Coronavirus

Fwiw, the newest projections from the primary model the White House has been using has finally been updated since some states lifted stay at home orders.
There are not predicting roughly 134,000 deaths in U.S. by August.

If you will remember, that is where they started a couple of months ago. Then it went all the way down to 60,000 when states enacted stay at home orders. Now it is back up to 134,000.

No model will be perfect but this is the one Trump and his team has been relying on the most.

For the sake of discussion, let's assume it turns out to be accurate. Meaning, instead of 70,000 deaths there will be 134,000 deaths but businesses etc can slowly get going again....is this worth it?

Chuck asked that question at the beginning and it wasn't popular. Its a valid question and one leaders of all kinds are wrestling with.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

And I don't have an answer, but yes I do think it's a valid question.

And I do think we make these tradeoff decisions all the time. I just think we need to KNOW that's what we're doing so we can make a good one.

Honestly I don't think a long term "stay at home" lockdown scenario is viable politically or economically for as long as it will take to get the significant gains in treatment or a vaccine we would like to see.

If that's the case, then it's a question of how much liberty and economy we reinstate against how many more get the virus and how many deaths come from it.

Another thing about this model is that it has been trending towards the top end of those ranges over the last month. That top end range is 242k by Aug. 1, and I expect that to happen.

The question is going to be how many lives will we have to lose before we realize that we screwed this whole thing up. It's pretty sad, I think most people were fine at the time looking at those projections and seeing just over 60k but being able to start back again on June 1, and thought, OK, that's acceptable. We can do that. Nope, we couldn't.

These "phase-in's" aren't going to work either. People will just start relaxing organically. The cases and deaths are going to keep going up and up, and then the second wave is going to hit. I honestly think that the only way we get past this is when there are so many deaths that it actually touches a majority of people. Right now, it's just too far removed.

Plus, we still don't have nearly enough testing.

Personally, its very frustrating for me. Because we have been in lockdown longer than any other state and our "phasing in" is verrrrry slow. For deaths and cases, that is a great thing.
But its terribly frustrating seeing states open up that were nowhere close to the President's phased plan (which again, I thought was very good). And not only not close (to the 14 day downward trend) but many were actually still going up.

If we see a spike in cases in those states because of it and it starts moving toward California, its just brutal is all I'll say.

Having said all of that, the question I need someone to answer for my logical brain is this....

Let's say every state stayed in lockdown as they were supposed to until June 1st. Everyone complied. And the cases were dropping big time. Great.
But, we still aren't at zero cases. Its still out there.
So, you have this HIGHLY contagious virus still out there. And businesses have terribly suffered into June. Huge unemployment. Huge closures.
How quickly do those small number of cases get us right back here anyways? So we open up on June 1st, but by August 1st, its spreading again. And then September and October it takes off again and we shut down.

That is simply not feasible. People cannot survive. And I don't mean emotional health (that too). And of course, since we did such a good job of shutting down the first time, we are nowhere close to herd immunity. So we start all over again until we have a vaccine.

How does that not happen, even if everyone shut down through June 1st? I just don't believe our tracing and testing is good enough to contain this. I don't. And the fact so many are asymptomatic means its likely to spread quickly again.

Talk me out of this.

Here, where the curve is not just flat but flattened at zero, there is no place for the number of cases, none for ten days, and deaths, one so far, no place for those numbers to go but up. Will the " I told you so and so's" be saying, "see, your fishing trip cost lives" or "see, your open restaurant made people get the virus" or "see, all those tourists coming into the airport exposed us all and killed someone" of course they are. Only stupid people will believe them.

Life is going to kill people. The new reality looks more like the old reality. In the old days, people died of scarlet fever, and malaria and polio and small pox and mumps and you name it. You can thank the Chinese for this walk down memory lane, where a virus is in the world that we have no cure for. The Atlantic, shrieking in its headline, proclaimed that Georgia opening was like "human sacrifice". Well, then, going by their reasoning, so was electing those two democrat incompetents in New York! No, it isn't human sacrifice. It's a return to the "good old days" when the world was riskier.

Also, you could, coldly, do a fine calculation of # of deaths and misery from wuflu vs # of deaths and misery from a nationwide depression, we have pretty good numbers for the former and better for the latter (from the 2008 great recession). Figure out the optimum. And there seems to be, among the "oh my god we're all gonna die if you go outside you racist (because protesting the lockdown is racist), there seems to be this idea that staying inside not only flattens the curve but reduces the area under the curve. I don't think so. We are all gonna get it, or 70% of us are, and some percent, less than .1% of us, my age an older, are gonna die. Also in that group, "if we just wait long enough, there will be a vaccine that will save us". I think that is highly unlikely.

In the end, I lean towards thinking the liberal crew wants the economy to keep tanking until the election, wants the trillion dollar bailouts to continue once a month with opportunities to do policy they didn't have, and is content to keep us locked down. I do not think we should stay locked down, spending money we don't have, risking our country, and I think we need to warn us old people and find a new normal. They'll point to 134,000 to 300,000 dead and yell at me, "see what you've done"! "Human Sacrifice"!

The chinese did it. And nothing I did changed any outcome but my own. And truthfully, the policy of opening for business will have saved lives in the long run.

Montana STate is, like UK determined to open. Will thousands of new residents in Bozeman with a thousand out of state students and their families moving them here and big lecture halls and labs and all that goes with a college town keep my town's flattened curve at zero? Of course not. Are Capiluto and Cruzado engaging in human sacrifice, not the students their universities depend on but my life and the seniors in my town? Of course not. The states that are opening and the universities that are opening are all inching their way back to some new normal that is riskier than the old normal.

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Originally Posted by bigsky

In the end, I lean towards thinking the liberal crew wants the economy to keep tanking until the election, wants the trillion dollar bailouts to continue once a month with opportunities to do policy they didn't have, and is content to keep us locked down. I do, and they'll point to 63,000 to 134,000 and yell at me, "see what you've done"! The chinese did it. And nothing I did changed any outcome but my own.

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I don't want this to hijack the thread....but I almost started a new thread about this the other day (because I find it fascinating) and will do it here pretty soon.

Ps. I am very curious to what Stu and/or others think about everything else you wrote and what I asked.

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Originally Posted by StuBleedsBlue2

The question is going to be how many lives will we have to lose before we realize that we screwed this whole thing up.

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Where did we screw up really? I"m curious to know how we were going to avoid this, even in large part.

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Originally Posted by ukpumacat

I don't want this to hijack the thread....but I almost started a new thread about this the other day (because I find it fascinating) and will do it here pretty soon.

Ps. I am very curious to what Stu and/or others think about everything else you wrote and what I asked.

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Well, since you asked, I think the whole "liberal thing for political gain" is complete garbage. Liberals get sick. Liberals have died.
Liberals have lost jobs. My wife just lost her job on Friday because of this virus. It was her life. It was a big part of our life. It became a fabric of our social life. I take GREAT offense to a comment like that. We left our friends and family to move for this job. It was the first time in 40 years that my wife lived anywhere else. And we've been happy. That's gone now. If someone were to say that to my face, I'd be tempted to knock them out, and I'm not a fighter. My wife, on the other hand, being from the south side of Chicago, wouldn't hesitate.

There's a left/right philosophy debate here, but it's more about safety vs economy.

I, like you, think the plan the President put out to reopen was a great plan, but it obviously wasn't his, as he undermined it within an hour of ending that briefing and has encouraged all governors not to follow it.

We are never going to get out of this until there's a vaccine. So now it's about how many people are going to die, and I don't want to be one of those, or my friends, or family. But, it's going to happen.

This whole "the Chinese did it" is garbage too. The SECOND it landed in the US, it became OUR problem. Our lack of planning, our lack of everything has made what could have been a manageable problem to one that has no boundaries and no ceiling to the damage it can cause.

My personal opinion is that you cannot have a thriving economy if you cannot keep people safe, unless you can rebuild the economy around that safety. You see that today with businesses that have completely transformed their business model to adapt to current situations.

The other side of the coin, what is obviously needed in NY isn't what is needed in Montana. I'm fine for taking risks, but calculated risks, and mitigating risks. We haven't even evaluated the lessons learned yet, but we are turning everything back on.

At the end of the day, though, there's too many people that just do not care about public safety relative to the economy. They can't see the forest through the trees. Some people need some sort of return to normalcy so bad that they are willing to die, or kill others, to do so. I don't know where this ends up, but it's not going to be good. We haven't even started to feel the pain yet.

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Originally Posted by CitizenBBN

Where did we screw up really? I"m curious to know how we were going to avoid this, even in large part.

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Seriously?

Let's just stick with the most recent trend going on now with not even making it to June 1 before reopening and completely ignoring the recommended 14 days of declines.

The bigger picture, and the worst way we screwed this up is making this a left vs right thing. I guess that's inevitable, though. Most everyone hunkered down, chose their side and really failed to rise to the challenges.

I'm not going to get in a debate of how we screwed(ing) it up. I would be writing for days. There will be enough written in the books for people to read for generations. Make no doubts though, we as a nation screwed it up.

We were never going to avoid the virus, but there are thousands of ways we could have been better prepared. Especially emotionally.

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Originally Posted by bigsky

In the end, I lean towards thinking the liberal crew wants the economy to keep tanking until the election, wants the trillion dollar bailouts to continue once a month with opportunities to do policy they didn't have, and is content to keep us locked down. I do not think we should stay locked down, spending money we don't have, risking our country, and I think we need to warn us old people and find a new normal. They'll point to 134,000 to 300,000 dead and yell at me, "see what you've done"! "Human Sacrifice"!

The chinese did it. And nothing I did changed any outcome but my own. And truthfully, the policy of opening for business will have saved lives in the long run.

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How many articles shall I link with liberal activists talking about how to take advantage of this "opportunity"? There are a whole lot of them.

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Originally Posted by StuBleedsBlue2

Seriously?

Let's just stick with the most recent trend going on now with not even making it to June 1 before reopening and completely ignoring the recommended 14 days of declines.

The bigger picture, and the worst way we screwed this up is making this a left vs right thing. I guess that's inevitable, though. Most everyone hunkered down, chose their side and really failed to rise to the challenges.

I'm not going to get in a debate of how we screwed(ing) it up. I would be writing for days. There will be enough written in the books for people to read for generations. Make no doubts though, we as a nation screwed it up.

We were never going to avoid the virus, but there are thousands of ways we could have been better prepared. Especially emotionally.

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Oh come on, I'd love to hear how obvious it is that we blew this war against an inevitable viral attack.

Emotionally prepared? So we screwed up not preparing emotionally for a once in a century event? How do you emotionally prepare for a once in a century thing, and more to the point how are we failing so badly emotionally? there are no riots, no one arming themselves, etc.

I'm sure we could do better here and there, there's always room in hindsight for improvement, but we're fighting an inexorable Act of God. It's like saying you screwed up battling a hurricane. You could maybe have done better, but it's going to flood, just a matter of how much.

This was all pitched as an attempt to just not overwhelm the medical system, not to avoid death itself. And so far with a few isolated hot spots we've all but bored our medical system more than overwhelmed it, so how is that really screwing up?

We did what we hoped to do, which is to just manage this and not cause collateral deaths. Maybe we're reopening too much too soon, maybe not, but with 50 states doing different things we'll know soon enough, and just sitting here until a vaccine arrives at best by the end of the year seems untenable for any nation.

By and large we seem to be doing fine compared to about everyone else. Some are worse off, some are better, but other than New York we're not doing too bad against the averages, and even in New York we have yet to collapse.

I'm sure lots of people will write books with the full benefit of knowing the outcomes and play Monday morning quarterback, but there's not much evidence to support "really screwing up" by anyone really. The most extreme case may be a few local politicians in New York, but even they are far from alone compared to other nations.


This is an Act of God. A virus for which we have limited defenses. It's going to take lives. The only way to truly minimize that is to lock ourselves up not for 30 days but for the better part of a year. The basic services that keep us alive won't hold out that long without work, and as a nation I doubt everyone is going to stand pat on that either. You can check to see how well people conformed to rules about the black plague to see that won't work.

We're trying to strike a balance between risk of the virus, risk of the cure being as bad or worse than the disease, basic guaranteed liberties, and human nature as social animals.

So far we seem to be doing OK. Not perfect, but not "really screwing it up" either.

And yes, even with "OK" we're going to lose a lot of people to this in the end. The last time this happened we lost about 750,000 people or so, with about 33% of the current population.

So by historical standards and by international standards we're actually faring pretty well. The sky isn't falling, we're doing OK. It sucks, but it's going to be OK.

Just to give some baselines of how we're doing, here are two comparisons:

1) Historical. The most recent event like this is the 1918 Spanish Flu. We lost about 700,000 people with a population of 108 million, about 1/3rd of today's population. That means if we did the same as that epidemic we'd expect to lose about 2.1 million people. We're no where near that number in the worst models, and in fact nowhere near even the 700K.

Yes technology etc. is vastly improved, but that's the best example we have for how we're doing compared to our past. It's a big improvement.

2) Internationally. Combine the main EU nations, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and our populations are pretty close (328m versus 324m) and so are the cases, 1.18m versus about 960K. The US is higher, but almost all of that is from New York City.

And unlike Spain and Italy at least our system is largely not overwhelmed and we haven't had very many collateral deaths due to the being unable to treat other kinds of patients.

Are we getting an A+? No, but we're hardly at the risk of flunking out.

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Originally Posted by StuBleedsBlue2

Well, since you asked, I think the whole "liberal thing for political gain" is complete garbage.

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Me too, but as I said, I will start a different thread on that. I meant, I am curious as to your view of the question I posted above and Bigsky's reply (minus the political part).

This part:

Let's say every state stayed in lockdown as they were supposed to until June 1st. Everyone complied. And the cases were dropping big time. Great.
But, we still aren't at zero cases. Its still out there.
So, you have this HIGHLY contagious virus still out there. And businesses have terribly suffered into June. Huge unemployment. Huge closures.
How quickly do those small number of cases get us right back here anyways? So we open up on June 1st, but by August 1st, its spreading again. And then September and October it takes off again and we shut down.

That is simply not feasible. People cannot survive. And I don't mean emotional health (that too). And of course, since we did such a good job of shutting down the first time, we are nowhere close to herd immunity. So we start all over again until we have a vaccine.

How does that not happen, even if everyone shut down through June 1st? I just don't believe our tracing and testing is good enough to contain this. I don't. And the fact so many are asymptomatic means its likely to spread quickly again.

Talk me out of this.

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Originally Posted by ukpumacat

Me too, but as I said, I will start a different thread on that. I meant, I am curious as to your view of the question I posted above and Bigsky's reply (minus the political part).

This part:

Let's say every state stayed in lockdown as they were supposed to until June 1st. Everyone complied. And the cases were dropping big time. Great.
But, we still aren't at zero cases. Its still out there.
So, you have this HIGHLY contagious virus still out there. And businesses have terribly suffered into June. Huge unemployment. Huge closures.
How quickly do those small number of cases get us right back here anyways? So we open up on June 1st, but by August 1st, its spreading again. And then September and October it takes off again and we shut down.

That is simply not feasible. People cannot survive. And I don't mean emotional health (that too). And of course, since we did such a good job of shutting down the first time, we are nowhere close to herd immunity. So we start all over again until we have a vaccine.

How does that not happen, even if everyone shut down through June 1st? I just don't believe our tracing and testing is good enough to contain this. I don't. And the fact so many are asymptomatic means its likely to spread quickly again.

Talk me out of this.

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I'm not sure what to talk you out of.

I thought that we could accept as a nation a reasonable plan to reopen, stay cautious and be prepared to do it again, if necessary. However, the way that we have failed as a nation to even hit a June 1 milestone, I have absolutely zero confidence that we can go through a second round of this as a nation again. I think people would rather watch the virus run its course and hope that it doesn't hurt them and accept that hundreds of thousands are going to die.

Just the way that we are casually accepting basically a doubling of projected deaths overnight without even a blink confirms that to me.

I firmly believe that an economy can recover, albeit slowly, learning how to adjust to a new normal and cause less pain than a 2nd shock to the system.

We'll see.

Just today's article. Don't have time right now to post the dozens out there along this theme:

https://www.foxnews.com/us/movement-...ng-coronavirus

In a comment to The New York Times, Tara Raghuveer, director of the Homes Guarantee campaign of People’s Action, indicated that "Cancel the Rent" movement’s ultimate goal may not be to actually see rent canceled – as the action may be unconstitutional since it would require the government to void contracts and alter bank operations. Instead, Raghuveer sees a political potential in the movement.


“Rent is not being paid, and the organizing strategy is figuring out how we rally around that and politicize it for our benefit,” Raghuveer said.


OK, one more, from Hillary Clinton:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...e-biden-215635

Later, she described the crisis as an opportunity to restructure government and society by saying “this would be a terrible crisis to waste, as the old saying goes.”

When you see this horrible tragedy as a vast political opportunity, I'd say that's not exactly praying for things to work out quickly and happily.

https://www.health.state.mn.us/disea...ion.html#ageg1

More than 3/4 of deaths in Minnesota due to Covid-19 were people in assisted living facilities. 82% of deaths were people 70 years old or older. Check the link. They weren’t at the beach or the brewery or the park or on the construction crew.

They weren’t helped by wearing masks at Costco.

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Originally Posted by CitizenBBN

How many articles shall I link with liberal activists talking about how to take advantage of this "opportunity"? There are a whole lot of them.

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Joe Biden just said it today, I think.

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Originally Posted by StuBleedsBlue2

I'm not sure what to talk you out of.

I thought that we could accept as a nation a reasonable plan to reopen, stay cautious and be prepared to do it again, if necessary. However, the way that we have failed as a nation to even hit a June 1 milestone, I have absolutely zero confidence that we can go through a second round of this as a nation again. I think people would rather watch the virus run its course and hope that it doesn't hurt them and accept that hundreds of thousands are going to die.

Just the way that we are casually accepting basically a doubling of projected deaths overnight without even a blink confirms that to me.

I firmly believe that an economy can recover, albeit slowly, learning how to adjust to a new normal and cause less pain than a 2nd shock to the system.

We'll see.

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A few things going on, two big ones being:

1) No one has great confidence in the projections. There have been 1,000 different ones in just a few months, from mortality rates to infection rates to everything in between. When things change every day or two, people start to tune it out.

2) People inherently know that we make these compromises with life and risk all the time. We lose 650,000 people a year to heart disease yet people vehemently oppose regulation of fast foods, would never accept mandatory exercise, etc. We could prolong a lot of lives by simply banning foods, but we don't do it.

We could say that's a personal choice, but we let parents feed their kids that stuff till most of them are obese. We choose liberty and individual choice even over losing more than half a million Americans a year.

I'm not saying we should not care about losing people, but I am saying that every decision we make entails accepting some losses to have some liberty and function as a society.

The trick is finding the right balance between the two. IMO locking us all up for indeterminate periods can only work for a short time, and that isn't necessarily wrong.

No one is casually accepting death, but neither is it true that this is all worth it if we save just one life, as some politicians have said. It's harsh, but that's just untrue.

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Originally Posted by bigsky

Joe Biden just said it today, I think.

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A lot of talk about how to use this to justify massive expansions of government and fundamental shifts in US "rights" and policy.

Not a lot of calls for useful things like how to help protect lives or develop treatments, etc., i.e. how to get us out of this with the least pain. Not from Hillary or these activists. Biden is just "I could do better" with nothing but hindsight monday morning quarterbacking.

House of Representatives cant make it back to Washington DC. Of course, I drove to Pittsburgh PA AND BACK in three days plus a couple of weeks ago. But that was an emergency. Nancy Pelosi’s version of emergency is something very different than mine, or any reasonable american.

Did she run out of ice cream? one of the $24,000 freezers stop working and the repairman can't get there till Wednesday?


The thing those who are trying to open up are looking for can be summed up in one word: sustainable.

What we have with total stay at home is not sustainable. not economically, constitutionally or psychologically.

So we look for something we can live with, yes probably with more loss of life, but not something that will start to unravel in 30 or 60 more days when this is looking like it could go into next Spring or longer.

We have to start figuring out the "new normal" for probably 9-12 months. That's not total lockdowns, unless we absolutely weld people into their homes, shut down the border completely to all human travel, quarantine everyone on every ship bringing goods, and start arresting people who violate the orders.

That's sustainable, as long as we're good becoming a police state like China.

Then there are problems with prisons, etc.

The dam won't hold forever. it's that simple, so we'd better figure out how else to manage the flood.

That's not "screwing it up" or not caring about human life. it's being pragmatic and looking at all the pressures on our nation and people.

FWIW that's what the Swedes are trying to do, find something that works long term. They'll have more deaths than being locked down, but once this is all over will they have more? B/c they know that lock downs won't last forever, and then we're right back to where we started, but in our case several trillion more in debt.

That's a valid question IMO, and not one that we should be condemned for asking, or that states should be condemned for trying.

The Chicago Mayor is out of control. Mayors out here don’t talk like that to the people they serve.

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Originally Posted by CitizenBBN

A few things going on, two big ones being:

1) No one has great confidence in the projections. There have been 1,000 different ones in just a few months, from mortality rates to infection rates to everything in between. When things change every day or two, people start to tune it out.

2) People inherently know that we make these compromises with life and risk all the time. We lose 650,000 people a year to heart disease yet people vehemently oppose regulation of fast foods, would never accept mandatory exercise, etc. We could prolong a lot of lives by simply banning foods, but we don't do it.

We could say that's a personal choice, but we let parents feed their kids that stuff till most of them are obese. We choose liberty and individual choice even over losing more than half a million Americans a year.

I'm not saying we should not care about losing people, but I am saying that every decision we make entails accepting some losses to have some liberty and function as a society.

The trick is finding the right balance between the two. IMO locking us all up for indeterminate periods can only work for a short time, and that isn't necessarily wrong.

No one is casually accepting death, but neither is it true that this is all worth it if we save just one life, as some politicians have said. It's harsh, but that's just untrue.

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One thing I’ve learned in all of this is that people are ok when they get to make the choice of whether they die, but when death is left to chance, well...we just all lose our minds. There just aren’t enough knowns with this virus. So many opposing facts stated, or maybe it’s because we don’t have facts as of yet, but the lines of truth are still too blurred to make a determination. One certainty though is that our economy cannot survive in shut down mode very long, and I don’t think the majority is willing to risk the loss of livelihood, and would prefer risk their life at this point. That may change in a month.

The joker, aka covid19, explains the situation quite well here.

https://youtu.be/eJsoeOEGP64

Pet peeve: when watching the news and they show a video of the beach and start talking about how crowded they are.

Duh. People want to be outside. But those people are not stacked like sardines. Groups are clearly apart from each other. But they show a helicopter view and it looks busy (and I’ve seen this on every network).

Take a video of the Costco parking lot and we can talk.

I went to the beach both days this past weekend. Easily 6ft of spacing between all there.

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Originally Posted by ukpumacat

Pet peeve: when watching the news and they show a video of the beach and start talking about how crowded they are.

Duh. People want to be outside. But those people are not stacked like sardines. Groups are clearly apart from each other. But they show a helicopter view and it looks busy (and I’ve seen this on every network).

Take a video of the Costco parking lot and we can talk.

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If I go to a beach and cant get 6 feet space around me, I am leaving, and that was before coronavirus