Coronaviral

[Vesper 28,844]

How the Pandemic Will End

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-coronavirus-end/608719/

 

Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.

A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”

So, now what? In the late hours of last Wednesday, which now feels like the distant past, I was talking about the pandemic with a pregnant friend who was days away from her due date. We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.

As we’ll see, Gen C’s lives will be shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks, and by the losses we suffer as a result. But first, a brief reckoning. On the Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed.

“No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,” says Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at the Boston University School of Medicine. More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza, the new coronavirus is also stealthier, spreading from one host to another for several days before triggering obvious symptoms. To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the United States did not.

As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.

 

The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country. Overstretched hospitals became overwhelmed. Basic protective equipment, such as masks, gowns, and gloves, began to run out. Beds will soon follow, as will the ventilators that provide oxygen to patients whose lungs are besieged by the virus.

With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency. That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition; some worried hospitals have bought out large quantities of supplies, in the way that panicked consumers have bought out toilet paper.

Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the president’s ear. Instead of springing into action, America sat idle.

Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”

I. The Next Months

Having fallen behind, it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the United States to catch up. To an extent, the near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April. As of last weekend, the nation had 17,000 confirmed cases, but the actual number was probably somewhere between 60,000 and 245,000. Numbers are now starting to rise exponentially: As of Wednesday morning, the official case count was 54,000, and the actual case count is unknown. Health-care workers are already seeing worrying signs: dwindling equipment, growing numbers of patients, and doctors and nurses who are themselves becoming infected.

Italy and Spain offer grim warnings about the future. Hospitals are out of room, supplies, and staff. Unable to treat or save everyone, doctors have been forced into the unthinkable: rationing care to patients who are most likely to survive, while letting others die. The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one.  By the end of the summer, the pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans, notwithstanding those who will indirectly die as hospitals are unable to care for the usual slew of heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents. This is the worst-case scenario. To avert it, four things need to happen—and quickly.

SNIP (much more at the top link)

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

 

[chippy 342]

31 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

No one noticed the information from the Chinese embassy between Christmas and Epiphany on 6th January. Johnson was having his extended toe suck on Mustique and the brexiteer gang were still hamming it large because, the tories had won.

There"s much to come out when this is over and by all accounts China will not come out of it very well.

Which do you trust the most - The   free world with its free media or those secretive Commies? I know which side I trust the most!

[chippy 342]

Purely on the economy.

As with us, the crash will only be temporary! 

We are very well oiled machines with lots of very clever people who know how to get things going, run things and get us out of difficult periods.

Furthermore. This has been a genuine shock to us all. We'll learn from this and make sure that from now on we'll have large enough reserves of crucial equipment etc, ready for when the next pandemic strikes, which it will do at some point in time.

 

 

 

 

[Fernando 6,464]

More Than 3 Million in U.S. Filed for Unemployment Last Week: Live Updates

 

RIGHT NOW

The Labor Department released data on last week’s unemployment claims, some of the first hard data on the pandemic’s economic toll.

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/business/stock-market-today-coronavirus.html

 

 

That's a lot. 

The figures are pretty bad. I say if it wasn't for the FED the economy will be much worse...that is the stock market and what not. 

Because US government is a bunch of shenanigans. Always fighting the democrats and republicans. 

This is why the autonomy that has FED is so vital to the economy of the us...and indeed the world because it impacts the world. 

[NikkiCFC 7,953]

I remember when Italy had 10k cases they had around 500 deaths. UK very similar numbers now. Be careful!

[11Drogba 2,000]

 

[11Drogba 2,000]

 

[Vesper 28,844]

All the Coronavirus Statistics Are Flawed

Are we winning the war against COVID-19? In the fog of pandemic, we simply don’t know.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/fog-pandemic/608764/

This is war.

That is the clear message from governments around the world that have locked down their populations and ordered businesses shuttered. It is the new reality for corporations that are repurposing their facilities to manufacture ventilators, masks, and hand sanitizer to beat back the coronavirus. It is the battle cry of celebrities—and legions of less famous people—urging their fellow citizens to sacrifice their social lives for the common good.

Many people will want to know in the next few weeks how the war effort is going. Are infections still rising exponentially, or are we flattening the curve? Is the economy headed for another depression, or are we poised for a swift bounce back? In short: Are we winning?

The frustrating answer is that we don’t know—and we might not know for a while.

Many of us have heard of “the fog of war,” a term coined by the 19th-century Prussian military writer Carl von Clausewitz. It refers to the idea that war is often conducted in a haze of uncertainty: Militaries do not fully understand either their enemy’s threat or their own capacity to combat it.

What we’re experiencing now is the fog of pandemic. The officials tracking COVID-19 are swimming in statistics: infection rates, case-fatality ratios, economic data. But in these early stages of the fight against the coronavirus, these figures each have their own particular limitations. We are already seeing how, in the haze of confusing data, political leaders are trying to marshal that uncertainty to override the advice of public-health experts. Indeed, President Donald Trump seems eager to seize on anything that can justify his push to reopen public life in mid-April, perhaps while daily cases are still increasing.  

To better identify both optimistic propaganda and useless pessimism, it’s important to see the limitations of the data we have before us.

Let’s start with the health statistics. A quick glance at available data in America will show coronavirus infection rates rising at a terrifying clip. In the U.S., the number of total confirmed cases is doubling every three days—quicker than in Italy, France, or the U.K.

But we have to be careful about drawing hard conclusions from that one statistic. Confirmed cases are a function of confirmed tests. After a tragically late start, U.S. testing capacity has doubled in the past week. Is the U.S. currently experiencing rapid growth in coronavirus cases, or rapid growth in coronavirus testing, or both? The answer should sound familiar: We don’t know yet, and it will be a while before we do.

Other metrics used to gauge the scale of the outbreak, such as hospitalizations and deaths, have their own limitations. Not all states are reporting hospitalizations, and once hospitals are full, additional cases might not show up in reported figures. Death statistics are also a function of case-by-case diagnosis and cause-of-death methodology. Many deaths due to COVID-19 may have been—and many more may continue to be—misdiagnosed as the result of pneumonia or another respiratory ailment.

With time and increased testing, the state of this outbreak will come into focus. But leaders should be humble, and citizens must be patient, about the fact that no single metric is gospel right now. Even many health statistics taken together can offer at best an incomplete picture of the scope of the crisis.

The economic front is equally murky. Predictions among investment banks for the second-quarter change in GDP range from a 12 percent decline (Bank of America) to a 30 percent decline (Morgan Stanley). That’s not a sign of economists having an informed debate. It’s a sign that economists have no idea what’s going on.

And how could they? This sudden-onset recession has no precedent in American history. Our economic tools are not designed to quickly and accurately measure this kind of abrupt devastation.

One example is the official unemployment rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish on April 3 its first estimate of March unemployment. You might expect that this official report will finally offer clarity on the economic picture in the U.S.

Don’t get your hopes up. According to the Cornell economist Erica Groshen, the report will tell us practically nothing about what happened in the second half of March. “The initial BLS surveys are conducted the week of the 12th of each month,” she told me. “So in April we will get an estimate of the unemployment rate from the week of March 12.”

March 12 was the Thursday before many states and cities announced, the following Sunday, that they would be closing all restaurants and bars. The economy in the first two weeks of March was an entirely different than the economy in these last two weeks of March. We won’t have an accurate picture of the March unemployment rate until the BLS releases its next revision, in May, an eternity in pandemic timekeeping.

Economists are also focused on the number of new people filing to receive jobless benefits—a statistic called “initial claims.” Economists broadly anticipate the highest initial-claims figure in history.

But that figure, too, might not initially reflect the depth of the crisis. State unemployment websites have been crashing as the numbers of applications surged to about three times greater than their previous record. To accommodate the historic increase, states are extending hours of operation and shifting government employees from other jobs to answer questions and process applications.

While official figures are slow, unofficial figures are pouring in from survey companies and online dashboards. Polls from SurveyUSA and NPR/PBS suggest that millions of people have already lost their jobs. Homebase, an online payroll and scheduling processor, reported that one in four businesses had stopped operating altogether.

“The big question is, ‘When will we know more?,’ and the answer is: It depends,” says Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. “On the financial side, we’ll see immediately if there’s a cascading catastrophe, because you’ll have a breakdown in credit markets. On the business side, we’ll see hints, like bankruptcy numbers, throughout the next few months. But on the consumer side, we might not really know where we are until the virus is beaten.” In fact, the Bureau of Economic Analysis doesn't publish its first estimate of second-quarter GDP growth, which includes estimates of consumer spending, until July.

The U.S. is fighting a war with extreme uncertainties. It may be weeks before we know whether we are flattening the coronavirus curve, and months before we know what kind of economy we’ll have in the second half of this year. But if one thing is clear, it’s that American leaders cannot afford to wait around until public-health and economic data offer an exact picture. Every day that Congress debates a relief package might be the day when thousands of families run out of food and hundreds of companies verge on bankruptcy. In the fog of pandemic, action must come before perfect information.

[Vesper 28,844]

UK patient zero? East Sussex family may have been infected with coronavirus as early as mid-January

If confirmed, it would mean outbreak in Britain started more than a month earlier than is currently thought

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/uk-patient-zero-east-sussex-family-may-have-infected-coronavirus/

A family from East Sussex may have been Britain’s first coronavirus victims, catching the virus in mid-January after one of them visited an Austrian ski resort that is now under investigation for allegedly covering up the early outbreak. If confirmed by official tests, it would mean the outbreak in Britain started more than a month earlier than currently thought. As things stand, the first recorded UK case was on January 31, and the earliest documented incidence of transmission within Britain occurred on February 28.

IT consultant Daren Bland, 50, was skiing in Ischgl, Austria from January 15 to 19 with three friends, two from Denmark and one from Minnesota in America. All three fell ill on their return with classic coronavirus symptoms, and Mr Bland passed on the infection to his wife and children in Maresfield, East Sussex. A virus caused a dry cough then spread rapidly through the area in the weeks running up to the February half-term, with many local children taking time off school with illness.

On Tuesday, Austrian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into allegations that a suspected infection in the resort of Ischgl was covered up, allowing Covid-19 to spread across Europe undetected. Hundreds of infections in Germany, Iceland, Norway and Denmark have been traced back to the resort, in the Tyrolean Alps, by European investigators, but Mr Bland and his family are the first in the UK known to be associated with it.

Like many of the European victims, Mr Bland visited the Kitzloch bar, known for its après-ski parties. The bar is tightly packed and known for "beer pong" – a drinking game in which revellers take turns to spit the same ping-pong ball into a beer glass. "We visited the Kitzloch and it was rammed, with people singing and dancing on the tables," Mr Bland recalled on Wednesday. "People were hot and sweaty from skiing, and waiters were delivering shots to tables in their hundreds. You couldn't have a better home for a virus."

The Telegraph has obtained an exclusive video shot inside the Kitzloch bar, which clearly shows conditions inside the venue.

 

[11Drogba 2,000]

Italy announces 6,153 new coronavirus cases, the most in five days

[NikkiCFC 7,953]

11 minutes ago, 11Drogba said:

Italy announces 6,153 new coronavirus cases, the most in five days

"A ratio of one certified case out of every 10 is credible," Angelo Borrelli told La Repubblica newspaper, indicating he believed some 700,000 people could have been infected.

[chippy 342]

14 minutes ago, Vesper said:

UK patient zero? East Sussex family may have been infected with coronavirus as early as mid-January

If confirmed, it would mean outbreak in Britain started more than a month earlier than is currently thought

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/uk-patient-zero-east-sussex-family-may-have-infected-coronavirus/

A family from East Sussex may have been Britain’s first coronavirus victims, catching the virus in mid-January after one of them visited an Austrian ski resort that is now under investigation for allegedly covering up the early outbreak. If confirmed by official tests, it would mean the outbreak in Britain started more than a month earlier than currently thought. As things stand, the first recorded UK case was on January 31, and the earliest documented incidence of transmission within Britain occurred on February 28.

IT consultant Daren Bland, 50, was skiing in Ischgl, Austria from January 15 to 19 with three friends, two from Denmark and one from Minnesota in America. All three fell ill on their return with classic coronavirus symptoms, and Mr Bland passed on the infection to his wife and children in Maresfield, East Sussex. A virus caused a dry cough then spread rapidly through the area in the weeks running up to the February half-term, with many local children taking time off school with illness.

On Tuesday, Austrian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into allegations that a suspected infection in the resort of Ischgl was covered up, allowing Covid-19 to spread across Europe undetected. Hundreds of infections in Germany, Iceland, Norway and Denmark have been traced back to the resort, in the Tyrolean Alps, by European investigators, but Mr Bland and his family are the first in the UK known to be associated with it.

Like many of the European victims, Mr Bland visited the Kitzloch bar, known for its après-ski parties. The bar is tightly packed and known for "beer pong" – a drinking game in which revellers take turns to spit the same ping-pong ball into a beer glass. "We visited the Kitzloch and it was rammed, with people singing and dancing on the tables," Mr Bland recalled on Wednesday. "People were hot and sweaty from skiing, and waiters were delivering shots to tables in their hundreds. You couldn't have a better home for a virus."

The Telegraph has obtained an exclusive video shot inside the Kitzloch bar, which clearly shows conditions inside the venue.

 

I know someone  who came back from a holiday in America in January and had all the symptoms of the virus. Both her and her hubby were pretty ill for several days but didn't need any hospital treatment. 

[chippy 342]

9 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

"A ratio of one certified case out of every 10 is credible," Angelo Borrelli told La Repubblica newspaper, indicating he believed some 700,000 people could have been infected.

Possible number of infections are really just guess work. I was watching something last night with somebody saying the UK might already have had many millions of people infected but they showed no symptoms at all or very little. 

[11Drogba 2,000]

 

[11Drogba 2,000]

 

[Vesper 28,844]

3 hours ago, 11Drogba said:

 

meanwhile in Sweden

home of the shittiest COVID response in the EU (no shutdowns of so many segments of society, only crowds of more than FIVE HUNDRED banned, etc etc)

ffs

duncey berks

 

Malmö in Skåne, the far south, right across from Copenhagen

 

 

 

AND today we had the US population adjusted equivalent of over 10,000 new cases and 350 deaths     

 

[Vesper 28,844]

Jonathan Pie: LOCKDOWN episode 2

Jonathan Pie: LOCKDOWN episode 2 Pie attempts to make his spare room look more like a news studio. https://www.jonathanpie.com

[Vesper 28,844]

Pie is turning into a national treasure