caulfield12

And the trade deficit just continues to worsen, sacrificing billions from the budgets of universities across the US. Great job! If only we did the same thing as Europe, we’d actually be able to open up all K-12 and universities in August and September...might even have had a good shot at completing football seasons and preventing the loss of at least 65,000-90,000 lives to boot. At one point, we were told for 2-3 weeks that we could keep it around 60,000 lives lost if we all cooperated on lockdown policies, masks and social distancing. We’ve already more than doubled and are well on the way to tripling those numbers at the current pace. And we’re destroying the economy by making it impossible again for parents to work if younger kids are home from school again.

This is a freaking nightmare. About 35-40% of our 475 or so graduates per year attend school in the US. I listed the exceptions above in some cases, but only we’re about 5-7 weeks out before many students were planning to return in the fall, not to mention the severely limited number of flights between the US and China right now, as it stands. Roughly 380,000 Chinese students in undergraduate and graduate programs. $2.85 billion in economic impact just for universities alone. Make that $44.7 billion total across various industries...

https://edsource.org/2020/university-of-california-campuses-plan-to-offer-most-classes-online-this-fall/633991 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/harvard-plans-bring-back-40-153950037.html There also will be “limited exceptions” for courses across the 23-campus system (CAL STATE) that can’t be delivered virtually, such as essential lab courses and clinical classes for nursing students, White said. Those classes will have restrictions, such as social distancing and fewer students. Another exception I discovered was architecture/design and other arts-related courses...

That would pretty much doom every country not self-reliant for its own food supply over time...

Modern antibiotics can prevent complications and death if administered quickly enough. Although maybe the anti-antibiotics (probiotics?) crowd will resist that, too. Somebody has been reading all the Dan Brown novels about 10-15 years late. Also, China has largely eradicated plague, but occasional cases are still reported, especially among hunters coming into contact with fleas carrying the bacterium. So I prefer to blame Eric or Donald Jr. And the first time I arrived here was actually 2007, so won’t take any responsibility for creating that 11 years and counting playoff-less drought. Plus, it was in Spanish water reservoirs in March, 2019, and Italy months before the major breakout here.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/06/health/spain-coronavirus-antibody-study-lancet-intl/index.html Spain's large-scale study on the coronavirus indicates just 5% of its population has developed antibodies, strengthening evidence that a so-called herd immunity to Covid-19 is "unachievable," the medical journal the Lancet reported on Monday. The findings show that 95% of Spain's population remains susceptible to the virus. Herd immunity is achieved when enough of a population has become infected with a virus or bacteria -- or vaccinated against it -- to stop its circulation. The European Center for Disease Control told CNN that Spain's research, on a nationwide representative sample of more than 61,000 participants, appears to be the largest study to date among a dozen serological studies on the coronavirus undertaken by European nations. It adds to the findings of an antibody study involving 2,766 participants in Geneva, Switzerland, published in the Lancet on June 11.There have been similar studies in China and the United States and "the key finding from these representative cohorts is that most of the population appears to have remained unexposed" to Covid-19, "even in areas with widespread virus circulation," said a Lancet commentary published along with Spain's findings. "In light of these findings, any proposed approach to achieve herd immunity through natural infection is not only highly unethical, but also unachievable," said the Lancet's commentary authors, Isabella Eckerle, head of the Geneva Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases, and Benjamin Meyer, a virologist at the University of Geneva.

The death rate still is decreasing, or at least leveling off despite the spikes in infections. The combined knowledge/expertise/technology of the US healthcare system is catching up and fighting the virus to a draw at the moment, but we still don’t know what Oct/Nov/Dec holds. If we were at 1,500-2,500 deaths per day instead of 500-750 and quickly shooting up to the 150-200,000 range, that would be one thing...it just seems the attention span for the story is wearing thin, fatigue is setting in and there’s a lull with protests as well as the “dog days” of a summer without much freedom approaching. Other than the VP naming and what happens to the conventions, not much drama until we get to the final two months of this five plus year long march. On second thought, you can put a fork in this whole charade...

If the Dow’s at 28,000 plus and NFL/NCAAFB going without interruption, they still think they have a puncher’s chance. The problem is how long they can keep propping up the structural unemployment funding in September, October and November. Plus, many of the southern and SW swing states are now getting completely battered. It’s also going to take some horrific debate gaffes for it to happen, though.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/sweden-epidemiologist-anders-tegnell/2020/06/03/063b20e4-a5a0-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html

And if we just went with Stockholm and excluded the remainder of the country? That’s 2300 deaths out of 2.344 million in Stockholm County. 7020 deaths for metropolitan Chicago so far (I used 8 million population for Chicago)...compared to an extrapolated number of 7,850 for Stockholm based on population mortality rate for that particular metro county if you normalized in order to make a valid comparison. Because comparing national rate of all of Sweden vs. Chicago metro doesn’t make sense, either.

Sweden 5420/10,100,000 That would mean 176,000 Americans would have died already.

Not sure this is an especially promising omen in the Year of Covid-19.

Dr Tom Jefferson, senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), at Oxford, and visiting professor at Newcastle University, argues that there is growing evidence that the virus was elsewhere before it emerged in Asia. Last week, Spanish virologists announced they had found traces of the disease in samples of waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the coronavirus disease was seen in China. Italian scientists have also found evidence of coronavirus in sewage samples in Milan and Turin, in mid-December, many weeks before the first case was detected, while experts have found traces in Brazil in November. Dr Jefferson believes that many viruses lie dormant throughout the globe and emerge when conditions are favourable. It also means they can vanish as quickly as they arrive. "Where did Sars 1 go? It’s just disappeared," he said "So we have to think about these things. We need to start researching the ecology of the virus, understanding how it originates and mutates. "I think the virus was already here, here meaning everywhere. We may be seeing a dormant virus that has been activated by environmental conditions.” https://www.yahoo.com/news/covid-19-may-not-originated-143843488.html Didn’t realize they had the world’s largest stamp show last June here in Wuhan...yet another possibility, as well as the World Military Games October 18th - 27th. We’ll probably never know, definitively, at this point.

NYC, Newark and Chicago are just huge travel hubs...and Chicago receives a massive amount of traffic from BOTH Asia (including Wuhan) and Europe. You can make arguments for Detroit, DFW, Minneapolis and Atlanta, but it would be hard to imagine any city with as many East/West connections in the entire country. You would also need to look at % of population with existing co-morbidities, especially Hispanic and African-Americans, to more accurately compare major metropolitan areas in the US.

Trying to look at this from a 2008-2016 perspective, I sincerely doubt Obama “being nicer” would have led to complete success. It certainly didn’t in terms of olive branches and numerous attempts at compromising with the opposing party in 2009-10. I do think the overall result, in terms of mask-wearing and social-distancing compliance, would have been better....whether it would have been a 25%, 33%, 50% improvement in terms of cases and deaths, nobody really knows. But I’m sure Dr. Fauci would have been allowed to speak more freely, and the CDC wouldn’t have been handicapped with such a poorly-equipped leadership group. Everyone in the administration would have been modeling the wearing of masks, and the Federal and state efforts wouldn’t have been at cross-purposes, negotiating against each other and even seizing shipments for “their stockpile.” For the last 2-3 weeks, we’ve been putting the preservation of controversial Federal statues over the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. None of the Founding Fathers would possibly have agreed with, neither Jefferson nor Hamilton nor Madison.

“Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.” https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/04/politics/trump-july-fourth-remarks/index.html Trump claimed without evidence during his Saturday remarks that 99% of coronavirus cases "are totally harmless." "Now we have tested almost 40 million people. By so doing, we show cases — 99% of which are totally harmless — results that no other country can show because no other country has testing that we have. Not in terms of the numbers, or in terms of the quality," he said, once again also falsely claiming that rising cases are caused by increased testing. There have been more than 2.8 million cases of coronavirus in the United States and at least 129,000 people in the United States have died, according to Johns Hopkins University's latest tally. Some people who become ill have only mild symptoms, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 35% of cases are asymptomatic, but even people with mild or no symptoms can spread the virus to others. While the World Health Organization has said the global fatality rate is likely less than 1%, the WHO also said about 20% of all people who are diagnosed with coronavirus are sick enough to need oxygen or hospital care.

The mayors are at least in some places like Savannah giving the police masks to distribute so the only fine they face is refusing to put even a free one on. In China, automatic fine or even jail. They don’t bother being bossy, you either do or don’t. And those same tough/macho male governors in AZ, TX, Georgia and Florida now have to be twice as “bossy” to get anyone to pay attention the second time around. How do you think that will go over? This isn’t like seat belts, where the only life you rusk is your own. It’s more like intentionally driving drunk and not expecting to face any consequences, because, freedom. Or smoking a cigarette and blowing it in someone’s face.

By this argument, why maintain statistics or data at all, if everything is subject to manipulation and misinterpretation? Well, throughout the illness, this patient has had the benefit of excellent medical care. This country is home to some of the most creative minds, finest doctors and most experienced public health officials the world over. And they, along with equally talented international researchers, jumped into action, trying to decipher the genetic make-up of the virus, learning how it spreads and how to mitigate that spread, discovering all the ways the disease manifests, figuring out how to treat symptoms and desperately trying to develop a vaccine that will prevent new cases of infection in the future. But after a few short weeks of following doctors' orders, our patient -- our country -- has chosen to turn its back on the advice of these health experts. It didn't like what the doctors were saying and it stopped taking the prescribed medicines because they were unpalatable. Some of the prescriptions, like social distancing and curtailing our daily activities, tasted bad and were hard to swallow. Others, like wearing a face mask, created a bit of physical discomfort and a lot of political friction. And the most aggressive medicine of all, the stay-at-home orders, triggered never-before-seen mass layoffs across many sectors of the economy and the fallout just rippled outward from there. In other words, very real pain. But difficult as it was to put the patient in a medically induced coma with the stay-at-home orders in order to get the infection under control, it appeared to have worked. Dr. Sanjay Gupta cnn.com

Respect Science, Respect Nature, Respect People

The protests over George Floyd started at least 4-6 weeks after the initial assault weapon armed Michigan protests at the capitol. Attendees clustered together in stadium seating in front of a patriotic-themed stage for hours before Trump arrived, and attendees at the top of the amphitheater sat in rows of folding chairs that were tied together with zip ties -- preventing any social distancing. The President mentioned the virus just once, at the very top of his remarks, thanking those working to fight it. A public safety official involved with the event told CNN the zip ties were part of fire code. In case of an emergency, like a fire or a storm or anything that would cause people to quickly move out, the zip ties would ensure that the chairs would not be easily knocked over or fly into egress paths -- moving a full row of chairs, rather than one or two. Information about the event online said there could be health screening for ticketed guests in some areas, though attendees seated in the zip-tied chairs told CNN they had not undergone any such screening. www.cnn.com

The Week America Lost Control of the Pandemic—-Sixteen states have reported record caseloads since Sunday. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/07/week-america-lost-control-pandemic/613831/ What should concern all Americans is that, as more and more states see their outbreaks intensify, the country will lose its ability to understand what is happening. As my colleague Alexis C. Madrigal and I reported this week, some of the country’s major testing providers are backlogged and overwhelmed, and are no longer able to turn around test results as quickly as is epidemiologically useful. Yesterday, Brett Giroir, who coordinates COVID-19 testing in the Trump administration, said: “It is absolutely correct that some labs across the country are reaching or near capacity.” ..... These cases aren’t all mild. At least 37,000 Americans are now hospitalized with COVID-19, the same number as were in sick beds in late May. This number is likely a substantial undercount: Florida, which is facing one of the largest outbreaks, does not report its total hospitalization figures, though it says it will publish that data soon. What data we do have suggest that health-care systems are overwhelmed. In Houston, for instance, the Texas Medical Center has filled 100 percent of its intensive-care-unit beds.

The US, Brazil and others (India/Russia) lifted lockdowns early. These charts show just how deadly that decision was https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/03/health/coronavirus-lockdown-lifting-deadly-charts-intl/index.html

The order is set to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Monday and remain in effect until further notice. States included in the order are: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. Beijing is going to 28 day quarantine periods in selected situations, fwiw.

Prince Andrew