COVID-19 (f/k/a "the Coronavirus")

[mu_hilltopper]

Two words: Massive Testing

[reinko]

Lefties, what do you think the best path is from today?

I feel we’re just delaying things. I understand the things we probably need, but no promise as to when they’ll come.

These past couple of weeks have told me (talking not just fed, but state & local levels) that the current approach is “fu(k, we need time to figure this out. Please stay home so it doesn’t get crazy wild super fast”.

I don’t see answers/plans.. just buying time. Maybe a weather plan as well, which is scary from a longer term view.

Earth is done. #LastDays

But curious if the lefties on here have thoughts on what should be done at THIS point in time.  (Aside from “be nicer in press conferences, etc)

It sucks someone in your building got the rona, and now you are petrified.  But this has to be the 15th time you asked this question.  None of us have a crystal ball, but numerous folks have answered their best guess.

[Jay Bee]

Two words: Massive Testing

But we can’t currently do that, yes? Why not and when can we? If you can get it more than once, does it help?

[TSmith34, Inc.]

As I said in the other thread, they're only killing their own.

No, they will then go spread it at the gas station, at the grocery store, at the pharmacy, anywhere and everywhere, regardless of political affiliation.

[Hards Alumni]

So, no current plan as of today. Great

It just hasn't changed.  Get on board.

[pbiflyer]

So, no current plan as of today. Great

Not from the administration. Not even criteria for making a determination of when to start an opening. I guess hope is the current strategy.

But, for the extremely dense, to highlight what others have repeatedly pointed out, Testing and Tracing are key. Sadly, neither are being pursued on a national level.

Over under for how many posts before Jay Bee asks again???

[ZiggysFryBoy]

Two words: Massive Testing

I'd rather see a test to see if you've already had it.  And a vaccine but an antibody test first.

[🏀]

Guns 'n God, baby. Guns 'n God.

The security blankets of the weak and ignorant.

[ZiggysFryBoy]

The security blankets of the weak and ignorant.

The strong and smart prefer cocaine and hookers.

[tower912]

Social distance, even in the south.   Shut down church services.  Vote by mail.  Pursue ALL medical options.   Ramp up production in America for all of the PPE and sanitizers we need.   Think how many jobs that will save.  Test everybody multiple times.  Until there is a treatment for the extreme cases and a vaccine.
     Quit whining and figure out how you can help others.  Don't hoard.   Order carry out.   Be patient.   Listen to scientists.   Send some pizzas to hospitals.   Give blood.   Unless you are infected, there is something you can do to help someone

[pbiflyer]

The strong and smart prefer cocaine and hookers.

Exactly!!

[Frenns Liquor Depot]

I'd rather see a test to see if you've already had it.  And a vaccine but an antibody test first.

Hear hear

[forgetful]

But we can’t currently do that, yes? Why not and when can we? If you can get it more than once, does it help?

Well it is not happening anytime soon, when the government is cutting off funding for some testing sites.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/08/829955099/federal-support-for-coronavirus-testing-sites-end-as-peak-nears

[pbiflyer]

An interesting read from smart people.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/National-Coronavirus-Response-a-Road-Map-to-Recovering-2.pdf

For those that will immediately go tl;dr main suggestions on criteria to re-open. For folks with even shorter attention spans, just read the bolded part.


Hospitals in the state must be able to safely treat all patients requiring hospitalization, without resorting to crisis standards of care.

Other cities and states fear that they will approach New York City’s state of crisis. They’re trying to increase the number of available beds and ventilators — as well as doctors, nurses and other health care providers — to make sure they aren’t overwhelmed in their capacity to provide care to all those who need it.

This is the most immediate bar, and the focus of most public health officials’ attention. At the moment, there’s no reason to believe any area is over a surge of cases, and analysts’ models predict many places won’t peak for weeks to come.

A state needs to be able to at least test everyone who has symptoms.

Dr. Gottlieb and colleagues estimate that the nation would need to have the capacity to run 750,000 tests a week — this is after things have calmed down greatly. There are times we might need even more.

“The 750,000 number should be viewed as a reasonable expectation for when we haven’t been having any major pockets or regional outbreaks to manage,” said Mark McClellan, an author of the report and a professor of business, medicine and policy at Duke. “If more testing to help contain outbreaks and potential outbreaks is needed, which seems very plausible, especially early on, the number would need to be significantly larger. We’ll also have to do some surveillance of people without symptoms, especially in higher-risk settings.”

A national estimate means less in deciding whether a state can reopen than its local capabilities. A state would need to be sure it could test every single person who might be infected, and have the results in a timely manner. That would be the only way to achieve the next requirement.

The state is able to conduct monitoring of confirmed cases and contacts.

A robust system of contact tracing and isolation is the only thing that can prevent an outbreak and a resulting lockdown from recurring. Every time an individual tests positive, the public health infrastructure needs to be able to determine whom that person has been in close contact with, find those people, and have them go into isolation or quarantine until it’s established they aren’t infected, too.

This will be a big challenge for most areas. Other countries have relied on cellphone tracking technology to determine whom people have been near. We don’t have anything like that ready, nor is it even clear we’d allow it. The United States also doesn’t have enough people working in public health in many areas to carry out this task.

Building that capacity will take significant time and money, and the country hasn’t even started.

There must be a sustained reduction in cases for at least 14 days.

Because it can take up to two weeks for symptoms to emerge, any infections that have already happened can take that long to appear. If the number of cases in an area is dropping steadily for that much time, however, public health officials can be reasonably comfortable that suppression has been achieved, defined by every infected person infecting fewer than one other.

In suppression, cases will dwindle at an exponential fashion, just as they rose. It’s not possible to set a benchmark number for every state because the number of infections that will be manageable in any area depends on the local population and the public health system’s ability to handle sporadic cases.

“We wanted to suggest criteria that would allow locations to safely and thoughtfully begin to reopen, but what that looks like exactly will vary from state to state,” said Caitlin Rivers, another author of the report and an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “We therefore included some flexibility for jurisdictions to tailor these criteria to their local context.”

These four criteria are a baseline. Other experts think we will need to add serological testing, which is different from the viral detection going on now. This type of testing looks for antibodies in the blood that our bodies created to fight the infection, not the infection itself. These tests can be much cheaper and faster than the ones we’re currently using to detect the virus in sick people.

Testing for antibodies will tell us how many people in a community have already been infected, as opposed to currently infected, and may also provide information about future immunity.

Gregg Gonsalves, a professor of epidemiology and law at Yale, said: “I’d feel better if we had serological testing, and could preferentially allow those who are antibody positive and no longer infectious to return to work first. The point is, though, that we are nowhere even near accomplishing any of these criteria. Opening up before then will be met with a resurgence of the virus.”

He added, “That’s the thing that keeps me up every night.”

Until we get a vaccine or effective drug treatments, focusing on these major criteria, and directing efforts toward them, should help us determine how we are progressing locally, and how we might achieve each goal.

[Elonsmusk]

Well, Ners, you're not blaming Wojo, so I guess that's progress!

How should President Pandemic have handled things differently, you asked ...

How about not forcing states to bid against each other and the federal government for PPE and ventilators?

How about not denying aid and equipment to states whose governors he doesn't like?

How about not letting maintenance contracts on life-saving equipment lapse in 2018 and not dismantling the NSC's global health security office that same year?

How about not lying to the American public dozens (if not hundreds) of times about the severity of the problem? Those lies were backed up by endless lies from his embarrassingly cloying Fox News cohorts, insuring that millions upon millions of gullible people would totally dismiss the coming pandemic.

How about not letting his red-state buddies keep beaches and churches open to serve as COVID-19 incubators?

How about not pushing his experts aside at his press conferences and then contradicting what they said, giving Americans a false sense of security?

How about educating himself as to how pandemics spread and not pretending we'd be down to "close to zero" cases "within days"?

Having listened to his experts (which he didn't) and educating himself (which he didn't), how about stockpiling the equipment we would need to survive the pandemic without so much loss of life?

How about, instead of going to rallies and getting his easily conned followers into a lather over the Dem "hoax," he had been honest with them instead? Maybe doing so would have convinced the deniers that this thing was serious. Maybe had they been led properly by their emperor, they would have paid more attention to social-distancing rules and other strong recommendations.

Once it was here and infecting people, how about getting extremely proactive by ensuring adequate PPE supplies, convincing governors (especially those friendly to him) to shut down their states, etc.

How about putting competent people, preferably those not married to his daughter, in charge of the effort?

How about taking even a smidge of responsibility for any of this?

How about not patting himself on the back if "only" 100K die?

Etc, etc, etc ... as discussed many times earlier in this thread.

I made the joke about Wojo to start this post, Ners, but I do find it funny that you are ever willing to hold a basketball coach accountable for failings on his watch -- so willing that you'll go on and on and on until you get yourself banned multiple times. But you are not willing to hold the president of the United States accountable for failings on his watch.

Considering China lied extensively about the severity of this, and they were the earliest data point - why would our government have spent billions of dollars on PPE and Ventilators, when to this day there are a reported 82,000 cases in China, a country 4x the size of the U.S., and only 3,000 deaths.

The World Health Organization didn't claim this as a public health emergency until January 30th.  We had ZERO context around how contagious and how fast this was spreading until it hit Italy/Spain

I was surprised to learn that the U.S. is NOT the Number 1 international travel destination, but that the top 5 are France, Spain, US, China, Italy.  Take a look at COVID cases/deaths in those countries, notice one is not like the other?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings

No surprise these European countries also struggled due to large international travel.  However, I would surmise that the travel between China and the US, greatly exceeds that of China to Italy, Spain, France.

Considering Italy has 60 million people, France, 66 million, and Spain 46 million - I would say our country at 330 million is doing quite well as it relates to deaths - especially considering we had an estimated 12,700 deaths from the Swine Flu of 2009, which had a miniscule mortality rate of .0002

https://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/estimates/April_March_13.htm

The current global mortality rate of Covid 19 is 5.8%

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

Guess those leaders of Europe sure suck too.  And why would Trump take any responsibility for a pandemic that has struck 184 countries? 

Your list sounds like a list of Huff Post/MSNBC/CNN/WashPost/NYTimes talking points.  Go ahead and link the sources to your above "facts."

[🏀]

The strong and smart prefer cocaine and hookers.

Yessssssir! Ain’t no worries when you’re skiing them slopes.

[Frenns Liquor Depot]

Turns out it is Europe’s fault
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavirus-cases-europe-genomes.html

[MU82]

Your list sounds like a list of Huff Post/MSNBC/CNN/WashPost/NYTimes talking points. 

Perfect response. Dismiss ... deny ... parrot your emperor whining about the "enemy of the people" media.

Get out of your bubble and listen to what even some Republicans are saying about your hero's response to the pandemic. For example, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said last week: "President Trump is suggesting that the testing problems are over, they've been fixed. It's no longer an issue. Yeah, that's just not true. ... No state has enough testing."

"Yeah, that's just not true." If ever a line captured the essence of the Trump presidency, that's it.

But hey, that lifelong conservative and son a former conservative congressman is just another lib reciting Huff Post/MSNBC/CNN/WashPost/NYTimes talking points, right?

Look, Ners, you want to learn the truth beyond the links that multiple Scoopers already have posted (and beyond the obvious)? Do some effen googling and educate yourself. I mean, it's pretty damn easy to find evidence of your hero threatening governors that U.S. citizens will not get the supplies they need if those governors aren't "appreciative" enough.

I've learned it's not worth going back and forth with those who have willingly accepted being conned by a guy who has been a professional charlatan since way before he was discriminating against the black folks who lived in his NY slums.

[Jockey]

Considering China lied extensively about the severity of this, and they were the earliest data point - why would our government have spent billions of dollars on PPE and Ventilators, when to this day there are a reported 82,000 cases in China, a country 4x the size of the U.S., and only 3,000 deaths.

The World Health Organization didn't claim this as a public health emergency until January 30th.  We had ZERO context around how contagious and how fast this was spreading until it hit Italy/Spain

Yes, those were the Fox talking points yesterday. No need to repeat them.

[Jockey]

So, no current plan as of today. Great

Trust the governors and mayors - except in the South.

Whether you choose Ds like Newsom, Inslee, Cuomo, Pritzger, Evers, Whitmer, or Rs like Hogan, Dewine, or Baker. THEY will make the right decisions. Do not trust our "leader" and his dog & pony daily show.

Talked to a very liberal buddy of mine from Ohio this afternoon and he gushed about the job Dewine (R) is doing. Unusual words, coming from him.

But, sad to say, these are the only people who will lead us out of this when the time is right.

[GooooMarquette]

I'd rather see a test to see if you've already had it.  And a vaccine but an antibody test first.

Mayo Clinic has been offering that test since Monday. http://outbreaknewstoday.com/covid-19-antibody-test-mayo-clinic-to-release-test-monday-65897/

[MU82]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/americans-are-paying-the-price-for-trumps-failures/609532/

Not behind a paywall.

This is quite a passage from that article:

At a session with state governors on February 10, Trump predicted that the virus would quickly disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February 14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”

Those two assumptions led him to conclude that not much else needed to be done. Senator Chris Murphy left a White House briefing on February 5, and tweeted:

Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.

Trump and his supporters now say that he was distracted from responding to the crisis by his impeachment. Even if it were true, pleading that the defense of your past egregious misconduct led to your present gross failures is not much of an excuse.

But if Trump and his senior national-security aides were distracted, impeachment was not the only reason, or even the principal reason. The period when the virus gathered momentum in Hubei province was also the period during which the United States seemed on the brink of war with Iran. Through the fall of 2019, tensions escalated between the two countries. The United States blamed an Iranian-linked militia for a December 27 rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq, triggering tit-for-tat retaliation that would lead to the U.S. killing General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, open threats of war by the United States on January 6, and the destruction of a civilian airliner over Tehran on January 8.

The preoccupation with Iran may account for why Trump paid so little attention to the virus, despite the many warnings. On January 18, Trump—on a golf excursion in Palm Beach, Florida—cut off his health secretary’s telephoned warning of gathering danger to launch into a lecture about vaping, The Washington Post reported.

Two days later, the first documented U.S. case was confirmed in Washington State.

[forgetful]

Considering China lied extensively about the severity of this, and they were the earliest data point - why would our government have spent billions of dollars on PPE and Ventilators, when to this day there are a reported 82,000 cases in China, a country 4x the size of the U.S., and only 3,000 deaths.

The World Health Organization didn't claim this as a public health emergency until January 30th.  We had ZERO context around how contagious and how fast this was spreading until it hit Italy/Spain

I was surprised to learn that the U.S. is NOT the Number 1 international travel destination, but that the top 5 are France, Spain, US, China, Italy.  Take a look at COVID cases/deaths in those countries, notice one is not like the other?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings

No surprise these European countries also struggled due to large international travel.  However, I would surmise that the travel between China and the US, greatly exceeds that of China to Italy, Spain, France.

Considering Italy has 60 million people, France, 66 million, and Spain 46 million - I would say our country at 330 million is doing quite well as it relates to deaths - especially considering we had an estimated 12,700 deaths from the Swine Flu of 2009, which had a miniscule mortality rate of .0002

https://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/estimates/April_March_13.htm

The current global mortality rate of Covid 19 is 5.8%

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

Guess those leaders of Europe sure suck too.  And why would Trump take any responsibility for a pandemic that has struck 184 countries? 

Your list sounds like a list of Huff Post/MSNBC/CNN/WashPost/NYTimes talking points.  Go ahead and link the sources to your above "facts."

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001316?page=2#article_comments

This was published on Jan. 29th. It has all the pertinent data regarding how easily it spreads and the risk, and also what needs to be done (and was done by China) to contain it.

Some countries used the data in a productive way (South Korea, Taiwan). Others ignored it.

[wadesworld]

Again, absolutely terrifying that people here actually think this administration has properly handled the response to this global pandemic. At any step of the way, really.

Other countries mishandling their response to it doesn’t give our administration a free pass. As we say on Scoop, that is very dumb and dangerous thinking.

[jesmu84]

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/08/829955099/federal-support-for-coronavirus-testing-sites-end-as-peak-nears?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=atc&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20200408

Uh. Wut?