Exactly. Which is why I am surprised that people are taking it so light. Almost all of us have had flu and multiple times and we know that its a horrid experience. You are bedridden, weak as fuck and useless. And by all accounts, COVID19 has worse symptoms. And longer duration.
If a significant amount of people are down sick, even if most recover, how will that affect the workforce and the economy.
China has taken extreme measures to test populations and to isolate people. The numbers show that the numbers of new infections has dropped markedly in recent days. Of course, it is possible that they’re just making shit up, and whole cities are now dead zones.
On the other hand, the US government seems to be handling this by pretending it does not exist, or is a hoax by Democrats.
This is the scary part.
Absolutely correct. The politicians are fuckwits. Unfortunately, in this Trump era, the politicians are muzzling the experts.
I certainly wouldn’t accuse you of that, and I think it would be grossly unfair for others here to do so.
What monstro was probably getting at is the frustration around such partisan tactics, especially the weaponization of the false dichotomy: if you dare be critical of anything I, as a political leader, am doing, then it’s automatically a vicious attack against my party’s ideology (and, in the extreme, America itself). That is very bad for fluid, critical, public thought, and bad for clear-eyed views of what’s going on.
Hopefully, those posting here are flexible enough to see that cautions over partisan tactics can be safely made without giving in to total inter-party animus in tearing down Trump, or unfairly binning anyone on the “we’re doing OK” side of this debate with such a negative-partisan verdict on the administration.
The overall CFR is likely less than 1% assuming that the healthcare system is good quality and is not overwhelmed. But, if too many people are infected at once our healthcare system will likely not be able to cope with the stress and the CFR might skyrocket to 3-5 percent.
‘Unclean! Unclean!’: The Questionable History of Quarantines - From the Black Death to Coronavirus, we’ve tried to separate sick people from the rest of society for centuries—to mixed results.
Quashing panic is a good idea. But are quarantines now political moves, not medical necessities?
Considering that the US, in practical terms as of right now, isn’t actually doing anything to stop the spread of COVID-19, I’m gonna go with “no”.
They’re just now beginning to wake up, but a larger problem is that the highest levels of the administration is putting political pressure on the scientists - and that’s bad news. That’s exactly the same mistake that China’s CCP made. They didn’t want to spook people, didn’t want to scare off investors and companies whose supply chain was in China - and it backfired spectacularly. And we’re making the same mistake.
Day late, dollar short - it’s already spreading well beyond what we know. That’s what happens when you don’t have testing.
No question the CCP screwed the pooch, but there are health systems like South Korea, Singapore, and Germany which are prepared to deal with this, and then there’s ours, in which people are afraid to spend the money it takes to get seen by a doctor, tested, and potentially hospitalized, and potentially take time off of work. All of the ills of “socialism” are exactly what separate our system from the rest of the industrialized world, and there’s a reason why our death rate is going to be inevitably - unavoidably - higher.
Dude, we’re about to have March Madness. We’re about to enter marathon season. We’re not going to cancel events because our lack of testing indicates that there’s nothing to worry about - not enough known disease vectors. Let’s come back to this time next month. I bet it’s a different story then. A lot of people are about to die from COVID-19, and you can absolutely bet your ass off that markets are about to experience shocked shit.
Two words: “Spring break.”
Yeah, evidence is lacking, except in the 33 non-Hubei provinces of China that had 5 million Hubei residents filter through them before the lockdown started and all of them managed to get the virus under control. In the meantime, a few hundred to thousand Chinese people maybe travelled to Iran or Italy and they both have more cases than any non-Hubei province.
You can talk about how impractical a China style quarantine is for anywhere else in the world all you want but you shouldn’t continue denying that it works.
BILLBOARD says event promoters are waiting for local emergency declarations to shut them down so they can collect cancellation insurance - which one insurer says will exceed 9/11 claims. Without a force majeure ruling, they’re ruined. Admission-charging events will close to avoid civil liability and/or so promoters can file bankruptcy i.e. take the up-front money and run. But that leaves free fun.
Free fun. A good time for us old farts to avoid the hottest party towns a.k.a. viral petri dishes. MrsRico and I hadn’t planned to snag kids at Santa Cruz or Cancun anyway. Easter features huge Holy Week gatherings; I think we’ll skip Antigua Guatemala and Valencia Spain, too. Are Easter Parades still scheduled for US cities?
It’s happening right now. Glance at business news: Oil prices in free-fall. Asian markets crashing. Cryptocurrencies crashing. US Treasury yields crashing to below 1% - first time in history. China exports crashing. Travel crashing.
Wall Street opens in a few hours. It won’t be pretty. Sure, “buy when there’s blood in the streets.” This assumes you have some idea when the bleeding will stop. Good luck.
I’d be a hell of a lot more trusting of the CDC if they weren’t required to filter all their communications with the public through Mike Pence, who’s loyalty is to Trump, oligarchs, and the Republican party and not the American public in general.
Political pressure after years of funding cuts.
When I worked in the insurance industry I had contact with people at the CDC. They’re hardworking people dedicated to medicine and science. But I think they’ve been hamstrung by an administration more concerned with their personal welfare than the welfare of the people they were elected to represent.
In this case, I don’t think they’re just political moves. I’d divide countries dealing with this virus roughly into “pay now” or “pay later.” Pay now include Singapore and Hong Kong. Pay later include China (Hubei) and Italy.
Hong Kong is a good example. They credit widespread adoption of personal hygiene measures, including washing hands and wearing face masks, and measures to minimize contact between people (social distancing). From a Financial Times article:
The same source remarks that Hong Kong’s flu season has ended significantly early.
And an NPR article:
The same article debates whether Hong Kong’s measures are too much.
Anyone see the US adopting such measures?
Just for my own reference, I’ve been watching the diagnosed case counts on the John Hopkins “dashboard” site. Here’s the US numbers, starting March 2nd (through to 3/10/20): {102, 107, 148, 213, 260, 401, 497, 605, 808}
We can’t post images here, but you can plug the logarithms of the values yourself into this linear regression calculator. The linear fit (on log scale) looks like a textbook example of exponential growth. The daily growth rate is around 32%, using the least-squares fit. So the number of US cases in days (d) since March 2nd goes like 102*(1.32)^d. An unpleasant curve to look at, but I suspect we’ll see stronger and stronger containment measures as the cases keep climbing. (The Hong Kong case count is almost flat.)
Like you say, there are treatments. And it’s good for statistical analysis of the flu.
But the question I have to ask is, how often do people get ACTUAL flu-like symptoms that aren’t the flu? I don’t mean the poorly-named “Stomach flu”, which is gastroenteritis.
I mean real, honest to God influenza symptoms. Because for me, they’re pretty unmistakable- relatively high fever, cough, body aches, generally feeling like crap. I typically don’t run a fever with other upper respiratory infections, and nor do I feel quite so atrocious as I do with the flu.
I would think that if you were suffering those symptoms, it would be worthwhile to report it to your doctor, if for no other reason, than for tracking and data gathering purposes. That stuff does come in handy later for epidemiologists and public health specialists.
IMO, there were two available options at the start:
#1 Completely shutdown all US borders and remove a large number of freedoms related to citizen travel and congregation then wait it out for a couple years until the vaccine was ready.
#2 Don’t.
Any choice in-between was a farce as only extreme measures could have stopped the virus from breaking containment. The government chose #2 and I think it was the right choice.
At this point I’d rather the government focus on a realistic goal like protecting the elderly from covid-19.
I just hope they get this under control before tick season starts up-I’m not a big fan of Corona with Lyme.
¡Ay carumba! Top it off with cheap aguardiente rum to disinfect. A jalapeño squirt couldn’t hurt, too.
There’s a sure procedure. Top-off all suspected COVID infected with rum. Count the survivors. Tally those who died smiling. Wait, this POTUS is a teetotaller. He’s doomed.
My university just shut down in-person final exams and all gatherings of 50 or more people, and moved to online-only for the first 3 weeks of spring term. In addition, they’ve cancelled university-sanctioned travel indefinitely and urge us not to travel over break. Residence halls remain open.
Zomg! Tom hanks, rita wilson!!! Zomg!!!
Ex-CDC director predicts up to 1.6 million US deaths over 2-3 years. (cite) But POTUS has it under control. :eek: