stevenkesslar

First, good for you. That is smart, and kind. Second, that's yet another problem with the idea that we should just work our way through a pandemic, and find ways to shelter the most vulnerable. Right now, the idea of putting people in nursing homes, or having young caregivers come in to their homes to take care of them while a pandemic rages outside, just doesn't make sense. The only thing that makes sense for the younger and healthier people going to work and the older and less healthy people staying home is to keep the absolute number of cases as low as we can.

I'm going to cut and paste something from another post in the politics forum. The video I posted includes a warning that this could spread like wildfire through rural America. The guy in the video mentions Mississippi, his home state, in particular. So I checked, and the two places that jump out in the Deep South are these: Dougherty County, Georgia has 685 COVID-19 cases now. With about 90,000 residents, the county is about one-tenth the size of San Francisco, but has about 30 % more cases than San Francisco. It is about 67 % Black and 30 % White. Caddo Parish, Louisiana has about one quarter million residents, with the main city being Shreveport. They have 598 cases. So about one-quarter the population of San Francisco, and about 20 % more cases. It is 50 % White, 40 % Black. That may be an offshoot of people who went down to Mardi Gras, got sick, and came home. So that's two examples where COVID-19 seems to be taking off in predominantly rural areas. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere in Mississippi. It would be a catastrophe on the scale of New York City. I can not understand why the military is not being sent into rural areas all across America, other than the lack of testing supplies. I would not even try to count nationally, but there are like 1000+ tiny red points of death all over that John Hopkins map. I did count Wyoming, and I think there are 17 little red points of death, each representing a county. In about two thirds of them, the number of diagnosed cases is in a single digit. The county with the most cases, Cheyenne, has 42. If they wait a month, there is every reason to think Cheyenne could have 200, or 500 cases. The longer they wait, the less effective contact tracing will be. Wyoming right now is an ideal place to go in and see if they can trace the virus into a corner. But it won't stay this way for long. And my assumption is that bringing in the military would add resources the state or county simply do not have ready to deploy in the numbers needed. That would not require martial law.

Just to clarify, all the stuff I said above was based on the second column - deaths per million. Not the absolute number of deaths in each state. It makes sense that a state with 40 million people like California will have more absolute deaths - from anything, including drunk driving or suicide - than a state like Wyoming with about half a million people. And, no surprise, Wyoming is now the last US state with zero COVID-19 deaths. (To make sure it's clear, the list is ordered numerically by absolute number of deaths, which is the first column. You have to go to the header of the second column, "deaths/1m pop" and click on it. That will reorder the entire list based on that measure. When you do that, Florida is still #21 as of 4/4/2020 based on that measure. You can do the same thing with "confirmed cases/1m pop" and Florida is # 19.) I'm hoping it doesn't take Wyoming turning into a rural version of New York to get everybody on board. Stated in positive terms, I would love it if Dr. Birx sent in the army and they could figure out how to make Wyoming the first COVID-19 free state in the country. It begs the question of how you keep the virus out. But the first step is to stop it from growing. We agree that martial law raises any number of problems. That said, I doubt Wyoming is known for its public health infrastructure. I think one place the military could really help right now is going into states like Wyoming and just doing shit loads of testing. Not surprisingly, I think China relied heavily on their military to execute their lock down strategy. We simply would not do it in the draconian way they did. But, ultimately, people reportedly did not object to the idea that temporary and tough measures were being taken to save lots of lives. Again, that is all premised on the notion that we actually have the testing capacity, which we don't.

Maybe this doesn't belong on this thread, but has any escort tried applying for unemployment in their state? In theory, "gig workers" should be eligible, subject to having some kind of documentation of income. I assume most escorts are like me, and filed taxes for years as a self-employed whatever. That solves the short-term income problem, in theory.

Life actually really does suck, doesn't it? The whole thing about this that seems incredibly unfair is that I could never figure out how to get that exponential growth thing to work with my penis. Then again, like I said, I always sucked at math, anyway. Fortunately, I was pretty fucking good at identifying offsetting skills, where just plain sucking turned out to be asset. At least, like Donald above, we all have certain things to keep us occupied.

Sadly, what you are saying already is starting to play out in Florida. Right now, it's subtle. I hope I'm wrong, but the trend right now is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Coronavirus (COVID-19) U.S. Deaths I intentionally excluded Florida in my comments above. So now that you cited them, I will lay down a marker, hoping I am wrong. I think the death rate there is going to explode. And before long they will be in the top 5 states with the highest death rates. More important than ranking, the point to me is that some large number of the deaths that are going to occur were completely avoidable. Until just a few days ago, Florida actually was doing better than California, both on cases per million and deaths per million. My bias in looking at these numbers is basically what I've already been ranting about. Bill Gates is on the side of the angels on this one. Everything he is saying makes sense - both in theory, and in practice. So the sooner we lock down and take the tough medicine, the sooner we'll be able to safely reopen. Florida actually had been an outlier. I made some comment a few weeks ago that may have been naive. I said that it made sense to me that Florida was not scolding teenage kids for wanting to go hang out on the beach with a few of their friends. And I still stand by that, kind of. If going to the beach with two friends and having your towels 6 feet apart keeps you sane, that's not exactly a stupid thing to do. When I wrote that, I wasn't watching the tv screens about the kids packed like sardines on the beach, or in bars. That's of course a very different thing. Florida is now # 21 in the nation in terms of deaths per million, and # 19 in terms of cases per million. So California and Ohio have 345 cases and 319 cases per million, respectively. Florida now has 537 cases per million. So they have jumped ahead of California, just like Michigan and Louisiana did (in cases per million) maybe a week ago. The rate at which they are flying up the charts is what is most troubling. Much more so than in Ohio or California, the increases in infections seems to be exponential. Now that they are under belated lock down, hopefully that will start to change. The reality is that this contagion is not in control IN ANY STATE. The states that are doing best are simply those that are limiting the growth of the virus - or, if you prefer, the amount of damage it is doing. Again, I think Gates is on the side of the angels, and of logic. He keeps saying that - IF WE DO THIS RIGHT - the growth of cases should plateau in April. And we should see a decline in new cases in May. Hopefully, at that point, to a place where testing and contact tracing is a viable strategy in the places we start to reopen. Again, we are not flying completely blind. I don't fully trust whatever records were kept in 1918, relating both to the death toll and the impact on local economies. But the received wisdom is that the cities that took the strongest interventions the earliest were the ones that got back to normal the quickest. I think it is reasonable to think some version of that will likely play out in 2020 - hopefully with far fewer deaths and less fundamental economic damage than in 1918.

Let me answer the question another way, which follows on the things I said above. I think the single best thing we could all agree on right now is martial law. And I see that as a statement that is 0 % political, and 100 % patriotic. The way I would phrase it in patriotic terms is simple: there is nothing more patriotic than wanting to save the lives of every other living American. I realize there are lots of good reasons NOT to have martial law. First on the list would be that it could be a logistical nightmare. It could be more trouble than it is worth. All that is above my pay grade, and I'll leave it to the generals. On an operational level, the most important work to be done is the stuff with medical ships and emergency hospitals and ventilators that the military is deploying. They probably could also do a lot of good in the short term with testing - if the number of test kits needed were available. One of the main reasons to be against martial law, in theory, is that it somehow abridges individual liberty. And that goes to the heart of the matter, for me. Are we all in this together, or not? In the military, there is no question about the answer. You are all in it together. That actually IS the ethic of the military. And it works. This should be something that is apolitical to all Americans. Presumably, we all respect that symbol above. And there is no distinction made about whether "E Pluribus Unum" applies to either of the two symbols in that image. In fact, it applies to both. The symbolism is completely relevant to the unfortunate and unprecedented situation we find ourselves in right now: the olive branches and spears symbolize that the United States has "a strong desire for peace, but will always be ready for war." Well, you can think of this one of two ways. You can believe we are at war with an invisible enemy. Or you can believe that for the next year or two, peace is war and war is peace. The phrase that sums in all up nicely for me is this: we are all in this together. Period. Whether we actually have martial law or not, I think we all have to start thinking of this as if we have martial law. I think most people get that. Because it is now basically a matter of survival. In a March 11 Yahoo poll, 35 % of Americans favored a lock down, 43 % opposed it, and 22 % were unsure. There's no such thing as "majority rules" on that one. There was no majority. The first cities to lock down were the Bay Area ones, I believe, on March 16th. In a March 26th Yahoo poll, the exact same question yielded a startlingly different response. 67 % favored a lock down, 17 % opposed it, and 16 % were not sure. That's obviously an overwhelmingly majority. The thing that I think is confusing about this is that in the military, the minority does not get to do it their way. It's a matter of life and death that everybody acts as a team. That applies in this situation. If Spring Breakers go get infected in Miami and fly back to Iowa, or if Mardi Gras partyers bring back a virus to a city on lock down like Houston, it simply defeats the entire point of the lock down. It's really easy for me to get my mind around this. I think we are all living a bin Laden moment. Or, better stated, a bin Laden year. I've posted this super long essay about "The Shooter" before. He is one of the SEALS who took out bin Laden. No one knows for sure who took the kill shot. Which is partly the point. It was a team effort. But this is one of the guys who fired one of the bullets. And I think two different parts of his story apply directly to this moment. The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden... Is Screwed For the first time, the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden tells his story — speaking not just about the raid and the three shots that changed history, but about the personal aftermath for himself and his family. First, there's this: And also, there's this: To me, both of those pieces speak to what is unique about the moment we are in, and will be in for probably a year or two. First, this moment really does call for the type of military discipline described in that story. Saying "Breacher" may not get your Grandma killed. But touching the wrong door handle, or giving her a hug, could. That's not the way Americans are used to thinking. Reality has changed, basically pretty much overnight. So, like it are not, we are all kind of like Navy SEALS now. And COVID-19 is like bin Laden on steroids. Second, it really always has been a national disgrace how we treated the 9/11 first responders, and how we treated the people that went and took out bin Laden. So that second quote speaks to the Grand Canyon between US civil society, and the military culture and discipline we all depend on to keep us safe. I actually think that one of the silver linings in this cloud is that it blows that line to shit, certainly more than 9/11 and bin Laden did. This isn't about something going on in caves in Afghanistan. This is about something going on in kitchens and nursing homes and playgrounds all over America. The virus could be anywhere. Again, I wrote this so that it is hopefully viewed as 0 % political, and 100 % patriotic. In a democracy, there is always room for partisan disagreement. But I think the best way to get through this is to agree that there is also a level of this that relates to some very basic things: survival, and patriotism, and a willingness to put a type of military ethic ("E Pluribus Unum") much more to the forefront than it usually is. For that matter, you could also call it a "hospital" ethic. Part of what I'm grateful about relating to @purplekow's posts is not only the sacrifices people like him are making, but also the sense of detail about how disciplined an operation this requires. Every detail about the mask you wear, or the way you clean up after work, could be a matter of life and death - to you, and to those you most love. We're not used to that. Maybe every detail about what I said is not quite correct. But I think the essence of what I said is correct. We've all been drafted into a war with a virus, whether we like it or not. The sooner we get our mind around that and act as a team, the sooner we'll start to win the war. The workers deserve mention, too. It is just reality that the clerk at the grocery store, the woman at the pharmacy, the guy who delivers the food, the government employee who takes the subway to work because she has to so somebody can get a Social Security payment, are all going to feel much safer in a nation where there are 100 new infections a day, rather than 10,000 or 100,000. (We're now at 33,000 in the US in just one day!) So apart from the question of how much death we can handle, we just owe it to the people we want to supply our food and our medications and our electricity and our internet to get in line, and follow a very tough set of rules.

I don't know. And I am trying to respect @Guy Fawkes and other posters and keep this apolitical. So hopefully this is apolitical: Police: Don’t expect us to enforce Michigan’s confusing coronavirus lockdown March 24, 2020 My guess is that, at some level, Kirby speaks for every worker in America. Certainly for all the medical professionals like @purplekow who are putting their lives on the line to keep us alive, fed, entertained, and healthy - even if entertainment these days means being a couch potato with a disinfected remote control. If I had to guess, the most telling thing about that article isn't the part about confusion (what "essential" means is somewhat confusing in every state). It's the date the stay home order was put in place in Michigan: March 23rd. That's a week after San Francisco. So, no surprise, Wayne County (Detroit) has more infections than Texas - 6,762 in Wayne County versus 6,359 in all of Texas. But because we get an "F -" for testing, I'm not sure how valid a measure diagnosed cases is. Macomb County has 1,838 cases. San Francisco, which has about a 10 % larger population than Macomb County, now has about 525 cases. Since the number of cases doubles maybe every four to five days absent public intervention, a one week delay in a lock down would be a good theory to explain where most of the difference in number of cases comes from. All the experts on this keep saying the same thing: speed trumps everything else. The CDC let the perfect be the enemy of the good in January by wanting to have a better and more comprehensive test. I don't know what role Dr. Fauci plays with actual production of the test kits in the CDC. But he has already publicly admitted this was a "failing". In fairness, I think even he had no clue how quickly this could spread through asymptomatic people. My guess is the CDC did help slow the spread of the virus for maybe a month or so, through contact tracing. That's when everybody should have been being warned and getting ready. In Houston, bars and restaurants were forced to close on March 16th. Again, with COVID-19 one week of inaction can mean the number of infections more than doubles. So that is probably the most logical explanation for the difference between Califorrnia or Texas, on the one hand, and Michigan and Louisiana on the other.

Daily New Cases in South Korea Daily New Cases in Italy Since this is turning into a thread about understanding the numbers, those are the sets of numbers I find most sobering, and most hopeful. What I am talking about in particular are the charts on new caseloads every day. It shows how "flattening the curve" is actually going in two very different countries. I think the essential fact about South Korea boils down to one word: compliance. There is a culture of compliance at work in those numbers. Everyone wears a mask. Everyone seems to more or less accepts that in this environment there is no clear line between personal safety and public safety. The actions of everyone else determine whether YOU get sick taking a subway to work. That's true with the flu in any year. But the rules clearly change when there is a pandemic. I think we can now conclude that this is just an unwritten rule of human nature. Pandemics change the rules. That has not always been true in South Korea. All the East Asian nations keep saying that they were better prepared to move rapidly this time precisely because they got caught flat-footed and unprepared the last time, with SARS. What's interesting and unique about South Korea (as opposed to Taiwan, Singapore, China, Japan) is they had one group that said "Fuck the rules." That's not quite fair. The religious sect that broke the rules probably had no clue what they were doing. But of about 10,000 sect members tested, about 4,000 tested positive. About half of the cases in South Korea stem from one group of bad actors. So you had this one huge break in a society that was otherwise compliant. And it caused this big spike, like a tenfold increase in new cases. But it all happened within a few weeks. And now it is back under control. So far, South Korea is proving that they can keep this to less than 100 new cases a day. Relative to the US population, that would mean that maybe, if we have fewer than 1000 new cases a day, we can start to get life back to a modified version of normal, like South Korea is doing. But the lesson seems to be that this all depends on a compliant group of citizens who are committed to avoiding sickness and death. The curve is not flattening out quite as easily in Italy. They have cut the numbers of new cases by roughly one-third, to somewhere in the ballpark of 4000 to 4500. The curve at least appears to be on a gradual decline. Before March 21, when the number of new daily cases peaked at 6,557, the number of cases was doubling every four to five days. Had there been no intervention, that would mean today there would be about 45,000 new cases in Italy per day, as opposed to 4500. At some point, the spread would slow down because there were just be fewer new bodies to infect. But I think we now know enough to understand that really would be an apocalyptic scenario. I have no idea what "compliance" means in a place like Italy. There are stories about how they are very proud of the work they are doing to contact trace and test people. But I think the bottom line, according to all the experts, is that contract tracing is just impossible when you have thousands of new cases a day. Italy is about the same size as South Korea. So we probably won't even begin to understand how well contact tracing works in a country like Italy until they get the number of new cases down to about 100 a day. That's going to take a while. I suppose you can make an argument that the cure is worse than the disease. And that the economy of Italy would be better off if they had 40,000 new cases today, rather than 4,000. How you get to such an argument just makes no sense to me, though. All of this paints a very clear picture of what the new normal in the US or UK or Canada or the European continent will look like in a few month's time. Let alone the countries that have way fewer resources to fight a virus like this. It will definitely not be like the old normal until we have a vaccine.

There is some cruelty to fate at work here. What that could mean is that next Fall, the care giver who unwittingly led to a death will actually be safe to put to work around older people. She presumably would pass an antibody test. The other caregiver probably should not be allowed around caregivers, because she won't have antibodies. Whether that form of testing is even legal or not is a good question. But it is practical, if the goal is to save lives of people in nursing homes. Obviously, these people also go to the front of the line when a vaccine is developed. That story you told above also goes to the many "soft" reasons why letting a pandemic run wild makes no sense. Critics keep saying, correctly, that this lock down could lead to more domestic abuse, or alcoholism, or depression. That is all correct. The main rebuttal is that our medical system and our society is simply not set up to deal with this amount of death, period. People just don't go to movies during pandemics. They don't even want to go to work. But when going to work, even when you are young, means you may kill somebody, that's a very heavy emotional burden to bear. Who would want to be that caregiver, who tested positive? By virtue of the fact that she was asymptomatic and was tested, I assume she may have figured out why she was tested. That would not be a truth I would want to bear for the rest of my life. As an escort, I felt bad having to tell certain clients that I may have given them an STD that could be cured with a shot in the butt and a week or so of abstinence.

We're not flying completely blind on this. That's from a study of the impact of interventions in the 1918 pandemic. I'm not 100 % sure how good the data actually is. Part of the horror of this is that there are stories about people dying at home, bodies left in alleys, mass graves. So nobody may know for sure. That said, that line above sums up the consensus: The 1918 flu pandemic depressed the economy. Public health interventions did not. The cities that were best prepared had the fewest deaths, and are generally believed to have bounced back the quickest. If those numbers are right, that was true by a factor of as much as 2 to 1. In Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, about 1,000 in every 100,000 died. In other cities, it was under 500 per 100,000. The story in every documentary about 1918 is that Philadelphia went ahead with a huge World War I parade, despite public health warnings. The business boosters insisted that we needed to conduct business as usual. As a result, they ended up with what historians describe as a ghost town. People didn't want to come outside. Children starved in homes because their parents died and nobody wanted to come near them. So the modern day equivalent to that is probably New Orleans and Mardi Gras. Other histories suggest that in some communities people banded more closely together, and helped each other out. I think one of the lessons is that if people are given false messages or false hope, trust just collapses. I keep posting those Bill Gates videos because I view them as the antidote to panic. By being sober and realistic, they are somehow comforting. Coronavirus (COVID-19) U.S. Deaths I think that's the best chart to assess the impact of different states' policies. And since this is in The Lounge, I'm going to avoid using the names of Governors and keep this apolitical. Other than to say that the biggest part of preparedness is community preparedness. If you are one of those people who have to go to work everyday, even in a pandemic, it makes a huge difference whether there are 100 other people sick in your city, or 100,000 people sick. Obviously the reason workers feel the subway in Seoul or Tokyo is safe enough is they don't have 100,000 sick people. If you click on "deaths per million" on that chart above, it will rank all 50 states from highest death rate to lowest. I think that's probably the most accurate measure of how deep the virus has penetrated. Probably ZERO states have an accurate picture of testing. And they won't, until we have widespread random testing. But the death rates don't lie. If Dr. Fauci is right, you can take the number dead and multiply it by 100 (based on a 1 % death rate). And that will tell you how many infected people there were maybe two or three weeks ago. As Fauci keeps saying, "death lags". So in California there are 285 deaths. That would suggest maybe 28,500 cases. Only about 12,500 people are diagnosed. So that would suggest at least half the positive people in California are not diagnosed, for whatever reason. But the ones who get severely ill or die will be in hospitals, and they will be counted. To me, California and Ohio are two standouts. They have death rates of 7 to 8 people per million. And they both were ahead of the curve in taking measures to slow the spread of the virus. I don't know much about Ohio, other than they cancelled a primary, which in retrospect was a very, very wise move. In California, 962 of the cases are in LA County. So a county that is about one quarter of the state population has about 42 % of all cases. Within the state, LA was relatively more behind the curve on shutdown - literally by a matter of days. But what we have learned is that a few days or a week of inaction can make a massive difference in how many people get sick and die. When you adjust for population, I think California and Ohio are examples to look at for what is being done that works. Adjusting for population, they have 95 % fewer deaths than New York and 90 % fewer deaths than Louisiana. Washington did a good job of getting ahead of the curve, I think. The first cases of COVID-19, back in January, suggest that this could have played out as having a West Coast epicenter. My guess, which may be wrong, is that the CDC was relatively effective in testing and tracing and suppressing the spread - up to a point. Where they failed is in testing people who had not been in China. And the asymptomatics probabaly sealed the deal on community spread. Dr. Fauci himself clearly did not see that coming in January. To his credit, he admits when he got it wrong, despite his vast knowledge. So at one point, Washington was the hot spot. Now they have a death rate of 38 per million. That's less than half of what it is in Louisiana. So I think Washington had the misfortune of being our Wuhan, where the virus first hit. But they were one of the first states to take extreme lock down measures once they got a clear picture of how this was spreading. Certainly, Seattle is not having the hospital crisis that New York City is. I think that speaks to the wisdom and effectiveness of aggressive intervention. Texas is the interesting one. Of any big state, they have by far the lowest death rate - 3.6 residents out over 1 million. Some of that could be geography, since they may have less travel from "hot spots" than New York City did. But there's obviously a lot of travel through Texas. My best guess is that in cities like Houston and Dallas, the local governments did follow the more aggressive lock down strategies relatively quickly. At least at the front end, urban centers are the first ones hit. That may not be true two months from now. Less dense states will be hit just as hard, in relative terms, I think. If they don't prepare. But right now Dallas and Houston have about 2200 cases, which is about one third of the statewide total. Those two counties house about 1 in 4 Texas citizens. So they are a little over-represented in the state count, which you'd expect for two large urban centers. That said, I think the actions of their local governments helped control the spread - certainly compared to Louisiana, where there are 6000 cases in two counties around New Orleans alone. Houston is worried that travel between New Orleans and Houston will help spread the virus to Houston. Every time Dr. Birx opens her mouth I am more impressed with her. She has already said she is going to prioritize rural areas for these quick test kits. I hope they make Texas a big priority. If you go to the John Hopkins map, there are counties all across Texas with one or two or a handful of cases. So those are all ideal candidates where we could figure out how we get two weeks ahead of the virus, rather than two weeks behind. That is essentially what all those East Asian countries have done. Texas would be an ideal lab for that, I think. It embodies all the crosswinds in American culture. There are no doubt people in rural areas who think this all may be an overreaction. But they don't want to die, or end up in a hospital that is 100 miles away. Birx's language is almost flawless. When she speaks, she does so in a way that anticipates all the objections. But then she points out, soberly and factually, that 5 goes to 50 goes to 500 in no time. That is math everybody gets. Dr. Birx will go down is history as an American hero and life saver.

Thanks for posting those articles. They are very sad to read. One of the underpinnings of this argument that we can somehow work our way through a pandemic (there are zero examples of how well that worked in 1918) is that we can somehow quickly and efficiently shelter maybe 10 % to 20 % of the most vulnerable population. That would include pretty much everybody in a nursing home. Plus lots of older or sicker people living at home. The idea is that somehow we could organize in-home care, or meals on wheels, or some such thing. The people who write about this nonsense generally have no practical experience in how you actually make those things happen. What these stories suggest is that somehow bubble wrapping a big chunk of the population is just logistically impossible. What these stories suggest is that we can't even prepare quickly enough in the places where we are organized - like nursing homes. In theory, they are set up to deal with situations like this. And the stories of the dedication of the staff, like the stories @purplekow is telling in another thread, are incredibly moving. But the nursing homes are still hit blind-sided, and under-resourced. What's not really said in these articles, because nobody knows, is how the infections get into the nursing homes. That is one area where we can hopefully learn a lot by Fall 2020, when we should be expecting Round Two. (Assuming we get Round One under control.) My assumption is that if something like 1 in 3 people who get this virus are asymptomatic through the illness, or only have mild symptoms, and they are younger, that would be a path into a nursing home. The logical explanation is these are probably staff who work in homes and bring the virus in. How you deal with that will itself be a logistical nightmare. From the second article you posted: That's probably a relevant example for COVID-19. In 2003, nobody could just stop the hot weather, of course. If we just let COVID-19 rampage across the country, there's every reason to think the results will be far worse than they were in 2003. The difference is that in 2003 the younger staff who worked in those homes may have been stressed by the heat, but they were probably fine. Now they are the ones that are getting sick, too - sometimes severely ill. The notion that we can just work our way through this just makes no sense. None whatsoever. This is a big part of the reason why. There is no way you can protect older and vulnerable people when a pandemic is running rampant.

The most optimistic estimate is the recent paper in The Lancet. It is basically just an educated guess. That estimate is that 0.66 % of people who are infected die. That's when you factor in that a lot of people who are infected are never diagnosed. Dr. Fauci is consistently saying 1 % of people infected eventually die. He's factoring in the same: asymptomatic infections that are never diagnosed, mild cases, etc. So factor that in to New York state, which has about 20 million people. Even at 0.66 %, that's 132,000 dead New Yorkers if everybody gets infected. And ten times as many as that in hospital beds that basically don't exist. Then factor in ICU beds they don't have. And ventilators. And protective equipment they don't have. Then take the catastrophe playing out today, with over 3000 dead New Yorkers. Then multiply it 40 times over. That's like 9/11 x 40. New York's coronavirus death toll surpasses that of 9/11 If anybody wants a sure fire recipe for a Great Depression, that's it. It doesn't really matter what percentage of something 3,000 or 30,000 dead New Yorkers are. What matters is the economy and culture of New York would be a shambles. And that's potentially the same for cities and states all over America. It made me want to cry several weeks ago when I read these articles about how the death toll in the US is "only" 10 people or only 100 people. I assumed that the people writing this stuff were not wishing death on the American people. I assumed that, like all of us, they are just ignorant about how viruses and pandemics work. Dr. Fauci keeps saying again and again and again that this is a long and slow illness. Very old and fragile people may die in a week or two after infection. But for many it takes over a month, or up to two months - the last weeks spent on a ventilator struggling to breathe. So talking about the death rate today really deals with a much smaller group of people who got infected two or three or four weeks ago. As Fauci keeps saying, "death lags". To their great credit, what now seems clear to New Yorkers is that a huge spike in infections today means a huge spike in deaths two or three or four weeks from now. The death toll will keep mounting. But the number of new infections may be starting to plateau. People would not say that because they wore a swimsuit in Florida in December when it was 80 degrees that it makes sense to go back to Chicago and wear a swimsuit in January when it is 10 below zero. And yet somehow there is this idea that it's just fine for Spring breakers to hang out in Florida in swimsuits and then go back home to places all over America, carrying a virus they don't even know they have. Those actions are going to result in lots of deaths one or two months after those sunny days on the beach, pretending that this was all okay. Louisiana now has the second highest death rate in the US - higher than New Jersey. New York has 150 deaths per 1 million residents, Louisiana has 73 per 1 million, New Jersey has just under 50 per 1 million. There is no question that Louisiana is now going to go through some version of what New York did because people at Mardi Gras basically said, "What the fuck! Let's just party!" This is like a wild fire. The truly sad thing is that so many places where it is NOT burning out of control yet seem to be saying, "We're not like New York. We don't have the same problem here." That is just a guaranteed recipe for death and disaster. Dr. Birx keeps saying, relentlessly and correctly, that any city or town in New York or Wyoming can go from 5 to 50 to 500 cases very quickly. Those are the numbers everybody needs to be focused on right now. Cities like San Francisco have set a model for how to treat a deadly disease. The Bay Area counties were the first in the nation to lock things down. They'll likely also be in the best position to open back up sooner than other large employment centers. The result is that San Francisco, one-tenth the size of New York City, has just under 500 COVID-19 cases and 7 deaths. Coronavirus: San Francisco reports 47 new cases of COVID-19, nears 500 total It has taken more than a week for cases in San Francisco to double Those numbers are all in the ballpark of what Americans should expect. Maybe up to 20 % of people who get sick will need to be hospitalized about a week after they start to develop symptoms. In the case of San Francisco it's closer to 10 %, although there is a one week lag or so between initial symptoms and hospitalization as pneumonia develops. There's now been numerous studies that all suggest that about 5 % of everybody infected needs ICU care. Fortunately, San Francisco has the luxury of putting everyone who needs an ICU bed in one. New York City is running out of the ability to do that. I posted a really interesting article from the Times about America's low-income workers in the politics section. Most of it was apolitical research about public health that I think can be posted here. While relatively well off people can stay at home, which often means working at home, many low-income people can't. They work in the grocery stores, the pharmacies, the pizza places that are delivering, or Walmart. They often have to commute to work using public transport. Pandemic or not, there is no way to avoid that. These are people who say, very understandably, that they are grateful to be able to work. But they also are afraid they will get sick. They are also people that can't really afford to get sick and end up in hospitals. The Times documented that while most relatively well off people have stopped moving around, as many as 50 % of low-income people are still moving around to go to work. My point is that it is obviously safer to do work in a grocery store, or even just go to a grocery store, in a place like San Francisco than in a place like New York. A huge part of preparedness for a pandemic has to do with community preparedness. The longer it takes to get everybody on the same page that this is a very deadly disease that kills some of those people who are still going to work every day, the more at risk those people are going to be. In about half a dozen East Asian nations the size of large US states like California, people seem to feel comfortable going to work - because there are only about 100 new cases a day. If we want to reopen the US economy, the number of new cases needs to go down from 30,000 a day - not up. The people who are actually two months ahead of the curve, like Bill Gates, are thinking about how we create an environment where maybe by June people can get on buses and in subways and go to grocery stores or pharmacies - either to work or to shop. Or get in their car and go to a factory, feeling like they are safe. The sooner we all get on one page and treat this like the life threatening disaster it is, the sooner we can get to that kind of environment. That should be the common goal. Whatever the death rate is today, it is way too fucking high. Period. At the end of the day though, me being a whore, all this numbers crap is way above my pay grade. So for me, I like it best when it's all explained simple. Kind of like whore talk, but with rhymes. Like whore poetry, I guess.

Two more deep dives into Bill Gates. I feel like I now know what The Fireside Chats felt like. I'll update "the only thing to fear is fear itself" for 2020. The only thing to hope for is reason itself. And compassion. You go, Bill. You are a national treasure.

I saw that on TV and my first thought was, That guy's obviously not Gay!

Half of New Yorkers likely to get coronavirus, de Blasio says 03/25/2020 I'm posting that as an example of an apolitical success story. A theme I've heard in lots of interviews with public health officials going back over a month is this: they know they have been successful when people accuse them of being hysterical, or flat out wrong. They make these projections to scare the shit out of the public. And to force the public to take imminent threats seriously. If it works, the imminent threat never materializes. At least not in the way people most feared. When I first read that story on the 25th, I assumed the intention of public health officials was to scare the living shit of out of New Yorkers. If that was the intention, it worked. You can now go back and look at the daily timeline of new cases. The typical timeline from infection to onset of symptoms is 4 to 7 days. Especially in this environment, I assume people are not rushing to emergency rooms the minute they start to sniffle. So it is too early to draw any conclusions. But there probably is some relationship between onset of symptoms, and testing positive. So on March 25th there were 3,705 new cases in New York City, which was the peak so far. Five days later there were 2,369 new cases. There was a bump up the next day. But a week later there are 1,047 new cases. It is too early to tell. But hopefully it means that New Yorkers heard the warning, and heeded it. I was grateful to the New York/New Jersey region after 9/11. In a sense, they took the hit for America (as did The Pentagon). They also set the tone for the response. The amount of grit and determination and community spirit was amazing. From the standpoint of body count, this is already way worse than 9/11. I think New Yorkers are going to do that for America again. There are going to be other hot spots. Hopefully, none will be quite as horrific as New York. And, like in 1918, partly that is because America learned from what happened where the pandemic first struck.

https://www.companyofmen.org/threads/in-the-uk-50-potentially-have-already-had-the-virus-oxford-university-study-says-so-how-many-really-have-had-the-virus.156755/page-2#post-1887613 Again, we've got two very similar discussions going on in two different threads. And both are almost impossible to talk about without butting up against politics; i.e. whether Chinese numbers can be trusted. That said, in this forum I'm trying to focus on the facts, the facts, and only the facts. So that thread has some reporting, particularly from TIME, that substantiates your skepticism. Reading that TIME article about Wuhan sounded just like reading historical pieces about the 1918 pandemic, or watching on the impact the pandemic had in Philadelphia. Which is to say, it killed 1 % of the population, and brought the entire economy and culture of Philadelphia to a crashing halt. So in Philadelphia, you had people dying in their homes, and their dead bodies were placed on sidewalks. If TIME's reporting is correct, something similar may have happened in Wuhan. The other thing we know, for a fact, is that such an outcome is not inevitable. We know that in the US, the percentage of people infected was about 25 % in 1918. But we also know that outcome varied depending on preparation. So in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, over 1 % of the entire population died. In Los Angeles and Seattle, less than 0.5 % of the population died. Translate that to the entire US today, and that is the difference between 3.3 million deaths and 1.65 million deaths. We also know that nothing in that range is inevitable. We know that because Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx are very smart people who know their shit. And that is what they are telling us. We also know it from direct observation from China. Apart from anyone's view of the politics of what they have done, the science and medicine of it are almost unbelievable. I say almost because the US and/or the world have done the same thing before - with Ebola, and SARS, and MERS. This virus is a much bigger challenge because it is more contagious and more elusive. But what happened in China certainly suggests that it is not inevitable that we - meaning the human race - inevitably have to simply sicken, suffer, and die in great numbers. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page As horrible as what is happening in New York City right now is, "the numbers" of caseloads offer some reason for hope. April 1st is the first day since mid-March they had "only" 1000 new cases a day. A similar pattern is playing out in Italy right now. They peaked at 6500 new cases a day on March 21. Now they are at about 4000 - 4500 new cases a day. As horrific as that is, the alternative of exponential growth is worse. Had New York City continued on the pattern it was on before lock down - doubling the number of cases every three days - there could have been as many as 30,000 new cases today, as opposed to 1,000. At some point the virus will of course wane, after there are no more live bodies to infect. In a city of 8 million, 30,000 would have been a drop in the bucket. If it were 1918, the number of infected in New York City alone could have easily grown to 2 million. Anyone who thinks that would have been better for the economy than what New York actually did might want to rethink that a little bit.

Dr. Birx predicts up to 200,000 U.S. coronavirus deaths 'if we do things almost perfectly' My advice would be that we all let Dr. Birx do the math for us. She is absolutely right. As is Dr. Fauci. This is a monumental horror story that is painful to watch play out. And part of what is so painful about it is that it is like talking to someone sitting in their car, saying it is completely safe to drive. After all, I am here in my car, which is parked in my driveway. It is completely safe. What could possibly go wrong? What could go wrong is that in 15 minutes your car will slam head on into another, and you will be dead, along with the family of four in the other car. That is what could go wrong. In fact, that is what is going wrong all over America. People understand car crashes, because most of us drive every day. We don't understand epidemics, because we only have them once a century or so - hopefully. So for weeks I have read these articles saying things like, "Well, there are only a few dead people. The death rate is only ........... of everybody infected. Besides, only a few people have this disease. It is totally safe." Dr. Birx is getting some crap for her idea of creating and enforcing county by county safety standards. It remains to be seen what exactly she means by that. But I think she is probably right - if the resources to aggressively test and trace are available and employed. That is the CDC standard. To quote Dr. Fauci: find the few people infected, trace their contacts, isolate them and test them and treat them as quickly as possible. Before they unknowingly infect others. That usually has worked: with SARS, MERS, Ebola. The alternative should be incredibly clear now. Oh, hell, it's just 5 cases. Oh, wait. It's 50 cases. Hmmm. Wow. Now there are 500 cases. How did that happen. But, hell, 500 isn't very much, is it? Oh, wait, geez. 5000 cases. How in hell did that happen? But that will be the end of ................. oh, wait. 50,000 cases! WTF???? How the hell? But, hey, no big deal. It couldn't really get to 500,000 cases, could it? Actually, yes. It could, and it will. New York is almost at 100,000 cases now. They'll top 500,000 before this horror story ends. And that's just Round One of the pandemic. Countries like South Korea and Singapore and Taiwan and Hong Kong are showing it pretty much works. At least so far. The idea is that we don't want to wait for 5 cases to turn into 5,000 a month from now, or 500,000 a few months from now. Because then we are fucked. So tey've all been able to limit the number of new cases to about 100 a day. And these are countries the size of New York, or California, or Michigan. For the most part they are as dense, or more dense, than New York City or San Francisco, the two cities in the US with the highest population density. Dr. Birx is right. She happens to be a Republican. But this has nothing to do with Republican math of Democratic math. It is just math, and science. https://www.companyofmen.org/threads/in-the-uk-50-potentially-have-already-had-the-virus-oxford-university-study-says-so-how-many-really-have-had-the-virus.156755/ I think that thread has a long and mostly very useful discussion of what we know and don't know about the numbers. I think we know with 100 % certainty now that this notion that maybe 50 % of the UK or US was already silently infected and now has some form of herd immunity is both dead wrong, and dangerous. We don't have herd immunity. We are completely exposed. About 1/2 of 1 % of New York has been infected, and it has created a nightmare in hospitals. The death toll exceeds that of either 9/11 or Americans who died in Iraq. Very soon it will exceed both. That's based on LESS THAN 1 % of New York being infected. It is very likely that somewhere between 20 % and 33 % of people infected with COVID-19 are asymptomatic through their illness. They almost certainly tend to be younger, and healthier. Even Olympic athletes in their 20's end up saying this hit them like a ton of bricks. 40 year olds who run marathons end up intubated for a week. So who and why some people experience this is the flu, or nothing, is unclear. But that group of asymptomatics is at most 1 in 3 people who get infected. It's probably closer to 1 in 5. When we get to more widespread testing, we'll get a clearer picture. I tend to think The Lancet article that just came out is as close to being correct as we have right now. As an educated guess, based on a sampling of data from different countries, it sounds believable that 1.38 % of all confirmed cases die. And then, as an educated guess, it sounds believable that this means that 0.657 % of all infected individuals die - including all the ones who are never diagnosed. That means that about half the people in the US who get this either have mild to moderate cases - like a bad case of the flu - or they have no symptoms at all. My educated guess is that this is 20/60/20. 20 % of people who get this don't even know they have a virus. They are almost certainly younger. Many may be children. Another 60 % know they have it, and may feel like shit for a few weeks. But they'll be fine. That is a massive workforce issue. If 60 % of the US population gets sick over the course of a few months, that is a much bigger problem than what we have today. Then another 20 % may need to be in a hospital bed. Or on a ventilator in an ICU. People who get this and survive can end up in an ICU for a week, or a hospital for a month. This is just an utter nightmare. And I personally have never been a fan of horror movies. I've never been great at math either. But I am good enough at math, and survival, to know that Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci are right. It is absolutely heartbreaking to read these stories about places like South Dakota and West Virginia where there are only a relatively few cases, and people say, "Well, it's just not a problem here." The reality is that if they think that way, they are thinking just like New York did a month ago, and the US did a few months ago. We now know how the math on this works. We at least know well enough to say that if this virus gets out of control, it is going to be a human blood bath. By saying it is not a problem here, they are pretty much condemning themselves to having a big problem a month or two from now. It is extremely sad to watch. Even if you take 0.66 % of the US population, that's over 2 million dead Americans. But Birx and Fauci are right. When hospitals don't have the capacity and people are left to die at home, it will actually be much, much worse. NYC COVID-19 Death Summary April 2, 2020 Those are the best numbers to focus on right now. Hopefully it will scare the shit out of everybody. That is like 9/11 happening every three days in America. When it peaks, it will be like a 9/11 happening every day in America. Note that 80 of the 1357 dead are aged 18-44. Note that 342 of the dead are aged 45-64. You and I are very lucky to live in California. California has 253 infected people for every 1 million state residents. New York State has 4,749 infected for every 1 million. New York City has 48,462 cases out of a population of 8.6 million. So that's about 5,635 infected people per every 1 million city residents. Many of them are in overcrowded hospitals right now. California has about 5 deaths so far for every 1 million state residents. New York State has 122 per 1 million residents. New York has 1,397 dead, which is 162 dead for every 1 million NYC residents. As Dr. Fauci keeps saying, the deaths lag. It takes up to a month in a hospital to die. Unless you are cut off a ventilator that is keeping you alive because someone else needs it. So the current death rate of about 3 % will go much higher in New York City. Some agonizing part of that is about the inability of really dedicated people in hospitals to keep so many critically ill people alive, given the lack of medical resources and personnel. I respectfully but emphatically disagree. What the "dumb shits" did is exactly why those numbers in California numbers are so much lower. It is not primarily about density. San Francisco is very dense. Singapore and Seoul and Hong Kong are all denser than New York City. This is about figuring out what we have to do to prevent massive numbers of sick and dead Americans. California is trying to figure that out. I'm grateful, actually. If the patterns from the 1918 epidemic hold, California will have a quicker and stronger recovery, because we limited the size of the hole we dug to remain safe. I think the tragedy in New York City disproves the argument that riding out a pandemic as if nothing is wrong and nothing has to change is a really bad idea.

First Responders First Thank you @purplekow. The stories of the doctors and nurses and hospital personnel, and their resilience and the support they give each other, are amazing to watch. That's one way those of us staying close to home can help. I've donated several times. I found out about it from Trevor Noah on The Daily Show. Before I made my first donation I spent about 10 minutes looking around online. This seems to be one of the primary ways to donate, run by and for front line health care workers. Most of the other ones I could find were individual hospital systems or state governments asking for donations. It is sad they have to do that in the middle of a pandemic. The website states: "Donations to #FirstRespondersFirst will provide essential supplies and equipment for protecting frontline healthcare workers and their patients." If anyone knows of other organizations doing this, could you let us know?

[MEDIA=twitter]1245419225721733122[/MEDIA] I've been following this one. Lat is a lawyer and "Above The Law" legal blogger. He is a 44 year old married Gay man with a son. According to Wikipedia, he "has run the New York City Marathon twice, walks about 25 miles a week and engages in interval training regularly." Anyone who still thinks this is just like the flu and we all have to just bite the bullet and spend a week on a ventilator might want to do a rethink.

This is probably the best interview of Dr. Fauci I have heard. Partly because the interviewer is a doctor. And partly because he is a hot young doctor. That's a silver lining on the cloud. Good news, bad news. Fauci says (and the young hot doctor I want to fuck me agrees) that it is very likely that people who are infected and recover will have immunity, at least for several years. He also says it is very likely we can plan on Round 2 this Fall. So everything we do has to have that in mind. We literally can not afford, economically, to get caught blind on this again. So, for example, we probably need to plan on ourt first vote-by-mail Presidential election.

Although separate from the one-time "stimulus" is unemployment compensation, which is a federal program that goes through states, anyway. Each state sets its own benefits. In California the weekly max unemployment payment is $450 for up to 26 weeks. Then on top of that there is this additional federal bonus of up to $600 per week, which is specific to the pandemic and lasts for up to four months. So if I am doing the math right, that would be up to $1050 per week - maximum - in California. Does that sound correct to anyone familiar with it? That's not a guarantee, and I have no idea how states make income calculations other than I think it's based on your past income. But I think in California it could mean you get up to $4000 or so a month. Then with the $1200 "stimulus", that is per adult, and also $500 per kid. So in the case of one of my tenants - two parents and three kids - that's $3900. I think the intent was to use the existing government structures, like the IRS and state unemployment offices, to get money out as quickly as possible. And to replace something like 100 % of income during this crisis. Arguably, the one time cash payments can be thought of as "stimulus", even though there's not a lot to stimulate while you are stuck at home. And the unemployment compensation is work income replacement, in theory. Normally unemployment is a percentage of your normal income. I think the idea under normal circumstances is to give people just enough to get by, so they are incented to go find a job ASAP. I assume the idea of that extra $600 a week is that now is not the time to go seeking work. It's supposed to replace the income you can't earn due to extraordinary circumstances. At least based on what I hear from my tenants, which are working class to middle class, it seems like this patchwork will pretty much do the job it's intended to do. Some may see some falling through the cracks, like if they didn't file taxes and they don't have income documentation for gig work. My escort buddy/tenant will likely be able to use his 2018 tax filing to document past income, I'm guessing. I'm not butting into my tenants' business, but in some cases I'm pretty sure their income will go up temporarily - particularly because of that $600 a week unemployment bonus. And then I have a few Section 8 tenants (government rent assistance) that will get dinged because they may count some of this money as additional income and correspondingly reduce the rent subsidy. But even if they give $1200 and take away $100 a month in rent subsidy, it's still more money. All that said, it's a minor miracle, I think. I'm one of those people that believe government basically works, even under a POTUS I don't much care for. So if the idea is to spend trillions to prevent a lot of unnecessary death and pain in a pandemic, and keep families intact while we figure out how to tame this virus, it looks like we are actually figuring that out. To me this is a better idea than past decisions to spend trillions fighting endless and unwinnable wars. Here's a few interesting articles about the details of how this will work differently for people in different situations. Both how some people will see their income go up a little, and others will fall through the cracks for various reasons: Unemployed workers could get more than 100% of their paycheck under the coronavirus bill These workers won’t qualify for beefed-up unemployment in the coronavirus relief package I am hoping this is also a back door way to help Mom and Pop small businesses. In theory, I think a worker could be laid off and then qualify for unemployment. If they were lower income and doing a retail job - like as a clerk in some small retail shop - they could actually end up making more than they did working full time, probably. And then, assuming it is safe in the Summer, the store could open back up and the workers are whole. I think. That doesn't solve the shop owner's problems, like how they pay the rent for the store. P{resumably that's where the Small Business Adminsitration can help. I think it's a given that this will push some small businesses that were marginal anyway over the cliff. But if we can get the virus flushed out, or more realistically contained - big IF - I think there is a good chance that most of the plumbing will still be intact in three or four months. That's at least the theory of how this could be a V-shaped recovery. It all comes down to whether we beat the virus, or it beats us.

Makes sense. At least you tried. Again, good luck and thanks for your service.

Since you know about this, I'm curious. Some people who filed in 2018 and gave bank data for refunds (or payments) will have out of date bank info: they moved, they switched banks, etc. How does that play out? Does the money just bounce back if the account is closed, and then those people go into the second queue? Anyhoo, sounds like there is a lot of thought and action going into this. Good luck.

Well, I'll just look on the bright side. It's always fun to put on a fashion show with my dearest and most darlingest friend.