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

[MNLonghornFUKM 8817]

No it’s not. Unfortunately. If you go by the California and N.Y. studies that have already been put out it’s bad. Hotspots running at 20% positive antibody isn’t good. Rest of NY excluding the hotspots at 4% or whatever it was is very bad. And it seems we can’t really trust the accuracy of these tests yet anyway.
I should have  some interesting antibody numbers in a few days, from San Antonio in a zip code that has a much higher positive rate than the rest of the city. I’m putting my guess on 5ish percent. I could entertain 10. Their cases are looking like they mostly came from spring break trips to Colorado and the spread from the people that brought it back from there. The new death rate being touted from the antibody tests while nowhere near the 3% level thrown around at the beginning of this, is still really bad if this is as infectious as thought.
i mean I get you are a dumbfuck from Minnesota but I don’t think you understand the math or virology.
Now, I’m now firmly in the camp of open this bitch up, because we completely lack the first tool to do that - testing and contact tracing. So does every country in this world outside of  2 or 3 and because of our size, culture, etc it’s not going to happen here. Our next tools are obviously treatment and then vaccine.
in the meantime I will hope the warm weather helps and I will stay (mostly) home while continuing to practice safe habits. I’m not going to go places with crowds and I’m not going to be hugging and shaking hands with people and I’m going to dry my hands out by washing them 19times a day and I promise I will stop touching my face even though I can’t.
so not to go all [mention=593]Brisketexan[/mention] here but since I expect mostly the worst of people, I will rely on what I can do and not what other people do or what I am told to do by some county judge or mayor or governor or president.
What we certainly can do is stay the fuck home if we are sick or come into contact with someone who is sick. Since this covid bitch doesn’t show symptoms immediately and can also be asymptotic that’s easier said than done. But let’s blame our neighbor or president or China. 

Ah name calling! this virus brings out the worst in people.




I question the math because I believe this is so wide spread and fucked. Almost every graph or model we see is “it has bad data to work with, Feed it garbage , receive garbage”. My question is Why did we just see a record for cases per day 1 month into our shelter in place? MN has started to increase testing and our cases have gone up the last 2 days despite most things closed the last 4 weeks. Most states have tested 1%of their population some more, some less. Very very few are for antibodies.


I agree with the rest of your post.

[workswithseed 2086]

1 hour ago, Brian Fantana said:

I thought this thread was about the 'rona, not sucking dick for meth.

Why? Did you suck his dick for meth or something? 

[michaelpshayes 417]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

The goal here is to SLOW the spread of the virus so our hospitals don’t get overrun because if our hospitals get overrun, shit really starts to break down.  You’ll see more supply chain disruptions, panic buying, and the economy will be hit even harder with demand shortages b/c people will continue to minimize risk by staying home. 

We’re going to be fighting this thing in waves until the population has been inoculated or entirely acclimated to the virus.  Things are not going back to normal for at least a few years.

[Don Johnson 4752]

 

[Enchubben 5510]

 

[Armybrat 40814]

4 hours ago, HenryJames said:

It’s ok to touch your face if your hands are clean.

Cheeto hands?

[Somnio 751]

What is the consensus amongst Surly virology experts regarding the reports of reinfection/reactivation of cases deemed recovered?

[EuroHorn 3250]

1 minute ago, Somnio said:

What is the consensus amongst Surly virology experts regarding the reports of reinfection/reactivation of cases deemed recovered?

My guess is that 100% of those who recovered had the virus.  

[Anastasis 23454]

1 hour ago, South Austin said:

It seems like people in Austin are sensing the end of the quarantine is near.  I ran the Town Lake trail yesterday morning and there were groups of runners gathered close together with no masks, in front of an APD car no less, and nobody was giving a fuck. On my neighborhood walks I’m seeing more people gathered for happy hour on front porches who clearly aren’t roommates quarantining together. And I’m noticing a general uptick in traffic on MoPac and across Austin I’m general.

Run out to dump a load of brush today and drove past Home Depot on way back.  The place was packed.  Everyone I saw at least were wearing masks, but I did a NOPE and kept right on driving.  I don't need fucking mulch that bad. 

[RDCanecutter 26376]

13 hours ago, workswithseed said:

Holy fuck, we're doing [serious] tags again? 

[serious] tags are some aggy bullshit. Full-grown men with dropped balls laugh at everything. Pancho Villa out front shoulda told you.

[EuroHorn 3250]

5 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Run out to dump a load of brush today and drove past Home Depot on way back.  The place was packed.  Everyone I saw at least were wearing masks, but I did a NOPE and kept right on driving.  I don't need fucking mulch that bad. 

Nail salon around the corner from me here in Atlanta had about a half dozen customers yesterday.  They at least required masks to get in. 

[EuroHorn 3250]

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

1 minute ago, EuroHorn said:

That's good advice......

[Somnio 751]

55 minutes ago, Don Johnson said:

 

And how many of the 6% are still active cases?  Calculating the fatality rate in the above methodology is equally as bad or worse than using only confirmed cases.

Neither is correct; it's somewhere in the middle.

 

[Somnio 751]

16 minutes ago, EuroHorn said:

My guess is that 100% of those who recovered had the virus.  

[NAVY 6740]

Just heard from some friends that their son is one of the sailors with Rona onboard USS Kidd. 

say he’s feeling fine... just a little tired. 

There isn’t a lot of space on the Burkes. This shit is really fucking fleet ops. 
 

 

 

[DDD Dad 14322]

My guess is that 100% of those who recovered had the virus.  

Whole lotta guessing going on.

Scientific conclusions? Not so much.

[RDCanecutter 26376]

12 hours ago, Helobious said:

Not sure what thread to put this...

Is anyone else getting too used to everything already? Seeing people out in public in masks, staying inside a bunch, only getting takeout, the sneezeguards/social distancing at stores, none of it feels weird at all to me anymore. Not sure if that’s a good thing or scary.

Hey, people got used to trench warfare. Bet if we asked some dude at Verdun in 1916 if he'd like to swap a few days there for sitting in a magically cooled/heated house, eating food and drinking plentiful beverages, squeezing up next to a lice-free woman and/or wanking it to magical titty movies on the glass screen, then Boom he'd be in our house tracking mud everywhere, and we, we'd be choking on the smell of corpses while astonished strangers screamed at us in French or German before stabbing us in the throat.

[pacman 7354]

https://www.kvue.com/mobile/article/news/regional/florida/miami-no-homicides-6-weeks-coronavirus/67-57831e0b-2630-47d4-8d5d-c739f8666adc

 

Drastic drop in Miami violent crime

No murder in 6 weeks, first time since 1957 that has happened

[Incredulity 11643]

Offered only at face value.

 

I watched The Big Short this morning and Brad Pitts character quotes a statistic that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate 40,000 people die.  I assume that is yearly, but don’t know.  Just the first actual number I have seen in that correlation.

I did a little googling and didn’t find any concrete affirmation or debunking.

 

[pacman 7354]

5 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

Offered only at face value.

 

I watched The Big Short this morning and Brad Pitts character quotes a statistic that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate 40,000 people die.  I assume that is yearly, but don’t know.  Just the first actual number I have seen in that correlation.

I did a little googling and didn’t find any concrete affirmation or debunking.

 

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39267/do-40-000-people-die-in-the-united-states-for-every-1-increase-in-unemployment

[Incredulity 11643]

3 minutes ago, pacman said:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39267/do-40-000-people-die-in-the-united-states-for-every-1-increase-in-unemployment

I saw that when I googled and it is a thread arguing the statistic.

Again, I did not offer it as fact, bait or other suspect motivation.

[Surly Bevo 24908]

11 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

Offered only at face value.

 

I watched The Big Short this morning and Brad Pitts character quotes a statistic that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate 40,000 people die.  I assume that is yearly, but don’t know.  Just the first actual number I have seen in that correlation.

I did a little googling and didn’t find any concrete affirmation or debunking.

 

Brad Pitt also wore a mask in that movie and farmed his own beans.  Ahead of his time that Brad Pitt was

[Helobious 9461]

1 hour ago, Incredulity said:

Offered only at face value.

 

I watched The Big Short this morning and Brad Pitts character quotes a statistic that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate 40,000 people die.  I assume that is yearly, but don’t know.  Just the first actual number I have seen in that correlation.

I did a little googling and didn’t find any concrete affirmation or debunking.

 

That's a pretty unknowable/unmeasurable stat. 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

35 minutes ago, Helobious said:

That's a pretty unknowable/unmeasurable stat. 

Would you describe yourself as incredulous?

[HenryJames 66031]

3 hours ago, Don Johnson said:

 

Username checks out.

[HenryJames 66031]

DP.

Edited April 25, 2020 by HenryJames

[GringoSalado 1651]

7 hours ago, HenryJames said:

It’s ok to touch your face if your hands are clean.

But what if your face is contaminated?  You should really wash your face also.

 

 

After you disinfect the faucet...

[GringoSalado 1651]

1 hour ago, Helobious said:

That's a pretty unknowable/unmeasurable stat. 

As is a true viral mortality rate, apparently.

 

To your point I'd at least say we do know there is an associated (w/ unemployment) mortality rate increase, but I'd agree that would be hard to measure accurately.

[Loco 3752]

If you are interested in testing of the antibody tests...  From the NY times

 

Quote

The researchers worked around the clock, in shifts of three to five hours, hoping to stave off weariness and keep their minds sharp for the delicate task.

They set up lines of laboratory volunteers: medical residents, postdoctoral students, even experienced veterans of science, each handling a specific task. They checked and rechecked their data, as if the world were depending on it. Because in some ways, it was.

For the past few weeks, more than 50 scientists have been working diligently to do something that the Food and Drug Administration mostly has not: Verifying that 14 coronavirus antibody tests on the market actually deliver accurate results.

These tests are crucial to reopening the economy, but public health experts have raised urgent concerns about their quality. The new research, completed just days ago and posted online Friday, confirmed some of those fears: Of the 14 tests, only three delivered consistently reliable results. Even the best had some flaws.

The research has not been peer-reviewed and is subject to revision. But the results are already raising difficult questions about the course of the epidemic.

Surveys of residents in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York this week found that substantial percentages tested positive for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the official name of the new coronavirus. In New York City, the figure was said to be as high as 21%. Elsewhere, it was closer to 3%.

The idea that many residents in some parts of the country have already been exposed to the virus has wide implications. At the least, the finding could greatly complicate plans to reopen the economy.

Already Americans are scrambling to take antibody tests to see if they might escape lockdowns. Public health experts are wondering if those with positive results might be allowed to return to work.

But these tactics mean nothing if the test results can’t be trusted.

In the new research, scientists found that only one of the tests never delivered a so-called false positive — that is, it never mistakenly signaled antibodies in people who did not have them.

Two other tests did not deliver false-positive results 99% of the time.

But the converse was not true. Even these three tests detected antibodies in infected people only 90% of the time, at best.

The false-positive metric is particularly important. The result may lead people to believe themselves immune to the virus when they are not and to put themselves in danger by abandoning social distancing and other protective measures.

It is also the result on which scientists are most divided.

“There are multiple tests that look reasonable and promising,” said Dr. Alexander Marson, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the project’s leaders. “That’s some reason for optimism.”

Marson is also an investigator in the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which partly funded the study.

Other scientists were less sanguine than Marson. Four of the tests produced false-positive rates ranging from 11% to 16%; many of the rest hovered around 5%.

“Those numbers are just unacceptable,” said Scott Hensley, a microbiologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “The tone of the paper is, ‘Look how good the tests are.’ But I look at these data, and I don’t really see that.”

The proportion of people in the United States who have been exposed to the coronavirus is likely to be 5% or less, Hensley said. “If your kit has a 3% false-positive, how do you interpret that? It’s basically impossible,” he said. “If your kit has 14% false positive, it’s useless.”

Hensley said the study nonetheless was well designed and the results pressing, given the sudden proliferation of antibody tests on the market and the push to use them to lift lockdowns.

“I think this is exactly the kind of study that we need right now,” he said.

Marson and his colleagues said they were drawn to the study for that very reason.

As universities in the Bay Area shut down all research not related to the coronavirus, some researchers began focusing on ways to improve diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2.

Marson and his collaborator, Patrick Hsu, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley, anticipated that antibody tests would face questions about quality.

In mid-March, Hsu heard that a friend, a venture capitalist who owns a network of 1,000 community clinics in the New York area, had ordered thousands of rapid antibody tests. Investors and entrepreneurs seemed to be distributing them around San Francisco, too.

“I realized, ‘Gosh this is really the Wild West,’” Hsu said. “We needed to figure out which of these would really work.”

The duo recruited Dr. Jeffrey Whitman and Dr. Caryn Bern, who last year published an analysis of antibody tests for Chagas disease. Other graduate students and postdoctoral fellows volunteered to help perform the evaluations.

The team began with a modified version of the method Whitman had devised to validate Chagas tests. The researchers created a biosafety-certified space, obtained the needed approvals and procured hundreds of blood samples from two Bay Area hospitals.

They also purchased tests from Chinese manufacturers, clearing customs regulations and sometimes accepting Uber deliveries in the middle of the night. In all, the investigators analyzed 10 rapid tests that deliver a yes-no signal for antibodies, and two tests using a lab technique known as Elisa that indicates the amount of antibodies present and is generally considered to be more reliable.

Suited up in protective gear, the team worked in shifts of three to five hours in a sort of socially distanced factory line.

One researcher spotted the test with a blood sample, and another added the necessary chemical solutions; then two independent readers looked at the test, and a last person recorded the results. Still other team members analyzed the results, sometimes working through the night.

In the early hours of recent mornings, they handed the baton to Dr. Tyler Miller and his colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, who were conducting a slightly different analysis of three tests, including one evaluated in San Francisco.

The Bay Area team finished evaluating 12 tests in record time, less than a month. By comparison, the Chagas project required a team of three people working for more than a year just to compare four tests.

Having a study design already in hand helped speed the work, but there was one key difference. Decades of data have shown that Chagas disease elicits lifelong immunity. For this study, the team had no idea how quickly SARS-CoV-2 antibodies might turn up in the blood, or at what levels.

New tests also usually compete with an established gold standard. Lacking such a standard, the team instead compared all the tests in a “head-to-head bake-off to see who’s the winner,” Hsu said.

Each test was evaluated with the same set of blood samples: from 80 people known to be infected with the coronavirus, at different points after infection; 108 samples donated before the pandemic; and 52 samples from people who were positive for other viral infections but had tested negative for SARS-CoV-2.

Tests made by Sure Biotech and Wondfo Biotech, along with an in-house Elisa test, produced the fewest false positives.

A test made by Bioperfectus detected antibodies in 100% of the infected samples but only after three weeks of infection. None of the tests did better than 80% until that time period, which was longer than expected, Hsu said.

The lesson is that the tests are less likely to produce false negatives the longer ago the initial infection occurred, he said.

The tests were particularly variable when looking for a transient antibody that comes up soon after infection, called IgM, and more consistent in identifying a subsequent antibody, called IgG, that may signal longer-term immunity.

“You can see that antibody levels rise at different points for every patient,” Hsu said. The tests performed best when the researchers assessed both types of antibodies together. None of the tests could say whether the presence of these antibodies means a person is protected from reinfection, however.

The results overall are promising, Marson added. “There are multiple tests that have specificities greater than 95%.”

Rapid antibody tests are generally used to get a simple yes-no result, but the team assigned the positive results — which appear as bands on a test strip — a score from 0 to 6. They trained readers to interpret those results and found their decisions often agreed and were supported by the more quantitative Elisa tests.

“If you train the readers well, they can start to be reliable,” Marson said of rapid tests. “That is critical to understand if these tests could ever be deployed.”

The team at Mass General set a higher bar for specificity; they considered a score of 1 for the intensity of a band to be a negative result, rather than a score of 0.

Perhaps because they eliminated the fainter bands — the ones most likely to be erroneous — their estimate of specificity for BioMedomics, the one test that was evaluated by both teams, was more than 99%, compared with the San Francisco team’s estimate of 87%.

Other experts were skeptical of the scoring approach, however. “That’s not really a method that would give you a real quantitation,” said Florian Krammer of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Krammer has developed a two-step Elisa test that he said has 100% specificity and delivers a measure of the quantity of IgM and IgG antibodies a person has. Scoring a rapid test’s bands might offer some data for a scientific study, he said, “but I would not make any decisions based on that.”

Krammer said false positives are less of an issue for assessing how widely the virus has spread in the population. If a test has a known false-positive rate, scientists can factor that into their calculations, he said.

But false positives become dangerous when making policy and personal decisions about who can go back to work. “You don’t want anybody back to work who has a false positive — that’s the last thing you want to do,” Krammer said.

Scanwell Health, a Los Angeles-based startup, has ordered millions of test kits from Innovita, a Chinese manufacturer, and has applied to the Food and Drug Administration to market the tests for at-home use.

In the new study, the Innovita test detected antibodies in 83% of infected people and yielded a false-positive rate of 4%.

Dr. Jack Jeng, chief medical officer of Scanwell Health, said the study looked at an earlier version of Innovita’s test and not the “newer, improved version” his company had ordered. “It will be interesting to see how it performs,” he said.

Marson and his colleagues have acquired tests from nearly 100 manufacturers and plan to continue comparing them. The scientists also hope to expand their sample set to include people who were mildly ill or did not feel ill at all, and to stratify their data by age and the presence of chronic conditions.

“This is just the beginning,” Marson said. “Our goal would be to keep going till we feel there’s adequate supply in the market.”

 

[JBJ 3654]

On 4/20/2020 at 12:44 PM, JBJ said:

I had my doubt last Monday, but we were definitely in a slow decline last week.  I think are are bottoming out  the transmission rate as far as it will go.  (The last time I posted this we cut the transmission rate in half, again).

Friday's projection: 965,731 total cases, 25,731 daily cases, 48,935 total deaths by the new reporting method (40,590 total deaths is charted above).

First, I adjusted my model a bit for the ratio of actual to reported cases.  I did this prior to the NY numbers being released, but that only confirmed what others had seen.  I also removed the baseline from the chart as it is just clutter now.

There were more interesting adjustments to the existing numbers this week - going all the way back to early March.   NY is showing probable cases along with deaths now.  NY back-dated the data so there's no longer a jump in the chart above.  Maryland is now reporting probable deaths (but not cases). Wyoming is now reporting both probable cases and deaths, but that does jack to the numbers.   I did not re-adjust the baseline for back-dated data yet.  It will make minor changes to all the scenarios when I do.

I added community resistance to the bottom left chart.  It's not set to any scale, but I show what the relation to the goal scenario (dashed line) for comparison.  This kind of points to differing strategic approaches being presented as to how to handle the virus going forward.  I'm in the controlled-spread camp and think we need to open up a bit.  No CR, but reduce and contain won't work and can be detrimental to both beating the virus and the economy even attempt.

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

Someone somewhere asked me my thoughts on other models:

1) IHME: Avoid like the plague.  It's not an epidemiological model. It fits a curve to data. The methodology is simple but poor.

2) The UT-group: Their model is an improvement of the IHME model.  It's not an epidemiological model, but they've incorporated some elements and improved the data-fitting process. They are actually tracking leading indicators of social distancing, so that's nice.  Still useless for long-term projection.

3) Imperial College: good model, poor assumptions (twice).  They were very early into the game and were using a mixture of assumptions about what we know from ILI/pneumonia in general along with bad WHO/China/Italy data..  I haven't seen anything from them since the second report, but I'd bet they've improved.

[pacman 7354]

3 hours ago, Somnio said:

And how many of the 6% are still active cases?  Calculating the fatality rate in the above methodology is equally as bad or worse than using only confirmed cases.

Neither is correct; it's somewhere in the middle.

 

Agree. The numbers are extrapolated from a study of only 1400 to 1600 cases too.

 

The fact is, this virus was a complete unknown so any numbers provided are just best guesses.

It really makes no sense to constantly harp on the numbers, as this thread has done over and over, playing captain obvious with a mocking tone. 

The numbers are going to continue to get better as time progresses and we get more information.

This is also why it was key to have strong, measured leadership in a time of unknowns.

Edited April 25, 2020 by pacman

[XYZ 2154]

3 hours ago, Incredulity said:

Offered only at face value.

 

I watched The Big Short this morning and Brad Pitts character quotes a statistic that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate 40,000 people die.  I assume that is yearly, but don’t know.  Just the first actual number I have seen in that correlation.

I did a little googling and didn’t find any concrete affirmation or debunking.

 

Everyone dies.

[utee94 15797]

4 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

The goal here is to SLOW the spread of the virus so our hospitals don’t get overrun because if our hospitals get overrun, shit really starts to break down.  You’ll see more supply chain disruptions, panic buying, and the economy will be hit even harder with demand shortages b/c people will continue to minimize risk by staying home. 

We’re going to be fighting this thing in waves until the population has been inoculated or entirely acclimated to the virus.  Things are not going back to normal for at least a few years.

Well, sort of.   Except, when people realize it's going to last a few years, then it will go back to normal.  Nobody's wearing masks for "a few years."   And nobody's avoiding restaurants and movies and football games for "a few years."  A few months at most, for those things.

I keep hearing people talk about "the new normal" but the reality is the new normal looks the same as the old normal.  We'll have a few months of temporary difference, and then everything will revert back to the OLD normal.  Because nobody is going to continue to live like we have the past 6 weeks or so.  The examples of people "breaking yurantine" on this thread aren't isolated, the American public is getting to the point where it's done with isolation. I'm not making a judgment, it's simply the way things will shake out.

[Macanudo 12974]

3 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

Hey, people got used to trench warfare. Bet if we asked some dude at Verdun in 1916 if he'd like to swap a few days there for sitting in a magically cooled/heated house, eating food and drinking plentiful beverages, squeezing up next to a lice-free woman and/or wanking it to magical titty movies on the glass screen, then Boom he'd be in our house tracking mud everywhere, and we, we'd be choking on the smell of corpses while astonished strangers screamed at us in French or German before stabbing us in the throat.

This is just fantastic prose.

Edited April 25, 2020 by Macanudo

[David Dennison 18837]

8 minutes ago, utee94 said:

Well, sort of.   Except, when people realize it's going to last a few years, then it will go back to normal.  Nobody's wearing masks for "a few years."   And nobody's avoiding restaurants and movies and football games for "a few years."  A few months at most, for those things.

I keep hearing people talk about "the new normal" but the reality is the new normal looks the same as the old normal.  We'll have a few months of temporary difference, and then everything will revert back to the OLD normal.  Because nobody is going to continue to live like we have the past 6 weeks or so.  The examples of people "breaking yurantine" on this thread aren't isolated, the American public is getting to the point where it's done with isolation. I'm not making a judgment, it's simply the way things will shake out.

Half of the population won't return to normal even when the other half does unless and until we get a hold of testing. Therein lies the problem economically. Things are going to be slow until the anxious half starts spending again. That will be a lingering drag on the economy.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

The economy is not going to come back on like a light switch.  It’s going to be a slow dial turn over a long period of time. 

[Somnio 751]

4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

The economy is not going to come back on like a light switch.  It’s going to be a slow dial turn over a long period of time. 

Haven't we lost like ten years of job growth over the last four to six weeks?

[utee94 15797]

19 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Half of the population won't return to normal even when the other half does unless and until we get a hold of testing. Therein lies the problem economically. Things are going to be slow until the anxious half starts spending again. That will be a lingering drag on the economy.

Yes there will be a lingering drag.  That's my point.  That's why there's no purpose in governments keeping things locked down in areas where the hospitals haven't been overrun.  Hotspots are a different conversation, but most of the country isn't New York, and isn't going to be.

There are hundreds of thousands of people that will gladly return to normal with or without testing.  These are the people that are already willing to go to Lowes with hundreds of other people, or be on a public beach with thousands of people.  They don't require testing.  They don't require the government's "okay."  They're already doing it.  They'll do it in greater numbers once the restrictions are lifted.

And that's fine.  They'll be the first to return.  Then there will be another group, slightly more risk-averse, that will wait a few weeks.  Then another group that will wait a month or two.  And so on.  They'll do this naturally, based on their own risk comfort level, without the government telling them to do so.  That slow return is what we want, it's what we need.  It will naturally manage the crisis curves and help keep hospitals from being overrun, all without government mandates.  This is not something to fear, it's what needs to happen.

8 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

The economy is not going to come back on like a light switch.  It’s going to be a slow dial turn over a long period of time. 

I'm not saying it will.  Even after restrictions are lifted, there will be a huge percentage of businesses that will fail. There simply won't be enough business to sustain them all.  But the first step is letting people return to those businesses.  And then the market will have to sort itself out.  "Long period of time" is relative.  The fundamental factors in recent economic success haven't changed, and won't change.  9 months out things are still bad.  18 months out, it'll be largely done and growth-- HEAVY growth-- will be occurring.  That's  a good thing.  I have no idea why so many people feel doom and gloomy about that.  The bad times are right now.  Getting back to work, begins solving those issues.

 

[Bevo 13557]

7 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

The economy is not going to come back on like a light switch.  It’s going to be a slow dial turn over a long period of time. 

I hope you are right. I am looking at vacation homes, and if the price falls, I'm in. But, alas, you will be wrong, I'll be back at work making money, while some dude from Weifang overpays so he can get his money out of his fucked-up country.

[Brisketexan 105037]

I'm not saying it will.  Even after restrictions are lifted, there will be a huge percentage of businesses that will fail. There simply won't be enough business to sustain them all.  But the first step is letting people return to those businesses.  And then the market will have to sort itself out.  "Long period of time" is relative.  The fundamental factors in recent economic success haven't changed, and won't change.  9 months out things are still bad.  18 months out, it'll be largely done and growth-- HEAVY growth-- will be occurring.  That's  a good thing.  I have no idea why so many people feel doom and gloomy about that.  The bad times are right now.  Getting back to work, begins solving those issues.
 

I very much would like this to be correct.
But man, I sure want us to come up with some reasonably effective therapies and a vaccine at some point as well. That would be the exclamation point on this whole deal.

[utee94 15797]

2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I very much would like this to be correct.
But man, I sure want us to come up with some reasonably effective therapies and a vaccine at some point as well. That would be the exclamation point on this whole deal.

One hundred fucking percent agree bt.

In unrelated news, I currently have a brisker on the smoker that is just coming out of the stall, I'm hoping it'll be ready by about 6:30 but I did get a late start this morning because... well... I drank too much whisky last night.  So there you have it, that's the way things were, in Corona2020.

 

 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

15 hours ago, utee94 said:

One hundred fucking percent agree bt.

In unrelated news, I currently have a brisker on the smoker that is just coming out of the stall, I'm hoping it'll be ready by about 6:30 but I did get a late start this morning because... well... I drank too much whisky last night.  So there you have it, that's the way things were, in Corona2020.

 

 

I think the phrase "too much bourbon" should be a very loose definition these days...

Edited April 26, 2020 by Onboard 2.0

[utee94 15797]

25 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

I think the term too much bourbon these days should be a very loose definition...

Yeah... just realized I wrote "brisker" instead of "brisket" and it's possible I might have already been overserved today, as well.  I really should fire that barkeep...

 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

Just now, utee94 said:

Yeah... just realized I wrote "brisker" instead of "brisket" and it's possible I might have already been overserved today, as well.  I really should fire that barkeep...

 

No worries, and in these times, tip your bar tender double....

[ChickenSandwich 9824]

5 hours ago, pacman said:

https://www.kvue.com/mobile/article/news/regional/florida/miami-no-homicides-6-weeks-coronavirus/67-57831e0b-2630-47d4-8d5d-c739f8666adc

 

Drastic drop in Miami violent crime

No murder in 6 weeks, first time since 1957 that has happened

Meanwhile in the last 28 days in NYC

Murder is up 55% 28 vs 18 for the same period last year  

 

[workswithseed 2086]

38 minutes ago, utee94 said:

Yeah... just realized I wrote "brisker" instead of "brisket" and it's possible I might have already been overserved today, as well.  I really should fire that barkeep...

 

I kinda like it, it's like living in the 1700s again when the English liked putting er at the end of words.

[Iceman 2690]

45 minutes ago, pacman said:

I don't know about these things as much as others. But, seeing how the job growth collapsed makes me wonder how much of that job growth was worth a shit. It's seems entirely too fragile.

 

ummm most jobs require a transaction to occur in which money changes hands for a service or product.  When businesses are shut down, it tends to impede most of those transactions.

That's a pretty high standard to say, "If your job is in an industry that cannot survive 5 weeks of tourniquet pressure, then it's a weak-ass job."

add in the oil prices' collapse, and we've taken some haymakers in the biggest way.

Edited April 25, 2020 by Iceman

[Iceman 2690]

19 minutes ago, ChickenSandwich said:

Meanwhile in the last 28 days in NYC

Murder is up 55% 28 vs 18 for the same period last year  

 

can one be charged with murder when the death is counted as CV-19 related?

 

 

Edited April 25, 2020 by Iceman