Texas Jeff

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The valuations only really determine how much tax you will pay relative to everyone else. Looks like this year is mostly frozen for residential. The real kicker will be when tax rates are set, which determines how much you'll pay. Will our city and county government have the courage to raise taxes as much as the legally can during a recession? I'm thinking yes... They will say if they don't raise it to the max they lose out on the ability to raise it even higher in later years.

The survey results are here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hgp-3ol9cEvQXjuoaRrMJf1rlJWJSZRO/view The question you are talking about was 19A. They polled 2,020 people, 694 identified as Democrats, 579 identified as independent, 517 identified as Republicans. I guess some people did not identify with any of those three categories, because those last three numbers do not add up to the total surveyed. About 413 R's said they trust Donald Trump for medical information about the outbreak (80% of 517) but only 747 people out of the total said they did (37% of 2020). So only 334 out of the 1503 non-Republicans in the survey said they trust Donald Trump for medical information (22%).

If you're not a big runner but want exercise ... or if your favorite trail is now closed, you can build your own 5k using the gmaps pedometer: https://www.gmap-pedometer.com Start at your house and plot a route through your neighborhood that adds up to 5k, or however far you want to go. Then go walk or run it. You'll likely be separated from other folks since not everyone is on the same trail, and at the end you can say you did a 5k. You can preview the elevation change and make it hard or easy. My favorite route goes out away from my house a bit, then circles back and spends the last half mile going around streets near my house, if I decide to cut it short.

The numbers look a lot better for Texas, we don't come close to running out of ICU beds or hospital beds in their new model. The old model had a ICU shortage for about two weeks in mid-April. The peak for Texas was pulled in from around May 5th to April 19th and the tail going into May is shorter. Great news!

You can read the law here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6819239/FINAL-FINAL-CARES-ACT.pdf See Sec 2201 starting on page 144. The money is a tax credit for tax year 2020, but they are giving checks to taxpayers now. It looks to me like the $500 per kid is lumped in with the $1200 (or $2400 for married folks) to figure the amount of your credit. It starts to phase out at $75,000 AGI for an individual, $112,500 for a head of household, and $150,000 for a joint return. I think they are going to guess the amount of your credit due based on a previous year's tax return when they send you a check, but ultimately you will see some math on your 2020 taxes to figure out what the actual credit should have been.

C'mon Pittsburgh, get creative... ... The Steel Corona Curtain ... The Immaculate Injection

Law enforcement spotted on their way to the border:

Texas just updated their numbers. They recorded 500 new positives and 223 new tests. Somehow that math seems wrong... The percentage of tests that are positive has been rising for four straight days now.

Their website models "normal" flu behavior, so it decreases over time during the spring. It declares an area abnormally high if the incidence of fever is higher than what would be expected at this time of year according to the model, and abnormally low if lower... It is showing that there was an abnormal spike higher than expected from the end of Feb until about eight days ago, then the trend reversed, and now it is lower than expected. COVID-19 may explain the higher spike. More distancing or simply more people taking their temperature may explain the lower spike. Maybe this is causing normal flu season to end a little early, or maybe COVID infections are dropping, or both. But the data went higher than the model and is now lower than the model, indicating that something may have happened to increase disease and we may be responding to stop it. It's pretty cool that we can measure it.

Our social distancing and shutdown efforts may be having an effect, according to the "US health weather map" https://healthweather.us/ Kinsa makes wifi thermometers and uses the collected data to forecast hot spots of disease. They make a public national "weather map" showing trends and with the ability to drill down to any county. Around Feb 29th, the amount of people with a high fever started to increase and deviate from their expected seasonal model. The deviation kept getting worse until about Mar 19th. The trend then reversed sharply, fell through the expected range, and is now below the expected range for this time of year. If you drill down to counties, you can see this happening all over the country, but in different degrees. So, something is happening. Either normally healthy people are taking their temperature more than expected and the weather map does not account for that, or social distancing is working, or some other factor is at play.

Our social distancing and shutdown efforts may be having an effect, according to the "US health weather map" https://healthweather.us/ Kinsa makes wifi thermometers and uses the collected data to forecast hot spots of disease. They make a public national "weather map" showing trends and with the ability to drill down to any county. Around Feb 29th, the amount of people with a high fever started to increase and deviate from their expected seasonal model. The deviation kept getting worse until about Mar 19th. The trend then reversed sharply, fell through the expected range, and is now below the expected range for this time of year. If you drill down to counties, you can see this happening all over the country, but in different degrees. So, something is happening. Either normally healthy people are taking their temperature more than expected and the weather map does not account for that, or social distancing is working, or some other factor is at play. (sorry folks, I meant to post this in the main thread!)

Sorry, I messed up the math.. 11% in Travis Co with 4% of the population...

Texas has a dashboard a lot like the Johns Hopkins dashboard, but not as informative (no data over time): https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/ed483ecd702b4298ab01e8b9cafc8b83 Using that data, right now 79 of 715 cases (11%) are in Travis Co. But, Travis Co has about 4% of the state's population. So, is Travis Co simply more disease-ridden than the rest of the state or simply testing more and finding more cases? Honestly, I could go either way on that one...

86 cases in Austin as of 7pm today. That's a great number if that's it for today... The previous four days were +18,+17,+4,+17 cases. Today was +7, lowest number of new cases in six days.

Fauci was on CNN and was asked about not being there every day. He said they are trying to rotate people at the pressers because everyone has their normal role to play, it takes time to do them and he has duties at the NIH. He said he was shuttling between the NIH and the White House a bunch and that he was working with the NIH folks on vaccine trials, that some days he just needed to be present at NIH to keep progress going. He said he was fine and not to worry, but don't expect him to appear in the briefing room every day.

One more chart about testing. I was curious to know what percentage of the population has been tested, and the positive test rate for each state. My data is 2-3 days old and I accidently grabbed the 2010 state populations instead of the 2019 populations, so it's a little off, but here's what it looks like: The purple diamond is Washington, the red circle is New York, the green triangle is California and the orange square is Texas. Texas is not testing much but also not seeing a big positive rate. I would like to see us testing more but either they are not finding the positives or we have a low infection rate at the moment. New York is having a huge outbreak even with a 20% positive rate. You might want to avoid the four dots on the right (low test rate, high positive rate) ... New Jersey, Maryland, Ohio and Delaware. The little dot with high testing rate but low positive rate (to the left of the red circle -- California) is New Mexico, a safe place to be.

Well I was curious to know if social distancing in Austin is having an effect. So I searched around to get daily case numbers reported by Austin and Travis County, then made a chart. Here's what it looks like so far, an exponential increase would be just a straight line: Hmmm, maybe a knee forming around March 20th, hard to tell. If we break 100 cases today that's kinda bad, because it means we've gone up an order of magnitude in 8 days. "Stay at home" for us kicked in around March 13th, the day that Austin ISD cancelled school. We are now eight days into it. The curve should be starting to bend.

You probably also need the controller software for the board, any display units, things like that. You at least need the binary image that they are loading. Plus factory lines to make the stuff, any calibration or other factory software they use to manufacture the boxes. If they are using a flexible manufacturer now this might be easier to do, but if they are doing that, why not just tell the flexible manufacturer to just change all lines over to ventilators?

3M CEO said they were ramping up to produce 35 million respirators (N95 masks, not ventilators) per month in the US, with capacity for 100 million per month worldwide. They are working to double their capacity worldwide within 12 months. I think early on there was some person that said we had 30 million in reserve in the US and we needed 300 million. So, with 3M cranking them out as fast as possible, we'll have what we need in maybe 7-8 months, assuming more production comes online during that time.

Do Brooklyn and Queens residents have a longer transit commute when compared to your average Manhattan resident? Maybe it's being spread via transit, where people sit or touch infected parts of trains and then touch their face on their ride to/from work. Perhaps it's not simply the density, but the use of shared objects like buses, trains or taxis. Just a thought...

We in the US are still early in this crisis compared to others. Check out the total number of deaths, recovered, and in-progress for various countries as of right now: China: 3255 deaths, 71,740 recovered, 6013 active Italy: 4825 deaths, 6072 recovered, 42,681 active USA: 301 deaths, 171 recovered, 23,468 active or, in percentages: China: 4% deaths, 89% recovered, 7% active. (most results are known, active cases decreasing) Italy: 9% deaths, 11% recovered, 80% active (still early but at least recoveries outnumber deaths) USA: 1% deaths, 1% recovered, 98% active (deaths outnumber recoveries, still really early)

Sorry if this is obvious, but the death rate while (number of critical patients < number of ventilators) is much lower than when (number of critical patients > number of beds with ventilators). Like maybe 4x lower. We are still in that first phase and trying to avoid that second phase.

I get that they want people outside, fresh air, fire code ... that makes sense. But if they are going to do that they need to make sure that people in the outside queue are able to stay six feet away from each other. Maybe a line of cones or sidewalk chalk on the ground. Move up one cone at a time. Or hand out tickets for admission.

What is HEB's goal in limiting people inside the stores? Prevent panic? Prevent people from coming in contact with each other? If you start blocking the door and creating queues outside of the store, you are creating group gathering in the line outside. That sounds bad. Seems like they should let people into the store at a rate so that there are no queues at checkout, but let people roam around the store freely to shop. Maybe that's what they are doing, just pushing the queues from checkout to the front door. If they are going to block the door, they need to have some kind of ticketing system like at the deli so that people could grab a ticket at the door, wait in the parking lot, then come in when their number is called rather than wait close together in a line.