Syrmax

If you can't see the irony in that, I don't know how to explain it further.

Another outcome that I think is possible is the end of major professional sports as we know them. Or at least the outrageous $ being made by Owners and Players. They will be the next cohort in line for Bailouts, you watch. I don't see how any league survives if all/most teams aren't allowed to play by their state/local authorities. France and Italy have already thrown in the towel on finishing this soccer season and others won't be far behind. Germany is pushing back any Bundesliga restart (which I really miss), as Mutti is nervous about R0 ramping back up. And Germany are the most competent ones it seems. MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, all done, in present formats.

Sort of perverse that the pandemic response being advocated, and largely followed, is being pushed by "experts" in the healthcare field, writ large. I don't know what the right answer is but you don't have to be an expert to figure out what the economic impact will be to the healthcare system as we're seeing it real time. At some point increased mortality due to non covid-19 causes will begin to register. Of course by the time that data shows up and is processed by "thought leaders", it'll only be good for the next serious pandemic response 100 years from now (and probably forgotten by then).

I ended up with about 1.6" here. A virtual desert compared to others totals. When does the next snow arrive? Since we can't have "fun" anymore...

I'm not so sure that even the testing for active infection is all that accurate. It may be...but no shortage of reports that indicate false positives and false negs. Hopefully the false tests end up being statistically insignificant but at this point who knows.

We'll see what excess mortality ends up at. It's the only real way to know the true toll I think. We know how many people always die per unit of time so comparing changes is instructive. Its staistical and after the fact, but given the various reports of under/over classifying covid-19 deaths I basically take a lot of the morbidity stats with a grain of salt right now.

I thought Herr Oberst Cuomo "banned" private antibody testing in NY? I have read that NY DOH (?) is doing pop up antibody testing bc they don't want long lines. So they aren't preannouncing locations. Since I don't go out very often, doubtful I'll stumble onto an active testing location.

I agree with that. I'm more of a Marxist when it comes to religion but i strongly support religious freedom principles and not tolerating persecution.

The Hasidim are also a major (if not the) reason that Measles made a comeback in the US, along with anti vax trends but this is concentrated in that community so it gets noticed. It was declared eradicated around Y2K, in the US. Not being nasty here, just pointing out that the Hasidim's self-inflicted vulnerability is a big reason why Rockland County / New Rochelle area had police deployed early in NY's covid-19 crisis. This detail was largely not reported at the time, which I thought odd...Why is that specific area having an outbreak? Prior to this, NY and CT have struggled with measles outbreaks in their communities. Measles is very highly infectious. In fact NY declared a public health emergency just last year, 2019, mainly in certain zipcode in Brooklyn, due to measles outbreaks stemming from that community. These people choose to not fully assimilate and while their cultural practices have many laudable family based traits...this sort of thing is the darkside. I'll just say this as speculation, if it were another certain middle eastern religious-culture behaving this way, there would he a sh*storm of Biblical proportions. (No pun intended).

Basically not. He doesn't really have a Constitutional leg to stand on with much of it. It may be good politics for Trump though as he's basically willing to let Blue states choke themselves while others take a different tack. We'll see how it plays out.

All businesses, schools, transportation should he shutdown until Dr. Fauci and Gov Cuomo say its safe to come out of the bunker. Otherwise people are going to die. People that go out of their homes are essentially murderers! Somebody's grandma somewhere might die because people are selfish and insist on going outside.

Yeah i was being a bit flippant but not totally...as far as Common Core...i went thru that with my kid. Mixed feelings. Generally not impressed but i get the idea, just implemented pretty ineptly. Distance learning after a certain age could work but not everyone has internet access and frankly, inner city school districts would probably drop to a 10% graduation rate. But OTOH, why pretend anymore? In a future lockdown world there will be increased emphasis on remote work, learning, and less participation in society outside of work. Which isn't all bad. Education systems should probably start looking at new learning models, soon, with an emphasis on STEM and languages early on. The rest of it all is pretty much crap anyway. IMO. Does anyone even care about government studies or 19th Century social justice warriors? LOL.

They should probably just cancel public schools for the next year. There's no reason to continue to think that they are going to reopen schools anytime soon. School admins and parents will never feel safe enough to go out again or allow their kids to go to school because they might pick up the virus (even though mortality for under 20s is almost nil). Or it'll be some other excuse (what about Grandma?). So, as an alternative why not just give diploma's to anyone that can pass a GED test? Schools will barely be reopened once the 2nd and 3rd waves hit this fall. This could be a model going forward. Less staff needed, less costs. If you can pass the test who really cares if you sit through years of bullsh!t?

I've been to Syracusa italy Mt Etna and Sigonella NAS in Sicily via the Navy. Loved visiting there. I almost requested Alitalia to just give me a voucher credit for my trip to Rome (which is where I am supposed to be right now) but...unsure if/when travel will be allowed again. So i requested a refund of airfare. I saw that Germany and other EU nations have been reimposing enhanced border checks and restrictions so no telling what you may run into overseas for the indefinite future.

Here's another indicator for why we will not reopen for probably years...Unrealistic expectations, but here's a sample of what one "thought leader" (Katherine Baicker, economist and dean of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago), has to say: “The longer it takes us to get the testing in place that we need, to develop the treatments we need, to ensure we have adequate health care resources in terms of beds and personnel and equipment, the more we risk businesses not being there when it is safe to resume business activity,” Baicker said. Most Americans said they do not feel safe about sending children back to school, allowing people to dine inside restaurants or allowing large gatherings for sporting events in this latest poll. About two-thirds said testing for the virus needs to improve before allowing people to return to work. __________________ ...Enjoy the lockdown, cuz it's not ending soon...

The USS Kidd offers a cautionary tale as to why covid-19 will likely never really go away anytime soon, or until it fully burns through the population or a vaccination is developed. Illnesses started onboard even after last port call was 30 days prior. So, while flattening the curve to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, we are guaranteeing that it will take forever for covid-19 to fully run through the population. As new cases will not get to zero anytime in the next couple of years (barring a deus ex machina), there will always be a demand pressure to not re-open, ostensibly to save lives. No politician wants to be seen as a "murderer," which is what histrionic people are already alleging. We see them all over social media and even in this forum. The whole situation is almost farcical, in that we're not isolating to limit total infections, we're only isolating to delay the infection spread, "flatten the curve!" This may save some lives although in the final analysis its not yet clear how many lives this will also cost due to delayed treatment for the usual host of all other diseases and maladies, cancer, heart, etc.). Someday in the distant future, perhaps a post-grad doing a doctoral thesis (if there still are such things in a few years), will unravel the net cost/benefits of all this. There's no reason to believe that you won't get covid-19 eventually. Hopefully, one experiences mild symptoms when they get it.

Same here. I actually went to Oktoberfest in Munich while i was in Europe last September. That was a lot of fun. The NY state fair probably has a wider range of attractions (agricultural, crafts, etc.), although the park rides were probably better at Oktoberfest. And of course there's the Bierhalls and tents! I didn't get on any rides though, as after the first couple "Maas" of bier, that wouldn't have been a good idea. Good thing i went last year cuz looks like international travel is all but done for years. Maybe for good as the airline industry collapses and consolidates.

We don't have the core institutional competency to "ramp up" testing or the production capability or means of administration or analysis. Places like Harvard or other public health organizations have these pie-in-the-sky academic recommendations and projections that aren't realistic and are full of fudge factors. This becomes a problem when entire nations are unprepared for pandemics, haven't seriously thought about what to do, and have this type of non-workable magical thinking as input to decision makers. Result is paralysis. And that's where we are and will largely remain into 2021 -2022.

We did have Measles declared eradicated in the US at one point around Y2K but its made a bit of a comeback due to a variety of factors...immigration, cultures, anti-vaccination trends...The Hasidic community in NYC is apparently a prime (but not the only) example of how Measles made a comeback.

meh. I don't think so. The State can and will keep this imposed indefinitely, which may not be the stated plan, but is likely IMO. There may be some relaxation in some areas but it'll all be re-imposed as soon as numbers start to look bad again. Other states will choose different paths, we'll see how it all works out in the end. I don't know what the correct answer is, i just believe that either way, there are big costs in terms of lives and $.

I saw that with Germany....here, there is no plan, just sh*t scribbled on a napkin somewhere. There's insufficient testing to conclude much of anything and everyone is panicked. There will likely be a 2nd or 3rd wave (or maybe even just a brief "pause" between waves). This will induce additional lockdowns or re-institution of them. It will take months/years to definitively determine things like continuing asymptomatic spread and reinfection characteristics as the virus mutates, which medical science doesn't fully understand right now. At least temporarily, we can print enough $ to give to people and businesses affected but eventually it'll all collapse, but that's another subject.

Agree but we don't have the capability or competency to do much contact tracing or enough testing (both antibody and actual virus presence). So we're going to be lost in a wilderness of the numbers game indefinitely. NY won't fully reopen for years (2022-23) unless a vaccine gets deployed or a magic treatment appears. We'll see how other less population dense areas fare as they play the game...

Unless the virus mutates into something less deadly or virulent, which is possible eventually, a 2nd or 3rd wave seems likely. A deployable vaccine doesn't appear imminent before 2021 at best and treatment improvements have been incremental / experimental. It'll be interesting to see the results from areas that are "re-opening" or relaxing controls. I'm especially interested to see how Germany fares as they seem to have been one of the more competent states/nations in handling this overall. If they have to re-institute a more aggressive lockdown then I don't think parts of the US will fully re-open for years (esp NY).

The conspiracy people are going to have a field day with that news. I'm going to hazard a guess that they've been sandbagging numbers all along and this is an attempt to keep things under some sort of control. It might be malicious calculating on the part of CCP or it could just be a result of re-opening with huge population centers without fully getting rid of the virus, which could be impossible until "herd immunity" does its dirty work.

If the state DOH is requiring Nursing and Rehab facilities to accept covid-19 positive people that would normally be hospitalized, when there is space available in actual hospital facilities, there needs to be an investigation of the Department ASAP. I have yet to discover a legitimate excuse for this decision. People (myself included) love to bash Trump for his many inane statements but this decision can actually kill many people...something like 25% of covid-19 deaths are associated with Nursing / Rehab type facilities due to their elderly population. It's almost tantamount to manslaughter.