Same for us, in every respect. In fact, we had enough in stock that we ended up giving some to our oldest daughter who lives in town and my wife used some of it to barter with. The lady who does her nails is also a seamstress, so my wife traded some TP for some masks she made for us out of old t-shirts and Crown Royal bags.
Hell, here's one to ponder: would a Crown Royal mask, soaked in Crown Royal, kill that fucking virus deader than a doornail?
On a related note, there's a big bottle of hand sanitizer by the back entrance of my office. Employees are supposed to use it before they enter the building. I noticed yesterday that it smells a lot like tequila.
We have that sanitizer at my job. When our manager gave me a bottle of it, I looked at the label on it and it said "70% Ethyl Alcohol". I looked at him and asked him "You know you just gave me a gallon of moonshine, right?" He asked what I meant by that. I told him to look t the label. So he did, and then he said "Oh, shit.... uhhh, well don't drink it... Unless you're at home." It makes sense though, a lot that is made by companies that normally produce alcoholic beverages, so switching to producing that sanitizer is pretty easy.
Garage sale signs finally started blooming around here the past couple of weekends. I will be skipping this season.
Finally got down to 1/2 tank of gas after 3 months - we just go for short Sunday drives to make sure the car hasn't rusted in place. Then I got a recall for my car (2nd recall on a 2019 model!) This time it's the fuel pump. Well, being retired, I can get it serviced any day at all, so I called. They can take it next week. "They have to drop the gas tank to change the pump, sir, so just make sure the fuel tank is less than half full." I told her it just took me three months to use a half tank and I just filled up. She said "Dios mio!" I said I'd call back in three months. :/
My new neighbor with the noisy pickup truck that wakes us up every morning at 6:00 hasn't used it in 2 1/2 weeks. He's either on vacation or he got the 'rona!
This whole thing has really opened my eyes regarding how much money I actually spend on frivolous crap. I thought I was pretty careful before. I always put some aside in savings, bought generic on stuff that doesn’t matter, etc. I don’t know where exactly I was spending so much other than restaurants and gas, but I have significantly more $ left over at the end of the month than I did before. One major bummer though is the baby missing out on her extended family. I have a huge family and other than my mom who is retired and goes nowhere, everyone else only got to meet her when she was brand new. She’s almost 6 months old now and she only really sees 5 people, including us.
I’m actually going to have to agree with Marso here, sort of. The death rate is at 5% for those who test positive, but given our poor understanding of asymptomatic spread rate, it’s really difficult to say that it’s truly 5%. When researchers look at flu death rates for example, they don’t look only at positive test cases, they also create models to estimate total infection numbers. So far we don’t have really good estimates on total infection numbers. On the other hand, death numbers are being underreported due to poor testing capability. In short, even the experts are having trouble estimating the infection fatality rate of COVID. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01738-2
Here's the thing: A death rate of roughly 5.4% applies across almost all countries. That means that differences in testing, medical care etc. haven't changed that number significantly. This makes it extremely likely that it's at least roughly solid. In addition, while we didn't have good estimates on total infections for a while, we do now know a lot more, and the purported large number of unreported cases no longer seem likely; look at the figures from Iceland and Sweden.
Death rate is 11% in resolved cases in the US, 9% globally. Even accounting for asymptomatics, it's not gonna be that much better.
Did you not read the article I posted? There’s no way you could have and still be on this tangent. Take NY State for example, in antibody tests they found that 12.3% of the population had been infected, in order for the death rate to be 5% as you suggest, we would expect to see about 120,000 deaths in New York State (19,450,000 * 12.3% * 5%), instead it’s at about 31,000, or 1/4 of that. I’m not saying that it isn’t serious, I’m just saying that people who seek out testing are more likely to have a positive result (see below). This is especially true when there is a shortage of tests and testing is done via priority. Thus if you are only looking at testing as the indicator of the number of cases, you will be wrong about your death rate. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2006100
You're right, the death rate is high due to underreporting of cases. We don't have an accurate estimate of actual cases. Do you have a cite for 12.3% positive antibody tests in NY? Is that randomized or people that think they had it got tested? (NM here it is. It appears to be pretty random). Still this report isn't very scientific. I see no time period for the tests. Methodology isn't well described. Other numbers reported on that page are not accurate. It's not time to conclude 5.4% is too high. ETA: the flu death rate 2019-2020 if using the low end number for cases, and the high number for deaths shows a pessimistic IFR of 0.1%. The lethality of covid-19 appears to be 10 times that number, and a lot higher if you weight cases:deaths more optimistically. There is also the number of people of all ages that suffer permanent disabilities due to other impacts besides death.
Read somewhere that the number of people who have died alone in their homes and found later are up almost 200%. Then there’s the people who do get the virus, get sick, recover and never get tested. there are a whole lot of factors that go into the 5%. But, honestly, between this administration and the fucked up media in the US, I trust global numbers before I trust anything coming out of the US.
Thanks for posting the article. The exchange you hooked onto addressed measured CFR, not assumed IFR. Please also note that studies in Sweden, where we see pervasiveness with little to no distancing, and Iceland, where we have almost 100 % tested, arrive at pervasions of under 1%, making measures like 12% in the limited NY study extremely unlikely.
We've been over this in the other thread. It's probably around 1.5% IFR (0.4-2.3% last I checked, which was probably a few weeks ago? Time is a flat circle and who even knows how long ago that was anymore), but that's heavily dependent on demographics and (probably) density. It's much worse in older people, and worse in what is not confirmed --- but sure waggles its eyebrows suggestively -- high viral load situations, which density creates. Even 0.4% is 3x the flu - pretty damn bad. Anything above 1% is just terrible. No need to say it's worse than it is. 5.4% is well above every credible estimate that I've seen.
NYC is 27-50x denser than urban core-metro Reykjavik; NYS 140x as dense as Iceland. Encounters with other people grow (VERY approximately) linearly with density, AFAIK, so 12 or 19x the prevalence in the same timeframe doesn't surprise me. ETA: That's why urban and potential super-spreader event lockdowns and are extremely important.
Yes, and in addition to that, NYC has been one of the worst hotspots for Covid-19 on the planet. Absolutely not the place from which to extrapolate numbers to the US or the world.
I don't think The Exception was. Edit: Oh, the IFR numbers. Except I think they match the rest of the world's estimates pretty well too, because the C:I ratio tracks.