COVID-19 virus thread (formerly Wuhan coronavirus)

[Estebonrober]

Saw a YouTube video that raised a good point. That point being how quickly people are willing to give up their rights in the event of a crisis. For example, bans on public gatherings over a certain size is 100% a violation of the 1st Amendment right to peaceably assemble. The 1st Amendment is widely regarded as the most important of the Bill of Rights and considered to be the very core of what makes the US the US. And yet now we are seeing the government blatantly strip us of that right while the people just let it happen as they cower in fear of a virus they most likey won't catch, and extremely unlikely to die from.

It's truly shameful how people in this country are acting right now. Letting fear and hysteria get the better of them.

I've read a lot of stupid posts here these last couple of days this one takes the cake. Its ok to let this go on for a couple of weeks if it continues past the crisis you rise up. I generally think fairly of your opinions man, even if I disagree with almost all of them, but this is garbage. I agree about the fear and hysteria of hoarding goods, but staying practicing the social distancing stuff is just good citizen stuff atm.

 

[Estebonrober]

The US government dumped billions of dollars into stock market. I think they can afford health care and unemployment insurance for all the citizens. But they're just the bottom of the rung so they don't matter not like the rich people.

1.5 trillion to be clear. Tehy dropped 1.5 trillion in two days into the banks to save the rich. Socialism for the rich. Capitalism for the poor.

Scarface "You know what capitalism is? Getting f***ed!"

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/12/fed...nding-expand-types-of-security-purchases.html

 

[Estebonrober]

Because it's an overreaction. Life is carrying on as normal, I bought groceries, did a yoga class, brushed past dozens of people walking around downtown.

Kids don't need to be shut indoors isolated all day. Like that's good for their immune systems.


That's part of it, it's disrespect to the parents masquarading as caring about the safety of the kids. The school just doesn't want to be liable.

The damage to society by all this mass-hysteria far outweighs the harm reduction that will come from it.

Maybe let the experts handle this and you follow their lead instead of thinking you are A) a expert epidemiologist and B) a master economist. From what I've read you are crucially massively wrong on both counts.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

I've read a lot of stupid posts here these last couple of days this one takes the cake. Its ok to let this go on for a couple of weeks if it continues past the crisis you rise up. I generally think fairly of your opinions man, even if I disagree with almost all of them, but this is garbage. I agree about the fear and hysteria of hoarding goods, but staying practicing the social distancing stuff is just good citizen stuff atm.

He is right though. He didn't say people should gather in mass protests, only that your government should not be legally allowed to ban it according to your own rules.

 

[Estebonrober]

He is right though. He didn't say people should gather in mass protests, only that your government should not be legally allowed to ban it according to your own rules.

Have they put in punishments, made laws, enforced them? As far as Iv'e seen they've asked people and shut down public events largely voluntarily. No one has challenged it because no one is yet dumb enough to hold this stupid position.

So he is wrong. He is also wrong more generally because millions of local ordinances violate the constitution and are never challenged. Not much is sorted out in that document, its a baseline.

 

[Gorbles]

He is right though. He didn't say people should gather in mass protests, only that your government should not be legally allowed to ban it according to your own rules.

Framing "do this to help mitigate an ongoing pandemic" (officially-recognised and labelled as a literal pandemic) as "the government are trying to strip us of our 1A rights" is so disingenuous that criticising it is perfectly fine. The only other option is that the government does nothing, and more people get infected and die (direct correlation, no need for "and / or").

Commodore's opposition to any (federal? any?) government intervention is breathtakingly paranoid, and I'm reading that charitably. If he wants to rail about the government forcibly suppressing people by telling them to avoid getting Covid-19, he can do it to the walls of his house, or whomever else happens to be near him. If he posts it on a public forum, he's going to get chewed out for it, because he is most definitely not "right".

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Have they put in punishments, made laws, enforced them? As far as Iv'e seen they've asked people and shut down public events largely voluntarily. No one has challenged it because no one is yet dumb enough to hold this stupid position.

So he is wrong. He is also wrong more generally because millions of local ordinances violate the constitution and are never challenged. Not much is sorted out in that document, its a baseline.

So if two people steal the third should as well? I still hold that from a legalistic standpoint he is correct. The moral standpoint I couldn't care less about.

 

[Gorbles]

So if two people steal the third should as well? I still hold that from a legalistic standpoint he is correct. The moral standpoint I couldn't care less about.

Your example of stealing is a moral argument, not a legal one. "should" is not "could"; one is rooted in morality, the other, technical (i.e. legal) possibility.

The government intevenes in peoples' lives for any number of reasons. An ongoing international medical pandemic is arguably justified cause. Why do you disagree, other than to argue a tedious technical legality that would need to go to court to even prove?

 

[Bootstoots]

This article:
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
is trying to make the case for shutting down everything yesterday. Along the way it addresses ways of guessing the true number of infections from the reported cases and reported deaths. It is filled with lots of data from China and other places. It is depressing and hopeful at the same time.

P.S. I've never heard of this guy or the website. Does anyone have thoughts about their trustworthiness?

Medium is a site that has all sorts of stuff of all sorts of levels of trustworthiness. But this article looks extremely good and well-researched: it fits with everything else I know from the available data about how cases have slowed down dramatically in places that implement restrictions, with a time lag of about 2 weeks. This is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to find in order to convince myself that @innonimatu and @hobbsyoyo are more likely to be right than my own dire prediction from a couple days ago.

Here's my understanding of what this article is saying.

tl;dr is that freaking out and canceling everything actually works pretty well. It may not seem like it at first, but it starts working immediately, you just don't know it at first.

There's a time lag of about 10-14 days between when this starts and when the number of diagnosed cases suddenly leaves its exponential trend and slows down quickly, because a lot of people had caught it already before the new measures but weren't showing symptoms or getting tested. Tracing back the likely time of infection, you find that the number of new infections had started declining almost as soon as the measures took effect.

Those couple of weeks, which just started right around yesterday here and around a week earlier in Italy, will look pretty horrifying. The number of cases will skyrocket and temporarily overwhelm hospitals, leading to medical chaos and excess deaths. But, assuming we continue to shut just about everything down, it will stop getting worse before about April 1 at the latest, and deaths will level off by tax time or so (April 15).

Now what I don't know is how long things have to be paralyzed to kill most of it off, how bad the economic decline will be, and to what extent it will just spread again as people go back to work. It is fairly likely to become endemic in the human population and never really go away entirely, unlike SARS, which did disappear entirely by mid-2004 thanks to effective control measures in the affected countries. But hey, I figure we can take any good news we can get right now.

 

[Zelig]

@Valka, pets don't carry the virus.

That does not seem to be the case: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...latest-advice-about-coronavirus-and-your-pets

SARS and MERS have some very important differences to the Wuhan Virus.
The affected became contagious after showing symptoms, so it was relatively easy to isolate them before they could infect too many people.
In the Wuhan Virus the affected are contagious several days before showing any symptoms, so it is much more complex to stop the spread.

The WHO says that pre-symptomatic transmission is not a major driver of transmission for covid-19.

P.S. I've never heard of this guy or the website. Does anyone have thoughts about their trustworthiness?

It's a blogging platform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)

 

[Bamspeedy]

Assuming your region has industrial scale composting, not garbage.

I'm not talking of putting whole turds in the garbage, just the little bit that would end up on toilet paper would be on paper towel instead. How is that different than cleaning up vomit and putting it in the garbage? And I'm not talking of doing this on a mass scale, just for those desperate with no toilet paper.

Got a package of toilet paper from WM competitor, after WM was sold out for at least the third day in a row.

 

[emzie]

Saw a YouTube video that raised a good point. That point being how quickly people are willing to give up their rights in the event of a crisis. For example, bans on public gatherings over a certain size is 100% a violation of the 1st Amendment right to peaceably assemble. The 1st Amendment is widely regarded as the most important of the Bill of Rights and considered to be the very core of what makes the US the US. And yet now we are seeing the government blatantly strip us of that right while the people just let it happen as they cower in fear of a virus they most likey won't catch, and extremely unlikely to die from.

It's truly shameful how people in this country are acting right now. Letting fear and hysteria get the better of them.

Is it a violation of your first amendment rights to have the fire marshal come close down a gathering that has exceeded capacity?

All rights in the Constitution have limits. As a classic example, you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Just like the limitations of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly may be abridged if there is a "clear and present danger."

 

[Synobun]

Now what I don't know is how long things have to be paralyzed to kill most of it off, how bad the economic decline will be, and to what extent it will just spread again as people go back to work. It is fairly likely to become endemic in the human population and never really go away entirely, unlike SARS, which did disappear entirely by mid-2004 thanks to effective control measures in the affected countries. But hey, I figure we can take any good news we can get right now.

Important questions to answer:

1) How well did everyone adhere to quarantine?

2) When were people in isolation infected? If people in isolation are infected at the end of quarantine, what danger do they pose to the community?

3) Do people who have recovered obtain resistance to future infections? (The earlier bit about antibodies makes me think yes.)

4) How many asymptomatic or mild symptom people are there?

There's a statistical issue here where simple probability comes into play. Rolling the dice can have another outbreak or have it peter out, which is why we're stacking the deck in our favour.

But I think even if it comes back after a 2-4–week quarantine, it'll be far less severe if only because of how many asymptomatic/mild symptom people there were who now can't get it again (and become vectors). The silent spreader is the danger, and the benefit of a quarantine is that it dramatically reduces how many of those there are... and how many are available to be infected.

And yet, even if a second outbreak is similar to this one, I think the quarantine will still have paid off. If hospitals are taxed now, it would have been far worse had the spread been uncontrolled. A delay of a couple weeks matters even if it doesn't have an appreciable effect on spread once society re-mingles. The biggest threat here is accessibility. Doing whatever we can to increase accessibility reduces the death rate.

 

[red_elk]

Just went to the supermarket. More people than usual.
No problems with toilet paper yet, but shelves with canned beef are almost empty.

 

[Zelig]

I'm not talking of putting whole turds in the garbage, just the little bit that would end up on toilet paper would be on paper towel instead. How is that different than cleaning up vomit and putting it in the garbage? And I'm not talking of doing this on a mass scale, just for those desperate with no toilet paper.

Got a package of toilet paper from WM competitor, after WM was sold out for at least the third day in a row.

Yes, I know what you're saying. You may want to check with your local waste disposal authority. In my municipality, paper towels and pet waste are compostable, but they don't give guidance for human waste.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The sticking points on the bill (according to CNN's sources) is that the GOP will not go for any of the paid leave / salary support provisions. He says the Democrats don't do enough but as usual, the exact opposite is the truth. This is aside from permanent changes to employment law, they just don't want to do provide any support whatsoever to working people and instead want to do a payroll tax cut that will somehow trickle down to the wage serfs while they're not actually working.

This is INSANE

I have not been this mad at Trump in a while and that's saying something. I'm legit more mad about this than all the crap he pulled during the impeachment trial.

Turns out the other sticking point is the GOP is insisting on putting a ban on abortions in the bill.


My congresscritter forced the head of the CDC to pledge provide testing kits for free for all Americans yesterday:
https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a31468179/katie-porter-coronavirus-testing-interview/

Spoiler :

It's worth pointing out that Katie's district (CA-45) does not have many lower income people at all. While she correctly pointed out that most people cannot afford a $1300 test, that is not really true of most of her constituents (who are not only mostly rich but fully insured) but she is still fighting for those who are less fortunate even if they aren't the ones she's necessarily representing.

Also, she's been on Bill Maher twice and is legit seriously funny. She's a keeper and I can't wait to vote for her again.

BRB gotta blast her with thank you's via resistbot

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Looks like Spain is next to be in serious trouble after Italy

Important questions to answer:

1) How well did everyone adhere to quarantine?

2) When were people in isolation infected? If people in isolation are infected at the end of quarantine, what danger do they pose to the community?

3) Do people who have recovered obtain resistance to future infections? (The earlier bit about antibodies makes me think yes.)

4) How many asymptomatic or mild symptom people are there?

There's a statistical issue here where simple probability comes into play. Rolling the dice can have another outbreak or have it peter out, which is why we're stacking the deck in our favour.

But I think even if it comes back after a 2-4–week quarantine, it'll be far less severe if only because of how many asymptomatic/mild symptom people there were who now can't get it again (and become vectors). The silent spreader is the danger, and the benefit of a quarantine is that it dramatically reduces how many of those there are... and how many are available to be infected.

And yet, even if a second outbreak is similar to this one, I think the quarantine will still have paid off. If hospitals are taxed now, it would have been far worse had the spread been uncontrolled. A delay of a couple weeks matters even if it doesn't have an appreciable effect on spread once society re-mingles. The biggest threat here is accessibility. Doing whatever we can to increase accessibility reduces the death rate.

Probably the number of infected people without or mild symptoms is way higher than thought, maybe even an order of magnitude higher, therefore the enormous difficulty to stop the pandemy. A clever virus will avoid to kill his host or even delate itself. And this is a pretty pretty clever guy, not like ebola or rabies, those brute morons...

 

[Kyriakos]

Saw a YouTube video that raised a good point. That point being how quickly people are willing to give up their rights in the event of a crisis. For example, bans on public gatherings over a certain size is 100% a violation of the 1st Amendment right to peaceably assemble. The 1st Amendment is widely regarded as the most important of the Bill of Rights and considered to be the very core of what makes the US the US. And yet now we are seeing the government blatantly strip us of that right while the people just let it happen as they cower in fear of a virus they most likey won't catch, and extremely unlikely to die from.

It's truly shameful how people in this country are acting right now. Letting fear and hysteria get the better of them.

I don't think it's a "giving up rights" issue - though it could become one, just not seeing it become one in the US, like it didn't in various european countries.

And according to projections the virus in the US will soon claim hundreds, and then thousands of lives, so if you don't start testing and containing - by ending mass events and then stopping most businesses or changing how they work for now - it will get far worse far faster.
In a number of Eu countries, including Greece, those measures already have been taken, despite far less deaths.

 

[Gorbles]

Latest personal supermarket anecdote (the one that was the best-stocked because it's a bit out of the way): very little pasta, very little bread, no passata or chopped tomatoes of any kind. Overheard conversations from the staff about how whatever was being delivered this morning had already gone, and the next similiar type of delivery was tomorrow evening. I can't imagine how hard they're having to work due to this - every supermarket I've been in in the past week has been permanently in a state of stocking their shelves, regardless of the time of day or week.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I bet the supermarket workers are just happy to keep their jobs because they sure as hell are not going to be getting extra (or any) PTO* absent government intervention, which is looking less likely by the hour thanks to the GOP.

*Except the ones in unions