caulfield12

Have they lost their minds? Today...of all days, they decide not to have a Coronavirus press briefing? Really? Maybe’s it is going to take the Supreme Court to shut down the stock market before 25-35% of American industry collapses.

I’ve never been one to shout from the top of the hills about term limits...but I’m getting there. The flip side, of course...is no more FDR’s, either. Leadership/experience is undervalued, until you actually need it. Kind of like government in general, for most. We love to complain about it, but see what happens when it’s not there in times of crisis to rely upon, to provide a sense of comfort and reassurance.

Contagion, Outbreak, etc. I watched The Hot Zone and Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak six episode series as soon as we got quarantined here. Warning: Reading about Ebola and Marburg doesn’t help much, lol.

Stuck watching High Fidelity...I can almost forgive John Cusack being more of a Cubs’ fan.

We have to order from grocery stores (online, Alibaba has their own stores and efficient delivery drivers) and have it delivered to the apartment complex entrance gates. Wife, who is the only one with a mask/protective gear and can communicate well in Chinese (not my strength after 8 years)...has to do that about once a week. Recently, have been able to start getting meat, shrimp, lamb and eat hot pot. Once, we successfully ordered Snickers, M&M’s and Doritos/Lays, but they’re down to basic staples. My essential diet for the past six or seven weeks, it was mostly noodles, dumplings and fried rice. Have gone from 190 to 182 pounds despite no exercise due to fewer snacks and less soda. Your last hopes...just not seeing how it’s going to be possible after that speech I witnessed. They’re going to have to shut down the stock market for two weeks IMO.

Nope, not at all. Officially, we’re still in a high risk zone despite the Xi Jinping victory lap on Tuesday. Wife COULD go back to work next Friday, buses/subways/taxis as early as next week...airport, etc. Schools will probably trail by at least a week or two. The biggest concern now is everyone coming back into the province...our teachers who were “stuck” in Thailand and Vietnam going back to the week of January 20th are probably facing a two week quarantine upon return, so running the school for those two weeks will be chaotic.

This is Week 8 here in China of not leaving the apartment once. Food/restaurant commercials are like torture after about a month. Losing NCAA basketball tournament and MLB are just hard to imagine. Reading, reading, reading. Playing with your children. An endless stream of movies and t.v. shows. Following political season more closely (that might be gone.) Not obsessing over selling and buying stocks/mutual funds, will just do nothing for now...eventually buying when there’s some light at the end of the tunnel (this happened in Week 7, but that meant a TOTAL lockdown here first). Having my Labs around would be comforting, we underestimate the impact pets can have on our daily lives. I think this is going to force both Dems and Republicans to finally deal with both health care, and immigration...in a strange way, it brings life back to Medicare for All (or at least “those who want it”) just days after it was declared dead.

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/coronavirus-its-time-for-mlb-to-suspend-spring-training-delay-the-start-of-season-due-to-covid-19/ People might think it’s fine for nature to correct the course...until it’s their own family, loved ones and friends.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/man-coronavirus-had-flu-aint-never-felt-bad-222431727.html Seems like a pretty common frustrating experience....from comments on this particular story. My 3 year old has had high fevers for 4 days now. We took him to the emergency room and they tested for all flu, and other common coronavirus strains. I took him back to his regular doctor yesterday and asked could he have the covid-19? The doctor said yes he could but they weren't going to test him. They said it's already in the community, it's too late. Now they only test the hospitalized to and only to determine a course of care. I said, but I'm a school teacher, what if I'm exposed and expose others? But they wouldn't budge, wouldn't test him. Meanwhile my little one is still really sick and we have no idea what's going on...

You’d have to move the Daegu team’s home games temporarily...and there’s a cluster in Seoul, but doable. The weird aspect is Japan’s decision on baseball with a similar lack of testing being done there. Seems they’re just completely focused on saving the Olympics at the cost of everything else. They can wait until the last two weeks of May to decide on that. Reports then surfaced that Hoiberg had been taken to a local hospital, and the Husker team was quarantined inside its locker room immediately after the game with no further announcements from the team. Here is a running timeline via Twitter of Hoiberg's status... ***UPDATE: 11:00 PM: Lincoln CBS affiliate KOLN/KGIN reported that a source confirmed to them that Hoiberg had been released from the hospital. ***UPDATE 11:30 PM: Hoiberg's son, Jack Hoiberg, posted on Snapchat that Fred "got cleared before the game to coach and just got released from the hospital with no quarantine. Thank you for the texts and concerns."

Which is why SARs burned out...at least 2x or 10% mortality rate, the fundamental principle for a novel or zoonotic virus is to keep multiplying, not quickly killing off all the hosts like Ebola, Marburg and MERs. Which is also why it’s almost the perfect combination of contagiousness, dormancy of symptoms and debilitation to respiratory tract...not to mention spreading from the nose and droplets instead of lungs.

You can make the opposite argument quite easily. The rate of hospitalization for those under 25 is negligible. Players have been fighting for years and years of training and games to get to this moment. Graduating seniors would never get the opportunity to play again. For the country, as more and more are forced to spend the majority of their time inside, having the distraction of sports as entertainment and escape takes on added significance...it keeps us connected to something bigger than ourselves. I’m not sure I feel exactly the same about the Olympics, because of the spirit of the games bringing fans together from almost 200 countries...friend and foe alike, just can’t be replicated...thinking of those inspirational stories from developing countries like the marathon runner who finishes hours behind but us cheered to the end by his/her fellow competitors for having the courage and persistence to compete for their countries.

Trump's big announcement for keeping the virus at bay -- what he said was a 30-day ban on travel to the US by Europeans and restrictions on cargo -- was immediately engulfed in confusion. The President later rushed to clarify on Twitter that he was stopping travel and not trans-Atlantic trade in goods, and officials said his plan did not apply to Americans or US permanent residents -- though such travelers would face mandatory quarantines. Trump also caused a muddle when he said he had convinced health insurance providers to waive all copayments for coronavirus treatments. A White House official later said the President had meant to say that the copayments would be waived for coronavirus tests -- but would still apply to treatments for the disease. cnn.com

Las Vegas and AC sports books? Fantasy sports commissioners? I’ll go with Carrot Top or Gallagher for B/C-List Celeb. Guess there are still all the NCAA tourney pools, at least for now... If you go back just one week, to imagine Nebraska and the Jazz being quarantined, Hoiberg in hospital, five more teams that have played against Utah in the last ten days to be tested/investigated...the odds of getting hit by lightning or winning the Power Ball would have been much better. Surreal. The only days/situations that rank as more memorable for me are the Reagan assassination attempt, Challenger disaster, 9/11 and Financial Crisis...arguably, Columbine, Princess Diana death, Oklahoma City Bombing wouldn’t be too far behind. OJ chase.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/28887560/nba-suspends-season-further-notice-player-tests-positive-coronavirus

We are using a platform called ClassIn...

https://www.omaha.com/sports/college/huskers/teams/mens-basketball/sick-fred-hoiberg-leaves-bench-before-final-buzzer-huskers-quarantined/article_28a0e05a-16bc-50a4-8a0c-4ecfa71c7ae0.html Team quarantined in locker room. https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/kansas-coach-bill-self-its-sad-as-nations-no-1-team-prepares-for-a-march-madness-without-fans/

The New Rochelle, NY, case was a passing of it to over fifty in a matter of days. Biogen conference in Boston...and all those attendees traveled all over the US. Almost everyone inside of Kirkland assisted living, staff and residents. Heck, ten nursing homes now in Washington state, alone. The record here, btw, was one brain surgery patient infecting 14 doctors/nurses/anesthesiologists. And another problem was the sheer chaos when everyone descended on hospitals waiting to be tested or for results...mixing together with the patients who were already sick but not yet critical/isolated. https://www.yahoo.com/news/think-doesnt-matter-catch-coronavirus-220536065.html Flattening Curve discussion...

The S&P futures are supposed to stop at 5%. The way this is going, we might see 13% breaker during regular trading, but 20% is almost impossible to fathom, which would result in a full stoppage until end of the day. Like trying to catch a falling knife, as they say. The guy on CNBC predicting 35-50% fall...which seemed insane at the time...seems more and more plausible if we end up in a similar situation to Italy, which is an economy of similar size to California.

Market was at roughly 20,000 in January, 2017. About 75% of gains in the last 3+ years gone, poof. Mnuchin, S.Miller and Kushner back to the drawing board. That said, financial crisis was roughly 14000 to 6600 fall.

I have 70-100 students in 4/5 classes per week and it has been getting increasingly worse...yesterday, the delays and echoes and getting logged off and then having to log back on. Nearly all Grade 1 - Graduate School has online classes right now in Wuhan. Even elementary has two hours per day, with three hours of homework that has to be checked and returned to parents each afternoon/evening. Imagine the joys of supervising those younger kids, working, and taking care of elderly parents/grandparents simultaneously. Never seen millions of people so desperate to go “back to work,” lol.

Our biggest problem is the large number of students who can’t return to Australia to start new school years after summer vacation. Two week quarantines, but flights were shut down, so they have to fly to a third country...wait it out...then hope thst country doesn’t end up with restrictions. We’re now five full weeks into online classes. IELTS, SAT (Hong Kong) and TOEFL all cancelled since January. IB, AP, A-Levels/CIE all have their yearly external exams starting the first week of May...and they’ll be lucky to have 3-4 weeks of real class time/revision, assuming we can get back in early April. Many gap year or repeats possible. 40% of our teachers are still stuck or trapped in UK, Thailand, Vietnam, US...facing the likelihood of their own two week quarantines upon return to China. Looks like flights into Wuhan could resume on March 28th/29th. Public transportation and most workers back next Friday, the 20th. They will have been working from home/online for almost 2 months. I’m sure the government will have mandatory weekend makeup days for the rest of the year...shorter holidays...even though my wife has been averaging 10-12 hours per day, no weekends off, she even got a text message from her boss at 2 a.m. last night.

Except there was MUCH more compelling advance warning in this case... If you go back and watch Inside Job, there were definitely a few prominent canaries in the coal mine in the banking, finance and regulatory fields in 2006-07...but this has been a blaring headline in the world media since the middle of January. Assuming that closing off travel between the two countries would suffice to contain it...and now simply reacting, instead of taking a more serious/measure proactive response when we had 4-6 weeks to get out ahead of this, not much that can be done about it now. Additionally, we probably don’t have too many NATO allies singing our praises tonight. More like the Reverse or Anti-Marshall Plan.

In China, they were threatening the death penalty or at least 20-30 years in jail for having the virus and intentionally spitting at or coughing on someone. Basically, attempted murder or at least manslaughter. It happened on a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Pudong/Shanghai this past Friday, where a Chinese passenger flipped out and starting coughing on flight attendants just to get off the plane after being stuck waiting to deplane for seven hours. Right behind Gobert is Congressman Gaetz from FL, wearing the gas mask into the House to make light of the “hysteria.” That’s not aging well, especially if he tests positive and has spread it to the President and other Cabinet members while on Air Force One.

You can keep pitchers in extended spring trying to simulate ramping up of workloads...but not sure for how long. Otherwise, you’re going to see the same results as those free agents waiting until midseason to sign, which has been historically pretty abysmal. Then you have service time issues, contract incentives based on 162 game seasons... All that said, containing the spread has to take precedence...but mitigation is more correct, because it’s hard to imagine testing catching up with the rapid spread at this point in time.