Corona virus - please stop with the politics

P5_OR_Bust - Thanks for the links. The point I am trying to hope for is the U.S. has some of the greatest medical minds in the world. If there were positive results in some trials, then maybe the U.S needs to work with these doctors and reinforce.

I absolutely agree. Every promising lead, no matter how weak has to be investigated!

Well dogonit…I should have talked to your clients

The one thing I have been doing is looking at places that are either hot spots or having better than average performance and try to understand the WHY? From Italy, Spain, France, NO, NY as the hot spots to SK, Singapore, and central Euro countries that have done better than Italy and Spain. Now we can add Germany and The Netherlands to the list of better than average performers. One of the common threads with the better performers is the collection of good data (Common characteristics of the Germans and Dutch historically) on where an infected person has been and who did they cross. We need to learn as much as we can what are causing the poor performers vs upper level performers and make sure we do far less of the poor performers and act more like the good performers…

Look for US deaths to be between 6k and 7k on April 4.

1 Like

Honestly, we know exactly why we are where we are. Not enough testing. But the cat is already out of that bag. There is no going back on these things. The only things you can do now is mitigation through universal restriction.

2 Likes

We can’t go back and conduct tests that we could have done the first half of March if we had the tests and the process ready, but our testing around the country is ramping up significantly over the past week and should be with us for the long haul to continue to identify and isolate and hopefully we get into the tracking of an infected person’s historical foot print and who they crossed that SK and Signapore has been very good at and is now being reported that the Germans and The Netherlands have been successful with to keep their death numbers and infections down below the averages.

Cuomo keeps talking about their increaes in testing and not to be alarmed by their increases in infections due to greater testing and here is an article about Quest ramping up their testing capacity around the country.

This is 8 days old now, but demonstrates our ramp up over the last 1.5 to 2 weeks. We have a ways to go but we’re making progress on that front.

This is 2 days old but is reporting NY has ramped up to 16K tests per day. I assume higher numbers to continue through Cuomo’s daily status.

I live in Vermont in a small town just off the highway. Town’s pretty much closed and I have a small business and am at the store on main st shipping things out for a couple hours a day. Most of the cars I see pass through have New York or Massachusetts plates. It terrifies me and you are right, they are not staying home, they are spreading it. I understand that they are scared too, and that’s why they are running. Just don’t think they understand that their actions are, frankly, heinous.

Snow:

The only way to answer this after 12 days of being all alone In a one room apartment is to sing a little diddy.

We are Brooklyn men born and
Brooklyn men bred
And when we die will be Brooklyn men dead.

So Rah Rah for Brooklyn
Rah Rah for Brooklyn
Rah Rah for Brooklyn, Rah Rah, Rah Rah.

If you don’t know the tune, you can Google the UNC fight song.

1 Like

I have worked in NYC, Mass, and CT plenty over the years. Complaints of NYC people going there and here are numerous and I honestly don’t see many to most going into a self quarantine exercise and it will spread the virus where ever they go. Just like the Asians and Chinese traffic flying into our west coast cities since the first of the year spread the virus into our hot spots on the west coast and Euros flying into NYC and other east coast areas until a few weeks ago also helped spread it here. Our international travel over airlines and other methods are significant transport systems for any virus.

I see you still have a good sense of humor to the poster formerly known as “Hotel”. Hope all is well for you in NYC.

I think the last time I talked to you is when we hired Kendal. You weren’t a happy camper at the time.

I have a niece and her family (the one that got married in NYC a few years back) and a nephew who live in Brooklyn. They have loved it.

Thanks, we are hanging in there.

General question to everyone on the data being posted on various websites. I’ve been following the worldometer data and have a question how each country counts a death so that it gets tagged to covid. Germany’s death numbers look good compared to Spain right now and I’m wondering if
different country’s report these differently ? Or what therapy is Germany doing that’s so much better ? Or is there a better website for understanding.

Thanks in advance.

Dunno if this violates any rules about political posts, but a $2 trillion package is in the works That’s $5,556 for every American man, woman, and child.

My only concern is just how much accountability will be expected of corporations receiving funds. No stock buy backs, no dividends, no bonuses, and limits on how many employees can be laid off. Plus the govt should take equity in every company receiving funds! It shouldn’t be free money! That’s socialism!

And absolutely no money for cruise companies that aren’t American flagged!

1 Like

I have been researching these differences. I posted an article earlier today about how well Germany and The Netherlands are doing which has to do with more testing and tracing of infected individuals with where they have been and who they have crossed along their paths which is similar to SK and Singapore. If you look at much of central Europe they are doing much better than three of the Latin European countries of Italy, France, and Spain. Some of the speculation around Italy, France, and Spain have been the following which I have read about. Of course it speculation, but some of it makes some sense and is probable.

  1. They responded late to the issues with separation of their people. Italy was still having soccer games at the start of their crisis.
  2. Latin culture is more touchy feely, per emotion, expression, and physically closer. Some have pointed to this reason.
  3. The Latin cultures typically have far greater numbers of smokers which can inflame the infection from Coronavirus.
  4. Italy has greater concentrations of pollution which can also inflame infections from the Coronavirus.
  5. Italy has an older generation than other Euro countries that may also contribute along with higher population density.

See the article I posted above regarding Germany’s and The Netherland’s success. But overall the Latin cultures vs central European cultures and countries are significant even with the Swiss and the Austrians also and others.

I don’t believe it is how they account for their infected.

I don’t want to get political, but this should always be of a concern. It was interesting to see the market go up pretty nicely the last two days but then drop when supposedly Wall Street started looking at the details of the bill and were finding weaknesses and the normal slush funds to speacial interests.

It’s impossible to know how different jurisdictions report. Even within the US. There are reports I’ve seen from Missouri and Texas of the county officials refusing to test or autopsy people who died. So those clearly won’t be in the statistics. You just have to hope people do the right thing and do a good job at the same time.

As far as testing and confining, it only really works if you do it when it isn’t out in the population enough to contain. After that point you have to contain everyone. That’s what has happened in the US. We should have had production of the tests ramped up in January, ready for February. But even now, nearing the end of March, we are woefully short. Improved, sure, but woefully short. At my institution, and elsewhere in the Twin Cities, we now, as of yesterday, have enough to test healthcare workers with symptoms. We still can’t test people with known exposures unless they are hospitalized. So no contact tracing and isolation which was the key in SKorea and probably the other success stories, just bulk everyone isolation. It also means we don’t have any real idea how prevalent the disease is in the community which again means we have to resort to blanket restrictions.

I know you are trying to see the bright side with your efforts to point out these things, but the reality is we have moved past the point where testing and directed isolation can work. It’s too late to gain back the progress the virus made during the time where we weren’t aggressively attacking the problem when it was vulnerable. Planning, organization, and early implementation are the keys to epidemic prevention. We are past prevention and on to containment/mitigation. Testing is less key now and having supplies and equipment takes the forefront in importance. I wish I could report we are doing better in these critical areas. It’s still a clusterF. I think my institution is getting a better supply of PPE, but we still don’t have enough to be able to use it the way we would/should if supply weren’t a problem. It leads to a very confusing, ever changing set of rules for healthcare workers to try to keep up with that follow our supply chain problems more than the medical necessity, which is, of course, much easier for everyone to understand. Next up (already up in many places like Atlanta and New Orleans) will be ventilator shortages and that is going to be the difference between life and death rather than limiting or not limiting infection.

Bottom line is the government response has been and seems to still be two weeks late. It’s hard for me to watch the national government talk about this because they time and time again prove they don’t get what is actually happening. It seems to be a lot of distraction and self congratulations about doing these that needed to be done two weeks ago.

Sorry for the rant, I’ve been submerged in COVID planning 4-8 hours a day for the past 12 days straight and the frustration level with the federal government is sky high.

5 Likes

I do have one personal story. My brother in law is a dr. His wife is very ill with flu like symptoms, he isn’t showing any symptoms. They went to his hospital, where they refused to test her, but did test him. But get this, it’ll take 6-8 days for the results to come back. In the meantime he has been told to remain at home. So basically at a critical time an able bodied dr is unable to work because of a shortage of chemicals!

We were at 5 days, we are supposedly down to 2-3. I have a co-worker who came back from Florida vacation and got symptoms two days ago. She got tested today. We will see when the results get back.

Isn’t the wife of you brother in law your sister? :thinking::grinning::smiling_imp:

Sorry running joke in my family