Coronavirus

[Economite]

He's basically trying to cast doubt on the accuracy of the test because he wants to participate in the SpaceX launch and NASA won't let him.

Elon Musk’s positive and negative covid tests create a quandary for SpaceX
By Christian Davenport

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/13/musk-coronavius-spacex-launch/

 

[uujjj2]

Of the confirmed case numbers over the last few weeks, how many are from PCR tests and how many from antigen tests?

 

[Daniel in SD]

Of the confirmed case numbers over the last few weeks, how many are from PCR tests and how many from antigen tests?

Here's an article at COVID tracking project about it: https://covidtracking.com/blog/antigen-testing-reporting
Hard to say but positivity rates are so high now the false positive rates of antigen tests probably don't matter in terms of the numbers.

 

[JRP3]

At least Elon is asking questions. Here's hoping some qualified people answer, and he listens.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1327367568298897408?s=20

 

[dhanson865]

 

[dhanson865]

 

[cwerdna]

Now up to 6. The first 5 were from the same traveling party. All passengers were tested twice prior to boarding. Follow @cruiselog on Twitter, as he is a passenger on the ship and providing regular updates.

It’s astounding that cruise lines are choosing to sail now, at the highest peak to-date.

Now it's apparently 7.

Covid-19 cases rise aboard first cruise to resume sailing in the Caribbean
Cruise ship COVID-19 situation: 7 cruisers test positive in Caribbean

 

[jerry33]

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Really needs to be per population rather than a total. Otherwise, the most populous states will show the most cases, rather than how common cases are and how well each state is doing.

 

[byeLT4]

He's basically trying to cast doubt on the accuracy of the test because he wants to participate in the SpaceX launch and NASA won't let him.

Elon Musk’s positive and negative covid tests create a quandary for SpaceX
By Christian Davenport

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/13/musk-coronavius-spacex-launch/

Can't he just wear an SCBA? Oooh, or a spacesuit? I bet he can even provide his own!

Keeping on topic- My county is starting to get crazy again. After keeping daily cases well below 20 on average for a couple of months, we are starting to creep back up averaging over 20 the last week and over 30 the past 3 days....

 

[madodel]

Can't he just wear an SCBA? Oooh, or a spacesuit? I bet he can even provide his own!

Keeping on topic- My county is starting to get crazy again. After keeping daily cases well below 20 on average for a couple of months, we are starting to creep back up averaging over 20 the last week and over 30 the past 3 days....

Here in Pennsylvania we are seeing much higher numbers. My county had been consistently 3-5 a day for months, but over the past week we are now 30+ a day with 66 cases as of yesterday. They are now closing some schools to at least after the holidays. And it is just starting to get cold here. We did have Rudy Giuliani and Eric Trump here for rallies a week or so before the election, but no evidence documented this is related to that.

Correction: Giuliani was here 3 weeks before the election, Trump 1 week before.
Edit2: Looking at PA Dept of Health data, this is the highest daily case count since early April which was the first peak here in our county.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

The good news is that this CAN be turned around by targeted interventions. But we have to realize those will take a couple weeks to have an effect.

The lagged CFR these days appears to be about 1.6%, with a lag of 19-22 days. So in about 3 weeks we should be seeing about 2700 deaths per day (peak, not 1-week average) in the US. Let’s all do what we can do prevent that number from getting higher. If we have just one more week of this growth, we will likely exceed the infection levels of early spring - along with the deaths, even on a 7-day average basis.

Definitely don’t do Thanksgiving - unless you are in a fortunate position where EVERYONE can do an extremely strict and rigorous 14-day quarantine in advance (no one working outside the home of course). It’s sad but that’s the cost of having a fun summer and early fall.

An effective vaccine exists! All transmission-eliminating actions we take now are guaranteed to save lives! Now is the time to really double down on our efforts.

 

[dhanson865]

Really needs to be per population rather than a total. Otherwise, the most populous states will show the most cases, rather than how common cases are and how well each state is doing.

You say that like you think any state is doing well.

If you only have room to post one graph or one info-graphic sure per million is a better metric. but this is an unlimited medium I can post thousands of different graphics here and there is information in that graphic even if it is (by any metric) lower quality.

Sometimes you just need a fresh look at the data to remind yourself of the scale of the overall problem. Deaths per million and cases per million is good data and I'm all for it but I also want to see every other valid visualization of the data.

 

[NikolaACDC]

Really needs to be per population rather than a total. Otherwise, the most populous states will show the most cases, rather than how common cases are and how well each state is doing.

Agree. Here is one

Quite a different picture from using the absolute number of cases:

COVID-19 Cases, Deaths, and Trends in the US | CDC COVID Data Tracker

 

[Daniel in SD]

You say that like you think any state is doing well.

Hawaii is doing well! And you're ignoring American Samoa, I think it should count even though it's not a state.

 

[ThomasD]

As the U.S. continues to set new daily record highs of coronavirus cases, at least one doctor on President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force is floating the idea of shutting down businesses in a lockdown that could last four to six weeks to control the spread of the pandemic.

In a Wednesday interview with Yahoo Finance Live, Dr. Michael Osterholm, who currently serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, stressed that the country is in a position to pay its workers to stay home.


“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks and if we did that, we could drive the numbers down.”


“If I interviewed 50 people today in the U.S. for what they define a lockdown as I could get 75 different answers,” Osterholm said, adding that he predicted in August the U.S. would find itself facing COVID hell as a result of reopening too quickly. “We said this would happen if we did nothing different.”

On Wednesday, the nation as a whole recorded more than 145,000 new COVID-19 cases to set a new record high. In some areas of the country, the number of hospitalizations is already pushing hospital staff to the brink. In El Paso, Texas, for example, the city had to bring in overflow hospital beds and upped its mobile morgue units from three, to four, and then 10 this week. At a Wednesday total of more than 1,000 hospitalized patients, the border town now has more COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization than most states.

In a dire warning, Osterholm predicted El Paso is not an outlier but rather the norm that could be coming to more towns across America as the holiday season approaches.

“People don't want to hear that El Paso isn't an isolated event,” he said. “El Paso, in many instances, will become the norm."


Osterholm stressed that a unified message coming from the federal government would help begin to reel in the pandemic.

“We need FDR moments right now. We need fireside chats. We need somebody to tell America, this is what in the hell is going to happen,” he said.

Zack Guzman is the co-host of the 11AM - 1PM hours on Yahoo Finance Live as well as a senior writer and on-air reporter covering entrepreneurship, cannabis, startups, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance[/a]

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, SmartNews, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.

Find live stock market quotes and the latest business and finance news[/a]

For tutorials and information on investing and trading stocks, check out Cashay[/a]


What about the Business owners that have to pay rent or a mortgage and their taxes.

 

[Daniel in SD]

What about the Business owners that have to pay rent or a mortgage and their taxes.

“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks and if we did that, we could drive the numbers down.”

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

As the U.S. continues to set new daily record highs of coronavirus cases, at least one doctor on President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force is floating the idea of shutting down businesses in a lockdown that could last four to six weeks to control the spread of the pandemic.

In a Wednesday interview with Yahoo Finance Live, Dr. Michael Osterholm, who currently serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, stressed that the country is in a position to pay its workers to stay home.


“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks and if we did that, we could drive the numbers down.”


“If I interviewed 50 people today in the U.S. for what they define a lockdown as I could get 75 different answers,” Osterholm said, adding that he predicted in August the U.S. would find itself facing COVID hell as a result of reopening too quickly. “We said this would happen if we did nothing different.”

On Wednesday, the nation as a whole recorded more than 145,000 new COVID-19 cases to set a new record high. In some areas of the country, the number of hospitalizations is already pushing hospital staff to the brink. In El Paso, Texas, for example, the city had to bring in overflow hospital beds and upped its mobile morgue units from three, to four, and then 10 this week. At a Wednesday total of more than 1,000 hospitalized patients, the border town now has more COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization than most states.

In a dire warning, Osterholm predicted El Paso is not an outlier but rather the norm that could be coming to more towns across America as the holiday season approaches.

“People don't want to hear that El Paso isn't an isolated event,” he said. “El Paso, in many instances, will become the norm."


Osterholm stressed that a unified message coming from the federal government would help begin to reel in the pandemic.

“We need FDR moments right now. We need fireside chats. We need somebody to tell America, this is what in the hell is going to happen,” he said.

Zack Guzman is the co-host of the 11AM - 1PM hours on Yahoo Finance Live as well as a senior writer and on-air reporter covering entrepreneurship, cannabis, startups, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance[/a]

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, SmartNews, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.

Find live stock market quotes and the latest business and finance news[/a]

For tutorials and information on investing and trading stocks, check out Cashay[/a]


What about the Business owners that have to pay rent or a mortgage and their taxes.

I think Biden should put some epidemiologists on his task force, and soon. Michael Osterholm has been wrong early on here, and I’m not sure he can be trusted.

Medical doctors are not epidemiologists, and epidemiologist AND medical doctors are needed to establish the right strategy.

I’m not convinced lockdowns are the right solution. At a minimum, you have to be really careful about it and make them carefully targeted. And by themselves they will solve very little. At this point we need something where multiple avenues of attack are used at once. It is going to be expensive, but I think it is likely that epi-based approaches have more bang for the buck and more sticking power than a simple lockdown.

In the end it probably doesn’t matter what Biden/Harris do because things will be wrapping up in 8-10 weeks. We probably need to get to about 30% infected to get “herd immunity” with the current Rt, and that seems like it is going to happen no problem, and quite soon. Dr. Atlas was right. Unfortunately a lot of people will die as a result (which is what he wanted as far as I can tell - he talks about protecting the elderly but he doesn’t really care.). Obviously that is a fragile unstable equilibrium % because the actual Rt of the virus with full social connectivity is higher than that (and the true HIT is closer to 60-70%). But I do expect things to start ramping down in the next 4-5 weeks on their own accord, even if no measures are taken to really stop the spread.

Biden and Harris will thus have a much easier landscape to employ whatever techniques they want. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives needlessly lost. It’s likely that basic mask wearing and other steps will be enough to avoid another massive outbreak if 30% of the population is immune. I guess we’ll see. It’s a complicated system.

In the short term, the right call might be to spend more money on controlling the outbreak, but it seems to me that even that is probably too late at this point. Not saying it should not be done ASAP (much better chance of getting something done with funding with Trump still in office, unfortunately, and funding to counter the pandemic and make businesses whole is probably good even if it is a bit too late), though.

Of course it can still be controlled and lives can be saved right now, but I don’t have high hopes for that. We’re committing to ~400k deaths, with ~30% of the population infected instead.

 

[heltok]

I found these first principle questions interesting:
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1327519155776458752
What's the actual difficulty with producing lots more of the Pfizer vaccine immediately? All the sources I can find say that it takes months to scale up to >1e8 doses, none of the sources say what exactly takes months (instead of weeks or years).
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1327519155776458752
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1327520740124418048
I find it hard to believe that's it. A hundred thousand people are going to die because nobody shipped Pfizer a few extra extra-strength refrigerators? I'll be disappointed in humanity if there isn't either a genuinely hard bio/physical obstacle, or a stupid bureaucratic one.

This seems like a typical Elon way of looking at the world. Not accepting the answer “because it’s hard”, and willingness to upset people with “if you cannot give me a good answer why we cannot launch that rocket in one month I will fire you and find someone who will!” Imo the answer is that we lack enough Elons in the governments and its bureaucracy and in the pharma industry.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Elons in the governments and its bureaucracy and in the pharma industry.

I, for one, am glad that Elon is siloed in the auto and rocket industry. At least his dangerous pseudoscience does limited damage there. (Sadly, he has Twitter.) Hopefully one of these days he’ll realize what a fool he has been. Dunning-Kruger in full effect with him!

 

[JRP3]

From the General thread, Elon finally understands that he does have covid.

Elon has shared results from Thursday night's COVID test (it was positive according to what he wrote). Hope he gets some rest, continues on the mild to no symptoms route and self-isolates. I'm aware there's a coronavirus thread but this probably belongs here.

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