Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Dr. Strangelove]

Don't know what the rationale was but I did see the Ohio Supreme Court did step in early in the morning and sided with DeWine. So not voting.

There was one Assembly member threatening to show up at the polls this morning with the police and force them to open.

[froot loops]

Here is Malcolm Gladwell's 1997 article on the 1918 pandemic for some light reading. It has a lot of interesting info that is pertinent to today. The main subject of the article is Kirsty Duncan who led an expedition to find a sample of the 1918 strain. She is now an MP in the Canadian government.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Initial research paper from China suggests the R value (how easily it spreads) drops as temperature and humidity increase: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=3551767

As I've said, it'll be interesting to follow the cases in warm places like, say, India -- where an outbreak should spread faster than gonorrhea at a bowling alley where Mrs. Wizard is plying her trade.

It's in the 80s here in South FL and has been for two weeks. While I don't have a graph that shows growth factor by county, it's probably safe to assume that it's on an exponential trajectory (>1.0) in Broward and Miami Dade...... for now. The new cases in these two counties account for about 90% of all cases in FL.

Mitigation steps just went into effect. If the course of growth factor experienced in China, SK and Japan repeat themselves in the US (and here in FL where residents seem to be taking this seriously) it takes about 2-4w to see a declining growth factor value establish itself.

In Economic news there was a dispiriting piece done by an economist there that spoke of the hit the global economy is going to take from anti-COVID-19 measures imposed by governments. He argues that the global economy is represented by a simple equation:



He goes on to argue that in no time in past history has the "core of how a capitalist economy works" been so disrupted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/upshot/coronavirus-economy-crisis-demand-shock.html?te=1&nl=morning-briefing&emc=edit_NN_p_20200317&section=topNews&campaign_id=9&instance_id=16834&segment_id=22302&user_id=eb3770cd26926d6908b2da6e075b25bf&regi_id=66290138tion=topNews

The details in the article about how hard the various sectors of the global economy will be hit is interesting and depressing at the same time. There's going to be a global recession as that term is defined by economic output The pregnant question is how long will it take for the global economy to recover from that assuming that the COVID-19 pandemic reaches it's zenith in global growth factor as experts are predicting it will in May-June. To be sure, lessons have been learned by governments and their central banks over time and bad choices - like raising interest rates after the US market collapse in 1929, aren't likely to get repeated .......

All the major nation's federal banking institutions have done all they can from a monetary policy standpoint to blunt the economic impact of COVID-19. Innovative fiscal policy is the catch phrase of the day from government bailouts, tax and debt relief, etc., of key economic sectors to direct government subsidies of large and small businesses in hard hit sectors (e.g., restaurants, travel, hotels), unemployment benefits and helicopter cash to get consumers to spend once it's practical to go back on the streets and do that.

As many have mentioned here, we're in unprecedented times. There's no comparable circumstance in history. Finding our way through this is going to be challenging. While the market is up this morning, I'm not convinced it will stay there. Has the DOW and S&P 500 reached it's bottom? Nobody knows for sure although opinions abound. While I've weathered three significant market downturns in my life, this one seems different for the many factors we are all painfully aware of. I'm not sure I'm comforted by the oft repeated reassurances that while things feel different during each economic contractions and down markets, they aren't and markets historically move up over time...... and this is the first time I've seriously wondered about the time honored advise of sitting pat.

[Dr. Strangelove]

They aren't getting much attention yet but two of the growing hotspots are ski resorts in Colorado and Louisiana, where it was possibly spreading around Mardi Gras. Pretty up to date count below

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...rus-in-the-u-s

[froot loops]

[Dr. Strangelove]

BTW, at least 14 Brazilians that traveled with Bolsonaro to the US and Mar a Lago have now tested positive. Obviously there's a lot of confusing reporting regarding whether Bolsonaro himself could be sick.

And speaking of that, it's been three days since it was made public that RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who was around the Brazilians, was being tested because she had "flu-like" symptoms and both the flu and strep throat had been ruled out. We still don't know what her test showed.

[Hannibal]

^^^^^^^ One of those guys that will say that we over reacted when the actions that we are taking work.

sigh

We didn't take any of those actions until late last week. After the virus had already been spreading unabated throughout the country for likely a month. Probably even more. China didn't do anything for well over a month, during which time the virus had a chance to spread around a country of 1 billion people and some of the most crowded cities in the world. How many Chinese in this time did not observe social distancing and instead rode on crowded buses to work? How many of them walked or biked to work through crowded streets? If this is the most contagious and dangerous virus in the history of the world, don't you think that China would have more than .008% having caught the virus by now? .008%. Wouldn't more than .0003% of their population have died from it? If you filled up the Big House with 100,000 Chinese, then there's a 30% chance that one person has died from it.

People were free to travel in and out of China long after it had a chance to spread. Since the virus arrived on our shores, how many people carrying it have ridden on subways, gone to church, gone to sports events, or coughed in a crowded room? The answer -- enough to infect about .0015% of the population and kill .000029% of us.

.000029%. That's .029 people per 100,000. Just to give you some perspective, the murder rate in Baltimore is 57 per 100,000 -- more than a thousand times greater. You are still far safer in the Coronavirus apocalypse than you are residing in Baltimore.

Meanwhile, millions of people are going to be running out of cash over the next month and struggling to buy groceries and make their next house payment, because their place of work has been shut down. Small business owners are going to struggle to make payroll. Employees of airlines and vacation resorts will get laid off. Anyone who owns a bar or a dine-in restaurant is fucked. In a few months, say goodbye to any home building or car factory jobs. Fortunately, I am not one of those people and my paycheck is secure as can be. But I'd rather not see another Great Depression just the same, and I'd rather not see my neighbors get their house repossessed this year. I thought that Liberals had a little empathy for the little guy? I guess not.

Personally, I think that it's worth doing a cost-benefit analysis of all of this. How many lives is The Depression of 2020 going to save? Part of this analysis is recognizing that the infection and death statistics do not even come remotely close to matching the rhetoric around this virus, despite the fact that the virus has had more than enough time to percolate through the population and for symptoms to show. The experts have already stated that Ohio has over 100,000 cases. 100,000! And at a death rate of 3%, that's 3,000 deaths here in the next few weeks or so. If that is really true then everything that we are doing and the time bomb will be going off any day now. If it doesn't, would you be willing to at least entertain the notion that the danger of this virus has been overstated?

[Jeff Buchanan]

....... would you be willing to at least entertain the notion that the danger of this virus has been overstated?

Fair concerns in this post...... but no, IMO, the danger of COVID-19 is not overstated. OTH, I would tend to agree with you that the benefits of containment, mitigation or what ever you want to call the steps global governments, including the US, are taking may or may not have the intended affect. Regardless, it appears these steps are going to crush the global economy. People are going to be hurt..... but less of them will die. Fair trade-off or not?

Here's the conundrum: you either introduce measures to reduce the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) attendant to COVID-19 (NB, there is a massive debate going on right now among data geeks about how this is calculated) or you simply let it run it's course and thin the earth's population of old people like me meanwhile allowing the economy to chug along.

Frankly, I don't think there is a single rational person on earth who would elect to pursue the second course the way I just phrased the choices. The evidence is overwhelming that in the face of viral pandemics, the stuff you are concerned about that is being implemented works to reduce the CFR. It's going to be costly but, governments and capitalistic enterprises themselves have the capacity to reduce those costs and mitigate the pain.

I look at it this way on a personal level and I am in the most vulnerable cohort. I'd rather tolerate the personal economic and financial pain of my government attendant to trying to contain and mitigate the spread of COVID 19 than exponentially increase my chance and that of my elderly friends of contracting the disease and dying from it. I'm pretty sure I could calculate that increase in personal risk to me of dying with the available current and historic data but I think my point is clear ....... are you willing to have the chance of your parents contracting COVID-19 and dying from it increase exponentially rather than supporting mitigation and containment strategies that reduce that risk to them at some, at this point, indeterminate cost?

The answer to that shaped the statement yesterday of the US COVID-19 Coordinator, Dr. Deborah Brix, that challenged the generation of millennials to understand they will largely determine the course of the COVID-19 virus in the US. They either take it seriously, conduct themselves accordingly and save lives or people die unnecessarily. I don't think you can worry about the costs of mitigation and containment on the economy when the conundrum I proposed above is understood in this context.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-birx-hiv-aids

[froot loops]

problem with Hannibal's argument is he is using these rates from China and acting as if they did nothing. Sure they were slow to acknowledge and did a ton of things wrong, but once they called the WHO in they did a lot of the tactics we are seeing now. They are clearly tanking their economy to fight this. If you let it run its course and do nothing the mortality rates skyrocket. The cost benefit analysis Hannibal is asking for needs to figure in the estimates the CDC made in January if no measures were taken and the Imperial College estimates from this weekend. For the US both projections were over a million fatalities.

For the 1918 outbreak it was bad in the spring but mutated I to something much worse after the summer.

The elderly are most affected now, but it isn't like the young can't get seriously ill. Someof the deaths in France were young people.

[AlabamAlum]

[iam416]

If we were dealing with this from a 50 and under perspective then we wouldn't be doing any of these things. It'd still be bad. But that would be truly closer to a very bad flu season. It's the elderly that make this a total emergency.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Italy is Italy and maybe they sought treatment too late but out of their first 800 patients, the death rate for people 80+ was around 15%. Typical seasonal flu does not kill the elderly anywhere close to those numbers. I'd be interested in getting updated stats

But speaking of Italy, they did report a small decline in the number of new cases today. That has happened before but maybe in a few more days it'll appear they've turned the initial corner.

[Dr. Strangelove]

I don't know how to verify this but Rob Portman told reporters on his weekly conference call that last week there were 6,500 unemployment claims in Ohio. This week there's been 45,000 already

Article below suggests 12,000 claims made Sunday night alone after DeWine ordered bars & restaurants closed

https://www.daytondailynews.com/business/economy/business-feeling-impact-virus-shut-down/69xuo27msZRz6V7KwUl0iP/

[iam416]

The cases were a little lower yesterday and a little higher today. But, they've started to flatten out in terms of raw numbers which means the percentage increase is decreasing significantly. They're getting closer to 10%. That means about 7 days to double (instead of 2.5). So, the shutdown is working. But, again, if that's the only solution then it's not much of a solution. I don't think we can stay shuttered for MONTHS.

[Dr. Strangelove]

China announces they're kicking out a bunch of US journalists from the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wash Post. Also bans them from working in Hong Kong.