any insight into how she got her test done? did she have a script?

I usually lean towards the conservative side of things for financial reasons, but am socially pretty damn liberal. I have defended the man many times and criticized him at times. I will say that his initial downplaying of the virus when many of us even knew it was going to get bad, is inexcusable. I do think he assembled a good team in Fauci and Birx. I think though that this virus was in the US shortly after it became a big deal in China, and we should have been doing all we could to have testing infrastructure in place then. I'm in a pretty damn small area and we just announced out first case here today. I think it's safe to say it's everywhere.

Nothing has set us behind as much as the lack of testing. When the virus first appeared we weren't able to track it and now it may be out of control. Our only option now is to have everyone isolate, and that isn't happening to the degree it needs to.

In addition we could have gotten a month head start at least on procuring medical supplies. Hearing the CDC advise use of bandanas as masks is appalling.

She was having serious breathing problems and had recently(a few days) been in a rehab facility. I was honestly surprised the hospital in Eastern Kentucky had tests. They didn't say, but my guess is the high risk and the possibility of it being in a nursing home are what led to the test.

edit: She was in bad enough shape that an ambulance was called and she was taken to the ER. Just got an update that she'll need surgery for kidney stones and has a blood infection and a blood clot.

To casually toss in that statement in a serious, ideally non-political thread is a cheap shot. And I didn't realize Bernie was a champion for UBI or at least not when Yang brought it up.

I'll be glad to continue this discussion. Let's take it to the Trump or Democrat thread.

It's worth noting that the shutdowns are also because we have a lack of testing. We have to take the safest route. This virus could very well be common throughout the population and most people are asymptomatic and this is an overreaction (which was necessary). We just don't know.

The most interesting data will come when we can take a random sample of a population. Just test 10,000 random people in a city right now and track the results. Otherwise we're flying blind on what the true mortality of this is.

There arent any when there isnt a pandemic either. I mean who are the closest Rand Paul Amash and Massie? Didnt they all vote against the bill?

Oh, there are planty of libertarians. I just got home from Gatlinburg TN. There were no less than 3 shop owners that blamed the Dems, the media and.or the Chinese for this. And believe it is a false pandemic.

What is your definition of a Libertarian? Go to reason.com or someplace for Libertarian viewpoints. Most of them actually support social distancing (not government mandated, which I disagree with them on) and all believe the virus is real. I think those sound like Republicans.

Agreed, the closest thing we have to that controlled of an experiment are the Diamond Princess numbers.

In fact right now they (reason.com) are talking about some anti malaria drug chloroquine that apparently has been used successfully in Asia but the FDA doesn't like.

I'm seeing that mentioned a lot.

This makes it a little more real. I can't imagine what that family is going through. Unfortunately, I'm guessing there will be more.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...itals-n1163696

The GOP bill is out. Seems odd that it would limit the payouts to the poorest people. For instance, I'd think seniors could use the extra cash right now as they might need more money up front to stock up on supplies if this lasts awhile. And the poorest workers are the ones losing their jobs first and living paycheck to paycheck.

Seems like the big winners are middle-class folks with families.

GOP bill on immediate checks:

-- $1,200 per person ($2,400 if filing jointly)
-- $500 per kid
-- Begins to phase out above $75K
-- Phases out completely above $99K
-- Much smaller benefit, of $600, for millions w/o federal tax liability pic.twitter.com/mPggn8eepS

— Jeffrey Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 19, 2020

This is my hometown.

I was born in that hospital.

My parents live 1/2 mile from there. My mom was playing bridge Monday. She knows several of the same people, thankfully none in the bridge game.

And it would be based on 2018 income. A lot of business owners would get screwed because they made good money until they suddenly had nothing.

Just give everyone money and raise taxes on upper income earners for 2020. Don’t make it complicated.

exactly, and like someone mentioned earlier, 75K means very different things depending on where you live.

I've mentioned it a few times. If I was to get that money 100% would go right back into the local economy.

I think it's a problem both ways. I don't think most of the politically oriented posts in this thread have been appropriate, Edward64's Bernie comments included. I'm just sort of trying to ignore that and focus on the larger, much more important at the moment issue, but …

This is fair and I appreciate your balanced view. I will stop the Bernie bashing in this thread.

That's a tougher nut to crack, and I haven't looked in depth into how much care people on ventilators need, but it certainly seems like there are parts of the process (like testing at drive thru testing places like they opened in New Rochelle, maybe even a large part of the monitoring if it's as simple as people need to be on ventilators) where we can quickly train up groups of people or even use parts of the National Guard to facilitate.

Trump got mocked here for the suggestion that a USS hospital ship in NYC harbor would only treat non-Corona patients, but it makes sense to separate them from the regular hospital population, and I'm not sure why we'd need to separately quarantine first responders or medical professionals who test positive but are asymptomatic - theoretically if you have like an armory or college dorm/auditorium as an area for Corona patients I don't see why they couldn't continue treating patients since all already have it.

Again though, I don't really know how much treatment patients need for Corona past "get them on a respirator and monitor them". Either way, I definitely agree this is a bigger hurdle than the idea that we won't have enough respirators, or masks, or bed space, in 2-3 weeks if the numbers continue soaring. We're seeing individualized reports of hospitals running out of supplies in places like Bellevue WA & Albany GA precisely because those are the first hot spots and the machinery hasn't been ramped up yet.
If you're going to continue arguing that China's initial response was markedly better than ours idk where this discussion is going to go. How It All Started: China’s Early Coronavirus Missteps - WSJ

So how does curbside service not spread the virus? I thought I read somewhere it lives for days on the surface, obviously they would try to be clean but seems fairly dangerous no?

For my part, I appreciate your humility. I think it's a rare trait in a poster and the one I aspire to improve at.

My guess is it reduces the # of "points of failure". The risk is not eliminated completely but it eliminates having to go into grocery store, walking by people, touching shopping carts etc. ... so say reduces maybe 70-80% of the risk?

And the drive thru. If they have the virus and are making the food and then handing it to you can't that spread it.

That's my understanding also - you're never going to eliminate spread/risk. The idea is to reduce it, i.e. flattening the curve. Barring the entire country going off the grid and living a hermit/survival lifestyle, which will never happen, the best that can be done is to walk a tightrope on this.

Those are 'theoretical' numbers, all they do is show you can detect viable virus. Not that it is still at sufficient density and virility to infect someone else or how likely it is. Especially since it would need to first go from someones facial area onto the surface, then onto the hand of the next Person and then again onto the facial area (more specifically inside mouth, nose or maybe eyes). Each step reduces the 'amount' of virus.

Basically it is a "yeah, it happens, but not nearly enough to come close to having the same relevance as close personal contact" situation. But there is a reason why one should, regardless of Corona, wash their hands much more often than most people do.

It is hard, at least for me, not to intertwine them when this administration is largely responsible for the position we are in.

When I die, please let it be known that it was probably because the cul-de-sac morons beside me have decided to throw a mini block party. Hey, we're all invited!!!! No thanks, I'll do my due diligence.

In our neighborhood FB we are talking about putting up Christmas lights to help cheer everyone up.

I'll throw out some Christmas lights a big Red C on my door if I need to lol.

and they probably think you're the asshole

At least my wife is on the same page with me on this.

My wife and I are totally in tune on all of this. I can't imagine living with someone who thinks it is no big deal. I wouldn't even know how to handle that

Houston's going to be much worse in a couple of weeks because they didn't shut down the rodeo until it was half over.


https://www.rodeohouston.com/About-U...Are/Attendance


About 630K for the rodeo + 219K for the cookoff. Oh, and one of the first cases in the area was confirmed to go there.


SI

Not great.

CALIFORNIA governor says he expects 56 percent of Californians to be infected within 8 weeks.

I'm in favor of this.


SI

So the cardiac surgeon for my MILK called her and told her to stay put and take her temperature. Apparently it was his assistant that told her to get tested. He doesn't want her somewhere she can potentially get infected.

Amazing that this lack of communication exists even with literally the best doctors in the world. This is Columbia Presbyterian, not Rochester general FFS

Oddly specific.

Technically yes. From what I've read, unless someone sneezed on your bun, you're probably fine. Hot food is usually a tough substance for a virus like that to survive on. Transfer from packaging would be rare considering how many point of contacts there are.

Just wash your hands after handling the bag/box/wrapper and maybe microwave it if you're really paranoid.

Marcus Smart of the Celtics and two Lakers players tested positive.

Former coworker I considered reasonable on FB: "Due to the coronavirus I am going to continue life as normal" and goes on to make a political statement I won't pollute this thread with.

This last week has not been good for my patience and blood pressure.

Well, it has some plusses and minuses. Actually, the FDA is fine with it - in, fact if you can find a "silver bullet" drug from something that's 50 years old, that's perfect. You already know about the side effects, which is a lot more than you can say for a new vaccine, which could potentially (but unlikely) do more harm than good. It's cheap and mass produceable - these are all great things!

However, I also read the French study (unpublished) and it's a really small sample size (40ish), it's not double blind, and the cohorts are substantially different (control group was statistically significantly different than group that got the drug). So the problem is not that it's a bad drug or had awful side effects, it's that it may not be much more effective than a placebo. They may have just been measuring noise. After all, this is a disease that /most/ people expect to recover from naturally with no intervention.

There's also a Chinese study out there about it (about 100 samples - also small), but, how do I put this delicately: the Chinese data on COVID-19 is easy to be skeptical of. It's clear they are trying to position themselves as the world's savior after their own poor response spread this thing like wildfire and their lack of transparency cost many of the lives they're trying to save.

In the study, the drug shows to drastically reduce viral loads, especially when used in conjunction with azithromycin (probably butchering the spelling; but it's the ye olde z-pak antibiotic that many of us have had for other stuff; not a microbiologist so I'm not sure why an antibiotic would help but I know you do sometimes toss them at a flu to help control secondary infections so maybe this is along those lines). But it's also a really small and flawed sample on a virus that most people recover from naturally so it's also possible there's noise in the data.

I badly want it to be the cure because it checks a TON of boxes (old, cheap drug that's easy to produce). Try it out, by all means - let's test on a much larger scale and see if it does! Worst case scenario is that we've wasted a bunch of a cheap drug with limited side effects on a population that was probably doomed anyway. But when paired with the upside of being a potential cure - it's a risk worth taking. There are a number of other drugs they're doing this with now, too, like the HIV cocktail, the Japanese flu drug, and the Ebola drug.

A vaccine is a nice idea but the best case scenarios for it are 18 month life disruption (at which point society will have substantially altered) and the chance that there are long term side effects. A cure can be done much, much sooner - it's just a lot harder to do.

SI

Just got home from Gatlinburg, TN. If ever there was a thought that Trump wasnt winning the 2020 election, that thought is erased.

I heard 3 theories from shop owners. I have no idea who these people were. I was just a dude in there shop. The theories were pretty much the same. The dems started the panic through the media to ruin the economy which in turn kills Trumps reelection. And one blamed the Chinese, saying they started it because of the trade war.

So, here we are. A country divided. I fall in the middle. My MIL and sister are former nurses who are saying this is legit and you should stay away from people, to these people in Gatlinburg.

All I know is that this country is so far divided, it will never come back.

So are we going to have the political discussions associated with CV in this thread or not?

Sen. Loeffler from GA also dumped a bunch of stock after a coronavirus briefing. Maybe this was the reason the briefings were confidential.

There is no way in hell that the numbers in China are accurate. No way. No way they shut it down that quickly. No way it didn't spread far across the US, but stayed isolated in China. No way. No math models in the world, best case, would ever have them to 0 new cases in a day 35 days after 14000 cases in a day. No way.

I wonder if certain regions it just doesn't take off in possibly? Are other parts of Italy hit as hard as Lombardy? I'm skeptical of China as well but do hope they are getting better regardless of true case count.