Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Daniel Horowitz · March 20, 2020

How can Congress treat the fallout of a problem it has failed to define and whose solutions are helping to drive the problem? What is the point of bankrupting our future for a stimulus when California is shutting down the entire state and the Trump administration is considering doing so for the entire nation? We are entitled to a robust debate and some answers.

Politicians and the media are telling the public to be prudent and not to panic, but everything they are saying and implementing is sowing panic, and they are now contemplating actions that reflect more of a bubonic plague dynamic. Their entire legislative approach is about feeding on panic and using the crisis to immediately implement socialism before we even know the scope of the problem and can more effectively target solutions.

Bailing out industries and indiscriminately sending out $1,200 checks to every person in this country (even those fully employed) is way too premature and doesn’t address the problem at hand. There is no economy to stimulate until we solve the logistical problem of getting people back to work. That requires using better scientific data to more effectively localize the quarantines to the places and to the people who need to be home and get as many people working as possible. We need a strategy of containment more in line with the South Korea model than with the European model.

In the meantime, we should be suspending different forms of taxation and offering interest-free loans to incentivize people to work and maintain personal businesses. We already passed paid leave for those who can’t work. And those who are laid off are already eligible for unemployment benefits, which we should work on expediting.

Aside from that, sending out checks to everyone makes no sense. For starters, while many are unable to work, a lot of people are still receiving 100 percent of their salary by working from home or through other arrangements. Why should we pay those people? For example, a family of five like mine who relies solely on telecommunicating (which is not shut down) would receive $3,900 in cash. I mean, I’ll gladly take it or donate it to charity, but does it really make any sense? Instead, incentivize more work by slashing taxes.

As for those in need, $1,200 per person is both too much and too little. It’s too much in the macro-fiscal sense, because it will bankrupt our nation with crushing interest payments on the debt. But it’s also way too little for most families if government is really warning about months of shutdowns, even up to 18 months. If we go the European route instead of the Korean route in terms of a shutdown, we’ll have to mail out $50,000 checks.

Which leads to the main point: Shouldn’t the legislative response focus on most effectively containing the outbreak while getting people back to work, rather than legislating for a major assumption of indefinite shutdowns that seems to be disproven by data from countries that have already gone through this?

All of the Asian countries, such as Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, have already bent the curve, with less economic pain. Even in Washington state, which was the inception and epicenter of the epidemic in the United States, the number of new cases appear to be declining. Washington began with the disruptions and distancing before anyone else, and while the fallout is severe and the deaths are more than in any other state, the state is beginning to see a downward trajectory.

Then there is geography. Most of the outbreaks are clustered in urban areas and most pronounced in a few parts of the country. This is largely going to depend on decisions by governors and local officials, but not every part of the country requires as severe a shutdown.

More than half the cases and over 60 percent of fatalities so far have been in three states: New York, Washington, and California. And even then, they are very localized. That’s why resources and the balance of quarantine vs. economic activity should be targeted.

For example, 56 percent of the Washington state cases are in King County, and when the two neighboring counties are factored in, they account for almost all the cases. 85 percent of the deaths were in King County, of which more than half were in one nursing home. Almost all the deaths are in metro Seattle.

As of Tuesday, 56 percent of the NY cases were in NYC, nearly all of them in metro NYC with the exception of a known anomalous outbreak in Westchester County.

In California and other Western states, the numbers are very much driven by the homeless population. Roughly half the cases in San Francisco are among the homeless.

We need to tailor the quarantine to where it’s needed most, and that will dictate the economic outcomes.

Thus, there is no reason Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf should be taking the prudent distancing a step further and shutting all “non-life-sustaining” businesses in the entire state when there has only been one fatality statewide. Most of the counties in the state have no cases reported. So we are going to shut every store in rural Pennsylvania but still have outbound flights from Seattle?

The decision by California’s Governor Newsom to essentially put everyone in every county under house arrest is just appalling.

South Korea got the epidemic under control in less than a month without shutting down its entire economy. The country went into crisis mode around February 20 and began bending the trajectory after the first week in March. Yes, it’s possible it could take longer in some parts of our country, but not in others, and certainly not for 18 months. So why is our government panicking to legislate under that assumption? Because policymakers are pandering to industries, and they are also trying to use the crisis to implement dependency-inducing and liberty-squelching policies they’ve long sought anyway.

Perhaps I’m not taking this serious enough? Well, here’s a rule of thumb: The government should treat the rest of our economy with the same plans to get it restarted again as it is treating refugee resettlement. The State Department announced its intention to bring in refugees again beginning on April 7, while California is contemplating an indefinite house arrest of Americans and the Trump administration is looking to do this nationally. Are you kidding me?

Panic mixed with shameless pandering is a recipe for a bigger crisis than the c****av***s itself. It’s time for real men to stand up and be counted.

If you want to hear a more sweeping analysis of this plan to socialize the C***D panic, go HERE

tbutkovich

Agree Absolutely! The big payout plan makes no sense. Let the healthy people work and quarantine those with the v***s! Testing those with symptoms or those who have been heavily engaged in social groups should get priority. Eventually everyone must be tested and those who test negative be allowed to resume working at their place of work. This big spending package is a chance the politicians have been waiting for to load up their wallets and purses with taxpayer money!

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

They are going for a massive redistribution of wealth.

Here's more on this. Worth a read.

A fiasco in the making? As the c****av***s p******c takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data

by Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis.

The current c****av***s disease, C****-**, has been called a once-in-a-century p******c. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.

At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.

Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the p******c dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the p******c churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?

V*****es or affordable treatments take many months (or even years) to develop and test properly. Given such timelines, the consequences of long-term lockdowns are entirely unknown.

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the v***s in a representative random sample of the general population.

This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from C****-**. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, se******n bias may even worsen in the near future.

The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from C****-** is much higher.

Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with C****-** would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.

That huge range markedly affects how severe the p******c is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

Could the C****-** case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type v***ses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” c****av***ses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter.

These “mild” c****av***ses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing. Instead, they are lost as noise among 60 million deaths from various causes every year.

Although successful surveillance systems have long existed for influenza, the disease is confirmed by a laboratory in a tiny minority of cases. In the U.S., for example, so far this season 1,073,976 specimens have been tested and 222,552 (20.7%) have tested positive for influenza. In the same period, the estimated number of influenza-like illnesses is between 36,000,000 and 51,000,000, with an estimated 22,000 to 55,000 flu deaths.

Note the uncertainty about influenza-like illness deaths: a 2.5-fold range, corresponding to tens of thousands of deaths. Every year, some of these deaths are due to influenza and some to other v***ses, like common-cold v***ses.

In an autopsy series that tested for respiratory v***ses in specimens from 57 elderly persons who died during the 2016 to 2017 influenza season, influenza v***ses were detected in 18% of the specimens, while any kind of respiratory v***s was found in 47%. In some people who die from v***l respiratory pathogens, more than one v***s is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for c****av***s does not mean necessarily that this v***s is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.
If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would t***slate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new v***s out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.

Some worry that the 68 deaths from C****-** in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?

The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have.

In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work. School closures, for example, may reduce t***smission rates. But they may also backfire if children socialize anyhow, if school closure leads children to spend more time with susceptible elderly family members, if children at home disrupt their parents ability to work, and more. School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.

This has been the perspective behind the different stance of the United Kingdom keeping schools open, at least until as I write this. In the absence of data on the real course of the epidemic, we don’t know whether this perspective was brilliant or catastrophic.

Flattening the curve to avoid overwhelming the health system is conceptually sound — in theory. A visual that has become v***l in media and social media shows how flattening the curve reduces the volume of the epidemic that is above the threshold of what the health system can handle at any moment.

Yet if the health system does become overwhelmed, the majority of the extra deaths may not be due to c****av***s but to other common diseases and conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, trauma, bleeding, and the like that are not adequately treated. If the level of the epidemic does overwhelm the health system and extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, then flattening the curve may make things worse: Instead of being overwhelmed during a short, acute phase, the health system will remain overwhelmed for a more protracted period. That’s another reason we need data about the exact level of the epidemic activity.

One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.

In the most pessimistic scenario, which I do not espouse, if the new c****av***s infects 60% of the global population and 1% of the infected people die, that will t***slate into more than 40 million deaths globally, matching the 1918 influenza p******c.

The vast majority of this hecatomb would be people with limited life expectancies. That’s in contrast to 1918, when many young people died.

One can only hope that, much like in 1918, life will continue. Conversely, with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.

If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.

John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.

Peewee Loc: San Antonio, TX

I would ask you consider one fact. Obama saved the too big to fail banks. Trump is saving the people this time. We've got the cure now and things will change rapidly. The average recovery time is six days once they get the meds. Ford and Chevrolet stopped their production lines and said they could make all the respirators needed with their equipment. Bill Hammer of Fox reported the upward trend line took the first jog to the right today, still too early to say the hump is flattening but it's better than up again.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Very thought-provoking. Thanks. Wealth redistribution seems to be the plan.


Project Veritas

If you haven’t read or listened to George Orwell’s book 1984, then you should. There’s a lot of ways that it speaks to our present circumstances.

In one scene, Winston, the main character, is being tortured in the “Ministry of Love” by a tyrannical government. His torturer O’Brien tells him:

“If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.”

O’Brien is the emphasizing control of the Party over humanity. Winston is the last to resist.

It reminds me of a scene in HBO 2019 show Chernobyl, in which the C*******t Chairman confronts a t***h-teller and tells him:

“You’re not heroic. You’re just a dying man who forgot himself…your i***tic obsessions with reason. When the bullet hits your skull, what will it matter why?...Your testimony today will not be accepted by the state. It will be not be disseminated in the press… No one will talk to you. No one will listen to you. Other men, lesser men, will receive credit for the things you have done. Your legacy is now their legacy… You will remain so immaterial to the world around you that when you finally do die, it will be exceedingly hard to know that you ever lived at all.”

With Beijing reframing the c****av***s response narrative, new arguments will be made praising c*******m and authoritarianism over the coming month, with a loss of confidence in Western Democracies.

In light of China’s decision to expel US reporters, it is outrageous that American Journalists are repeating Chinese Propaganda while citizens are faced with excruciating choices about their liberties vs health and security.

Winston from 1984 wrote in his forbidden diary, that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

We believe that no matter what Governments say, Cinema Verité, is the best way to break through the propaganda in times of crisis.

It has the power to show that “stones are hard, water is wet, and objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center.”

Meanwhile, in this world of illusion and quasi-illusion, the brave insiders and unsung heroes with solid virtue alone have access to what is happening behind the shadows.

We have encouraged to come forward to shatter the illusions, whether it’s inside ABC News or C*******t China.

This is not a time to be quiet -- we need to fight back and speak up.

Peewee Loc: San Antonio, TX

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

George W. tried it and got away with it. Why is it that Dems get accused of being socialists, but it's the GOP that gives other people's money away?

Lonewolf

Trump is trying to buy the e******n

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

WTF are you talking about? How you made that comparison is anybody's guess.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Wanna explain that, little guy?

Peewee Loc: San Antonio, TX

The Bushes, Clintons, Obamas all on the same team, the NWO g*******t team. Now globalism is failing and a p******c breaks out because they couldn't start a war. Fewer people are easier to control. They're just culling their livestock back to a manageable level once again. The elites like the royals of yesterday think they have a divine right to rule us. They just traded crowns for pinstripe suits.

Daredevil

Yes, I've been saying this ever since they proposed it. That is such an expensive, extreme way to try to save Americans.

It mirrors the bailouts in 2008, and will increase our national debt by even more.

Lt. Rob Polans ret.

"Panic mixed with shameless pandering is a recipe for a bigger crisis than the c****av***s itself. It’s time for real men to stand up and be counted." That's kind of what my post on the first thread was about. I never took the gubment at face value and now even less. Besides, I know many who are waiting for a signal to start a revolution. Extreme? Yes. That's why I keep them at bay.

Lt. Rob Polans ret.

Is Beijing changing the narrative? I know what it is and that Russia has joined China won't help, they're still guilty. I still remember when they had a terrified dog up on a pole. Second to spread the v***s is Mexico and all who come through it. Spreading the panic hype. Do I have to tell you the government, msm, media on the right (yes Fox too) and sometimes innocent, scared people not meaning to. So be strong, stand tall and act your age.

Lt. Rob Polans ret.

You got me there. If everyone was stuck inside I'd at least understand them doing it. Not think 'Good idea,' because it isn't imo. Bush was dealing with a recession, almost what we're into. How much money can they give away before we're bankrupt? This way the kids would be right that the gubment should pay for their student loans.