Why Trump Is Right to Re-Open the Economy

[0R0 + 6,251]

4 hours ago, timamtti said:

On 4/7/2020 at 6:33 PM, 0R0 said:

I don't think I am that smart and don't have the academic chops for it. To produce a powerful statistical model would take more than I can do on my own and direct access to CDC and state data.

Then what are you basing your estimates that differ so massively from others if not on "powerful statistical models"? Just a hunch? I mean, if you have evidence supporting your claims, it should be trivial to write that paper. The key word is evidence. What is the data that makes you think that you're right and almost all the world's epidemiologists are wrong? If you have that data, then even if you're wrong by a factor of 2, your estimate would still be much much closer to the true number than what others are saying. 

I am saying that my analysis is an order of magnitude more complex than the R0 based epidemiological models. Meaning that the order of magnitude of work I would have to do on my own in order to deliver a "bulletproof" presentation would require years of work. I presume that with the appropriate super smarts I would be able to run through the modifications of the models necessary to incorporate the observation of R0 variation with population density and propagation of high fever measurements by Kinsa, and county test numbers, which are not always available.

I am saying that as most areas in most sciences are dominated by prevailing dogma, getting anything published that departs from it has to be accompanied by more proof and mathematical modeling must have cleaned out confounding factors. It is an enormous amount of work. To just publish a minor variant of a standard model you get no criticism and the level of proof is not burdensome.Reasoning is not mathematical proof so is a source of argment the further you go off the beaten path. 

The temperature measurement data is being ignored by the epidemiologists so far. I presume that is because it can be confounded with flu and other pneumonias and bronchitis. 

I presented my thinking here. It is distributed among many postings. Look it up if it is worth your trouble. 

 

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

1 hour ago, timamtti said:

Thanks. Regarding the Trump cult, we're in an interesting experiment. Trump changed his stance quite radically with COVID-19 from "we don't have to care about it" to "this is a national emergency, we'll have to keep the country closed at least to the end of April". That has dropped the cult members in an interesting void. Should they continue on a stance of downplaying the threat that they adopted when Trump was on that side and resist all the restrictions for people's movements and gatherings or rally behind Trump and support his actions. It's a horrible cognitive dissonance that is wrecking their brains probably worse than any other effects of the epidemic. 

Trump was not the only head of state or politician who ‘misread’ the severity of this virus in the early days. This was largely due to the disinformation coming out of China and the WHO.

I do not see either you, or Marcin2, vilifying any of the others, only Trump.

Why is that?

[Prometheus1354 + 178]

On 4/1/2020 at 8:11 AM, Rob Plant said:

563 dead in the UK today 😥

The avalanche is coming just like Italy and Spain

Robert;  I don't have the proper words, all I can say is I keep y'all in prayers much as I do those affected here.

[0R0 + 6,251]

On 4/6/2020 at 1:19 PM, timamtti said:

If I could following your reasoning correctly, then you're saying that social distancing has pretty much no effect. Almost everyone will get the virus in the first wave no matter what we do (and in New York that's already the case). Am I correctly interpreting you? 

 

No

What I am saying is that it takes several weeks to infect a big sprawling city. It takes two weeks or less to infect all of NYC. 

Social distancing matters little AFTER most people were infected. 

Social distancing does not need to be severe where population density is low. Just avoid public transport and large congregations and you are good. 

I am saying that the time to do quarantine with effect was here Mar 4-5 or earlier

By the time NY metro was in Quarantine

 

Temp. readings popped Mar 4, the avg. duration from first fever to dyspnea when you need to be hospitalized is 12 days, and on Mar 16 positive tests started showing up in significant numbers. By that same math, the peak should be a mild slow down in cases starting 3.26 + test delay time, about 2-4 days. So at about 3.30, and the plateau should break by 4.4 to 4.6. And go down from there. gradually, While less dense and less infected areas will have a sharper downtrend off the plateau, similar to the behavior of the temperature anomaly charts (see below)

Population density of NY county is 71,510, Queens is over 20,000 per sqm a large portion of Queens residents commute to NY county. Most of the rest commute to other neighboring counties among the boroughs of NYC. I believe the crowded subway and trains going into NYC is where most transmission occurred, there is nowhere to distance yourself from other commuters by more than 1 ft not to speak of the required 6 ft. and commutes from Queens or Hudson co. in NJ are not instantaneous, and the further your commute the greater your exposure time and initial viral load.   

I guess that R0 in NYC is on the order of 10-20, like measles. Not 2 like a flu. 

For comparison, Milan, at the center of the Italian outbreak is 19,391

That as opposed to the CA shutdown that started 2.28 and tightened in stages. With full lockdown on 3. 11 precisely where the peak in the fever rate peaked. LA is 40% of California cases. 

Population density 2344 

I am guessing the R0 is about 2

As to the differing R0 depending on temperature and humidity, This is for Miami You can clearly see the effect of the viral propagation by the intrusion of spring breakers from NYC, Philadelphia and Boston area universities etc.. Partial lockdown started with the national guidelines publication. Miami is 35% of Florida cases. Thanks to FL high temp. and humidity it seems at least, that the spike in elevated temperatures did not result in widespread propagation. I would allocate the highest contribution to this being that spring breakers largely exchanged coronavirus among themselves more than among the locals, and when they felt bad, they went back home to infect their parent's households back in the big cities of the NE.

Population density 1431

 

 

[Radha + 262]

Trump is correct here, the WHO has been in bed with Bill Gates and Big Pharma since they started accepting private contributions in 2005  They are not interested in helping people stay or become healthy.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281876323_Why_the_Corruption_of_the_World_Health_Organization_WHO_is_the_Biggest_Threat_to_the_World's_Public_Health_of_Our_Time

[0R0 + 6,251]

On 4/6/2020 at 1:19 PM, timamtti said:

So, now the question is, why did it work in China? Why there shutting down everything was able to stop the virus from spreading? It wasn't that it was fully contained in Hubei, but did spread a bit to other provinces as well. If it spread in the US far far quicker than any models suggest (you're talking about 80% of New York having had it, while official numbers say less than 1%) then why didn't it do that in China? 

 

It worked because they quarantined a hard lockdown 782 million people in residential buildings where one case was reported in a building. The entire neighborhood if two or more buildings had infections. You did not get to go get food. You stayed inside. Food was delivered by your order or by the local CCP committee, or by the property management company. Or often by nobody at all. 

It was contained in Hubei because most of the population was infected. It is contained in Wuhan because all of the population was infected. Only people who made it to the hospital and through triage got tested. The 99% who got the virus were not tested, most who died did so at home. Estimates from urn deliveries, crematorium operating hours and the mercury cloud over Wuhan, as well as difference in abandoned cell phone lines indicate 80-160k more people died in Wuhan than in recent years in the same period. Chinese stats are useless. You are better off not being informed by them.

It did do that in China. Reports from there are as real as a Guy Fawks mask telling you what is behind it. 

Wuhan is like NYC, it waited far too long to quarantine, it is densely populated and has lots of densely packed public transport. If you want to know what happened there, then follow what happens in NYC, just that NYC hospitals expanded in time and have not filled up, fewer people died at home without treatment - which is how most of the CV19 victims died in Wuhan. People in Wuhan are malnourished in proteins, NYC are over-fed. 

[0R0 + 6,251]

6 hours ago, timamtti said:

So, then R0 in Korea and Japan must be close to R0 in NYC, right? If so, why the disease is not spreading there? The entire Japan has about 4k confirmed cases when NY has over 100k. Korea had about 7k cases already in early March. Now they have 10k. If the virus spreads like wildfire in urban populations and especially without us detecting the spread how is it possible that Japan and Korea have been able to contain the spread of virus? The method used in Korea that stopped the spread there on its tracks was based on the massive testing and contact tracking. But that doesn't work if the tested positive people account only a small fraction of the true positive cases. You're saying that a half of the NYC has the virus, which means that the tested 100k represent a small fraction of the total positive cases. Why is that not the case in South Korea? 

 

Up until the lockdown it was expanding unchecked in NYC.

At no point was there an unchecked propagation in S Korea, Taiwan, Japan or Singapore. They did extensive testing and quarantined all suspected contacts of the infected repeatedly. 

Can't you separate apples from oranges?

 

[0R0 + 6,251]

6 hours ago, timamtti said:

You do understand that the route of Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and Korea is completely opposite to what Sweden is doing? Those countries won't have the herd immunity. South Korea has had more testing than anyone else and they have it at about 0.02% of the population having had the disease. And as I said, if their number is way off, they would not have been able to have done what they have done, namely contact tracing and isolating the positive cases. That doesn't work if the tests are catching only a tiny fraction of the actual positive cases. 

 

I do understand perfectly well that the Swedes are doing a controlled propagation. Taiwan S Korea Singapore are doing a selective containment by very close tracking of the contact chains of the infected. 

You should not presume I am pulling things out of the air and am not aware of different circumstances or goals of different approaches. 

Once we have antibody tests to show how many were infected in a broad sampling by region, we will know. But the different methods in Korea etc. vs. Sweden, vs. unchecked propagation in NYC till the 16th, vs,gradual imposition of quarantine in CA over a week earlier, should result in far different penetrations of the virus. It may very well be 0.02% in Korea. I can't be any less than tens of % in NYC. I expect that NYC would be in the 80% range, LA 20-30%, etc...all will have different numbers because all have different epidemiological factors and paths to initiation of the contagion. 

[Rob Plant + 2,635]

3 hours ago, Prometheus1354 said:

Robert;  I don't have the proper words, all I can say is I keep y'all in prayers much as I do those affected here.

Thanks for the kind words Prometheus1354, yesterday was the worst day 938 dead, worse than the worst day Italy have had.

My wife and I still have to go to work as we supply utilities and nuclear defence companies.

From a safety point of view its probably a bit more risky than locking yourself at home but we must stay working as the last thing the country needs at the moment are power outages.

Everybody is trying to do their bit to support the NHS and other support healthcare professionals in their brave fight against this horrible virus.

We have had more than 750,000 volunteers for the NHS in the last 2-3 weeks. Incredible how, when the country is in isolation, we have all come together, united against this virus.

Stay safe!

[timamtti + 17]

13 hours ago, 0R0 said:

Does not explain the difference. And it is not anywhere near the 0.04% or 0.7% you are quoting. The symptomatic patients qualifying for tests are a tiny fraction of the number infected. Thus 1 tested positive means at least 10 infected 4 with mild symptoms who were done with the virus by the time they may have tested, 5 with no symptoms at all.

Even if we took that factor of 10 in face value (that you have shown zero evidence so far) it would still mean that the percentages were 0.4% for California and 7% for New York. The New York value is still miles away from what you would need for herd immunity. 

Furthermore, we are still waiting for you to explain us South Korea and Japan, which according to you are more like New York, where the disease should spread with R0 of 20. Their testing would have the exact same problem as above meaning that the vast majority of the cases would have gone undetected because they were with people without symptoms. Still these countries (esp. South Korea) were able to contain the spread of the disease by doing massive testing and isolating the ones who tested positive. Instead South Korea tested a massive number of people, with only about 3% of them testing positive. So, clearly just testing more doesn't ramp up the positive numbers. It just means that you get a lot of negative results in addition to the positives that you would have picked anyway. If we scale the South Korean numbers in proportion to the US numbers based on the death rate, meaning that the actual underlying death rate is about the same in both countries, but unlike the US, South Korea was just able to detect all the covid-19 cases, this would increase the US number only by a factor of 3 (1% death rate in SK, 3% in the US). For New York the factor would be 4. So 3 or 4, not 10. If you multiply the New York number by that factor, you'll get about 3% population being infected, not 50%. And this is conservative estimate for two reasons. One, the South Korean infected were predominantly your women, which has the lowest death rate and two, South Korean hospitals were not close to the capacity unlike in New York. Some of the deaths in NY may be due to healthcare system pushed to the limit meaning that in a normal situation these people would not have died. 

As I said, the South Korean number has to be close to the truth as otherwise it would not be possible that they stopped the spread of virus as otherwise the hidden untested asymptomatic cases would have spread the disease just like in the US. 

Regarding China, you made a claim that all of Wuhan has had the virus. You are yet to show a single evidence supporting this claim. And by the way, Trump praised Xi for handling the coronavirus crisis. Was Trump wrong? (SHOCK HORROR)

[timamtti + 17]

11 hours ago, 0R0 said:

It may very well be 0.02% in Korea. I can't be any less than tens of % in NYC. I expect that NYC would be in the 80% range,

Ok, if that is the case, South Korea would have found pretty much all their COVID-19 cases and their death rate would be the true one, a bit less than 2% (204 deaths from 10423 infections) of people with the virus would die. If you would then put this to New York and use your 80% number for true number of infections, you should have something like 130k deaths in NYC. Instead you have about 4k. To get that low value of deaths from that many infections would require that the overstretched healthcare system of NYC would be performing about 30x better in keeping people alive than South Korea's.  

Which one is more likely, that NYC's hospitals are that much better at keeping COVID-19 patients alive or that your estimate of the prevalence of coronavirus within NYC is wrong by at least an order of magnitude?  

[Bob D + 562]

We have lost 1132 jobs for every confirmed US death from COVID-19 (14,817)

https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-fina ... st-3-weeks

[0R0 + 6,251]

2 hours ago, timamtti said:

Still these countries (esp. South Korea) were able to contain the spread of the disease by doing massive testing and isolating the ones who tested positive. Instead South Korea tested a massive number of people, with only about 3% of them testing positive.

You are presuming that the tests of the contact chains of people would somehow reveal past carriers of the virus who had fought it off. It can't, only an antibody test would reveal that. For the vast bulk of the infected, no symptoms show up or symptoms are very minor. In the case of interviewing the Diamond Princess positive testing population, it had to be eked out of them that they had some sort of symptom, because they didn't notice it on their own. The initial interviews showed 40% with no symptoms. That went down to 18% once they were prompted in subsequent interviews to recall specific symptoms. The odd thing is that the ship had "only" 20% infections. I don't believe that is the right number. The number of cured patients no longer carrying live virus is unknown. But I will posit that much more than that number was exposed, got no symptoms or very mildly ill and stopped carrying the virus within a week or two, before even docking in Japan. The idea that this highly contagious virus would skip some people entirely despite sharing the same ship surfaces food and air (all cabins share the same air supply) before the presence of the disease was known strikes me as fanciful. 

The same goes for Taiwan Korea and other contact chain testers. The number of people who were unsymptomatic or very mildly so would be cured and no longer test positive for the live virus. So we should expect that the contact chain would be retested as soon as a reliable antibody test is available. I would be surprised if the chain would not reveal a much larger proportion having been infected. That said, the practice had been a hard quarantine of all people in the contact chain till they were cleared with multiple tests for the live virus. They are testing at 10 day intervals. Despite this, they are having people slip through the contact tracking and they obtain new cases. 

 

 

[0R0 + 6,251]

1 hour ago, timamtti said:

Ok, if that is the case, South Korea would have found pretty much all their COVID-19 cases and their death rate would be the true one, a bit less than 2% (204 deaths from 10423 infections) of people with the virus would die. If you would then put this to New York and use your 80% number for true number of infections, you should have something like 130k deaths in NYC. Instead you have about 4k. To get that low value of deaths from that many infections would require that the overstretched healthcare system of NYC would be performing about 30x better in keeping people alive than South Korea's.  

 

Again, that would not be the case, because the number of people cured and no longer carrying live virus are going to be outside this figure. For each positive test there is a much larger number of people in a contact chain that had been infected but no longer have the virus when they get tested. S. Korean contact chains have missing links where they "know" someone was communicating the virus but all the known contacts between one case and the next on in the chain tested negative. Thus the death rate is likely not 2% but 0.5%. We will not know till wide antibody testing is done. 

The peak in high temperature readings in NYC metro (not Manhattan) was on 3.14. The last weekday before the imposition of quarantine. By that time, NYC commuter traffic and transition to work from home were 1/4-1/3 of the people as corporate offices and Wall Street already got their insurance and legal liability info and were aware that they are not covered if they insist on having their folks come into the office. In some proportion, they had pulled their kids from school and restaurant workers were not called in for shifts as these office workers were also not going out any longer.

Spring breakers went home during the first week of NYC quarantine, thus bringing a plateau of high temperature readings rather than an immediate drop as has been observed elsewhere upon imposition of Quarantine. That leads me to believe that the elevated temperatures are showing us the duration of illness of mild cases is a day or two. That means that within one week most will have no virus, and within two weeks, none of those folks will have live virus and would test negative even if they retain some coughing and decide to ask for a referral for a test. 

Thus I would expect that the % positives will start falling as we proceed from the peak last weekend going forward. 

[0R0 + 6,251]

2 hours ago, timamtti said:

Ok, if that is the case, South Korea would have found pretty much all their COVID-19 cases and their death rate would be the true one, a bit less than 2% (204 deaths from 10423 infections) of people with the virus would die. If you would then put this to New York and use your 80% number for true number of infections, you should have something like 130k deaths in NYC. Instead you have about 4k. To get that low value of deaths from that many infections would require that the overstretched healthcare system of NYC would be performing about 30x better in keeping people alive than South Korea's.  

Which one is more likely, that NYC's hospitals are that much better at keeping COVID-19 patients alive or that your estimate of the prevalence of coronavirus within NYC is wrong by at least an order of magnitude?  

The more likely case is that Korean testing misses the unsymptomatics in the contagion chain tracking as they are likely to have no virus by the time they are tested. 

NYC made no big effort to contain the virus early on. S. Korea went on full on SARS footing from the time Wuhan was just a rumor. That an all out well planned containment would result in 0.1-0.2%  infections (0.02% measured) vs. an anything goes for 2-3 months of rampant unchecked virus propagation, is a very very unlikely scenario in an exponential growth situation. The NYC circumstance would be of a much much greater penetration. normal for March flu high temperature readings average is 3% and corresponds to a national penetration of 20-40% of the virus. Readings in NYC metro were at 6.5%. Would you really expect 1 or 2% penetration? I would expect 40-80%.

In Florida, the exponential growth of fever readings was during spring break and crashed down within days of them being sent back home, where they led to continued elevated temps in dense urban centers where they came from like Manhattan - where elevated temps continued an extra week after shutdown. It appears the spring breakers left FL just in time to stop the disease propagating wildly into the native FL community. 

[timamtti + 17]

3 minutes ago, 0R0 said:

S. Korean contact chains have missing links where they "know" someone was communicating the virus but all the known contacts between one case and the next on in the chain tested negative. Thus the death rate is likely not 2% but 0.5%. We will not know till wide antibody testing is done. 

I don't understand you. On one hand you make bold statements as above that the death rate is wrong by a factor of 4 and on the other, you say that we don't know. Please decide, which one you hold. If the former, please provide the evidence why "a few missing links" suddenly pumps up the number of infections by a factor of 4. If the latter, please stop making any statements of facts and just say that we'll know the infection rate sometime in the future. 

And fine, even if the rate was off by a factor of 4, it would still mean that with your numbers the NYC deaths from COVID-19 should be an order of magnitude higher. 

11 minutes ago, 0R0 said:

I would expect that the % positives will start falling as we proceed from the peak last weekend going forward. 

So, how do we distinguish this from % positives falling as the social distancing measures take effect and reduce R0 below 1 from your claim that they fall because pretty much everyone has had the disease? If you look at the number of positive cases in San Diego, which is definitely completely different type of city (less urban) they show decline already from a peak around a week ago. The restrictions  (schools, restaurants, stay at home) that you list above came into effect there at about same time as in NYC. How do we know that in San Diego it's the social distancing that's bringing down the infections while in NYC it's the herd immunity? 

I still come back to publishing the results. If you're lazy and don't want to publish it in a medical journal,  have you sent your data to CDC or New York State government? If not, why not, if it conclusively proves that the situation in New York is completely different than what they think it is (80% vs. a few percent)? If your claim is true, New York might as well reopen the schools after Easter and everyone could go back to work. This would have an enormous economic value compared to the situation that the number of new cases is falling because of social distancing measures and if they are relaxed, the rapid growth of cases resumes in the population that is still largely hadn't had the infection.

[0R0 + 6,251]

3 hours ago, timamtti said:

Regarding China, you made a claim that all of Wuhan has had the virus. You are yet to show a single evidence supporting this claim. And by the way, Trump praised Xi for handling the coronavirus crisis. Was Trump wrong? (SHOCK HORROR)

Start with the presumption that not a single item of information from China is worthwhile unless it went through the gauntlet of scientific peer review, and even then may remain suspect till it is confirmed. 

Don't start with the presumption that Trump is wrong. But he definitely was wrong about praising his "friend" emperor Xi, for accomplishing a retention of virus susceptibility for his country as a whole. 

3 hours ago, timamtti said:

Furthermore, we are still waiting for you to explain us South Korea and Japan, which according to you are more like New York, where the disease should spread with R0 of 20.

As you refuse to differentiate between quarantine measures, you obviously have no idea how to view epidemiology. 

No amount of explanation will help you get it. I already addressed this.

 

[timamtti + 17]

1 minute ago, 0R0 said:

Don't start with the presumption that Trump is wrong. But he definitely was wrong about praising his "friend" emperor Xi,

Don't start with the presumption that Trump is wrong but Trump is wrong. LOL. Thanks. That sentence made my day. 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

Time to open up the country again, instead of further lockdown.

[0R0 + 6,251]

1 hour ago, timamtti said:

I don't understand you. On one hand you make bold statements as above that the death rate is wrong by a factor of 4 and on the other, you say that we don't know. Please decide, which one you hold. If the former, please provide the evidence why "a few missing links" suddenly pumps up the number of infections by a factor of 4. If the latter, please stop making any statements of facts and just say that we'll know the infection rate sometime in the future. 

And fine, even if the rate was off by a factor of 4, it would still mean that with your numbers the NYC deaths from COVID-19 should be an order of magnitude higher. 

So, how do we distinguish this from % positives falling as the social distancing measures take effect and reduce R0 below 1 from your claim that they fall because pretty much everyone has had the disease? If you look at the number of positive cases in San Diego, which is definitely completely different type of city (less urban) they show decline already from a peak around a week ago. The restrictions  (schools, restaurants, stay at home) that you list above came into effect there at about same time as in NYC. How do we know that in San Diego it's the social distancing that's bringing down the infections while in NYC it's the herd immunity? 

I still come back to publishing the results. If you're lazy and don't want to publish it in a medical journal,  have you sent your data to CDC or New York State government? If not, why not, if it conclusively proves that the situation in New York is completely different than what they think it is (80% vs. a few percent)? If your claim is true, New York might as well reopen the schools after Easter and everyone could go back to work. This would have an enormous economic value compared to the situation that the number of new cases is falling because of social distancing measures and if they are relaxed, the rapid growth of cases resumes in the population that is still largely hadn't had the infection.

I keep pointing out that the infection rate or virus penetration has to be far higher than the positive tests of symptomatic patients would show. That could not yet be measured directly till antibody tests are ubiquitous. It can be estimated in round about ways from the behavior of the multiple annual flue pandemics and from temperature anomaly data. You keep insisting that only the direct evidence  AFTER it is measured in 2021 is useful and everything else amounts to nothing. If you were an engineer on my team then you would have been raising hands and giving up on your assignment when you just delineated what it was supposed to be. Sorry that reality is unable to serve you with confirmed p <0.001 information 4 months from the breakout of pandemic and 1 month from its breakout in the US. Use what you have, determine your path to obtain by test what is missing and go do your job. 

San Diego did not start shut down with NYC, it started well before. Same as Santa Clara in the example provided above, and had bent the Temp curve well earlier. So it never departed substantially from the average flu temperature measurement pattern. Penetration was slowed down and then halted earlier. They will soon have no flu at all. On the other hand, NYC continued with increasingly elevated rates of fever till shutdown, while SD was nearly flat. That was a successful, if overly expensive and not necessarily productive outcome in SD. 

Or at state level

The difference in the timing of quarantine implementation resulted in CA having more than an order of magnitude fewer  positive tests per million. Predominantly because of the slow spread early in the "quarantine light" phase and because it is naturally low density. 

As to why I don't publish this in the epidemiology journals, 

1. I am unwilling to take on the effort

2. Kinsa has an ongoing relationship with academic school district and health departments and it is not my job to promote their databases. 

3. for my purposes, as a financial economist with an engineering R&D background what I have done so far is quite enough to produce a likely path for the pandemic's economic toll and problems that will remain. Thanks to folks like you throwing stones at my work, I have more certainty that I have a good handle on what is going on.

4. As shown by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Gates who were interviewed this week on the matter, they are in the throws of a  delusion of imaginary vaccines that somehow work when the natural immune response of the infected but cured remains in doubt. That somehow testing negative on virus tests and measuring 0 on qPCR is less important than their fear that there is virus left in these cured folks' system. While a vaccine that relies on precisely the same immune system would magically be successful. 

I would say that there is no amount of rational demonstration and fact that will dislodge the Gates and Pharma crowd and their moochers in congress and the medical bureaucracy from their hard grasp on benefiting from the gravytrain of sales of a vaccine that can't at all have a benefit if the actually cured don't have  that same benefit, and that despite no SARS vaccine having been successful in 15+ years of development and testing. 

There is no vaccine coming any time soon, We don't have to have one, We can open up the economy with or without another breakout. We likely have a treatment that halts the progression of the disease for most people to reduce death rates to below flu. Personal protection methods are easy and cheap to apply and result in an R0 of less than 1 with the exception of crowded public transport which would require novel management to keep going. We only need more testing capacity and antibody tests, and capacity for HCQ/Z and other treatments. 

I don't owe the public a tilt at the windmill. 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

@0R0  info for you to dig into.   Looks like CDC has been "untruthful" in Covid - 19 death counts.

First up:

 

Next, CDC site that has this information:

Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)   

( Plain URL of this ^ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/ )

 

Data set can be downloaded here in CVS format (Comma Separated Values)

https://data.cdc.gov/api/views/hc4f-j6nb/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD&bom=true&format=true

or data set can be downloaded in Data.CDC.gov (Export to CSV, JSON, XLS, XML)[?] format 

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-Death-Counts-for-Coronavirus-Disease-C/hc4f-j6nb

 

 

Excel file from CDC attached (or you can download it in the link above)

Provisional_Death_Counts_for_Coronavirus_Disease__COVID-19_.xlsx

 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

For amusement, read the comments

Newsweek shocked to learn that counting every death as COVID makes COVID the leading cause of death

 

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

Almost 2000 in one day

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[0R0 + 6,251]

1 hour ago, Tom Kirkman said:

@0R0  info for you to dig into.   Looks like CDC has been "untruthful" in Covid - 19 death counts.

First up:

 

Next, CDC site that has this information:

Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)   

( Plain URL of this ^ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/ )

 

Data set can be downloaded here in CVS format (Comma Separated Values)

https://data.cdc.gov/api/views/hc4f-j6nb/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD&bom=true&format=true

or data set can be downloaded in Data.CDC.gov (Export to CSV, JSON, XLS, XML)[?] format 

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-Death-Counts-for-Coronavirus-Disease-C/hc4f-j6nb

 

 

Excel file from CDC attached (or you can download it in the link above)

Provisional_Death_Counts_for_Coronavirus_Disease__COVID-19_.xlsx 10.67 kB · 1 download

 

It should be no surprise that there are fewer accidents, fewer colds and flus - the national temperature tracker is at 0.4% vs the seasonal average of 2.66% so there should be that many fewer cases of death and pneumonia  related to flu. As to how many heart attacks we are NOT having, there is no reason to expect those to just be independent phenomena unrelated to general activity levels and exposures to flu. If we managed to cut down flu to 1/8th of its normal levels, then flu related deaths from pneumonia, heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes etc. would all go down with it, as they are all physical stress related and flu is the most common stress. Accidents and non-flu related heart attacks etc are activity related, and there is much less of that going on.

The CV19 deaths average 7-8 days from hospitalization, and 3 weeks since infection. The lockdown following 3 16 have tamped it down. But that peak would be just now and take about a week. 

I would not be surprised if the CDC is trying to cook the books to make it seem as if there are more CV19 deaths. But what I see so far is not unexpected. 

[Ron Ron + 18]

On 3/25/2020 at 8:22 AM, wrs said:

How do we know social distancing works?  We can't say if it is or isn't working any faster than the virus gets weaker on it's own.  Prove that it has worked anywhere.  Remember A before B doesn't mean A caused B.  

Here is a perfect example of a key component of social distancing not working.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/586612/six-amazon-warehouses-have-coronavirus/

If everything has to be delivered and therefore touched and it's infected first, how does social distancing work?  Wiping everything down all the time is just ridiculous.  When I go to the store and pick fresh vegetables, how many others have touched them?  If you are really paranoid you can use a hydrogen peroxide and water solution to wash them but that's a lot of work.

It's inevitable that the virus will spread, that is what is scientific.  All the juju about social distancing is hocus pocus and not scientific because it's really not proving to help that much or do anything more than give govt more unearned authority and make people even stupider as they believe what they can't understand because they have been trained to all their lives.  Science is just another religion with it's own appeal to authority for enforcement.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/italy-may-set-heavier-fines-for-coronavirus-lockdown-violations/ar-BB11D4NI

So you want to see our healthcare system overrun like in Spain, Northern Italy and NYC. In western Washington, California, Germany and Austria social distancing seems to have worked to flatten the curve. Austria which responded early with social distancing is about to restart their economy.