Coronavirus Thread

[IEEEWreck]

Trump said today he’s taking hydroxychloroquine, because “he’s heard a lot of good things about it.” I mean ...

Our state rep from Aiken filed a bill today to enable people to refuse taking a future vaccine. I mean ...

*Full disclosure: I am consuming tiny amounts of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the gin and tonic I am drinking right now.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

A few days ago, I posted a vid on the maths behind running down the virus. But I didn't mention the big takeaway for me: pandemics are an externality. It is a lot like emissions from cars. In the old days we had a lot of people - pretty much the same ones as are at risk from COVID-19 - who died every year from pollution from cars without catalytic converters. We also had a lot of youngsters who suffered damage to their brains from emissions from cars using leaded gas (paint too). The normal way you might take care of this would be to pay the people causing the pollution to stop it. Problem = this was an externality; i.e. it was the result of an activity that created effects that were incidental to use of the goods and that no one had any individual or corporate interest in stopping. Consequently, no market existed to make payments, even if we could have gotten people to set a price for it. Which we could not because … freedom.

So what we did is the same thing we've been doing in this situation: we got the government to sanction behavior that was creating the problem. We required catalytic converters on cars and, since a thriving business in disabling them sprung up, made it a crime to remove or disable them. Then we passed a set of laws that required use of unleaded gas in cars and set pollution limits for states and localities. Result: a lot fewer vulnerable people died and we saw a perceptible change in behavior resulting for banning lead in gas and paint.

That was easy in comparison, however. All we had to do is go to car and gas producers and the mechanics and say, "Stop it!" Changes in behavior by individuals hardly entered into it. Now we find ourselves having to require behavior in the entire population to combat the virus. And, as before, there is no market where we can go to pay people to act responsibility, even if they were willing to take a price to do so. Soooooo … we issue orders to control the behaviors spreading the disease, more or less depending on how far governments are willing to go to do it. And we get a lot of people who are just like the folks who went to the mechanics to get the catalytic converters removed: "Why should my car all of a sudden be deprived of 20% of its power, just because of some exhaust fumes? Why should I be singled out? My car doesn't produce much exhaust! I bought it to go fast! Besides … FREEDOM!"

The economic costs of this are higher too. That's why we need to continue to offer a set price to deter dangerous behavior and to limit economic damage to the extent possible. Other then that it's pretty much the same; an external effect that we have to meet outside of market mechanisms.

LOL. Hard to take the time to point out all the wild differences here. But some of the larger ones - consuming air or touching surfaces and then your face, even if those things contain the virus, isn’t a guarantee it will harm you. You can also socially distance, wear masks, and use good hygiene to make sure you don’t get the virus in the first place. You have full control over your own circumstances. It’s not a boogie man under the bed.

 

[IEEEWreck]

LOL. Hard to take the time to point out all the wild differences here. But some of the larger ones - consuming air or touching surfaces and then your face, even if those things contain the virus, isn’t a guarantee it will harm you. You can also socially distance, wear masks, and use good hygiene to make sure you don’t get the virus in the first place. You have full control over your own circumstances. It’s not a boogie man under the bed.

Consuming air filled with tetraethyl lead isn't guaranteed to harm you either. There were plenty of people who didn't develop lead poisoning back in the leaded gasoline days.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Consuming air filled with tetraethyl lead isn't guaranteed to harm you either. There were plenty of people who didn't develop lead poisoning back in the leaded gasoline days.

You can’t guarantee you don’t consume the lead. You can absolutely prevent yourself from acquiring the virus.

 

[IEEEWreck]

You can’t guarantee you don’t consume the lead. You can absolutely prevent yourself from acquiring the virus.

That's silly. In fact, the same respirator you use to protect from CoViD has modules that protect against tetraethyl lead. Or you can stay inside.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

That's silly. In fact, the same respirator you use to protect from CoViD has modules that protect against tetraethyl lead. Or you can stay inside.

That’s silly, lead doesn’t act like a virus, have a short life, etc. If you went and tested the air outside your house right now, you’d find zero virus. And so on.

 

[IEEEWreck]

That’s silly, lead doesn’t act like a virus, have a short life, etc. If you went and tested the air outside your house right now, you’d find zero virus. And so on.

I feel like we may have gotten off track. Whether lead behaves like a virus probably doesn't have much to do with market externalities one way or the other.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

I feel like we may have gotten off track. Whether lead behaves like a virus probably doesn't have much to do with market externalities one way or the other.

Right, but that’s the point. There is no point in trying to treat them the same. You can go through life guaranteeing you never get the virus, even without wearing a mask. They aren’t really comparable at all in terms of having to regulate them.

 

[IEEEWreck]

Right, but that’s the point. There is no point in trying to treat them the same. You can go through life guaranteeing you never get the virus, even without wearing a mask. They aren’t really comparable at all in terms of having to regulate them.

I can? How? Remember I do need to periodically get food to survive.

It seems like the onus on me to keep myself safe from either tetraethyl lead or coronavirus is quite similar, in point of fact. Scrupulous decontamination, respirators, and staying inside as much as possible. In fact, since lead needs a while to build up, you can be substantially more cavalier about occasionally breaking the isolation regiment than you can with a virus.

It points to the fact that making the outdoors not a hazmat zone should be a policy goal.

 

[RamblinRed]

@RamblinRed You're right there’s no smoking gun, but if we’re waiting for a videotape it will never materialize. You’re alleging we should consider the following as being circumstantial but not related:
a. Outbreak occurs in China
b. Outbreak occurs in Wuhan
c. Outbreak occurs in close proximity to a newly commission bioweapons lab in Wuhan
d. The Wuhan lab had been reported to be concerning to international officials over lax security procedures
e. The Wuhan lab was working on coronavirus research and a variety of dangerous pathogens on how they go from animals to humans
f. The Wuhan lab was staffed with qualified yet inexperienced staff
g. Experienced labs have incidents, but an inexperienced lab does not
h. China destroyed samples needed to determine the virus origin
i. China has not permitted access by prominent international specialists to help investigate the origins
j. China has made numerous false representations, ie no human-human transmission, falsified numbers of deaths and cases, etc
k. China has threatened retaliation of other nations if they did not abide by China’s wishes
l. Key players in and associated with the Wuhan lab disappeared when communication they made went public
m. China makes up a story about how US soldiers came over and infected the Chinese in Wuhan.
n. All records and communications are being tightly controlled by the national political party officials

All this is just coincidental. Despite all of this mounting evidence we’ll just make up a story that fits a convenient narrative because we’re supposed to be Globalists? There’s absolutely zero evidence to suggest it came from anywhere besides the Wuhan lab other than a chinese expert that’s been told what to say says so and a few people affiliated with the lab and don’t want their research eliminated have said so as well. Your kid has chocolate all over his face but didn’t eat the cake? Really?

It will all come out in time. We’re just beating our way thru delaying tactics now.

First, there is no bio-weapons lab in Wuhan. That is completely false.
Second, there have been outside scientists/doctors in China since January.
Once the virus has expanded outside China, whether they destroyed evidence (I have no knowlege of that), it wouldn't matter. At that point scientists can get samples from elsewhere. it certianly set things back a few weeks though. I've have a colleague whose wife works at the CDC and they have been working on this since mid-January.
I have no knowlege of whether your point E is accurate. I have not seen any evidence of that.
I agree completely with points J, K, M, and N. None of that mean they created a virus.
It was pretty well known that the local Chinese officials were harassing the local doctors and making them sign false oaths and appeared to be providing false information up the chain to Beijing. That is not unusual behavior in an autocratic government where there tends to be a motivation not to provide bad news up the chain.
The Chinese Government behavior during this has been atrocious. I've never argued against that. Their propaganda attempts around it being created by the US military and brought there is laughable. Of course we have loonies in this country that believe there is a specific former soldier who did just that.

The Chinese Government tried to pressure Australia to drop investigations and Australia politely told them to pound sand.

Most of what you posted really isn't any evidence at all, it's musings.
Of course it is nice to come up with a convoluted story rather than just going with the much less convoluted story - a coronavirus passed from a animal host to a human host. It then spread among humans. That's it. It's well known that Chinese have all sorts of virus's passing through them because of their food habits. Most end up being harmless. in this case it apparently was not.
I'm going to stick to what scientists tell me rather than convoluted stories by conspiracy theorists that are full of holes (whether it is my colleagues wife at the CDC, or the majority of scientists and doctors from around the world)

Also, right now our government is not helping our case at all. They are making it easy for China to work around this and look less like a bad nation than they are. It is the US that pulled funding from the WHO during a pandemic. It is the US that has not agreed to take part in International Vaccine efforts. It is the US pushing conspiracy theories our allies are pissed off about because it makes it harder for them to go to China and try to get them to deal with their wet markets. Meanwhile China is pledging money and pledging to share any vaccines created. The US has not been willing to be one of the signatories for an 'independent evaluation' into the pandemic. Right now we are literally playing into China's hands and it frankly pisses me off. We are making international affair decisions that make us more a pariah and allow China off the hook way too easy.

 

[IEEEWreck]

The lab based theory is simply this...that someone in that lab became infected by covid getting it from one of th beats there were experimenting with, and then went to the local wet market, and boom..spread from there. I don't know what you referring to, but the fact that it escaped from the lab is the theory that sits opposite the theory that it somehow came from the wet market.

Ah, sorry. What I'm saying is that evidence that one theory is wrong is not evidence that another theory is right. It is possible that both or neither are true.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

I can? How? Remember I do need to periodically get food to survive.

It seems like the onus on me to keep myself safe from either tetraethyl lead or coronavirus is quite similar, in point of fact. Scrupulous decontamination, respirators, and staying inside as much as possible. In fact, since lead needs a while to build up, you can be substantially more cavalier about occasionally breaking the isolation regiment than you can with a virus.

It points to the fact that making the outdoors not a hazmat zone should be a policy goal.

You can have food delivered to you. Curb side service. Etc. You either need to stay a few feet away from people, or wear a mask. But you can spend as much of your time indoors or outdoors as you want with zero risk otherwise.

 

[684Bee]

First, there is no bio-weapons lab in Wuhan. That is completely false.
Second, there have been outside scientists/doctors in China since January.
Once the virus has expanded outside China, whether they destroyed evidence (I have no knowlege of that), it wouldn't matter. At that point scientists can get samples from elsewhere. it certianly set things back a few weeks though. I've have a colleague whose wife works at the CDC and they have been working on this since mid-January.
I have no knowlege of whether your point E is accurate. I have not seen any evidence of that.
I agree completely with points J, K, M, and N. None of that mean they created a virus.
It was pretty well known that the local Chinese officials were harassing the local doctors and making them sign false oaths and appeared to be providing false information up the chain to Beijing. That is not unusual behavior in an autocratic government where there tends to be a motivation not to provide bad news up the chain.
The Chinese Government behavior during this has been atrocious. I've never argued against that. Their propaganda attempts around it being created by the US military and brought there is laughable. Of course we have loonies in this country that believe there is a specific former soldier who did just that.

The Chinese Government tried to pressure Australia to drop investigations and Australia politely told them to pound sand.

Most of what you posted really isn't any evidence at all, it's musings.
Of course it is nice to come up with a convoluted story rather than just going with the much less convoluted story - a coronavirus passed from a animal host to a human host. It then spread among humans. That's it. It's well known that Chinese have all sorts of virus's passing through them because of their food habits. Most end up being harmless. in this case it apparently was not.
I'm going to stick to what scientists tell me rather than convoluted stories by conspiracy theorists that are full of holes (whether it is my colleagues wife at the CDC, or the majority of scientists and doctors from around the world)

Also, right now our government is not helping our case at all. They are making it easy for China to work around this and look less like a bad nation than they are. It is the US that pulled funding from the WHO during a pandemic. It is the US that has not agreed to take part in International Vaccine efforts. It is the US pushing conspiracy theories our allies are pissed off about because it makes it harder for them to go to China and try to get them to deal with their wet markets. Meanwhile China is pledging money and pledging to share any vaccines created. The US has not been willing to be one of the signatories for an 'independent evaluation' into the pandemic. Right now we are literally playing into China's hands and it frankly pisses me off. We are making international affair decisions that make us more a pariah and allow China off the hook way too easy.

Yeah, we should just keep doing what every other administration has done before now, which is p*ssy-foot around with China. This is the first time in a LONG time that we’ve actually called them out on their bs and are pushing back.

 

[LibertyTurns]

@RamblinRed You can’t be serious? The same centrifuges that make u-238 for nuclear reactors can be used to make U-235 for nuclear bombs. The same goes for baby milk and vaccine factories to produce and ricin, botulinum toxin, etc. The BSL-3 & 4 labs routinely experiment with viral hemorrhagic fevers, brucellosis, among other including transmission vehicles to determine how lethal they are in a variety of forms. Our country does it and so does everyone else. To claim a facility like Ft Dietrich does not do bioweapons research and the Chinese would not have similar dual use facilities is comical. Here’s a report on a breach just 6 months ago in our own back yard.

https://www.military.com/daily-news...e-about-fort-detrick-research-suspension.html

Sometimes people do real bad things.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-12/The-mind-blowing-history-at-Fort-Detrick-Qr1cLbK0dW/index.html

 

[MWBATL]

Ah, sorry. What I'm saying is that evidence that one theory is wrong is not evidence that another theory is right. It is possible that both or neither are true.

Well, yup. That's something I do agree with. As @slugboy stated in another post it might be neither and maybe came from somewhere else within China. It certainly seems certain it came from China from what I understand. And I don't think anyone believes they let it loose on purpose. To me, the point that @takethepoints made makes the most sense...someone screwed up, China got embarrassed and once they started lying, they couldn't figure out how to get out of it.

Still bothers me to no end that they quarantined Wuhan...for domestic travel only. They continued to allow international travel. That is something I have yet to understand. Can anyone help me out with that?

 

[MountainBuzzMan]

Here's something interesting about the way the Georgia DPH has ben reporting COVID-19 stats:

https://www.ajc.com/news/state--reg...uses-critics-cry-foul/182PpUvUX9XEF8vO11NVGO/

I'm inclined to agree that there's nothing sinister about this; the DPH has been chronically understaffed for decades and the whole business of how to present data graphically has always been a challenge for public health pros. They should leave it to the statisticians/data scientists, but they don't. Still, given the screwups here, I'm going to the AJC dashboard from now on (https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard/jvoLBozRtBSVSNQDDAuZxH/). They have someone on staff there who can do a half-decent job.

Now, if only someone would tell them that a gray scale graph shows up better on computer screens …

It cant be that hard. Give them a few of these. Or better yet purchase 100 of them and put each one in a shoe box with the name of the county on the box.
Open, click once for each new case and then put it back in the box.

 

[IEEEWreck]

You can have food delivered to you. Curb side service. Etc. You either need to stay a few feet away from people, or wear a mask. But you can spend as much of your time indoors or outdoors as you want with zero risk otherwise.

Sure. And the same delivery will keep you safe from tetraethyl lead. It's a fairly heavy molecule, so as long as you're either inside or outside about 5 miles away from a concentration of emitters, you're fine with zero risk. Inside that radius, just wear a respirator if you want to go out.

Ludicrous argument aside, it's not an either or, it's a both and. That's just basic failure analysis.

Wear a mask AND stay at least 6 feet away from others.

 

[IEEEWreck]

@RamblinRed You can’t be serious? The same centrifuges that make u-238 for nuclear reactors can be used to make U-235 for nuclear bombs. The same goes for baby milk and vaccine factories to produce and ricin, botulinum toxin, etc. The BSL-3 & 4 labs routinely experiment with viral hemorrhagic fevers, brucellosis, among other including transmission vehicles to determine how lethal they are in a variety of forms. Our country does it and so does everyone else. To claim a facility like Ft Dietrich does not do bioweapons research and the Chinese would not have similar dual use facilities is comical. Here’s a report on a breach just 6 months ago in our own back yard.

https://www.military.com/daily-news...e-about-fort-detrick-research-suspension.html

Sometimes people do real bad things.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-12/The-mind-blowing-history-at-Fort-Detrick-Qr1cLbK0dW/index.html

Ft Detrick is explicitly a biological weapons facility. The CDC, however, is not. The difference is rather important.

Kinda like how we produce phosgene in all kinds of industrial chemical plants, but none of them are chemical weapons facilities.

 

[takethepoints]

LOL. Hard to take the time to point out all the wild differences here. But some of the larger ones - consuming air or touching surfaces and then your face, even if those things contain the virus, isn’t a guarantee it will harm you. You can also socially distance, wear masks, and use good hygiene to make sure you don’t get the virus in the first place. You have full control over your own circumstances. It’s not a boogie man under the bed.

Is it really that hard for you to understand a general point?

The similarity is that in both cases individual behavior causes substantial harm and there is no market to allow us to ameliorate it. The reason is, again, that the effects are incidental to the behavior and can't be included in the any original price, real (cars) or shadow (the virus) effectively. Consequently, the behavior can't be handled by transactions between individuals or firms; no one has any incentive to name a price that will stop or moderate the behavior. That means that governments have to step in once the effects have been widely recognized and take action to curtail the behaviors involved. That - and accepting risks that firms and banks won't take and costs that individuals can't afford - is the reason we have governments in the first place.

The particular points you have made about the virus have been refuted both here and by people who, you know, know something about epidemics so many times there's no need to go into it. However, I think the best refutation can be found on the first line of the table here:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

 

[takethepoints]

It cant be that hard. Give them a few of these. Or better yet purchase 100 of them and put each one in a shoe box with the name of the county on the box.
Open, click once for each new case and then put it back in the box.

It isn't the thumb that's the problem. It's when the methods tell you to punch the button. For reasons known only to themselves and God (and, maybe, Brian Kemp), the DPH has problems with that.