Unintended Consequences

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Running For Their Political Lives

 h/t Irons In The Fire

Too little, too late.

And one or two other things changed: banking, and trucking.

Which is also why he flipped so fast.

People are doing a permanent runner on the Canuckistani banks, which may become endless until it all crashes. Funny how once you lose trust in the entire system, and it's a trust-based system, it implodes. Turdoo was sick the day they taught that in dictator school.

Mooselini Turdoo wanted to see what happened when he drove the banking system into a brick wall, just to try out the airbags, and it turns out there were no bumpers on the car.

Oh well. Right, Turdoo?

Howzat cunning plan working out for you, eh?

And truckers?

Most of them went home, all right.

And now they're starting to refuse to haul to Ottawa.

Pisser, eh?

And "Je refuse!" is something the Canuckistani dotGov can't do anything about, unlike protests in the streets.

Gonna send the RCMP to beat up their mothers, perhaps? Or not so much?

4GW, right up the bunghole.

We're maybe about to find out how long people in Ottawa can live on rat and pigeon soup and sawdust bread. In winter. Should be an interesting experiment.

I hope nothing happens to the rail lines into the capitol. That might make things even worse.

Say, About Your 401K...

 

Jump, You Fuckers

Live by the government-sanctioned Ponzi scheme, die by the government-sanctioned Ponzi scheme.

In related news, three youngster co-workers who were fully (3x) vaxxed and boosted and caught COVID anyways this month, some for the second time, were discussing scheduling their next vaxx jab (#4!?!) on a day when they'd have a day or two off afterwards to deal with the debilitating side effects.

Can't help people too stupid to catch on after grabbing a hot stove bare-handed three times, can ya?

I'm hoping in a few years when I'm still plugging along, I don't end up treating them for pericarditis and congestive heart failure, in their mid-to-late 30s.

Embrace The Suck

h/t WRSA

Italy Lombardy region is on the brink. Retired doctors summoned, nursing students field promoted to graduation. Just under 10% of Lombardy's #COVID19 cases need ICU. 10% of doctors/nurses have already caught #coronavirus and in quarantine. Jesus.

 The head of the Lombardy's intensive care crisis unit says the health system is on the brink of collapse, intensive care being set up in hallways. By March 26 they predict ~18,000 #Covid19 cases in Lombardy, of which ~3,000 will need intensive care.

The U.S. will not  automagically do it better because "'Merica, f**k yeah!". In fact, more than likely, we'll do it worse. 50 states' licensing boards are not going to overnight drop their standards for getting a nursing license. Which license only confers on a shiny new grad the 80% likelihood than on any given day, they won't kill their patient outright. It takes six months of baby-steps precepted training to make a specialty nurse that can operate without training wheels, and 10-18 months' time practicing in that specialty to become a certified functional badass. You won't teach nurses how to function faster simply by pointing a blowtorch up their butts, and getting a license is a wee bit more involved than getting a diploma from the Wizard of Oz.

And we're not set up (and never have been), outside the 4 BL-IV level bio-hazard wards in the entire U.S., to deal with a highly infectious pandemic, nor surge capacity anywhere to 4000% of normal census.

Not. Going. To. Happen. Evah.

So what you'll get, is what I've described on these pages previously.

A FEMA Kung Flu Treatment Center in a sports auditorium, or convention center.
No isolation. lots of cots in an open-air open-grid coughatorium. Genius!
No licensed personnel (except some poor schlub or two, holding the bag and supervising an army of well-meaning amateurs).
No PPE equipment for staff, and certainly nowhere near enough of anything, but patients.

Were talking, on our best day, Crimean War-era levels of hospital care.
(Hint: Horrible hospital care put the "crime" into Crimean. 900,000 soldiers out of 1,650,000 soldiers on all sides died in it, most from disease, not combat or wounds from it.)
Care so bad Florence Nightingale had to invent modern nursing science to fix the death rate. How did America do at that? Google Civil War hospitals 6-10 years later, and Clara Barton. Same damned thing, even with years of a head start.

Because you can't pull hospital beds (just regular ones, let alone ICU beds) for millions of people out of your ass on the fly if you don't know what you're doing, and we won't do that either. By the time anyone realizes this and takes it to heart, it's going to be time for bulldozers and bonfires.

I repeat for emphasis:

Shit Mardi Gras.



This is why I keep telling you to do things so you don't get this virus. Maybe you'll be in the lucky 80%, for whom it's just a PITA. Millions of your friends, neighbors, and your family, FFS, may not be as lucky. Start working out how you and yours might start self-quarantining, before it becomes mandatory instead of an option. And if you can do so, do it.

And you should take a long, loving look at the healthcare system that was the envy of the world. Take some souvenir photos. If this goes Shit Mardi Gras, like it apparently has in Italy, it's probably going bye-bye for the duration. If not altogether and for good.

Pay close attention to those last two points at the bottom.
Math optional, but recommended. When 40% of your staff is
 symptomatic, in a viral outbreak with a 2-28 day latent
period, you're not crippled; you're DONE.

Start wrapping your heads around the increasing likelihood of those unpleasant realities.

It'll hurt less than waiting until you do a faceplant in the brick wall at 60MPH if you wait until five minutes after it's already too late.

Like the government - here, there, everywhere - is doing.

I'd love - LOVE -  if I turn out to be all wrong on this (as would half a dozen armchair sceptics with low-level IQs and government-level critical thinking skills).
And I'm frankly scared shitless of being spot-on. It's not fun to contemplate.

But I've yet to see any promising news from anywhere, and I've been sciencing the shit out this since late January, when it hit radar.

And a curmudgeonly pessimist is rarely ever disappointed in how things turn out, but occasionally pleasantly surprised.

The $64 Question

Bad, wicked, naughty, evil Zoot.

A month ago I was worried we might have 10-20 cases of Kung Flu. Instead, we have nearly 20 deaths. That means those people got it up to a month ago, from other people who didn't know they had it either.

So far, most of them are elderly, and/or with other co-morbid conditions.

But sooner or later, a relatively healthy 40- or 50-year old with no predisposition is going to croak. Maybe a teacher. Or a school janitor or lunch lady. Then everyone will lose their shit.

The school will be closed. But that person will have infected 40-200 kids, who won't be symptomatic, who will then be locked up at home to infect their whole families, and you'll have a blossom of 1000 cases. Some of whom will still be going to work infected and asymptomatic, and give it to co-workers, who'll give it to their kids, and so on, and so on.

That's how a pandemic marches onwards.
And it will be everywhere.

Take a pair of ordinary dice. There are only 36 possible combinations (6x6). So the raw chance for any roll is a hair under 3% (2.77% for the anal retentive math geek crowd). If coronavirus only has a 3% chance at being transmitted, every time you're out and about, you're rolling the dice. Except you touch things 1000 times a day, and your face about 500 times. (We'll forget about droplets, mucous membranes, and inhalation vectors from coughing and sneezing people for the moment). So, roll the dice every day, and see how long before snake eyes comes up. Remember those thousands of touches, and 500 times touching your face.

After rolling dice 164 times, your chance of getting snake eyes is 99% probable.

So being out and about, in a world becoming saturated with asymptomatic carriers, you're not just likely to get Kung Flu, you're going to get it .

For probably 80% of all persons, two weeks to a month of PITA. For some of them, they may not even know they have it! For 10-17%, you're going to the hospital. But unless you're dying, you aren't getting in. And about 3 people out of every 100 are going to die from it.

If everybody in CA gets it, that's up to 1.2M deaths. Leaving us with 38.8M swinging Richards afterwards. For Texas, it would be up to 870K dead, and 28M still there. Nationwide, up to 10M dead, and 320M still here.

That's if mortality holds at 3%, and everyone gets it. Juggling those numbers around on the slide rule gets you any answer you want.

Bad for the 10M dead, and the 20-50M hospitalized/laid out, but that's not the catastrophe, per se.

The real problem is, the only way to stop this is to send everyone - everyone - home, until 30 days after the last case gets well or dies. Even the idiots among TPTB will figure this out, after exhausting all other half-assed options (just like in China).

If you do nothing, you lose 10M outright, and 50M who can't work for months, and 100M more out for up to a month, but not all at once.

That's the problem. Either of those options screws the economy like a $2 hooker, which is why the stock market is in freefall, why Italy and China have thrown in the towel, and why Korea and the rest of Europe probably will too, before we figure it out.

And until you self-quarantine, and don't pop positive in the next month, you won't know you don't have it already either.

So the $64 Questions is, how long can you miss work, school etc., and how much money, water, food, medicine, and other necessities do you have, to stay home for what may become a mandatory extended quarantine? Will you have a job to go back to when it's over? Will anyone?

We'll leave the discussion of how you hold a valid general election for the President, 1/3 of the Senate, and the entire Congress amidst this sort of thing, for another time.


Local observation:

I note for informational purposes that the local bookseller, B and N, is suddenly light on disaster/survival/preparedness books, which had formerly just been gathering dust, and is now missing every volume on first aid. Because I check those aisles 2-3X/week, and probably know them better than store staff.

Some people are getting edjumicated, apparently.

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Also, over at WRSA, one of the He's-who-shall-not-be-named observed accurately that contrary to all dystopian fiction, the stores remain open and unburnt, rather than the popular "stripped to the walls in 48-72 hours".

Allow me to respond:

Food isn’t coming here from China (unlike N95 masks), the trucks are still running, and you’re still free to travel, and not under draconian quarantine.
Yet.

So there isn’t any national emergency, for the moment.
{cf. 1940: Phony War. Compare and contrast with Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain, a few months later.}

Once you can’t go out, it won’t matter what’s on the shelf. The average person and family has three days' food at home. (If you have more, by definition, you’re above average, just like the kids at Lake Wobegone. That also means somewhere there’s some jackass who has less than three days on hand.)

So, how long do store shelves stay stocked (and not gloriously aflame) when the trucks aren’t rolling, and Trayvon Diversity and his posse go emergency shopping after midnight, with a brick and a machete?

And what happens when people who depend on prescriptions, made from precursors that aren’t coming from China, and haven’t been for the last month or two, start getting shorted on their Rx meds, esp. the ones that
a) keep them alive, or
b) keep them sane and functional?

Just curious.
Feel free to extrapolate at your own leisure, as you see fit, considering those new data points.

A Terrible Resolve

h/t Liberty's Torch