Posts Made By: James Brown

Originally Posted by Russ Carroll

Hey, man. Even though I wasted space for 16 bottles of pedialyte, I'm ready!

Originally Posted by David Cotterell

The blue dots are the new mortality rates calculated in the article.  The red dots are the older W.H.O. mortality rates.  For each date the blue mortality rate is significantly higher.  Thus, it is as I said: The new mortality rates are higher than the old ones....

The curves are both declining over time because the sample size (number of cases) is increasing and the mortality rates are trending closer and closer to their 'true' value, asymptotically..

Are you not alarmed that by either metric the mortality rates of COVID are tens of times higher than those of the influenzas we are used to...?   

If 50 000 (ballpark number) people die of influenza in America in a given year and the mortality rate is 0.2% then how many people caught influenza?  The answer is 100 Million.

Now, if 100 million Americans catch this Covid and the mortality rate is 5% how many will die?  The answer is 5 MILLION.. That's one entire Alabama of dead people.. 

Supplementary question for you:  How many intensive care beds are there in the entire USA?  The figure is around 6 000 (google it)....   there or only about 1 000 000 hospital beds of any sort at all in the USA...

Now think:  6 000 vs 5 000 000.   Or even 900 000 vs 5 000 000.... And what about other folks who need ICU and general hospital ccare?  Heart attack victims, burn victims, car accident victims...Babies born, illnesses....  It would be an astonishingly inconceivable disaster. 

So everything is being shut down, restaurants closed except for take-out.  All gatherings of more than 50 people cancelled.  No unnecessary travel.  International travel shut down.  Canada USA border closed (soon...) Everyone SHELTER IN PLACE..  Everyone, sick or well...And we might be able to keep the number of cases of Covid down to a manageable level.. 

Or you and your colleagues here and on the internet and in political life can keep on with the whataboutism relating to influenza deaths, and continue saying the Covid pandemic is hype, overblown, politically motivated and delay, waffle and hide behind rhetoric.   

Dave  

Originally Posted by James Lacey

I'm shocked... Lastly, you genuinely are a pollyanna... 

Originally Posted by David Cotterell

I'm saying read the article. Really dig in there.

 Every day there is a delay in implementing complete isolation (the 'hammer' in the article) the death toll will increase...

US WW2 military/soldier deaths about 400 000.      

If 20 million Americans get the virus and the death rate is 2%.......there you are....400 000 dead.

And the longer we delay effective social distancing the longer we will all have to practise it...

For my country, Canada the WW2 dead totalled 42 000.  So, if 2 million Canadians (out of 37 million) get it, 40 000 will die...

That's what I meant by WW2 levels of death...Could 20 million Americans get the virus?  That's only about 6 or 7% of the population.... 


Dave

Originally Posted by David Cotterell

I am in a self-imposed isolation with an asterisk.  *Four days ago I went out food shopping to get myself to the 3-week level of food preparedness.  When I run low I'll do another very careful run to the grocery store....  or have food delivered....

My ladyfriend, Heather, is immune-compromised due to the drugs she takes for an ongoing ailment.  She is also in lockdown mode, more severe than mine. I took a food order from her four days ago and left it at her door, waved at her in the window and drove home.. We are not visiting each other.  We Skype.... 

All my friends and greater social circle are staying home.  SElf-isolation is the norm in Ontario now...

Everything is shut here in Ontario, restaurants are take-out only.  Any sort of gathering, even as small as 4 or 5 people, is pretty much banned, either by the Provincial State of Emergency Law or by peer pressure or self-regulation.  So no movies, plays, sports, courts, municipal offices, you name it....schools....church.....everything is shut.  Food stores, drug stores, banks etc. are open but with restrictions.... Retail stores are shutting down bit by bit...  The State of Emergency law shut all hair salons, nail salons, tatoo parlors etc. right away until further notice..  Marriage licenses are no longer being issued for certain dates in the near future...

I expect a Federal Edict any day now that everyone across the country must stay home except to travel to specific essential jobs like police, fire, food store etc.The rest of us only will be able to go out to go food and drugstore shopping or to the doctor........

I am fortunate here in my rural home with my nearest neighbours hundreds of feet away.  There are two hiking trails nearby which I could take for exercise...My entire township, 15x10 miles in size has only 4000 people...farm country.

I'm just getting my backyard observatory up and running from the long winter shut-down.  I have a good well, unlimited internet, a couple of streaming services for movies and TV shows... hundreds of books, music CD's etc.  

Assuming I could get food delivery on a regular, on-going basis I could quite easily be by myself for months, if it comes to that..

I have no desire to take risks to find out if a 68-year-old former 30-year smoker (now smoke-free for 19 years) in otherwise excellent health can conquer this virus....

And, finally, I am quite aware that as a retired guy I am luckier than those who will lose income/jobs as we go through this, or who live in crowded apartment buildings and dense cities..  It appears that the Federal and Provincial governments are preparing to give out some $ to those who are affected the most.  This may be the case in the US, too, I've read....

Remember, our parents and/or grandparents were asked to fight a war.  We have been asked to sit on our couch.  

Stay home!

Dave

Originally Posted by James Lacey

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

If current rates of the increase in positive cases continue, and there is no reason to expect they won't accelerate, we are looking at tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people sick by the end of the year. The fatality rate in the US is holding steady at 1%. I hope what I'm seeing based on publicly available data is not true.

Originally Posted by James Lacey

All Presidents and parties play politics with everything. However, it is not politics to point out the continued failures of the man who is supposedly the leader in this crisis, especially when he keeps making new horrific decisions atop of the old ones. Trump ignored the crisis for months and dismissed it as no more severe than the seasonal flu. He could have taken actions to prepare, but instead, he was more worried about spooking the markets. To put it bluntly, he has been derelict in his duty. That is not political; at this point, it's just a self-evident truth. Have you been watching the daily press briefings? They are a joke and resemble a pep rally with hostages whose only real purpose is to shower, the dear leader with praise. Occasionally, Pence, or Fauci, or Birx will attempt to interject some reality, but inevitably Trump starts babbling and thinks he can word salad his way out of tough questioning. Either that or he plays the bully or spouts more nonsense about anti-malaria drugs being a miracle cure because he saw it on Fox news. This behavior is not leadership. It's pathetic at best.

Originally Posted by Russ Carroll

My understanding is that the reason it is "working" in S Korea is because of the very large-scale testing they do for the virus of entire populations. It isn't just testing that makes a difference; it is the immediate isolating of those that have the virus. We are not doing that at all.

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

The worst polling position since Truman:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/21/politics/trump-vs-biden-poll-of-the-week/index.html

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

Jim Brown said, "We have excellent reasons to think that the rates of increase will not accelerate". Are you crazy? The projected infection rate in California is currently 56%. We don't have the tests so we really don't yet know and you can't say in your state because the single drive thru closed due to lack of supplies. Just because one or two cases may have been reported in one county or town, it doesn't mean that others haven't been infected. We don't know because the delay in the response from the feds and their current policy of relying on the private sector within the states to provide for their own equipment is a dismal failure...