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

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

I'd bet my house that the real story here is considerably different from how Trump's errand boy presents it.

Per https://www.abc12.com/content/news/Democratic-state-rep-explains-why-she-opted-for-unproven-COVID-19-treatment-not-hospital-569461601.html

"You go to the hospital, you're going with no one,” she said. "All I could think of is...if I go in here, I may not come out."

The first term representative asked the doctor who wrote her the prescription to take the COVID-19 test if he would prescribe her with hydroxychloroquine. It’s a disease-modifying agent and an anti-malaria drug that President Donald Trump has touted frequently as a treatment of the coronavirus, but the FDA says there is no proven treatment for COVID-19. Additionally, the New York Times recently reported the president has a small financial stake in the company that produces the brand-name of the drug.

”If he had not been pushing it on a federal level, I would have not had access to it, and I would not be alive today,” she said.

”It was just out of nowhere, like, you literally had no time to think,” Whitsett said.

"You go to the hospital, you're going with no one,” she said. "All I could think of is...if I go in here, I may not come out."

”If he had not been pushing it on a federal level, I would have not had access to it, and I would not be alive today,” she said.

"If you have an opportunity to receive something, and it's a choice between taking this pill and a machine to keep you breathing, you tell me what your choice would be,” Whitsett said.

"Men and women crying and thanking me for speaking out and putting people over politics,” Whitsett said.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1247885878451556353

Dr. Frieden said that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent.

But New York mandated those measures after localities in states including California and Washington had done so.

San Francisco, for example, ordered schools closed on March 12 when that city had 18 confirmed cases; Ohio also ordered its schools closed on the same day, with five confirmed cases. Mr. de Blasio ordered schools in New York to close three days later when the city had 329 cases.

Then seven Bay Area counties imposed stay-at-home rules on March 17. Two days later, the entire state of California ordered the same. New York State’s stay-at-home order came on the 20th, and went into effect on March 22.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1247968705864179716

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/07/coronavirus-is-infecting-killing-black-americans-an-alarmingly-high-rate-post-analysis-shows/

The coronavirus is infecting and killing black Americans at an alarmingly high rate

As the novel coronavirus sweeps across the United States, it appears to be infecting and killing black Americans at a disproportionately high rate, according to a Washington Post analysis of early data from jurisdictions across the country.

The emerging stark racial disparity led the surgeon general Tuesday to acknowledge in personal terms the increased risk for African Americans amid growing demands that public-health officials release more data on the race of those who are sick, hospitalized and dying of a contagion that has killed more than 12,000 people in the United States.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/


Apr. 9 at 4:03 a.m.

Cases:

Deaths:



Cases and Deaths, per state, raw:

Cases and Deaths, per state, per capita:



Totally 1973 deaths were registered yesterday, of which 53% are from NY + NJ.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/04/08/coronavirus-latest-news-2/

German antibody study indicates fatality rate of 0.37 percent

BERLIN — The preliminary findings of an antibody study by German virologists published on Thursday indicates a covid-19 fatality rate of 0.37 percent, information expected to inform government decision-making about lifting restrictions.

The study by researchers at the University of Bonn involves testing 1,000 individuals in the hard-hit district of Heinsberg in northwestern Germany in an attempt to ascertain the number of people who have been infected without realizing it.

The preliminary findings were based on results from 509 individuals, the researchers said in a news conference on Thursday.

Some 14 percent of the sample had antibodies for the disease, and an additional 2 percent had current infections. A death rate of 0.37 percent is well below the 3.4 percent case fatality rate cited by the World Health Organization last month and at the lower end of the 0.3 to 1 percent range that has been estimated by scientists.

Trump's hunch was right.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Virus Death Toll May Be ‘More Like 60,000 Than 100,00 To 200,000’ | TODAY

Joining TODAY live, Dr. Anthony Fauci says that even though the number of deaths validate that this is a bad week in the coronavirus battle, there are “some glimmers of hope” such as stabilizing numbers of hospitalizations in New York. He says that social distancing and behavior changes are “starting to have a real effect” and that the virus death toll may look “more like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000” initially predicted. He dismisses “conspiracy theories” that coronavirus death tolls are inflated and says he’s “cautiously optimistic” that the country may be able to begin reopening by summer.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

The issue here is that Germany is very restrictive in assigning deaths to COVID-19.  The US and Italy use a method that appears to cover all deaths of patients who tested positive.  Germany does not and appears to only count patients who were otherwise healthy with no/minimal underlying conditions before getting COVID-19.  The numbers are not simply not comparable.

Source?

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

799 (+20) new deaths in NY today, all-time high. Bu #s are of new hospitalization way down.





US will probably to hit 2000+ today and certainly will overtaken Italy's totals in 2-3.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1247979820144889857https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1248035366914994181

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1248336179575115776

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1248035366914994181

Very confusing graph for an even more confusing model.  So on April 2, the model predicted that infections in Georgia would peak on April 5, and then on April 5 they changed the peak to April 25??  I don’t really see how that can be trusted at all.

They weight heavily stay-at-home order, which GA implemented between the updates. Stay-at-home order = flatten the curve per their model. + new data I suppose.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/byHeatherLong/status/1248316823302483969?s=19

Happening never, lol

May be I misunderstood your post, but as right now US pay MORE than 100% of wages for ALL workers with wages under nat'l median. For next 4 months, but I guess Congress will extend it until emergency is over.

But there is no bonus for re-hiring.

"Increase standard weekly unemployment benefits by $600 for the next four months."


Unless he means, that the workers will keep health insurance (Danmark style?), it would be actually a downgrade, esp for worker whose wages were much less than natl median.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.ft.com/content/f6768727-e04c-4483-ab24-37a8da4d7437
Trump reaches respirator mask deal with 3M
US to import more than 160m N95 respirators from overseas over three months

The Trump administration has reached a deal with 3M, the US manufacturer, to import 166.5m N95 respirator masks into America from abroad, easing tensions between the White House and the Minnesota-based company.

Since the start of the outbreak in the US, 3M had ramped up its US production of N95 masks to 35m a month, and is planning to further increase that in the coming months. However, the White House had been piling pressure on 3M to both limit its sales to foreign buyers, including Canada and in Latin America, and to import N95 masks it was producing internationally for overseas markets.

According to the terms of the deal, 3M will import 55m masks a month into the US for three months, mainly from a flagship facility in China, but also smaller volumes from other plants in Singapore and South Korea, the company said. None of the masks will be coming from 3M’s other manufacturing facilities around the world, including Europe.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

WSJ Opinion:  Virus mortality crashes as economic misery skyrockets.

FT's Martin Wolf makes similar point.

https://www.ft.com/content/b427db58-77e6-11ea-af44-daa3def9ae03
We must focus attention on our next steps
The lockdowns are necessary to get the disease under control — but they must be brief

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The journey through this pandemic is going to be long and hard. We cannot know where it will end, although it is hard not to speculate. What we must do instead is focus on the steps right ahead if we are to avoid falling off our narrow path into mass deaths on one side, or economic devastation on the other. If we do not avoid these calamities in the near future, we risk chaos ahead. Even if we do manage to do so, we will not return to the normality we took for granted until recently. For that, we must at least wait for a cure or vaccine. The economic and social damage will last even longer.

Analysis by the OECD illuminates the economic disruption ahead. This is no ordinary recession or even depression, caused by a collapse in demand. Economic activity is being switched off, partly because people fear contact and partly because governments have told them to stay at home. The immediate impact of these actions could be a reduction in gross domestic product in the Group of Seven leading high-income countries of between 20 and 30 per cent. Every month that large parts of our economies stay closed, annual growth might fall by 2 percentage points.

Moreover, the costs are unequally shared. Unskilled workers suffer worst from loss of jobs. People and businesses able to work online, stay working. Those that cannot do so, do not.

You need to re-open economy to help (in first place) unskilled poor workers.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

"Increase standard weekly unemployment benefits by $600 for the next four months."

That is if you can actually get on unemployment benefits to begin with. I can tell you for a fact that Florida's system, which was designed by Rick Scott to be barely usable (both technically and in terms of rules/regulations, for political reasons), and has been trashed in local media for weeks because of a website that barely functions and crashes seemingly every day, phone numbers that are constantly busy (iirc, by the department's own statistics, only a mere fraction of the million+ calls were answered), and few benefits are actually being paid out. As far as I know, it's like this in some other states, to a lesser degree. Then you also have to know that even in a well-functioning system, not everyone qualifies, even if they were employed at the time of this pandemic.

Depending on what state you live in, the unemployment boost from the stimulus is easily next to useless because you can't collect any benefits whatsoever anyway.

So they will have to fix it. Most people will get their money. Likely later than sooner, because US system wasn't designed for that.

Not only R struggles. Not only because of R.

In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont warned that residents might not see their first unemployment payment until early May because labor department staff are overwhelmed and the computer systems are outdated; after Florida’s unemployment website failed, the state reverted to paper applications.

The unemployment insurance system has gone underfunded for decades, and the consequences are becoming evident, says Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “We don’t have a system that’s agile and strong enough to handle the avalanche of claims,” she says. “There will be delays, and people will suffer needlessly.”

https://time.com/5816775/coronavirus-unemployment-stimulus/

Kind reminder:
Pr. Hillary would never get such a good Populist Stimulus through Congress because Evil Republicans wouldn't let her.
Pr. Cruz would never get such a good Populist Stimulus through Congress because he is evil and wouldn't want to 

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/


Data as of Apr. 10 at 4:32 a.m.

Cases:

Deaths:



Cases and Deaths, per state, raw:

Cases and Deaths, per state, per capita:





Totally 1,783 deaths were registered yesterday, of which 56% are from NY + NJ.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1248374630399672321
Mass graves... just one more day in Donald Trump's Great Republican America.

Keep America Great™

Let's not forget that (D) president would not stop flights from China because muh xenophobic, and what exponential growth would mean together with incompetence of (D) NY officials.

Trump's wise decision probably saved [ten] thousands of lives of his native NYC and in US 🙏🙏🙏

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1247733104313319425
https://twitter.com/SeanTrende/status/1247735553182883840

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

WTF is DeSantis doing over there

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1248425413379932161

From the article.

In reality, the CDC reports on its website that four people between the ages of 15 and 24 and one person between the ages of one and four have died. CNN has also reported on the death of a newborn in Connecticut on April 1 and an infant in Illinois last month whose death is being investigated as possibly caused by the virus.

What a liar!

He said 0, but in fact it was 5! It completely changes his point that your policies should be based on this fact!

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/KevinCate/status/1248365705503932420

Not an indictment on you, GM, but I'm just a little confused on where Cate is getting "hundreds" from -- maybe he's referring to confirmed cases?

According to the CDC's provisional breakdown, there has been five COVID-deaths in the U.S. in people aged twenty-five and under.  

In Russia, there is a joke.

вы не рефлексируйте
вы распространяйте
пусть отбиваются

Which translates ~

don't reflect (about the message)
just spread (the message)
let them defend themselves.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1248374630399672321
Mass graves... just one more day in Donald Trump's Great Republican America.

Keep America Great™

Let's not forget that (D) president would not stop flights from China because muh xenophobic, and what exponential growth would mean together with incompetence of (D) NY officials.

Trump's wise decision probably saved [ten] thousands of lives of his native NYC and in US 🙏🙏🙏

That is just an assumption not backed up by facts.

The actual facts are that Trump and the government he leads screwed up the testing and allowed the virus to circulate unchecked in the country until it was too late. So now we had to screw our economy to get this thing under control. Trump can redeem himself if he can ramp up testing and medical supplies by May 1st so we can get the economy opened up again. And we better be prepared when the second wave hits, whether that is in May after the country is opened, or in September/October as the weather gets colder. If we aren't prepared a second time Trump will get drubbed in the election.

Haha, I asked you about the sources of your assumption that "government he leads screwed up the testing" and I still haven't got anything.


IMO, as I said, there was a structural problem with CDC and stockpiling of chemicals. It doesn't depend on who is in WH.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/21/politics/us-coronavirus-tests-invs/index.html
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-coronavirus-tests-actually-work/

So if you think Hillary would do any better, you have to assume that she would start to stockpile chemicals in 2016 and override Fauci/CDC in 2020. IMO, not realistic at all.

The fact is that Trump restricted flights from China, which probably explains a ~2 week lag from Europe. The fact is it was against experts' advice and was his nationalistic hunch. He was criticized by experts, Democrats and their Media, so (D) president likely wouldn't do it.


German economy is likely to be initially screwed even more by the way (because of higher reliance on exports, perhaps).

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1248374630399672321
Mass graves... just one more day in Donald Trump's Great Republican America.

Keep America Great™

Let's not forget that (D) president would not stop flights from China because muh xenophobic, and what exponential growth would mean together with incompetence of (D) NY officials.

Trump's wise decision probably saved [ten] thousands of lives of his native NYC and in US 🙏🙏🙏

Small sample size but a sample of early infected people in NYC found 2/3 of them were infected from European visitors (of which on any given year there will be much, much more of than Chinese visitors).

https://twitter.com/QuickTake/status/1248351088438370304

Yes. The 2 week lag that I mentioned depends probably on that.


Without flight restrictions:
China >>> US

With:
China >>> Europa >>> US


Isn't it a reasonable assumption?


As I said earlier, Trump should have restricted flights from Europa earlier and should have restricted inside US as well. A big mistake, he didn't.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.leftvoice.org/

Is it run by Russians? I endorse!

Trump owns this, for good or for bad. There is still a long way to go till November. His actions from now until then will matter a lot. He needs to make sure the government is functioning efficiently from now on. If we can't get our testing capability along with our ability to contain local outbreaks through contact tracing and local lockdowns, we will be back here again in a few months and then the people will be really pissed.

I never said, he didn't own it. Especially when US media are as they are.


People will, perhaps, look at Europe? US will likely be better on testing, economy and tracing.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-google-partner-on-coronavirus-contact-tracing-technology-11586540203
Apple, Google Partner on Coronavirus Contact-Tracing Technology
Solution helps alert users if they have had contact with an infected person

Apple Inc. and Google are teaming up to build software into smartphones that would alert people recently in contact with someone infected with the coronavirus, an unprecedented collaboration between the makers of the operating systems behind billions of smartphones world-wide.

The tech giants said the solution, which will be released over the coming months, will use Bluetooth technology on phones to allow users who opt-in to tap into an ecosystem of apps from health authorities that track the virus. The concept, known as “contact tracing,” would make it easier to contain future outbreaks as people return to work and the drumbeat of daily life.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

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

The model is updated. US #s are revisited slightly up from 60 to 61 [26-155] thousands of deaths.


http://www.healthdata.org/covid/updates

Predicted peak for daily COVID-19 deaths. At the national level, current data suggest that the predicted peak for daily COVID-19 deaths could be approximately April 10, reaching 1,983 deaths (estimate range of 500 to 5,583). These projections suggest that the US may be nearing its peak for COVID-19 deaths; subsequently, we may soon see the number of daily deaths decreasing at the national level.

Predictions for cumulative deaths. For the US, projected cumulative COVID-19 deaths could reach 61,545 (estimate range of 26,487 to 155,315) across states during the epidemic’s first wave. Today’s release aligns closely with national-level predictions published on April 7, where the cumulative death toll was projected to be 60,415 (estimate range of 31,221 to 126,703).

Based on the latest data and current model, the following states could have the highest cumulative COVID-19 death toll through the epidemic’s first wave:

• New York, at 13,463 deaths (estimate range of 9,382 to 24,236)
• Massachusetts, at 6,739 deaths (estimate range of 1,269 to 22,854)
• Connecticut, at 4,614 deaths (estimate range of 1,143 to 13,559)
• Florida, at 3,999 deaths (estimate range of 1,218 to 10,293)
• Georgia, at 3,564 deaths (estimate range of 1,300 to 9,020)

Obviously, the model put to much weight on stay-at-home order (Massachusetts!).