Coronavirus!

[sturt]

17 minutes ago, AHF said:

When the President is giving bad information to the public that is something that needs to be nipped in the bud immediately.  Trump is used to being able to give inaccurate information without repercussion and usually that doesn't have real life consequences but it does now.  I'm not going to be tolerant of inaccurate or dismissive statements that will encourage people to put themselves and their loved ones at risk.  That isn't limited to Trump but goes for any public figure with an audience that will rely on what they are being told.  The time for tolerating alternative facts is past.

I see no difference of opinion in any of that, to the degree that it's been true that he's given bad information. I'm aware that he was quick to be dismissive early on. I'm not aware of anything in the last two weeks that would have encouraged people to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.

I would only add to it... that we need to apply similar critical thought and discernment to major media outlets. Trump gives himself credit for halting travel with China early on, and though I hate to agree when someone pats him/herself on the back like that, he was right on that one and a whole lot of major media outlets were not.

What is galling and disturbing is the degree to which major media outlets have a propensity to choose politically-saturated phrasing, or as I've indicated above, cherry-pick which stories they want to report based evidently on a narrative they prefer to affirm.

it's those who attempt balance and, as a result, seem to care about objectivity who I find to be most trustworthy. And the converse is also true.

I would only repeat... if it's criticism of something that can be changed, that's valid. If it's criticism of something that cannot be changed--ordinarily, something that borders on advocacy for or against something that we will decide in November--that is distracting and unhelpful.

 

 

 

 

[sturt]

Decided to post something about basketball for a change, and just as I clicked "submit," my wife (nurse at a dialysis facility) texted me to say we're going to have to spend some time apart for her peace of mind. They had a patient come in today who was presenting with shortness of breath, but evidently there is no anticipation for now that he's going to be tested. This is her first day back, after we lost her brother early Saturday morning, and of course, she's about as anxious as anyone could possibly be. The fact that she's worn all the PPE and that, as far as I know right now, she didn't have any direct contact with him, none of that matters when you're as on-edge as she (for good reason) is.

 

[AHF]

As far as inaccuracies, I'd put them in two baskets:  deliberate lies and recklessly inaccurate statements.  Fauci addresses the latter on a near daily basis.  The former are done both to try to coverup mistakes some of which are continuing in the present and to manage the politics of the situation rather than the needed policy.  I'm not sure why we've heard that we have tests for anyone who wants one or that we are on the verge of a vaccine, etc. but it is patently false and sends the wrong message we've identified the risk (when it is largely unknown due to lack of testing) or on the verge of irrelevance (since a vaccine will soon eliminate this).  Trumpeting potential cures that aren't yet validated leads to the same sort of problems.  (I do not put the "Darwin Award" people who died trying to take this miracle cure on anyone.  The equivalent of putting a cat in the microwave to dry off.)

Saying churches should be open on Easter as the numbers are in the exponential growth stage sends the exactly wrong message.  In a time when people are still conducting mass gatherings, I find every bit of rhetoric that suggests we are on the brink of returning to normalcy to be outright dangerous.  Suggesting that people can or should be meeting en masse for church services is leading to very dangerous situations. 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-choir-practice-deemed-superspreading-event-after-45-members-diagnosed-with-coronavirus

https://www.christiantoday.com/article/pastor-tests-positive-for-coronavirus-in-historic-dc-georgetown-church/134401.htm

https://nypost.com/2020/03/17/evangelical-pastor-mocks-pansies-wont-close-church-for-coronavirus/

People are continuing to meet up and as long as they keep hearing from people with a public voice that they are right for thinking this way that is a problem.  And that is what mixed messaging does.  Telling people to isolate themselves in one breath and then saying how wonderful it will be to gather en masse on Easter is dangerous because it is the line of thinking that feeds these groups to continue to gather and spread this illness.  If on Easter, why not today?

Of course, this all loops back to the lies about how this was under total control, was going to be zero cases in a few days, was just a couple rogue people from China, no big deal, etc.  Everytime you backtrack to that line of thinking it feeds the people who are inclined to ignore the Fauci's of the world and do their own thing.  And there are a lot of people looking for that type of confirmation to put themselves and others at risk.

********

On a personal note, I hope your wife is 100% clear Sturt.  Been isolating from my wife for most of the week after she had a cold earlier in the week.  Not fun but neither of us could live with putting the other in that situation if things didn't turn out for the best.

[sturt]

1 minute ago, AHF said:

Saying churches should be open on Easter

No. Now c'mon. If we expect Trump to be accurate... and we both just agreed we should... then of course, we have to be just as expectant of ourselves.

He did not say "churches should be open on Easter." He said it was his hope that churches could be open on Easter. Those two statements are not the same. It is right to be critical of the things it is right to be critical about. That's not one. And when asked to reconcile what Trump had said and what he himself had said at the very same WH briefing, Fauci said he saw value in Trump's outwardly projecting some aspirational goal. The markets definitely saw value in it.

 

No time right now to go through the rest, but the point I would hope is well-taken.

[sturt]

9 minutes ago, AHF said:

On a personal note, I hope your wife is 100% clear Sturt.  Been isolating from my wife for most of the week after she had a cold earlier in the week.  Not fun but neither of us could live with putting the other in that situation if things didn't turn out for the best.

Thank you, man, and same back at ya.

[AHF]

11 minutes ago, sturt said:

No. Now c'mon. If we expect Trump to be accurate... and we both just agreed we should... then of course, we have to be just as expectant of ourselves.

He did not say "churches should be open on Easter." He said it was his hope that churches could be open on Easter. Those two statements are not the same. It is right to be critical of the things it is right to be critical about. That's not one. And when asked to reconcile what Trump had said and what he himself had said at the very same WH briefing, Fauci said he saw value in Trump's outwardly projecting some aspirational goal. The markets definitely saw value in it.

 

No time right now to go through the rest, but the point I would hope is well-taken.

Here is what he said:

Quote

“You’ll have packed churches all over our country … I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

Quote

“We’re opening up this incredible country. Because we have to do that. I would love to have it open by Easter,” Trump said.

Quote

"America will, again, and soon, be open for business. Very soon.”

Again, I think the mixed messaging is a big problem.  So him saying more conservative things in addition to these types of reckless statements is not a salve for these messages in my mind. 

He said this while people were continuing to gather.  That behavior has cost Americans lives and this type of messaging reinforces and encourages it.  Heck, we see press conferences where certain political leaders aren't socially distancing, are shaking hands with each other, all touching the microphone one after another (which leads me to think they don't follow the NBA), etc.  Reinforces bad behaviors and the dangerous rhetoric.

I'm going to drop the political side of this, though, and just say that I want accurate and well grounded communications coming from our political leaders during this outbreak.

[TheNorthCydeRises]

Here's another site with a more comprehensive projection for what is to come.  And this is with social distancing / shutdown measures in place.  Without it, this would be much worse.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

 

If you click on where it says United States of America, it'll show the projections state by state.   The only thing about the state projections, is that they've haven't been updated in real time.

The projections for my state are sobering, and could cause flat out chaos in Nashville and Memphis in about 2 weeks.  When the beds get overrun in those two cities, they'll send those patients to other cities around the state.  Seeing that I'm in the 5th largest city, some of the Nashville people will come here ( to our substandard but beautiful looking hospital ).  I think this may be the unseen factor in the spread.  Healthcare workers are getting this virus, and may bring it back to their home areas outside of the big city.  Without the Stay at Home orders, people will get infected.

My city ( Clarksville ) just issued the Stay at Home order today, as our numbers are starting to rise.  Unfortunately, the leaders in our state wait to see the tsunami wave crashing ashore, before running from the wave.  I'm going to alert my entire extended family about these projections today.

Looking at this, I now see what Virginia and Maryland enacted their shutdowns through June orders.

 

The X-factor in this, will be the Stock Market.  Will the dramatic rise in deaths in the coming weeks spook everyone, like the dramatic rise in cases did?  If it does, this may cause the President to react in an irrational way come the middle of May, and may suggest or even mandate that the country open back up to save the economy.

 

[AHF]

2 minutes ago, TheNorthCydeRises said:

Unfortunately, the leaders in our state wait to see the tsunami wave crashing ashore, before running from the wave.  

 

Not just your state.

[macdaddy]

39 minutes ago, sturt said:

Decided to post something about basketball for a change, and just as I clicked "submit," my wife (nurse at a dialysis facility) texted me to say we're going to have to spend some time apart for her peace of mind. They had a patient come in today who was presenting with shortness of breath, but evidently there is no anticipation for now that he's going to be tested. This is her first day back, after we lost her brother early Saturday morning, and of course, she's about as anxious as anyone could possibly be. The fact that she's worn all the PPE and that, as far as I know right now, she didn't have any direct contact with him, none of that matters when you're as on-edge as she (for good reason) is.

 

Good luck.  I'm sorry to hear this.   I hope and pray this is just a short time apart.  

[Thomas]

Realize this could be removed because of wrong thread but taking a chance so many will see it. Has been posted in the "Politics" thread as well. This is a chronological list of what the guy we are being asked to measure in a balanced way has stated. Documented statements that he would no doubt deny he made because, why not. These statements are from the same guy that canned our pandemic person we had in China in July 2019 as he shuttered the entire department along with a 16% cut of the CDC. He wanted to cut another 18% recently but then the caca hit. I do not measure this person in a balanced way for serious reasons.

January20: I know more about viruses than anyone.”
January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”
February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
March 9: “This blindsided the world.”
March 13: “National emergency, two big words.”
March 13: “When you compare what we’ve done to other areas of the world, it’s pretty incredible.”
March 13: “Five million (tests) within a month... I doubt we’ll need anything near that.”
March 13: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
March 14. “It’s something that nobody expected… it’s one of those things that happened. It’s nobody’s fault.”
March 15: “This is a very contagious virus. It's incredible. But it's something that we have tremendous control over”
March 17: “I have always known this is a real, this is a pandemic. I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic… I’ve always viewed it as very serious.”
March 19: “If we had an honest media in this country, our country would be an even greater place.”
March 19: “It could have been stopped, could have been stopped pretty easily if we had known, if everybody had known about it… Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic… of this proportion.”
March 25: “Nobody could have ever seen something like this coming.”
March 25: “It’s hard not be happy with the job we’re doing, that I can tell you.”
March 26: “I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?”
March 26: “It can’t be managed by the federal government.”
March 27: “We’ve had great success over the past month.”
March 27: “You can call it a germ. You can call it a flu. You can call it a virus.... I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.”

[macdaddy]

Here's a good article that shows that even today there is misinformation coming mainly from one person and it's harmful.  This is a Republican governor reporting that the facts on the ground don't lineup.  So I don't think this is political.  Beating a dead horse here i know but the idea that 'maybe he did a bad job but he's doing good now' doesn't add up for me.  Misinformation is very dangerous. 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/31/coronavirus-larry-hogan-says-trumps-claims-testing-not-true/5093609002/

 

[TheNorthCydeRises]

Just going through that site, here are the states that will have major trouble with keeping people in hospitals, when this thing pops in 2 - 4 weeks.

 

• California -  ( no bed shortages . . . 1,517 ventilators needed )
• Colorado  - ( 1,925 bed shortage . . . 478 ICU bed shortage . . . 826 ventilators needed )
• Louisiana  - ( 1,060 bed shortage . . . 792 ICU bed shortage . . . 1,015 ventilators needed ) - 1,978 deaths
• Maryland  - (    915 bed shortage . . . 465 ICU bed shortage . . . 585 ventilators needed )
• Massachusetts - ( 1,224 bed shortages . . . 652 ICU bed shortage . . . 743 ventilators needed )
• MIchigan -  ( 4,407 bed shortage . . . 1,506 ICU bed shortage . . . 1,798 ventilators needed ) - 3,007 deaths
• New Jersey - (  435 bed shortage . . . 814 ICU bed shortage . . . 1,023 ventilators needed )
• New York - ( 60,610 bed shortage . . . 10,602 ICU bed shortage . . . 9,055 ventilators needed ) - 15,788 deaths
• North Carolina - ( 862 bed shortage . . . 625 ICU bed shortage . . . 954 ventilators )
• Tennessee - ( 11,167 bed shortage . . . 2,269 ICU bed shortage . . . 2,318 ventilators needed ) - 4,985 deaths

 

So while no one is really talking about Tennessee right now, that may change DRAMATICALLY in 3 - 4 weeks.  The only thing that MIGHT keep these numbers down in Tennessee, is if younger adults are the ones getting this the most.  They'll have the best chance to fight it off without going to the hospital.

 

[TheNorthCydeRises]

In the President's news conference, they're using the models from the exact website that I posted an hour ago.  They're citing the range of fatalities between 100,000 - 200,000 deaths.  And as high as 2,200 deaths per day, during the peak.  Which they project comes in 3 weeks.

Edited March 31, 2020 by TheNorthCydeRises

[JayBirdHawk]

2 hours ago, sturt said:

Decided to post something about basketball for a change, and just as I clicked "submit," my wife (nurse at a dialysis facility) texted me to say we're going to have to spend some time apart for her peace of mind. They had a patient come in today who was presenting with shortness of breath, but evidently there is no anticipation for now that he's going to be tested. This is her first day back, after we lost her brother early Saturday morning, and of course, she's about as anxious as anyone could possibly be. The fact that she's worn all the PPE and that, as far as I know right now, she didn't have any direct contact with him, none of that matters when you're as on-edge as she (for good reason) is.

 

Hope it all turns out well for you.

[JayBirdHawk]

Quote

......about a week-and-a-half ago, the group comprised of approximately 70 adults in their 20s left for a spring break trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Currently, 28 of the 70 have tested positive for COVID-19, and more of them are under public health investigation. The University of Texas at Austin confirmed all 28 people who tested positive were UT students.

...and the ignorance continues.

[Dnice]

TV alert, since this seems to be the  frequent thread,  they are showing the Sonics  vs hawks  on NBA tv where Steve Smith had 7 3s in the 4th quarter. Airs 7:30 and 10:30.. this is like a hardwood classics short pretty much. 

[AHF]

51 minutes ago, JayBirdHawk said:

...and the ignorance continues.

There are a very dangerous number of people who aren't taking this seriously.  We need to stay on message with the importance of taking actions to flatten the curve.  No gatherings is step 1.  I know there are people in my area who are not being responsible.  Hurts to see especially from people you know and like.  I just scratch my head going "I know you are smart but you are acting like this doesn't apply to you and your family.  Where is your head that you can get there and think this is no big deal?"

[Dnice]

 

[AHF]

Remember that game.  Smitty was so easy to root for during his years with the team.

[JayBirdHawk]

Please tell me this isn't true, in the height of pollen season??????