StrangeSox

Our next major crisis is going to be state and local budgets being slammed. Need the federal government to backstop or layoffs are only going to accelerate.

6.6M new unemployment claims this week, and that's probably still undercounting because state systems are so overloaded right now

Probably more of an artifact of limited testing

Just to clarify here, I was quoting the WSJ editorial board there. Nobody should give any weight whatsoever to anything that collection ever says. In fact, you'd probably do much better on taking whatever they say and betting on the exact opposite. For the TP, how much TP do people use??? In early March, the lady behind us in Jewel had two shopping carts full of TP. That would be like a 3 year supply for us. I dunno, if you go through that much TP, just switch to a bidet or something.

Oh yeah just to clarify, I stocked up to limit how often we have to go to the store, not because I'm worried about actual food shortages in the mid term.

The response is still terrible and that includes some governors who are otherwise handling it well, like JB who went ahead with in-person primaries on March 17th. I started stocking up on food and cleaning products in late February, and even that was later than I really wanted to. This was obviously going to get very, very bad. I won't say I fully appreciated how bad and how quickly, but at the same time the heads of the United States government were insisting that this was nothing, it'd be gone by April, nobody in America is really that much at risk, it's all a political hit-job by a desperate opposition, stock market hitting record highs! Yes, other countries have had poor responses as well, but the US response is shaping up to be pretty uniquely terrible. Earlier today, Vice President Pence said our situation is now most comparable to Italy. We are in for a very rough couple of weeks ahead.

Had always seen skits of Key and Peele here and there, finally just watching it all on Hulu. Exactly the kind of hilariously stupid entertainment we can use right now.

It's definitely true that other countries have handled this poorly as well, but the US seems to be taking the lead. Partially it's thanks to hacks like this who rushed out to tell us all it's no big deal, it's all a hoax, it'll blow over, just another political hitjob while they were enriching themselves off of the pending crisis.

More very bad news:

The two antimalarial drugs have shown promise in some very very early trials in other countries, one of which is deeply questionable in methodology and reliability given the researcher's history. The FDA has approved trials in this country to evaluate them at this point. We do not know if they will actually help or not. At best, it's inconclusive, and we're a long way from knowing if he got this one "right." Regardless, his promotion of this early on was based not on medical science but on media and memes. For people who are paywalled, here's the entirety of this WSJ Editorial Board letter. There is no new information, just praise for Trump for the FDA allowing wider usage of unproven treatments. The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday green-lighted two malaria medicines that have shown some promise treating the novel coronavirus, and the emergency approvals couldn’t come soon enough. Expanding their use could bring quicker relief to patients and hospitals while allowing scientists to better assess their efficacy. The malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine (HC) and chloroquine have been around for more than five decades, so their safety is well documented. New evidence suggests that they could also help fight the novel coronavirus, as op-eds by Dr. Jeff Colyer on these pages have reported. Both chloroquine and HC in vitro block the replication of RNA viruses like the novel coronavirus. Hydroxychloroquine nowadays is often prescribed for the autoimmune conditions lupus and rheumatoid arthritis that result from the body’s immune system attacking its own cells. Scientists have also documented an overreactive immune response in severely ill coronavirus patients. Notably, a study in France of 80 coronavirus patients given HC and azithromycin, an antibiotic for upper respiratory infections, documented “a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74 year-old patient still in intensive care unit.” Doctors have also reported anecdotal evidence of the malaria drugs’ efficacy. More study is needed, and a clinical trial of the two drugs involving 1,100 patients started last week in New York. But the FDA’s emergency authorization will let more doctors prescribe the drug outside of clinical trials, and hospitals will be required to maintain data on drug dispensation and patient outcomes. This will allow a larger review than possible in a controlled clinical trial. Production of the drugs will need to increase so patients with autoimmune conditions can maintain their treatments, and the emergency approval covers only drugs supplied by the National Strategic Stockpile. The Department of Health and Human Services reported Sunday that Novartis has donated 30 million doses of HC, and Bayer has contributed one million doses of chloroquine to the federal government, which can distribute the drugs to areas with the highest need. Some are attacking President Trump for giving patients “false hope” by encouraging the emergency drug approvals. They quibble that the French study lacked a control group, but are flogging a smaller Chinese study that found no statistical benefit from HC. That study’s control group received other antiviral drugs. Effective drug treatments would reduce the strain on hospitals and in the long term will be more important and less costly than government quarantines in defeating the pandemic.

I've been analogizing this in my head to the birthday paradox with statistics. In that case, if you get 23 people together, there's a 50% chance any two of them will share the same birthday (month and day, not year). About 70 people and it's 99.9%. Odds are we're all going to know someone who dies from this, or at least know someone who knows someone.

I don't think they have the authority to do it at the federal level, but a lot of states would follow the feds lead on this if they were directed. Instead we spend weeks/months calling it a hoax, just the flu, cases going to zero soon, open by Easter etc. Desantis in Florida was explicit about waiting for direction from the feds on this. Beaches are still open and crowded!

Seems bad to me:

200k is wildly optimistic

15 total cases, going to drop to zero soon!

Today we learned the more optimistic White House estimates are 100-200 thousand dead Americans in the next couple of months. Far cry from it's all under control.

dire

My boss's brother is some sort of calibration tech up there, says they've been running non-stop for weeks

Woof

Hospitals are also considering reducing staffing because census counts are down. Seems like a bad idea to me!

200 positive cases on an aircraft carrier https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Exclusive-Captain-of-aircraft-carrier-with-15167883.php

Local food pantry is going to get a few hundred at least.

We won't know the true extent of this globally or in specific countries until there are retrospective studies a few years down the road. "Oh, huh, 'Cardiac arrest' events were 50% higher in 2020 than 2019 or 2021" type analysis. We don't have reason to believe that anyone has a really good, accurate handle on how many cases or even how many COVID-caused deaths we have. smh at this:

Is the Abbott thing still a "hopeful" thing or confirmed working and just need to ramp up produciton/distribution?