caulfield12

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

It’s basically the same thing in baseball, with 30-something free agents (except for pitchers, especially lefties) getting pushed out of the game 3-5 years earlier than they used to. Or radical shifting and endless pitching changes...but just because the game is more purely efficient in terms of statistical outcomes, the product quality has actually decreased markedly. Leaving aside the world of sports, where are the incentives in this type of system for investing in design, innovation and creativity? Simply extracting the most value out of any transaction gives you an entire world of Wal-Marts and Amazons that function as near-monopolies and serve to stifle competition. In this type of environment, the bottom 80% of a society will cease to thrive. As more money shifts from the hands of the labor class, who are going to the markets and reliable buyers of the future? Eventually, you end up with a world where the opposite trends take hold, where competition is largely eliminated and producers, not consumers, set prices. And only a certain number of people can pay for products and services that used to be affordable to the majority. That’s where even completely decoupling from China, how are you going to limit production costs of the future? You’re looking at an almost completely automated society driven by AI and almost completely invulnerable to a health care crisis. No more driving careers as autonomous vehicles take over. No more assembly line workers. Almost no more blue collar workers left at all, except for certain niche areas that are more dependent on art/creative skills. It’s a wonderful future for those value added profit extractors who work in fields like a actuarial science and aren’t themselves wiped out by apps and algorithms, but doesn’t bode well for the rest of society. The entire developing world is pretty much going to be consigned to a perpetual gerbil wheel existence, frozen between 3rd world and 1st status.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week ordered bars in the state to reclose. But that's not stopping the owner of a bar in Odessa from welcoming customers during the July 4 holiday weekend. "The government has no business telling us how to deal with our health. That's what we're here for," Gabrielle Ellison, owner of Big Daddy Zane's, told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on Wednesday. Several bar owners in the state, including Ellison, are suing Abbott after he ordered bars to reclose June 26 as the state's number of Covid-19 cases skyrocketed. Ellison's customers "also have their rights," she said. "I'm not going to take theirs away from them like mine are being taken away right now." In the lawsuit, the bar owners claim the order violates the state's constitution by depriving them of their "liberty or freedom to operate their businesses." They also say the Governor is picking "winners and losers" by allowing hair salons and other businesses to remain open. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/us/texas-bar-owner-big-daddy-zanes-interview/index.html

Apparently you haven’t been paying attention to what has happened to the state of Wisconsin the last twenty years...or let’s just make it forty. It’s not a “both sides” issue. Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan might line up with very similar views on foreign trade and US jobs leaving the country, but their core belief systems about the actual intrinsic VALUE of American labor are quite different. If approached in a completely centrist/non-partisan fashion (3rd party or reform movement)...the position tends to be basically a neutral one. All evidence indicates it’s (support of unions or radical restructuring of the economy) going to be led by that generation of those under 30 or 35 starting to pull back to the left again due to two devastating financial crises in their lifetimes. 52% of Americans approved of labor unions, unchanged from 2010. 78% of Democrats approved of labor unions, up from 71% in 2010. 52% of Independents approved of labor unions, up from 49% in 2010. 26% of Republicans approved of labor unions, down from 34% in 2010. wikipedia.com Imo, the GOP has simply done a much better job of consistent messaging on issues like labor unions and welfare/social programs, and for a LONG time. As labor union membership has eroded by roughly 50% or more, the Democratic Party was then left with a conundrum that would reverberate from NAFTA/GATT/China WTO in the 90’s all the way to the 2016 election. The decision was made to fight for money from Wall Street and the financial services industry, believing labor unions were going to be stuck with nowhere to go. And you saw a generation of 35-55 year old disaffected blue collar/non college educated workers who felt completely taken for granted in Michigan, PA and WI rolling the dice and swinging the electoral college with 77,000 votes combined. You also saw it in recently in huge splits in Nevada over supporting Biden or Sanders (pragmatism vs. progressive litmus tests). Of course, there are also massive chasms when it comes to protecting white vs. black vs. brown jobs, with racism and anti-American/anti-immigration tides thrown into the combustible mix for good measure the last five years. The problem is that if you approach this from a data scientist perspective as opposed to a political economist’s, you’re going to be in the exact same position as those who work for Twitter, Facebook and Amazon...forced to “sell out” for profits of a limited few vs. what’s best for the greatest number of people. Otherwise, you’re going to have to create your own start-up that 100% mirrors your values on this issue and deliberately avoids any politicization. Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect example, where he straddles the line (or at least attempts to), creating the perception with charitable giving initiatives that he skews to the left (along with most of Silicon Valley with a few notable exceptions like Peter Thiel), when if you really pay attention to what he says and does, it’s always to protect the brand and profits over all other considerations. Why? $77 billion dollars in advertising revenue per year. We can call him the Michael Jordan of Silicon Valley, essentially...”because Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Just not sure how long anyone can be on “both sides” without eventually having to make a substantive choice here. While it would be nice to inhabit a utopian reality “beyond politics,” the odds of that happening anytime soon are slim and none.

$2/hour bumps in salary, that was insulting enough. But to have even those gains erased by premature openings that put those same workers at even higher risk (and back at previous salaries) while MANY were getting raises for staying at home...and topping it all off with the administration trying to kneecap ObamaCare one final time, it’s like something out of the French Revolution “let them eat cake!” days of centuries past. Social mobility is becoming almost non-existent, with the US hovering near the top of the world charts in wage and wealth inequality figures...clustered right there along with a slew of banana republics and authoritarian regimes.

Trickle down economics has been a lie for those same 40 years, starting with David Stockman and Reagan, through the Paul Ryan’s and Grover Norquists of today. Cutting taxes on the rich and corporations, attempting to starve or defund the Federal government through austerity policies and “balanced budget” posturing...we didn’t even need to go back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, we ran surpluses for three years under Clinton largely due to increasing revenues/receipts from capital gains and estate taxes. That said, I don’t believe that you can accurately blame economists more so than, let’s say, Ayn Rand or the Koch Brothers. Perhaps we can all neatly lay this at the doorstep of Alan Greenspan, but he was empowered and embraced by presidents of both parties. In the end, economists or think tanks are unelected policy creators, but it’s the corporations and Top 1% pulling the string behind the scenes to fund their self-fulfilling research and theories that have hollowed out 2/3rd’s of the former middle class.

Right, it was actually the PLA, or Chinese army units. That was for the first 2-3 weeks, they were also involved in delivering supplies/PPE, helping to lock down the city, secure highways/borders, transporting patients to hospitals, etc. Because we have two massive door to door delivery companies here, and they were classified as essential workers, just like the grocery stores...since these workers (there are literally an army in blue as well as black and gold uniforms) are independent contractors, they had no choice but to work, even without tipping. Orders that used to be turned down for $1-1.50 to go 3 km during normal times were suddenly being picked up at 75 cents. Entire blocks or neighborhoods could make group orders together. Everything was delivered to the apartment complex main gate and picked up there. Seniors had someone assigned to make sure they were getting supplied. Every 2-3 weeks free vegetables and limited fruits would show up. After the first couple of months, one designated person per household could go out but only for essential tasks (and only two hours, and couldn’t travel to other districts/areas of the city), and then they had to sign in/out, temp check, green QR code check...and go through that at the grocery store again as well, and then repeat the process to come back into the apartment complex. With banks closed, someone even collected propane gas (for cooking) cards and deposited money into those accounts so everyone would still be able to cook after getting resupplied with new tanks.