caulfield12

https://theathletic.com/1698008/2020/03/25/how-mlb-can-get-creative-experiment-and-make-the-most-of-a-delayed-season/?source=dailyemail Excellent ideas...including starting season with ASG, more seven inning doubleheaders, minor league extra inning rules, 30 team or expanded sudden death playoff format, playing into Nov and Dec at only warm weather or domed stadiums. Can’t forfeit year to NBA playoffs and get squeezed by NFL/NCAA fb.

The Department of Homeland Security stopped updating its annual models of the havoc that pandemics would wreak on America’s critical infrastructure in 2017, according to current and former DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter. From at least 2005 to 2017, an office inside DHS, in tandem with analysts and supercomputers at several national laboratories, produced detailed analyses of what would happen to everything from transportation systems to hospitals if a pandemic hit the United States. But the work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impact the COVID-19 outbreak is having on vast swaths of the U.S. economy. Officials at other agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to find quickly. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/24/dhs-pandemic-coronavirus-146884

Gov. Cuomo is no nonsense, and he's a bit of a control freak and anal, but my god, we really need governors to coldly and rationally look at things from a data-driven standpoint and attack this problem in a logical/rational and non-partisan fashion. He's taking responsibility, even to the point of saying he will go out across the country after New York peaks and assist other communities...like Atlanta, Florida, New Orleans, Louisiana, Illinois, etc., that may be peaking first. Has an exact number for every single category of needs, whether staffing or PPE or respirators. Is considering the mental/psychological health side as being an area that's being potentially overlooked and needs to be reinforced. Calling for volunteers has gotten 45,000+ in the last week, either psychologists, nurses or doctors. If we can stop blaming the other side, other countries....and just concentrate and actually addressing the problems and developing creative solutions...for the first time in this crisis, I got the sense that there actually will be a light at the end of the tunnel. It might not be Congress...but it certainly can be the people living in these affected communities who know those needs better than anyone else looking at the "big picture" of country-wide morale from the distorted lens of Washington, D.C. Have also seen these same traits in the likes of Charlie Baker, Governor Hogan in Maryland, DeWine in Ohio, Inslee in Washington...interestingly enough, they're all "moderates/centrists" and not occupying the political extremes of the left and right (maybe Inslee is the furthest on climate change issues.) Last election, Kasich stood out on the GOP side.

Unless they end up taking equity positions in companies or buying bonds of corporations that eventually fail...

The National Football League is closing all its team facilities starting later today due to the coronavirus pandemic. In a memo sent to teams Tuesday night, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell detailed league-wide guidelines "to ensure that all clubs operate on a level playing field, and that the NFL continues to conduct itself in a responsible way at this time." The league set guidelines, according to the memo, that all teams' facilities will remain closed starting today at 6 p.m. local time to all personnel, except the following: source CNN.com

Gardner? Similar to Wang plan?

There's still time to stop the United States from becoming the next epicenter of the novel coronavirus pandemic, a World Health Organization spokeswoman told CNN on Wednesday. "The potential is there, but you've still got time to turn it around," WHO's Margaret Harris said. Though the number of cases and deaths continues to grow in the country, it's possible to reverse the trajectory, she said. "You've got the best public health brains in the world," Harris said. "You've got people who can harness technology brilliantly. You've got people who can really think out of the box." The formula for success is testing people, finding each case, identifying people who have come into contact with those who have been infected, isolating those who are ill or who have been exposed and quarantining, she said. "Finally, getting the people who are ill to treatment -- and when you do that, really, really protect your health workers," she said. Harris previously said that the US had the potential to be the next epicenter based on the "very large acceleration" in its number of cases. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/health/coronavirus-state-actions-wednesday/index.html Still back to basics of what we should have been contemplating the last week of January or first week of February....instead of six or seven weeks later, reactively.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/why-trump-to-restart-the-economy-in-april-is-being-derided-as-totally-nuts-190129407.html Good virus heat map of the entire country by counties... ?Medical staff in the national capital New Delhi say they have been ostracized and discriminated against by their communities due to fears that they may be infected after working with coronavirus patients. Some doctors have even reported being evicted, or facing threats that their electricity will be cut off. "Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers involved in Covid care are being asked to vacate their rented homes and some have been even forcefully evicted from their temporary residence by landlords and house-owners due to the fear that those healthcare professionals make them susceptible to coronavirus infection," said a letter from the Resident Doctors' Association of New Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, sent on Tuesday to Union Home Minister Amit Shah. "Many doctors are now stranded on the roads with all their luggage, nowhere to go, across the country," said the letter, which urged Shah to take action to protect the embattled medical workers. www.cnn.com

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3076789/thousands-covert-coronavirus-cases-go-under-radar-wuhan-chinese

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/opinions/germany-low-death-rate-for-coronavirus-sepkowitz/index.html Why is Germany doing so much better? Early testing and, lots of nurses.

Kasich, Hogan, DeWine and Baker might be it.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ Sure, anyone can argue anything, because NOBODY knows due to under-testing. This Stanford epidemiologist was just on CNN arguing based on information from a cruise ship and Iceland statistics (just one death!) that it was THEORETICALLY the same or even LESS dangerous than the common flu virus. He wants reliable data before making economy-shifting decisions, but it’s already way too late to use manpower for contact tracing and community surveillance. They need 30,000 respirators and ventilators in NYC over the next month. Without them, doctors will be making “hand of God” decisions (see Italy/Spain) on an hourly basis about who should live and die. China can’t get them to the US before May. Too late. They’ve come up with under 1,000 today. As they bid for them against other states and localities (capitalism!), it bids up the cost to taxpayers who will eventually foot the bill. They simply need to allocate all available resources to NYC...deal with the crisis there, then quickly move equipment and fully experienced (with COVID-19) staff all across the country as new trouble spots like Illinois, Louisiana, Washington and California flare up. That’s the only path that makes sense. GM, GE, Ford, Tesla and 3M can’t get it done that quickly. It would have required converting the factories 6-8 weeks ago to meet present and future demands. PS: Spain is reduced to transforming garbage bags into PPE and calling in NATO. So many bodies are piling up that nobody has the protective equipment to deal with them...so they all are being diverted to a massive ice skating arena.

QE, Fed purchases...lending power/backstop of the Fed, Treasury notes, etc. Once upon a time, spending $1 trillion was considered a clear threat to future generations of Americans. Now the pendulum has swung so far the other direction. The other $4 trillion will allow the Federal Reserve to make huge emergency bailouts to whatever entity it chooses — a measure that was used to prop-up Wall Street firms from collapse during the 2008 financial crisis.

Perfect FA acquisition target. Fits timeline, lowered cost/risk, expertise in organization dealing with numerous TJ recoveries...

You’re not calculating the mortality rate, though, from total cases. You have to compare to recovered to get the most accurate picture of the real situation on the ground. Trying to recall any president from Nixon until today who attempted to take credit publicly positive swings in the stock market.... President Trump said that a “big part” of the stock market and the Dow’s surge today was due to his work to get the country “open as soon possible” as well as the potential deal reached on the Hill. “This is very encouraging and I think part of the reason is looking what is close to being passed and I think a very big part of it is they see that we want to get our country open as soon as possible. They see we’re working very hard on that. That’s a very big factor I think in today’s historic gain,” Trump told reporters in the briefing room on Tuesday. cnn.com

The seemingly improving or cresting situation in Italy took another turn for the worse. Already at double China in roughly 1/3rd the amount of time. https://www.yahoo.com/news/italian-coronavirus-cases-likely-10-103516089.html ROME (Reuters) - Fatalities in Italy from coronavirus have surged in the last 24 hours, the Civil Protection Agency said on Tuesday, dashing hopes the epidemic in the world's worst hit country was easing after more encouraging numbers in the previous two days. The death toll rose by 743 on Tuesday, the second highest daily tally since the outbreak emerged in northern regions on Feb. 21, and up steeply from the 602 recorded on Monday. Italy has seen more fatalities than any other country, with latest figures showing that 6,820 people have died from the infection in barely a month. The total number of confirmed cases hit 69,176 on Tuesday, but with Italy testing only people with severe symptoms, the head of the Civil Protection Agency said the true number of infected people was probably 10 times higher.

Watch out, you’ll get Fauci’ed!!! But Morgan Stanley is warning that there are real risks to that strategy. "If the White House were to relax the social distancing measures 'soon,' well ahead of the necessary timeline to have a significant impact on our view, it would raise the risk of increasing the peak or delaying the time to peak," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a report Tuesday. In other words, rather than flattening the curve, the government would be making it worse. If anything, the Wall Street firm is growing more concerned about the coronavirus outlook in the United States, which now has more than 50,000 confirmed cases. "High positive testing rates and mixed lock down measures raise [the] risk that our base case forecast may be optimistic," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote. I forgot to mention in an earlier post about potential trouble areas...ICE detainees and prisons, in general. Had sime really bad clusters in a women’s prison here in China, and we only hear 10-15% of what’s actually going on, so probably far worse in actuality.

20 min ago More than 13% of Spanish coronavirus cases are health care workers From CNN's Lindsay Isaac Medical workers in Spain account for 13.6% of its total coronavirus cases, according to Fernando Simón, director of the Spanish Coordinating Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies at Spain’s Ministry of Health. Health care workers account for 5,400 of the country’s 39,673 total cases, he said on Tuesday.

Okay, thank god the #2 in command isn’t in charge, then.

62 million. Like shutting down all of California or Italy for eleven full weeks. And there’s still a growing concern with roughly one million migrant workers finally leaving the province (they were trapped and now in massive debt after going so long without income, and no bailout checks ) and eventually city for their factory/manufacturing jobs in other areas of the country. One local case in Hubei and only “imported” cases across the country....nobody believes it. There were supposedly ten new Covid cases at Xiehe Hospital today, not very far from where I live.

Texas is probably going to end up with something similar...based on comments from Gov. Abbott and especially the Lt. Governor. Wonder if GOP governors and states are indemnified when this massive gamble goes south?

Even then, everywhere between the coasts but perhaps Illinois...without 43% of the country, you’re not going to be able to get the economy humming along like it needs to. You still have huge issues with energy industry there in Texas, hotels, airlines (opening up more flights just spreads it to the middle of the country)...the biggest area is the restaurant industry, with so many jobs interconnected. If you can invest into delivery and carry out systems that are safe but ultimately prevent 2/3 or 3/4 restaurants from shutting down permanently, you have to at least look at that.

Dr. Fauci sidelined again. SIGH. Here’s the thing. Even with 400 respirators here from stockpiles, Musk contributing around 1000 to California....they’re tens of thousands from having enough for NYC. Which is 30,000 more that are needed to save lives. Not needed in May or six weeks from now, critical to survival 2-3 weeks from now. We’re supposed to be the greatest country on earth and we’re relegated to experimenting with split respirators and ventilators to take care of two patients simultaneously. Analogies to car accidents or flu deaths are completely beside the point. Gov. Cuomo had it right, channeling his father’s immigrant roots. That’s not who we are as a country...to just accept 1-2% of our fellow Americans dying, not without fighting until the very end to save each and every life. They’re not just numbers on an actuarial table.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-recession-to-hit-over-24-million-workers-hardest-study-151816474.html Fifteen biggest markets/areas to be hit by coronavirus job losses or displacement. Entertainment/tourism and energy hugh on the list.

Let’s just pass a new law to set the DJIA back to 29,600. Or, better yet, 30,000. Problem solved!!!