Syrmax

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.

I just ran across this recently developing issue regarding NY Nursing homes being required to accept elderly covid-19 patients, apparently at the Order of the Governor, or at least his office. This seems very odd and I can't think of a good reason for such logic as the elderly are the most vulnerable and in need of isolation. This would seem to make matters much worse. The below opinion article seems to summarize concerns with this edict. https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2020/04/25/new-york-lacked-common-sense-in-nursing-homes-coronavirus-approach/amp/

Wow. A friend of mine, bartender, told me about 2 months ago that he lost taste and smell for a week or so. I didnt think anything of it at the time other than it was weird with no other symptoms. I don't think that I had it based on timeline (although emerging studies saying it was around as early as September in China), but I was sick with flulike, walking pneumonia symptoms for almost the whole month of October as soon as I got back from Europe. I didnt go to China but I can tell you that China came to me with all the Chinese tourists in Prague, Salzburg and Amsterdam especially....

I suspect this is a politically motivated effort (Trump Lied - People Died), or pranksters, or both. OTOH, if it's real, it looks like Natural Selection is doing its dirty work. Future generations will be thankful.

You hit on some good points and I had read the same article recently (NYT?). Part of the problem with all these numbers, covid-19, seasonal flu, model projections, is that the final infection/mortality values are estimates. Not everyone that gets the flu, dies or even gets tested. Same with covid-19, so there are a lot of extrapolations that occur. Which means a lot of uncertainty...esp with modeling, which appears to have been overly pessimistic. I could be wrong here but wasn't the main objective of distancing to "flatten the curve?" It's not so much to directly prevent infection / deaths but to string out the number of cases at any given time so as to not overburden the healthcare system and wind up with higher mortality. I think in the end the models project roughly the same number of infections. I suppose if the R0 value gets low enough the virus will just "go away" as they all do so that could be another good reason to isolate but there's also a gigantic cost to this. So, trying to figure out when to sound the "all clear" is really problematic as we are using a lot of projections and guesstinates... but not sure of a better way.

he's right about those things. This isn't a Dem/GOP observation, but I hope that he internalizes the fact that Government at all levels but especially federal, were warned by 10 separate internal reports over the past 16 years about the US being woefully unprepared for a pandemic...and basically nothing was done. Which ensured a late and panicked response when a serious pandemic did happen. We were lucky that in 2009 H1N1 Swine flu and the previous SARS outbreaks weren't as virulent or transmissible as this thing is.

I'm going to try the Lysol next. Been looking for a way to shoot UV light inside my body.

Yes you are correct! I couldn't think of her name but it was Tanta. It was a real eye opener blog.

Spot on @cleetussnow I would just add, for posterity: During the run-up to the 2008 crisis i followed a blog - Calculated Risk - that was run by (IIRC) a couple of individuals that were well experienced in the R/E financial field. It was shocking to read about how the entire residential mortgage loan system was shot through with corruption, greed, and ignorance, from the people agreeing to mortgages with preposterous terms, to the mortgage companies arranging the loans, to the Appraisers (the f@cking appraisers even), who were matching home appraisals to whatever the loan was going to be as they were incentivized to support loans because they were paid per appraisal...by the mortgage companies (or lenders). Then you get to the Wall Street financial "engineering" and it was even worse. Sure enough, it all blew up. The only other thing i'd add as a backstory to 2008 (and this has been missed / forgotten by vapid Democrats and Republicans), is that pressure for the Financial Crisis stemmed back to what were thought to be good ideas in the 1990s. It's a sordid story full of players that are still cited as "experts" (looking at you Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan), but basically there was political pressure from the Left to expand Home Ownership. The Right, (and Libertarian Greenspan) rationalized this with the noble lie that expanding home ownership to lower income people would make more of the population "invested" in the economy, jobs, supporting the status quo...neither of which were wrong ideas. But...then the Banks were deregulated in the late 1990s because they were crying they couldn't make money and compete globally with new Investment Banking. So...Congress (a bipartisan effort) sh!tcanned the last of the 1930s Glass-Steagall rules that were still in effect from the heinous excesses that helped trigger the Great Depression (reckless lending, excessive leverage, etc.). So then the banks did what banks do...create new financial products to maximize gains and a derivative "insurance" system that promised to distribute losses should an R/E downturn occur. Except that it too was shot through with fraud and corruption from top to bottom...all while Regulators (SEC, etc) were asleep at the wheel kissing the asses of the likes of Bernie Madoff and surfing internet porn at the office (SEC staffers were fired over this, for real). End rant.

I think you are quite right with the above. It's hard to definitively know exactly what has, and what is, transpiring with the virus and its spread as there are different strains apparently and other variables exist: social distancing has been implemented to varying degrees of compliance, there appears to be a difference in R0 (if that's the right use of the term) between high density and low density population areas, inadequate testing, etc etc.. I don't think we'll have an accurate gauge of covid-19 mortality for quite a while as a lot of data has to be sorted and analyzed. Its clearly worse than seasonal flu but by exactly how much is TBD.

Wow. o:O

I did read it but didn't pick up on that. I'm kind of ok with my Delta credit - assuming they are still in business of course - because i plan on travelling/flying as soon as the coast is clear...

Delta only offered a similar flight credit for my flight from SYR-ORL. And did the same for my SYR-JFK flight, 1st leg to Italy. However, one of the people i was travelling with to Italy (who actually booked the flight on her CC) called Delta and bitched and supposedly managed to get a full refund for us. That ticket was only $256 R/T though. The ORL flt was $425 IIRC. Alitalia is providing a full refund of our ticket though. I had to apply via email and then when i didn't hear anything back, i called last week and was able to get straight thru to Customer Service (was impossible a month ago). Of course, with both of these, i'll believe it when i actually see it. Expedia has refunded virtually all of my Italy hotel reservations and i've received those. I put in for those back in mid March when the whole thing got locked down. They are trying to screw me out of the cost of our last night in Rome reservation refund, although it was only $61 per room. I thought i had put in to cancel it a month ago but either i missed it (there were 4 other reservations i was doing) or their website never registered it. When i went to cancel the res the other day it stated no refund available. I'm going to follow up but if that's the total of refund screwjobs, i'll consider myself lucky as I didn't purchase "travel insurance" on any of it.

this plan makes sense, in its general organization. Glad to hear this. IMO Cuomo has generally done pretty well with covid-19. His brother is a bit of a histrionic lunatic but he's not Gov.

Those transition plans, at least in NY, will likely have to be lengthened out as the plan is basically for the State to subsidize "green" energy to the tune of Billions per year...which will have to be rethought with State budgets about to be blown out. Sadly, the Gov, being influenced by radical environmentalists, has turned his back on natural gas and downstate nuclear (Indian Point). That also has a long term jobs impact as the "green jobs" are largely small contractor behind the meter installations (rooftop solar). Wind and Solar provide virtually no long term employment in state, to generate electricity, and are minimal / no carbon emissions.

Gasoline pretty much is there, if you account for inflation and NY's increased fuel taxes since the 1990s... Gas locally at BJs was selling for $1.89/gal last week. The other non-member Stop n Robs are around $2.10-$2.20 still because they are all in cahoots to keep local prices (and store /distributor profits) elevated.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that our Bear Market rally in Equities has about spent itself, almost right at the Fibonacci 0.618 retracement, depending on the index. Uncanny.