Coronavirus

Because he contradicted and then laughed at the Prince of Fools.

The great president for life Putin from the magnificent Russian Federation sent the US a plane load of supplies to fight the COVID=19 virus. Reuters says the people in Russia are kinda upset because they are short of supplies too. It seems odd that a big deal would be made of this plane. I mean the gesture is nice, but couldn't our companies kick out more than a plane load in a day or so?

Then there's engineer guy, the Huffington Post story is about him crashing his train near the hospital ship in California because he thinks it's part of a conspiracy. He was charged with train wrecking. I didn't know that was a crime.

In theory, if they don't suffer any long term consequences from the damage* the virus did, they should be able to go back to work (or lives pre-virus) I haven't heard anything that implies they are carriers after the initial infection period and recovery quarantine phase. I have heard that even after the person feels "recovered" like with a regular flu - out of the hospital - no fever, there is still a three week period they should remain quarantined. I don't know how well that is researched yet. I don't trust much of the Chinese data, anymore.

We should be getting better data out of South Korea soon, and they tested everybody not just those that showed symptoms. There were a lot in the 20-30 range who were infected and spreading it, but didn't appear to be sick. That is the group that really needs to stay the f*** home. (and of course they aren't) They are also a lot of our "essential" workers in that they make up a lot of our lower wage retail and restaurant work force.

*what I mean by damage is the Dr I have been listening to say the virus attacks lung cells, so not only to you feel like crap during it, some of the cells in the lungs don't recover, and that can have some long lasting debilitating effects on some people. So where they may have been fine before, they may not be fit to work afterwords, even though they are "recovered" or at least not fit to work in the same field. Especially if that feild is one of the "essential" which really means "physically demanding" for a lot.

Community Mobility Report:

an effort to help public health officials understand how people are moving about in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The reports show location data from folks who have agreed to share their location history with Google in order to show places that are following instructions to shelter in place -- or not.

Engadget

I almost posted this in my Technology Paranoia thread .. but really, it's just old news put to a different use - good use in this case.

Until the military rolls in.

This reminds me of the frog in the pot. It's use in this situation isn't necessarily evil but it could be used in a "big brother" fashion. It's use here can be a justification for this type of data collection. The same can be said of crime. Parents use this type of technology to monitor their children. Eventually we live in a surveillance state by default.

***edited to fix quote tag and fix page - tiger

Yes, I thought of the frog too.

There are also other countries handing over more power to their heads of state "in this time of crisis" (which it is, but it's also a good excuse)

Recovery

Here's an on topic story from Foreign Policy comparing the intelligence failure on COVID-19 and comparing it to the Pearl Harbor attack, Iranian Revolution, and 9/11

I keep seeing different estimates of the COVID-19 mortality rates, mosts in the 2% to 3% range.

According to "WorldOMeter" and Wikipedia, which may be BS:

> Coronavirus Cases: 1,201,964
> Deaths: 64,727

Doing the math, I get a mortality rate of 5.385%.

Maybe I am doing my math wrong...

The USA has something like:

> Coronavirus Cases: 311,357
> Deaths: 8,452

Doing the math, I get a mortality rate of 2.71%.... but with 288,080 active cases...8,206 of which are considered "serious" or "critical"... depending on the outcome that could put the mortality rate in the USA in line with the worldwide mortality rate.

Maybe I am doing my math wrong...

Math is not my strong point.... but, a few days ago ny state had a lot of cases not a lot of deaths yet. So their isolated death rate was like 0.5% Then s*** got bad and it got harder to get ventilators and PPE. So the deaths increased and the rate jumped into the same rates as Seattle (around 1.5%ish)
So some of it is math and statistics are just fuzzy. As depending where in the curve you do the math the death rate will change. Higher at the peak when the hospital is overwhelmed, and lower at the beginning when people either have my died yet, or enough haven’t been tested yet.

At least there's jello

The lower reported rates may be due to a higher testing % of the population.

We're only counting the deaths compared to KNOWN cases.
With testing still limited, we really don't know how many actually have it.

What is the % of asymptomatic cases?!? We don't know, because if they're not showing symptoms, they're not being tested.

I also wonder: Early on they were saying of those tested with symptoms only about 20% tested positive. Has that changed?

Of +300k cases - how many were tested?

Yes.

Much of this would also be true of other diseases like "flu"... we only report on known cases. Example: I'm pretty sure I've had the flu at least twice in my life, but never went to a hospital or doctor so was not tested.

Things like Ebola probably have a more accurate set of numbers to work with.