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March Banter 2020


George BM
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16 minutes ago, supernovasky said:

I really just hope we can get the testing up soon.

What does the testing do? There is no cure. I suppose if you can get people to self quarantine it might slow the spread. But we aren’t going to get people to stay home. I went out tonight for dinner and the place was running over with people. They may be able to keep people from gathering in the tens of thousands but there are still gonna be large gatherings of people, and many tens of thousands of those gathering across the country.

What happens if we have a million test kits? 10 million?  Does everyone who gets a sniffle or a cough go get tested? What then? How do we handle that? 
 

We gonna close businesses? Gas stations? Food stores? Where does this end. A mass panic seems very unlikely to be the best course of action here.

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32 minutes ago, nj2va said:

Grocery stores are legit madhouses today...I stocked up before today but friends have sent pictures...lines to get in some stores...empty shelves...

I am a Store Manager of a Grocery store and it's been crazy the last week. Not 1 pack of toilet paper left in the store. No hand sanitizer and cleaning products, etc. Problem is our warehouse is out of it and will probably be out of it for an extended period of time. 

Its really histeria going on right now

 

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6 minutes ago, Chris78 said:

I am a Store Manager of a Grocery store and it's been crazy the last week. Not 1 pack of toilet paper left in the store. No hand sanitizer and cleaning products, etc. Problem is our warehouse is out of it and will probably be out of it for an extended period of time. 

Its really histeria going on right now

 

I don't understand the run on TP.. this virus doesn't give you the shits as far as I know.. even if you run out, that's what showers and leaves are for

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2 minutes ago, Yeoman said:

I don't understand the run on TP.. this virus doesn't give you the shits as far as I know.. even if you run out, that's what showers and leaves are for

Lol. Yep. I dont get it either. Hand sanitizer and cleaning products sure.  

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27 minutes ago, WinterWxLuvr said:

What does the testing do? There is no cure. I suppose if you can get people to self quarantine it might slow the spread. But we aren’t going to get people to stay home. I went out tonight for dinner and the place was running over with people. They may be able to keep people from gathering in the tens of thousands but there are still gonna be large gatherings of people, and many tens of thousands of those gathering across the country.

What happens if we have a million test kits? 10 million?  Does everyone who gets a sniffle or a cough go get tested? What then? How do we handle that? 
 

We gonna close businesses? Gas stations? Food stores? Where does this end. A mass panic seems very unlikely to be the best course of action here.

I think the answer is simple. Testing is critical to tracking and stopping the outbreak. How would we even know a single person had it without a test?

We could just say fucck it, who cares? We get all sorts of viruses and (most) survive and move on. Lots get the flu every year. This is new, however, and its behavior is largely unknown. It is pretty clear it is more severe than the flu and the fatality rate among older folks is much higher though. And ofc, there is no vaccine.

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21 minutes ago, WinterWxLuvr said:

What does the testing do? There is no cure. I suppose if you can get people to self quarantine it might slow the spread. But we aren’t going to get people to stay home. I went out tonight for dinner and the place was running over with people. They may be able to keep people from gathering in the tens of thousands but there are still gonna be large gatherings of people, and many tens of thousands of those gathering across the country.

What happens if we have a million test kits? 10 million?  Does everyone who gets a sniffle or a cough go get tested? What then? How do we handle that? 
 

We gonna close businesses? Gas stations? Food stores? Where does this end. A mass panic seems very unlikely to be the best course of action here.

So there are two ways to control this disease:

- The massive quarantine system.  This is the China method. It works. It's brutal and effective. It costs the country greatly economically.

The surgical contact tracing system. To do this you need MASSIVE testing capacity. South Korea has run 200k tests and they are much smaller than us. When they get a hit, they not only contact trace, they alert everyone via text message about an area where a coronavirus patient was at that they may have passed through. They ALL wear masks. They all drive through test at the slightest symptom.

 

There's actually a third... The Italy, Iran, and now the United States system... which is to let it burn through. Iran tried this and it brought them to their knees, infecting and killing politicians and leaders. Italy tried this and now they're importing help from China.

 

We're trying it too. 

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Just now, WxWatcher007 said:

Although a lot of people got swine flu, the mortality and hospitalization rates were dramatically lower than the data we’ve seen so far from novel coronavirus. That was really a situation where it wasn’t much worse than the flu.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html

Coronavirus is a whole different ballgame. We better hope we got ahead of this to slow the rate of transmission. South Korea is doing extraordinary things with testing and their mortality rate but we’re clearly on the Italy track if we don’t keep ramping up our social distancing and hospital readiness.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN20Z27P

Adequate testing is so important to know what extent of it we are dealing with and to make the appropriate decisions based off of how widespread it is and what areas ,etc. Its impossible to make educated decisions if we dont have all the facts. IMHO its crazy that we do not have the ability to adequately do testing right now in the most powerful county in the world.

 

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Sadly I think that ship has sailed. Our state has six confirmed cases and has only tested about 100 people. Yesterday there were three cases and the state epidemiologist said we should assume widespread community transmission in the county closest to NYC.

Today there were three more cases and he said in the next month 10 to 20 percent of the state could contract the virus and 70% by the end of the year if we do nothing. That’s at least a thousand deaths assuming the very lowest end of the mortality data we have. Just here. We’re almost flying blind here and it’s a shame. 

We just have to do the best we can. At least Congress seems to have its act together.

dunno about you, but I’ve been impressed with the fairly rapid speed we’ve managed to socially distance in the past 48 hours. It should have happened weeks ago, and the testing has still been horrendous, but the rapid progress by private companies, state governments, and schools has given me some hope that we are making good progressing on flattening the curve. The virus is almost 100% already in most metropolitan communities, but many people seem to be taking it seriously. I’ve felt a seismic shift amongst my peers in the past few days.

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7 minutes ago, EastCoast NPZ said:

(12500 / 60M)*100 = .021%

(40 / 127K) *100 = .031%

I would not classify this as dramatically different.  Especially since they are being conservative with the test kits at the moment.   We know there are significantly more cases than have been confirmed.  Again, precautions are warranted, mass hysteria is not.

Where are you getting that second number?  40/127k?

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6 minutes ago, EastCoast NPZ said:

Yeah, double checked that data and it was wrong.  That's why I deleted the post.  1400 cases not 127K.

Yeah, it’s not great (around 3%) but probably not as bad as that in reality because we don’t have anywhere near an accurate count of the total number of cases.  Even 1% would be pretty bad though and about 10x worse than the flu.  

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https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html

 

60 million plus cases, 12000 plus us deaths.

I don’t remember anything shutting down. Does anyone else?

Quick math... that is a fatality rate of 0.02%.

 

What is the low-bar estimate on Coronavirus fatalities? .5-1% of cases — albeit with symptoms noticeable enough to get diagnosed. That rate becomes much, much higher when a bunch of cases appear in one area, which is why things get shut down. What is happening in Lombardy isn’t fake... I don’t understand why people continually seek to minimize the severity of this issue.

 

And for the record, schools definitely closed for swine flu. Obviously things weren’t cancelled at this level. But swine flu was much less severe, and potentially less contagious. People really think famous NBA players, UK and Brazilian government officials, Tom Hanks, and the wife of Justin Trudeau are randomly getting the virus while common folk remain unaffected? Hint: it’s already everywhere, these guys just have the clout to get rushed tests.

 

Maybe that is a good sign that the fatality number might be lower, but given the number of vulnerable people... why not shut things down?

 

 

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8 minutes ago, WxWatcher007 said:

I think those numbers are off. It’s approximately 5k deaths for ~135k cases here (globally) that ends up creating a 3.7% mortality rate (which is certainly high). 

Even if you assume 60 million Americans get this (lower than some estimates) and there’s a .5% mortality rate, similar to South Korea, that’s an estimated 300,000 deaths. That dwarfs swine flu and anything we’ve seen in a long time. 

Closing schools and mass gatherings isn’t mass hysteria, nor is simply running or discussing the numbers. That’s good public health policy. We have to be clear eyed about this. It isn’t an existential threat to us all but it is a serious threat. 

Spot on but I’m slightly optimistic that we can keep the total number below 60,000,000 by taking the social distancing and mitigation steps that we are doing now.  We didn’t do much of those things with swine flu, although we did have the benefit of a vaccine.  

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4 minutes ago, WxWatcher007 said:

To add context to this, my mom lives in a county where there’s been multiple coronavirus cases and a death. 

Today she needed to go to the emergency room. This was at 4pm today, ambulance and all, under a physician’s order.

The local hospital is a madhouse. It’s 11pm and she still doesn’t have a room. Now imagine dozens of coronavirus patients needing care at the same time in rural areas. Imagine hundreds or thousands in urban understaffed hospitals.

Us young and healthy folks have to stop looking at it from our narrow personalized perspective.

I'm pulling for your mother to make a full recovery.

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6 minutes ago, WxWatcher007 said:

To add context to this, my mom lives in a county where there’s been multiple coronavirus cases and a death. 

Today she needed to go to the emergency room. This was at 4pm today, ambulance and all, under a physician’s order.

The local hospital is a madhouse. It’s 11pm and she still doesn’t have a room. Now imagine dozens of coronavirus patients needing care at the same time in rural areas. Imagine hundreds or thousands in urban understaffed hospitals.

Us young and healthy folks have to stop looking at it from our narrow personalized perspective.

Sorry to hear about your mom.  Prayers for her, and you.

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1 minute ago, WxWatcher007 said:

Thanks everyone—she has a different medical issue, but she’s definitely in that vulnerable population. I don’t want to be a downer or be too personal but yeah, you definitely want to keep hospitals clearer and the only way to do that is by taking steps to flatten the curve.

I’m with you.  These steps will literally save lives.  The economy will suffer for sure but it will bounce back eventually.  

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9 hours ago, supernovasky said:

Thanks Mattie. I’ll be fine. Today was better than yesterday so I think I’m finally turning the corner. WHATEVER it is I have, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Similar symptoms?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/health/coronavirus-survivor-elizabeth-schneider/index.html

Also, this is good news.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/roche-gets-clearance-for-coronavirus-test-that-s-10-times-faster

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13 hours ago, supernovasky said:

I have been sick as a dog. Dry cough, fever 101, sore throat, malaise, weakness, etc. For 8 days. I went to the doc yesterday who swabbed for strep and flu. Negative on both. Asked about covid, testing isn’t there unless you have a known contact or went out of the country. I do have a lot of contact in my job with international people.

 

Who knows. It’s been ugh though. Hope everyone is well and stays healthy through this.

Yikes, feel better and try to stay home as much as you can.

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3 minutes ago, mappy said:

I’m gonna probably go crazy the next two weeks while home with kiddo. There’s not nearly enough booze in the house for that. 

I am legit gonna stop on my way home and get a case of beer and hit up the ABC store for gin, rum and anything else I think I might need.  It won't be Scraff epic but the hell if i'm going to lose my mind while sober during all this.

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7 hours ago, WxWatcher007 said:

To add context to this, my mom lives in a county where there’s been multiple coronavirus cases and a death. 

Today she needed to go to the emergency room. This was at 4pm today, ambulance and all, under a physician’s order.

The local hospital is a madhouse. It’s 11pm and she still doesn’t have a room. Now imagine dozens of coronavirus patients needing care at the same time in rural areas. Imagine hundreds or thousands in urban understaffed hospitals.

Us young and healthy folks have to stop looking at it from our narrow personalized perspective.

100% 

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22 minutes ago, MN Transplant said:

Closed.  Can’t see them opening prior to Easter. 

How they came to this decision is just lol.  Doing a complete 180 and closing is just egg on their faces.  And making the call at midnight is extra lol.  Its good they did it but i wish it had been done differently.

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42 minutes ago, H2O said:

I am legit gonna stop on my way home and get a case of beer and hit up the ABC store for gin, rum and anything else I think I might need.  It won't be Scraff epic but the hell if i'm going to lose my mind while sober during all this.

 

40 minutes ago, losetoa6 said:

Good luck !!:lol: 

With all the people staying home from work my commute to my jobs will be a cake walk ..easy drives each day . No waiting for equipment at the gym either lol.

We have plans with a small group of friends tomorrow night, so when I run out for that booze run, i'll be picking up extra to keep at home. I'm out of wine, and whiskey :weep:

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