“Like the gay circuit party in Miami”. Steve, you don’t need the adjective “gay”.
The isteve commentariat knows what a “circuit party” is and who enjoys said parties!

Kinda O/T but there’s a Sailer headline somewhere in here…

https://www.foxnews.com/health/coronavirus-infected-new-york-city-doc-talks-battle-with-covid-19

After consulting with Mt. Sinai doctors, and having read up on the limited literature on potential treatments for the novel virus, Deutsch said he began hydroxychloroquine,
…
Deutsch said his symptoms began to improve a few days later. But, he cautioned: “People have to understand that it should be used in consultation with your doctor. We want to make sure there is enough supply for people who need it,” he said.

I think it might be…something like…“Save the hydroxychloroquine for people who really need it, like, say…me…”

Probably 15 or 20 yrs ago I read someone’s analysis that Northern Italians had it the best of anyone in Europe. As rich as the Germans but enjoyed life a whole lot more. That was before Corona and before the Great Recession, which Italy was very slow to come out of. Everywhere will change after this, but Italy may change more than most.

An exception has popped up in South Dakota, where nearly a majority of the active cases in the state are related to the Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls. I have heard rumors the total number of cases related to Smithfield employees is higher than 80+ being reported in the local press. After doing almost nothing to address the outbreak, Smithfield had to be encouraged by the state to close plant for three days starting Saturday for “deep cleaning.” South Dakota is not reporting racial demographics on infections, but a majority of the plants workers are immigrants and refugees.

https://www.keloland.com/news/local-news/smithfield-foods-in-sioux-falls-to-close-for-three-days-due-to-outbreak-of-coronavirus/

There should be heavy carrot/stick usage on businesses to make sure they hire back 100% of the people they laid off due to WuFlu. The next bailout/stimulus package should include language favoring businesses who bring back their entire staffs, and special penalties for those who fail to do so.

To accommodate those who aren’t rehired, in addition to infrastructure projects, like bridges and antibiotics factories, there should be a federal law mandating the replacement of every faucet in every public bathroom in the country which fails to meet new standards. Presently, many faucets require you to smash a knob or trip a sensor every five seconds to produce a trickle of frigid water barely sufficient to dampen a mouse. These should be replaced with faucets that produce a full, continuous stream of warm water-and temperature is important because people, especially children, won’t touch cold water. Additionally, “open office” workplaces should be forbidden OSHA violations, just as toilets without doors are-they are horrendously effective vectors for the spread of respiratory disease. When Betty in sales coughs, everyone on the floor gets sick. Outlaw them. No more than four people should be seated per room and seats should be spaced at least six feet apart. Lots of construction jobs will be made for the erection of walls in office buildings. Good. Businesses will complain of course, but ultimately comply or decide to let more people work from home, which they should have done years ago anyway.

Finally, there should to be a push adopt a more hygienic greeting ritual than the handshake. WuFlu might just be the catalyst for this, assuming political and cultural leaders capitalize on it. Unfortunately, alternatives generally either objectively suck or seem too foreign for people to actually adopt. I’m partial to just looking someone in the eye and saying hello, but that’s just me.

Well, then — there will simply be no singing and dancing.

Sure this is legit detective work, but I’m getting the feeling that natural human behavior is under the microscope more than the virus, that we are going to be made the culprits rather than the COVID

“How are new couples going to meet?” Online. First they will video chat, then determine if their potential partner is worth the risk of meeting in person. So when you finally see each other face to face, it’s like date #3 already.

The Times had a story where the operative theory behind the Italian and Spanish outbreaks was that 35-year-olds commonly live with their parents. The “children” go out partying all night or attend big soccer matches, come home and infect their senior-age parents.

I had no idea these 2 countries are filled with millions of George Costanzas.

Leaving Miami aside, I’d have guessed that circuit parties were for wild and crazy electrical engineers. Of course, I’d never heard of foam cannon parties until I started reading The Rational Male at age 60 and by then it was way too late to get an invite

German scientists have been studying their country’s hardest hit district, Heinsberg

PiltdownMan, in another thread, pointed to published German findings released today related to this region. A full-on randomized-sample study of a particular town, Gangelt.

“Vorläufiges Ergebnis und Schlussfolgerungen der COVID-19 Case-Cluster-Study (Gemeinde Gangelt)” by Prof. Dr. Hendrik Streeck (Institut für Virologie), et. al., April 9, University Clinic, Bonn.

In short, it is more good news as it corroborates the previous findings, and the oft-heard-speculation, that the number of asymptomatic-and-untested positives is many, many times higher than the number of confirmed positives.

A close analysis of the numbers in the Streeck study published April 9 reveals yet more evidence for the new coronavirus having a true fatality rate very likely under 0.1%, and a pretty good chance it rounds to 0.0% (i.e., <0.05%).

I'm going to re-post these comments on the Streeck et. al. study here, as they are more relevant to this thread than as a late-thread comment to PiltdownMan’s link:

Here is an article that focuses on the Heinsburg study (the Guardian’s wanders all over the map). It’s by Antonio Regalado, in the MIT Revew: Blood tests show 14% of people are now immune to covid-19 in one town in Germany. BTW, Regalado is a real reporter; he’s the guy who broke last year’s CRISPR babies story.

Prof. Streeck seems to have given a briefing about halfway through his study (it’s in German under “Videos und Livestreams”). AFAIK, it hasn’t been written up as a preprint, yet. So the details aren’t clear.

One possible issue is that Streeck’s test of serum antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 viral antigens might also recognize antibodies to some of the other four coronaviruses that colonize humans. Such antibodies are common (2010 publication). A few days ago, John Bell of Oxford sounded an alarm about faulty serology tests, perhaps partly on this basis.

Or perhaps Streeck’s finding of a 14% prevalence of anti-Covid-19 antibodies in a randomly-sampled population is the real deal. It would be very strong evidence that the virus has had a much longer run outside of China than most people have thought. It will be time to revise lots of priors, and models.

Edit: In a comment above this one, Hail links to a two-page summary (PDF) of the study. If I could read German, I’d probably say it’s the draft Abstract of a forthcoming peer-reviewed article.

Lul, wouldn’t that be the perfect final solution: eliminate all non-virtual socializing, strictly business! It’ll be bad for the Instagrammers but not the e-girl freelancers — the exact style of Nurse Ratched compromise you’d predict from The Z Man’s “gynocratic hysterical society.” (I too was surprised the proto-spinster CEO pantsuits took Unz.com first on their march, but they’re always where you least expect)

“Like the gay circuit party in Miami”. Steve, you don’t need the adjective “gay”.
The isteve commentariat knows what a “circuit party” is and who enjoys said parties!

Are key parties affected?

By the way, China’s agricultural ministry is about to reclassify canines from “livestock” to something more cynophilic:

https://www.the-sun.com/news/661221/china-dogs-companions-new-guidelines-animal-trade/

No news about Chiroptera, though.

I was mocked for posting here during the dark days of March that Chicom Bat Flu was a kissing/hugging disease. But that’s where the evidence pointed.

The aerosol transmissions stories are PROJECT FEAR. It can happen but the odds are very low.

The masks are critical because they break the facial touching cycle to a great extent. Hand to face touching and face to face touching.

The criminal CDC leaves open the question of airborne transmission as a theoretical possibility for many viruses they know damn well don’t transmit through the air! They use just enough weasel words to maintain ambiguity. CDC = fog machine.

Well, work is often fun and working from home is not a good situation, My daughter works for a large manufacturing company and while she works from home, production has been spread over three shifts. Makes sense to me.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/enough-capacity-in-country-to-meet-hydroxychloroquine-demand-industry/articleshow/75029934.cms

India manufactures 70 per cent of the world’s supply.
India can produce 200 million 200 mg pills per month.

…installing copper door handles and the like…

Naturally anti-microbial touch surfaces are a great idea.

The trick is finding say, door knobs, that are actually made of copper and its alloys.

The first ‘copper’ door knob that pops up on Home Depot’s website? It’s made of stainless steel treated to look like copper.

No problem…just find a nice bronze knob.

Well, the ‘bronze’ knob is just a bronze finish over a core material specified as ‘metal.’

Mhmmm.

There’s always Sun Valley Bronze, but now you’re talking about spending real money!

Granular data on ethnicity in that other Nordic stronghold – MN:

https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/situation.html

You are truly unique, Reg. It took a special person to find a pic of a bat embossed coin, mother and baby bats even.

“If you have 100 or 200 people spend enough time in a room with a person carrying the virus, then for example 20 might walk out with the new infection and, after a few days’ incubation time, pass it on to their families and workmates, let’s assume 10 more people each. Within a few days, the virus can thus multiply 200 times with only one new incident – and then continue.”

That’s a strange assumption. If R0 is, say, roughly 3.0, how do these infected people manage to infect on average 10 more people?

The only way I can see it is if most of these people go from superspreader event to another, which I guess could happen for certain types.

In general, for highly networked people, who commonly engage with other highly networked people, the degrees of separation between them and any virus is probably pretty low. That may be why we see a good number of prominent people coming down with it.

Instead of merely multiplying the number of daily cases by a certain factor, Popper’s example tries to account for what he calls the starting point of “local epidemic networks”.

Silly me. This whole time I had always assumed that professional epidemiologists used mathematical models that reflected the way people actually interacted in societies, that took into account things like social nodes, intimacy of contacts, regular air connections, etc., because that’s sure as hell what I would do if I had their job… That’s why I felt somewhat ill at ease coming out against the majority professional opinion even though my instincts told me something different.

My greatest weakness is that I give others too much credit. I am constantly assuming that they are smarter and more thorough than they really are.

I don’t see young people staying away from clubs if, upon entry, they’re told they have a–what?–10% chance of getting sick, a 1% chance of spending a couple days in the hospital, and a 0.whatever% chance of dying.

Shit, I would have found those stats to make things exciting.

Plenty of people banged and screwed and, crazy!, married during the 80s and 90s, when even semi-random hookups carried a non-zero chance of certain death. My read from my college students is that 1% of them are actually scared of covid19.

Or perhaps Streeck’s finding of a 14% prevalence of anti-Covid-19 antibodies in a randomly-sampled population is the real deal. It would be very strong evidence that the virus has had a much longer run outside of China than most people have thought. It will be time to revise lots of priors, and models.

A number of experts had been shouting this (or the strong possibility of it) from the rooftops since about mid-March, but alas people like that don’t control the media, and, as academic types by disposition, they are not necessarily the best at self-promotion or “getting heard.” None of them would do well on a cable-news talk show format. So they largely got drowned out.

About the same time as the Streeck team was carrying out its randomized sample study in Gangelt, a hotspot for many of the Kreis Heinsberg cases, Hamburg’s Dr. Klaus Püschel made the following comments in the local media in Hamburg:

Professor Klaus Püschel, head of forensic medicine in Hamburg, explains about Covid19: „This virus influences our lives in a completely excessive way. This is disproportionate to the danger posed by the virus. And the astronomical economic damage now being caused is not commensurate with the danger posed by the virus. I am convinced that the Corona mortality rate will not even show up as a peak in annual mortality.“

In Hamburg, for example, „not a single person who was not previously ill“ had died of the virus: „All those we have examined so far had cancer, a chronic lung disease, were heavy smokers or severely obese, suffered from diabetes or had a cardiovascular disease. The virus was the last straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. „Covid-19 is a fatal disease only in exceptional cases, but in most cases it is a predominantly harmless viral infection.“

In addition, Dr. Püschel explains: „In quite a few cases, we have also found that the current corona infection has nothing whatsoever to do with the fatal outcome because other causes of death are present, for example a brain haemorrhage or a heart attack. Corona in itself is a „not particularly dangerous viral disease“, says the forensic scientist. He pleads for statistics based on concrete examination results. „All speculations about individual deaths that have not been expertly examined only fuel anxiety.“

(Translated from the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper.)

“This man Püschel is clearly a dupe, must’ve fallen for Hoaxer material he read online. He needs to get educated and learn basic facts about this Mass Killer Apocalypse Virus!”

Oops, he is the Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Hamburg University since 1992. Hmm.

Don’t forget urinals. They should all be six feet apart. This would also foil that species of awful weirdo who wants to chat while pissing.

“How are new couples going to meet?” Online. First they will video chat, then determine if their potential partner is worth the risk of meeting in person. So when you finally see each other face to face, it’s like date #3 already.

Except it wouldn’t work. They can’t smell each other.

Digital representations of a person are just mirages. They have no reality. That’s why I could call you names here that I never would in real life.

It’s also why so many OkCupid/Tinder/whatever relationships die on the vine. People get bored chatting and just delete each other—they didn’t actually know each other and won’t see each other around, so who cares? It’s easy to ghost a person you’ve never actually met.

We’re having a hard enough time producing children (in civilized nations) as it is. We shouldn’t make it more difficult by not letting young people meet, relate, and mate.

Steve,
Take some time off from the Plague to watch Tiger King.
It will warm your heart to know that Old Weird America is alive and well.

when even semi-random hookups [were thought to carry] a non-zero chance of certain death.

FIFY.

I do not view the German serology results as a source of optimism.

Some might see a glass 16% full – I see it 84% empty. Even in a hard-hit town, there are 4 times more people eligible to be hit before herd immunity kicks in.

It’s common in many cultures to live at home until you get married, not just in Southern Europe.

If you are 20-something and want some quality time with your SO in that situation, in Japan, South Korea, and Brazil, you can head to a love m(h)otel. They aren’t bad places to stay. In the megacities-Tokyo, Seoul, Sao Paulo-some of them can actually get quite fancy or exotic if you’ve got money to spend for a special occasion. Other, more prudish countries often have similar arrangements, if more staid and less advertised.

Here is my edit of a Google Translate translation of the abstract of Prof. Streeck’s abstract (PDF in German).

Preliminary Results and Conclusions of the COVID-19 Case Cluster Study (municipality of Gangelt, Germany)
by H. Struck, G. Hartmann, M. Exner, & M. Schmid
April 9, 2020
[Note: These results are preliminary. The final results of the study will be published and presented to the public as soon as this available.]

A couple of slightly OT links, since earlier threads are now buried too deep:

Are doctors HARMING patients by ventilating them too soon? As 80% of NYC coronavirus patients on ventilators die – and doctors search for other ways to help them breathe…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8201783/Some-doctors-moving-away-ventilators-virus-patients.html

The face of Wuhan Virus in NY today:

Anil Subba, a Nepali Uber driver from Jackson Heights, Queens, died just hours after doctors at Elmhurst Hospital thought he might be strong enough to be removed from a ventilator.

In the nearby Corona neighborhood, Edison Forero, 44, a restaurant worker from Colombia, was still burning with fever when his housemate demanded he leave his rented room, he said.

Not far away in Jackson Heights, Raziah Begum, a widow and nanny from Bangladesh, worries she will be ill soon. Two of her three roommates already have the symptoms of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Everyone in the apartment is jobless, and they eat one meal a day, she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/nyregion/coronavirus-queens-corona-jackson-heights-elmhurst.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

It’s not Tom Hanks Disease anymore. Shoulda stayed back home in Bangladesh, I guess, Raziah. You pays your (smuggler) money and you takes your chances with the Big Apple. Cue world’s smallest violin.

There is no intrinsic R0. R0 depends on human behavior and location vis-à-vis other humans.

It took a special person to find a pic of a bat embossed coin, mother and baby bats even.

Thanks, but hardly. Around two billion quarters are minted in the US annually, so there will be at least one of these bat quarters for each American. They came out in February.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Mint_coin_production

how are new couples going to meet?

Covid may do to {love, affection, friendship, courtship} what HIV/AIDS did to sex. May be everyone will watch BBT to learn how Amy and Sheldon became a couple following strict Covid protocol.(Though the show was produced many years before Covid)

In the above comment, I wrote:

[If correct, Streeck’s finding of a 14% prevalence of anti-Covid-19 antibodies in a randomly-sampled population] would be very strong evidence that the virus has had a much longer run outside of China than most people have thought. It will be time to revise lots of priors, and models.

This is partly wrong — the abstract attributes the high antibody prevalence to rapid spread in the aftermath of a superspreading event on Feb. 15, 2020 (a local carnival).

However, the finding of 2% active infections accompanied by ~14% resolved infections, six weeks after initial spread of the virus, paints a picture that is far different from the consensus view. So lots of priors and models would need revision.

On reflection: I can’t visualize the kinetics of this spread. Infections take 2 to 3 weeks to resolve, so initial R would need to have been very high. But given a current-infection rate of only 2%, it than would have had to fall very low, to a fraction of 1. And the vast majority of SARS-CoV-2 infections would have had to have been asymptomatic — if, say, 1/3 of infections required hospitalizations, that would have been about 580 admissions from this one town in March. Streeck does not mention that.

This doesn’t seem to match the “normal” history of SARS-CoV-2 infection and Covid-19 disease.

Edit: Unless that carnival was a red herring, and the 14% figure does stem from the virus being in circulation for a much longer time, at a rather low R.

the gay circuit party in Miami, are reminiscent of how AIDS spread

Surely you mean the gay party circuit?

“What happened to your gay party friends?”
– Jack Nicholson

We could all use a laugh. Here’s an oldie:

Gangelt repeatedly autocorrected to Gantlet. My mistake.

BTW

Smithfield Foods, Inc., is a meat-processing company based in Smithfield, Virginia, in the United States, and a wholly owned subsidiary of WH Group of China.

In related news, Italy has been flooded with Africans these past several years. How is this playing out w/r/t the Wuhan Disease? I can’t imagine getting Africans to co-operate with much of anything, frankly.

Alas. It’s not your parents’ Italian Riviera any more.

This is the Italian border with France. What’s he spraying them with, Lysol?

Oh, sure, cancel thousand year old festivals in order to keep 40,000 flights a day spreading every would-be local problem into a worldwide meltdown.

Stop the airplanes. If you reduced the number to 500 a day and tax the heck out of it, you can make air travel prohibitively expensive for all but the people who actually need to fly for productive work (i.e. not sales)

People everywhere hate globalism, and if it doesnt wipe out humanity, it will come very close. End it now.

I agree, despite my extremely dim opinion of online dating (it makes everybody miserable, and for many men, it is like taking on a second job). But I think this is a little much. Nothing short of the bubonic plague reborn is going to prevent people from wanting to meet a potential mate. Most people-at least those my age, I’ll let other people speak about older generations-already talked a fair bit before they meet in person before the pandemic, anyway.

It’s kind of funny how young people have a popular image as being dissolutely promiscuous: judging from how older people who experienced the 60s and 70s talk, we’re tamer in everything except for public casual acceptance of “non-standard” sexuality. Looks can be deceiving: a lot of girls have Tinder profiles that they don’t actually use.

Stop the airplanes. If you reduced the number to 500 a day and tax the heck out of it, you can make air travel prohibitively expensive for all but the people who actually need to fly for productive work (i.e. not sales)

Or who splurge for a once-in-a-lifetime tour of Australia. I’m down with it. The amount of plane travel is ridiculous. For instance:

430,000 flew directly from China to US since January

And we wouldn’t have to curtail ocean cruises, so those with wanderlust can still slake their thirst.

Some of your recommendations sound far fetched, but I like the idea of foot pedals for public sinks and foot hook thingys to open bathroom doors with your shoes (I’ve already seen these installed in a few places).

Yes one thing that is oft ignored with regard to R0 is that it is given as a mean figure. The AVERAGE person spreads it to say 3 other cases. But that includes 50 or 80 dull folks who spread it to maybe their spouse or maybe no one and one person who just happens to be in a charismatic cult or is serving the food at the retirement party and bang there you go. We have known this from the beginning and if you can reduce those super spreading events down to 0 (I.e. no gatherings >2 of any kind) then perhaps you can get R0 down to zero just with masks and tight discipline.

Unfortunately I agree with Yarvin. Americans are puerile children and can’t get with the program so it’s a non starter. R is clearly currently a bit above 1 everywhere in the U.S. so what do we even do now? Let it rip? There’s not much other choice!

So, “singing and dancing” and we can’t forget “skiing”. I’d add “sweating” as singing and dancing and skiing often cause participants to sweat.

How much of this virus might be shed in perspiration?

No one lies more about how much sex they had in high school and college than divorced boomers. Add in a remarried ex-wife and they become Wilt C.

But the idea that millennials are going to accept the slightest bit of curtailment of their social lives in order to let boomers live a couple more years is laughable. Boomers have spent the past forty years boring every one to death with their fanciful stories about how hard they fucked and partied in their youth.

But in this hypothetical there is no reason those people would transmit more than the population avg.

Some might see a glass 16% full – I see it 84% empty. Even in a hard-hit town, there are 4 times more people eligible to be hit before herd immunity kicks in.

But what if that isn’t so? Statements like this always involve the assumption that only those who have developed antibodies have been exposed to the virus, and everybody thinks this way because this is what we’ve all been taught, and this is the working theory behind the successful practice of vaccination. But what if this is too simplistic? What if everybody was already exposed and the majority never developed antibodies because they did not need to, because they never became infected or they faught off the virus by other means?

Perhaps infection is not such a passive process after all. Perhaps an organism needs to actively “take up” a virus before it can cause disease and require an immune response. What if we’ve gotton a lot of basic facts aboiut virology backwards? I think that’s what this corona epidemic is going to teach us.

Off topic but saw Rod Dreher referenced Steve here:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-big-kowtow-nature-china/

“What Donald Trump is guilty of is what Steve Sailer calls “noticing” ”

Some of Rod’s articles and their timing made it obvious that he read Steve’s columns but I’d never seen him actually refer to him by name. Interesting…

Steve, Take some time off from the Plague to watch Tiger King.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/telephoto-trickery/#comment-3827911

Steve, are you going to strike while the zeitgeist is hot and review “Tiger King”?

It’s hard to believe Steve failed to review Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Dog The Bounty Hunter: Meheeco Bandidos, and House Flippin’ Little People.

Unforgivable lacunae in the iSteve oeuvre.

Stop the airplanes. If you reduced the number to 500 a day and tax the heck out of it, you can make air travel prohibitively expensive for all but the people who actually need to fly for productive work (i.e. not sales)

Nothing happens in business without sales. You can have all the brilliant ideas and business plans and productive work at your disposal, but if you can’t make the sale, nothing gets produced, no ideas and plans get implemented. This is why salesmanship and salesmen are still a thing, why physically calling on clients face to face and going to conferences are still a thing.

When you try to reduce sales because it seems unproductive, you introduce economic planning by unaccountable managers and bureaucrats who are far removed from the wants and needs of people and issue directives, unlike salesmen who personally call on customers and are highly attuned to them.

This indication of infection related to singing and dancing in an enclosed space tracks closely with the interview given by Korean virologist Kim Woo-joo that was posted on an iSteve thread about ten days ago. He said transmission in enclosed spaces where people were shouting and singing was likely, while transmission outside in parks or on hiking trails was very unlikely.

In fact everything Dr. Kim said, for instance in recommending wearing masks, stands up very well. A link in case anybody missed it:

So you mean adopt the old fashioned faucets warm water that were tossed out by the environmentalists to save the earth? I believe Moet, Kohler, American Standard etc and the plumber contractors joined the environmentalists to sell a lot of faucets and get a lot of contracts.

Same with save the earth electricity and those motion censor lights and all the rest. A fortune for the entire industry from the copper mines to the actual installation of the new light bulbs by the janitor. A bonanza. Solar panels another bonanza. It’s a bonanza for our family business, so I shouldn’t complain. Even White electrical engineers are getting jobs there’s so much complete re doing of entire electric systems.

My mottoes: don’t believe anything in the media and look for the money.

Here’s my opinion on the tranny public bathroom thing. Another conspiracy by lunatic liberals, plumbers tilers dry wall framing carpenters and again, Moet, American Standard and other bathroom fixture manufacturers and contractors. Look who’s making the money remaking all the public bathrooms into single stalls.

Of course, I’d never heard of foam cannon parties until I started reading The Rational Male at age 60 and by then it was way too late to get an invite.

Ask Marco Rubio. He can hook you up.

Given that the first cases in Wuhan were said to be in November, it’s possible the virus was already circulating elsewhere earlier. Most virus-chains are dead-ends, though, and they tend to depend on super-spreading events, or so is my understanding, which kind of amounts to dumb luck, lucky alignments of conditions one way or another.

There are lots of strains of HIV in Africa, but only one strain caused the global pandemic in the 1970s, recognized in the 1980s. All the others were dead-ends, at least in global terms, and they say a few never even left their localized areas, even to other parts of West-Central Africa. The pandemic-to-be strain found its super-spreader networks.

On reflection: I can’t visualize the kinetics of this spread. Infections take 2 to 3 weeks to resolve, so initial R would need to have been very high. But given a current-infection rate of only 2%, it than would have had to fall very low, to a fraction of 1.

February as peak flu season in Germany; viruses do well in that kind of weather. That’s something that could affect the equation for sure.

It turns out that Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria (not Italy in this case) had a flu-death spike that peaked in 2018 Week 10 (March 4 to 10), with excess deaths rising from ca. early-February and fading again by late-March of that year, implying lots of virus transmissions ongoing in January and February, I would think. Such is life for the most at-risk. Such is flu season. People die.

Although some are going to say it was the Corona Shutdowns and the Corona Panic that blunted new infections in Germany in the past few weeks (some experts disagree and say the shutdown measures generally came after infections had already peaked in at least some cases), applying a ‘weather’ modifier to your visualization might help. Also, all viruses go into full retreat in spring.

This is all interesting but a little academic. The most important thing about the Streeck et al study is that it reconfirms again the non-government, dissident-experts’ consensus of 0.1% as the upper-bound death rate from this coronavirus strain; whatever the true figure is, and it looks to lie between 0.01% and 0.1% with a best-bet being closer to 0.01% (which will hardly affect total-yearly-mortality at all*), it is a fairly unremarkable virus and totally fails to live up to its reputation as an apocalyptic mass killer. The shutdowns were wrong. Let’s work to end the shutdowns to stop the bleeding from this unfortunate self-inflicted wound. As a commenter wrote elsewhere yesterday:

This isn’t about best versus worst-case scenarios. This is about the worst public policy in recent memory after mass third-world immigration. Public policy should involve the weighing of costs and benefits. Was that done here? No, this is just flat out hysteria.

______________

* – Most advanced countries log 1.0% deaths/years now. A bad-flu-season-event like this might bump what would otherwise be a 1.00% to a 1.05% (and also thereby put gentle downward pressure on the next few years’ expected deaths). This is interesting to specialists, maybe, but overall is simply negligible, forgettable, a footnote of a footnote.

Creating this kind of mass chaos over such a small bump is IMO criminally irresponsible; so reckless that people ought to go to prison for it, in a fair world.

As it happens, in 2018 Germany ‘clocked-in’ its highest-ever total death rate since the 1940s, at 1.15% of total population, partly because of the aforementioned flu-strain spike in February and March of 2018. In 2016, Germany’s final tally was 1.10% deaths, following a very mild flu season with almost no excess deaths. The bad flu season appears to account for most of that rise from a 1.10% to 1.15%, a net of 0.05%. Corona is unlikely even going to best that.

What was the impact of the Spanish Flu on golf course architecture? Charles B. Macdonald’s work on the Yale golf course seems to be a reaction to the miasmatic teens.

On a related note, California published racial data on coronavirus cases and deaths:

As of April 8th:

“This initial information, representing 54 percent of COVID-19 cases and 53 percent of deaths, shows the race and ethnicity data is roughly in line with the diversity of California overall:

Latinos: 30% of cases and 26% of deaths (39% of the state’s population)
Whites: 37% of cases and 38% of deaths (37% of the state’s population)
African Americans/Blacks: 7% of cases and 8% of deaths (6% of the state’s population)
Asians: 13% of cases and 18% of deaths (15% of the state’s population)
Multiracial: 2% of cases and 1.5% of deaths (2% of the state’s population)
American Indians or Alaska Natives: 0.2% of cases and 0.4% of deaths (0.5% of the states’ population)
Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders: 2% of cases and .8% of deaths (0.3% of the state’s population)
Other: 13% of cases and 8% of deaths (N/A) “

https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Immunization/ncov2019.aspx

German Scientists: Virus Is Spread Less by Work Than by Fun

Why, yet another way that the response to the virus just happens to be pulled from some kind neo-liberal globalist oligarchy playbook, as if the bio-tracking, surveilance, social isolation, snitching, dependency on government and media, submission to unelected techocrats, and cashless society were not enough.

Citizen! Work more and enjoy yourself less!

Bend the Arc, er, I mean: Flatten the Curve!

I have been thinking of how Japan is quite confounding to much conventional wisdom on CV. I wonder if some of their relative success, in spite of very modest actions, is partially because of how they socialize. In my limited experience, they tend to be more “handsoff” until they get really drunk. Japan relative success makes me question some current thinking on Covid…

-Italy’s high death rate is because they have lots of old people. Yet Japan is also a very old country with just a fraction <1% of Italy’s covid deaths. Japan’s first known case was 6th of January. Italy’s first known case was 31st of January.

-Population concentration and mass transit vs cars should an important variable yet Japan has not yet closed mass transit and is very densely populated.

It is critical to enforce drastic social distancing to get Ro low. Japan has only taken mild steps ie. no fans at Sumo events and strong border control. But most workplaces and transit are still open.

Mass testing thought to be critically important yet Japan testing rate is only 6% of Korea’s

Is Japan’s relative success due to Japan normally being obsessive about hygiene? Is it due to traditional lack of physical contact when they socialize. Is it due to use of masks?

Will this relative success continue?

https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1247872359312351232

R0 looks to be 5.7. For all those wondering how the near vertical trajectory of Wuflu wrt SARS, and both supposedly had R0 of 2, there’s your answer.

R(effective) lowers with reduction measures.

This man Püschel is clearly a dupe, must’ve fallen for Hoaxer material he read online. He needs to get educated and learn basic facts about this Mass Killer Apocalypse Virus!”

Oops, he is the Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Hamburg University since 1992. Hmm.

Thou shalt have no other epidemiologists before Anythony Fauci. Fauci, thy Fauci, is a jealous public health expert.

The most important thing about the Streeck et al study is that it reconfirms again the non-government, dissident-experts’ consensus of 0.1% as the upper-bound death rate from this coronavirus strain

Pretty much confirming the data from the Plague Princess in Yokohama harbor if I remember rightly. It is disappointing to me that apparently no one – not anyone – took the trouble to get data from the multiple cruise ships that have made their way to Florida in the last few weeks, including one that started in B.A. Argentina, rounded Cape Horn and made its way north via Panama. Those floating Petri dishes should have been regarded as valuable case studies. Instead it appears they were ignored.

That’s the problem with working for cash and not having a record with unemployment. social security etc contributions

Had they been enrolled they could have signed up for unemployment and received an income. Everybody in NY state is eligible for welfare and the food card. There’s probably a welfare application office in the international terminals arrival section. Probably ready made EBT cards ready to be activated right there like in a bank when you lose your debit or ATM card. Oh, and the voter registration form as well.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re all on that childless adult minimal welfare and food card program already. Most immigrant restaurant, domestic janitorial and casual labor workers are.

Work for cash for an employer who doesn’t enroll in the unemployment program, you won’t get unemployment when you’re laid off.

Some of my friends have banned the cleaning woman. But they’re paying them the regular wage with a check in the mail.

These immigrants probably work for immigrants who pay them less than minimum wage anyway.

F’em

iSteve
I didn’t get too far into Southern Italy (Lecce in the heel), but Southern Italians seemed more furtive and suspicious. Northern Italy, where there isn’t much mafia, was the friendliest place I visited in Europe.

Due to the vagaries of history and wandering of armies, Northern Italy has a lot of Austrian admixture while the South has a lot of Arab admixture. Personally, I’ve never been south of Rome, and Firenze is my fave city with Venezia a close second. Although a few days in Verona would be quite pleasant (Verona was occupied at least once by the Austrians).

I used to watch Honey Boo boo. Remember their brown Walmart living room couch? Worst of all was the way mothers at the beauty contests dressed. The kids in their$ 2,000 ruffle dresses and the moms uniform of shabby T shirt, shabby pants, no make up long hair scragged up in a dowdy pony tail. Yikes ! That’s what you wear to wash the car and do construction work on your house.

We watched a couple Tiger King episodes a few days ago. I only saw regular TV ads for bounty hunter. But if I ever saw men who looked like that around my street, I’d call the police about intruders attempted burglary lock the doors and windows. Who’d believe they had anything to do with law enforcement? And that totally outdated 1960s motorcycle club look??

1) Why can we send people to the moon, but not, within a week, crank up a production of 10 or 100 million N95 masks per day, per major country, with ample government enticement or subsidies? Even at 5 dollars emergency price per piece for paper N95 masks, and 100 dollars a piece for washable masks, that still is cheaper than layoffs.

2) Mask sizing and fitting needs some serious effort, one size fits all is not the soluton for off size faces and most people don’t fit the masks air tight even if they could.

3) The chinese CCP virus cover up efforts, lies, and intimidation to shut down #TrueSpeech about the virus — are very similar to race, crime, IQ cover up and intimidation in our PC Western world. Honesty and sincerity could greatly improve this world.

Where are you getting these death with (death bed) estimates of 67% for Sweden and 88% for Italy?

10% chance of getting sick, a 1% chance of spending a couple days in the hospital, and a 0.whatever% chance of dying.

that’s pretty much the risk spread of casual sex in the modern era, and you people wonder why we young-uns ain’t takin’ the covid suresslee?

I take my coffee like Germans take their lives: Dark and bitter.

What they fail to mention is that Nordrhein-Westfalen is crawling with Central Asian immigrants, like Iranians, groups that appear to be heavily succeptible to CV and also not very keen on social distancing, as is being seen in France, which has given up on enforcing the quarantine in many migrant communities. This being 21st Century Germany though, I doubt the scientists are allowed to control for things like that.

Steve — for a really smart guy you really are dumb.

There will be NO restarting the economy. NONE.

First, the Democrats are up to their old tricks. Senate Dems killed Cocaine Mitch trying to spend more for small business, Democrats HATE HATE HATE people working. Since none of them ever worked a day in their lives. Media people, University bureaucrats and professors, state workers, the FBI, the Joint Chiefs, cops etc. in other words important people don’t care if the economy just craters. More poor people to lord it over. Its like arresting people sitting in their cars at the beach watching the sunset while not doing a thing while the homeless poop all over the beach. Its the whole point.

Second, all those small businesses GLOBALLY are done. There is no more savings to restart them. Any aid money is going to be swept up by big business, the political ruling class, the media, and protected classes. Already AOC is demanding White people pay up BIG TIME to Latinos and Blacks for WuFlu Bat Virus. There is just NO MONEY for small business and active will to crush them by their eternal enemies — the political class.

Third, no big company is going to rehire even a fraction of those laid off. Macy’s laid off something like 130,000 workers. They might rehire about 3,000 and hire mostly illegals at a fraction of the wages of those they laid off. Most businesses were already under severe pressure from Amazon, Ebay, and the like and retail and other groups like Macy’s are just about survival. Put Disney, Apple, Ford, GM, etc. into that mix. With 30% unemployment being the “good news” none of those companies are going to be hiring any DECADE soon. People will not be buying new cars, or iphones, or going to Disney World for the next twenty years.

Fourth, no Governor is going to give up the power to make ordinary people poor and miserable any time soon. NY State, VA, CA, NV, OR, WA, IL etc. will be locked down for the next year minimum just to screw over Trump. Yes they are that myopic. And no, corporations can’t do anything. Gavin Newsome and Cuomo are on TV EVERY DAY. Think they’ll give up the camera? Heck they can just cancel elections and rule for the next ten years. Crisis. Opportunity. Its not like Disney and Apple can fund challengers for either one of those turds. And they know it. Besides these turds live to make ordinary people miserable and poor. Its what their AWFL backers all want too.

Fifth, Democrats sense an opportunity to finally, at last, solve their White people problem. Expect re-education camps while Governors seize houses, cars, property, and bank accounts to give to various vibrant groups that culturally enrich Whitey. Whitey does not have the money, or means to fight back now.

Sixth, how couples meet is determined by well, women. Bars and other social gatherings are over. Most bars are not re-opening, as “Bar Rescue” host John Taffer notes, seating changes will halve or cut into a third of prior seating capacity which means doubling or tripling prices just to keep revenue the same as operating costs rise dramatically. Forget a $15 bottle of beer. Try $45. Nope, all stuff will just be online, Tinder, etc. where only the best looking, most Alpha, most A-hole wealthy dudes will monopolize all the non obese women. We are looking at the long awaited Dem/Media/Women dream: END OF THE NUCLEAR FAMILY.

Instead a “family” will consist even and especially among Whites of a single mother with either one kid or multiple kids with different fathers and men acting like African fathers. By not being there.

Seventh, we will have internal exiles, formerly middle and working class Americans herded off into work camps and re-education centers living like the homeless but micro-managed in every aspect of their lives, and as a regular feature revolts and acts of brutal repression of said revolts and counter-reprisals in counter-reaction. While most White men not herded into camps will have likely not even a Pr0n Hub subscription as that will be closed down by AWFLs.

Eighth, we will have oil prices crash, then rise dramatically as the Saudis chase away Russian production and simply have ended US Shale production. The ability of most non Elite Americans to heat or cool their homes or even have light at night will be minimal if anything. Most transport will be bicycle, or bus and train. Food will consist of bugs and beans that the Elite have been pushing on ordinary people for decades.

In short, by buying into the panic and hysteria of the media, medical establishment shills, and Democratic operatives you and others have helped guarantee the worst recession in modern history, a level of global poverty and misery and warfare and violence that will make the 1930s and 1940s look like an Edwardian Garden Party.

A close analysis of the numbers in the Streeck study published April 9 reveals yet more evidence for the new coronavirus having a true fatality rate very likely under 0.1%, and a pretty good chance it rounds to 0.0% (i.e., <0.05%).

How much does this matter, though? It seems to me that lethality is a function of both infectiousness and fatality rates.

Let’s work to end the shutdowns to stop the bleeding from this unfortunate self-inflicted wound.

In other words, let’s send our modern-day Committee for Public Safety to their own guillotines by eliminating their own job safety. It would be great to get one more “You’re fired!” from Trump to Fauci on national TV.

Steve, i don’t mean any offense by the question but I’ve noticed over the last few weeks you’ve been using the terms “healthy” & “wholesome” a lot. I dunno just thought it weird….whats up w this new tendency?

Anyway, i guess if anybody can figure this stuff out its Zee Germ-Mens….

I saw a suggestion somewhere that this behavior could be explained by individual susceptibility to infection as following a distribution. As the most susceptible persons in a network get infected, the virus finds it harder and harder to spread. Hence Ro drops rapidly. This isn’t in the current models. The implication is that herd immunity arrives much sooner than understood. Of course, this is only speculation at this point. Personally my intuition says this is correct. Everyone knows there is a distribution of severity of reaction to infection. Why not a distribution of susceptibility to infection at all?
Here’s a proposed mechanism: Say the innate immune system can overcome the infection by itself in some persons. Then the adaptive immune system, which generates antibodies, never even activates in them. Hence no test can find that they were exposed, but they are probably immune.
So much for d-khead Bill Gates wanting to microchip us all with immunity certificates.

I suspect the strictness of their “no handshaking” policy is a bit of revisionist history. I’m sure there was a defacto one, but these types of church people just can’t seemed to resist a hug or two. I’m sure some people tried to abstain, but I bet a few of the more gregarious socialite church ladies weren’t “gonna let no silly virus” stop them handing out a few hugs pre and post singing.

Attitudes were much more lax even 3 weeks ago.

I like your idea of retrofitting restroom faucets. I get the point of time-limiting the water in a low-trust society, but time limit it to at least a minute. And make the faucet handle out of copper.

Something else that should be plated with copper are those poles people hold on to in subways.

As for pressuring companies to hire back 100% of their workers, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, sure, if they’re getting government money or cheap loans for the purpose of holding onto their employees, they should do that (and if I were Trump, I’d want them to keep them on the payroll until the election), but there are likely going to be some changes to the economy going forward, which will mean less need for workers in some companies and more need for them in others.

I don’t think we’re going to go back to exactly what we had before. I expect there’ll be some consolidation in the restaurant industry, for example. Ideally, there will be more manufacturing jobs, as some of that comes back from China.

This sounds like a German plot to make everybody work more.

No fun for you!

Maybe the ideal date would be someone like 87th Precinct detective Steve Carella’s deaf-mute wife, Teddy? And a study of the outcome of a Deaf Club event could be compared with the choir?

But this finding really brings down the death rate.

Good, thoughtful, comprehensive post. I’d only (possibly) quibble with this part:

it is a fairly unremarkable virus and totally fails to live up to its reputation as an apocalyptic mass killer.

Seems to me that it’s remarkable in being extraordinarily infectious. Definitely not an “apocalyptic mass killer” and yes our colossal ‘own goal’ in shutting down the economy will likely haunt us for years. But it does seem that it’s well on its way toward infecting billions and that’s nothing to sneeze at. We just hope it doesn’t mutate along the way into something actually apocalyptic.

Creating this kind of mass chaos

I have moments when it doesn’t seem real. The scale of this shutdown, stay-at-home and stimulus.

Trying to find some scale on the money at least:

Though it lasted fewer than four years, World War II was the most expensive war in United States history. Adjusted for inflation to today’s dollars, the war cost over $4 trillion

(2016 dollars)
(https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/cost-u-s-wars-now.html)

I’m not sure how to count the current costs but that’s about what we’ve signed off to spend in two months in the US between the stimulus bill at $1.3T, plus whatever the heck the Fed is doing for $2.3T plus state spending. That Fed stuff might be loans, but Congress already has more trillion dollars books on the pipe.

As a percentage of GDP it’s less than WW2 was but it is still an enormous amount.

I think we may well see a resurgence of The Northern League whose split from Italy may be eased by the upcoming collapse of the EU.
People here forget how young many European Countries are, having been cobbled together in the past century and a half. People in those countries are more mindful.

This map shows the dogs breakfast that constituted much of Europe in 1815.

(You will note that the accompanying text says 1850 but then this is SUNY.edu we are talking about)

“It was like an average day in Italy was like a holiday in Germany.”

Enough of these underhanded slights against their work ethic already.

Well, of course the Germans would find out that more work and less fun is the solution… 😉
Now we need a counter-study by Italians or Spaniards.

There certainly is no evidence for 14% prevalence in a randomly sampled part of the German population. It is ludicrous to misrepresent the results of that study in this way.

It was a sample from a region for which is was known beforehand that it was affected by COVID-19 much more than Germany in general. That region is not representative, at all for Germany, and no one expects it to be respresentative. There was this superspreader event, the carnival, that is certainly not unique, but certainly is not representative of the country as a whole, either. It was selected for the study because it was strongly affected by COVID-19. Studies for regions that are closer to being representative will follow.

Yes, there are people who want th shout the false allegation that Heinsberg is a typical region „from the rooftops”. Those who want to shout such falsehoods from the rooftops are irresponsible people who don’t care about evidence. No one should listen to them.

To prepare oneself to get admitted in the vicious orgy in Miami – I am not sure that funerals are more innocent because seeing people eat like crazy and make jokes when you are supposed to mourn is particular – look at what UK people are avidly watching locked in their homes, queerest gym instructor ever :

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/arts/television/bbc-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare

When he is doing the pushing the trolley, it’s really hilarious .

In Brazil, two choir regents died (and some choir members became sick) of Covid-19. One of the regents had been at a rehearsal of the opera Aida where the orchestra conductor was, according to a choir member, with symptoms after arriving from abroad. The rehearsal required them to sing at the top of their voices.

This info is at the following news story, in Portuguese:

https://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/aos-64-anos-maestrina-do-theatro-municipal-de-sp-morre-vitima-de-coronavirus-24330266

a federal law mandating the replacement of every faucet in every public bathroom in the country which fails to meet new standards.

I remember when I read the briefly available AOC “New Green Deal” It had a lot of language like this, requiring the retrofitting of every building in the country one way or another. Not practical. You do it prospectively, plus give tax incentives for retrofits. Just dropping some expense on people, most of whom are not rich, is a quick way to make a lot of enemies. Heck, dropping paperwork is almost as bad.

It’s hard to believe Steve failed to review Here Comes Honey Boo Boo….

Hell’s Bells, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was worth at least an article for Taki’s!

Nothing happens in business without sales. You can have all the brilliant ideas and business plans and productive work at your disposal, but if you can’t make the sale, nothing gets produced, no ideas and plans get implemented.

Don’t worry, Bra, the Central Planners at the US Federal Reserve Treasury have this covered. I believe they’re using the same consulting firm that advises CDC and FDA, so everything will be just fine.

Excuse me, but I need to go track down even more mass quantities of TP.

Skiing itself is unlikely to be that risky, except maybe standing in the lift lines.

How much of this virus might be shed in perspiration

Probably not in sweat either. They don’t even find it in blood afaik. It’s all the lung and throat related things that spread it: coughing, sneezing, talking, breathing…

(and also intestinal stuff. Aerosolized waste matter was implicated in some apartment buildings with suboptimal drain pipe set-ups on China. )

“One pattern we are seeing across the globe is that wherever there was singing and dancing, the virus spread more rapidly”

God almighty, the Puritans were right!

If this thing turns back the stupid open floorplan trend, and brings back offices, it will have paid for itself in terms of productivity.

I have become mildly uneasy about joggers in my neighborhood. They run past breathing heavily and if the wind current is unfavorable, there’s no way I’m not getting some of that. Something I had not observed before is the whole family out jogging, each about 30 seconds behind the other. I’m finding a cave…oh shit, that might not work, it could have bats…

>big funeral for local janitor
Kek.
Lots of good news lately:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/04/09/japan-ditches-china-in-multi-billion-dollar-coronavirus-shakeout/#37a5321c5341

“Arbeit Macht Frei”.

Thanks Jack. It’s about time someone did some serious thinking around here.

Nothing happens in business without sales.

Every division imagines it’s the critical one without which the rest cannot survive. Granted some have a better claim than others, but the book “A Nation of Salesmen” describes where this particular mentality has led our society.

Well, we’d better just ignore all that. If the racial data don’t show blacks being hit hardest, we’ll have nothing to talk about.

So, “Arbeit macht gesund” is the new slogan of the Health Nazis.

Pulling off the mask (see what I did there?):

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/8/anthony-fauci-sets-stage-mandatory-vaccine/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/huge-mn-senator-doctor-hospitals-get-paid-list-patients-covid-19-three-times-much-patient-goes-ventilator-video/

https://www.lewrockwell.com/political-theatre/from-robert-f-kennedy-jrs-instagram-post-today/

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-diabolical-evil-of-bill-gates-caught-on-video/

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/conspiracy/gates-fauci-conspiracy/

It’s a well known thing that many Italian men don’t leave home for awhile. Too easy to stay home and enjoy Mama’s cooking and not have to fend for yourself in a not great economy. A part of why a Catholic country like Italy, which once had a high birth rate, now has men and women marrying late and having maybe one bambino.

Combine with high viral load situations (the various crowded celebrations, hospitals, highly social people/peoples, etc.) that can overcome the immune systems of the healthy, and it does seem to fit the weird, non-uniform spreading.

No one is going to change.

1 year of the flu that kills a bunch of old people has 0 Darwinian Consequences.

None.

There will be no change. This is 0 effect on ANYTHING.

Even the guys who were playing ‘Taste my Spit’ Beer Pong in Ischgl—They are all recovered now.

The only effect is perhaps the Rich Globalists somehow using this to their advantage.

STRAWBERRIES FOR THE TURTLE KING!

Steve isn’t the only writer who has enjoyed a good mechanistic materialist, para-prehistoric, high adventure fantasy about carbon-enriched iron:

The whole landscape was barren, and the fires burned everywhere. And in the smoldering remains of the Senate, Mitch McConnell sat on a throne of skulls making preparations to confirm his 8,999th judge. Mitch McConnell would leave no vacancy behind.
The people were long gone. The streets were empty, and some old scraps of burned newspaper tossed on the hot, sulfurous wind. And Mitch McConnell was still confirming judges.
The sky was a dark, angry red. The sun was not visible and had not been visible for a long time. There were no longer any rhinoceroses whatsoever. There were exactly three birds. The halls of Congress were empty except for John Quincy Adams’s ghost and one hoarse buzzard perched on a cracked torso in Statuary Hall. And Mitch McConnell was still confirming judges.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/08/sitting-throne-skulls-mitch-mcconnell-confirms-his-8999th-judge/

http://archive.fo/YERVi

Sister’s been singing in choirs all her life. She said right away choirs would get infected. All that deep breathing and droplets from everybody else going in lungs.

A thought about why blacks don’t like the masks.

Blacks favorite activity is loud talking anywhere and everywhere they are. Hard to hoot and holler wearing a mask.

Six days ago, in the UK, Labour chose Keir Starmer by a landslide to replace the hilariously divisive and ineffective Jeremy Corbyn. Who is Keir Starmer? Was he the prosecuting authority who rejected police reports that Jimmy Saville was a pedophile in 2009 and who refused to bring charges? Has Keir Starmer subsequently promoted Naz Shah, the Muslim pedophile-enabler whose response to the Rotherham scandal was to demand that victims be silenced? Can such halal child handling prevail against a recovered Boris Johnson whose beautiful voice has been left even deeper by Xi Jinping Cough?

Why can we send people to the moon, but not, within a week, crank up a production of 10 or 100 million N95 masks per day, per major country, with ample government enticement or subsidies?

Because we can’t send people to the moon.

Thanks Whiskey, but don’t sugarcoat it next time.

But seriously, I really do take comfort from hearing worst case scenarios well articulated.

“Shoulda stayed back home in Bangladesh, I guess, Raziah.”

Trump should offer free transport home to anyone from a shithole country. And once we’ve cleaned out the mess, ban any and all flights and entry from those same nations. This is a really good opportunity to take out the trash, and all under the veneer of “helping the most vulnerable among us.”

Okay, that was funny.

But you’ve now permanently ruined The Two Towers for me.

It looks like China is hiding another lockdown :

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-toll/chinas-new-coronavirus-cases-double-as-imported-infections-surge-idUSKBN21Q01W

Maybe Swedish are right . There is no stopping this …

“…wherever there was singing and dancing, the virus spread more rapidly.” In hindsight the town in the movie Footloose appeared wise and just wanted to protect themselves from being wiped out in a plague.

Americans are puerile children and can’t get with the program so it’s a non starter.

Since, in comparison with other occidental countries, Americans do not marry later, bear a higher proportion of their children out of wedlock, or abstain from working more often, this is a witless calumny. My suggestion is that if you don’t live here, don’t visit and if you do live here, leave.

Carpe diem. Europe was hit by syphilis of a particularly virulent kind in the late 15th, early 16th century, probably brought back by the sailors of Columbus. It did not stop human sexual activity.

Think the prob is more the apres ski than the skiing. I had not even heard of the Austrian resort that generated a lot of early cases but it is apparently great for apres ski.

“But restarting the pleasures of social life … that might be a long way off.”

You speak for yourself, bedwetter.

They’re also really in mommy porn, disturbingly.

Arbeit macht frei in its 21st century version…

OT I’ve been noting what’s going on with Wu’Flu in Cape Verde. There’s a Wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Cape_Verde. Well, more than one: the Portuguese one is more informative, saying that up to April 4 there have been 7 cases, echoed by the Johns Hopkins map this morning. This interests me because I’ve been to the country twice before, I was planning to vacation there last month, and I still am – the airline claims it will be restarting flights from Boston July 1. We shall see. In the meantime, it strikes me that desert islands close to the Equator could be an instructive laboratory. I also note that the number of people tested is greater than the number of people diagnosed, which may be the opposite of the way it works in, oh, New York City.

Also OT, I wonder if there will be a lot of civil disobedience this Sunday, as people decide that getting together just for Easter can’t be too bad. Since there will be no official or unofficial count, and since the caprices of computer modeling seem to permit or require an elastic sense of incubation period, there’s no telling when or whether a trailing spike of cases will be seen. If there isn’t one at all, will this be taken to mean there was no civil disobedience, and so panic-in-place is a great success and must be maintained?

You really fluctuate between telling people unpleasant truths and full on kookery. None of the things you think will happen, will happen. Just hope that in a year when everything is going pretty much ok nobody thinks of digging this up and replying with it to everything you say.

A Chinese friend said he heard situation in Heilongjiang province is severe but it is well managed. He thinks at worse it’s losing some backwards provincial people in an unimportant location next to the Russian border .

“Mask sizing and fitting needs some serious effort, one size fits all is not the soluton for off size faces and most people don’t fit the masks air tight even if they could.”

Irrelevant. Masks are a form of virtue signalling – and beautiful unique snowflake expressivity for women sewing their own on designer patterns.

This is the Italian border with France. What’s he spraying them with, Lysol?

Chianti.

We ought to be able to get back to work sooner, but how are new couples going to meet?

Their parents can introduce them.

I don’t think we’re going to go back to exactly what we had before.

What would be good sectors or specific companies to invest our savings in?

2% of German town called Gangelt test positive for Chinavirus. The number used for CFR.

13% more found through antibody tests. Identifying those who never got turned into “cases” but nevertheless have been infected.

Germany is one of the best tested countries in the world, so the gap between the IFR and the CFR is one of the smallest.

Nonetheless, the CFR is therefore likely 7.5 times higher than the IFR even there.

This makes the IFR about 0.3%, even avoiding the adjustment for deaths “with” rather than deaths “of”.

Furthermore, there is evidence emerging that far from everyone even can be infected, such as families living together in constant exposure and yet some members never getting sick or developing antibodies.

It does seem to burn out when about 15% of a population are infected.

This would predict that the number of deaths in the US “with” not “of” Chinavirus would end up at about 150,000 without any lockdown and full but unlikely spread to all remote rural areas. Perhaps under 100,000 really without lockdown.

It would also give Sweden a ceiling of 4,500 deaths and the UK of 27,000.

We don’t even ban smoking which kills 5 times as many, but instead we lock everyone in their home and forcibly close their businesses. Makes perfect sense!

Our bodies’ security system is multi-layered. Most pathogens never even get past the first layers of defense – our skin and mucus membranes are supposed to block or capture them before they can begin to infect our cells. Once those defenses are breached, then other immune defenses are supposed to kick in, but if everything is working as it should be, the pathogen never even gets past the door. We are surrounded at all times by all sorts of pathogens but they don’t usually infect us (even if we don’t have immunity) because they never even get past the outer defenses. This is why, even in superspreader events, 100% of the people exposed don’t usually come down with the virus. Of course the larger the viral assault, the more likely it is that at least some virus particles will make it thru.

Supposedly the testing results from the controversial Navy ship that docked in Guam which resulted in 2 senior officers losing their jobs:

95% tested
11% positive
ZERO hospitilizations!

Matches closely with some of the other observations.

I have been trying to calm everyone I know down by saying the data used by these models is BAD.
No one listens.

Alister Mackenzie (while an MD) during the Great War but worked on camouflage. Or maybe the Spanish Flu freaked him out and kept him out of the hospital.

The longer one mingles in a heavy crowd, the greater the likelihood of catching a bug.

Great Moments in Science.

This pattern exists because we are still in the very early phase of the pandemic, so random mass events show up as huge spikes. This is very similar to “founder effect” in evolutionary biology, where a mutation in a single individual during a population bottleneck ends up percolating through the subsequent generations so that the majority of a population of millions ends up with that mutation centuries hence.

As the pandemic grows, these superspreader events will account for a smaller and smaller percentage of transmissions. Making management decisions during a more advanced stage of the pandemic based on dynamics that existed at the early stage isn’t very smart and hopefully policymakers don’t make that mistake.

If Germany’s corona-positive deaths follow Sweden’s, where it is reported that two-thirds are deathbed-patients — i.e., “deaths with” and not “deaths from” — The ‘True Corona Fatality Rate’ in this community in Germany is the ballpark 0f 0.08% (0.067% to 0.1%); on the other hand, if local circumstances push “deaths with” higher, up to the Italian figure of 88%, we’re down to ca. 0.02% to 0.04% as the True Corona Fatality Rate.

Hail, your math on “deaths with” vs. “deaths from” doesn’t work. It’s hand waving.

Take this German study. They are saying they are seeing roughly 16% with anti-bodies in this town and with that the IFR looks to come in at 0.37%. (If you want to use .3%–fine.)

In an aged society like Germany the annual death rate will be around 1% (it was .86% in the US last year.)

Do the math. These deaths are over a month. A winter month is higher so ballpark the background rate at 0.1%. So you could “write off” a death 0.1% corona positive rate as just “their fair share”.

But 0.37% is greater than 0.1% … 3.7 times greater. So something is going on.

~

Your point about total deaths is valid. But to be able to tell you need a decent infection rate. For instance something like .37%, with only 16% infection rate will yield a .06% death bump. That’s real, but going to be close to noise in annual statistics with a death rate of 1%.

If infection rates stay down in the few percent range, you’ll get absolutely nothing looking at annual death statistics, even with the ~1% IFR we get (age adjusted) off the Diamond Princess or towns in northern Italy.

Finally, there should to be a push adopt a more hygienic greeting ritual than the handshake.

I’ll now with you if you insist so you can enjoy being an hyper-allergic shut in, while I enjoy withe everyone else the warm balance of genuine human contact.

Steve, OT, but did you see this item about Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot violating the precepts of social distancing and lockdowns by — yes, you guessed it — getting her hair cut.

https://wgntv.com/news/coronavirus/im-out-in-the-public-eye-mayor-lightfoot-gets-haircut-amid-social-distancing-orders/

Reason? Can’t be looking bad when you’re imposing totalitarian restrictions on your citizens.

“Hey, close at 9 or the Stasi will pay you a visit. By the way, how does my hair look?”

And on top of that, Lori is a dyke!! Thought that group didn’t really care about appearance. You can take the heterosexual out of the girl, but you can’t take the girl out of the girl.

More evidence, if any were needed, that hairism will NEVER go away, even if it came to the end-times.

Seems thanks to the WuFlu, there’s going to be tons of Foam Cannon Parties in the future, just that the foam will be at least 3% hydrogen peroxide.

European Mortality Data Shows Extremely Elevated Levels

One word: dicpic

The thing conspicuously missing from that NYT article (and all its coverage), is confirmation that these anecdotes of woe are people who actually have Covid. People who have “flu-like symptoms” can have anything, including the flu.

The NYT is in full hysteria mode so until further notice everyone who is sick has Covid, and everyone who dies was killed by it.

The alleged body counts in the papers each day are wildly over-stated. The only way it could be in the ballpark is if the fake cases being reported from hospitals are balanced out by real cases that go unreported.

In LA, I haven’t heard of any big outbreaks in Koreatown, where every third building is a Karaoke bar. Maybe Covid is only spread by good singing.

Statements like this always involve the assumption that only those who have developed antibodies have been exposed to the virus, and everybody thinks this way because this is what we’ve all been taught, and this is the working theory behind the successful practice of vaccination. But what if this is too simplistic? What if everybody was already exposed and the majority never developed antibodies because they did not need to, because they never became infected or they fought off the virus by other means?

Slow down a bit. We were taught about the innate immune system, and its mechanisms for fighting off viruses and bacteria that don’t rely on antibodies and such.

Yes, there are certainly individual variations in susceptibility to infections. Some “nurture” factors are already well known, such as age, sex, comorbidities, and prior exposure to (i.e. recovery from) SARS-CoV-2. At least one “nature” (gene-bassed) influence is also known, the ABO blood group antigen system. When researchers used modern tools (SNP chips and GWAS study designs) to look for multiple genetic influences on susceptibility to malaria… they found them.

The best guide may be the range of human responses to other coronaviruses. It appears that most people do develop specific antibodies in fighting off those infections.

The ‘important’ epidemiological models for Covid-19 are complex, to represent a complicated world. But it seems that they represent the potential of people to become infected in an overly simple way (e.g. only as a function of age). If so, there is room for improvement. Major improvement.

Basically you have a few alternative solutions to these severity questions:

1) The Covid death count is bogus.
For the “nothingburger” crowd:
They are attributing to Covid-19 similar old age deaths where the patient didn’t actually have the virus.
For the hysterics:
They aren’t counting as Covid-19 all sorts deaths out there where people really do have the virus.

(The “nothingburgers” have the better argument here. If all sorts of death “out there” are really Covid-19 deaths, then the infection rate is much much higher, and correspondingly IFR lower–less hysteria!–and the overall death rates should be way up.)

2) Exposure != Infection

Another possibility is that there is a big difference among people in susceptibility to infection. That perhaps the virus has circulated very widely and lot of the population has already been “exposed”, but the virus only really gets going in some people with some set of genetic or life-history factors. Other’s don’t even get infected, don’t develop an antibody response.

That would be an alternative explanation for the curves rolling over. That many of the people who are most likely to die from it are the ones who actually get infected and go ahead and die. But there are many more–younger, healthier–people who were exposed and didn’t get it at all. (And won’t at least for a few more decades.)

The problem with this, of course, is that those younger/healthier folks wouldn’t have been carriers at all either, so it’s hard to see how the virus physically gets to all the old and sick who are dying from it. Much more likely is there are more infected–and completely or relatively asymptomatic–and we still plenty of susceptible old/sick people who will be culled this year or next if we don’t get a vaccine or make the hydroxychloroquine treatment (or another) ubiquitous.

3) It’s pretty much what it has looked like from the beginning.
It’s 10-50X more lethal than typical flu, but skewing even more toward old and/or sick.

IFR for a typical flat aged ZPG population perhaps down as low as 0.3% in someplace with nuclear families where elderly are not getting a lot of intimate continuous contact with younger relatives. But up as high as 1% for someplace with multi-generational living–elderly getting megadose viral loads from sustained contact with infected family members–in the middle of winter with the old folks respiratory tracts dried out.

IFR for younger skewing 3rd world populations in tropical nations with humidity may also end up much lower.

~~

This sort of uncertainty just shows how much we need solid numbers. Every corpse and every hospital patient coming in should be tested. And we need both good random nationwide samples–with all the demographic tabs hit (age, sex, race, ethnicity, geography, straight/queer, weight, other medical conditions) and recorded. And we need a bunch of “everyone”–test the whole town–data sets.

This should have been job #1 for public health bureaucrats–ok, maybe “job #3” after quarantining us off from China and other nations and giving public solid guidance.

But bottom line getting rock solid data is critical to making good decisions, and our very well paid and pensioned “public health authorities” still have not gotten it.

How much does this matter, though? It seems to me that lethality is a function of both infectiousness and fatality rates.

It is. But the working assumption has been that without countermeasures the R0 is 2 or more. If that is the case then most people will eventually get infected regardless of the fatality rate.

If we assume 50% of Americans become infected when this is all over and done (including future waves unless we get effective treatment and/or a vaccine) then a 0.1% fatality rate (IFR) implies 160,000 dead Americans while a 1% fatality rate implies 1.6 million dead Americans. There is a big difference between those two outcomes which affects how stringent a level of countermeasures is acceptable. The real wildcards are how much the additional time given by countermeasures affects the fatality rate (e.g. by preventing hospital overload and giving time to develop more effective treatment) and final infection rate (e.g. by giving time to develop a vaccine).

The CDC estimates that 2009 H1N1 infected about 60 million people in the US (a little less than 20%) with a much lower R0 (est 1.5) but fortunately the fatality rate was extremely low so only about 12,000 died.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-h1n1-swine-flu-770496

Here is a comparison of 2009 vs. 2020
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-what-the-2009-swine-flu-pandemic-can-tell-us-about-the-weeks-to-come-134076

German “fun” isn’t always that appealing:

Austrians are marginally better:

not even pennies are made from copper today. If your Lincoln Memorial penny has a date before 1982, it is made of 95% copper, just 2% copper today.

Has there ever been a time when special interest rent seekers have mobilized so quickly and effectively. The Capitalists are lining at the trough. But so are the Socialists. The New York Times editors yesterday had a big spread about how they were going to exploit the shutdown as the impetus for a massive project to reduce “inequality.”

But somebody should measure singing versus loud talking versus quiet talking versus quiet talking with a mask. Maybe public place should turn off the music and add sound dampening to get people to talk more quietly.

I sure wish. Loud music has been an incredible annoyance my whole life.

I’m 30+ out of the dating market, but i still wish they’d just dial it down for all the following generations. Loud music is just a convenient cover for all the empty brains out there with nothing to say.

Maybe if girls and guys started by talking to one another, we’d screen out 90% of the relationship startups in hour one–the ones that start now from sheer male-female chemistry. And as a result, start fewer but much more likely to be successful long term, relationships.

The chemistry between men and women will be there. There’s nothing quite like sheer good clean PIV fun. But talking to one another, finding shared interests and most importantly having shared values and a complementary view of what married/family life would look like … that’s the ticket.

Turn that shit down!

If this epidemiologist at Rockefeller University is right then we are witnessing the latest chapter in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”

“Men think in herds but only come to their senses one at a time.

This interview needs to go viral.

Japan may benefit from high iodine levels due to seafood consumption.

Or who splurge for a once-in-a-lifetime tour of Australia.

It’s the other way around. Young Antipodeans are notorious for their worldwide “walkabouts”.

Back in the Awful Aughts, a 15-year-old Kiwi named Bree was apparently allowed by her parents to tour the world solo, with a stop at Burning Man. She posted photos, one of which showed her with a bunch of college-age kids wearing nothing but mud.

But don’t worry. At three-digit temperatures Fahrenheit, Burning Man is anything but erotic:

Burning Man: Not the orgy everyone thinks it is

Never let a crisis go to waste.

Ah… So THIS is the commenter they call “Whiskey”.

“Like the gay circuit party in Miami”. Steve, you don’t need the adjective “gay”.
The isteve commentariat knows what a “circuit party” is and who enjoys said parties!

My problem with the adjective “gay” is that there’s nothing about homosexuality that is really “gay”.

Rather there’s a lot of over-the-top drama–casual sex, drugs, clubbing, more casual sex, more drugs, parades, noise making, more casual sex–to cover up/compensate for the sad reality of being fundamentally disordered–having been dealt a bad hand–and cutoff from the fundamental nature of meaningful life. Very un “gay”, more like “dreary”.

They are focusing on a traditional Carnival party on February 15 as the local superspreader event.

Those who celebrate Fasching are Faschists. Next years will be cancelled, deplatformed, and demonetized. So says the Saxon Poverty Law Center.

Thanks to such irresponsibility, this year’s Lent is going into overtime.

There are at least two strains of COVID-19.

COVID-19-L has a very high kill rate and gives you no immunity.

COVID-19-S has a very low kill rate and gives you immunity from both COVID-19-L and COVID-19-S. COVID-19-S is also much more contagious than COVID-19-L at least partly because of its much lower kill rate. In other words, for healthy people at least, COVID-19-S is a vaccine for COVID-19-L. That means that the shutdown has been a public health disaster that should end immediately.

COVID-19-S is “just the flu, man!” Preventing death is a race to make sure people get COVID-19-S before they get COVID-19-L. End the COVID-19-L curve by raising the COVID-19-L curve.

Just like clowns are sad or mean in real life. I tried to think of a gay man I’ve known who was an exception to your comment but behind the considerable bubbles and fizz there lived an unhappy person who would never have chosen to be born that way.

Some die of natural causes some in a tragic way
But for every single one of us a final night and day
Without respect for the power of wealth and without respect for fame
Death the great equalizer treats everyone as the same
Without respect for anyone or creatures great or small
The billionaires of the World to the Reaper’s scythe do fall
At least the one who does claim every life promotes equality
Amongst the wealthy of the World and those in poverty
Some live on to a ripe old age and some die in their prime
And some even die as children they are not granted much time
Not ageist or discriminatory in any way
He claims the lives of the very young and those who are old and gray
He’s a true egalatarian of him one can only say
And for each and everyone of us a final night and day.

Francis Duggan

My problem with the adjective “gay” is that there’s nothing about homosexuality that is really “gay”.

Gay didn’t mean “happy”, it meant “happy-go-lucky”, i.e., carefree, insouciant (“showing a casual lack of concern; indifferent”), and the like.

Homosexuality, of course, is an oxymoron.

And a bastard:

“Maybe public place should turn off the music and add sound dampening to get people to talk more quietly.”

That would be the second good thing to come out of this crisis if enacted, Washing hands after coming into the home being the first. I regularly let restaurants know I won’t be returning because I don’t go to a place to shout at my dining companions. Modern restaurant theory says a loud buzz is what’s best for business, so they actively seek to amplify sounds. Ugh.

The “Corona Coup d’Etat” faction want us to show more damned respect for CoronaReligion, our substitute God now that Easter has been cancelled:

(See 1:20 to end; spotted here)

[1:42]

You WILL see darkness! You will be pushed! And, our society needs you! To stand together at this time! Our country loves you, our doctors, and our nurses!

Fire! Brimstone! Corona!

Nobody meets in bars anyways. It’s not 1980 anymore lol.

Bars are where late 20s, early 30s people go who are already in a relationship, and they go with friends to hang out.

Hail, your math on “deaths with” vs. “deaths from” doesn’t work. It’s hand waving.

No, it isn’t hand waving. It is very germane. Any calculation about CFR is meaningless if the F part is wrong. The evidence is pretty clear that a lot of death’s are being chalked up to COVID-19 that are not actual COVID-19 deaths.

That Congresswoman is another tragic case of CID: Corona Induced Dementia

Automobile is another half-Latin/half-Greek word.

It is disappointing to me that apparently no one – not anyone – took the trouble to get data from the multiple cruise ships that have made their way to Florida in the last few weeks, including one that started in B.A. Argentina, rounded Cape Horn and made its way north via Panama. […] it appears they were ignored.

I recall people here, in comment sections, using cruise ship data, especially Diamond Princess, to come to the tentative conclusion that the 3%–8% Corona Death Rate was wacky, likely inflated by 30x, 50x, or perhaps 100x. Here is one.

A Feb. 29 comment by an Anon was going in the right direction. There may be others here and there. Using the strong Unz.com search function would come up with many more, but few until the latter third of March predicted the possibility of a when-the-smoke-clears <0.1%, and it was a lonely rock to stand on through March and even at the present.

The first time I saw an age-controlled, Diamond Princess-data-based Corona Death Rate estimate from a credentialed source is the Dr. Ioannidis essay published March 17. This was right as much of the US still stood at the cusp, and as some key actors had just passed the Corona Rubcion into the Great Mistake. Merely days later, a team of French experts published a paper saying there was no evidence the virus had an unusually high fatality rate; without looking it up, I think they gave an upper-bound of 0.2%. Their findings got almost no traction in English media.

Dr. Ionnidis, having stuck his neck out now as a CoronaDissident, was also busy collecting data and soon pulled the trigger on predicting, “0.01% to 0.1%,” which has been endorsed by others using new data as it comes in.

If someone came before Dr. Ioannidis, I’d love to know. Looking around a little, I see a Science News article by Tina Hesman Saey dated March 12 makes a Diamond Princess-based calculation that the True Corona Death Rate is 0.5%, which itself was pushing back against the tide for the time, but turns out to be off by full order of magnitude (the true death rate is likelier around 0.05%; certainly much closer to 0.05% than to 0.5%).

I was telling my daughter and her friend yesterday that I’m going to set up arranged marriages for them.

No wasted time dating.

Parents thoroughly vet the guy so bad behavior is found before the marriage.

Considering the Me Too insanity, it’s the least we can do for our sons and daughters.

There should be heavy carrot/stick usage on businesses to make sure they hire back 100% of the people they laid off due to WuFlu. The next bailout/stimulus package should include language favoring businesses who bring back their entire staffs, and special penalties for those who fail to do so.

To accommodate those who aren’t rehired, in addition to infrastructure projects, like bridges and antibiotics factories, there should be a federal law mandating the replacement of every faucet …

The #1 thing that must be part of the reconstruction effort–pretty much the alpha and omega–is an end to immigration.

All jobs, all stimulus to create jobs go to Americans and only Americans. Hard borders and employment checks–mandatory E-verify–to enforce it. And severe–crippling–penalties to cheap labor goons who violate it.

If you don’t do that all the stimulus won’t pop for America’s working class but ooze away. Mexicans will be swinging the hammer on construction projects. Any sort of decent wages–wage pressure–will never recover for young American men. Ergo millions of families will never be formed.

But if we stop immigration cold, then we’ll come out of this actually much better than we came in. In a few years things will firm back up. Repatriated industry will be humming. Technological progress will be raising living stanards … with the fruits going to actual Americans. And the next generation will also have a better perspective on life, work and love. More families, more babies, more a better future.

JF showed a graph of the drop in pneumonia this year, cases that have probably been re-labeled as Covid.

I suspect that any and all deaths are now blamed on Covid.

You have to ask yourself why they are inflating numbers and causing hysteria.

What is the point of scaring people?

Lysol? Try Raid

LOL. Good one.

On March 21, Philippe Lemoine gave an outsider’s view of the now-famous Imperial College London epidemiological model in a very long blog post. The key description is in the six paragraphs after the heading “A brief description of the model used to perform those simulations.”

You wrote, “Another possibility is that there is a big difference among people in susceptibility to infection.”

Lemoine:

At each stage during the simulation, each individual is either infected or not infected, with the model updating this status as it unfolds depending on the contacts individuals have with each other. Similarly, each individual is either susceptible or non-susceptible, depending on whether or not he or she has acquired immunity after becoming infected. In the case of a seasonal influenza epidemic, the model assumes that a relatively large proportion of the population is not susceptible at the onset of the epidemic, most notably because many people are vaccinated. But this is not the case for the coronavirus, which is a novel pathogen for which there is no vaccine yet. So they are making the assumption that everyone is susceptible at the beginning of the epidemic and, although the report is not clear on this point, I think they also assume that everyone is equally susceptible.

He goes on to make an important point:

…running such complex simulations requires huge computational resources and is very time-consuming (…the simulations for the United States required 20,000 processor hours), so you can only run the simulation for a small number of possible combinations.

In other words, when it comes to accounting for heterogeneity of susceptibility to infection, this and similar models are no more complex than this interactive simulation. (Which is instructive to try a few times, BTW.)

What this drives home is that the best epidemiological models out there are elaborate, and too computationally intensive to run lots of times (e.g. can’t do Monte Carlo simulations). Yet evidence is growing that their utility may be hampered by this major simplification. Since all people are not equally vulnerable to infection.

From New York magazine today:

New York State has more cases than any country other than the U.S.

With at least 161,807 confirmed cases, New York state now has more confirmed coronavirus cases than any country outside of the United States. Spain’s 157,022 confirmed cases and Italy’s 143,626 are the second and third most, respectively. China, where the virus originated, has 82,940 confirmed cases, but there are plenty of reasons to question that number.

Yet the msm still claims Trump is the one who failed us…not DeBlasio and his city health officials, who were telling New Yorkers a few weeks ago to go out to restaurants and Chinatown parades in spite of the virus. And were going to the gym to work out, as well.

Why do you think it’s Gov. Cuomo going on TV all the time to encourage New Yorkers, and not De Blasio? Wasn’t it Mayor Rudy Giuliani encouraging NYC after 911? The media wants DeBlasio and his culpability to disappear, not because they love him that much but because they hate Trump that much.

At this point, about a third of the US confirmed cases and deaths are New York cases and deaths, and most of those are from NYC. Just a few days ago nearly half the deaths were from NY. Didn’t matter…Trump was to blame. 3/4 of the deaths in the US could be from NYC, and it would still be Trump’s fault.

So while the country is trying to win a fight against a disease, the mainstream media is trying to win an election against Adolf Trump. That’s because they believe there aren’t any consequences for them by going outside of their nominal role as neutral journalists. They’re wrong, of course. It’s a pyrrhic battle they’re fighting as journalists turned political operatives. In terms of motivation, people won’t just be voting for Trump in the fall; they’ll also be voting against the mainstream media.

Besides, Trump can only be a crass president for four more years. The msm will have to portray themselves as fair-minded journalists indefinitely. And that will be a hard thing to swallow for a public that remembers the Trump era.

I’m at a Wal-Mart now most of the shoppers are black, almost everyone has on masks.

Some are quite stylish. Oddly the few I’ve noticed without them have been mostly white and male.

I’m so glad that the people responsible for destroying the economy and spreading unwarranted panic and tyranny around the world are at least taking their positions with an appropriate sense of gravity.

If Dr. Anthony Fauci is featured in an SNL skit, he wants Brad Pitt to play him.

Spread this around please.

Why are you at Wal-Mart? That whole place is a giant petri dish and a lot of their workers have caught it across various states.

Unless you’re in a rural area with no other options, shop higher-end groceries.

Afforadbilli familia formazzionni?

Only part of the problem is the sick person. Professional vocal singing requires you to take deep, deep breaths to store the maximum amount of air in your lungs, and if someone’s spewing virus in your vicinity, you suck those virus particles down all the way to the bottom of your lungs. This leads straight to lung infections, which are more serious.

With a person is breathing normally, which is a shallower, less vigorous breathing, the virus often gets no farther than the openings in your nose. There, the virus gets trapped in mucous and often is either sneezed out or blown out in a tissue before it can work its way further down.

You cancel out the nose screening effect if your mouth is open and you’re talking a lot, or if you’re a mouth breather. If you have to go to the grocery store or another public place, try to breathe through your nose only, keep your mouth shut, and don’t lick your lips if they feel dry.

Steve — for a really smart guy you really are dumb.

Sorry, old boy, can’t quite grasp what it is that you are trying to say?

Could you tell me

I don’t agree with all your predictions Whiskey BUT damn as always entertaining and when you are right DAMN YOU’RE RIGHT.

Main area i think you are wrong is @ oil prices….Putin, Venezuela and simply put too many other marginal producers can afford to sit around & let Saudi permanently control everything.

Many thought the same thing circa 2008 & frackers & 3rd party producers like Mexico etc upped production to eat into Saudi market share…..

Has there ever been a time when special interest rent seekers have mobilized so quickly and effectively. The Capitalists are lining at the trough. But so are the Socialists

The new Corona Political Split is still unpredictable, unclear who is on whose side, or even what the sides exactly are (except that the pro-CoronaPanic side holds all the cards and has seized power), or how long the split will last.

It’s comparable in political terms to the chaotic aftermath of a coup d’etat which got out of control and had unclear results, a government collapse followed by a period of political-vacuum; people emerge to push agendas, test the waters, and — if finding no countervailing force — soon enough make bold attempts try to seize power and/or otherwise “jockey for political advantage” and try to ride the coattails of the perceived emerging new order,. (“I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords.” –Kent Brockman)

More thoughts on this here: “Against the Corona Panic, Pt. II: “Honor the Truth, be Steadfast, Defend the Nation” — Say ‘No’ to jockeying for political advantage on the coattails of Corona Hysteria” (see esp. second half of post, ‘Further thoughts on the new Corona political division‘).

the few I’ve noticed without [masks] have been mostly white and male.

Attention MSM lurkers! Story idea! Go, go quick, before the next journalist steals it.

Theres something i call “indirect subsidies”…..basically any low wage industry like hotels, fast food, general restaurants, retail etc that pays its workers artificially low wages and pockets the spread in labor cost savings while dumping the cost of the semi-employed to the govt welfare dole to pick up the tab….

I agree completely…..set up a “favoritism system” for loans…..the more you hire back the more likely & larger amount you’ll get for any govt loan to bail your ass out…

Those numbers are simply a cross-section of all deaths, with slight deviations as expected from a statistical sample.

Btw, Is Lance Welton is in hiding?

Also, on the media shoving “Blacks Hardest Hit by Corona” at us. One sign that the Corona Panic has already pass a “jumped the shark” point is that such stories started coming out.

Those stories subtly, vaguely, smugly imply a White Racist Institutional Corona Conspiracy, or whatever, is responsible for the Black deaths. I’m guessing the areas highlighted are associated with substantially worse Black overall health, obesity, maybe other things. Controlling for health condition, does Blacks Hardest Hit hold?

Corona has made introverted reserve a virtue and extroverted gregariousness a vice.

Sailer on the golf ban:

Not since James II have the citizenry been so affronted by tyranny.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2020/04/10/are-golf-courses-essential-during-covid-19-crisis-it-depends-where-you-live/#2894ba71a245

To add a little more detail. The percentage of individuals who get infected is known as the “attack rate.” This paper has some useful details.
Unraveling R0: Considerations for Public Health Applications
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935673/

Here is a graphic (and caption) showing Attack Rate vs. R0 for some simple models.

FIGURE 3—
Attack rate as predicted by R0 based on simple models.

Note. At least for simple models—such as the susceptible–infected–recovered (SIR) and susceptible–exposed–infected–recovered (SEIR) models discussed in this article—the basic reproductive number of an epidemic offers insight into the overall attack rate. However, estimation of R0 often results in broad confidence intervals. Shown are the ranges for the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic as well as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic; these ranges provide little confidence for the predicted attack rate. This problem is exacerbated at lower values of R0 because of the asymptotic dependence of attack rate on R0 near the y-axis (R0 = 1).

Hey, ease up on our Fearless Leader!

The blacks in my area are in masks and gloves (the grocery store employees especially).

The Navy is populated with fit young men. Fit young men are seldom if ever in danger. People over 60 are in danger, especially if they are carrying excess weight.

I used to watch Honey Boo boo. Remember their brown Walmart living room couch?

No.

only the best looking, most Alpha, most A-hole wealthy dudes

“And what about it?” .gif

men not herded into camps will have likely not even a Pr0n Hub subscription

Camps or no camps, I’m guessing that’s your worst nightmare …

My observations in this very mixed area this week is that blacks are most likely to wear masks, whites next, and Mexicans last.

The whiny chick “music” that’s played at Safeway is extremely annoying.

If this epidemiologist at Rockefeller University [Knut Wittkowski] is right then we are witnessing the latest chapter in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”

Note that Google is actively suppressing the Wittkowski interview in its search results. The video was posted seven days ago. As I have been trying to promote the video, I began to notice the suppression. It began happening by about 5 days ago. I could no longer find it: Even searches for his name no longer get the video (they did in its first two days up, the top result), much less for some kind of generic Coronavirus-related search. A result doesn’t shoot up to number one and then totally disappear the next day. It’s hard to find the video without the direct link, and CoronaNeutrals are unable to find it. Facebook is also said to have banned it from being posted, according to people who have posted it there.

(By the third week of March, I noticed that any searches for alternate views and ‘Corona Skeptic’-type material, or anti-CoronaPanic material, were thin on Google [suppressed as Fake News, I guess], but thick at DuckDuckGo. Off-Guardian, a stalwart anti-CoronaPanic website to be commended, had its posts/articles delisted, knocked way down, whereas they were easy to find on DuckDuckGo.)

Anyway, Dr. Knut Wittkowski, who is an anti-CoronaPanic hardliner, also happens to be far more credentialed and experienced in the relevant fields than the pro-CoronaPanic censors in Big Tech land, the people behind the curtain who have de-listed and banned the video. (Deleting it entriely would probably yield more bad press than just de-listing it so no one can find it.)

Entirely by word of mouth, the Knut Wittkowski interview has gotten many hundreds of thousands of views.

Here was Intelligent Dasein, writing yesterday on the need to fight aainst the pro-CoronaPanic info-monopoly:

It’s time to start pushing back, although Facebook and Twitter will probably shut down any attempt to organize a resistance via social media, thus plunging the very people who most need to resist even further into suicidal isolation. The rest of us have to be a voice for them. We have to fight back on every blog and comment box we can access, even if it means mounting some kind of samizdat campaign to get the truth out. There are some very cynical power plays going on, especially with the media and the Democratic Party. Bill Gates is out there like Lord Farquaad talking about the need to end mass gatherings permanently. This is ridiculous.

The suppression of the Wittkowski interview is an example of exactly what he means. When I started noticing this, by the way, I saw that some obscure blog “debunking” Wittkowski was a new top result and his interview itself nowhere to be found.

One more thing:
.
.
.

“Long Live Knut Wittkowski!”

Also, on the media shoving “Blacks Hardest Hit by Corona” at us. One sign that the Corona Panic has already pass a “jumped the shark” point is that such stories started coming out.

Yeah, a day or two ago one of the Public Radio shows (2A, The Takeaway , All Things Considered) started one of these stories and it was palpable how relieved the hosts were to slip back into their familiar narrative.

It was the same feeling as the “and now sports!” segue they used to have in evening news broadcasts to signal that the “serious” news is over.

Perhaps people who attend one “superspreader” event are more likely to attend others.

Definitely ON topic:

Dr. Scarfy of Trump’s CV taskforce lamented today that kungflu death rates never went logarithmic like most epidemiologists and climate modelers– um, oops I mean pandemic modelers prayed they would. Yes, kungflu body counts remain so so disappointingly linear.

Ron Unz and several other junior high math geniuses wept.

#CoronaHoax

I like to cook so going to the supermarket used to be fun. Getting a leg of lamb over in CT today was like walking into one of those weird black-and-white 1960ish films like Seconds or Carnival of Souls. Eerie quiet, somber people.

My own hunch is that the models being used are far too complex at this point to be good at their job.

The best evidence that they aren’t doing their job is how far off they’ve been in their predictions — by a factor of maybe 4, or more, depending on which iteration we’re talking about.

This strongly suggests that they are not getting the basics right, or anywhere near what’s right. The bells and whistles in the model are useless at this point. The models should be simplified at this point, and need some mechanism to get a better grip on empirical realities. Simplification would also enable more simulations.

For example, at this stage, one can likely simply neglect the apparatus that takes into account how many people are already immune. The number of people so immune may very well be assumed to be 0 without affecting the outcome. (If we find out otherwise, we can so adjust). We need a better mechanism to estimate basic parameters, such as R0, and the effect of social distancing. Those are the key parameters here. If you are miles off on these estimates, everything else is pointless.

I’m also not sure why Lemoine focuses on the vulnerability of being infected. What’s lost by simply taking the average here? It would result in the same number of infections, I’d think, unless there’s some peculiar way people of different vulnerabilities interact. And even if there are such peculiar ways, how could we come up with good estimates of them at this stage anyway?

Difficult to do de jure since it would require an act of Congress but may happen de facto. With the expected dislocation, potential immigrants will be likely discouraged and the ones here may even prefer to go back.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/china-us-coronavirus-workers-intl-hnk/index.html

On the plus side, most of the immigrant sending countries seem to be faring better than U.S. with respect to Covid, so immigrating here will be more dangerous than staying home. With transport disrupted, it will be difficult to move too. Generally, immigration reduces during recessions anyway. 1930’s were a period of almost no immigration.

It’s very hard to come up with a “true Corona death rate”. We don’t really have a clue as to either the numerator (# of dead) or the denominator (the # infected).

As to the # of dead, OTOH, some places seem to be counting everyone who dies WITH Covid as having died OF Covid.

OTOH, people who die at home of unidentified causes are (at least in some places) NOT counted. Data from the NYC fire department shows that 1,125 people died in their homes or on the street in the first five days of April alone. It is more than eight times the number of deaths recorded this time last year when when 131 people died .

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8208325/Bodies-recovered-NYC-homes-not-counted-COVID-death-toll.html

Similar excess mortality has been seen in some place in Italy. It’s a fair assumption that some or most of that excess mortality is due to Covid.

As for the denominator, without effective testing or an antibody test, we have no idea how many people have been infected and have recovered.

Even the Princess data is less than perfect. The rate on board for the known infected was closer to 1% but they are assuming (without any real proof) that for every know infected person there was one person who was asymptomatic so that makes the rate .5%. In truth they have no idea – maybe there were only 20% asymptomatic victims. Maybe there were more.

Everyone is stumbling around in the dark but it’s clear that almost everywhere the epidemic peaks (at a fairly low level) and then declines – at first it climbs exponentially so that in a few more doublings 1000% of the population will be dead from it, but then it levels off and falls and so the prediction of 1000% dead never happens. It seems to level off if you impose an aggressive quarantine and if you don’t. No one really understands what the drivers are.