COVID-19 numbers

[HouseDivided]

Since I'm apparently too stupid...

Explain, please.

This shows insight, Psych.

Definitely, a hopeful sign.

I’m still waiting for the requested explanation.

[Shirley]

Since I'm apparently too stupid...

Explain, please.

This shows insight, Psych.

Definitely, a hopeful sign.

I’m still waiting for the requested explanation.

You're not paying me enough, I already schooled you about Inspectors General today.

Besides, with your casual relationship with arcane concepts like "evidence" and "facts", what good would it do?

[Shirley]

Yikes! St. Joseph, Mo. Be careful out there:



373 employees and contract workers at Triumph Foods in Buchanan County, Missouri, have tested positive for coronavirus. All of them were asymptomatic, according to a press release from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services...

[HouseDivided]

This shows insight, Psych.

Definitely, a hopeful sign.

I’m still waiting for the requested explanation.

You're not paying me enough, I already schooled you about Inspectors General today.

Besides, with your casual relationship with arcane concepts like "evidence" and "facts", what good would it do?

Don’t have one. Got it. That’s about what I expected. Carry on with the contempt.

[PhDhawk]

Yikes! St. Joseph, Mo. Be careful out there:



373 employees and contract workers at Triumph Foods in Buchanan County, Missouri, have tested positive for coronavirus. All of them were asymptomatic, according to a press release from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services...

ALL of them were asymptomatic? Is that because they're testing everyone and the outbreak just occurred, in which case many are pre-symptomatic?

[Shirley]

Yikes! St. Joseph, Mo. Be careful out there:



373 employees and contract workers at Triumph Foods in Buchanan County, Missouri, have tested positive for coronavirus. All of them were asymptomatic, according to a press release from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services...

ALL of them were asymptomatic? Is that because they're testing everyone and the outbreak just occurred, in which case many are pre-symptomatic?

The article doesn't say how many employees work at the plant, or what motivated the testing, such as an employee becoming ill or testing positive, or if they decided to screen employees out of an abundance of caution.

...Testing at the plant has been ongoing since last week and results have been coming in over the past few days, the release from DHSS said.

As of April 30, at least 1,500 had been tested, a previous release said...

[PhDhawk]

Right.

But I'm more surprised that outta the 373 that tested positive, 373 didn't have symptoms. I'm guessing many of them will have symptoms they just haven't yet.

[Shirley]

Right.

But I'm more surprised that outta the 373 that tested positive, 373 didn't have symptoms. I'm guessing many of them will have symptoms they just haven't yet.

I agree.

Unfortunately, this plant is emblematic of the larger quagmire we find ourselves in, that after 3 months, we still don't have a denominator.

[Shirley]

Let's hope this model, like many models, is wrong. Very wrong:



Projections from an internal report show that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month.

The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June.

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.

The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.

“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the C.D.C. warned.

The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways with cases rising so rapidly that the health care system is overloaded.

“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. “We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.”

Some states that have partially reopened are still seeing an increase in coronavirus cases, including Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas, according to Times data. Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska and Arizona also are seeing an increase in cases and are planning on some kind of reopening soon. Alaska has also reopened and is seeing a small number of increasing cases.

[...]

[jfish26]

Which is part of what's just so baffling: it is known that the human and economic tolls of all this will be disproportionately felt by significant portions of Trump's base. The math above isn't hard to come up with.

Why in the world does he think this path - the unpreparedness, the incoherence, the recklessness - is helpful to his reelection?

[ousdahl]

I don't think he thinks the path is helpful.

I think he's just never known any other path.

[Deleted User 289]

Which is part of what's just so baffling: it is known that the human and economic tolls of all this will be disproportionately felt by significant portions of Trump's base. The math above isn't hard to come up with.

Why in the world does he think this path - the unpreparedness, the incoherence, the recklessness - is helpful to his reelection?

Republicans buy shoes too?

[Shirley]

Which is part of what's just so baffling: it is known that the human and economic tolls of all this will be disproportionately felt by significant portions of Trump's base. The math above isn't hard to come up with.

Why in the world does he think this path - the unpreparedness, the incoherence, the recklessness - is helpful to his reelection?

Good question. For Trump not to realize at least by mid-February that it was in his own best political interest to act to protect the US from the pandemic as vigorously and with every reasonable tool at his disposal as possible seems asinine, and makes no sense.

[jfish26]

Which is part of what's just so baffling: it is known that the human and economic tolls of all this will be disproportionately felt by significant portions of Trump's base. The math above isn't hard to come up with.

Why in the world does he think this path - the unpreparedness, the incoherence, the recklessness - is helpful to his reelection?

Good question. For Trump not to realize at least by mid-February that it was in his own best political interest to act to protect the US from the pandemic as vigorously and with every reasonable tool at his disposal as possible seems asinine, and makes no sense.

I don't tend to think there's much subsurface motivation or design.

I think (a) he genuinely lacks the capacity to have understood all of this shit early enough, (b) he views things primarily (only?) through the lens of what affects him personally in the short- and intermediate-term, and (c) he has so surrounded himself with sycophants and weasels that there was no overlap between the circles of "people who care about and understand this" and "people who can influence him".

[MICHHAWK]

This caught the entire world off guard.

[CrimsonNBlue]

This caught the entire world off guard.

It will be nice to watch some live baseball tomorrow morning.

[DCHawk1]

Which is part of what's just so baffling: it is known that the human and economic tolls of all this will be disproportionately felt by significant portions of Trump's base. The math above isn't hard to come up with.

Why in the world does he think this path - the unpreparedness, the incoherence, the recklessness - is helpful to his reelection?

Good question. For Trump not to realize at least by mid-February that it was in his own best political interest to act to protect the US from the pandemic as vigorously and with every reasonable tool at his disposal as possible seems asinine, and makes no sense.

I don't tend to think there's much subsurface motivation or design.

I think (a) he genuinely lacks the capacity to have understood all of this shit early enough, (b) he views things primarily (only?) through the lens of what affects him personally in the short- and intermediate-term, and (c) he has so surrounded himself with sycophants and weasels that there was no overlap between the circles of "people who care about and understand this" and "people who can influence him".

This is, without question, the biggest part of it. No argument.

But there's also the question of how you deal with the problem once you know it's a problem. It's clear that they thought that the BIGGEST issue was going to be panic. And as a result, they thought their role was to be a calm, reassuring voice amidst a panicking crowd. They were wrong, obviously, but it's not hard to see why they came to that conclusion.

[PhDhawk]

This caught the entire world off guard.

It did, but should it have? Shouldn't we (as a world) have been more prepared than we were?

Here is an excerpt from the textbook I used this semester to teach my Pathogenic Microbiology course:

Research studies using animal coronaviruses have demonstrated that coronaviruses can undergo rapid genetic change with alterations in clinical disease and “trans-species” movement to new animal hosts. These laboratory observations were dramatically confirmed in nature during the spring and summer of 2003 with the recognition that a new human coronavirus was the cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Within several months of its emergence in the Guangdong province of southeastern China, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) demonstrated worldwide spread and the potential for high mortality with dramatic economic and societal consequences. The SARS epidemic raised important questions about coronaviruses and their biological potential to cause new diseases in humans and other animals. Where did SARS-CoV come from? Why was it able to cause such severe disease in humans? Why did it disappear, and will it reemerge to cause new outbreaks of disease? Recent studies of coronavirus genomics and evolution give important clues to the answers to those and other questions....

Genomic studies of “viromes” of other species have identified in many bat species a large number of coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV and more generally to all mammalian coronaviruses. Bat coronaviruses have not been cultured and do not appear to cause disease in bats, suggesting a long coevolution and possible reservoirs in bats for trans-species movement of SARS-like viruses to new hosts.

I mean, if the textbook I use in my class was able to predict, pretty accurately that this would happen, shouldn't the WHO, the CDC, the Presidential administration, etc. have been a little more prepared?

We shoulda seen this coming.

[CrimsonNBlue]

I mean, if the textbook I use in my class was able to predict, pretty accurately that this would happen, shouldn't the WHO, the CDC, the Presidential administration, etc. have been a little more prepared?

We shoulda seen this coming.

I think the SARS and MERS countries, WHO, CDC definitely knew this was possible, even knew that SARS-COV-2 was capable.

But, like has been discussed, we don't fund things that might happen.

[Deleted User 62]

This caught the entire world off guard.

It did, but should it have? Shouldn't we (as a world) have been more prepared than we were?

Here is an excerpt from the textbook I used this semester to teach my Pathogenic Microbiology course:

Research studies using animal coronaviruses have demonstrated that coronaviruses can undergo rapid genetic change with alterations in clinical disease and “trans-species” movement to new animal hosts. These laboratory observations were dramatically confirmed in nature during the spring and summer of 2003 with the recognition that a new human coronavirus was the cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Within several months of its emergence in the Guangdong province of southeastern China, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) demonstrated worldwide spread and the potential for high mortality with dramatic economic and societal consequences. The SARS epidemic raised important questions about coronaviruses and their biological potential to cause new diseases in humans and other animals. Where did SARS-CoV come from? Why was it able to cause such severe disease in humans? Why did it disappear, and will it reemerge to cause new outbreaks of disease? Recent studies of coronavirus genomics and evolution give important clues to the answers to those and other questions....

Genomic studies of “viromes” of other species have identified in many bat species a large number of coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV and more generally to all mammalian coronaviruses. Bat coronaviruses have not been cultured and do not appear to cause disease in bats, suggesting a long coevolution and possible reservoirs in bats for trans-species movement of SARS-like viruses to new hosts.

I mean, if the textbook I use in my class was able to predict, pretty accurately that this would happen, shouldn't the WHO, the CDC, the Presidential administration, etc. have been a little more prepared?

We shoulda seen this coming.

If only just 1 of our Presidents took the threat seriously enough to create a task force to handle a possible pandemic. Serious enough to have staff stationed in China to keep on eye on the area most likely to be the jump off point of a possible pandemic....