OT: Corona virus

[witpqs]

Urns in Wuhan far exceed death toll, raising more questions about China’s tally

Questions about those numbers.

[Ian R]

Gentlemen

Less do support situations going

Lets rock?

[Cap Mandrake]

ORIGINAL: Ian R

Gentlemen

Less do support situations going

Lets rock?

Huh? Maybe too colloquial, Ian. Is that a call for optimism?

[Kursk1943]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

ORIGINAL: Ian R

Gentlemen

Less do support situations going

Lets rock?

Huh? Maybe too colloquial, Ian. Is that a call for optimism?

(relieved!) And I thought it was only the stupid German again who didn't get the word...[:)]

[obvert]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

In the US the money spigot has been turned on the highest it has ever been.

2 Trillion in borrowed money (at <1% 10 year T-bill rates) and another Trillion or so already in "funny money" quantitative easing by the Fed.

Right now it would seem recession is inevitable but world-wide depression can be avoided if this doesn't last too long.

The lives of billions of human beings are being overturned by tiny spheres of lipids, proteins and RNA that have no cognizance of their existence.

Yes, but there are LOTS of them. And somehow they know how to get to us and make it hurt. How is that? [X(]

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

Urns in Wuhan far exceed death toll, raising more questions about China’s tally

Questions about those numbers.

Makes sense to me.

[obvert]

ORIGINAL: ITAKLinus

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

In the US the money spigot has been turned on the highest it has ever been.

2 Trillion in borrowed money (at <1% 10 year T-bill rates) and another Trillion or so already in "funny money" quantitative easing by the Fed.

Right now it would seem recession is inevitable but world-wide depression can be avoided if this doesn't last too long.

The lives of billions of human beings are being overturned by tiny spheres of lipids, proteins and RNA that have no cognizance of their existence.

America is fine.

Europe will be in a very, very complex situation. We have nothing even remotely comparable to the American economical answer to the emergency.

However, if Europe falls into depression, I suppose US won't be much healthier at that point.

The economic hit for America is not at the corporate level as much as at the personal level. What do the people do who worked in industries that have closed, and won't re-open for a good while?

Social disruption caused by unemployment, poverty, hopelessness, could also be answered with other kinds of restrictions on freedoms, and force.

This is all a worst case scenario, but it's possible with a lasting emergency, lockdown, unemployment, and the same kinds of reactions happening in Southern Italy. Only with more guns.

[obvert]

ORIGINAL: warspite1

With everything exploding around them - Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium and the UK - the German and Austrian numbers just don't add up to me [&:]

One is lots of testing from early on, and isolation of cases from the vulnerable. So the average age of cases there is 46, while in Italy it's 63.

Here is the article from the NY Times on this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/opin ... e=Homepage

First and foremost: Early and persistent testing helps. And so does tracking people.

Take the country’s first recorded case. On Jan. 28, a man in Bavaria who works for a car parts company that has two plants in Wuhan, China, was confirmed to have the virus. Within two days, the authorities identified the person who had infected the patient, tracked his contacts and quarantined them. The company stopped travel to China and shut down its plant in Bavaria. The outbreak — several other employees tested positive — was effectively contained. Across the country, the pattern was repeated.

Germany has also been better at protecting its older residents, who are at much greater risk. States banned visits to the elderly, and policymakers issued urgent warnings to limit contact with older people. Many seem to have quarantined themselves. The results are clear: Patients over the age of 80 make up around 3 percent of the infected, though they account for 7 percent of the population. The median age for those infected is estimated to be 46; in Italy, it’s 63.

“Both skiing and carnival may have affected the low average age of the first wave of confirmed cases,” said Karl Lauterbach, a physician and a member of the Bundestag.

Both early testing and incubation of the virus among the young go part of the way in explaining why the country’s fatality rate is so comparatively low.

[Miller]

It's pretty obvious that China are fiddling the figures. Italy, with 5% of the total population of China have three times as many deaths? Not buying that for a moment.

[Lokasenna]

ORIGINAL: Ian R

ORIGINAL: Lokasenna


"armchair spreadsheet artists pontificating on a forum."

I just wanted to ask if I could shamelessly adopt that, use it as a put-down on another forum.

Permission to proceed sir?

Why of course, I can't copyright it or anything [:'(]

ORIGINAL: ITAKLinus

ORIGINAL: HansBolter

ORIGINAL: warspite1

So recently, prior to Coronavirus, it was suggested by someone in the Government (or their advisors) that we don't need farms in the UK...

... there is now a headline stating there will be a veg and fruit shortage because there is no one to pick the stuff.

So the UK no longer manufactures much, how important our financial services will be post Brexit who knows, and now, apparently, we don't need to produce any of our food either.....

You couldn't make this up.

One lasting result I see coming is a move away from interdependency and toward self sufficiency.

That is only possible to the degree that the distribution of natural resources allows.

Sure, the US can move away from dependency on China for pharmaceuticals, but not away from SE Asia for rubber gloves.

Arguable. Just to stick to your example, you can get rubber gloves using rubber produced in Liberia (until few years ago the biggest rubber producer in the world) instead of Malaysia. They're gonna be marginally more expensive, but that's it.

It's a matter of cost. If we assume we can reduce somehow our consumption rates, we don't really need to purchase so much from Asia. Basically, we don't really need to "sub-contract" the world production to Asia if we accept that we have to lower our consumption, at least in the short-term.
In general, it's manufacturing that produces huge amounts of jobs and it's manufacturing that can help our economies to keep being relatively healthy and wealthy in the future. After this major crisis, we will enter in a complex economical situation and manufacturing is the main way to create jobs, whatever some streams of thought say.

Aren't gloves these days made out of nitrile, which is a synthetic rubber? Why couldn't that be made domestically?

ORIGINAL: obvert

ORIGINAL: ITAKLinus

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

In the US the money spigot has been turned on the highest it has ever been.

2 Trillion in borrowed money (at <1% 10 year T-bill rates) and another Trillion or so already in "funny money" quantitative easing by the Fed.

Right now it would seem recession is inevitable but world-wide depression can be avoided if this doesn't last too long.

The lives of billions of human beings are being overturned by tiny spheres of lipids, proteins and RNA that have no cognizance of their existence.

America is fine.

Europe will be in a very, very complex situation. We have nothing even remotely comparable to the American economical answer to the emergency.

However, if Europe falls into depression, I suppose US won't be much healthier at that point.

The economic hit for America is not at the corporate level as much as at the personal level. What do the people do who worked in industries that have closed, and won't re-open for a good while?

Social disruption caused by unemployment, poverty, hopelessness, could also be answered with other kinds of restrictions on freedoms, and force.

This is all a worst case scenario, but it's possible with a lasting emergency, lockdown, unemployment, and the same kinds of reactions happening in Southern Italy. Only with more guns.

I'm more concerned about sales-oriented small businesses that rely on, essentially, foot traffic and in-person patronage.

Breweries, restaurants, bars, all things arts, venues, etc. The businesses with a few employees, where if they don't have incoming cash flow for 3-4 months, could go under. While the aid bill passed this past week does pretty well for individuals (replacing 100% of income up to about a $50K annual salary, for 4 months, via unemployment claims) and large corporations, it does not do enough for small firms.

Those people who can't work can't file UI claims unless they lose their job. Small firms can receive forgivable loans to cover their costs (including payroll) if they keep their employees, but nowhere near enough money was allocated to that even by conservative-aligned economists' estimates. Obviously, not all of these firms would fail or not be able to bring back all their employees or some other factor, but some will that otherwise wouldn't if there were more money allocated there. I'm thinking of businesses like our local meadery, which has 4 employees plus the owners, and the local brewpub (a fixture here since 1993), where the quality of the employees are so critical to maintaining good business momentum. It's not like the giant chain retail store in the mall where employees are much more fungible.

[Encircled]

ORIGINAL: obvert

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: obvert




This is an interesting article that brings a bit more of the industrialised food industry under scrutiny as related to this outbreak. We now it's not just the wild, but the domesticated, that can bring about these kinds of outbreaks.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... oronavirus

Sorry, obvert. That article is rubbish six ways from Sunday.

The main factors with the rampant spread of human H5/H7 avian influenza in China are not CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation-I won't use the same inflammatory language as they repeatedly choose to descibe these operations), but small 'backyard' type operations, their abominable biosecurity and anachronistic use of wet markets. Same story with African Swine Fever (ASF) that has decimated their swine herd there for the last year and a half and caused the price of pork there to skyrocket. And don't even get me started on bats/wildlife/coronaviruses. I'm just curious how many epidemics this sort of behavior has to start in China for the leadership to modernize? I guess five is not enough?

If people have an ongoing demand for consumption of animal protein, the best thing for the world is efficient production of well-regulated, clean and professionally tended flocks/herds. How else to feed 9 billion (2050 estimates) people? Resumption of anachronistic bronze-age animal husbandry and farming practices would be disastrous.

You don't bring up the point that in fact a lot of the backyard producers of wild animals were forced into that practice to make a living because they could no longer make it in an industrialised farming world with a small family farm. So there are knock-on effects, and we know western industrialised farms are not pristine, beautiful oases either. (NC hog farming?)

The point this article brings up is that human activity is bringing us more into contact on a large scale with previously isolated "wild" animals and their diseases. The needs of the 7+ billion people on this planet are increasing. The way to feed those predicted 9 billion people by 2050 is to transition to more vegetables and not so much meat. It's less resource intensive and the yield per area is much higher.

We as a family now eat about 1/2 as much meat as we used to, and make stews/curries/bolognese type dishes with lentils and meats.

Tastes the same, and is much better for you and the enviroment

[Encircled]

ORIGINAL: warspite1

So recently, prior to Coronavirus, it was suggested by someone in the Government (or their advisors) that we don't need farms in the UK...

... there is now a headline stating there will be a veg and fruit shortage because there is no one to pick the stuff.

So the UK no longer manufactures much, how important our financial services will be post Brexit who knows, and now, apparently, we don't need to produce any of our food either.....

You couldn't make this up.

Brexit still dominates the UK, to the extent that we are not joining an EU initiative for medical supplies, even though we are desperately short.

Its deeply depressing sadly.

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: Encircled
We as a family now eat about 1/2 as much meat as we used to, and make stews/curries/bolognese type dishes with lentils and meats.

Aye. Ours too. That's great. But it's a far cry from 'diversify your diet' to 'meat=murder' and 'big=bad'. Unfortunately, the militant vegan screed preys on an uncertain public to opportunistically promote their drivel.

[Encircled]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: Encircled
We as a family now eat about 1/2 as much meat as we used to, and make stews/curries/bolognese type dishes with lentils and meats.

Aye. Ours too. That's great. But it's a far cry from 'diversify your diet' to 'meat=murder' and 'big=bad'. Unfortunately, the militant vegan screed preys on an uncertain public to opportunistically promote their drivel.

Aye, all they have to do is look at how much has changed over the past ten years and realise that the message is getting through and eventually we will be eating a lot less meat.

But their lifestyle choice is fine, its just one that isn't for me!

[alanschu]

ORIGINAL: warspite1

With everything exploding around them - Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium and the UK - the German and Austrian numbers just don't add up to me [&:]

Couldn't say for Austria, but my hypothesis is that Germany was detecting earlier while other places didn't start ramping up tests until people were more aggressively dying.

Germany is showing a (still modest) increase in its daily death totals now, and I wonder if part of that is just that they had started ramping up testing before people within Germany were starting to suffer the serious consequences of the virus.

EDIT: Obvert's response was good >.>

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: Encircled

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: Encircled
We as a family now eat about 1/2 as much meat as we used to, and make stews/curries/bolognese type dishes with lentils and meats.

Aye. Ours too. That's great. But it's a far cry from 'diversify your diet' to 'meat=murder' and 'big=bad'. Unfortunately, the militant vegan screed preys on an uncertain public to opportunistically promote their drivel.

Aye, all they have to do is look at how much has changed over the past ten years and realise that the message is getting through and eventually we will be eating a lot less meat.

But their lifestyle choice is fine, its just one that isn't for me!

They don't want to eat bacon or beef? Good, more for me. It will help raise my cholesterol. [:D]

[DD696]

My neighbor's brother in law being sent to hospital in Savannah with pneumonia. Will be tested. Neighbor Shelley says it is starting to feel real.

I reckon that remark may apply to a lot of us.

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake
Yes, you need the Army but they need to BRING something with them to eat. That is skirting close to a breakdown in social order. If the infrastructure still works the UN brings in bakeries (like they did in Sarjevo).

I just read the news, and the government is doing just that: 400 millions Euro are being set aside to provide food for families everywhere. They devised a scheme that gives more money to the needy (basically, if your family income is lower that the national average you get more money for food).

I can't comment on the numbers. My feeling is that 400 millions Euro is too little - but it is a step in the right direction.

And I still wonder what this will mean for illegal workers. Can they honestly say that they are maintaining a family with - officially - zero or close to zero income?

[alanschu]

Read this in a NY Times article.

Not surprising, hopefully the numbers aren't that much more explosive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/worl ... homes.html

In Italy, authorities have conceded that their coronavirus death toll did not include those who had died at home or in nursing homes. Similarly in France, officials have said that only those who died in hospitals had been recorded as pandemic-related — a practice they said would change in the coming days.

[alanschu]

I'm unfamiliar with the source but based on other murmurs I've heard on the internet, sounds like Wuhan's death totals could be between 40k and 50k based upon cremations.

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/ ... 82846.html