Coronavirus

[RichardGibbons]

I just got a phone survey from the (Canadian) federal government.

 

The first question was, "What do you think the Federal government should be focused on today?"  (My wife suggested I should've answered, "They should be focused on opening more dog parks.")

 

The other questions were basically asking whether I though the government was doing well, whether I'd heard of what the government had done, which things I though were the most important, and how stressful various aspects of the government response were to me. One of the questions was basically, "Are you stressed that you can't go to hockey games right now?"

 

It did make me wonder about the degree to which the government cares the perception of its actions relative to the value of its actions.  Too bad there wasn't a question on that....

[Jurgis]

After the high risk group have been identified, please also add a bailout package for them until vaccine has been found. Easy peasy, recession solved.

 

No, I'd say just kill them all. They gonna die anyway.

 

A lot of problems solved.

 

 

[cubsfan]

Damn - just read WHO has a $2B/yr annual budget!

 

What the hell do they do - and can't get stuff like this right!

[Investor20]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-05/taiwan-s-advance-on-who-in-covid-19-shows-its-place-in-world

 

"Forced to develop its own health vigilance systems, Taiwan, with a population of 23 million, took a separate approach to handling the virus.

 

When the WHO recommended against restrictions on travelers from China, officials in Taiwan implemented bans from the original affected areas and later widened them.

 

As the WHO advised that masks weren’t necessary, Taiwan ramped up production and issued them to citizens.

 

As the pandemic spreads around the world, Taiwan has recorded just 339 cases and 5 deaths, compared to official figures of more than 82,000 cases  in China and more than 10 times that number globally. The vast majority of Taiwan’s cases are of citizens returning from Europe or the Americas."

[John Hjorth]

Politico - David M. Herszenhorn & Sarah Wheaton [April 7^th & 8^th 2020] : How Europe failed the coronavirus test.

 

Devastating criticism ... - plain and simple.

 

- - - o 0 o - - -

 

In Denmark, we're trying to improve :

 

Rokokoposten [April 8^th 2020] : Yearly clamydia epidemic in the media industry avoided after cancellelation of the People's Meeting (from the future archive, august 2020).

[Liberty]

Attempting to pass the buck:

 

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1247540701291638787

 

100% will work on some people.

 

Reddit comment:

 

> “They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known, and they should have known, and they probably did know,” Trump told reporters at a White House press briefing, suggesting the WHO failed to sufficiently warn the global community about the virus.

 

> “We’re going to be looking into that very carefully, and we’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO,” Trump continued. “We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it, and we’re going to see. It’s a great thing if it works, but when they call every shot wrong, that’s not good.”

 

As a reminder: The WHO warned the world that the global risk from SARS-CoV-2 was high on January 23rd. The WHO declared a global health emergency on January 30th.

 

Trump on the other hand tried to minimize the threat of the new coronavirus for weeks in statement after statement well into March. Just a few weeks ago, he still accused the WHO of exaggerating the threat:

 

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-statements-about-the-coronavirus/

 

6 days after the WHO declared it a pandemic, on March 17th, Trump changed course and claimed “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

[Liberty]

Thread on serum antibody tests:

 

[Dalal.Holdings]

Attempting to pass the buck:

 

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1247540701291638787

 

100% will work on some people.

 

Reddit comment:

 

> “They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known, and they should have known, and they probably did know,” Trump told reporters at a White House press briefing, suggesting the WHO failed to sufficiently warn the global community about the virus.

 

> “We’re going to be looking into that very carefully, and we’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO,” Trump continued. “We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it, and we’re going to see. It’s a great thing if it works, but when they call every shot wrong, that’s not good.”

 

As a reminder: The WHO warned the world that the global risk from SARS-CoV-2 was high on January 23rd. The WHO declared a global health emergency on January 30th.

 

Trump on the other hand tried to minimize the threat of the new coronavirus for weeks in statement after statement well into March. Just a few weeks ago, he still accused the WHO of exaggerating the threat:

 

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-statements-about-the-coronavirus/

 

6 days after the WHO declared it a pandemic, on March 17th, Trump changed course and claimed “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

 

Trump changed course and claimed “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

 

LOL. Fortunately some people have very short attention spans so these kind of statements have 100% efficacy.

 

Trump called it a "hoax" on Feb 29 and minimized the threat (comparing to the Flu and estimating "zero cases") well into March.

 

WHO is a global org, yet there are countries that have done very well with this outbreak such as S Korea, so clearly national leaders can drive the outcomes in countries. No one here believes the WHO manages things like our CDC/FDA, testing, etc do they?

 

WHO did not do a good job that being said -- waiting so long to declare a pandemic, hesitating on masks, and mid January "no confirmed human-human" (i.e. "absence of evidence"), but I never heard them refer to it as a "hoax", and certainly not at the end of February.

 

Trump gonna pass the buck to whoever it sticks to: local/state officials below or multinational bodies above. It works like a charm on many people.

 

Trump gets asymmetry with his followers: someone else gets the downside (Obama, WHO, Cuomo, De Blasio, Sessions, etc), while he gets all the upside. A risk-free trade: the perfect arbitrage.

[zippy1]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-05/taiwan-s-advance-on-who-in-covid-19-shows-its-place-in-world

 

"Forced to develop its own health vigilance systems, Taiwan, with a population of 23 million, took a separate approach to handling the virus.

 

When the WHO recommended against restrictions on travelers from China, officials in Taiwan implemented bans from the original affected areas and later widened them.

 

As the WHO advised that masks weren’t necessary, Taiwan ramped up production and issued them to citizens.

 

As the pandemic spreads around the world, Taiwan has recorded just 339 cases and 5 deaths, compared to official figures of more than 82,000 cases  in China and more than 10 times that number globally. The vast majority of Taiwan’s cases are of citizens returning from Europe or the Americas."

Being a Taiwanese, here people believe that in this corona virus outbreak, the more a government believes what the official Chinese government says, the more its citizens will suffer.

 

The health minister leading the Taiwanese COVID task force was quoted saying that "what they (CCP) did not allow us to see really worried us. So We (the Taiwanese government) kicked the initiatives into high gears."

 

 

[cubsfan]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-05/taiwan-s-advance-on-who-in-covid-19-shows-its-place-in-world

 

"Forced to develop its own health vigilance systems, Taiwan, with a population of 23 million, took a separate approach to handling the virus.

 

When the WHO recommended against restrictions on travelers from China, officials in Taiwan implemented bans from the original affected areas and later widened them.

 

As the WHO advised that masks weren’t necessary, Taiwan ramped up production and issued them to citizens.

 

As the pandemic spreads around the world, Taiwan has recorded just 339 cases and 5 deaths, compared to official figures of more than 82,000 cases  in China and more than 10 times that number globally. The vast majority of Taiwan’s cases are of citizens returning from Europe or the Americas."

Being a Taiwanese, here people believe that in this corona virus outbreak, the more a government believes what the official Chinese government says, the more its citizens will suffer.

The health minister leading the Taiwanese COVID task force was quoted saying that "what they (CCP) did not allow us to see really worried us. So We (the Taiwanese government) kicked the initiatives into high gears."

 

Excellent and very interesting feedback.

[Liberty]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/americans-are-paying-the-price-for-trumps-failures/609532/

 

This is long, but for those who are sick of seeing history being rewritten before their eyes and don't like being gaslighted, here's the timeline of what actually happened:

 

Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.

 

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.

 

The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault. [...]

 

The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed in mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the first of a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks between January 3 and March 21.

 

Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth. [...]

 

This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China. Instead, the United States will suffer more than any peer country. [...]

 

Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.

 

At a session with state governors on February 10, Trump predicted that the virus would quickly disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February 14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”

 

Senator Chris Murphy left a White House briefing on February 5, and tweeted:

 

"Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now." [...]

 

Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today. By the end of January, eight cases of the virus had been confirmed in the United States. Hundreds more must have been incubating undetected.

 

On January 31, the Trump administration at last did something: It announced restrictions on air travel to and from China by non-U.S. persons. This January 31 decision to restrict air travel has become Trump’s most commonly proffered defense of his actions. “We’ve done an incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said on February 27. “We closed those borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,” he repeated on March 4. Trump praised himself some more at a Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the next day. “As soon as I heard that China had a problem, I said, ‘What’s going on with China? How many people are coming in?’ Nobody but me asked that question. And you know better than—again, you know …  that I closed the borders very early.”

 

Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.

 

On January 31, the same day the United States announced its restrictions, Italy suspended all flights to and from China. But unlike the American restrictions, which did not take effect until February 2, the Italian ban applied immediately. Australia acted on February 1, halting entries from China by foreign nationals, again ahead of Trump... he ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China [...]

 

Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut. If anybody missed the message, the firing of Captain Brett Crozier from the command of an aircraft carrier for speaking honestly about the danger facing his sailors was a reminder. There’s a reason that the surgeon general of the United States seems terrified to answer even the most basic factual questions or that Rear Admiral John Polowczyk sounds like a malfunctioning artificial-intelligence program at press briefings. The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him. [...]

 

“We have contained this,” Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC on February 24. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight. We have done a good job in the United States.” Kudlow conceded that there might be “some stumbles” in financial markets, but insisted there would be no “economic tragedy.” [...]

 

On February 28, then–White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, near Washington, D.C.:

 

"The reason you’re ... seeing so much attention to [the virus] today is that [the media] think this is gonna be what brings down this president. This is what this is all about. I got a note from a reporter saying, “What are you gonna do today to calm the markets.” I’m like: Really, what I might do today to calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours ... This is not Ebola, okay? It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS."

 

That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.” [...]

 

The clearest statement of that knowledge was expressed on February 28. That day, Trump spoke at a rally in South Carolina—his penultimate rally before the pandemic forced him to stop. This was the rally at which Trump accused the Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus as “their new hoax.” [...]

 

By February 28, somebody in his orbit seemed to already be projecting 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Trump remembered the number, but refused to believe it. His remarks are worth revisiting at length:

 

"But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people [sick] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early; we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement.

 

So a statistic that we want to talk about—Go ahead: Say USA. It’s okay; USA. So a number that nobody heard of, that I heard of recently and I was shocked to hear it: 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? Thirty-five thousand, that’s a lot of people. It could go to 100,000; it could be 27,000. They say usually a minimum of 27, goes up to 100,000 people a year die.

 

And so far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared. It doesn’t mean we won’t, but think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode."

 

The lack of testing equipment? On March 13, Trump passed that buck to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration.

 

Were ventilators desperately scarce? Obtaining medical equipment was the governors’ job, Trump said on a March 16 conference call.

 

Did Trump delay action until it was far too late? That was the fault of the Chinese government for withholding information, he complained on March 21.

 

On March 27, Trump attributed his own broken promises about ventilator production to General Motors, now headed by a woman unworthy of even a last name: “Always a mess with Mary B.”

 

Masks, gowns, and gloves were running short only because hospital staff were stealing them, Trump suggested on March 29.

 

Was the national emergency medical stockpile catastrophically depleted? Trump’s campaign creatively tried to pin that on mistakes Joe Biden made back in 2009.

 

At his press conference on April 2, Trump blamed the shortage of lifesaving equipment, and the ensuing panic-buying, on states’ failure to build their own separate stockpile.

 

 

[LC]

Thanks Liberty. Your username is especially relevant in such case :D

[Liberty]

And what genius you are!  These candidates had EVERYTHING to say about what the President does right and wrong.

They cover all the critical issues of Presidency - but of course, in February - they did not give a rat's ass about Coronavirus.

 

They have opinions about all the critical issues facing the country like diversity, green new deal, failed impeachment, crooked Hunter Biden,

and political correctness.

 

You should watch it - you'd be real proud.  NO BODY GAVE TWO SHITS ABOUT CV - NOT EVEN THE MEDIA. NOT ONE FRICKIN' QUESTION!

 

What hypocrisy! TODAY THEY ARE ALL EXPERT SECOND GUESSERS.

 

Just like the media.

 

Oh, yeah, the candidates ....."It's not their job" .... BUT THEY WANT TO BE PRESIDENT.

 

They really "nailed" the "issues" those critical thinkers...

 

Hilarious

 

Oh, and btw, Joe Biden op-ed about it in January:

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/27/coronavirus-donald-trump-made-us-less-prepared-joe-biden-column/4581710002/

[cubsfan]

Politico - David M. Herszenhorn & Sarah Wheaton [April 7^th & 8^th 2020] : How Europe failed the coronavirus test.

 

Devastating criticism ... - plain and simple.

 

 

That article on Europe is devastating...Thanks John

[Liberty]

https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/body-mass-and-risk-from-covid-19-and-influenza/

 

"Body Mass and Risk from COVID-19 and Influenza"

 

 

[Liberty]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/07/trump-dismantled-the-very-jobs-meant-to-stop-the-covid-19-epidemic-173347

 

"The government agencies designed to protect us are riddled with vacancies and temporary officials. No wonder we’re facing a catastrophe."

 

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump’s routine, day-to-day mismanagement of the government has left both organizations—the very entities we tasked as a nation to prevent the next 9/11—riddled with vacancies and temporary officials as the novel coronavirus rapidly spread from a small blip in China to a global health and economic catastrophe. In fact, the four top jobs at DHS and ODNI have all been filled with temporary acting officials for literally every day that Covid-19 has been on the world stage. [...]

 

Yet Trump has churned through officials overseeing the very intelligence that might have helped understand the looming crisis. At Liberty Crossing, the headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government will have been without a Senate-confirmed director for eight months as of next week; last summer, Trump accepted the resignation of Dan Coats and forced out the career principal deputy of national intelligence, Sue Gordon. Coats’ temporary stand-in, career intelligence official Joseph Maguire, then served so long that he was coming close to timing out of his role—federal law usually lets officials serve only 210 days before relinquishing the acting post—when Trump ousted him too, as well as the acting career principal deputy. In their place, at the end of February—weeks after the U.S. already recorded its first Covid-19 case—Trump installed U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as his latest acting director, the role that by law is meant to be the president’s top intelligence adviser. Grenell has the least intelligence experience of any official ever to occupy director’s suite.

 

This Friday, the role of Homeland Security secretary will have been vacant for an entire year, ever since Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out over Trump’s belief she wasn’t tough enough on border security. DHS has numerous critical roles in any domestic crisis, but its acting secretary, Chad Wolf, has fumbled through the epidemic; in February, Wolf couldn’t answer seemingly straightforward questions on Capitol Hill from Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana about the nation’s preparedness—what models were predicting about the outbreak, how many respirators the government had stockpiled, even how Covid-19 was transmitted. “You’re supposed to keep us safe. And you need to know the answers to these questions,” Kennedy finally snapped at Wolf. Wolf has been notably absent ever since from the White House podium during briefings about the nation’s epidemic response

 

etc etc

[alwaysdrawing]

By my calculation, PA unemployment is up to 22.6% as of today.  PA is one of the few states that publishes daily unemployment claims data.

 

https://www.uc.pa.gov/COVID-19/Pages/UC-Claim-Statistics.aspx

 

Feb unemployed: 308,900

New Covid unemployment claims: 1,179,326

Total unemployed: 1,488,200

Total PA labor force:  6,558,000

Unemployment rate: 22.6%

 

If other states are proportional, there would be an additional 4+ million unemployment claims for last week when the data is reported on Thursday.  Obviously that's an extrapolation from one state, however claims in certain states (notably TX, FL) have been low the past few weeks due to issues with those states filing systems.  I would guess 4 million +- 1 million is a pretty good guess for last week, and claims are still not slowing.

 

In the last two days, unemployment has risen in PA by 1.6%....in two days.

 

PA added another 0.4% yesterday, bringing the total to over 23% unemployment.

[cubsfan]

By my calculation, PA unemployment is up to 22.6% as of today.  PA is one of the few states that publishes daily unemployment claims data.

 

https://www.uc.pa.gov/COVID-19/Pages/UC-Claim-Statistics.aspx

 

Feb unemployed: 308,900

New Covid unemployment claims: 1,179,326

Total unemployed: 1,488,200

Total PA labor force:  6,558,000

Unemployment rate: 22.6%

 

If other states are proportional, there would be an additional 4+ million unemployment claims for last week when the data is reported on Thursday.  Obviously that's an extrapolation from one state, however claims in certain states (notably TX, FL) have been low the past few weeks due to issues with those states filing systems.  I would guess 4 million +- 1 million is a pretty good guess for last week, and claims are still not slowing.

 

In the last two days, unemployment has risen in PA by 1.6%....in two days.

 

PA added another 0.4% yesterday, bringing the total to over 23% unemployment.

 

Not sure what the unemployment rate was before all this in PA.

 

Let's say the average age of CV death is around 80

total coronavirus death count 240 today

current unemployed    1,500,000  or 23%

 

so for every 1 CV death - there are 6250 unemployed in PA

 

I'd love to hear your "adjustment" to get to the true figure and cost

 

And what is the real tragedy - the number of unemployed (destroying lives) or the tragic early death of someone due to having CV?

 

The number I'd like to get to : for every CV death - how many are newly unemployed in PA?

 

 

 

[cwericb]

In his own words....

 

Jan. 22: Trump makes his first comments about the coronavirus, saying he is not concerned about a pandemic. “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. … It’s going to be just fine.”

 

Jan. 30: Trump says of the threat: “We think it’s going to have a very good ending for it. So that I can assure you.”

 

Feb. 7 (tweet): ”… as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone.”

 

Feb. 10: “I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine.”

 

Feb. 14: “We have a very small number of people in the country, right now, with it. It’s like around 12. Many of them are getting better. Some are fully recovered already. So we’re in very good shape.”

 

Feb. 19: “I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.”

 

Feb. 24 (tweet): “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

 

Feb. 25: “You may ask about the coronavirus, which is very well under control in our country. We have very few people with it, and the people that have it are … getting better. They’re all getting better. … As far as what we’re doing with the new virus, I think that we’re doing a great job.”

 

Feb. 26: “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low. … When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

 

Feb. 28: “I think it’s really going well. … We’re prepared for the worst, but we think we’re going to be very fortunate.”

 

Feb. 28: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

 

Feb. 28: “This is their new hoax.”

 

Feb 29: “Tremendous amounts of supplies are already on hand. We have 43 million masks, which is far more than anyone would have assumed we could have had so quickly, and a lot more are coming.”

 

March 4: “Some people will have this at a very light level and won’t even go to a doctor or hospital, and they’ll get better. There are many people like that.”

 

March 6: “Anybody that wants a test can get a test.”

 

March 9 (tweet): “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

 

March 10: “And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

 

March 11: “I think we’re going to get through it very well.”  “The vast majority of Americans: The risk is very, very low. Young and healthy people can expect to recover fully and quickly if they should get the virus.”

 

March 12: “It’s going to go away. ... The United States, because of what I did and what the administration did with China, we have 32 deaths at this point … when you look at the kind of numbers that you’re seeing coming out of other countries, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it.”

 

March 13: “We’ll have the ability to do in the millions (tests) over a very, very quick period of time.”

 

March 15: “This is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.”

 

March 16: “If you’re talking about the virus, no, that’s not under control for any place in the world.”

 

March 17: “I’ve always known this is a, this is a real, this is a pandemic … I’ve felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

 

March 24:"I give it two weeks..." "So, I think Easter Sunday, and you'll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time. And it's just about the timeline that I think is right,"

[Ross812]

The executive branch is going to get an earful anytime there is a catastrophe. You cannot make everyone happy and there is always something that could have been done better.

 

The travel restrictions were a good call. I don't think anyone can really defend the rest of the response though. When China shut down Wuhan and shuttered much of their economy in January, that was a huge wake up call that this could be a big deal. If the message from the top have been 20% of what it was in the last two weeks in mid January, we would be in a very different place.

 

The country follows the leader and we didn't have buy in from a lot of people until Trump changed his tone a couple weeks ago. Our ability to respond was hollowed out; some of that responsibility lies on past administrations who could have taken SARS more seriously like Taiwan or Korea. The rhetoric, tweets, Fox <-> Trump relationship no doubt influenced millions of people and has lead to loss of life. Those lives are on the executive.

[Liberty]

Not sure what the unemployment rate was before all this in PA.

 

Let's say the average age of CV death is around 80

total coronavirus death count 240 today

current unemployed    1,500,000  or 23%

 

so for every 1 CV death - there are 6250 unemployed in PA

 

I'd love to hear your "adjustment" to get to the true figure and cost

 

And what is the real tragedy - the number of unemployed (destroying lives) or the tragic early death of someone due to having CV?

 

It's a disaster either way, but the numbers are not independent of each other. There's fewer deaths because people are staying home. The way to mitigate both deaths and economic impact was to have a better response when this was small, but that ship has sailed.

 

As Bill Gates says, this isn't as simple as "deciding" to reopen on a dime. People won't ignore that "pile of bodies in the corner" and just get back to their lives as if nothing is going on, this needs to be brought under control.

 

This isn't just affecting those who are 80, as is quite clear when you look anywhere. Dying isn't the only thing that can go wrong. Having double pneumonia with high fever for days isn't exactly a walk in the park and can leave permanent damage to both heart and lungs, and overwhelming medical capacity means people die from other causes that could've been saved, so it compounds.

[Cigarbutt]

Politico - David M. Herszenhorn & Sarah Wheaton [April 7^th & 8^th 2020] : How Europe failed the coronavirus test.

Devastating criticism ... - plain and simple.

- - - o 0 o - - -

In Denmark, we're trying to improve :

Rokokoposten [April 8^th 2020] : Yearly clamydia epidemic in the media industry avoided after cancellelation of the People's Meeting (from the future archive, august 2020).

Thinking out loud. Probably best to disregard. I wonder what is most devastating?

 

-The strength of the article

  -We can learn from past mistakes

  -We can learn from contemporaneous mistakes of others

  -The CV has been and will be the cause of excess mortality, especially in certain specific groups

 

-Questions from the article

  -This outbreak had significant characteristics (R0 etc) that made previous strategies (MERC etc) only partially applicable to this new outbreak

  -Given the huge uncertainty as this thing developed, an echo-chamber approach may not be ideal in terms of public policy (evolutionary perspective)

  -It's still unclear how the extent of lock-down had an effect (flattening) outside of basic individual reflexes (physical distance, washing hands, careful what

    people touch)

  -When comparing similar countries (histories, institutions, social customs), variations in case and death rates are visible, especially in the short term, and

    some of these deviations can be explained by poor policies, political bickering etc but some of these deviations can also be explained by historical path-

    dependency, health profile of the host at large and resilience of the domestic health care system

  -When looking at mortality rates overall (being established in Europe and similar picture developing in the US and Canada) with a longer term perspective,

    rates are down, Covid-related peaks often don't appear significant (apart from some hot spots) and this raises the difficult question, which is relevant, as to

    why similar extensive measures have not been taken before for chronic and recurrent flu episodes

 

A separate link was included about Chlamydia in Denmark. I think this may be relevant? Chlamydia has been on the rise in developed countries (also Denmark) and many people have tried to find explanations (aren't we in an era progress after all?). Some say it's because of more tests (maybe), better tests (better detection) or poor tests (high false positives). Some say it's because risk sexual behavior is on the rise. Some think it's because of rising Chlamydia resistance to antibiotics (including azithromycin, one of the wonder drugs suggested for CV). There is also some solid evidence backing another theory called arrested immunity hypothesis as early treatment may interrupt the natural immune response enhancing population susceptibility to infection as susceptible patients re-enter the same sexual networks. I think banning large group events may prevent short term spikes in chlamydia transmission but, human nature being what it is, I doubt that overall incidence and prevalence numbers will be changed. For Chlamydia to completely disappear, one has to wonder the extent of state intervention as it may involve watching what people do in their own bedrooms, which, in a way, is nobody's business.

 

[alwaysdrawing]

By my calculation, PA unemployment is up to 22.6% as of today.  PA is one of the few states that publishes daily unemployment claims data.

 

https://www.uc.pa.gov/COVID-19/Pages/UC-Claim-Statistics.aspx

 

Feb unemployed: 308,900

New Covid unemployment claims: 1,179,326

Total unemployed: 1,488,200

Total PA labor force:  6,558,000

Unemployment rate: 22.6%

 

If other states are proportional, there would be an additional 4+ million unemployment claims for last week when the data is reported on Thursday.  Obviously that's an extrapolation from one state, however claims in certain states (notably TX, FL) have been low the past few weeks due to issues with those states filing systems.  I would guess 4 million +- 1 million is a pretty good guess for last week, and claims are still not slowing.

 

In the last two days, unemployment has risen in PA by 1.6%....in two days.

 

PA added another 0.4% yesterday, bringing the total to over 23% unemployment.

 

Not sure what the unemployment rate was before all this in PA.

 

Let's say the average age of CV death is around 80

total coronavirus death count 240 today

current unemployed    1,500,000  or 23%

 

so for every 1 CV death - there are 6250 unemployed in PA

 

I'd love to hear your "adjustment" to get to the true figure and cost

 

And what is the real tragedy - the number of unemployed (destroying lives) or the tragic early death of someone due to having CV?

 

Unemployment was 4.7% in February (308,900/6,558,000)

 

I don't really see how society could go on normally if 1%+ of the population was dying all around them.  I also think if we "open up", doctors will walk off the job as they won't be able to handle what would happen to the health care system. 

 

The way doctors describe it to me is that this is a sliding scale where deaths under normal health care system resources are over 1%, and as capacity is reached deaths will increase as the number of patients who could have been saved, but cannot due to lack of resources (ventilators, trained staff, etc) climbs significantly.

 

I think basically no matter what we are headed towards a severe recession, and I think re-opening will not change that, but will in fact make things worse as the virus will spread uncontrolled until people are ordered back home or just quit and don't go to work.  I don't really see a world in which people go back to restaurants/bars/theme parks/planes/hotels/cruises at any normal levels in any case, and thus the gains from closing down is increasing the health improvement by better social distancing.  Lots of the layoffs would be happening no matter what the govt did regarding "stay at home".

[LC]

The travel restrictions were a good call. I don't think anyone can really defend the rest of the response though. When China shut down Wuhan and shuttered much of their economy in January, that was a huge wake up call that this could be a big deal. If the message from the top have been 20% of what it was in the last two weeks in mid January, we would be in a very different place.

 

The travel restriction was put into place on Jan 30 and was sadly flawed:

 

The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Times reported.

 

[cwericb]

"And what is the real tragedy - the number of unemployed (destroying lives) or the tragic early death of someone due to having CV?"

 

Perhaps its just me but personally I would rather be unemployed than dead.