The Coronavirus, not the beer

[Dalyn]

But Dalyn will say there is no reason to speculate even though its obvious.

May have originally been a lab mistake but China used it as a weapon to achieve their goals.

Speculate: form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence

You sure speculate a lot, and then you seem to never adjust your speculation once we have actual firm evidence. Speculate all you want, just don't be an idiot.

Here is this link again - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

We know it was not constructed in a lab. We know it was not manipulated in a lab. So what were they doing with it? Also, it would have to evolve naturally, spread to a human, that human get quarantined without giving it to anyone else, the virus collected from said human, kept in the lab for a bit, nothing done with it except observation, and then accidentally or on purpose getting released to their own population (not carried to another country and released). All this while nothing else dangerous in that lab was released, and the lab remained operational. If you believe a scenario like that with no firm evidence over the scenario we have faced with nearly every other virus, you are being an idiot.

[cajunrevenge]

https://calgaryherald.com/cannabis/c...6vDTiq0Czjjx-g




omgomogomomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomg. I have been smoking the vaccine all along!




Sure hope Trump sees this, bonus points he could REALLY piss off Jeff Sessions.

[nsacpi]

https://calgaryherald.com/cannabis/c...6vDTiq0Czjjx-g




omgomogomomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomg. I have been smoking the vaccine all along!




Sure hope Trump sees this, bonus points he could REALLY piss off Jeff Sessions.

I see that and raise you a gin and tonic...100% effective so far...anecdotally speaking

[cajunrevenge]

well thats good enough for the President.

[nsacpi]

well thats good enough for the President.

look...there is no need for you to compare me to very poorly chosen one...my science is of a much higher standard...you have no idea how much work has gone into my effort to find the right gin and the right tonic

[cajunrevenge]

Cant argue with a 100% success rate. Why even both raising the sample size beyond 1. That can only lead to bad news and bad news is bad. So best not to test and just assume the best case scenario will happen. I am like... a very stable genius.

[nsacpi]

Of course bad news is bad...if you only test once that's less chance of bad news

#obvious

[Krgrecw]

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) asked World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to suppress news about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, the German intelligence agency BND found, according to a report by German magazine Der Spiegel.

During a conversation on Jan. 21, Xi reportedly asked Tedros not to announce that the virus could be transmitted between humans and to delay any declaration of a coronavirus pandemic.

It took until the end of January before the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak needed to receive international attention. Because of China’s delay, the world wasted four to six weeks it could have used better to counter the virus from spreading, the BND concluded.

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute also said that China failed to reveal all relevant information at the outset of the epidemic, leading it to turn to the BND for advice, according to a report in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung quoted by CNA.

In a response to the German media reports, Chinese diplomats said the opposite was true, arguing that the communist country’s handling of the virus had saved time which had been wasted by governments in other countries.




Is this concerning enough?

[nsacpi]

Besides if I tested my gin and tonic on someone else there woul be less for me

#therealstablegenius

[thethe]

Speculate: form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence

You sure speculate a lot, and then you seem to never adjust your speculation once we have actual firm evidence. Speculate all you want, just don't be an idiot.

Here is this link again - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

We know it was not constructed in a lab. We know it was not manipulated in a lab. So what were they doing with it? Also, it would have to evolve naturally, spread to a human, that human get quarantined without giving it to anyone else, the virus collected from said human, kept in the lab for a bit, nothing done with it except observation, and then accidentally or on purpose getting released to their own population (not carried to another country and released). All this while nothing else dangerous in that lab was released, and the lab remained operational. If you believe a scenario like that with no firm evidence over the scenario we have faced with nearly every other virus, you are being an idiot.

The CCPs nature is all you need to understand.

[sturg33]

[Dalyn]

The CCPs nature is all you need to understand.

This isn't challenging and the response of it's just China is well laughable.

I'll let you handle my light work.

[nsacpi]

Michael Levitt is someone I find very useful to listen to on the pandemic, even though I've come to hold rather different views on how it should be handled. Good podcast.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...heir-economies

[Carp]

From what I can tell only Estonia and maybe Italy are testing more per capital than the US? And those are basically the same as US, just slightly higher

Many countries haven't released that sort of information, or it's lagging. But Denmark, UK, Italy, and New Zealand are all a good bit better than the US.

[nsacpi]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/f...NK+NZL+CAN+DEU

Here's a neat site that has the cumulative testing per capita data. You can add or subtract countries from the graphic. I would focus a bit more on how much testing they are doing now or the past few weeks, but the cumulative data is interesting to look at.

[nsacpi]

Some of the social distancing should absolutely be maintained since it can be done at relataively low cost. But we have to find a way to restart some of the parts of the economy that have been shut down. None of this is easy. But I don't buy the absolutist position that it should 100% be about saving lives. At some point the cost becomes prohibitive. And I think we have crossed it. So we need to scale back and become smarter about some of the measures that have been taken.

So what radicalized me?

Well I would say three things:

1) Playing around with the numbers on how quickly infections (an unobserved variable mind you, not the same as cases) were rising in the weeks ahead of social distancing/lockdown. Exponential growth radicalized me. I now realize we had to throw the kitchen sink at this in mid/late March. My post above is March 23, so if we had proceeded according to what I believed at that time, we would have had a very bad outcome.

2) There is a paper I've referenced by economist named Anna Scherbina (who is not some wide-eyed radical, she worked for the CEA a couple years ago), who made the point that the more effective social distancing/lockdown is the quicker you can re-start the economy. And ineffective measures have to be kept in place longer. I thought this was counterintuitive when I first read it, but now it makes total sense. This convinced me we had to be all-in rather than half-assed about this. Unfortunately, we have been half-assed and now in many states that are reopening find ourselves in a position of basically keeping our fingers crossed everything will be ok.

3) Paul Romer. Who has converted me to the idea that massive testing is the only ROBUST (as in not depending on good luck such as a vaccine being found quickly) strategy that allows us to at least somewhat sidestep the awful choice between large numbers of deaths and economic disaster.

We've wasted a lot of time. And my own understanding of things has evolved slowly enough that we would have wasted some of that time even if the people in charge had held my views.

[nsacpi]

It was Jan. 22, a day after the first case of covid-19 was detected in the United States, and orders were pouring into Michael Bowen’s company outside Fort Worth, some from as far away as Hong Kong.

Bowen’s medical supply company, Prestige Ameritech, could ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week. He viewed the shrinking domestic production of medical masks as a national security issue, though, and he wanted to give the federal government first dibs.

“We still have four like-new N95 manufacturing lines,” Bowen wrote that day in an email to top administrators in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation.”

But communications over several days with senior agency officials — including Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and emergency response — left Bowen with the clear impression that there was little immediate interest in his offer.

“I don’t believe we as an government are anywhere near answering those questions for you yet,” Laura Wolf, director of the agency’s Division of Critical Infrastructure Protection, responded that same day.

Bowen persisted.

“We are the last major domestic mask company,” he wrote on Jan. 23. “My phones are ringing now, so I don’t ‘need’ government business. I’m just letting you know that I can help you preserve our infrastructure if things ever get really bad. I’m a patriot first, businessman second.”

In the end, the government did not take Bowen up on his offer. Even today, production lines that could be making more than 7 million masks a month sit dormant.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/inves...691_story.html

[57Brave]

Joshua Potash
7h


There have been more new cases of COVID in the White House

over the last 24 hours than the entire country of New Zealand.

[nsacpi]

The approval the FDA gave yesterday for an antigen test could be a yuge breakthrough. Antigen tests are easier to scale up on an economical basis.

[thethe]