SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 Evening Update 2-25-2020: The Pandemic Hide the Name & Blame Games

28 thoughts on “SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 Evening Update 2-25-2020: The Pandemic Hide the Name & Blame Games”

1. It’s “hoard”, not “horde”.

2. Four Fortune 1000 CEO’s resigned today. All four are in industries that will get hammered if COVID-19 becomes an epidemic in the USA.

   See:

   Disney:
   https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/disney-ceo-bob-iger-steps-bob-chapek-named-69210724?fbclid=IwAR1JWVhVuc5gzs5wZuPWVjlHU4VXeW6s4vlDHOvY1F8hFNX_TKpJMvpdVWM

   Mastercard:
   https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mastercard-ceo-idUSKBN20J1LG?fbclid=IwAR3W4oDGGQ_YSOPNM-i_9Ax61b5pvMICTE3Cb5WUsaO1LVde0mtqhYIJWL8

   Salesforce:
   https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/companies/salesforce-co-ceo-steps-down-leaving-founder-marc-benioff-in-charge/ar-BB10nWu9?fbclid=IwAR1K-H0alR9p95rZqIikQtW6FyTBfrra9hBAv-fcyJ3WCrhuTUMyFwf1LPk

   Uber eats
   https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/companies/salesforce-co-ceo-steps-down-leaving-founder-marc-benioff-in-charge/ar-BB10nWu9?fbclid=IwAR1K-H0alR9p95rZqIikQtW6FyTBfrra9hBAv-fcyJ3WCrhuTUMyFwf1LPk

   S–t be gettin’ real.

3. >>It’s “hoard”, not “horde”.

   Have you seen the super market line photos in ROK, Italy & Singapore?

   Both words apply…but I’ve changed it non-the-less.

4. Interesting:

   https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/24/xi-jinping-coronavirus-china-covid-19-quarantine/

5. Everyone’s doing a terrible job on reporting on the global spread–one case in country X does not mean one person has the virus, it means the first person has gotten seriously ill and sought medical attention, and that probably hundreds (or more) of people are infected. Containment had obviously failed as of a week or more ago, and still no prep has been done, certainly not in America. They say that South Korea has tested tens of thousands of people, which might be a wide enough net to let them seriously slow it down, while the US can only test a couple of hundred people a day.
   The bottom line is it’s already global, and will from this point on most likely kill everyone the flu would have killed where it gets established, plus a lot more, and in a country the size of the USA there’s no possible way for every urgent care center, ER, etc., to protect its workers from infection. I’m kind of surprised the nurse’s union, etc., aren’t throwing a fit already.

6. https://twitter.com/USForcesKorea/status/1232486433799032832
   A USFK soldier stationed at Camp Carroll tested positive for COVID-19, marking the first time a U.S. service member has tested positive for the virus. We’re implementing all appropriate control measures to protect the force.

   My immediate question is the usual one about what sort of testing throughput the military in Korea has. They clearly need to test 100% of their personnel ASAP and isolate anyone testing positive. And hope the tests are 100% accurate, of course…

7. Here’s the problem: Until we get honest numbers out of this, we don’t know enough about it to really say. Six months from now, we may be looking back and wondering why we panicked–Or, we might be shaking our heads at the lack of response and how badly we flubbed it. Thanks to China’s need to obscure this data, we’re really screwed.

   I suspect that COVID-19 has been here in the US since at least December; what hasn’t happened has been any testing to identify it. The rather nasty flu we’ve all had around here tracks nicely with many of the reported COVID-19 symptoms and progressions, and there’s no telling what actual testing for it will show. My guess is that several of these cases outside China are only getting identified now as COVID-19 cases due to publicity and the notoriety of it all–Otherwise, people would be saying that it was just a bad case of the flu or whatever.

   I’m not going to rule out that this is almost entirely a propaganda event until something proves otherwise. The timing is excellent, if nefarious intent was behind it all, which alone makes me suspicious. That we have the sister of the same guy who got the Mueller investigation off the ground working at the CDC, and doing her best to stoke panic and fear…? Yeah; some of these things are highly questionable.

   Things will eventuate. I want to know the real numbers from China–Are the casualties from this higher than they’ve admitted? Are they leveraging this for some scheme? Who the hell knows, at this point. All we know for sure is what we’re seeing, and I’m not all that sure that what’s visible is the reality of it all.

8. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about the same thing Kirk has. As least as far as COVID spreading already in the US is concerned.

   a) I know a potential vector I could have gotten it from.
   b) One of my older relatives had a period of fairly sick after contacting me, after I was around potential vector.
   c) This upper respiratory crud I’ve been dealing with for a couple of months could be partly COVID.

   Would be bad news for containment, and good for survivability.

   Caveat is that I am a prone to constant upper respiratory issues.

   From a US domestic propaganda angle, the test issue is interesting.

   Since I am a vaccine skeptic without being unconditionally anti-vax, I’m also wondering about safety and efficacy of the vaccines they are pushing.

9. “San Francisco Mayor declares state of emergency”

   What? Does this mean that San Franciscans will not be allowed to defecate on the sidewalks anymore? There is research on the role of fecal transmission of this virus.

10. Kirk: If coronavirus were in the US for that long, we’d have seen a noticeable upswing in (fatal) pneumonia cases. I’m not aware that we have. It’s almost definitely here, but much more recently than that. Expect cases very soon.

    I do not like this Trump press conference thing scheduled for this evening. Not one bit. IF this thing is “just the flu” it will all blow over soon and literally no one will care, or remember, a couple day drop in the stock market. If not, anything he says will be replayed ad infinitum a la Bush/Katrina.
    We don’t have a functioning media or political system, which is really scary right now, but throwing Trump himself into this because of a couple of days of market drops is a terrible idea. You don’t do things that have massive downside risk, even if there is a corresponding upside opportunity, which there isn’t at all here.

11. Amid all the hype, it is useful to have a framework to give a sense of proportion. Global data would be useful, but US data is more accessible.

    The US has around 5% of the global population, and about 7,800 human beings die in the US each day. The CDC puts out some information on the causes of those deaths. Even though flu is a big killer, it is only Number 8 in the Top 10.

    https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db355_tables-508.pdf#page=3
    (US deaths in 2018, rounded to nearest thousand)

    655,000 Heart disease
    599,000 Cancer
    167,000 Accidents
    159,000 Chronic respiratory diseases
    148,000 Strokes
    122,000 Alzheimers
    85,000 Diabetes
    59,000 Influenza and Pneumonia
    51,000 Nephrosis
    48,000 Suicide

    All other causes of death amounted to 744,000 in 2018.

12. I really like the fact that, while South Korea has tested thousands of people for CoVid-19, the CDC has made it impossible for the US to do so. Our armed forces excepted, as they don’t have to comply with CDC regulations concerning their own personnel.

    Borrowing a line from the Paranoia role-playing game,
    

    “The CDC is your friend.“

13. Would we see an increased rate of death from pneumonia, though?

    Most Chinese men smoke like chimneys. US conditions are nowhere near the crowded ones of China or the cruise ships. Different conditions make for drastically different outcomes, so unless we are doing the testing to actually identify what everyone is coming down with, who the f**k knows what is actually out there in the population.

    We badly need an intelligence network for disease, one where you get samples for testing from the general population on a random yet consistent basis, so that the public health authorities know what the hell is actually going on in the general population before this crap sneaks up on us.

14. Kirk: I’ve not seen anything talking about the deaths outside of China suggesting they’re not in general dying from pneumonia.

    I’m still watching the case of the Slovak PM with great interest. This new article has quite a number of pucker moments:
    https://kafkadesk.org/2020/02/26/a-few-days-after-being-hospitalized-slovak-prime-minister-travels-to-moscow/

15. Brian, what I’m getting at is the question of whether the COVID-19 virus would demonstrate such extreme effect outside Chinese conditions. I don’t think that is a given–There are some diseases that will wreak havoc in a vulnerable population, and have limited to no effect on another lacking those vulnerabilities.

    You saw this with the Columbian Exchange; Native American immune systems were not “tuned” to deal with disease so much as they were parasites. Spaniards in Mexico were horribly vulnerable to the parasitical issues that the locals shrugged off, while the Native Americans dropped like flies to some fairly innocuous diseases brought over from Europe. Lousy hygiene and sanitation standards didn’t exactly help issues with the Spaniards, who grew up in a miasma of European diseases, zoonotic and human both. The Native Americans of the time did not have large-scale animal agriculture going, so they had no experience at all of the zoonotics.

    Something similar could be going on here–In China, this stuff is lethal because of compromised immune systems, and because of the prevalence of tobacco use. Here, it may only have a fraction of the lethality.

16. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see. We’ll know by the end of March who’s right.

    Also, your description of the cause of Native Americans getting wiped out by European disease doesn’t match any authoritative description that I’ve ever encountered anywhere.

17. Then you need to do more reading on the issue.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics

    Read the whole thing, in detail–What actually did more of the killing in Central America was apparently an Old World salmonella strain, which was brought into contact with the native population through the Spanish introduction of domesticated animals and what amounted to collectivization. The first wave killed more locals, arguably leaving the Spaniards alone, followed by the second wave that went after everyone.

    The immune system “tuning” stuff I gleaned from references in 1491 and 1492, the books about the Columbian Exchange written by Charles Mann. I’d have to go back and look at which ones they were–That factoid just stuck in my head, because it suddenly clarified why my missionary friend came back with a ton of parasite issues from Honduras, and his buddy who was a 2nd generation full-blooded Honduran immigrant here came back with none, having spent their entire time down there together–Ate the same food, slept in the same room, worked on the same sites, but one came back with like six different parasites and the other with zero.

18. This is way off topic. But that describes the standard story of Old World disease, not “tuning” of immune systems or whatever you’re talking about.

19. Brian & Kirk, I studied the 16th century demographic disaster that swept the New World during and after the Spanish conquests. The total number of Native Americans dropped by about 90% from 1521 to about 1600. My recollection is that the two chief newly-introduced Eoropean diseases responsible were measles and smallpox.

    The New England – Great Lakes area of North America suffered a similar decline in the 17th century from European diseases introduced by French and British settlers.

20. The CDC seems to be doing a Dilbertian “Mordac the Preventer of Information Services” job with disease control – it prevents control of epidemic diseases.

    https://www.google.com/search?q=mordac+the+preventer+of+information+technology&client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=ALeKk02jXeKSTezaFP1IojBkeHQCb00PZw:1582753146477&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=fe7kfsQCARZdhM%253A%252C8Z64D8UBhq0LPM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kSWjxlYOJciQdfssOE41Ha1kiJxAw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwip_b_4lvDnAhVWHzQIHVv_BcoQ9QEwBXoECAoQJg#imgrc=fe7kfsQCARZdhM:

21. Kirk: “what I’m getting at is the question of whether the COVID-19 virus would demonstrate such extreme effect outside Chinese conditions.”

    Chinese conditions include weather. An acquaintance in China (currently in lockdown) mentioned that the weather in that part of China has been unusually dry, which may be helping to create conditions ripe for transmission. Flu-type virus infections normally drop off towards summer because of reduced survivability of the virus outside the body, and if rainfall returns to normal that may also help reduce the spread there.

    Has the virus demonstrated an extreme effect (medically, rather than in the reaction)? China reports around 3,000 dead so far. Scaled to the smaller population of the US, that would be equivalent to about 750 deaths over approx. 2 months. If we assume that the Chinese authorities are lying through their teeth and the actual death toll is 10 times higher — make the scaled US number 7,500. Spread over only 30 days (to be conservative), that would be equivalent to about 250 deaths per day — and increase of about 3% over the usual 7,800 Americans dying each day.

22. a recent perusal of a large hospitals respiratory culture results in my Southeast city indicates that the only positive coronavirus findings were in pediatrics(no SARSCOVID19), yes, we have had the nasty 6-8 week respiratory cough condition here. The hospital respiratory studies as well as nasopharyngeal genomic studies done in my office indicates that this is actually a rhinovirus.

23. The WHO is not going to declare COVID-19 a “Pandemic” before July 2020, because it would wipe out its bond issues with all it’s sweet heart financiers.

    See:

    ————-
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-25/catastrophe-bonds-signal-coronavirus-nearing-pandemic-status

    The World Bank launched a $425 million 2017 catastrophe bond issue supporting its Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF). There are two tranches of PEF bonds outstanding, expected to mature in July, and this means investors of the bonds will collect massive profits if the bonds aren’t triggered or will lose everything if the Covid-19 outbreak continues to escalate.

    and

    Class A bonds were issued in the amount of $225 million, with a payout of 6.9% annually. The bonds default if a pandemic is identified, and deaths reach over 2,500 in one particular country with an additional 20 deaths in another, the prospectus states.

    Class B bonds were issued in the amount of $95 million, with a payout of 11.5% annually but had a much lower trigger level of deaths, versus Class A, hence the high yield.

    Bloomberg spoke with several investors who own the bonds. The unidentified people said the bonds aren’t quoted on public exchanges.

    and

    The bonds were issued to support the World Bank’s PEF, and would only be triggered if certain criteria of a pandemic were met. If triggered, the bondholders would lose their money, the funds would be transferred to developing countries to fight the virus. To date, the bonds have yet to be triggered, as it’s increasingly becoming obvious that the WHO may stall calling Covid-19 outbreak a “pandemic” until after the bonds mature in July.

24. First diagnosis of a case in the wild in the US. Now we’ll see how prepared the system is, and how far behind we are, and how destructive our political and media systems can be.

25. Ugh. The Northern California coronavirus victim has been seriously ill in multiple hospitals for a week, but was only just tested because he didn’t meet the CDC criteria for being a risk for it:
    https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1232847757804802048

26. Trent — Thanks for that link on the WHO “bonds”. Just occasionally the curtain flutters aside for a moment and we realize how thoroughly the insiders have been screwing us peons.

    The WHO gets cash indirectly from some taxpayers somewhere, and uses that cash to pay the interest on a much larger sum of money it borrows from undisclosed entities in a non-competitive market. The potential for sweetheart deals and backhanders goes without saying, not to mention whatever fat fees are paid to insider lawyers and financiers. Whatever the murky details are (e.g., where is the money in the meantime?), it is a lot closer to gambling than investing, with WHO playing the role of the House.

    It makes one wonder what else international bureaucracies have been doing that we don’t know about?

27. The Saudi goverment just cancelled this year’s big pilgrimages to Mecca & Medina due to fear of spreading CoVid-19 in Saudi Arabia.

    https://english.alarabiya.net/en/coronavirus/2020/02/27/Saudi-Arabia-suspends-entry-for-Umrah-pilgrimage-due-to-coronavirus.html

    I expect the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be cancelled or postponed.

28. @Satch… If they haven’t been testing for it, how would they know it’s not showing up? Are there generic screening tests that tell what general range of virus is present in the patient, and those are the ones they’re using?

    I was under the impression, from talking to my doctors over the years, that they screen for things they know about, and the tests they conduct aren’t general surveys of whatever the patient has going on. Did I misunderstand? Last time I had walking pneumonia, they were telling me that they couldn’t really narrow down what the hell I had that triggered it. Or, has the state of the art come that far, that they can get a general sense for what’s causing the issue? Surely they’re not sequencing everything in every patient…?

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