OT: Corona virus

[HansBolter]

So we opened the floodgates of America bashing and we finally see people's true colors.

Good riddance.

[Encircled]

Anti-American?

Not from what I can see

Anti far right conspiracy theorists and the propaganda they spread, sowing hatred and division?

Guilty as charged

[mind_messing]

ORIGINAL: HansBolter

So we opened the floodgates of America bashing and we finally see people's true colors.

Good riddance.

Another exceptionally knowledgeable denizen of the forum described it to me as "the Emperor having no clothes". In this case, the Emperor is the USA, and no criticism is tolerated.

The past few pages have been exceptionally satisfying to read, as now it's quite clear that the problem isn't "the lone poisoner", as Canoerebel would have.

Just to sumaraise some of the highlights for me;

- Canoerebel is apparently omnipotent, having absolute knowledge everything that is going on in Georgia related to COVID-19, which is impressive for a state of 150k square miles.
- Europeans all watch CNN, apparently (I've never, FWIW)
- Canoerebel gets something wrong, and admits it! This is amazing progress!

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

A quick scan of a few other jurisdictions showed Alabama and Massachusetts below the minimum projected, North Carolina and Ohio below projected and Washington State and Arizona above projected.

At some point you're going to need to learn about statistical uncertainty, and that's going to be fun reading.

ORIGINAL: Encircled

So this Gatestone Institute then?

Google searches just add to my disquiet.

I'm sorry lads, but some of you have gone into a long, dark tunnel and you ain't coming out of it anytime soon.

Take care all, and remember the US of pre-2016 with fondness and respect, rather than the one it is today.

ORIGINAL: Encircled

Anti-American?

Not from what I can see

Anti far right conspiracy theorists and the propaganda they spread, sowing hatred and division?

Guilty as charged

Bold move that, I think you'll be joining Obvert and myself in the persona non grata club for daring to call out some of the questionable sources and inferences. That said, good to know it's not me!

It's good fun here though!

[Canoerebel]

Spain still trending down. Chart is through April 5, with 694 mortalities on the 5th. Today, April 6, mortality reported is 414.

To this point, Spain seems to have risen and begun falling more quickly than Italy, where the numbers remained agonizingly plateaued for so long.

[Canoerebel]

There was a news report last night about rising case numbers in China.

That doesn't seem to be reflected in the Worldometers numbers, as with this chart of daily mortality (ditto the new cases chart).

There have been questions raised about China's numbers but since we've relied on the Worldometers info it seems best to continue doing so unless and until a better source comes along.

[Canoerebel]

News is reporting the encouraging trend in Italy: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN21N0GA

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: Kursk1943

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

ORIGINAL: obvert




It's not. Most Americans simply don't know anything about the political makeup of Germany or any similarities that exist with the US.

The Lander system has worked well there as early on the regional governments all activated local labs for testing and isolating people with the virus.

There were local labs testing early on as well. One in Washington state comes to mind.

I think the other Germans and me could explain a lot about the situation in Germany and its approach to the crisis and how our federal system works. But I'm afraid that they and me are genuinely disgusted about the dogmatism and bad athmosphere of this thread now. Did you notice that fewer and fewer non-USA forumites are posting? Soon even the last Scots and Brits will have left.
I for my part won't post anything anymore because I seems to be of no use at all. You already seem to know everything and if it doesn't fit into your view of the world the "offender" receives a US shit storm in the end. So this thread turned into a club of people discussing US internal affairs. International statistics and comments are only needed if they fit into their view of the world. Unfortunately no Chinese forumite is present. I would have liked to hear his opinion about all the abstruse theories about China (audiatur et altera pars!) Good luck to you all and goodbye WitP-forum!

This thread is discussing the Corona virus and its effects all over the world.

I will respond to other peoples posts even if it is something that I would not post. I do post information from all over the world. I have also posted about what it is like where I live. I do not like undeserved insults about any country. I do joke about things and places.

I have not posted where I live, however. Not at all. My avatar is of a pretty Northern Russian sniper. She was a man killer, literaly.

Please feel free to post. I will state something that I like about Bavaria: The Bavarian bier laws. Only barley, water, hops, and yeast. I prefer lager over ale. I do like alt bier. Bavaria was a nice place to visit and I did have some good times there, doing what some others considered fun. Fresh air and exercise.

[Canoerebel]

To this early point, the US media hasn't yet mentioned any downward trend in the virus domestically. It shouldn't, as the numbers are just developing and could be an aberration. To do so would be premature. But if the trend holds for a day or three or five, at some point they'll have to make tough calls on when and how to approach this.

The one thing that nobody would want is to trigger people letting their guard down, thus re-igniting an outbreak.

On the other hand, there's the risk of a Chicken Little reaction. If (not when, but if) there were to be a perception that things weren't as bad as forecast in some or many places, people may be less inclined to take future situations as seriously.

Purely from a historical perspective it should be interesting to see how the media and others walk a challenging balancing beam in handling all these concerns.

[Canoerebel]

For most of this thread's existence, focus has been on places where the outbreak seemed concentrated. At first and for weeks, China and South Korea received a lot of the attention. Then it shifted to Italy, with Germany and UK getting considerable mention. Spain too. With the exponential growth in the US, that's been the main topic the past days, though still plenty of reports about Italy, et al.

I don't know what forum AE demographics are but might hazard a guess at 1/2 US and 1/2 other? Probably half the posts (more?) have been from Americans, half from many other countries, especially UK.

Across the board and despite disagreements into approaches, etc., everybody's pulling for each country to do well. It's been said plenty of times, "As Italy goes, so goes the world." And "As New York goes, so goes the US."

[Canoerebel]

I forgot to allow for the sheer volume of MakeeLearn's posts. [X(]

[obvert]

This new map and article, based on a study just published from the University of Texas, Austin, is a bit sobering. There is a lot of dark on this map, and that makes me concerned. Its at it's darkest where I'm from, where my parents live, in spite of comparatively low rates of cases/1,000 right now. The same true for the locations of all of my other family, best friends, and acquaintances.

It's most of The US mostly, and because of the parameters of the study, probably the large majority of the world is in the same position.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... e=Homepage

“I worry that many local officials are waiting until there is clear evidence of local transmission before taking action,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of biology and statistics at the university. “The message is, we should not wait.”

With no consistent federal policy, local officials have been left on their own to decide when to enact control measures, Most should assume it is already here, she said.

Over all, the study finds, 70 percent of all counties in the United States — making up 94 percent of the country's population — are likely to have epidemics. The study defines an epidemic as an outbreak that grows exponentially instead of fizzling out on its own, eventually infecting a large fraction of the population.

Known cases in a county - Probability of community transmission

0 - 9%
1 - 51%
2 - 70%
3 - 79%
4 - 84%
5 - 85%
10 - 95%
20 - 99%
43 or more 100%

By The New York Times·Source: Emily Javan, Spencer Fox and Lauren Ancel Meyers, the University of Texas at Austin

[Canoerebel]

On that map, Erik, Wyoming looks pretty tough too.

Here's the current projection for the Cowboy State, from https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

The projection for Wyoming equates to 213 deaths/M. That's far less than New York (given pop. density, no doubt) and less than Georgia.

[Canoerebel]

Erik, I meant the map you posted yesterday or Saturday with Georgia counties in various shades of orange.

Thanks for providing the explanation below and that set of graphs.

I wonder if the sources are capable of taking the raw data, digesting it, presenting it, and having it bear out what they're claiming.

You'd expect travel to be less, per capita (and gross volume), in urban areas, where people live closer to store, post office, etc. The bulk of the population is urban and thus drives/walks shorter distances. In outlying regions (like Taliaferro County, portrayed in dark orange on that map), people have to drive further for the same purposes. That would be especially true in South and Southwest Georgia.

So people complying with the mandated countermeasures would still show more travel in rural areas than in urban. Or so I'd expect.

ORIGINAL: obvert
...
You asked, Dan, for the map on movement. I had posted it earlier. It's here again, from the NY Times. It was posted April 2 and shows movement for the week of March 23 (I think beginning March 23).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... Position=1

Stay-at-home orders have nearly halted travel for most Americans, but people in Florida, the Southeast and other places that waited to enact such orders have continued to travel widely, potentially exposing more people as the coronavirus outbreak accelerates, according to an analysis of cellphone location data by The New York Times.

The divide in travel patterns, based on anonymous cellphone data from 15 million people, suggests that Americans in wide swaths of the West, Northeast and Midwest have complied with orders from state and local officials to stay home. Disease experts who reviewed the results say those reductions in travel — to less than a mile a day, on average, from about five miles — may be enough to sharply curb the spread of the coronavirus in those regions, at least for now.

“That’s huge,” said Aaron A. King, a University of Michigan professor who studies the ecology of infectious disease. “By any measure this is a massive change in behavior, and if we can make a similar reduction in the number of contacts we make, every indication is that we can defeat this epidemic.”

But not everybody has been staying home.

In areas where public officials have resisted or delayed stay-at-home orders, people changed their habits far less. Though travel distances in those places have fallen drastically, last week they were still typically more than three times those in areas that had imposed lockdown orders, the analysis shows.

This is from the time period Feb 28-March 27. It is done by the county, since that was the most common area of difference in stay at home orders for this time, local governments taking charge of this decision.
...

[Cap Mandrake]

Simply labeling everything a "conspiracy theory" is intellectually lazy. The notion of a completed bioweapon release IS kooky but accidental release of a bat coronavirus that had picked up the ability to infect humans IS almost certainly what happened. The only question is was it some Burmese smugglers hauling live Pangolins over the mountains for Wuhan cioppino or was it accidental release from a laboratory with a legitimate scientific purpose?

When SARS emerged we knew almost NOTHING about zoonotic Coronaviruses. This chick that runs the lab in Wuhan 285 meters from the wet market is nicknamed "bat woman" because of her tireless efforts to study bat reservoirs of Coronavirus. Partly because of her work, the horseshoe bat is known to be a major reservoir. Do you now what the Chinese call this virus? The call it SARS-2. It's actually ALMOST as good as name as the "China virus"[:)] because the similarity is extreme. SARS is no longer circulating (as far as we know) but after SARS we DISCOVERED two other Coronaviruses of bat origin circulating in the human population. Based on mutation rate analyses they have probably been in the human population for hundreds of years so there is an existing high level of immunity.

Now, if you are handling a virus with likely genetic homologies to a virus KNOWN to have caused a very dangerous human epidemic (SARS-1)...you had bloody well be doing those studies in the highest level bio-containment lab. To not do so is criminal negligence.

[MakeeLearn]

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

Did Bill Gates Just Reveal the Reason Behind the Lock-Downs?
Apr 4, 2020


https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/04/did ... ock-downs/


"On March 24 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute interview (above) to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks."

""It appears that rather than let the population be exposed to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines." "

" It appears" marks the story as an opinion piece. Unless Gates came right out and said that is a business strategy they were following, I highly doubt the veracity of the claim. The "pro-herd immunity" crowd seem to discount the cost in deaths, sometimes because of ageism.

Did you listen to his interview? "Deduction, Induction My Dear Watson"

[Cap Mandrake]

Good article from Nature.

The author asks "If pangolins are the source and they came from anther country, why haven't we heard about any cases there?"

Seems to me that is a damn good question.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00548-w

[Cap Mandrake]

Excellent summary article about SARS(1) from several years ago. The authors are absolutely psychic.

SHOULD WE BE READY FOR THE REEMERGENCE OF SARS?
The medical and scientific community demonstrated marvelous efforts in the understanding and control of SARS within a short time, as evident by over 4,000 publications available online. Despite these achievements, gaps still exist in terms of the molecular basis of the physical stability and transmissibility of this virus, the molecular and immunological basis of disease pathogenesis in humans, screening tests for early or cryptic SARS cases, foolproof infection control procedures for patient care, effective antivirals or antiviral combinations, the usefulness of immunomodulatory agents for late presenters, an effective vaccine with no immune enhancement, and the immediate animal host that transmitted the virus to caged civets in the market at the beginning of the epidemic. Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination (375), which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks. The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.

https://cmr.asm.org/content/20/4/660

These guys and gals aren't conspiracy theorists. They told us what was going to happen.

[MakeeLearn]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

While emergency services and health care professionals and myriad other support folks fight this long battle, I was fortunate to spend the day outdoors in the northwest Georgia mountains.

I hiked six miles of the Pinhoti Trail, topping out on Horn Mountain and dropping to Snake Creek Gap. The birds and flowers were showing their stuff. Then I bicycled back to the truck via lovely mountain roads.

There were a zillion people using the trails and roads - bicyclists, motorcyclists, motorists, hikers, families, couples, individuals. More than I've ever seen in that remote area. All keeping their distance from others, as best I could tell.

On the long climb up the mountain, an army medic (reserve or National Guard probably) was in the midst of a training hike, wearing fatigues and with full pack. He was fatigued and said that, when he got home, he would sit naked in his apartment and drink beer for the balance of the weekend. I thanked him for his service and told him that was too much information. He was a nice young man.

Weather is awesome right now. My job is 60% People and 40% Paperwork and I was working long hours before CV19. My stress comes in different forms. Because I have more off days than work. I spend a lot of time in nature. It reminds me of what the real world is.

The added CV19 stress on everyone is very evident. The stress in cities have to be on a slow boil. Even people here are saying "Enough is Enough".

[MakeeLearn]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

Excellent summary article about SARS(1) from several years ago. The authors are absolutely psychic.

SHOULD WE BE READY FOR THE REEMERGENCE OF SARS?
The medical and scientific community demonstrated marvelous efforts in the understanding and control of SARS within a short time, as evident by over 4,000 publications available online. Despite these achievements, gaps still exist in terms of the molecular basis of the physical stability and transmissibility of this virus, the molecular and immunological basis of disease pathogenesis in humans, screening tests for early or cryptic SARS cases, foolproof infection control procedures for patient care, effective antivirals or antiviral combinations, the usefulness of immunomodulatory agents for late presenters, an effective vaccine with no immune enhancement, and the immediate animal host that transmitted the virus to caged civets in the market at the beginning of the epidemic. Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination (375), which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks. The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.

https://cmr.asm.org/content/20/4/660

These guys and gals aren't conspiracy theorists. They told us what was going to happen.

Yes "Agent of Emerging and Reemerging Infection". Ive posted some on warnings from years ago. It is a arms race. And Mother Nature does not care if we can quote Shakespeare, know Calculus or have a space program.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

[MakeeLearn]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

I forgot to allow for the sheer volume of MakeeLearn's posts. [X(]

I'am a BIG believer in reconnaissance.