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

[B00M 6280]

47 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Why are you folks allowed to post unverified stats like this on here?  Seems like bullshit.  

Come the fuck on. The most verifiable shit we've got is tweets. Quick @Anastasis get that CFR data (you undoubtedly copy-pasted) notarized!

 

[LonghornDoc 0]

Long time listener, first time caller of shaggy bevo.  How did this become the off the rails COVID feed?

[Anastasis 23394]

15 minutes ago, B00M said:

Come the fuck on. The most verifiable shit we've got is tweets. Quick @Anastasis get that CFR data (you undoubtedly copy-pasted) notarized!

 

Copy paste with a little division function worked in. Thought this was the right thread for local data discussion.  Sorry for partying. 

[Okie State 3788]

Riot, you fools.

Seriously. Don't really give a shit about wearing a mask, but take my alcohol and we're going to have problems.

[Guest Lobo]

31 minutes ago, B00M said:

Come the fuck on. The most verifiable shit we've got is tweets. Quick @Anastasis get that CFR data (you undoubtedly copy-pasted) notarized!

 

Guinta, na-Guinta, my-my-na-Guinta.  

[clapclapclap 9000]

49 minutes ago, Hate said:

Quote

Travel From New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks

So now we can say fuck China and New York?

Yes.  Especially their evil and irresponsible leaders:  Winnie the Flu and Jomboy.

[dcar00 14036]

1 hour ago, GringoSalado said:

NYT

Siap, 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/new-york-city-coronavirus-outbreak.html#click=https://t.co/umJUgjbGkt

 

Tldr, 70% of TX infections traced to NY (only 4% from WA) genetically. Not sure of sample size, I didn't see that number in there but I sped read

  Hide contents

 

Travel From New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks

The coronavirus outbreak in New York City became the primary source of infections around the United States, researchers have found.

By Benedict Carey and James Glanz

May 7, 2020Updated 3:23 p.m. ET

1292

New York City’s coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States, new research reveals, as thousands of infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country.

The research indicates that a wave of infections swept from New York City through much of the country before the city began setting social distancing limits to stop the growth. That helped to fuel outbreaks in Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and as far away as the West Coast.

The findings are drawn from geneticists’ tracking signature mutations of the virus, travel histories of infected people and models of the outbreak by infectious disease experts.

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“We now have enough data to feel pretty confident that New York was the primary gateway for the rest of the country,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.

Early analysis of genetic samples indicates that more infections across the country came from a line of the virus associated with the outbreak in New York City, shown in red, than from a line associated with the outbreak in Washington State, shown in yellow.

Percent of genetic samples related to each area

Washington State

New York City

100%

50%

0%

50%

100%

States on the West Coast

Washington

53%

42%

California

32%

50%

Viruses that spread from Washington early on carry a distinct genetic signature.

 

But even on the West Coast, samples related to New York are common.

Oregon

30%

50%

Alaska

80%

0%

Other Western states

Wyoming

31%

69%

Texas

4%

70%

Arizona

6%

84%

Utah

9%

89%

Idaho

0%

98%

Midwestern states

Illinois

27%

45%

Minnesota

15%

72%

Wisconsin

4%

78%

Ohio

0%

88%

Iowa

0%

100%

Southern states

Georgia

0%

30%

Virginia

11%

78%

Every sample from Louisiana, a hot spot for the virus, was related to New York.

Louisiana

0%

100%

Northeastern states

Connecticut

12%

81%

New Jersey

7%

93%

Maryland

0%

92%

The genetic line associated with New York can be traced back to Europe.

New York

1%

94%

Massachusetts

0%

94%

Note: Scientists have thus far sequenced only a small fraction of total infections, so the distribution of genetic lines could change as more samples are analyzed. States with fewer than 10 samples were left off the chart. Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Wyoming all had fewer than 20 samples. Percentages may not add up to 100 because additional genetic lines are omitted.

Source: Nextstrain

By Derek Watkins

The central role of New York’s outbreak shows that decisions made by state and federal officials — including waiting to impose distancing measures and to limit international flights — helped shape the trajectory of the outbreak and allowed it to grow in the rest of the country.

This is your last free article.

Subscribe to The Times

The city joins other densely populated urban hot spots around the world, starting with Wuhan, China, and then Milan, that have become vectors for the virus’s spread.

Travel from other American cities also sparked infections across the country, including from an early outbreak centered in the Seattle area that seeded infections in more than a dozen states, researchers say. Even if New York had managed to slow the virus, it probably would have continued to spread from elsewhere, they say.

But the Seattle outbreak proved to be a squall before the larger storm gathering in New York, where, at the end of February, thousands of infected people packed trains and restaurants, thronged tourist attractions and passed through its three major airports.

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During crucial weeks in March, New York’s political leaders waited to take aggressive action, even after identifying hundreds of cases, giving the virus a head start. And by mid-March, when President Trump restricted travel from Europe, the restrictions were essentially pointless, the data suggest, as the disease was already spreading widely within the country.

Acting earlier would most likely have blunted the virus’s march across the country, researchers say.

“It means that we missed the boat early on, and the vast majority in this country is coming from domestic spread,” said Kristian Andersen, a professor in the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. “I keep hearing that it’s somebody else’s fault. That’s not true. It’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our own fault.”

A lack of testing obscured the true extent of the outbreak for months, and officials acted on incomplete and sometimes conflicting information. The enormous growth of New York’s outbreak partly reflects its volume of international visitors, especially from Europe, where most of its infections came from.

Dani Lever, communications director for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, criticized federal authorities, describing an “enormous failure by the federal government to leave New York and the East Coast exposed to flights from Europe, while at the same time instilling a false sense of security by telling the State of New York that we had no Covid cases throughout the entire month of February.”

A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said that Mr. Trump had acted quickly. The president blocked most visitors from Europe starting on March 13, more than a month after he restricted travel from China.

“Just as he acted early on to cut off travel from the source of the virus, President Trump was advised by his health and infectious disease experts that he should cut off travel from Europe — an action he took decisively without delay to save lives while Democrats and the media criticized him and the global health community still did not fully comprehend the level of transmission or spread,” Mr. Deere said.

The travel that helped spread the virus includes New York residents who left the city and non-New Yorkers who visited or passed through the city. Now that infections are dispersed around the country, travel from New York is no longer a main factor shaping the progression of the epidemic, researchers said.

As states around the nation begin to relax their restrictions, the findings demonstrate that it is difficult, if not impossible, to prevent those actions from affecting the rest of the nation.

Image

Research showed that by March 1, when the first coronavirus case was confirmed in New York, the city probably had over 10,000 undetected infections.Credit...Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times

Geneticists have analyzed and shared more than 2,000 samples of the virus from infected people. As the virus infects new people and replicates, it picks up mutations along the way. These mutations typically do not change the behavior of the virus, but they can provide a signature of a virus’s origin.

 

Most samples taken in Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, Idaho, Wisconsin and many other states carry distinct mutations that can be traced back to viruses introduced into New York.

Over all, Dr. Grubaugh estimated, infections spreading from New York account for 60 to 65 percent of the sequenced viruses across the country.

Other scientists ntists said that they would like to see more samples before calculating precise figures. But they agreed that New York’s prominence in seeding the national spread appears to have begun in early March, two weeks before stay-at-home orders were put in place.

“New York acted as the Grand Central Station for this virus, with the opportunity to move from there in so many directions, to so many places,” said David Engelthaler, head of the infectious disease branch of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona.

The most commonly detected viruses tied to New York have a distinct genetic signature linking them to outbreaks in Europe. Those spreading from Washington State have a signature linking them directly to China.

Benjamin M. Branham, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the airports, said that before the flight restrictions from Europe, the federal government’s Customs and Border Protection “only screened passengers from China,” not from Europe.

How the Virus Got Out

We analyzed the movements of hundreds of millions of people to show why the most extensive travel restrictions to stop an outbreak in human history haven’t been enough.

March 22, 2020

At this stage, scientists say, genetic fingerprints alone are not sufficient for pinpointing the source of the viruses. But travel patterns and case histories of early known cases support the idea, they said.

“It is a combination, still, of what genomic epidemiology and shoe-leather epidemiology is going to tell us,” Dr. Engelthaler said.

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Scientists modeling the progression of the disease nationally said the prominence of New York as a national hub was broadly consistent with their findings, although the picture was still emerging.

“I would say this is not surprising in a sense,” said Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston. “The picture emerging is consistent with numerical models.”

Earlier research by Dr. Vespignani showed just how rapidly, and invisibly, the outbreak exploded in New York. By March 1, when the first coronavirus case was confirmed in New York, the city probably had over 10,000 undetected infections, his research group showed.

 

New York and Washington State are not the only sources of the outbreak. Other large domestic hubs contributed to the spread, scientists believe, and a more diverse genetic mix is still seen in some places around the country, particularly in the Midwest and parts of the South.

Even as domestic travel began to drive the outbreak, some infections were still seeded around the country by international travelers, geneticists said. It is possible, experts said, that some of the virus samples attributed to New York may have instead been seeded in other cities by direct flights from Europe, or from travelers laying over in New York before traveling elsewhere.

For that reason, some scientists said they would like to see more samples before linking the majority of infections in the United States to New York.

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“I think that’s probably the story line that’s going to emerge, but I’d like to see more data,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Mount Sinai in New York.

A New York Times analysis of travel data supports the idea that the chains of infection originated in New York, experts said. The number of cases across the country was closely related to how many travelers each place received from New York in early March, based on anonymized cellphone tracking data from Cuebiq, a data intelligence company.

“It looks like most of the domestic spread is basically people traveling out from New York,” said Dr. Kari Stefansson, founder and chief executive of deCODE Genetics, a leading genome analysis firm based in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Last week, Dr. Andersen of Scripps Research and other scientists analyzing the outbreak in New Orleans reported that all of the samples taken from New Orleans were from the line linked back to New York. The virus swept through the area in March and has killed more than 1,000 people.

“You can figure out, with travel patterns, that the most likely thing to have happened is those came into New Orleans directly from New York,” Dr. Grubaugh said.

Josh Holder, Michael Crowley and Derek Watkins contributed reporting.

 

like I said biggest mistake was not cutting off all incoming travel Jan 30 you can add quarantining NY/NJ to that.

[brakeman 28254]

12 minutes ago, dcar00 said:

like I said biggest mistake was not cutting off all incoming travel Jan 30 you can add quarantining NY/NJ to that.

Just maybe, but our biggest mistake could have of been 3 years ago in november.

no cr.

[Hate 20103]

Just maybe, but our biggest mistake could have of been 3 years ago in november.
no cr.

Damn...even BradAtx thinks that is cloakroom.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23359]

How South Korea is going according to this BBC reporter.

This is what testing and tracing looks like.

[B00M 6280]

8 minutes ago, brakeman said:

Just maybe, but our biggest mistake could have of been 3 years ago in november.

no cr.

Reminds me of this

[Hugo Stiglitz 23359]

 

[Treefidy 1463]

14 hours ago, SHOOTER12 said:

Cock-a-doodle-dooo

Or for sa's mom

Any-cockle-doooo

 

Or for Thujone

doodle-a-cock-or-two

Would be great to have him in this thread with charts and shit.  

[McFly 606]

47 minutes ago, brakeman said:

Just maybe, but our biggest mistake could have of been 3 years ago in november.

no cr.

[atomheartbevo 89452]

2 hours ago, Hate said:

So now we can say fuck China and New York?

[tx 3 putt 76411]

1 hour ago, LonghornDoc said:

Long time listener, first time caller of shaggy bevo.  How did this become the off the rails COVID feed?

[Hook1997 5290]

2 hours ago, Wulaw Horn said:

That’s confirmed tests, right? So divide that by what-4? 8?  Something like that for actual kill percentage? 

Serious question, so if we are doing antibody test for Covid but never have before for the flu which has non symptomatic carriers also I’m sure.  Wouldn’t the numbers of confirmed cases be apples to apples and antibody test numbers be apples to oranges in comparison??  So the confirmed cases would stand vs anything before because we haven’t done mass antibody testing ever before....  I don’t people saying it’s not bad based on antibody testing numbers.

Edited May 8, 2020 by Hook1997

[South Austin 52150]

2 hours ago, LonghornDoc said:

Long time listener, first time caller of shaggy bevo.  How did this become the off the rails COVID feed?

And what does CB stand for?

[MNLonghornFUKM 8799]

Just maybe, but our biggest mistake could have of been 3 years ago in november.
no cr.

What happened nov 2017?

[justhookit 4182]

38 minutes ago, Hook1997 said:

Serious question, so if we are doing antibody test for Covid but never have before for the flu which has non symptomatic carriers also I’m sure.  Wouldn’t the numbers of confirmed cases be apples to apples and antibody test numbers be apples to oranges in comparison??  So the confirmed cases would stand vs anything before because we haven’t done mass antibody testing ever before....  I don’t people saying it’s not bad based on antibody testing numbers.

Is English your 3rd language?

[justhookit 4182]

41 minutes ago, South Austin said:

And what does CB stand for?

Citizen Band but that’s not important right now. Google shows:

CBCall Back Telecom Computing Slang Technology

*****CBChat Brat Texting sms

****CBCoffee Break Texting Online

**CBCock Block

just my opinion but those all seem worse than the 9.95 definition.

 

[RayDog 682]

5 hours ago, Okie State said:

Ban on alcohol sales? What the fuck?

Alcohol sales have been banned in much of the Philippines.  It serves two purposes with the first being to prevent neighbors from gathering to drink together and in some cases violating curfew. The other is to make sure people spend their limited money on food.

[atomheartbevo 89452]

@PenelopeWitherspoon I read a few articles with quotes from various people in power - there probably won't be any more stimulus checks.  Seems like many people could use those checks, given that things are not going to stabilize for at least a few more months.

[Hook1997 5290]

2 hours ago, justhookit said:

Is English your 3rd language?

Yes yes it is.....   Sorry i didn't think I had to type a proper dissertation to you for you to understand.   We are on a fing message board, a train of thought should be acceptable late at night when posing a legit question.  Thank you for your knowledgeable reply on the subject though, very insightful........   (I understand get out after I don't and its not proper sentences sue me i'm drinking, answer the question since you are so smart)

Edited May 8, 2020 by Hook1997

[Hook1997 5290]

25 minutes ago, Hook1997 said:

Yes yes it is.....   Sorry i didn't think I had to type a proper dissertation to you for you to understand.   We are on a fing message board, a train of thought should be acceptable late at night when posing a legit question.  Thank you for your knowledgeable reply on the subject though, very insightful........   (I understand get out after I don't and its not proper sentences sue me i'm drinking, answer the question since you are so smart)

Jesus, I meant get was supposed to be after I don't.....     You win @justhookit .  Original thought still stands tough, apples to oranges.

Edited May 8, 2020 by Hook1997

[Bartles 769]

7 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

How South Korea is going according to this BBC reporter.

This is what testing and tracing looks like.

It's worth mentioning South Korea was averaging lower than 13 new cases per day for several weeks, and now this one guy has caused more than that in a single night of clubbing.

No way the US would be able to identify and trace so quickly - at least for the moment, we don't hear many calls to open up dance clubs over here though. Guess just a cultural thing that SK would be so careful for months and then allow karaoke, night clubs, etc. to open.

[brakeman 28254]

5 hours ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:

What happened nov 2017?

yep, ill go over here and sit out a few.

 

[BradInATX 9208]

8 hours ago, Hate said:

Damn...even BradAtx thinks that is cloakroom.

 

It's about as transparently political as most of your posts where you're whining like a little snowflake bitch about getting made fun of by the intelligentsia for loving to eat at Chili's.

Edited May 8, 2020 by BradInATX

[Cheeseweasel 26437]

11 hours ago, Lobo said:

you folks

[Cheeseweasel 26437]

10 hours ago, LonghornDoc said:

Long time listener, first time caller of shaggy bevo.  How did this become the off the rails COVID feed?

Stick around, kid. This is what we do.

[Js1 85115]

7 hours ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:

What happened nov 2017?

Losing to fucking Texas Tech. God damnit Tom 

[Liquor and Poker 3659]

7 hours ago, justhookit said:

Is English your 3rd language?

Third Language was a pretty decent band in the late 80s-early 90s.  I think they played my prom. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23359]

2 hours ago, Bartles said:

Guess just a cultural thing that SK would be so careful for months and then allow karaoke, night clubs, etc. to open.

Fact check: South Korea never went into a full lock down.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/coronavirus-cases-have-dropped-sharply-south-korea-whats-secret-its-success
 

 

Quote

Amid these dire trends, South Korea has emerged as a sign of hope and a model to emulate. The country of 50 million appears to have greatly slowed its epidemic; it reported only 74 new cases today, down from 909 at its peak on 29 February. And it has done so without locking down entire cities or taking some of the other authoritarian measures

 that helped China bring its epidemic under control. “South Korea is a democratic republic, we feel a lockdown is not a reasonable choice,” says Kim Woo-Joo, an infectious disease specialist at Korea University. South Korea’s success may hold lessons for other countries—and also a warning: Even after driving case numbers down, the country is braced for a resurgence.

Behind its success so far has been the most expansive and well-organized testing program in the world, combined with extensive efforts to isolate infected people and trace and quarantine their contacts. South Korea has tested more than 270,000 people, which amounts to more than 5200 tests per million inhabitants—more than any other country except tiny Bahrain, according to the Worldometer website. The United States has so far carried out 74 tests per 1 million inhabitants, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.

 

Edited May 8, 2020 by Hugo Stiglitz

[jeevsie 3723]

[Hate 20103]

 
It's about as transparently political as most of your posts where you're whining like a little snowflake bitch about getting made fun of by the intelligentsia for loving to eat at Chili's.

I don’t love to eat at Chili’s.

[Somnio 751]

10 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

 

55 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Fact check: South Korea never went into a full lock down.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/coronavirus-cases-have-dropped-sharply-south-korea-whats-secret-its-success
 

 

 

So I noticed these two posts were negged.  I'm curious as to why. 

Are we now negging people who post info we don't like?  Or maybe you believe the information is false, and the poster is intentionally spreading lies?  Is there some history here, and you just don't like the person posting?

I'm just trying to understand, as the information seems reasonable and relevant to this thread.  It doesn't seem like it belongs in the Cloak Room.  What's going on here?

[Wulaw Horn 18983]

9 hours ago, Hook1997 said:

Serious question, so if we are doing antibody test for Covid but never have before for the flu which has non symptomatic carriers also I’m sure.  Wouldn’t the numbers of confirmed cases be apples to apples and antibody test numbers be apples to oranges in comparison??  So the confirmed cases would stand vs anything before because we haven’t done mass antibody testing ever before....  I don’t people saying it’s not bad based on antibody testing numbers.

Sure. But in this instance I wasn’t really making a comparison to the flu- I was trying to figure out everyone chance of dying. So- you figure published kill rate, divided by whatever factor gets you from kill rate to total testing- times likelihood of getting it. I’m figuring 70% likelihood of infection. 

So, as a 41 year old I figure .09 published CFR) divided by 8 (I’m guessing 8 times as many infected as tests at a minimum) times .7. So I get .09/8x.7 Or 0.0079 percent chance of me dying. Expressed as a fraction that would give me 1 chance in 1300 or so of dying from this?  Is that right?

some math need help me out- what’s my death fraction if I’m right that my CFR is 0.09, there are 8x infections and I’m 70% likely to get it. I’m a stupid and haven’t used math that’s more complicated than a 3rd grader would use in 23 years. 

[dcar00 14036]

11 hours ago, Hate said:

Damn...even BradAtx thinks that is cloakroom.

if he had just thrown in an early "no offense to the orientals" qualifier he might have gotten some more likes.

Edited May 8, 2020 by dcar00

[Wulaw Horn 18983]

9 hours ago, justhookit said:

Is English your 3rd language?

Hook on hook violence. Love it. 

[dcar00 14036]

5 minutes ago, Somnio said:

 

So I noticed these two posts were negged.  I'm curious as to why. 

Are we now negging people who post info we don't like?  Or maybe you believe the information is false, and the poster is intentionally spreading lies?  Is there some history here, and you just don't like the person posting?

I'm just trying to understand, as the information seems reasonable and relevant to this thread.  It doesn't seem like it belongs in the Cloak Room.  What's going on here?

its better we don't tell you and you stay on the DT board...ignorance is bliss. oh and he's LSU so negging any post of his is OK.

[aggie08 21434]

8 hours ago, RayDog said:

Alcohol sales have been banned in much of the Philippines.  It serves two purposes with the first being to prevent neighbors from gathering to drink together and in some cases violating curfew. The other is to make sure people spend their limited money on food.

I'm admittedly not a frequent visitor of the alcoholics thread but, with my limited expertise, I'm going to go ahead and guess that the ones choosing to buy alcohol with their only food money aren't going to just start buying food because alcohol sales are banned.

[Newdoc 3433]

7 minutes ago, aggie08 said:

I'm admittedly not a frequent visitor of the alcoholics thread but, with my limited expertise, I'm going to go ahead and guess that the ones choosing to buy alcohol with their only food money aren't going to just start buying food because alcohol sales are banned.

They will start drinking unsafe sources of alcohol. I know this from clinical experience. I’ve caught patients buying pump hair spray in the gift shop to drink because of the alcohol content. I’ve ordered beer ( like ordering Tylenol for fever) for patients to keep them from dangerous withdrawals.

[Cheeseweasel 26437]

Just now, Newdoc said:

They will start drinking unsafe sources of alcohol. I know this from clinical experience. I’ve caught patients buying pump hair spray in the gift shop to drink because of the alcohol content. I’ve ordered beer ( like ordering Tylenol for fever) for patients to keep them from dangerous withdrawals.

Man, you've seen some shit. Thanks for what you do.

[BabaYaga 15213]

6 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

I’ve ordered beer ( like ordering Tylenol for fever) for patients to keep them from dangerous withdrawals.

I, um....feel shaky....and like, uh, Doc, I need a fix man....

 

 

 

*light on the hops, nothing too malty.  Thanks in advance....

[BradInATX 9208]

46 minutes ago, Hate said:

I don’t love to eat at Chili’s.

You sound like a snotty hipster from NYC or Seattle. They have solid burgers.

Edited May 8, 2020 by BradInATX

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19093]

8 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

@PenelopeWitherspoon I read a few articles with quotes from various people in power - there probably won't be any more stimulus checks.  Seems like many people could use those checks, given that things are not going to stabilize for at least a few more months.

WSJ has an article that states that House Democrats are nearing a plan.  Now, that does not mean one will come, but I am hearing up to 2k payments.  I have also heard that the Republican plan is for tax cuts.  Most of that was from yesterday.

[Newdoc 3433]

32 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Man, you've seen some shit. Thanks for what you do.

On the flip side, we see substance abuse climb in stressful situations. Now we have a crazy virus coupled with horrible changes to our economy. I fully expect (from previous data) that drug and alcohol abuse and addiction will climb. People are trying to cope. Y’all be careful.

[utee94 15746]

5 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

On the flip side, we see substance abuse climb in stressful situations. Now we have a crazy virus coupled with horrible changes to our economy. I fully expect (from previous data) that drug and alcohol abuse and addiction will climb. People are trying to cope. Y’all be careful.

From Facebook memes, I am assuming that all women I know are drinking wine by 9 AM every day.

 

[Brisketexan 104631]

Okay, a friend shared this article with me - key point is that the expectation is that we've seen around 10% of the world population exposed to COVID, with 270k deaths (yes, we know that's underreported).  https://people.com/health/coronavirus-began-spreading-last-year/

Some other interesting stuff in there, but the numbers are what have got me thinking.

While the news ain't great, I'm going to raise a voice of relative "optimism." The article says that 10% of the world has been exposed (that would be 750 million infections)..but the death count is only 270k. We know that's an undercount (we know that China alone has underreported). But let's say it's double that -- 500k. Extrapolating the number of deaths to exposures, and knowing that "herd immunity" happens at around 75% exposure (meaning that transmission sharply declines when the infection rate reaches that point), then we're looking at a global number of deaths of under 4 million. Yes, no death is "good," and a bad annual flu death total is 500k, so we'd be looking at 8X the annual flu death total, globally. BUT, as this is a unique disease, and there are multiple parallel efforts to develop a vaccine, within a year or so, this should not be a repeated event. Oh, and those numbers would translate to around 250k dead in the US when all is said and done.

There are no good choices here. But can the world handle 4 million deaths, and the US 250k, so that billions of people don't lose their livelihood, their homes, their future? These are the hard balancing discussions that have to take place. We know that we can live and go about our lives with the risk of the flu, which happens every year. Can we do the same with something materially worse than the flu this year, but which we are working to ensure doesn't repeat annually? I don't know. But it's a discussion that should be had.

If we laid out those simple facts at the beginning of this event:

1) we have a pandemic that is likely to kill 3-4 million people globally.

2) we have reasonable confidence that we can limit a repeat of that in future years.

3) harsh measures to reduce the lethality of the pandemic will cause unprecedented harm to the global economy, and to the lives and livelihood of literally billions of people.

Would we take a different path than we're on right now?  At least a more limited path of using the lockdown to protect healthcare resources, and then smart, measured reopenings?  I think we would.  We have to act based on the information we have at a given time.  As we get better information, we should make better decisions.  I want to see more, I want to get the numbers nailed down - the IFR number is really important here.  But I suspect that there's a pathway out of this.  It needs to be understood and weighed. 

Edited May 8, 2020 by Brisketexan

[Hate 20103]

You sound like a snotty hipster from NYC or Seattle. They have solid burgers.

The Old Timer with cheese is solid. For some reason, I enjoy their nachos with the pico. Their Patron margaritas are damn good as well. I’d never choose to go there on my own, but it’s a decent place for the family to go when we are already out because everyone can get something they like.