I think this can be here and not the political thread, but I wonder how much our reaction to the virus has been molded by our short attention spans.

When this started, everyone agreed that we would need a few months of social distancing to really get a handle on things. And that we would not be "normal" until we got a vaccine in 12-18 months.

2 weeks into that, and you have a lot of people all saying "Well, we did that. Now everyone pretend that everything is normal again."

I don't know if it is a Right/Left thing so much as a no one has patience to do anything anymore thing.

The last few years has made me think that, generally, as a society, we're kindof screwed.

SI

Even in my neighborhood, which as been one of the best in this area at adhering to guidelines, things as simple as the single direction aisles at safeway are breaking down and social distancing is becoming isn't being followed as strictly as it was even a couple of weeks ago.

IMO we as humans have a difficult time watching others break rules or guidelines with no perceived punishment before we decide to do the same ourselves.

A couple of anecdotal stories from this weekend to support the thought that people are just done with the lockdown - there were at least 3/4 pool parties with screaming kids, loud music and cars all over the street we saw/heard this weekend while walking our dogs, and talking to an old coworker who is doing bike rides down PCH he said the beaches on Sunday were pretty packed. And this is LA, so it's certainly not a taking shots at Red states thing.

I think human nature is to not going to accept being cooped up in isolation for months on end, consequences be damned. I don't necessarily agree with it, but we are where we are, and I'm not sure it would have been massively different at any time in human history to be honest other than the fact that we have the technology and the connectivity to be able to instantly analyze and judge it today.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...tests-n1194876

It seems that as of right now they're not all that accurate and results vary depending on who made the test.

Good news, bad news time ...

Bad:

Christian Drosten on Twitter: "Viral loads by PCR as seen in our laboratories. No significant difference between children and adults. Age categories: Kindergarten (KG), Grade school (GS), Highschool (HS), etc. with age ranges and (counts). https://t.co/xunzyHEi47… https://t.co/xdURZBqqto"

Basically: while absolutely less kids get symptoms* (hence less tests to analyze), they shed similar amounts of virus as a group.

* We just don't know how often they get infected in the first place (maybe there is some Background 'immunity') because they don't get sick so rarely tested in the first place and all antibody studies either ignore them by design or did not differentiate them in the results. Or like a german one sits on the results to finish the paper ... Which is insanely frustrating considering how urgen people need to know how to handle schools and daycare etc.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/w...e=articleShare

New earliest "if all the stars align" date for first production of a vaccine in September.

Would be pretty cool if a smallish university lab comes through first against the odds.

Seems that while NY is gradually getting better, the rest of the nation is picking up the slack. Pennsylvania and Illinois particularly of late.

The PA numbers may be a reporting catch-up. Today's press release states 479 new reported deaths which happened over the past 2 weeks. Here is the exact quote:

As a result of our continued work to reconcile data from various sources, the state is reporting an increase of 479 deaths today bringing the statewide total to 2,195 deaths in Pennsylvania. These deaths have occurred over the last two weeks.

Also 2/3 of PA deaths are in nursing homes, so it is concentrated to those types of specific outbreaks that social distancing likely doesn't mitigate well.

Does the UK really have 4500 today?

Kind of an interesting idea out of New York for restaurants. Close down some streets and let the restaurants set up outdoor seating in them. Allows for proper social distancing, fresh air, and keeping those restaurants open. I like it.

Coronavirus in NYC: Restaurant Reopening Could Include Seats on Closed Streets - Eater NY

No, they included care home deaths in the numbers for the first time today

I think the key to Instacart is doing the fast and flexible. I got wind they may strike on 5/1 and I had a delivery set for 5/2. I changed it today to fast and flexible for today or tomorrow and it showed up within 2 hours. I even got a huge bottle of hand sanitizer.

Ohio had its highest death total day and they are opening up on Friday.

That's a bit of a hyperbolic way of putting it.

A few business types are being allowed to reopen and they have restrictions. So it's not like business as usual.

On the other hand, Texas is pretty much opening the doors Friday

SI

I generally find my views on this board tend to lean to the right of most of you guys even though in real life I'm hardly Republican but I totally agree that they are loosening these restrictions a little too early. Anecdotal of course but I remember back when St. Louis had a pending stay at home that was clearly coming and some friends decided to get a "last hurrah" in that didn't make any sense at all. I mean the highly contagious disease is out there, hence the stay at home order that was coming. So I totally agree in the next couple of weeks that those same people are going to overdo it.

Here's where I differ a little with you guys and differ a lot more with social media/local paper comment section etc... These idiots who do go out right away are really just exposing themselves to risk, getting sick. The whole point of any of this was to flatten the curve and I think we did that almost everywhere and now (IMO obviously) I think the hospitals will not be overrun in the summer for lots of reasons. (Hotter/humid, people more aware, a lot of people have had this (again IMO), masks and social distancing a little more understood etc) There is no blood on hands, these people are not killing other people etc. Sorry but 60,000 people didn't die because of anything but a deadly virus not everything has to be political. (I saw one guy on social media blame every single death on political decisions like had we done something different there would have been zero deaths here even though the rest of the world clearly got hit) I think that hyperbole is sadly what is causing people to want to open businesses too early.

Interesting thing about Illinois numbers, we ramped up testing capacity by a great deal went from 5000 to over 15000 a day. Total amount of daily cases increased but the percentage of positive tests decreased. So I still think Illinois is improving, hopefully.

Worldometers reporting 2,390 so it has gone back up from the mid 1K to mid 2K. It's not NY and NJ anymore but other states making up the difference.

The lack of recent news on respirators I think (probably) means there is sufficient supply now. No more news on hospital bed capacity and building field hospitals so assume that means the same.

I sure hope the Gilead drug proves real.

Pennsylvania had a big jump so I am wondering if they just had a backlog that is making the number seem higher today.

Then again there are likely states playing games with the numbers.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health...ade-them-stop/

From up thread.

Aside from me thinking the 2/3 is bogus and a sign they missed a lot of at-home deaths etc:
That is my absolute pet peeve ... I know how you mean it and see what you are getting it, so please don't take this personally ;)

More infections in the general populus inevitably lead to more outbreaks in closed-off systems. There will always be cracks in the wall and the more infected are walking around, the more likely it is those are exposed (the most obvious one being that more Infections generally obviously increases the risk that any given nurse or administrator working in a home infects themselves in the outside world).

You need to do all you can to close the cracks or mitigate the outfall of any given outbreak (germany is currently testing every nurse, administrator and inhabitant of all homes and all ambulatory providers as well, planning to repeat this every 3-4 weeks), but that is going to be infinitely easier with a low infection rate in the general public.

The debate over COVID death count will never settle. It is already devolving into red/blue territory, and that's like a black hole for rationality.

We're seeing multiple credible studies look at "deaths over expected levels," and I have yet to hear any explanation for why those numbers should be so much larger than the reported COVID death counts. However, because those point in a direction that could be politically damaging for the incumbent administration, the two sides immediately rush to weaponize/discredit the line of thinking, without any regard to the math, science, or medicine behind it.

And, to be fair, I cannot really tell if I'm just a victim of the same hatred. I am not really qualified to assess the validity of the argument, but is the reason why I find it superficially compelling is that it seems like it might increase the percentage chance that Trump leaves office soon? I mean - that is basically all I care about in pure politics right now, so maybe I'm every bit as deranged by my own biases as everyone else I'm criticizing.

Well it is indeed true that they did not count those in nursing homes or those found dead in the count. And by and by some governors started reporting "probable death by covid" to be a trackable datapoint. But some won't. That's a given. Florida numbers seem unreliable now too.
always florida...

Definitely the right thing to do.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Per the project cost and "significant waste", I think most will understand and still support this.

As a side note, I wonder what PETA's response would be on the animal experiments.

I live in Eureka, MO which will at a minimum has already become the center of a major local/state news story in the last week or so and possibly elevate to national story here soon.

Eureka bucks St. Louis County order, says it will reopen on Monday | Local Business | stltoday.com

The thing about it is I know a lot of the principal actors involved (the mayor, some of these business owners) and they are all good people who are seriously misinformed and have taken the Red/Blue thing like you said to a whole new level. It's really sad because here's my synopsis of what happened and what could have happened to avoid any of this...

1) My hometown is divided between two counties (St Louis and Jefferson) one of which is under a county stay at home and the other whose statewide stay at home order will end next week.

2) The mayor has decided he is siding with the state as our city (approx 10K) is definitely more rural than St Louis City and even a lot of it's municipalities.

3) IMO the locals are wrong here not only in underestimating the virus but also understanding the law and the county's authority.

4) However they are fueled by social media/St Louis paper etc where they are basically framing the town as a bunch of redneck "deplorables".

I have no good thoughts on how this will likely end but sort of see this for the entire country. We are not in a good place, not everything is Red/Blue and there are decent/good and shitty/evil people on both sides. I'm not sure if this country is going to make it. Unfortunately the end result is either a lot of people die or it is possible that a lot of people won't die in more rural spread out area. Both would be counted as "wins" right? God it's depressing.

Good of them to join the party and waking up to what is needed.
Ideally you really do need to do parallel production of as many promising candidates as possible before they have been proven in studies and then have it ready to go once it is proven. More costly but also safer than cutting to many corners in testing and ending up betting on the wrong horse ...
Basically what Bill Gates was planning/proposing makes a lot of sense.

This will happen all over the globe and actually already is. A very large vaccine producer in india (one of the worlds largest or the largest, can't quite remember) is already starting production on the Oxford vaccine i linked yesterday before this trial has even started on the off-chance this turns out great and then you at least have the first few million avaialable for a large scale global study.

The cut corners and speeding up vaccine dev and creation was what I had hoped for. I am not super happy about tax payers shouldering the financial burden, but big Pharma is only about the benjamins. Now I go back to a question I asked especially in light of the sped up vaccine process. Are people ready to get a vaccine right away based on what their government saying it is safe?Though I am not an anti vacciner I have zero trust in the US leadership. I seem to remember zombie apocalypse or the planet of the apes scenario occurring due to a screwed up vaccine for something in movies. We probably have no choice but cross our fingers and role up our sleeves for the needle but it still all now gives me pause.
Also, if it is unclear or proven there is not an immunity for people who have had it would we make the vaccine mandatory for all citizens?

I thought that was basically what a vaccine worked off of. I mean if the antibodies do nothing there cant be a vaccine right?

I agree with you for the most part. From what I have seen so far, most of the plans seem to be reasonable. I still believe it is too early but at this point I would only be delaying the current plans by 2 weeks or so.. I am going to sound like a broken record but for me it all goes back to trust. It also touches on what I feel is the pettiness (IMO) that you seem to allude to in your last sentence.

I would be in 100% agreement with you if I trusted that people would act on being more aware, masks, and social distancing. The problem would be if (because I am trying to give the benefit of the doubt) people are, at best not aware of those things or at worst are aware but don't give a damn because "that is their right" or because of the hyperbole that they have see. I have a hard time believing in the existence in the not aware but if they do exist then that is a societal fail and we need to do better with education. Then we get to the don't give a damn crowd.

We are already seeing the rebellion about being "forced" to wear the masks and having to adhere to one way aisles in stores begin. I assume those people are similar to the people you talked about who went out for the last hurrah. Yes, they may have learned the lesson during the stay at home time but we can't ignore that this was a thing before and for some is a thing now. I have no idea what percentage of people that is but there is a percentage of people who are going to do that again. What I don't understand is why it is wrong to acknowledge that, for a portion of the population, not giving a damn about those precautions that you mentioned is a political statement. Especially when those same people are telling you they are doing it as a political statement. The old saying "When someone shows you who they are, believe them." seems appropriate in this case.

Whether I believe it is the right time or not, reopening is happening. Everyone has acknowledged that in order for the reopening to work, there are still precautions that need to be taken. If people are actively and purposefully not engaging in those precautions, they should be acknowledged such. Do I need to take it as far as having blood on their hands? No, but this seems like complaining about the use of the term soldier in the sports world IMO. If I have the flu (yes I know, but I am not trying to be cheeky here) and I purposefully go into an office setting while sick, that is a decision I made that could affect other people. If others get sick after me in the office, it is acknowledged that I got them sick. The reality is it is possible they could have gotten it from anybody else they came in contact with who has the flu, but given that scenario I get the blame. That has been the way of the world since I have been alive. I am not sure why it would be different with CV?

I like it, though Operation Warp Speed is a super silly name (though most 'Operations' are a little weirdly named - however, Operation Desert Storm was a really cool name).

The worst part is that you know a bunch of people from St. Louis County are going to stream into Jefferson County, and then bring that back into their county. Which is just going to make things worse.

Yeah that kind of has always been the gist of St. Louis being on the Illinois/Missouri border with the vast difference in red state/blue state. People have always crossed to Illinois for vices (pot, strip clubs, Sunday liquor, horse racing, casino gambling back in the 90's) and crossed into Missouri for the more lax laws, lower taxes. But yeah now it's a virus that doesn't understand man-made boundaries.

Sadly I am most scared about people making a big show about how everything is fine. So instead of actually going to a restaurant and not sitting within 6 feet, wearing a mask in stores, and probably not getting sick they will flaunt all those rules and make it worse for everyone. Like the California beaches our parks keep opening and closing because people can't follow simple guidelines. I mean think just one 3 mile trail (what 15000 ft?) how you could actually have thousands of people socially distancing. Instead they congregate in parking lots and hang out and get them shut down again for the rest of us.

Yep and that is the rub. It's kind of like talking about pot with teenagers. (Bear with me a little as I know its a contagious virus and this analogy is a bit out there)

Should 14 year olds be smoking pot? No. Are there serious health consequences and life destroying choices being made? Absolutely. So let's say there are 3 camps...

1) Don't smoke. You will eventually go on to harder drugs and die.

2) Some sort of nuanced approach that acknowledges kids make bad decisions etc but educates them on bad choices and even more dangerous drugs.

3) Do whatever you want.

Somehow this virus debate seems to be between 1 and 3 doesn't it?

You know the meme "This is why we can't have nice things"? I simply can't understand how people just completely fuck it up for everyone else because they can't follow simple guidelines. This is what gives me pause for the gradual reopening, because once you give a crack, people stream through like it's business as usual.

So I get the arguments that flattening the curve means not overwhelming hospitals and in a lot of areas that looks like it happened, but that only works if people keep socially distancing and being smart when certain things are reopened. If they just act like pre-pandemic, the curve is right back un-flattened.

Sometimes we can be so individualistic that it drives me mad - think about your fellow neighbors!

Home - COVID-19 Simulator

This shows what the experts have been saying about what happens after we relax restrictions.

Actually that example is perfect.

I generally push back against it not being a Red/Blue issue at all. None of this is in a vacuum. We have had to make these types of choices before. In general, if we have a choice between 1,2,and 3, we generally choose 1 if it has even the potential to hurt themselves and others (i.e. health risks) or definitely has the potential to hurt others (i.e enjoyment of). We also severely punish anyone who goes against option 1 or choose the harder stuff. If we ever choose option 3, it is in a limited context i.e. our kids over here can do whatever they want as opposed to THOSE kids over here.

Option 2 today means you are wishy washy and unwilling to take a stand.

EDIT: Just to clarify, if our recent choice history was 2 or 3, we would not have nearly the divide. IMO. We have made different choices in the past and I wonder why we are making the choices we are making now.

I am not sure if this is the best place for this but this is a very interesting take on how the virus will change travel in all sorts of interesting and very plausible ways. For example this quote I agree is going to be true"business travel “will get crushed” thanks to the economic impact and workflow lessons of the pandemic.

“Many companies have learned for the first time that Zoom is highly effective,” he said. “And with finance budgets being slashed, the bar for what will be considered an essential in-person meeting will be much higher. For the first time ever, leisure travel will become the majority of hotel and airline profits.”

He also believes there won’t be nearly as many conferences.

“The conference industry will likely never recover,” he hypothesized. “Not only will be people not want to go to conferences during a recession and post-coronavirus, but conference organizers did not have pandemic insurance and most will go bankrupt because of this.”
Experts Predict How Coronavirus Will Change The Way We Travel

Yes true. Just going by what I have heard said by Fauci though a while ago where they are working on the vaccine but also that someone getting the disease may not provide much or any protection. I am not smart enough in the medical field to remotely understand the difference.

Vaccine vs Immunity: really can't come up with a way to explain it, but there is a massive difference. Essentially natural immunity depends on how the immune system reacts, a vaccine can be designed to make the immune system react in a specific way. There are various different ways, and while most vaccines actually use the virus in question in live or inactivated form, most proposed for Covid don't.

The questions right now is not if the antibodies "do something" but basically (i think).

1) there are enough of them created for all infected or maybe only those that get seriously ill
2) they stop it or only mitigate it (next time you get infected but not very sick)
3) how long the effects of protection last

It might well be that the first vaccine only creates immunity for a year or so and later ones last much longer of course.

One thing that this has taught me is that my 3rd grade teacher really skipped some details when she taught us how viruses and the immune system work.

That shit's gonna end up being the 270 To Win swing state map.

This also seems counter-intuitive to the purpose of FEMA.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/01/polit...ion/index.html

The Little League World Series has been cancelled for the first time since 1947.

Are they cooking the books in Florida?

Florida officials stop publishing medical examiners' coronavirus death data - Business Insider

One of the problems with solving this is that everyone agrees that more testing and more information is better. But information will make some people look bad, so there is an incentive to reduce testing and/or the public dissemination of information.

This seems like it would always be a problem on some level when you are talking about fixing things: (e.g., knowing in great detail how shitty the public schools are will better help us fix them, but the people in charge of that data don't want us know how shitty they've run the schools).

But the stark nature of this crisis puts the problem front and center.

As someone that is now selling into the industry this is the issue. Our projects that were underway are continuing, if the project was waiting for funding or did not have the green light, they are on hold because the processors are trying to figure out how to keep running rather than trying to integrate new processes into their plant.

Not sure if it was here or somewhere else, if you know a local butcher in a lot of cases you can get meat cheap because the ranchers are trying to offload the mature animals so they do not need to maintain mature animals.

Last week, 2 million chickens were going to be destroyed in the Delmarva because there was no place to process the chickens. This is similar to what we were seeing with oil last week, we have plenty of the resource (in the case of oil there was no where to store it, here there is no place to process it so prices plunged).

Not sure why they haven't announced anything, but Amazon is definitely setting up some sort of testing program. Ideally it will be voluntary & antigen/antibody tests instead of full testing, but there are rumors otherwise and not hard answer yet Amazon confirms COVID-19 testing program for employees in Fresno - Business Insider (And yes, I googled that because I literally saw a roped off corner with computers that had a screen saying employee Covid testing here at my Charlotte facility, so it is happening nationwide and it will be happening very soon is my guess.)

Amazon doing nationwide testing of that sort on a semi-regular basis would actually be amazing data for the country & many cities to use about community spread going forward as states re-open, and a decent data point about current spread (though many Amazon's probably have clusters & much higher exposure rates than GenPop). If they're testing for actually having Corona I'm a little less excited for that as a matter of public policy since it seems like it could be competing for tests vs medical personnel/older people who are at higher risk, but I'm still definitely down personally. (And hey, maybe Bezos has already scaled up company testing labs & designed Amazon's own test.)

Orange County, NY has 320 deaths with 8650 confirmed cases. If the death rate is @1% we're missing roughly 70-75% of cases.

The problem going forward is that in a county with a population of about 330,000, that means 90% or so still have no exposure and immunity.

Or more likely, you have the cases, but you don't have the tests to prove it. I'd wager that the death rate is far more stable and reliable that way, then the other way of trying to explain it.