Coronavirus Thread

[Supersizethatorder-mutt]

Eva Lee

Thanks. So counting the two I found, that means that at least 3 current or former Tech professors are involved in some sort of scandal. Not a good image for the school.

 

[GoldZ]

This is going to be partly political so if it needs to be moved I have no issue with the mods doing that.

The first briefing for White House and Congressional Leaders on the Coronovirus epidemic was on Jan 3rd according to the head of Heath and Human Services Alex Azar.
So our leaders - both Republican and Democrat basically knew what was likely coming at the beginning of the year. The intital talks about it below that level started back in early December by US Intelligence Services.

I was reading an article in Foreign Policy magazine this morning. Pretty much every daily intelligence briefing starting in January was headlined by Coronavirus and the briefings consistently said that Coronavirus was the greatest threat to America currently in the world. By mid-January US Intelligence sources were telling White House and Congressional leaders that China was seriously underreporting how big an issue it was. So trying to say our Government was blindsided is inaccurate. By mid-January it was already known this was incredibly serious and dangerous.
Unfortunately our political leaders either ignored it (Democrats) or belittled it (Republicans). By the late January Peter Navarro had written his first letter to White House officials saying you needed to start taking this seriously or you could be looking at 600K deaths and 2+ trillion in lost economic activity.

Over the first 8 weeks after Jan 3, only one action was taken by the US Government, the travel ban from China (note that when that was announced on Feb 2 - 38 other countries had already instituted travel bans that were as or more strict). By then it was already too late - 340,000 people had traveled form China to the US between December and February. Another 43,000 Americans would return home from China after the ban was put in place and almost none of them were checked to see if they were carrying any symptoms.

On Feb 25th, Dr. Messonier, head of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiritory Diseases states that community spread is already taking place and we should start implementing mitigation strategies. (There were 14 confirmed cases in the US at this point). By this time Peter Navarro had written his second letter (which included President Trump on the distribution list) even more forcefully arguing the steps needed to ba taken.

Basically the lights were blinking red all over, our Governmental leaders chose to ignore those warnings and that is the single biggest reason we are in this mess now. When a post-mortem is conducted in a couple of years our leaders are going to look really bad.

IMO, Both the death toll and the economic toll from this worldwide is going to be staggering. Right now the estimates are for GDP to be down 2.9% for 2020. I believe that is way to rosy. it is much more likely to be twice that. I underestimated the damage from the 2008 Financial Crisis. This one is going to be considerably worse than that. That was caused by human greed and hubris (some of the Wall Street firms knew their packaged derivatives were crap - they were actually shorting them in the markets), this is caused by a natural virus that has overrun the world. Due to the global economy it is likely to take longer to recover from this, than anybody realizes. China is having a really difficult time trying to re-start their economy. First they are using fewer employees ans second, they continue to have outbreaks that force them to shut down parts of the country. over 20% of US jobs are dependent on Global trade, that is not coming back anytime soon, certainly not in 2020.

As a final FYI, the current IHME estimate is 60K deaths, we are likely to hit confirmed deaths of 60K by mid-May at the latest, if the death rates don't drop quickly we could hit that by May 1.

I don't much see this as political. Could we have handled it better once it was apparent there actually was a problem ? Absolutely. It's tough being a political leader right now as is evidenced by Dr. Fauci, who I have tremendous respect for, saying in effect in January---No problem for the US. What's Trump, who I do not have tremendous respect for, to do? Bill Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump were not ready for this. This is not a Presidential problem, a Republican problem, or a Democratic problem. It IS a National problem of being slow to learn from history. If we used Obama's approach in '09 with H1N1, we would be Italy and Spain on steroids today, and for some time to come.

 

[LongforDodd]

Besides Fauci even the WHO was saying STTE “there’s nothing to see here (yet)” in mid to late January.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

This is going to be partly political so if it needs to be moved I have no issue with the mods doing that.

The first briefing for White House and Congressional Leaders on the Coronovirus epidemic was on Jan 3rd according to the head of Heath and Human Services Alex Azar.
So our leaders - both Republican and Democrat basically knew what was likely coming at the beginning of the year. The intital talks about it below that level started back in early December by US Intelligence Services.

I was reading an article in Foreign Policy magazine this morning. Pretty much every daily intelligence briefing starting in January was headlined by Coronavirus and the briefings consistently said that Coronavirus was the greatest threat to America currently in the world. By mid-January US Intelligence sources were telling White House and Congressional leaders that China was seriously underreporting how big an issue it was. So trying to say our Government was blindsided is inaccurate. By mid-January it was already known this was incredibly serious and dangerous.
Unfortunately our political leaders either ignored it (Democrats) or belittled it (Republicans). By the late January Peter Navarro had written his first letter to White House officials saying you needed to start taking this seriously or you could be looking at 600K deaths and 2+ trillion in lost economic activity.

Over the first 8 weeks after Jan 3, only one action was taken by the US Government, the travel ban from China (note that when that was announced on Feb 2 - 38 other countries had already instituted travel bans that were as or more strict). By then it was already too late - 340,000 people had traveled form China to the US between December and February. Another 43,000 Americans would return home from China after the ban was put in place and almost none of them were checked to see if they were carrying any symptoms.

On Feb 25th, Dr. Messonier, head of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiritory Diseases states that community spread is already taking place and we should start implementing mitigation strategies. (There were 14 confirmed cases in the US at this point). By this time Peter Navarro had written his second letter (which included President Trump on the distribution list) even more forcefully arguing the steps needed to ba taken.

Basically the lights were blinking red all over, our Governmental leaders chose to ignore those warnings and that is the single biggest reason we are in this mess now. When a post-mortem is conducted in a couple of years our leaders are going to look really bad.

IMO, Both the death toll and the economic toll from this worldwide is going to be staggering. Right now the estimates are for GDP to be down 2.9% for 2020. I believe that is way to rosy. it is much more likely to be twice that. I underestimated the damage from the 2008 Financial Crisis. This one is going to be considerably worse than that. That was caused by human greed and hubris (some of the Wall Street firms knew their packaged derivatives were crap - they were actually shorting them in the markets), this is caused by a natural virus that has overrun the world. Due to the global economy it is likely to take longer to recover from this, than anybody realizes. China is having a really difficult time trying to re-start their economy. First they are using fewer employees ans second, they continue to have outbreaks that force them to shut down parts of the country. over 20% of US jobs are dependent on Global trade, that is not coming back anytime soon, certainly not in 2020.

As a final FYI, the current IHME estimate is 60K deaths, we are likely to hit confirmed deaths of 60K by mid-May at the latest, if the death rates don't drop quickly we could hit that by May 1.

The “problem” is we didn’t have 30 total cases nationwide until March. We sit everything down when the health experts said to. The only way to have avoided what we have is to have shut it down 30 days earlier. There is no way people would have gone for that when we had no problem. It’s not a political problem, it’s a virus indeed.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

I find it interesting how little discussion I’ve seen about the economy in this thread. Where are studies on the potential impact this is having on it? How in the hell do we gauge success without that metric. If we save a 100k lives here, but trigger a depression, I think we would have failed.

Our economic condition is right around the Great Depression right now. Michigan’s entire unemployment is over 25%. We can’t just cut checks to people, we can’t even do that right anyway. We’re going to be around a $4T deficit this year. Lots of people and companies are going to take quite awhile to recover from this. I see lots of false starts until there is a vaccine, then about a year or more of gradual recovery. I wouldn’t expect we see 165m workers again until 2025.

 

[Boaty1]

Our economic condition is right around the Great Depression right now. Michigan’s entire unemployment is over 25%. We can’t just cut checks to people, we can’t even do that right anyway. We’re going to be around a $4T deficit this year. Lots of people and companies are going to take quite awhile to recover from this. I see lots of false starts until there is a vaccine, then about a year or more of gradual recovery. I wouldn’t expect we see 165m workers again until 2025.

I think we need to just let it rip with people under 60 and have people older than that stay in. Watching so many people lose their jobs and businesses due to orders from the government is just more than I can stand. I’d rather take my chances with something that has the mortality rate of the flu regardless of how contagious it is.

 

[bobongo]

I don't much see this as political. Could we have handled it better once it was apparent there actually was a problem ? Absolutely. It's tough being a political leader right now as is evidenced by Dr. Fauci, who I have tremendous respect for, saying in effect in January---No problem for the US. What's Trump, who I do not have tremendous respect for, to do? Bill Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump were not ready for this. This is not a Presidential problem, a Republican problem, or a Democratic problem. It IS a National problem of being slow to learn from history. If we used Obama's approach in '09 with H1N1, we would be Italy and Spain on steroids today, and for some time to come.

Not true. Trump claims that Obama waited 6 months to declare a national emergency, but that's only part of the story. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared a public health emergency shortly after the outbreak of H1N1 in April of 2009, and if H1N1 had been comparable to the public health threat that coronavirus is, I'm quite sure Obama's response would have been a far stronger and more competent one that Trump's is now. H1Ni killed a little over 12,000 people (Trump falsely inflates this to 17,000), which is about the number that would normally die in an average flu season. Coronavirus has killed about 38,000 and counting.

https://hillreporter.com/trump-call...have-died-of-coronavirus-than-swine-flu-63820

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Not true. Trump claims that Obama waited 6 months to declare a national emergency, but that's only part of the story. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared a public health emergency shortly after the outbreak of H1N1 in April of 2009, and if H1N1 had been comparable to the public health threat that coronavirus is, I'm quite sure Obama's response would have been a far stronger and more competent one that Trump's is now. H1Ni killed a little over 12,000 people (Trump falsely inflates this to 17,000), which is about the number that would normally die in an average flu season. Coronavirus has killed about 38,000 and counting.

https://hillreporter.com/trump-call...have-died-of-coronavirus-than-swine-flu-63820

Yea this stuff is dumb. There is no evidence either guy ignored what the health experts recommended. They are both different situations. I wish we could just fight a global pandemic together without having to try and find someone to blame a virus on.

 

[CuseJacket]

Not trying to sidetrack this discussion but what does anyone know about the GT professor who is supposed to be a nationally recognized VIP in statistical modeling (?) and the Feds are trying to get her to work for them but because of her alleged fraud in a recent grant application, GT has locked her out of getting her hands on 200 computers that has her work on it.

I apologize if it was discussed earlier in this thread or somewhere else but I just came to this thread this morning trying to learn stuff.

https://gtswarm.com/threads/why-an-...r-is-barred-from-her-covid-19-research.21344/

 

[Deleted member 2897]

0 new cases today in Charleston County. Population 500,000. Still on 3 total deaths.

Apparently, they’re re-opening the beaches and retail stores come Monday. Don’t wanna let that bent downward curve last do we!

 

[LibertyTurns]

0 new cases today in Charleston County. Population 500,000. Still on 3 total deaths.

Apparently, they’re re-opening the beaches and retail stores come Monday. Don’t wanna let that bent downward curve last do we!

Keep the Yanks off your beach & you’ll be ok.

 

[Supersizethatorder-mutt]

Looks like this thread is devolving into politics AGAIN. Where are the mods when you need them?

 

[dtm1997]

I think we need to just let it rip with people under 60 and have people older than that stay in. Watching so many people lose their jobs and businesses due to orders from the government is just more than I can stand. I’d rather take my chances with something that has the mortality rate of the flu regardless of how contagious it is.

Opening up or not, the world's going to change.

Some of these restaurant & retail jobs are gone regardless because they'll either be closed permanently or they'll need to be reconfigured to serve lower capacity until treatments/vaccines are viable. The local bar may not be a viable business for a while at the volumes they once had.

Some infrastructure businesses (dry cleaning, barber shops, lunch spots, retail, etc.) that supported metropolitan commercial areas are going to see permanent declines as more businesses see they can have more people work remotely, allowing for a reduced footprint in office space.

I think some of these will be offset by increased job opportunities in warehousing/logistics, as online retailing booms even further.

Maybe we'll see a potential uptick in domestic manufacturing, as companies begin to weigh cheaper production overseas versus more control, safety, reduced shipping times, etc. Then again, a lot of this is likely to be automated and does the U.S. have the engineering know-how to build & maintain moving production onshore.

Big box retail will also probably see an uptick, as Wal-Mart, Target, etc further cement their importance in the national infrastructure.

There are certainly jobs available right now in the agricultural sector if people want to get out to farms and help with the harvests, as it's been challenging to get migrant workers in to work from other countries.

Even as things open, I think people are hungry to leave their homes, but at the same time, will be somewhat inward facing, so businesses supporting the home will continue to see growth. Supermarkets and home improvement sectors have actually held up well the past 6-8 weeks, amidst the crisis.

Counterbalancing a lot of these items, have to wonder if we start seeing inflation as a result, creating a different set of challenges, as the employment base shifts to other roles.

People over 60 still contains a solid portion of senior level managers, so be mindful of that and keep in mind there are many people that will face challenges that are below the age of 60, so saying let it rip is a bit flippant.

Just a few thoughts.

 

[MWBATL]

sorry deniers but it's true.

LOL....to be clear, it’s your opinion, it’s not “true” until alot more facts are known. Stanford has issued a report indicating infection rates are much higher than previously thought, which means the lethality rate of this virus is pretty low. It does happen to be extremely contagious, but best information now is that it is really a danger only to the elderly and infirm. Many more people show no symptoms than is the case with influenza.

 

[RonJohn]

Some infrastructure businesses (dry cleaning, barber shops, lunch spots, retail, etc.) that supported metropolitan commercial areas are going to see permanent declines as more businesses see they can have more people work remotely, allowing for a reduced footprint in office space.

I think those businesses were going to be in decline anyway. It just makes too much sense for many office jobs to be completed at home, at least part of the time. If your employees can efficiently complete work from home it makes too much sense to not lease expensive office space for all of your employees if you don't have to. Lease 20% of the space and have your employees come into the office one day a week alternating. This took years of decline for those businesses and shoved it into a few days.

Restaurants, bars, and nightclubs open and shut down all of the time. There will be some there when it is possible to go to them. The biggest change will be that some older and well established businesses will be part of the turnover, when they would not have if this hadn't happened.

I don't see how WeWork survives this. Their business model makes it very easy for their clients to pull out. I think coworking space will still be a business, but it won't be a multi-billion dollar venture that a single company will be able to control.

In general as you alluded to, the economy will be different even after things are fully opened back up. I don't think anyone knows what all the differences will be nor all of the implications.

EDIT: As to inflation, I don't see how it won't happen. The FED has pumped trillions of dollars into the economy that didn't exist a few weeks ago. For several years there has been low interest rates, low inflation, and high growth. All three of those at the same time doesn't make sense. I'm not an economist, but I don't see how that along with injecting trillions of new dollars into the economy can not cause inflation.

 

[RamblinRed]

I think we need to just let it rip with people under 60 and have people older than that stay in. Watching so many people lose their jobs and businesses due to orders from the government is just more than I can stand. I’d rather take my chances with something that has the mortality rate of the flu regardless of how contagious it is.

This is so false.

It is not just as deadly as the flu. The latest studies suggest it is about 6 times more deadly than the flu (0.66% to 0.1%).
It also has a transmissions rate anywhere from double the flu to 4.5X the flu depending upon which study you use (flu R0 is around 1.2-1.3, COVID19 is anywhere from 2.6 to 5.6).

using legitimate comparison measures (death certificate to death certificate) this virus has already killed 4.5X as many who died from the flu this season and we aren't even half way through it with semi strong mitigation measures. This is an exponentially more dangerous infectious disease.

The estimate for the flu infections for the last 9 years is 28.4M people contracting it per year and an average of less than 10,000 death certificates filed for flu per year (which leads to the modeling estimates of 16K-50K flu deaths most years).
If you use a 5% number of COVID19 infection, which is likely too high, then you are talking about 16.4M Americans being infected with over 30,000 death certificates so far.
That is not even a remotely similar mortality rate. If you equalize the infected population then the difference in mortality rate would be about 5-6X higher.

Best case scenario is that the transmission rate is a little more than double the flu's (2.6 to 1.2). That transmission rate would mean needing more than 60% infection to stop the spread (you have to get the R0 under 1). If it is on the higher end (one study said 5.6) then you would need over 80% infection rate. Right now all studies suggest an infection rate of no more than 5% (most are 1-3%).
To put the numbers in perspective. Going the straight herd immunity route would likely create documented deaths of at least 480K possibly as high as 650K, which using a similar model to how we calculate flu deaths would lead to an overall final death count estimate of 1.1-3.25M deaths.

Given the differences in health care resources needed to fight it, medical resources would be quickly overwhelmed - the avg stay for someone with COVID19 requiring ICU/ventilator is 20 days, those not needing icu/ventilator are in the hospital an avg of 8 days. The average time to death in the hospital is 7 days. The avg length in time in the hospital for flu is 5 days. COVID19 requires much higher resource use for much longer periods of time.

Also, if you choose to 'let it rip', given how contagious combined with the mortality rate this has, our economy will likely crash within 8-10 weeks due to the amount of people who would start coming down with it - from those who would be asymptomatic but required to quarantine for 2 weeks, for those who get sick and are out for weeks or longer and those who die. The fear from that would cause a large percentage of remaining healthy people to refuse to go to work. The economy would actually be worse than it is right now and would greatly increase how long it would take the country to recover - as well as give you a lower ceiling on your recovery. it is impossible to go back to the economy of Feb 2020 - that economy is gone, for years. It's not coming back - Because we didn't take this seriously we now have to work through the consequences and get ourselves to a new spot that can work. We have to strap on our big boy pants, grow up and handle the big time adversity that is going to be with us for a long time.

It is so obvious that those who like the idea of letting those 60+ stay isolated have no clue what they are talking about. There are 68.7M Americans over 60. How exactly are you going to isolate that many people, do you have an island paradise somewhere they can all stay? Also, you can't just isolate 60+, you would also have to isolate all Americans who are high risk for COVID19 due to co-morbidity factors. For under 60 that is an additional 41.4M Americans. Does your isolated island paradise have room for 110.1M Americans? Of course, that is almost 45% of all American adults, but i'm sure the other 55% can easily make up all that lost labor. Or maybe we need our 81M kids to go to work. Of course they might have to given that 30% of teachers are over 50 and a decent percentage of the under 50 would be high risk so there wouldn't be enough teachers for them to go to school anyways.

China is having issues restarting its economy. Canada has already announced that it does not plan to re-open its border with the US within the next few weeks (our biggest trading partner). Even if we wanted to let the economy rip we literally cannot because the world economy all countries rely on would not allow us to.

You are right about alot of Americans losing their jobs due to the government, but not because of the shutdown orders. It is due to the government failing to act from Jan 3 forward when they were warned the single biggest threat to the US was Coronavirus and they chose to do nothing about it.

Historically only one strategy has ever worked against dangerous infectious diseases. Identify, test, trace, quarantine.
You have to identify the disease, you have to quickly test for it among your population, you have to trace its spread, and you have to quarantine anyone who has it as well as anyone who has come into contact with those who have it. The US managed to go 1/4 - ok for a baseball player, not good enough to fight a dangerous disease. We did identify it pretty quickly. Didn't have it completely mapped but knew enough to know what family of disease it is. But we didn't test at all, we didn't trace at all, and because we didn't do those 2 we were not able to quarantine at all. Those missteps put the government in a spot where it literally had no other choice. The only thing the government could have done would have been to implement even stricter mitigation policies like some European countries did (and Australia and New Zealand).

The mitigation measures have bought us time, but have not solved the problem, nor were they designed to. For the last 2+ weeks we have been able to keep the new cases relatively flat around 30K. But we haven't been able to get it to go below that level. Cases are a 2-3 week lagging indicator and deaths are a 3-4 week lagging indicator. If we are still avg 30K cases a day come May 1st we are in a heap of trouble as it means we haven't done good enough to not only 'flatten the curve' but to bend it back downward.

As Americans we need to understand what we are up against. We are likely going to be dealing with this significantly until at least the end of June.
Experts in last week survey conducted by UMass-Amherst believed we would likely be at around 50K deaths by the end of the month, Unless the current rate drops quickly we are going to easily pass that.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...eath-toll-will-hit-50000-by-the-end-of-april/
We are not out of this by a long shot and until we are our economy has little chance to get much better.

 

[RamblinRed]

LOL....to be clear, it’s your opinion, it’s not “true” until alot more facts are known. Stanford has issued a report indicating infection rates are much higher than previously thought, which means the lethality rate of this virus is pretty low. It does happen to be extremely contagious, but best information now is that it is really a danger only to the elderly and infirm. Many more people show no symptoms than is the case with influenza.

The lethality rate is not 'pretty low'. Even with the numbers from the Stanford study the mortality rate is still 5-6X the flu.

it's also not just a disease that affects the elderly and infirm. There is a higher asymptomatic rate than flu but the transmission rate makes up for that. Also, it is not just deaths. If you get sick, your symptoms are highly likely to be more severe and longer lasting than what you would experience with the flu.

 

[RamblinRed]

I think those businesses were going to be in decline anyway. It just makes too much sense for many office jobs to be completed at home, at least part of the time. If your employees can efficiently complete work from home it makes too much sense to not lease expensive office space for all of your employees if you don't have to. Lease 20% of the space and have your employees come into the office one day a week alternating. This took years of decline for those businesses and shoved it into a few days.

Restaurants, bars, and nightclubs open and shut down all of the time. There will be some there when it is possible to go to them. The biggest change will be that some older and well established businesses will be part of the turnover, when they would not have if this hadn't happened.

I don't see how WeWork survives this. Their business model makes it very easy for their clients to pull out. I think coworking space will still be a business, but it won't be a multi-billion dollar venture that a single company will be able to control.

In general as you alluded to, the economy will be different even after things are fully opened back up. I don't think anyone knows what all the differences will be nor all of the implications.

EDIT: As to inflation, I don't see how it won't happen. The FED has pumped trillions of dollars into the economy that didn't exist a few weeks ago. For several years there has been low interest rates, low inflation, and high growth. All three of those at the same time doesn't make sense. I'm not an economist, but I don't see how that along with injecting trillions of new dollars into the economy can not cause inflation.

I agree with your economic thought. All the money injected will eventually lead to more inflation.

 

[JacketOff]

This is so false.

It is not just as deadly as the flu. The latest studies suggest it is about 6 times more deadly than the flu (0.66% to 0.1%).
It also has a transmissions rate anywhere from double the flu to 4.5X the flu depending upon which study you use (flu R0 is around 1.2-1.3, COVID19 is anywhere from 2.6 to 5.6).

using legitimate comparison measures (death certificate to death certificate) this virus has already killed 4.5X as many who died from the flu this season and we aren't even half way through it with semi strong mitigation measures. This is an exponentially more dangerous infectious disease.

The estimate for the flu infections for the last 9 years is 28.4M people contracting it per year and an average of less than 10,000 death certificates filed for flu per year (which leads to the modeling estimates of 16K-50K flu deaths most years).
If you use a 5% number of COVID19 infection, which is likely too high, then you are talking about 16.4M Americans being infected with over 30,000 death certificates so far.
That is not even a remotely similar mortality rate. If you equalize the infected population then the difference in mortality rate would be about 5-6X higher.

Best case scenario is that the transmission rate is a little more than double the flu's (2.6 to 1.2). That transmission rate would mean needing more than 60% infection to stop the spread (you have to get the R0 under 1). If it is on the higher end (one study said 5.6) then you would need over 80% infection rate. Right now all studies suggest an infection rate of no more than 5% (most are 1-3%).
To put the numbers in perspective. Going the straight herd immunity route would likely create documented deaths of at least 480K possibly as high as 650K, which using a similar model to how we calculate flu deaths would lead to an overall final death count estimate of 1.1-3.25M deaths.

Given the differences in health care resources needed to fight it, medical resources would be quickly overwhelmed - the avg stay for someone with COVID19 requiring ICU/ventilator is 20 days, those not needing icu/ventilator are in the hospital an avg of 8 days. The average time to death in the hospital is 7 days. The avg length in time in the hospital for flu is 5 days. COVID19 requires much higher resource use for much longer periods of time.

Also, if you choose to 'let it rip', given how contagious combined with the mortality rate this has, our economy will likely crash within 8-10 weeks due to the amount of people who would start coming down with it - from those who would be asymptomatic but required to quarantine for 2 weeks, for those who get sick and are out for weeks or longer and those who die. The fear from that would cause a large percentage of remaining healthy people to refuse to go to work. The economy would actually be worse than it is right now and would greatly increase how long it would take the country to recover - as well as give you a lower ceiling on your recovery. it is impossible to go back to the economy of Feb 2020 - that economy is gone, for years. It's not coming back - Because we didn't take this seriously we now have to work through the consequences and get ourselves to a new spot that can work. We have to strap on our big boy pants, grow up and handle the big time adversity that is going to be with us for a long time.

It is so obvious that those who like the idea of letting those 60+ stay isolated have no clue what they are talking about. There are 68.7M Americans over 60. How exactly are you going to isolate that many people, do you have an island paradise somewhere they can all stay? Also, you can't just isolate 60+, you would also have to isolate all Americans who are high risk for COVID19 due to co-morbidity factors. For under 60 that is an additional 41.4M Americans. Does your isolated island paradise have room for 110.1M Americans? Of course, that is almost 45% of all American adults, but i'm sure the other 55% can easily make up all that lost labor. Or maybe we need our 81M kids to go to work. Of course they might have to given that 30% of teachers are over 50 and a decent percentage of the under 50 would be high risk so there wouldn't be enough teachers for them to go to school anyways.

China is having issues restarting its economy. Canada has already announced that it does not plan to re-open its border with the US within the next few weeks (our biggest trading partner). Even if we wanted to let the economy rip we literally cannot because the world economy all countries rely on would not allow us to.

You are right about alot of Americans losing their jobs due to the government, but not because of the shutdown orders. It is due to the government failing to act from Jan 3 forward when they were warned the single biggest threat to the US was Coronavirus and they chose to do nothing about it.

Historically only one strategy has ever worked against dangerous infectious diseases. Identify, test, trace, quarantine.
You have to identify the disease, you have to quickly test for it among your population, you have to trace its spread, and you have to quarantine anyone who has it as well as anyone who has come into contact with those who have it. The US managed to go 1/4 - ok for a baseball player, not good enough to fight a dangerous disease. We did identify it pretty quickly. Didn't have it completely mapped but knew enough to know what family of disease it is. But we didn't test at all, we didn't trace at all, and because we didn't do those 2 we were not able to quarantine at all. Those missteps put the government in a spot where it literally had no other choice. The only thing the government could have done would have been to implement even stricter mitigation policies like some European countries did (and Australia and New Zealand).

The mitigation measures have bought us time, but have not solved the problem, nor were they designed to. For the last 2+ weeks we have been able to keep the new cases relatively flat around 30K. But we haven't been able to get it to go below that level. Cases are a 2-3 week lagging indicator and deaths are a 3-4 week lagging indicator. If we are still avg 30K cases a day come May 1st we are in a heap of trouble as it means we haven't done good enough to not only 'flatten the curve' but to bend it back downward.

As Americans we need to understand what we are up against. We are likely going to be dealing with this significantly until at least the end of June.
Experts in last week survey conducted by UMass-Amherst believed we would likely be at around 50K deaths by the end of the month, Unless the current rate drops quickly we are going to easily pass that.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...eath-toll-will-hit-50000-by-the-end-of-april/
We are not out of this by a long shot and until we are our economy has little chance to get much better.

I love absolutely everything about this post. Overloading hospitals with Covid patients is the direct consequence the mitigation policies are trying to avoid. It’s not necessarily directly about preventing infections or deaths, those are just indirect outcomes for the primary goal. I think a lot of people are forgetting that, or just ignoring it.

I also believe this has caused some to become so anti-media that they’ve decided to believe almost the exact opposite of what’s being reported. Yes, the media is corrupt and dramatized in order to drive ratings, but the overwhelming majority of what’s being reported is true. The President himself has bragged about how great his ratings are. You don’t have to believe everything that’s on 24/7 news channels as the 100% truth, but a lot of it. Just take everything you hear with a grain of salt, because it’s never really as good or as bad as it’s made out to be.

 

[RonJohn]

The estimate for the flu infections for the last 9 years is 28.4M people contracting it per year and an average of less than 10,000 death certificates filed for flu per year (which leads to the modeling estimates of 16K-50K flu deaths most years).
If you use a 5% number of COVID19 infection, which is likely too high, then you are talking about 16.4M Americans being infected with over 30,000 death certificates so far.
That is not even a remotely similar mortality rate. If you equalize the infected population then the difference in mortality rate would be about 5-6X higher.

This comparison isn't exactly accurate. The yearly flu deaths are estimated precisely because death certificates don't always have flu listed, even if flu caused pneumonia or a bad heart condition to kill a person. With respect to COVID-19, even presumed cases are listed in the number of deaths. The comparison would be the 16K-50K to the 30k. (Although the CDC number is actually 12K-61K. The uncertainty for 2017-18 is up to 95K. and the deaths associated to COVID-19 to date are 39K)

It is still too early to draw definitive conclusions. It is possible that we have detected every single person who is infected and the death rate is as you describe. Unlikely, but possible. It is also possible that 80% of the US population is already infected with the majority showing no symptoms, so we have already achieved herd immunity. Unlikely, but possible. The numbers for flu are derived at from statistical modelling for a very well known and understood disease. Doctors and epidemiologists don't know and understand this disease as well as the flu. If we did antibody tests on every American, and continued on every non-infected American weekly, it could probably be understood quite well, but that is impractical. Perfect data will never be available. The data that we have now is far from good. That isn't anyone's fault: Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Communist, etc It is just the nature of epidemiology. It seems that people expect epidemiology to be like Google. Ask and it has the correct answer quickly. It isn't that. It is a lot of statistics run on imperfect data.