SARS II: Respiratory Boogaloo

This is something that needs investigating. Hopefully it's not bullshit.

Why? Because they reported the best information they had at the time? Drama queen much?

You want the West to have more sway over China? Write your boy in the white house and scold him for ending the liaison position in the China CDC.

No. They didn't report the best information they had at the time.

China has too much influence on WHO.

I also don't want the west to have more sway over China. I want the west to tell China to fuck off until it becomes a free country. No more giving it shit on a silver platter. No more letting companies send manufactuiring there. No more accepting China's bullshit where it steals IP from American companies. No more looking the other way while China has actual concentration camps in the country. Stuff like that.

China can do whatever the fuck it wants. But if it wants to be part of the rest of the world it needs to stop being a dictatorship.

Flyers in New York

It was Nancy Pelosi who killed the bill.

Here's a more accurate picture:

House Democrats go on vacation for a week.
Republicans stay behind and work on bill. Republicans pretty much have an agreement with the Senate Democrats.
Nancy Pelosi comes back and says no. Senate Democrats turn around and block bill.
Democrats block bill again.
Democrats get scared that America is getting pissed off at them.
Democrats bend the knee and agree to a deal as of late last night.

As was shown above the New York Times gave the accurate headline the first time:



But than they changed it:



But it still wasn't good enough so you got:

Ugh, dark thought just hit me. If any of our enemies really wanted to strike a blow at the Great Satan, now would be a hell of a time to cripple our internet infrastructure.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2...company-exclusive-claim-promising-coronavirus

And the door keeps revolving.

I did some more careful work on my extrapolations from yesterday. The resulting graph is downright scary.

The original, with the mustard-yellow line, comes from here. The rest is my extrapolation.

This is a logarithmic scale. That means that with exponential growth, the line should be straight. On a graph with a linear scale, it continues to mount at a steeper and steeper rate, but that is extremely hard to visualize in extrapolations.

I have considered the increase in the slope of the line of the last week as simply a normal statistical variation, and extrapolated a line that is averaged out over a longer period. If I extrapolated the curve of recent days, it appears to be increasing, even on a logarithmic scale. But we won't go there.

Here is the result. A million dead, in the US alone, before the end of April. One. Million. Deaths.

That's what is very likely to happen unless drastic measures are taken, at least a week ago and maybe quicker, to stop that expansion right now. No more nonsense talk about how much it's going to hurt the economy. You might as well accept the fact that, no matter what we do, we all just lost our financial security. No one can say, right now, what the future holds economically, but the next few years are going to be bleak.

And they will be even more bleak with a million deaths in the U.S. alone.

And that still isn't even looking at May...

Yesterday Ireland nationalised all private healthcare, froze all rents and will shortly announce a plan to pay all wages for the duration of this shit, among other radical measures, all of which were dismissed as impossible in the recent past by the same people enacting them now.

So, what are the thoughts on the stimulus bill going through Congress?

One hopes that some of the measures that have been taken to date, however imperfect, will slow that down. And there's also the fact that at some point the disease will run out of vulnerable people to kill. I mean - you could extrapolate your graph indefinitely.

Insufficient.

This situation calls for measures that Socialists understand and American capitalists do not. The stimulus bill shows that. What is needed is not to "stimulate the economy" (because it's wrecked anyway) but to help those in trouble. There are some good things in there, but both the Republicans and the Democrats have shown they have no idea how to do this.

Emmanuel Macron came up with a much better plan in just a couple of days, over a week ago.

That last point is why I didn't dare extrapolte it beyond the end of April. I have done enough statistical work to know the limits of extrapolations. I would hope that even this is way off.

However, it is not an unreasonable extrapolation, based only on the next five weeks. Pessimistic? Perhaps. Hopefully, even. But not necessarily so. Based on the acceleration of deaths over the last week, it might even be optimistic.

It is interesting to look at the corresponding graphs for France and Italy. Instead of a straight line, on a logarithmic scale, they are both slowing down. We are a long way from dealing with the problem here, but at least the strong lock-down measures are helping. The US isn't even doing that on a massive scale. And Trump continues to say things that are calculated to prevent people from supporting those kinds of measures. And Fox News is backing him up on it.

If my graph turns out to actually be right, a lot of the blame will be squarely on the shoulders of Donald Trump, the Fox News pundits, and the right-wing conspiracy theorists who continue to pretend that the sky isn't falling.

In terms of both economics and, even more importantly, human lives, this is probably the worst catastrophe the world has faced in over a century, and that includes two world wars, the Great Depression, and the so-called Spanish flu.

well I do know that the airline industry is holy fuck-sticks FUBAR and needs some type of financial assistance. During my recent (just got back last night) Phoenix trip I flew on six different planes totaled with connecting flights and whatnot. None of the planes I flew on were more than 30 percent passenger capacity. The biggest money-flusher was a 757 with about 50 passengers. Entire rows were empty on all legs of the journey. Atlanta airport was a ghost town. Nearly all the shops and restaurants were closed in the middle of the afternoon. Flight cancellations and thus extremely long layovers trying to fill planes were the norm, versus the exception.

Granted the biggest and most urgent financial priority #1 is to get money into the pockets of the low wage earners first. Letting the aviation industry tank would benefit nobody obviously, regardless of what anybody thinks about capitalism, corporations, etc etc.

The biggest priority full-stop is the population's health and well-being, but when the dust settles we need a "normal" to return to.

Are you a fucking retard? No really, are you stupid?

Your numbers neglect a certain reality. disease does not work like an equation. There comes a certain point where this thing we have called an immune system saves some of us from death because our bodies adapt to new virus strains. Maybe a million people will die because of a sickness like this, but you are a fucking moron if you are trying to project a graph like that using logarithms and linear ideas.

Go sit in the dayton corner for that fearmongering load of bullshit.

OK chicken little. Let me help you out on this thing called life. These sorts of things happen to life forms. It seems horrible in a personal sense, but the species goes on even if a whole lot of people do not. For most of us the sky is not falling. Even killing a million people in america is not going to cause the collapse of society. The reality is it is trimming the unhealthy anyway. Not to sound cruel, but aside from a small number of cases, the people who are dying from this are probably on some sort of medical or public support as is. Those are the people most at danger from such a sickness. It is those people we are using science and medicine to keep alive despite an extremely weakened state who are going to be culled by this the hardest.

Your distorted view of things neglects the reality we were keeping them alive beyond what would normally be their demise to begin with. The fact that this has been taken for granted by people like you is actually a good thing. We have been that powerful and we have helped people live well beyond old expectations. That is awesome and we will get better at it. However, we are not gods, and there are a lot of people who are compromised and not going to live beyond this. We are going to try, but it is not the end of the world that we lose those people who were sickly.

I am also not saying those are the only people who die, but those are going to be the largest of the dead. The more healthy people survive this disease. It may be highly contagious but it is also something healthy people are very likely to get over.

So calm down kiddo. The sky is not falling, but this is a bump in the road.

Americans are overreacting. Overreacting is one of the things Americans as a whole do best.

A virus with a less than 2% death rate (in the U.S.) is not worth wrecking the U.S. economy over.

The U.S. can stand 100,000 virus deaths with ease.

Also, Donald Trump is qualified to be President now.

And here I thought you guys would be cheering her on, for delaying $2 trillion of deficit spending for socialism. Isn't this far more nightmarish than a virus?

PornHub Premium now offered free to the world

It had been offered free in Italy a couple weeks back, and I could access it with a VPN, but it was too much trouble to navigate in Italian.

Porn conquers a lot of things. Perhaps it could keep people inside.

I would like to ask @RickDeckard what is so dumb about calling out chicken little, aka @Asyncritus , over some clearly errant numbers.

China, which has many times the population of the US, has not seen close to a million deaths because people get better. The count is less than 20,000 worldwide now. Do you understand the population of the US and what exactly it would take to actually reach a million? If china, a country of 1.3 billion people, has not seen a million people die how is the US going to see a million people die when the population is a mere 350 million?

Do you even understand the insane logistics of such a thing? Have we shown that americans are for some reason much more likely to die from this? I have missed the reports where americans die at large percentages more than the chinese. Please do enlighten me with these numbers as I have hear no major or minor news source come close to claiming this.

Maybe in a year or so the death toll will be in the millions if we consider indirect deaths due to this, but the numbers simply do not work the way chicken little says they do.

To go a step further, there are people who are fucking scared to death regarding this and making such irresponsible claims is trumpian in terms of effect. It is one thing to discuss this, and another thing to start spouting such flawed paranoia when everyone is on edge. Chicken little, aka @Asyncritus needs to keep this bullshit to a minimum. Even @Zombie and @Tuttle are not spouting such crazy bullshit.

@Tererun - Your entire argument (although it is peppered with other nonsense too) collapses when one takes into account the simple fact that China implemented incredibly aggressive containment measures.

There is a possibility of such a high number, but not because of the math dipshit is doing. It is because the US has some of the best elderly care out there, and we have a huge number of life sustained elderly in the boomer and previous generation around. There is no reason to expect huge increases in death among those with a healthy immune system. This means @Asyncritus has some really off math, and that it should be noted that the people dying are already living extended time. They are retired.

I am not saying go out and have coronavirus parties, but this is not as deadly as the bullshit fearmongering chicken little is pushing.

Ok Florida Man.