Are pence and gwbush the same lizard person just wearing a different disguise. Eerily similar mannerisms.

This guy makes a lot of convincing points that we are going too far with ineffective/long-term costly measures, etc. I was sounding the alarm early and with the need for early preventative measures (partially thanks to this thread), but I beginning to agree that we are going a bit far with political CYA measures that don't fully take the data and long-term ramifications into account.

Long article, but any thoughts (TS)?
https://medium.com/six-four-six-nine...9-1b767def5894

But the map:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Why is the borders to Mexico and Canada closed? Are the majority of Mexicans and Canadians already immune to it?

I stopped reading at "When 13% of Americans believe they are currently infected with COVID-19", which, when I checked the source, is 13% are afraid that they might have coronavirus right now.

Closing the Canadian border is more about Canadians wanting to keep americans out...

"I just got off the phone with doctors in Bergen County, New Jersey who told me their hospitals are saying doctors & nurses will be *disciplined* for wearing protective gear, including masks. This is dangerous and may be illegal. And their stories are alarming"

"Folks have been asking for what the “explanation” is for this decision. We’ve been told the hospital administrators are concerned patients & visitors would be unduly alarmed & fearful if they saw health care workers wearing protective clothing & masks."

https://twitter.com/wendellpotter/st...68154208518145

I was just about to post this. Brit Hume linked to it on Twitter, and naturally the comment section is teeming with people blaming the media for all this hysteria and calling Michele Obama a wookie.

I don't think it's really worth people's time in here to read the article (I read a little over half of it—it is clear the author is in over his head but thinks of himself as very smart). But I was going to post it to give people a flavor of the misinformation that people who are biased toward thinking this is just the flu can produce, and how many are still brushing off the severity of the virus. Inshallah, that article convinces some hedge fund managers and other moneyed participants to give us a big green day on Monday.

lol this has to be fake news right? without protective gear hospitals will run out of nurses & doctors, lets see panic levels if that happens .

"As of mid-March, the US has a significantly lower case severity rate than other countries. Our current severe caseload is similar to South Korea. This data has been spotty in the past; however, lower severity is reflected in the US COVID-19 fatality rates (addressed later)".

This guy has no idea what the hell he is talking about.

https://medium.com/six-four-six-nine...9-1b767def5894

It's really silly, and a lot of arguments rely on old data and simply wrong claims about data. I detailed a few pages back how this could be beaten without economic destruction: a mass brainwashing/training program and rule enforcing project (rules being for behavior that brings virus spread below 1) that pulls together everyone's efforts and goes through all levels of government, the media, corporations and social groups to the level of all Americans internalizing rule-enforcing social shaming in their own groups.

Imagine 20% of the population being crazy SJW woke level about following virus transmission avoidance rules, such as mask wearing, social distancing, staying home when sick, hand sanitizing at all points of contacts. SJW type people shaming people in the streets, their family, shops, etc for not doing the right thing, calling police and security guards to sanction them. You could change behavior sufficiently in 2-3 weeks to take transmission below 1 and kill this dead (you'd need lots of tests and masks). That's what's needed and it's possible to keep society open if you do that. It's also a long term solution. You need to make this a positive, saturation coverage "Team America" effort at mass behavioral change where everyone owns their part and feels licensed to shame and coerce those that don't participate.

Short of that there's no choice except lockdown and economic destruction unless you're ok with needlessly killing 4-7% of your population, which no one will ever be ok with (except the British).

How long does a person who tests positive need to stay quarantined before they can safely go back into society and no longer spread the virus?

How spot on is this?
http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/20...ing-angry.html

I am bored and this is fun to pick apart so I'll bite:

Total cases are the wrong metric: What's his point? That we should pay 0 attention to total cases? That's just wrong. We should interpret total cases correctly? Sure. I guess I should continue because I have no ****ing clue what his point is here and I'm already annoyed.

Time lapsing new cases gives us perspective: What's his point? Is he actually trying to make it a + that USA figures are in line with Europe? There are multiple countries in Europe where healthcare is falling apart right now...

As a bonus illustration: In Italy, on a normal average day 1.750 die. Corona alone killed almost half of that today. 2 weeks into a severe lockdown. As a comparison if corona gets to that level in the USA, it would be around 3.500 deaths a day.

On a per-capita basis, we shouldn’t be panicking: This is just hiding behind the massize size of USA. Outbreak wont happen at the same pace everywhere of course.

In case you are not convinced: per million capita, Italy today is at 886. You want to know the number of New York? 545.

COVID-19 is spreading, but probably not accelerating: Yesterday we had 30k new cases. A week before that 11.000. If you think that is not worrying or accelerating, I have no hope for you.

Watch the Bell Curve: All countries that have defeated corona so far, have taken extreme measures. Not sure what his point is. You can defeat it with extreme measures? Correct. But isn't his point that extreme measures aren't necessary?

A low probability of catching COVID-19: If no measures are taken and every time you come across someone who has COVID-19 you have a 1-5% chance of catching it, you will catch it 100% of course, you only need to run into a very limited number of people who have it to get near to 100%. That's why the extreme measures are necessary.

Common transmission surfaces: This basicly says that we don't know how much virus is needed to infect someone. Not sure how that is an argument to his point.

COVID-19 will likely “burn off” in the summer: This is speculation and has not been proven. See all real scientists their comments on this. Would be fantastic though.

Children and Teens aren’t at risk: And? Adults don't matter anymore? Also, children & teens can still kill their grandparents quite easily if no measures are taken. This is most likely also what's happening in Italy, because contact betweel children, parents & grand parents is extremely common/multiple times a week in Italy.

A strong, but unknown viral effect: He basicly points out here that when extreme measures were taken in China, the infection rate declined. Again, I'm not sure what's his point.


... I'm done.
This article is bull **** and this type of missinformation should be illegal.
If you believe this ****, you are a lost cause.

I think this should be obvious to anyone who's ever been part of any significant business decision making and has been paying attention, but it seems like this needs to be said:

Trump has been completely awful in his response and it follows from how he runs any organization. Throughout his career, his primary competency has been PR and messaging and has not shown much concern for operations. This has meant that any organization he runs tends to bleed operationally competent people and even otherwise competent people often look incompetent because they are incentivized to care about what he cares about. Incentives matter - most people in any organization are going to fall in line. And if they don't, Trump tends to purge people who don't fall in line over time. Again, those at the top are responsible for creating a culture where people can speak up - no amount of internal expertise matters if you don't incentivize people to use expertise to solve real problems.

One interesting aspect about Trump's management style - it's common among crime bosses and this obviously comes from him running a lot of shady businesses in legally grey areas - is that he not-so-subtly insinuates which outcomes he prefers to his inner circle of loyalists and he punishes/rewards people based on whether they deliver the outcome. This ensures that accountability is a one-way street - his underlings are accountable to deliver the outcome he wants, but he has plausible deniability both in terms of what is delivered and how. In this case, Trump made it relatively clear that the outcomes he prefers are high stock market prices and low confirmed cases - while I don't think anyone would be so corrupt as to act deliberately to deliver these outcomes at the expense of public health but it's certainly possible that efforts that went against this mandate were indirectly impeded by his clear preferences.

Also, even a relatively incompetent president would have appointed someone with both some expertise and decent political/management skills a czar and granted them sufficient power to coordinate the response across different branches of the federal bureaucracy, not to mention the states and the private sector. The federal government is a large beast that moves very slowly in normal times because they have so many mandates and conflicting interests. The point of a czar is to create an alternative control structure that can respond specifically to the issue at hand without having to care about all these other mandates.

I'm sure someone brought this up and it's fairly obvious why Trump didn't go with it. The sense of urgency it creates would have interfered with his PR campaign - keep in mind, at this time, he was making fun of the Democrats and the MSM for making a big deal out of it to crash the market and ruin his reelection chances. Also it's likely that he couldn't think of anyone who's both loyal enough to put his personal interests front and center and while having enough expertise to ensure the coordination. Trump generally appears uncomfortable working directly with people that aren't clearly loyal to him personally, which explains the current suboptimal arrangement where Pence is effectively the czar, though the real responsibilities are delegated.

While the response even now isn't great in terms of coordinating with the state governments and the private sectors, the two biggest misses so far are the testing and the messaging. The whole testing issue was simply a matter of coordination - it's a political failure to coordinate this and given that Trump isn't entirely surrounded by morons, there must have been suggestions to appoint a czar to coordinate the response and any competent czar would have unblocked testing by working across the relevant agencies. In terms of the messaging, Trump popularized the meme that went around for a while that Coronavirus is a Democratic hoax to take down Trump and this was so ingrained within the right wing that it remains popular even after Trump walked it back and the right wing media followed. Trump's instinct to instantly politicize the crisis has been a huge impediment to ensuring that the public takes it seriously. In the US, there's a strong correlation between how seriously individuals are taking the crisis and their party affiliation[1] - normally you'd expect the correlation to be the opposite given the demographics - and much of this goes back to Trump's early response:

[1] http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-cont...2003151338.pdf

candybar,
You have this completely backwards, which is amusing. I'm so sick of indoctrinated morons with emotive Trump-hate having no clue what they're talking about holding forth.
Here's m_reed:
And here's you:
What you suggest he should have done was EXACTLY what he did. God this is ridiculous

On January 29th, way before anyone else, Trump created the Coronavirus Task Force, with broad powers to coordinate the response across departments. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 - highly experienced, not partisan, not a Trump appointee, was given broad powers.

Fauci has been in his job for decades, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He led Ebola effort under Obama and AIDS efforts. He's considered the nation's chief expert on infectious diseases, is widely respected in the medical community. When Trump convened the task force late January, way before anyone else, he gave wide powers to Fauci to do what was needed to protect the US. This was the perfect response, and he could not have done anything better. Should he have appointed someone other than the most trusted infectious disease expert in the US and the long time head of the National Institute of Infectious diseases, who has broad epidemic response experience? Who? Should he have micromanaged the US's most respected infectious disease expert? Trump doesn't know a damn thing about virology and trusted these guys. He did everything right here.

The experts, are they often do, as they did in every country and the WHO, screwed it up. They screwed up the tests (is Trump supposed to supervise scientists now, or is that Fauci's job?), they screwed up the messaging, they screwed up their advice to the president, they screwed up the urgency and at seeing what the future held without drastic action. While it was spreading silently in the US to tens of thousands, here's Fauci for weeks:

"The risk to the American public is very low"
"There is low community spread in the United States. The risk to the public is low."
"You don't need to do anything special. Follow normal flu season guidelines. I want to reiterate that the risk to the community is low"

Here's Nancy Messonnier, Director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who's been around since 2014:

"Right now, we have a handful of cases in the U.S., and right now, it is not spreading in the community and we believe the risk to the general American public is low"

None of these people even believed there was spread in the US or that urgent action was necessary. They were advising the public, and the president, that the risk was "very low" and that they didn't need to do anything. They outright advised against wearing masks (because there was a shortage) and failed to rapidly requisition them as far as I can tell.

This is a failure of experts - appointed under Obama and before - to have even the level of reasoning that some random idiot traders on the Internet had. This is their fault. Blaming Trump, who aced the response to this, is comical. Saying he should have done something that he actually did is also comical. The only thing Trump did badly was message badly for a couple of weeks. He did that on advice from experts that this was likely less serious than the flu - something they were also communicating to the public.

Left wing thinking is a fatal disease. Fact matters, guys. I know the left wing news organizations are comically fact free ideologically driven fake news at this point, that spew out Trump hate and blame 24/7 (remember 2 years of daily hysteria about a pure hoax about Russian colllusion?) but as individuals you really should notice this and do a better job of being non-******ed citizens.

My wife's hospital no one is allowed to use protective gear, unless you are seeing a "high-risk" patient, where the threshold for this is so absurdly high the vast majority of positive patients won't meet this threshold.

They hospital did finally lock up all the PPE and other supplies though, as private doctors were coming in and raiding the supply rooms to stock up for their own practices. Although the supplies there is still won't last very long if/when the **** hits the fan.

Spread the word they need people to sew fabric masks, which will be sterilized and reused. This should be started everywhere.

https://www.courierpress.com/story/n...Z_XheND06nYGds

Candybar and Toothsayer,

You are both wrong about many things and correct about others.

One major thing you are wrong about is multi-paragraph Trump arguments dominating the thread.

Let's try to keep things to coronavirus's impact on business, finance, and investing, and avoid massive walls of text about stuff you will never agree with the other about.

That said, I've been following this since the very beginning as had many others who also read ZH and other stuff.

My thoughts once it came to the US was essentially cities eventually going on full lock down for a short period of time, and normalcy of life around June-July. Im actually starting to feel pretty optimistic about everything.

The US government is willing to print the way out of this, which seems excellent. They need to get money to people who cant pay their bills at the low end of income, and let the large companies get liquidity to cover the coming gap. But the virus does not seem that formidable in terms of sending us into Mad Max. Recovery wont be instant but I think its max 2-3 years to last highs. Am i being way too optimistic?

Larry,
Like I said we need a low content thread. People are going to talk about it (left wingers bring it up) so just move it there. Or move it into the politics forum thread if you can do that and dump any trash that comes up there, since that's two plus two's trash dump. I'm hugely in favor of quickly moving posts that are off topic.

There's not much to say at this point on the economic impact. It's all done and dusted on a certain trajectory and was weeks ago. It will be severe and ongoing for a good period of time without a miracle like a vaccine or effective treatment. If there's sufficient fiscal stimulus to keep the current businesses alive for reopening (Trump's plan), the US will come out roaring. If there isn't or if they keep trying to fix this with monetary stimulus, the US goes through major shocks as small and large businesses collapse with no revenue.

Things will get much worse before they get better.

This is one of the reasons why Americans are doomed. We are more worried about hurting peoples feelings, vs giving them a dose of reality which alters their behavior and saves life's. I am bringing this up again because I do think it would be effective. MSM needs to go into one of these hospitals in New York, and actually show Americans what it looks like. Though this may scare them, it will alter their perspective of this virus, which would in-return alter their behavior and save life's.

Just came home, people at a lake nearby my house, hot dog vendor open, local donut shop open (maybe can't sit inside it?)

Looked like a regular day tbh

Saw starbucks closed for 30 days so I'll probably sleep through the next 3 days now as withdrawal from that stuff is brutal.

The most interesting thing to me was bonds getting out control last September, when the fed stepped with Not QE to calm the market, which has continued ever since, and gone crazy clown level since the virus.

I would really like to know what's going on there that bonds got out of control.

The US won't have a sovereign balance sheet crisis for a while. Italy is surviving on 130% of GDP and their economy is joke level compared to the strength and breadth of the US. Japan is surviving on 236% of GDP.

Obv tweet is super misleading and of course healthcare providers aren't disciplined for simply wearing PPE. But rather wearing PPE in common areas after treating patients.

I believe this is SOP...PPE will be compromised , and should not be worn outside of this area to prevent the spread to others. same reason providers have to be careful when disrobing to minimize self infection.

Where do you guys think Italy is going?

They went on lockdown March 9th.

In China it took 2 weeks to reach peak case, but 3 weeks to reach peak death.

If it goes like China, we will double death rate before it plateaus around 1600/day. That's more than 10 times the Chinese peak rate.

So maybe we expect 30-40k deaths?

As a comparison, an average flu year in Italy is 17k deaths. Without social isolation.

I think it's a solid take.

candybar, I expect better from you. How many times does this have to be addressed?—Trump was saying that the Democrats' blaming him for the impact of the virus was tantamount to a hoax. He wasn't saying that the virus itself was a hoax. He said the virus was very serious, which is why he had already banned travel from China. Reminds me of how there are still millions who insist that Trump claimed white nationalists were good people because of that bogus clip, which if you watch it for its entirety (and it's a 30-second clip that the media snipped to 10 very misleading seconds) you can see he explicitly condemns white nationalists totally.

And Seedless, you better not be a native English speaker. Otherwise you deserve a ban for not knowing that the plural of life is lives.