Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Hooahguy]

I cannot imagine that his overall health is conducive to a quick recovery either.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

His base tends towards the view that tough people can and will beat it. Fido.

Two weeks from now he will declare victory.


It did sadden me, while watching media coverage, to see so many hoping he was sick (though of course mouthing the opposite). Could practically see the snarky “i told you so” smirks.


Trump is an asshat but i would not wish this on anyone. Seen it kill otherwise hale folks too quickly.

[ReluctantSamurai]

It did sadden me, while watching media coverage, to see so many hoping he was sick (though of course mouthing the opposite). Could practically see the snarky “i told you so” smirks.

I place myself in that category....without shame. Sorry, if that makes me less of a human being, so be it. The fact that he lied to the American people about the dangers of SARS-2, then called it a hoax, then refused to assemble a national plan and instead passed the buck to individual states, then interfering with said states capacity to procure the supplies they required to fight the virus, then encouraging people to engage in activity know to be helpful to spreading the virus, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. The net result is tens of thousands excess deaths, and an economy reeling deeper and deeper into recession.

Do I hope he dies? No. I can be criticized for my feelings on this, but I won't fall that far. Hopefully, he will at least get sick enough to understand what hundreds of thousands of Americans have had to endure while he's been off enjoying a round of golf.

If this post gets deleted, so be it.

[Montmorency]

His base tends towards the view that tough people can and will beat it. Fido.

Two weeks from now he will declare victory.

My belief is this is a genuine development - though by now I had sort of assumed he was one of the asymptomatic fortunates. Trump is unlikely to be hoaxing because I've never heard of him pretending to be weaker than he is (and he's plenty weak, to be clear), only the opposite. Always the opposite. His narcissistic psychology precludes the notion in the same way it precluded a rational pandemic, or public relations, strategy.

It did sadden me, while watching media coverage, to see so many hoping he was sick (though of course mouthing the opposite). Could practically see the snarky “i told you so” smirks.

Trump is an asshat but i would not wish this on anyone. Seen it kill otherwise hale folks too quickly.

If Trump's suffering has a utilitarian externality, then he ought to suffer to the maximum extent that such suffering brings us benefit, or vice-versa to the extent it does the opposite.

It's not a question of personal satisfaction or schadenfreude. All else being equal, Trump's private experience is of no interest to me.

"I don't really care, do u?" [VIDEO]

I place myself in that category....without shame. Sorry, if that makes me less of a human being, so be it. The fact that he lied to the American people about the dangers of SARS-2, then called it a hoax, then refused to assemble a national plan and instead passed the buck to individual states, then interfering with said states capacity to procure the supplies they required to fight the virus, then encouraging people to engage in activity know to be helpful to spreading the virus, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. The net result is tens of thousands excess deaths, and an economy reeling deeper and deeper into recession.

Do I hope he dies? No. I can be criticized for my feelings on this, but I won't fall that far. Hopefully, he will at least get sick enough to understand what hundreds of thousands of Americans have had to endure while he's been off enjoying a round of golf.

If this post gets deleted, so be it.

Trump potentially exposed Biden and others to coronavirus without ever warning them or taking action to protect them, on top.

It would be an outrage to delete this post.

[Hooahguy]

Trump is being taken to Walter Reed hospital.

It reminds me of what happened to Boris Johnson, how first he said he felt fine but then took a sharp downward turn really quickly afterwards. So I guess we will see if he pulls out of this. Though in the video I just saw he walked to the helicopter so clearly he's not bedridden. Yet anyways.

I saw a tweet where a doctor responded to the treatment the WH docs claim they gave him:

The President’s team either:

A) Can’t read basic medical literature.

B) Can read medical literature but can’t overrule what he’s telling them to do, based on what advice he’s getting elsewhere.

C) Believes he is dying and therefore are willing to try anything.

I am inclined to think that B is the right answer here. On the other hand they have lied about his health before so who knows whats really going on.

Meanwhile, Biden reports his test is negative, though I wonder if its too soon to take a test. My doctor told me 5 days after potential exposure is when a test will have the most accurate results. I guess we will find out.

As for posts on here being blasé about Trump being infected, I will just say this: I come from a culture where we eat cookies shaped like a bad guy's stupid hat (or his ear, there's significant debate around this) to celebrate the time he was unsuccessful in his attempt to do a genocide and instead got himself killed and we make fun of him annually and have been doing this for over a thousand years, so

[Montmorency]

As for posts on here being blasé about Trump being infected, I will just say this: I come from a culture where we eat cookies shaped like a bad guy's stupid hat (or his ear, there's significant debate around this) to celebrate the time he was unsuccessful in his attempt to do a genocide and instead got himself killed and we make fun of him annually and have been doing this for over a thousand years, so

Lot of the Jewish prayers I've heard are lurid entreaties for the divine destruction of enemies.

Anyway, 10 years ago no one, not even the chin-strokingest of regressive centrists, would have wrung their hands over reports of Osama Bin Laden or Anders Breivik getting the sniffles after challenge-snorting anthrax or whatever.

[Hooahguy]

Lot of the Jewish prayers I've heard are lurid entreaties for the divine destruction of enemies.

I'm not sure I'd say a lot of them are like that, but yeah its not an insignificant number either. I mean a prayer for the destruction of the heretics/wicked is supposed to be said 3x a day. Though to be fair much of the liturgy was written when we were getting kicked around the Middle East and Europe like a hacky sack.

Anyway, 10 years ago no one, not even the chin-strokingest of regressive centrists, would have wrung their hands over reports of Osama Bin Laden or Anders Breivik getting the sniffles after challenge-snorting anthrax or whatever.

True, but I think the status of the office held is the more important thing to consider here rather than how much they are hated. Regardless of who it is, POTUS being taken to the hospital for a potentially deadly virus is very serious.

Anyways, Twitter seems to be taking a strong stance about this.

[Montmorency]

True, but I think the status of the office held is the more important thing to consider here rather than how much they are hated. Regardless of who it is, POTUS being taken to the hospital for a potentially deadly virus is very serious.

From a certain point of view; we might also say that no one knows what the is going on and the radical, dangerous instability of our moment is the most serious integral threat to the nation in living memory.

Anyone who prays, pray for the country and pass over Trump.

[ReluctantSamurai]

An interesting take from the "Fake News" channel:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...-fox-news.html

The network has been a key vector for bad coronavirus information all year. From initially claiming that COVID-19 was basically just the flu, to touting hydroxychloroquine as a remedy without any compelling scientific evidence for the claim, to amplifying the president’s sneering disdain for masks, state and regional shutdowns, and his own administration’s health experts, Fox News personalities speaking to the network’s vast and elderly audience have surely helped make the pandemic worse than it otherwise might have been. Now that their beloved leader has been hit by the virus, how would they react? By 9 a.m. Friday, after watching Fox & Friends, I had my answer: by pandering to the president, incessantly referencing hydroxychloroquine, and somehow still finding a way to make the story about Joe Biden, the Democrats, and the sickos in the liberal media.

[Hooahguy]

Well Fox News/OANN would certainly explain why he would be given an odd cocktail of medication rather than tried and true treatments.

Per CNN's Acosta:

Trump adviser said there is reason for concern about Trump's health tonight. "This is serious," the source said. The source went on to describe Trump as very tired, very fatigued, and having some trouble breathing. WH officials continue to say Trump will be fine.

I wonder if we are going to see the 25th amendment invoked in the coming days. That would certainly be interesting. Its been invoked a few times before during medical procedures (a couple of colonoscopies and a colectomy), so I guess this would be the first time it would be invoked for a non-colon reason.

It also seems apparent that the Barrett announcement event was the super spreader event. Senators Tillis and Lee, Trump, Melania, Hicks, the Notre Dame president and several WH press corps journalists. All infected.

Edit: so are Kellyanne Conway and Trump's campaign manager, Bill Stepien. I expect more people to show positive in the coming days.

[Hooahguy]

There seem to be conflicting reports on how Trump is doing. His doctors said that he is doing fine, but then another source said right after that “the president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

I don't know what to believe, guess we will find out soon enough.

Edit: "AP source: President Trump was administered supplemental oxygen at the White House on Friday before going to hospital."

I wager that we aren't being told the full truth.

Original source might be Mark Meadows, WH Chief of Staff.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I wager that we aren't being told the full truth.

Considering who you're talking about, is that any surprise? The truth will come out (sort of) if he recovers, or if he dies. Even if he dies, the GOP will probably just hire Alec Baldwin....

[Seamus Fermanagh]

It was interesting to see him NOT colored like an Oompah-Loompah for a change.

[Hooahguy]

Trump is being released from the hospital today, but I don't think he is out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.

A reminder of the Herman Cain (GOP candidate from 2012) timeline:

6/24: Attends Trump rally
7/2: Tests positive for Covid-19
7/10: Says he’s improving
7/15: Says his doctors seem happy
7/27: Says he’s really getting better
7/30: Dies

[Montmorency]

Incipient New York surge

Trump is being released from the hospital today, but I don't think he is out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.

A reminder of the Herman Cain (GOP candidate from 2012) timeline:

6/24: Attends Trump rally
7/2: Tests positive for Covid-19
7/10: Says he’s improving
7/15: Says his doctors seem happy
7/27: Says he’s really getting better
7/30: Dies

Sir your are mistaken.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Wanna guess how Fearless Leader would've reacted had it been Biden who contracted COVID-19? Flashback:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6a-rdtvuoM

[Hooahguy]

Sir your are mistaken.

Ah yes, the ghost tweeting, definitely one of the oddest things about the whole affair. Also the fact that Cain seems to have been completely forgotten by his former party.

[Shaka_Khan]

[ReluctantSamurai]

@Monty

I guess the "kids" haven't learned much since the pissing contest of this past spring:

https://www.politico.com/states/new-...-cuomo-1321450

“These public disagreements between the governor and the mayor are not helpful,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia and once an informal adviser to the mayor. “To have the mayor overridden by the governor of New York State, it is not acceptable. If he’s got a difference with the mayor, call him up, come to a conclusion, yell at him. This should not be in the public forum.”

[ReluctantSamurai]

These people are so fucking stupid:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...virus-fox-news

The man is coughing constantly during the interview. Could be COVID, could just be a cough. But the other member of Trump's debate prep team, Chris Christie, has already tested positive, yet Giuliani continues his abject denialism. Moron.

And the hits just keep on coming:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...k-milley-trump

The White House outbreak now has more cases than Vietnam, Taiwan, and New Zealand.......combined.

[Montmorency]

Fresh NYC shutdowns to begin this week, by intensity of cluster (along zip code lines).

Truthfully there's been a marginal rise in cases in all areas of the state, with the cumulative effect of putting us at 1000+ official cases for almost all of the past 10 days.

I repeat, NY had gone without registering more than a thousand cases on a single day for close to 4 months.

https://www.politico.com/states/new-...-cuomo-1321450

De Blasio warned New Yorkers to prepare for a shelter in place order on Tuesday, March 17, but was immediately shot down by Cuomo. Then the governor turned around and enacted, essentially, the policy de Blasio espoused, though not until the following Sunday evening — a delay that researchers say likely cost many lives.

At the beginning of April, de Blasio advised New Yorkers to wear face coverings when out in public. The next day, Cuomo and his health commissioner questioned the effectiveness of the measure. Almost two weeks later, Cuomo issued an order making masks mandatory across the state.

And when de Blasio announced that city schools would stay closed for the rest of the academic year that ended in June, Cuomo insisted that was only the mayor’s “opinion” and no decision had been made. Ultimately, schools statewide remained closed.

All of this and more was discussed in April exposes, some of which were linked here, but it's good to have a reminder. Cuomo/de Blasio, like Newsom and some other governors. should be credited for strong and steady policies over the duration of the emergency, but gosh did they make a lot of petty and short-sighted decisions to our detriment. Cuomo sufficiently influenced the media narrative - to say nothing of his entrenched patrimonial network in state politics - to sustain his position in future elections if he wants to; De Blasio was already disdained across the board before the pandemic and I don't see how he survives next year's primaries.

The White House outbreak now has more cases than Vietnam, Taiwan, and New Zealand.......combined.

I want to make a joke about Chinese territorial heritage here.

Giuliani... Moron.

Yes.

[Hooahguy]

Just when you thought things couldn't get any dumber:

President Donald Trump on Saturday will address hundreds of supporters on the South Lawn of the White House before traveling to Florida on Monday for a rally, marking his return to public events after being hobbled by the coronavirus.

Guests for Saturday’s event won’t be tested for the virus and won’t be required to wear masks, setting off fresh concerns that the White House itself has become a vector for the disease. Earlier Friday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease expert, decried a previous gathering at the White House to celebrate Trump’s Supreme Court nominee as a “superspreader event.”

[...]

His speech is being billed as “Remarks to Peaceful Protesters for Law & Order,” according to an invitation. He’ll address the crowd from the Truman Balcony off of the Blue Room, a large state room on the main floor of the White House. More than two thousand guests have been invited, according to a person familiar with the event.

And he is going to a rally in Florida on Monday. All I can think of is what Herman Cain went through. I give him two, maybe three weeks before he is hospitalized again.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Acts of complete desperation. His campaign is getting trounced in available money to spend on ads, all of his recent antics have served only to drive more women and suburbanites over to Biden, closing down broad COVID negotiations and pushing to just bail out the airline industry (AGAIN) isn't going to win over small business people, and as you've stated...he actually believes he's superman. SARS-2 will likely put him in the hospital again, drugs notwithstanding.

If he had any hope of winning here in MI, he did his chances serious damage with his and his lap dog Jason Miller's comments about Gretchen Whitmer. Despite all the BS this spring in Lansing, she is still very popular. Right-wingers here may be quite loud, but they are a small minority.

[Hooahguy]

I cant remember where I saw this but apparently he has also increased ad spending in the DC area.

The DC area.

The renowned electoral toss-up that is the DC area.


I just hope he doesnt get more people sick. The number of cases in DC has skyrocketed over the past week. At the end of September we had only 26 new cases but now cases are trending back up.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Has Boris blown it?

https://www.vox.com/2020/10/10/21508...-uk-cases-news

After a relatively quiet summer, the United Kingdom is now suffering a new onslaught of Covid-19. Where the seven-day rolling average for much of the summer was regularly below 1,000 cases a day, it began increasing in September, and by October 5, the new average had reached 15,505. The counts are complicated by test shortages and changes in the way cases are counted, but it’s clear the country is going through a serious second wave.

On July 4, with the daily new case count down to 403, Johnson reopened English pubs and restaurants with no face coverings needed, but with more hand-washing and ventilation required, and a limit of two households allowed to dine together. On July 15, to the delight of millions of Brits, Johnson took things a step further with a plan to pay people to eat out.

The public health community reacted to the plan with horror. “In a word, it’s nuts,” says Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Center on National and Global Health Law, professor of global health law at Georgetown University, and a research fellow at Oxford University. “In the midst of a pandemic, it’s actually directly opposite to what the public health evidence suggests.”

There are no currently published medical studies definitively linking the rise in UK cases beginning in early September to the increased visits to restaurants throughout August. But it’s hard to think otherwise.

Toby Phillips, head of research and policy at Oxford University’s Pathways for Prosperity Commission, looked at how many more people dined out and how many more cases there have been, and concluded that the increased number of cases in early September “is consistent with” the restaurant program.

“Looking at the English regions, there is a loose correlation between uptake of the scheme and new cases in the last weeks of August,” Phillips wrote in the Conversation. “Again, this isn’t to say that the scheme caused those cases. But it certainly didn’t discourage those people from going out.”

Even Johnson himself recently acknowledged that his plan might have played a role in fueling the new wave of cases across the country. At the same time, he took responsibility “for everything that has happened since the pandemic began.”

Many blame the uneven reaction to the new coronavirus — and many of the UK’s more-than 42,500 Covid-19 deaths — on Johnson’s hot-again, cold-again belief in the seriousness of the pandemic, his interest in helping out businesses, and a system that gives him unquestioned power to guide the government response.

“You can have the best health system in the world,” Gostin says. “You can have the most expert scientists in the world as the UK has. But if you don’t have a leader that can effectively implement good policy and effectively communicate the importance of risk avoidance behaviors, you’re finished.”

[ReluctantSamurai]

Interesting read on individual states response here in the US:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/1...andemic-429376

Vermont, Washington, Michigan, Colorado, and Rhode Island get high marks from a wide range of health researchers, public officials and academic experts. Other states got good grades in several specific areas.

As a sidenote, Michigan got high marks in reducing the impact of COVID-19 on black people. After a stuttering start, Gov Whitmer organized the state's COVID-19 response and directed it throughout. It's generally acknowledged that her response saved thousands of lives, and despite that idiocy in April from a right-wing militia group (two brothers photographed on the capital steps at that time are two of the 13 indicted in her kidnapping plot), most people here realize that. Trump and other White House officials did themselves no favors here with the voting population by attacking her and continuing to claim she's done a poor job. Bye-bye CoviDon....not this year

[Montmorency]

The US is on the upturn of a third wave. New York and New England's suppression of the virus that lasted through the summer is in peril.



France and Spain have recorded the majority of their cumulative caseload since around the beginning of September.

Much of the rest of Europe, including Russia, is recording their highest daily case counts yet. Iceland too, which just now recorded its first COVID death since April.

As far as I can find, only the Czechian Republic - one of the many European countries only now experiencing a rampant virus - has decided to deprioritize in-person schooling so far.

israel has completed nearly one month of its lockdown, the strictest second national lockdown in the world apparently, and will lower restrictions soon. (Red transverse line denotes start of partial lockdown, a week before the full one was implemented).



Singapore and Australia seem to know how to control the virus.




South Korea's probably still the best medium-sized country on this.




The March relief aid and central bank intervention reduced American poverty in April (and raised personal income) during perhaps the sharpest economic downturn in all of history. Since the spring, millions have gone into poverty as the aid was not renewed. BIG GOVERNMENT ROCKS
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/u...ty-levels.html


I didn't hear this before, but apparently during his town hall earlier this week Trump offered the preposterous lie that 85% of people who wear masks catch COVID.

Samurai, did you ever form an opinion on Abdul El-Sayed?


OT: Hooah, you'll be pleased to hear that so far the MSM have given Giuliani's Hunter Biden story a derisory sniff. It was so obviously fake news that apparently even the NYPost's (a tabloid grown only more notorious since Rupert Murdoch acquired it) newsroom rebelled at having to produce it. Get ready to hear about "but his emails" from the RWNJ mediasphere for the next 4 years, in the downtime between fresher stories.

[edyzmedieval]

Romania's struggling with COVID right now in a significant way, we have around 4000 new infections per day. This second wave is massive and they will re-impose lockdowns in some places over here.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Perhaps everyone should be paying more attention to this number:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...ndemic/616548/

By now many people have heard about R0—the basic reproductive number of a pathogen, a measure of its contagiousness on average. But unless you’ve been reading scientific journals, you’re less likely to have encountered k, the measure of its dispersion. The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an over dispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic—or our preventive practices.

There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Over dispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

This kind of behavior, alternating between being super infectious and fairly noninfectious, is exactly what k captures, and what focusing solely on R hides. Samuel Scarpino, an assistant professor of epidemiology and complex systems at Northeastern, told me that this has been a huge challenge, especially for health authorities in Western societies, where the pandemic playbook was geared toward the flu—and not without reason, because pandemic flu is a genuine threat. However, influenza does not have the same level of clustering behavior.

We can think of disease patterns as leaning deterministic or stochastic: In the former, an outbreak’s distribution is more linear and predictable; in the latter, randomness plays a much larger role and predictions are hard, if not impossible, to make. In deterministic trajectories, we expect what happened yesterday to give us a good sense of what to expect tomorrow. Stochastic phenomena, however, don’t operate like that—the same inputs don’t always produce the same outputs, and things can tip over quickly from one state to the other. As Scarpino told me, “Diseases like the flu are pretty nearly deterministic and R0 (while flawed) paints about the right picture (nearly impossible to stop until there’s a vaccine).” That’s not necessarily the case with super-spreading diseases.

Hitoshi Oshitani, a member of the National COVID-19 Cluster Taskforce at Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and a professor at Tohoku University who told me that Japan focused on the overdispersion impact from early on, likens his country’s approach to looking at a forest and trying to find the clusters, not the trees. Meanwhile, he believes, the Western world was getting distracted by the trees, and got lost among them. To fight a super-spreading disease effectively, policy makers need to figure out why super-spreading happens, and they need to understand how it affects everything, including our contact-tracing methods and our testing regimes.

[...]we don’t need to know all the sufficient factors that go into a super-spreading event to avoid what seems to be a necessary condition most of the time: many people, especially in a poorly ventilated indoor setting, and especially not wearing masks. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, told me, given the huge numbers associated with these clusters, targeting them would be very effective in getting our transmission numbers down.

Over dispersion should also inform our contact-tracing efforts. In fact, we may need to turn them upside down. Right now, many states and nations engage in what is called forward or prospective contact tracing. Once an infected person is identified, we try to find out with whom they interacted afterward so that we can warn, test, isolate, and quarantine these potential exposures. But that’s not the only way to trace contacts. And, because of over dispersion, it’s not necessarily where the most bang for the buck lies. Instead, in many cases, we should try to work backwards to see who first infected the subject.

As Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and the author of the book The Rules of Contagion, explained to me, if we can use retrospective contact tracing to find the person who infected our patient, and then trace the forward contacts of the infecting person, we are generally going to find a lot more cases compared with forward-tracing contacts of the infected patient, which will merely identify potential exposures, many of which will not happen anyway, because most transmission chains die out on their own. Indeed, as Kucharski and his co-authors show mathematically, overdispersion means that “forward tracing alone can, on average, identify at most the mean number of secondary infections (i.e. R)”; in contrast, “backward tracing increases this maximum number of traceable individuals by a factor of 2-3, as index cases are more likely to come from clusters than a case is to generate a cluster.”

Another significant consequence of overdispersion is that it highlights the importance of certain kinds of rapid, cheap tests. Consider the current dominant model of test and trace. In many places, health authorities try to trace and find forward contacts of an infected person: everyone they were in touch with since getting infected. They then try to test all of them with expensive, slow, but highly accurate PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests. But that’s not necessarily the best way when clusters are so important in spreading the disease.

Once a country has too many outbreaks, it’s almost as if the pandemic switches into “flu mode,” as Scarpino put it, meaning high, sustained levels of community spread even though a majority of infected people may not be transmitting onward. Scarpino explained that barring truly drastic measures, once in that widespread and elevated mode, COVID-19 can keep spreading because of the sheer number of chains already out there. Plus, the overwhelming numbers may eventually spark more clusters, further worsening the situation.

As Kucharski put it, a relatively quiet period can hide how quickly things can tip over into large outbreaks and how a few chained amplification events can rapidly turn a seemingly under-control situation into a disaster. We’re often told that if Rt, the real-time measure of the average spread, is above one, the pandemic is growing, and that below one, it’s dying out. That may be true for an epidemic that is not overdispersed, and while an Rt below one is certainly good, it’s misleading to take too much comfort from a low Rt when just a few events can reignite massive numbers.

Perhaps one of the most interesting cases has been Japan, a country with middling luck that got hit early on and followed what appeared to be an unconventional model, not deploying mass testing and never fully shutting down. By the end of March, influential economists were publishing reports with dire warnings, predicting overloads in the hospital system and huge spikes in deaths. The predicted catastrophe never came to be, however, and although the country faced some future waves, there was never a large spike in deaths despite its aging population, uninterrupted use of mass transportation, dense cities, and lack of a formal lockdown.

Oshitani told me that in Japan, they had noticed the overdispersion characteristics of COVID-19 as early as February, and thus created a strategy focusing mostly on cluster-busting, which tries to prevent one cluster from igniting another. Oshitani said he believes that “the chain of transmission cannot be sustained without a chain of clusters or a megacluster.” Japan thus carried out a cluster-busting approach, including undertaking aggressive backward tracing to uncover clusters. Japan also focused on ventilation, counseling its population to avoid places where the three C’s come together—crowds in closed spaces in close contact, especially if there’s talking or singing—bringing together the science of overdispersion with the recognition of airborne aerosol transmission, as well as presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission.

Could we get back to a much more normal life by focusing on limiting the conditions for super-spreading events, aggressively engaging in cluster-busting, and deploying cheap, rapid mass tests—that is, once we get our case numbers down to low enough numbers to carry out such a strategy? (Many places with low community transmission could start immediately.) Once we look for and see the forest, it becomes easier to find our way out.

In looking at the huge surges happening around the world at this moment, it might be worth considering a look at Japan's strategy of "cluster-busting". While just about every country in the world is seeing big upticks in cases, Japan's rolling average for the last seven days has been going down.

A look at what Japan is doing:

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavir...n?country=~JPN

Samurai, did you ever form an opinion on Abdul El-Sayed?

Dunno if he'd make for a good governor, but he might make a good local taskforce head on fighting the pandemic...

[ReluctantSamurai]

The end result of having a president who simply doesn't give a rats' ass anymore, and a staff that has now fully endorsed "herd immunity":

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/u...alth&smtyp=cur

Gone are the days when Americans could easily understand the virus by tracking rising case numbers back to discrete sources — the crowded factory, the troubled nursing home, the rowdy bar. Now, there are so many cases, in so many places, that many people are coming to a frightening conclusion: They have no idea where the virus is spreading.

But as cases skyrocket again in many states, many health officials have conceded that interviewing patients and dutifully calling each contact will not be enough to slow the outbreak. “Contact tracing is not going to save us,” said Dr. Ogechika Alozie, chief medical officer at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, where hospitalizations in the county have soared by more than 400 percent and officials issued a new order for residents to stay at home.


The problem, of course, is that failing to fully track the virus makes it much harder to get a sense of where the virus is flourishing, and how to get ahead of new outbreaks. But once an area spins out of control, trying to trace back each chain of transmission can feel like scooping cupfuls of water from a flood.


In some places, overwhelmed health officials have abandoned any pretense of keeping up.

“You can swing a cat and hit someone who has got it”