Amid all of the doom and gloom that the press is all too eager to peddle upon you for eyeballs and clicks, I present a few promising stories about the latest Chinese virus to infect our shores.
Approximate timelines on medications/vaccines to combat the virus.
Canadian scientists have successfully isolated the virus, an essential step in getting a vaccine ready for testing.
A welcome side effect of the virus is that as people have sheltered, pollution has plummeted.
A University of Minnesota doctor has gone MacGyver in creating a ventilator.
The total number of people recovered has recently surpassed one hundred thousand.
Projections of death totals could be orders of magnitude too high.
Apple may start re-opening stores in China soon.
There are many, many more good stories about the event if you care to test out your Google-fu.
Also, some anecdotal items. It appears that people in general are helping one another, remaining calm for the most part, and doing the right things. If there were hospitals with people stranded in hallways or on floors we would have seen those photos/video by now so I am assuming that **at this point** they are handling the influx of patients just fine. My stores locally are fully stocked with all items, save some canned foods like tomato sauce, and of course paper products. I assume those will be available sooner rather than later.
Discuss as you wish.
“If there were hospitals with people stranded in hallways or on floors we would have seen those photos/video by now so I am assuming that **at this point** they are handling the influx of patients just fine.”
Exponential growth, etc., but if you
haven’t accepted that by now you clearly never will.
https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud/status/1243194040444694531
“This is insanity, They’re creating makeshift patient rooms in the hospital pavillion,” says a New York City Doctor who sent me these pictures of what’s happening now at @MountSinaiNYC main hospital which is setting up patient pods in public spaces due to growing volume.”
Luckily we’re super rich and had time to prepare, though most of it (too much, unfortunately) was wasted.
*several unproductive comments deleted*
Americans are pulling together in ways not seen in 70 years to collectively slow the spread of the virus, making personal sacrifices for the common good.
People are supporting local businesses in trouble.
Governments are finally rallying resources to surge health care capacity.
This is going to be an event talked about in a century. It’s going to be bad. Worse than it had to be. But we’re going to make it through, and implement more robust systems to minimize the effects of the next one.
I think I’ve posted this before but…
There may be two strains of virus going around , “L” and “S,” the latter of which is milder. The government bureaucracies did what they always do, build empires and then fail in the crisis. The FBI and CIA before 9/11 is only one example. Pearl Harbor is another.
The battle of Midway was won by one guy, Joe Rochefort, who got the intelligence right but eventually lost his battle with the Redman brothers who ran Naval Intelligence in DC and who missed the whole thing.
Other sources suggest Rochefort received no official recognition during his lifetime because he was made a scapegoat for the embarrassment of OP-20-G. Redman (whose brother was the influential Rear Admiral Joseph Redman) complained about the operation of the Hawaii station; as a result, Rochefort was reassigned from cryptanalysis to command the floating dry dock ABSD-2 at San Francisco.[21][22] Rochefort never served at sea again.[23] The fact that Rochefort received no higher recognition at the time is considered by some to have been an outrage.[24] However, he was decorated with the Legion of Merit at the end of the War
How do you tell a successful bureaucrat? See who gets the credit from other bureaucrats.
The Redmans
Other sources suggest Rochefort received no official recognition during his lifetime because he was made a scapegoat for the embarrassment of OP-20-G. Redman (whose brother was the influential Rear Admiral Joseph Redman) complained about the operation of the Hawaii station; as a result, Rochefort was reassigned from cryptanalysis to command the floating dry dock ABSD-2 at San Francisco.[21][22] Rochefort never served at sea again.[23] The fact that Rochefort received no higher recognition at the time is considered by some to have been an outrage.[24] However, he was decorated with the Legion of Merit at the end of the War.”
When this is over, we’ll see who gets the credit or blame.
Traffic is light. Lots of people out biking and walking.
Lack of traffic is a great side benefit. Glad the folks in your area are taking advantage and getting exercise and fresh air.
My favored local supermarket (the HEB at Bulverde and 1604) has instituted nice little floor stickers, indicating where customers may stand in line, and proceed as the checkout cashier instructs – to preserve the nice social distance. They have also put in clear plastic shields, between every cashier station, and smaller ones between the cashier and the person waiting for their purchasers to be rung up. You may only advance when the cashier instructs you, to the pay-station to insert your card…
Well, it’s a good thing otherwise that all the things have not been closed down. And a number of local restaurants have converted – since they can only now do take-out and delivery – to small grocery outlets. https://www.expressnews.com/food/restaurants/article/San-Antonio-restaurants-turn-into-grocery-stores-15152287.php
Some of those on the list are doing meal-kits, in addition to re-selling their food and supplies stocks. It’s really quite sensible, really.
We have been to La Gloria Icehouse, now and again – a nice place, on the grounds of the Pearl Brewery development.
“Exponential growth, etc., but if you
haven’t accepted that by now you clearly never will.”
That was unnecessary and should have been deleted. You owe Dan an apology. There was and is no reason to accuse him of not accepting exponential spread. His intent was to bring some positive points to the table.
I’m not conversant in the predictive models being used so can not comment the various predictions on spread and mortality, but I believe the two Stanford physicians are correct about the bias in the stats towards over estimation of mortality and under estimation of spread. To what extent the models can compensate for the data issues I am unaware. I’m pretty sure that New York City is in crisis, but resilient and with targeted aid will get things under control sooner rather than later. Its population concentration presents a worse case scenario for an event like this.
I am of a certain age to be high risk. It is incumbent on me to use extraordinary protections and I don’t see general panic as particularly helpful to people like me in the short or long run. Sierra Echo November Delta Tango Oscar India Limma Echo Tango Papa Alpha Papa Echo Romeo!
Death6
Ok Death 6 I laughed at that last part well done.
Brian, the “exponential growth” analysis on hears tends to rely on the unstated assumption that what happens in math (the growth continues at the same rate) describes indefinitely what will happen in nature. You probably know it does not, whether talking of fungus in petri dish or fissions in an atomic bomb. Ponder what happens with, eg, a virus: sooner or later an infected person cannot easily find a neighbor who is not already infected. The problem for math models resides in figuring out how to predict that sooner or later. Just that puzzle was involved, eg, in the Manhattan project determining a critical mass and how to create it with available technology.
My point re CCP-Bat virus: I’m not certain how the growth curves are actually proceeding. Seems to me that different locales have seen different rates, even very different rages. Seems to me that at least some sources show it in some cases as, while growing, not growing as fast as it did initially. I had understood earlier predictions as saying by this week we’d see ICUs overwhelmed. That they are not *yet* does not mean that won’t happen (your point, which Dan’s and my observation does not dispute). It does mean that we can *probably* conclude earlier predictions need modification, that while ‘it’s gonna get bad’ it may not be quite as bad as we’d thought.
Meanwhile, just for some perspective, consider a long-ago U.S. experience
https://www.theaquilareport.com/perspective-the-dreaded-cholera-in-kentucky-1832-1833/
Roy: Not to relitigate things from 4-6 weeks ago, but the point some of us made wasn’t that certain exponential growth rates were assured, but that given “I’m not certain” whether something like Spanish flu was about to happen, the prudent thing to do was take action to get that probability as close to zero as possible.
“I’m not certain” in that case doesn’t mean, wait to collect more data until you are certain the worst case is about to happen and then act, it meant take action now until you are certain it’s not.
Brian: provided that one grants thinking about the trade-offs involved, I tend to agree with your 27Mar 1:42 p.m. comment. Thus weeks ago I began and am now actively practicing self-isolation, both to protect myself and to prevent my behavior from becoming a link in a chain that reaches to others. Simultaneously, I take the position that younger folks (eg, my daughter and SIL) who are not retired and cannot self-isolate without very serious short term and even more serious long term economic disasters, “bet” on their relative immunity/survivability. Thus SIL works in an “”essential” job, but does so practicing all sorts of protective measures.
In my 1:16 p.m. post, shoulda read “very different ranges” rather than my (Freudian Slip?) “very different rages”. RE those ranges and rates: interesting that in the comments of the OP prior to this one (which I read after the above OP) several observed reasons for these rates and ranges to differ: different locales had very different methods of deciding what counted as a CV19 fatality.
How to have an “abundance of caution” without getting “an abundance of unintended consequences”.