Coronavirus

[nervus]

Maybe of interest for some of you (in dutch, but Google Translate can help): Data nieuwe coronavirus (COVID-19) in Nederland | RIVM

 

[nervus]

Interestingly enough, I would like to know how Germany treated you for free. According to this, you are supposed to come with insurance that covers medical problems if you enter Germany:

Countries Which Won't Let You In Without Health Insurance

"The Schengen Area is a zone in Europe where 26 countries have acknowledged the abolishment of their internal borders. Anyone who needs to apply for the Schengen visa to enter Europe must have international health insurance.

The 26 countries in the zone are Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland."

That is correct BUT: even illegal immigrants are treated, most of those are not insured. Personally I have seen a few of that type before my retirement (I was neurologist), it was paid for by a special governemental funded organisation.

 

[JRP3]

That's fine, that's his right, but they are "pie in the sky" ideas with no real rational thought put forward on how to pay for them.

The title he posted was essentially click bait, and it IS a very important consideration for how something will be paid for and changes the discussion considerably.

You pay the same way you pay for endless wars and corporate bailouts.

 

[bkp_duke]

That is correct BUT: even illegal immigrants are treated, most of those are not insured. Personally I have seen a few of that type before my retirement (I was neurologist), it was paid for by a special governemental funded organisation.

We do something similar here, but it is not at a federal level. I worked in a hospital in TX where I trained and there was a high proportion of illegal immigrants. Their kids could get coverage through the state, even if they were illegal, and we would treat them. Don't know about their parents, but the county (Dallas) had it's own tax setup to cover the care for all residents. The catch was they would only be treated at a single hospital (Parkland - where JFK was treated after he was shot).

 

[jerry33]

You pay the same way you pay for endless wars and corporate bailouts.

Except that this helps everyone, not just corporations and the defense industry.

 

[bkp_duke]

You pay the same way you pay for endless wars and corporate bailouts.

Politcal discussion for the market politics thread, but the cost of Medicare-4-All dwarfs the annual cost for wars, etc. And the "corporate bailouts" is a great catch phrase (click bait), but if you go back to the records for 2008 - most of those had to be repaid, and the companies that got them did repay them.

 

[dhanson865]

Same week means the same week in which you worked the overtime (which is how you get comp time).

That's a totally different concept. Your "comp time" is somehow related to overtime and is illegal in many states.

"The reason comp time is prohibited under federal law is that it allows an employer to get out of paying an employee overtime as required under the FLSA"

My "comp time" is unrelated to overtime, it's a replacement for vacation time and sick time. It's actually called "comprehensive leave" in our time sheet software.

"Traditionally, workers have been offered time off from two main buckets: sick leave and vacation leave. Sick leave usually expires after a certain amount of time. When a worker leaves his job, he is paid for any unused vacation time but not for unused sick time.

Many employers are beginning to offer comprehensive leave, where sick days and vacation days count the same. Upon leaving their jobs, employees are paid out for any excess comp leave they have accumulated."

So an overtime based comp wouldn't apply to taking weeks off for quarantine, but a leave based comp would.

 

[nervus]

We do something similar here, but it is not at a federal level. I worked in a hospital in TX where I trained and there was a high proportion if illegal immigrants. Their kids could get coverage through the state, even if they were illegal, and we would treat them. Don't know about their parents, but the county (Dallas) had it's own tax setup to cover the care for all residents. The catch was they would only be treated at a single hospital (Parkland - where JFK was treated after he was shot).

Good to see the kids were treated! Over here it is not restricted to special assigned hospitals.

 

[SageBrush]

The current PCR test uncovers hidden infections because it tests for the virus. Antibody tests test for antibodies which you only produce after you've been infected for some period of time (don't know how long).

Correct about the RNA test.
There is a wide variation in time to detection of IgG post exposure but generally in the 7 - 10 day window.

 

[bkp_duke]

Many employers are beginning to offer comprehensive leave, where sick days and vacation days count the same. Upon leaving their jobs, employees are paid out for any excess comp leave they have accumulated."

My company does this. We simply call it PTO (Paid Time Off). Employees have just a pool of days that they can take off. I don't, however, allow them to roll over from year to year. I've found that the mental well-being of the employees depends very much of them taking some time off, and I force them to use it during the year.

On a case by case basis, I do give some employees comp time. Specifically if someone was busting their hump to meet a software deadline and worked extra, then they get time off to use sometime in the future (usually within a month).

 

[JRP3]

Politcal discussion for the market politics thread, but the cost of Medicare-4-All dwarfs the annual cost for wars, etc.

Yet somehow many other countries are able to provide it.

 

[jerry33]

That's a totally different concept. Your "comp time" is somehow related to overtime and is illegal in many states.

It's supposed to be, but in practice it's not because it's easy for companies to get around it (at least it is for large companies).

 

[Daniel in SD]

That's a totally different concept. Your "comp time" is somehow related to overtime and is illegal in many states.

"The reason comp time is prohibited under federal law is that it allows an employer to get out of paying an employee overtime as required under the FLSA"

My "comp time" is unrelated to overtime, it's a replacement for vacation time and sick time. It's actually called "comprehensive leave" in our time sheet software.

"Traditionally, workers have been offered time off from two main buckets: sick leave and vacation leave. Sick leave usually expires after a certain amount of time. When a worker leaves his job, he is paid for any unused vacation time but not for unused sick time.

Many employers are beginning to offer comprehensive leave, where sick days and vacation days count the same. Upon leaving their jobs, employees are paid out for any excess comp leave they have accumulated."

So an overtime based comp wouldn't apply to taking weeks off for quarantine, but a leave based comp would.

Comp time for an exempt employee (i.e. one not subject to overtime rules) means something different. My boss might say "Hey, you've worked really hard to tape-out this chip and done an 80 hour week, here's 5 days of comp time (vacation)." It's completely at the discretion of the employer, after all it's completely legal to hire people to do nothing.

 

[SageBrush]

So, we only know that the gestation period is highly variable

We also know a fair amount about the shape of the variation curve. 4 - 7 days works for modeling.

By the way, gestation is for pregnancy. You mean incubation

 

[dhanson865]

My company does this. We simply call it PTO (Paid Time Off). Employees have just a pool of days that they can take off. I don't, however, allow them to roll over from year to year. I've found that the mental well-being of the employees depends very much of them taking some time off, and I force them to use it during the year.

On a case by case basis, I do give some employees comp time. Specifically if someone was busting their hump to meet a software deadline and worked extra, then they get time off to use sometime in the future (usually within a month).

So the context here is someone complained that employees of a certain company were asked to use it (paid time off / comp leave) to cover their self quarantine instead of the company paying them without making them use that benefit pool.

Voice of San Diego spoke with more than a dozen employees from multiple departments in the regional VA.
Employees in departments like mental health and social work, which are doing most of their work by phone and by video, have been asked to come in, despite employee requests to work remotely. Employees who wanted to quarantine or were told by their doctor to do so said they were forced into an unappealing dilemma: Either use annual leave or take time off unpaid, or come into the office to work.

I've got something like 5 weeks saved up so a week or two for quarantine would be a non issue for me and my employer wouldn't have to do anything special to cover my bills. I was asking

* how much PTO/comp leave is enough to cover this covid 19 situation?
* how many people don't have that much time accrued?

I would assume VA employees have lots of accrued time off.

and we got off on a weird tangent because "comp time" means different things to different people.

 

[jerry33]

* how much PTO/comp leave is enough to cover this covid 19 situation?
* how many people don't have that much time accrued?

Except in states where they are forced to, companies don't allow year to year rollover, and most people only have two or three weeks vacation time plus the nine days of sick time. Because this happened at the start of the year, most people probably haven't used any vacation time. So they would have two or three weeks plus nine days. Of course, that only covers employers who give the entire vacation up front.

 

[Daniel in SD]

* how much PTO/comp leave is enough to cover this covid 19 situation?
* how many people don't have that much time accrued?

If you become infected I would hope that they would pay you not to come into work. Most people probably don't have enough time accrued. The question gets much trickier when we are talking about high risk individuals. Personally I think that any employer should allow their employees to work at home if possible in the current situation. I'm not sure how to force them to do so though, I assume the VA feels that working at home is not possible.

 

[kbM3]

Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine has issued an updated IFR estimate of 0.05%-0.14%, based on the testing data from Iceland. Global Covid-19 Case Fatality Rates - CEBM

That’s not the lowest estimate out there from credible scientists either. And of course there are many estimates that are higher.

In the absence of antibody testing or much more robust models it is hard to have any confidence in any of these estimates. We can all make educated guesses about which is more likely to be right, but if the scientists can’t agree it is hard to say one view is right and one is wrong — it’s just opinion until better data or models are available.

I agree with @jhm that the discussion shouldn’t be limited to epidemiologists or other scientists, especially since they seem to be all over the map (which is understandable given how fast this is moving and how poor most of the data collection has been since everyone is in crisis-mode).

A) When that article was first posted I pointed out how strange it was they calculated IFR from Germany alone, with no rationalization and then arbitrarily cut it in half. Do you have an explanation why this is a good method?

B They’ve since updated IFR:
“Our current best assumption, as of the 22nd March, is the IFR is approximate 0.29% (95% CI, 0.25 to 0.33).*”

 

[X Fan]

Marc Lipsitch is one of the most prominent epidemiologists in US.

Good news is the Covid task force asked Marc's team to model certain scenarios.

Bad news is that the administration decided to ignore what the model predicted. Instead Dr Birx (who is not an epidemiologist) decided to go with what Trump wanted to hear, apparently, that it is ok to end the lockdown quickly and everything will be ok.

I believe Dr. Birx & Dr. Fauci are extremely talented professionals and are apolitical. Their work history is amazing and have served under both Republican and Democratic Administrations.

FWIW: I don't doubt that she has consulted with other professionals on her team (and epidemiologists) and through that, has rendered her view.

As I know you realize, all these models being produced require a set of inputs, many of which are SWAGs at this point given the recent emergence of the virus.

 

[SageBrush]

Three of my relatives were at a wedding two weeks ago. All three acquired COVID-19 and all three were diagnosed the day after the wedding.

This is a fine example of inoculum.

Everybody should read this and think only one thing: MASKS

There is a small but growing understanding in the public that masks will decrease R naught, but almost nil understanding that masks will reduce disease severity (all else being equal.)