caulfield12

Hope someone sees the irony of Guatemalans being attacked in their native country for having returned from the the US, which experienced roughly 1,400ish more Covid-19 deaths than any country in the world yesterday. Not exactly a safe haven. They might need to eventually block the border on the Mexican side to prevent immigrants from Texas, AZ, NM and California from fleeing south like in that incomparable CGI movie, 2012. Guatemala President Alejandro Giammattei denounced several reported attacks on people returning to Guatemala from overseas, particularly those arriving from the United States. During a government news conference Sunday, Giammattei asked Guatemalans to treat these people not as "criminals" but rather as "brothers." Giammattei mentioned a case reported on Saturday, in the municipality of Santa Catarina Palopó, where people "tried to attack the mayor, his family and a person who had returned to his home." The person who returned from abroad had attained the proper paperwork demonstrating they had tested negative for coronavirus and had followed all necessary quarantine measures, Giammattei said. cnn.com Blomberg said the protesters' demands are shortsighted because the virus is still spreading unabated. "If you're in a hospital bed, you're not making any money anyway. In fact, you're putting yourself in further debt," Blomberg told CNN. "If you're dead, it doesn't matter anyway -- you're not going to be able to provide for your family. You're going to have your medical bills, your funeral costs, you're going to be leaving that for them on top of it all."

I’ve had great “ratings” my whole life, there’s nothing unusual about that for me. The White House News Conference ratings are “through the roof”(Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale , @nytimes) but I don’t care about that. I care about going around the Fake News to the PEOPLE! It is amazing that I became President of the United States with such a totally corrupt and dishonest Lamestream Media going after me all day, and all night. Either I’m really good, far better than the Fake News wants to admit, or they don’t have nearly the power as once thought! 96% Approval Rating in the Republican Party. Thank you! This must also mean that, most importantly, we are doing a good (great) job in the handling of the Pandemic. It’s nice to know he has nothing better to do than watch Morning Joe at 6 a.m. and vent on Twitter. Congratulating yourself when there’s a 9/11, Pearl Harbor or Civil War battle’s worth of American deaths sticking out daily, like a sore thumb in the midst of our previously shared sacrifice. I’m starting to think Governor Kemp might be even more oblivious to the steadily rising numbers in his own state and a frightening cluster in Albany, not to mention not even consulting with the Atlanta and Savannah mayors. To even think of putting a reality t.v. show like The Bachelor in the same sentence with the worst global crisis in 75 years pretty much says it all. Despite those approval numbers (not sure where they came from, probably Fox News), 59% of Republicans also argue that opening up the country before mid-May in most states is premature. But, hey, at least we’re stopping all those violence-prone Mexicans and Central Americans from bringing that invisible plague into our great country! Our new press secretary already making us proud!

“I don’t give a damn about politics now," (Brian) Kemp said. The (Georgia) governor said he was concerned about residents "going broke worried about whether they can feed their children and make the mortgage payment.” latimes.com There’s one obvious problem here. How many of these families are going to be able to survive at even 40-60% of previous business capacity? There aren’t many that instantaneously leap to mind. Definitely not restaurants. Gun shops, I guess. Home repair/improvement stores. Even in the South, there’s going to be at least 40-50% who won’t be going out to movies, theatres and shopping malls. There’s X amount of cost involved in reopening...plus, you’re putting employees at risk or in uncomfortable positions choosing between job, health, family, unemployment benefits. It’s fine for small family-owned businesses if they want to risk their lives, or sole/single proprietorships. What will be next? Protesting their neighbors who aren’t confident enough to go out and spend? If it was really that safe, the President or VP should confidently be able to attend a public grand opening if he believes so strongly in his convictions. The fact of the matter is there are still 1500-2000 deaths per day nationally. Which, for obvious reasons, the administration doesn’t want to talk about except in vague or generic terms, afraid to put a human face on all the suffering. We’re not anywhere close to 100 or less deaths per day nationally...and most scientists’ recommendations were for under 50 or 60 in the entire country to consider opening up everywhere. We had 3 deaths in 14 days before Wuhan was reopened, and that was at 30% (only essential workers back) the last 3+ weeks. It won’t be until this Monday (April 27th) that the majority of workers are back. That’s THREE full months. Not just 4-5 weeks, or even 6. This whole thing isn’t halfway over...remember, the Wuhan virus was concentrated in ONE province about 1/3rd the size of California. The US is dealing with significant problems in 30-35 states...and those other 15-20 are likely to flare up or are simply being under tested or not tested at all due to lack of access to test kits, swabs and chemical reagents.

If Facebook starts blocking all posts referencing protests against social distancing or government guidelines, there will be another Civil War...it’s only going to serve to bring more attention to these fringe groups. And now Georgia is pretty much opening up a large part of the state on Friday. Opening hair salons and body artist/tattoo parlors? Gyms and bowling alleys? Massage therapists? How do those places maintain social distancing? WHAT? They’re nowhere near meeting Trump’s own guidelines...”my rights are not from the government!” said one protestor’s sign. Theatres and restaurants in Georgia on April 27th....this Monday. Of course, this is the same governor (Kemp) who three weeks ago admitted he just learned that there was such a thing as asymptomatic transmission. South Carolina is opening up retail stores tonight at 20% capacity TONIGHT. In order to get the same number of NYC flu deaths as they’re currently experiencing, EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the entire city would need to have the flu to get the same number of deaths. But you know things are bad when former Bush WH medical officers are saying “it’s a dereliction of duty” and “reckless” for Georgia, S.C., Texas, Florida and Tennessee to open up. PS: Starting a public war with the head of the Republican governors, Larry Hogan of MD...who had to go out of his way to secure 500,000 tests/PPE supplies from South Korea THIS WEEK because the Federal government can’t help...simply won’t end well. His current approval ratings almost double Trump’s. Even Ricketts (NE) and Noem (SD) are complaining about a lack of supplies (reagents and swabs) to actually read the tests, but we should congratulate the government for getting kits out there? DeWine, Baker and the Indiana governor joined with Democratic governor coalitions...

On the positive side, they don’t have an MLB franchise. But the South shall rise again! Kentucky, Maryland, West Virginia are becoming true border states once again. If it wasn’t for those pesky voters in VA and NC, Jefferson Davis’ entire Confederacy would be back in the game 150+ years later. (And John Danks/country music might need to temporarily relocate. Btw, which SoxTalk poster was jokingly threatening to move to Nashville a couple of years ago if the Sox continued to struggle?)

Otoh, we’re also 7-10 days away from having DOUBLE the number of deaths as the #2 country in the world, likely to still be Italy at that time. Now we can easily compare the populations of the US, Italy and Spain and look at this on a per capita basis...but the argument currently being made for “best testing” can certainly be turned on its head for far and away the highest death count (and potentially still climbing back up again, especially with recent developments.) Even bringing it up as a reporter might be declared unpatriotic in a week or two as pressure continues to mount on the economy (and re-election odds) as we enter the first two weeks of May. It’s also not a terribly convincing (or empathetic) approach to “spin” death rates in the most positive fashion...for now, it seems to be the one topic that’s just being conveniently brushed aside with all the political diversionary tactics.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/20/politics/wild-west-masks-thermometers-tests/index.html Lost in all this is how will businesses gear up for reopening without many of these same essential supplies everyone in the world is pursuing at precisely the same moment. On the hospital side, seems the blowback on PPE shortages in the UK with the NHS overpromising and underdelivering is even worse than in the US. Hospitals now taking the position they don’t want to hear anything about supplies until they’re actually delivered and in hand. Also, simply can’t wait for Trump to spin how abundant cheap gas is such an amazing/wonderful/beautiful thing for those budding Patrick Henry’s of state liberty out and about...

One of the arguments banks are making is this “preferred customer comes first” one. Which is only going to result in the biggest, most well capitalized small and medium-sized enterprises receiving assistance and surviving this. Surely, there will be some rare exceptions along the way...likely because they had some preexisting connections with bank execs. Its almost reminiscent of an IPO, except the public offering is America, Inc., and that means the average middle income investor is going to be totally shut out, late to a party he never knew he hadn’t even been invited to. Unfortunately, we’re turning a whole generation of risk-taking entrepreneurs into Instacart/Uber drivers who struggle to put 2-3 side jobs together to eke out a living, pay for health insurance, house payments and have enough left over to provide a better life for their families. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/howard-schultz-on-wealth-inequality-and-small-business-133143460.html Small business loan program should start with a T as in Trillion.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-adviser-kudlow-wife-loan-business-coronavirus-relief-program-easy-2020-4 This is the world we live in now. Shake Shack got $10 million and gave it back so “real” small businesses would have an opportunity. Kudos to them, at least. Meanwhile, Larry Kudlow’s wife was supposedly approved for a significant loan for her home-based art business. How is she even allowed to apply? And how is the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors only worth $2 million? Not buying that for a second.

In Indianapolis, protester Andy Lyons said he understands the health risks. But he wants the government to back off. "If I get sick, then I am going to bear the consequences of my getting sick," Lyons told CNN affiliate WTHR. "If anybody else gets sick, they bear the consequences of their free choice without government coercion to do so. That's what this is about." cnn.com https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/harvard-richest-9-million-cares-aid-033517131.html Roughly $45 million to Ivy League schools through CARES? WTH??? $41 billion endowment...

You can choose whether you get a flu shot or not, just as you can choose whether to drive a car, buy a gun or get on an airplane. Whether to wear a seatbelt or not. The likelihood of someone dying from this is magnitudes higher than for a person over 60 to make any of those five choices. At least with the flu, there’s a shot. While there’s certainly risk from drunk or reckless drivers or texting while driving, we consider these acceptable risks as members of society. The various rights and freedoms of everyday life in America, a series of tradeoffs. The question is when the risk to others starts to outweigh the benefits any one individual receives or enjoys. It’s one of the reasons that the social acceptance of smoking has decreased dramatically over the last fifty years in the US, right? “If the (Wuhan) citizen goes to the supermarket or takes a car to go shopping, and there is a person in the supermarket or car you come into contact with who has a fever or cough, the green QR ( mobile phone app) code will turn to yellow. If that person is diagnosed as a new case, the citizen must go to the designated place for isolation/quarantine for 14 days, and the total cost of the inspection, blood sampling, CT, accommodation, living expenses, etc., during this period is $1,143 and borne by the citizen himself. If the test is positive, the treatment fee of $60,000 shall be borne by the citizen themselves.” I don’t think you would see many protests with that particular policy in place in the US. It should be noted that up until the end of March (the 24th), the government paid all the costs for test/treatment.

Leaving the US is probably the last thing you want to think about right now, but there are lots of opportunities for someone with a PhD to teach in places like Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, HK, Japan, etc. You might lose about 2-4 weeks of holiday compared to a typical university schedule...and the "travel opportunities" are not nearly so enticing as they were a decade or so ago, for obvious reasons. It seems your degree is pretty highly specialized, if I remember correctly...but there might be a fit with a specific IB, A-Levels (A2 or seniors) or AP class. Assuming your salary is in the $60-75,000ish range, you might take a slight pay cut, but most teaching positions abroad carry very solid health insurance (ours here in Wuhan is probably going to need to be readjusted before we go back to work because it would only max out at $7,000 USD if any of us were to contract COVID-19, the government had previously been covering everyone inside the borders before it got so politicized.) Teachers wanting to make even more money can set up additional private lessons on the side, or contract with a private training center for a group or individual lessons in a specific subject area. (Can't honestly recommend China right now because of the anti-immigrant trend and the fact there's a current flight ban on entering the country.)

Right now, all production of the new “DT” generation of the Ram 1500 takes place in Sterling Heights, Michigan, while the older heavy-duty Ram trucks are built in Saltillo, Mexico. PPE highly likely made in China, unless 3M. With the exception of brands like American Apparel, most t-shirt mills do most– if not all– of their manufacturing outside of the United States. Maybe they can carry along pillows from that My Pillow guy next...he’ll probably be named new head of the SBA the way things are going. Oh, well.

Charlottesville Part Deux Trump responded: “I’ve seen the people. I’ve seen interviews of the people. These are great people.” He added that they have cabin fever and they want their lives back. “Their life was taken away from them,” he said. “These people love our country, they want to get back to work.” CNN.com https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/us-coronavirus-outbreak-out-control-test-positivity-rate/610132/ A New Statistic Reveals Why America’s COVID-19 Numbers Are Flat Few figures tell you anything useful about how the coronavirus has spread through the U.S. Here’s one that does. The test-positivity rate, then, is a decent (if unusual) proxy for the severity of an outbreak in an area. And it shows clearly that the U.S. still lags far behind other countries in the course of fighting its outbreak. South Korea—which discovered its first coronavirus case on the same day as the U.S.—has tested more than half a million people, or about 1 percent of its population, and discovered about 10,500 cases. The U.S. has now tested 3.2 million people, which is also about 1 percent of its population, but it has found more than 630,000 cases. So while the U.S. has a 20 percent positivity rate, South Korea’s is only about 2 percent—a full order of magnitude smaller. South Korea is not alone in bringing its positivity rate down: America’s figure dwarfs that of almost every other developed country. Canada, Germany and Denmark have positivity rates from 6 to 8 percent. Australia and New Zealand have 2 percent positivity rates. Even Italy—which faced one of the world’s most ravaging outbreaks—has a 15 percent rate. It has found nearly 160,000 cases and conducted more than a million tests. Virtually the only wealthy country with a larger positivity rate than the U.S. is the United Kingdom, where more than 30 percent of people tested for the virus have been positive.

Someone in the press corps brought up Nazi flags as well. Saying “we’re not even going to have a country left” because Joe Biden will bow down or cave in to China, North Korea, Iran, Mexico and Canada hardly seems relevant to a health care-related briefing.

What do you propose? Just throw out the entire last month’s shared national sacrifice and roll the dice? If we do it state by state, every single border is going to be blocked off from ones that are wide open. Why should those who are sacrificing pay the consequences for 5-10% who refuse to follow the guidelines? Why should those who foolishly went to Spring Break and are already recovered get the benefit of going back to work the earliest if they theoretically pass Covid or antibody tests? Why should the nursing home residents in Florida be exposed to illness because of the Six Degrees of Separation from beachgoers this weekend...likely passing it on to one of their caregivers inadvertently? If we had cell phone GPS tracking, this would be simple. People would be warned they wouldn’t receive any financial support from their insurance company or the government if it was determined they got sick from going to a location they couldn’t explain away as essential...other than the grocery story or required reporting to work (by government order.) Of course, hard to prove where it came from without contract tracing. They would just argue it was from the grocery store or drug store/pharmacy, right? Back to that solution which means surrendering privacy rights and giving up personal data to corporations and the government...to track everywhere you go, and you would have to explain all trips away from the house and justify your behavior in order to be treated in the hospital. So that would be fair...right? Of course all those people out protesting would protest THAT as well, right? If they do elect to take those risks, why should others have to pay the consequences for following guidelines? It’s no different than those idiots who try to cut to the front when there’s a merge due to highway construction with signs pointing this out miles ahead.

Sounds like something Nigel Farage came up with just to block Huawei 5G partial rollout in the UK...especially after Boris Johnson got so sick. The sad point is that this business would likely go to Ericsson or Nokia, as the US is not competitive (Cisco and Oracle get a small chunk). Current # of contact tracers: 2000 Total amount needed in the US: 100-250,000

Pretty soon the argument will be there shouldn’t have ever been a shutdown at all. Of course, Trump’s #1 indicator is the stock market and no deaths/cases/testing. Can’t imagine his reaction if the DJIA was down in the 15-18,000 range. But it’s just incredible to me that these same people arguing that hundreds of thousands if not millions died here in China...that it was unintentionally or purposefully released from the Wuhan virology lab to take the focus off Hong Kong protests and Xinjiang concentration camps or take market share away from the US...yet they still think it’s perfectly okay to completely ignore social distancing. This is after just one full month of social distancing...compared to three full months here. Now reports that 12,000+ Covid tests in Washington state are contaminated... Whatever happened to that Abbott device that President Trump displayed upside down (yet is perhaps the most popular innovation so far)...is Abbott struggling to bring it up to scale, or too many of them are going to private labs for higher profit margins? Whatever happened to hydroxychloroquinine?

Chicago Covid-19 death toll passes city’s 2019 homicide numbers in a span of weeks...286/1290 statewide related to nursing homes. More than 100,000 people defied Bangladesh's lockdown order on Saturday to attend the funeral of a senior leader of the Islamist party in the district of Brahmanbaria, according to the prime minister's special assistant, Shah Ali Farhad, and the Brahmanbaria police spokesperson Imtiaz Ahmed. The funeral for Maulana Zubayer Ahmad Ansari, an Islamic teacher, broke the country's ban of no more than five people attending prayers at one time, sparking fears of a new coronavirus outbreak emerging from the event. cnn.com

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-air-force-academy-commencement-politically-correct_n_5e9b7f91c5b664cb6c43d9fd He can’t even get the distancing amount right. CDC recommends six feet. AFA commencement used eight as the guide. Trump claimed it was ten feet. I guess that’s closer than the difference between millions and billions, so progress...

Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/influential-covid-19-model-uses-flawed-methods-shouldnt-guide-policies-critics-say/ “It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Others experts, including some colleagues of the model-makers, are even harsher. “That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool,” said epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, who has served on a search committee for IHME. “That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.”

It would take 73 consecutive days testing at 450,000/day to reach the 10% of population level most experts are recommending. Three times the amount we are currently capable of. And that’s not even going to be 10%, because many of those will be positive tests that need to be retested multiple times until it clears...not to mention the potentially reinfected, false positives/inconclusives, etc. The former director of the CDC, Dr. Tom Frieden, is arguing it needs to be 10-20x that. Which would amount to 1.5 - 3 million tests per day. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html Harvard is arguing 350,000 per day, compared to the present 150,000. Btw, it’s starting to look like the Civil War Era all over again. Florida, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina among the first to make plans to reopen, West Virginia, Arkansas and Georgia next?

They’re going to need a lot more than 450-500,000 tests performed per day (a 3X increase in current levels)...because all of these people now venturing out and about are just going to serve to increase that number of potentially infected or exhibiting symptoms. Amazon might be the only company in the world with the capacity to create an adequate and sustainable testing regimen for their own employees...of course, the irony is that a W-shaped instead of a V or even U insures even more profits for Bezos, the Walton Family, etc. Above and beyond that, you have all these cities like NYC being denied revenue for businesses as well as incoming tax receipts. How can there be a reopening when many of these cities are going to be technically bankrupted by coronavirus and can longer provide essential services? Obviously, they can double or triple taxes upon reopening to make up budget shortfalls, but that will just create more deflationary pressure...which leads to discussions of drawing down from pension funds that have already taken a 15-20% hit...and inevitably to cuts in Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. Of course, none of these will be considered until January, 2021. If they don’t help the cities and hospitals when interest rates are so low, they will regret it. Austerity policies are only going to hurt the middle class and poor, small business owners, those on fixed incomes. The Top 10% will be just fine. They will be making loans that lead to further indebtedness, buying up distressed properties and adding to their investment portfolio while others are forced to sell in order just to make ends meet. Tale as old as time.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/18/politics/cdc-coronavirus-testing-contamination/index.html Starting to get the full picture on early CDC testing failures.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/coronavirus-donald-trump-and-the-wizard-of-oz-presidency.html There’s a concept in economics known as diminishing marginal utility. What seems like a potential advantage (nearly unlimited and free airtime) will not look the same way to the American people six to eight weeks from now if they still have inadequate testing, no job, a return to stay at home policies...unemployment benefits not arriving or facing the spectre of them soon running out. Presidential elections are almost always decided on the economy...with the only exception being not wanting to change presidents during wartime. That said, by ceding all the responsibility and decision-making authority, he’s acting like the opposite of FDR. He wants the same fireside chats, but this time as an open platform to malign and disparage his political enemies instead of attempting to unify and comfort the country. Sooner or later...people in his base will start to wonder why he’s more concerned about ratings than doing something to improve and/or safeguard their lives. Great American presidents have never run in the opposite direction during challenging times. Lincoln never paused before Gettysburg when times looked particularly bleak for the Union and said let’s call this whole thing off, I am not at all responsible for the Civil War, let the individual states decide these issues amongst themselves. Instead of fighting for all the people, the reality is it’s turning out to be none of the people when your primary audience continues to be only 38-46% of Americans. Divided against each other we shall fall.