30 Chinese Cities are on Level 1 lockdown

[Solom01]

There aren't too many survivors of the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) during WW2, but ask any of them how human behavior changed when food became harder and harder to find. It will be interesting to see how the cuddled masses of wealthy countries react when they can't find their favorite flavor of ice cream in the grocery store. And no one is asking anyone to take chances they don't want to take. If you feel that you're particularly vulnerable due to age, immune deficiency or whatever you're free to bunker down in your home for as long as you want, just don't ask me to support you with your tax dollars or limit what I can do in public places.

 

[Handlebars]

@Deleted Member 4210 ,

I don't really know how to intellectually process what you are saying here. The reason there are fewer cases than expected is people changed their behavior.

Correlation is not causation no matter how high your horse is.

 

[Alex M]

There aren't too many survivors of the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) during WW2, but ask any of them how human behavior changed when food became harder and harder to find. It will be interesting to see how the cuddled masses of wealthy countries react when they can't find their favorite flavor of ice cream in the grocery store. And no one is asking anyone to take chances they don't want to take. If you feel that you're particularly vulnerable due to age, immune deficiency or whatever you're free to bunker down in your home for as long as you want, just don't ask me to support you with your tax dollars or limit what I can do in public places.

The behavior in Leningrad during WW2 was not what you think. There was a strict food rationing in place, everybody was issued a "ration card" that entitled you to get certain amount of food. You couldn't buy anything in stores and it was similarly difficult and also dangerous trying to get anything on black market. Patrols would execute such a businessman on spot when he got caught, without any court proceedings. Black market - mostly barter type, since money had lost value - existed in a very limited capacity, not just because people were scared but because very few had any extra food to sell. Same execution for those who were spreading panic or criticizing the government.

Rest assured, people will limit what they can do in public places, if not out of logical thinking then out of necessity when ordered so. There are already fines for this kind of violations. Governments may go really far when the situation demands, there are acts and regulations already in place that they may invoke very quickly.

 

[Cowlitz]

I expect little or no improvement until January, and that is doubtful. We have idiots in charge of the government. We are at a time where we need government. The effects of the anti-gubmint movement are showing.

I'm glad I live on the west coast. The three states are working together to try to figure things out. I hope they succeed, but it is a shame that the leadership on the state level seem to be the only adults in the room.

Meanwhile, I encourage anybody that can afford it, to donate to your local food bank. They are having a heck of a time meeting the demands. My check goes in the mail today. I plan to send them one each month.

 

[tomjasz]

The reason there are fewer cases than expected is people changed their behavior. Best evidence is that people started social distancing in many places even before stay-at-home orders went into effect.

Almost 7% fatality rate in NY!

Result: 6.8834708653747%
6.8834708653747% of 106763 = 7349

 

[Solom01]

Hi Alex. Luckily the US is not the USSR. There's a reason why there's a 2nd amendment and there are lots of people with arms that limit the ability of the states to do what they want. No doubt it means that there will be a few more covid deaths, but to me that's an acceptable price over allowing a state to determine where and when I can be out in public. Just like when you give a jurisdiction the power to tax you they will never give it up, the more you allow a state to keep track of you and tell you when and where you have to be the less likely they are to give up that power in the future. Funny how all the flakes who were all upset when Black Lives Matter marches and environmental protests were limited don't seem too upset at having a state trying to dictate their lives.

 

[Alex M]

Luckily the US is not the USSR.

South Koreans would probably say - luckily they are not the US.
One has to be really dim to consider checking for 14 days how newly arrived travelers follow their quarantine to be a threat to democracy. Or to think that national health emergency is a hoax or some plot against his freedom.

 

[Browneye]

Okay...let's go back thirty days...sorry I missed it by a couple of days.

The experts were just sure that 40-70% of the population was going to get the virus (or even more), and that meant there would be approximately 1.6 million deaths at the more or less accepted 1% fatality rate. Seems the numbers have changed a little in thirty days - now they've changed their tune a little bit, eh?? Gee...THEY WERE WRONG.

Some here were off the rails because I posted the quote below from Chris Centeno MD, but even today, a month later, it holds water pretty well. And we are not even within spitting distance of the projected deaths. NOT. EVEN. CLOSE. Sure, 25K deaths is awful, and it has turned ugly and complicated, and killed our economy. It is worse than I expected - I was wrong about that. And there will likely be a few more deaths as this thing winds down. But let's keep it in context, compared to other lethal threats, year over year, shall we?



After some harping by some here I posted this comment:

You're assuming the entire percentage of the population is going to contract it. Personally I think you're way over-estimating what the numbers will be and horriblizing it. Panicking. Which you're entitled to do, your free choice.
>snip

And this is what prompted me to come back after a month...

>snip
I'm simply just not running around in a panic.
I do not believe all the panic hype. YOU can call them 'experts' if you like, I don't. Just some people with opinions. Most of the time, most of them are dead wrong.

>snip

I'll check back in a month.

I'm STILL not running around in a panic. Did it get bad? Yup. But not anywhere even close to the what the 'experts' predicted. Actually, it's a very small fraction of their projections.

But I AM checking back in a month like I said I would.

Gavin Newsom today - CA governor - at a live news conference, was explaining the criteria they are going to use to re-open the state. My earlier post from yesterday, my personal prediction, was like a crystal ball. I could have done the govenor's news conference yesterday for him.

 

[Browneye]

South Koreans would probably say - luckily they are not the US.
One has to be really dim to consider checking for 14 days how infected persons follow their quarantine to be a threat to democracy. Or to think that national health emergency is a plot against his freedom.

This is disingenuous. Nobody is saying or thinking that infected individuals shouldn't be quarantined. Many are up in arms because 99.99% of the population is healthy, but we are ALL being quarantined.
The facts are difficult for many, we get it.

 

[tomjasz]

This is disingenuous. Nobody is saying or thinking that infected individuals shouldn't be quarantined. Many are up in arms because 99.99% of the population is healthy, but we are ALL being quarantined.
The facts are difficult for many, we get it.

Life in a bubble. NY is an example of what could have happened. And still could happen. But I forget it’s a deep state conspiracy.

 

[Alex M]

Nobody is saying or thinking that infected individuals shouldn't be quarantined.

The point is - nobody (in the US or Canada) is doing anything about it, either.
We don't track whether these persons follow self-quarantine (when not hospitalized), or a mandatory 14-days self-isolation upon arrival from overseas when tested negative.

On the positive note, - there are more clueless places yet . Though not too many - Nicaragua, Brasil and Belarus. They just chose to ignore the virus.

 

[Handlebars]

Trump just cut the WHO rats.

 

[Deleted member 4210]

Almost 7% fatality rate in NY!

Result: 6.8834708653747%
6.8834708653747% of 106763 = 7349

Not even close to that. They are not capturing all the cases bc no where near enough testing is being done, and thousands are asymptomatic. What is raising death rates are:
Nursing homes - due to medical workers spreading it there, and people there taking care if them have terrible hygiene practices. Basically you are a sitting duck for this in one of these places . No one should be going in or out of any of them, and workers need to stay on site, and housed in RV's if needed.

NY labeling numerous deaths as Covid-19, when they could be pneumonia, or many other things and many doctors are admitting these people who died were never confirmed as actually having covid 19, bc they did not get tested. This is a travesty.

 

[Deleted member 4210]

@Deleted Member 4210 ,

I don't really know how to intellectually process what you are saying here. The reason there are fewer cases than expected is people changed their behavior. Best evidence is that people started social distancing in many places even before stay-at-home orders went into effect.

To start off with, I don't think anybody knows what the death rate for this virus actually is. There are large errors in both the denominator (due to inadequate testing and people who are asymptomatic) and in the numerator (best evidence is that we are significantly undercounting deaths). Plus, there are bewildering variances amongst population in both how easily this virus is transmitted (although to a first approximation "extremely easy" is a good answer) and how many people die from it. You probably can't say much more than that the death rate is somewhere between 0.1 percent and 10 percent. That is two whole orders of magnitude.

Also, a death rate of "only 0.5%" is still insane. You would not voluntarily participate in an activity that had a 0.5% chance of you dying, and very few people who were not completely cuckoo would do so. That is ten times more dangerous than paragliding or climbing in the Tetons, and approximately as risky as climbing an 8000-meter mountain in the Himalayas.

Based on experience in China (which of course may not apply here) it will probably take weeks, and possibly months, for new cases to fall to a low enough level that "reopening" will be feasible.

My own personal opinion is that anyone who thinks that you can end this mess by just declaring it "over" and "reopening" is completely nuts. Nobody is going to book a trip on a cruise ship. Damned few people are going to engage in personal or business travel of any kind (or even be able to). I doubt people are going to flock back to sporting events or concerts; You aren't likely to purchase a new car or new home or start a new business while something like this stalks the land.

The only way you are going to get things restarted again is (1) getting new cases to a very low level, preferably zero; and (2) having an infrastructure in place (large-scale testing and contact tracing) to catch the inevitable leakers. We have neither of those things and aren't likely to for months.

On testing, the US has stalled out at around 100,000 tests per day. Even the bare-minimum proposals on starting things up require about 750,000 tests per day. Some plausible proposals would require 20 millions tests per day or more. I have extreme doubts that testing even the lower of those amounts is possible without a huge ramp-up in capacity: we'd need more people doing tests, we'd need more machines to run the tests; we'd need more test kits; we'd need more reagents. Even scaling up antibody tests would have comparable challenges. Basically we are going to have to (1) train a small army of people to train the large army of people we will need to do the testing; and (2) either build entire factories or repurpose existing factories to make the testing equipment and materials needed for such an effort.

On contact tracing, we have comparable challenges. To adequately staff a nationwide effort we'd need to hire on the order of 1 million people. You are also going to need to build a huge organization to train and manage all those people. You can't do that overnight. The one glimmer of hope is that on the tech side of this Google and Apple seem to be collaborating on a contact-tracing smartphone app that would be enormously helpful in such an effort. Although it is interesting to note that there have been no other concrete steps taken by anybody to make a large-scale testing and contact tracing infrastructure possible.

These are enormous challenges. Given time and a supertanker full of money I think they are achievable challenges. But time is the one resource we don't necessarily have a lot of. Please understand that we are looking at order-of-magnitude increases in scale here. If you went to the beach every day and surfed 4-foot waves and showed up one day and there were 40-foot rollers you are really looking at a totally different sport. Quantity has a quality all its own.

Making all of that happen in two weeks (for a May 1 "reopening") is flat out impossible. Doing it by the end of May is borderline, and a more realistic time frame would be in July.

'Intellectually process' ?!!?

Cute. Long way of saying you 'don't get it', and you might try watching that video, before essentially dissing me in a very long winded whatever you tried to write, and dissing that doctor (who I paraphrased a few highlights, for those who didn't care to watch the video) and he's someone who's forgotten more than you'll ever know about health care let alone this virus. Seriously you of all people need to watch his video. And don't be so darn arrogant about everything all the time. Rather unbecoming of you. You've done that in a lot of threads, and not just mine.

 

[Deleted member 4210]

Correlation is not causation no matter how high your horse is.

Yeah it's unfortunate he doesn't get that the social distancing (locking people in homes and shutting down businesses) is wrecking the economy with far worse damage being created , than the virus itself. And that it does NOT stop the spread, as the spread is only being slowed slightly enough to keep peak hospitalizations down so the very limited capacity available to handle any of this, isn't completely overwhelmed. Everyone ultimately is GOING to get this, period, just like they get the flu. The vast majority will have flu like symptoms, and 99% will live and not need hospitalization. Herd immunity would develop much faster, AND this virus would become less potent if it was allowed to spread, just as all viruses in history have done. Humans have survived those viruses due to build up of anti bodies. Viruses need a host to survive. Humans. It's us versus them. Our natural immune system is design to fight this stuff. And all new stuff. However, we cannot continue to live in fear and stay in bubbles, or the virus wins. And economically it will be so Devastating to not continue working, that the human race will certainly die off as it will starve without economic activity. This virus is going to kill some people as all viruses like it, and the flu, do kill people. But it simply does not rate as a serious enough public health threat worthy of shutting down the entire economy, breaking entire supply chains, bankrupting businesses world wide, that will have no chance to ever recover or hire workers back for those that go under. It's time to stop the stupid, and open the economy back up now.

 

[pmcdonald]

I'm left speechless by the sentiment in the comment above, but then eugenics never was my cup of tea.

While we hunker down, wait this out and swap tit for tat comments about the appropiate or inappropriateness of the various responses to this pandemic, the armchair macro historian in me notes two big shifts:

• Another signal the globalisation project is teetering and lacks the resilience to survive whatever hellish future climate change throws at us
• Early signs of the ascendancy of one world power and the decline of another

I lement the passing of both.

 

[Browneye]

But it didn't have to be this way.

 

[tomjasz]

Not even close to that.

Show me? Those are the numbers. Yours are different?

 

[BlackHand]

NY labeling numerous deaths as Covid-19, when they could be pneumonia, or many other things and many doctors are admitting these people who died were never confirmed as actually having covid 19, bc they did not get tested. This is a travesty.

OK, Sure?... You stated the real problem - there's not enough testing up front even though NY is way ahead of the rest of the country in testing.

So just in case you think it's plausible that Covid-19 deaths in NYC are severely overreported:

Mean pneumonia caused deaths in NYC per year(1999-2015): 2435 link

NYC pneumonia caused deaths reported to and processed by CDC 2/1/20-4/11/20: 2744 CDC

(That report states that there is a delay of 1-8 weeks for all death reporting to show up in the report, it was updated on 4/14 so the pneumonia number is only going to go up). So more pneumonia deaths in an incomplete 10 weeks then in an average 52 weeks?

Nothing you said is untrue, but if you want to believe NYC is having a record setting pneumonia outbreak, go for it. I mean what else could it be?

 

[Handlebars]

• whatever hellish future climate change throws at us

• Your belief in climate catastrophe is based on narratives by politically driven volume liars, not on anything with scientific bases.
• The lies are easily discerned by comparison with the liars' own conflicting statements and the frenetic attempts to close down dissenting opinion by political action.
• As Phil Jones, as Director of the CRU in England, former adjuster and keeper and loser of the world's temperature records and highly cited researcher, told us, his work had never once, in his entire 30 yr career, been actually checked by a referee when submitted for publication. It's not science, it's a politically driven narrative that has fiercely and sometimes illegally co-opted a branch of research.
• If you really are stressed out by their narrative, you need only check for yourself whether or not the leading "scientists" have lied repeatedly to the public about their work and have gone along with ridiculously faked studies such as the "consensus" studies.