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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Atlanta is not burning. Bodies are not piled up in the streets. Hospitals in Georgia are not being overwhelmed; in fact, they are virtually empty. There is no mad rush for ventilators (remember those?). Instead, men, women, and children in the Peach State are returning to some semblance of normal life: working outside their homes, going to restaurants and bars, getting haircuts, exercising, and most important, spending time with their friends and families and worshipping God. The opening that began more than three weeks ago is continuing apace.

Oh, my apologies, you were waiting for bad news? Sorry, I forgot, we were actually not supposed to be rooting for the virus. Despite the apparent relish behind headlines like "Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice," one assumes that most Americans, even the ones most committed to omnidirectional prophecies of doom, were actually hoping this would happen. While it really is a shame that we do not get to gloat about the cravenness and stupidity of yet another GOP politician, I think on balance most of us will be glad to hear that Gov. Brian Kemp was not badly wrong here.

What is happening instead of the widely predicted bloodbath? Confirmed cases of the virus are obviously increasing (though the actual rolling weekly average of new ones have been headed down for nearly a month) while deaths remain more or less flat. This is in fact what happens when you test more people for a disease that is not fatal or even particularly serious for the vast majority of those who contract it, for which the median age of death is higher than the American life expectancy.

How was this possible? One answer is that the lockdown did not in fact do what it was supposed to do, which is to say, meaningfully impede transmission of the virus. In fact, data both from states like Georgia and from abroad suggests that the lifting of lockdowns is positively correlated with a decrease in rates of infection. This could be because lockdowns are inherently ineffective at slowing down a disease whose spread appears to be largely intrafamilial and nosocomial.

It could also be the weather. That's right: another thing that we were told months ago not even to suggest aloud because it would be irresponsible to make assumptions of any kind about the virus, even sensible ones, like the idea that wearing masks just might help slow it down. This is not science. COVID-19 arrived from China, not from outer space. Unsurprisingly, it appears to behave very much like other respiratory viruses, including influenza. It hates sunlight and the outdoors generally and prefers cramped stuffy conditions, like those found in public transit systems and dense housing complexes with poor ventilation.

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Most people are more likely to wind up six feet under because of almost anything else under the sun other than COVID-19.

The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%. Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago.

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In the political response to the Covid-19 pandemic, everything is proceeding just as economist Robert Higgs has foreseen. But that doesn’t make it any easier for him to watch it. “I have an overwhelming feeling that I am reliving a bad experience I’ve lived through several times before, only this time it’s worse,” Higgs says. “I have no doubt that even if the current situation plays out in the best imaginable way, it will leave an abundance of legacies for the worse so far as people’s freedom is concerned.”

Higgs sees government, as usual, vastly expanding during the crisis, and he’s sure that it will not shrink back to its former scale once the crisis is over. It never does, as he famously documented in his 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, and in later works exploring this “ratchet effect.”

By surveying the effect of wars, financial panics, and other crises over the course of a century, Higgs showed that most government growth occurs in sporadic bursts during emergencies, when politicians enact “temporary” programs and regulations that never get fully abolished. New Deal bureaucracies and subsidies persisted long after the Great Depression, for example, and the U.S. military didn’t revert to its prewar size after either of the world wars.

Besides charting the growth of government, Higgs identified the fundamental psychological cause. He recognized the political significance of the negativity effect, also called the negativity bias—the universal tendency of negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You can't find one thing that I've been wrong about. That's why you're such a laughingstock, JACK.

Well, that and all your faux claims you've had to drop or backtrack on because they were flat out wrong.

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Jan 31
One thing he did mention many times is that there are only a limited number of test kits... in his estimation, each hospital is getting only 100 kits per day, and that the hospitals are EXTREMELY reluctant to test people if they don't believe that the patient is seriously sick with flu.
IF TRUE, that does a couple of things ... it reduces the total number of diagnosed patients. At the same time, it drastically increases the measured death rate, since asymptomatic/ mildly symptomatic people would never be tested positive. The only way to get a true death rate is near-universal testing of at least one sub-population.

Jan 31
China has in the past built "instant" structures ... hospitals, apartment complexes, skyscrapers, bridges etc. They're fully capable of that. If they're really doing it, then they either perceive a real epidemic problem, or a real political one (in which the local government ... which everyone knows are more corrupt than the national one ... sat on a secret and hoped it would go away, leaving the national government to contain the political fallout.

Jan31
As I read the paper, the "function" of those snippets of genome is "host recognition and binding". In other words, they would make the virus much more infectious (is that the correct word?) i.e. able to grab onto the human host cell more efficiently than a regular corona virus.
If that's the case, then that might explain the unusually high R-naught that some people seem to be estimating.

Feb2
The latest figures point to a roughly 2% fatality rate.
One good thing about the virus moving out of China is that we'll get better numbers, because (again, if I believe the Chinese social media) the Wuhan government is so overwhelmed and test kits are so scarce relative to the demand that nobody has any good figures on R-naught and death rate.
But clearly this isn't Ebola, with a 90% death rate.

Feb3
It seems to me, KIKI, that this whole concept of "insertions" should be easily proved or disproved. There was one team than said they found them. Well, they're either there, or they're not. They're either part of the "host cell recognition and docking" mechanisms, or they're not.
Where are the other virologists to either replicate or dispute the findings?
Because IF the insertions are there, and IF they're unprecedented to coronaviruses, and IF they have a function in the virus and increase infectivity, THEN that should tell people an awful lot about what governments do in secret. And when I say that "they have no moral or ethical boundaries to cross" I would have to expand the scope of my imagination to encompass that.

Feb11
With a 2.5% fataltiy rate, this would not be an extinction-level event. It would be just the old and pulmonary-compromised people (like me) who would be sickled off the end of the population-curve.
Now, if this were Ebola (60-90+% fatality rate, and the last big scare) ... THAT would be a near-extinction-level event!
What an outbreak of NOCOV-19 across the world would do is disrupt economies immensely, as people "hunkered down" and tried to reverse-quarantine. Since most people don't have the resources (either food or money) to stay at home for anything more than a day or two ... doomed to failure.
Curiously, the Mormons would probably fare well. Apparently they have this "thing" about storing food at home and institutionally (in the Church) for emergencies.

Feb12

China reports huge jump in new infections...

Phone makes it difficult to copy, but Hubei reported an additional 14,840 infections and 242 deaths, due to a change in definition (AGAIN). Originally they were including asymptomatic people who tested positive. Then they started excluding asymptomatic people who tested positive. Then they reversed their previous change and are now including asymptomatic people who test positive, and also including people diagnosed on the basis of "clinical symptoms" without a positive test (because test kits may not be available or result in false negatives)
For comparison, just the day before the definition change, the number of "new infections" was about 2000 and going down.
My take on this is that China is seeing a real reduction in cases and now that they feel they have a handle on this they're letting in foreigners and being more honest with their numbers. Chinese really don't want to air their dirty laundry especially to foreigners. To mix metaphors, something about losing face

Feb15
And just an "I told you so", which I should post in the relevant thread ... I have been thumping for quite a few years under What are America's interests? that the USA ... and indeed ALL nations interested in self-preservation ... should have as self-sufficient economy and neutral balance of trade as possible. The reason for that thinking is that highly centralized and interconnected production, while extremely profitable, is also extremely FRAGILE. I have pointed out several cases ... the plastics factory in Japan that was the only source of chip-making plastic which caught on fire, leaving the world with no ability to make memory sticks, the JUST IN TIME delivery which leaves every production facility hostage to any interrruption in transportation ...
Well, here we have China, "factory to the world" (and also source of cheap migrant labor into S Korea and Japan) ... a position which it coveted and which "advanced" nations were willing to give up ... in essence shutting down to control the spread of the Wuhan virus.
Yanno, we can do without Apple products. But China is a source in a vast and unaccounted SUPPLY CHAIN for a vast number of products, from car parts to textiles. They disrupted our entire recycling industry when they stopped taking our contaminated plastics ... what would happen if they were to shut down almost entirely?
When I was working, I had to order specialty chemicals to use as standards so we could analyze a wide variety of industrial and household products. Acrylic glue for packaging tape, the kind so beloved by Amazon. Resins for autobody paints. Surfactants for cleaners and stabilizers/antifungals for house paints. Catalysts for oil refining FCCUs.
Do you know how many were made in the USA?
NONE.
Some in Germany, but mostly in China. Pharmaceutics? Pesticides? Where are THEY coming from?

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Mar3
Meanwhile, the shock of discovering another "first" ... first patient, first death, first cluster ... in yet another nation, state, or province, seems to be wearing off.
We've been seeing patients being rushed to hospital under oxygen by medics in space suits, which is very scary, but some reports are coming back from people who have recovered, saying that it was no worse than having a cold.
What this probably will be is a MASS PROBLEM. MOST patients are going to recover just fine, but a certain portion ... especially the elderly and those with heart problems, diabetes, or respiratory problems ... are going to become extremely ill, and there won't be enough hospital beds, IF the spread of the coronavirus isn't slowed down by isolation measures....
In the meantime, dd and I are starting a new fashion statement: we're running errands in masks. (WOW! What a way to pull a bank robbery!) We've set up a "decontamination" station at the breezeway sink, which is our dividing line between "clean" and "dirty".

Mar10
I think SIX was hoping to catch you repeating an M$M "lie" so he could ignore the numbers.
Trump is playing to his "base" by downplaying the virus and saying it will "go away". Well, maybe it will throttle back in summer, maybe it will mutate to a less virulent form but there's no guarantee that will ever happen.
I was never part of his base, and if his prediction doesn't come true before the election then IMHO he's digging himself a "heckuva a job, Brownie"-sized hole and it will swallow his election.
Don't get me wrong, SIX. I'm HOPING that Trump wakes the fuck up. I'm on his side. Better late than never.

Mar11
What's with the lack of test kits???
Supposedly they were distributed last week, totaling up to 1.5 million individual tests (roughly 450,000 patients) and THIS week 78 public health labs were certified.
So WTF??
yes, I know ... it's hard to get big programs going at the drop of a hat. This speaks to the slow strangulation of governmental science and medicine by previous Presidents over various terms of office ... but still. Is this deliberate or just mind-blowingly incompetent??

Mar12
Not only is hand sanitizer missing, so is rubbing alcohol (the active ingredient). There's a lot of misinformation "out there" which results in people buying or making sanitizers with ineffective concentrations of alcohol, which is a great way to waste alcohol
Sanitizer is great for situations where you can't leave your work station (like assembly line), for high-contact jobs like receptionists, fast food, and cashiers, where you have close minute-by-minute contact with lots of people (like caregivers, EMTs etc) and aren't always near a sink or can't wash your hands every minute.
Same goes for masks (not even respirators) which at least keeps those people from touching their faces. Everyone who MUST work with a lot of people should have a mask and sanitizer at their work station. It just seems like a job requirement nowadays.

mar15
The # of confirmed case in the USA for the past two-three days has topped out at approx +400/day. But there STILL isn't widespread testing available! So possibly this topping-out reflects the number of tests that can be performed. The CDC is promising it will have the testing snafu worked out ... any day now...!

mar19
It's a little like the Spanish Flu. The case fatality rate (#deaths/#infected) is widely quoted as anything from 2-10%, but in reality nobody knows because they didn't have tests back then. All they could do is look at symptoms. So the ACTUAL case fatality rate might have been much lower. In reality, we will never know. But even with a lower case fatality rate, because it was so infectious it still killed a lot of people.

mar20
added #staythefuckhome to my tagline

mar26
with all of the data available we shold be able to start to draw some conclusions, or at least ask questions.
I noticed, for example, that after Italy went on lockdown the number of new cases tends to stick pretty close to an average of about 5,500, which means it is no longer exponential. But where is the transmission still occurring?

mar27
Trying to "grok" the data here, unfortunately the quality of what it available online makes that difficult.
For example, Italy's death rate (deaths per day) rose again. It was at about 650 per day, jumped to a high of 800, dropped down, but is now back up again at 919. But that leads me to wonder ... what is the death toll for Bergamo? Bergamo is the hardest-hit. It was several weeks ahead of the rest of Italy, and instituted a lockdown before the rest of Italy. Is the death rate declining, because the most vulnerable have already died? Is the death rate declining because Russia swooped in with ventilators and other assistance? Is the death rate NOT declining? That kind of detail would really be helpful in understanding what works, and what doesn't. Needs more thought.
Same with NYC. It's hard to tell whether "social distancing" has been successful, or not. The pictures I see of NYC public spaces all have young people in them, so maybe the coronavirus is spreading (undetected) among young people, but the vulnerable have chosen to #staythefuckhome so the death rate will still be lower than the healthcare system capacity.

mar28
We have the Amber Alert on our phones, and yesterday it blared out, repeatedly, in English and Spanish, that parks, trails, and beaches were closed. I didn'r catch whether that was a state or county order, LA CITY already has more enforced "shelter in place" orders.
I think what's really going to clobber our system is the #of homeless and illegals. I imagine COVID-19 spreading like wildfire among Skid Row and the many other homeless encampments in LA County. Hell, we've had a couple of disease scares among the homeless already. And then there are the marginally-housed illegals who live in their own set of encampments. Maybe CA will learn that you're not supposed to let people roost, like pigeons, in the untennanted parts of our economy, plucking them out ar random for odd jobs "as needed" or shuttling them thru one-night stints in the drunk tank. You either provide them full services or, if you can't provide reliable jobs and services, you kick them out. None of this halfway bullshit.

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mar29
SIX:Young and healthy people don't die from this. Period.

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apr8

I heard about, but have not been able to find a follow-up article on the fact that the UK's NHS deemed the serological test kits to be not acccurate enough, and won't distribute them. I don't know if the problem is poor sensitivity or lack of specificity. There is ANOTHER serological finger-stick test for Covid-19 antibodies which the company (falsely) claimed was approved by the FDA (BodySphere) https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/02/health/coronavirus-test-false-fda-autho
rization/index.html

As far as I can tell, the only serological test approved by the FDA by Cellex https://www.medtechdive.com/news/fda-authorizes-cellex-coronavirus-ant
ibodies-test/575451/ is for in-office and in-laboratory testing. So, no five-minute or two-minute or in-home test yet, altho I'm sure one will be developed at some point (It's a tried-and-true approach)

apr9
Actually, if you look at the data, I wonder whether antibodies (immunoglobulins) are the most effective way to clear the virus. If young people seem to do better but have fewer antibodies (at least to the spike proteins) and older people have more spike protein antibodies but don't fare as well, maybe other parts of the immune system (or antibodies to other parts of the virus) are more effective at inactivating it.
I don't know much about the immune system, other than there have got to be at least a dozen separate components that turn it on, and off (cytokines, antibodies/plasma cells, T cells, macrophages, interferons, steroids, calcineurin, etc) Every time I look itup, I bump into at least two other things I didn't know.

apr10
changed my tagline to #wearamask

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What also makes you think that I don't apply those same standards to myself and what should happen to me when I'm old and sick either?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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How, exactly, am I shitting my pants over this situation again?

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