Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Why would you think something is amiss? Despite social distancing there is still a lot of physical interaction going on. And without social distancing the number would be much higher.

 

Okay. So, what do you think is going to happen now that states are opening things up? If dumb asses are effing it up for all the rest of us, what’s going to happen when people start congregating at various businesses again? Asking a legitimate question.

 

how were you able to get it on camera?

 

See the previous reply I made to bling.

 

So a 9k gap for those locations alone. Cut out a bunch of drunk driving deaths due to people staying home and likely closer to 10k

 

If people start physically interacting more, the cases will go up more than they otherwise would have. All things being equal, we will see higher case numbers. The only way the virus can be transmitted is through direct physical contact or through touching a surface that an infected person recently touched. So it's a 100% certainty that more contact will lead to more cases than there otherwise would have been.

 

Other types of accidents and homicides are certainly down too.

 

My cell phone. I got up on the fence and confronted them about it and they started mouthing off, telling me to F off and that I wasn't going to do anything about it, even sprayed me with a hose.. They were so busy peacocking for each other that they didn't see me holding my phone up filming them. The cops said they were pissing themselves when they knocked on the door and lined them up against the wall. I heard the mom tearing them a new one for 5 minutes.
In the end, I wanted them charged but the cops wouldn't do it. Just wrote up a report and told them if I called again they would be brought in.
I haven't even seen them in their own backyard since. 1 kid lived at the house, the others were his buddies.

 

Cases and deaths will increase at a faster rate in the target-rich environment.

 

I don't disagree that there will be more cases. If the government starts telling people it's okay to interact more, albeit in restrained quantity and fashion, people will let their guards down even more. If people weren't doing what they needed to do when the government was telling them to stay home unless it's an emergency, then they're really gonna get loose when the government tells them more interaction is okay now.

The point I'm getting to here is that I would say the last 6+ weeks of social distancing, school closures, work from home, et al have been a colossal failure and ultimately, we may have very little, if anything to show for it. Let us review now (not in order of importance or gravity necessarily):

1. Children having their school years cut short by 2 months.
2. Almost $3 trillion in new national debt
3. 30,000,000+ people out of a job
4. a spike in drug overdose deaths as people go nuts being sheltered in place
5. sports, entertainment, leisure all pretty much dead
6. an economy that will likely contract 25% this quarter (read that about 10 times and let it sink in)
7. ~70,000 dead from Covid-19 and growing
8. Constitutional freedoms trampled on (yes, this is no small thing)

I'm sure I left some things out. And yet, here we are six weeks later and we're still adding 30,000 new cases to the pool. Which will translate to roughly 1,500 - 2,000 new deaths each day. We blew up our economy and up-ended everybody's social structure and we don't really have anything to show for it. In theory, did we stave off a run on hospital beds? Perhaps. But as I have said from the very beginning, we can't do this every time a new bug comes around. We cannot dictate to nature and we're going to get worked every time we try.

I also think it is plausible we have a strand of Covid-19 here that is more contagious than other places in the world. This thing is constantly mutating. Obviously, if that's true, we're in a world of hurt.

 

Other than the 70,000 dead being a million, how would any of this be different if we hadn't socially distanced and everything shut down because we had a million dead Americans?

 

I think, without trying to be argumentative, this is where I am losing you. Textile/Clothing manufacturing is returning to the United States, in fact in my state of North Carolina it is coming back. Precisely because it is all highly automated to manufacture sports shirts. As i have said in several other places I know a guy, play tennis with him, who owns 3 re-started factories that do contract work for private labels and large companies such as Adidas, producing thousands of shirts per month with 39 total employees. Furniture manufacturing, at least wood furniture without fabric, has also surged in N Carolina. All of the machining, shaping, forming, finishing and final assembly can not be fully automated. So, i am honestly a bit confused when people say "we need to bring manufacturing back" while at the same time saying "we do not want x-kind of manufacturing".

As for the tax breaks, that is one area I am in full agreement with. I would love to see corporate tax rates cut. This is a huge sticking point for me with my own party. A JFK-style (do not care if he was corrupt or not) corporate tax cut could actually spur money into the federal coffers. We have seen it before. However, should this happen, there would be $Tens of Billions returned to share holders and there would still be no more manufacturing in this country.

At the risk of annoying you by continuing this discussion, my proposal would be review the heavy regulation that dissuades people from investing in manufacturing in this country. I would like the federal government to even create a fund to help new players enter many fields and compete against the Chinese manufacturers.

For example (the only area I actually know : If people want electronic devices manufactured in high tech factories in the US, the US needs SMDs (capacitors, inductors, resistors, etc....). Most of the raw materials could be mined in this hemisphere, if not actually in the US. We would need the government to work with Apple, Googles, Microsofts, Intels, Texas Instruments, etc.....to find out exactly what they would need, and the fund someone willing to up-fit an old factory (or build a new one) and get it cranking out components in volume to be cost competitive with the Chinese. That is the kind of leadership i would like to see from the federal government......but know that we never will.

 

100 meat inspectors have tested positive

At Beleaguered U.S. Meat Plants, Inspectors Are Getting Sick Too

 

Younger adults are getting seriously sick and ending up in the hospital because of the coronavirus, and it's alarming doctors

 

Virtually anywhere people are in close quarters, once the virus has been introduced, it has exploded. NYC, cruise ships (and naval ships), prisons, nursing homes, meat packing plants...

 

So my stepdaughter just got back from an orientation for Applebee's opening tomorrow.

It is going to be a very sterile experience.

One party comes in at a time for seating.
You must sit at an assigned table.
Paper menus(limited food items) and prepackaged condiments.
Must follow arrows on the floor.
Servers do not serve you. They take your order, then bring a tray of food, put at the end of the table and you serve yourself. You bus your own table, stack dishes on tray for the server.
If you sneeze or cough you will be asked to leave.
Must follow arrows to go to the bathroom. One person at a time.

The GM told the crew they would try to be open for a week then reassess to stay open.

They will provide one N95 mask per employee, they must keep it and reuse it each shift. They provide gloves that they must change a few times each shift.
If they get sick, Applebee's is not responsible.

Also anyone that works loses their unemployment.
He told them he would understand if they didn't come back tomorrow.

 

It may not be a bad thing that we have a more contagious form. Viruses tend to mutate toward more contagious but less deadly. Deadlier viruses receive more attention and more measures implemented to stop it. It's possible that we're actually changing the course of evolution of this virus through our actions. There's actually some empiric evidence of it. People have studied the two strains that were isolated initially from Wuhan, and found that after the lockdown the more contagious but less deadly variant became much more prominent.

As far as the numbers you're mentioning, do you consider 1 million infections and 70k dead bad? Relative to zero cases/deaths, sure, but relative to the initial projections of 200 million infections and 2 million dead, not really.

With that said, I do kind of agree with you. What we've done is essentially getting 5 numbers right in the lottery but missed the Power Ball. It's a lot better than nothing, but one more step and we could've saved a lot more lives, and will save a lot more, with likely LESS economic disruption. Again, we should've had a coordinated nation-wide lockdown for 4-6 weeks, with compulsory mask wearing and massively ramped up testing capacity. We would've been able to shut it down to maybe a few hundred cases a day, with the testing capacity to test all who were exposed to those hundreds of people each day. In that case, we can probably open up the economy fully.

As it stands right now, we'll be dealing with hotspots on and off for months if not years, with many people reducing their public outings and spending in general due to fear of the virus or the uncertainties of the economy. As countries get over the hump, they'll also start to open up toward each other, boosting trade and economic activity overall. South Korea and China are already opening up to each other as two countries that controlled this virus early. More countries will join them, while many may be hesitant to do the same for us if we continue to have a large number of cases. All this means that biting the bullet and doing a more complete lockdown likely will result in LESS economic disruption over time despite suffering greater pains in the first 4-6 weeks.

We've certainly done a lot better than the alternative, but it's impossible to contact trace 30k people or even a few thousand a day, so a KEY part of a safe opening up, the proverbial Power Ball, is missing.

 

With more testing identifying people with less symptoms and supposedly a better understanding of how to treat this one would think that the death / reported case would be dropping. I guess it is good that it isn't rising anymore but disappointed / perplexed that it isn't dropping.

 

Yes. Every death is the end of that person’s universe. Tough times for us all.

 

Yes, that is possible.

That would depend on what type of activities happen. If restaurants open, and nobody shows up, then it probably doesn’t have much impact vs. what we see now. That is a flattened but continued spread. I don’t have a problem with restaurants opening, they basically have to to try and survive. I’ve been getting takeouts frequently from my favorite places to try and help them out, and that’s what I’m personally going to stick with. I don’t think having 25% capacity is too risky as far as the virus, but it might not be good business.

If people start actually gathering in crowds, then I would guess we would see some spikes back up, though it’s possible the summer heat would offset that somewhat. Nobody really knows for sure.