Typical for this thread...completely devoid of any attempt at logic or the most basic internet search.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/policies/law.../exposure.html

That's just the criminal law side.

That link changes nothing. The laws state that HIV infected people are required to disclose their HIV status to potential partners.

That differs immensely from your specific words earlier, which were “required to abstain”.

The former is a rule that few would dispute as a Constitutional infringement. The latter, however, would be far more troublesome.

About as troublesome as a law-abiding shopkeeper being ordered by one elected official to stop conducting business indefinitely until “I say so”.

Please stop spreading facts, it hurts the narrative.

The fact that the wealthy own the research, work and production of others? Ya we know. That's the system of capitalism lol.

Oh bless you billionaire saviors. Rescuing us from covid and totally not profiting from a crisis...

They should have just done that from the beginning instead of willingly trashing the economy for years to come. This will go down as the world's biggest ruse....

Traffic is still light and I love it. The sky usually turns into a soupy haze after 2 consecutive days of sun but now it's amazing how pristine and crisp it has stayed since the lockdown.

Day 9 in Arkansas:

Went to my sisters house for my nephew's 2nd birthday party. About 20 people showed up(ILLEGAL IN MANY PLACES LOL). My brother-in-law's grandpa came up to me and shook my hand. I thanked the guy for giving me some semblance of normalcy back(he also happened to be the oldest guy in the room). About three of the guests worked at the hospital with my brother-in-law, zero masks. Beautiful day. Kids were going crazy. We had a side-by-side pulling some "train cars" to keep the kids entertained. Man, life is NICE when you feel normal again, so damn nice.

My brother-in-law's father is a preacher in rural Missouri. I asked him about how his church has been doing, and he said, to my surprise, "never been better." Their donations are up and he is going to keep the internet thing going and he's actually broadcasting on the radio within a 2-mile range of his church so the older people who are worried(and don't understand technology) can sit in their cars or at home and listen in. He said the social distancing protocols he's put in place has been universally appreciated by people there and things are moving along nicely. Great news.

Anyways, how is Covid-19 impacting my current city of Paragould Arkansas? Not much.

They own the means of production. All of those valuable capital assets are what make our economy and society different from impoverished places in Africa where they plow fields by hand. Those people work hard as well.

sure open up your shop. i catch a corona in there because you arent enforcing common sense rules i will sue you back to the stone age. you really want your already backed up courts clogged up with that? :shrug:

delete

A few quick points here:

1) I swear, the self-righteous, selfish, "Me! Me! Me!" attitude I've been reading by so many fellow SSPers here is truly disgusting! All this whining about not being able to get your hair cut, go to a bar, sit inside restaurants, go to the gym, etc... What about the freaking employees of those establishments? Does anyone care about their health and safety?

2) It's abundantly clear that the average income level of most SSPers is 3-5x the national/world average, apparently. All this talk about huge bonuses and commissions, paying cash for homes, huge down payments, etc... Wow, it's like we're on another goddamned planet from most people!

3) As many of you know, I've gone from working in a professional industry (oil & gas services) to retail (specifically a huge liquor store chain). Let's just say that the last couple of months have been insane for me, both in terms of ever-changing rules and regulations to of course a massive increase in sales. It's gotten to the point where the lines outside to get in have as many people as those in the store! I deal with hundreds of people every single day, not sure if any of them are carriers of COVID-19. Obviously the masks help greatly in preventing the spread from one person to another, but there's still a certain level of risk in what I do right now.

4) To everyone saying to open everything now, get rid of social distancing, etc... How many new cases/deaths are acceptable to you? You really think restaurants should be back to being packed? Bars packed to the gills three-deep? No distancing at all? With no real treatment and no vaccine? Seriously? I'm not saying a vaccine is the be all end all here, but a reasonable treatment protocol that reduces severity of the illness would be nice!

5) As a retail/service worker for the last year or two, I've seen the good, bad and ugliest of people's behaviors. If anything, I truly hope that there is a much greater appreciation for the people that allow all of you bitching and moaning about not being able to do everything you want right now on a freaking whim now and into the future! Be thankful that there are still delivery drivers, cashiers, warehouse/stockers, restaurant employees, postal carriers, transit employees, etc., (and of course our amazing nurses!) that are risking their own safety by dealing with the public right now!

6) I still can't get over the absolute narcissism and selfish behaviors by so many here. It makes me sick to my goddamned stomach. :(

Aaron (Glowrock)

Welcome to America, land of the most spoiled people in the world. The fact that we have people comparing the lockdown (which was implemented in the interest of public health and safety, not because they wanted to prevent you from going to Chili's) to Communism and being ruled by Hitler, when they haven't lived a second of their lives in those environments, tells you all that you need to know.

That being said, the time to reopen was a month ago, and should be, and is, gradual and carefully thought out. The curve has been flattened, hospitals have plenty of capacity, and people can make the personal choice whether they want to assume the risk or not.

No way, man, you're way too selfish. Anyone would wants to avoid a second Great Depression and mass global starvation is selfish. Anyone who wants to sit at home the next three years watching Netflix, waiting for the death count to approach zero, is virtuous.

Great post, and thank you. I am a professional working from home but a significant portion of my friend group works in various areas of the local restaurant and craft beer scene. They are affected a hell of a lot more than me, and in many different ways*. It's easy to whine while sitting at your computer because you can't go out after work - I get it, I normally do that and it fucking sucks.

But as to some of your points, seems like a select number of SSPers would gleefully shove the homeless / old people / relatives into a woodchipper if it benefited their portfolio.

*Almost everyone has gotten supported by the government at least, with the exception of the current failings of our small business program. I hate being a Canada booster but we haven't turned this into a Culture War in the same sense that the US seems to have managed.

Lockdowns should've wound down like homebucket mentioned but the Oscar for a leading role in a drama goes to...

Many people did lose their jobs in industries that had razor thin margins who never prepared for black swan events or those with one foot already in Chapter 11 but we were asked to social distance for a month of so and the hysterics ensued. Glowrock is correct.

The correct answer on when to "reopen" is once adequate test-and-trace is in place. Reopening before then is useless, because cases will spike again within a few weeks. Australia shows we could do it - if we gave a shit.

FWIW, there's no evidence that reopening will "save the economy." Sweden is heading for a steep recession even though people there just stayed at home voluntarily. And in the U.S.'s case, Georgia has been "open" for about a month now. It seems like economic activity has only picked up slightly, and new unemployment filings continue to rise (apparently now over 40% - highest in nation).

One great fallacy among the know-nothings: The idea that going out only puts yourself at risk.

Another: A single partial measure (six feet, a mask, etc.) is all you need without the other measures.

4 years of Donald Trump has literally hardened millions of hearts. He gave them permission to openly act like assholes.

Like who the F totes guns to the state house because they think theyre going to strong arm the governor into submitting to their selfishness? We are devolving very quickly and these idiots are nothing but brainwashed sheep.

And make no mistake, they are being prodded by online bots, just like in 2016.

My high school buddy has an 80's cover rock band and they plays gigs throughout the southeast. They had a show in Dayton TN last night. I texted him asking what sort of crowd control / social distancing measures if any they had in place for the pandemic, and he told me "nothing at all...it's business as usual with normal crowds and activity up this way".

Well, good luck not getting that suit thrown out. I imagine it would be nearly impossible to win such a case.

Besides, many States like Illinois have executive orders in place that provide tort immunity from Covid related litigation. Thankfully so, the last thing we need from this pandemic is to make more slimy lawyers rich....

Last but not least, even if you did “catch Corona” :rolleyes: and you were allowed to sue, what are you going to sue for? For being among that 99.9% of people who have either no symptoms or, at most, a fever, headache, and body aches for a week? Oh boy, that will win you millions!!

Nearly 6% of the known US cases have died. Your "99.9" is BS and you know it.

The real number is certainly lower than 6% because we miss a large percentage of cases due to lack of testing, and probably do catch most deaths. But the point remains whether it's actually 1% or 5%.

You have absolutely zero evidence that the mortality rate of this infection is between 1-5% and if you are claiming so then you are pulling that out of your ass.

Nobody knows, we will only know in the future upon retrospect after a long, hard look at years of data.

But my guess is that it will be well south of 1%. A death rate of 1% is ludicrous and based on the most pessimistic perspective

It doesn't really matter what the mortality rate is, but it's obviously not "well south of 1%".

In NYC, 21,216 people have either been confirmed to have died from COVID-19 or are presumed to have had it (had it listed as cause of death, but no test to confirm).

NYC is estimated to have 8,336,817 people right now.

22,216 divided by 8,336,817 is roughly 0.25% of the population of New York City.

Serology tests suggest 20%-25% of New Yorkers have had the virus, so multiply the number by 4 or 5, and that's the effective death rate.

Good point. 0.1%, 1%, 10%, 20%, 40%...........its all the same :uhh:

Just for comparison, Smallpox’s case mortality rate was estimated to be 30%. Now that, my friend, is a virus worthy of running and hiding from.

As for Covid? Deadlier than Influenza, it appears, but way way way closer to that than a real killer like Smallpox was.

What matters is mortality rate AND reproduction rate. If only 7 people are infected then a 1% mortality rate isn't scary. If 7 billion people get infected, then California, New York State, and Illinois die. Reproduction rate determines that. Also, everyone in Europe and the Americas will get sick enough to be hospitalized (the 20%).

Not arguing that COVID-19 is worse than smallpox (it's obviously not, except that we have a vaccine for smallpox, even though we don't use it anymore), but is it correct to compare the smallpox case fatality rate to the COVID-19 infection fatality rate? Maybe that's appropriate for smallpox (all infections represent as cases?) but I have no idea. Obviously CFRs are easier to calculate and there probably wasn't the population monitoring in the past to get a decent estimate of the IFR. I guess the age distribution is also very different between now and then (which makes smallpox scarier, since it was more deadly on a younger population), and smallpox appears to have an even higher reproductive constant than COVID-19.

If we're talking CFRs, the CFR for COVID-19 is of course much higher than than the IFR estimate of 1%. Using the numbers for dead and recovered on the Worldometer site, it's 18% in the US, although that is possibly an overestimate as many "active cases" may never get marked as recovered. Using deaths / total cases you get 5.6%, which is an underestimate for the CFR because obviously deaths lag cases. 10% is probalby a reasonable estimate for the CFR for COVID-19 (and is ~compatible with the overall 10X underreporting that most studies indicate).

The CDC estimates the mortality rate for all cases is .4%
Point 4......virulent pathogen with 99.6% survival rate. Okay...

That seems incongrous with the population fatality rate in some Italian provinces where it appears nearly everyone got affected and strongly in tension with NYC (it would imply that 60% of NYC got infected, or that NYC had an atypical infected age distribution).

The source seems to be https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...scenarios.html but they don't explain their methodology at all, unfortunately.

I read somewhere the virus is mutating and in the process becoming more infectious but less lethal, the goal of any virus; not to kill its hosts and to spread even more effectively. The earlier strains probably had a much higher death rate.

All viruses mutate and it would make sense that this is the direction of travel. That’s why we have so many endemic viruses that cause the common cold.

Why is it selfish to want to open the economy but it's not selfish to sit there and beg the government to force businesses to shut down because of your fear? Many of which will never reopen, why isn't that selfish?

Let me flip the question on you: how many deaths are you willing to put up with to reopen? If it is ZERO, you aren't a rational person. So what number is it? Also, how many deaths of despair are you willing to put up with to save people in nursing homes?


Your moral posturing is off the charts bro, relax. You live in Chicago, they won't open up until probably 2025.

I haven't see any article or researcher on TV who thinks the death rate is anything over 1%.

Bro, I feel like you are stuck in mid-March when we had no idea what was going on and we were scared and just wanted ACTION. It's fine to come out now...

How hard have you worked over the years to become such a complete jackass? My god, it's as if nobody in this world matters but you! You're behaving like a boorish ass, and it's absolutely sickening. I can throw several other SSPers in with you on this one right now, too.

I think it's time for me to make my final exit from SSP at this point. I don't want to be associated with such buffoonery.

Aaron (Glowrock)

I should have said "more like 1%." It's still far more realistic than the "0.1" that was suggested out of either ignorance or hyperbole.

The recent antibody studies suggesting numbers like 0.4% are encouraging. There's debate over whether they're accurate enough to give a clear picture on infection rates.

Let's say it's 0.4% and we get to 70% infection in the US. That's just 942,000 US deaths if we open things up and don't find a vaccine or effective treatment.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-clu..._join#cxrecs_s

Expect memorial Day weekend activities to produce new hotspots amd significant increases in R0 rates across America.

No, it isn't. As usual, you know just enought to be very wrong. First of all, the "common cold" is not a disease but a syndrome caused by many viruses (guesses now are perhaps 200 different ones). There are at least 4 main unrelated groups: coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, parainfluenze viruses and respiratory syncitial viruses. Within these groups, there are a number of different distinct viruses (as there are at least 2 distinct SARS-CoV viruses). It's possible that back somewhere they may have a common ancestor, but within our period of observing them they are not mutations one of the other. And, indeed, by one estimate at least 20-30% of "colds" are caused by totally unidentified viruses.

It's true that all viruses mutate, but it isn't true that all viruses commonly undergo signficicant mutations of their immunologically important proteins. This, while SARS-CoV-2 has been observed to mutate, it has not undergone mutations of its spike protein in ways that are thought to make a vaccine to that protein ineffective.

It's going to be a philosophical debate. Do we accept the risk and carry on with life but adopt mitigating strategies or try the 100 percent containment method which has resulted in 100 percent economic catastrophe. It's safe to say the narrative was hijacked by the press and they made it look 1000 times worse. I also think because the world saw an authoritarian regime lock up its people we thought that was the an acceptable protocol. Honestly by the time we started noticing cases containing it was probably futile. It had already been spreading around the country. My vote is the world panicked and multiple opportunists seized this moment for their individual agendas.

How does any of this contradict that I said? I know all of this, trust me, and I never said or implied that viruses which cause colds had a single ancestor. They are different viruses but they are endemic in humans, partly because they are able to spread between human hosts without being fatal. The fact that many different viruses appear to have evolved to fit this ecological niche (essentially) supports the point.

PDX: The lockdowns should have been tigher. We'd have far lower day-by-day numbers today, and far easier options going forward. Imagine if we had 300,000 active cases vs. the 1,140,000 active cases reported right now at WorldO.

And we should have done a better job keeping things financially afloat...more to those at risk, less to those not at risk.

As for getting back to normal economically, we're seeing signs that it won't happen until people are confident, regardless of what's allowed to reopen. Smart people aren't going to restaurants in Georgia right now.

“100 percent containment” is not an option, both because it’s impossible and because it doesn’t meet any reasonable assessment of cost vs benefit.

On the contrary, one theory (see below #2848) has it that the strain of virus that has been active in most of the US, the west coast being the exception, is more virulent than the original Asian strain predominant on that coast (which may explain why Washington State and California, which had some of the earliest cases and the most direct travel from Asia in the early days of the pandemic, seem to have had a better experience than New York and the rest of the country east of the Rockies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/s...e-genomes.html

However let me repost a diagram of the SARS-CoV-2 virus:

https://i.shgcdn.com/607f7680-433d-4...ality/lighter/
https://www.assaygenie.com/sarscov2-...ection-methods

Mutations are alterations in nucleic acid base pairs (in the viral RNA) which code for proteins so viral mutations produce slight changes to the proteins of the virus (or of the cells of other organisms). As the diagram shows, SARS-CoV-2 has 4 principal proteins making up its "coat" or capsule, any one of which can theoretcially be altered by mutation. But it's the spike protein (or glycoprotein) which seems to be critical to viral infectivity and it is antibodies to the spike protein which neutralize the virus (and the production of which is the goal of the various vaccine candidates). Therefore, it would be major mutation-caused alterations to the spike, and probably only the spike, protein which would change the effectiveness of a vaccine (or permit reinfection of someone who has previously had COVID-19). So far, although there have been at least 14 observed spike protein mutations (see also below #2848), I don't believe any has been observed in either SARS-CoV-2 or in other coronaviruses of the SARS/MERS group that researchers believe would render a vaccine ineffective.

You said we have so many viruses causing colds because they mutate. That isn't the reason.

PS: Niether I nor anyone here has any idea of your credentials for saying anything because you won't tell us what they are.

You misunderstood the point. They have not mutated or evolved from a common ancestor, but have all developed to be contagious but not generally deadly to humans, as this allows them to spread more broadly. But it’s like convergent evolution (not really, but similar idea) rather than these various viruses having had a single genetic antecedent, at least in humans.

And I think some of your fellow forumers have been able to figure it out...

And here's the philosophical debate part. I'll have to politely disagree. The lockdowns should never have happened in the first place. We should have adopted mitigation from the get go. Made everybody wear masks and do all the distancing. How do can protect society when you remove its foundation? Maybe that's the Achilles heal of western capitalism. The moment you stop working and producing revenue, the engine seizes. I'll agree though, we need a better safety net. Baby SARS has proven we dont have our tactical and economic act together.

Probably not necessarily tighter, but earlier. The evidence seems pretty good that measures that were put into place, at least in the aggressive parts of the country and world, worked fairly well to reduce the R0 but they weren't put in place until the virus was fairly widespread. One theory, with which most of us are probably familiar because it got a lot of press, had it that even one week earlier would have made a tremendous difference. I'm not sure I buy that, but the general point I believe to be valid.

It's a valid arguing point but we'll never really know. But recall that we were told the need for lockdowns was because we didn't have enough ICU beds and ventillators and even emergency care providers, all of which turned out to be wrong. But whether it was wrong because we DID have lockdowns in the hotspots or whether it would have been wrong without them remains hard to say. I suspect New York would have resembled northern Italy with no lockdown and that was pretty awful.

We had enough facilities in most places BECAUSE we locked things down...that's been a success so far.

One study recently said we could have saved 35,000 lives by locking down a week earlier. That appears to be a general consensus, with only the extent being debatable.

I'll say it again...this stuff is so much easier when numbers are low, and the options for going forward are so much better. We made our bed by letting it get out of hand, not having a central system for dealing with it aggressively, and allowing the wingnuts to get loose.