Coronavirus

I wish I could agree with you, but I can’t.
There are no known effective treatments for this.
It does impact the young.
There are more unknowns than knowns for this disease.

I think you are misinformed and mislead.

I’m sure you value your own life more than you value someone else’s purse, so why can’t we all just extend that to everyone else? For a largely Christian nation, I don’t understand why this is a hard concept to grasp.

Essential businesses are running and have been running.

Other nations aren’t suffering the economic impact of lockdowns because they are taking care of their people.
Mass deaths have a huge economic impact, too. People with long term lung, organ and brain damage have a huge economic impact. We don’t even know what is going to happen to people who’ve had this in the years to come. It’s a strange disease, it does things other don’t.

I understand that people are suffering economically and living in uncertainty is difficult, but this isn’t going away.
It’s hard times for a long time to come.

And yes, people like me with education and job skills that allow me to work in an field that gives me the freedom to work from home are better able to weather this storm.
People like my wife, who is a first responder here in NY, don’t have that luxury and run the risk of getting exposed.

The virus is actually hitting hardest the very people who don’t normally work from home. I really care about them too. The people who clean and build and deliver and sell and man counters and transport things... those people and their communities are the real victims here. I’m not in any rush to see them being forced back to dangerous environments because others are not coping well or want to return to a life that doesn’t exist anymore and they haven’t come to terms yet.

Wearing a mask and keeping distance is just polite consideration and basic disease control that, as members of a society, we should be practicing.
Watching these people coughing or spitting on others for asking for this is unreal.

Our healthcare system is still under a great strain. According to the CDC, 62,000 healthcare workers in the U.S. have tested positive for COVID-19. 84% of nurses haven't been tested yet, and 87% of nurses have had to re-use single-use PPE. So, not enough tests, not enough masks, and potentially an impending shortage of doctors and nurses if we get a second spike. We are seeing more people testing positive in rural areas where they tend to have more limited access to healthcare.

www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/620...7Kz&ocid=mailsignout

And I think there is a lot of vitriol towards people who refuse to wear masks in public because those people are literally leading to the death of others.

Why would you even want to risk being the person that contributes to the spread of a disease that causes suffering and death?

I don't like people who don't wear masks or keep social distance. These measures aren't taken to prevent yourself from getting the virus, it's to prevent you from spreading it to other people. If your "convenience" is more important than another's health, then you deserve derision and scorn.

Here's what scares me in a more general sense about people who think this is "over." Even in a best case scenario, where we have successfully flattened the curve and the worst is behind us (which I don't believe for a second), that still means we have the downward slope of the curve ahead of us. That's still another 100,000 deaths. It's a curve. It doesn't drop off like a cliff.

I saw somewhere (maybe here? Forgive my repetition if so.) that we Americans have become immune to the horrors of death. When we accepted school shootings and mass murders as a part of life (rather than change laws), we lost. Now when we're accepting 1,000s of deaths a day as part of life, we've lost. We've normalized things that should be unacceptable.

Shellhead wrote: A new employee just tested positive for COVID-19 at our Ohio location, on her third day on the job. We are going to follow the CDC guidelines, which includes disinfecting the rooms where she worked and everything she might have touched. It's not a big site, so we will probably need to shut down the whole facility for a few days and lose our current crop of insects there. We're classified as agriculture, but all of our work is done indoors in a climate-controlled environment. We're even supposed to shut down the HVAC during the disinfecting process.

An update. We disinfected just the areas where the new employee was working, which didn't include the production rooms where we raise the insects. We sent the most of the employees home for a few days and asked everybody to get tested. Our oldest employee at that site tested positive, and she was working closely with the new employee. Neither one of them has any symptoms so far, but we will require them to show us a negative test result before they can return to work. A couple of other employees are afraid to come back to work. They don't qualify for paid time off under FFCRA, and they don't have any accrued PTO to use, but we are allowing them to take unpaid leave until they feel safe to return. As an essential business, we have stayed fully operational throughout this pandemic and this was are first shutdown. We offer considerably safer working conditions than the meat packing plants, so hopefully this will be our only shutdown.

Stay safe, Shellhead. It is scary out there. Our town was wildly unsafe to be out in for memorial day (big vacation town) so I will be interested to see the case numbers or percentage testing positive figures over the next 2 weeks.

Shellhead wrote: Our healthcare system is still under a great strain. According to the CDC, 62,000 healthcare workers in the U.S. have tested positive for COVID-19. 84% of nurses haven't been tested yet, and 87% of nurses have had to re-use single-use PPE. So, not enough tests, not enough masks, and potentially an impending shortage of doctors and nurses if we get a second spike. We are seeing more people testing positive in rural areas where they tend to have more limited access to healthcare.

www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/620...7Kz&ocid=mailsignout

Ok, we can crunch the data on this article. 62,000 positive health care workers, 291 deaths (but only 57% of that 62k have mortality follow-up, so lets call the death toll 450). 450/62k = 0.007. Below 1%. And 85% never even got tested, which means they are most likely not symptomatic or not infected at all.

Even looking at all cause mortality shows an increased mortality in the past few weeks, but it isn't the only time we see that, it tends to happen when we have a bad flu seasons (this season is obviously worse than any in recent memory).

Look at the all age deaths for COVID. Almost the entire workforce is in the lower brackets. ( www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm )


Look at all mortality, the lower age groups barely have a bump over the normal death rate

So it seems obvious to me that we can allow the workforce to work and focus our efforts on protecting the most at risk. Set up specific early times for them to interact with commercial business, send them home from work while younger staff keep going, fund food deliveries, insulate and protect their caregivers. But to say COVID has the same risk to everyone is just denial of the current data.

I was out today. I wear a mask. I use a copper tool to push/pull doors and keypads. But I saw a lot of folks with no masks and they certainly weren't grizzled c&%ks%$ker human garbage GOP unless republicans made some serious inroads with black and hispanic high school graduates and their families. So clearly people are prioritizing their life against the perceived risk and if they don't have interactions with the elderly or compromised people, why should they be FORCED to isolate? Just use the common sense precautions we all have in place (barriers, increased sanitation, commercial worker low level PPE, no mass events like concerts or theme parks) and let summer do its thing like it has been for centuries.

Do you believe Florida's numbers?

Florida has seen 1,762 deaths from COVID-19 this year. They've also reported 5,185 deaths from pneumonia.

Any guess at the average number of deaths from pneumonia in Florida over this time period for the years 2013-2018?

It's 918. It's a real bad pneumonia season, I guess.

I can not believe we have politicized DYING FROM A PREVENTABLE ILLNESS. Even us. Here. It boggles my mind.

You don't need to look up numbers here and numbers there. This is a disease that can be prevented by social distancing, mask wearing, and washing your hands. People that would have lived will instead die or suffer grievous harm if we don't do this. The evidence is in, and it is a stack of bodies. A mountain of them. 100,000 and counting, and that's using Florida's obviously bullshit accounting.

You know how I know it's preventable? Because it's been prevented. Mongolia has zero internally transmitted cases. It has zero deaths. ZERO. Not one. New Zealand is back to pre-shutdown normalcy, managing exposure by quarantining new arrivals. This is a doable thing. You don't need to wax poetic on the freedom-loving nature of American male to justify 100,000 and counting deaths. You don't. Listen to epidemiologists. Listen to experts. This disease goes away in two weeks if we can just do the right thing. Our failure to do so is a stain on us.

Warm weather doesn’t seem to effect this virus.
Tropical countries are being very badly impacted.

Re: vitriol. I agree that it is unhelpful and I regret my spleen-venting upthread. It should be possible to disagree, even strenuously, without resorting to name-calling. Jason, I appreciate your perspective and sticking around to discuss in this hotbed of godless socialists who somehow like nerd games.

Re: reopening. The US government uses a concept called "statistical value of a life" for calculating the cost/benefit analysis of various policy options. E.g., if we make car companies put in airbags, they will pass that cost onto consumers, which will cost the economy $X (since they could have spent that money elsewhere). But, it will save $Y worth of lives. Since Y > X, it is a good policy. Various departments of the federal government use different calculations for what a life is worth. Some base it on total average economic output over a lifetime, some on revealed preference -- how much would you take for a 10% of dying tomorrow? Multiply the average response by 10.

Of course there's a million criticisms one could make of that concept, but when you're talking about decisions that impact millions of lives, you have to use admittedly imperfect abstractions. While the state should make the models as accurate as possible, as long as it is apples-to-apples, and it revises the models as new shit comes to light, it's at least a basis for comparison.

Currently modeling indicates that moderate social distancing will save the economy $8 trillion dollars ( source ). Our GDP last year was $21 trillion. So that seems clear: as long as the economy does not shrink by more than $8 trillion, then moderate social distancing is still the way to go. [Edit: through March 2020, the US economy contracted 4.8%, which is a loss of about $1 trillion.] The paper defines their concept of social distancing as (1) anyone showing symptoms isolates for seven days, (2) everyone in their household isolates for fourteen days, and (3) anyone over seventy years of age isolates for four months.

So I don't know if that meets your criteria, Jason. It seems fairly in line with what you're wanting. But, that paper is two months out of date and new facts about the disease are coming in daily.

There another discussion (also two months old, unfortunately) on the NYT website here:

www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/business/econ...navirus-economy.html

Please stop quoting New Zealand as being an example of defeating it (this is my country by the way), they were lucky in that it arrived late and with few infected people and they therefore had the luxury of seeing what worked and didn't work in the rest of the world. And they were able to shut down the borders easily as we only have a few international airports with very little traffic in comparison to most countries. They had so few infected people arriving in the country that they were able to identify nearly every person who brought it in and track all the different clusters of infections from that.
Basically good luck and then not pissing around (i.e. making decisions quickly, what NZ and Australia are good at) when they realised what needed to be done. Plus I suspect they have a milder strain than Europe and the Americas, the few deaths occurred nearly all in the 70+ age group and most were residents in retirement complexes while here in the UK it has been slaughtering people of all ages.

jeb wrote: Do you believe Florida's numbers?

Florida has seen 1,762 deaths from COVID-19 this year. They've also reported 5,185 deaths from pneumonia.

Any guess at the average number of deaths from pneumonia in Florida over this time period for the years 2013-2018?

It's 918. It's a real bad pneumonia season, I guess.

Saw some figures about a month ago that showed the difference between the normal average death rates in different places compared to this year, irrespective of cause. I'll see if I can dig it up.

To echo what southernman said, Australia has been pretty lucky. We're not out of the woods yet though and things are far from normal. Even so, it was big news yesterday when someone (a 30 year old, as it happens ) died.

mc wrote: To echo what southernman said, Australia has been pretty lucky. We're not out of the woods yet though and things are far from normal. Even so, it was big news yesterday when someone (a 30 year old, as it happens ) died.

That's sad, I suspect they probably had other underlying health problems.
Factors so far identified over here that cause people to be more susceptible to the virus are:
- Age, increasingly susceptible every decade in age.
- Underlying health issues
- Diabetic
- Obese
- Black or similar minority ethnicity (this is how those racial groups are described in the UK in case anyone raised an eyebrow)
- Male

southernman wrote: Please stop quoting New Zealand as being an example of defeating it (this is my country by the way), they were lucky in that it arrived late and with few infected people and they therefore had the luxury of seeing what worked and didn't work in the rest of the world. And they were able to shut down the borders easily as we only have a few international airports with very little traffic in comparison to most countries. They had so few infected people arriving in the country that they were able to identify nearly every person who brought it in and track all the different clusters of infections from that.
Basically good luck and then not pissing around (i.e. making decisions quickly, what NZ and Australia are good at) when they realised what needed to be done. Plus I suspect they have a milder strain than Europe and the Americas, the few deaths occurred nearly all in the 70+ age group and most were residents in retirement complexes while here in the UK it has been slaughtering people of all ages.

Following up on the comparison between New Zealand and the UK - NZ had about (I think) 1500 cases and 21 deaths (all over 60) for a population of 5 million, in the town I live in (population 220,000 plus surrounding villages) we have had around 110 deaths at our hospital (including two doctors) and currently have around 450 live cases. It's a different world over here,