Formerly DT: COVID-19 - Featuring Lots of Politics, now CR because political talk not going away

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

2 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

human beings don't instinctively understand exponential growth

Human beings can't do 10% tax in their heads let alone understand exponential growth.

[ztejas 43728]

3 minutes ago, Js1 said:

 

Yeah because everyone knows that the first 84 tests always come back negative!

[MoJames 8256]

10 minutes ago, Trey3216 said:

Yep.  From what I hear, it's a fairly prominent local bank executive.  I also personally know at least 20 people that just got back from the Colorado ski areas that are suggesting 14 day self quarantines for those returning from those areas.  They are pretty influential people around town.  Local business community could get interesting pretty quick.   

You know which ski resort? It appears most indications suggest Aspen or Vail.

Edited March 17, 2020 by MoJames

[Not a cat 5731]

Just now, Cheeseweasel said:

Human beings can't do 10% tax in their heads let alone understand exponential growth.

If every day you doubled the number of people that don't understand exponential growth, in a month there'd be hundreds.

[akhornfan 4]

3 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

Exactly, I think we all agree that the USA vs. Italy chart is coincidental as much as anything. Our per capita testing has been much lower, our population distribution is vastly different, etc. What it is useful in showing the general public, however, is that the growth in confirmed cases is exponential in both countries. As another poster mentioned above, human beings don't instinctively understand exponential growth. Charts that help them understand the reality of how fast this thing spreads if no countermeasures are taken are a good thing.

Read the twitter comments when one of those charts is posted and tell me how educated everyone is getting. The ones who didn’t understand exponential growth now think everyone is going to die and create panic. That is not better. Maybe not worse, but certainly not better. Stupid will always be stupid 

[FWD 297]

2 minutes ago, Enchubben said:

A risk of derailing the current thread, can you please stop trying to make this about politics please?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/16/no-white-house-didnt-dissolve-its-pandemic-response-office/

  Reveal hidden contents

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

 

 

Sorry but public health experts at the time cried out that disbanding the pandemic response team made us less prepared. There were reports from health groups and lawmakers asking that the team be reinstated. Current top public health officials have said that the initial and ongoing response to COVID19 would be better coordinated if that team was still in place.

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

Just now, Not a cat said:

If every day you doubled the number of people that don't understand exponential growth, in a month there'd be hundreds.

[Trey3216 15380]

3 minutes ago, MoJames said:

You know which ski resort? It appears most indications suggest Aspen or Vail.

Ding Ding Ding Ding 

[Newdoc 3465]

4 minutes ago, MoJames said:

You know which ski resort? It appears most indications suggest Aspen or Vail.

Sensational headline but good information

[Huckleberry 33331]

2 minutes ago, akhornfan said:

Read the twitter comments when one of those charts is posted and tell me how educated everyone is getting. The ones who didn’t understand exponential growth now think everyone is going to die and create panic. That is not better. Maybe not worse, but certainly not better. Stupid will always be stupid 

You should stop caring about Twitter comments. I mean it's pretty obvious at this point that you're the yin to GreenspointTexas's yang. You both are being silly and going overboard to one direction because it makes you feel better for whatever reason. You have made multiple posts misreading dates and numbers in charts and misrepresenting reality, just like he has.

[Loco 3754]

Florida closing all bars @5pm on Saint Paddy's day....  I'm sure this will go smoothly...  oh so smooth

Quote

Additionally, starting at 5 p.m. Tuesday, all bars and nightclubs will be closed for the next 30 days, DeSantis said. That will be enforced by Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation, but the governor’s office did not provide immediate details of that enforcement.

 

[dcar00 14551]

5 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Human beings can't do 10% tax in their heads let alone understand exponential growth.

its hilarious when I do simple 2 and 3 digit math in my head, not because I want to impress someone because it is just quicker, and people act like it is some magic trick.

15% tip might as well be vector calculus for some.

[Captainant 27944]

1 minute ago, Enchubben said:

A risk of derailing the current thread, can you please stop trying to make this about politics please?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/16/no-white-house-didnt-dissolve-its-pandemic-response-office/

  Reveal hidden contents

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

 

 

Not about politics. And I too can post links to articles from people who ran the office, but I'll refrain from making a big deal about it. I'm saying that our capacity to track and collect data on the spread of diseases is materially and measurably diminished from the last time we had a public health scare (Ebola), and we are paying for those decisions today.

It's relevant to having a realistic conversation on how fast we'll be able to create a vaccine today. It's relevant to considering how far we want to go with social distancing from our families and loved ones today.

It's not about politics. It's about having reasonable fucking expectations for how this thing is gonna go.

[Viper 12112]

3 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

How the fuck was this not approved and done weeks ago? This is the shit that infuriated me CR style. This is obvious, basic shit. 

Why does it need to be "approved" though? Can't the hospitals order them on their own? 

[Loco 3754]

2 minutes ago, dcar00 said:

its hilarious when I do simple 2 and 3 digit math in my head, not because I want to impress someone because it is just quicker, and people act like it is some magic trick.

15% tip might as well be vector calculus for some.

Is it nice back in the year 2000?

[UDontKnow 10468]

7 minutes ago, Loco said:

Florida closing all bars @5pm on Saint Paddy's day....  I'm sure this will go smoothly...  oh so smooth

 

I figure it would go over harder in places like New York City and Chicago, no?

[dcar00 14551]

10 minutes ago, FWD said:

Sorry but public health experts at the time cried out that disbanding the pandemic response team made us less prepared. There were reports from health groups and lawmakers asking that the team be reinstated. Current top public health officials have said that the initial and ongoing response to COVID19 would be better coordinated if that team was still in place.

yes and per the person quoted in the article, Obama admin and others said it was to big.  without real details no one really knows. It was reorg'd and some were let go I'm sure.

[SydneyCarton 48268]

4 minutes ago, Viper said:

Why does it need to be "approved" though? Can't the hospitals order them on their own? 

Sure, they could I guess. But a government  order of thousands and a promise of funds seems like a quicker, louder statement of the import of ramping up production. And it should have been obvious. 

[GabrielsHorn 2207]

27 minutes ago, Trey3216 said:

Yep.  From what I hear, it's a fairly prominent local bank executive.  I also personally know at least 20 people that just got back from the Colorado ski areas that are suggesting 14 day self quarantines for those returning from those areas.  They are pretty influential people around town.  Local business community could get interesting pretty quick.   

Pretty much if you skied last weekend, you need to quarantine. Also, the ski season is over as Vail and Loveland announced that they are closed for the season. High country is really going to be hurting both from a hospital perspective where they don’t have the resources and financially from all the business at the end of season dissipating. 

[Hagbard Celine 10970]

11 hours ago, dcar00 said:

good luck with that.  "Austrailia has it! this virus is heat immune!"

sydney 33 south

dallas 33 north

[Loco 3754]

3 minutes ago, UDontKnow said:

I figure it would go over harder in places like New York City and Chicago, no?

I'll put day drunk Floridiots up against anyone...  name your fighter

[akhornfan 4]

12 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

You should stop caring about Twitter comments. I mean it's pretty obvious at this point that you're the yin to GreenspointTexas's yang. You both are being silly and going overboard to one direction because it makes you feel better for whatever reason. You have made multiple posts misreading dates and numbers in charts and misrepresenting reality, just like he has.

I didn’t say I care but claiming that the chart is education the idiot masses is ridiculous. 
I’m not going to get into a pissing match with our over how you’re choosing to line up the charts, but we did equal to more testing than they did on 3/11 or 3/12 than the comparative 3/6. 
Are you telling me you really think we did fewer tests on 3/16 than they did on 3/6? I know you don’t. We’re ahead of Italy on testing -10 or -11 days. 

[MoJames 8256]

The most interesting thing for me today, is despite the amount of work being done by the community to social distance, I'm still having several patient's show up for non-essential visits (in my opinion) over the age of 60. It's a bit insulting to be honest. I'm doing everything I can to keep my 4 and 7 year old at home and happy so not to spread the virus if it is in fact present in the community. Yet the exact people I'm trying to protect are showing up to the hospital for a visit on an ailment that really has little to no acuity. Frustrating.

[TXSG8R 3362]

11 minutes ago, Enchubben said:

A risk of derailing the current thread, can you please stop trying to make this about politics please?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/16/no-white-house-didnt-dissolve-its-pandemic-response-office/

  Hide contents

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

 

 

So outside of his semantic argument, the new office should be impactful during this pandemic, right?  

Quote

Much of the intelligence community’s tasking on the issue of global health and pandemics comes from the National Security Council, which will ask the agencies questions it needs answered. That has led former officials to express concern about the departure of national security staffers with relevant expertise—including Adm. Tim Ziemer, the NSC’s former senior director for global health security and biodefense who left in 2018 and is now a senior official at USAID.

The staff shakeups “have had a profound ripple effect, the consequences of which we are seeing play out now, I think,” said Ned Price, who served in the CIA and on the National Security Council under President Obama during the Ebola outbreak.

The NSC’s director for medical and biodefense preparedness, Dr. Luciana Borio, left in 2018, as did Bossert, whose job included coordinating a response to global pandemics. Part of Bossert’s role was later given to Hillary Carter, the former global health security director who was moved into Bossert’s old office and is now senior adviser to Homeland Security and Resilience Adviser Julia Nesheiwat.

Additionally, the NSC’s Global Health Security directorate, initiated under Obama “to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats,” was folded into the counter-proliferation and biodefense directorate by former national security adviser John Bolton, according to an NSC spokesman and a former U.S. government official. The bureaucratic change caught some in the White House by surprise at the time, according to a former Trump White House official.

Asked why Bolton made the move, the former official said he likely did not view global health as a national security concern and viewed it more as a Department of Health and Human Services responsibility.

“His view of national security is kind of a one-trick pony and is military-to-military confrontations,” the former official said of Bolton.

Price said the global health security directorate was valuable because it “focused exclusively on public health threats abroad that had the potential to affect us at home. Now there are directorates that can pick up the slack, but you don’t have the same level of expertise of people who have lived through Ebola, H1N1, and other disease responses.”

Current and former officials maintain that the structural change has not resulted in a loss of expertise. A spokesman for the NSC said that officials responding to the pandemic within that unit have “extensive experience and expertise in virology, infectious disease epidemiology, global health security, public health, and emergency response,” and a former official said that the WMD directorate, which absorbed the global health security office, “had the same people, the same expertise, with no loss of efficiency as our response to the Ebola virus in Congo showed.”

But other current and former officials have lamented the changes. Fauci, asked about the disbanding of the global health security directorate during a hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday, responded cautiously.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as a mistake, I would say we worked very well with that office,” Fauci said. “It would be nice if that office was still there.”

Quote

Of the roughly 115 policy specialists at the NSC, there are currently just two people who specialize in pandemics, although both have doctorates, with at least one in virology. Both are housed within the WMD directorate.

One official said that the NSC’s senior director for counter-proliferation and biodefense, Anthony Ruggiero, led the initial response and relied heavily on the expertise of biodefense experts and epidemiologists. Deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, formerly the council’s senior director for East Asia policy, has since taken charge under O’Brien.

But neither Ruggiero, a nuclear arms specialist, or Pottinger, a former journalist turned soldier, has experience responding to a global disease outbreak.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/12/america-national-security-viral-threat-126574

[Loco 3754]

Just now, Hagbard Celine said:

sydney 33 south

dallas 33 north

Yeah we were looking at spending a "summer" in oz/nz    Only it's winter june/july/august (cold and rainy).   They are cruising into winter so we will see how it goes. 

 

Broward has been hot this spring, it's not stopping the spread here.  #1 in Florida baby!

[MoJames 8256]

21 minutes ago, Trey3216 said:

Ding Ding Ding Ding 

 

21 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

Sensational headline but good information

Have a friend who went to Beaver Creek 11 days ago and is paranoid. I guess time will tell.

[Digdogger 1344]

On a brighter note, APD is being heroic with traffic enforcement.  Very few cars on the road = easy picking for speeding tickets

[dcar00 14551]

7 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

sydney 33 south

dallas 33 north

I get it.  It was a joke that no one really knows yet.

[dcar00 14551]

2 minutes ago, Digdogger said:

On a brighter note, APD is being heroic with traffic enforcement.  Very few cars on the road = easy picking for speeding tickets

might be the best post on the thread.  good point.

[clapclapclap 9000]

3 hours ago, NoName said:

This individual said the PM “joked” that the enterprise to build more life-saving ventilators could be known as “Operation Last Gasp.”

That's pretty good.

[TXSG8R 3362]

Can anyone find a response from O'Brien to this?  

https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/02/19/senators-call-on-trump-administration-to-immediately-fill-global-health-security-position/

Quote

Dear Mr. O’Brien:

As the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that began in December in Wuhan, China continues to accelerate, we strongly urge you to appoint a qualified, dedicated, senior global health security expert to coordinate the United States’ global health security work, including the response to and containment of this and other global health emergencies. This action is long overdue. According to reports, in May 2018, “the head of global health security on the White House’s National Security Council left the Trump Administration.”  Almost two years later, this position on the National Security Council (NSC) remains vacant. We urge immediate action, as well as your response to questions regarding the NSC’s readiness.

In May 2018, some of us wrote to then-National Security Advisor John Bolton regarding our concerns about this vacancy, noting “[t]he threat of a pandemic is serious, and it’s important families know we have a vigilant and experienced team in place and working to protect us against such public health threats.”  We asked a series of questions about how the NSC would handle global health security threats. But we received no answers to our questions.

Quote

The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and on January 31, 2020, HHS Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency in the United States.  President Trump has also established the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, of which you are a member.  But you are not a public health expert, and it is not clear if the NSC has such an expert in position to effectively advise or coordinate its global public health work on the Task Force and in other areas. Families concerned about the novel coronavirus threat need to know the NSC has a dedicated, senior official with appropriate expertise and authority to address the domestic and global health threats from the virus. It is of paramount importance that this person approaches this role through a public health lens. 

 

[Bevo 13628]

13 minutes ago, MoJames said:

The most interesting thing for me today, is despite the amount of work being done by the community to social distance, I'm still having several patient's show up for non-essential visits (in my opinion) over the age of 60. It's a bit insulting to be honest. I'm doing everything I can to keep my 4 and 7 year old at home and happy so not to spread the virus if it is in fact present in the community. Yet the exact people I'm trying to protect are showing up to the hospital for a visit on an ailment that really has little to no acuity. Frustrating.

Now imagine if you were getting paid. Seriously, though, are you getting paid per patient visit?

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

1 hour ago, jinx said:

Because the rains were blessed there.  We should have considered that decades ago.

It takes a lot for me to neg rep, but even just mentions of bands or their lyrics like that (will not even type the name) make pushing that button a hell of a lot easier.

[Eastwood 4394]

It only took 2 days trapped in the house to realize how being able to go out and grab something real quick was seriously taken for granted. If I feel like a certain beer, food, or item, I go out and get it. Not anymore. Now, I have to go in and consciously focus on not touching anything I don't have to, keeping my hands off my face, keeping my distance from people, getting the item, sanitize the item when I get home, wash my hands, and then have a small nagging worry in the back of my head if that was the time I went out and brought it home.

It doesn't take up a whole lot of my head space, but enough to not make trips worth it. My power supply for my PC absolutely died yesterday right when the work day started. Ordered a new one from Best Buy instead of Altex because Best Buy was closer. The parking lot was half full and people are just walking around the store browsing. Not there for any other reason, which is asinine at this point. Go there to pick it up and wait in line at the very end of the line area to make room for the person at the counter. Person is clueless and walks away to talk on the phone about what he needs to pick up. I get waved up, I'm ready with everything I need, and the dude who just got out of line walks up and gets literally shoulder to shoulder with me. Just complete idiocy. And those people, who have zero disregard for what is going on in the world right now, are everywhere.

The point is: stay home unless absolutely necessary. The quicker we all do that, the quicker all of this is over with. I work from home and needed that power supply. If I didn't need it, I wouldn't have gone out there. I immediately regretted doing so the moment that goober decided he wanted to be at the counter the same time as me. One sneeze right there is all it would take. Avoid idiots. Stay home.

[VABuckeye 2472]

China Announces it will Expel US Journalists

 

Nothing to see here, says China.

[gmr548 16619]

 Not quite to the bolded.  The testing criteria AND the ability to test have both increased.  You're not tracking the spread of infection only.  You are tracking the changes who is being tested (as you mentioned) as well as the different labs abilities to get testing online.  The total number of cases data is currently useless.  

So yes, that's true especialy as testing criteria has become fragmented across jurisdictions.

Your last sentence is the ultimate point. It's going to remain useless short of some Herculean federal effort that isn't gonna happen. We don't really know how many cases there are and we never will. You can work backwards from deaths to get a very rough estimate but that's about the best we can do.

[SimonBolivar 10961]

Our signs recommending that people use the drive-thru for all transactions is currently batting 0%. A few have stopped to read it before coming in, but most don't look at it twice.

[Loco 3754]

5 minutes ago, VABuckeye said:

China Announces it will Expel US Journalists

 

Nothing to see here, says China.

Cool it bro, at this point we're going to need a hell of a loan

[Texas Jeff 1971]

A town in Italy was running an infection control experiment at the beginning of the outbreak.  Timing was accidental, they were just trying to see what would happen if they tested an entire population for a disease.  They tested everyone for COVID-19 in round 1, all 3300 town members, and found that 3% were infected and half of the infected had no symptoms.  So they quarantined those folks and their contacts and retested everyone 10 days later.  Infection rates had dropped tenfold, to around 0.3% infected.

https://www.ft.com/content/0dba7ea8-6713-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3

An easy to do at-home test would really help beat this thing...

 

[MoJames 8256]

14 minutes ago, Bevo said:

Now imagine if you were getting paid. Seriously, though, are you getting paid per patient visit?

No

[MNLonghornFUKM 8908]

A town in Italy was running an infection control experiment at the beginning of the outbreak.  Timing was accidental, they were just trying to see what would happen if they tested an entire population for a disease.  They tested everyone for COVID-19 in round 1, all 3300 town members, and found that 3% were infected and half of the infected had no symptoms.  So they quarantined those folks and their contacts and retested everyone 10 days later.  Infection rates had dropped tenfold, to around 0.3% infected.
https://www.ft.com/content/0dba7ea8-6713-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3
An easy to do at-home test would really help beat this thing...
 

Agreed.

[Pato del Muerto 52756]

1 hour ago, Dahobbs said:

You're just seeing a trend line, the raw number comparison is meaningless. The chart demonstrates that the growth curve of both Italy and US confirmed cases (by their own separate criteria of when to test and what counts as confirmed) is the same (exponential). 

This sounds logical. That’s the only thing that can be extrapolated from the graph, though, right?  Hospitalization and death will have their own trend lines based on respective ability to process patients, right?  Or are those factors similar enough that all the data is correlatable and we are really seeing 10 days into the future when we look at Italy?

[TXSG8R 3362]

3 minutes ago, Texas Jeff said:

A town in Italy was running an infection control experiment at the beginning of the outbreak.  Timing was accidental, they were just trying to see what would happen if they tested an entire population for a disease.  They tested everyone for COVID-19 in round 1, all 3300 town members, and found that 3% were infected and half of the infected had no symptoms.  So they quarantined those folks and their contacts and retested everyone 10 days later.  Infection rates had dropped tenfold, to around 0.3% infected.

https://www.ft.com/content/0dba7ea8-6713-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3

An easy to do at-home test would really help beat this thing...

 

An easy, accurate test would be great.  I think the concern is the latter for most medical folks.  

[clapclapclap 9000]

14 minutes ago, VABuckeye said:

China Announces it will Expel US Journalists

Nothing to see here, says China.

All US journalists, or just the ones covering the Another Deadly Chinese Originated Virus?

Edit:  aka COVID-19 (China Originated Virus Is Deadly #19)

Edited March 17, 2020 by clapclapclap

[ABSR 5327]

13 hours ago, ChiTownDoc said:

Hell no, the issue isn't the sick people or how sick - the issue is we don't have the healthcare system to support the spike.  Hence all the flatten the curve talk - it's legit.  I can't help you if you don't see the issue with asymptomatic carriers taking death to unsuspecting people.  That's a nightmare scenario to most doctors and all ID doctors/epidemiologists. 

Is there anything that shows the "normal" sickness/hospitalization rate for every other disease, injury etc that we would normally experience in a year in the US, and then an estimation of what happens to these people if they can not get adequate medical care because the system is grossly over taxed?   Net question is just counting deaths tracked specifically to COVID19 does not capture the medical and death toll that an overwhelmed medical system will cause and I wonder if we can estimate ancillary deaths or extended illnesses due to lack of care or adequate care.

So if someone is out there saying they are young and it won't affect them, ask what they will say if their 8 year old kid or 8 year old sibling has some kind of event or accident (allergic reaction, hit by a car, falls out of tree) and needs hospital care and a ventilator.  Normally they would be treated and be okay, but if the answer is "no beds, no ventilators" what happens?

[NoName 16566]

1 hour ago, Enchubben said:

A risk of derailing the current thread, can you please stop trying to make this about politics please?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/16/no-white-house-didnt-dissolve-its-pandemic-response-office/

  Reveal hidden contents

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

 

 

not trying to make it political but here is Snopes on it

Quote

 

Legum outlined a series of cost-cutting decisions made by the T**** administration in preceding years that had gutted the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure. The “pandemic response team” firing claim referred to news accounts from Spring 2018 reporting that White House officials tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic had been ousted.

Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council in May 2018 amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Ziemer’s team was disbanded. Tom Bossert, whom the Washington Post reported “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” had been fired one month prior.

 

Quote

It’s thus true that the T**** administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer’s position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time.

Full Text

Spoiler

 

Amid warnings from public health officials that a 2020 outbreak of a new coronavirus could soon become a pandemic involving the U.S., alarmed readers asked Snopes to verify a rumor that U.S. President Donald Trump had “fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”

The claim came from a series of tweets posted by Judd Legum, who runs Popular Information, a newsletter he describes as being about “politics and power.” Legum’s commentary was representative of sharp criticism from Democratic legislators (and some Republicans) that the Trump administration had ill-prepared the country for a pandemic even as one was looming on the horizon.

Legum outlined a series of cost-cutting decisions made by the Trump administration in preceding years that had gutted the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure. The “pandemic response team” firing claim referred to news accounts from Spring 2018 reporting that White House officials tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic had been ousted.

Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council in May 2018 amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Ziemer’s team was disbanded. Tom Bossert, whom the Washington Post reported “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” had been fired one month prior.

It’s thus true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer’s position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time.

Legum stated in a follow-up tweet that “Trump also cut funding for the CDC, forcing the CDC to cancel its efforts to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics in 39 of 49 countries in 2018. Among the countries abandoned? China.” That was partly true, according to 2018 news reports stating that funding for the CDC’s global disease outbreak prevention efforts had been reduced by 80%, including funding for the agency’s efforts in China.

But that was the result of the anticipated depletion of previously allotted funding, not a direct cut by the Trump administration. But that was the result of the anticipated depletion of previously allotted funding, not a direct cut by the Trump administration. And as the CDC told FactCheck.org, the cuts were ultimately avoided because Congress provided other funding.

On Feb. 24, 2020, the Trump administration requested $2.5 billion to address the coronavirus outbreak, an outlay critics asserted might not have been necessary if the previous program cuts had not taken place. Fortune reported of the issue that:

The cuts could be especially problematic as COVID-19 continues to spread. Health officials are now warning the U.S. is unlikely to be spared, even though cases are minimal here so far.

“It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a press call [on Feb. 25].

The coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in the winter of 2019, and cases spread around the globe. The U.S. had 57 confirmed cases as of this writing, while globally, roughly 80,000 patients had been sickened with the virus and 3,000 had died. As of yet, no vaccine or pharmaceutical treatment for the new coronavirus. Data from China suggests the coronavirus has a higher fatality rate than the seasonal flu, although outcomes depend on factors such as the age and underlying health of the patient.

 

again, NOT making it political. Also want to note that this doesn't specifically go against what was said in your article - regarding streamlining/combining 3 areas into 1. Both of these things can be true IMHO

[UDontKnow 10468]

16 minutes ago, VABuckeye said:

China Announces it will Expel US Journalists

 

Nothing to see here, says China.

I know it's in response to actions done by our government, but fuck China anyways. When the dust settles, hopefully they are sanctioned by the UN for creating (yes I am blaming them - coincidence that their highest rated/classified virology lab is in Wuhan and every viral respiratory pandemic in the last 25 years has originated in China?) and attempting to hide (the cover-up is always worse than the original crime) what became a global pandemic.

[gsoda3 3284]

has anyone been watching mayor adler's PC?  what's he saying?

[JBJ 3681]

11 minutes ago, Texas Jeff said:

An easy to do at-home test would really help beat this thing...

Temperature screening has a similar albeit lesser effect.  It has the benefit of actually existing and is easily deployed.

[alincoln 2385]

18 minutes ago, VABuckeye said:

China Announces it will Expel US Journalists

 

Nothing to see here, says China.

Fuck China.  That is all