Coronavirus

[Singuy]

So with government check for two months, it is ok to shut down 2 months?

You shut down places like Disney for 2 months, you'll have to pay these workers (or ex workers now) for years just to prevent life loss.

And this goes beyond Disney, it can bankrupt the City of Orlando.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Sure -- I have been advocating those behaviours since this epidemic began and realize their importance, but do the Japanese substantially differ from populations in Singapore, Taiwan, S. Korea, and Hong Kong where much more authoritarian control was progressively instituted to control the outbreak ?

Yes. Japan are the uber clean freaks, Korea next. Taiwan and Hong Kong are closest to China culturally and thus very, very different from Japan.

 

[SageBrush]

trump's media echo chamber is showing stresses
Dr. Anthony Fauci suggests growing coronavirus rift with Trump as White House signals discomfort with his independence

 

[shootformoon]

"Promised $100m. " So many people are donating money now. But we needed actual supply of PPEs etc for hospital, not only future research money. He is devoted to the pandemic area for quite long now. He has the knowledge of the area and should be aware of the underpreparedness of any severe pandemic based on his 2015 talk. What would you have done differently than him if you are in this area and have >$10B under your disposal ?

Of course he still did more than most of us. Just not up to his own caliber.

Well, as a floor, >=$100,000,000*? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is exploring at-home COVID-19 tests in Seattle

That said, I'm not impressed by his leadership on...Teslas

*...google 'gates foundation seattle testing', About 8,250,000 results (0.46 seconds)

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

a certain body count is sensible

Could you narrow down that number a bit for us?

Spending that money without a shutdown would be a waste.

I'm beginning to this this might be Trump's strategy. Really spur the economy with the stimulus and the low interest rates, then just tell everyone not to worry about it, we've got plenty of vents, just go to work. More vents that you ever would have believed.

I'm not saying that I think that would work. I think it would go pretty poorly! I also don't think it's the only way to get to that strong recovery he is banking on.

 

[MXLRplus]

Interesting news. A huge media push is on, both by US news outlets and Chinese news outlets to prove COVID-19 started in the US and had millions of cases so far.

Easy. Our GDP this year is $20T. Let's say we shut down the economy for 6 weeks. The cost of that would be $2.5T. That looks like about what we're spending, and it's less because many sectors are only mildly affected.

We then pay it back over 30 years at our 1.5% interest rate. It costs us $60b per year which becomes a 3rd digit in a GDP growth rate.

We can easily weather this, but we just need to ACTUALLY do this. Spending that money without a shutdown would be a waste.

Let's say it costs $5 million to get a sheet metal small business into the black in 3 years. Demand shuts off, rent is due, pay is due, taxes are due, equip payments are due. In one month you go into the red, and at 2 months it's over, business sells for a negative amount, machines are repo'd.

How long does it take for $5 million more dollars to revive the business? Never. Because demand increases slowly for the most part. It would now take $5 million + X to revive it. And your credit and reputation are destroyed so it might not be feasible.

Why do you think we permanently lost so many business in 2001? Money alone can't fix it. If you bought your house for $100k and it burned down, how much would it cost to replace everything? You can't. This will cause permanent damages. The only question is how much?

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

both by US news outlets

You may want to double check on your "news" outlets.

 

[MXLRplus]

You may want to double check on your "news" outlets.

I believe it all to be communist propaganda worthy of Pravda. That is to say worthless. But that just appeared on China's Official Twitter account. Go look.

 

[wdolson]

Do explain further. I can’t wrap my head around the logic that would lead to this conclusion. Unless you mean when Wuhan was at its peak - but even that we likely are now exceeding that even within the United States.

SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 has many symptoms of other, common, and mild infectious diseases. About 80% of those infected have no symptoms or mild enough symptoms that it looks like something else. I thought I was having a bit worse than usual asthma episode.

I don't count among those who had it and recovered because I wasn't tested for the virus and I can't get the antibody test yet. I have read many stories online of people who appear to have had it, got over it, and don't count in the statistics. One that stands out to me is someone who was at an event in Everett, WA where the first known patient in WA was (same event) and got sick with a terrible flu-like illness a little over a week later. There was an added footnote at the end of the post that said after writing about their experience they had found out an elderly family member who had been at the same event was among the dead in WA.

It also started being noticed in the US just after the peak of the yearly flu. A slight increase in hospitalizations due to pneumonia-like symptoms, medical staff would assume this year's flu was causing an unusually high, but not alarmingly high number of cases of pneumonia. It's a case of when you hear hoof beats and you're not on the plains of Africa, it's more likely horses than zebras.

Washington pushed back the point of first infection in the US to January 26. That's as far back as they can prove, but it may be a little earlier than that. With so many silent cases, a lot of people had it and thought they just had a cold or something mild and went about their lives, spreading it to others around them. When it landed in an old folks home and started ripping through that population, suddenly the medical profession discovered it was not just here, but well rooted.

BECAUSE MOST RNA VIRUSES DO NOT HAVE PROOFREADING MECHANISMS

Coronaviruses DO HAVE proofreading mechanisms built right into their replication machinery. It's one of the unique features of coronaviruses, and also why their mutations rates are much lower than other RNA viruses.

Please stop posting things you don't have knowledge of and are clearly just resorting to just googling it to defend your position. You are completely wrong here. I'm a molecular biologist, I used to have to manipulate adenoviruses in my work, I'm extremely familiar with all of this.

I stand corrected.

Problem is, we are a fat, cardiovascular poorly-conditioned society. For this reason, in the US, we are seeing much higher death rates in the 20-50 age group than other countries had. There are plenty of "targets" for this virus besides the 80+ group.
Younger Adults Make Up Big Portion of Coronavirus Hospitalizations in U.S.

I' m not surprised, but this is scary. That could vastly increase the number of hospital cases which will top out the hospitals much faster.

Someone had a break-down of covid-19 deaths in NY that directly refutes this. 29 of the 63 deaths were 45-75, while the rest were over 75+. Generally poor health is a risk factor, but doesn't mean that the US is predominantly of poor health.

29 of 63 is almost 50%. That's pretty high compared to most of the rest of the world.

That is not a refutation. You have to know exposure and co-morbidity data.

As for poor general health, ~ 50% of adults in the southern states are obese. That is by definition poor health. Put on top of that the adult tobacco abuse prevalence and there is really nothing left to argue about.

The US isn't the fattest country in the world, but it is the fattest large country
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/most-obese-countries/

Kuwait is the only country on the list above the US with a population more than 1 million.

The distribution in the US is also not even
New Adult Obesity Maps

Most of the places hit hardest thus far are states with lowish obesity rates (for the US).

Yes. Japan are the uber clean freaks, Korea next. Taiwan and Hong Kong are closest to China culturally and thus very, very different from Japan.

I grew up in a predominantly Asian neighborhood and knew a lot of Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese. Most were born here, but we had a big influx of Chinese immigrants from Taiwan starting when I was in junior high. The Japanese were very orderly, the Koreans similar, and the Chinese were much more "seat of the pants" in their approach to things. Though all three cultures put an extremely high value on education. The local public school was rated as one of the top schools in the state of California when I was going there. It beat out a bunch of private academies.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Let's say it costs $5 million to get a sheet metal small business into the black in 3 years. Demand shuts off, rent is due, pay is due, taxes are due, equip payments are due. In one month you go into the red, and at 2 months it's over, business sells for a negative amount, machines are repo'd.

How long does it take for $5 million more dollars to revive the business? Never. Because demand increases slowly for the most part. It would now take $5 million + X to revive it. And your credit and reputation are destroyed so it might not be feasible.

Why do you think we permanently lost so many business in 2001? Money alone can't fix it. If you bought your house for $100k and it burned down, how much would it cost to replace everything? You can't. This will cause permanent damages. The only question is how much?

Why would the lender who repo'd the machines destroy them? What happens to the machines?

Seriously though that is why the government is working on interest free loans and possible loan forgiveness. It's a real problem but it should be solvable. Theoretically it should be possible to "pause" large sectors of the economy and start them back up quickly. Also remember that the agriculture sector, health care sector, and many other businesses are still operational.

 

[jerry33]

Let's say it costs $5 million to get a sheet metal small business into the black in 3 years. Demand shuts off, rent is due, pay is due, taxes are due, equip payments are due. In one month you go into the red, and at 2 months it's over, business sells for a negative amount, machines are repo'd.

How long does it take for $5 million more dollars to revive the business? Never. Because demand increases slowly for the most part. It would now take $5 million + X to revive it. And your credit and reputation are destroyed so it might not be feasible.

Mostly correct. However, except for the inventory (which would be small in a sheet metal business) the $5M equipment would be sold for 10% of the purchase price--maybe 15% if someone could be found that wants to take over the business, because the startup cost would only be $0.5M or so. Of course, this doesn't help the original owner (unless he or she already has money squirreled away that the bankruptcy can't touch).

 

[Cherry Wine]

God I love math.

Let's take your numbers:
0.2% "true mortality rate" - the experts disagree with you at closer to 0.7%, but let's use your number
40% infection rate - the experts also disagree with you, and predict closer to 70-80%

350 million people in the USA.

350,000,000 x 0.4 x 0.002 = 280,000 deaths.

That's about 5-8 times the annual death rate from influenza.

Any questions?

Sprinkle in some healthcare collapse, sickness and death in health providers, and those numbers would go up from there imho, including the inevitable statistical outliers in the very young (and any currently "low-risk" population).

No thanks.

 

[deonb]

Interesting news. A huge media push is on, both by US news outlets and Chinese news outlets to prove COVID-19 started in the US and had millions of cases so far.

Let's say it costs $5 million to get a sheet metal small business into the black in 3 years. Demand shuts off, rent is due, pay is due, taxes are due, equip payments are due. In one month you go into the red, and at 2 months it's over, business sells for a negative amount, machines are repo'd.

Demand is shut off but the government can supplement it until it comes back.

Here's an idea. Send 11% of each non-financial sector business's 2019 tax return (top line, not bottom) back to them. That carries them for 6 weeks. Make it a criminal offense to lay anybody off or reduce any employee's salary during that time. Lock down the country under police or even military force for 6 weeks.

It requires coordinated and intelligent effort. But it can be done by smart leaders. So yes, we're doomed. But it could be done.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

With so many silent cases, a lot of people had it and thought they just had a cold or something mild and went about their lives, spreading it to others around them.

So, let's just go with that hypothesis. Please explain why we did not see the explosive exponential growth in case count earlier. What was suppressing it, specifically?

Remember, when you propose your explanation, that tests of the AT-RISK population (those who have likely been exposed or have symptoms) nationwide yield only a 10% positive result (so to be clear, this is a massively biased sample). You're saying these people testing negative have just recovered?

 

[Compton]

Could you narrow down that number a bit for us?

Both influenza and malaria cause ~1 million deaths each year combined and the average Joe hardly blinks an eye and doesn't buy any toilet paper. So a 5 year worth of these mundane boring killers would be 5 million, equal to annual air pollution deaths which is just the cost of doing business. Relative to these, up 5 million direct and indirect deaths wouldn't be too shabby. And now we are at ~20 thousand official deaths?

But of course just 0.5 million deaths would cause mayhem and chaos. Because it's not influenza.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Both influenza and malaria cause ~1 million deaths each year combined and we hardly blink an eye. So a 5 year worth of these mundane boring killers would be 5 million, equal to annual air pollution deaths which is just the cost of doing business. Relative to these, up 5 million direct and indirect deaths wouldn't be too shabby. And now we are at ~20 thousand official deaths?

But of course just 0.5 million deaths would cause mayhem and chaos. Because it's not influenza.

I'll ask the question again: How many deaths in the United States from COVID-19 this year do you consider to be acceptable? Then we can work the numbers.

 

[Compton]

I'll ask the question again: How many deaths in the United States from COVID-19 this year do you consider to be acceptable? Then we can work the numbers.

Just scale the numbers to match population. It's an easy calculation. I don't live in the USA so I don't focus on it, there's the rest of the world as well.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Just scale the numbers to match population. It's an easy calculation. I don't live in the USA so I don't focus on it, there's the rest of the world as well.

212,000 deaths in the US.
With your plan what would the infection rate be?
What is the fatality rate of COVID-19?
How would load on the hospitals change that fatality rate?

 

[MXLRplus]

Why would the lender who repo'd the machines destroy them? What happens to the machines?

Seriously though that is why the government is working on interest free loans and possible loan forgiveness. It's a real problem but it should be solvable. Theoretically it should be possible to "pause" large sectors of the economy and start them back up quickly. Also remember that the agriculture sector, health care sector, and many other businesses are still operational.

Normally about .10 on the dollar net at auction. Minus the amount due. So you could owe money on repo'd equipment. Storage and rigging is not cheap either.

They won't see government assistance for a long time.

 

[Compton]

212,000 deaths in the US.
With your plan what would the infection rate be?
What is the fatality rate of COVID-19?
How would load on the hospitals change that fatality rate?

I would emulate Sweden where schools are running and there are no restrictions on public transport or movement but large gatherings are discouraged and social distance is encouraged, these guidelines apply also in the capital of Sweden. There are some deaths and they are preparing for more cases but they accept some deaths instead of locking everything down as the only country in Europe. And they will probably come out of this the fastest and with the least total damage.