We are all escorts now

[+ stevenkesslar]

An interesting biographic look back on how it worked in a small town in 1918:

 

 

 

"Be aware the it could happen again ... Of course I'm sure hospitals are.

 

But the shock wave that sets in when something like this happens kind of stuns people."

[+ stevenkesslar]

Interesting Ted talk with Bill Gates.

 

At the time, he said a major flu epidemic could reduce global wealth by $3 trllion.

 

Hell, we had a $1 trillion a year deficit to start with. And we just added $2 trillion to it.

 

Next time, prevention might be cheaper.

 

[+ Keith30309]

Interesting Ted talk with Bill Gates.

 

At the time, he said a major flu epidemic could reduce global wealth by $3 trllion.

 

Hell, we had a $1 trillion a year deficit to start with. And we just added $2 trillion to it.

 

Next time, prevention might be cheaper.

 

He did an interview on CNN Thursday and I was super-impressed with his depth of knowledge about virology and the nature of controlling pandemics. He didn't politicize anything and gently pushed back on attempts to draw him into doing so.

I vote for Bill to replace Mike P.

[+ bigjoey]

He did an interview on CNN Thursday and I was super-impressed with his depth of knowledge about virology and the nature of controlling pandemics. He didn't politicize anything and gently pushed back on attempts to draw him into doing so.

I vote for Bill to replace Mike P.

 

 

Health (especially in third world countries) has been an area of focus for him and his foundation. This is not a sudden new interest from him. He is an amazing man.

[thickornotatall]

Better more comprehensive information for the East Coast is available every day in New York Governor Cuomo's press conferences.

 

Cuomo is a real hero and is mostly very well informed. Unlike President Trump.

 

But Doctor Fauci is the very best.

Cuomo is an intellectual genius compared to trumphole....BTW Where is Melania?

[+ stevenkesslar]

He did an interview on CNN Thursday and I was super-impressed with his depth of knowledge about virology and the nature of controlling pandemics. He didn't politicize anything and gently pushed back on attempts to draw him into doing so.

I vote for Bill to replace Mike P.

 

Here's three more of Gates.

 

The first goes the deepest, ans is a "socially distanced" TED interview. It is only a few days old so it is very timely in terms of the biggest challenges in focus right now. It's close to one hour long.

 

The second and third are pieces of the CNN interview. I'm posting it because it's a shorter version that makes some of the same points, in case you don't want to watch an hour.

 

This is the closest I've heard to the voice of global leadership. I listen to Gov. Newsom, because that is what will save my ass if I get sick. And he is thinking and planning on this like the crisis it is. My guess is that the number of lives Newsom saved by taking action aggressively and quickly will be measurable by the time this is over. I also listen to Dr. Fauci and Dr. Blix, but I assume 10 % + of what they say is basically BS they have to say to protect themselves from the wrath of you know who.

 

I'm assuming Gates reflects the thinking of much of the global scientific, medical, political, and philanthropic communities here. As such, the TED interview is full of insights not only about where we are right now, but where we are likely headed.

 

Gates does point out that if had spent tens of billions back in 2015 or so, we might saved saved trillions now. Oh well.

 

This is probably my lifetime's version of the Fireside Chats. I found it comforting. It's the voice of optimism, grounded in reason, science, and the ability of humanity to go high when a killer virus tries to drag us down.

 

 

 

The first five minutes of this one below are definitely worth watching. Gates predicts that infections will peak in about a month, and we could be ready to start to loosen up by late May - if we remain in lock down and people comply. He also talks about why - duh! - everyone in the US needs to do this at the same time. The idea that some areas are able to reopen because there are only 100 cases is just wrong. Do that, and they'll soon have 1000, and then 10,000..

 

Edited March 28, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[+ stevenkesslar]

 

 

Amy Klobuchar's husband returns home from hospital to recover from coronavirus

 

[MEDIA=twitter]1243269061733220353[/MEDIA]

 

Utah Democrat Rep. Ben McAdams, one of the first two lawmakers who tested positive, was hospitalized Friday and said Tuesday that doctors had told him he still needs to be in the hospital as they monitor his supplemental oxygen needs.

 

 

That says something about how much stronger this must be than the regular seasonal flu. McAdams is in his 40's, and looks as fit as can be.

Edited March 28, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[+ stevenkesslar]

[+ stevenkesslar]

[MEDIA=twitter]1244019186973597696[/MEDIA]

 

He was in the hospital for a week. It's serious business.

[+ stevenkesslar]

 

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.

[+ stevenkesslar]

[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.

 

[Islesguy]

5 lessons on social distancing from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic

 

An interesting article about how the world has been here and done this before. Including social distancing.

 

Some of my takeaways:

 

This article claims that cities that were well prepared and implemented mitigation strategies - school closures, a ban on mass gatherings, social distancing - were able to reduce the rate of deaths by about half. When these measures were relaxed prematurely, infection rates - and deaths - spiked again. Same pressures between health, work, and play we are experiencing right now. The lesson from history is that the best way to save lives is to not let off until the storm really passes. In our case, that would presumably be when we have a vaccine, which was not available in 1918.

 

The overall US infection rate is estimated in Wikipedia to be 28 % of a population of 105 million in 1918. So that would be about 30 million Americans who got sick. Of those, an estimated 500,000 to 675,000 died, or between 1.7 % and 2.2 % of all people infected. None of these numbers seem very well documented. There's nothing even remotely comparable to the online data about COVID-19 in every country on the planet.

 

One of the most interesting things about the article is the comparison between Philadelpia and St. Louis. There is very specific documentation of weekly death rates there. Based on the charts in the article, it looks like about 1 % of the total population died in Philadelphia. In St. Louis, it looks more like 0.5 % of the total population. So I'll go with Wikipedia's estimate and assume about one in three people was infected. That would triple the death rate to 3 % of everyone infected in Philadelphia, and 1.5 % of everyone infected in St. Louis.

 

I say that because these death rates don't sound so different than what's happening with COVID-19. Even in South Korea, the death rate is well over 1 % of infected people who die. And their testing does include a lot of younger adults who only get mildly ill. In countries like France and Spain and Iran, the death rate is more like 3 - 5 %, probably reflecting the fact that younger people who don't get as sick aren't counted in the total. COVID-19 is also like the Spanish flu in that the primary cause of death is that people succumb to bacterial pneumonia. The main difference is that for some reason the Spanish flu was particularly deadly to young adults aged about 20-40. COVID-19 isn't.

 

Another interesting point the article makes is that back in 1918 epidemics and quarantines were much more common. Some of them involved diseases that we don't even think about today, like polio and smallpox. So the article suggests people might have been more compliant to the "social distancing" measures of that era because they knew the drill. They had lived through the consequences of epidemics before.

 

A related point is that once the outbreak started, people wanted social distancing, because they were afraid of getting sick and dying. In that sense, people in 2020 are just like people in 1918. I find it interesting that some politicians and talking heads have either subtly or bluntly pitched the idea of "herd immunity" as kind of inevitable. Their argument is that a large percentage of the population is simply going to get this virus, anyway. A few will die, but most will be fine. So let's just get on with it, shall we? Boris Johnson initially earned the nickname "The Grim Reaper". Now he has clearly backed off. He now seems to be acting on the idea that people would prefer to embrace a likely recession than embrace a huge wave of illness, and hospitals that are death mills.

 

What hadn't occurred to me until I read this article is that part of the reason people may view this as an exaggerated crisis is that they can't understand what they haven't experienced. None of us personally had friends or relatives who died of polio or smallpox epidemics. Our concerns are cancer, heart disease, diabetes, HIV. And with the young it's doubly true. They feel invulnerable. And they understand Spring break much better than they understand pandemic.

 

I wonder if that explains why the world seems to be choosing the path of certain recession over the path of possible death. We are just like people were in 1918. Once death actually appears at our door, people get scared. If it's true that in 1918 people were more likely to simply accept epidemics as a part of life, that actually could mean we are more terrified than a century ago. At least once the reality of what an epidemic is hits. We all of course know death is coming eventually. But we have no experience whatsoever with it coming this way. That may explain what seems to me like a pretty strong reaction against these ideas of "herd immunity", except perhaps among elites.

 

1918 may also give us a clue about whether we are headed into a recession, or a depression. The more I read about the Spanish flu, the more it sounds like it was in the ballpark of COVID-19: in terms of death rates, mitigation strategies like school closures and restrictions on gatherings, and people just being afraid. I haven't read anything about factories shutting down, and stores closing. So one big difference is that the economy probably just kept going back then. But if 675,000 people died (the equivalent of over 2 million today) and lots more got sick, and people were afraid to be out in public, that had to have an impact on the economy, as well.

 

In at least two ways, there were a few things in 1918 that might have made the situation worse. A lot of 20 to 40 years olds were sick or dying from Spanish flu. I suspect some of the descriptions I read of that time - like how young men woke up fine and dropped dead on the way to work - may be urban legends that simply speak to the fear people had. Whether it was death, illness, or simply fear of it, having that going on in a big chunk of the young adult workforce had to be a drag on the economy.

 

Also, WW1 had ended. So unemployment spiked when lots of soldiers came home. And wartime production dropped. In fact, the 1918 recession is usually described as the "Post-World War I Recession". The Spanish flu isn't even mentioned in several summaries of it I've read.

 

So the good news, if 1918 is used as a model, is that the recession in 1918 was "a brief but very sharp recession" according to Wikipedia. It lasted only seven months, from July 1918 to March 1919. That made it the shortest recession between The Civil War and The Great Depression.

 

They didn't record unemployment rates and GDP data back then. But the measures that were used for recessions, which you can scan on that Wikipedia link, suggest that the 1918 recession was moderate. There was a 25 % reduction in business activity. That looked like about average for recessions during that period. The 1920-21 Depression saw a 38 % drop in business activity, by comparison.

 

The one thing that is completely absent from that article about social and political responses to the 1918 virus is the idea of "test, trace, treat". They didn't even know in 1918 that what was causing the disease was a virus. So there was no vaccine, and no test for it - or for antibodies for people recovered from it. There may have been health departments. But I haven't read anything that suggests that there were people trying to trace the contacts of people who had the virus. There certainly were not cell phones or GPS systems you could use to track where people had been.

 

The best news to me in a bleak picture is that "test, trace, treat" has mostly worked in many Asian countries. It's contained the virus and allowed people to get on with work, school, and at least some percentage of normal social life - like eating in a restaurant, or shopping. While aspects of it may fit somewhat better with their culture, it was not "normal" for them, either. That chose to embrace it after they got hit by past epidemics like SARS. So there's no particulars reason to thin Europeans or Canadians or Americans can't embrace it, too.

 

If that is true, that would be the most significant innovation compared to 1918. Going back to the estimated infection rate then, 28 %, that close to 100 million Americans getting sick, and 1 million or more dying. No matter how well we spread that out, it is just going to be ugly.

 

South Korea, with 60 million citizens, has had the most cases of any Asian country outside China to have a well organized "test, trace, treat" mitigation strategy. Two months into an epidemic, 8000 people - which is 0.01 % of their population, has been infected.

 

There's a massive difference between 0.01 % and 28 % of a population. If we can bend the curve and swiftly implement these mitigation strategies

 

Speaking for myself, that sounds better than three months or so of a death game in which we are the contestants. We can call it "Survival Of The Fittest: Pandemic Edition."

 

Some experts thought it

The other comparison to 1918 is we had a president who didn't take the pandemic seriously and didn't have or develop a national strategy. Wilson may have done some really good things with regards to progressive economic policy and try to start the League of Nations, but he was pretty horrible in every other respect include being a virulent racist.

[+ stevenkesslar]

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.

 

 

Edited April 4, 2020 by stevenkesslar