COVID-19/Coronavirus thread

[WilliamTell]

Due to Covid-19, I wasn't able to be inside the vet's office when my cat was put down this week. It was painful enough having to say goodbye to her, but not being able to be with her when she passed is something I really regret. I completely understand the reasoning, it just sucks. 

[Balta1701]

8 minutes ago, WilliamTell said:

Due to Covid-19, I wasn't able to be inside the vet's office when my cat was put down this week. It was painful enough having to say goodbye to her, but not being able to be with her when she passed is something I really regret. I completely understand the reasoning, it just sucks. 

?

[Balta1701]

So who was it who kept insisting that the virus actually infected a lot of people back in December and January and it would turn out that there was a much wider immunity once you could test for antibodies? There's now a statistically large enough data set to look at, from a couple of rich people in Telluride Colorado trying to test the whole town using that test. Only about 1% of those who have been tested in that community have showed antibodies present using that test, according to this article. 

https://www.durangotelegraph.com/news/top-stories/less-than-1-of-telluride-tests-positive/

While Telluride CO is obviously biased towards rich, white people, there would also be a lot of travel in and out of that community by those people over the winter, so if it had pushed through major urban areas the numbers would be expected to be high there.

[NWINFan]

I agree with at least some of what Jack Parkman says, or at least I think I do. It is very hard to be a real independent journalist within the corporate structure today. Many reporters do not get to report what they may want to report.

I am a journalist and have done a great deal of historical writing on the JFK assassination. I will tell you that no one who has a prestigious journalism job will even speculate that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. They won't have a career left if they do. I read an extensive biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover played a large role in the investigation of the John Kennedy murder. Yet, this book only devoted one page to the Hoover investigation, and it said next to nothing. I found out from a friend of the author that the author would never have gotten his book published if he tried to delve into the Hoover investigation of the assassination.

Then the media went ga-ga over Bernie Sanders and his socialism. Most don't even know what socialism is. I swore they treated Sanders as if he were Stalin and the rest of the Democratic field ran for the hills.  I'd like to know one thing: If capitalism is so great, why do so many people not have good health care?

Chris Matthews was a big part of the political and corporate structure. Won't miss him.

 

 

[Quin]

59 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

I believe that there are independent journalists that have a moral compass but they get fired or neutered fairly quickly. When was the last time a politician or CEO was actually held accountable by the media? 

Where's the investigative journalism that took down Nixon, gathering enough evidence that not even his own party could defend him? Where is that when it's needed now more than ever? It doesn't exist. 

Excuse Me for distrusting the media when a major newspaper like the Washington Post is owned by Gollum incarnate himself, Jeff Bezos. 

Until we start putting people and the truth over profit, nothing will change. 

Btw you might have misunderstood me, but I think a lot of it is intentionally misleading. It takes a brain to pick out the facts from the bullshit. 

I haven't posted in this thread for a while, Maybe I'll just continue to stay out. 

 

It exists everywhere.

Miami Herald reporting brought down Epstein and Sec. of Labor Alex Acosta.

Reporting brought down EPA Dir. Scott Pruitt, HHS Sec. Tom Price, Act. Navy Sec. Modly (just the other day), Mike Flynn (before the Mueller probe reached him), Rob Porter, White House speechwriter David Sorensen.

Kelly Loeffler is now facing a tough re-election because of reporting on her stock trading coinciding with her Senate hearings on COVID-19. 

Reporting from the Waington Post is why Roy Moore isn't in the US Senate.

Journalists can put out the facts, but money needs to come from somewhere. I subscribe to a few papers and make sure to disable adblock for all news outlets. Outlets such as the Texas Tribune are popping up that are non-profit. The Salt Lake Trib is switching to that.

But unfortunately, opinion often pays for fact reporting, because people don't subscribe or, thanks to Trump, will now just call all fact based journalism fake. The Chicago Tribune had a painfully accurate article on this back in 2014 that broke it down as "we want to churn out more of this, but this is what you want and we know because we have analytics."

My own example is when I was an intern, I worked on two tech pieces. One was about a solar cell invented by an MIT researcher that stored energy using heat, which included an interview. 500k views. The other was about a Bluetooth, app controlled sex toy. 15m views.

@Jack Parkman, you decided to lump everyone in the journalism industry top to bottom in this as if there's an Illuminati meeting held weekly. A vast majority of journalists hold truth paramount over profit.

I could have gotten a job with a PAC, and from what my friends in the industry have told me, it probably would have been a solid $50k raise. That PAC is still in operation, because it was independent of the candidate's campaign. I'm lucky I have a good salary, but a lot of journalists that you lumped in make shit wages.

[Dick Allen]

25 minutes ago, NWINFan said:

I agree with at least some of what Jack Parkman says, or at least I think I do. It is very hard to be a real independent journalist within the corporate structure today. Many reporters do not get to report what they may want to report.

I am a journalist and have done a great deal of historical writing on the JFK assassination. I will tell you that no one who has a prestigious journalism job will even speculate that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. They won't have a career left if they do. I read an extensive biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover played a large role in the investigation of the John Kennedy murder. Yet, this book only devoted one page to the Hoover investigation, and it said next to nothing. I found out from a friend of the author that the author would never have gotten his book published if he tried to delve into the Hoover investigation of the assassination.

Then the media went ga-ga over Bernie Sanders and his socialism. Most don't even know what socialism is. I swore they treated Sanders as if he were Stalin and the rest of the Democratic field ran for the hills.  I'd like to know one thing: If capitalism is so great, why do so many people not have good health care?

Chris Matthews was a big part of the political and corporate structure. Won't miss him.

 

 

Where you able to investigate Ted Cruz’s father?

[Jack Parkman]

14 minutes ago, Quin said:

It exists everywhere.

Miami Herald reporting brought down Epstein and Sec. of Labor Alex Acosta.

Reporting brought down EPA Dir. Scott Pruitt, HHS Sec. Tom Price, Act. Navy Sec. Modly (just the other day), Mike Flynn (before the Mueller probe reached him), Rob Porter, White House speechwriter David Sorensen.

Kelly Loeffler is now facing a tough re-election because of reporting on her stock trading coinciding with her Senate hearings on COVID-19. 

Reporting from the Waington Post is why Roy Moore isn't in the US Senate.

Journalists can put out the facts, but money needs to come from somewhere. I subscribe to a few papers and make sure to disable adblock for all news outlets. Outlets such as the Texas Tribune are popping up that are non-profit. The Salt Lake Trib is switching to that.

But unfortunately, opinion often pays for fact reporting, because people don't subscribe or, thanks to Trump, will now just call all fact based journalism fake. The Chicago Tribune had a painfully accurate article on this back in 2014 that broke it down as "we want to churn out more of this, but this is what you want and we know because we have analytics."

My own example is when I was an intern, I worked on two tech pieces. One was about a solar cell invented by an MIT researcher that stored energy using heat, which included an interview. 500k views. The other was about a Bluetooth, app controlled sex toy. 15m views.

@Jack Parkman, you decided to lump everyone in the journalism industry top to bottom in this as if there's an Illuminati meeting held weekly. A vast majority of journalists hold truth paramount over profit.

I could have gotten a job with a PAC, and from what my friends in the industry have told me, it probably would have been a solid $50k raise. That PAC is still in operation, because it was independent of the candidate's campaign. I'm lucky I have a good salary, but a lot of journalists that you lumped in make shit wages.

I don't think that. I think there are a lot of good people that aren't allowed to do their job properly and have to cave to those people in order to keep their paychecks. My comments were more geared toward management than the individual journalists themselves. It's a power play by upper management. Sorry for not being more clear on that. 

I think at the higher levels, there is a lot of manipulation going on. At the lower levels, I think there are lots of arguments about what gets published and what doesn't because sales and dollars. Sorry for the confusion. 

I believe that the press is the 4th branch of government, and being a slave to profits like every other company is dangerous. 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Jack Parkman

[Quin]

3 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

I don't think that. I think there are a lot of good people that aren't allowed to do their job properly and have to cave to those people in order to keep their paychecks. My comments were more geared toward management than the individual journalists themselves. It's a power play by upper management. Sorry for not being more clear on that. 

I think at the higher levels, there is a lot of manipulation going on. At the lower levels, I think there are lots of arguments about what gets published and what doesn't because sales and dollars. Sorry for the confusion. 

Then that's my bad on that line and I'm sorry.

I stand by reporting holding truth to power.

[Jack Parkman]

3 minutes ago, Quin said:

Then that's my bad on that line and I'm sorry.

I stand by reporting holding truth to power.

Occasionally, the power structure has to let one through to keep the widespread corruption under wraps. 

When allowed to do so, reporting absolutely holds truth to power. The huge issue is that media companies are being bought up and controlled by those same power brokers, so they can control the narrative. 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Jack Parkman

[Quin]

Following up, here's a good bit about less local news being terrible for democracy

https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-less-democracy/

And then this

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-journalists-newspapers.html

Quote

She has co-founded the American Journalism Project, which aims to create a huge network of nonprofit outlets, some organized around subjects like education or criminal justice, others focused on covering a town, a city or a state. She wants to replace the hundreds of local newspapers now owned by hedge funds that are slowly being bled dry.

---

And on the local level, she and John Thornton, the other founder of the American Journalism Project, are working on a new project: backing a nonprofit outlet in West Virginia. It will be led by Greg Moore, a former Charleston Gazette-Mail executive editor, and Ken Ward, a reporter at the paper who won a MacArthur “Genius” grant for his coverage of damage done by the coal and gas industries to people’s lives. The not-yet-named new outlet (candidates include “Mountain State Muckraker”) will begin with a staff of about 10, seven of them journalists, a news team on the same scale as the diminished local paper.

Thornton is behind the Texas Tribune. If every state were to get one of these to start (obviously places like California would need more), it goes a long way. There are even things like The Nevada Independent which is run by Jon Ralston, who is very pundit-y, but he's also very no bullshit and discloses every donation over $1 on their website and backs up his (strong) opinions with facts.

Ok, I've derailed this thread from coronavirus enough.

[StrangeSox]

 

[Quin]

2 minutes ago, StrangeSox said:

 

This is roughly the plot of Osmosis Jones.

[mqr]

38 minutes ago, StrangeSox said:

 

And what antibiotics are used for

[bmags]

Oh...boy

[Chisoxfn]

2 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

So who was it who kept insisting that the virus actually infected a lot of people back in December and January and it would turn out that there was a much wider immunity once you could test for antibodies? There's now a statistically large enough data set to look at, from a couple of rich people in Telluride Colorado trying to test the whole town using that test. Only about 1% of those who have been tested in that community have showed antibodies present using that test, according to this article. 

https://www.durangotelegraph.com/news/top-stories/less-than-1-of-telluride-tests-positive/

While Telluride CO is obviously biased towards rich, white people, there would also be a lot of travel in and out of that community by those people over the winter, so if it had pushed through major urban areas the numbers would be expected to be high there.

I have that view and there have been a lot of rumblings in California that some of the heavy flu cases may in fact have been early COVID cases in California.  Stanford has some researchers digging into it.  

[caulfield12]

2 hours ago, StrangeSox said:

 

Was that a tweet or direct quote?  Trying to figure out if the TOO/TO grammatical error was intentional assumption or interpretation...of how Trump makes so many mistakes, because that makes the quote even rougher in conjunction with the 5th grade science take.

Things are really going to get testy well before we even get to May 1st...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said the state will require people who participate in mass gatherings this weekend to quarantine for 14 days.

In his Friday press briefing, Beshear said the state will record the license plates of any people at a mass gathering, including in-person church services this weekend, and give the information to local health departments, who will order people to quarantine for 14 days.

https://www.whas11.com/article/news/local/kentucky-mass-gathering-quarantine-in-person-church-service/417-378a3d5e-849b-4b0a-8fb7-aee72ceeb60a

Edited April 10, 2020 by caulfield12

[The Beast]

4 hours ago, WilliamTell said:

Due to Covid-19, I wasn't able to be inside the vet's office when my cat was put down this week. It was painful enough having to say goodbye to her, but not being able to be with her when she passed is something I really regret. I completely understand the reasoning, it just sucks. 

?

[NorthSideSox72]

Further on the news diet topic, and related to COVID, another thing I like to do every so often is sift through some local papers' sites around the country. I just end up picking places I've lived or where I might have family or friends, so I end up reading the paper of record for cities like Des Moines, Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Atlanta and Memphis. It gives a nice perspective on things, and a more nuanced national view than you get from just the Eastern Megalopolis papers. Pick your own cities' papers, but especially with COVID, it is fascinating to see how different areas are different/same as Chicago.

 

[The Beast]

3 hours ago, Quin said:

It exists everywhere.

Miami Herald reporting brought down Epstein and Sec. of Labor Alex Acosta.

Reporting brought down EPA Dir. Scott Pruitt, HHS Sec. Tom Price, Act. Navy Sec. Modly (just the other day), Mike Flynn (before the Mueller probe reached him), Rob Porter, White House speechwriter David Sorensen.

Kelly Loeffler is now facing a tough re-election because of reporting on her stock trading coinciding with her Senate hearings on COVID-19. 

Reporting from the Waington Post is why Roy Moore isn't in the US Senate.

Journalists can put out the facts, but money needs to come from somewhere. I subscribe to a few papers and make sure to disable adblock for all news outlets. Outlets such as the Texas Tribune are popping up that are non-profit. The Salt Lake Trib is switching to that.

But unfortunately, opinion often pays for fact reporting, because people don't subscribe or, thanks to Trump, will now just call all fact based journalism fake. The Chicago Tribune had a painfully accurate article on this back in 2014 that broke it down as "we want to churn out more of this, but this is what you want and we know because we have analytics."

My own example is when I was an intern, I worked on two tech pieces. One was about a solar cell invented by an MIT researcher that stored energy using heat, which included an interview. 500k views. The other was about a Bluetooth, app controlled sex toy. 15m views.

@Jack Parkman, you decided to lump everyone in the journalism industry top to bottom in this as if there's an Illuminati meeting held weekly. A vast majority of journalists hold truth paramount over profit.

I could have gotten a job with a PAC, and from what my friends in the industry have told me, it probably would have been a solid $50k raise. That PAC is still in operation, because it was independent of the candidate's campaign. I'm lucky I have a good salary, but a lot of journalists that you lumped in make shit wages.

 

3 hours ago, NWINFan said:

I agree with at least some of what Jack Parkman says, or at least I think I do. It is very hard to be a real independent journalist within the corporate structure today. Many reporters do not get to report what they may want to report.

I am a journalist and have done a great deal of historical writing on the JFK assassination. I will tell you that no one who has a prestigious journalism job will even speculate that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. They won't have a career left if they do. I read an extensive biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover played a large role in the investigation of the John Kennedy murder. Yet, this book only devoted one page to the Hoover investigation, and it said next to nothing. I found out from a friend of the author that the author would never have gotten his book published if he tried to delve into the Hoover investigation of the assassination.

Then the media went ga-ga over Bernie Sanders and his socialism. Most don't even know what socialism is. I swore they treated Sanders as if he were Stalin and the rest of the Democratic field ran for the hills.  I'd like to know one thing: If capitalism is so great, why do so many people not have good health care?

Chris Matthews was a big part of the political and corporate structure. Won't miss him.

 

 

If you are both journalists, I would love to read some of each of your work. Journalism was a profession I considered but got scared off of because my school wasn’t prestigious enough and I was scared of job outlook and salary. That being said, I have thought of writing again and I do love volunteering for political campaigns.

Does anyone else work in media or for political organizations?

[caulfield12]

Chris Murray from UWash (the national model Trump admin has been relying on) just stated that if the social distancing doesn’t go at least through the end of May/early June...the peak numbers we are experiencing these four days will return again with a vengeance in July.

CA, FL, TX, PA still to come...Detroit is nearing, along with New Orleans and Chicago, but then you have the DC area, Baltimore, Houston, Philly, etc.

His model has blipped back up about 1,000 in the last 24-36 hours to 61500.

Of course, that model is also based on the expectation of continued stay at home for the next two months.

 

Going from 200-240,000 to 100k to 60k in the span of a week is now turning into a trap.

Because it means that putting everyone back to work again May 1st makes it patently obvious we’ve made the decision to kill another 40,000-80,000 Americans in order for Trump to get his way with the economy...and he’s not going to be able to force every individual state or governor to relax their rules without creating one Constitutional showdown after another.

I can just see the Fox headlines now.  “Those scaredy-cat Dem governors and mayors don’t love their country.  They’d all rather we don’t go back to work because they want to destroy the economy and prevent President Trump from being re-elected.   The cure is worse than the illness itself blah blah blah.”

US now only 183 deaths behind Italy...at least we’re not passing them on “Resurrection Sunday,” both those will be the headlines for every Easter newspaper carrying over from Saturday’s news. 

Edited April 11, 2020 by caulfield12

[caulfield12]

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-10/coronavirus-stay-at-home-order-social-distancing-summer#nt=liF1promoSmall-7030col2-7030col1-main
 

LA County extends social distancing/stay at home until May 15th.

 

Los Angeles County health officials warned Friday that the region needs to significantly increase social distancing to slow the spread of coronavirus and that stay-at-home restrictions could remain into the summer.

Even with the dramatic social distancing the county is now seeing, officials forecast that up to 30% of residents could be infected by mid-summer without more behavioral changes, such as reducing shopping trips. 

As a result, Los Angeles County is extending the stay-at-home order for California’s most populous county through at least May 15.

Officials could not provide a definitive answer as to when the stay-at-home order will ease.

[Balta1701]

3 hours ago, Chisoxfn said:

I have that view and there have been a lot of rumblings in California that some of the heavy flu cases may in fact have been early COVID cases in California.  Stanford has some researchers digging into it.  

I would buy this but think about the numbers. If there were a few thousand infections over a month, the deaths would be in the dozens, and since California was smart and closed down early enough the late March spike was avoidable.

Out of a state of what, 40 million, a few thousand infections is not any sort of widespread immunity. That was the idea challenged by this data - that somehow half the world would already be immune.

A few thousand extra cases and a few dozen extra deaths changes the overall curves slightly but doesn’t change the evaluation of what worked and what didn’t. More worrisome is that it might mean there are more hard to identify clusters out there, and if we don’t give social distancing several months, then these hidden clusters will explode.

[Chisoxfn]

27 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

I would buy this but think about the numbers. If there were a few thousand infections over a month, the deaths would be in the dozens, and since California was smart and closed down early enough the late March spike was avoidable.

Out of a state of what, 40 million, a few thousand infections is not any sort of widespread immunity. That was the idea challenged by this data - that somehow half the world would already be immune.

A few thousand extra cases and a few dozen extra deaths changes the overall curves slightly but doesn’t change the evaluation of what worked and what didn’t. More worrisome is that it might mean there are more hard to identify clusters out there, and if we don’t give social distancing several months, then these hidden clusters will explode.

Oh I agree with you entirely. There is nowhere that already has herd immunity (aren’t we talking about a pretty high percentage needed for full herd immunity 80-90%...albeit even 50% would help). I have seen some emerging data indicating current data seems to indicate pretty heavy underreporting with conservative estimates falling within 10-50 times.  My understanding is the imperial college (or whatever the uk school is) is in the midst to a large refinement of their study.  

[caulfield12]

16 minutes ago, Chisoxfn said:

Oh I agree with you entirely. There is nowhere that already has herd immunity (aren’t we talking about a pretty high percentage needed for full herd immunity 80-90%...albeit even 50% would help). I have seen some emerging data indicating current data seems to indicate pretty heavy underreporting with conservative estimates falling within 10-50 times.  My understanding is the imperial college (or whatever the uk school is) is in the midst to a large refinement of their study.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-pandemic-neil-ferguson-did-not-walk-back-covid-19-predictions/

[Balta1701]

18 minutes ago, Chisoxfn said:

Oh I agree with you entirely. There is nowhere that already has herd immunity (aren’t we talking about a pretty high percentage needed for full herd immunity 80-90%...albeit even 50% would help). I have seen some emerging data indicating current data seems to indicate pretty heavy underreporting with conservative estimates falling within 10-50 times.  My understanding is the imperial college (or whatever the uk school is) is in the midst to a large refinement of their study.  

That’s because we are doing  social distancing. If we weren’t this would already be a nightmare everywhere. And if we pull the plug any time soon, we will get to see the Imperial study. I’m just stealing these words.