She should get a "I beat COVID 19" tattoo.

Think of how viral it would go!!!!

Glad to hear to good news!

SI

Yeah Spleen!

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Really good news

Wonderful news, spleen!

Yup, great news. We all need to hear about the victories more than ever.

Congrats to you and her Spleen.

Great news! Can I have some of her blood if I get sick?

this sounds gross the way you put it...

That's fantastic news.

lol Dangers of no comma.

Meat shortages soon? I'm sure hoarding will happen now that they're calling for it.

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported | Free to read

Thought this was an interesting article about the increase in deaths around the world since the COVID-19 pandemic started. I was looking into this kind of data yesterday but didn't get far . If this is accurate, there is an overall increase in deaths around the world that's above and beyond the COVID-19 totals + the average deaths for the time period.

Based on the lack of testing and the choice to assign COVID-19 deaths only to those who tested positive for the disease, this kind of trend makes sense. Curious to see what other reasons could come into play for the increase besides the ones mentioned in the article (increase in suicides and homicides, people avoiding the hospital and dying instead of getting treatment, etc).

Testing was so bad early on that it makes sense.

Setting aside the false positive issue (less of an issue here than it'd be in a non-hotspot and offset by false negatives of people infected recently), the main problem is that this was done on a part of the population that was more likely to be actively 'out and about' (shoppers at grocery stores) which would naturally skew the results. Heck, it might even be that people more likely agreed to do them that had a gut feeling that they had it already.

I mean, it's not as useless as asking people to volunteer via Facebook or in emails enticing them with "we can tell you if you can go back out safely" and then retroactively 'adjusting' it for underrepresented demographics (and posting a "see, this is like the flu !" Op ed) but also not exactly what you should aim for when you want to be able to upscale your results as a basis for policy decisions.

"Controversy" makes it sounds like it's something made up or junk science.

COVID-19 Antibody Testing | ARCpoint Labs

This is on the website of one of the testing labs that has dozens of sites nationwide:


The bottom line is what a lot of people choose to focus on, as we know so little about the virus. But I'd argue the bolded part is even more important. Considering coronaviruses hit about 20% of the population each cold and flu season, that seems really problematic.

Yes, I know this isn't how the naming works, but, as a parent of a 4 year old, I joked that I probably have already had COVID-18, COVID-17, COVID-16 3/4, COVID-16 1/2, etc.

SI

I'm surprised it took this long, but hadn't seen it mentioned here; the court battles over stay-at-home orders are ramping up. In Illinois, a temporary restraining order has been granted, essentially (for the moment) preventing the governor from extending the current order into May. Other cases are pending in Michigan and I presume elsewhere. Like everything else, there'll be a lot of scrutiny over what the courts decide to do on this, and I wonder how far up the legal chain it goes by the time we're done.

The one thing that unites us in this country--left and right together--is a fierce opposition to frivolous lawsuits and an equally fierce belief that anytime you don't get everything you want, you should sue somebody and deserve to win.

We disagree only on what we mean by frivolous :-)

NJ governor still hasn't cancelled schools for the year and said yesterday 5/15 return is still a possibility. Will be interesting to see if they do reopen schools, as I know a lot of parents who have already said they won't send their kids.

I've said from the start that we probably have double the recorded deaths and 15 times the recorded cases. We just haven't tested close to the amount of people to feel any confidence in these numbers. Trends are really all you can look at it with these daily numbers (and that is also extremely questionable). If you could wave a magic want to test 75%+ of the USA, I bet you would see atleast 15 million that have/had it and around 120K who died from it. But, we keep following these 1K-2K daily reported deaths like it is massively important if it is 1,300 vs 2,300.

Our approach to testing is like the drunk guy who drops his house keys in a dark parking lot at night. There are two street lamps and he keeps looking under them but can't find them. Of course, the street lamps only cover about 10% of the parking lot. That's the USA/World testing for coronavirus.

I'm finding the "excess deaths over average" metric useful as a rough way of trying to capture how many people have actually died of COVID-19.

But until we get a handle on how deadly the disease is, that still tells us little about how many are/were infected.

I think it is important, and I don't think the trend in deaths is nearly as questionable as you do. I agree we aren't close to accurate in terms of number of cases, but deaths is different as a lot of those people are actually dying in hospitals. That number is naturally going to be a lot closer to accurate than cases, and it also means the trend is significant.

We were at 2k+ for a week and a half or more. If it drops to closer to 1k for an extended period (today's number will be important on that), I don't see how that's not indicative of a trend. The experts have also said that deaths are pretty much the furthest-lagging indicator, so once that starts going down we are past the worst of the current bump.

Russia gonna Russia

Second Russian Doctor Falls From Hospital Window Amid Coronavirus - The Moscow Times

"Second Russian Doctor Falls From Hospital Window Amid Coronavirus"

Fall from window. Very sad.

SI

My doctor is calling in scripts for my wife and me to get a blood test for the antibody. Will be a relief to see if I have had it.

I think it's more the hospital load than the number of deaths. We may have a massive number of deaths over 3-4 days, but if the load of hospitals drops to 50%, that means more to me than fewer deaths but a load at 80%.

My kidney Doctor called to let me know he sent my prescriptions in and to reschedule my April appt for June. Let's hope I can make that one this time.

One good thing from all this stay at home stuff? I've learned the names of many of my neighbors now on my daily walks through the neighborhood.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/28/polit...ply/index.html
Trump with an executive order to save our bacon (couldn't resist the pun)

SI

I can only remember their dogs' names. It's something, I guess.

Keeping meat processing going is good, but just ordering plants to stay open without helping them devise ways to keep workers safe is thee wrong way to go. If the workers get sick, it doesn't matter that the President says the plant has to stay open.

The hamberders must flow

Any particular reason, or is it more widely available now if you ask? Last I checked they still had high error bars so it wasn't something I was looking to pay $100+ out of pocket for unless necessary, but I'm also curious.

(I'm also curious if the newer testing starts showing even a 20-25% antibody rate, and nothing shows re-infection, if they start allowing those people not to wear masks or we start using it for non-essential air travel etc.)

There wasn't really going to be a meat shortage. It was just a ploy to loosen liability and change the narrative.

My brother works in the lab of one of the biggest food processors in the country.

I asked about accuracy. He said it is a blood test and very accurate. We all showed some symptoms a while back and what we thought was the flu ripped through our kids school in January. We live in a hot zone and it would just be nice to know. He also said insurance should cover it, but if it doesn't the government should. TBH I would pay OOP within reason to know.

Going to be close to 2k today at a minimum, so if it is going down it's not by that much yet. My best guess is that we're just past the peak.

I'm seeing just over 2,400 deaths in the US today

edit: I think the site I'm looking at might be screwed up. They are showing different figures for the same stats in two different places

Yup.

"We can't keep our workers safe without spending some money to do so."

"OK. You don't have to keep your workers safe."

The combination of no unemployment if you don’t go back and liability waivers for corporations is perfectly GOP.

Worldometer was at 1900 when I posted originally, now 2300. So either way, obviously not at the 1.4kish that we were seeing for a couple days there.

There's a whole lot of people flat out making crap up if that's the case. I've seen numerous reports of excessively high numbers of animals being euthanized because there's nowhere to process them, and we do know of major processing plants that really have been shut down or lowered capacity. What I've been reading says there's plenty of frozen meat, but fresh meat is likely to have shortfalls in May.

I'm not saying you are being untruthful here, I just don't see how to connect the dots. Are all the people who used to work at, say, Smithfield just lying and they really are still working there but just saying they're not? I would think we'd know if that was the case.

Yeah, that part is fun. Amazon is going back to their normal time off policies starting Friday (getting rid of the one where you could skip a day if you felt sick & you wouldn't get paid, but it also wouldn't come out of your 20 hours per quarter of Unpaid Time Off), and probably getting rid of the $2/hour pay increase & 2x OT pay (vs the normal 1.5x) on May 15. Guess it was a pipe dream to assume they'd still have that little extra hazard pay as long as they're requiring everyone to show up wearing masks and enforce 6 feet of separation (officially at least, there's plenty of stuff in my department that is impossible to do while maintaining 6 feet of separation all day.)

All your doctors need to be careful next to windows. You should be worried about them. Windows are dangerous.

Well partially inspired by COVID I decided to jump back into Nutrisystem

I say inspired because I figure Nutrisystem would cut down on my grocery shopping which I hate to do these days.

So I get my box from Nutrisystem and they leave out 5 breakfast items. The bastards.

Well I'm 202 pounds on a 5'3 frame. Let's see how this goes.

Good luck.

Maybe it's how you define shortage, my guess is ... no shortage of meat at the source, the shortage is in the inability to process them and get them to the consumers.

BTW, anyone else notice there seems to be more SPAM commercials?

Thanks, I'll need it.

I have a small business and office space. We have been fortunate that we can remain in business and productive remotely, but I don’t see how places like mine are supposed to open back up to clients until cleaning supplies become readily available again.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...oll-total.html


Yikes... those graphs are seriously frightening. Without testing we can't really know how many have the virus, but the much higher than normal death tolls (even when you exclude COVID 19 positive people) seems to indicate the undercounting is substantial.