The Next Pandemic: SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19

[TPS]

5 minutes ago, Joe in Winslow said:

 

Jim Cramer.

Really.

 

Yes, it goes to show you how the guys in the market felt. Why do you think the market tanked after the fed dropped interest rates to zero?  Trump was so giddy that Sunday and said "I'm sure wall street will be happy."  That monday was the second largest drop in history, and that afternoon trump took on a different focus in his press conference.  It's not difficult to see.

[Rob's House]

11 minutes ago, jrober38 said:

 

Sure.

 

So he didn't do anything.

 

Thanks for clarifying that. 

 

I'm not sure how that's responsive to the question.

 

You've declared unequivocally and repeatedly that the response was not handled properly wrt testing.

 

Maybe you're right, maybe not, but a conclusory statement without support isn't very persuasive.

 

Rather than criticize you, or even argue with you, I simply asked you how you thought it should have been handled. 

 

I asked you that simple open-ended question 3 times and this is the only response you've offered.

 

It's almost as if you have no idea what the available options were, but are supremely confident that your conclusion, that happens to coincide with your political predisposition, is right.

 

If you're not able to support your position, why do you hold that belief? And do you think holding such a belief is rational?

[GG]

8 minutes ago, TPS said:

If you've read anything on how testing is used, it's to identify, so you can isolate, then contain by finding everyone else that person contacted.  It's exactly what SKorea did. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-51897979/coronavirus-south-korea-seeing-a-stabilising-trend

It's 2 minutes long.

 

That would only work in the early stages of the outbreak.  It certainly wouldn't work in NY now, nor would it have worked in NY, where as recently as early March officials were telling people to g on with their lives.

7 minutes ago, jrober38 said:

 

Trump can't do any harm. It's not his fault they didn't have enough tests or do anything to build more ventilators and PPE. 

 

He locked down the border with China as if that would be enough to stop the spread. That's enough for his supporters to think he did all he could to help. 

 

It's not only about Trump you imbecile.  All officials were downplaying the threat, because that was the information that was provided to them.  Why aren't you as focused on the squabble in March between Cuomo & Diblasio whether to still hold St Patty's parade?

[jrober38]

Just now, Rob's House said:

 

I'm not sure how that's responsive to the question.

 

You've declared unequivocally and repeatedly that the response was not handled properly wrt testing.

 

Maybe you're right, maybe not, but a conclusory statement without support isn't very persuasive.

 

Rather than criticize you, or even argue with you, I simply asked you how you thought it should have been handled. 

 

I asked you that simple open-ended question 3 times and this is the only response you've offered.

 

It's almost as if you have no idea what the available options were, but are supremely confident that your conclusion, that happens to coincide with your political predisposition, is right.

 

If you're not able to support your position, why do you hold that belief? And do you think holding such a belief is rational?

 

My view is as follows.

 

In January a foreign adversary essentially declared war on the US. A pandemic was spreading in Asia, and every scientist said it would spread to the US eventually. Dr. Fauci was on TV multiple times in late January and early February sounding the alarm bells. As early as 8 weeks ago he was saying hospitals needed to prepare, that people with elective surgeries scheduled should be cancelling them, and that it would affect every corner of the US. 

 

The US should have been preparing for war. 

 

Plan for the worst, hope for the best. 

They did the opposite. 

 

They closed the border with China and called it a day, hoping that would be enough. They were totally wrong.

 

In early February Trump actually sent 18 tons of PPE to China which was a terrible decision. 

At that time, the Federal Government should have been ordering companies to begin supplying extensive quantities of PPE and they should have begun the manufacturing of ventilators as soon as there was enough data to suggest that your only hope at survival if you make it into an ICU is being hooked up to one. 

 

That's hindsight, but the response was laughable. Even when hospitals in Italy were being completely overrun with sick patients, the Federal government was still sitting around twiddling its thumbs in early March. 

They thought shutting that border would be enough. Trump said although they had 15 cases, it would soon be zero. 

 

A lot of people deserve blame. I think the only people who have done a good job all things considered are the Governors of California and Washington. They were hit first, and they acted decisively to shut things down and limit the spread. Their epidemics are mostly under control at this point, although there is obviously a chance that can change. 

 

To think that Florida is still operating without a major lock down is beyond mind boggling. It's going to get absolutely hammered by this virus in 4 weeks and its elderly population is going to be devastated. 

[billsfan1959]

8 minutes ago, TPS said:

If you've read anything on how testing is used, it's to identify, so you can isolate, then contain by finding everyone else that person contacted.  It's exactly what SKorea did. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-51897979/coronavirus-south-korea-seeing-a-stabilising-trend

It's 2 minutes long.

 

Testing is important, no doubt. However, I'm not sure the level of testing, early on, that people in this thread have been saying should have been done, was logistically achievable. How do you suggest they could have produced the number of tests necessary to test a significant portion of this population early on?  Serious question.

 

Also, if we were so far behind the curve with our response, how is it we currently are only .5% behind South Korea in deaths per confirmed cases? And, if we had conducted the same number of tests, per capita, as South Korea, wouldn't our death rate be even closer to theirs?

[BullBuchanan]

7 hours ago, Hedge said:

 

Could you please share some of these left leaning news sources that you trust?

 

 

 

I said no such thing. The gaslighting here is wild.

1 hour ago, billsfan1959 said:

 

Yet, somehow, Trump was supposed to have enough of those tests available, early on, in a nation of 330 million people, to have widespread testing across the nation....

Germany has had a reliable test available for months.

[BillsFanNC]

The CDC bureaucracy dropped the ball with the initial roll out of failed kits. This is not disputable.

 

 Rolling out PCR testing on a mass scale was never, ever going to happen. Traditionsl PCR is not a high throughput test and with the testing infrastructure available at the CDC and public health labs even if the initial kits were good there would still be large gaps. Then you saw the partnership with private labs and EUAs for alternative molecular diagnostic technologies with higher throughput than traditional PCR and still you are seeing long time to results (days to weeks).

 

The notion that this massive national testing infrastructure was going to magically appear indicates either a total lack of understanding of the logistics of sampling, transport and actually performing these tests, or you're latching on to a partisan talking point in the middle of a pandemic and national emergency. 

[Foxx]

thread.

https://twitter.com/DavidLarter/status/1244975396619198465

 

[Rob's House]

9 minutes ago, jrober38 said:

 

My view is as follows.

 

In January a foreign adversary essentially declared war on the US. A pandemic was spreading in Asia, and every scientist said it would spread to the US eventually. Dr. Fauci was on TV multiple times in late January and early February sounding the alarm bells. As early as 8 weeks ago he was saying hospitals needed to prepare, that people with elective surgeries scheduled should be cancelling them, and that it would affect every corner of the US. 

 

The US should have been preparing for war. 

 

Plan for the worst, hope for the best. 

They did the opposite. 

 

They closed the border with China and called it a day, hoping that would be enough. They were totally wrong.

 

In early February Trump actually sent 18 tons of PPE to China which was a terrible decision. 

At that time, the Federal Government should have been ordering companies to begin supplying extensive quantities of PPE and they should have begun the manufacturing of ventilators as soon as there was enough data to suggest that your only hope at survival if you make it into an ICU is being hooked up to one. 

 

That's hindsight, but the response was laughable. Even when hospitals in Italy were being completely overrun with sick patients, the Federal government was still sitting around twiddling its thumbs in early March. 

They thought shutting that border would be enough. Trump said although they had 15 cases, it would soon be zero. 

 

A lot of people deserve blame. I think the only people who have done a good job all things considered are the Governors of California and Washington. They were hit first, and they acted decisively to shut things down and limit the spread. Their epidemics are mostly under control at this point, although there is obviously a chance that can change. 

 

To think that Florida is still operating without a major lock down is beyond mind boggling. It's going to get absolutely hammered by this virus in 4 weeks and its elderly population is going to be devastated. 

 

Okay, so you're saying that we could have been more prepared, and perhaps that's true, but the question was what should have been done wrt testing.

[B-Man]

 

 Estimates of the severity of coronavirus disease 2019: a model-based analysis.

 

This is a more complicated mathematical model for what people have been reading in the medical literature if they read past the headlines. See, for example, Anthony Fauci in the New England Journal of Medicine:

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%.

 

This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

 

 

 

.

[Warren Zevon]

6 minutes ago, Foxx said:

thread.

https://twitter.com/DavidLarter/status/1244975396619198465

 

 

What a story - thanks for sharing. Heartbreaking

[IDBillzFan]

2 hours ago, 3rdnlng said:

This is from 2 1/2 weeks ago. 

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/drive-through-coronavirus-tests-states-2020-3

 

Funny how a simple Google search proves you wrong.

 

Unfortunately, the disruption caused globally by this virus, coupled with the batschittcrazy media pissing themselves to see who can scare Americans faster, is falling right into the hands of the American left, who absolutely LOVE to take something out of context and repeat it as far and often as possible so it becomes a new truth.

 

I'll say it again...if you're watching what is happening in the world right now and your instincts are to spend every minute casting blame and shouting what SHOULD have been done, you're part of the problem, not the solution. Sit down, shut up and let people who WANT to fix this issue start fixing it.

 

Blame does nothing but make the weak feel better about themselves.

[billsfan1959]

27 minutes ago, BullBuchanan said:

I said no such thing. The gaslighting here is wild.

Germany has had a reliable test available for months.

 

South Korea and Germany did a good job testing early. Germany has the added advantage of having far more ICU beds than any other country in Europe. However, for the US to equal the level of testing that Germany (roughly 1/4 of the population of the US) and South Korea (roughly 1/7 of the population of the US) we would have had to have almost 2 million tests being conducted fairly early. I'm not sure that would have been logistically possible. Even Germany, who, as you say has had a reliable test available is still only up to less than 500,000 tests per week after approx 3 weeks of testing.

 

Even as important as testing is in identifying cases, stopping the spread, and early intervention, the death rate (per confirmed cases, since we don't have total cases) is 1.1% in Germany and 1.6% in South Korea. In the US, it is 2.1%. If we were at the same number of tests, per capita, as each of those countries, our numbers would be even closer to theirs, and better than any other country with a significant number of cases..

 

Do I think we could have done more, and can still do more? Yes. However, I don't believe the level of criticism I am hearing from some people is warranted or reasonable.

Edited April 1, 2020 by billsfan1959

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

28 minutes ago, jrober38 said:

 

Trump can't do any harm. It's not his fault they didn't have enough tests or do anything to build more ventilators and PPE. 

 

He locked down the border with China as if that would be enough to stop the spread. That's enough for his supporters to think he did all he could to help. 

The point being made consistently here is not that Trump is never wrong---that's simply your interpretation.  The argument you seem to make is that availability of testing is the only major problem, and that's silly. 

 

Interestingly, California received some props from Dr. Birx for aggressively shutting down San Francisco earlier in the fight, while suggesting NY and NJ were behind the curve on that sort of action.  

 

I agree that widespread availability to test would have been extremely helpful in this situation. Should Cuomo have shut down NYC and was it a mistake to encourage business as usual and leave people to figure out their own personal Covid-19  journey? 

[B-Man]

 

 

COVID19 update, March 31, 2020: a brief look at Belgium.

 

 

 

.

[Boatdrinks]

10 hours ago, BullBuchanan said:

That's disingenuous. "Cuomo" didn't release them, DOCCS did. Second of all, they weren't released from sex offender crimes, they were released from being in jail due to technical parole violations. Do I think they should be free? No, but painting it the way you are is the typical sensationalism that we've come to expect from the right wing and their media.

Cuomo, Blas, and the DOCCS are in lockstep on this. AC pushed for the bail reform earlier this year. It’s part of their agenda. 

[123719bwiqrb]

4 minutes ago, B-Man said:

 

 

COVID19 update, March 31, 2020: a brief look at Belgium.

 

 

 

.

Very encouraging they are pushing for a vaccine now - but it will still take >9 months to hit the street if everything goes correctly.

[BullBuchanan]

3 hours ago, billsfan1959 said:

 

Hey Doc, It caught everyone off guard; however, the data shows this country has handled it better than virtually any other country out there. You saw the data I put in the post you quoted. Using the same countries, If you look at the data below you will see the date each country surpassed the number of cases equal to .002 of the population. If you look at the next fourteen days for each of the countries, you will see the United States has the 2nd highest percentage in the increase in confirmed cases, because we did more testing during that that period than any other country. Even though we had the 2nd highest percentage increase in confirmed cases, we had the 2nd lowest increase in percentage of deaths (just behind Germany). That tells me this administration and everyone at the state and city levels have been doing all we could have asked from them, given the circumstances. Hindsight truly is 20/20.

 

Country	Population	Date Reached .002 (of total population) Cases	Death rate at .002 cases	Cases at 14 days from .002	Cases per Capita at 14 days from .002	Deaths at 14 days from .002	Death rate at 14 days from .002	14 day rise in death rate from .002
Italy	60000000	3/1/2020	2.41%	24747	0.0412%	1809	7.31%	4.90%
Spain	46000000	3/9/2020	2.44%	35136	0.0764%	2311	6.58%	4.14%
France	65000000	3/9/2020	2.12%	19856	0.0305%	860	4.33%	2.21%
Belgium	11000000	3/9/2020	0.00%	3743	0.0340%	88	2.35%	2.35%
Germany	83000000	3/11/2020	0.15%	37323	0.0450%	206	0.55%	0.40%
UK	67000000	3/15/2020	2.52%	19522	0.0291%	1228	6.29%	3.77%
United States	331000000	3/18/2020	1.60%	189633	0.0573%	4081	2.15%	0.55%

 

 

Gary, see above.

How do you get there?  We lead the world in cases and the growth here is still exponential. We haven't even gotten started with how bad this is going to hurt and it's time to throw on the flight suit and Mission Accomplished banner? We call the curve below Hockey Stick Growth and is usually something good, like the price of Amazon stock. This is kinda like that, if there was free two day shipping that created dead Americans.

Two days ago we had 100k cases, and no we're up to 180k. And it has to be repeated, they aren't even testing most people that likely have the disease. In some ways maybe that could actually be good for the data. It's possible 10s of millions are already infected with many being asymptomatic. We can count on there being 360k cases bad enough to warrant a test no one can get right now, and a million of those within a week.



We have distinct advantages that very few other countries on earth have with respect to our natural geographic isolation, infrastructure and population density. Canada has many of those same advantages and their results are far better than ours so far. South Korea blew our response out of the water and they are massively disadvantaged in terms of proximity to the source and population density.

4 minutes ago, Boatdrinks said:

Cuomo, Blas, and the DOCCS are in lockstep on this. AC pushed for the bail reform earlier this year. It’s part of their agenda. 

This isn't bail reform though, and the bail reform should be universally touted as a good thing, unless you believe the law should apply more harshly to the poor and less harshly to those of means.

Edited April 1, 2020 by BullBuchanan

[Boatdrinks]

4 minutes ago, BullBuchanan said:

How do you get there?  We lead the world in cases and the growth here is still exponential. We haven't even gotten started with how bad this is going to hurt and it's time to throw on the flight suit and Mission Accomplished banner? We call the curve below Hockey Stick Growth and is usually something good, like the price of Amazon stock. This is kinda like that, if there was free two day shipping that created dead Americans.



We have distinct advantages that very few other countries on earth have with respect to our natural geographic isolation, infrastructure and population density. Canada has many of those same advantages and their results are far better than ours so far. South Korea blew our response out of the water and they are massively disadvantaged in terms of proximity to the source and population density.

This isn't bail reform though, and the bail reform should be universally touted as a good thing, unless you believe the law should apply more harshly to the poor and less harshly to those of means.

I see you’ve bought their BS on the bail reform too. Not surprised. There’s an easy way to stay out of jail. 

[BullBuchanan]

1 minute ago, Boatdrinks said:

I see you’ve bought their BS on the bail reform too. Not surprised. There’s an easy way to stay out of jail. 

What BS is that exactly? I didn't buy anything, it's common sense.