Coronavirus thread

[Stahlseele]

Spain appearantly has reached 5% infections. So somewhere above 2 million cases.

[Blade]

Has the response from red commie European socialists been noticeably better than the USA's?

Like the Viking countries, Germany, France, what are they up to

In France we've had confirmation that we should have stayed red commie socialists instead of destroying our public services, especially public health.

When I say "we", I mean the people. The government is now thinking about giving medals to public health workers instead of listening to their requests.

EDIT: But I just realized that our better employee protections mean that there haven't been many lay-offs due to Coronavirus (yet). People relying on the "gig-economy" have a hard time if they couldn't work, other employees couldn't get fired just because they couldn't work (at least not that easily). The government offered to pay 70% of the salaries of people in that situation (and some companies agreed to pay the rest).

[Kaelik]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/202 ... izers.html

Edit: Nancy pelosi explaining the entire caucus supports it but it was important to nix it because an advisory agency told her a technical accounting rule means it would be costed high.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?472138-1/ ... y-briefing

[Kaelik]

Now that NYC must face great austerity and we just have to cut all those budgets!!!!!!

Here's some spending that NYC has done in the last 6 years and has no plans to cut, unlike all funds for poor school districts.

- 1,100 new cops in a time of very low crime

-City-funded security guards for PRIVATE schools

-City-funded rent for privately-run charter schools

Just thought I'd mix it up a bit and get some DeBlasio hate in here too.

[erik]

My Missourah in-laws had a June Florida vacation planned up in the panhandle at a rental before all this happened. As a whole they've been pretty cavalier about social distancing and the virus in general.

My wife and I were hoping that Florida would stay closed and the family would come around that this was a terrible idea in the current environment, but nay. Rentals are still technically closed but beaches are now open and counties probably in the next week or two will have their plans approved to open rentals as well. So, on Friday we told them we'd not be attending. We can look forward to a month of needling trying to get us to change our minds.

I haven't been able to get testing and I work in healthcare. I've tried to be cautious as can be but still wonder if I've caught it and don't know it. Actually I think I can now go somewhere and pay $160 to get tested and get results within a week or so. But I'm not sure that will do much for my peace of mind or planning (assuming a negative result) since another week of working in healthcare will have passed by then.

I don't think we're being unreasonable that mid-June is way too soon to go circulating and traveling. If we went to Florida would I be wearing a mask around the in-laws all the time? I know they wouldn't be wearing, nevermind the kids. It all just seems stupid. My wife just told me that her brother might be arriving to Florida by way of a brief trip to London to hang out with some friends. FFS. And I was thinking he was one of the ones taking the pandemic more seriously.

In local news Indiana did a random sampling where we tested a sampling of 4600 people and tried to extrapolate the spread of the virus to the state as a whole. The results suggest about 2.8% of the state was actively infected on May 1, so a bit under 200,000. And about 45% of the people who tested positive didn't have any symptoms at the time.

[Josh_Kablack]

You stay the fuck home until adequate testing is implemented. If you need to keep the peace you can fabricate a story to the in-laws about having tested positive and having a mild-yet-contagious case that you don't want to spread.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

No bro, the government said it's okay for me to go outside so it's okay for me to go outside. We have to think of the economy! WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO THE ECONOMY IF PEOPLE DIDN'T VACATION TO FLORIDA?

[Kaelik]

https://www.politico.com/states/new-yor ... in-1284316

[DSMatticus]

Estimated herd immunity threshold without non-pharmacological interventions: 60-70%.

Estimated infection fatality rate, which will likely turn out to be slightly higher because we know we're undercounting deaths, but if you're feeling optimistic could be slightly lower if we're still underestimating asymptomatic cases: .5-.8%. Doesn't factor in the nightmare hellscape that happens when hospitals get overwhelmed, if things are allowed to get that bad that fast.

That's in the ballpark of a million dead - about 1 in 300 americans.

We know it causes some amount of longterm damage in some number of patients. We don't know to what extent or to how many. It's one thing when a 60-year-old man claws his way back from a severe case and we find that his lungs are permanently fucked. That's relatively easy to diagnose because there's a certain threshold of function that's being crossed as a result of age and illness, and it will present with obvious symptoms like persistent shortness of breath. But what the fuck is happening in the body of a 30-year-old man with a typical moderate non-hospitalization case? Did he just have 5-10 years shaved off his life? Did he just get downgraded to the lifelong smoker life expectancy track? We don't know. At the end of the day, you last until the first important bit of your body gives out. Health can be generally very connected, yes, but the thing that kills you will be specific. For non-smokers, that is very rarely the lungs. Your lungs really do have years of accumulated permanent damage to spare before they become your primary risk factor. That's one of the reasons you should always be optimistic about quitting smoking - most of the damage at any given time isn't permanent, and the damage that is permanent accumulates slowly enough that you really can just stop and let your heart be the thing that kills you ten years later as though you'd never smoked at all. But speaking of heart, we know COVID-19 can attack that too. It can attack damn near everything to some extent, even in cases that don't cause obvious severe respiratory symptoms.

We're pretty sure immunity to SARS, another, significantly more lethal coronavirus, lasts 2-3 years. There are actually a number of coronaviruses endemic to the human population right now that we just don't care about because they're common colds. Immunity to those coronaviruses can fade in weeks. COVID-19 will probably be somewhere on that spectrum, but where? There are no credible cases of reinfection - key word credible. If you've read stories about reinfection, and you might have, they were everywhere for awhile, I can promise you that as of right now they're not credible. They're usually bad reporting - a lot of it is misunderstanding false negatives/false positives in recovering patients as evidence of reinfection. But it's really only been five months, and even then no single hotspot has been burning for the full five months. With a vaccine 12-18 months off, we could have one full wave of this through the entire population... or two or three. Would later waves be gentler, because of partial immunity? (Immunity isn't actually binary, even if your immunity wanes to a degree that permits reinfection we would expect people's immune systems to do a better job in round 2.) Would later waves be worse, because of cumulative, permanent damage to organs from earlier waves? Note that when I say "wave," I'm not talking about this piddly fucking 100k dead we have now. This is a wave we stopped - temporarily, at the looks of things, and perhaps more 'slowed' than 'stopped'. We're still in the first round of the match. We're nowhere near herd immunity, let alone discussions of whether or not that herd immunity will fade in time for us to have to go through it all over again like we do with the flu every year.

In short: if people are bugging you to go back to normal tell them to fuck off. Okay, I get that they're family, and you can't actually do that. But tell them you're taking this seriously, it's unfortunately not over just because the governor let the barbers open back up, and you're not interested in discussing it. But they're welcome to text/call/skype/zoom/whatever the hell people are using to keep in touch with loved ones.

[deaddmwalking]

I'd go with 'As a healthcare professional, I need to take this very seriously. I'm not going to tell you what you can or should do, but we've made the decision to minimize contact outside of our immediately household for the foreseeable future.'

[erik]

If you need to keep the peace you can fabricate a story to the in-laws about having tested positive and having a mild-yet-contagious case that you don't want to spread.

Nah, the closest to a lie I've been willing to run was that we didn't just tell them a few weeks ago that we weren't going, because we foolishly thought it would become a non-issue with venues remaining closed down, and would tentatively reschedule for the distant future next year. So that's on me, or us. I don't believe they would change their plans, so the only real difference is their transient (hopefully) extra grumpiness at us vs. us having avoided an extra month of needling.


But they're outta their ghostdamn minds if they think I'm driving my family to Florida to hang out for a week in this pandemic. The odds are probably low for getting sick, but they're higher than I feel is responsible to accept at a risk not just to my immediate family, and my in-laws, but also my coworkers.

We visit my parents like once a month (used to be weekly/twice weekly, as they're local) with everyone outside in masks and a goodly distance apart and we check everyone's temp before heading out to visit. That's about the level of exposure I'm willing to accept in order to see loved ones.

[virgil]

My wife & I have done our best to avoid leaving the house other than the grocery store every week or two (with masks), but our roommate works at a CVS, so who knows whether we've gotten one of the asymptomatic cases.

I have to move to Austin at the end of the week, and we're letting some friends help - said friends all live in the same house and one of them contracted Covid-19 in March; so I'm hoping they're safe to spend time near.

[Thaluikhain]

Where I live, they are easing restrictions, so given it takes about 2 weeks for symptoms to show, in 3 weeks I can see if that was a good idea and maybe start relaxing. Absolutely not going to be one of those people that start immediately doing things the government says is now ok.

[Whipstitch]

Sadly it'll take far longer than that before I'll have a real degree of confidence. One of the things that sometimes gets lost in the talk about flattening local curves is the notion that locking things down helps slow the spread to other communities. Basically, a lot of these protesting assholes in Bumblefuck, Wisconsin wouldn't be in position to call this shit a hoax if the Tr-state area had felt more determined to just keep spreading everything willy-nilly rather than shut down.

[MGuy]

Can someone explain to me why Nancy Pelosi thinks that it matters that the CBO counts possible future disasters for 'stabilizers', she really definitely supports, on a bill she acknowledges is not going to pass while keeping the parts that allow Trump and lobbyists to profit? This is a bill that's supposed to outline the concerns of the party going forward during the virus crisis and likely for a while afterward. It is not something the Republicans in the Senate are going to pretend they are going to pass. Yet the party leadership is still concern trolling over the price after we're three bills and several trillions of dollars in corporate scams into this?

[Kaelik]

Can someone explain to me why Nancy Pelosi thinks that it matters that the CBO counts possible future disasters for 'stabilizers', she really definitely supports, on a bill she acknowledges is not going to pass while keeping the parts that allow Trump and lobbyists to profit? This is a bill that's supposed to outline the concerns of the party going forward during the virus crisis and likely for a while afterward. It is not something the Republicans in the Senate are going to pretend they are going to pass. Yet the party leadership is still concern trolling over the price after we're three bills and several trillions of dollars in corporate scams into this?

The CBO scores automatic stabilizers in the current bill based on how long it will project them to keep occurring in the current pandemic, so they basically told her they would make the assumption that the coronavirus was going to keep causing problems for a long time, so it would cost a lot.

Inherently this is evidence that the CBO is garbage that shouldn't exist and if democrats were actually left, instead of multimillion dollar landlords using it as justification for killing left policies and/or cowards, they would just say "the CBO is filled with the dumbest shitheads that exist and was invented by someone who wanted to cut welfare to justify cutting welfare, obviously automatic stabilizers don't COST anything because they save the fucking economy, and the CBO is too dumb as bricks to do that calculation."

On a purely factual matter, all CBO estimates are garbage because projections like that are basically never right, and because of that whole invented to justify cutting welfare thing the CBO errs in its projections pretty steadily in the same direction, saying that all taxes raise less money than they do, all tax cuts cost less than they do, and all social programs cost more than they do, and that interest rates will always be higher than they are.

[MGuy]

But I don't care about that. I don't care about how much the cbo thinks a purely symbolic bill will cost. After they've already opened the money hose no one on the ground is going to give a fuck either. Not that I give a shit about balancing the budget over helping actual people and not corporations to begin with, but I'm really sure there's no political value to observing what they have to say on a bill that's supposed to send a message. Especially when you find room in it to allow the Trumps and lobbyists to benefit from it.

[Kaelik]

I'm really sure there's no political value to observing what they have to say on a bill that's supposed to send a message.

Yes that is a message I made in most of my post?

[MGuy]

I'm really sure there's no political value to observing what they have to say on a bill that's supposed to send a message.

Yes that is a message I made in most of my post?

I'm leaning more in the direction that this is Pelosi's personal failure and your post seems more against the CBO itself. Even if the CBO wasn't anti taxing rich people and such it would still be a dumb political move to concern troll over the numbers even if you have credence to the organization's calculations.

[Kaelik]

that the CBO is garbage that shouldn't exist and if democrats were actually left, instead of multimillion dollar landlords using it as justification for killing left policies and/or cowards, they would just say

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

How are the other reopening states doing right now? Texas has already broken our previous records for cases per day, I'm wondering if the second wave is hitting anyone else, too.

[Zaranthan]

I've been keeping my head firmly in the sand due to an inability to do anything about anything until the IRS stops holding my tax return over my head, but my South Carolina county (which contains an international airport) had about 200 new cases reported the other day, up from a few dozen last week.

[erik]

https://www.indystar.com/story/entertai ... 221875002/

I’ve been expecting this for a while. GenCon is a big deal for downtown Indy. It’s like our Black Friday when much of the venues get into the black for the rest of the year.

[hyzmarca]

How are the other reopening states doing right now? Texas has already broken our previous records for cases per day, I'm wondering if the second wave is hitting anyone else, too.

Hard to tell here since the data is being massaged. It's going up less quickly than people feared.

As you can see, the X-axis on this graph is ordered from days with the most new cases to days with the fewest, rather than chronologically like a sane person would expect. The end result is that it looks like it's going down.

Florida is more egregious, though. They actually fired the person running their coronavirus reporting system because she didn't want to falsify data.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/20 ... ails-show/

[Stahlseele]

In Germany, reopenings in combination with school holidays lead to one thing that is being reportet on:
kilometer long tailbacks on the autobahn and several hours of waiting time to get to your destination in some cases.