Eskimo Joe

We got takeout from our favorite Catonese place last night. I was waiting for the food and the owner told me they had a rough first week and almost had to lay off staff. One of their staff suggested some changes to their business model, so they closed for a day, changed their operations up and now they're making as much money as they normally do. I was really curious about this, and they told me that increased social media presence, a daily special to standardize food counts/ordering and partnering with the big delivery services (uber, eta l) are going to save them. When I was waiting for the food their 3 phone lines were ringing consistently. This flexibility shows that businesses can still thrive in an environment like this if they are open to adapting.

Here's ur answer from an SPC met:

IMO, you'll see a slow return to dine in, but restauratns should just adjust to take out for the time being. Times like this make pizza, subs and sushi and Catonese food places king.

A lot of volunteer fire departments are doing side details in the community like they do at Christmas with Santa Claus to try and cheer the kids up. I think his order might be due to that. EDIT: these departments are pulling operational apparatus off the street to run calls, usually it's a brush truck or something with a light crew.

MD folks filing for unemployment:

People forget that if you die or are in a hospital, you cannot participate in the economy. The latter is especially true because our healthcare system sucks a fat one and medical debt held by the consumer would soar, so you're not buying anything.

Big oof and this number only includes those who died in a hospital.

Yup. Pandemics, terrorism and cyber attacks are entirely and human disaster. There's no excuse for not being able to detect it, test for it and isolated it. The clinical treatment apparatus certainly will be delayed but that cannot be helped.

IIRC, CIPS is weighted towards GEFS from HR 72 and out which is a good.

I'll say it again. The real victim here for some people are their 401(k)s.

I don't really care if Phin et al gets angry at me. EastCost's argument that we have to open things up and can't keep everything closed down is valid. The public health and emergency management fields are keenly aware of that and are working with the business sector to do that. But I can tell you that even once things open back up, there is going to be a 2nd spike in cases if this is not done in concert across this country. Some of the states that were reticent to enact physical distancing actions are going to just blanket open things and slow it down for the rest of us. We can't even test and ID hotspots yet or pass laws to protect workers from being fired who are quarantined. If we can't get that protective measure passed then blanket stay-at-home orders are going to be the norm for a time.

Wall Street is getting free money for the foreseeable future and that's all the DOW et al care about. If one thing has been made clear post-2008, it's that conditions on Wall Street are not indicative of conditions on Main Street.

We live in the bizarro timeline:

Without a doubt the re-opening is going to slow. As certain sectors of the economy and routes of transport are activated again there are going to be certain higher risk route. Mass transit and flying for one. Even after that, I doubt you'll see baseball stadiums and bars packed.

You can see how insidious this infection has become in society from the image @mappy posted. Even Allegany and Kent Counties, which have the slowest population growth and lowest density, have cases all from community spread.

Even with the proactive levels, we have something like a 17% - 20% positive test rate in the Free State. We're able to hold things like this without breaking the system but man we are walking a knife blade here.

One big failing of the American media has been to not bring real experts on and challenge the stupidity (Dr. Oz, Dr. Drew) and educate the public. The one report that showed something like 1 - 2 million dead was an extreme outlier and should have been laughed off the stage. Instead, CBS and the NY Times and Fox News ran stories on it.

I think some folks attempt to compare COVID to flu because that's the only thing they can wrap their brain around. Flu acts a bit like COVID in that it is spread kind of the same way (surfaces, aerosolized environment) but the flu is really only a danger to folks with significantly compromised immune systems. We also know a lot more about the flu than COVID. Healthy people with no underlying conditions are dying from COVID and if you have something even as "simple" as asthma and get COVID you go downhill fast. Of course, there's a certain slice of the country that just cannot or will not accept any infectious disease as being serious unless it's gotten to the point of what you see in a movie. Those folks are bizarre.

It is dubious to compare Flu-A/B to a strain of coronavirus. With Flu-A/B we have a systematic, global bio-surveillance process to identify hot spots, several vaccine derivatives that can be tweaked to adapt to the downstream flue season and event some in situ prophylactic (tami flu). Almost none of this exists with MERS, SARS or COVID. We have a bungled approach to testing a small portion of what we think is an infected person. There is no treatment protocol or prophylactic.

All good points, none of which will likely be resolved until about <12 hours out. We're just going to have to look for trends, timing, etc an monitor upstream conditions. If we see an overperforming event in Dixie Alley with discrete action ahead of the main line, all bets are off and it could be the event of the spring. If it's QLCS mess behind stratiform rain then we fail.

Flip side....it rains a lot and we get a QLCS that wrecks the trees because of saturated soil. Either way, the Sunday PM to Monday midday is looking busy in these parts.

Monday is starting to look interesting up even towards Baltimore and Frederick. It's going to be interesting to see how Sunday plays out down south...if things go as planned down there then we probably stand a good chance of seeing a decent line move through.

Posted by a met who I believe works for Mt Holly WFO

Bring us home