German scientists have been studying their country’s hardest hit district, Heinsberg near the Dutch border. They are focusing on a traditional Carnival party on February 15 as the local superspreader event. From The Guardian:
… A hundred days after a Chinese government website announced the discovery of a “pneumonia of unknown cause”, it has become clearer that the dynamics behind the virus’s rapid expansion across the globe has relied heavily on such “cluster effects”.
Each of the countries most heavily hit by the pandemic has reported similar stories of social, cultural or religious gatherings where large numbers spent numerous hours in close company – holding hands, kissing, sharing drinks from the same glass – which then turbo-charged the spread of the pandemic.
For example, there is a bad outbreak in small town southwest Georgia that appears to trace back to a big funeral for a local janitor from a big family on February 29. As I’ve been mentioning, while some superspreader events, like the gay circuit party in Miami, are reminiscent of how AIDS spread, an awful lot of the superspreader events are innocent, respectable, normally healthy events like funerals, choir practices, and birthday parties.
“One pattern we are seeing across the globe is that wherever there was singing and dancing, the virus spread more rapidly,” said Prof Hendrik Streeck, a virologist at the University of Bonn whose team of researchers has spent the last week carrying out the first “Covid-19 case cluster study” in Heinsberg.
“Most infections didn’t take place in supermarkets or restaurants,” Streeck said of his preliminary findings. In Heinsberg, his team of coronavirus detectives could find scant evidence of the virus being transmitted via the surfaces of door handles, smart phones or other objects.
Early theories that the virus at the carnival party in Gangelt could have been transmitted through the dishwater in the kitchen turned out to be a red herring: most guests drank their beer from bottles.
Instead, he said, transmission took place at “events where people spent a length of time in each others’ close company”, such as apres ski parties in the Austrian resort of Ischgl, the Trompete nightclub in Berlin and a football match [Bergamo’s big game was rescheduled to the big stadium in Milan on February 19] in northern Italy.
“Mass events are a perfect opportunity for the virus, as people meet total strangers,” said Niki Popper, a mathematician at Vienna’s Technical University whose team has been developing a simulation that could help governments predict the development of the pandemic more accurately.
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”.
“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.”
So if these German scientists are right (and they might not be, but I’ve been looking forward to their findings since April 1 because this is a serious effort), then restarting the economy will be easier than restarting the society, which is good news and bad news. We ought to be able to get back to work sooner, but how are new couples going to meet?
In terms of restarting the economy, I can imagine that once masks are available, there will be some demand for blue collar workers to retrofit shops and houses to make them more resistant to spreading infections: for example, installing plexiglass along checkout counters and installing copper door handles and the like because viruses can’t survive as long on copper as on stainless steel or plastic. The government could offer 1% loans for this kind of project.
But restarting the pleasures of social life … that might be a long way off.
I’ve only been to Italy once, in 1980, but my impression after first visiting northern Europe upon arriving in Milan was that northern Italians were much friendlier than the more standoffish Northern Europeans. It was like an average day in Italy was like a holiday in Germany.
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.

“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!
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.
https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/new-quarter-ht-er-200109_hpMain_v3x4_4x5_992.jpgReplies: @miss marple
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".Replies: @Old Prude, @Reg Cæsar
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…”
India manufactures 70 per cent of the world's supply.
India can produce 200 million 200 mg pills per month.
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.
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.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=map+of+political+boundries+of+europe+history&iax=images&ia=images&iai=http%3A%2F%2Facademic.brooklyn.cuny.edu%2Fhistory%2Fjohnson%2FEurope1815_1905.jpg
(You will note that the accompanying text says 1850 but then this is SUNY.edu we are talking about)
Quite likely. Of course the Germans punctually paid off all of their Euro loans by their governments whereas in Italy, fun loving northern Italy, they enjoyed the fruits of those loans and let the Germans (and their controlled EU monetary authority) pay them off.
Of course eventually the Germans wised up and cut up most of those credit cards.
Not as much fun there now.
In general, Germans are not so fun loving and jovial. They get blitzed on weak beer and undrinkable schnapps and go nuts with the polka. The farther north you go, the meaner the drunks get. At least in the northern hemisphere.
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.
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.
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.Replies: @Anonymous
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.Replies: @epebble
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...
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
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.Replies: @Mr McKenna, @Anon
“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.
The isteve commentariat knows what a "circuit party" is and who enjoys said parties!Replies: @Known Fact, @Reg Cæsar, @AnotherDad
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
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:
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.]
Background: The community of Gantlet within the district of Heinsberg is one of the places in Germany that has been most affected by COVID-19. It is believed that infection was spread at a local carnival held on February 15, 2020, as several people tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 positive after this event. The outbreak subsequent to the carnival is being closely examined, by focusing on a representative sample from the community. The protocol recommended by the WHO for a community the size of Gangelt (12,529 inhabitants) calls for a random sampling that varies depending on expected prevalence randomly of 100 to 300 households, with sample size dependent on the expected prevalence. The representativeness of our sample was confirmed by Prof. Manfred Güllner of the Forsa research institute in Berlin.Goal: The goal of the study is to determine the level of SARS-CoV2 infections (current and resolved) in this community. In addition, the status of residents' current immunity to SARS-CoV2 will be determined.Procedure: A form letter was sent to approximately 600 households. Overall, about 1,000 residents from approximately 400 households took part in the study. Questionnaires were filled out, throat swabs taken [for RT-PCR testing], and blood was sampled for assays of plasma antibodies (IgG and IgA). This Abstract presents a first evaluation of results from the first c. 500 people tested.Preliminary results: About 14% of people tested had a pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in the form of plasma IgG titers to viral antigen (specificity of the method is >99%). RT-PCR testing revealed that about 2% of those tested had an ongoing SARS-CoV-2 infection. About 15% of those tested had either a current or a resolved SARS-CoV-2 infection. Based on this data, the Case Fatality Rate for the community of Gangelt is about 0.37%. For Germany as a whole, the current CFR as calculated by Johns Hopkins University stands at 1.98%, 5 times higher than our projection. For the entire population of Gantlet, Covid-19 mortality is currently 0.06%.Preliminary conclusions: The Covid-19 mortality rate calculated by Johns Hopkins University is several times greater than that found in this study, due to the much higher pool of infected people that we found. This study captured all people in our sample who had become infected, including those who were asymptomatic and those who experienced only mild symptoms. Approximately 15% of Gantlet’s population had already developed immunity to SARS-CoV-2 at the time samples were taken. This fraction of of the population of Gangelt cannot be infected with the virus, so progress towards herd immunity is already underway. This level of immunity decreases the speed of the further spread of SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. it lowers R, the net viral reproduction number of epidemiological models).By adhering to stringent hygiene measures, it is expected that the average size of viral dose which initiates future infections will be reduced. Infection from a lower dose may lead to more effective training of the immune system, and result in a less severe course of illness. Such relatively favorable conditions are not present when an outbreak is the result of a superspreading event, such as at a carnival, or exposure at an acres-ski bar in Ischgl, Austria. Thus, the implementation of hygiene measures is expected to have favorable effects on all-cause mortality.Therefore, we strongly recommend the following four-phase strategy to implement the model of the German Society for Hospital Hygiene (DGKH):* Phase 1: Impose social quarantine [social distancing] to contain and slow the pandemic, avoiding overloading the critical resources of the health care system.
* Phase 2: Begin the withdrawal of quarantine regulation, while simultaneously ensuring that the framework of hygienic measures remains and continues to influence people’s behavior.
* Phase 3: Remove the quarantine while maintaining the framework of hygienic measures.
* Phase 4: Return to public life as it was before the Covid-19 pandemic (the status quo ante).(The DGKH statement can be found here (PDF):
https://www.krankenhaushygiene.de/ccUpload/upload/files/2020_03_31_DGKH_Einl
adug_Lageeinschaetze.pdf )Replies: @ic1000
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.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @Hail
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)

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/Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome
The isteve commentariat knows what a "circuit party" is and who enjoys said parties!Replies: @Known Fact, @Reg Cæsar, @AnotherDad
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://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..."Replies: @utu
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.
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
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.
https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/new-quarter-ht-er-200109_hpMain_v3x4_4x5_992.jpgReplies: @miss marple
You are truly unique, Reg. It took a special person to find a pic of a bat embossed coin, mother and baby bats even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Mint_coin_production
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.
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.
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.Replies: @Steve Sailer
The Washington choir practice case where they had lots of hand sanitizer and didn’t shake hands but 45 of 60 got infected sounds like airborne transmission.
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.
In fact everything Dr. Kim said, for instance in recommending wearing masks, stands up very well. A link in case anybody missed it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAk7aX5hksU
Attitudes were much more lax even 3 weeks ago.
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-24330266Replies: @Anon
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.Replies: @Ed, @Art Deco, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous
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!Replies: @Anon
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.
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.
FIFY.
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:
“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.
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.Replies: @Hail
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.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Anonymous Jew, @Alden, @Dave Pinsen, @Anon, @UK, @AnotherDad, @Neoconned
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.
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.
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.Replies: @Marty, @BenKenobi, @Wielgus
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.
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.Replies: @Jack D, @ic1000
I had no idea these 2 countries are filled with millions of George Costanzas.Replies: @nebulafox, @RAZ, @kihowi
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.]
Background: The community of Gantlet within the district of Heinsberg is one of the places in Germany that has been most affected by COVID-19. It is believed that infection was spread at a local carnival held on February 15, 2020, as several people tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 positive after this event. The outbreak subsequent to the carnival is being closely examined, by focusing on a representative sample from the community. The protocol recommended by the WHO for a community the size of Gangelt (12,529 inhabitants) calls for a random sampling that varies depending on expected prevalence randomly of 100 to 300 households, with sample size dependent on the expected prevalence. The representativeness of our sample was confirmed by Prof. Manfred Güllner of the Forsa research institute in Berlin.
Goal: The goal of the study is to determine the level of SARS-CoV2 infections (current and resolved) in this community. In addition, the status of residents’ current immunity to SARS-CoV2 will be determined.
Procedure: A form letter was sent to approximately 600 households. Overall, about 1,000 residents from approximately 400 households took part in the study. Questionnaires were filled out, throat swabs taken [for RT-PCR testing], and blood was sampled for assays of plasma antibodies (IgG and IgA). This Abstract presents a first evaluation of results from the first c. 500 people tested.
Preliminary results: About 14% of people tested had a pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in the form of plasma IgG titers to viral antigen (specificity of the method is >99%). RT-PCR testing revealed that about 2% of those tested had an ongoing SARS-CoV-2 infection. About 15% of those tested had either a current or a resolved SARS-CoV-2 infection. Based on this data, the Case Fatality Rate for the community of Gangelt is about 0.37%. For Germany as a whole, the current CFR as calculated by Johns Hopkins University stands at 1.98%, 5 times higher than our projection. For the entire population of Gantlet, Covid-19 mortality is currently 0.06%.
Preliminary conclusions: The Covid-19 mortality rate calculated by Johns Hopkins University is several times greater than that found in this study, due to the much higher pool of infected people that we found. This study captured all people in our sample who had become infected, including those who were asymptomatic and those who experienced only mild symptoms. Approximately 15% of Gantlet’s population had already developed immunity to SARS-CoV-2 at the time samples were taken. This fraction of of the population of Gangelt cannot be infected with the virus, so progress towards herd immunity is already underway. This level of immunity decreases the speed of the further spread of SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. it lowers R, the net viral reproduction number of epidemiological models).
By adhering to stringent hygiene measures, it is expected that the average size of viral dose which initiates future infections will be reduced. Infection from a lower dose may lead to more effective training of the immune system, and result in a less severe course of illness. Such relatively favorable conditions are not present when an outbreak is the result of a superspreading event, such as at a carnival, or exposure at an acres-ski bar in Ischgl, Austria. Thus, the implementation of hygiene measures is expected to have favorable effects on all-cause mortality.
Therefore, we strongly recommend the following four-phase strategy to implement the model of the German Society for Hospital Hygiene (DGKH):
* Phase 1: Impose social quarantine [social distancing] to contain and slow the pandemic, avoiding overloading the critical resources of the health care system.
* Phase 2: Begin the withdrawal of quarantine regulation, while simultaneously ensuring that the framework of hygienic measures remains and continues to influence people’s behavior.
* Phase 3: Remove the quarantine while maintaining the framework of hygienic measures.
* Phase 4: Return to public life as it was before the Covid-19 pandemic (the status quo ante).
(The DGKH statement can be found here (PDF):
https://www.krankenhaushygiene.de/ccUpload/upload/files/2020_03_31_DGKH_Einl
adug_Lageeinschaetze.pdf )
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:
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.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/08/09/104967261_Migrants_France_Italy_FOREIGN-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqaRL1kC4G7DT9ZsZm6Pe3PehAFAI_f6ud569StXyOKH0.jpg This is the Italian border with France. What's he spraying them with, Lysol?Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Known Fact
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
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."
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.Replies: @Robert Dolan
There is no intrinsic R0. R0 depends on human behavior and location vis-à-vis other humans.
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
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:
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.
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.Replies: @Whitey Whiteman III
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:
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.]
Background: The community of Gantlet within the district of Heinsberg is one of the places in Germany that has been most affected by COVID-19. It is believed that infection was spread at a local carnival held on February 15, 2020, as several people tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 positive after this event. The outbreak subsequent to the carnival is being closely examined, by focusing on a representative sample from the community. The protocol recommended by the WHO for a community the size of Gangelt (12,529 inhabitants) calls for a random sampling that varies depending on expected prevalence randomly of 100 to 300 households, with sample size dependent on the expected prevalence. The representativeness of our sample was confirmed by Prof. Manfred Güllner of the Forsa research institute in Berlin.Goal: The goal of the study is to determine the level of SARS-CoV2 infections (current and resolved) in this community. In addition, the status of residents' current immunity to SARS-CoV2 will be determined.Procedure: A form letter was sent to approximately 600 households. Overall, about 1,000 residents from approximately 400 households took part in the study. Questionnaires were filled out, throat swabs taken [for RT-PCR testing], and blood was sampled for assays of plasma antibodies (IgG and IgA). This Abstract presents a first evaluation of results from the first c. 500 people tested.Preliminary results: About 14% of people tested had a pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in the form of plasma IgG titers to viral antigen (specificity of the method is >99%). RT-PCR testing revealed that about 2% of those tested had an ongoing SARS-CoV-2 infection. About 15% of those tested had either a current or a resolved SARS-CoV-2 infection. Based on this data, the Case Fatality Rate for the community of Gangelt is about 0.37%. For Germany as a whole, the current CFR as calculated by Johns Hopkins University stands at 1.98%, 5 times higher than our projection. For the entire population of Gantlet, Covid-19 mortality is currently 0.06%.Preliminary conclusions: The Covid-19 mortality rate calculated by Johns Hopkins University is several times greater than that found in this study, due to the much higher pool of infected people that we found. This study captured all people in our sample who had become infected, including those who were asymptomatic and those who experienced only mild symptoms. Approximately 15% of Gantlet’s population had already developed immunity to SARS-CoV-2 at the time samples were taken. This fraction of of the population of Gangelt cannot be infected with the virus, so progress towards herd immunity is already underway. This level of immunity decreases the speed of the further spread of SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. it lowers R, the net viral reproduction number of epidemiological models).By adhering to stringent hygiene measures, it is expected that the average size of viral dose which initiates future infections will be reduced. Infection from a lower dose may lead to more effective training of the immune system, and result in a less severe course of illness. Such relatively favorable conditions are not present when an outbreak is the result of a superspreading event, such as at a carnival, or exposure at an acres-ski bar in Ischgl, Austria. Thus, the implementation of hygiene measures is expected to have favorable effects on all-cause mortality.Therefore, we strongly recommend the following four-phase strategy to implement the model of the German Society for Hospital Hygiene (DGKH):* Phase 1: Impose social quarantine [social distancing] to contain and slow the pandemic, avoiding overloading the critical resources of the health care system.
* Phase 2: Begin the withdrawal of quarantine regulation, while simultaneously ensuring that the framework of hygienic measures remains and continues to influence people’s behavior.
* Phase 3: Remove the quarantine while maintaining the framework of hygienic measures.
* Phase 4: Return to public life as it was before the Covid-19 pandemic (the status quo ante).(The DGKH statement can be found here (PDF):
https://www.krankenhaushygiene.de/ccUpload/upload/files/2020_03_31_DGKH_Einl
adug_Lageeinschaetze.pdf )Replies: @ic1000
Gangelt repeatedly autocorrected to Gantlet. My mistake.
https://www.keloland.com/news/local-news/smithfield-foods-in-sioux-falls-to-close-for-three-days-due-to-outbreak-of-coronavirus/Replies: @Mr McKenna
BTW
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.
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.Replies: @Anonymous
Boomers never came close, except for the gay ones.
As a dad now, I am certainly glad things have changed since the early 90s.Replies: @anon
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.Replies: @Mr McKenna, @Anon
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.
Burning Man: Not the orgy everyone thinks it is
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.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Anonymous Jew, @Alden, @Dave Pinsen, @Anon, @UK, @AnotherDad, @Neoconned
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!
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.
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?
(and also intestinal stuff. Aerosolized waste matter was implicated in some apartment buildings with suboptimal drain pipe set-ups on China. )Replies: @RAZ
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.
From the UK Mirror:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/debbie-harry-says-shes-considering-21804766 https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article21803629.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_36th-Annual-ASCAP-Pop-Music-Awards-Arrivals.jpg
For her age and only being 5'3 she does have pretty good legs, no cankles, no big nasty old varicose veins.Replies: @donvonburg, @Wielgus
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.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @GermanReader2
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…
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.Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican
https://www.unz.com/isteve/telephoto-trickery/#comment-3827911
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.
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??Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican
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.Replies: @Mr McKenna, @Anon
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.
Excuse me, but I need to go track down even more mass quantities of TP.
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:
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.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Anonymous Jew, @Alden, @Dave Pinsen, @Anon, @UK, @AnotherDad, @Neoconned
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.
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.
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:
______________
* – 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.
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.Replies: @Hail
Trying to find some scale on the money at least: (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.
Graphic from above article about cost of wars. Nothing to do with covid-19
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/1.jpgReplies: @Rob
Projected death rate for the Netherlands is between 20 and 80 thousand, lets say 50 thousand, making it 5 times more deathly then the influenza from 2018. With 50 thousand deaths we have an excess death percentage of around 0.3 %
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
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?Replies: @vhrm, @Intelligent Dasein
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.
Thou shalt have no other epidemiologists before Anythony Fauci. Fauci, thy Fauci, is a jealous public health expert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e98A4iTnsVY
(See 1:20 to end; spotted here) Fire! Brimstone! Corona!Replies: @Mr. Anon, @jsm
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.
Irrelevant. Masks are a form of virtue signalling - and beautiful unique snowflake expressivity for women sewing their own on designer patterns.
Where are you getting these death with (death bed) estimates of 67% for Sweden and 88% for Italy?
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.Replies: @Marty, @BenKenobi, @Wielgus
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.
But you've now permanently ruined The Two Towers for me.
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.
But seriously, I really do take comfort from hearing worst case scenarios well articulated.
Bars are where late 20s, early 30s people go who are already in a relationship, and they go with friends to hang out.
Sorry, old boy, can't quite grasp what it is that you are trying to say?
Could you tell me
and go on at greater length?
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.....Replies: @anon
How much does this matter, though? It seems to me that lethality is a function of both infectiousness and fatality rates.
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-134076Replies: @res
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.
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.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Anonymous Jew, @Alden, @Dave Pinsen, @Anon, @UK, @AnotherDad, @Neoconned
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!

Enough of these underhanded slights against their work ethic already.
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?
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.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @GermanReader2
But this finding really brings down the death rate.
Good, thoughtful, comprehensive post. I’d only (possibly) quibble with this part:
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.
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:
(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.
Graphic from above article about cost of wars. Nothing to do with covid-19

Well, of course.
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)
We can probably be more confident that salesmen earn their pay more than just about any other type of job.
No fun for you!
https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2017/04/06/06-soup-nazi.w330.h330.jpgReplies: @nokangaroos
“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.
- Known: Number of confirmed-tested-positives for a region: Known (denominator),We are still stuck with a cannot-compute-in-good-faith situation because of the severe denominator-deflation problem, widely mentioned but rarely gotten through to the MSM, which continues its pro-CoronaPanic bloodlust campaign.If we get a reliable estimate on the true denominator (total persons who have had definite contact with the virus), we can begin to make the calculation with more certainty. This is useful data, and it is good news. We no longer need to fear the Doomers' doomsday talk. We can begin to re-open, while still protecting the vulnerable.
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
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.
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.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Anonymous Jew, @Alden, @Dave Pinsen, @Anon, @UK, @AnotherDad, @Neoconned
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.
Hell’s Bells, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was worth at least an article for Taki’s!
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.
How much of this virus might be shed in perspiration?Replies: @vhrm, @Yawrate
Skiing itself is unlikely to be that risky, except maybe standing in the lift lines.
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.
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.
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.aspxReplies: @Charon, @Hail
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/
I had no idea these 2 countries are filled with millions of George Costanzas.Replies: @nebulafox, @RAZ, @kihowi
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.
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.Replies: @Whitey Whiteman III
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:
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.
Some are quite stylish. Oddly the few I’ve noticed without them have been mostly white and male.Replies: @S. Anonyia, @Hail
Note the reporter's viral name:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sqoLotkP2_A
Commercial face masks don’t actually impede speech that much.
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?
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.Replies: @peterike, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Hippopotamusdrome
Because we can’t send people to the moon.
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.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @kihowi, @Old Prude, @LoutishAngloQuebecker, @anon, @Neoconned, @Jenner Ickham Errican
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.
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!Replies: @Art Deco
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.
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.Replies: @Marty, @BenKenobi, @Wielgus
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.
(and also intestinal stuff. Aerosolized waste matter was implicated in some apartment buildings with suboptimal drain pipe set-ups on China. )Replies: @RAZ
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.
FearlessLeader!I had no idea these 2 countries are filled with millions of George Costanzas.Replies: @nebulafox, @RAZ, @kihowi
They’re also really in mommy porn, disturbingly.
Citizen! Work more and enjoy yourself less!
Bend the Arc, er, I mean: Flatten the Curve!Replies: @Wielgus
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?
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.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @kihowi, @Old Prude, @LoutishAngloQuebecker, @anon, @Neoconned, @Jenner Ickham Errican
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 .
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.Replies: @peterike, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Hippopotamusdrome
“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.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/08/09/104967261_Migrants_France_Italy_FOREIGN-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqaRL1kC4G7DT9ZsZm6Pe3PehAFAI_f6ud569StXyOKH0.jpg This is the Italian border with France. What's he spraying them with, Lysol?Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Known Fact
Chianti.
Their parents can introduce them.
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.Replies: @Anonymous
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!
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.Replies: @Jack D, @ic1000
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.
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.
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.Replies: @ic1000
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.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Anonymous Jew, @Alden, @Dave Pinsen, @Anon, @UK, @AnotherDad, @Neoconned
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.
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?
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.
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.Replies: @Jack D, @ic1000
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.
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.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @Hail
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.
You wrote, "Another possibility is that there is a big difference among people in susceptibility to infection."
Lemoine: He goes on to make an important point: 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.Replies: @candid_observer, @Sparkylyle92
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
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.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935673/bin/AJPH.2013.301704f3.jpg
German “fun” isn’t always that appealing:
Austrians are marginally better:
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!Replies: @Travis
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.”
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.
.
.
."Long Live Knut Wittkowski!"
-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?Replies: @Endeavor
Japan may benefit from high iodine levels due to seafood consumption.
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.
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.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @kihowi, @Old Prude, @LoutishAngloQuebecker, @anon, @Neoconned, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Ah… So THIS is the commenter they call “Whiskey”.
The isteve commentariat knows what a "circuit party" is and who enjoys said parties!Replies: @Known Fact, @Reg Cæsar, @AnotherDad
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”.
Homosexuality, of course, is an oxymoron.
And a bastard:
https://yahooeysblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/cp-scott-television.jpg?w=640Replies: @Jack D
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.
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".Replies: @Old Prude, @Reg Cæsar
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.
Francis Duggan
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".Replies: @Old Prude, @Reg Cæsar
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)
Fire! Brimstone! Corona!
Do these people even LISTEN to themselves?Replies: @Hail
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.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @kihowi, @Old Prude, @LoutishAngloQuebecker, @anon, @Neoconned, @Jenner Ickham Errican
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.
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.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @Hail
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e98A4iTnsVY
(See 1:20 to end; spotted here) Fire! Brimstone! Corona!Replies: @Mr. Anon, @jsm
That Congresswoman is another tragic case of CID: Corona Induced Dementia
Homosexuality, of course, is an oxymoron.
And a bastard:
https://yahooeysblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/cp-scott-television.jpg?w=640Replies: @Jack D
Automobile is another half-Latin/half-Greek word.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929#unintentional-injuries
https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estimates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
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.Replies: @Hail
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%).
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.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Johann Ricke
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.
Good luck with that.
"Parents thoroughly vet the guy so bad behavior is found before the marriage."
So how did you get through the screening process?
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.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Anonymous Jew, @Alden, @Dave Pinsen, @Anon, @UK, @AnotherDad, @Neoconned
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.
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.
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.Replies: @Robert Dolan
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?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/08/09/104967261_Migrants_France_Italy_FOREIGN-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqaRL1kC4G7DT9ZsZm6Pe3PehAFAI_f6ud569StXyOKH0.jpg This is the Italian border with France. What's he spraying them with, Lysol?Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Known Fact
Lysol? Try Raid
God almighty, the Puritans were right!Replies: @e, @John Achterhof
LOL. Good one.
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.Replies: @ic1000
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:
He goes on to make an important point:
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:
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.
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.Replies: @Ed, @Art Deco, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous
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.
Unless you're in a rural area with no other options, shop higher-end groceries.
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.
Some are quite stylish. Oddly the few I’ve noticed without them have been mostly white and male.Replies: @S. Anonyia, @Hail
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?
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-24330266Replies: @Anon
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.
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.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @kihowi, @Old Prude, @LoutishAngloQuebecker, @anon, @Neoconned, @Jenner Ickham Errican
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
and go on at greater length?
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.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @kihowi, @Old Prude, @LoutishAngloQuebecker, @anon, @Neoconned, @Jenner Ickham Errican
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…..
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‘).
Some are quite stylish. Oddly the few I’ve noticed without them have been mostly white and male.Replies: @S. Anonyia, @Hail
Attention MSM lurkers! Story idea! Go, go quick, before the next journalist steals it.
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.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Anonymous Jew, @Alden, @Dave Pinsen, @Anon, @UK, @AnotherDad, @Neoconned
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…
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.aspxReplies: @Charon, @Hail
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?
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.
Nobody makes such quotidian hay out of something if they believe it's an actual emergency, especially if they think it's about to darken their own doorstep.
I have also noticed more and more that those commenters from the peanut gallery who align themselves with CoronaPanic seems to be on a power trip. They are very eager to show themsleves on the side that (presently) holds the whip hand, and they're getting that arrogant brogue in their voice.
God almighty, the Puritans were right!Replies: @e, @John Achterhof
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
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-134076Replies: @res
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.

You speak for yourself, bedwetter.Replies: @the one they call Desanex
Hey, ease up on our
FearlessLeader!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.Replies: @Ed, @Art Deco, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous
The blacks in my area are in masks and gloves (the grocery store employees especially).
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.Replies: @Art Deco
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.
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??Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican
No.
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.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @kihowi, @Old Prude, @LoutishAngloQuebecker, @anon, @Neoconned, @Jenner Ickham Errican
“And what about it?” .gif
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.
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!Replies: @Anon
The whiny chick “music” that’s played at Safeway is extremely annoying.
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:
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!”
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?Replies: @vhrm, @Intelligent Dasein
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
#VietnamHoax 58K, #KoreaHoax 40K, #WW2Hoax 407K, #WW1Hoax 117KReplies: @Je Suis Omar Mateen
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.
You wrote, "Another possibility is that there is a big difference among people in susceptibility to infection."
Lemoine: He goes on to make an important point: 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.Replies: @candid_observer, @Sparkylyle92
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?
No, it's me who's harping on that heterogeneity. Suppose that (contra the models) there is a range -- call it a bell-shaped curve. One tail is "touch a doorknob with ten viruses then your mouth, and you're infected," while the other is "it takes a superspreader sneezing in your face to get you."
On introduction to a population, the number of cases is going to double very fast, say every 3 days, as the number of slightly tainted doorknobs and elevator buttons grows. But as the most vulnerable are converted from naive to infected, the pool of easily-infected shrinks. Doubling time edges up; people near the middle of the curve need to touch a doorknob with thousands of viruses to likely get infected. And so on. Social distancing has an additive effect -- but "the curve bends" even without it.
The current crop of computer models haven't predicted such a bend, but it's visible in the data.
If this speculation about differential vulnerability is right, herd immunity will be achieved sooner (with a lower fraction of the population immunized) than anticipated.Replies: @candid_observer, @Dieter Kief, @Steve Sailer, @candid_observer
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.Replies: @epebble
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52196815
Multiply that out, and it's becoming clear why the specter of mass graves isn't necessarily left-wing hyperbole.
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.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @Hail
Your estimate for the Diamond Princess IFR fails to include those who has it and recovered before testing; those whore refused testing and the known large number of false negatives from both insensitive tests and poor technician ability.
The pathetic solid purple line on the bottom is actual hospital bed occupancy in NY. Note: it is a slow linear ascent. The dotted purple line is projected bed occupancy.
Reality again refuses to go exponential. And reality remains undefeated.
#CoronaHoax
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.Replies: @peterike, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Hippopotamusdrome
Because it would be more costly to produce extra masks per unit outside the existing established production chains, and charging more for supplies in an emergency is “price gouging” and that is immoral and illegal and the state will confiscate your equipment and your picture will be posted on Twitter to shame you for being a heartless libertarian bastard.
> I’m also not sure why Lemoine focuses on the vulnerability of being infected.
No, it’s me who’s harping on that heterogeneity. Suppose that (contra the models) there is a range — call it a bell-shaped curve. One tail is “touch a doorknob with ten viruses then your mouth, and you’re infected,” while the other is “it takes a superspreader sneezing in your face to get you.”
On introduction to a population, the number of cases is going to double very fast, say every 3 days, as the number of slightly tainted doorknobs and elevator buttons grows. But as the most vulnerable are converted from naive to infected, the pool of easily-infected shrinks. Doubling time edges up; people near the middle of the curve need to touch a doorknob with thousands of viruses to likely get infected. And so on. Social distancing has an additive effect — but “the curve bends” even without it.
The current crop of computer models haven’t predicted such a bend, but it’s visible in the data.
If this speculation about differential vulnerability is right, herd immunity will be achieved sooner (with a lower fraction of the population immunized) than anticipated.
I find it a little unlikely that vulnerability to infection itself is strongly variable among people in basically the same circumstance. One reason I doubt this is that the infection rates (as opposed to death rates) seem not to differ terribly much across ages, with the exception of the very young. I'd expect to see a great increase among the elderly in infection rates if vulnerability were greatly variant.
But if there is a modest increase among the elderly in infection rates at this point, it may well be due to the circumstances of many of them, especially the very old: so many of them are in facilities of one description or another. It's pretty obvious that the virus runs riot through these facilities -- infecting, though, not just the residents but also the much younger staff. I wonder how much of our current rise in deaths and infections are based in these facilities. When they are burned through, the rise may subside. But I'm not sure what percentage of them have been invaded at this stage.
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/Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome
LOL. Payola?
No, it's me who's harping on that heterogeneity. Suppose that (contra the models) there is a range -- call it a bell-shaped curve. One tail is "touch a doorknob with ten viruses then your mouth, and you're infected," while the other is "it takes a superspreader sneezing in your face to get you."
On introduction to a population, the number of cases is going to double very fast, say every 3 days, as the number of slightly tainted doorknobs and elevator buttons grows. But as the most vulnerable are converted from naive to infected, the pool of easily-infected shrinks. Doubling time edges up; people near the middle of the curve need to touch a doorknob with thousands of viruses to likely get infected. And so on. Social distancing has an additive effect -- but "the curve bends" even without it.
The current crop of computer models haven't predicted such a bend, but it's visible in the data.
If this speculation about differential vulnerability is right, herd immunity will be achieved sooner (with a lower fraction of the population immunized) than anticipated.Replies: @candid_observer, @Dieter Kief, @Steve Sailer, @candid_observer
OK, I can see how that might work.
Copper is quite expensive…
How much of this virus might be shed in perspiration?Replies: @vhrm, @Yawrate
Lots of ski areas feature closed gondolas.
When in doubt – ask Bob Dylan – He’ll help you out!
“You only tell the truth when you’re wearing a mask,” Dylan quips in a new interview, providing Scorsese with framing language for his whole film.”
Bob Dylan did wear a plastic mask while performing his Rolling Thunder concerts, so: We’ll all follow in his footsteps and roll out of this crisis like we’ve done so often times before.
No?
Yes, we will – with the help of Dylan and masks – ‘n’ stuff (intensive CO-19-testing)!
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.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Johann Ricke
LOL. They are not testing suspicious dead people during the most important pandemic ever in history that is in the news 24/7. Not interested. What’s the matter, they don’t get any extra grant money for dead people with Corona, so why spend money on expensive tests?
There is blood on the hands of those who may be responsible for any unnecessary deaths through either incompetence, or through deliberately sparking panic for political reasons.Replies: @Johann Ricke
>>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<<
Quite likely. Of course the Germans punctually paid off all of their Euro loans by their governments whereas in Italy, fun loving northern Italy, they enjoyed the fruits of those loans and let the Germans (and their controlled EU monetary authority) pay them off.
Of course eventually the Germans wised up and cut up most of those credit cards.
Not as much fun there now.
In general, Germans are not so fun loving and jovial. They get blitzed on weak beer and undrinkable schnapps and go nuts with the polka. The farther north you go, the meaner the drunks get. At least in the northern hemisphere.
It seems fairly obvious to me that the rapid spread in New York was caused by the subway system. Stuck in a metal tube with 40 or 50 other people breathing in everyone else’s exhaled air — Boo Yah! COVID-19.
No, it's me who's harping on that heterogeneity. Suppose that (contra the models) there is a range -- call it a bell-shaped curve. One tail is "touch a doorknob with ten viruses then your mouth, and you're infected," while the other is "it takes a superspreader sneezing in your face to get you."
On introduction to a population, the number of cases is going to double very fast, say every 3 days, as the number of slightly tainted doorknobs and elevator buttons grows. But as the most vulnerable are converted from naive to infected, the pool of easily-infected shrinks. Doubling time edges up; people near the middle of the curve need to touch a doorknob with thousands of viruses to likely get infected. And so on. Social distancing has an additive effect -- but "the curve bends" even without it.
The current crop of computer models haven't predicted such a bend, but it's visible in the data.
If this speculation about differential vulnerability is right, herd immunity will be achieved sooner (with a lower fraction of the population immunized) than anticipated.Replies: @candid_observer, @Dieter Kief, @Steve Sailer, @candid_observer
I’d add to your model the special vulnerability of older people in Italy with more than two other serious illnesses and with a lot of antibiotics-resistant persons among them at the same time – and add the benefit from wearing simple masks, as seems to work out quite nicely in Tchechia – – – and you could maybe hope for a not utterly catastrophic development of this crisis.
Everyone in the Czech republic must wear a mask in public. No exceptions.
Not even for nudists. Can sunbath naked, but still must wear a mask.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/czech-nudists-virus-police/index.html
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.Replies: @Anonymous
Some of these oldsters are not getting the action that they would like.
From the UK Mirror:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/debbie-harry-says-shes-considering-21804766
For her age and only being 5’3 she does have pretty good legs, no cankles, no big nasty old varicose veins.
She will be at the 3/4 century mark very soon, why you seem to think that we should be that interested in her is beyond me, or anyone else, for that matter. She's an old woman with some money, but no children, no family, and posessed only of a vestigal career at this point: she's probably very lonely, but being enough of a celebrity she has to take any potential friend or companion, much less suitor, with a gimlet eye-are they after her money, are they wanting to do her harm, etc?-I'm guessing she is a lonely person. In staying single and childless, she made a decision she probably regrets.
GenXers were the biggest sluts in US history, hands down. We set the all-time record for teen pregnancy — and that was with widely available birth control.
Boomers never came close, except for the gay ones.
As a dad now, I am certainly glad things have changed since the early 90s.
Post Covid, era of "toys"?Replies: @Bill P
Lori isn’t a real dyke, she’s a man. Check out those hands.
20K this month and 20K next month, pretty soon you are talking real numbers, even if disappointingly linear.
#VietnamHoax 58K, #KoreaHoax 40K, #WW2Hoax 407K, #WW1Hoax 117K
1/512 = 0.00195Because there are 26 Repub and 24 Dem governors, by simple chance there is not even a 0.00195% probability that the first nine economy-wrecking governors are all Democrats.COLLUSION. pure. and. simples.
You wrote, "Another possibility is that there is a big difference among people in susceptibility to infection."
Lemoine: He goes on to make an important point: 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.Replies: @candid_observer, @Sparkylyle92
Good observations. Obvious implication if true: herd immunity arrives much earlier as the most susceptible are picked off early in the epidemic.
A “true death rate” even with accurate numerator and denominator would be meaningless. What we need are true infection rates that are linked to true death rates for differing cohorts; one for people who wear face masks diligently (Asians), another for people who practice social distance/wash hands/avoid laughing a lot in public for no reason at all (whites), and one lastly for other.
It’s the lodges, I’d bet. There’s got to be more fresh snot in ski lodges than just about anywhere else. People come in from a run down the slopes dripping and wiping all over the place, not to mention the sneezing, coughing and vigorous throat clearing. You’d probably have to be wearing a biohazard suit to be safe from infection in a ski lodge.
Boomers never came close, except for the gay ones.
As a dad now, I am certainly glad things have changed since the early 90s.Replies: @anon
Thanks to HIV/AIDS. Also, widespread and easy availability of high quality porn in recent times.
Post Covid, era of “toys”?
What happened was right about '94 society started cracking down on young people. I remember it clearly. There was the crime bill, VAWA, draconian child support legislation attached to welfare reform, etc. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the year the youngest boomers turned 30.
Millennials never got to know what it was like to have an unmonitored adolescence.
Honestly, I think there's going to be a post-virus reaction against social control. I've said it before, but it bears repeating:
Twenty-five years ago, the very people who are currently shutting down this country never would have stood for the same measures on behalf of their own elderly parents.
I'm not saying they would have been right then, or that they are wrong now (time will tell), but the self-interest aspect of this is pretty obvious.
There's already pushback against the shutdown, and it is growing day by day. This is going to be costly not only in terms of jobs and business, but political capital as well. I suspect that the end result will be a less obedient, less stable populace that will no longer be as inclined to follow the rules.Replies: @nebulafox, @Wielgus
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?Replies: @vhrm, @Intelligent Dasein
This.
Nobody makes such quotidian hay out of something if they believe it’s an actual emergency, especially if they think it’s about to darken their own doorstep.
I have also noticed more and more that those commenters from the peanut gallery who align themselves with CoronaPanic seems to be on a power trip. They are very eager to show themsleves on the side that (presently) holds the whip hand, and they’re getting that arrogant brogue in their voice.
FBI considered Steele “Dossier” to be “Russian disinformation,” but was cool with basing their whole election-throwing attempt on it, while publicly crying about Russian interference in our elections.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/breaking-doj-declassifies-3-footnotes-horowitzs-report-revealing-fbi-assessed-steele-dossier-russian-disinformation-used-anyway/
Another factor might enter into those deaths at home, namely that with the panic ongoing, perhaps access to the normal healthcare needed to sustain some of these unfortunates has been sufficiently disrupted that they died in place. Even assuming that they could transport themselves to a medical office or ER in search of their needed and customary medical support, if they got to either of these places, chances are they would not have been seen, and their needs addressed due to the panic, so they may have just given up, and died in their homes.
There is blood on the hands of those who may be responsible for any unnecessary deaths through either incompetence, or through deliberately sparking panic for political reasons.
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.Replies: @Ed, @Art Deco, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous
Because it’s yet another Yankee Puritan imposition on freedom of movement, as were speed limits and seat belts? Beverly, Mass, now fines people for walking on the wrong side of the street. Imagine that.
Note the reporter’s viral name:
And deadlier than any pandemic!
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929#unintentional-injuries
https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estimates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e98A4iTnsVY
(See 1:20 to end; spotted here) Fire! Brimstone! Corona!Replies: @Mr. Anon, @jsm
Is anybody besides me sick of hearing, “We’re in this together” …or.. “Together we’ll get though this” … or… “to stand together”…. yada, yada, yada? NO, idiots, togetherness is exactly what we’re NOT doing. Just like you asked, remember?
Do these people even LISTEN to themselves?
- early 1970s: Haley's parents-to-be meet while students at Oakland University in Michigan. Mother [b.1951?] graduates in 1973 and begins climbing corporate ladder;
- Haley is born June 1983 in Oakland County, Michigan (Detroit metro area) and raised there; mother was for a time the "CEO of a successful marketing agency" (1990 to 2007); father ran a landscaping business and later became a high school teacher. Haley was their only child;
- In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Haley is raised mainly in Rochester Hills, Michigan, at which time the small city of 60,000 was 95% White, 1% Black (see pdf of Michigan town results on 1990 census -- note: As of 2020, the city is at 76,000 pop., 76% White, 12%+ Asian, 5% Hispanic, 5% Black);
- 1994: Haley wins "a district-wide speech competition as a fifth grader. 'I was always a performer and somebody who wasn’t shy being in front of large groups of people,' says Stevens, who spoke of wanting to be an actress when she grew up. A love of history later sparked her political curiosity;"
- June 2001: Graduates from Seaholm High School nearby in Birmingham, Michigan, "where she served as student body treasurer, started the diversity club and peer mediation group, and delivered the graduation speech;" she had been accepted to American University in Washington DC, and by August 2001 she will have relocated to DC; in her first few weeks there, 9/11 happens;
- Late 2001? to June 2002: Gets her start in politics, volunteering for "Mark Shriver’s unsuccessful 2002 congressional bid" for a US House seat from Maryland; he lost the primary challenge to the incumbent Democrat by three points;
- 2003: Elected American University Student Government President, but cannot have served long, because she spent some or all of the 2003-04 academic year at Oxford; (perhaps the student government presidency was a rotating-door position or there were co-presidents);
- 2005: Graduates with BA "in Political Science and Philosophy" from American University;
- 2007: Graduates with MA in Social Policy Philosophy from American University;
- ca. summer 2007: Joins Hillary Clinton For President campaign as paid staffer, "conducting research on economic and Native American policy and compiling the daily briefing;" and after Hillary drops out, moves on to the Obama campaign;
- 2009 to 2017: Holds various positions on the margins of government: "Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry;" "Director of a manufacturing innovation and economic growth program in Louisville, Kentucky, as part of a two-year fellowship with the City of Louisville sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies;" "Director of workforce development and manufacturing engagement at the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute [Chicago], a Department of Defense-funded initiative;"
- Late 2016: Enraged by the election of Trump, and probably bored with the types of positions she was floating around in (summarized above), she decides to return to Michigan and run for Congress; she announces her campaign formally in April 2017;
- Aug. 2018: Wins Democratic primary which is split five ways. Wins 27-22-21-19-11;
- Nov. 2018: Benefits from the wave of agitated anti-Trump'ers whose turnout surges; wins (52-45) the general election in Michigan's 11th District, a district that had elected Republicans in 38 of the previous 39 general elections back to Nov. 1938;
- As of 2020, unmarried (according to Congressional profile), presumably no children.(Much of the above is from an alumni profile at American University; other material is HaleyStevensForCongress dot com.)
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.....Replies: @anon
Lol, when you find yourself agreeing with Whiskey on anything at all — check your premises.
No, it's me who's harping on that heterogeneity. Suppose that (contra the models) there is a range -- call it a bell-shaped curve. One tail is "touch a doorknob with ten viruses then your mouth, and you're infected," while the other is "it takes a superspreader sneezing in your face to get you."
On introduction to a population, the number of cases is going to double very fast, say every 3 days, as the number of slightly tainted doorknobs and elevator buttons grows. But as the most vulnerable are converted from naive to infected, the pool of easily-infected shrinks. Doubling time edges up; people near the middle of the curve need to touch a doorknob with thousands of viruses to likely get infected. And so on. Social distancing has an additive effect -- but "the curve bends" even without it.
The current crop of computer models haven't predicted such a bend, but it's visible in the data.
If this speculation about differential vulnerability is right, herd immunity will be achieved sooner (with a lower fraction of the population immunized) than anticipated.Replies: @candid_observer, @Dieter Kief, @Steve Sailer, @candid_observer
Are there examples of other viruses where your model of rapid herd immunity due to those more likely to get infected first get infected first is true?
I don't know. I've been pickup up a little virology and immunology on a learn-as-you-go basis. I'll check and report back.
"Herd immunity" is the term I used upthread. It may be "right" as a description. It may also be "wrong" as a policy prescription, considering what that would mean for vulnerable people's risks, in the likely absence of a widely available vaccine. This was the reason for BoJo's government's about-face last month, as you remarked at the time.
I did some literature searches at PubMed on host susceptibility to coronaviruses, and on host susceptibility to influenza viruses. In both cases, human genetic factors that affect susceptibility to infection have been identified.
These more and less risky alleles exist, and they definitely affect the odds of infection of the people who carry them. However, this doesn't really answer your question, which focuses on their epidemiological impact. That has two parts: First, how profound are the observed differences in resistance to infection? And second, how common are the minor alleles?
For malaria, alleles are both protective enough and common enough to generate a wide range of resistance against infection among the peoples of West Africa.
For coronavirus and influenza, some important genes are known, but definitive studies that would quantitate their effects in various human populations haven't been done.
Coronavirus: M.H. Ng et al (2004) identified a Class I HLA gene that was present in 10% of SARS cases, twenty times the expected frequency. Chan et al (2007) found that one form of the cell-surface protein CD209L is partially protective against SARS-CoV. M.W. Ng and colleagues (2007) identified one form of the cytokine RANTES that led to four-fold increased susceptibility of Hong Kongers to SARS. Also working in Hong Kong that year, Yuan et al. showed that a common allele for cell surface protein CD14 noticeably increased risk of SARS, but the study wasn't powered enough to say just how much. Lastly, in 2008 Khoo et al discovered an allele of the inflammatory response gene L-SIGN that displayed extra protective activity against SARS.
Interest in this research area declined at about that time, and no additional risk factors seem to have been reported in the past dozen years.
Flu: Working in Vietnam, Horby et al reviewed The Role of Host Genetics in Susceptibility to Influenza, in a paper of that name. The abstract provides a readable summary of the state of the art in 2012; its key points -- Since then, the human genes IRF7 (Ciancanelli et al. 2016), MxA (Graf et al 2018) and IFITM3 (Wellington et al 2019), has been strongly implicated in differential resistance to varied influenza strains.
No, it's me who's harping on that heterogeneity. Suppose that (contra the models) there is a range -- call it a bell-shaped curve. One tail is "touch a doorknob with ten viruses then your mouth, and you're infected," while the other is "it takes a superspreader sneezing in your face to get you."
On introduction to a population, the number of cases is going to double very fast, say every 3 days, as the number of slightly tainted doorknobs and elevator buttons grows. But as the most vulnerable are converted from naive to infected, the pool of easily-infected shrinks. Doubling time edges up; people near the middle of the curve need to touch a doorknob with thousands of viruses to likely get infected. And so on. Social distancing has an additive effect -- but "the curve bends" even without it.
The current crop of computer models haven't predicted such a bend, but it's visible in the data.
If this speculation about differential vulnerability is right, herd immunity will be achieved sooner (with a lower fraction of the population immunized) than anticipated.Replies: @candid_observer, @Dieter Kief, @Steve Sailer, @candid_observer
As I think about it some more, I can see how your idea might work out to a degree, but possibly not for the sorts of reasons you mention.
I find it a little unlikely that vulnerability to infection itself is strongly variable among people in basically the same circumstance. One reason I doubt this is that the infection rates (as opposed to death rates) seem not to differ terribly much across ages, with the exception of the very young. I’d expect to see a great increase among the elderly in infection rates if vulnerability were greatly variant.
But if there is a modest increase among the elderly in infection rates at this point, it may well be due to the circumstances of many of them, especially the very old: so many of them are in facilities of one description or another. It’s pretty obvious that the virus runs riot through these facilities — infecting, though, not just the residents but also the much younger staff. I wonder how much of our current rise in deaths and infections are based in these facilities. When they are burned through, the rise may subside. But I’m not sure what percentage of them have been invaded at this stage.
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.Replies: @Corvinus
“I was telling my daughter and her friend yesterday that I’m going to set up arranged marriages for them.”
Good luck with that.
“Parents thoroughly vet the guy so bad behavior is found before the marriage.”
So how did you get through the screening process?
Um, copper door handles? Anyone check the price of scrap copper lately? Anything made of copper won’t last five minutes left unattended in plain sight!
“Yes, kungflu body counts remain so so disappointingly linear.”
You keep using that word linear. I’m starting to think you don’t know what it means. For example, here is a fairly linear graph pertaining to US coronavirus deaths, swiped from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ :
https://ibb.co/8gh5nP3
Also note that this fairly linear graph is of the LOG of deaths. In other words, the actual body count is about as close to exponential behavior as one can expect.
I don’t know what this doctor you mention is referring to, but if he did say linear, I suspect he, too, was referring to the log of the number of cases.
#VietnamHoax 58K, #KoreaHoax 40K, #WW2Hoax 407K, #WW1Hoax 117KReplies: @Je Suis Omar Mateen
“20K this month and 20K next month, pretty soon you are talking real numbers, even if disappointingly linear.”
But I was promised by all the wizards of smart this baby was exponential.
When I noticed the first NINE state governors to wreck their economies are all Democrats, I knew this was a hoax…. because I remember my eighth-grade maffs:
One divided by 2^9 = 1/512
1/512 = 0.00195
Because there are 26 Repub and 24 Dem governors, by simple chance there is not even a 0.00195% probability that the first nine economy-wrecking governors are all Democrats.
COLLUSION. pure. and. simples.
Yeah, I was wondering about that point too. Do any flus follow this model?
Also, a basic problem with it is that we are so little through the population at this point, at least apparently. If, say, only 5% have been infected, how do we get all the way to herd immunity from there? Even assuming that there’s great variability across the entire population in susceptibility, how much difference might there between the most vulnerable 5% and the next most vulnerable 5%? How does that bend the overall curve so we quickly get to herd immunity? Is the idea that, say, only the most vulnerable 20% will contract it at all?
And it would be surprising that the variability across the entire population might be quite large, yet the infection rates across ages, apart from the very young, don’t seem to be terribly different.
“was referring to the log of the number of cases.”
Aargh, I mean log of the US deaths from coronavirus, not number of cases (though for what it’s worth, the graph of the number of cases is still not a bad exponential plot either, but unlike the body count, that has indeed levelled off from true exponential growth in the last two weeks.)
Post Covid, era of "toys"?Replies: @Bill P
I don’t think AIDS had much to do with it. Even back then everybody knew it was mainly a gay and junkie problem.
What happened was right about ’94 society started cracking down on young people. I remember it clearly. There was the crime bill, VAWA, draconian child support legislation attached to welfare reform, etc. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the year the youngest boomers turned 30.
Millennials never got to know what it was like to have an unmonitored adolescence.
Honestly, I think there’s going to be a post-virus reaction against social control. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating:
Twenty-five years ago, the very people who are currently shutting down this country never would have stood for the same measures on behalf of their own elderly parents.
I’m not saying they would have been right then, or that they are wrong now (time will tell), but the self-interest aspect of this is pretty obvious.
There’s already pushback against the shutdown, and it is growing day by day. This is going to be costly not only in terms of jobs and business, but political capital as well. I suspect that the end result will be a less obedient, less stable populace that will no longer be as inclined to follow the rules.
What do you think the long-term effects of this are going to be?
Re AIDS, it was understood to be a disease of junkies and homosexuals, especially reckless ones, at least outside Africa where it became much more widespread. Rare cases of non-homosexuals and non-junkies getting it were hyped up by the media, much like young COVID-19 deaths are being hyped up now.
Germans have fun after the work is done, not instead of doing the work.
In Berlin there are forests with wild boar running about.
—-
Italy, Many Reasons Why Part 9: Air quality.
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution over Northern Italy is the worst in Europe and especially bad in big cities like Milan.
Not enough personnel. They are probably stuck on pre-virus SOP’s, such that every i has to be dotted, and every t has to be crossed. Federal grant money comes with reams of paperwork requirements, something they don’t have time for when they’re hustling with several times the normal volume using the same number of staff they had pre-crisis.
There is blood on the hands of those who may be responsible for any unnecessary deaths through either incompetence, or through deliberately sparking panic for political reasons.Replies: @Johann Ricke
I’d say it’s rarity rather than incompetence. If they had enough staff for budget-busting pandemics that occur once a century, municipal credit ratings nationwide would be a single D. The US was unprepared for WWII because the war required a defense budget that increased military spending from 1% of national output to about 50%. That’s not a level of buildup that can be maintained indefinitely.
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...Replies: @ANON
He’s quoted and referenced Steve on quite a few occasions.
Do these people even LISTEN to themselves?Replies: @Hail
jsmwrote:
Mr. Anon, above, wrote:
It’s not clear from the video, but it turns out this is a young woman, or at least a lot younger than one might think.
This picture of the CoronaAddled ranter, Congresswoman Haley Stevens (by Crain’s Detroit magazine) wast taken not longer after she turned 35, believe it or not:

_____________
Life-trajectory profile:
HALEY MARIA STEVENS
– early 1970s: Haley’s parents-to-be meet while students at Oakland University in Michigan. Mother [b.1951?] graduates in 1973 and begins climbing corporate ladder;
– Haley is born June 1983 in Oakland County, Michigan (Detroit metro area) and raised there; mother was for a time the “CEO of a successful marketing agency” (1990 to 2007); father ran a landscaping business and later became a high school teacher. Haley was their only child;
– In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Haley is raised mainly in Rochester Hills, Michigan, at which time the small city of 60,000 was 95% White, 1% Black (see pdf of Michigan town results on 1990 census — note: As of 2020, the city is at 76,000 pop., 76% White, 12%+ Asian, 5% Hispanic, 5% Black);
– 1994: Haley wins “a district-wide speech competition as a fifth grader. ‘I was always a performer and somebody who wasn’t shy being in front of large groups of people,’ says Stevens, who spoke of wanting to be an actress when she grew up. A love of history later sparked her political curiosity;”
– June 2001: Graduates from Seaholm High School nearby in Birmingham, Michigan, “where she served as student body treasurer, started the diversity club and peer mediation group, and delivered the graduation speech;” she had been accepted to American University in Washington DC, and by August 2001 she will have relocated to DC; in her first few weeks there, 9/11 happens;
– Late 2001? to June 2002: Gets her start in politics, volunteering for “Mark Shriver’s unsuccessful 2002 congressional bid” for a US House seat from Maryland; he lost the primary challenge to the incumbent Democrat by three points;
– 2003: Elected American University Student Government President, but cannot have served long, because she spent some or all of the 2003-04 academic year at Oxford; (perhaps the student government presidency was a rotating-door position or there were co-presidents);
– 2005: Graduates with BA “in Political Science and Philosophy” from American University;
– 2007: Graduates with MA in Social Policy Philosophy from American University;
– ca. summer 2007: Joins Hillary Clinton For President campaign as paid staffer, “conducting research on economic and Native American policy and compiling the daily briefing;” and after Hillary drops out, moves on to the Obama campaign;
– 2009 to 2017: Holds various positions on the margins of government: “Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry;” “Director of a manufacturing innovation and economic growth program in Louisville, Kentucky, as part of a two-year fellowship with the City of Louisville sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies;” “Director of workforce development and manufacturing engagement at the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute [Chicago], a Department of Defense-funded initiative;”
– Late 2016: Enraged by the election of Trump, and probably bored with the types of positions she was floating around in (summarized above), she decides to return to Michigan and run for Congress; she announces her campaign formally in April 2017;
– Aug. 2018: Wins Democratic primary which is split five ways. Wins 27-22-21-19-11;
– Nov. 2018: Benefits from the wave of agitated anti-Trump’ers whose turnout surges; wins (52-45) the general election in Michigan’s 11th District, a district that had elected Republicans in 38 of the previous 39 general elections back to Nov. 1938;
– As of 2020, unmarried (according to Congressional profile), presumably no children.
(Much of the above is from an alumni profile at American University; other material is HaleyStevensForCongress dot com.)
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.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @Hail
There has got to be a named logical fallacy for the phenomenon whereby measuring something too closely creates a false pattern, a self-reinforcing narrative. “Total Coronavirus-Positive Deaths” inflates the numerator, given that we know with certainty that many (most, acc. to reports) of these people were terminal, deathbed patients. Corona or no corona, they were on very limited time. The relevant questions are, what %, and by what standard are we defining ‘terminal.’
The example I have used before is, if a man on Jan. 1, 2020, got a “3 to 6 months left to live” terminal diagnosis for a late-stage cancer, and died in mid-March, and on autopsy they found coronavirus, how do you honesty count his death? Surely no doctor in the world would list “Cause of Death: Flu” for such a person. That would be a breach of medical ethics of some kind, so bizarre it would almost be as if someone is trying to cover something up. What about a person with a “6 to 12 months to live” terminal diagnosis on Jan. 1 who dies today? It gets tricky, but this measurement problem is real and cannot be ignored.
Sweden has said two-thirds of its corona-positive deaths were deathbed patients.
We have long needed to solve the denominator problem (how many people actually came in contact with the virus, not how many tested positive), and this German study, released preliminarily April 9, is useful for that, though more data is needed. The numerator problem is also significant. Enough specialists and experts have been warning about the numerator problem that quite a few local and national health authorities are now separating their corona-death reports accordingly, but most continue to keep to “all deaths which are corona-positive” and toss that number daily to the bloodthirsty media.
JHU's tally of recorded Covid-19 deaths for the 7 days of Week 14 were (rounding to thousands) 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, and 8, or 35,500 total. For Week 15 (assuming tomorrow is the same as today), it will be 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19, 19, or 102,000 recognized Covid-19 deaths.
Eyeballing Spencer's graph, the total number of U.S. Week 14 deaths in 2016-2019 was 53,000 to 54,000.
Hail, instead of writing another long post about the qualitative phoniness of corona-chan, could you interpret these numbers?
Week 14 deaths: 53,000 in 2016, 53,000 in 2017, 54,000 in 2018, 54,000 in 2019
Week 14 deaths for 2020: [some number near 50,000] plus 102,000 attributed to Covid-19.
What's your prediction for Weeks 15, 16, 17? Anything to remark upon?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Hail
> Are there examples of other viruses where your model of rapid herd immunity due to those more likely to get infected first get infected first is true?
I don’t know. I’ve been pickup up a little virology and immunology on a learn-as-you-go basis. I’ll check and report back.
“Herd immunity” is the term I used upthread. It may be “right” as a description. It may also be “wrong” as a policy prescription, considering what that would mean for vulnerable people’s risks, in the likely absence of a widely available vaccine. This was the reason for BoJo’s government’s about-face last month, as you remarked at the time.
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.Replies: @Hail
I think you may been misreading or reading out of context what ic1000 wrote.
The 16% (not 14%) finding is for a certain town (Gangelt) with one of the earliest documented outbreaks, with transmission chains thought to start in mid-February.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/german-scientists-virus-is-spread-less-by-work-than-by-fun/#comment-3827700
If the situation is:
– Known: Number of deaths for a region: Known (numerator);
– Known: Number of confirmed-tested-positives for a region: Known (denominator),
We are still stuck with a cannot-compute-in-good-faith situation because of the severe denominator-deflation problem, widely mentioned but rarely gotten through to the MSM, which continues its pro-CoronaPanic bloodlust campaign.
If we get a reliable estimate on the true denominator (total persons who have had definite contact with the virus), we can begin to make the calculation with more certainty.
This is useful data, and it is good news. We no longer need to fear the Doomers’ doomsday talk. We can begin to re-open, while still protecting the vulnerable.
About 2.8 million Americans died last year, an average of 54,000 per week. Roy Spencer graphed this, you can see the annual low of 50,000/week happens every summer. For 2015-2019, this rose to a peak of 56,000 to 68,000 in January or February. So in a typical year, influenza causes a rise of about 6,000 to 20,000 deaths per week over the winter.
JHU’s tally of recorded Covid-19 deaths for the 7 days of Week 14 were (rounding to thousands) 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, and 8, or 35,500 total. For Week 15 (assuming tomorrow is the same as today), it will be 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19, 19, or 102,000 recognized Covid-19 deaths.
Eyeballing Spencer’s graph, the total number of U.S. Week 14 deaths in 2016-2019 was 53,000 to 54,000.
Hail, instead of writing another long post about the qualitative phoniness of corona-chan, could you interpret these numbers?
Week 14 deaths: 53,000 in 2016, 53,000 in 2017, 54,000 in 2018, 54,000 in 2019
Week 14 deaths for 2020: [some number near 50,000] plus 102,000 attributed to Covid-19.
What’s your prediction for Weeks 15, 16, 17? Anything to remark upon?
> Are there examples of other viruses where your model of rapid herd immunity due to those more likely to get infected first get infected first is true?
I did some literature searches at PubMed on host susceptibility to coronaviruses, and on host susceptibility to influenza viruses. In both cases, human genetic factors that affect susceptibility to infection have been identified.
These more and less risky alleles exist, and they definitely affect the odds of infection of the people who carry them. However, this doesn’t really answer your question, which focuses on their epidemiological impact. That has two parts: First, how profound are the observed differences in resistance to infection? And second, how common are the minor alleles?
For malaria, alleles are both protective enough and common enough to generate a wide range of resistance against infection among the peoples of West Africa.
For coronavirus and influenza, some important genes are known, but definitive studies that would quantitate their effects in various human populations haven’t been done.
Coronavirus: M.H. Ng et al (2004) identified a Class I HLA gene that was present in 10% of SARS cases, twenty times the expected frequency. Chan et al (2007) found that one form of the cell-surface protein CD209L is partially protective against SARS-CoV. M.W. Ng and colleagues (2007) identified one form of the cytokine RANTES that led to four-fold increased susceptibility of Hong Kongers to SARS. Also working in Hong Kong that year, Yuan et al. showed that a common allele for cell surface protein CD14 noticeably increased risk of SARS, but the study wasn’t powered enough to say just how much. Lastly, in 2008 Khoo et al discovered an allele of the inflammatory response gene L-SIGN that displayed extra protective activity against SARS.
Interest in this research area declined at about that time, and no additional risk factors seem to have been reported in the past dozen years.
Flu: Working in Vietnam, Horby et al reviewed The Role of Host Genetics in Susceptibility to Influenza, in a paper of that name. The abstract provides a readable summary of the state of the art in 2012; its key points —
Since then, the human genes IRF7 (Ciancanelli et al. 2016), MxA (Graf et al 2018) and IFITM3 (Wellington et al 2019), has been strongly implicated in differential resistance to varied influenza strains.
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.Replies: @Ed, @Art Deco, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous
On the contrary, blacks have really taken to the masks.
Commercial face masks don’t actually impede speech that much.
“the most susceptible are picked off early in the epidemic” – acausal nonsense.
So the theory of important variation in susceptibility may be irrelevant to this pandemic’s kinetics (wrong). But it’s not acausal and it’s not nonsense.
JHU's tally of recorded Covid-19 deaths for the 7 days of Week 14 were (rounding to thousands) 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, and 8, or 35,500 total. For Week 15 (assuming tomorrow is the same as today), it will be 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19, 19, or 102,000 recognized Covid-19 deaths.
Eyeballing Spencer's graph, the total number of U.S. Week 14 deaths in 2016-2019 was 53,000 to 54,000.
Hail, instead of writing another long post about the qualitative phoniness of corona-chan, could you interpret these numbers?
Week 14 deaths: 53,000 in 2016, 53,000 in 2017, 54,000 in 2018, 54,000 in 2019
Week 14 deaths for 2020: [some number near 50,000] plus 102,000 attributed to Covid-19.
What's your prediction for Weeks 15, 16, 17? Anything to remark upon?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Hail
The only interpretation that need be given here is that these numbers are outrageously nonsensical. There have not even been that many coronavirus deaths in total in the entire world, let alone one week in the United States.
I “showed my work,” adding the JHU numbers for Sunday through Thursday, then double-counting Friday to account for day 7 (Saturday, today).
In your view, are these fatalities being mis-attributed to COVID-19? Or is it something deeper, along the lines of forged death certificates?
You are right -- my apologies.
I read the graphs at the 91-COVID website wrong.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
From the UK Mirror:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/debbie-harry-says-shes-considering-21804766 https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article21803629.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_36th-Annual-ASCAP-Pop-Music-Awards-Arrivals.jpg
For her age and only being 5'3 she does have pretty good legs, no cankles, no big nasty old varicose veins.Replies: @donvonburg, @Wielgus
That knee looks pretty rough. Looks like she’s had significant surgery and has been putting weight on it as well. If you watch her walk, this would make sense.
She will be at the 3/4 century mark very soon, why you seem to think that we should be that interested in her is beyond me, or anyone else, for that matter. She’s an old woman with some money, but no children, no family, and posessed only of a vestigal career at this point: she’s probably very lonely, but being enough of a celebrity she has to take any potential friend or companion, much less suitor, with a gimlet eye-are they after her money, are they wanting to do her harm, etc?-I’m guessing she is a lonely person. In staying single and childless, she made a decision she probably regrets.
From the UK Mirror:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/debbie-harry-says-shes-considering-21804766 https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article21803629.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_36th-Annual-ASCAP-Pop-Music-Awards-Arrivals.jpg
For her age and only being 5'3 she does have pretty good legs, no cankles, no big nasty old varicose veins.Replies: @donvonburg, @Wielgus
I regret not being available, owing to lockdown. This damned virus is tragic on so many levels…
Your estimates of the excess death percentage seem too low. We have real numbers now. For instance for Bergamo province (1.1 million people) the excess death rate was more then 4000 between March 10th and March 31th. For the Netherlands (17 million people, with large parts of the country still relatively unaffected) the excess death rate was between 2 and 3 thousand in the first week of April.
Projected death rate for the Netherlands is between 20 and 80 thousand, lets say 50 thousand, making it 5 times more deathly then the influenza from 2018. With 50 thousand deaths we have an excess death percentage of around 0.3 %
What happened was right about '94 society started cracking down on young people. I remember it clearly. There was the crime bill, VAWA, draconian child support legislation attached to welfare reform, etc. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the year the youngest boomers turned 30.
Millennials never got to know what it was like to have an unmonitored adolescence.
Honestly, I think there's going to be a post-virus reaction against social control. I've said it before, but it bears repeating:
Twenty-five years ago, the very people who are currently shutting down this country never would have stood for the same measures on behalf of their own elderly parents.
I'm not saying they would have been right then, or that they are wrong now (time will tell), but the self-interest aspect of this is pretty obvious.
There's already pushback against the shutdown, and it is growing day by day. This is going to be costly not only in terms of jobs and business, but political capital as well. I suspect that the end result will be a less obedient, less stable populace that will no longer be as inclined to follow the rules.Replies: @nebulafox, @Wielgus
>Millennials never got to know what it was like to have an unmonitored adolescence.
What do you think the long-term effects of this are going to be?
What happened was right about '94 society started cracking down on young people. I remember it clearly. There was the crime bill, VAWA, draconian child support legislation attached to welfare reform, etc. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the year the youngest boomers turned 30.
Millennials never got to know what it was like to have an unmonitored adolescence.
Honestly, I think there's going to be a post-virus reaction against social control. I've said it before, but it bears repeating:
Twenty-five years ago, the very people who are currently shutting down this country never would have stood for the same measures on behalf of their own elderly parents.
I'm not saying they would have been right then, or that they are wrong now (time will tell), but the self-interest aspect of this is pretty obvious.
There's already pushback against the shutdown, and it is growing day by day. This is going to be costly not only in terms of jobs and business, but political capital as well. I suspect that the end result will be a less obedient, less stable populace that will no longer be as inclined to follow the rules.Replies: @nebulafox, @Wielgus
I think the reaction when lockdown ends, and it will have to end eventually – is apt to be explosive.
Re AIDS, it was understood to be a disease of junkies and homosexuals, especially reckless ones, at least outside Africa where it became much more widespread. Rare cases of non-homosexuals and non-junkies getting it were hyped up by the media, much like young COVID-19 deaths are being hyped up now.
He is a white male. He has good hair. He is the only Labour politician who showed any signs of intelligence during the Brexit debates last Autumn. If needed he is very economical with the truth. Conclusion: although probably not a very likeable person, he is by far the best choice if Labour wants to win the next election.
Interesting subject. I was never doubting the moon landings until last June when I spend a day investigating this discussions, that have been going on for decades. I came away with this conclusion. The chance that some of the iconic images of the moon landings are falsified is quite high, lets say 70-80%.
I agree that in retrospect Sweden is probably more correct in the policies they choose then other western countries. Although less rapidly then in the Northern hemisphere the virus is now spreading in many countries in the tropics. The chance that the virus will disappear from this planet in 2020 or 2021 is close to zero. We also know that the current lock downs in many countries is not sustainable for more then a couple of months. Only rescue is getting effective medicine. Most promising is the so called Z-pac. Since this Corona virus is only 5 times more deathly then the influenza of 2018, if taking Z-pac, as soon if a patient shows the first symptoms, reduces the number of serious cases and deaths with 80% we are back to the same lethality as with the influenza of 2018.
> There have not even been that many coronavirus deaths [102,000 for week 14] in total in the entire world, let alone one week in the United States.
I “showed my work,” adding the JHU numbers for Sunday through Thursday, then double-counting Friday to account for day 7 (Saturday, today).
In your view, are these fatalities being mis-attributed to COVID-19? Or is it something deeper, along the lines of forged death certificates?
utu, as far as “acausal nonsense,” see my comment #209 above. Environmental factors like prior exposure to related virus might contribute. As might diversity in the ABO blood antigen genes and other genes, I name candidates in comment #253 (begins “” if the numbers change).
So the theory of important variation in susceptibility may be irrelevant to this pandemic’s kinetics (wrong). But it’s not acausal and it’s not nonsense.
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.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Johann Ricke
The numbers are daunting. A single NYFD shift recorded 12 suspected virus deaths not in the city’s COVID-19 stats. There are thousands of NYFD paramedics and presumably hundreds of such shifts daily.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52196815
Multiply that out, and it’s becoming clear why the specter of mass graves isn’t necessarily left-wing hyperbole.
OK, I read your comment. Indeed it would not be acasual. If the stipulated phenomenon of varying susceptibility existed as long as the susceptibility>0 for everybody the herd immunity still would require the same fraction of population infected.
“Masks? We don”t need no stinking masks!”
Reply posted as this comment on a more-recent thread.
Italy:
Italy: Only 12% of “Covid19 deaths” list Covid19 as cause
_________________
Sweden:
“To Swedes, it’s the rest of the world engaging in a reckless experiment,” Fraser Nelson, Telegraph (UK) [rehosted], April 2:
_________________
The estimate of an up-to-two-thirds reduction for Sweden was tentative. Firmer and more recent data from Hamburg, whose head of head of forensic medicine has come as an anti-CoronaPanic’ker:
There are possible arguments over definitions, normally only of interest to specialists. If someone dies, and the examining doctor(s) did not know a flu epidemic was going on, how would they classify a given death which is coronavirus-positive? Also this:
It’s easy to get your boss to raise the price of something when you can show it’s losing him money. But when the price is too high, the best route to getting it lowered is to explain the situation to the sales team.
JHU's tally of recorded Covid-19 deaths for the 7 days of Week 14 were (rounding to thousands) 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, and 8, or 35,500 total. For Week 15 (assuming tomorrow is the same as today), it will be 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19, 19, or 102,000 recognized Covid-19 deaths.
Eyeballing Spencer's graph, the total number of U.S. Week 14 deaths in 2016-2019 was 53,000 to 54,000.
Hail, instead of writing another long post about the qualitative phoniness of corona-chan, could you interpret these numbers?
Week 14 deaths: 53,000 in 2016, 53,000 in 2017, 54,000 in 2018, 54,000 in 2019
Week 14 deaths for 2020: [some number near 50,000] plus 102,000 attributed to Covid-19.
What's your prediction for Weeks 15, 16, 17? Anything to remark upon?Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Hail
Good dataset for past years.
What we see there is a milder than usual flu season for 2020 weeks 1 to 10. Spencer’s specific point in the post is that deaths are updated as the information comes in and retro-date, which means most-recent-week mortality tendsd to be undercounted, which cannot be denied. Past weeks, though, are near-complete counts, and we see lower-than-usual deaths for 2019-20 throughout the winter, similar to the mild 2015-16 season in his graph. This is notable for the US and also applies to Europe. Italy in the 2010s regularly had flu-death spikes but had among its mildest in years from Nov. 2019 to Feb. 2020.
Reading and re-reading your comment, I don’t know where this comes from:
Are you claiming 152,000 total deaths for Week 14? Is this your estimate?
Remember the double counting problem (see also here; the New York Times staffers who compiled their recent ‘hockey stick’ graph may not be aware of this basic problem and NYT commenters called them on it).
It’s more realistic that what we will see a spike along the lines of a normal peak-flu event, part of the impetus for which is the slack caused by the otherwise-mild flu-season, also observed in Europe. In the long-run numbers tend to hug long-run averages, and a mild period in a dataset is expected to be ‘corrected’ by a higher-than-average one later.
Afaik, they are still ‘tallying’ all deaths of all coronavirus-positive persons. This is increasingly meaningless data, because as the virus runs its course, any death can end including car accidents, suicides, and murders can up being in that tally, if coronavirus-positive under the media-enforced and media-supervised reporting protocol.
I was, but I'm mistaken.
At 3:02 am GMT, I wrote: I read the graphs wrong, confusing cumulative and new cases. Thanks for the pointer!
That paragraph should read:
JHU’s tally of recorded Covid-19 deaths for the 7 days of Week 14 were (rounding) 400, 500, 900, 900, 1,200, 1,200, and 1,300 or 5,400 total. For Week 15 (assuming today [Saturday] is the same as yesterday), it will be 1,200, 1,200, 1,900, 2,000, 1,800, 2,100, and 2,100, or 12,300 total.
US mortality has a summer low point of around 50,000 per week. It goes up thanks to influenza and similar conditions, which peak in the winter. For Weeks 14 and 15, it looks like business as usual in most of the country, except for the effects of Covid-19 mortality in the NY Metro area, New Orleans, Albany GA, and Detroit.
So 53,000 (base rate) + 5,400 (deaths attributed to Covid-19) = 58,400 is my revised prediction for Week 14. For Week 15, it's 65,300.
> Are you claiming 152,000 total deaths for Week 14? Is this your estimate?
I was, but I’m mistaken.
At 3:02 am GMT, I wrote:
I read the graphs wrong, confusing cumulative and new cases. Thanks for the pointer!
That paragraph should read:
JHU’s tally of recorded Covid-19 deaths for the 7 days of Week 14 were (rounding) 400, 500, 900, 900, 1,200, 1,200, and 1,300 or 5,400 total. For Week 15 (assuming today [Saturday] is the same as yesterday), it will be 1,200, 1,200, 1,900, 2,000, 1,800, 2,100, and 2,100, or 12,300 total.
US mortality has a summer low point of around 50,000 per week. It goes up thanks to influenza and similar conditions, which peak in the winter. For Weeks 14 and 15, it looks like business as usual in most of the country, except for the effects of Covid-19 mortality in the NY Metro area, New Orleans, Albany GA, and Detroit.
So 53,000 (base rate) + 5,400 (deaths attributed to Covid-19) = 58,400 is my revised prediction for Week 14. For Week 15, it’s 65,300.
> The only interpretation that need be given here is that these numbers are outrageously nonsensical. There have not even been that many coronavirus deaths in total in the entire world, let alone one week in the United States.
You are right — my apologies.
I read the graphs at the 91-COVID website wrong.
You are right -- my apologies.
I read the graphs at the 91-COVID website wrong.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
Hey, no problem, buddy. You had me knitting my brow there for a moment.
Trying to find some scale on the money at least: (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.
Graphic from above article about cost of wars. Nothing to do with covid-19
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/1.jpgReplies: @Rob
Interesting. Is there a higher resolution version of that image. A lot of it I couldn’t read.
https://online.norwich.edu/academic-programs/masters/military-history/resources/infographics/the-cost-of-us-wars-then-and-now
Yes, thank you.