Yeah, the political risk to Trump. That’s what we’re worried about. How about putting shortsighted amateur President actions come back to bite world in ass? pic.twitter.com/JjAwiZz7Eg
— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 25, 2020
Every night for the past month, I’ve been posting a ‘Coronavirus Update’, usually between 4am-5am. (I know it’s easy to overlook at that hour, but it’s when I have the time to pay attention, and I think predictability has its advantages given the current firehose of breaking news.)
I am in no way an expert, but if you’re curious about where this mess is coming from, my earlier posts should give you an idea of what the actual experts have been saying, as well as some twitter feeds to follow — Helen Branswell, Dr. Tara C. Smith, ɪᴀɴ ᴍ ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ, et al. And I’m always grateful for leads to new, trustworthy sources!
The @WHO have said that the coronavirus outbreak was not out of control globally nor causing large-scale deaths and so it is too early to declare it a pandemic https://t.co/LaqLXSSczc pic.twitter.com/No0I8rij8X
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 24, 2020
Nice to know as people are worrying about staying healthy and sane he will be tweeting, “Great time to invest!” pic.twitter.com/0etTI6sRBk
— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 25, 2020
Fox, very useful in a crisis. https://t.co/EHMqgDzrfT
— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 25, 2020
Remember the mantra: KEEP CALM & CARRY ON. (Also, never forget your towel. Seriously — individual towel usage, highly recommended for slowing the spread of viruses… )
ziggy
Anne Laurie, seriously, do you ever sleep?
My preparations at this point are to get and stay very healthy. I assume that sooner or later it will arrive here, and I want to be able to fight it off.
brettvk
I wish I lived in a country that educated its citizens so well that they wouldn’t mistake the natural evolution of a virus for a bioweapons attack. I wish I lived in a nation where rumor-mongering wasn’t quite so profitable.
randy khan
I’d like to say that I really appreciate the daily posts – including the consistency of when they show up. It gives me a quick, easy way to understand what’s happening.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Seriously, WHO? Not a pandemic, yet? It’s in several different zones, now. It’s unknown if it’s spreading in the community in Italy, but it looks like it. It’s certainly spreading in Iran, SK, and Japan.
All this is aimed at is trying not cause a panic, which I get, but I feel like it unnecessarily keeps people from taking proper precautions and just going, “Oh well, just another flu”.
Currants
@randy khan: And I’d like to second that. I very much appreciate the curated, reliable information predictably available. Thank you, AL!
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t think anybody’s saying “oh, just another flu.” We are plenty good at freaking ourselves out when it comes to medicine! Now imagine how people would be acting if they started throwing the P-word around casually.
How many of the people freaking out could even define it for you?
Major Major Major Major
Kent
Am I a horrible misanthrope if I think about summer 2020 natural disasters that would take down the Trump presidency?
A major Category 5 hurricane that took out the oil processing capacity in the Texas Gulf Coast and shot gas prices up to $6-8/gallon right when farmers were getting into their fields to harvest their crops would blow a massive hole through his base. But if it saved the planet from another 4 years of Trump?……
Fair Economist
@brettvk:It’s horrifying to see all the people saying “this is dangerous, it must be a bioweapon” when in actuality ALL of the dangerous diseases in history are natural. The only lab-derived one was the Russian Flu of 77-78, coming from a release of a frozen lab specimen from decades earlier, probably from the USSR – and it was the least dangerous flu pandemic ever.
ziggy
@Kent:
Trump IS a “natural disaster”. The best and cleanest way to save the world from more Trump is for HIM to implode. Otherwise, I can see him and the GOP weaponizing anything else that could possibly happen for their own benefit. Never would have believed that was possible, but I do now. Imagine what they could do with immigration, forced quarantines, work shutdowns, postponing elections, etc… if Covid19 starts spreading stateside.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
“It’s just the flu” is definitely a thing I’ve heard people say, though not as much anymore. Most people aren’t paying attention to this, unfortunately. You have a point about causing a panic, but it just seems like the WHO and even the CDC aren’t doing enough. As far as I’m aware, we’re still only testing those that either traveled from China or have connections to those that did. And our testing capacity is still only like 400/month. It’s been estimated that roughly 2/3 of those screened that have the virus get through. I’d bet a million dollars that COVID-19 is spreading in the US right now. Most cases are just mild and asymptomatic right now or still in the incubation period. It doesn’t help that symptoms are indistinguishable from the common cold or flu
COVID-19 isn’t going to kill us all, but there’s a good chance it will cause severe supply chain disruptions (it already is, in fact) and perhaps plunge the world into another recession
Amir Khalid
I wasn’t expecting this, but football in Italy has already been affected by COVID-19.
Martin
Gotta give these guys props for staying on the financial service message:
I made a decent bit of money in the market, and it’s a truism that on every side of a trade you have one person convinced that security will go up, and someone else equally convinced it will go down. And both of those people believe they are above average, that it’s the other guy who is an idiot.
I would back a constitutional amendment that banned federal officials ever referring to the stock market in any way. It should also make the DJIA illegal, because it’s fucking stupid and useless.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@ziggy:
If that comes to pass, I doubt Trump will benefit. He’s the one who cut the NSC staff responsible for coordinating infectious disease response across the government after Ebola in 2014. Imagine Trump supporters having to witness mostly older loved ones dying from this virus.
Diehard Trump cultists can cry and try to spin it all they want. Trump will be responsible for the deaths of perhaps thousands. The economy, the one thing he’s got going for him, will be in shambles
Now that I think about it, it’s funny comparing the response to Ebola and now COVID-19
We were all going to die when Obama was in charge and now, “Actually, the flu kills more people” from the media now that Trump is in charge.
Anne Laurie
Yes, that’s why Trump & his minions are panicking *now*. If you believe the political scientists, it’s already too late for a recession to change low-info voters’ minds about Trump — but any hint that Dear Leader might not be able to command the tides & turn away ‘snake death plague’ through the sheer force of his personality is seen as a threat to the orderly workings of the universe.
Marcopolo
Sure, if Covid-19 reaches the US & starts to spread it will be a problem cause of lack of foresight & planning by our federal government. But remember, those feds are also totally making sure the census comes off well this year and I’m sure a little added virus action wouldn’t upset that
apple cartlooks like it might already be a shit show waiting to happen…am I right?Seriously, I watched the first fifteen or so minutes of Maddow tonight (it included talking about Covid-19 & the Trump admin. subordination of the DC ASUA office). By then I was thinking I could understand why folks watch Fox. It doesn’t tell its viewers the truth about all the crap that is happening atm. I mean the trade off is you are totally misinformed about everything but …oh, that’s right they stoke the anger and grievance of their audience with made up shit. Right.
On that note, good night everyone.
dmsilev
@Amir Khalid: I’m going to a conference next week which ordinarily has a very large contingent from China, like 20-25% of attendees. This year, yeah no. The organizers are scrambling around trying to see if they can set up video chat feeds for people who can’t travel (“First, we need the bandwidth for 3000 simultaneous Skype calls…”), not to mention sending out emails telling everyone not to shake hands and to use plenty of sanitizer.
They haven’t yet reminded us to bring our towel, not to panic, and that the virus is only “mostly harmless”, but I’m sure that will come in the next couple of days.
Mandalay
Only slightly O/T since this is a Health Care thread, WaPo provides a nice summary (hatchet job) on how willing the Democratic Candidates have been to provide meaningful information about their health: In a historically old presidential field, candidates refuse to release health records.
TLDR:
Here’s a summary of the health of their health data:
– Klobuchar released a four page report yesterday.
– Warren has released a six page report.
– Biden released a fairly detailed three page medical report showing that he is an old man.
– Sanders and Boomberg: vague and evasive.
– Buttigieg: bizarrely, the (presumably) healthiest one of the lot has released nothing at all.
It seems incredible that any information released is completely arbitrary, and voluntary. I don’t understand why the health of the applicants for POTUS is none of our business.
PeakVT
Well I now know of one person who absolutely deserves to catch and die from COVID-19.
Major Major Major Major
Thinking of throwing a Movie Night this weekend to watch Contagion.
cain
@dmsilev:
I don’t think you need a skype call.. just make it a one direction streaming. They can always ask their questions on a slack or something or some chat service if they have.
mrmoshpotato
@Martin: I’d rather knee them all in the nuts.
cain
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
It’s fine at least they owned the libs.
mrmoshpotato
@Major Major Major Major: LOL make it a double feature with Outbreak.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
I’ve never watched that movie. It has Matt Damon, so I’ll have to check it out. Apparently it was very scientifically accurate.
I’d also recommend Outbreak and the 1994 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. I can’t believe I never recognized Ed Harris was in it until recently
Unfortunately, as a miniseries it’s like 6 hrs long lol, but the first time I watched it, I ended up watching 3 hrs straight through it was so good
Odie Hugh Manatee
When this first blew up I heard a blurb in the news that deaths from the flu can average 3% and that pandemics like SARS in 2003 are much higher (it hit 10%). Unless I’ve missed something from what I’ve seen so far the death rate is hanging around 3%. Any deaths are horrible but people have to put this into perspective and so far it looks no more lethal than the ‘regular’ flu.
That said, like many others out there my health is such that any flu is not good for me so I am watching this with great interest.
mrmoshpotato
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Beat you on Outbreak, kiddo. :)
dmsilev
@cain: A lot of the presenters are trapped in China as well…
In any event, there are “only” about 50 or 60 simultaneous presentation tracks at this conference, so you probably could do it just with Skype or whatever. Except, of course, for the Great Firewall. And the time difference would truly suck for anyone who has to get up at 2 AM to give a talk.
Mandalay
So the slimebag still hasn’t quite made it to jail…
Thoughts and prayers.
mrmoshpotato
Is? Is Cole inviting us all to West Virginia?
dmsilev
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Ordinary influenza (i.e. not the 1917 Spanish Flu) is around 0.1% or so fatal, so this thing is roughly 10x more likely to kill. And is more infectious than SARS was. It’s that combination which has people spooked.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
The mortality rate of the regular flu is “only” 0.1%. Because of asymptomatic and mild cases likely flying under the radar it’s likely 1%. I saw a paper recently that determined it was 0.7% outside of China currently. However if health care systems become overwhelmed that morality rate will shoot up to 2% or higher because those people aren’t getting proper medical attention. 0.7% is still fairly deadly when compared to the flu, especially since it is as contagious as the normal flu
The Dangerman
@Kent:
This is probably pretty far out there as a possibility, but I’ve long been of the opinion that if it looked like Trump was about to get his ass kicked (DOW tanks, gas hits records, etc.), he would find an excuse to cancel the election. Say he had to because the Deep State was behind it.
mrmoshpotato
@The Dangerman: ?
ellenr
@dmsilev: Pittcon?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That Tucker Carlson quote is so random it begs the question do the producers at Fox News have remind Carlson to wear his pants before going on the air?
Jay
Jay
The
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@mrmoshpotato:
LOL. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie
@cain:
Contracting a (relatively) deadly virus to own the libs
@Anne Laurie:
I’d have to imagine that would change if/when people start to experience shortages and loved ones die from the disease. Those factors would not happen during a typical recession, something those political scientists aren’t taking into account.
That is an interesting observation about Trump’s response though. He definitely views it as a threat to his reelection for sure
joel hanes
Ima just leave this here …
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1232057726039138306
mrmoshpotato
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Also dying because you’re a racist, fascist, pussy-grabbing pile of shit manchild who voted for one of their own to own the libs.
ETA – hardest hit areas would be red states that didn’t expand Medicaid to own the libs
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That Carlson quote ties in with an observation I made to a non white friend of mine; that it seems like minorities image that MAGA hats run saying the N word over and over, when in reality when it’s just us whites, the Conservatives will whine non stop how we liberal whites treat them with utter contempt and are so mean to them. That it’s safer to say that these conservatives whites are jealous the liberal whites have rejected them for the minorities.
Joey Maloney
Interesting article about “Authoritarian Blindness” from one Zeynep Tufekci: How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw
Thesis:
mrmoshpotato
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Are you sure Fucker Carlson doesn’t think pants are a liberal conspiracy?
Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
yeah, no.
a friend of mine was murdered by a Trumpster less than a month ago. They were not a “liberal white”.
The fear is real because it happens every day.
smike
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Yeah, I don’t normally worry about the flu much, but it’s mainly because of the annual flu shot (the ‘old person’ kind). This ‘no vaccine’ situation is a bit more worrisome.
La Nonna
Italy is slightly freaking out about corona, cancelling Carnevale, closing some small villages, quarantining people….partly because we have an aging population, more vulnerable to pneumonia, etc. I can say that face masks are all sold out, even in the South, and we are simply avoiding crowds, theaters, restaurants, and flying, for now. At least there is universal healthcare here, but I can imagine smaller local hospitals becoming overwhelmed.
mrmoshpotato
OT – but I have a possible explanation
It had to change – they had a T-Rex!
JaneE
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The flu is actually a serious illness. There will probably be a vaccine for COVID-19 within a year or two, maybe sooner, and at that point it may well be just like the flu. Mainly mild, but lethal for some, with new strains being more virulent. Flu kills thousands in the US every year, but no one gets too concerned. If we enforced a quarantine for everyone sick with the flu, I’ll bet we would see businesses cut production shifts every year.
piratedan
hey, why you guys are talking about Contagion and Outbreak, I can only imagine these guys in charge would have totally eradicated life on the planet if faced with an Andromeda Strain…. just saying.
jl
Not sure I can figure out what Tucker Carlson is trying to say, other than that blind panic and irrational bigotry is identical to taking “some steps against it.”
Panic and ignorance has been an effective strategy, well at least a popular one, against serious threats for thousands of years, I know that…. of course…
Odie Hugh Manatee
@smike:
Us olds have reason to worry a bit more. And thanks to others for setting me straight on the numbers. :)
Back to watching the world melt down…
Mnemosyne
@Fair Economist:
The total randomness of disease freaks people out. They’d rather believe that some malevolent person somewhere created it than believe that shit like this happens randomly and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it. It’s actually more comforting for them to think it was a person rather than a random mutation of a virus that we can’t control.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
One of my coworkers is supposed to travel to Milan next week and we’re not sure what we’re supposed to do. Everything may still be shut down, and there’s not much point in sending her to sit in a hotel room and do videoconferences. She could do that from LA.
joel hanes
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1232050502025781257
Mary G
(Guy whose adorable children gatecrashed his BBC interview a while back)
mrmoshpotato
@Mary G: You sunk my battleship.
Mnemosyne
I am now regretting all of the “Masque of the Red Death” jokes I was making a few months ago. ?
Mnemosyne
@Mary G:
Is it weird to say OMG the baby is so big now in his dinosaur jammies! ?
Mary G
Quarantined peeople are getting creative:
?BillinGlendaleCA
@piratedan:
M31 does comment here.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@mrmoshpotato: It knows what it did.
opiejeanne
@Major Major Major Major: We watched “Contagion” a couple of weeks ago. It’s compelling, and frightening when it portrays the breakdown of society, the death of civility.
We’re seeing a little bit of that in Costa Mesa, CA and Alabama right now.
opiejeanne
@dmsilev: I read yesterday that the rate of death from Covid 19 is about the same as the Spanish flu of 1917, 2-3%, which killed many millions of people around the world.
I don’t know how accurate that percentage is wrt the current outbreak, but if this is correct it has the potential to cause a lot of political disruption.
Patricia Kayden
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Patricia Kayden: That’s true, cause the stock market is all he’s got.
JPL
I find the virus updates very informative and appreciate the time that you (Anne_) put into them. It’s valuable to get updates from YY_Sima Qian. Rush was spreading nonsense on his radio show and said that it’s a plot to take down trump or something. Either he know he’s spewing nonsense and doesn’t care, or he’s uninformed.
bjacques
@Mnemosyne: there’s also “King Pest”, one of Poe’s lesser-known stories.
Patricia Kayden
Betty Cracker
@Mary G: Retweeted — that’s awesome!
Betty Cracker
Saw two people wearing masks in our local grocery store this Sunday.
JPL
@Betty Cracker: Interesting.
Cermet
@opiejeanne: the 1918 flu killed between 2 – 20% (rather large range, since records then were bad!) of the people infected (the exact world wide death rate is unknow but many consider it killed more people than WW I.) What was especially bad about this 1918 flu was it tended to kill healthy people in the age range of 20 – 40.
As for the Corona virus, a lot is unknown since this type of virus (the SARs family) isn’t well understood. Hence, whether it falls off with warmer weather is still unknown. It does tend to handle warmer temps better and can stay active on surfaces far longer than the flu virus. Both these aspects are troubling but certainly not necessarily going to cause this illness to continue into late spring.
Still, zero reports of anyone under ten dying; that tends to indicate that this isn’t as deadly as many believe – I still continue to think innate health issues make this illness so deadly for older people. That is, some of these older people have more lung damage (long term smoking, air pollution exposure or previous lung related illnesses) or other serious health issues. So, hoping this is true and that most healthy people either never get ill or just suffer a typical flu like illness.
LongHairedWeirdo
I think/hope you mean, “always know where your towel is”? Otherwise, towels have been absconded with by another author.
LongHairedWeirdo
@?BillinGlendaleCA: the idea that the stock market is *his* is abysmally stupid. Only a complete, absolute frickin’ *moron* would think that the stock market is rising because of Trump, which means, I hope, there’s only one goddamned fool stupid enough to think this, and the rest are just agreeing to butter him up.
Alas, as we’ve seen, a lot of the GOP really is stone cold stupid, believing the BS they’re feeding the rubes to keep them in line. E.g., whatsisface was sure that, while the entire US intelligence community knew Assange was getting his dirt from the Russian, that Assange could present proof that the dirt came from Seth Rich.
So it’s entirely possible that even the people who might nominally be able to know better have been taught to shut their brains down, and believe in teh stupid.
debbie
@JPL:
Nonsense of course. It’s a Democrat plot and the coronavirus is just the common cold. //
Ken
Same as the realtors – it’s always a great time to buy or sell a house.
However neither can hold a candle to the gold guys, especially the ones who run back-to-back commericals, one offering to buy and the other to sell.
chopper
@Cermet:
spanish flu was particularly terrible, but it also struck during a period before modern medicine, where hygiene basically sucked if it existed at all. and yeah, it spread like wildfire through the dirty wet trenches of WW1.
it did have the particular effect of causing massive immune reactions in many, via cytokine release syndrome. SARS is similar, which is what makes it very deadly as well. luckily, this current virus doesn’t seem to have that feature.
kindness
I know I would do anything to keep a plague from spreading here in the US. The answer clearly is to leave Trump in India and not allow him back in.
yellowdog
@Odie Hugh Manatee: The regular flu has a .01 fatality rate. Covid appears to have a fatality rate 200x that of the flu. If it hits the US with a 60% infection rate and a2% fatality rate that will mean almost 40,000 excess deaths in the US and about 60,000,000 excess deaths worldwide. Yeas, let’s keep in proportion.
PenAndKey
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t think anybody’s saying “oh, just another flu.”
I’m a microbiologist by training and profession, and while I don’t work in the medical field I know enough about pathogens and their related issues to not have an issue with the “oh, just another flu” statement. With one caveat: just a flu isn’t exactly a minor thing. People forget how deadly the annual flu is because it’s been around our whole lives, and this looks to be worse but not apocalyptic.
Honestly, I fully expect that 2019-nCoV is already in ever major air hub on the planet by this point, that it’s spreading asymptomatically, and that the majority of people who contract it won’t realize it’s anything but a severe bout of influenza. Will it kill people? Yes, obviously. Will it kill more than the average round of flu? By all the numbers so far it certainly it will, but not catastrophically so. Beyond that I’ll leave the economic prognostications to others, but outside of the usual precautions that everyone should already be taking during flu season there’s not much any of us can do about it
That last part’s the sticking point, really. Because, as a man much smarter than me put it, “a person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it”.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@JaneE: Or not, there are still no vaccines for either SARS or MERS and those are also corona viruses. I’m not saying there won’t be a vaccine but it may not exist for a year or two. And this corona virus may disappear after a while as SARS and MERS did, although considering it’s more easily transmissible that may not happen.
Will there be a vaccine?
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Major Major Major Major: Watched it back in the summer, might be time for a re-watch. I like Contagion much better than Outbreak because it has a very “collaborative” feel to explaining how disease clusters are detected and all the agencies and people involved (I learned the term CDC Epidemic Intelligence Officer). I also kind of loved the way Contagion opens – black screen, “cough, cough”….
Outbreak was much more “one or two heroic geniuses” type story which in the real world is mostly bull. Plus I can not stand Dustin Hoffman.
terry chay
@Anne Laurie:
Not true. The recession of 2007-2008 wasn’t recognized until 1 month before the election and it had a HUGE impact, creating a democratic landslide. Any political scientist claiming that a recession won’t affect the election is not one to be listening to at all.
Furthermore, trumps tepid support is being held up ENTIRELY by the economy. When adjusted for the economy he is the most unpopular president. If you can remember Bush’s low numbers at the end of his term in 2009, you can imagine what Trump will look like if the economy falters.
They know this which is why his COVID-19 response is all about the economy and optics and not what is best. For instance his state department overrode the recommendation of the CDC and doubled the number of known cases in the US in a single night (putting almost 40 known infected people on a plane to the US with the rest).
terry chay
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
get a better news source. Typically the mortality of flu is around .1%. The worst pandemics in history broke into 2% and 5%. the flu is worse because it is so infection and mutates rapidly making it a yearly thing of killing tens of thousands of people to millions in the case of bad epidemics.
COVID-19 mortality was consistently around 2% though that number may actually lower for two reasons: Wuhan was ill prepared/reacted poorly making it more fatal than normal and the infection rate can possibly be much higher than currently reported. It will end up being much more deadly than all but a few historical flu’s no matter how you slice it (though the overall death numbers may be lower if we can keep it contained like China did).