The drops in cases are most likely reporting errors. Reporting shows consistent drops on weekends, then generally on Tuesdays the backlog is filled and we're back to the same increasing pattern.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H2K1JepoVuM/XpR6tcQIt5I/AAAAAAAAAVM/sfvPb_is8QAG7e9_jAcvXDndEfrNUPVoACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/13April2020_slope_linear.PNG

Unknown said...

+ 20 for leaving healthcare. If there's a penance I was supposed to be paying I think I'm all paid up by now.

Michael said...

I am still waiting to see if any of the Democratic Big Wigs like Pelosi and Schumer manage to test positive for COVID19.

They sure have had a LOT of Public made for The Media mass meet up's over the past few months including several folks that later Tested positive for COVID 19 yet they seem unafraid of ongoing close public meetings for the Media. No social distancing or masks for them I notice....

I'm *still* wondering if this man made bioweapon has an existing vaccine and like that story of Animal Farm The Pigs said "All animals are Equal, some animals are MORE Equal than others"....

Time will tell.

Ray - SoCal said...

Thanks Aesop for your comment on it may be shedding up to 42 days. My guess was symptoms would show within 2 weeks, but, with the restrictions on testing.

A recent death in Santa Rosa of a Lady Police Detective, who was turned down twice for Coronavirus testing by Kaiser by at the time CDC Guidelines is sad. And tells you a lot of the state of testing in California.

My guess on why Riverside and San Bernardino Counties were showing increased infections, was due to stay at home not working. Traffic is only down 30%. And that is why both counties started requiring the wearing of face coverings. https://masks4all.co/ I thought had a lot of good information on why masks help.

I don't think there is a great understanding yet of how Coronavirus spreads. Germany seems to be figuring this out. I hear different things. If I understand a post of yours, basically gloves and a face mask helps a huge amount. I have heard you need to be around a person for a while to get infected, at least 10 minutes (this was a Dr. in NY). I am confused on the subject. Unfortunately I need to do some in person contact for my job, apartment maintenance, sigh...

My guess on NY is subways are huge disease vectors, and they are not doing the super cleaning as done in HK, Singapore, and Taiwan that have limited the spread. Taiwan and HK both require wearing of masks.

I went to Trader Joe's in Brea, and it was closed on Saturday with people with respirators outside. One worker was tested positive, so they are cleaning, and were to re-open Monday. I went to Mother's Market, and a Lady freaked out when I started walking toward her and yelled at me "don't I read, and do not pass her". And she turned her cart around and pushed it off in another direction.

CoronaVirus seems to hit some perfectly healthy people, and others that have obesity, breathing issues, etc. I wonder if it's how much virus they were exposed to, genetics, or ?

Bezzle said...

Kung Flu has (allegedly) killed 120,000 so far worldwide, and both cases and deaths are now post-spike (because the real deal flashed through the asymptomatic population largely unnoticed in early March, with all the testing and lockdowns occurring after the flash had spiked with herd-immunity developing; official counts are just sampling the tail).

The CDC's own website maintains that 4 million people die of pneumonia every year. 120,00 is only 3% of 4 mil, and it's obvious that places like New York state are cooking the data to even get far. Look at EuroMOMO mortality; 2020 winter flu season mortality is not worse than previous years.

-- We all got played like a bunch of chumps. They weaponized a shitty common cold and used it as excuse to justify at-whim soft-communism whenever and wherever they want, under pretext of giving one of the dozens of yearly colds and flus a "name to blame".

What a fantastic coincidence that they could use the opportunity to short the ever-livin' purple-snotted fuck out of all-time-high equities markets in mid-February to lock in a ton of long-dated put-options. Not to mention finally implement all that dreamy dictatorship they've been craving to implement with thirty years' worth of global warming hysteria.

What a bunch of suckers we are.

Robin Datta said...

Delay and exponential increase

T said...

Vitaeus said...
I think POTUS just did an amazing jedi mind trick. He had the reporters arguing with him about the limits of the President under the Constitution....with them on the limiting side...


Well, for a change the MSM reporters are right: (blind hog, acorn, etc). The various state governors do have the say-so about lifting their state restrictions.

I'm not sure why Trump would think it's his call, unless he's "Jedi mind-f***ing them", like you say.

Something else: https://underdogsbiteupwards.wordpress.com/2020/04/08/a-new-theory/
Rather interesting explanation of why the malaria drugs may be working on the Kung Flu virus.

Another interesting one is the current study of Ivermectin effectiveness on the Kung Flu. That would indeed be interesting if it does work: see your local veterinarian for treatment.........LOL.

From Norway said...

There was an antibody test for a whole department of a hospital, to check who might have had it, and how many asymptomatic carriers could be. It was found out that they are, but actually very few. Small data set, but good news.

Ominous Cowherd said...

But for the earnest bozos (the sort of people who want underpants on dogs, and seatbelts on motorcycles) who think "a quarantine is only for infected people" and "we should let all the healthy people out immediately and restart this economy",...

Quarantine is what you call isolating sick people so they can't spread it.
Quarantining the sick, and letting all the healthy people go about their business is the only sane option. It's not an option our government will allow.

IF the CDC and the FDA hadn't forbidden, then slow-rolled testing until we had community transmission and it was far too late, we could know who's sick and who isn't.
IF we knew who was sick, and who isn't, we could quarantine the sick, and make sure everybody could eat.
We're in the mess we're in because the government agencies which are supposed to safeguard us have been run by purity-spiraling social justice hobbyists who are can't be bothered to do what we paid them to do. They were more interested in not stigmatizing the Chinese, or the infected than in preventing this epidemic.

Now, since the government experts still are preventing adequate testing, the only options left to us are to all get it before we all starve, or wait until we all starve out, then get it. The only option which doesn't involve everybody getting it is to test everybody, quarantine the sick, and let everyone else get on with it. As long as tests are strictly limited, as long as you have to meet criteria to get tested, everybody is going to get the virus: sooner, or later and hungrier.

Aesop said...

@mike,

That's quite simply the most recockulous take on the current situation imaginable.

1)The CDC's "numbers" on pneumonia annually come from the same place second-hand smoke death numbers come from : from up someone's ass.
2) Most pneumonias can be cured entirely with common antibiotics. Kung Flu has no known cure, at this point. You just have to wait and see how sick you get.
3) European winter flu mortality doesn't and never has had them digging mass graves to bury the dead, and stacking people on gurneys in the hallways of hospitals because so many are trying so hard to die. Ignoring that reality is simply counterfactual horse droppings. The same is true for MYFC burying unclaimed bodies 3 deep in mass graves this spring.

Ominous Cowherd said...

Kung Flu has no known cure, at this point. You just have to wait and see how sick you get.
Are they using the chloroquine, azithromycin and zinc where you are? Everywhere the docs are using it, they're reporting near-100% cures, often within hours. I suppose we could say that the Trump Cure is causing remission rather than cure, but it'll have to do until something better comes along.

Also, if you aren't old and you aren't fat and you aren't diabetic, you're not likely to have problems. See the sorting tree in https://www.zdnet.com/article/nyu-scientists-largest-u-s-study-of-covid-19-finds-obesity-the-single-biggest-factor-in-new-york-critical-cases/

ThatWouldBeTelling said...

IF the CDC and the FDA hadn't forbidden, then slow-rolled testing until we had community transmission and it was far too late, we could know who's sick and who isn't.

Except the way our public health system, our society in general is set up, we could never use that tool the way East Asia minus the PRC did to control it. The privacy of people who test positive is infinitely more important than being able to trace their contacts from both directions, "Do you remember being around X guy?", assuming you can even ask answers from someone who's got pneumonia or is on a ventilator. Liberalism kills.

As you note this at the end of this:

We're in the mess we're in because the government agencies which are supposed to safeguard us have been run by purity-spiraling social justice hobbyists who are can't be bothered to do what we paid them to do. They were more interested in not stigmatizing the Chinese, or the infected than in preventing this epidemic.

Infectious disease control went out of fashion decades ago, perhaps when it was prevented from functioning during the AIDS crisis, and that disease was granted civil rights. They're also more interested in "banning Big Gulps and guns."

But, still, they might as well focus on something else when they're explicitly denied the old fashioned public health tools we know work. That's one reason to explain the business as usual attitude of the CDC and FDA on testing, they knew it wasn't going to make a significant difference in our response, so, eh.

Except of course for informing our leadership, which is a bug when the top dog is the Bad Orange Man. I'm still struggling to find a better answer for why the FDA demanded entities who wanted to get Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for tests other than the CDC's be able to distinguish between SARS-CoV, which died out, MERS-CoV, which isn't infecting very many people, and none in the US as far as we know, and SARS-CoV-2. It sounds like a deliberate delaying tactic, requiring them to procure a great deal more RNA from already crushed by demand BSL-3 labs to validate their tests, and of course requires more complex tests, which may have been one of the fatal flaws in the CDC test.

Now, since the government experts still are preventing adequate testing

I thought that was more a lack of testing capacity, so that's only retrospectively true. Except for coming down hard on home tests, the FDA has been very accommodating based on the inside the industry reading I've been doing. Amazingly so, allowing you to open for business before even sending in your EUA application 15 days later.

the only options left to us are to all get it before we all starve, or wait until we all starve out, then get it.

Not sure it's one of either extremes, even ignoring our host's plan which we don't have the political will to implement now. A modified, limited lockdown, a cycling of tightening and then loosening, based on hospital capacity, seems to be the current plan of many, and is at least vaguely practical when the relevant state governments aren't downright homicidal like Michigan's (e.g. child car seats are not essential). I don't know of any other states that adopted it and Vermont's ban on gardening, and we have all sorts of ways to prevent people from starving, if that's actually a goal.

And there's the end game that involves one or more safe and effective vaccines. We won't know until we reach that point if it's going to happen, thus we can't depend on it, but it's reasonably likely to happen.

Of course, that assumes we don't turn up our civil war a notch or 11 if the Blue state coastal government embargo sea shipping, which is needed for all sorts of things like plastic packaging for meat. Matt Bracken has been examining this concept, see here.

ThatWouldBeTelling said...

I don't think there is a great understanding yet of how Coronavirus spreads. Germany seems to be figuring this out. I hear different things. If I understand a post of yours, basically gloves and a face mask helps a huge amount. I have heard you need to be around a person for a while to get infected, at least 10 minutes (this was a Dr. in NY). I am confused on the subject. Unfortunately I need to do some in person contact for my job, apartment maintenance, sigh...

I think the lack of understanding is general for respiratory viruses, it's easy to figure out possibilities, but without knowing for example infective dose patterns (how many viruses can infect which types of people, and it looks like the higher the dose, the more likely a bad outcome), we're as usual flying blind. And there's a whole bunch of tests we did for example with "the common cold" which we can't do ethically for COVID-19, e.g. pay college students to kiss each other (really, and it turned out to be a poor way to transmit colds).

I personally eschew gloves almost all of the time, in part to preserve my supply of them. But if they help you not touch your face, something I trained myself to do in the 1980s after reading research on how that's a if not the #1 way to catch a cold, they might have value. The medical grade disposable ones do trap moisture, which I hate.

I'd assume it can take a lot less time than 10 minutes with an infected person. If they've filled an enclosed space with lots of droplets that are taking their time to fall to the ground....

If I was in your shoes, I'd do a half mask plus googles, or a full mask respirator, and a good decontamination protocol. Ebola provided lots of lessons in not screwing up the later.

My guess on NY is subways are huge disease vectors, and they are not doing the super cleaning....

Without universal mask wearing, super cleaning probably won't help much, as you imply in text I snipped.

RSR said...

Aesop - Curious about your thoughts on both of below.

NYC ER Doc questioning whether ventilators are being used in the wrong manner causing lung damage.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNgMagm3-NwKdfGiXp8WILg/videos

Personally, I think it's a blood disease causing lung damage, not vice versa. Gastro issues and now skin lesions/boils both seem to support that. Also, check out Hussman Foundation's inflammation report -- not a medical pro, but the preponderance of evidence seems to suggest the anti-inflammatory effects/ability to counter this virus extend above and beyond just cytokine storm prevention.

The foundation wants this report to reach ICUs and ERs (and I also trust Hussman for market analysis; his interest and philanthropy in medical research appears to be originated by a child afflicted w/ autism, which I also believe is inflammatory/auto-immune related): http://hussmanfoundation.org/articles/SARSCoV2_Therapeutics.html

RSR said...

*Specifically Hussman Foundation report states "On the weight of published research regarding SARS, MERS, ARDS, and the emerging literature on SARS-CoV-2 my impression is that one of the reasons SARS-CoV-2 has such a high fatality rate is that it is being treated in the context of pulmonology when it should also be treated in the context of rheumatology."

To save you the click-through.

RSR said...

Austin, Texas' Salvation Army downtown homeless shelter just closed after 12 people staying there tested positive. The SA shelter is just a stone's throw away from the City's homeless shelter which is still open AFAIK.

And Austin, like most liberal cities, doesn't want to discriminate against/alienate the housing-disenfranchised homeless, so both facilities are in the heart of the City's downtown entertainment district.

What an epically irresponsible decision that was in hindsight!

https://www.kut.org/post/salvation-armys-downtown-homeless-shelter-closes-after-positive-tests-arch-confirms-first-case

Ominous Cowherd said...

Except the way our public health system, our society in general is set up, we could never use that tool the way East Asia minus the PRC did to control it. The privacy of people who test positive is infinitely more important than being able to trace their contacts from both directions, ...
I think you're missing my point. We need home test kits, stupid simple ones that you can carry with you like a blood sugar test kit. Want go to work or go to the bar? Show your boss or the bouncer you test clear, right there in front of him. We have 'em for blood sugar, we have 'em for pregnancy. The FDA has shut down development of chinkypox home test kits entirely, last I heard.

There is no profit in solving a problem, but enormous profit in keeping it going.

Ominous Cowherd said...

And there's the end game that involves one or more safe and effective vaccines. We won't know until we reach that point if it's going to happen, thus we can't depend on it, but it's reasonably likely to happen.
Like the AIDS vaccine?

Any end game that goes on after our food and energy stockpiles are gone doesn't really matter. We have a very limited time that we can not go to work.

We can probably hold out another couple of weeks, maybe another couple of months, then the productive people have to go back to work. If we wait too long, it doesn't matter how many dollars they print, they won't be able to print stuff for the bucks to buy. We simply don't have the stockpiles we need to interrupt our economy very long. Even in normal times, we're just one bad harvest away from seriously screwed.

The Ruling Class imagine that making a Glorious Five Year Plan puts food on the table.

ThatWouldBeTelling said...

And there's the end game that involves one or more safe and effective vaccines. We won't know until we reach that point if it's going to happen, thus we can't depend on it, but it's reasonably likely to happen.

Like the AIDS vaccine?


Like the vaccines for measles, mumps, polio, and rubella, just to name some of the most famous RNA viruses for which we've developed safe and effective vaccines (modulo the attenuated oral polio virus, which can do a gain of function back into being pathogenic after it travels through a few people).

Please don't be dense and pretend we can't develop safe and effective vaccines, I believe I covered that quite thoroughly in the text you quote only to piss on.

Any end game that goes on after our food and energy stockpiles are gone doesn't really matter. We have a very limited time that we can not go to work.

We can probably hold out another couple of weeks, maybe another couple of months, then the productive people have to go back to work.


The "essential" productive people are still working by and large. The ones who grow the most basic important foodstuffs in my farming region, for one thing.

If we wait too long, it doesn't matter how many dollars they print, they won't be able to print stuff for the bucks to buy. We simply don't have the stockpiles we need to interrupt our economy very long. Even in normal times, we're just one bad harvest away from seriously screwed.

You ... really don't know anything about our farming system, do you? What happens as, not if, we stop burning corn for fuel (already in progress as gas consumption plummets)? What happens if we have to thin our herds and flocks so we can feed the population on the feed they consume (might already be about to happening as the supply chains to market get gummed up)? Here in my Red state farming region, our land grant college is putting out advice to minimize transmission in farming families.

Sure, it wouldn't be fun to change your diet so radically, and "Glorious Five Year Plans" generally plan to kill people like us, but we can do a whole lot to keep people fed, if we have the will, and the government doesn't get in the way too much.

Fuel, demand has crashed so much I'm not aware of it yet being perceived as that sort of problem, and I can't remember if it was here or elsewhere someone mentioned he was about to take a trip back to an offshore oil extraction platform. Although I don't know what refineries are doing now that demand for the kerosene/jet fuel fraction of their output has crashed so much more.

Be more worried about supply chain disruptions for e.g. pesticides and herbicides.

RSR said...

Unfortunately, false hope.
"U.S. coronavirus deaths set single-day record increase -Reuters tally

April 14 (Reuters) - U.S. coronavirus deaths rose by at least 2,228 on Tuesday, a single-day record, to top 28,300, according to a Reuters tally, as officials debated how to reopen the economy without reigniting the outbreak.

The United States, with the world's third-largest population, passed a second milestone on Tuesday with over 600,000 reported cases, three times more than any other country.

The previous single-day record was 2,069, set last Friday.

The increase of 2,228 deaths excludes a revision by New York City to include deaths presumed to be due to the novel coronavirus but never tested dating back to March 11.

New York City's health department said the death toll is now over 10,000, including the 3,700 deaths added on Tuesday.

Health officials have cautioned that deaths are a "lagging indicator" and do not mean that the sweeping stay-at-home restrictions are a failure. New York state and some other hard-hit areas continue to report sharp decreases in hospitalizations and patients on ventilators.

Health experts had forecast deaths would peak this week and last week but there had been hopes the worst was behind the United States when new deaths reported on Sunday and Monday were about 1,500 per day, far below last week's running tally of roughly 2,000 deaths every 24 hours, according to a Reuters tally."
https://news.trust.org/item/20200414214724-hfp57

Bezzle said...

@Aesop...
> "The CDC's "numbers" on pneumonia annually come from the same place second-hand smoke death numbers come from : from up someone's ass."

....At least they're not *further* up the ass than Covid-19 numbers, which governments have made clear there's a vested interest in inflating. They're not paying $13,000 to hospitals for "positives" for no reason, and $39,000 if a ventilator is waved under the nose. (New York state, that noted bastion of ethical government and fiscal restraint, is jizzing itself to report every death as "with" Covid.)

> "Most pneumonias can be cured entirely with common antibiotics."

Unless you're already two feet in the coffin due to an immune-system approaching complete senescence. The 2019 winter flu season was mild compared to 2017 and 2018. 2019's wheezing oldsters have just rolled into 2020 before kicking off.

> Kung Flu has no known cure, at this point. You just have to wait and see how sick you get.

The "common cold" never had a cure.

Bezzle said...

> European winter flu mortality doesn't and never has had them digging mass graves to bury the dead, and stacking people on gurneys in the hallways of hospitals because so many are trying so hard to die. Ignoring that reality is simply counterfactual horse droppings. The same is true for MYFC burying unclaimed bodies 3 deep in mass graves this spring.

( Not that Hyde Island meme...) -- Of *course* America's largest metropolitan city buries unclaimed bodies in mass graves, just like every other one does. They do it every day. More in winter. They're laid down in untreated plywood caskets that rot quick, and the dozers can hit up the same stretch of ground in another five years.

~ ~ ~ ~

This common cold flashed rapidly through the asymptomatic population, spiking in the US in late February and early March (and a week earlier in Eurasia), and fell off just as quickly. All the case and deaths counts (aside from China's early numbers) are occurring during the dwindling tail section.

If we were still in beginning phases, it'd still be going exponential in reality (i.e., besides whatever counts are being reported). But that's obviously not happening.

Did lockdowns "work"? Bollocks. No environment-capable halo virus is inhibited by such things, especially not when they're not real lockdowns in the first place. People troop back and forth carrying viral particles on their clothes, in their hair, etc with them landing and flying off again in every puff of the wind.

Masks are a government-touted placebo, same as every latest, breathlessly-announced cure or vaccine. You can't go a day without an exciting news piece maintaining that some doc in a strip-mall clinic "healed" hundreds of people -- as if any statistical sampling of thousand people with a cold and no medical attention whatsoever wouldn't have more than a few succumb, and they're the sorts who'll go to a real hospital and die there instead of at a strip-mall clinic.

~ ~ ~ ~

Everything this guy says is correct, and matches the reality of most of us getting a rotten cold in February or March that didn't go into the nose (like an influenza) and seemed like it took forever to hack all the lung gunk up, all while our wonderful governments world-wide provided every incentive to NOT say a thing.

The way you deal with respiratory outbreaks is to sequester your one-foot-in-coffin loved ones while letting everyone else mill about to develop herd-immunity as fast as possible. Then the viral strain dies out. Instead, governments are eager to keep the bug lingering around as long as possible and keep it going into autumn, because there's an 11yr-fattened bull-market to loot during their upcoming jackhammered-into-place Keynesian bear cycle.

And here we all thought that the global warming scam was the worst bit of chicanery they would float in broad daylight. We were wrong, because they learned that lying for thirty straight years has no consequences. They've merely upgraded the lie. It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, writ large, all over the world right now.