People have no idea just how bad things are going to get
Just how bad will it get?
Symbolically, this is a good indication.
Thomas Schaefer, the finance minister of Germany's Hesse state, has committed suicide apparently after becoming "deeply worried" over how to cope with the economic fallout from the coronavirus, state premier Volker Bouffier said on Sunday.
The economic fallout could be catastrophic, and it could be sooner than you think.
Social unrest could erupt among the poorest people in Europe's biggest cities due to a lack of income caused by the coronavirus crisis, a Red Cross chief warned...
Speaking in a UN news briefing, he said: 'We have a lot of people who are living very marginalised, in the so-called black hole of society... In the most difficult neighbourhoods of the biggest cities I am afraid that in a few weeks we will have social problems.'This is a social bomb that can explode at any moment, because they don't have any way to have an income.'
If they are saying this about the poor of Europe, what do you think will happen in a 3rd world nation like the United States, where the heavily-armed poor are an afterthought?
Now let's put some numbers behind this.
The head of the International Monetary Fund said Friday it is clear that the global economy has now entered a recession that could be as bad or worse than the 2009 downturn...“A key concern about a long-lasting impact of the sudden stop of the world economy is the risk of a wave of bankruptcies and layoffs that not only can undermine the recovery but erode the fabric of our societies,” she told reporters at a news conference following a telephone conference with finance officials from the 24 nations that make up the IMF’s policy-setting panel.
Are you starting to see a pattern here?
Let's look at the impact specifically to America and the off-the-charts impact to employment.
Nothing like this has ever happened before.
And yet things will only get worse this week.
The impact on workers is almost beyond belief.
It's impossible to overstate how much misery this will cause.
So you can imagine what that'll do to the economy.
How has our government responded to this economic catastrophe?
By making the National Guard active in 22 states.
So starve in silence you poor f*cks or we'll have other poor people shoot you.
But planners involved at the Pentagon and U.S. Northern Command, while admitting that the National Guard is the best choice if there is a public breakdown, also say that the Guard may not be able to be relied upon, not just because of the scope of need, but also because it is a citizen force spread out across America and thus as susceptible as the rest of the general population to contracting the virus.
A senior military planner working on coronavirus but not authorized to speak on sensitive planning matters says that deployment of federal troops in support roles is being prepared.
In this unprecedented economic crisis is an unprecedented bipartisan political failure.
On one side you have former Tea Party leaders supporting the corporate bailout.
On the other side you have anti-establishment progressive leaders supporting the corporate bailout.
Neither party cares whether you live or you die.
The odds that we will avoid social unrest and violence is near zero.
Comments
I mentioned a week ago that
violence had started to pop up here and there in my tiny community of mostly dirt poor people.
And before that, I had mentioned I had gotten some info about plans for martial law.
I wanted to be wrong.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Food Riots ?
h/t to Jimmy Dore for this one: 'We have to eat': Sicilian police crackdown on locals looting supermarkets
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
Food riots become Hunger Marches
TOP link
one of my best diaries
And even before the food riots
"If a modern state is to rest upon a firm foundation its citizens must not be allowed to starve. Some of them do. They do not die quickly. You can starve for a long time without dying."
- leader of Children's Bureau of Philadelphia, 1931
"There is no poverty in America."
- Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior, 1931
"We march on starvation, we march against death,
we're ragged, we've nothing but body and breath;
From north and from south, from east and from west
the army of hunger is marching."
- Hunger Marcher's song, 1932
Empty is the cupboard,
no pillow for the head,
we are the hunger children
who cry for milk and bread.
We are the hunger children
who cry for milk and bread.
We are the worker's children
who must, who must be fed.
- song that was sang by children at the gates of the White House, Thanksgiving Day, 1932, shortly before they were arrested
I'm spending my nights at the flophouse
I'm spending my days on the street
I'm looking for work and I find none
I wish I had something to eat
- the popular 'Soup Song' sung to the tune of 'My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean'
NY Times in early 1930
These are actual quotes in the NYT about protests against unemployment:
"In the riot which resulted, women and children of from 8 to 15 years were roughly handled and beaten by the police, who used their fists."
- NY Times, March 2, 1930
"The mob was led by a group of children holding aloft placards and singing the Internationale."
- NY Time, March 1930
The threatening crush, which might have meant serious injuries to many, was averated when the police ordered Woodward Avenue cars and buses to drive straight through the crowd-jammed street.
- NY Times, March 1930
"Communist demonstrators are charged at Washington with using bad language."
- NY Times, March 1930
Yes, I read it,
good piece, but I'm not going to log in there to rec it.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
The difference, there are no Communists in 2020.
Just poor people without a song or a clue. To survive, we must relearn lyrics not heard or believed for many decades.
There will be homeless people everywhere.
Nobody will be able to afford rent.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
Small businesses are being crushed right now
Gig workers are about to discover just how much of a scam it was.
I couldn't help but think about
our armed forces.
Imagine the COVID 19 virus on a submarine. Devastating!
Or a Navy carrier group. Even a regiment of regular Army would struggle in this environment.
Have any bases been locked down? Anybody know?
The thing about this virus is the ability to bring down the most powerful and destructive machine ever unleashed upon the Earth.
Remember H.G. Welles "War of the World"?
What brought those horrible, invulnerable, alien war machines down?
A bug.
And considering the military hospital ships are now tasked with civilian casualties.
I'm not so sure we would see regular troops here in the streets of America.
Based on the past behavior of the rest of this government, have our military leaders prepared for this scenario?
Just askin'.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
And those horrible alien machines
were symbolic for Colonialism.
Which is what elitists built this capitalist hell on.
Crew of a Dutch submarine has tested positive for CV
https://defbrief.com/2020/03/30/dutch-submarine-crew-hit-by-covid-19/
Actually some of us know ...
If we act now:
When we the people develop a spine we the people will storm city hall and demand accountability for the plethora of maleficent actions of the recent past.
If we act later, then:
· · · well just read some history.
Given the behavior I have witnessed these last three weeks plus it looks like I am in a hot bed of defectors, so · · ·
RIP
A Just-In-Time Economy
Saagar touched on this.
Amazon's Whole Foods has a truck to shelves policy. No storerooms.
GM, Ford get their parts for the assembly lines Just in Time.
What is the plan for when the foods or car parts aren't delivered? I think that's what we are facing.
Terrifying.
NYCVG
"Inventory is evil." - Apple COO.
Just wait and see how that translates to the food and drug supply.
Grasshopper’s motto in the Aesop fable of
the Grasshopper and the Ants?
Far be it from me to deny an expert opinion
based on much experience and study.
Apple must know a lot about the nature of evil.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Why
would it be unthinkable to issue emergency or disaster money, unrelated to our standard economy, in a different currency or whatever, for the period of an emergency?
Why does our currency have to coincide with the established state of affairs when no one can work?
I do understand that our standard economy was likely imploding before the pandemic. But all the more reason to re-think what we normally do.
Taxes
US dollars are needed to pay US taxes. Plus barter is also taxable and an alternate currency would likely be regarded as barter.
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
Because of Trump's effective leadership
deaths in the US will kept to 200,000. His poll numbers are at an all time high.
Someone needs to tell Dr. Deb that we DID do precisely what Trump's government officials said was required in the last 65 days. That's why we're in this fucking hand-basket right now!
Damn good thing we bought so much toilet paper. We can use it to wipe our asses before we kiss them goodbye.
Failing health system in the US now training children
to take over medical care as qualified doctors and nurses drop like flies. Children appear to have natural immunity.
And watching the elderly suffocate
won't cause a rise in schizophrenia and other traumatic side effects.
It'll toughen them up.
Kids nowadays have it too soft. When I was a young whippersnapper my pa sent me and my sister to dig grandma's grave the day before she croaked.
Yup
Had my share of that.
42 wheelbarrows loads. Standard grave.
Sure gives you time to think.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
There can only be one possible response.
[video:https://youtu.be/qlIXn0r0AY8]
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I've read that the virus
has mutated 8 times since they started tracking it in earnest. Second wave the kids may not be so lucky. If that happens I give it 6 weeks before Trumps head is displayed in a pike.
Please, good people, please!
It's "unsafe" to relay information you're picking up about stuff like mutation rates and strains and whatnot. The virus has mutated dozens of times -- we have literally over a hundred different genomes at this point, but none of them (well, not when I checked a couple of days ago) are particularly different from each other, and nobody has demonstrated any clinical distinction amongst them.
Apart from some highly cautious government (US and other) sites, every "reliable" secondary source -- regardless of who is deciding what gets labeled reliable -- is over-interpreting and over-simplifying the actual data, and often enough in the bargain getting the basic science and technical terminology wrong. (Small, almost meaningless example, but NOT REALLY, because every small error confuses the conversation: Yesterday I was reading a South Korean site that equated "RT-PCR" with "real-time PCR". That's an easy mistake to make, but in this context, "RT-PCR" means Reverse-Transcriptase PCR. The diagnostics being used in Germany, South Korea and elsewhere are using real-time Reverse-Transcriptase PCR.) Too many "influencer" armchair virologists, epidemiologists and geneticists are jumping on every new press release from this university or that institute, then blowing it out into the socialmediasphere, where ordinary interested folk are mistaking it for, like, scientific consensus.
Yet, at the moment, "Science" -- the endeavor -- is actively struggling to synthesize the torrent of data that is gushing forth worldwide, whether in terms of treatment, or genetics, or epidemiology, or molecular biology, or immunology, or any darned thing at all.
Can I say, "Please," one more time?
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
OK
I'll refrain.
Children have immunity?
I hope that's true, but it's a big claim.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Not immunity - just lower risk
Just taking poetic license for dramatic effect.
Yes, lower risk among
children for getting seriously ill or dying.
But they can still contract the virus, though to what extent, or if at the same rate as adults, I couldn't say -- testing still is de minimus in the US. And bc they can get the virus, but children tend not to get sick from it, they can be considered subtle, silent carriers and of course infectious to the rest of the population.
I stay away from kids just the same as adults.
Animals and pets too. I don't think there's much scientific evidence so far in this category, but just to be safe, I'm keeping to my No Pets rule in this house, and no petting of cute looking dogs I see in the neighborhood.
It's possible too, as we enter warmer weather and the insect season, that mosquitoes could be carriers.
My two cents. Always do your own research and thinking and check in with solid scientific authorities. But my view is that the science, which always errs on the side of being too conservative, may be a little behind in understanding how this virus works and all its potential avenues of transmission. In the meantime, I prefer to be proactive and not wait for the scientific establishment, and take reasonable extra precautions that the mainstream authorities may be slow to endorse. It's a small sacrifice -- a little more $ expended on mosquito repellents and various immunity builders. YMMV.
Yes. Asymptomatic children can be carriers
China is doing a study of these people because they can be a considerable risk for spreading the virus.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N6jEDb93YY]
China is taking no chances at this time. All asymptomatic people are being quarantined. In the US there has been little testing of asymptomatic people. Due to testing shortages you can only get a test if you show symptoms or have a doctors prescription. Those that are discovered positive with no symptoms are being allowed to self-quarantine.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLNRjwdxXOs]
As far as transmission by blood products:
I wonder if that is not a matter of child abuse ...
Is that really proven that the children have a higher immunity or a lower risk to be infected?
Sorry, I am behind in reading here, but I have a lot of difficulties to believe in any data so far. Just the number of deaths are matter of factly correct.
https://www.euronews.com/live
The girl doing the testing in the photo
was not underage. She was most likely a new graduate from nursing school. Many Chinese girls look younger than they are because of their genetically smaller stature compared to Caucasian. Even a first year nursing student of 18 or 19 is well prepared to do these tests. One advantage is if they do get infected, they recover very quickly and the likelihood of people under 20 dying from the coronavirus is effectively zero.
Maybe I should have put a snark tag in that comment.
oh, sorry then, I was not reading carefully, my bad.
I guess I just was a grouchy person. The moving restrictions, shutdown everywhere and being forced to stay home is getting at me. I am totally not for the measurements they enforced in Germany to "protect ourselves from the virus". I don't believe in its effectiveness.
I better shut up.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Don't. You keep speaking.
It was my fault for the misunderstanding - not yours.
Gjohnsit, thanks for writing this!
So far the public discourse lives in fantasy land, really, really sorry to say this. The current projections are based on hopeful intuition, that is it should be fixable in a few months and the economy should be restored by the Summer and no more than 100,000 Americans should perish. I understand where they are coming from and they are partly basing this on science.
There are only three ways out of this. 1) Vaccine, the best, probably 18 months out way past the curve of where everything bad has happened. 2) We duplicate China's effort. Wow, we are way behind - China had 58 cases per million, we currently have 485 cases per million and climbing exponentially by about 10x per 14 days. China is essentially flat. China has a severe problem of preventing another cluster from forming and will have to maintain extreme vigilance until a vaccine in ready. Could we ever mount the campaign that China just finished? I'm really skeptical. Social distancing is weak medicine and reflects the fact that no masks are available and we cannot do things like case tracking and quarantine. It represents basically what we can do now. A study from MIT looked at exhaled small droplets and documented that a small fraction of fine droplets travel 30 m at high speed. They also land everywhere on hard surfaces waiting for you to touch the surface then your nose or eyes later. OK, so now comes the most probable case 3) Go to full herd immunity. Wow, you need about 70% of the population immune to get there and still it may be propagating dependent on R-naught. For the US that's more than 200 million people. NY is finding that about 20% require hospitalization. So then we will have about 40 million in hospitals, but not at the same time, fortunately. OK, here's the hard part, what will the death rate be? UN WHO thinks it's about 3.4%, some have it higher some lower. The problem is that we do not have good numbers until the epidemic is much older as there are too many cases in the pipeline. I'm not going to do the multiplication, I don't have the stomach for it.
Right now Europe is getting very high levels of infection and rising fast. Survival is highly dependent on quality respiratory and support health care. Don't even think about third world nations. Did the US come to the aid of Italy?
The US has no idea of what it is doing. It's screwing with trying to keep the stock market up. That's totally wrong timing. We are blowing up our powder before we have seem more than 2% of the capability of the enemy. We are doing absolutely everything wrong. The most important actions right now are to provide testing, hospital beds, respirators and supply lines for food and medicines. If those supply lines are broken then all is lost. Trump is clueless, but the governors don't have accurate guidelines. Cuomo thinks that NY will peak in 4 to 6 weeks. Why? The population of NY State is 19.5 million. Take 70% to near herd immunity and you have just under 14 million. He better get a plan to stop the spread at way under herd immunity. Coumo keeps referring to the graph of cases of infection as having an "apex" . Wow where did that come from? Damn if I have ever seen real live graphs of physical phenomena that look like that. I really want to see some underlying assumptions and some data. Best case this could just be the marketing graph of a real study?
At this point I really want to see some graph, from some state, any state, that shows the cases moving off of the exponential growth line due to social distancing. That would give some measure of hope.
As far as economics, the US is toast and so is most of Western Europe. Economies are dynamic organizations requiring goods and services to be produced and transactions in play in a tightly woven grid. The question is how to rebuild it from scratch once wealth and systems have been trashed? You can't print money, because there are no goods and services being produced, so even a small amount of money will result in runaway inflation and your currency will be useless, especially fiat currency. You have to bootstrap it somehow. Do we have the resources and infrastructure to do this? Better start planning now.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
350 million subjects
. 70% means 245 million infected. If 3.4% of them die, that's 8.33 million. Won't be many families untouched, at that point.
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
@Bisbonian The data from South
The data from South Korea suggests a mortality rate that is closer to 1%. Most other countries have been restricting testing to the people who are having serious symptoms.
That suggests that we need to worry about "only" 2-3 million deaths. Of course South Korea did not get to the point of having to pull people over 65 off the ventilators. Lack of supplies, treatment and basic supportive care does increase the mortality rate.
It's early days yet, but
news from Virginia is at least a little bit encouraging: http://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/ scroll down to block graph
Social distancing, schools closed, all nonessential business (including much local and state government business) shut down, libraries closed, no gatherings of more than 10 people, all large gatherings canceled or postponed (this includes the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester/Frederick County), etc. Pretty drastic, but about what you might expect from a state whose governor (although frequently a jackass) is also an MD.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
New York State appears to have gone "linear",
rather than geometric, for new cases. (Same for Italy, BTW).
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Do you have a link for that data?
I've been following the graphs from the Financial Times and they don't show that.
That chart shows deaths, not new cases.
The mortality timelines are certainly going to lag behind the confirmed cases timelines, and indeed might even show additional spikes, given that the medical system is essentially saturated: 7000 new cases today might be a lot worse than 7000 new cases yesterday.
This link includes a table showing both confirmed cases and deaths for New York State. I don't have a graph, because I don't need one -- I can easily do the arithmetic in my head, to see that the number of confirmed cases in New York State has been growing linearly over the past 4 days:
2020-03-25 30,811(+20%) 285(+5%)
2020-03-26 37,258(+21%) 385(+35%)
2020-03-27 44,635(+20%) 519(+35%)
2020-03-28 52,318(+17%) 728(+40%)
2020-03-29 59,513(+14%) 965(+33%)
2020-03-30 66,497(+12%) 1218(+26%)
(for them what ain't up for cipherin' with me an' Jethro, the actual numbers of new cases, from day to day, are approximately: 6400,7400,7700,7200,7000.)
Note that other sites will show different numbers, having mostly to do with the time at which they "cut" the data.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd Do we know how
Do we know how many people are being tested each day in NY and if the testing rate has changed? I am also wondering about the demographics of the people tested but have not seen any information.
deeper data tends to be difficult to come by
and contradictory. you could probably dig around in the sources listed at that wikipedia page and extract some of that information. i know (personal communication with a New Yorker who lives in the Hudson Valley) that as of about a week ago, it was pretty hard to get tested unless you had been brought to the hospital.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippd Thanks! It is
Thanks! It is hard to draw conclusions without knowing what the sampling errors are. The trend you spotted is interesting though.
It is hard to even guess what percentage of the population has been infected. It would be a lot easier to get an idea about how fast it is spreading if we knew how many people have only had mild cases or been asymptomatic. If 80% of the cases are mild and it is still difficult to get tested we may need to multiply the number of infected people by 5. That is just a wild guess though.
With the data on this epidemic in the US conclusions are a matter of Garbage In-Garbage out. Of course it is really hard to tell if better data would lead to better policy given the lack of basic common sense in the responses so far.
This site gives you gross daily stats on testing:
https://covidtracking.com/data/state/new-york/
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Are you sure the leveling off of new cases
is not due to extraneous reasons like reduction of testing?
Without comprehensive information about the testing
regimes all across New York State, that's impossible to say. It's my understanding that testing has mostly been restricted to people who show up at ERs or urgent care clinics. Numbers of tests performed has varied considerably over the last five days, ranging from 10.1K to 23.6K per day (the lowest was Saturday).
Overall, the fraction of tests coming up positive has slowly risen (again, Saturday was the exception, with a HUGE one-day jump in the ratio of positive to negative tests.
At the moment, I can't even tell you whether the whole state is even using the same kit, nevermind the same protocol. All I can tell you is that the number of confirmed cases is growing approximately linearly.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Note, BTW, that Advisory 8 to which you linked is dated
March 20, 6 days before the beginning of the trend that I observed.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
The conditions have got considerably worse
since then. Hospitals and health care workers can barely keep up. There has been a high attrition rate.
https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/home
Ecuador being a country of less than 17 million people
well separated into two major cities and 2-3 medium sized cities (one is my home, Cuenca, with 650k in the city and surrounding area - mid-size) with the rest rural or remote areas with low density population. I'm not sure this is a good example of the effectiveness of aggressive social distancing or not.
Here is the link to the stats for the infections here: https://coronavirus.com.ec/
The first reported case was 29 Feb in Guayquil. The international travel ban began 14 March and the internal travel and social distancing restrictions began two weeks ago on the 16th. Those restrictions have been tightened twice. We're down to be permitted to drive two days a week. Travel is supposed to be for food or medical reasons only. The curfew has tightened to 2:00 PM to 5:00 AM. Buses are pretty much completely stopped; taxis are available but limited. All business not involved in food or medicine are closed as are restaurants. The many mercados were allowed to open for about a week then were shut down. Grocery stores are exceptionally well stocked (this seems like a government priority - wise in my opinion) and occupancy is strictly limited with sanitizing occurring at the door and distancing well enforced. One family member is allowed to shop. Businesses, banks, utilities, and government functions have suspended payments for the duration of the emergency. People, here anyway, strongly support the restrictions and are working together to be sure family and neighbors are being cared for and have what they need. The big city mayors asked for much tougher restrictions but they have not been accepted by the national government.
The restrictions dropped in out of the blue. They've been strictly but humanely enforced and regularly tightened as needed. This was a really aggressive campaign begun with relatively few confirmed cases. That may be because testing is limited but may also be accurate. Look at the maps of number of cases by province. Confirmed cases are centered on Guayaquil with the rest of the country having minimal infections. The increases in confirmed and suspected cases are not exactly linear but they're also not geometric or exponential. The medical community was organized very early. The unavailability of my doctor, her cancellation of our physicals, and her message telling me indicates she has been involved in training, education, and preparing since well before the first case landed here. That's a national medical mobilization that really surprises me.
One of you with familiarity with or having expertise may be able to sort through the limited data on the site and have a more informed opinion on the effectiveness of the #quedateentucasa campaign and restrictions but from my perspective it looks pretty solid so far. What concerns me is that people will take apparent success as an excuse to become lax. It is also very early. We're only one month since the first confirmed case.
Edit: I forgot that I hadn't checked one of the expat papers recently. This is an article today concerning the restrictions. It about covers the current situation: https://cuencahighlife.com/understanding-the-covid-19-health-emergency-r...
Sigh...the comments remind me why I left that cesspool way up north. I swear these whiney assholes are following me. Thankfully these people are not representative of those I know in the expat community.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
At this point in time,
because the Trump administration failed to respond effectively to the coronavirus in a timely fashion, the country is headed for herd immunity.
Trump had from February 2 when he banned travelers from China to start preparations. He did very little to manage the problem except downplay the looming threat until a week ago. He wasted 6-8 weeks of the most valuable preparation time because he was more concerned for his corporate interests rather than for the people. The country is now in a position of "too little, too late."
BTW, herd immunity was how the Spanish flu of 1918 was handled.
What immunity are you talking about?
Some in China had it three times before dying.
Covid-19 offers no immunity, If it does that's a new genetic mutation that hasn't made the news yet.
Link
If there is no herd immunity how does it end?
There's still too little known about the disease
to be sure. Epidemiology is a complicated subject. One hope is that less deadly strains will emerge, and will outcompete the more deadly ones.
We don't yet know enough to know whether some people might acquire an immunity and others not. And although complete immunity might be rare (or nonexistent), there might be limited resistance -- note the claims/hopes that the serum of survivors may provide relief for newly infected patients. Thus, if you survive the bug this year, maybe you'll get it again next year, but it will be less severe.
And of course, some people seem to be highly resistant -- they get infected but show no symptoms. Worst-case scenario is that those are the only people who survive this thing in the long run.
Or maybe we develop a highly effective vaccine, and it goes the way of smallpox.
It's all up in the air.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I heard that a preliminary study in Wuhan seems
to indicate that blood group could be an indicator of vulnerability, with type A being more vulnerable and type O less so. I lay claim to no medical expertise. BTW my blood group is A, so maybe uh-oh.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
I did a bit of checking
Some people have compromised immune systems and are incapable of producing sufficient anti-bodies to prevent re-infection. The majority of people will manage to produce sufficient anti-bodies to prevent re-infection. But, it is not known how long this immunity will last at this time.
Apparently there are also two strains of the virus
that is what John Campbell said. Which accounts for at least some, maybe all, of the "reinfections."
EDIT: CB has more recent information about immuno-compromised people being unable to produce enough antibodies to bar the door. These two facts, taken together, could explain the phenomenon of reinfection. I don't think the facts currently support the idea that people with ordinary, non-compromised immune systems just get reinfected willy-nilly.
also, for *now*, it looks like this version of the virus is relatively slow-mutating, again according to John Campbell, meaning that the antibodies produced should last for at least a year and could last for up to a lifetime. New data could overturn that thesis, of course. But for now, it seems that re-infection is not a large worry. EDIT: except for the immuno-compromised.
This should have been a reply to Pluto. Sorry y'all. I haven't had coffee yet. About to call my insurance provider. Whee!
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
You Can Add A Global Food Shortage to the Equation...
The UN just warned of a Global Food Shortage. Looks like Event 201 Part Deux, the aptly namedFood Chain Reaction Game, is going to be every bit as "prophetic" as Event 201.
Food is going to skyrocket in price during this cluster fuck.
I agree, people have no idea how bad things are going to get...
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
I've started watching the Event 201 Videos
...that I can find. The experts, who appeared as themselves, dropped a lot of tidbits about the lack of adequate strategic stockpiles for medical products.
That disaster rehearsal went well. They knew they were in big trouble (with lack of medical equipment) but they did not follow up.
The new bread lines.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
what happens when they don't have money to buy the
gas to drive the car to wait in the traffic to get the food?
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Suppose their car
got repossessed?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
What happens
when they get to the store and there's nothing there?
Panic buying, supply line disruptions, farm labor, credit crunch, labor in food processing plants, climate impacts.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
That's when a sleeping giant awakens:
USSR expatriates.
They see the thing that won so them over most (supermarkets so abundant that many of them were sharing photographs of their shopping carts decades before Instagram existed) taken away from them, they're going to be piiiiiissssed.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
How bad is it?
3 words: Twitter. VeggieTales. Parody.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/fnvrki/thought_thi...
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
OK... after reading all this, I have a headache.
So much contradictory information that I just don't feel it is helpful. I'm not sure if raising the level of fear is good for us or bad for us. Since all of it is pretty much out of our control, this is just adding to the looming depression that I am trying to ward off. I don't want to be naive, but I also don't want to spend everyday waiting for the mob and seeing all our life savings go down the drain.
Solutions anyone?
"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin