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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wrong

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And here I am, telling them that they should get up off their asses, step away from whatever screen they're looking at, and MAKE themselves essential. Take back control of government and economic policy. Stop begging for "more of the same but worse" and start working towards something better.

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SIX ...instead of wiping out less people in a year than die from automobile accidents

SIGNY:Wrong

SIX: Yes. You are wrong in your assertion that I'm wrong.

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SIX: ... most of whom were close to checking out anyhow.

SIGNY: Wrong.

SIX: Yes. You are also wrong again in this assertion that I'm wrong.

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SIGNY: But, good question: why not kill off a bunch of people? Maybe because if you kill off enough people, SOME wealth will concentrate among the sheeple, and the goal is to make the sheeple poor, not to make people dead?

SIX: The sheeple are already poor. You're a boomer at the end of your life who still has some of the pie. You just haven't noticed it in your own life that everyone after you is fucked.

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SIGNY: The only winner so far is The Fed because it has 'lent' many big banks ... including international ones ... an unimaginable amount of money and now has them in thrall. The EU central bank (ECB) so far has not been able to crank up digital money-creation because the nation backstopping such loans ... Germany... won't go along with it.

SIX: No more in their thrall than they already were. Our currency has been monopoly money for longer than I've been alive. This didn't just happen in the last 2 months.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Do you even have a ballpark figure in your head as to how many people die of automobile accidents every year? I do. You, apparently, don't. You might want to look that up instead of speaking from your ass.

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Not my ass, but the WHO does have the stink of a bunch of assholes running that show.

But yeah... 1.25 MILLION globally in 2013, according to the WHO, since you asked.

https://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_number/en/

Yup. I'm right again. Thank you very much.

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Do you have any idea how many additional years those people would have lived if not for Covid-19? I do. You might want to look that up instead of speaking from your ass.

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Of the very small amount of people who actually died of the Coomph, and not all those bullshit inflated numbers by adding a bunch of deaths that weren't due to the Coomph, not many.

If you are younger than the average life expectancy of a human being, you have almost ZERO to worry about even if you catch it. FACT.

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People MY age are fucked. That handyman, that homeless sometime gardener, people in my own close family? They got fucked, too. It's not just people "after me" ... like everyone my age has it made ... EVERYONE is getting fucked. That's why there's 70-year-old Walmart greeters. Jeezus, SIX, stop feeling so specially picked on!

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The only difference is that we're all going to be WalMart greeters when my generation is your age. Without retirement funds. Without any meaningful health insurance.

Oh, wait... half of us are non-essential now. We're going to wish we could be WalMart greeters.

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Apparently you haven't looked into the Fed balance sheet lately, nor the Exchange Stabilization Fund. Again, you might want to look that up instead of speaking out of your ass.

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What the fuck does it matter if we're talking billions or trillions when it's all monopoly money. So what that they have more paper and ones and zeros. They already owned everything long before The Coomph made you piss your panties.

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MORE LATER

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SIGNYM: Do you even have a ballpark figure in your head as to how many people die of automobile accidents every year? I do. You, apparently, don't. You might want to look that up instead of speaking from your ass.

SIX: ...yeah... 1.25 MILLION globally in 2013, according to the WHO, since you asked.

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SIGNY: Do you have any idea how many additional years those people would have lived if not for Covid-19? I do. You might want to look that up instead of speaking from your ass.

SIX: Of the very small amount of people who actually died of the Coomph

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, and not all those bullshit inflated numbers by adding a bunch of deaths that weren't due to the Coomph, not many.

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SIGNY: People MY age are fucked. That handyman, that homeless sometime gardener, people in my own close family? They got fucked, too. It's not just people "after me" ... like everyone my age has it made ... EVERYONE is getting fucked. That's why there's 70-year-old Walmart greeters. Jeezus, SIX, stop feeling so specially picked on!

SIX: The only difference is that we're all going to be WalMart greeters when my generation is your age. Without retirement funds. Without any meaningful health insurance. Oh, wait... half of us are non-essential now. We're going to wish we could be WalMart greeters.

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SIGNY: Apparently you haven't looked into the Fed balance sheet lately, nor the Exchange Stabilization Fund. Again, you might want to look that up instead of speaking out of your ass.

SIX: What the fuck does it matter if we're talking billions or trillions when it's all monopoly money. So what that they have more paper and ones and zeros.

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American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic

* U.S. billionaires saw their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the nation's lockdown between mid-March and mid-May, according to a new report.

*Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg had the biggest gains.

*Bezos added $34.6 billion to his wealth and Zuckerberg picked up $25 billion.

America's billionaires saw their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the U.S. lockdown between mid-March and mid-May, according to a new report.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg had the biggest gains, with Bezos adding $34.6 billion to his wealth and Zuckerberg adding $25 billion, according to the report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies' Program for Inequality. The report is based on Forbes data for America's more than 600 billionaires between March 18, when most states were in lockdown, and May 19.

The billionaire gains highlight how the coronavirus pandemic has rewarded the largest and most tech-focused companies, even as the economy and labor force grapples with the worst economic crisis in recent history.

According to the report, the net worth of America's billionaires grew 15% during the two-month period, to $3.382 trillion from $2.948 trillion. The biggest gains were at the top of the billionaire pyramid, with the richest five billionaires -- Bezos, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison -- seeing combined wealth gains of $76 billion.

Elon Musk had among the largest percentage gain of billionaires during the two months, seeing his net worth jump by 48% in the two months to $36 billion. Zuckerberg was close behind, seeing his wealth surge by 46% in the two months, to $80 billion. Bezos' wealth increased by 31% to $147 billion. Bezos' ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, who received Amazon shares in their divorce, also saw her wealth increase by a third, to $48 billion.

Because the study timeline captures the stock market bottom and quick rebound, it creates a slightly sunnier picture for billionaires than the full year. For the year, Buffett's wealth has declined by $20 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index, while Gates is down by $4.3 billion. For the year, Jeff Bezos has gained $35.5 billion while Zuckerberg is up by $9 billion.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Your US death numbers for the Coomph are bullshit Signy.

Until you can admit that, we have nothing further to discuss on the topic.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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The problem with the Covid-19 death numbers
...I was reminded of that disconnect between truth and reality -- and the difficulties of accounting for disaster-related deaths -- this week as researchers from Yale School of Public Health and the Washington Post published a report looking at "excess deaths" from Covid-19.

The Yale findings indicate officials are vastly underestimating the toll of the pandemic.

"What the actual fatality count from Covid is or was is still not clear," Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, as well as a professor of public health, told me. "We're in a muddle of numbers, which is a problem."

It may seem a callous term, but "excess deaths" are critical to understanding this pandemic. The term refers to the number of deaths that are found to be in "excess" of the normal death rate for a particular place during a certain period of time.
This is a statistical estimate, not a case-by-case accounting. Yet many epidemiologists and medical examiners consider it to be the best measure of pandemic- and disaster-related deaths. It's not hard to see why. It's easier to measure the total number of deaths and compare those to a past baseline than it is to test every victim, to review their medical records, to interview their family members and to come to an objective assessment. That case-by-case methodology is extremely hard to carry out in practice and often will come up short.

"The assignment of causes of death is more of an art than a science," Daniel Weinberger, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, and the report's lead researcher, told me. The assignment might change from one doctor to the next, he said.

...The Yale figures work like that, too. The researchers found 15,400 excess deaths in the United States from March 1 through April 4, the early weeks of the coronavirus's rampage through this country. During that time, only about half that many deaths -- 8,128 -- had been attributed to Covid-19, according the report.

The figures suggest the pandemic has been far worse than reported.

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"Not everyone who dies due to Covid-19 is going to have 'Covid' listed on their death certificate or get counted in those official statistics; so there is going to be some level of undercounting," said Weinberger, from the Yale School of Public Health. "Because of the lags in the [mortality] data and how long it takes to report and backfill the data, it's going to be some time before we have a handle on how much it's underreported. A conservative estimate is that the real number [of Covid-19 deaths] is maybe 1 ½ or two times higher than what the reported numbers are."
The excess death figures aren't perfect, either, Weinberger said. Did deaths drop because there are fewer traffic accidents with fewer people on the road? Did some people avoid seeking medical care because they were afraid of catching Covid-19 at a hospital, and therefore died from otherwise treatable infections or diseases? It's hard to tell. But the measurement remains a critical method for understanding the broad impact of the coronavirus, experts said.
I asked Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, whether excess deaths were the best measure of the toll of a pandemic. Yes, he said. "For sure."
The point, to me, and to the experts I reached by phone this week, is that we know far less about the actual toll of Covid-19 in the United States than officials and the media tell us.

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SIGNY: Apparently you haven't looked into the Fed balance sheet lately, nor the Exchange Stabilization Fund. Again, you might want to look that up instead of speaking out of your ass.

SIX: What the fuck does it matter if we're talking billions or trillions when it's all monopoly money. So what that they have more paper and ones and zeros.

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SIGNY: It isn't. If you can drop out of the workforce and nobody goes hungry or naked or sick or unhoused, then what were you doing, exactly? Polishing doorknobs?

SIX: Then figure out UBI or something. And then figure out a way to keep people busy that doesn't involve jacking off all day and watching Netflix. Because we're on the precipice of an unprecedented amount of suicides when the realization hits millions that their existence is superfluous. Particularly among males.

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SIGNY: Why would the elite kill off a bunch of people? Has it not occurred to you that the elite want an entire WORLD full of desperately poor people who have no control over their future? Maybe their idea of heaven is billions of people in such miserable conditions that they're willing to do ANYthing ... sell their kidneys, their hearts, their babies ... to extend the lives of the elite. Yanno, their idea of heaven could be our idea of hell.

SIX: Overpopulation. It is the real crisis of the 21st century.

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SIX: Maybe the plan is to catalyze en-masse suicide. Then the media can say that they did it to themselves.

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SIGNY: And here I am, telling them that they should get up off their asses, step away from whatever screen they're looking at, and MAKE themselves essential. Take back control of government and economic policy. Stop begging for "more of the same but worse" and start working towards something better.

SIX: And how exactly do you make yourself "essential"?

There's too many people. That is impossible. We're a world of consumers.

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If consumerism dies after this, than so does the purpose of half of the human beings on the planet.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Your US death numbers for the Coomph are bullshit Signy.

Until you can admit that, we have nothing further to discuss on the topic.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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So, SPEAKING OF BULLSHIT NUMBERS...

WHAT ABOUT THAT 4TH GRADE ARITHMETIC PROBLEM THAT YOU'VE BEEN AVOIDING, SIX?

YOU KNOW ...

327 MILLION * 0.4 (OR 0.3, IF YOU WANT TO BE CONSERVATIVE) INFECTION FATALITY RATE?

HOW MUCH WAS THAT, AGAIN?

500.000?





-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Here's the funny thing: you whine that men are going to off themselves when they are not longer able to acquire any of that funny-money that you seem to think is useless, and you whine when men are suddenly faced with actually having to WORK for a living when other nations stop accepting our funny-money.

So what, exactly, are you complaining about?

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Not to be too pointed about it, but you've mentioned suicide so many times I'm beginning to worry that you've got suicidal ideation. You OK, SIX?

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Signy forgot to add the % symbol

AND

your math is still wrong.

When YOU looked at the 0.004 CDC figure YOU thought it meant 0.004% .

IT DOESN'T.

It meant 0.004 FRACTION. Or, for those who can read and do simple math, 0.4%


So try your math again and tell me - does 325M * 0.4% = 500,000 like you ... HA HA HA HA HA HA HA ha ha ha ha ... ... figure?

'Cause if you think so, your problem goes beyond mere stupid.

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SIGNY: Here's the funny thing: you whine that men are going to off themselves when they are not longer able to acquire any of that funny-money that you seem to think is useless, and you whine when men are suddenly faced with actually having to WORK for a living when other nations stop accepting our funny-money.

So what, exactly, are you complaining about?

SIX: Go back to work doing WHAT

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There are now 35 million more people unemployed that have been told for 60 days that they were unessential. How many of those jobs do you think are going to come back? Maybe half of them if we're lucky.

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SIX: Where are these magic jobs going to come from?

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SIGNY: FOR WHO? Not for the wealthy elite! They'll still have their chateaux in the mountains, and their private island retreats and, if worse comes to worst, their bunkers in New Zealand. You seem to think the wealthy envision sharing a common future with the rest of us, when their entire life experience have told them no such thing.

SIX: You seem to be putting a much larger importance on money backed by paper than you should be.

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SIX: Do you believe that the wealthy elite all agree with each other that global warming isn't real and that we haven't contributed to it? Or a more accurate question is, do you believe that 100% of the wealthy elite are so absolutely certain that global warming isn't real and we don't contribute to it that they're willing to risk allowing our severe overpopulation problem along with our ever increasing carbon footprint to grow unchecked so they can have more slaves?

I mean, really... How many slaves are enough? Where's the ROI on having 7 Billion slaves when half of them are "non-essential"? That's not very Six Sigma.

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That's an extra 3.5 Billion mouths to feed that don't need to be fed. An extra 3.5 Billion people polluting the air and the environment. An extra 3.5 Billion people that need to be housed.

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SIX: An extra 3.5 Billion people that need just enough shit that they don't start burning everything down.

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SIX: From a managerial aspect, there's no benefit to having that many people. If there were half as many people, it's twice as easy to keep them happy enough where the idea of revolt isn't in all of their heads 24/7.

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SIX: Under the right circumstances, it's possible to have a few billion slaves who find their existences copacetic enough that they don't even really feel like they are slaves. Under those circumstances, the majority would likely argue against the more intelligent that they aren't slaves.

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SIGNY: Hmm... I don't think the elite worry over-much abou the morality of killing a million ... or a billion... people. I just don't think they'd bother with "overpopulation" as a problem. It's only a problem if you imagine that YOU'RE going to be in the scrum, fighting for resources.

SIX: Boy... have you been coming off as an elitist yourself recently. Must be nice in those cushy California digs you got with your cushy retirement accounts and health insurance.

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SIGNY: Every consumer needs a producer. It is possible to be both.

SIX: You're forgetting halfway through your post that 35 million people in America alone have just been told that what they do is non-essential. And you offer zero ideas for job replacement for them. It's impossible to have a conversation with you because you're changing your argument every time you break my post up to reply to me.

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SIGNY: Not to be too pointed about it, but you've mentioned suicide so many times I'm beginning to worry that you've got suicidal ideation. You OK, SIX?

SIX: Nah. I already got all of that out of my system.
I told you and Karen before that I've been through all of this and you're all living in my world now.

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SIX:But I'm far more in touch with your average citizen than you could ever possibly be with your Karen problems in the middle of Karenfornia.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Why are you hoping for all of these non-essential jobs to come back? Do you LIKE getting paid shit for shit jobs?

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A few points I should make to this question:

1. What is essential and non-essential is highly subjective. A perfect example would be the smoke shop run by the only Indian guy I ever see in my area. His prices are fair and he's earned my loyalty. Our governor shut his store and likely his entire livelihood down. In the mean time, I've been perfectly free to order the products online, which I'm sure was something that was already killing his business before the shutdown happened.

2. We've already discussed overpopulation and how it relates to jobs years ago. I've already known that most of our existences, particularly through our vocation, are superfluous and said as much back then. This is new news to 35 million or so Americans.

3. I'd bet that if you looked into what jobs are still deemed essential, 25% of them are still minimum wage shit jobs, and more than 50% of them pay less than $15 per hour, and it's very likely that most of them don't include benefits like health insurance. Even if they did, you still have to pay for the health insurance.

Point number 4 is the question I asked next but you didn't really answer...

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SIX: Where are these magic jobs going to come from?

SIGS: I would especially like to see "banker", "internet mogul", "financial analyst", "investment advisor", "internet influencer", "greeter" and "barrista" disappear.

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Okay. Me too, if you want my opinion. But except for the short time Starbucks shut down, "barrista" was the only one out of work even in this shutdown. They might not actually be essential, but none of them were ever deemed non-essential. I'm sure if you asked any of them they would feel highly insulted if you insinuated that what they do for a living isn't essential, and the fact that they weren't put out of business by the government in the last 60 days would really be all the justification they'd need in their argument.

But seriously... Where are these magic essential jobs for 35 million Americans going to come from?

I'd love for the answer to be jobs upgrading and updating our crumbling and antiquated infrastructure. But who's going to pay for it?

And if the answer to that is "The Government", great!

But if that extremely unlikely scenario ever unfolds, I can't help but wonder exactly how far back in the queue I'm going to be as a white male. If this new Government Infrastructure Jobs Project were a train, I'm assuming I'd be sitting in the back of the caboose.

Just sayin.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Quote:

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
How this virus moves in a population isn't clear to me.

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KIKI: How this virus moves in a population isn't clear to me.


SIX: Nothing is clear to you.
You're a retard.

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How Cluster Cases Drive The Covid Pandemic

One of the many mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic is how the disease actually spreads. We were told to wash hands and about the dangers of droplets in one to one contacts. But newer evidence continues to point in another direction.

There are more and more reports about cases where the infections seems to have spread by aerosol, droplets smaller than 5µm in diameter, instead of by bigger droplets or fomites like surfaces and objects. Lambert Strether has collected reports of cluster cases in restaurants, buses, ships and a callcenter where aerosol transmission was the most likely cause:

There’s mounting evidence that airborne transmission indoors is a key — perhaps the main — pathway to SARS-COV-2 transmission. In this post I want to look at why that’s so, give examples, and suggest a simple heuristic to stay safe....

That paragraph is footnoted with a link to a WHO recommendation from March.

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Since then much has been learned about cluster cases in which aerosols were the most likely transmitter of the disease.

Aerosols are droplets smaller than 5 micrometers. At that small size they do not fall to the ground but float in the airstream. Unlike droplets they are not a problem outside of closed rooms as the normal air movement will start to disperse them immediately.

A study in Hubei tracked down 318 cluster creating incidents in which at least 3 persons were involved. It found that only one happened in open air. A Japanese study says that the risk of infection indoors are 19 times higher than outdoors.

An early study has found that the secondary attack rate in households defined as "the probability that an infection occurs among susceptible people within a specific group (ie, household or close contacts)" is quite low at some 35%. Other studies have come to even lower values of some 25%. There were a number of reports of families where only one or two persons were infected while other members of the household did not catch the disease.

But the overall reproduction rate R0 of Covid-19 is estimated to be somewhere between 2 and 3. That means that without isolation measures each newly infected person will on average infect 2 to 3 other persons. How does that fit with the relatively low secondary infections in households?

Science has published a must read piece that explains this conundrum:

Other infectious diseases also spread in clusters. But COVID-19, like two of its cousins, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), seems especially prone to attacking groups of tightly connected people while sparing others. It's an encouraging finding, scientists say, because it suggests that restricting gatherings where superspreading is likely to occur will have a major impact on transmission and that other restrictions—on outdoor activity, for example—might be eased.
...
Most of the discussion around the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has concentrated on the average number of new infections caused by each patient. Without social distancing, this reproduction number (R) is about three. But in real life, some people infect many others and others don't spread the disease at all. In fact, the latter is the norm, Lloyd-Smith says: “The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero. Most people do not transmit.”

That's why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters. The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people. In a seminal 2005 Nature paper, Lloyd-Smith and co-authors estimated that SARS—in which superspreading played a major role—had a k of 0.16. The estimated k for MERS, which emerged in 2012, is about 0.25. In the flu pandemic of 1918, in contrast, the value was about one, indicating that clusters played less of a role.

Current estimates of the dispersion factor k for SARS-CoV-2 vary between 0.1 and 0.5. That means that cluster infections from relatively few superspreading events drive the epidemic more than single transmissions from one person to another person.

This explains the success of the Japanese strategy which brought the epidemic in that country down without ordering strict lockdown measures:

As of Thursday, Japan had confirmed more than 16,000 infections and about 900 deaths from the virus, by far the lowest figures among the Group of Seven major economies.

Japan has urged people to avoid environments with what it calls the “Three Cs”, meaning close contact in closed-off, crowded spaces, where experts say most infections have occurred.

Without knowing if the measures would work Japan picked the right strategy. Only those events and places where superspreading is most likely to occur where shunned. Additionally the people in Japan actually wear their masks and generally health conscious and disciplined.

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Unfortunately it is unlikely that 'western' nations will develop such discipline.

Yves Smith has written about her recent personal experience in a hospital in Alabama where even the staff was not wearing masks and was also otherwise quite careless. This at a time where numbers in Alabama are surging.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

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KIKI: How this virus moves in a population isn't clear to me.


SIX: Nothing is clear to you.
You're a retard.

---

Well, now we see that SIX can't carry on an intelligent discussion of viruses, so he has to call people names.


-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Quote:

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KIKI: How this virus moves in a population isn't clear to me.


SIX: Nothing is clear to you.
You're a retard.

SIGNY: Well, now we see that SIX can't carry on an intelligent discussion of viruses, so he has to call people names.

SIX: Karen's been bouncing around from thread to thread, some not even related tot he virus, just to personally attack me.

I don't feel sorry. Even Wishy never stalked me like this when she was off her pills and at her worst. At this point I quite prefer dialog with Wish.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I ran across this at Moon of Alabama

Quote:

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How Cluster Cases Drive The Covid Pandemic

One of the many mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic is how the disease actually spreads. We were told to wash hands and about the dangers of droplets in one to one contacts. But newer evidence continues to point in another direction.

There are more and more reports about cases where the infections seems to have spread by aerosol, droplets smaller than 5µm in diameter, instead of by bigger droplets or fomites like surfaces and objects. Lambert Strether has collected reports of cluster cases in restaurants, buses, ships and a callcenter where aerosol transmission was the most likely cause:

There’s mounting evidence that airborne transmission indoors is a key — perhaps the main — pathway to SARS-COV-2 transmission. In this post I want to look at why that’s so, give examples, and suggest a simple heuristic to stay safe....

That paragraph is footnoted with a link to a WHO recommendation from March.

---

WHO has been corrupt since the beginning

Quote:

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Since then much has been learned about cluster cases in which aerosols were the most likely transmitter of the disease.

Aerosols are droplets smaller than 5 micrometers. At that small size they do not fall to the ground but float in the airstream. Unlike droplets they are not a problem outside of closed rooms as the normal air movement will start to disperse them immediately.

A study in Hubei tracked down 318 cluster creating incidents in which at least 3 persons were involved. It found that only one happened in open air. A Japanese study says that the risk of infection indoors are 19 times higher than outdoors.

An early study has found that the secondary attack rate in households defined as "the probability that an infection occurs among susceptible people within a specific group (ie, household or close contacts)" is quite low at some 35%. Other studies have come to even lower values of some 25%. There were a number of reports of families where only one or two persons were infected while other members of the household did not catch the disease.

But the overall reproduction rate R0 of Covid-19 is estimated to be somewhere between 2 and 3. That means that without isolation measures each newly infected person will on average infect 2 to 3 other persons. How does that fit with the relatively low secondary infections in households?

Science has published a must read piece that explains this conundrum:

Other infectious diseases also spread in clusters. But COVID-19, like two of its cousins, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), seems especially prone to attacking groups of tightly connected people while sparing others. It's an encouraging finding, scientists say, because it suggests that restricting gatherings where superspreading is likely to occur will have a major impact on transmission and that other restrictions—on outdoor activity, for example—might be eased.
...
Most of the discussion around the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has concentrated on the average number of new infections caused by each patient. Without social distancing, this reproduction number (R) is about three. But in real life, some people infect many others and others don't spread the disease at all. In fact, the latter is the norm, Lloyd-Smith says: “The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero. Most people do not transmit.”

That's why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters. The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people. In a seminal 2005 Nature paper, Lloyd-Smith and co-authors estimated that SARS—in which superspreading played a major role—had a k of 0.16. The estimated k for MERS, which emerged in 2012, is about 0.25. In the flu pandemic of 1918, in contrast, the value was about one, indicating that clusters played less of a role.

Current estimates of the dispersion factor k for SARS-CoV-2 vary between 0.1 and 0.5. That means that cluster infections from relatively few superspreading events drive the epidemic more than single transmissions from one person to another person.

This explains the success of the Japanese strategy which brought the epidemic in that country down without ordering strict lockdown measures:

As of Thursday, Japan had confirmed more than 16,000 infections and about 900 deaths from the virus, by far the lowest figures among the Group of Seven major economies.

Japan has urged people to avoid environments with what it calls the “Three Cs”, meaning close contact in closed-off, crowded spaces, where experts say most infections have occurred.

Without knowing if the measures would work Japan picked the right strategy. Only those events and places where superspreading is most likely to occur where shunned. Additionally the people in Japan actually wear their masks and generally health conscious and disciplined.

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I think masking plays a far larger role in limiting the spread than avoiding the "three C's".

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Unfortunately it is unlikely that 'western' nations will develop such discipline.

Yves Smith has written about her recent personal experience in a hospital in Alabama where even the staff was not wearing masks and was also otherwise quite careless. This at a time where numbers in Alabama are surging.

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MORE AT https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/05/cluster-cases-drive-the-covid-pa
ndemic.html#more

So maybe there really ARE super-spreaders ... people who just shed and transmit viruses way more efficiently than anyone else.

So every time you have a LARGE group of people in relatively cramped indoor circumstances ... church, gym, sporting event, political rally, assisted living facility, military training, dance club etc ... not only do you increase the number of people potentially a risk, you also significantly raise the probability that a super-spreader will be among them.

That doesn't explain Los Angeles' steady incremental increase of infections and deaths, tho. I'm not privy to the details of Los Angeles' data, but - mostly- clusters have not been identified.




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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

But as you've noted, and which I've been puzzling over, that leaves California (specifically Los Angeles County), the prolonged transmission of the Diamond Princess, and the Navajo Nation unexplained.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Thank you so much for your information, Brenda.

But it's sad information, to be sure.

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More fact-free sh*t flinging from JACK, with the ironic coda at the end.
Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
My relationship with the First Nations is pretty tenuous. I might have mentioned that after I graduated, the very first interview I had for my very first real full time job was at the Navajo reservation hospital in Ganado. I did turn down the job because they wanted a 5 year commitment on the reservation, and it was so different and unimaginable to me that I wasn't sure I had 5 years in me.

But that sparked a lifelong curiosity. I always want to know more.

And I'm sorry to know that people are struggling there and on many reservations with COIVD-19.

There are so many historic and current-day injustices against the First Nations. It would take a lifetime to even right one of them. That's why I still stand in awe of the Canadian legal system, and the creation of Nunavut.

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