COVID-19 Megathread 4: Grandma Got Run Over by the Dow Jones

[Florida Man for Crime]

TRUMP's base in Florida are exposing themselves to the virus, rather than keeping themselves safe and healthy to vote for TRUMP in November.

Golf will go on at The Villages under Gov. DeSantis' 'stay-at-home' order

THE VILLAGES, Fla. - Golf received an OK under Florida's stay-at-home advisory, though other activities will be curtailed amid concerns the coronavirus is starting to take hold in there.

Officials in central Florida’s Sumter County, where most of The Villages retirement community is located, issued a stay-at-home advisory Tuesday recommending that residents remain at their houses except to get groceries, seek medical attention, work, care for another person or exercise outdoors.

Golf was specifically noted as permissible in the order’s exercise category. The Villages has dozens of courses. As one resident recently told The Associated Press, “This is The Villages. There would be a riot if they stopped golf.”

A day after Sumter County issued its advisory, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order Wednesday after weeks of resisting the move. The statewide order allows “participating in recreational activities” and lists walking, biking, hiking, fishing, hunting, running or swimming as examples but makes no mention of golf.

Video shows dozens gathered in The Villages during coronavirus pandemic

SUMTER COUNTY, Fla. — A video sent by a viewer to Eyewitness News shows residents in The Villages hanging out, watching the sunset at Lake Sumter – despite Sumter County leaders urging people to stay home and maintain social distancing.

The video in the link shows a huge group of golf carts all gathered together.

[Florida Man for Crime]

So since this is a thread for essentially all things coronavirus related, another chapter in my business is ongoing quest to seek Financial relief. So my law partner , God bless him, first called our bank at 9 this morning as scheduled. He got an automated message to call back at 2. He did so and then got an automated message to call back at 2:30.

Upon doing so he got an automated message saying to call back later. He called every two to three minutes for over 45 minutes before they even put him on hold. Let me reiterate that in his words. What type of f****** timeline do we live in where one celebrates the accomplishment of being put on hold?

And then, then, after waiting on hold for an hour, he gets another automated message saying we are experiencing difficulties processing your call, please try back again later.

And hangs up on him. The fact that he did not throw his phone against the wall proves he's a much better man than I.

At least he was able to get immediately back on hold when he called back a minute later oh, so hooray for small victories. He's planning on ordering pizza and staying by the phone so that we don't have to wait until Monday which could put us further back in the line of applicants. What a trooper.

This is what small businesses across this country are dealing with. And we've been proactive as hell in jumping on relief applications. God help anyone that's been tied up doing actual, you know, work to earn money rather than my partner spending a significant part of his work day the last couple weeks, along with my office manager, filling out forms and reading online is to Avenues we can pursue.

There is a lot of reports that the big banks are putting all sorts of restrictive terms and conditions on who is even allowed to apply for loans. This totally defeats the purpose of what is supposed to be a government program to keep the economy from collapsing in a massive wave of small business bankruptcies. It was a horrendous mistake to make this necessary support to small businesses dependent in any way on the willingness and ability of the private banking industry to make loans. Loans (really grants) should be available for ALL small businesses, across the board, and it should not have been set up so that private banks had any say whatsoever in the matter. Given that they do have a say, it appears quite possible that a lot of small businesses could fail for no good reason. In addition, Congress chose to arbitrarily cap the amount that can be loaned to small businesses at too low a level, so that whichever small businesses are the last to be able to apply will not be able to borrow unless Congress can act quickly enough to expand the program with sufficient funding.

[Florida Man for Crime]

The governor of Iowa is half-wit apparently.

How stupid are is the people Governor of Iowa?

[Florida Man for Crime]

WSJ: BREAKING NEWS The CDC is recommending Americans voluntarily wear nonmedical masks in public to limit coronavirus transmission, Trump says

But Trump says that he himself won't wear one, because he is mentally deficient and completely devoid of leadership skills.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Data from Bank of America points to a YUGE drop in consumption. GDP is falling off a cliff (not unexpected, but just look at the magnitudes, it is really YUGE).

https://twitter.com/pueokeffer/status/1245543006918381568

[Florida Man for Crime]

Erm. Washington DC, we have a problem that you might want to do something about...

https://twitter.com/SBAJovita/status/1246218482762514433

There are about 30 million small businesses in the USA...

If the small businesses that have gotten loans so far are representative of the average small business, and each small business got a loan equal to the average sized loan so far, that would come out to a total of $9,255,556,190,367.37 in loans (30,000,000/17,503*5,400,000,000 if you want to check the math). That is $9.26 trillion... But only $350 billion is budgeted for the program in total...

That means there are only enough loans for something like 3.8% of all the small businesses in the USA...

Let's say that this rough estimate math is off though substantially, by an order of magnitude. In that case, there would be enough loans for 38% of all small businesses.

Which is not remotely enough!!! What on earth were they thinking in how they set this up???

[Florida Man for Crime]

Panic buying is already a *major, major problem (and so far is actually a bigger problem than anything we've seen on the healthcare side).

Sometimes I read these things and wonder.

A temporary shortage of toilet paper or eggs is a bigger problem than people dying?

Hmmm.

I guess when it really comes down to it, when the going gets tough, and when push comes to shove, when you turn 100 years old and look back on your life, what really maters in end is not actually friends and family, but whether you always had enough toilet paper and whether you had to go even a single week without a carton of eggs.

[Florida Man for Crime]

It's not just toilet paper and eggs, though. People are also panic buying surgical masks and rubbing alcohol. Things that are useful to help protect oneself from COVID. I have had to go grocery shopping without a mask more than once since the lockdown began because I simply did not have any on hand, and I am quite aware that I put myself (and consequently my elderly mother) at risk by doing so.

Shortages of things like masks and isopropyl alcohol have nothing whatsoever to do with panic buying. The usual/normal demand for those sorts of things is essentially nil. Maybe something like 1/1000 supermarket shoppers normally buys 1 bottle of isopropyl alcohol in normal times. If that rises even to 1/100 customers buying a single bottle, that is proportionately a huge demand shock and can easily wipe out the supply chain. Those proportions are just random guesses, but the point should be obvious regardless of exactly the true figures.

And an individual buying a single bottle of a product is hardly behaving irrationally or panic buying. They are just buying what they need.

The same goes for things like a bag of rice. While rice is commonly bought on grocery runs, not every single customer normally buys a bag of rice. Being generous, in normal times maybe 1/4 of shoppers buy a single bag of rice on a supermarket run. If that rises to 80% of shoppers each buying even a single bag of rice each (something which is hardly unreasonable of an individual to buy), the supermarket quickly runs out of rice.

Moreover, normally a large amount of demand for food is met by restaurants, which have their own supply chains separate from grocery stores. That demand has fallen off a cliff, creating more stress on supermarket supply chains because people redirect demand for most of what they normally would have eaten at restaurants to supermarkets.

So no "panic" or "hoarding" or "irrational behavior" on the individual level whatsoever is necessary to totally wreck just in time supply chains. It is simply the way the supply chains have been set up by our Corporate MBA overlords that makes them extremely vulnerable to even the slightest demand shock.

[Florida Man for Crime]

For the people panicking, most of Europe currently has had similar restrictions on grocery stores for weeks. We have not fallen to anarchy yet.

In any case, I don't understand why blue avatars are complaining about it being difficult for them to get some particular things from stores. The Republican philosophy is "I've got mine."

If you don't have yours, you have nobody but yourself to blame. I've got mine. If you don't got yours, then maybe you should have been smarter. Rather than blaming others or blaming the system, blame yourself and for your failure to adequately provide for yourself and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. That is what the GOP is all about.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Some people on Atlas are underestimating how much live sports would be a morale boost for tens of millions of people.  Being able to watch sports every day would take my pain level in this from a 9/10 to a 6.5/10 just like that.

Hopefully they can figure out a strategy to bring back sports, even without crowds.

My God, Americans have really gone soft.

Imagine just for a moment that you are in the 1st Infantry Division on the morning of June 6, 1944 and are storming Omaha Beach. You would not be complaining that you can't watch sports on TV every day.

Or imagine that it is 1350, you are a European peasant, and the plague has just made its way into the next village.

Truly, we are a decadent society.

Get some perspective, you have it good. If you want sports, watch a re-run game or play a simulated sports video game on your computer/personal entertainment system of choice.

[Florida Man for Crime]

It's also very likely that deaths from COVID-19 are being significantly under-reported due to lack of confirmation of infection.  If this is the case, and numerous articles support that it is, then comparing the actual number of deaths to any estimated number of cases is inherently flawed, and will certainly underestimate the fatality rate.  For consistency, you need to either compare actual deaths to actual reported cases, or estimated deaths to estimated total cases.

It's likely that we won't be able to estimate the true death toll until after the fact, by calculating excess deaths over the number that would have been expected in a typical population during the same period.

Two things I would add to this and the other points that people have made.

1) First, along the lines of Georgia Moderate's point, one should keep in mind that from historical precedence, virus fatality rates estimated from early in an outbreak don't only get revised down, they also get revised up. For example, while it is true that the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak appeared from initial data to be more deadly than it ultimately turned out to be, for SARS, the fatality rate initially seemed to be quite a bit lower than the 10% or so (possibly more given that the Chinese data is suspect and international data points to a higher fatality rate) that it ultimately ended up as. And while I certainly would not say that this implies that it is more likely to be revised up than to be revised down for COVID-19, we do know that in biological terms COVID-19 is similar to SARS (since that was caused by another Coronavirus).

2) In addition to seeming to be inconsistent with most other available data/information, the idea that COVID-19 may only be as deadly as the flu seems to be inconsistent with the data from the Diamond Princess Cruise ship. For the IFR to be in that range (with 11 deaths out of 712 confirmed cases, and that at a time early in the outbreak when hospitals were not overwhelmed and they could get good medical care), probably something like every single person on the ship (maybe more?) would have had to have been infected with COVID-19 at some point during the cruise, even accounting for demographics. But thousands of passengers tested negative. So either the tests of passengers would have to have been extremely inaccurate, or else thousands of passengers would all have had to have gotten the virus early enough (and without anyone on the ship realizing that there was an epidemic going around) that by the time they were tested all traces of the virus would have to have disappeared from their bodies.

[Florida Man for Crime]

What the CDC and most of the public health establishment was saying up until yesterday was that there is no reason to wear a mask unless you are sick.  That would imply that if you aren't sick then you can't spread the virus.

They were only saying that because there was (is) a huge shortage of proper masks (both N95s and surgical masks) and they made a judgment that it was better (not good, but less bad) to lie and tell people that they didn't need masks and that masks don't do anything in the hopes that it would make it easier to get more masks into the hands of health care providers. And also, it was easier to communicate than it was to spell out the differences between different types of masks and the varying effectiveness of them in different settings, which doesn't fit so easily into a simple soundbite and which people would have a hard time understanding. Moreover, at the time they said that you didn't need to wear a mask or be particularly worried on the individual level, that *was* true. On an individual level, current risk *was* low (and in most parts of the country, current individual risk is quite low even now!

This was a bad judgment IMO, but it is not hard to see why they made it. It is not that they didn't know that asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people could spread the virus.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Castiglione d'Adda was one of the earliest and hardest hit towns in Northern Italy.  There was a report that 70% of people who showed up to donate blood last week had antibodies, so that town may have herd immunity now if that is verified.  But, crucially, they have already lost about 2% of their total 2017 population to coronavirus.  Many other people there are still very sick and at risk of dying from it.  That's what any jurisdiction that goes for herd immunity is risking.

It there more data about Castiglione? In Kirkland's nursing home ~50% died. With other words, if a nursing homes with 100 people in Castiglione would get infected, it'd be enough to get 2% of whole population. 5k town can become anecdotal evidence. Italy has also 4-6 times less ventilators per capita then US I think.

The bad news is that recent news show that Western World keep failing protecting places like nursing homes, so we can, indeed, follow Castiglione...

That I don't know.

If it turns out to be Italy's version of The Villages, that would be somewhat reassuring.  If it's a college town, that would be terrifying. 

https://www.citypopulation.de/en/italy/lombardia/lodi/098014__castiglione_dadda/

Age Groups (E 2019)
0-17 years   648
18-64 years   2,910
65+ years   1,088

Age Distribution (E 2019)
0-9 years   325
10-19 years   421
20-29 years   476
30-39 years   486
40-49 years   708
50-59 years   820
60-69 years   602
70-79 years   477
80+ years   331


That comes out to 23.4% age 65+ in Castiglione d'Adda.

By comparison, in Italy as a whole, "In 2020, 23.1 percent of the Italian inhabitants were estimated to be aged 65 years and older."

https://www.statista.com/statistics/569201/population-distribution-by-age-group-in-italy/

So looks like it is fairly representative in terms of age of Italy as a whole.

[Florida Man for Crime]

I wasn't talking about demographics of town, but demographics of first deaths. One thing if it happened in "regular" basis, the opposite is that outbreak happened in unprepared nursing homes or hospitals. As I said in Kirkland 50% died.

Kirkland Washingon has 90,000 people. 50% of the population there did not die. 50% of the confirmed cases there died, I would assume that is what you mean.

But Skill and Chance said that 2% of the entire *population* in Castiglione died.

2% of the population of Kirkland WA dying would be 1,800 deaths.

Which (God forbid) would be entirely consistent with 50% of the people in a single nursing home dying.

[Florida Man for Crime]

This was re-tweeted by Marc Lipsitch (epidemiologist from Harvard for anyone who doesn't know who that is):

https://twitter.com/AndurandPierre/status/1246348944331988993

[Florida Man for Crime]

The small business loans, which are absolutely vital to get fully functional immediately to prevent a massive wave of small business failures, are... a clusterf***

https://twitter.com/SRuhle/status/1246444951791157248

https://twitter.com/SRuhle/status/1246446084605513728

There are 30 million small businesses, a huge % of which need this to work, and need it now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not next month. Now.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Having it I can tell you it's not fun having it, but if people want to be dumba$$es and get it, let them

Except people like my fiancee will have to die for their stupidity. And these are going to be the same morons who will just walk into a hospital ER waiting room with no mask on coughing on everybody in sight.

This is why we should make an isolated unpopulated island (or perhaps multiple islands, depending on demand) in the Pacific be "COVID-19 freedom island" and people like Bandit should be allowed to go there. "COVID-19 freedom island" is an island where people who wish to get intentionally infected can do so. You are only allowed to leave the island a certain time after you have gotten infected and recovered, and are certified to no longer be contagious. After that, Bandit can leave the island and go on with his life for as long as he remains immune (depending on how long immunity lasts). Or alternatively, there's a chance that Bandit will be dead or perhaps end up suffering from lifelong damage to his lungs. Either way, that is a chance that Bandit is willing to take, and an outcome he is comfortable with accepting. This way people such as Bandit can get voluntarily/intentionally infected without risk of them infecting others who do not wish to be infected.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Here's a pretty good and easy to read general explanatory article on epidemic models:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

[Florida Man for Crime]

Trevor Bedford (the U Washington scientist who has done lots of great phylogenetic analysis of the outbreak) estimates based on genetic sequencing that the actual total number of cases in China was about 55,800 (range from 17,500 to 194,400).

Phylodynamic estimation of incidence and prevalence of novel coronavirus (nCoV) infections through time

Here, we use a phylodynamic approach incorporating 53 publicly available novel coronavirus (nCoV) genomes to the estimate underlying incidence and prevalence of the epidemic. This approach uses estimates of the rate of coalescence through time to infer underlying viral population size and then uses assumptions of serial interval and heterogeneity of transmission to provide estimates of incidence and prevalence. We estimate an exponential doubling time of 7.2 (95% CI 5.0-12.9) days. We arrive at a median estimate of the total cumulative number of worldwide infections as of Feb 8, 2020, of 55,800 with a 95\% uncertainty interval of 17,500 to 194,400. Importantly, this approach uses genome data from local and international cases and does not rely on case reporting within China.

The important thing about this analysis is entirely independent of the reported case #s from China, but it is nonetheless in the same general range.

So it suggests that the Chinese #s likely do not understate the actual # of cases that occurred in China, at least not by a huge amount. That is some more evidence, from an independent method, that there are not a larger # of asymptomatic/mild cases than scientists currently think.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Natural selection in action:

https://twitter.com/AmarAmarasingam/status/1246658639785492480

[Florida Man for Crime]

It would be good to have more information regarding whether it is possible for cats to infect humans:

https://twitter.com/UNMC_DrKhan/status/1246622176406470657