Balta1701

My dad loved the hotel room story.

The only way to avoid that is to do what we've been saying repeatedly: 1. Keep everything closed until your numbers of new cases drop off dramatically, to the point that there are only a handful of community spread cases per day in broad areas. 2. Dramatically ramp up testing availability, to the point where for every case that does appear you have the ability to test literally thousands of people. Your ability to test determines how low your case numbers need to be per area in #1 and defines my use of the word broad: if you can do 20,000 tests per day in Houston TX, you can't really reopen anything of value until you are seeing under 2 new cases per day in Houston, TX. 3. Dramatically increase funding and resources for public health departments, who will need to track down thousands of people every time there is a new case that crops up. 4. Figure out how to quarantine everyone who tests positive after exposure, meaning really isolate them for 2+ weeks. 5. Dramatically increase production of testing equipment, medical supplies, dramatically increase education and outreach to prepare for a massive second wave of this outbreak once things do open up later this year. We've already seen this jerk beating relaxed social distancing rules in Asian countries, so even that may not work, but that's the outline for what needs to happen.

Ironically, since the federal reserve is basically running the digital equivalent of a printing press right now, we're borrowing from our strategic reservoir of digital ink, not from the future.

It's already in Africa, there's just no testing so no idea how expansive.

FWIW, we can actually fundamentally prove this study is biased/wrong. The methods aren't clear but it seems likely that they recruited people who wanted to be tested, and if you do that you get a biased set. However, beyond that, Los Angeles currently has 600 deaths. If I take the number in the middle of that range, 300,000 cases, that gives me a 0.2% death rate - comparable to the flu. That would be great news if true. However it cannot be anywhere close to factually correct, because New York City exists. Depending on what estimate you use, New York City currently has a death rate at about 0.15% - of the entire population. If the death rate in a full population is 0.2%, that means New York City would have to have >75% of its population already infected. If that was the case, then New York City's population would have basically established herd immunity, and their death rate should be plummeting rapidly right now, because there would be no one else to be infected. However, New York City's death toll has stayed above 500/day for over 20 days, and Lombardy in Spain has stayed above 200/day for a month. That area should have had 100% infected long ago. The long tails are completely inconsistent with the results of this study, and suggest that this test either has a biased sample or a much higher false positive rate than reported.

I think hearing "They can't get the money to work" is entirely reasonable right now, because right now safety is a far bigger issue and that's not something they can resolve yet. If Georgia and Texas and Arizona decide they're opening their states up by May 1 and the end result is that at the end of Spring Training they're seeing cases rise again, then any negotiation they did on money would be moot anyway. So, there's no reason for the players association to make a deal that drops salaries until there's actually a strong likelihood of games happening and revenue coming in, and there's plenty of reasons for MLB to leak "The players association won't allow it to happen" as a negotiating tactic.

You realize that this is all Rick Hahn's fault.

The issue right now is the price speculators apparently. The contracts for May oil delivery come due tomorrow, and if I'm a financial investor I don't particularly want to show up in Oklahoma to take delivery of the oil myself. Normally I could sell that contract to refiners, but the refiners aren't buying right now. So, the price speculators are dumping their contracts today to avoid having to take physical delivery of the material tomorrow.

Seriously? 41,000 dead Americans dead in a month. That is 15x the rate of gun violence in this country. It’s not even super close to true as the real number is what, 1.5 times that? 2 times that? We now have 13 9/11s out of just what we’ve counted, ignoring people dying at home or in immigrant communities or wherever else doesn’t matter. Imagine a 9/11 every 2 days. A Vietnam war each month. Is there no one you care about? You know no one who is immune compromised? Well let me introduce you. 2 days ago I was yelling at a distance at the 9 kids using the playground in my neighborhood because I couldn’t call the police as it was under 10 people, and if one of them had it then this neighborhood would have 5 families infected this week and no one would know until they passed it to me. I’m immune suppressed because my immune system went haywire last year, I’m out of a job in 5 weeks, my career is over, and if I can’t find something else I have no idea how to procure health insurance during this. I am personally terrified, with good reason. My doctor literally told me that because I was such a regular blood donor for 20 years I might have delayed the onset by helping nearly 300 people with donations, but I couldn’t stop that. So you want to know what scares me? It’s people like you ignoring how serious this is or coming up with your own conspiracy about why you are special, because if enough of you do that and one of you coughs on my porch, I die an agonizing death, and I become that statistic for you to ignore. I planned for this financially starting years ago. I will not go bankrupt any time soon because I thought there was a good chance our leadership would find a way to do something awful, and they did. But I couldn’t control my immune system, and right now I need help. I only live through this if other people act like this is serious. I can’t beat it if you don’t. so you know what scares me? That you and people like you are asking that question. Because you aren’t holding chambers 5 and 6 at your own head, you are holding it at mine and asking why I should be afraid.

#FormerChicagoResident

I forgot how much I hated Jerry Krause in 1998.

Well first of all no, it didn't arrive in the US until mid-January. And second...not every case turns into an explosion. But some do. And as I said...you don't know which ones will. You don't know in advance which person infects 50 at a conference, or 500 at a meatpacking plant in South Dakota, or 1000 at a facility for migrant workers in Singapore...or triggers the explosion in New York.. Yes, the US has limited these by Social Distancing. If you are not bringing together large groups of people, if you have the parks closed, you avoid this Maybe instead of 50 people, they infect 5. Did one of those people show up at the protests this week? We'll know in a couple weeks. I've pulled the trigger on this revolver 4 times. I therefore know with confidence that I can pull the trigger 2 more times, right? Don't you get it man, I pulled the trigger 4 times, what the F went on those 4 times? It's safe as can be.

Multiple studies, not controlled but out there, have tested it now. One came out in China a few days ago - basically showing 0 effect on viral load in people where it was tested.. While there's still no control group, it did not look promising. Also, several studies, including ones in Brazil and France, have been shut down because half of the people given the drugs at high doses died of heart conditions. Meanwhile, people are still receiving it, there's just very little positive impact and if people are dying because of it, they're dying.

For those who are curious, here’s a detailed look at the methods in that paper by an epidemiologist and as I suggested, the false positive rate of the test in that statistically 0 positive tests is within the margin of error. In other words, it’s statistically unknown whether 0 of their 3300 candidates actually were positive or whether 50 were. Furthermore, there’s reason to believe they might have selectively recruited people who thought they might have had it in previous weeks. Overall that study makes a strong case that the real incidence is well under 1% in that area. https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of-covid-19-antibody-seroprevalence-in-santa-clara-county-california-1f6382258c25

I think a lot of times when you hear a team say that a player has the flu, it's actually something else.

Yes, for trace and contain. Right now we're totally in reaction mode, with hundreds of thousands of cases. In order to safely open anything, we need to be able to throw tens of thousands of tests out every time there's a case. This has been bugging me specifically since my state is one of the ones that wants to reopen stuff, so let's take the example of Texas state parks. A couple things we know - people are commonly contagious for several days before they show symptoms, the virus can survive on surfaces, and whether it's the situation or biology or something else single infected people have in some cases infected dozens, if not hundreds (the entire South Korean peak apparently can be traced to 1 individual breaking quarantine). So, a family of 4 goes to a Texas state park and camps for the weekend. Earlier that Friday, one of the parents is exposed and contracts it. They become contagious at some point that weekend while they're still using the toilets, maybe shopping at the store there, whatever. How many people are at the state park on a weekend? For normal business, several hundred, all could be exposed. They won't all come down with it, but chances are good that some people will. Everyone leaves on Sunday, going back to their local places of work for Monday and Tuesday. It is Wednesday of that week before the first person in the chain starts showing symptoms. It then takes 24 hours to get results back on the test, which comes back positive. Meanwhile, anyone who picked it up at the state park is already contagious, most likely without showing any symptoms yet for several days. How many people need to be tested from this chain? Everyone in the state park has to be tracked down, everyone they work with, their families, everyone at stores they visited. If any of them ran into someone who works at a nursing home, this chain could kill dozens of people shortly. How many people need to be tested to shut down this one chain? Potentially ten thousand. Any one of that chain could be a "Super-spreader" and you don't know which person it is, so you have to track them all down. Furthermore, you don't know how the chain started, so you still have to figure out where the first person got it at. Singapore had enough cases that one person got into a packed facility for migrant workers, and now they have thousands of new cases. Until we have that little transmission that we can overwhelm every single case with tests, then we're in no position to relax this stuff.

“At $50 a test it wasn’t enough to hire a tech to run the tests full time but at $100 a test it is”. 1:07 into today’s briefing under that post. I hope you’re already asleep so you don’t hear that phrase in your sleep.

That’s precisely the problem of this. It spreads rapidly so if an area isn’t shut down, the cases that are isolated or tracked burn out, but it is still going to find its way into your untracked, dense populations of immigrants, nursing homes, whatever. In South Dakota it hit a meat packing plant where the rich owners didn’t care about distancing. The fact that it is concentrated is a natural result of how this spreads, not some anomaly.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/17/politics/republican-governors-stay-at-home-coronavirus/index.html?__twitter_impression=true

Based on what we are seeing internationally, specifically the surges in Singapore and Japan, I think the evidence is convincing that anything less than Italian level “we will arrest you if you are within 20 feet of another human” lockdown will eventually enable a massive surge in cases, within a few weeks. There are too many underserved populations packed into spaces that are too small, the time in between infections measurable data and Is too long, too many people defy these voluntary rules and one single infection can become a superspreader, and I’m No longer confident that testing and tracing can deal with this, especially not at the scale of the US. so yeah, I think these guys are going to start reopening stuff and then we are going to see more spikes a few weeks later, including in urban areas in the south where they will be very lethal and hard to control.

The peak in deaths, per our current data, comes 18-21 days after the peak in infections. So, we will see the results of opening these beaches and Texas state parks and all the other things sometime around May 15. We will see the results of keeping them open during the subsequent days. This is the absolute worst state to play this game, but my state is going to create the same disaster. This is a worthy thread for anyone.

According to Sportac.com, Trey Burton’s cap hit to the Chicago Bears is $8.55 Million. The amount of dead cap he creates this year is $7.55 million. However, reports are this will be a post June 1 designation and the team will save around $3 million in cap space for 2020. https://beargoggleson.com/2020/04/17/trey-burton-chicago-bears-release/

Florida is reopening their beaches tonight. Why I am commenting on that in a post where you said something about an extreme mortality rate amongst the elderly is totally a mystery as no one thinks of retirees and Florida. (my 90 year old grandmother who usually winters in Florida headed back to Indiana in late February after someone in that trailer park tested positive).

I’d say we are consistently seeing that there is a very small portion of the population who actually has been exposed and in almost all cases almost every positive antibody test is a false positive. Such that removing restrictions will produce huge spikes in cases, exactly as seen in Japan and Singapore.