Coronavirus / COVID-19 [Archive] - Page 4

Viking

05-29-2020, 22:30

The obvious problem with the analogy is that the voluntarism is an essential component and is universally recognized as such. Tidy lawns is not a particularly significant or meaningful component of Stalinism (leaving aside the conflation of scope, the difference between a mass movement of tidy lawns and a single family's preferences). Now, if Sweden looked like a one-party state in which the leadership emphasized heavy industry and violent suppression of political dissent, centralized consolidation of social control and intervention, it would be fairer and more insightful to say it was adopting Stalinist practices and values.

The thing that's the same in both cases is that you have one or more essential components that are missing. Voluntarism performed by the citizens of a state on territory controlled by that state is not anarchism, because the state is still there - the other essential component.

People dressed in actual battle gear employing actual battle tactics and firing rubber bullets at each other in the woods does not constitute a real battle, and an attempt to evaluate the performance of battle tactics in such a setting may be of minimal value.

I don't understand your distinction, but it sounds like splitting hairs. The political and economic behavior of groups has in any context potential implications for political philosophies in general, unless the stance is one of pure thought. How Swedish people behave in this event is just one more qualitative case.

I see it as being more of a case of splitting redwood trees. But with the stock of the different ways to reformulate the positions rapidly depleting, the discussion may perhaps not move more than the breadth of a hair strand from here.

Unrelatedly, I just watched the Norwegian show Beforeigners, and I notice that every Norwegian show I've ever watched has evidenced a preoccupation with outsiders changing Norwegian culture. Which reminded me of you. Is this a general tendency with Norwegians that I should understand?

So, which TV series have you been watching? You've mentioned Occupied in the past, which is about occupation by a foreign country. Now you mention Beforeigners, which is about people from earlier time periods emerging in present-day society. At n = 2, an equally compelling hypothesis might be that there is a trend in which TV series you have decided to watch..

I have not concerned myself much with changing culture, my main focus has been on the effect of heterogeneity on a society's ability to function optimally. Preserving homogeneity does not necessitate the conservation of culture. In fact, the more different cultures in a society influence each other, the more the members of the different cultures might be interacting with each other, in which case the more likely it would be that the two groups would end up merging over time and make the society culturally homogeneous (the melting pot concept). That's not to say I would not place any value on conserving culture in the same way I might place value on conserving nature or individual species or subspecies.

Related to the topic at hand, it would be interesting to see how the performance in the handling of the pandemic varies among countries with respect to heterogeneity. I guess that all the other variables will muddy the waters to such a degree that not much of value is easy to obtain. Though, a theme that has occurred a few times is differing infection rates among different ethnic groups in the same country, something that should undermine the sentiment of being in it together if the differences are perceived to be significant.

Furunculus

05-31-2020, 08:31

norway having a change of heart, gonna be a little more swedish in future:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/coronavirus-norway-wonders-should-have-like-sweden/

edyzmedieval

06-01-2020, 10:48

I find the cherry picking of statistics to confirm Sweden's model rather disingenuous - Sweden has a population of about 10 million people, with a density of 22 per square kilometre.

It works for Denmark, Norway and Sweden - it does not work for heavily populated areas.

Furunculus

06-01-2020, 13:47

who is doing this?

Montmorency

06-02-2020, 07:24

I'm not looking any further into this (https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1266335781775380480), but it sounds about right for our planet.

https://i.imgur.com/vDqI0MV.png

In more serious news, there's evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating domestically in France as early as November or December??
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-france-patient-zero-december.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/new-evidence-race-find-france-s-covid-19-patient-zero-n1207871

The thing that's the same in both cases is that you have one or more essential components that are missing. Voluntarism performed by the citizens of a state on territory controlled by that state is not anarchism, because the state is still there - the other essential component.

I won't accept this equivocal premise that we can't speak of characteristics except in total systems - which don't exist.

People dressed in actual battle gear employing actual battle tactics and firing rubber bullets at each other in the woods does not constitute a real battle, and an attempt to evaluate the performance of battle tactics in such a setting may be of minimal value.

Tell that to wargaming military brass around the world.

So, which TV series have you been watching? You've mentioned Occupied in the past, which is about occupation by a foreign country. Now you mention Beforeigners, which is about people from earlier time periods emerging in present-day society. At n = 2, an equally compelling hypothesis might be that there is a trend in which TV series you have decided to watch..

Lol, sure. But I don't investigate shows before I watch them, I go off interesting premises or recommendations. The other Norwegian show I've watched is Lillyhammer (Mafia-American expat corrupting small-town Norway). It's an amusing correlation. I'm sure you could draw plausible themes from a personal sample (though invariably larger) of American shows.

norway having a change of heart, gonna be a little more swedish in future:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/coronavirus-norway-wonders-should-have-like-sweden/

Every country or locality that reduces transmission plans (in concept) to loosen restrictions and cruise on flexible safeguards. It would be misleading to say China, for example, has embraced the Swedish model since the winter.

(Although notably, China is unusually-prepared to reintroduce aggressive measures (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/world/asia/coronavirus-china-lockdown.html) on a case-by-case basis.)

rory_20_uk

06-02-2020, 14:08

A story that seems to have received a lot less coverage than it should have done: Link (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/01/exercise-cygnus-nhs-doctors-legal-bid-force-government-release/)

In 2016 the UK government did an exercise to see how the UK would cope with a pandemic. Not well apparently. And since then are very keen to suppress the release of the information with their excuse being releasing it would prevent Civil Servants saying anything. As getting someone to redact the names / ranks would be impossible...

Now, either the UK was MASSIVELY unprepared and has spent 4 years getting to the abysmal state we are currently in, or did very little and would rather the narrative was "who could have predicted this?" As opposed to "yeah, we knew but really didn't bother to fix it".

The opposition are not pushing to have the data released. I imagine as they are aware sooner or later they'll be in power and want to ensure their mistakes can equally be hidden from the general populace.

So we the pubic are indirectly encouraged to focus on the daily deaths toll and the week day Punch and Judy update presentation where we are told little of any value - but it really helps fill up the News cycle with stuff, right?

~:smoking:

Montmorency

06-03-2020, 06:11

The opposition are not pushing to have the data released. I imagine as they are aware sooner or later they'll be in power and want to ensure their mistakes can equally be hidden from the general populace.

Well...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/labour-urges-government-publish-findings-2016-pandemic-drill

rory_20_uk

06-03-2020, 09:45

Well...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/labour-urges-government-publish-findings-2016-pandemic-drill

After it was released to the papers, no harm in jumping on the bandwagon now. And besides urging, are they going to join in the court battle? Provide finding? Put money where their mouths are?

Is it the case that a Pandemic response exercise can be undertaken and the Opposition have absolutely no idea whatsoever about it? Perhaps that is true - which itself is rather concerning for oversight of the Government.

~:smoking:

Strike For The South

06-03-2020, 18:35

What has happened at these meat packing plants is infuriating. The American government is treating these people as disposable because apparently they aren't "regular folks" to quote a Wisconsin judge. These guys make Americas comforts possible, it is disgusting how they are being treated. An utter lack of humanity.

CrossLOPER

06-03-2020, 18:57

Americas comforts
You can probably stop the conditions at these plants, global warming, animal abuse and 100 other problems if you just stop eating or even slightly reduce the amount of meat you eat.

ReluctantSamurai

06-05-2020, 00:32

Why am I not surprised:rolleyes:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/iowa-covid-19-coronavirus-testing-investigation#maincontent

Nomi Health was contracted to have the TestIowa website built and to supply the state with 10 machines for testing and 540,000 coronavirus tests over six months at an eventual rate of 3,000 tests a day.

By 13 May, three weeks after its launch and two days before the state officially started to reopen, TestIowa had sent results to only 4,000 Iowans.

Hmmmm....$26,000,000 for 4,000 tests in a three week period? That's $6,500 per test...seems reasonable to me...:shifty:

“If someone doesn’t own a computer, tablet or mobile phone with internet connection, they cannot access the TestIowa site independently,” she said. “They are advised to have a family member or friend help them enter their data. This is inappropriate because the assessment asks personal medical information.”

This is considering that only 65% of Iowans have the necessary broadband i-net speeds needed to complete an application:book2:

In addition, the platform is only offered in English and Spanish, making it inaccessible to speakers of other languages common in the factories where Covid-19 is most prevalent in Iowa, where immigrants from Mexico, Bosnia and Burma work.

See accompanying data below on this bone-headed snafu....

And in Nebraska, the Journal Star reported the TestNebraska initiative results were showing a 2% positive rate, which is “well below the 18% average positive rate for all other tests conducted in Nebraska since testing began in early March”.

Nice! Only a 2% positive rate? Let's get the state open ASAP:no:

Meanwhile:

Iowa is one of the fastest-growing states for cases of coronavirus, fueled in part by spikes at meatpacking plants where hundreds of mostly immigrant workers have fallen ill. Nearly 60% of employees at one Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa – 730 employees – reportedly were infected with the virus. Another Tyson plant, in Waterloo, Iowa, had 1,031 reported cases among about 2,800 workers. An additional outbreak was revealed in a news conference in May in Storm Lake where 555 of the plant’s 2,517 employees have tested positive.

So let's just shut the hell up about what's really going on in our state:

the Iowa department of public health said it would not be publicly announcing continuing outbreaks at meatpacking plants unless directly asked by reporters. The Iowa department of public health and the governor’s office declined to respond to questions about the number of coronavirus hotspots in the state, and whether those would be tracked by TestIowa.

How many other states have such idiots overseeing their recovery program?

.......thankfully I live in Michigan where our leadership is making intelligent decisions on how to reopen the state:bow:

Montmorency

06-05-2020, 02:34

https://i.imgur.com/aCDTjEY.png

Whoooaaaa...

https://i.imgur.com/cKKbNBM.png

I-I'm pretty sure that isn't mathematically possible.

Viking

06-05-2020, 19:04

norway having a change of heart, gonna be a little more swedish in future:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/coronavirus-norway-wonders-should-have-like-sweden/

I find the cherry picking of statistics to confirm Sweden's model rather disingenuous - Sweden has a population of about 10 million people, with a density of 22 per square kilometre.

It works for Denmark, Norway and Sweden - it does not work for heavily populated areas.

Yet there is little appetite to take the same approach as Sweden. The biggest change in strategy probably relates to the closing of schools and kindergartens, whose role in the spread of the disease is uncertain. They have been open for a while now, and it would probably take more to see them closed now than it took the first time around.

Regarding population, I've seen Bergamo named the worst affected Italian city. It has a population of around 120,000, which even by Nordic standards is not very large. Things get hairier when comparing metropolitan areas, but I am not sure that it would change the conclusion by much.

I won't accept this equivocal premise that we can't speak of characteristics except in total systems - which don't exist.

Now it sounds like you are saying that a society that most people would agree is anarchist is impossible in practice for whatever reason.

Of course you can attempt to study a subject by studying something that is related in some fashion, and then attempt to correct for the differences. Maybe you can figure out something about how dinosaurs walked by studying chickens that have extra weight attached to their rear ends (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088458). Figuring out what you need to correct for and how to correct for it is non-trivial, and of course it is impossible to correct if the differences are too large.

In this case it is not obvious that you can correct for something as fundamentally different as having versus not having a state.

Tell that to wargaming military brass around the world.

Practice in circumstances that are superficial similar to the real thing might have its use. But preparing oneself for the real thing and testing hypotheses concerning the real thing are mostly different things. So preparing yourself for an anarchist society by immersing yourself in voluntarism on a state controlled territory might be useful, just don't expect the real deal to be very similar to the scenario you've immersed yourself in, or that the tactics and strategies that seemed useful then will still work.

Montmorency

06-06-2020, 03:02

Now it sounds like you are saying that a society that most people would agree is anarchist is impossible in practice for whatever reason.

Well, I might have a belief like that but it's totally separate from the semantic discussion here. Which is that there are no absolute sociopolitical frameworks in practice, and that it's petty to reject classification of events or practices by attributes where they don't exist in a qualitatively-homogenous environment.

An anarchist or communist system typically involves a comprehensive arrangement of mutual aid and cooperative economic activity. In our world, most mutual aid and cooperative economic activity (e.g. legally or formally organized in such a way) is non-ideological, and all of it is embedded within the larger capitalist system. That doesn't mean these practices cannot be connected to abstract philosophies. The same goes for authoritarianism, transhumanism, anarcho-capitalistm, or whatever. The possibility of analysis is always there.

Of course you can attempt to study a subject by studying something that is related in some fashion, and then attempt to correct for the differences. Maybe you can figure out something about how dinosaurs walked by studying chickens that have extra weight attached to their rear ends (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088458). Figuring out what you need to correct for and how to correct for it is non-trivial, and of course it is impossible to correct if the differences are too large. In this case it is not obvious that you can correct for something as fundamentally different as having versus not having a state.

Practice in circumstances that are superficial similar to the real thing might have its use. But preparing oneself for the real thing and testing hypotheses concerning the real thing are mostly different things. So preparing yourself for an anarchist society by immersing yourself in voluntarism on a state controlled territory might be useful, just don't expect the real deal to be very similar to the scenario you've immersed yourself in, or that the tactics and strategies that seemed useful then will still work.

Correct for what, though? What question or explananda are you imputing? The question is not:

Does this offer insight into how an anarchist society would work in practice?
Will these practices contribute to an anarchist revolution?
Are these practices reflective of latent anarchist ideology among Swedish people?
etc.

It's just, Is the expectation placed on Swedish people instantiating a typical anarchist ideal? Is this, in a narrow sense, part of how anarchists would want people to behave?

One problem with these narrow semantic disputes is that it's easy to lose sight of what it is one is talking about in the first place.

Viking

06-06-2020, 18:19

Which is that there are no absolute sociopolitical frameworks in practice [...]

What?

That doesn't mean these practices cannot be connected to abstract philosophies. The same goes for authoritarianism, transhumanism, anarcho-capitalistm, or whatever. The possibility of analysis is always there.

'Connecting' them in and of itself is fine.

It's just, Is the expectation placed on Swedish people instantiating a typical anarchist ideal? Is this, in a narrow sense, part of how anarchists would want people to behave?

How does the preceding relate to the following?

Very fascinating that Sweden's pandemic response has become a de facto case study in anarchism; I never would have predicted it.

For those studying anarchism, could the approach taken in Sweden be interesting to study? Sure.

Montmorency

06-07-2020, 05:24

What?

IOW people live under political systems that lie on continuums and don't display a uniform set of rules or traits essential to that system. With that in mind, that one framework is more dominant than others for a given context is not itself a conceptual barrier to assessing a phenomenon in terms of another framework.

For those studying anarchism, could the approach taken in Sweden be interesting to study? Sure.

The confusion is probably that you read this sentence as a categorical statement, as in the sense that now Sweden exists under anarchy and before it didn't. That's not what I meant. I think you get it already.

Pannonian

06-08-2020, 20:18

Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive medical records of Covid-19 patients in £1 deal (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/palantir-nhs-covid-19-data.html)

Shaka_Khan

06-10-2020, 10:28

My sister lives near Houston...

https://www.today.com/health/fort-bend-texas-students-test-positive-coronavirus-after-prom-event-t183646

13 high school students test positive for coronavirus after unsanctioned prom

...At least 13 students from Foster High School and George Ranch High School have tested positive for COVID-19 after reportedly attending a prom event in Katy on May 28. The event was not sanctioned by the schools, and the group then spent the weekend at a beach house in Galveston, according to the Fort Bend Herald...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeH6p_Ll3tw

rory_20_uk

06-10-2020, 10:33

Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive medical records of Covid-19 patients in £1 deal (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/palantir-nhs-covid-19-data.html)

True. Gave them access to help model the spread of a pandemic in the country.

When I work for clients I get access to their data for free as well! I need their data to... do the job they're paying for.

Whether the exchange of the data for the service is a fair deal I do no know - but your description at best is highly misleading.

~:smoking:

Pannonian

06-10-2020, 12:44

True. Gave them access to help model the spread of a pandemic in the country.

When I work for clients I get access to their data for free as well! I need their data to... do the job they're paying for.

Whether the exchange of the data for the service is a fair deal I do no know - but your description at best is highly misleading.

~:smoking:

Blame CNBC then. I copied and pasted their headline.

rory_20_uk

06-10-2020, 15:19

Blame CNBC then. I copied and pasted their headline.

OK, Trump ~;)

~:smoking:

Furunculus

06-11-2020, 07:50

OK, Trump ~;)

~:smoking:

OK, brexit. #muhmustbebad

-----------------------------

Karol Sikora on UK deaths:

Essentially - we front-loaded deaths that were going to happen in summer autumn into spring.
Thus, while excess deaths for the months of April/May were considerable, the excess deaths over the year might look rather more normal.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/11/prof-karol-sikora-covid-19-death-toll-may-less-half-has-recorded/
(can usually read a pay-walled'ed article by stopping the page loading half way thru #capitalism)

Montmorency

06-11-2020, 22:46

23811
23812
23813

Eastern Europe is a land of contrasts.

Essentially - we front-loaded deaths that were going to happen in summer autumn into spring.
Thus, while excess deaths for the months of April/May were considerable, the excess deaths over the year might look rather more normal.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/11/prof-karol-sikora-covid-19-death-toll-may-less-half-has-recorded/
(can usually read a pay-walled'ed article by stopping the page loading half way thru #capitalism)

Deaths have been frontloaded only in the unlikely event where no reliable vaccine or treatment is forthcoming. Otherwise those are better termed "deaths we failed to prevent."

ReluctantSamurai

06-12-2020, 18:13

Didn't have to be a virologist to figure this one out:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/coronavirus-cases-uptick-detected-some-us-states

According to data tracked by the Washington Post, since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have experienced their highest seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began. The states are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

The surge in cases, which public health experts have described as worrying, and had warned about repeatedly, shows that while Covid-19 is now in retreat in New York City and other major urban centres, it is sweeping across rural areas, infecting smaller towns.

Again, one didn't need to be a brain surgeon to figure out that rural America was in for a rough ride. Folks must not have passed their math classes in school....if it got from China to just about every nook and cranny in the world, why wouldn't it get from the urban areas to the rural areas?

A somewhat dated article, but useful, IMHO:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/06/08/14-states-puerto-rico-hit-their-highest-seven-day-average-new-covid-19-infections-since-june/

If the pandemic’s first wave burned through dense metro hubs such as New York City, Chicago and Detroit, the highest percentages of new cases are coming from places with much smaller populations: Lincoln County, Ore., an area of less than 50,000, has averaged 20 new daily cases; the Bear River Health District in northern Utah has averaged 78 new cases a day in the past week, most of them tied to an outbreak at a meat processing plant in the small town of Hyrum.

The biggest bugaboo for rural areas is hospital care which is sparse, or non-existant in many counties. And the hospitals that do exist, have nowhere near the capacity or the resources to deal with a large influx of critically ill patients. A good mapping of rural trends in the US:

https://dailyyonder.com/rural-counties-rank-among-best-and-worst-for-may-infections/2020/06/03/

Of the 100 counties nationally with the highest infection rates for May, three quarters were rural.

A general description of hospital care in rural America and how medical care is trying to adapt:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/06/why-rural-hospitals-may-not-survive-coronavirus-telemedicine/

Last year was already the worst in a decade of ongoing rural hospital closures. In that time, 120 locations have shuttered, and earlier this year another 453 were marked as vulnerable to closure before the pandemic even started. Moreover, federal pandemic aid has been disproportionately allocated to urban hospitals already buttressed by large financial reserves, and not to struggling rural medical centers.

And it looks like America (and elsewhere) are going to the 'herd immunity' method by default:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/virus-will-win/612946/

it is now difficult to imagine that anybody could muster the political will to impose a full-scale lockdown for a second time. As one poll in Pennsylvania found, nearly nine out of 10 Republicans trusted “the information you hear about coronavirus from medical experts” back in April. Now just about one in three does. With public opinion more polarized than it was a few months ago, and the presidential election looming, any attempt to deal with a resurgence of the virus is likely to be even more haphazard, contentious, and ineffective than it was the first time around.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/06/america-giving-up-on-pandemic/612796/

But as the pandemic persists, more and more states are pulling back on the measures they’d instituted to slow the virus. The Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force is winding down its activities. Its testing czar is returning to his day job at the Department of Health and Human Services. As the long, hot summer of 2020 begins, the facts suggest that the U.S. is not going to beat the coronavirus. Collectively, we slowly seem to be giving up.

Viking

06-13-2020, 14:00

IOW people live under political systems that lie on continuums and don't display a uniform set of rules or traits essential to that system. With that in mind, that one framework is more dominant than others for a given context is not itself a conceptual barrier to assessing a phenomenon in terms of another framework.

This debate seems to be going in circles.

The confusion is probably that you read this sentence as a categorical statement, as in the sense that now Sweden exists under anarchy and before it didn't. That's not what I meant. I think you get it already.

No, not that there is anarchism practised in Sweden, but that the conditions in Sweden can be used as a 'trial' or 'case study' of anarchism, or principles of it. I think there could be a significant underlying disagreement here, cf. the unresolved issue above.

Montmorency

06-13-2020, 22:27

I completely forgot about the Netherlands until now, but they were an initial example of an aspiring light-touch intervention. While their testing regime has been even less robust than Sweden's, I can't argue with these trends and ratios that the Netherlands aren't doing better. It should be noted that the Netherlands did have a lockdown with school, and some business, closures.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-05/netherlands-coronavirus-lockdown-dutch-followed-the-rules

23816
23817

On the negative side, despite the two countries having similar cumulative case counts (Netherlands 48,640, Sweden 50,931), the Netherlands has sustained 6,076 confirmed deaths to Sweden's 4,874 (12.4% vs. 10.4%), and if I'm reading the FT COVID tracker right the Netherlands have seen twice as many excess deaths since March (concentrated in early Spring).

In Europe only Central Europe, the non-British island states, and the non-Sweden Nordics look particularly felicitous.

No, not that there is anarchism practised in Sweden, but that the conditions in Sweden can be used as a 'trial' or 'case study' of anarchism, or principles of it. I think there could be a significant underlying disagreement here, cf. the unresolved issue above.

The disagreement is being inflamed by the insistence on relating the idea to some 'pure' anarchist model, when we can parcel out variables and episodes (which is what a case study is for). As an Internet anarchist recently pointed out, when people (non-ideologically) return shopping carts to their holding areas without being prompted, they are upholding anarchist values. In terms of a case study one can obviously debate whether these observations have significance for the wider constellation of social and political functioning, how generalizable they are, but measuring prosocial behavior like shopping cart maintenance does admit an anarchist lens. If for some semantic reason you refuse to recognize it for a case study in "anarchism" as such because it's not behavior within a comprehensive setting (e.g. shopping-cart-like maintenance of commons in a commune/cooperative) - then let's leave it at that.

Pannonian

06-14-2020, 03:07

The disagreement is being inflamed by the insistence on relating the idea to some 'pure' anarchist model, when we can parcel out variables and episodes (which is what a case study is for). As an Internet anarchist recently pointed out, when people (non-ideologically) return shopping carts to their holding areas without being prompted, they are upholding anarchist values. In terms of a case study one can obviously debate whether these observations have significance for the wider constellation of social and political functioning, how generalizable they are, but measuring prosocial behavior like shopping cart maintenance does admit an anarchist lens. If for some semantic reason you refuse to recognize it for a case study in "anarchism" as such because it's not behavior within a comprehensive setting (e.g. shopping-cart-like maintenance of commons in a commune/cooperative) - then let's leave it at that.

Why is that anarchist? Why isn't it Tory?

Viking

06-14-2020, 18:58

If for some semantic reason you refuse to recognize it for a case study in "anarchism" as such because it's not behavior within a comprehensive setting (e.g. shopping-cart-like maintenance of commons in a commune/cooperative) - then let's leave it at that.

That it should be mere semantics is precisely where the disagreement lies.

Montmorency

06-16-2020, 09:08

Yeah, masks are probably very effective on both population and individual levels, at reducing transmission of SARS-2. Tbh it's kind of convenient to be masked at all times in public - you don't have to worry about what your face is doing.

Recently published, on hundreds of millions of infections averted by lockdowns in Asia, Europe, US.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2404-8_reference.pdf

Trump is imminently holding his first rally since before lockdowns began sweeping the country. Originally it was to be held on June 19, a national holiday for African Americans commemorating emancipation, at the site of an anti-black pogrom that occurred a hundred years ago. In the middle of a national wave of unrest against anti-black violence. Reagan eat your heart out. But the date of the rally has been pushed up a day, though it's still to be held in an indoor arena in Tulsa.

Meanwhile (https://www.twincities.com/2020/06/12/mn-coronavirus-george-floyd-early-test-results-show-few-protesters/) -

Early data from coronavirus tests of Minnesotans who participated in demonstrations after the death of George Floyd suggest the mass gatherings may not result in a spike in COVID-19 infections.

More than 3,300 people who participated in protests and community events after Floyd’s death were tested for the coronavirus this week at four community testing sites. Floyd died on Memorial Day after Derek Chauvin, at the time a Minneapolis police officer, knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Results from about 40 percent of the coronavirus tests done in St. Paul and Minneapolis this week show 1.4 percent of participants who were tested had contracted COVID-19. Health officials are awaiting the rest of the test results and are encouraging anyone who participated in mass gatherings to get tested — regardless of symptoms.

The 1.4 percent positivity rate is lower than the 3.7 positivity rate of the more than 13,000 test results reported Friday. It is lower than the current seven-day average rate of positive tests, which is also 3.7 percent.

Goodie, an opportunity to compare the epidemiology of outdoor mass gatherings of mostly-masked young people to indoor mass gatherings of mostly-unmasked middle-aged-to-elderly people. (I believe Samurai has occasionally been posting some relevant incidents of the latter category.)

For those who are sensitive to such things, an eruption of nasty old tropes in the treatment of Native Americans:
https://www.propublica.org/article/a-hospitals-secret-coronavirus-policy-separated-native-american-mothers-from-their-newborns

prominent women’s hospital here has separated some Native American women from their newly born babies, the result of a practice designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 that clinicians and health care ethicists described as racial profiling.

Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque implemented a secretive policy in recent months to conduct special coronavirus screenings for pregnant women, based on whether they appeared to be Native American, even if they had no symptoms or were otherwise at low risk for the disease, according to clinicians. The hospital screens all arriving patients for COVID-19 with temperature checks and asks them whether they’ve been in contact with people who have the illness. But for soon-to-be moms who appeared to be Native American, there was an additional step, according to clinicians interviewed on the condition they not be named.

Hospital staff would compare the expectant mother’s ZIP code against a list of Indian reservation ZIP codes maintained by the hospital, known informally as the “Pueblos List,” a reference to New Mexico’s Pueblo Indian tribes. If the pregnant woman’s ZIP code matched one on the list, she was designated as a “person under investigation” for COVID-19, the clinicians said. Lovelace does not use rapid COVID-19 tests, and babies were sometimes born before asymptomatic Native American mothers’ test results came back from the lab, a process that can take up to three days. As a result, the hospital separated Native American newborns from their asymptomatic mothers in at least a half-dozen cases, one clinician said. Such separations deprive infants of close, immediate contact with their mothers that doctors recommend.

“I believe this policy is racial profiling,” one clinician said. “We seem to be applying a standard to Native Americans that isn’t applied to everybody else. We seem to be specifically picking out patients from Native communities as at-risk whether or not there are outbreaks at their specific pueblo or reservation.” The Navajo Nation and several Pueblo tribes in New Mexico have recorded some of the highest per capita rates of COVID-19 infection in the nation. In response to the pandemic, the state has designated several counties as hot spots, including some that are home to tribes with large numbers of cases. But 10 of the ZIP codes on the Lovelace Pueblos List reviewed by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica do not fall within those hot spot counties, nor do all tribes within those ZIP codes have a high rate of infection.

“Regardless of pending test results, pregnant individuals who are asymptomatic at the time of admission and have no history of high-risk contact should not be considered to be suspected cases,” the CDC guidelines note. In a follow-up email, Marquez said Lovelace’s residential geography screening applied to all patients: “Any patient admitted to the hospital for any reason from a designated hot spot region is tested for COVID-19 as a PUI (person under investigation), per CDC guidance.” Marquez’s claim was disputed by several clinicians who work in the hospital. Only ZIP codes with significant populations of Native Americans appeared on the list. Patients who did not appear to be Native American were not subject to further screening based on the ZIP code list, they said. The two other large hospitals in Albuquerque said they did not have a policy like the one described by clinicians at Lovelace. Mothers are not determined to be suspected COVID-19 cases based only on their home ZIP code or their appearance, officials at Presbyterian Hospital and the University of New Mexico Hospital said. Nor are asymptomatic mothers’ newborns separated for isolation pending test results at those other hospitals.

At Lovelace, only women who appear to be Native American were singled out for the additional examination, even if they showed no symptoms and had not been in contact with a person who has tested positive for the illness, clinicians said. “This isn’t about where you live or if you live in a hot spot — it’s about whether someone thinks you look Native,” a clinician explained. “The only people for whom we’ve been told to check ZIP codes are patients who appear to be Native.”

Why isn't it Tory?

I don't know what you're referring to, but something can be more than one thing.

That it should be mere semantics is precisely where the disagreement lies.

Putting the weight on "mere" gives the wrong impression, it's that I think there is good reason to implicitly define the relation of concepts the way I have, moving between theory to component to practice (I never offered or suggested an insight from observation to a model as closing the circle to theory, while allowing that someone could undertake the effort). I don't like your objections because the link between theoretical component and practice doesn't need to admit a specific context, but the substance of the link in its own right. For example, to study polygamist practices in their meaning and operation it is sufficient to define and identify polygamist practice; there's no reason why the phenomenon of polygamy can't be analyzed as such if it occurs outside marriage, or outside original Mormonism or some other society with institutionalized polygamy. The value or behavior can stand alone, and if it won't (household Stalinism) then you can reframe it until it does.

Shaka_Khan

06-16-2020, 12:48

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8gHyM2TryY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDMPZTUjbow

Pannonian

06-16-2020, 16:21

I don't know what you're referring to, but something can be more than one thing.

I'd have thought that individuals adhering to unofficial social norms would be classic traditional Toryism. Not the new post-Thatcher Toryism, which is all about individual rights and outraging the libs. Which (the latter), AFAIK, bears some resemblance to what I know of anarchism.

CrossLOPER

06-17-2020, 03:17

Atlanta, Georgia, reporting.

After a steady decline, I have noticed more people wearing masks and gloves and distancing since the cases have started to go up. The behavior of people seems to rest on the binary ends of polite and considerate to fairly aggressive. People seem extremely tense.

Shaka_Khan

06-17-2020, 07:41

Very disturbing photo of the long term lung damage at 16:52...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnS4MbRribw

ReluctantSamurai

06-17-2020, 15:04

Pannonian

06-17-2020, 16:23

Sensible discussion, although the product plug at the end was rather unnecessary:shrug:

The hair salon case was interesting. Two COVID-19 positive hairstylists, 140 clients, no additional cases after 14 days~:eek: Masks and social distancing protocol works...

If everyone had hair like Steve Stevens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTJmXrgsFg) there would be no issues with social distancing.

ReluctantSamurai

06-17-2020, 17:32

More on in-house church services being....whatever you want to call it---super-spreader events, kill-zones, etc:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jun/17/mexico-churches-catholic-mass-covid-19-coronavirus

Does this man even realize what he is saying?:

The pastor [Pastor Gilvrando Rodrigues, whose church is in Rio’s biggest favela, Rocinha] claimed God had allowed the pandemic, partly in order to help transform the church. Faith had become a commodity, Rodrigues complained.

And these prophetic utterances:

“Those who give, receive,” Rodrigues added, as he asked for help to fund building work on the church. “And those who sow, will reap.”

At a recent Sunday service he told congregants: “You’ve listened to the word and received God’s blessing. And now, whoever would like to pay tribute to the house of the Lord, feel free.

“I won’t accept having to cower in a cave, I won’t accept hiding in a hole because I have a calling from God,” Rodrigues added as he encouraged his flock – most of whom were not wearing face masks – to flout social isolation for their faith.

Yeeeeah. Apparently, taking his own advice, Pastor Rodrigues contracted COVID-19 himself. And after paying 'tribute' to the house of the Lord, 'feel free' to go out and infect as many other people as you can....

https://www.businessinsider.com/brazil-surpass-us-coronavirus-cases-deaths-end-july-2020-6

"We are doing something that no one else has done," Pedro Hallal, an epidemiologist at the Federal University of Pelotas, told The Post. "We're getting near the curve's peak, and it's like we are almost challenging the virus. 'Let's see how many people you can infect. We want to see how strong you are.' Like this is a game of poker, and we're all in."

So the world gets to see what happens in a completely unrestricted environment.

....pssst [Brazilian SARS-CoV-2 to all its buddies all over the world]: "Hey, come on over to Brazil. Noone wears face masks, there are no lock-downs, and their Fearless Leader(2) believes we are just another nasty cold. Come on down, we''ll have lots of fun killing these stupid humans...."

ReluctantSamurai

06-17-2020, 18:19

Make of it what you wish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etAIpkdhU9Q

I'm a rolling thunder, a pouring rain
I'm comin' on like a hurricane
My lightning's flashing across the sky
You're only young but you're gonna die
I won't take no prisoners, won't spare no lives
Nobody's putting up a fight
I got my bell, I'm gonna take you to hell
I'm gonna get you, Satan get you
Hell's bells
Yeah, hell's bells
You got me ringing hell's bells
My temperature's high, hell's bells
I'll give you black sensations up and down your spine
If you're into evil you're a friend of mine
See the white light flashing as I split the night
'Cause if good's on the left,
Then I'm stickin' to the right
I won't take no prisoners, won't spare no lives
Nobody's puttin' up a fight
I got my bell, I'm gonna take you to hell
I'm gonna get you, Satan get you
Hell's bells…

Seems an appropriate description of today's world:shrug:

ReluctantSamurai

06-17-2020, 20:50

Don't usually post this many times consecutively, but I've got a lot of time to kill today with nothing else to do:shame:

With all the hype being given to COVID-19 vaccine development these days found this article from Down Under:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-18/coronavirus-covid-vaccine-race-how-the-candidates-work/12310814?nw=0

The world is in limbo and it’s unclear which, if any, of the more than 100 vaccine candidates might reach the finish line first. Broadly speaking, there are three classes of vaccine and each has its own promises and drawbacks.

The old-school approach that can carry some risk.
The new-school approach that’s worked well before but still takes time we don’t have.
A silver bullet that’s cheap and could be produced quickly — but it’s never been used in humans before.

All three approaches have this in common: scientists are racing to solve the biggest problem in the world by tackling a microscopic one first.

A good primer on what's being done throughout the worlds' labs today....:book2:

Hooahguy

06-19-2020, 04:35

Its been a week and I am still waiting on my coronavirus test results. This is a little ridiculous. Frankly if I'm not showing symptoms by Sunday I would have passed the 14 days they say people start showing symptoms after possible infection, so was taking the test even worth it? :shrug:

I guess the next step is to take the antibody test.

Montmorency

06-19-2020, 06:48

Yet another kind of COVID visualization resource for the United States.
http://91-divoc.com/
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

New Zealand had likely eradicated SARS-2 from its shores by the beginning of the month. It has imported 3 cases in the past week, ones that hopefully don't have the potential to restart community spread.

https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/new-zealand-confirms-third-new-coronavirus-case

Authorities are working to trace those who may have come into contact with the man and two women who flew from Britain and tested positive after being permitted to leave their quarantine early to see an ill relative.

As anticipated, for countries that successfully suppress their outbreaks their primary hazard going forward is reintroduction by travelers (a shame we can't have a uniform transnational authority for public health...). The only alternative to perpetually being on edge of exponential growth is strict quarantine protocols for all incomers, and that entails something more comprehensive than restricting a few "high-risk" countries according to paper indicators. That's why countries like Australia have banned general international travel for at least the remainder of the year. For those who do travel the international standard has been 2 weeks of isolation, which I imagine is typically paid for out of the travelers pocket. International tourism (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/tourism-industry-slump-recovery-coronavirus-lockdown/) won't rebound for years.

I expect the US as a whole will exceed 500K tests daily in rolling averages) by the end of the month. However, the lack of federal response or national coordination lowers the ceiling and ensures that there will be (has been) a lot of inefficiency going forward.

As far as I know, specimens are not tested between states, or not in meaningful numbers. But the spread of disease is not proportional across the states. Thus you'll have New York #1 or 2 in the national ranks of testing each day while its outbreak is contained, whereas a state like Arizona - struggling to break into the 5-figures in daily testing - will rely on its native capacities to manage a serious outbreak. The intersection of "petri dishes of democracy" and sociopolitical failure.

A dark irony and a reminder that relative scale of testing alone (and no large countries are testing at the level we would like to see) is no substitute for committed and comprehensive national crisis management: The countries that are testing the most* - US, Brazil, Russia, India - are the foremost COVID hotspots. lolsob

Of course, there are some reasons for this. Populous countries have the potential for more infections than smaller ones, and tend to have more resources for testing. The named countries have more motivation to invest in testing *right now* because they are actually realizing that potential in the form of massive outbreaks. Countries, including larger ones, that by other indicators have small or contained outbreaks have more margin to choose to keep their powder dry. And on the other hand, other large countries that may be experiencing large outbreaks - Philippines, Nigeria - but haven't managed to mobilize testing on the same scale offer a submerged presentation according to their paper results alone. But then you look at a country like Japan, which seems to genuinely have suppressed CV19 despite having testing on the scale of New Zealand.

*Next-biggest testers after the named are the UK, Italy, and Germany with mid-5 digits daily. China's testing rate has never been reported per my awareness.

Its been a week and I am still waiting on my coronavirus test results. This is a little ridiculous. Frankly if I'm not showing symptoms by Sunday I would have passed the 14 days they say people start showing symptoms after possible infection, so was taking the test even worth it? :shrug:

I guess the next step is to take the antibody test.

Everything seems delayed these days. My mail ballot, and some health insurance-related matters, both took over a month to be delivered.

I guess the NIH didn't want to recruit me for their national antibody survey, so I'm waiting on the next round of NYC free assays.

Montmorency

06-21-2020, 03:07

From a few days ago:

https://i.imgur.com/SCXhg4m.jpg

Correction! Earlier I referred to Brazil as one of the top testers in the world, but I had made an assumption from the rate of case growth and absent any recent data on testing on common resources like World in Data. In fact Brazil has only run over 1.5 million tests - fewer than Australia, but more than Kazakhastan (which have similar population size to each other). I knew that the intensity of an outbreak, as reflected in positivity ratios, would reduce the number of tests per confirmed case, but mistakenly assumed that given more than 90% of confirmed cases in Brazil have been identified just since the beginning of May, there would surely have been a corresponding growth in testing itself. Therefore it really hits home that Brazil (and its neighbors) probably are experiencing the very worst outbreaks in the world.
https://www.msf.org/coronavirus-covid-19-nightmare-continues-brazil

...Brazil reporting 7,500 tests per million people, which is almost 10 times less than the US (74,927 per million), and 12 times less than Portugal (95,680 per million). With Brazil the second most-badly hit country in the world after the US, both in terms of total cases and in total deaths, it is clear that the situation country-wide is catastrophic.

rory_20_uk put the Org ahead of the curve.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/world/europe/uk-contact-tracing-coronavirus.html

Although the app has not failed, since the government is no longer sure it can even introduce it before winter.

ReluctantSamurai

06-21-2020, 04:11

Perhaps the most alarming part of Brazil's problems:

Nurses in Brazil are dying of COVID-19 faster than in any other country in the world, with almost 100 nurses dying from the disease per month.

And according to figures published by Bloomberg News, there are 15,000 nurses infected with COVID 19, which is 40% of the worldwide number of infections in the nursing community:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-21/covid-19-is-killing-nurses-in-brazil-more-than-anywhere-else

In addition, 114 doctors have also been killed by COVID-19:

https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/coronavirus/brasil-ultrapassa-marca-de-cem-medicos-mortos-por-covid-19-dois-por-dia-1-24438369

~:eek:

As Pedro Hallal, the epidemiologist from Pelotas Federal University, stated that Brazil is playing a high-stakes game of poker with COVID-19, it appears that it's a game they will lose badly.

Up next----India.

Hooahguy

06-21-2020, 05:38

Got my results today, negative. I figured as much but its nice to know I didnt contract the virus from participating in the protests.

Montmorency

06-23-2020, 06:30

Yet another visualization tool, this time global/international.
https://www.covibes.org/

https://i.imgur.com/vSfsSA8.png
https://i.imgur.com/Np6b8WW.png

Also, I haven't looked at them before but John Hopkins produces some good US visualizations beyond its map UI.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states

The Gothamist has been doing pretty extensive daily data-based coverage of the New York epidemic. Here's a sample.
https://gothamist.com/news/coronavirus-statistics-tracking-epidemic-new-york

https://i.imgur.com/Uj1jZO2.png

Critical indicators as NYC moves into Phase 2 of restarting.

https://i.imgur.com/ANlIGbG.jpg

Damn, Sao Paolo.

Interesting news about age distribution in the rising curves of new hotspots in the South and Southwest.

The most important COVID story right now is the age shift.

In Texas: Young adults driving the spike.
https://texastribune.org/2020/06/16/texas-coronavirus-spike-young-adults/

In Arizona: COVID cases growing 2X faster among ages 20-44 than 65+.

In Florida: Median age of new COVID cases fell from 65 in March to 35 this week —>
https://i.imgur.com/4AjakJq.png

See further tweets (https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1275061694604115968) in chain. America's case fatality rate has been lower than Europe's for some reason, and the author offers the hypothesis is that recent infections (artifact of changing testing priorities?) - especially the new surges concentrated around Florida, Texas, Arizona - are driven by lower-risk young people.

https://i.imgur.com/rd7l5bw.jpg

ReluctantSamurai

06-25-2020, 02:46

Texas is following the same trend as the above graph for Florida:

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/06/16/texas-coronavirus-spike-young-adults/

One of the areas of concern Abbott mentioned was Hays County, where 476 of the 938 confirmed cases are people ages 20 to 29. People in their 20s accounted for 50.7% of all the cases in Hays County as of Monday, an increase from Friday, when the age group made up 42% of total cases.

“What’s most concerning is that we’ve seen the largest increase in infection among 20-year-olds,” Nirenberg said in a televised interview with ABC, adding that city officials are seeing younger patients in the hospitals as well. “While they may survive an illness, younger people are going to be stuck with a pretty hefty medical bill at the end of it.”

"It is my current theory that elder persons have become more vigilant in taking precautions," Persse said.

Arizona:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/not-care-world-hard-hit-states-younger-adults-increasingly-bear-n1231748

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-hospitalizations-surge-arizona-texas-n1231945

Ducey [Governor of Arizona], a Republican, said the majority of the cases were in the age ranges of 20-44.

Where are all the "Boomer Remover" jokes now?:inquisitive:

It's relatively easy governors: REQUIRE FACE MASKS FOR EVERYONE! ENFORCE SOCIAL DISTANCING ON BEACHES! AND FOR GODS SAKE'S LIMIT INDOOR INTERACTIONS!

People are so fucking stupid and lazy here. They'd rather bitch about their rights being supposedly trampled by a few simple restrictions, which a lot of people don't seem to realize will lead to a quicker recovery in the long run. If Fearless Leader had just shown some spine in leading this country, then his stupid minions would've followed:wall:

And an ironic turn:

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/06/24/new-york-region-to-quarantine-travelers-from-states-with-coronavirus-spikes-1294362

The three states’ restrictions go into effect at 12 a.m. and will apply to states with infection rates that exceed 10 people per 100,000 on a seven-day rolling average, or if 10 percent of the total population tests positive on a seven-day rolling average. On Wednesday that included Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, Utah and Texas, Cuomo said. Most recent census estimates for the nine states add up to about 92 million.

California‘s newly released daily case data shows a record 7,149 new cases in the most recent 24-hour period. That pushes the state’s seven-day average to 4,633 cases, which would qualify 39.5 million residents from the nation's most populous state for the quarantine as well.

Anyone found out of compliance will be subject to a judicial order and a mandatory quarantine, Cuomo said. Fines can range from $2,000 to $10,000, depending on whether it is the first offense and if harm is caused.

ReluctantSamurai

06-25-2020, 11:30

Does this sort of thing happen elsewhere, or are Americans singularly stupid?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/us/coronavirus-health-officials.html

“I’ve been called a Nazi numerous times,” said Andre Fresco, the executive director of the Yakima Health District. “I’ve been told not to show up at certain businesses. I’ve been called a Communist and Gestapo. I’ve been cursed at and generally treated in a very unprofessional way. It’s very difficult.”

In California, angry protesters have tracked down addresses of public health officers and gathered outside their homes, chanting and holding signs. Last week, a group called the Freedom Angels did just that in Contra Costa County, Calif., filming themselves and posting the videos on Facebook.

More:

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/14/876714176/public-health-workers-face-threats-unemployment-while-fighting-virus

A review by Kaiser Health News and The Associated Press found that at least 27 state and local health leaders have resigned, retired or were fired since April across 13 states.

...we had seen a picture of the six of our public health directors posted on a Facebook page that was about reopening businesses. And there was threats around firearms and around stringing people up, comments about the fact that we were women or the fact that, just based on what we looked like, we obviously weren't health experts and shouldn't be listened to. But there was so much stress on our system that to be attacked that personally just added to the struggle of trying to go on with the behind-the-scenes pandemic response.

:shame:

ReluctantSamurai

06-26-2020, 18:57

I'd put this in the Errata Forum but two weeks from now it's going to end up here anyway...:creep:

This certainly belongs in the Cersei Walk of Shame category:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/26/the-atmosphere-was-ugly-bournemouth-aghast-beach-chaos

On Johnson’s view of the scenes, the spokesman said: “Everyone should be able to enjoy the sunshine, and we understand people want outdoor exercise and to enjoy public space, but it’s important that we don’t undo the hard work of the British public in reducing the transmission of this virus.”

Ummmm Boris, it's a bit late for that kind of rhetoric:shrug:

However, in my own home state there's this utter lunacy:

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/06/10/jobbie-nooner-2020-michigan/5318550002/

But will revelers wear masks, when some don't even wear tops? And if they gather on the lake, will boaters actually stay 6 feet apart to prevent catching and spreading coronavirus? "The thing is, it's kind of an unmanageable event, and we have not endorsed it — ever," said Deputy Steve Campau, a spokesman for of the St. Clair Sheriff's Office. "Our goal — and it has been for years — is to keep people alive."

In past years, the party has attracted more than 10,000 boats and 100,000 people. :no:

Montmorency

06-27-2020, 02:58

https://i.imgur.com/oGQUFQx.png

https://i.imgur.com/V3F5Xj5.jpg

Image from May that I hadn't yet seen. Fresh graves for Sao Paolo, Brazil fatalities. Beats anything on Hart Island.

US news: So that's it. This week New York's testing has been slipping to around 50K daily, while California (after having, perhaps for the first time, surpassed NY in testing each day of the week last week) has skyrocketed past 80K, past 90K daily. California alone is testing more than 2 or 3 other countries on the planet. And so it came to pass that the day before yesterday, July 24, in one heroic spurt, California finally overmatched the Empire State in cumulative testing: 3,592,899 to 3,551,952. On July 25, they were the first state to pass 100K tests in a day. GG WP

On the other hand, California this month has developed one of the worst positive-test trends in the country (albeit driven (https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/1276223013994651648) by the suburbs), while New York has maintained one of the best.

Arizona's outbreak is officially Brazil-tier, and in Florida de Santis knows that if at first you don't succeed, cook the books even harder.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/how-arizona-lost-control-of-the-epidemic/2020/06/25/f692a5a8-b658-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/florida-scientist-state-stopped-tracking-icu-beds-ahead-july-4-2020-6

Florida was one of the first states to pull back public health orders and reopen businesses in mid-May. Now, as cases continue to surge there, the Department of Public Health has stopped tracking the number of coronavirus patients being treated in ICU beds at hospitals. The announcement came on Tuesday, after more Florida hospitals started to publicly report that all of their ICU beds were full, according to the Sun Sentinel. Previously, hospitals were asked to self-report the number of COVID-19 patients in ICU beds, but now they are only expected to report how many patients in those beds are receiving ICU-level care. The Department of Health told Business Insider Wednesday that the change is in an effort to better track the more serious coronavirus cases, as some hospitals have been using ICU beds for patients who didn't require critical care.
[...]
The number of new cases reported by day in Florida have more than quadrupled since the state began reopening on May 4. Nearly 5,500 new cases were recorded on Tuesday, a new high.
[...]
Jones also said multiple Department of Health sources have told her they've been instructed this week to change coronavirus numbers by "deleting deaths and cases" so it looks like Florida is improving ahead of July 4.

I wonder if Putin exchanged notes ahead of his rescheduled VE-day parade (held June 24). Or maybe he's altogether less irresponsible a leader.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53152725

The military units taking part have been in quarantine during weeks of rehearsals, avoiding contact with anyone not directly involved in the event.

The parade features some 13,000 military personnel, 234 armoured vehicles, and 75 aircraft performing the traditional flypast.

However, Texas leadership has perhaps decided the feared ad-hoc shutdown cycle will be preferable to either brazening it out or designing/implementing a measured and scientific public health plan (in the first place, though it's never too late to get on track).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/us/texas-coronavirus-cases-reopening.html

Just 55 days after reopening Texas restaurants and other businesses, Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday hit the pause button, stopping additional phases of the state’s reopening as new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations soared and as the governor struggled to pull off the seemingly impossible task of keeping both the state open and the virus under control.

As even Joe Biden recognizes, you can't revitalize the economy without containing the pandemic.

https://i.imgur.com/hcvknZ9.jpg?1

New York has one of the worst tax revenue shortfalls in the country, at up to 40%. One of things that contributed to a weak recovery after 2008 was weak government stimulus, and a major component of weak stimulus was the lack thereof at the state/local level. At least the Feds did something for their part; state spending in general never recovered. Millions of government jobs across the states are currently at risk or have been lost over the past chrono quarter, and tens of billions set to be cut from state budgets. An economy can't sustain itself under those conditions, and it won't if the Feds fail to step up for the shortfall. UI expansion ends in a month...

It's relatively easy governors: REQUIRE FACE MASKS FOR EVERYONE!

As Washington State's Gov. Inslee did this week after rural Yakima county (rural counties in the PNW are chock-full of, and ruled by, anti-government white power wackos) started developing as many new cases as Seattle.

Does this sort of thing happen elsewhere, or are Americans singularly stupid?

Yes
https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1275912010555932672
https://twitter.com/jkbjournalist/status/1276682643032203264

ReluctantSamurai

06-27-2020, 11:53

From the NYT article on Texas:

“The governor’s plan was always predicated on a very high rate of voluntary compliance with things like wearing masks and socially distancing,” said Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas, a Democrat, who has been pushing for a statewide mask policy. “I think what we’re seeing is that was a miscalculation.”

The problem in a nutshell.

The Arizona situation is staggering:

And now, Arizona is facing more per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even more than the confirmed number of cases in hard-hit Brazil. Among states with at least 20 people hospitalized for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, no state has seen its rate of hospitalizations increase more rapidly since Memorial Day.

Government leaders don't seem to grasp a simple fact that any farmer knows---the herd follows the bell cow. And the biggest bell cow of them all could have mitigated much of the current situation:

Some residents noted that the Republican governor was following his party’s standard-bearer. “Hindsight’s 20/20, but yeah, it was a little late,” said Greg Cahill, loading his car with groceries outside a Costco at Phoenix’s Christown Spectrum mall. “I think he was a little slow. But he’s a conservative man and he wanted to do what Trump said.”

Borderline criminal behavior in Arizona:

[...] top health officials acknowledged having changed the testing count to include viral tests confirming an infection and serology tests determining the presence of coronavirus antibodies — a move with the potential to artificially lower the positivity rate touted by Ducey at his May 4 briefing.

....and in Florida:

Florida was one of the first states to pull back public health orders and reopen businesses in mid-May. Now, as cases continue to surge there, the Department of Public Health has stopped tracking the number of coronavirus patients being treated in ICU beds at hospitals. The announcement came on Tuesday, after more Florida hospitals started to publicly report that all of their ICU beds were full, according to the Sun Sentinel.

Gilrandir

06-27-2020, 12:21

The military units taking part have been in quarantine during weeks of rehearsals, avoiding contact with anyone not directly involved in the event.

Not only the units, but the "war veterans" (in fact, they are too young - usually around 70-75, sometimes 80 - to be real veterans) that were sitting around him and shook hands with him had been kept quarantined for two weeks as well.

Montmorency

06-27-2020, 23:23

I remember 5-10 years ago, there was this Internet trend of dismissiveness toward the zombie apocalypse genre, on account of a real zombie outbreak ostensibly being very easy to suppress. 'Zombies move so slow and you kill them by shooting them, world governments would immediately mobilize an effective response before hardly anyone noticed.'

I always did feel like that was weak tea.

Video on arguments against restrictions [VIDEO]https://twitter.com/i/status/1264988189455835138
This is very cute. [VIDEO] https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1275147205918306305

I remember 5-10 years ago, there was this Internet trend of dismissiveness toward the zombie apocalypse genre, on account of a real zombie outbreak ostensibly being very easy to suppress. 'Zombies move so slow and you kill them by shooting them, world governments would immediately mobilize an effective response before hardly anyone noticed.'
I always did feel like that was weak tea.

Yes
https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1275912010555932672
https://twitter.com/jkbjournalist/status/1276682643032203264

Just in case anyone missed it, the first is a 2-minute clip and the second...

https://i.imgur.com/cum441S.png
https://i.imgur.com/K8Qu6D8.jpg

From the NYT article on Texas:

“The governor’s plan was always predicated on a very high rate of voluntary compliance with things like wearing masks and socially distancing,” said Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas, a Democrat, who has been pushing for a statewide mask policy. “I think what we’re seeing is that was a miscalculation.”

For context.
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/27/harris-face-masks-fine-texas-coronavirus/

APRIL 27, 2020

Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday that local officials cannot impose penalties on residents who violate rules about wearing masks in public — including those in Harris County, where county Judge Lina Hidalgo’s mask order went into effect that morning.

“We strongly recommend that everyone wear a mask,” Abbott said at a press conference where he announced his plans for reopening Texas. “However, it's not a mandate. And we make clear that no jurisdiction can impose any type of penalty or fine.

“My executive order, it supersedes local orders, with regard to any type of fine or penalty for anyone not wearing a mask,” he added.

I wouldn't even disagree in principle, but it's not clear what was done to compensate for mixed messaging and supply, and the oppositional mentality of many locals.

ReluctantSamurai

06-28-2020, 03:04

Sorry---just wear the damn mask. There's no better way for making Americans get the message than by imposing fines. However, this is a better alternative (as per the above Texas Tribune article):

"If you run into someone in a uniform ... he's not going to give you a ticket, he'll offer you a mask," Turner said. "That's what we're emphasizing, because it's all about your health."

Shaka_Khan

06-28-2020, 12:19

https://www.yahoo.com/news/startling-images-reveal-coronavirus-forming-175319183.html

Startling images reveal coronavirus forming tentacles in cells. It may help identify new treatments.

Startling, never-before-seen images show that the new coronavirus hijacks proteins in our cells to create monstrous tentacles that branch out and may transmit infection to neighboring cells.

The finding, accompanied by evidence of potentially more effective drugs against COVID-19, published Saturday in the journal Cell by an international team of scientists.

By focusing on the fundamental behavior of the virus — how it hijacks key human proteins and uses them to benefit itself and harm us — the team was able to identify a family of existing drugs called kinase inhibitors that appear to offer the most effective treatment yet for COVID-19...

CrossLOPER

06-30-2020, 16:54

...“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control,”...“We can affect it, but in terms of the weather or the season helping us, I don’t think we can count on that,” she said....

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/29/cdc-says-us-has-way-too-much-virus-to-control-pandemic-as-cases-surge-across-country.html
People were joking about endless rolling lockdowns, but I didn't actually think it would happen.

Idaho

07-01-2020, 13:00

Sorry---just wear the damn mask. There's no better way for making Americans get the message than by imposing fines. However, this is a better alternative (as per the above Texas Tribune article):

You Americans were always going to do badly with this. You have conditioned yourselves to believe that collective action, caring for one another and self sacrifice are evil and unpatriotic. Which is so strange when so many of you are active Christians.

You also seem to have no notion of volition in the public space. Things are either mandated by law and backed up by fierce penalties or they are a total free for all.

ReluctantSamurai

07-01-2020, 13:55

You Americans were always going to do badly with this.

For multiple reasons, yes. An inequitable healthcare system, racial divides, economic disparities, and political divides.

You have conditioned yourselves to believe that collective action, caring for one another and self sacrifice are evil and unpatriotic.

Wasn't always so. The Tea Party movement in 2009 capped a very long decline from the passionate days of WW2, where arguably, we had our 'finest hour' in terms of collective action. As for volition in public, it's a difficult task to manage 50 individual states to act in unison. Personally, I think Americans have gotten soft & fat (provided you don't live in a ghetto). The pursuit of material gain has become the driving force behind the life of many Americans---as evidenced by how much consumer spending drives our GDP.

In 1950, consumer spending was 1403.69 USD Billion or roughly 60% of GDP. In 2019 consumer spending was 13413.81 USD Billion or nearly 75% of GDP. Bigger, better, more....or conversely, "what's in it for me". Looking at it from a federal perspective, it's not an easy task managing a family of 50 kids. Unfortunately, the 'big stick' approach is often the only one that works.

Face mask fatigue, and the imposition of fines is not endemic to the US, tho':

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/01/south-korea-incidents-of-covid-19-mask-rage-flareas-summer-heats-up

Seamus Fermanagh

07-01-2020, 17:58

You Americans were always going to do badly with this. You have conditioned yourselves to believe that collective action, caring for one another and self sacrifice are evil and unpatriotic. Which is so strange when so many of you are active Christians.

You also seem to have no notion of volition in the public space. Things are either mandated by law and backed up by fierce penalties or they are a total free for all.

Structurally, we set up a system from the outset where federal action at interstate level was limited. It was done on purpose to mitigate against tyranny. Nothing comes without cost -- and our history shows us having paid in blood and treasure several times for this choice.

On the cultural side of our handling this poorly, I think R-Samurai's points are worth noting.

Pannonian

07-02-2020, 11:23

ReluctantSamurai

07-02-2020, 11:45

Interesting take from Down Under about what motivates people to comply with COVID health measures:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-01/coronavirus-restrictions-comply-lockdown-second-time/12409134

The survey began five weeks after mandatory social distancing restrictions were introduced. It asked participants to report their level of compliance with social distancing restrictions during the past week. It found a substantial proportion of participants were not adhering to mandatory social distancing rules. Specifically:

50.3 per cent of respondents said they socialised in person with friends and/or relatives they didn't live with in the past week targetted
45.5 per cent said they left the house "without a really good reason"
39.6 per cent said they travelled for leisure
5.95 per cent said they went shopping for essential or non-essential items with COVID-19 symptoms, and
57.2 per cent said they went shopping for non-essential items when healthy.

The rate of non-compliance with restrictions increased as time passed.

The research also examined factors that predicted who was most likely to comply with restrictions. The two primary predictors were feelings of "duty to obey the government" and "personal morality". Simply, people were most compliant if they felt a stronger duty to obey government instructions, and if they thought it was morally wrong to flout the rules. These findings suggest social norms, rather than fear of COVID-19, motivated compliance the most.

Our survey indicated fear of punishment played little role in motivating Australians to observe social distancing rules during lockdown. Importantly, the best strategy would be to persuade citizens it's their moral responsibility to follow the rules, as this will help protect the most vulnerable among us.

:shrug:

ReluctantSamurai

07-02-2020, 23:01

Better late than never, I suppose:

https://www.uschamber.com/letters-congress/joint-letter-business-leaders-call-president-vp-and-nga-lead-face-covering-concerns

Some business leaders are finally starting to realize that there is no economy without gaining some measure of control over COVID-19. If this request (with many, many more names attached) had come on 2 April instead of 2 July, and was actually listened to and implemented in some form or another, the US wouldn't be in the situation it currently finds itself in. I'm not holding my breath that anything will come of this, but.....the Governor of Texas Greg Abbott, who has steadfastly refused to issue any kind of mandatory mask-wearing order (and blocked local municipalities from doing so), has now reversed his stance and issued Executive Order No. GA-29:

https://open.texas.gov/uploads/files/organization/opentexas/EO-GA-29-use-of-face-coverings-during-COVID-19-IMAGE-07-02-2020.pdf

Let's see how long it takes Donny Jr.---err I mean Ron DeSantis (Governor of Florida) to wake up to the facts:inquisitive:

ReluctantSamurai

07-03-2020, 05:15

Seems to confirm what many virologists have been saying about indoor events....not yet peer reviewed, so apply a grain of salt:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16wtnHe4hM6I7TFHXVpLXY8R4GAUzAJ-7NWbKIVvsVuA/edit#gid=1131322210

Elderly care facilities, meat-packing plants, prisons, and navy or cruise ships top the list. Churches and bars clock in at the next tier. The average person is not likely to be in the first tier of risk (except those foolish enough to set foot on a cruise ship). Pray in outdoor services or from home....and take George Thorogood's advice and drink alone.....

........or keep it within a small circle of friends~:cheers:

ReluctantSamurai

07-03-2020, 23:09

A little humor:

https://static.politico.com/dims4/default/25d6c4d/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F9a%2F7e%2Fcf3e02744b409df54311e3e27b45%2F14-jen-sorensen.jpg

a completely inoffensive name

07-06-2020, 01:11

When my grandchildren ask me what we did during the lockdown year of 2020, I'm gonna tell them I shared some white-hot memes with like minded people.

Idaho

07-06-2020, 11:15

Since Greece currently bars direct flights from the UK due to our situation with Covid-19, the PM's dad gets around this by going to his villa via Bulgaria. One rule for the PM's circle, another for the rest of us.

In true British media style, working class people going to the beach are vilified, while it's generally applauded that middle class people can now go to their Italian villas.... Those same middle class people who brought covid in from their ski trips.

Gilrandir

07-06-2020, 11:28

When my grandchildren ask me what we did during the lockdown year of 2020, I'm gonna tell them I shared some white-hot memes with like minded people.

2020 turned out to be a bad year for white-hot memes. Black-hot seem to be more suitable.

Pannonian

07-06-2020, 12:58

In true British media style, working class people going to the beach are vilified, while it's generally applauded that middle class people can now go to their Italian villas.... Those same middle class people who brought covid in from their ski trips.

I doubt working class people, or at least the less privileged class that you mean by working class, are going to the beach. Pub maybe. Takeaways, and other food shops on the high street. Beachgoers are just as middle class as ski trippers.

rory_20_uk

07-06-2020, 22:04

Furunculus

07-07-2020, 07:36

anyone feel like graphing out the data here:

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-government-response-tracker

Stringency and policy indices

OxCGRT collects publicly available information on 17 indicators of government responses. Eight of the policy indicators (C1-C8) record information on containment and closure policies, such as school closures and restrictions in movement. Four of the indicators (E1-E4) record economic policies, such as income support to citizens or provision of foreign aid. Five of the indicators (H1-H5) record health system policies such as the COVID-19 testing regime or emergency investments into healthcare.

The data from the 17 indicators is aggregated into a set of four common indices, reporting a number between 1 and 100 to reflect the level of government action on the topics in question:

an overall government response index (which records how the response of governments has varied over all indicators in the database, becoming stronger or weaker over the course of the outbreak);
a containment and health index (which combines ‘lockdown’ restrictions and closures with measures such as testing policy and contact tracing, short term investment in healthcare, as well investments in vaccine)
an economic support index (which records measures such as income support and debt relief)
as well as the original stringency index (which records the strictness of ‘lockdown style’ policies that primarily restrict people’s behaviour).

Note that these indices simply record the number and strictness of government policies, and should not be interpreted as ‘scoring’ the appropriateness or effectiveness of a country’s response. A higher position in an index does not necessarily mean that a country's response is ‘better’ than others lower on the index.

https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker/raw/master/data/OxCGRT_latest.csv

Pannonian

07-07-2020, 09:00

anyone feel like graphing out the data here:

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-government-response-tracker

https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker/raw/master/data/OxCGRT_latest.csv

What does that mean?

Furunculus

07-07-2020, 14:01

it is an attempt to build a comparitive profile on the relatives strictness of countries various lockdown restriction/enforcement policys':

https://quillette.com/2020/05/19/podcast-91-oxfords-thomas-hale-on-measuring-the-variation-in-government-response-to-covid-19/

Montmorency

07-08-2020, 11:13

Rt/projection resources for the US and world. Another Not sure how legit.
https://rt.live/
https://epiforecasts.io/covid/

Popular thread (https://twitter.com/DaniOliver/status/1279155358666305541) on a COVID survivor's personal experience, emphasizing the chronic adverse events that can accompany morbidity.

Hey, so, I got #Covid19 in March. I’ve been sick for over 3 months w/ severe respiratory, cardiovascular & neurological symptoms. I still have a fever. I’ve been incapacitated for nearly a season of my life. It's not enough to not die. You don’t want to live thru this, either. 1/

I am not unique. Support groups have sprung up all over the internet because medical science doesn’t know what to do with the hundreds of thousands of Covid patients who don’t get better in the (utter and complete bullshit, and they know it) CDC guidelines of 2-6 weeks. 2/

The CDC is also refusing to add widely-reported, terrifying symptoms to their lists. So here’s a grab bag of what patients like me are experiencing, so you know: Extreme tachycardia. My heart rate was once 160 while I was sleeping. Chest pain, like someone’s sitting… 3/

...on your sternum. Back and rib pain like someone’s taken a baseball bat to your torso. Fatigue like you’ve never felt before in your life. Fatigue like your body is shutting off. Fatigue so bad that it would often make me cry because I thought it might mean I was dying. 4/

GI problems, diarrhea to severe acid reflux. I had diarrhea every day for two+ months. Unbearable nausea. Also: Inexplicable rashes. For me, little broken blood vessels all over my body. For many of us, a constant shortness of breath that doctors can’t find an explanation for. 5/

Neurological symptoms. I had delirium & hallucinations. Many report tingling all over their body, an internal “buzzing” or “vibrating.” Also, insomnia & chronic hypnic bodily jerks. One symptom so weird that I thought it was just me, but it turns out it’s so many of us… 6/

was waking up in the middle of the night, gasping for breath. I also experienced tremors while trying to sleep, like someone was shaking the bed. Also: many report a “hot head.” Mine literally radiated heat, despite not hitting a high fever. Then, there’s the confusion… 7/

The “brain fog.” I couldn’t read or make sense of text at times. I couldn’t remember words. I’d stare at my partner at a loss for what I needed to communicate, or how to do it. Also: thickening of the blood, clotting. Weird, inexplicable changes to the menstrual cycle. 8/

Everyone knows the lung stuff already, so I won't elaborate. But it doesn’t just go away. I wake up every morning & when I breathe in, it feels like someone is crinkling plastic in my chest. And these are just the symptoms. I’m not even touching the physical damage done… 9/

...to patients’ organs and bodily systems. I’m also not touching the mental component of this, which is compounded by the very virtue of not knowing if it’ll eventually kill you. But long-term covid sufferers all report the same thing: that the recovery is non-linear. 10/

You’ll wake up feeling better and assume, like would be true for the flu or a cold, you’re on the mend. But then... you get worse. & then you're feeling better again! & then you’re bedridden, worse than before. It makes no sense. You start to think you’re losing your grip... 11/

or maybe it’s all in your head. It isn’t. Thousands & thousands are experiencing these cycles. At some point, I realized that this was causing a trauma response in my body, which only seemed to worsen recovery. And I’m someone who’s learned over the years how to tend to... 12/

their mental health needs pretty well. This experience is a whole other ball game. It is terrifying what it did to my mind. There are parts of the experience I am well aware I've blocked out in order to function, and times my partner has to remind me of things I've shut out. 13/

There's so much we don't know — including if these physical damages are permanent or, for some, will lead to chronic illness. But one thing we do know is this isn’t the fucking flu. Those of you taking risks (yes, you in masks, as well), please, please weigh them against... 14/

...experiences like mine. It's not "well, a tiny fraction of people die, and most people are better in two weeks." This is simply untrue. So many of us have suffered for months. Ask yourselves: is going to get a coffee, or getting a haircut worth being debilitatingly ill... 15/

...for 4+ months of your life? Or, is it worth condemning someone else to this experience? Tending to your critical needs (grocery, medicine) is a necessary risk. So is fighting for the lives of others (protesting, organizing). But I promise you, the risk is too great... 16/

...for a birthday party. Or a fucking bar night. Or visiting your fav restaurant. Good lord, I cannot stress this enough. Please. Wear a mask. Stay home as much as you can. And know that the recovery times associated with this illness are wrong. That people are suffering. 17/

Bolsonaro tests positive for corona. Let's hope it's nothing trivial. No, but maybe he'll have a road-to-Damascus moment and do something wholesome for his country. That didn't totally fail with Boris Johnson, right?

The story of Israel's pandemic, brought down to Switzerland levels but since May reaching new heights in a second wave, arguably caused by school reopenings and reopenings of other crowded indoor spaces. Uh oh!
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/israel-s-short-lived-victory-over-coronavirus

More on the discredited Swedish model.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-should-we-aim-for-herd-immunity-like-sweden-b1de3348e88b
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa864/5866094
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/23/sweden-coronavirus-failure-anders-tegnell-started-long-before-the-pandemic/

It’s probably all true. And while it’s frustrating that everyone admits failure but no one admits fault, looking for a scapegoat is futile. This isn’t the mistake of one person or a failure of the Swedish strategy as a whole. The Löfven administration did right by granting experts power free from political interference. But even the best leaders can’t repair a larger systemic failure in a matter of months.

The crisis Sweden is seeing today is the consequence of a government that has handed over responsibility to regions and counties at the expense of central oversight and, more importantly, a social democracy that has progressively abandoned its chief mission: protecting the most vulnerable.

https://i.imgur.com/6qnBZfS.png

As expected, the vast majority of US CV19 deaths are attributable to our unusually-inept and/or self-destructive government response.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/19/faster-response-prevented-most-us-covid-19-deaths/

Two recent studies published in Nature confirm the “astonishing effectiveness” of the type of government interventions we have discussed, especially when adopted early. Our analysis shows that with the same actions actually taken by other nations large and small, from East and West, the U.S. could have prevented 70% to 99% of its Covid-19 deaths. This has been a needless tragedy.

As expected, at least in the US the pandemic damages economic activity and confidence much more than government policies responding to the pandemic. The lesson has been there for those who want to learn it...
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27432.pdf

The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense. An important
question is how much of that resulted from government restrictions on activity versus people
voluntarily choosing to stay home to avoid infection. This paper examines the drivers of the
collapse using cellular phone records data on customer visits to more than 2.25 million individual
businesses across 110 different industries. Comparing consumer behavior within the same
commuting zones but across boundaries with different policy regimes suggests that legal
shutdown orders account for only a modest share of the decline of economic activity (and that
having county-level policy data is significantly more accurate than state-level data). While overall
consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 of that. Individual
choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection. Traffic started dropping
before the legal orders were in place; was highly tied to the number of COVID deaths in the
county; and showed a clear shift by consumers away from larger/busier stores toward smaller/less
busy ones in the same industry. States repealing their shutdown orders saw identically modest
recoveries--symmetric going down and coming back. The shutdown orders did, however, have
significantly reallocate consumer activity away from “nonessential” to “essential” businesses and
from restaurants and bars toward groceries and other food sellers.

Let's look at some recent events in the states. Samurai will be amooz.

https://twitter.com/NathanLerner/status/1278708717974929408
https://twitter.com/StevenTDennis/status/1280522032598392833

[Ed. From a week ago]
Remember when
@GovWhitmer
refused to give in to Trump’s demands to end to social distance restrictions in Michigan?

Michigan is now down to 250 new cases a day.

Meanwhile Florida is at around 8,000.

[Ed. Yesterday]
*295* Arizona COVID deaths have been reported in the last 7 days.

Scaled to the country that would be like USA reporting 13,000 deaths in a week.

ARIZONA COVID testing positivity is WELL OVER 30% TODAY.

(New York is at 1.04%).

3,654 new cases on ~11K tests.

ARIZONA hospitalizations, ventilators in use, ICU beds in use & 7-day daily death average all at record highs today too.Chart with upwards trend

The White House reaction is in its stable equilibrium (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-says-he-thinks-coronavirus-will-just-disappear-despite-rising-n1232709). From a week ago:

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he believes the coronavirus will "just disappear" even as cases explode across the U.S. and top health officials warn that the country needs to do more to stop the spread.

If you want to make a callback to February, he actually makes the same point in slightly-different language a lot (https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/19-times-trump-said-the-coronavirus-would-go-away/2020/04/30/d2593312-9593-4ec2-aff7-72c1438fca0e_video.html). Sample from April 29:

It's gonna go, it's gonna leave, it's gonna be gone - it's gonna be eradicated.

https://i.imgur.com/pk2zFpI.jpg

The master plan (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-and-biden-campaigns-shift-focus-to-coronavirus-as-pandemic-surges/2020/07/06/53a4ec50-bd62-11ea-80b9-40ece9a701dc_story.html) is to continue to have no plan. It's a(nother) genuine crime against humanity.

The goal is to convince Americans that they can live with the virus — that schools should reopen, professional sports should return, a vaccine is likely to arrive by the end of the year and the economy will continue to improve.

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Americans will “live with the virus being a threat,” in the words of one of those people, a senior administration official.

“They’re of the belief that people will get over it or if we stop highlighting it, the base will move on and the public will learn to accept 50,000 to 100,000 new cases a day,” said a former administration official in touch with the campaign.

The acclamation of his base is his biggest priority (https://www.axios.com/trump-kushner-second-thoughts-408d5a33-725d-442a-88e4-d6ab6742c139.html), in terms of public contact.

President Trump has told people in recent days that he regrets following some of son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner's political advice — including supporting criminal justice reform — and will stick closer to his own instincts, three people with direct knowledge of the president's thinking tell Axios. Behind the scenes: One person who spoke with the president interpreted his thinking this way: "No more of Jared's woke s***." Another said Trump has indicated that following Kushner's advice has harmed him politically.
[...]
Trump now says privately it was misguided to pursue this policy, undercutting his instincts, and that he probably won't win any more African American support because of it.
"He truly believes there is a silent majority out there that's going to come out in droves in November," said a source who's talked to the president in recent days.
The president also pays close attention to Fox News' Tucker Carlson. A few weeks ago, in a brutal monologue, Carlson blamed Kushner for giving Trump bad advice.

"In 2016, Donald Trump ran as a law-and-order candidate because he meant it," Carlson said. "And his views remain fundamentally unchanged today. But the president's famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency almost four years ago, have been since subverted at every level by Jared Kushner."

Some have suggested one factor motivating right-wing realignment against public health governance has been the development that while the virus may not discriminate along social categories per se, social categories condition exposure and susceptibility to the virus. If you know what I mean and I think you do.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-americans-cdc-data.html

https://i.imgur.com/D6C1FFs.png

Mmm, ah, yes. At some point in between doing fascisms Tucker Carlson,

https://i.imgur.com/ijbKf6U.jpg

Who will secure the existence of our people and our homeland?

Russia's favorite American commentator, went from being pro-mask to anti-mask. Remember, what you're seeing and reading isn't what's happening.
https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1280655048205369344 [VIDEO]

anyone feel like graphing out the data here:

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-government-response-tracker

https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker/raw/master/data/OxCGRT_latest.csv

I know it's Oxford and WorldinData and whatever, and part of the dataset was used in the comparative study on US deaths referenced above, and I'm not reading the definitions or methodology, but this

https://i.imgur.com/ApKHGMq.png
https://i.imgur.com/lKseqyj.png

is hard to credit at face value, that Italy and France score higher on a "Government Response Index" than China at their respective peaks.

Furunculus

07-08-2020, 11:58

i'm not sure the Swedish model can yet be deemed to be discredited.

"Conclusions
The Swedish COVID-19 strategy has thus far yielded a striking result: mild mandates overlaid with voluntary measures can achieve results highly similar to late-onset stringent mandates. However, this policy causes more healthcare demand and mortality than early stringent control and depends on continued public will."

This latter point rather presumes that public will accept enforcement against their will, and it is a matter of record that the UK government built policy against the assumption that tight lockdown would remain effective for no longer than three months - presumably due to growing non-compliance.

Re: "is hard to credit at face value, that Italy and France score higher on a "Government Response Index" than China at their respective peaks."

It is important to note that the blavatnik data does not attempt to measure the effectiveness of caronavirus policy, only its stringency in application.
So graphing it against reported cases as a measure of its accuracy might miss the point.

Idaho

07-08-2020, 12:27

It's important to factor in Sweden being a low density population with almost half the population living alone. Compared to, say, Italy where people live in dense multi generational housing.

edyzmedieval

07-08-2020, 13:22

ReluctantSamurai

07-08-2020, 14:54

Romania is discussing over reintroducing a generalised lockdown, after being a model to follow in the first two months only to now find ourselves as #1 in Europe in terms of new daily cases.

Unbelievable.

"Sneaky Bastards for $1000, please"

[horns blaring, bells and whistles] "The Daily Double!"

Pannonian

07-08-2020, 14:56

Bolsonaro tests positive for corona. Let's hope it's nothing trivial. No, but maybe he'll have a road-to-Damascus moment and do something wholesome for his country. That didn't totally fail with Boris Johnson, right?

If you're looking for a Road to Damascus moment for the UK, you need to be looking at the relevant people in power. Not Boris Johnson, but Dominic Cummings. Johnson is the front man. Cummings is the decision maker, as seen most recently when one Tory MP threatened the highest ranking British general with Cummings's attention should he not do as he was told.

Gilrandir

07-08-2020, 15:46

Romania is discussing over reintroducing a generalised lockdown, after being a model to follow in the first two months only to now find ourselves as #1 in Europe in terms of new daily cases.

Unbelievable.

Own up to it: it's gonna stay with us indefinitely - until most of the world's population develop immunity through having contracted and survived the plague.

Furunculus

07-08-2020, 15:56

Johnson is the front man. Cummings is the decision maker, as seen most recently when one Tory MP threatened the highest ranking British general with Cummings's attention should he not do as he was told.

speaking as someone who approves of the UK's activist foriegn policy, and supports significant investment in UK defence to maximise our ability to project power...

... i sympathise with mark francois, because the grinding incompetence of MoD procurement is beyond belief.

yes, it was rude. no, i wouldn't have done it. but i do sympathise; "look, i want to give you the cash, but as a supporter can you please make an effort not to make me look like a fool!"

i listened to the whole two hours of that select committee last night, it is after all my interest.

edyzmedieval

07-09-2020, 00:03

Own up to it: it's gonna stay with us indefinitely - until most of the world's population develop immunity through having contracted and survived the plague.

The impressive efforts done by the country and the Minister of Health in the first 2 months were almost top notch, we had excellent stopping of the spread.

Measures of relaxation, even in the slightest, wrecked absolutely everything. Austria just blocked our entry into their country.

Gilrandir

07-09-2020, 04:29

The impressive efforts done by the country and the Minister of Health in the first 2 months were almost top notch, we had excellent stopping of the spread.

Measures of relaxation, even in the slightest, wrecked absolutely everything. Austria just blocked our entry into their country.

We are also having a surge. You can't stay at home forever. Once you step over the threshold the disease is gonna jump at you. So be ready to live with it.

CrossLOPER

07-09-2020, 17:31

We are also having a surge. You can't stay at home forever. Once you step over the threshold the disease is gonna jump at you. So be ready to live with it.

I have heard this line of thinking for a number of things, and I find that it a tool of the inept to claim that "it can't be done better". It's not just applied to the pandemic, either. All you ever hear the the constant promise of "final victory" or whatever.

It is being done better in other places, and I refuse to believe it.

ReluctantSamurai

07-09-2020, 21:02

We are also having a surge. You can't stay at home forever. Once you step over the threshold the disease is gonna jump at you. So be ready to live with it.

Most of this is, unfortunately, true (though the jumping at you part is only if your locality hasn't done a very good job).

Here in the US, we had a window of opportunity of about 4-6 weeks from late March through April to get a handle on the pandemic, but we squandered it by politicizing it, attempting to call it a hoax, and pursuing personal agendas both economically and personally. Many people here in the States are either unwilling, or unable to suffer another lock-down type of response. There have been many mis-leading and downright disingenuous statements from too many people, including our own health specialists. So, here we are....staring at a firestorm that's looking to be even worse than that of April and May.

Sports is trying to make a comeback; young people listened too much to all the hype that COVID-19 was a "Boomer Remover" and totally ignored everything that we had learned during those early months about how to suppress this virus; we have a president who is trying to force school re-openings even before there are guidelines in place to do so, and the very same president who urged states to re-open their businesses quickly (thereby bypassing many of the protocols necessary to do so), and you can see how that strategy has been an epic FAIL.

So now we have new infections spiraling out of control in some areas, and setting unthinkable records in the process. The death toll hasn't yet begun to show up, because it takes time to die from COVID-19...about 3-6 weeks. As an American, I am embarrassed to see just how ignorant and callous we are of what this pandemic means. Bereft of leadership from the top, we are doomed to an endless cycle of hotspots. First it was the Northeast and the West coast, now it's the South and Southwest. It will just be a damn game of Whack-a-Mole until there is a unity to getting the virus under control, because if there's an out of control situation Somewhere, it's going to reach Everywhere....again.

Until there's a unified approach, we will indeed just "have to live with it".....or die by it.

Seamus Fermanagh

07-10-2020, 04:00

Most of this is, unfortunately, true (though the jumping at you part is only if your locality hasn't done a very good job).

Here in the US, we had a window of opportunity of about 4-6 weeks from late March through April to get a handle on the pandemic, but we squandered it by politicizing it, attempting to call it a hoax, and pursuing personal agendas both economically and personally. Many people here in the States are either unwilling, or unable to suffer another lock-down type of response. There have been many mis-leading and downright disingenuous statements from too many people, including our own health specialists. So, here we are....staring at a firestorm that's looking to be even worse than that of April and May.

Sports is trying to make a comeback; young people listened too much to all the hype that COVID-19 was a "Boomer Remover" and totally ignored everything that we had learned during those early months about how to suppress this virus; we have a president who is trying to force school re-openings even before there are guidelines in place to do so, and the very same president who urged states to re-open their businesses quickly (thereby bypassing many of the protocols necessary to do so), and you can see how that strategy has been an epic FAIL.

So now we have new infections spiraling out of control in some areas, and setting unthinkable records in the process. The death toll hasn't yet begun to show up, because it takes time to die from COVID-19...about 3-6 weeks. As an American, I am embarrassed to see just how ignorant and callous we are of what this pandemic means. Bereft of leadership from the top, we are doomed to an endless cycle of hotspots. First it was the Northeast and the West coast, now it's the South and Southwest. It will just be a damn game of Whack-a-Mole until there is a unity to getting the virus under control, because if there's an out of control situation Somewhere, it's going to reach Everywhere....again.

Until there's a unified approach, we will indeed just "have to live with it".....or die by it.

As has been said in this thread before, there is a notable percentage of folks for whom the idea of putting life on hold for a year to a year and a half is intolerable, so they are willing to accept the casualties and drive on.

I would expect this percentage to correlate strongly with persons who self define themselves as being "never sick" or "tough" since they are of the belief they will beat the disease if they get it.

Gilrandir

07-10-2020, 05:08

As has been said in this thread before, there is a notable percentage of folks for whom the idea of putting life on hold for a year to a year and a half is intolerable, so they are willing to accept the casualties and drive on.

"Intolerable" may have two readings:
1. When you are just tired of limitations and want everything to be as it used to be before.
2. When you are running out of money because you are out of work.
While the first is what could be criticized, the second is a survival issue so I can't blame the people of the second category for their readiness to take a risk.

ReluctantSamurai

07-10-2020, 21:26

Stupidity knows no bounds, nor geographical borders:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/two-charged-over-attack-on-french-bus-driver-who-refused-entry-to-unmasked-men

And unfortunately, the man died:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/10/philippe-monguillot-french-bus-driver-dies-following-attack-passengers-refused-wear-masks

On a lighter note:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/12/06/coffee-rat-nyc-viral-subway-pizza-rat-new-york-city/4351812002/

Possibly a distant relative of this hungry critter:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/09/21/pizza-rat/72579216/

ReluctantSamurai

07-10-2020, 21:56

This situation points up a major disaster just waiting to happen...as if the situation wasn't bad already:

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/4342/mississippi-hospitals-cannot-take-care-of-mississippi-patients-five-icus-full-as-virus-booms/

Mississippi hospitals are “stretched thin,” and Mississippians “will not be able to get the health care (they) need” as the novel coronavirus outbreak accelerates across the state, top health experts warned during a dire press conference this morning. Already, State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said, five of the state’s largest hospitals have already run out of ICU beds for critical patients.

The virus’ spread had begun to slow in Mississippi during May, as Gov. Tate Reeves began to reopen some businesses. By the second half of June, as the governor began a broad reopening of state businesses, Mississippi averaged just 11 novel coronavirus deaths per day, down from an average of 15 per day in May. In July so far, the state has averaged 15 deaths per day. Deaths rose sharply in the past two days, though, with MSDH confirming a record 34 new deaths on Tuesday and another 30 on Wednesday. Cases have also risen at record rates, with health officials announcing 705 additional cases per day on average since July 1. In June, the state averaged about 390 cases per day.

And the additional dread:

As the Gulf Coast enters hurricane season, the health experts warned today, Mississippi’s health-care system could teeter over the edge if a major hurricane struck. There simply would not be enough workers or resources available to deal with a natural disaster on top of the current pandemic if current COVID-19 trends hold up, the experts said.

“It’s going to be a New York situation, and we’re going to be in a parking lot trying to take care of people, and we can’t do it. And if a hurricane hits, I’m quitting,” said Dr. Alan Jones, a UMMC professor. Some present laughed at the grim assessment. Dr. Woodward smiled. “No quitting,” she said.

Ironic how these very same folks were probably looking at New York this spring and thinking that that can't happen here, are now facing the very same problems, even if it's on a smaller scale:help:

Governor Tate Reeves has so far resisted the implementation of a mandatory mask-wearing order, citing:
He has faced political pressure from some who claim a mask mandate would violate their freedoms. .
Wonder how free those folks will feel when they have to wear a ventilator?:no:

And despite having one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the world, the governor of South Carolina still refuses to issue a mandate requiring a mask for ANY situation:

https://www.thestate.com/news/coronavirus/article244136287.html

Measuring the number of new infections per capita over a seven-day period, June 28 to July 4, Arizona was the most afflicted, followed by Florida, then South Carolina, then the nation of Bahrain, and Louisiana in fifth — solidifying the southern U.S. as the global COVID-19 hot zone — according to New York Times data.

https://www.thestate.com/news/state/south-carolina/article244090802.html?

Roughly 1 in 5 tests in the state are coming back positive, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. As of Wednesday, there have been 48,770 infections and 876 deaths — 38 of which were reported the same day. At the same time, hospitalizations continue to rise. DHEC says 75.5% of hospital beds are currently occupied.

Bars, restaurants, beaches and many other non-essential businesses and attractions were reopened weeks ago. Gov. Henry McMaster has said there are no plans to roll back any reopening measures, though the situation has continued to worsen. “At this point, the answer is individual responsibility, not mandates from the government,” McMaster said in June.

And....surprise, surprise! Both Governors are staunch Republicans:juggle:

Csargo

07-11-2020, 03:30

I continually wonder what freedoms these people are talking about, in reference to wearing a mask.

Pannonian

07-11-2020, 10:55

I continually wonder what freedoms these people are talking about, in reference to wearing a mask.

It's basically freedom to declare political allegiance. The far right in the US and UK have set themselves apart from experts of all colours, so whatever experts of any kind say, they resist, as visibly as possible.

ReluctantSamurai

07-11-2020, 13:29

I continually wonder what freedoms these people are talking about, in reference to wearing a mask.

The link in post #816 sums it up pretty well. Despite being a cartoon, it covers all the dumb-ass reasons that people have....and the all too often result:no:

Hooahguy

07-12-2020, 01:28

Trump wore a mask today and of course the Beltway media is falling all over themselves to praise (https://twitter.com/AshleyRParker/status/1282085216773865473?s=20) him for it even though he should have done this four months ago. And Trump's team is calling (https://twitter.com/JesseLehrich/status/1282089662023176192?s=20) this Biden's death knell for some reason? Trump is looking a bit saggy (https://twitter.com/notcapnamerica/status/1282086650240262149) lately too.

Montmorency

07-12-2020, 04:33

https://i.imgur.com/uRjTKVa.png

https://i.imgur.com/UpF6aFJ.png

https://i.imgur.com/C4h5APX.png

https://i.imgur.com/7CcNtIk.png

i'm not sure the Swedish model can yet be deemed to be discredited.

The Swedish model is a bad one because its premises are known to unfounded. The premise is that a single consistent baseline, achieved largely by individual action, would prove less disruptive and costly compared to a more discretionary top-down approach that, the argument went, would not in the whole timeframe of the pandemic reduce total deaths in proportion to other countries. We know this to be wrong for sure now, but even beforehand it was predictable that - depending on the starting conditions - a lockdown could suppress the curve and save lives now in order to buy time for a governmental, economic, social response to save even more lives later, through prevention as well as superior treatment (be that through maintaining capacity or by identifying sub-blockbuster enhancements (https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heres-exactly-where-were-at-with-vaccines-and-treatments-for-covid-19) in course of care).

The schema was always supposed to be (assuming flat-footedness at onset of community spread, since readying prior to widespread transmission obviates the need for initial stringent measures, hint hint climate skeptics):

1. Apply measures as strict as they need to be in the circumstances to break transmission and flatten the curve.
2. Build up infrastructure, technology, and protocols for testing, tracing, and treatment.
3. Once the public health indicators are congenial and preparations are in place, lessen the restrictions to a new baseline for the duration.
4. A robust public health framework can now contain any acute flareups with resort merely to more moderate or targeted controls.

The lockdown enables the longer-term sustainable approach. If done properly. In places like Israel, Brazil, the United States - you know, struggling authoritarian societies - there was basically none of step 2+, or on a small scale by organizations and sub-jurisdictions at best. Maybe countries like the UK haven't done enough, or sound governance was preempted by poor leadership. Others like South Korea and Germany seem to have figured it out.

The study you quote from my post, by the way, suspects that Swedish hospitals were preemptively triaging beds and resources to avoid being overwhelmed (i.e. leaving people to die outside the system), and that early stringent controls are the way to avert such developments (compared to late controls). The positive aspects identified are basically the same as we discussed in April and May, that the Swedish public has relatively-high individual adherence to recommendations - the implication being that ultimately governments cannot succeed without the cooperation of their people, so this aspect of Swedish performance is favorable.

Model predictions suggest that the Swedish public-health mandates alone would have
resulted in approximately 40-fold more patients (median 42, 90% CI 42-43; statistical
sampling not limiting on error) who could benefit from ICU care than ICU beds available prepandemic
(Fig. 4). Voluntary self-isolation of 50% of the population reduced this to 5-fold
(90% CI 4.8-5.1), and strong suppressive mandates would have reduced it to 1.5-fold (90%
CI 1.4-1.5). As part of its public-health response, Sweden approximately doubled its number
of ICU beds during spring 2020. However, not all ICU beds were occupied—the number of
unique patients receiving COVID ICU care was approximately 53% of the total COVID diagnosed deaths
at the start of May 2020 [14, 36] To analyze this, we examined the demographic characteristics
of patients diagnosed with COVID-19, patients admitted to the
ICU, and patients who died with a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis [25]. Analyzed by
categorical age group, older Swedish patients with confirmed COVID-19 were more likely to
die than to be admitted to the ICU (Fig. 5), suggesting that predicted prognosis may have
been a factor in ICU admission. This likely reduced ICU load at the cost of more high-risk
patients dying outside the ICU.

What this actually means is that a Swedish approach, if tried in most countries, would produce catastrophic results rather than merely poor ones. It's frightening to imagine what America would look like in those circumstances, as despite our haphazard, inconsistent, and self-sabotaging response with a significantly more unruly population, almost all of the country has had at various times more government controls imposed than Sweden has at any point.

It is important to note that the blavatnik data does not attempt to measure the effectiveness of caronavirus policy, only its stringency in application.
So graphing it against reported cases as a measure of its accuracy might miss the point.

That's what I'm saying. Can you tell me how the indicator is defined and constructed such that the French government response may be more "stringent" than the Chinese one?

The graphs are from their github.

The impressive efforts done by the country and the Minister of Health in the first 2 months were almost top notch, we had excellent stopping of the spread.

Measures of relaxation, even in the slightest, wrecked absolutely everything. Austria just blocked our entry into their country.

If a sound public health regime is in place, it increases the ease and likelihood of snapping back in the face of any acute surge, as well as reducing the chances of such a surge occurring in the first place. Hopefully it goes well.

When a country's horrible new wave is something in the dozens or hundreds (e.g. Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia (the latter two making similar mistakes leading to the surge)), and is subsequently brought under control with moderate restrictions, that's pretty much things going as well as they can be expected to.

As has been said in this thread before, there is a notable percentage of folks for whom the idea of putting life on hold for a year to a year and a half is intolerable, so they are willing to accept the casualties and drive on.

I would expect this percentage to correlate strongly with persons who self define themselves as being "never sick" or "tough" since they are of the belief they will beat the disease if they get it.

There's a difference between 'I don't want to sacrifice to minimize the public health risks or risks to myself' and 'I will strenuously maximize the risks to myself and the public, checkmate libturd.' Even worse that the entire Republican Party adopts and implements the latter as public policy.

"Intolerable" may have two readings:
1. When you are just tired of limitations and want everything to be as it used to be before.
2. When you are running out of money because you are out of work.
While the first is what could be criticized, the second is a survival issue so I can't blame the people of the second category for their readiness to take a risk.

I'll post about it tomorrow perhaps, but it has been repeatedly noted here that (2) is an issue of public policy that many countries have decisively handled. Relief legislation in March slowed business closures and decreased the pre-pandemic poverty rate. Those who found the action involved to be ideologically unpalatable have been pursuing the worst of both worlds, limiting worker power as a social value in order to exacerbate both mass death and long-term economic damage. It's a death cult, the active undermining of both parochial political interests and the public good, even along the simplest, lowest-cost measures, and it's criminal.

Gilrandir

07-12-2020, 08:14

I'll post about it tomorrow perhaps, but it has been repeatedly noted here that (2) is an issue of public policy that many countries have decisively handled.

The poorer countries have not, so for their populations it is a matter of physical survival.

Furunculus

07-12-2020, 10:23

@ Monty

"What this actually means is that a Swedish approach, if tried in most countries, would produce catastrophic results rather than merely poor ones. It's frightening to imagine what America would look like in those circumstances, as despite our haphazard, inconsistent, and self-sabotaging response with a significantly more unruly population, almost all of the country has had at various times more government controls imposed than Sweden has at any point."

I take the point entirely that the swedish method is entirely reliant on a high level of public trust, such that calls for disciplined self-action will be heeded. And, that this would not appear to be a method america could follow. Would the uk have have sufficiently high level-levels of public trust, there is certainly anecdotal evidence from gov't ministers suggesting that the initial lockdown was never meant to halt business to such a suffocating extent, and that the take of the furlough scheme was never meant to be so high.

"Can you tell me how the indicator is defined and constructed such that the French government response may be more "stringent" than the Chinese one?
The graphs are from their github."

No, becuase i haven't looked. Would seem strange if there methodology was not published.
I have no doubt the graphs were published using the data, but you initial response seemed to question the validity of the survey's methodology based on the 'curious' results of graphing stringency against reported cases. I'm pointing out that this is not what they're setting out to achieve, i.e. demonstrating a correlation between stringency and 'success'.
In economic terms, they appear to be trying to measure the supply side, which when combined with the demand side (climate variables / ethnographic variables / population health), gives you the tools to assess 'success' via such metric of cases/deaths/etc.

Beskar

07-12-2020, 12:33

I take the point entirely that the swedish method is entirely reliant on a high level of public trust, such that calls for disciplined self-action will be heeded. And, that this would not appear to be a method america could follow. Would the uk...

Dominic Cummings broke the Quarantine in the country. Since then, it was Cart Blanche "Do whatever" and the morons went out in force-full after this whilst it was more restrained prior to this.

Seamus Fermanagh

07-12-2020, 23:31

"Intolerable" may have two readings:
1. When you are just tired of limitations and want everything to be as it used to be before.
2. When you are running out of money because you are out of work.
While the first is what could be criticized, the second is a survival issue so I can't blame the people of the second category for their readiness to take a risk.

A fair rejoinder. In my, admittedly anecdotal, personal experience overhearing this sentiment the motivation was loss of money/profit/growth not imminent destitution. Coupled, I think, with number one on your list. Which explanation does not, at least wholly, refute your number two.

Montmorency

07-13-2020, 02:16

https://i.imgur.com/D9767L7.gif
https://i.imgur.com/6AUEyFQ.jpg

https://medium.com/@indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e

Florida and Texas account for a tenth of all new cases in the world, despite forming <1% of the human population. But let's not forget Arizona.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/10/coronavirus-obituary-blames-arizona-ducey/

When her father died of covid-19 last month, Kristin Urquiza minced no words assigning blame.

Mark Urquiza, 65, should still be alive, his daughter wrote in a scathing obituary, published Wednesday in the Arizona Republic.

“His death is due to the carelessness of the politicians who continue to jeopardize the health of brown bodies through a clear lack of leadership, refusal to acknowledge the severity of this crisis, and inability and unwillingness to give clear and decisive direction on how to minimize risk,” she wrote.

The searing tribute encapsulates the fury of critics who say governments at multiple levels are failing at their most basic duty: keeping citizens safe. The obituary also nods at the outbreak’s disproportionate impact on black and Hispanic communities, which have experienced higher rates of coronavirus-related hospitalization and death.

Among the leaders whom Kristin Urquiza feels failed her father, a Mexican American resident of Phoenix who worked in manufacturing, are Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) and the Trump administration. Ducey, she said, “has blood on his hands” for beginning to reopen the state in early May, roughly three weeks before new infections started to rise quickly.

Mark Urquiza rarely left the house while Arizona’s stay-at-home order was in place except to do his job, which was deemed essential, his daughter said. He started to go out with friends after Ducey and Trump said people could safely resume their normal lives, even as his daughter begged him to stay home.

Kristin Urquiza remembers that as the state continued to reopen, her father told her the governor was encouraging residents to go out in public again. Mark Urquiza asked his daughter: Why would he do that if it was still dangerous?

“Despite all of the effort that I had made to try to keep my parents safe, I couldn’t compete with the governor’s office and I couldn’t compete with the Trump administration,” Kristin Urquiza said.

The link in post #816 sums it up pretty well. Despite being a cartoon, it covers all the dumb-ass reasons that people have....and the all too often result:no:

Toxic masculinity is an especially prominent factor IMO, in context of a primary appeal of Donald Trump being to Republican masculinity... as they understand the concept, you see.

(Now that Trump is wearing a mask, all the right-wing commentary is suddenly about how he looks like a badass.)

BTW, your link about the Gun Couple in the other thread is broken.

The poorer countries have not, so for their populations it is a matter of physical survival.

As it happens the precise nature of this fact is an important corollary of the other countries' outcomes, being that to the extent rich or large countries hamper their own recoveries through bad or negligent policy, the worse and more durable the knock-on effects against poorer countries, whose economies tend to be heavily reliant on tourism from or commodities exports to richer countries. We live in a win-win/lose-lose interconnected world, and we'd better act it fast.

E.g. Unfortunately Mexico's AMLO has been another shocking failure in office when it comes to CV19 (though I'm given to understand he's had a mixed record at best through the rest of his admin), and I doubt Mexico can well afford a prospective eye-popping double-digit decline (https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/coronavirus/mexico-will-take-biggest-economic-hit/) in GDP this year. But they won't recover anytime soon without their neighbor getting itself in order: "Pobre Mexico, tan lejos de dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos."

And the Mexican economy was already in recession BEFORE 2020!!!

@ Monty

"What this actually means is that a Swedish approach, if tried in most countries, would produce catastrophic results rather than merely poor ones. It's frightening to imagine what America would look like in those circumstances, as despite our haphazard, inconsistent, and self-sabotaging response with a significantly more unruly population, almost all of the country has had at various times more government controls imposed than Sweden has at any point."

I take the point entirely that the swedish method is entirely reliant on a high level of public trust, such that calls for disciplined self-action will be heeded. And, that this would not appear to be a method america could follow. Would the uk have have sufficiently high level-levels of public trust, there is certainly anecdotal evidence from gov't ministers suggesting that the initial lockdown was never meant to halt business to such a suffocating extent, and that the take of the furlough scheme was never meant to be so high.

"Can you tell me how the indicator is defined and constructed such that the French government response may be more "stringent" than the Chinese one?
The graphs are from their github."

No, becuase i haven't looked. Would seem strange if there methodology was not published.
I have no doubt the graphs were published using the data, but you initial response seemed to question the validity of the survey's methodology based on the 'curious' results of graphing stringency against reported cases. I'm pointing out that this is not what they're setting out to achieve, i.e. demonstrating a correlation between stringency and 'success'.
In economic terms, they appear to be trying to measure the supply side, which when combined with the demand side (climate variables / ethnographic variables / population health), gives you the tools to assess 'success' via such metric of cases/deaths/etc.

What I'm getting at is, if someone told you in plain language, "France's pandemic response has been more stringent than China's," one's minimally-informed response would likely be of bemusement. So how's that?

To settle the issue I'll just look for their explanation. From the Oxford/Blavatnik page (https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-government-response-tracker):

original stringency index (which records the strictness of ‘lockdown style’ policies that primarily restrict people’s behaviour).

From the WorldinData (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index) stringency index page (where, among others, Libya, Iraq, Moldova, the Philippines, and Guatemala are all ranked more stringent than China as of now):

The Government Response Stringency Index is a composite measure based on nine response indicators including school closures, workplace
closures, and travel bans, rescaled to a value from 0 to 100

The specific policy and response categories are coded as follows:

School closures:
0 - No measures
1 - recommend closing
2 - Require closing (only some levels or categories,
eg just high school, or just public schools)
3 - Require closing all levels
No data - blank

Workplace closures:
0 - No measures
1 - recommend closing (or work from home)
2 - require closing (or work from home) for some
sectors or categories of workers
3 - require closing (or work from home) all but essential workplaces (eg grocery stores, doctors)
No data - blank

Cancel public events:
0- No measures
1 - Recommend cancelling
2 - Require cancelling
No data - blank

Restrictions on gatherings:
0 - No restrictions
1 - Restrictions on very large gatherings (the limit is above 1000 people)
2 - Restrictions on gatherings between 100-1000 people
3 - Restrictions on gatherings between 10-100 people
4 - Restrictions on gatherings of less than 10 people
No data - blank

Close public transport:
0 - No measures
1 - Recommend closing (or significantly reduce volume/route/means of transport available)
2 - Require closing (or prohibit most citizens from using it)

Public information campaigns:
0 -No COVID-19 public information campaign
1 - public officials urging caution about COVID-19
2 - coordinated public information campaign (e.g. across traditional and social media)
No data - blank

Stay at home:
0 - No measures
1 - recommend not leaving house
2 - require not leaving house with exceptions for daily exercise, grocery shopping, and ‘essential’ trips
3 - Require not leaving house with minimal exceptions (e.g. allowed to leave only once every few days, or only one person can leave at a time, etc.)
No data - blank

Restrictions on internal movement:
0 - No measures
1 - Recommend movement restriction
2 - Restrict movement

International travel controls:
0 - No measures
1 - Screening
2 - Quarantine arrivals from high-risk regions
3 - Ban on high-risk regions
4 - Total border closure
No data - blank

Testing policy
0 – No testing policy
1 – Only those who both (a) have symptoms AND (b) meet specific criteria (eg key workers, admitted to hospital, came into contact with a known case, returned from overseas)
2 – testing of anyone showing COVID-19 symptoms
3 – open public testing (eg “drive through” testing available to asymptomatic people)
No data

Contract tracing
0 - No contact tracing
1 - Limited contact tracing - not done for all cases
2 - Comprehensive contact tracing - done for all cases
No data

From the document (https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Calculation%20and%20presentation%20of%20the%20Stringency%20Index.pdf) on "Calculation and presentation of the Stringency Index 4.0" from one of these pages: Formulas.

I dunno, I find it hard to believe that China could be said not to reach the highest rating for each of those indicators. Maybe you can check the underlying data, but I'm going to assume this is one of those situations skewed by lack of data for China along one or more of the parameters, which would input 0 to the formula for the ordinal value of the indicator. I think we had a case of this here a few years back on some ranking of human rights or child rights or whatever where the UK score plummeted year-on-year and below that of some countries one would assume do not have a superior enjoyment of rights; upon inspection it turned out that because the UK had failed to submit data on many measures that year these gaps were applied as minimum values (zero) to the formula, producing the dissonant score. It's one of those pitfalls of model construction I suppose, but I don't have the education or training to troubleshoot it.

ReluctantSamurai

07-13-2020, 16:37

People in just about every country around the world have had plenty to say about how their governments have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic running the whole gamut from excellent to abysmal. What I don't see a whole lot of anymore is how the news industry has responded to the pandemic. I remember back in March when this thread was criticized as being "fear porn" (wish he'd come back with his opinion as of today:inquisitive:). I also went back and perused this thread from the very first post to see how not only my own perception of this pandemic has changed, but everyone else's. An interesting exercise, to say the least.

In one of my own posts (#98) I reread the link and the quote I lifted from it, and was stunned to see how prophetic Mr. Barry was in predicting how not only governmental response, but media response would shape how the public reacted to a pandemic. To reiterate the part I quoted:

I recall participating in a pandemic “war game” in Los Angeles involving area public health officials. Before the exercise began, I gave a talk about what happened in 1918, how society broke down, and emphasized that to retain the public’s trust, authorities had to be candid. “You don’t manage the truth,” I said. “You tell the truth.” Everyone shook their heads in agreement. Next, the people running the game revealed the day’s challenge to the participants: A severe pandemic influenza virus was spreading around the world. It had not officially reached California, but a suspected case—the severity of the symptoms made it seem so—had just surfaced in Los Angeles. The news media had learned of it and were demanding a press conference.

The participant with the first move was a top-ranking public health official. What did he do? He declined to hold a press conference, and instead just released a statement: More tests are required. The patient might not have pandemic influenza. There is no reason for concern. I was stunned. This official had not actually told a lie, but he had deliberately minimized the danger; whether or not this particular patient had the disease, a pandemic was coming. The official’s unwillingness to answer questions from the press or even acknowledge the pandemic’s inevitability meant that citizens would look elsewhere for answers, and probably find a lot of bad ones. Instead of taking the lead in providing credible information he instantly fell behind the pace of events. He would find it almost impossible to get ahead of them again. He had, in short, shirked his duty to the public, risking countless lives. And that was only a game.

And with a few additional twists, that's what we have today here in the US. Our president indeed downplayed the virus while liberally dabbing his tweets with all sorts of mis-information, and except for his adoring followers, citizens indeed had to look elsewhere for answers. Instead of taking the lead, our president instead chose to politicize the greatest threat to American society in a hundred years, downplay the severity on our health and economy, and put this country behind the pace of this virus from which we are constantly falling further and further behind. It's gone much further than just risking lives, it's costing tens of thousands of lives that could have otherwise been saved.

So, back to the news industry. After a little digging, I found this:

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-06-politically-extreme-sources-publish-covid-.html

Overall, the study shows that although the coronavirus cases have fluctuated and even decreased, the number of news articles published on the pandemic have decreased at a faster rate than the number of COVID-19 cases. By evaluating spikes in media coverage, the researchers found that media outlets were more interested in novel events at the beginning of the pandemic.

Say WHAT?~:confused:

When comparing COVID-19 news articles and the representation of the different bias ratings of news published pre-pandemic, the study showed that scientific and least-biased-rated news has been represented less since the pandemic began. However, the representation of left-, right-center-, right- and conspiracy-pseudoscience-rated news articles have increased since the pandemic.

This! Use the link in the article to go to their "pandemic pulse tool". There are a bazillion parameters you can use to set up a social trend of your choosing and track the media response results. Hooked me for a couple of hours playing with different choices.

Then a quick perusal of left-center-right media sources:

https://www.allsides.com/topics/coronavirus?search=coronavirus#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=coronavirus&gsc.page=1

I found this article to be stunningly spot-on, IMHO:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2767950

The first error that thwarts effective policy making during crises stems from what economists have called the “identifiable victim effect.” Humans respond more aggressively to threats to identifiable lives, ie, those that an individual can easily imagine being their own or belonging to people they care about (such as family members) or care for (such as a clinician’s patients) than to the hidden, “statistical” deaths reported in accounts of the population-level tolls of the crisis.

[...]a second reason for the broad endorsement of policies that prioritize saving visible, immediately jeopardized lives: that humans are imbued with a strong and neurally mediated tendency to predict outcomes that are systematically more optimistic than observed outcomes.

A third driver of misguided policy responses is that humans are present biased, ie, people tend to prefer immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future. Even if the tendency to prioritize visibly affected individuals could be resisted, many people would still place greater value on saving a life today than a life tomorrow. Thus, if escalating critical care capacity enables the prevention of certain deaths in the short term, it is a more attractive policy option than taking steps that would prevent more deaths over the long term.

The fourth contributing factor is that virtually everyone is subject to omission bias, which involves the tendency to prefer that a harm occur by failure to take action rather than as direct consequence of the actions that are taken. This bias helps explain why some parents refuse to vaccinate their children, even when they understand that harms are more likely without vaccination.

I'd copy/paste more stuff, but just read the damn article:inquisitive:

So what set me off about the media? Two things: All the current BS concerning getting kids back to school and about how "safe" they will be, yet paying only lip service to the safety of teachers and staff, many of whom are in high-risk categories; and the lip service being paid to the mental strain of our medical workers, especially how easily we take them for granted by tagging them as "heroes", which they are.

Anyway, before the post-length patrol shows up....enough for now:laugh4:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/13/healthcare-workers-families-covid-19-compensation

In interviews with lawyers and families across the nation, KHN found that healthcare workers – including nurses’ aides, physician assistants and maintenance workers – have faced denials or long-shot odds of getting benefits paid. In some cases, those benefits amount to an ambulance bill. In others, they would provide lifetime salary replacement for a spouse.

Legal experts say that in some states Covid-19 falls into a long-standing category of diseases like a cold or the flu – conditions not covered by workers’ compensation – with no plans to change that. Other states force workers to prove they contracted the virus at work, rather than from a family member or in the community.

“We are asking people to risk their lives every single day – not just doctors, nurses and first responders, but also nurses’ aides and grocery store clerks,” said Laurie Pohutsky, a Democratic Michigan lawmaker who introduced a bill to help essential workers get coverage more easily. “These people are heroes, but we have to actually back those words up with actions.”

I state my case....:smash:

Furunculus

07-14-2020, 07:50

Dominic Cummings broke the Quarantine in the country. Since then, it was Cart Blanche "Do whatever" and the morons went out in force-full after this whilst it was more restrained prior to this.

i'm afraid i believe that to be cobblers:
there is flexibility in the regs, and it is open to interpretation.
cummings seems to have used the flexibility interpreting his personal circumstances:
a vulnerable minor who could not be properly cared for in london.
non of this justifies the removal of agency from the general public in being able to make their own choices and be deemed responsible for those choices.

Pannonian

07-14-2020, 08:42

i'm afraid i believe that to be cobblers:
there is flexibility in the regs, and it is open to interpretation.
cummings seems to have used the flexibility interpreting his personal circumstances:
a vulnerable minor who could not be properly cared for in london.
non of this justifies the removal of agency from the general public in being able to make their own choices and be deemed responsible for those choices.

Other people breaking lockdown: held responsible and fined. Fines not returnable.
Dominic Cummings breaking lockdown: not held responsible, no action taken.

Following rules and being held responsible if one broke those rules is for ordinary people. Not people like Dominic Cummings, Stanley Johnson, etc.

rory_20_uk

07-14-2020, 09:39

Other people breaking lockdown: held responsible and fined. Fines not returnable.
Dominic Cummings breaking lockdown: not held responsible, no action taken.

Following rules and being held responsible if one broke those rules is for ordinary people. Not people like Dominic Cummings, Stanley Johnson, etc.

Dare I say it, the vast majority of people who broke lockdown did not get caught or fined since we just don't have the number of police to process beaches filled with people or entire marches of people. The police did say they would have fined him had they caught him, so that is probably the same as for everyone else.

To be clear - Cummings is an arrogant shit and was guilty as sin and managed to create an excuse that would pass the criminal standard to get him off but that's about it. Just like the MP who had to travel all the way to see his parents to give them medicines since no Pharmacist, GP nor neighbour was able to collect and deliver - technically allowed within the rules but frankly most likely an excuse since he was caught.

~:smoking:

ReluctantSamurai

07-14-2020, 15:45

Following rules and being held responsible if one broke those rules is for ordinary people.

Like these folks?

https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/14/magaluf-residents-left-fuming-drunken-tourists-wreck-car-12985946/

Now to be fair, there were tourists from Germany and other EU countries in Magaluf as well, and Spain was inviting something like this to happen when an entire district full of bars is opened all at once. But it shows that the younger generation of you Brits isn't any more responsible when it comes to this pandemic than ours here in the States. What DC did was a very bad look, no doubt, but those idiots are just petulant children with no regard of anyone but themselves.

I've said this before, if those in the UK are so abhorred by Cummings, go to London and demand his removal. Otherwise move on......:inquisitive:

Pannonian

07-14-2020, 16:19

Like these folks?

https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/14/magaluf-residents-left-fuming-drunken-tourists-wreck-car-12985946/

Now to be fair, there were tourists from Germany and other EU countries in Magaluf as well, and Spain was inviting something like this to happen when an entire district full of bars is opened all at once. But it shows that the younger generation of you Brits isn't any more responsible when it comes to this pandemic than ours here in the States. What DC did was a very bad look, no doubt, but those idiots are just petulant children with no regard of anyone but themselves.

I've said this before, if those in the UK are so abhorred by Cummings, go to London and demand his removal. Otherwise move on......:inquisitive:

The British people are definitely voting him out in the next election. Hang on, they can't, as he's unelected.

BTW, British exceptionalists are a-holes. The behaviour of that trash does not surprise me one bit.

ReluctantSamurai

07-14-2020, 18:03

The British people are definitely voting him out in the next election. Hang on, they can't, as he's unelected.

What he should have done was to voluntarily pay the fine, and this whole business would probably have gone away on its' own:shrug:

Beskar

07-14-2020, 20:14

i'm afraid i believe that to be cobblers
Anecdotal yes, cobblers, no.

Hooahguy

07-14-2020, 20:22

ReluctantSamurai

07-15-2020, 00:10

Depends on the airline. Heard stories that some are much better than others. Biggest thing for flying is whether the middle seats are kept empty, and what the protocol during boarding/debarking is. Should be back to front when boarding, and front to back when deplaning to keep close contact to a minimum.

I love trains. Window seat....get to see the countryside.:2thumbsup:

Hooahguy

07-15-2020, 00:22

I would be flying on United. They seem pretty solid when it comes to their Covid policies, but then I heard about a friend of a friend who got sick after flying last month so perhaps the train would be safer. Amtrak said that they are only filling to half capacity, and besides, how many people would be taking a train at 6:30 in the morning on a Sunday?

Csargo

07-15-2020, 02:02

Got a bit of a Sophie’s choice question here: I have to travel for one day in about a month from now. I’ll be staying within the northeast of the US where thankfully cases have been plateauing as of late.

I have two travel options, go by train or by plane. Driving is not an option as I’m traveling to and from the destination on the same day. It’s a 3 hour train ride or a 1 hour plane ride. Which is the safer option? I’d be leaving at about 6:30 am on a Sunday and returning around 3-4pm on the same day.

I’d love to drive but it’s a 4 hour drive and to do an 8 hour round trip in a single day is very taxing especially since I’d have to leave at 5am to arrive on time and I’ll be exhausted by the time I’d leave. Staying overnight at a hotel is not an option. What do people think is the safer choice? I’m thinking the train because I can’t imagine that many people are taking the train on a Sunday, but with a plane there’s less time for exposure since it’s a 1 hour flight versus a 3 hour train ride.

I don't know how much traffic a train station has in your area, but I would imagine exposure wise, train would be a safer bet depending on how many stops would be made along the way. Considering a lot of airlines aren't doing the distancing thing anymore and are just packing people in, and airports would in general have more foot-traffic than most stations.

Best bet is to just get a good mask and wash your hands often/try not to touch unnecessary surfaces/etc.

Shaka_Khan

07-15-2020, 05:24

This virus is not to be taken lightly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Y9epUwgZo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H86pu1jg9K0

Idaho

07-15-2020, 13:30

Best bet is to just get a good mask and wash your hands often/try not to touch unnecessary surfaces/etc.

The surface contact transmission is actually very low risk. Not washing your hands for the whole journey and eating with those same hands is far less risky than being in a confined space with others - even with a mask. If you have the virus, you are aspirating thousands of virus bodies into the air constantly.

Montmorency

07-16-2020, 01:52

Daily deaths in Arizona match those in all of EU.

Daily deaths in Florida match those in all of EU.

AMLO in Mexico seems determined to conduct an experiment in Trumpism.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/mexico-surpasses-italy-post-world-s-fourth-highest-coronavirus-death-n1233627

Deaths in Mexico from the coronavirus pandemic rose above 35,000 on Sunday, with the Latin American country overtaking Italy for the world’s fourth-highest death total, according to Reuters data... Lopez Obrador said he was briefed on the pandemic this past week and was optimistic. “The report is positive, good. The conclusion is that the pandemic is going down, that it is losing intensity,” he said in a video message.

New Confirmed COVID cases per day animation.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1282442536305426432

Milan seems pretty crowded these days.
https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam/italia/lombardia/milano/duomo-milano.html?timelapse=1

Hooahguy

07-16-2020, 04:15

I don't know how much traffic a train station has in your area, but I would imagine exposure wise, train would be a safer bet depending on how many stops would be made along the way. Considering a lot of airlines aren't doing the distancing thing anymore and are just packing people in, and airports would in general have more foot-traffic than most stations.

Best bet is to just get a good mask and wash your hands often/try not to touch unnecessary surfaces/etc.
Decided to go with the train and make sure I can open the window by me. I should be ok I guess.

Pannonian

07-16-2020, 09:15

Decided to go with the train and make sure I can open the window by me. I should be ok I guess.

Couldn't you go by plane and make sure you could open the window by you? I'm sure I've seen that on camera before; Airplane! IIRC.

Idaho

07-16-2020, 09:58

Daily deaths in Arizona match those in all of EU.

Daily deaths in Florida match those in all of EU.

This is obviously fake news created by socialists. They probably poison masks to spread covid. And covid doesn't exist. (Waves flag)

edyzmedieval

07-16-2020, 17:20

We're in the second wave now. South Korea has a third wave already...

... but apparently Moderna said the vaccine is showing good signs.

Hooahguy

07-16-2020, 18:19

The Oxford vaccine is showing promise (https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-oxford-vaccine-could-provide-double-protection-report-12029406?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter&fbclid=IwAR0z0xrr7KFioTOmA0Om4ebpDUfzI_zCFGQg4Bjy4tkZw0f9DFNaV-4F0nI) as well.

Furunculus

07-17-2020, 09:14

entertaining oopsy in british covid stats:

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no-one-can-ever-recover-from-covid-19-in-england-a-statistical-anomaly/

Greyblades

07-17-2020, 13:16

ReluctantSamurai

07-17-2020, 15:53

It’s time to fix this statistical flaw that leads to an over-exaggeration of COVID-associated deaths. One reasonable approach would be to define community COVID-related deaths as those that occurred within 21 days of a COVID positive test result.

While this fixes the anomaly of getting run over by a bus, it doesn't account for long-term effects of COVID-19 that result in death, which may not be relevant, I would admit. Personally, I don't think the logging of in-hospital deaths as the "official" tally captures the true extent of fatalities. A look at the "expected deaths" when compared to a historical benchmark is a better indicator of total deaths, IMHO. That method is not without its' problems either as there are deaths by suicide, murder, overdose, etc that occurred because of lock-down procedures. Then again, there were deaths from COVID-19 that occurred outside of the hospital, and these never get included in the "official" figures. Monty did a pretty good piece awhile back explaining why the "expected deaths' method of counting was perhaps a more accurate method.

Starting to wonder if there was ever a time when a statistic became publicised and hasnt turned into a shitshow of misinterpretation.

Would you care to elaborate on this?

CrossLOPER

07-17-2020, 18:00

So they record every death of a covid patient as death by covid, even if the death is after they have been cleard and discharged and regardless of cause of death.
What are complications?

Furunculus

07-17-2020, 18:42

From scientific advice given on june 22nd and released today:

“SPI-M-O (scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling, operational) do not believe it is possible to return to a ‘pre-Covid’ normality, without levels of contact tracing and Covid security effectiveness that would be difficult to achieve, without some sort of additional increase in immunity, either through vaccination or infection.

As a result, thought should be given to the triggers for when measures should be reintroduced, what metrics should inform this, and what further data and information may need to be collected”

ReluctantSamurai

07-17-2020, 19:57

As a result, thought should be given to the triggers for when measures should be reintroduced, what metrics should inform this, and what further data and information may need to be collected”

To me, recommendations are already in place.

1. Testing a given proportion of the populace. Together with the total number of positives that come back, and the proportion of the tests that come back positive, yields sufficient data on whether the virus is being contained and/or suppressed. Biggest problem here in the US is that labs are overwhelmed, resulting in huge delays that render the reason for testing in the first place, almost moot.

2. Having a sufficient number of contact tracers so that clusters of infections can be identified quickly, and hotspots can be suppressed before they get out of control. That's problem #2 in the US, as few states have the required number of tracers, with some states having only a token staff. Consequently, hotspots routinely spiral out of control, as can be seen by the current firestorm ravaging the US South & Southwest.

3. Mandatory wearing of masks. Period. Don't want to hear all your BS reasons for not doing so. No mask? Here's one. Still don't want to wear one? It's going to cost you, then. Multiple offender? How about jail, where you can get intimately acquainted with COVID-19 (among other things:creep:)

4. Keep indoor activities with large crowds to a minimum. It's a fact that many types of indoor activities are super-spreader events; church gatherings, bars, gyms. Keep these locked down until you have 14 consecutive days of falling cases; the positivity rate is less than 2.5%; and strict monitoring of areas like restaurants and other shops where people mingle. Businesses that violate protocol are fined or again closed.

We've learned a lot about SARS-CoV-2 since the pandemic began, and the more we learn the more we see there's a lot we don't know. But the above guidelines put out by many health agencies around the world have shown that we know enough about how this virus behaves and spreads, to suppress and contain it. The biggest challenge here in the US is to stop politicizing the pandemic. It's THE single biggest underlying reason behind the current unfolding crisis. And you can point squarely at our Fearless Leader and his Minions for the cause of this.

Idaho

07-17-2020, 21:35

So they record every death of a covid patient as death by covid, even if the death is after they have been cleard and discharged and regardless of cause of death.

I am not suprised anymore; it happens so often. Starting to wonder if there was ever a time when a statistic became publicised and hasnt turned into a shitshow of misinterpretation.

The only stats that are really relevant are the deaths over average seasonal mortality. Those show the impact of the pandemic - direct and indirect.

Montmorency

07-18-2020, 05:24

We're in the second wave now. South Korea has a third wave already...

... but apparently Moderna said the vaccine is showing good signs.

For context, here is South Korea's second/third "wave."

https://i.imgur.com/3bKBoIA.png

entertaining oopsy in british covid stats:

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no-one-can-ever-recover-from-covid-19-in-england-a-statistical-anomaly/

That method could certainly be problematic in the long-term, but there is no reason to believe it includes more than a handful of questionable categorizations. The PHE (Public Health England) began recording all deaths associated with a COVID test at the end of April, in part due to concerns that deaths outside hospital were being missed. Before then only hospital deaths were counted. Evidence toward this was the discrepancy from ONS (Office of National Statistics) reported deaths up to that time, which defined deaths according to inclusion of COVID in death certificates. While that can also miss or miscategorize deaths, particularly in overflow conditions, it at least more directly attempts to capture etiology.

Meanwhile, the PHE definition continues to exclude all deaths without a positive test result, though we know many people were missed entirely by testing, and since March there have been tens of thousands of excess deaths (~65K excess deaths total since March) beyond the PHE death count (excess deaths returned to historical levels only at the end of June). I assume the commonly-reported figures are the PHE data, since those are updated daily compared to weekly or monthly for ONS. Currently if you look up "UK coronavirus deaths" you are presented with 45K and change. So, correct me if I'm wrong here, but it indeed appears that PHE figures continue to come lower than ONS figures, which reported ~46K deaths through the end of June.

So the method of counting all deaths associated with a positive COVID test still produces a dramatic undercount as of now.

Is this the power of reading through? I hope. :wink:

That said, the method will have to be revised eventually to be sustainable, accounting for any debate of how to categorize the long-term impact of CV19 sequelae in terms of cause of death.

EDIT: I have to add a clarification to the ONS figures cited above. The 46K deaths through June were for England and Wales alone. My bad.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19englandandwales/deathsoccurringinjune2020

There were 50,335 deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) that occurred between 1 March and 30 June 2020, registered up to 4 July 2020 in England and Wales; of these, 46,736 had COVID-19 assigned as the underlying cause of death.

I can't easily identify if there are or where the ONS up-to-date fatalities data for all the UK are, but I doubt Scotland and Northern Ireland add much to the evident discrepancy from PHE figures (which I gather include all-UK deaths, with Scotland and NI deaths being time-limited 28 days unlike the England deaths).

From scientific advice given on june 22nd and released today:

“SPI-M-O (scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling, operational) do not believe it is possible to return to a ‘pre-Covid’ normality, without levels of contact tracing and Covid security effectiveness that would be difficult to achieve, without some sort of additional increase in immunity, either through vaccination or infection.

As a result, thought should be given to the triggers for when measures should be reintroduced, what metrics should inform this, and what further data and information may need to be collected”

Heh, "difficult to achieve." Is it materially or organizationally difficult to achieve? Is there literally an absence of available resources that could be put to the task? Would trying to achieve it by hook or crook somehow be more trouble than its worth? Would the marginal benefits of doing so be too low to justify the trouble? Or is it more of a fiscal and political question of implementation? "Difficult to achieve" is typically a gloze on the latter IME.

3. Mandatory wearing of masks. Period. Don't want to hear all your BS reasons for not doing so. No mask? Here's one. Still don't want to wear one? It's going to cost you, then. Multiple offender? How about jail, where you can get intimately acquainted with COVID-19 (among other things:creep:)

To be blunt this is kind of the same impulse as hoping sexual predators get 'a taste of their medicine' in prison, but here with extra public health implications (of exposing reckless people to COVID hotspots). And the reports were coming already in March and April on how police were abusing authority for maintaining social distancing or masking mandates to unreasonably target people for harassment, especially minorities. It really is a difficult subject, how to most rationally and humanely mete out the coercive activities of the state. Even a lot of liberals fall into this trap, such as with gun control: 'If they won't obey a gun seizure law send the cops to sort them out.' Who, those police, whom we know and love so well?

I don't know how to operationalize these concerns but clearly police intervention and punitive incarceration as policy needs to be rationed. For example, send burglars to community restorative justice programs, hand everyone in the White House life sentences without possibility of parole and confiscate the bulk of their estates toward a sovereign wealth fund. :sweatdrop:

Furunculus

07-18-2020, 10:26

ReluctantSamurai

07-18-2020, 14:05

To be blunt this is kind of the same impulse as hoping sexual predators get 'a taste of their medicine' in prison, but here with extra public health implications (of exposing reckless people to COVID hotspots).

In my point #3 above, handing out a mask was choice one, paying a fine was choice two if choice one was rejected, and only then would the threat of choice three come into play. Interesting that you bypassed the first two choices and went straight to the end-game:shrug:

Personally, I don't view mandatory mask wearing as any different than the seat belt law. And the New Jersey Supreme Court decided that causing the death of another in violation of the latter can get you jail time:

https://www.einhornlawyers.com/blog/criminal-law/drivers-can-jailed-passengers-dont-wear-seatbelts/

The message from the case is simple and clear: a driver can be held responsible for injuries or death sustained by a passenger if that driver does not insist that seat belts be worn. This applies to drivers of all ages; not just teenagers. The decision sends a loud and distinct message. Our Courts consider seat belt usage to be of primary public importance. The decision stands for the proposition that failure to have passengers wear seat belts can result in a jail sentence to a driver. If there is a death, the driver can face up to 10 years in prison and if there is significant or serious injury, the driver can be jailed between 3 and 5 years for the third-degree offense or for up to 18 months for the fourth-degree offense.

The only difference, AFAICS, is that the causal effect is clear with a seat belt, less so with death(s) from COVID-19. Considering the current state of affairs in the US, how is it any different if you insert "face masks" instead of "seat belts" in the above quote?

BTW, would you have commented if I'd left off the part about 'getting intimately acquainted with COVID-19 and other things"?

Montmorency

07-19-2020, 02:53

Professor Carl Heneghan - Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University:
https://unherd.com/thepost/prof-carl-heneghan-can-we-trust-the-covid-19-death-numbers/

Key quotes:

There was “massive confusion” about different Covid data between England’s health bodies. “Public Health England figures are about double the ONS figures because PHE are reporting anybody who has had a positive Covid death in the past… This will get increasingly confusing as we go into the next Winter because there could be a new outbreak and new deaths while also still reporting on historical deaths… This is a problem for epidemiologists and media… ”

Even a “28 period cut-off is still not ideal for accurate death numbers because there is “immediate cause and underlying cause… Immediate cause means you’ve had Covid within 21 days but outside of that, it becomes the underlying cause — something that contributed to your death but wasn’t a direct cause. A 21 day cut-off would be helpful because it gives a clearer understanding of that distinction”

“We follow excess deaths which is the most accurate information about what’s going on at that moment, but it can’t tell you what those deaths are caused by” (i.e. people not coming forward with heart attacks etc)

“There’s an important distinction between lives lost and life years lost. One of the things we’ll be watching very closely over the next six months is how many people would have actually died in the next six months… That’s where the excess deaths really matter. If we start to see it trend significantly under for the next few months, we’ll start to come forward with information that suggests there was a group of vulnerable people that any respiratory infection would have shortened their life.”

“In the media you’ll always hear about catastrophe and the consequences of that. One of the things we notice is that when you don’t hear anything that usually means there’s good news happening. So when Sweden looks worse you hear about it but when it’s not so bad, like now, you never see it in the media.”

To be clear, the PHE numbers are in fact the ones widely reported in the media, such as NYT, or COVID databases/resources, such as John Hopkins. (PHE figures exclude the death of one British citizen on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, or the 84 recorded deaths in the British Overseas Territories and Crown dependencies, which other sources do include.) From the relevant PHE site
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

https://i.imgur.com/F4W3DFE.png
https://i.imgur.com/qCdXNK7.png

45273 (45233 as of July 17) is not about double 46736 (through June), so I would ask the professor with all due respect, "What the :daisy: are you talking about?"

Some media coverage:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53443724

Figures release from PHE today show that just under 10% of coronavirus deaths in England happened more than 28 days after a positive test.

In almost half of those cases, Covid-19 was recorded as the main cause of death.

In my point #3 above, handing out a mask was choice one, paying a fine was choice two if choice one was rejected, and only then would the threat of choice three come into play. Interesting that you bypassed the first two choices and went straight to the end-game:shrug:

Personally, I don't view mandatory mask wearing as any different than the seat belt law. And the New Jersey Supreme Court decided that causing the death of another in violation of the latter can get you jail time:

https://www.einhornlawyers.com/blog/criminal-law/drivers-can-jailed-passengers-dont-wear-seatbelts/

The only difference, AFAICS, is that the causal effect is clear with a seat belt, less so with death(s) from COVID-19. Considering the current state of affairs in the US, how is it any different if you insert "face masks" instead of "seat belts" in the above quote?

I didn't object to handing out free masks, so I didn't comment on that. A driver can be held liable for not enforcing seatbelt usage (I don't know how often this is prosecuted), but it's difficult for me to entertain scenarios in which a driver should be arrested and prosecuted when caught with unbelted passengers. The appropriate space for these sorts of matters becoming police matters is very slim in my perspective.

BTW, would you have commented if I'd left off the part about 'getting intimately acquainted with COVID-19 and other things"?

The sentiment is worth remarking on, but even without saying it there's clearly a risk in augmenting confined populations where outbreaks are already routine. What does it amount to? I'm just saying when we treat with the abstract power of law and state we take into account the actual process, civil liberties, and costs/benefits of prosecution or incarceration. We shouldn't be looking to put refuseniks 'through the system,' because it's abusive in principle, even more abusive in practice, and won't actually serve public health objectives or notably change behaviors. I expect Donald Trump deciding masks look cool sometimes now has had a bigger impact than all the mask patrols could.

ReluctantSamurai

07-19-2020, 03:45

it's difficult for me to entertain scenarios in which a driver should be arrested and prosecuted when caught with unbelted passengers

It's "unbelted passengers" that result in death, a key distinction from simply being pulled over and not having one on. I would ask you again, what is the difference between these statements given the current circumstances: "seat belt usage to be of primary public importance" or "face mask usage to be of primary public importance"? I would say the latter carries greater weight because of the possibility to cause many multiple deaths.

The appropriate space for these sorts of matters becoming police matters is very slim in my perspective.

And who is going to do it? A Walmart clerk making minimum wage? A customer who is following protocol? We've seen all too often how badly that turns out.

We shouldn't be looking to put refuseniks 'through the system,' because it's abusive in principle

Agreed. My comment about incarceration was made more in frustration than in seriousness. Just wear the damn mask, and it will go a long ways towards putting down this virus.

I expect Donald Trump deciding masks look cool sometimes now has had a bigger impact than all the mask patrols could.

Not holding my breath on that one:no:

Montmorency

07-19-2020, 04:26

It's "unbelted passengers" that result in death, a key distinction from simply being pulled over and not having one on. I would ask you again, what is the difference between these statements given the current circumstances: "seat belt usage to be of primary public importance" or "face mask usage to be of primary public importance"? I would say the latter carries greater weight because of the possibility to cause many multiple deaths.

I mean that arresting over mask noncompliance would be like arresting over seatbelt noncompliance, whereas with arresting over seatbelt noncompliance in connection to injury or death, the more direct analogy is to arrest over mask noncompliance where infections are traced back to the refusenik at a time and place where they were shedding virus while unmasked.

And who is going to do it? A Walmart clerk making minimum wage? A customer who is following protocol? We've seen all too often how badly that turns out.

I'm not strictly opposed to police bodily handling people off private premises who refuse to leave.

Agreed. My comment about incarceration was made more in frustration than in seriousness.

Gotcha.

Not holding my breath on that one:no:

I'm not going to put together a compilation, but Trump wearing a mask (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/11/trum-wears-face-mask-walter-reed-visit-357249) just once (not sure if he has since then) prompted a great deal of conservative fawning in the media about his masculinity and toughness. You can imagine what their impressions of a masked Joe Biden were a couple months ago.

Whether this actually changed the behavior of some Trump supporters I can't show in evidence, but I assume there must be some effect.

ReluctantSamurai

07-19-2020, 04:43

I'm not strictly opposed to police bodily handling people off private premises who refuse to leave.

That's what I'm referring to. Again, option 1---here's a free mask to wear while you are in our place of business. Still don't want to wear one?---then sorry you must vacate the premises. Don't want to leave, or escalate to creating a scene? Then here's a $500 ticket. Thank You and have a nice day!~D

ReluctantSamurai

07-19-2020, 05:15

This just confirms that the more we think we know about SARS-CoV-2, the more we find we don't know enough:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/18/health/texas-infants-coronavirus-trnd/index.html

"We currently have 85 babies under the age of one year in Nueces County that have all tested positive for Covid-19," said Annette Rodriguez, director of public health for Corpus Christi Nueces County.

Damn! :shame:

But this is entirely predictable:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/18/politics/cdc-funding-white-house-senate-republicans/index.html

This as the delays in receiving test results in some states is taking so long due to backlogs, that it almost makes getting a test useless.

ReluctantSamurai

07-19-2020, 05:47

Here's how face masks are handled Down Under:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-19/face-masks-melbourne-victoria-rules-who-needs-to-wear-them/12470640

In metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire, everyone over the age of 12 needs to wear a mask or face covering when they leave their house for one of the four allowed reasons.

Study or work — if you cannot work from home
Medical care and caregiving
Shopping for essentials
Daily exercise

This applies to everyone, including people who live outside these areas but are visiting for one of the permitted reasons.

Penalty for not wearing one? A $200 fine.

The current resurgence in Victoria?

Victoria has recorded 363 new cases and three more deaths from COVID-19, with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announcing masks will be made compulsory in Melbourne and Mitchell Shire in a few days' time.

:jawdrop:

Even here in Michigan, 363 new cases and three deaths was where we were a month ago, and that was considered 'having it under control'.:dizzy2:

a completely inoffensive name

07-19-2020, 06:56

I'm trying to figure out how to clarify my thoughts right now. American's seem to have somehow conflated the concept of liberty with the concept of individualism. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are in the context of a people, really mankind as a whole. It's like we are living that passage from The Republic where they discuss the ultimate tyranny arising out of the most free society because the people begin to chafe at the slightest inconvenience.

EDIT: More thoughts...I wonder if this experiment is on track to end, not so much from any physical threat but because the concept behind the experiment has been lost and forgotten as people live their life believing as if the Founding Fathers were sociopaths that only wanted to make money and act without regards to others. I'm just not sure the discipline is there anymore to behave in a free manner, which is really the whole point of what I am trying to say. Liberty requires restraint. Freedoms confer responsibilities and obligations. Citizenship demands duty. In the most practical sense, rights mean as much as they are enforced and if everyone is careless and apathetic then rights are essentially abandoned and in the vacuum we return to a might makes right system.

Pannonian

07-19-2020, 16:28

Papewaio

07-20-2020, 04:43

ReluctantSamurai

07-23-2020, 13:25

Another brown-nosing politician willing to sacrifice someone else for the sake of money:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/20/politics/mike-parson-missouri-governor-school-reopening/index.html

However, he's in good company:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/22/us-reopening-politicians-volunteering-peoples-lives-coronavirus

ReluctantSamurai

07-24-2020, 12:08

So you think you want to mandate in-school classrooms this fall America? Here's a hint of what to expect from a country that's done a far better job at battling this pandemic than you:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-24/nsw-coronavirus-seven-new-cases-recorded/12488446

COVID-Safe registrations were also made compulsory for venues which involves submitting a digital record of patrons' attendance within 24 hours and a mandatory hygiene marshal.

What is their "COVID-Safe" plan, you might ask?

https://pmc.gov.au/nccc/have-covid-19-plan

You should have a plan that sets out how you prepare your workplace to protect staff and customers to prevent infection, your response if there is COVID-19 case and how you will recover.

I don't think the word 'plan' is in too many American lawmakers vocabulary these days....:shame:

a completely inoffensive name

07-25-2020, 10:07

Trumpism and Brexit are Liberal Democracy gone wrong. It's the worst aspects of Liberalism and Democracy taking charge, with the best aspects ignored. Rather than individual rights safeguarded for the protection of society, and democracy safeguarding against tyranny, it is the individual no matter what their impact on society is, and responsibility for choices and decisions put aside as long as there is a big enough crowd tending one way.

Well, it is the lack of safeguards for individual rights that makes our countries quite illiberal democracies rather than some extreme variant of liberalism. We should be very clear that we have ideologies that deviate from liberalism flourishing, masquerading otherwise. They deliberately go out of their way to paint themselves as what they are not and project all their flaws and sins on their political opponents. It is quite clear what the goal is, the first step is not taking the bait by doubting the notion of liberal democracies but instead we should attempt to restore it.

A democracy works better with and engaged and educated government.
It doesn't works so well with conspiracy theorists who believe the new world order wants to use facial recognition on everyone, and that same NWO wants to put face masks on everyone to control them. Just like the small government types are happy to have unmarked federal officers arrest people without due cause, reading them their rights or proper processing and legal procedures being applied.
And yes we have the anti-mask morons in Australia too. Social media spreads stupidity much faster than fact - Mark Twain was right.

Industrialization is sustainable once a large segment of the population has compulsory education, the levels you would call primary and secondary.
Digitization requires a large segment of the population with what you call tertiary education. However, both the US and Australia only have roughly 30% of residents under 30 with a bachelor's degree.

Basic education facilitated worker transition into an economy of things and manufacturing. University or 'liberal' education is necessary for a transition into an economy of thoughts and services.
There is a symmetry on the political side. Primary and secondary education turned otherwise illiterate farmers into a labor force that could communicate and organize. Tertiary education does the same in an age of mass disinformation and propaganda.

Pannonian

07-25-2020, 12:15

Well, it is the lack of safeguards for individual rights that makes our countries quite illiberal democracies rather than some extreme variant of liberalism. We should be very clear that we have ideologies that deviate from liberalism flourishing, masquerading otherwise. They deliberately go out of their way to paint themselves as what they are not and project all their flaws and sins on their political opponents. It is quite clear what the goal is, the first step is not taking the bait by doubting the notion of liberal democracies but instead we should attempt to restore it.

The far right have the right to act however they like. That's liberalism. This is underpinned by the elected government, which reinforces their ability to impose their will on dissenters. That's democracy. Their every argument is founded on the language of liberalism and democracy. We're just used to the idea of governments doing what they think is right and power having checks and balances, and people listening to reason. What the far right have realised is that, for many, "winning" is reason enough, and winning can take the form of making sure the other side loses.

rory_20_uk

07-25-2020, 19:21

Industrialization is sustainable once a large segment of the population has compulsory education, the levels you would call primary and secondary.
Digitization requires a large segment of the population with what you call tertiary education. However, both the US and Australia only have roughly 30% of residents under 30 with a bachelor's degree.

Basic education facilitated worker transition into an economy of things and manufacturing. University or 'liberal' education is necessary for a transition into an economy of thoughts and services.
There is a symmetry on the political side. Primary and secondary education turned otherwise illiterate farmers into a labor force that could communicate and organize. Tertiary education does the same in an age of mass disinformation and propaganda.

Most degrees are not there to help people analyse data in facts, and it doesn't require something to be a degree to do so. Whether most people even want to is also in question. Most people don't want "news" they want "olds" - to have confirmation of what they already believe.

In an economy of thoughts and services will not be everyone requiring a degree - it will be a very small handful of people (increasingly supplemented by AI) creating and then the instructions passed down to a mixture of software, robots and humans who require a basic level of ability to follow instructions - a handful of people create PowerPoint, but a vast number of idiots use it; those who use phones have no idea how they work etc etc etc.

An example is a budget hotel in the UK. The hotel "manager" plugs things into the software. They have a certain level of flexibility but if there are deviations then this is flagged and someone at HQ then contacts them. Their salary for "running" the hotel is about £20k. All the thinking has been moved to the software and those up-stream.

~:smoking:

a completely inoffensive name

07-26-2020, 05:08

Most degrees are not there to help people analyse data in facts, and it doesn't require something to be a degree to do so.
You don't need a high school degree to read and write competently either. It's not really about the education being necessary to learn certain things, but it helps to force everyone to be exposed to the knowledge, to be challenged.
I never said anything about data or statistics either, misinformation and propaganda are enabled by shit thinking skills. Any college degree will to a certain extent improve cognitive discipline. Or is it coincidence that in the US the party identification between college and non-college grads continues to diverge?

Whether most people even want to is also in question. Most people don't want "news" they want "olds" - to have confirmation of what they already believe.
The default stance for anyone is to avoid challenge or stress, what does this say about anything? Kids don't want to be in school at any age, regardless of how basic and fundamental the knowledge is, do we abandon learning the ABCs?

In an economy of thoughts and services will not be everyone requiring a degree - it will be a very small handful of people (increasingly supplemented by AI) creating and then the instructions passed down to a mixture of software, robots and humans who require a basic level of ability to follow instructions - a handful of people create PowerPoint, but a vast number of idiots use it; those who use phones have no idea how they work etc etc etc.
This is at odds from the reality by a wide margin. The market demand for college graduates is large, the average income for college degrees is still remarkably higher than non-college grads. The expectation right now is that college degree is your ticket to the middle class. Please tell me when this trend will reverse and higher education will go back to comprising 10% or less of the workforce.

An example is a budget hotel in the UK. The hotel "manager" plugs things into the software. They have a certain level of flexibility but if there are deviations then this is flagged and someone at HQ then contacts them. Their salary for "running" the hotel is about £20k. All the thinking has been moved to the software and those up-stream.
This example is not making sense, plug what things into what software? Flexibility regarding plugging things into other things? What are you talking about.

Assuming somehow all the manual labor has been automated, you will have technicians to maintain the robots which require a type of higher education as these are complicated machines. You will have the on site manager who may well be a glorified security guard standing around making sure the machines are operating. You will have developers who develop the software which require a type of high education. Even in this fully automated scenario the few jobs that are related to this hotel require advanced skills to complete with the exception of maybe the one 'manager' but we won't have 90% of the workforce acting as managers.

ReluctantSamurai

07-28-2020, 12:31

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/28/coronavirus-spike-spain-pandemic-mistakes

What struck me about this article is not that yet another country is being shown to have taken their victory lap prematurely, but this:

It is a relief that Spain’s armed forces are now being trained to test and trace. During the first wave, the Military Emergencies Unit stepped in when the pandemic overwhelmed care homes. Its personnel cleaned, disinfected, taught staff how to respond and carted away the dead.

The government will offer military trackers to regional authorities. Some may take this as an insult to local pride, though one hopes that saving lives, and the economy, will trump petty politicking. If that doesn’t happen, Spain risks an autumn return to a state of emergency, with central government taking control once more.

With the extreme shortage of trackers/tracers, is using military personnel to fill this role a good idea?

Seamus Fermanagh

07-28-2020, 16:35

With the extreme shortage of trackers/tracers, is using military personnel to fill this role a good idea?

A lot would depend on context. Offering such a resource seems to have few drawbacks. Requiring or imposing such a resource would be far more intrusive.

How well would a populace respond to such? Cultural norms on the issue differ.

However, military forces do represent a (usually) significant number of personnel who are in a position to be trained and used for a task such as this that requires numbers and an immediacy that ramping up a civilian equivalent may not provide.

Pannonian

07-28-2020, 18:14

A lot would depend on context. Offering such a resource seems to have few drawbacks. Requiring or imposing such a resource would be far more intrusive.

How well would a populace respond to such? Cultural norms on the issue differ.

However, military forces do represent a (usually) significant number of personnel who are in a position to be trained and used for a task such as this that requires numbers and an immediacy that ramping up a civilian equivalent may not provide.

Military forces may be less lethal to the civilian population than law enforcement forces.

ReluctantSamurai

07-28-2020, 22:14

My thought is that this sort of situation is something military organization is well adapted to do. Personnel are already organized into units, they would more than likely have their own vehicles, and are used to dealing with logistical situations. Of course the underlying premise is that the military would be available upon request, and not simply inserted by force. Here as in many places, trackers/tracers are in extremely short supply, and are equally as important as testing.

Shaka_Khan

08-02-2020, 05:03

I'm afraid of what would happen if they open the schools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYEFfd63AxY

Hooahguy

08-02-2020, 06:32

Its going to be a million times worse, but maybe when children start dying en masse the GOP will finally get its head out of its :daisy:

ReluctantSamurai

08-02-2020, 10:44

Hopefully, common sense and better protocol will prevail in other states. Remember, Georgia is a state whose governor, not too long ago, claimed he didn't know that asymptomatic people could spread the disease:crazy: My guess is that in-house schooling will last a month or so, and then will have to go to online learning only. And with an administration that refuses to allocate resources to schools to deal with the pandemic, even that is not going to go well. Of course you have these morons:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-schools-must-reopen-person-instruction-education-commissioner-says-n1233061

Florida's education commissioner said Monday all public schools must reopen to students in-person when the academic year begins next month, even as cases of the coronavirus continued to surge in his state. In the emergency order, Commissioner Richard Corcoran called schools "not just the site of academic learning" but also crucial places in students' lives that provide "nutrition, socialization, counseling and extra-curricular activities," adding that their reopening was critical to "a return to Florida hitting its full economic stride."

Of course, the almighty dollar above the lives of children and teachers....and of course a moronic governor [Ron DeSantis] making the statement that "if you can do Walmart, then we absolutely can do schools".:crazy::crazy:

And then there's this bit of hypocrisy:

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/10/texas-reopening-schools-teachers-coronavirus/

Particularly galling for some teachers is the TEA's [Texas Education Agency] own behavior. Even as the agency compels teachers back to the classroom, its own offices remain all-but-closed with most staff working from home to protect their own health. As of July, agency staff have had the option to return to the office building on a “voluntary basis” and the TEA is working on next steps for “later this summer and beyond,” according to a written statement from the agency.

And there will be serious blowback if/when disaster strikes the rush to reopen schools when people realize that the original CDC guidelines were suppressed by the White House:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/us/politics/trump-schools-reopening.html?searchResultPosition=1

“While many jurisdictions and districts mention symptom screening, very few include information as to the response or course of action they would take if student/faculty/staff are found to have symptoms, nor have they clearly identified which symptoms they will include in their screening,” the talking points say. “In addition, few plans include information regarding school closure in the event of positive tests in the school community.”

One only has to look at MLB here in the States to see what kind of mayhem will result from that lack of planning.....

Lastly, our Fearless Leader has once again managed to turn a crucial health issue into a personal one:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/us/politics/trump-schools-coronavirus.html

The issue has enormous consequences for the economy as well as the upcoming election. With children at home, many parents are unable to resume work, hindering the economic resurgence Mr. Trump hopes to spur before the Nov. 3 vote. And so, like wearing masks, the issue of reopening schools has become one more battleground in the ferocious ideological wars that divide America. Mr. Trump brushed off the rise in virus cases, pointing instead to lower death rates, and characterized those reluctant to reopen the schools as partisans trying to hurt him politically at the height of his re-election campaign this fall. “They think it’s going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed,” he said. “No way.”

Of course it has nothing to do with thousands of teachers and students who will be at risk of contracting COVID-19. "It's damn simple America....it's a political ploy to keep me from being RE-ELECTED!!!".:clown:

Seamus Fermanagh

08-03-2020, 20:40

Its going to be a million times worse, but maybe when children start dying en masse the GOP will finally get its head out of its :daisy:

The statistics say that they will not, and even the incidence of post-covid syndrome stuff (which is worse than the disease itself for most kids, just as with chicken pox) is at a low enough rate to make 'en masse' quite unlikely.

However, 10 and ups apparently spread it to adults just as readily as do other adults, so the school openings could still jack the rate of infection, death, etc. quite a bit.

However, nothing short of a punitive electoral debacle in November will stop the GOP's rectal insertion of cranium behavior. I look forward to voting my part in making this happen.

Montmorency

08-04-2020, 04:46

OT: UK MP rape

36 crew members test positive for coronavirus on cruise ship docked in Norway (https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-cruise-ship-norway-20200802-hexemm54gvc63keycynzdodxoa-story.html)

Thirty-six crew members have tested positive for COVID-19 aboard Hurtigruten cruise line’s MS Roald Amundsen after the virus rippled through the ship, the Norwegian cruise company said Saturday.

The outbreak scuttled a sailing scheduled for Friday.

Passengers on voyages that departed July 17 and July 24 have been contacted, according to the cruise line.

The ship, a small ocean liner that can accommodate 530 passengers, has emptied of passengers and sits in dock in Tromsø, Norway, Hurtigruten said.

The rest of the crew of 158 tested negative, according to the cruise operator.

In the U.S., cruising is suspended. A no-sail order is set to last at least into the fall.

Gottem.

‘Not handling the pandemic well’: Man fires at officers with AK-47 after refusing to wear a mask, police say (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/03/mask-mandatory-pennsylvania-shooting-police)

When a cigar shop clerk told Adam Zaborowski on Friday he had to wear a mask in the shop, the 35-year-old angrily refused. Instead, he grabbed two stogies, stormed outside — and then pulled a handgun and shot at the clerk, Bethlehem Township, Pa., police said.

The next day, cornered near his home, Zaborowski allegedly fired at police with an AK-47, sparking a wild shootout with at least seven officers that ended with him shot multiple times and under arrest.

True American, just like the lady from this older story.

https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/woman-opens-fire-on-cell-tower-workers-hundreds-of-feet-in-the-air-sheriff-says/1012483719/

Channel 9 got a hold of the 911 call made from the tower, where a three-person crew was doing work south of Taylorsville.

"I've got a lady across the street that's been yelling and raising hell since we've been here -- that we're on her property -- and now there's shots that have been fired," the caller told a dispatcher. "I've got two guys on the tower."

Deputies said when they arrived, Moose was armed with two axes and had barricaded herself inside her house across the street from the tower.

Authorities were able to eventually get her out of the home. She was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon and resisting arrest.

Sheriff Chris Bowman said Moose has contacted deputies previously over concerns about the tower.

"She's hearing voices from that tower, they're sending signals -- this type of thing," Bowman told Channel 9. "It concerns me she has a weapon and actually discharged that weapon."

None of the workers were struck by the bullets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIUdssOAn0s

Montmorency

08-04-2020, 04:47

The statistics say that they will not, and even the incidence of post-covid syndrome stuff (which is worse than the disease itself for most kids, just as with chicken pox) is at a low enough rate to make 'en masse' quite unlikely.

However, 10 and ups apparently spread it to adults just as readily as do other adults, so the school openings could still jack the rate of infection, death, etc. quite a bit.

However, nothing short of a punitive electoral debacle in November will stop the GOP's rectal insertion of cranium behavior. I look forward to voting my part in making this happen.

At least 1100 people under age 25 have died - call it a thousand kids. How many tens of thousands with subtle to crippling sequelae, who knows.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#AgeAndSex

EDIT: Sorry, I read the wrong numbers. Here, for more clarity.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku/data

244 deaths under 25, but that's are outdated (135,579 total deaths vs. 158,929 on other online sources) so let's round it to 250 kids. In that case a thousand dead in the minor age range would be the plausible projection.

When schools were shutting down in March, the actual prevalence of the virus around the country was orders of magnitude lower than it is now.

Here's an example of a school that just reopened, and had to close due to contagion the same day. After exposing everyone.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/31/us/indiana-student-covid-positive-school/index.html

What I'm saying is, half-assed policy and an increasingly well-distributed (i.e. uncontrolled) virus certainly has the potential to kill a few thousand more kids by election day. Our hair is getting mussed.

EDIT: Even better, the school I referenced above did not appear to close after the D1 fail. More here, and some prayerful tripwire strategies from school systems around the country:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/us/schools-reopening-indiana-coronavirus.html

Because of the low infection rate locally, New York City, the largest district in the country, plans to reopen schools on a hybrid model on Sept. 10, with students attending in-person classes one to three days a week. Yet even there, the system might have to quickly close if the citywide infection rate ticks up even modestly.

On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio laid out a plan for responding to positive cases that would mean many of the city’s 1,800 public schools would most likely have individual classrooms or even entire buildings closed at certain points.

One or two confirmed cases in a single classroom would require those classes to close for 14 days, with all students and staff members ordered to quarantine. The rest of the school would continue to operate, but if two or more people in different classrooms in the same school tested positive, the entire building would close for an investigation, and might not reopen for two weeks depending on the results.

In California, where schools in two-thirds of the state have been barred from reopening in person for now, state guidelines call for a school to close for at least 14 days if more than 5 percent of its students, faculty and staff test positive over a two-week period.

Chicago, the nation’s third-largest school district, has proposed a hybrid system for reopening that would put students into 15-member pods that can be quarantined if one member tests positive. School buildings should close if the city averages more than 400 new cases a week or 200 cases a day, the plan states, with other worrying factors like low hospital capacity or a sudden spike in cases taken into account.

ReluctantSamurai

08-04-2020, 13:30

The statistics say that they will not, and even the incidence of post-covid syndrome stuff (which is worse than the disease itself for most kids, just as with chicken pox) is at a low enough rate to make 'en masse' quite unlikely.

There are approximately 56.6 million students, here in the US, in the K-12 range. The incidence rate per 100,000 in the 10-19 year old range is about 117.4 in the US. So about 66,000 students would contract COVID-19 at that rate. With a 0.2% CFR in that age group, that's 1,329 deaths (if my math is correct). Not an insignificant number, IMHO.

Then, of course, there's the risk to teachers and staff, and the risk of students bringing the virus home. And all of this is assuming an individual that has contracted COVID-19, will not get reinfected, which is an unfounded assumption at this time.

ReluctantSamurai

08-05-2020, 16:07

Resistance to wearing a mask during a pandemic is nothing new:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/mask-protests-1918.html?referringSource=articleShare

Idaho

08-05-2020, 16:10

Trump's covid interview as Lisa Minelli:
https://mobile.twitter.com/SoozUK/status/1290720617361219586?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1290720617361219586%7Ctwgr% 5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs9e.github.io%2Fiframe%2F2%2Ftwitter.min.html1290720617361219586

edyzmedieval

08-05-2020, 19:20

I've seen multiple reports of cruise liners being infected - my question is, who goes on a cruise at this very moment? This is unreal. Why would you do that?

Gilrandir

08-06-2020, 10:28

I've seen multiple reports of cruise liners being infected - my question is, who goes on a cruise at this very moment? This is unreal. Why would you do that?

Because tickets were booked a year in advance and it's a shame to waste the money. Or because the tickets were bought a week ago at a cut-throat discount and its a shame to miss so cheap an offer.

ReluctantSamurai

08-06-2020, 13:09

I would add a third reason...denial of the seriousness of COVID-19. "If I get corona, I get corona...At the end of the day, I'm not going to let it stop me from partying."

Furunculus

08-07-2020, 06:30

entertaining oopsy in british covid stats:

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no-one-can-ever-recover-from-covid-19-in-england-a-statistical-anomaly/

That method could certainly be problematic in the long-term, but there is no reason to believe it includes more than a handful of questionable categorizations. The PHE (Public Health England) began recording all deaths associated with a COVID test at the end of April, in part due to concerns that deaths outside hospital were being missed. Before then only hospital deaths were counted. Evidence toward this was the discrepancy from ONS (Office of National Statistics) reported deaths up to that time, which defined deaths according to inclusion of COVID in death certificates. While that can also miss or miscategorize deaths, particularly in overflow conditions, it at least more directly attempts to capture etiology.

Meanwhile, the PHE definition continues to exclude all deaths without a positive test result, though we know many people were missed entirely by testing, and since March there have been tens of thousands of excess deaths (~65K excess deaths total since March) beyond the PHE death count (excess deaths returned to historical levels only at the end of June). I assume the commonly-reported figures are the PHE data, since those are updated daily compared to weekly or monthly for ONS. Currently if you look up "UK coronavirus deaths" you are presented with 45K and change. So, correct me if I'm wrong here, but it indeed appears that PHE figures continue to come lower than ONS figures, which reported ~46K deaths through the end of June.

So the method of counting all deaths associated with a positive COVID test still produces a dramatic undercount as of now.

Is this the power of reading through? I hope. :wink:

about 10% apparently:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8599213/amp/Thousands-Covid-19-deaths-wiped-governments-official-toll-counting-fiasco.html

:wink:

ReluctantSamurai

08-07-2020, 12:16

about 10% apparently

But 10% over or under? If one uses the actual mortality vs the expected mortality method, then the number of deaths is 53,641 since 20 March, or about 8% higher than the official toll:shrug:

https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/static-reports/mortality-surveillance/excess-mortality-in-england-latest.html

ReluctantSamurai

08-07-2020, 23:54

In a nutshell, here's why the United States has had one of the worst responses to the SARS-2 pandemic:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/07/south-dakota-bikers-rally-coronavirus-pandemic

The crowd at Sturgis will represent one of the biggest in the world since the coronavirus pandemic began. People are expected to pack concerts with at least 34 acts playing. Most rallies bring a sea of black leather, boots and bandannas into Sturgis, population 6,900 in normal times.

In a videotaped address to city residents the day after the city council voted to move ahead with the rally, Mayor Mark Carstensen said throughout the pandemic, “the state of South Dakota has been the freedom state and the city of Sturgis has stayed true to that”.

Carstensen emphasized that public health could not be pitted against the economy and people’s ability to maintain livelihoods.

“It’s a situation where those can work together. It’s not easy,” the mayor said, “but we’re all in this together.”

For the prospect of short-term financial gain for a single state, the governor of S. Dakota and everyone else involved, is willing to put the entire country at risk when all these yahoos return to whatever part of the country they came from. The mayor of Sturgis STILL doesn't understand that the longer the SARS pandemic rages, the longer the economy is suppressed for everyone. And the BS excuse that it can't be stopped anyway is tragically lame.

Thanks South Dakota for punting the virus to every corner of the US where the bikers will be coming from~:mad

CrossLOPER

08-08-2020, 06:28

Because tickets were booked a year in advance and it's a shame to waste the money. Or because the tickets were bought a week ago at a cut-throat discount and its a shame to miss so cheap an offer.
Accountants call that a sunk-cost fallacy, and it usually results in disappointing returns.

Seamus Fermanagh

08-09-2020, 21:54

The selfish arrogance of that attitude is the assumption that "I am too tough to die," so I am just gonna live my life. Like the old fighter pilot concept of "the right stuff," it is a belief that you are somehow better/stronger/purer and that anyone who ends up not being that way, like from catching COVID and ending up dead, does NOT mean that your view is skewed but that THEY didn't have "the right stuff." It's tautological bovine excrement.

Moreover, this attitude runs counter to libertarianism and reasoned conservatism in that it demands that you not only value your own life and freedom (reasonable), but that you actively value their life and freedom LESS than your own. Libertarianism generally holds that you should have the maximum degree of individual freedom possible, but that your rights "stop at the other person's nose." ALL must be free to the fullest extent possible without impinging on the equally valuable rights of others.

The attitude displayed by continuing Sturgis etc. is to ignore that last portion. Selfish at a minimum, arrogant in its attitude, utterly reckless in its occurrence -- and blithely risking others directly and most of the country at some remove just to enjoy a good drunk and some ear damage. :shame:

Montmorency

08-09-2020, 22:22

More evidence on SARS-CoV-2 being transmitted primarily by respiratory (i.e. airborne) route; large droplets are still the emphasized mechanism. Theatrical measures such as hand sanitizer (hand washing still a good idea) and area disinfection first undertaken as early precautions might be deprecated.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/7/13/21315879/covid-19-airborne-who-aerosol-droplet-transmission

Perhaps part of the reason the WHO has been slow to address the airborne transmission of Covid-19 is because in a health care setting, “airborne” means a very specific thing.

Though infection prevention experts know there’s a fuzzy boundary between drops that fall and specks that float, the dichotomy between airborne and droplet-borne is baked into how health care workers are trained to respond to outbreaks. “We’ve trained [health care workers] for decades to say, airborne is tuberculosis, measles, chickenpox, droplet is flu and pertussis and meningitis,” Saskia Popescu, a hospital epidemiologist in Arizona, says. “And that’s, unfortunately, kind of antiquated. But that’s how we’ve always done it.”

They do it because there are very specific sets of guidelines in place to deal with extremely contagious airborne diseases in a hospital setting. For instance, a patient with a dangerous airborne disease often needs to be put in a room with an air pressure lower than the rest of the rooms in the building. That way, no virus in the air of that room can escape it (since air flows from high pressure to low pressure).

For droplet transmission, health care workers can be a little more lax; they can wear simple surgical masks during routine care and can save high-filtration (and sometimes scarce) respirators for the most dangerous procedures and cases.

In this light, it makes some sense that the WHO has been hesitant to label Covid-19 an “airborne” infection. It’s not an airborne infection like measles is. It is not as contagious. Contact tracing studies consistently find that Covid-19 is spread most readily among people in the closest physical contact to one another. “Airborne” means something very specific, very resource-intensive, and very scary for hospitals and the people who work in them. And Covid-19 doesn’t match that definition.

“The debate often isn’t very nuanced because of these rigid categories,” Daniel Diekema, an infectious diseases physician and epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, says. “As soon as you say ‘airborne’ in the hospital infection prevention world, it brings to mind pathogens like tuberculosis, measles, chickenpox. It’s clear the respiratory viruses, influenza, coronaviruses, are not airborne in the same way that the measles, varicella [chickenpox] become airborne.”

But at the same time, with Covid-19 and other respiratory viruses, “there definitely are small-particle aerosols produced,” he says. “And in the right setting, where there’s poor ventilation, indoors, and a crowded environment, there is a risk for transmission among individuals, even if they may be more than 6 feet apart.”

There has been a lot of discussion on the effectiveness of masks, and their indication at micro and macro levels, since the pandemic emerged. (I mean nuanced, scientific discussion here, not the reactionary indoctrination and social media hearsay.) The weight of evidence that I've been aware of for universal masking of a spectrum of materials has since spring shifted from 'Sure, maybe, give it a shot' to 'This probably helps as a rule.' Another Vox article rounding up findings.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21299527/masks-coronavirus-covid-19-studies-research-evidence

The situation with masks and the evidence for them shows how quickly things can change in the midst of a fast-moving disease outbreak. In just a few months, the US has gone from no government recommendations and wide expert skepticism of masks to embracing them.

Experts caution that this kind of situation is going to happen again and again with Covid-19. There’s simply going to be a lot of uncertainty with the coronavirus for some time, even after we’ve — hopefully — vanquished it with a vaccine. This is a virus that’s new to humans, causing a pandemic of the likes that modern society hasn’t seen. We’re still learning, for example, just how airborne the coronavirus is, if children widely spread it, what kinds of medical treatments work against it, and whether immunity is long-lasting.

Given how new this all is, experts say the public and its leaders need to be ready to act on changing evidence, and officials shouldn’t be criticized too harshly for adapting on the fly. “It’s never too late to say the right thing,” Wehby said.

So while it’s unfortunate that the CDC and surgeon general worked against public mask use at first, and they arguably moved too slowly, it’s also good that they rigorously reviewed the research and embraced change once they felt there was enough evidence to do so. It’s the kind of model that everyone should be encouraged to follow.

For a loose case study of the potential* for masks to mitigate transmission, see (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e2.htm):

Among 139 clients exposed to two symptomatic hair stylists with confirmed COVID-19 while both the stylists and the clients wore face masks, no symptomatic secondary cases were reported; among 67 clients tested for SARS-CoV-2, all test results were negative. Adherence to the community’s and company’s face-covering policy likely mitigated spread of SARS-CoV-2.

There's even a neat infographic that might as well be titled 'So This Is the Power of Mask Instinct':

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/social-media/mm6928e2_HairSalonCOVID19_IMAGE_14July20_1200x627-medium.jpg

*It's possible that the customers all had prior resistance or immunity or luck or good health, or the hairdressers coincidentally had very low viral load.

Capstone pieces by The Atlantic, the NYT, and WaPo on the total failure of the United States government to manage the epidemic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-struggled-summer-coronavirus/2020/08/08/e12ceace-d80a-11ea-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html

Not only did Trump always approach the crisis as a rhetorical challenge rather than a technical or administrative one, he has done so increasingly over time, as the federal government dropped what little pretense it once assumed that there was any need for collective or individual action. For undermining state and local responses alone - even the most dismal of which were more useful than the feds' - Trump and his lackeys should be condemned as criminals against humanity. And that was not alone.

On school reopening, within the month:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/us/students-teachers-quarantined-in-georgia-school

At least 260 students and eight teachers from a suburban school district in Atlanta, Georgia, were quarantined after multiple students and teachers tested positive for Covid-19 during the first week of school.

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/08/09/world/europe/09reuters-health-coronavirus-britain-education.html

"Keeping our schools closed a moment longer than absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible," Johnson wrote.

It's great to run experiments when you know what the results will be, just not with human lives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/middleeast/coronavirus-israel-schools-reopen.html

As the United States and other countries anxiously consider how to reopen schools, Israel, one of the first countries to do so, illustrates the dangers of moving too precipitously.

Confident it had beaten the coronavirus and desperate to reboot a devastated economy, the Israeli government invited the entire student body back in late May.

Within days, infections were reported at a Jerusalem high school, which quickly mushroomed into the largest outbreak in a single school in Israel, possibly the world.

The virus rippled out to the students’ homes and then to other schools and neighborhoods, ultimately infecting hundreds of students, teachers and relatives.

Other outbreaks forced hundreds of schools to close. Across the country, tens of thousands of students and teachers were quarantined.

Israel’s advice for other countries?

“[B]They definitely should not do what we have done,” said Eli Waxman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and chairman of the team advising Israel’s National Security Council on the pandemic. “It was a major failure.”

I have a sinking feeling about Japan. Their out-Swedening Sweden may be catching up to them. You can plug a hole with your thumb, but not ten at once - then ten becomes a hundred.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/world/asia/japan-coronavirus.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/asia/tokyo-coronavirus-fatigue-intl-hnk/index.html

They're going to have to crank up a testing regime that remains one of the weakest in the developed world, barely budged since April. Something more than 20X smaller than Iceland (https://www.icelandreview.com/travel/iceland-considers-limiting-number-of-travellers-from-abroad/)'s, around less than a fifth of France (https://www.france24.com/en/20200806-closed-for-vacation-france-faces-new-covid-19-testing-woes)'s, adjusted for population.

Dr. Shibuya said that such retrospective testing may have worked in the early days of the pandemic, but that a broader approach was now necessary. Japan has consistently performed tests at well under its stated capacity: It says it can conduct as many as 30,000 a day, but it has more recently conducted fewer than 15,000 on a daily basis, and some days much fewer.

New Zealand (https://theconversation.com/100-days-without-covid-19-how-new-zealand-got-rid-of-a-virus-that-keeps-spreading-across-the-world-143672) has gone more than 3 months without a recorded case of community transmission (there's a steady single-digit drumbeat of cases from abroad).

I haven't read this beyond the headline, would be great if someone could look into it and tell me what to think before I form any judgments.

55% of coronavirus patients still have neurological problems three months later (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/55-of-coronavirus-patients-still-have-neurological-problems-three-months-later-study-2020-08-07)

about 10% apparently:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8599213/amp/Thousands-Covid-19-deaths-wiped-governments-official-toll-counting-fiasco.html

:wink:

The blunder could see up to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749, according to reports [Ed. whose reports?]. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.

That makes it sound like nobody knows what adjustment should be made.

Professor Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the prestigious university, told the Sun: 'It is a sensible decision. There is no point attributing deaths to Covid 28 days after infection.

Cutoffs like 28 days or X days are applied to promote real-time approximation in the data set, when conclusive fact-finding, registration, etc. for each death for the purpose of national statistics may not be available or will take weeks or months or longer to determine, validate, and compile. But literally adopting the position that someone can die of COVID at X-1 days but cannot die of COVID at X+1 days sounds like an arbitrary threshold with no medical basis. If someone has an extended disease course they have an extended disease course, irrespective of bureaucratic deadlines. Or someone who dies of COVID as a secondary or contributing cause, someone whose lungs or heart or kidneys fail without transplant 3 months subsequent to infection because they were so badly damaged by the illness, they too are plausibly recorded in any preliminary accounting. These latter could best be captured by abducing COVID as a cause of death in the death certificate and then counting death certificates.

Similar maybe to what the ONS is doing.

The Office for National Statistics, another Government agency, also records Covid-19 deaths, and is considered the most reliable source.

The ONS — which is not affected by the counting method — has confirmed at least 51,596 people have died in England and Wales up to July 24.

Its calculations are based on death certificates with Covid-19 as a suspected contributor.

Wait, what's that? ONS?

Let's compare.

England's official toll of 41,749

Currently the PHE site (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/deaths), reports 41082 deaths for England through July 24. What's the death toll for Wales through July 24? 1548. What's 1548 + 41082? 42630. And what's that quote about the ONS?

The ONS — which is not affected by the counting method — has confirmed at least 51,596 people have died in England and Wales up to July 24.

51,596 people have died in England and Wales up to July 24.

Let's assign some variables.

PHE is Wales + UK deaths through July 24 = 42630
ONS is Wales + UK deaths through July 24 = 51596

What is PHE - ONS? 42630 - 51596 = -8966 or negative eight thousand nine hundred sixty six

The ONS figure, itself widely acknowledged as an undercount (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53592881), attributes up to ten thousand more deaths (by now, 2 weeks later) to COVID than the PHE figure does. And someone wants to knock off a few thousand from the PHE figure for unspecified raisins?

It seems some people may be confused by very basic math(s), or perhaps by the concept of cross-verification. Or maybe they're not confused at all. If their aim is what it appears to be, I can't wish elements of the UK government and media luck with misleading the British public into thinking you've had fewer deaths than your already-undercounted headline statistics have indicated, while continuing to bungle testing, tracing, tracking, and regulatory environment. Excuse my bitterness at this confounded planet. :no:

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/08/09/world/europe/09reuters-health-coronavirus-britain-education.html

"Keeping our schools closed a moment longer than absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible," [Boris] Johnson wrote.

ReluctantSamurai

08-10-2020, 12:26

From the above Atlantic article:

“There is no way to get spillover of everything to zero,” Colin Carlson, an ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. Many conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the wildlife trade or the eating of “bush meat,” an exoticized term for “game,” but few diseases have emerged through either route. Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we have uprooted the planet’s animals, forcing them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own doorsteps. Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing grip—and viruses have come bursting out.

This is going to be the most difficult aspect of the pandemic for world leaders to grasp. Here in the States, you have a president doing his best to gut anything resembling environmental protection; and in India you have a government preparing to destroy thousands of acres of primal forest to strip mine coal---

https://caravanmagazine.in/communities/long-battle-of-hasdeo-arand-residents-against-parsa-coal-project-chhattisgarh

SARS-CoV-2 is going to happen again. We've had 6 world-wide disease outbreaks in the last 20 years, including the current one. I don't find it co-incidence that climate change in the last 20 years has begun to accelerate faster than in any previous period.

Gilrandir

08-10-2020, 18:20

From the above Atlantic article:

This is going to be the most difficult aspect of the pandemic for world leaders to grasp. Here in the States, you have a president doing his best to gut anything resembling environmental protection; and in India you have a government preparing to destroy thousands of acres of primal forest to strip mine coal---

https://caravanmagazine.in/communities/long-battle-of-hasdeo-arand-residents-against-parsa-coal-project-chhattisgarh

SARS-CoV-2 is going to happen again. We've had 6 world-wide disease outbreaks in the last 20 years, including the current one. I don't find it co-incidence that climate change in the last 20 years has begun to accelerate faster than in any previous period.

Such diseases result not so much from destroying animals' habitats but from eating bats, groundhogs and other species which is symptomatic of Asia.

ReluctantSamurai

08-11-2020, 01:25

Such diseases result not so much from destroying animals' habitats but from eating bats, groundhogs and other species

Not so, although the ingestion of disease-bearing animals can account for the jump of vector type pathogens to humans. Vector pathogens have been around for thousands of years, and hosts such as bats have carried them for just as long. However, our destruction of wildlife habitat has forced animals that carry vector-borne diseases into closer contact with humans as they search for food and suitable habitat, increasing the chances that a pathogen makes the leap from animal to humans. But it goes beyond that.

I picked this article out of many at this site...

https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/84175?locale-attribute=fr&locale=es

....because it points up some salient points:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/65995/WHO_SDE_PHE_99.4.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Epidemics of vector-borne disease occur in unprotected populations which lack sufficient immunity and/or effective public health measures. Many regions in the tropics are without an effective public health infrastructure. In these regions, the transmission of vector-borne diseases has a natural boundary where ecological or climatological conditions limit the distribution of the pathogen or vector. Often pathogen and vector share the same ecological niche having shared their evolutionary pathway. In these “unstable” or “fringe” areas, small changes in weather between years may dramatically change the conditions for disease transmission.

There is good epidemiological evidence that El Niño is associated with an increased risk of certain diseases in specific geographical areas where climate anomalies are linked with the ENSO [El Niño-Southern Oscillation] cycle. The associations are particularly strong for malaria but suggestive for other mosquito-borne and rodent-borne diseases. More research is needed to determine the nature of the ecological mechanisms of these relationships. Reports that link disease outbreaks to a single El Niño event are difficult to interpret because there are a number of potential confounding factors that may be responsible for the observation. Therefore, in this report, more emphasis has been placed on the results of analysis which have included a number of events or a long data series.

This essay is also particularly good:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/43379/9241593865.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

It is commonly accepted that climate plays a role in the transmission of many infectious diseases, some of which are among the most important causes of mortality and morbidity in developing countries. Often these diseases occur as epidemics which may be triggered by variations in climatic conditions that favour higher transmission rates.

For infectious diseases caused by a pathogen that develops outside the human host (i.e. in the environment or in an intermediate host or vector), climate factors can have a direct impact on the development of the pathogen. Most viruses, bacteria and parasites do not complete their development if the temperature is below a certain threshold (e.g. 18 ºC for the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and 20 ºC for the Japanese encephalitis virus; Macdonald, 1957; Mellor& Leake, 2000). Increases in ambient temperature above this threshold will shorten the time needed for the development of the pathogen and increase reproduction rates, whereas temperatures in excess of the tolerance range of the pathogen may increase mortality rates.

Weather and climate (two separate things) certainly enhance or retard the incidence of diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and others. It's not a great leap to foresee an impact on emerging pathogens.

Gilrandir

08-11-2020, 04:26

Not so, although the ingestion of disease-bearing animals can account for the jump of vector type pathogens to humans. Vector pathogens have been around for thousands of years, and hosts such as bats have carried them for just as long. However, our destruction of wildlife habitat has forced animals that carry vector-borne diseases into closer contact with humans as they search for food and suitable habitat, increasing the chances that a pathogen makes the leap from animal to humans. But it goes beyond that.

Still, eating such animals is as close a contact as might be.

ReluctantSamurai

08-11-2020, 23:56

Still, eating such animals is as close a contact as might be

If the meat is cooked, highly unlikely there's a disease transfer. If eaten raw, then yes. Read the material provided. It's not as simple as vector-transmitting animals as a food source.

Montmorency

08-12-2020, 00:56

Sadly, a family in New Zealand (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/08/11/901304243/new-zealand-on-alert-after-4-cases-of-covid-19-emerge-from-an-unknown-source) just turned up infected in an apparent reemergence of community spread. Coming just after the ostensible 100-day milestone of eradication.

On the possibility that cross-resistance and effective herd immunity (in the sense of a combination of disease point prevalence and active adaptive measures), both varying across demographics and communities, have reduced the ultimate or potential severity of the pandemic.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/reasons-for-covid-19-optimism-on-t-cells-and-herd-immunity.html

This is going to be the most difficult aspect of the pandemic for world leaders to grasp. Here in the States, you have a president doing his best to gut anything resembling environmental protection; and in India you have a government preparing to destroy thousands of acres of primal forest to strip mine coal---

https://caravanmagazine.in/communities/long-battle-of-hasdeo-arand-residents-against-parsa-coal-project-chhattisgarh

SARS-CoV-2 is going to happen again. We've had 6 world-wide disease outbreaks in the last 20 years, including the current one. I don't find it co-incidence that climate change in the last 20 years has begun to accelerate faster than in any previous period.

Article on pandemic gaming and modeling before and after COVID19. See bold for TLDR.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02277-6

Morhard was not the only one sounding the alarm. Event 201 was one of dozens of simulations and evaluations over the past two decades that have highlighted the risks of a pandemic and identified gaps in the ability of governments and organizations around the world to respond.

The exercises anticipated several failures that have played out in the management of COVID-19, including leaky travel bans, medical-equipment shortages, massive disorganization, misinformation and a scramble for vaccines. But the scenarios didn’t anticipate some of the problems that have plagued the pandemic response, such as a shortfall of diagnostic tests, and world leaders who reject the advice of public-health specialists.

Most strikingly, biosecurity researchers didn’t predict that the United States would be among the hardest-hit countries. On the contrary, last year, leaders in the field ranked the United States top in the Global Health Security Index, which graded 195 countries in terms of how well prepared they were to fight outbreaks, on the basis of more than 100 factors. President Donald Trump even held up a copy of the report during a White House briefing on 27 February, declaring: “We’re rated number one.” As he spoke, SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading undetected across the country.

Now, as COVID-19 cases in the United States surpass 4 million, with more than 150,000 deaths, the country has proved itself to be one of the most dysfunctional. Morhard and other biosecurity specialists are asking what went wrong — why did dozens of simulations, evaluations and white papers fail to predict or defend against the colossal missteps taken in the world’s wealthiest nation? By contrast, some countries that hadn’t ranked nearly so high in evaluations, such as Vietnam, executed swift, cohesive responses.

By late January, Inglesby was anxious. The coronavirus outbreak was escalating at a frightening pace in China and spreading to other countries, including the United States. These were the kinds of foreboding signs that he had plugged into his simulations. But the Trump administration seemed to view the outbreak as China’s problem, says Inglesby. During the third week of January, Trump posted one reassuring tweet about the coronavirus and around 40 regarding his impeachment hearings, his rallies and defeating the Democrats. The only public action that the government took was to screen travellers coming from China for symptoms at a handful of international airports.

Inglesby knew that travel bans and checkpoints don’t sufficiently prevent the spread of contagious pathogens. So, on 26 January, he listed a series of actions needed to prepare the United States for the coronavirus — dubbed nCoV — in a 25-part Twitter thread. “Global and national leaders should be looking ahead to what must be done to prepare for the possibility nCoV can’t be contained,” he wrote. The list included vaccine development, expansion of personal protective equipment for health-care workers, and “very high numbers of reliable diagnostic tests”.

These actions are key to curbing most infectious diseases, but, in an outbreak, they must occur at hyperspeed. Biosecurity experts had woven this lesson into every simulation, because muddling the response in the early months of an epidemic has catastrophic repercussions. J. Stephen Morrison, director of global health policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, says: “You can’t fart around for weeks on end and then give a confused, half-baked, not very serious response.”

Infectious-disease researchers were also worried. Fearing undetected transmission in the United States, scientists in the states of Washington, New York and California started vetting tests that detect the genetic sequence of the virus in late January — including a protocol developed by German researchers and disseminated by the WHO. But their efforts to roll tests out for public use hit a wall at the FDA, which wasn’t ready to authorize them. Meanwhile, officials at the CDC insisted that labs exclusively use tests that it had developed.

The CDC started shipping test kits to public-health departments on 6 February. On a Sunday morning, three days later, Kelly Wroblewski, the infectious-disease director at the Association of Public Health Laboratories in Silver Spring, Maryland, woke up to a flood of e-mails saying that the tests didn’t work. “We always knew laboratory testing was complicated, but it’s something that was often overlooked in these simulations,” says Wroblewski; she had participated in Crimson Contagion just months earlier.

While the CDC scrambled to fix the faulty tests, labs lobbied for FDA authorization to use tests that they had been developing. Some finally obtained the green light on 29 February, but without coordination at the federal level, testing remained disorganized and limited. And despite calls from the WHO to implement contact tracing, many city health departments ditched the effort, and the US government did not offer a national plan. Beth Cameron, a biosecurity expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington DC, which focuses on national-security issues, says that coordination could have been aided by a White House office responsible for pandemic preparedness. Cameron had led such a group during Barack Obama’s presidency, but Trump dismantled it in 2018.

In March, the CDC stopped giving press briefings and saw its role diminished as the Trump administration reassured the public that the coronavirus wasn’t as bad as public-health experts were saying. An editorial in The Washington Post in July by four former CDC directors, including Frieden, described how the Trump administration had silenced the agency, revised its guidelines and undermined its authority in trying to handle the pandemic. Trump has also questioned the judgement of Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading scientist on the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Confusion emerged in most pandemic simulations, but none explored the consequences of a White House sidelining its own public-health agency. Perhaps they should have, suggests a scientist who has worked in the US public-health system for decades and asked to remain anonymous because they did not have permission to speak to the press. “You need gas in the engine and the brakes to work, but if the driver doesn’t want to use the car, you’re not going anywhere,” the scientist says.

By contrast, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea showed that it was possible to contain the virus, says Scott Dowell, an infectious-disease specialist at the Gates Foundation who spent 21 years at the CDC and has participated in several simulations. The places that have done well with COVID-19 had “early, decisive action by their government leaders” he says. Cameron agrees: “It’s not that the US doesn’t have the right tools — it’s that we aren’t choosing to use them.”

Perhaps the biggest limitation of simulation exercises was that they didn’t actually drive policymakers to prioritize and fund improvements to the public-health system. Morrison now questions whether it’s even possible to do that through simulations alone, or whether people must experience an epidemic at first hand.

Why I fear for humanity this century.

Look, heck, maybe a moderate pandemic incapacitating the largest and richest countries (other than China) will shock the world enough to initiate sweeping reforms that will blunt the inevitable new, potentially more severe, iterations. But we're already facing the effects of moderate climate change, with more baked in as of now, and the confident apprehension remains that our societies is not learning.

Such diseases result not so much from destroying animals' habitats but from eating bats, groundhogs and other species which is symptomatic of Asia.

Animal-human interactions are the interface to zoonotic disease spillover. Your culturally-specific interactions are not somehow purer or more wholesome than others. Emphasizing taste-based accounts, like the Yellow Man being tainted by the eating of strange foods (that they may or may not actually eat), over scientific ones is unhelpful. Keep an eye on your pigs and cows and chickens (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/4/22/21228158/coronavirus-pandemic-risk-factory-farming-meat).

Since bats come up as a meme in connection to SARS-CoV-2, I would emphasize that no evidence has been presented for a direct vector between bats and humans (let alone through consumption).

Gilrandir

08-12-2020, 09:23

If the meat is cooked, highly unlikely there's a disease transfer. If eaten raw, then yes. Read the material provided. It's not as simple as vector-transmitting animals as a food source.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-15/mongolian-teenager-dies-of-bubonic-plague/12459306

A 15-year-old boy has died in western Mongolia of bubonic plague, the country's national news agency reported.
Mongolia reported two cases earlier this month linked to people eating marmot meat
Suspected cases of the bubonic plague have also popped up in China
More than 50 million people died in the 14th century due to the bubonic plague
The Health Ministry said laboratory tests confirmed the teenager died of plague that he contracted from an infected marmot, according to the Montsame News Agency.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/07/asia/china-mongolia-bubonic-plague-death-intl-hnk-scli-scn/index.html

Plague, caused by bacteria and transmitted through flea bites and infected animals, killed an estimated 50 million people in Europe during the Black Death pandemic in the Middle Ages.

If you only try to catch these animals you are likely to be bitten by fleas living on them. You don't even have to eat them in any way. This is how plague travelled to Europe in the Middle Ages - on rats that infested ships.

Your culturally-specific interactions are not somehow purer or more wholesome than others.

Historically, plagues have always come from the East. Which is the evidence that my eating habits are at least less deleterious than the Chinese or Mongolian.

And by the way, bite the dust, Western scientific losers. Russia has a vaccine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53735718

ReluctantSamurai

08-12-2020, 12:45

Historically, plagues have always come from the East. Which is the evidence that my eating habits are at least less deleterious than the Chinese or Mongolian.

Again....you focus on one aspect of vector transmission of disease, and ignore the bigger picture. I've already agreed that disease can be transmitted by eating animals, being bitten by animals or insects, even playing in monkey shit. Read the material in the links provided. Climate change can allow insects to move well beyond their "normal" range, as in the case of mosquitoes; habitat destruction directly by humans, or indirectly by humans influencing climate can force animals to seek new habitats closer to humans, increasing the risk of zoonotic transmission.

And as Monty has pointed out, there's little difference between Asian wet markets, and today's animal farms, in their ability to create conditions ripe for vector transmission of disease (the biggest difference in a wet market is that a disease can be transmitted from one animal to another, possibly recombining and then making the jump to humans).

How convenient your historical analysis left out this one:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/362316

And this one:

https://www.history.com/news/1889-russian-flu-pandemic-in-america

And btw, the most devastating pandemic in recent history (1918) is strongly suspected as having started in a pig farming area in SW Kansas, USA when an avian flu virus probably brought in by migrating birds, made the jump from bird to swine, before making the move to humans.

And by the way, bite the dust, Western scientific losers. Russia has a vaccine.

Seriously??? Are you really going down the Cold War rabbit hole with that nonsense? You couldn't pay me to take such a vaccine because it hasn't even entered Phase III testing. Oh, that's right, the Russian general public are going to be the test subjects:inquisitive:

Gilrandir

08-12-2020, 13:47

Again....you focus on one aspect of vector transmission of disease, and ignore the bigger picture. I've already agreed that disease can be transmitted by eating animals, being bitten by animals or insects, even playing in monkey shit. Read the material in the links provided. Climate change can allow insects to move well beyond their "normal" range, as in the case of mosquitoes; habitat destruction directly by humans, or indirectly by humans influencing climate can force animals to seek new habitats closer to humans, increasing the risk of zoonotic transmission.

Climate changes can hardly be called accountable for the medieval plagues.

How convenient your historical analysis left out this one:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/362316

And this one:

https://www.history.com/news/1889-russian-flu-pandemic-in-america

My historical analysis dealt with PLAGUES not FLUS. And bird (avian) flu generated in China, btw.

And btw, the most devastating pandemic in recent history (1918) is strongly suspected as having started in a pig farming area in SW Kansas, USA when an avian flu virus probably brought in by migrating birds, made the jump from bird to swine, before making the move to humans.

There is a whole world of difference between "strongly suspected" and "scientifically proven".

Seriously??? Are you really going down the Cold War rabbit hole with that nonsense? You couldn't pay me to take such a vaccine because it hasn't even entered Phase III testing.

I was being sarcastic.

Oh, that's right, the Russian general public are going to be the test subjects:inquisitive:

It has already been tested. On Putin's daughter.

https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/11/vladimir-putin-claims-daughter-inoculated-after-russia-registers-coronavirus-vaccine

So it is perfectly safe and efficient. Don't you trust His word?

(Again sarcastic, if you don't feel it).

ReluctantSamurai

08-12-2020, 21:10

Climate changes can hardly be called accountable for the medieval plagues.

But climate change can certainly have an effect on the frequency and location of emerging viruses. Please just read the material from the links I provided...as a start.

My historical analysis dealt with PLAGUES not FLUS. And bird (avian) flu generated in China, btw.

We are talking about pathogens that cause worldwide pandemics. Doesn't matter if it's an avian flu, a swine flu, a corona virus, or a bacteria like Yersinia pestis.

There is a whole world of difference between "strongly suspected" and "scientifically proven".

:rolleyes:

The closest you're going to get to "scientifically proven" is this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/

It has never been clear, however, where this pandemic began. Since influenza is an endemic disease, not simply an epidemic one, it is impossible to answer this question with absolute certainty. Nonetheless, in seven years of work on a history of the pandemic, this author conducted an extensive survey of contemporary medical and lay literature searching for epidemiological evidence – the only evidence available. That review suggests that the most likely site of origin was Haskell County, Kansas, an isolated and sparsely populated county in the southwest corner of the state, in January 1918. If this hypothesis is correct, it has public policy implications.

Concerning some of the other hypotheses put forward as to where the 1918 pandemic originated:

Jordan considered other possible origins of the pandemic in early 1918 in France and India. He concluded that it was highly unlikely that the pandemic began in any of them. That left the United States. Jordan looked at a series of spring outbreaks there. The evidence seemed far stronger. One could see influenza jumping from Army camp to camp, then into cities, and traveling with troops to Europe. His conclusion: the United States was the site of origin.

A later equally comprehensive, multi-volume British study of the pandemic agreed with Jordan. It too found no evidence for the influenza's origin in the Orient, it too rejected the 1916 outbreak among British troops, and it too concluded, "The disease was probably carried from the United States to Europe."

Australian Nobel laureate MacFarlane Burnet spent most of his scientific career working on influenza and studied the pandemic closely. He too concluded that the evidence was "strongly suggestive" that the disease started in the United States and spread with "the arrival of American troops in France."

And BTW, this article is a fascinating (and scary) read about the reconstruction of the Influenza A responsible for the 1918 pandemic:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html

I was being sarcastic.

Don't know you personally. Would have very little idea when you are being sarcastic. But that's what emoticons are for~;)

Furunculus

08-14-2020, 07:29

Cutoffs like 28 days or X days are applied to promote real-time approximation in the data set, when conclusive fact-finding, registration, etc. for each death for the purpose of national statistics may not be available or will take weeks or months or longer to determine, validate, and compile. But literally adopting the position that someone can die of COVID at X-1 days but cannot die of COVID at X+1 days sounds like an arbitrary threshold with no medical basis. If someone has an extended disease course they have an extended disease course, irrespective of bureaucratic deadlines. Or someone who dies of COVID as a secondary or contributing cause, someone whose lungs or heart or kidneys fail without transplant 3 months subsequent to infection because they were so badly damaged by the illness, they too are plausibly recorded in any preliminary accounting. These latter could best be captured by abducing COVID as a cause of death in the death certificate and then counting death certificates...

...It seems some people may be confused by very basic math(s), or perhaps by the concept of cross-verification. Or maybe they're not confused at all. If their aim is what it appears to be, I can't wish elements of the UK government and media luck with misleading the British public into thinking you've had fewer deaths than your already-undercounted headline statistics have indicated, while continuing to bungle testing, tracing, tracking, and regulatory environment. Excuse my bitterness at this confounded planet. :no:

and yet...
... this is precisely why PHE have done.
in a puff of smoke 10% of the Covid deaths have vanished. like magic. :wink:

ReluctantSamurai

08-15-2020, 03:24

This was entirely predictable:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/14/school-reopenings-covid-19-coronavirus-us

Nationally, children represent 8.8% of all Covid infections, according to the report from the American Academy of Pediatrics. About 70% of the new cases reported among children in July came from states in the south and west, where coronavirus has ripped through the population.

Children represent less than 4% of hospitalizations from the virus and account for less than 1% of Covid-related deaths in states that reported results. Twenty states reported zero child deaths.

Children younger than five tend to be least symptomatic, Williamson said, and outbreaks among children and teachers at care centers and preschools remain low. The risk goes up for children aged five to 10, and children over 12 appear to have more adult-like symptoms, she said.

You don't have to be a medical expert to come to this conclusion:

John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s school of public health, said the timing of the case surge highlighted by the report did not bode well for a return to in-person instruction in the near future. “The very significant increase in cases occurred when children were out of school, which suggests that if we put children back in school, it will exacerbate the problem,” Swartzberg said.

And just about anyone can answer this question:

“Putting children back in school, sending students back in universities, is a great experiment,” he said. “We have no idea what’s going to happen.”

Want to take bets on how many "COVID Parties" occur on college campuses once universities are back in session?

Furunculus

08-15-2020, 08:21

Pannonian

08-15-2020, 11:07

ReluctantSamurai

08-15-2020, 13:41

Normal economic activity cannot resume while dependent minor children are in need of parental care.
Early years education is crucial - and failing here will follow a child through their educational life and economic future.

The calculus is remorseless - schools must open.

Agree with all of that. However, the way schools are being reopened in the US is following the same helter-skelter pattern of dealing with the virus as the country at large. The no national plan, every state for themselves approach has been an epic fail. The prevailing attitude that kids don't get COVID-19 at a high rate, and even if they do, it's usually mild, is patently false. I'll repost some quick calculations I did earlier:

There are approximately 56.6 million students, here in the US, in the K-12 range. The incidence rate per 100,000 in the 10-19 year old range is about 117.4 in the US. So about 66,000 students would contract COVID-19 at that rate. With a 0.2% CFR in that age group, that's 1,329 deaths (if my math is correct).

So which 1,329 kids will you choose to sacrifice so that the others may continue their 'educational life and economic future'?

And, as is the norm with this virus, the data base is in constant flux:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/11/health/covid-19-children-cases-rising-wellness/index.html

There were 179,990 new Covid-19 cases among US children between July 9 and August 6, according to the report. At least 380,174 total child Covid-19 cases have been reported as of August 6. As of now, it still appears that severe symptoms are rare among children with Covid-19 infections. Children were between 0.5% and 5.3% of total hospitalizations, according to data from the states that record that information. Children were 0% to 0.4% of all Covid-19 deaths.

Nineteen states have reported no child deaths. In states that tracked the details, 0% to 0.5% of all child Covid-19 cases resulted in death. However, experts worry those numbers may increase as cases in children rise and more children with autoimmune disorders and other risk facts are impacted.
"As case counts rise across the board, that is likely to impact more children with severe illness as well," O'Leary said in a news release from the AAP.

The hospitalization rate for children <18 is, so far, turning out to be nearly the same as adults:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932e3.htm?s_cid=mm6932e3_w

During March 1–July 25, 2020, 576 pediatric COVID-19 cases were reported to the COVID-19–Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network (COVID-NET), a population-based surveillance system that collects data on laboratory-confirmed COVID-19–associated hospitalizations in 14 states. Based on these data, the cumulative COVID-19-associated hospitalization rate among children aged <18 years during March 1–July 25, 2020, was 8.0 per 100,000 population, with the highest rate among children aged <2 years (24.8). During March 21–July 25, weekly hospitalization rates steadily increased among children (from 0.1 to 0.4 per 100,000, with a weekly high of 0.7 per 100,000). Overall, Hispanic or Latino (Hispanic) and non-Hispanic black (black) children had higher cumulative rates of COVID-19–associated hospitalizations (16.4 and 10.5 per 100,000, respectively) than did non-Hispanic white (white) children. Among 208 (36.1%) hospitalized children with complete medical chart reviews, 69 (33.2%) were admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU); 12 of 207 (5.8%) required invasive mechanical ventilation, and one patient died during hospitalization. Although the cumulative rate of pediatric COVID-19–associated hospitalization remains low (8.0 per 100,000 population) compared with that among adults (164.5),* weekly rates increased during the surveillance period, and one in three hospitalized children were admitted to the ICU, similar to the proportion among adults.

The fly in the ointment here is that the annual cold/flu season is approaching, and who is the largest vector in the transmission of these two? Children. I don't think anyone has any idea if both colds/flu can be transmitted concurrently with COVID-19.

Do schools need to resume? Yes....but there needs to be a plan, and serious money allocation, to safely minimize risk to both children and teachers/staff. The risk cannot be reduced to zero, I get that, but I fear for all those parents feeding their children into the current maelstrom of this pandemic, hoping that it won't be theirs that ends up on the growing list of deaths.

CrossLOPER

08-15-2020, 19:17

The calculus is remorseless - schools must open.
"I need to get across the chasm, but I don't feel like making a political statement by building a bridge, so I am going to push a bunch of people off until the pile of corpses is just good enough for me to walk across. Got mine."

Furunculus

08-16-2020, 08:33

Do you always follow through with your calculations?

What are you saying?

"I need to get across the chasm, but I don't feel like making a political statement by building a bridge, so I am going to push a bunch of people off until the pile of corpses is just good enough for me to walk across. Got mine."

^ apparently oblivious to the non-medical damage wrought on people's lives as a result of the covid policy response ^

Montmorency

08-17-2020, 06:54

More on the concept of effective herd immunity through social reduction of susceptible population.
https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1291860664936407040

https://i.imgur.com/yydvSyD.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/DLAJ15P.jpg

If 10+% of the country has contracted or resisted CV19 so far, with some similar proportion yet resistant, then even moderate national social distancing should suppress the virus (such as to NY levels, where we've been in single-digit confirmed daily deaths for a month now). A consistent strict 1-month lockdown starting now might bring us within striking distance of eradication in much of the country (this should have happened in early spring). That it seems easier and easier for us to prevent death and suffering only makes their ongoing, and potentially escalating, ubiquity here more tragic and condemnable. What a time to begin concentrating tens of millions of people all at once around the country.

Did you hear about the sheriff who's banning masks?

On the key role of restaurants and bars as vectors this summer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/health/Covid-restaurants-bars.html

COVID19 already has a far higher human cost than the height of the AIDS pandemic, the death toll in New York matches the H1N1 flu pandemic toll of 1918, and the per capita mortality rate is probably going to be similar by the end of it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-19-death-toll-rivals-fatality-rate-during-1918-flu-epidemic-researchers-say/2020/08/13/48e1dbf2-dd01-11ea-b205-ff838e15a9a6_story.html

Reminder that the US has had more than 200K excess deaths in 5 months.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deaths-us.html

https://i.imgur.com/Bo1v2JE.png
https://i.imgur.com/3QRxDLd.png
https://i.imgur.com/bVj4DFT.png
https://i.imgur.com/kUHqSey.png

and yet...
... this is precisely why PHE have done.
in a puff of smoke 10% of the Covid deaths have vanished. like magic. :wink:

I wish you'd post a link, so here's one.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53722711

If you could find a source explaining how the government determined which deaths to exclude, that would be swell. The BBC link gives the impression they took the brute force approach on all recorded cases with a date of death further away from the date of assay (the basis of all PHE data) than the 28-day threshold.

It doesn't take an educated person to know that you can't erase deaths by striking them off a ledger. There have been 380K deaths in England and Wales through July this year, compared to 320K in year-to-date 2019. Those people no longer exist. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who subscribe to magical thinking.

Normal economic activity cannot resume while dependent minor children are in need of parental care.
Early years education is crucial - and failing here will follow a child through their educational life and economic future.

The calculus is remorseless - schools must open.

Your calculus is remorseless, but ours need not be. It is true that fully-distanced learning for K-12 is pedagogically and socially devastating. It is also true that schools are potent environments for superspreader events - which will themselves force mass school closures anyway, on top of the mass infection and mass death beyond baseline. There are many schools planning to reopen that will find themselves shut for the majority of the fall semester, having contributed hundreds of first-order infections for their trouble. This is better than carefully preparing for and smoothing out all-online learning, at a minimum for teenagers? Alternatively, a hard lockdown ahead of school reopening remains available.

https://i.imgur.com/F7iNLJh.png

There was a relatively straightforward condition for reopening schools, which was to minimize the rate of transmission in the communities the schools exist in. Risk tiers could be established on a county level, with one way to define them being test positivity: <1% is arguably tolerable, or even 1-2%. If there is no transmission in the community, the risk at the school is minimal. Half a year to suppress the virus, half a year to prepare schools - is 'bubble' doctrine all there is to show for it? If bars and sports games are a manifestly higher priority than schools, how can the handwringing about educational outcomes and families be taken seriously? In other countries during troughs of CV19 circulation there has been at least a semblance of normal operation.* You don't get to have that simply as a function of 'would like to have' or "remorseless calculus" (see: magical thinking).

Many thousands of teachers and staff in the United States are prepared to participate in a national sick strike in the coming weeks. It has already begun. (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/15/us-schools-reopening-teachers-sickout-arizona)

Good luck getting those gears grinding. I wonder what the professional mood is in the UK.

When conservatives fail badly and flippantly try to hang their work over us as a Sophie's choice (c.f. cutting funding for services, demanding the services be cut when they no longer work as well), they should get a hard middle finger for their enmity. I prefer not to pick hostages for execution.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/08/why-britain-failed-coronavirus-pandemic/615166/

Much of the focus has been on Johnson: an apparent manifestation of all that has gone wrong in Britain, a caricature of imperial nostalgia, Trumpian populism, and a general lack of seriousness. Yet this was not simply an issue of inept political leadership, inept or otherwise: Johnson stuck closely to a strategy designed and endorsed by the government’s experts, leaders in their fields and respected internationally. Even if the prime minister did make serious mistakes, the country’s issues run far deeper. The British government as a whole made poorer decisions, based on poorer advice, founded on poorer evidence, supplied by poorer testing, with the inevitable consequence that it achieved poorer results than almost any of its peers. It failed in its preparation, its diagnosis, and its treatment.

*I watch Western Europe's recent surge in cases grimly, as all the constituent governments seem committed to full operation of schools as though their numbers in September are certain to be what they were at the beginning of summer.

Seamus Fermanagh

08-17-2020, 17:20

We are deciding to get back to business mostly as usual. Few states will adopt a second shut-down, our system is not likely to support a federally mandated shut-down (which will not happen under the current admin even if a framework exists or could be promulgated). A vaccine seems too distant and financial difficulties too close. Enough of the USA is willing to say "oh well..."

It will likely get us to the upper right quadrant of the Rt scale above reasonably quickly. The price will be a couple of hundred thousand lives.

CrossLOPER

08-17-2020, 17:48

^ apparently oblivious to the non-medical damage wrought on people's lives as a result of the covid policy response ^
^ apparently oblivious to the actually effective measures nearly every single country in the world enacted, because his freedom lined lungs are incapable of collapsing without a piece of cloth covering his mouth and nose.

This false narrative being pushed by those incapable of being wrong is precisely why the response was so poor and continues to get worse. It is progressing from infuriating to pathetic. In addition, the fact that a cautious response WOULD cause personal economic hardship is precisely why the current system should be done away with. Why some continue to avoid this inevitable conclusion is either due to malice or just a lack of creativity and imagination.

The price will be a couple of hundred thousand lives.

I have no inclination to put differing values on lives, but what SOME seem to fail to understand is that some of these lives hold certain capabilities that are not easily replaced. Teachers, professors and researchers are not always young and resilient, and their loss would ultimately lead to a devastating national situation.

That this is not a primary topic for discussion shows where the priorities of SOME lie. An economic system built of toothpicks.

Furunculus

08-18-2020, 07:45

Your calculus is remorseless, but ours need not be. It is true that fully-distanced learning for K-12 is pedagogically and socially devastating. It is also true that schools are potent environments for superspreader events - which will themselves force mass school closures anyway, on top of the mass infection and mass death beyond baseline.
you're free to adopt whichever calculus you please, but normality must return in this sphere in order that it can return in other spheres:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/18/children-covid-19-english-schools-virus-safe-reopening

Pannonian

08-18-2020, 08:56

you're free to adopt whichever calculus you please, but normality must return in this sphere in order that it can return in other spheres:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/18/children-covid-19-english-schools-virus-safe-reopening

We're on course to bugger up our supply situation early next year. Unlike the panic buying we experienced this year, this isn't a matter of unexpected demands overrunning a functional supply system, which could be returned to functional if the demands could drop for a few days. This is the supply system itself being fundamentally borked. The people who told us not to worry earlier this year, even as the shop shelves were emptying, are telling us the supply system will be borked. This isn't a natural disaster, nor is it something unexpected. This is a political decision, and it is expected, and the effects have been modelled and plans made to mitigate for it. Except these people whose efforts we are relying on are telling us that they cannot be sufficiently mitigated for.

How does your calculus fall on this?

ReluctantSamurai

08-18-2020, 11:53

From The Guardian link above:

But having detectable virus is not the same as being infective to others. Here the experience of Sweden is useful: it has kept schools open for under 16-year-olds during the pandemic, and found that infection rates in teachers were no higher, and were often lower, than other occupational groups. Clearly many other variables could be at play here (teachers may, for example, be younger or healthier than the other occupational groups), but this does provide some reassurance that students are not efficient spreaders of coronavirus.

This is debatable as there are studies that show a different conclusion than the one reached by the PHE. If we've learned anything about this virus it's that more than one study needs to be done to confirm a hypothesis, and experiences differ from country to country. It also seems that the PHE can be quite dysfunctional and issue questionable decisions, at times:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-britain-tracing/

Children and teenagers have already had to sacrifice a significant amount of their education for an illness they rarely suffer from; we now all need to remember our obligation to make their continued wellbeing and development our priority.

Again, if school restarts are undertaken without following a strict, and uniform protocol, and adequate funding provided for schools to achieve those protocol goals, bad things are going to happen, IMHO.

The implications for college students are, of course different than the K-12 students, but a preview of what to expect across universities in the US:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/17/unc-shuts-down-campus-coronavirus-397200

Without quick-returning test results, and a mind-set change by students, another epic fail looms:shrug:

CrossLOPER

08-19-2020, 07:20

ReluctantSamurai

08-19-2020, 13:27

Keep an eye on your pigs and cows and chickens.

A simple, but effective, discussion on how the world's current farming practices enhance the possibility of creating new viruses:

https://www.vox.com/videos/2020/8/18/21374061/factory-farming-meat-coronavirus-pandemic

Shaka_Khan

08-22-2020, 09:22

I think we'll see a higher infection rate in students soon. The reason why we haven't yet is because the schools had been closed and then there was the summer vacation. If they attend school in a crowded and an indoor area, I have no doubt in my mind that the virus will eventually spread there. We shouldn't base the likelihood of infection only on age. Yes, older people are more vulnerable, but that doesn't mean that children are invincible. We should also take into account the lifestyle. Most of the adults go out farther and meet more strangers because of work. Children are usually just limited to meeting people they personally know. But once the virus starts to spread in the schools, it'll spread like haywire. A child could get it from a parent. And then that kid would spread it in class. Then more kids would spread it to their parents. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if this is already happening now. Anyone who has been to school, or is a teacher now, would know how quickly a virus could spread in a classroom.

I feel bad for the students and the parents. But this is really a danger for everyone. The larger number of infections raises the probability of infection to anyone else. Even a president wouldn't be safe. Look at what happened to Woodrow Wilson.

Pannonian

08-22-2020, 09:41

ReluctantSamurai

08-22-2020, 12:53

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if this is already happening now. Anyone who has been to school, or is a teacher now, would know how quickly a virus could spread in a classroom.

Happening here in the US already. Nearly every school from K-12 to college universities, have had immediate outbreaks of COVID-19 soon after opening. Schools need to return to session, but it's madness to try and do that when the pandemic in the population at large is not under control. Schools do not operate in a bubble like the NBA. Students come into an indoor environment from places where the virus is still running rampant. Testing is now on the decline in the US at the worst possible time, when it wasn't even at satisfactory levels before. While outbreaks at the K-12 level can't be blamed on students, the students at universities seem to be carrying on the same irresponsible attitude of "If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day I'm not gonna let it stop me from partying."

Sadly, this madness is going to continue, and will get worse when the flu/cold season arrives.

Seamus Fermanagh

08-23-2020, 18:38

As far as I know, only the academies will handle this effectively. They put all the cadets into quarantine for two weeks before school started. Of course, those folks are under military discipline...not the norm at university.

ReluctantSamurai

08-24-2020, 03:53

Trump_Lite?

Boris Johnson attempted to reassert his grip over education after days of chaos by making a personal plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom in England in September.

The prime minister, who was criticized for going on holiday to Scotland during the A-level debacle, has spoken out to say the risk of contracting coronavirus in school is low and that it is damaging for children to be out of education for any longer.

His decision to personally front the return-to-school drive rather than Gavin Williamson, the beleaguered education secretary who has faced calls to quit over the fiasco, is part of a deliberate attempt to switch the “messenger” and win back the public, a senior Tory suggested.

Johnson’s intervention comes after the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, said children could be at greater harm by staying at home than attending school.

Regarding the expected return on 1 September, Johnson said: “I have previously spoken about the moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely, and I would like to thank the school staff who have spent the summer months making classrooms Covid-secure in preparation for a full return in September.

“We have always been guided by our scientific and medical experts, and we now know far more about coronavirus than we did earlier this year. As the chief medical officer has said, the risk of contracting Covid-19 in school is very small and it is far more damaging for a child’s development and their health and wellbeing to be away from school any longer."

“This is why it’s vitally important that we get our children back into the classroom to learn and to be with their friends. Nothing will have a greater effect on the life chances of our children than returning to school.”

Sounds all too familiar:inquisitive:

Then this from Chris Whitty:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/statement-from-the-uk-chief-medical-officers-on-schools-and-childcare-reopening

We are confident that there is clear evidence from many studies that the great majority of children and teenagers who catch COVID-19 have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. There is reasonable, but not yet conclusive, evidence that primary school age children have a significantly lower rate of infection than adults (they are less likely to catch it). Evidence that older children and teenagers are at lower risk of catching COVID-19 is mixed. They are either less likely to catch COVID-19 than adults or have the same risk as adults.

Our overall consensus is that, compared to adults, children may have a lower risk of catching COVID-19 (lowest in younger children), definitely have a much lower rate of hospitalization and severe disease, and an exceptionally low risk of dying from COVID-19. Very few, if any, children or teenagers will come to long-term harm from COVID-19 due solely to attending school. This has to be set against a certainty of long-term harm to many children and young people from not attending school.

The first quote is similar to rhetoric here in the States---"We're not entirely sure about infection rates and long-term effects of COVID-19 on children, but trust us, we know what's good for your kids so go ahead and send them to the petri-dish called school."

The second quote is pure and simple bloviating. Evidence is pointing to very real long-term effects of COVID-19 on children/teens, and a lot more research needs to be done in that area. It certainly seems irresponsible to me for a public health official to be floating his own opinion about the long-term effects of COVID-19 without sufficient evidence to back himself up:shrug:

And BTW, figures from the CDC that I posted earlier, showed that here in the US 1 in 3 children admitted to the hospital, ended up in the ICU---about the same rate as adults.

Montmorency

08-24-2020, 04:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEYQz3B9n_8

As COVID in Spain has been rebounding, protesters: hey're against vaccines and 5G and masks, and believe the pandemic is a hoax.

Fiscal transfers + restricting services + economic uncertainty =
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/amid-mass-unemployment-u-s-households-are-richer-than-ever.html

https://i.imgur.com/Q6eosXE.jpg

you're free to adopt whichever calculus you please, but normality must return in this sphere in order that it can return in other spheres:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/18/children-covid-19-english-schools-virus-safe-reopening

It is terrible not to have children in school. Online learning is not a substitute in the best of times. But you know what's worse? To reopen no matter what. Seeing the iceberg and going full bore into it. There is no dilemma between "reopening" and all-online (where public health indicators exceed some limits) because we know those tend not to be the choices available to us. A school that reopens to a circulating virus has a very high probability of generating dozens to hundreds of cases - and then closing again in chaos. Which seems better to you, developing protocols for distanced instruction from the beginning, or investing in redesigning the educational experience for outdoors, or... or letting kids and staff loose - though some large minority of the student body will refuse to attend at all - in a pathogen pit 2 weeks out of each month to play Simon Says with the virus, because the rest of the time the schools will be periodically closed? To reopen regardless of what conditions obtain and of their predictable consequences surely undermines all the theoretical objectives of pushing for on-site schooling. School "reopening" is the mirror image of the worst caricature of an intermittent hard lockdown in its disruptiveness. Normalcy is a treacherous mirage.

If there's a sniper watching over your foxhole, you don't just walk out no matter how badly you might want to or what you need to do outside it. You soil yourself if it comes to it, because the alternative is your head might get blown off. Blame your situation on the lack of relief for your position, not on the people telling you to keep your head down.

All that said, given appropriate community indicators and preparations there are many schools that could reasonably reopen even in countries with resurgent transmission. Primary schools would have the lowest threshold to reopening given the evidence on relative risk, which is welcome when the youngest children are the ones most negatively-affected by school closure or online instruction. The point is to not manifest the spirit of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Because the evidence on transmission in schools is that it happens pretty often, and studies from the spring on the basis of data from countries with minimal community transmission is no guideline for what much of the world is collectively attempting starting now or next month.

This is what the future very predictably looks like, and not just for universities:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/17/unc-shuts-down-campus-coronavirus-397200

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is ending in-person instruction for undergrads just a week after reopening, after dozens of students living in dorms and a fraternity house tested positive for coronavirus.

UNC is hardly the only institution experiencing an uptick in infections within days of students returning to campus. Bethel College in North Newton, Kan., reported a cluster of 46 confirmed cases of Covid-19 through mandatory entry testing. Officials said 482 people have been tested and many still await their results. At Oklahoma State University, a sorority house is under quarantine after reporting 23 cases.

(It sure is nice, though, that we're having this discussion - to the extent we've been put in a position to endure it - not in April but in August, when it appears that in the developed world the mortality rate of the disease has been at least halved. Buying time has some advantages, as many predicted.)

The first quote is similar to rhetoric here in the States---"We're not entirely sure about infection rates and long-term effects of COVID-19 on children, but trust us, we know what's good for your kids so go ahead and send them to the petri-dish called school."

The second quote is pure and simple bloviating. Evidence is pointing to very real long-term effects of COVID-19 on children/teens, and a lot more research needs to be done in that area. It certainly seems irresponsible to me for a public health official to be floating his own opinion about the long-term effects of COVID-19 without sufficient evidence to back himself up:shrug:

And BTW, figures from the CDC that I posted earlier, showed that here in the US 1 in 3 children admitted to the hospital, ended up in the ICU---about the same rate as adults.

Of course, even supposing young children are in a broad sense "half as infectious" as adults or whatever, you're talking about reshuffling and remixing the virus through millions of households, to say nothing of the school staff.

Simple formula: the more successfully the virus is suppressed, the more normal socioeconomic activity is available! Look, I'm not the highest-quality person myself. There were plenty of instances during my academic career in which I said, well, I have to leave for class in half an hour and I've barely started this essay, maybe I can get a postponement - but a government can't act to this standard, and there are no postponements. Time's up and attendance is a collective hazard. That's on the government for failing to prioritize arranging suitable conditions for this very important sector, having had the whole summer.

In the end I expect North Ireland, Wales, and Scotland will manage the semester all right, but many parts of England are vulnerable right now.

Headline findings from a relevant study indicate that, in the absence of public health resources that have simply not been available up to now, they're on track in a bad way...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30250-9/fulltext

With increased levels of testing (between 59% and 87% of symptomatic people tested at some point during an active SARS-CoV-2 infection, depending on the scenario), and effective contact tracing and isolation, an epidemic rebound might be prevented. Assuming 68% of contacts could be traced, we estimate that 75% of individuals with symptomatic infection would need to be tested and positive cases isolated if schools return full-time in September, or 65% if a part-time rota system were used. If only 40% of contacts could be traced, these figures would increase to 87% and 75%, respectively. However, without these levels of testing and contact tracing, reopening of schools together with gradual relaxing of the lockdown measures are likely to induce a second wave that would peak in December, 2020, if schools open full-time in September, and in February, 2021, if a part-time rota system were adopted. In either case, the second wave would result in R rising above 1 and a resulting second wave of infections 2·0–2·3 times the size of the original COVID-19 wave. When infectiousness of children and young adults was varied from 100% to 50% of that of older ages, we still found that a comprehensive and effective test–trace–isolate strategy would be required to avoid a second COVID-19 wave.

Montmorency

08-25-2020, 04:28

One point in the UK's favor I should note: Since the beginning of the month they've pushed their testing up to 170K tests daily. Though the UK has been affected by the general sparks threatening to ignite through Europe, a daily new case count of ~1K about now is still a positivity ratio around 0.5%, which is pretty good. If trends quickly stabilize or turn around, the baseline is favorable for school reopening. Spain is the large Euro country worst-hit by resurgence, and is currently back into April intensity or beyond. For the UK to allow itself to reach that level from its current position would be unconscionable, so this is their chance to demonstrate how much they care about schools by being smart.

Wait, what - school in the UK starts in just a week? Yikes.

The Spain surge is especially associated with young people, as in many other places but worse, and their testing and tracing regime remains poor in the regionally-decentralized healthcare system.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53832981
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/21/spain-is-becoming-coronavirus-cautionary-tale-again/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spain-caught-off-guard-by-resurgent-coronavirus-11598194801
https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-08-19/with-just-weeks-to-go-madrid-region-yet-to-announce-plan-for-the-reopening-of-schools.html

Hint: "The new normal does not work if it’s too close to the old normal." It's helpful to keep bars and restaurants closed to indoor service. NYC seems to be holding it together so well largely through widespread masking and excepting indoor services from the now-complete reopening. We still don't know when schools will reopen here, but what I've gleaned is that our leaders are expecting roughly sometime in September as long as the positivity rate remains below 3%. De Blasio is betting hard on the hybrid model, so I certainly hope we aren't about to erase our hard-earned reprieve - but I do fear hybrid/blended learning is just the worst of both worlds.

Furunculus

08-25-2020, 07:34

Trump_Lite?

Sounds all too familiar:inquisitive:

Then this from Chris Whitty:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/statement-from-the-uk-chief-medical-officers-on-schools-and-childcare-reopening

The first quote is similar to rhetoric here in the States---"We're not entirely sure about infection rates and long-term effects of COVID-19 on children, but trust us, we know what's good for your kids so go ahead and send them to the petri-dish called school."

The second quote is pure and simple bloviating. Evidence is pointing to very real long-term effects of COVID-19 on children/teens, and a lot more research needs to be done in that area. It certainly seems irresponsible to me for a public health official to be floating his own opinion about the long-term effects of COVID-19 without sufficient evidence to back himself up:shrug:

And BTW, figures from the CDC that I posted earlier, showed that here in the US 1 in 3 children admitted to the hospital, ended up in the ICU---about the same rate as adults.

no.

ReluctantSamurai

08-25-2020, 12:23

No to what, specifically?

CrossLOPER

08-26-2020, 21:56

No to what, specifically?

My guess is that he is going to dispute the meaning of the word "adult", but he's being enigmatic at the moment.

no.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932e3.htm?s_cid=mm6932e3_e&deliveryName=USCDC_921-DM34906

Furunculus

08-29-2020, 10:35

“no” as there is no useful parallel to he drawn between trump and Johnston, other than that they both have thinning windblown blond hair.

any attempt would be trivial and facile compared to all the ways they are not similar, given that such trivialities might apply equally well to any other random assortment of politicians you chose to compare them too.

you don't have to think either of them is a competant or admirable politician to reach this great epiphany.

Pannonian

08-29-2020, 14:38

The UK Health Minister announces that there will be law changes to allow doctors, nurses and pharmacists to deliver flu jabs. The news comes as a surprise to doctors, nurses and pharmacists, who have been doing this for ages already.

Montmorency

08-30-2020, 06:15

Trump is the new Hitler analogy, with the problem that Trump's distinctive features are much less common in real other humans and governments than Hitler's or Nazism's distinctive features. There is genuinely no one I can think of like Trump, even pretenders like Duterte and Bolsonaro, in part because there are just not many people with Trump's psychological profile. There are plenty of dedicated liars, fools, thieves, and fascists out there, but none really altogether Trumpian.

It seems the Americas account for the majority of recorded global COVID deaths. South America is of course badly affected. While the US continues to trip on its dick, China has been leveraging its worldwide pandemic outreach into South America, with economic assistance and the like.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-covid-19-response-increases-chinese-influence-in-latin-america-2020-8

Bolsonaro, its far-right president, is a Trump ally who, like Trump, ran on an anti-China platform, blamed China for the virus' spread, and promoted the unproven malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a remedy.

But now facing the second worst outbreak in the world after the US, and having contracted the virus himself, Bolsonaro has reconciled with Beijing. The about-face was almost certainly under pressure from Brazil's powerful agribusinesses, which know China is a customer they cannot afford to alienate.

Today, China is the top trade partner to Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, and number two for many others in the region. ... Media analysts have been slow to see the trend and still ask who will be the top foreign power in Latin America. At this point, it is not even a question. China eclipsed the US a long time ago. ... Today, the US is in no position to dictate terms to a region where it is neither seriously engaged nor the only game in town — something everyone seems to realize except the US. Should it wish to have some clout in the future, it needs to offer a better deal.

Hehehehehe

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/07/28/china-imports-91-more-brazilian-soy-basically-ignores-us/#3736ef222f43

Remember all the soybeans China said it would be buying from the U.S. once the phase one trade deal was inked and tariffs were rolled back? Well, they are buying from the wrong country.

China's Brazilian soybean imports in June broke a record, based on China’s General Administration of Customs data from this weekend. They bought 10.51 million tons of soybeans in June, an increase of 91% from June of last year. Volume also rose 18.6% from May volumes.

To put that into perspective, China’s overall soybean imports in June were 11.16 million tons, meaning Brazil accounted for almost all of it.

The U.S. made up a lot of the remainder.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-trade-soybeans/chinas-2018-soybean-imports-from-u-s-hit-lowest-since-2008-idUSKCN1PJ05M

China’s soybean imports from the United States plunged 99 percent in December to just 69,298 tons, customs data showed on Friday, taking its full-year 2018 imports to the lowest level since 2008 amid an ongoing trade war.
[...]
U.S. shipments in December fell from 6.19 million tons a year earlier. China did not import any U.S. beans in November. For the full year, imports from the U.S. were at 16.6 million tons, about half of 2017’s 32.9 million tons. By contrast, China brought in 4.39 million tons of soybeans from Brazil in December, up 126 percent from 1.94 million tons a year ago, according to the data from the General Administration of Customs. China usually gets most of its oilseed imports in the last quarter of the year from the United States as the U.S. harvest comes to market at that time. But purchases fell sharply after Beijing placed an additional 25-percent tariff on U.S. soy imports on July 6 as part of the tit-for-tat trade dispute. China has stepped up its Brazilian imports to fill the gap.

Half of American parents with school-age children report, in this poll, that their children's education this fall will be all-online.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/nbc-poll-covid-aug23/

A growing share of parents—48% this week, up from 44% last week and 41% in early August—say their children’s schooling will be conducted fully online this fall, according to NBC News and SurveyMonkey’s latest weekly tracking poll. One quarter (25%) say their children will have a mixture of online and in-person school, while 17% say their children will be going to school fully in-person.

ReluctantSamurai

09-01-2020, 21:27

Another politician bloviating on what a life is worth, and who should be willing to make that sacrifice: [not himself, of course:rolleyes:]

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/01/tony-abbott-some-elderly-covid-patients-could-be-left-to-die-naturally

He claimed it was costing the Australian government as much as $200,000 (£110,000) to give an elderly person an extra year’s life, substantially beyond what governments would usually pay for life-saving drugs.

Abbott said not enough politicians were “thinking like health economists trained to pose uncomfortable questions about the level of deaths we might have to live with”. More politicians should have asked whether the cure was proportionate to the disease.

“In this climate of fear it was hard for governments to ask ‘how much is a life worth?’ because every life is precious, and every death is sad, but that has never stopped families sometimes electing to make elderly relatives as comfortable as possible while nature takes its course.”

“The generation of the second world war had been prepared to risk life to preserve freedom. This generation is ready to risk freedom to preserve life.”

Right Tony. So does this mean that at 62 years old, if you contract COVID-19 and get seriously ill, you will "let nature takes its course"? Somehow I doubt it:no:

Pannonian

09-02-2020, 00:45

Montmorency

09-02-2020, 04:38

Here's how to enforce masking.
https://twitter.com/hipchkk/status/1300484964023111680 [VIDEO]

Since it hasn't been mentioned, the CDC recently changed its reporting guidelines in an attempt to suppress testing. Not sure what effect it will have in practice.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/26/health/cdc-guidelines-coronavirus-testing/index.html

Who authorized this? Not Fauci, who appears to have been pressured or excluded from the process.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/trump-new-favorite-covid-adviser-scott-atlas-thinks-herd-immunity-is-a-good-idea

onald Trump’s new pandemic adviser is pushing a “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus—a stance has concerned health experts and underscored White House officials’ use of the coronavirus crisis to win political influence. The Washington Post reports that Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who was brought on to advise Trump on COVID-19 earlier this month, is spearheading the herd immunity approach, which involves lifting restrictions on social and business interactions to spread the virus through most of the population, protecting the vulnerable while the healthy build up resistance to the disease.

Atlas “does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology” and was reportedly hired “to argue an alternative point of view” from Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, two central members of the White House coronavirus task force “whom the president has grown increasingly annoyed with for public comments that he believes contradict his own assertions that the threat of the virus is receding.” Atlas apparently caught Trump’s attention as a regular on Fox News, where he has appeared 20 times since the end of April to voice unproven claims and incorrect predictions, many of which support Trump’s insistence on a return to normalcy. Atlas reportedly meets with Trump on a near-daily basis, more than any other health official, and is “advocating policies that appeal to Trump’s desire to move past the pandemic and get the economy going.”
[...]
The administration has already started to embrace policies in line with Atlas’s approach, as evidenced by the abrupt change in CDC testing guidelines last week that undercuts the risk posed by asymptomatic carriers, a decision reportedly made while Fauci was undergoing surgery. Fauci told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta that he “was under general anesthesia in the operating room and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations,” which suggest people without symptoms may not need to be tested, even if they’ve been in close contact with an infected individual. “I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern,” Fauci said. “In fact it is.” (Brett Giroir, the official overseeing coronavirus testing efforts, told reporters that Fauci had signed off on the guidelines “before it even got to the task force level.”)

Florida hasn't been doing well.
https://www.ocala-news.com/2020/08/28/florida-shows-947-9-increase-in-covid-19-cases-since-governor-reopened-state/

In the roughly three months since Gov. Ron DeSantis greenlighted Phase Two of his plan to reopen Florida, the Sunshine State has seen a whopping 947.9 percent increase in the number of COVID-19 cases.

As of Friday morning, 615,806 cases had been identified across the state. On June 3 when the governor made the announcement that bars and pubs could reopen at 50 percent capacity inside and full capacity outside, the state was reporting 58,764 COVID-19 cases – a difference of 557,042.

Under Phase Two, bowling alleys, movie theaters, arcades and auditoriums also were allowed to reopen at 50 percent capacity. But a portion of that plan was short-lived, as DeSantis reversed his decision on bars and ordered them closed again on June 26 when the state was reporting 122,960 cases.

The number of deaths and people hospitalized also are quite different today than when DeSantis decided to reopen the state. On June 3, the state was reporting 2,566 deaths and 10,525 people hospitalized. On Friday, those numbers had jumped to 11,099 deaths and 38,029 people being treated in area hospitals.

In the tri-county area on June 3, there were 39 deaths and 158 people hospitalized. Those numbers have now increased to 320 deaths and 1,331 people requiring some form of hospital care.

But Iowa has developed a fairly significant outbreak lately.
https://iowastartingline.com/2020/08/30/ames-iowa-city-covid-outbreaks-are-worst-in-the-world/

Iowa’s exploding COVID-19 outbreaks at state universities in Ames and Iowa City are now disasters that can only be fully measured on a global scale. Ames holds the distinction this morning as the worst coronavirus outbreak in the entire United States, while Iowa City is at third on the list [Update: on Monday, Iowa City climbed to the number two spot in the list, while Ames remained at the top]. The per capita rates are worse than any individual country in the world, and appear to surpass any state in some of the other currently hardest-hit countries.

According to the New York Times COVID-19 tracker, Ames has had 956 new cases in the past two weeks, while Iowa City has counted 1,489. In the past seven days, Story County’s per capita infection rate is 797 per 100,000 people, with Johnson County coming in at 787 per 100,000.

Those represent some of the worst, if not the absolute worst, local spread in the world. It is far more than any individual country’s current per capita spread. Some tiny nations, like Aruba (417 cases per 100,000 population in last week) and the Turks and Caicos (284 per 100,000) currently sit at the top of the world’s nation per capita rates, though that’s in part due to their small size. Peru and Colombia have 157 and 150 per 100,000 recent spread, respectively.

Not many tracker sites break out other countries by metro area, but we can compare Ames and Iowa City to individual states in other countries where the pandemic is spreading fast. Brazil’s worst states are Tocatins (440 per 100,000 in past week) and Distrito Federal (420 per 100,000). India’s worst states are also not as bad as Iowa’s two major college cities — Puducherry has a 276 per 100,000 rate, while Gao is at 189 per 100,000.

But the worst may be yet to come. The New York Times also places both Ames and Iowa City as first and third on their list of “Where there may be bad news ahead.”

Many of America’s colleges and universities have proven to be fully unprepared for students’ return, choosing to offer vague assurances over the summer to get students and, importantly, their tuition and residence money back on campus. The second-worst city is Auburn, Alabama, where Auburn University has seen a swift outbreak.

But the incompetence of Gov. Kim Reynolds and leaders at Iowa’s two largest universities, as well as the reckless irresponsibility of many of their returning students who have packed bars and house parties, represent a global embarrassment.

On Friday, the University of Iowa reported 500 new positive COVID-19 cases from students. Johnson County’s positivity rate on Friday was a disastrous 55.5%, while Story County’s Friday positivity rate was even worse at 65.5%. That means that well over half of the people who take a test are testing positive. Gov. Kim Reynolds has received significant criticism for setting a 15% positivity rate as the metric for deciding whether local K-12 schools can go online-only for a time.

After scenes of massive student parties the week prior, Reynolds ordered the closure of bars and nightclubs in Story, Johnson, Black Hawk, Polk, Dallas and Linn counties. But the damage had already been done.

The University of Iowa warned late this past week of possible discipline measures for students found at this point to attend a gathering of more than ten people off campus. They also began offering testing for students after initially not doing so to start the semester, believing a negative test would give a student a false sense of security. That did not seem to stop over 600 students from contracting the virus as of the end of this week — and that’s just the number who have self-reported.

Yet (https://twitter.com/ByJakeKurtz/status/1299477950446931968):

I asked Gov. Reynolds about a possible mask mandate today near Schaller and she completely shot it down.

“Oh no, I’m not doing that. I think I’ve made it very clear. Nope, not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.”

Another politician bloviating on what a life is worth, and who should be willing to make that sacrifice: [not himself, of course:rolleyes:]

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/01/tony-abbott-some-elderly-covid-patients-could-be-left-to-die-naturally

Right Tony. So does this mean that at 62 years old, if you contract COVID-19 and get seriously ill, you will "let nature takes its course"? Somehow I doubt it:no:

Australia has had 663 deaths attributed to coronavirus, 70% of them in the past month, 93% over a month-and-a-half. From May 1 to July 1 there were 11 CV19 deaths recorded for a country of 25 million. However, their limited lockdown measures (last I checked it was limited to Melbourne) seem to be successfully navigating the space of secondary response as hoped and the rate of infection has dropped again.

https://i.imgur.com/GdZjYyH.png

But this is actually an example of how shortsighted market-based logics are in defining value, and how capitalist ideologies tend toward self-destruction. Abbot can't conceive that a government could work to maintain the public good in a complex crisis (something else he probably doesn't understand) that strains multiple economic sectors, the labor force, social services, the student body, the public and consumer confidence, and healthcare capacity, beyond the intrinsic question of the quantity of people being sickened, impaired, or killed by disease. All he can think of is in terms of basic topline inputs and outputs. He's probably the type to ask why we need spare hospital beds and staff if they're not all being used right now - and even if they were being used, couldn't we do more with less anyway?

Imagine a heavy equipment design process that produces a device that operates to a high standard of safety. Some dick-fool executive takes a look at the costing documents and says, all this safety BS isn't making us any money, it's not legally mandated, and this product is already very safe anyway. Let's have the best of both worlds by cutting design standards and budgets and at worst a couple more accidents - I'm not saying no one's going to get their hair mussed. Even better, think of what the quarterly earnings will look like if we apply the philosophy across all our operations.

Then, because the causality here isn't conducive to some defined incrementality of externalities, suddenly the product becomes considerably less reliable and is linked to a bunch of injuries and deaths, after which... ("ideally" in the theory the company loses business consequent to their lack of diligence, but that's all up in the air and might not change behavior even if it happens) Good product got driven into the ground, a decent firm debased.

"Oh well, not my problem." This terrible ideology considers only short-term fiscal gains or losses and doesn't entertain knock-on effects or the functioning of systems as such, nor how it all comes together to create or avert human and other costs.

ReluctantSamurai

09-02-2020, 07:07

All he can think of is in terms of basic topline inputs and outputs. He's probably the type to ask why we need spare hospital beds and staff if they're not all being used right now

We had this discussion a few months back with another poster here. The same thing pisses me off now as then; who are you to determine that just because I've got many more years behind me than ahead, that my usefulness to society is already over. A fair number of inventions and innovations come after the age of 45, and a significant number after 50 (not that I'm necessarily in those categories:laugh4:) So Tony Abbott can put it where the sun don't shine......~;)

I think Seamus is correct in stating that only the service academies will be successful in having COVID-free campuses

Pannonian

09-03-2020, 20:39

We had this discussion a few months back with another poster here. The same thing pisses me off now as then; who are you to determine that just because I've got many more years behind me than ahead, that my usefulness to society is already over. A fair number of inventions and innovations come after the age of 45, and a significant number after 50 (not that I'm necessarily in those categories:laugh4:) So Tony Blair can put it where the sun don't shine......~;)

I think Seamus is correct in stating that only the service academies will be successful in having COVID-free campuses

Don't know what Tony Blair has said wrong.

ReluctantSamurai

09-03-2020, 22:06

Don't know what Tony Blair has said wrong.

You're right. Hadn't realized I screwed up the last name. Tony ABBOTT:oops:

Pannonian

09-03-2020, 22:18

In sort of Coronavirus related news but not really.

The UK government has used Covid legislation to requisition land to prepare for no deal Brexit. No planning permission required, no appeals allowed.

ReluctantSamurai

09-04-2020, 03:49

In case any fellow American Orgahs were wondering, we are still in the throes of a pandemic that is claiming over 1100 lives per day. In the never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole, the current shift is moving away from the Arizona/Texas/Florida/California quad back to the upper Midwaest:

https://www.vox.com/2020/9/2/21418812/covid-19-coronavirus-us-cases-midwest-surge

[South Dakota]

The number of daily new cases is up 192 percent over the last two weeks
Daily new cases per million people is 354, the highest rate of new infections in the country
The positive test rate is 22.2 percent, the highest figure among states and more than doubled from two weeks ago

As you can see, South Dakota ranks an ignominious first in all of the leading indicators for a worsening outbreak. Hospitalizations also doubled from a low of 35 in early August to 78 as of September 1.

It’s hard to be sure what’s behind this spike in cases. South Dakota still doesn’t have a mask mandate, and Gov. Kristi Noem has said she won’t issue one, nor will she impose a stay-at-home order. The state has not placed meaningful restrictions on businesses or other public activities, according to Boston University’s state policy database.

There was also the Sturgis motorcycle rally last month, which state health officials have linked to more than 100 cases of South Dakotans contracting Covid-19. The number of people infected at the state’s universities ballooned from less than 50 in mid-August to more than 550 by the end of the month. There have been another 200 cases reported recently in K-12 schools.

[In North Dakota]

The number of daily new cases is up 77 percent over the last two weeks
Daily new cases per million people is 332, the second-highest rate of new infections in the country
The positive test rate is 20.1 percent, the second-highest figure among states and doubled from two weeks ago

Like South Dakota, North Dakota does not and has never had a mask mandate. The state did close some businesses in March, when the outbreak was largely contained to the New York City area, but they began reopening in May and no new restrictions have been put into place.

[Iowa---again]

The number of daily new cases is up 90 percent over the last two weeks
Daily new cases per million people is 300, the fourth-highest rate of new infections in the country
The positive test rate is 18.5 percent, the third-highest figure among states and nearly doubled over from two weeks ago

Yet Gov. Kim Reynolds is declining to impose any new mitigation measures. Iowa is another one of the 16 states without a mask mandate. Most business restrictions were lifted in May. And now Iowa State says it will allow 25,000 people to attend its season-opening football game on September 12.

[Kansas]

The number of daily new cases is up 26 percent over the last two weeks
Daily new cases per million people is 206, the eighth-highest rate of new infections in the country
The positive test rate is 16 percent, the fifth-highest figure among states and increasing from two weeks ago

The state has been more aggressive about trying to contain the virus than some of its neighbors. Gov. Laura Kelly imposed a mask mandate on July 1 and she waited until the end of June to allow bars to reopen. Still, the metrics in the state suggest the virus has started spreading in the community again.

And btw, that article was listed 11th on Vox's story board.....

Montmorency

09-04-2020, 03:55

Can states even set a higher drinking age?
https://kwwl.com/2020/09/02/governor-kim-reynolds-doesnt-rule-out-raising-the-drinking-age-as-covid-19-cases-surge-among-young-people/

drone

09-04-2020, 14:21

Can states even set a higher drinking age?
https://kwwl.com/2020/09/02/governor-kim-reynolds-doesnt-rule-out-raising-the-drinking-age-as-covid-19-cases-surge-among-young-people/

You must be younger than I thought. Yes, the states set the drinking age, it's only 21 nationwide because the federal government threatened to withhold interstate highway funds from states that did not raise the age to 21 back in the mid-late 80s. Some states jacked it up immediately, others grandfathered in on a yearly basis as they raised it.
Those of us on the wrong side of the cusp might still be a little bitter about it. Just a little.

Seamus Fermanagh

09-04-2020, 23:09

Montmorency

09-05-2020, 03:51

You must be younger than I thought. Yes, the states set the drinking age, it's only 21 nationwide because the federal government threatened to withhold interstate highway funds from states that did not raise the age to 21 back in the mid-late 80s. Some states jacked it up immediately, others grandfathered in on a yearly basis as they raised it.
Those of us on the wrong side of the cusp might still be a little bitter about it. Just a little.

You thought I was a Boomer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act

Somehow I had been under the intuition that this acted as a ceiling as well. I was never in a place to entertain raising the drinking age, though there have always been notable voices toward its lowering.

ReluctantSamurai

09-05-2020, 13:46

I thought this was a joke, at first. Scratch & Sniff? Upon further reading:

https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-covid-19-testing-screening-smell-20200821.html

“Our message is ‘If you have sudden-onset smell loss, in the absence of other explanatory history like a head injury, the chance of you being infected is high,’” said John E. Hayes, a professor in the department of food science and director of the Sensory Evaluation Center in the College of Agricultural Sciences. “This is about raising awareness that smell loss is an early symptom of COVID-19.”

“More COVID patients have loss of sense of smell than have a fever,” Reed said. “Yet fever is often first on the checklist of COVID symptoms and sense of smell is at the bottom, like an afterthought. We think it should be near or at the top.”

A recent study based on a worldwide survey of 25,000 patients by the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research found that COVID-19 is more strongly associated with smell and taste than with fever, cough, or shortness of breath, though those are the “cardinal symptoms currently highlighted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).” The study has not been peer-reviewed.

Several other studies have linked the loss of smell to the virus. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic reported in June that patients with COVID-19 were 27 times more likely to lose their sense of smell than people without the virus, while less than three times as likely to report fever and/or chills. Another analysis of medical records by Mayo researchers suggested that routine screening for those changes "could contribute to improved case detection in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic."

Perhaps the best part of smell testing is that it doesn’t involve discomfort or stigma, and it can easily be turned into a game. Soon, Reed said, instead of being zapped with a digital thermometer, individuals who are entering a meeting or store may be handed a card with three peel-off stickers and asked which one has a scent.

Scratch and Sniff---brings back childhood memories....:laugh4:

ReluctantSamurai

09-05-2020, 14:06

And in the ongoing game of COVID Whack-A-Mole here in the US:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/05/college-coronavirus-outbreaks-sick-kids-home-409262

American colleges are a mess right now. And public health experts and school administrators are still deciding whether the best strategy is to forge ahead with in-person instruction, send kids home with a Zoom syllabus and risk spreading the virus, or shelter them in place. The last option could be a potentially miserable experience for a teen riding out the pandemic alone in a dorm with ramen noodles and Pop-Tarts.

President Donald Trump has demanded that colleges reopen, with minimal guidance from the federal government on how to safely bring students back or what to do when infections are found. Administrators confronted with thousands of positive cases are improvising on the fly, trying to both prevent new flare-ups and keep the disease from spreading beyond their walls.

“I don’t think there are two universities that have the same protocol,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University. “It’s national chaos.”

Experts say the variable conditions are a reflection of the broader U.S. response and expect more islands of disease when the season changes.

“A school is not a spaceship, a school is not a bubble, it’s a reflection of the community it’s in,” Frieden said.

"Islands of disease". Interesting way of putting it....:rolleyes:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-college-cases-tracker.html

With no national tracking system, colleges are making their own rules for how to tally infections. While The Times’s survey is believed to be the most comprehensive account available, it is also a near-certain undercount. Among the colleges contacted by The Times, many published case information online or responded to requests for case numbers, but at least 360 others ignored inquiries or refused to answer questions. More than 170 have reported zero cases.

Given the disparities in size, reopening plans and transparency among universities, this data should not be used to make campus-to-campus comparisons. Some colleges remove people from their tallies once they recover. Some only report tests performed on campus. And some initially provided data but then stopped.

No national tracking system....:shame:

drone

09-05-2020, 15:39

You thought I was a Boomer?

I had you pegged as younger side of GenX. Now you have outed yourself as a Millennial, since Millennials tend to think GenX doesn't exist and everyone older than themselves are Boomers. Which, of course, is the worst thing you can call a Xer. :tongue:

I don't think raising the drinking age will help at all, and I'm basing this argument solely on my experience with the NMDA. It never stopped anyone from drinking on campus when I was in college, since we all knew people above the age willing to supply. Things probably changed later as the those close to the cusp left and 21 was considered the new normal, but at the time everyone thought raising it was a bit of an injustice. Which is what will happen now if it gets raised again.

Shaka_Khan

09-07-2020, 02:47

I think the use of generation labels became common when the term Generation-X began to appear on the news articles. I had never heard of the term Baby Boomer before I heard the term GenX, but that was probably because I was too young to remember it at that time.

When looking at what I know of the generations before the Boomers, I see similarities from the Boomers to the Millennials in life having been much easier, abundant, safer and with high expectations when we were growing up. The Boomers may disagree in that I believe that the 'me me me' thing began significantly with the Boomers. (In certain other countries, the generations as late as the Boomers suffered hardships from wars and poverty. Some countries have the current younger generation experiencing it now). I agree that there's a difference with the generations after GenX who grew up during the Information Age, but when looking at my grandparents' generation, there really isn't a big difference between GenX and the later ones. The wealthy people and the flappers of the Roaring Twenties might've been similar to us, but I heard that those people didn't represent the majority of the population (far from it).

The current children and teenagers are different. They're growing up during an unusual time not experienced before since the 1918 pandemic. We're all being affected by the current pandemic, but I think the impact is being more felt by the younger generation who are growing up at this time.

Shaka_Khan

09-08-2020, 13:58

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3en1Lo_xXio

ReluctantSamurai

09-11-2020, 23:09

Glad to hear that Dr. Fauci agrees with me:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fauci-odds-trump-downplaying-threat-good-thing-normal/story?id=72952834

On Thursday, in contrast to the president's rosy outlook, Fauci told a Harvard forum, “I just think we need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter, because it’s not going to be easy. We know every time we restrict, we lift restrictions, we get a blip. I mean … it’s whack-a-mole.”

~D

Hooahguy

09-17-2020, 00:29

At least the Senate is taking this seriously (https://twitter.com/vanitaguptaCR/status/1306333155100590081?s=20).

The Senate has confirmed six of Trump’s judicial nominees in the past 30 hours. These are lifetime appointments that McConnell’s pushing through instead of the HEROES Act & other crucial legislation

Oh also the CDC director said (https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/cdc-director-says-coronavirus-vaccines-wont-be-widely-available-till-the-middle-of-next-year/2020/09/16/209fecf6-f827-11ea-be57-d00bb9bc632d_story.html) that a vaccine probably wont be available until middle of next year.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted Wednesday that most of the American public will not have access to a vaccine against the novel coronavirus until late spring or summer of next year — contrary to President Trump’s assertions that the pandemic is nearly over.

At a Senate hearing on the government’s response to the pandemic, CDC director Robert Redfield adhered to President Trump’s oft-stated contention that a safe and effective vaccine will become available in November or December — perhaps just before the presidential election seven weeks away.

But Redfield said the vaccine will be provided first to people most vulnerable to covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and supplies will increase over time, so Americans who are lower priority for the protection will be offered the shot more gradually. For it to be “fully available to the American public, so we begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life,” he said, “I think we are probably looking at late second quarter, third quarter 2021.”

I'm surprised that Trump hasn't fired him yet.

ReluctantSamurai

09-17-2020, 03:13

I've not heard a single broadcast media here in the US say anything about this unfolding catastrophe ( I guess it does nothing for ratings):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/16/its-getting-worse-by-the-day-indias-covid-battle-rages-on

Five months on, Mumbai has 1.8 million coronavirus cases and on Thursday, India crossed the dubious threshold of reporting more than5 million cases nationwide. With the fastest rate of infection in the world, and no signs of the country hitting its peak any time soon, many predict India will eventually overtake the US – currently on 6.6 million – to report the most cases worldwide. While cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata have recorded the highest concentration of cases so far, data shows the virus is now spreading to rural areas, which are reporting two-thirds of new cases.

Honestly, I don't know why this hasn't happened sooner considering the state of medical care, and the abysmal living conditions for millions of Indian people.

Seamus Fermanagh

09-17-2020, 15:02

ReluctantSamurai

09-17-2020, 18:36

But I guess the physical conditions with poverty etc. can become almost an insoluble obstacle to curtailing this sort of thing.

They do have good medical facilities......in the cities. India is 65% rural. With 1.4 billion people, that's 910 million people with substandard healthcare. India's healthcare leaders are mostly pointing to the sudden, and drastic lockdown measures imposed by the Indian government in late March. Counter-intuitive to how we think here, but in India, millions of indigenous migrant workers were trapped in cities and not allowed to leave, thereby contracting COVID-19. Millions left anyway, bringing the virus from the cities to the countryside. Lack of testing also led to undercounting.

Despite still having ~40k cases/day, and ~1k deaths/day here in the US, sometime this year India will surpass in both cases and deaths:embarassed:

Montmorency

09-18-2020, 05:12

One consideration is that India, by factors of size and infrastructure, is less capable than the US or other rich countries of comprehensively tallying its deaths even in the best of times. Beneath the formal statistics it is easily plausible that India has already been experiencing the world's highest rate of infections and number of COVID deaths for months.

But yeah, at this rate India will overtake the US for #1 in case count sometime in October.

In better news, some American Indians (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/15/913246691/to-limit-covid-19-navajo-leader-says-listen-to-your-public-health-professionals) are turning the page on COVID without much support.

In other news, Singapore seems to have crushed their outbreak at last, having seen one COVID death in 3 months and 15K cases in the same period, only 2K in the past month. After a 2-month battle with a resurgence in Melbourne (in which up to 90% of cumulative Australian COVID deaths were recorded), Australia's measures seemed to have paid off in returning to the status quo ante.

In worse news the Rona is breaking records across Europe this month, as the failure to contain the resurgent outbreak was seemingly comprehensive. I'll start reviewing the record on school openings in Europe in October. But even here is a silver lining, as has been observed throughout the summer, namely that time has allowed us to more than halve death rates (and the gains are most pronounced among the oldest and most vulnerable demographics). How much more justice need be done on behalf of early and aggressive suppression?

ReluctantSamurai

09-18-2020, 12:22

Under the radar:

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/516960-trump-coronavirus-adviser-threatens-to-sue-stanford-researchers

Scott Atlas, one of President Trump’s coronavirus advisers, is threatening to sue a group of Stanford doctors and researchers after they penned a public letter calling out “falsehoods” and “misrepresentations” of science around COVID-19.

Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who has questioned the science of wearing masks to stop the spread of COVID-19, has made claims that “run counter to established science” and undermines public health authorities by doing so, 78 researchers and doctors wrote in the Sept. 9 letter posted on Stanford's website.

Apparently cut from the same cloth as his new boss:

Attorneys for Atlas responded Thursday, threatening to “vindicate his reputation in court” and “seek compensatory and punitive damages” if the letter is not withdrawn.

“Your letter, which you wrote and sent with no regard for the truth, maliciously defames Dr. Atlas,” wrote Attorney Marc Kasowitz, whose firm helped represent President Trump during the impeachment proceedings.

Kasowitz demanded that signatories immediately issue a press release withdrawing the letter and contact every media outlet that has reported on it to request a correction by Friday.

And:

Atlas, a neuroradiologist who has no training in infectious diseases, public health or epidemiology, recently joined the White House coronavirus task force and appears to be favored by the president.

Experts have raised concerns over Atlas’s hard-lined push to reopen schools and his skepticism around the science of mask-wearing to slow the spread of COVID-19.

He has also pushed an approach to the pandemic that focuses on protecting those most at risk for serious COVID-19 illness including the elderly, while minimizing restrictions for the rest of the population, butting heads with Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, who are also on the White House coronavirus task force, according to The New York Times.

Sounds like "herd mentality".....errr I mean herd immunity, to me.

So who is the latest "totally unqualified yes man" hired by Fearless Leader?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/08/12/who-is-dr-scott-atlas-trumps-new-covid-health-adviser-seen-as-counter-to-fauci-and-birx/#23ee266220a4

A senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, Atlas is not an infectious disease expert — he’s board-certified in diagnostic radiology, which means he specializes in reading and interpreting imaging like X-rays, CT scans and MRIs, and he served as a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center from 1998 to 2012.

During a Fox News appearance on Aug. 3 discussing college reopenings, Atlas echoed an argument often made by Trump that children "have no risk for serious illness" and "they're not significant spreaders," adding, "There should never be and there is no goal to stop college students from getting an infection they have no problem with."

Calling the debate around reopening schools "irrational," Atlas said during his Fox appearance that "people are kidding themselves" if they believe testing is valuable and seemed to criticize the practice of quarantining asymptomatic carriers of the virus if they test positive, though studies have shown the virus can be spread by people not exhibiting symptoms.

A quick perusal of COVID-19 cases on college campuses here in the US and in other schools points up what an unmitigated quack this guy is. But the real reason he was hired is:

Trump brought in Atlas as an adviser after repeatedly contradicting the advice of the lead healthcare experts on the administration's coronavirus task force. The administration has particularly taken aim at Fauci. In late July, Trump called him "a little bit of an alarmist," to which Fauci said, "I consider myself more of a realist."

"Scott is a very famous man who’s also very highly respected," Trump said on Monday. "He’s working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus. And he has many great ideas."

But hey, let's adopt "herd mentality"...I mean herd immunity, and 2 million deaths later (hopefully all Democrats:quiet:) the US will have "turned the corner" on COVID-19 and we can all get back to merrily living in "normalcy" again.

Rock On Baby Donny:thrasher:

ReluctantSamurai

09-18-2020, 20:37

And another episode in the continuing Rocky & Bullwinkle Show entitled "Olympus Has Fallen" or "Help Me, I Can't Get Up":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0KjJROCZ-E

A president who is openly only the leader of "Red States".....:shame:

Furunculus

09-19-2020, 21:53

..European countries bet on personal responsibility and targeted measures, instead of sweeping restrictions that froze their economies in the spring

https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-coronavirus-rebounds-europe-rejects-new-lockdowns-11600251871?mod=wsjtwittertest19

now who does that sound like?

Furunculus

09-21-2020, 13:46

latest results from the Oxford group's Covid Openness Index:

https://covidtracker.bsg.ox.ac.uk/stringency-map

+ "New Risk of Openness Index available: see the press release and the research note. The index aims to help countries understand if it is safe to ‘open up’ or whether they should ‘close down’ in their fight to tackle the coronavirus."

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2020-09/Risk_of_Openness_press_release_11_09_2020v2.pdf

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/publications/risk-openness-index-when-do-government-responses-need-be-increased-or

Shaka_Khan

09-24-2020, 18:47

https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-pandemic-may-started-115756134.html

Coronavirus pandemic may have started in October, says UK-French study

Henry Samuel, The Telegraph May 8, 2020

.....The theory the virus was circulating earlier than had been thought came after a French athlete who fell ill after competing in Wuhan in October said she had been told by doctors it was likely that she had caught Covid-19.

The claim by Olympic silver-winning pentathlete Elodie Clouvel bolstered theories that coronavirus may have been carried around the world by people who had taken part in an international competition in the Chinese city.

Ms Clouvel, 31, said that she and her 27-year-old boyfriend Valentin Belaud, also a pentathlete, had fallen ill after the Military World Games, held in Wuhan between October 18 and 27 and featuring 9,308 athletes from 109 countries.

Other French team members have since spoken to the French press, mainly on condition of anonymity, to say they too had become sick.

"We all fell ill with the same symptoms," Ms Clouvel, a military police officer, told RTL radio. "We have recently had a contact with the military doctor, who said to us: 'I think you had [it] because there were a lot of people who were ill afterwards'.".....

Then the first infection to a human began before October 2019.

ReluctantSamurai

09-24-2020, 23:28

Then the first infection to a human began before October 2019.

I'm not sure that "Patient Zero" will ever be found:shrug:

Another strange twist on the CoronaVirus trail:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54288067

The dogs can detect coronavirus in humans five days before they develop symptoms, Anna Hielm-Bjorkman, the University of Helsinki professor who is running the trial, told Reuters news agency.
"They are very good [at detecting coronavirus]. We come close to 100% sensitivity," she said.

Be interesting to see if any business or agency here in the US looks seriously at this....

Shaka_Khan

09-25-2020, 16:07

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1525439/10-areas-england-coronavirus-cases-jumped-last-week-2/

Earlier this week it was revealed that one in four patients admitted to Preston hospital trusts during the pandemic had died from the virus.

Montmorency

09-29-2020, 05:49

https://www.startribune.com/covid-surveys-halted-in-minn-amid-racism-intimidation/572535141/

A door-to-door COVID-19 testing survey has been halted due to multiple incidents in greater Minnesota of residents intimidating and shouting racial and ethnic slurs at state and federal public health survey teams.

The CDC pulled its federal surveyors out of Minnesota this week following reports of verbal abuse and intimidation, including an incident in the Iowa border town of Eitzen, Minn., in which a survey team walking to a house was blocked by two cars and threatened by three men, according to state health officials. One man had his hand on a holstered gun.

Frustration with the state's pandemic response "is totally understandable," said Dr. Ruth Lynfield, state epidemiologist, "but that is distinctly different than taking out frustration on another human being who is trying to help and is especially galling when there is a taint of racism. There is no justification for this — the enemy is the virus and not the public health workers who are trying to help."

Surveyors had been fanning out to 180 neighborhoods this month — offering free diagnostic testing for active COVID-19 infections and blood antibody testing to identify prior infections — to understand the true prevalence of the coronavirus causing the pandemic.

Insults came at doorways, from angry people approaching the surveyors or just people walking their dogs on the other sides of the streets, said Stephanie Yendell, a state senior epidemiology supervisor.

The frequency of problems became clear last weekend when surveyors discussed their experiences, Yendell said. A Hispanic surveyor was called one slur "more in the last week than in her entire life," she said.

Most people were polite in all areas of the state, but there were "several" incidents and "a pattern emerged," said Dan Huff, assistant state health commissioner. The state ended the survey rather than continuing without the CDC workers, or sending only white surveyors in largely white rural communities.

"We found that our white teams had a very different experience, a much more positive experience, but I think from our perspective it's ridiculous for us to contemplate that," he said. "We choose who is doing this survey on their professional qualifications."

While samples were collected from 400 volunteers, that is short of what was sought for assessing COVID-19's presence in Minnesota. In a sad irony, health officials said that people who drove surveyors away due to frustration over state pandemic restrictions ended up short-circuiting a study that could have hastened the end to those restrictions.

Meanwhile, in Kandahar Province...
(I swear, the country's not supposed to be this way.)

State health leaders said it was disappointing for Minnesota and that CASPER surveys have been completed this year in Georgia and Hawaii and are ongoing in other states. The Hawaii study assessed joblessness amid the pandemic.
[...]
Incidents occurred mostly in central and southern Minnesota, rural areas where there has been pent-up resentment over the spring statewide shutdown, the indoor mask mandate and the bar and restaurant restrictions. Such measures were seen as overkill in small towns where virus transmission has been less prevalent.

In the past week in New York State we've inched marginally past a 1% positivity rate for the first time since perhaps the beginning of summer, and had the first day with more than 1000 cases since early June. Much of the uptick has been associated with surging infections in colleges and college towns attendant to on-campus residents; college openings have been a disaster all across the country, typically worse than we've seen in New York so far.

This comes as restaurants are slated to finally open in the city for indoor dining (at 25% capacity) at the end of the month, the last in the country to my knowledge. At least it's promising that restaurants in the rest of the state have been open to indoor dining to at least a degree since the end of June, and that went alright as far as I can tell. In-person school openings have been repeatedly pushed back for 3 weeks in a confidence-shaking ordeal of logistical and administrative chaos, though the other major school systems in the country have gone all-online and most students in the NYC school system will be all-remote anyway. But NYC schools will be opening for in-person (online has already begun) at the end of the month. Seems like a dumb and costly and dangerous way to go about it- the in-person instruction will be an expensive and disruptive "hybrid" experience that sucks basically everywhere it has been tried.

I hope we're not about to lose our hard-earned stability.

For a curveball, this Lancet study finds a very low proportion of Americans with SARS-2 antibodies by late July. I would have figured the contemporary proportion twice as high. Maybe someone who cares to read the study in depth could offer insight.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/25/coronavirus-immunity-us/

Totally OT, but what is up with all the channels of South Asian villagers trying Western products that have emerged in the past months?