Corona Virus (COVID-19)( SARS-CoV-2) from China: Its going to be bad.

[carlson1]

WalMart is controlling the amount of shoppers.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.news4j ... utType=amp

Walmart will begin imposing new limits on the number of customers allowed inside its stores at a time, the retail giant announced on Friday.

Starting on Saturday, Walmart locations will allow no more than five customers inside for every 1,000 square feet of the building, or approximately one-fifth of the average store’s capacity.

Our local HEB was doing this last week. I don’t know if they use the same ratio or not, but they let only so many people in at a time and they had “social distance” marks on the sidewalk for the line waiting to get in.

I can’t find the article this was in, but I find them deciding what is essential interesting.

Retailers such as Target, Walmart and Costco are now required to limit the sales of nonessential items.

[SewTexas]

What did they decide to do about helping people who are self-employed and/or independent contractors? People who work in salons (or barber shops), for example, are usually 1099 contractors, not employees of the salon. Not to mention all the little mom-and-pop businesses out there. Seems like all the assistance is for small businesses with employees.

I've been told there are a couple of things they can do....
1. supposedly the restrictions for unemployment have been changed and they can file for that
2. owners can look to the SBA and such for loans.

I also heard a rumor that the SBA is looking to sue various govn'ts for closing businesses, that should be interesting....

[Outnumbered]

What did they decide to do about helping people who are self-employed and/or independent contractors? People who work in salons (or barber shops), for example, are usually 1099 contractors, not employees of the salon. Not to mention all the little mom-and-pop businesses out there. Seems like all the assistance is for small businesses with employees.

There was some discussion of this in yesterday's White House briefing. Here's a link to it.

He specifically mentions contractors at around the 23:50 mark. I made the link to start just before that to give a bit of background.

[philip964]

MARCH
March 22, 2020- 318,662 world, 13,672 dead. 27,004 infected US,
347 dead. 53,578 Italy, 4,825 dead. 81,397 China. Texas has 557 with 5 deaths. Houston at 154.

March 23, 2020- 354,677 cases worldwide with 15430 dead. 35,345 infected US, 473 dead. 59,138 Italy with 5,476 dead. 81,496 China. Texas has 674 with 8 deaths. Houston 166 with 2 deaths.

March 24, 2020 am- 396,249 cases worldwide with 17,252 dead. 46,805 infected US, 593 dead. 63,927 Italy with 6,077 dead. 81,591 China (is anyone believing this). Texas has 807 with 9 deaths. Houston 199 with 2 Deaths.

March 25, 2020 pm- 468,523 cases worldwide with 21,192 dead. 66,132 infected US, 947 dead. 74,386 Italy with 7,503 dead. 81,667 China (is anyone believing this). New York state has 33,006 with 366 deaths. Louisiana has 1,795 with 65 deaths. Texas has 1,289 with 16 deaths. Houston 371 with 2 deaths.

March 26, 2020 am. 492,603 cases worldwide with 22,184 dead. 69,210 infected US, 1,046 dead. 74,386 Italy with 7,503 dead. 81,782 China (is anyone believing this). New York state has 33,006 with 366 deaths. Louisiana has 1,795 with 65 deaths. Texas has 1,353 with 17 deaths. Houston 372 with 2 deaths.

March 27, 2020 am. 553,244 cases worldwide with 25,935 dead. 86,012 infected US, 1,301 dead. 80,589 Italy with 8,215 dead. 81,897 China (is anyone believing this). New York state has 39,140 with 461 deaths. Louisiana has 2,304 with 83 deaths. Texas has 1,353 with 17 deaths. Houston 461 with 3 deaths.

March 28, 2020 12:48 pm. 640,589 cases worldwide with 29,848 dead. 112,458 infected US, 1,841 dead. 92,472 Italy with10,023 dead. 81,999 China (is anyone believing this). New York state has 52,318 with 728 deaths. Louisiana has 2,746 with 119 deaths. Texas has 2,026 with 26 deaths. Houston 543 with 4 deaths.

March 29, 2020 10:48 am. 684,652 cases worldwide with 32,113 dead. 124,763 infected US, 2,187 dead. 92,472 Italy with (no data) dead. 82,120 China (is anyone believing this). New York state has 53,520 with 834 deaths. Louisiana has 3,315 with 137 deaths. Texas has 2,535 with 34 deaths. Houston 810 with 6 deaths.

March 30, 2020 10:01 am. 741,030 cases worldwide with 35,114 dead. 143,532 infected US, 2,572 dead 4,865 recovered. 97,689 Italy with 10,779 dead. 82,198 China (is anyone believing this). New York state has 60,679 with 1,026 deaths. Louisiana has 3,540 with 151deaths. Texas has 2,306 with 34 deaths. Houston 929 with 8 deaths.

March 31, 2020 9:05 am. 803,313 cases worldwide with 39,014 dead. 164,719 infected US, 3,170 dead 5,945 recovered. 101,739 Italy with 11,591 dead. 94,417 Spain with 8,189 dead. China 82,276 (is anyone believing this). New York state has 67,384 with 1,342 deaths. New Jersey has 16,636 with 198 deaths. Louisiana has 4,025 with 185 deaths. Texas has 3,339 with 48 deaths. Houston 1,054 with 11 deaths.

APRIL
April 1, 2020 10:58 am. 885,687 cases worldwide with 44,216 dead. 185,477 recovered. USA 190,089 infected, 4,102 dead 7,141 recovered. 105,792 Italy with 12,428 dead. 102,136 Spain with 9,053 dead. China 82,361 (is anyone believing this). New York state has 76,049 with 1,714 deaths. New Jersey has 18,997 with 267 deaths. Louisiana has 5,237 with 239 deaths. Texas has 3,925 with 58 deaths. Houston 1,267 with 13 deaths.

April 2, 2020 12:41 am. 981,221 cases worldwide with 50,230 dead. 204,605 recovered. USA 226,374 infected, 5,316 dead 8,826 recovered. 115,242 Italy with 13,915 dead. 110,238 Spain with 10,003 dead. China 82,432 (is anyone believing this). New York state has 92,381 with 2,373 deaths. New Jersey has 22,255 with 355 deaths. Louisiana has 6,424 with 273 deaths. Texas has 4,612 with 68 deaths. Houston 1,540 with 16 deaths.

April 3, 2020 11:50 am. 1,056777 cases worldwide with 55,781 dead. 221,595 recovered. USA 257,773 infected, 6,586 dead 9,311 recovered. 115,242 Italy with 13,915 dead. 117,710 Spain with 10,935 dead. China 82,509 (is anyone believing this). New York state has102,863 with 2,935 deaths. New Jersey has 25,590 with 537 deaths. Louisiana has 9,159 with 310 deaths. Texas has 5,254 with 86 deaths. Houston 1,729 with 23 deaths. For detailed information on Texas see https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/ops ... b9cafc8b83

April 4, 2020 11:32 am. 1,141,180 cases worldwide with 60,960 dead. 235,775 recovered. USA 278,942 infected, 7,174 dead 9,920 recovered. 119,827 Italy with 14,681 dead. 124,736 Spain with 11,744 dead. China 82,543 with 3,330 dead (is anyone believing this). New York state has 103,172 with 2,935 deaths. New Jersey has 29,895 with 646 deaths. Louisiana has 10,297 with 370 deaths. Texas has 6,059 with 104 deaths. Houston 2,029 with 26 deaths. For detailed information on Texas see https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/ops ... b9cafc8b83

The USA graph of confirmed cases is steep almost vertical with the daily plots accelerating showing greater new cases each day than the day before. The world graph is the same. The only country with a level graph is China.

[03Lightningrocks]

Good lord that is a long winded repost.

[PlatinumCouch]

I realize this whole China Virus is a huge deal. I know a great many people have already died and many more are and will be infected. And... know I will catch a lot of flak/grief for this post. But.... Are we really willing to sacrifice the health (no pun intended) or even the viability of our great nation with mass hysteria? Let’s say we have a case of "many more" deaths than predicted. Let’s say 875 thousand people die, 3 times worse than predicted (I believe worst case predictions are 250 thousand). That is about .025 percent (that's point zero two five) of the American population. Terrible, Tragic, Heartbreaking, etc. Why are we standing in line to shut everything down! Have we as a nation grown so selfish that we are willing to give up our freedoms, our rights, our way of life, in order to ensure our 90-year-old grandpa doesn't get sick? YES, I KNOW other age groups are also getting sick, but the statics show mainly elderly people with underlying conditions are the ones with WAY higher rates of bad outcomes (the great majority of people will survive). One thing is for certain, we are all headed toward the grave, it's just a matter of when. Point 3 percent of the American population died during WW2 in order to preserve our nation. I guess no one is willing to make sacrifices today, and yes, I we are looking at a threat which could very well change the face of the country in a way we in hindsight we will all regret.

[parabelum]

Platinum, no offense but your post is pretty ridiculous. There is more I want to write but I’ll leave it alone.

[TreyHouston]

Platinum, no offense but your post is pretty ridiculous. There is more I want to write but I’ll leave it alone.

Lets talk about just now. 10 million new unemployed. Lost health insurance. Lost income for the family. Lost life savings on a now closed business. Can’t feed the family or pay ANY bills because the economy is shut down. Oh ya, now they are releasing nonviolent and violent offenders out of jail.

How many will this kill?

PS- its gonna get even worse in 2 weeks

[parabelum]

Hope you do realize that if this gets out of hand we will lose a lot more then what was/will be lost already. Nobody likes any of this. Doing nothing and letting folks prance around and spreading this virus to others, putting those who have built the roads for us to enjoy (our elders) into graves is not right.

[The Annoyed Man]

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... FnPYVICgkc

[PlatinumCouch]

Platinum, no offense but your post is pretty ridiculous. There is more I want to write but I’ll leave it alone.

None taken. I was hoping to generate discussion of things I have been hearing daily in my profession. I am former Military and current Airline Transport Pilot. Please dissect my post and give my your counter points (everyone reading for that matter). My post seems to be the consensus of a lot of the people in my profession. You seem to be an educated rational guy as am I. No offence was meant in my post.

[parabelum]

Thank you Sir. The part that stood out for me was the indifference (perceived by me) towards the elderly, many of whom ironically are the ones that fought the battles to help protect our freedoms and ways of living you eluded.
I get the philosophical point though, but we really need to clamp down on this virus so that we can all move along in our lives.
This has a potential to be far more damaging, on all fronts, if we don’t honker down for just few more weeks.

[FrogFan]

This has a potential to be far more damaging, on all fronts, if we don’t honker down for just few more weeks.

Hunkering down is going to cause people to die -- unemployment, poverty, crime, etc., yet there is no consideration given to this by the experts promulgating policy. How many such deaths are acceptable in support of the economic shutdown to control the virus spread? Some are talking about the end of the year to continue hunkering down. How long is long enough? When do we know we can move on? Are the Draconian economic measures being taken having a significant impact over the hygiene steps we've all learned to take?

There are lots of questions like this to consider. The larger point, in my view, is that there is no balance to policy making regarding this virus. That's very scary.

[03Lightningrocks]

Thank you Sir. The part that stood out for me was the indifference (perceived by me) towards the elderly, many of whom ironically are the ones that fought the battles to help protect our freedoms and ways of living you eluded.
I get the philosophical point though, but we really need to clamp down on this virus so that we can all move along in our lives.
This has a potential to be far more damaging, on all fronts, if we don’t honker down for just few more weeks.

"Hunkering down" will do nothing to alleviate China Virus. It merely stretches it out so hospitals can have more room for those who will die from it to house them while they die. That is the reality of this thing. The moment we all try to go back to life as usual, it will spread further. Are we all going to "hunker down" for months, years, even decades. What about the next one? More "hunkering down"? more freedom lost to government control of our lives?

[Rafe]

I'm not on the panic train, but I absolutely do not know what the best answer is to balance the economic risks and the medical risks. I posted a couple of days ago about the 1998 PBS episode of American Experience on the 1918 influenza pandemic. I'll say again, I think it's worth a look: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperi ... influenza/. It isn't on YouTube, but it can be streamed for free from the PBS site. The good news: we aren't involved in a world war, and we have technology available to help many sectors of our predominantly service-related economy to work from home. At least somewhat. But we made a bunch of mistakes in 1918, and after watching that PBS video, I think you'll see we started out making very similar mistakes with COVID-19.

But here's a well-done video from Vox on April 1 that is on YouTube and offers a comparison of what we know currently about COVID-19 vs. the flu:



We have a lot more urban population density now than we did in 1918, and I think the worst-case scenario is potentially much worse than PlatinumCouch indicates. For one, Fauci and Birx have said that the real worst-case, even though both discount it as improbable, is more like 1.7 million U.S. deaths. We have no "herd immunity" yet to COVID-19, and we did, at least some, to H1N1 back in 1918. We thankfully understand the difference between a virus and a bacterium (unlike in 1918) and we aren't simply stacking cots shoulder-to-shoulder in triage wards and calling it hospitalization, but COVID-19 is far more contagious than influenza.

From two days ago, here's an interesting article from FiveThirtyEight, a product of ABC News: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/be ... far-apart/. They've been working on outbreak models weekly. One important opinion they arrived at was only about 12% of all COVID-19 infections in the U.S. have been reported so far. Which likely means the panic-inclined will become even more panicky because with actual numbers artificially low, as more and quicker/cheaper testing is done and more cases are identified the total number and percentages ain't going down anytime soon.

The "how many will die this year in the U.S. due to COVID-19" estimates in that article are all over the place. The orange bar on this graph represents the collective best-guesses, which fall in line with the White House current numbers of 100,000 to 240,000:



TAM and our resident physicians can speak to this better than I can, but what I think I'm also concerned about are the deaths that are not caused by COVID-19, that won't go down in the books in the statistics. The nation has limited medical and hospital resources. If we're to believe what Andrew Cuomo says, New York is on the verge of setting up cots in the streets. (I'm not a huge Cuomo fan, BTW.) But the reality is that only so many ICU beds available, only so many ventilators, only so many physicians and PAs and nurses.

The mean of Dr. Fauci's current estimates would be 170,00 dead from coronavirus. That ain't gonna take until November to sort itself out. If we plop only a fraction of those into hospital ICUs over the next 5 to 7 weeks, the whole medical system will be overwhelmed and brought to a virtual standstill. What happens to the normal stream of people that need inpatient hospital admittance? People who have heart attacks, a stroke, a burst appendix, are in a car accident, need cancer surgery...have an unintentional discharge at the range and shoot themselves in the leg? (I had to bring it around to the focus of the Forum. )

If we take the top three causes of death--stopping at anything respiratory-related--and divide the annual number by 12, it means we see about 118,000 deaths each month in the U.S. from those causes alone, so over 200,000 in a 7 week period. Where do those people go when the inn is full? It's almost like a MASH triage where they will treat injuries to the lower extremities only. Been gut-shot? Sorry, we don't have the resources to treat you. That's what all this flattening-the-curve stuff is about.

My longest post in history, and I've got not a single solitary answer to offer. But I don't think it's to revert to the days of the Black Death and have trucks driving around to pick up the dead like a scheduled trash day. We've got to try to control this thing somehow. Otherwise we'll see the 170,000 deaths in a matter of weeks from the virus itself, plus undoubtedly 100,000-plus more from "normal" emergency medical requirements who kicked the bucket because we were too short on resources to give them the treatment they would have received if they'd had the foresight to get hit by that drunk driver in February instead of May.