COVID-2019 in America, effect on politics and economy

[Officer of Engineers]

Trump wants to open the country back up, the economy. That's not a small town in Oklahoma. That's New York. Chicago. Los Angeles.

Rock and a hard place.

The economic arguement against opening up right now is that if the system is overwhelmed, it would cost more. The other side of the arguement is that people can't afford health care when they can't even afford bread. Both Trump and Fauci said that they are flexible. I have no doubt that Fauci is under extreme pressure to come up with good news but Trump is not wrong.

You're young. Yo're healthy. You have bills to pay. Why can't you go back to work? Something as abstract as you MIGHT get COVID-19 doesn't compare with an eviction notice.

[tbm3fan]

Well if both Newsom and Cuomo both feel their respective states stay closed down things won't get back to normal like Trump wants. Already it seems Newsom has made the call to keep the school system closed till at least May 4th. It was till the end of spring break which would have been April 13th in California.

[tbm3fan]

USS Theodore Roosevelt

AP,WASHINGTON — The Navy says an outbreak of COVID-19 infections aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific has forced it to divert to Guam so that all 5,000 aboard will undergo testing.

The acting secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, told reporters that the carrier remains “operationally capable.” Even so, other officials said the number of infected sailors has risen sharply, from three reported initially to “dozens” as of Thursday.

Modly said the carrier, which is the first U.S. Navy ship to have a reported outbreak while at sea, had about 800 COVID-19 test kits aboard and more were being delivered. He said the initially reported cases were sailors with relatively mild symptoms.

The Navy said earlier this week that the Theodore Roosevelt’s most recent port call was in Vietnam.

[Officer of Engineers]

No. We will NOT take Celine Back!

Trump looking to put troops near Canadian border amid coronavirus fears - National | Globalnews.ca

[Double Edge]

Welp, you can kiss Fauci's ass goodbye.

So, let's take a survey: Who would you really take medical advice from?

A world renown top infectious disease doctor...

A person who on his best day, can't put together a coherent sentence and threatened to sue any of the schools he attended, if they release his grades?

Fauci leaving is just speculation at the moment.

I think Trump's posturing.

He would like to open the place up in Easter.

But come Easter will he ? yeah, that's the point

Remember people thinking this will be over soon keeps panic down.

Even if he has to lie and there's been a few in the clips i've seen

They're just white lies

[astralis]

Fauci leaving is just speculation at the moment.

I think Trump's posturing.

He would like to open the place up in Easter.

But come Easter will he ? yeah, that's the point

Remember people thinking this will be over soon keeps panic down.

Even if he has to lie and there's been a few in the clips i've seen

They're just white lies

Republicans polled -still- have a higher rate of skepticism about COVID being a "hoax" or "overblown".

this leads to greater numbers of people disregarding things such as voluntary shelter-in-place and other requests for social distancing.

this leads to greater infection velocity and deaths.

these are -not- white lies because some people -believe-.

[Double Edge]

Republicans polled -still- have a higher rate of skepticism about COVID being a "hoax" or "overblown".

this leads to greater numbers of people disregarding things such as voluntary shelter-in-place and other requests for social distancing.

this leads to greater infection velocity and deaths.

these are -not- white lies because some people -believe-.

Agree but he isn't saying anything stronger than he has already.

Maybe that will be up to Mayors of the cities to do so.

[Officer of Engineers]

Republicans polled -still- have a higher rate of skepticism about COVID being a "hoax" or "overblown".

this leads to greater numbers of people disregarding things such as voluntary shelter-in-place and other requests for social distancing.

this leads to greater infection velocity and deaths.

these are -not- white lies because some people -believe-.

The flip side is we also have scare mongering from the other side about 30 million dead in the US alone. Even when COVID-19 was on the rampage in China, the death toll came nowhere near those numbers. Those who are crying wolf cannot blame others for not believing them.

[astralis]

The flip side is we also have scare mongering from the other side about 30 million dead in the US alone. Even when COVID-19 was on the rampage in China, the death toll came nowhere near those numbers. Those who are crying wolf cannot blame others for not believing them.

nope, this is mostly a function of partisanship.

IE, it's just Republicans that have had, ah, relaxed views about COVID up until this last week. and the following increase in the number of Americans "concerned"/"taking action" about it have matched Republicans changing their minds about the subject.

even now there's a vocal minority of Republicans thinking all of this is overblown, that Dr Fauci is a deep-state anti-Trumper trying to deliberately sink the economy to ruin Trump's chances of re-election. you don't see independents and Democrats thinking the same.

[Double Edge]

Internal Emails Show How Chaos at the CDC Slowed the Early Response to Coronavirus | Pro Publica | Mar 26 2020

The documents — mostly emails — provide a behind-the-scenes peek into the messy early stages of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, revealing an antiquated public health system trying to adapt on the fly. What comes through clearly is confusion, as the CDC underestimated the threat from the virus and stumbled in communicating to local public health officials what should be done.

I have no doubt that Fauci is under extreme pressure to come up with good news but Trump is not wrong.

Might not be the only one

By that point, it was clear that the coronavirus was gaining ground within the country, even if the inability to test for it was obscuring the true numbers. Physicians and public health experts begged for more tests while warning that thousands of cases would soon emerge.

Still, Redfield’s March 3 email struck a reassuring note.

“Confronting global outbreaks and protecting Americans is what we do,” Redfield wrote in the message. “More and more, people are turning to us for guidance, and we respond consistently with evidence-based information and professionalism.”

[astralis]

nurses are using goddam trash bags and bandannas as PPE.

first NYC nurse died yesterday since contracting coronavirus last week; his hospital didn't have enough PPE while he was treating patients. this is like f*cking Chernobyl all over again, it makes me sick. we aren't supposed to be Soviet Russia.

[JRT]

IBM Goes All In On Fight Against Covid-19:
The Tech Industry Goes To War

By Rob Enderle
March 25, 2020
Datamation

This week IBM announced they were adding another 16 additional systems, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the US Department of Energy through a massive technology pool.

IBM had earlier announced they were pivoting the most potent Supercomputer in the world, Summit, to fight Covid-19. The result was that they have been able, with Oak Ridge Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, to screen 8,000 compounds to find out which ones were likely to mitigate Covid-19.

They were looking to see which compounds could best bind to the central “spike” protean of the coronavirus, making it unable to infect host cells. In effect, they are looking for what would render the virus ineffective against anyone medicated with one of these compounds. The effort surfaced 77 promising small-drug compounds that potentially make Covid-19 wholly or partially ineffective. These compounds are now undergoing testing.

This week IBM announced they were adding another 16 additional systems, that’s 330 petaflops, 775K CPU cores, 34,000 GPUS, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the US Department of Energy through a massive technology pool. This pool includes Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), Argonne National Lab (ANL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and multiple other leading technology companies.

This move is the kind of effort you typically only see during massive scale war, and it is certainly indicative of how seriously this is being taken by some of the major technology players. This is the first time this level of computational power has been applied to a single problem.

Now a few years back, even if we had this kind of computational power available, it would have been challenging to rapidly apply it to something it wasn’t designed to do.

These systems were generally designed to look at massive problems that revolved around predicting weather patterns globally, the interactions between galaxies, and attempting to discover Dark Matter. You typically can’t take something that was designed uniquely to work on one class of problem and pivot it very quickly to another.

However, over the last decade, IBM has mostly re-engineered how these huge systems function and the need for these systems to be able to handle a wide variety of problems so that their massive cost can be spread between more entities have been advanced.

Even the way we connect systems like this into a solution has undergone a rather revolutionary process. It used to be that when you had various systems working with unstructured data, all of which needed to be collated to find an answer you’d need to re-analyze the date from scratch with whatever computational tool you had.

But now the process is to allow the various systems to do the analysis they were designed for. Then you have the master system analyze the results, which cuts a massive amount of time out of finding an answer and reduces the computational power needed to arrive at a solution.

Now, if you combine the massive additional computational power with this change in the process you get a multiplicative impact where the combination should result in far more reliable results considerably faster. One of the things I expect they’ll be looking at is easier to determine early markers for someone who is sick that can scale.

For instance, we know that one of the first symptoms is a loss of taste. Assuming everyone could be tested when well to set a baseline, you should be able to rapidly test a lot of people for a loss of taste if you had a test focused on this.

Anyone that couldn’t taste what they tasted during the baseline would immediately be flagged as a potential carrier and removed until more detailed testing could be done (that testing time is dropping rapidly as well) and the combination of a rapid, cheap test coupled with a quick, effective quarantine process could get the nations back to work again avoiding much of the massive financial crisis that we currently anticipate.

IBM is one of several companies stepping up sharply to address this crisis. IBM’s approach begins with what they do the best analysis of unstructured data at scale, and their engagement increases the likelihood that we all can get back to something approaching a normal life this year, and before the economic damage becomes the bigger problem.

This use will also begin to establish best practices for the next Pandemic, and there will be the next one, hopefully assuring that this Pandemic will be the last with this level of global damage. It is also a showcase of how technology can be effectively be rapidly repositioned to address tactical problems of massive scale, making these applications critical for dealing with the many anticipated threats we will face as a race going forward.

.

...

[surfgun]

39 million masks “found.”
https://www.businessinsider.in/polic...w/74838092.cms

[Firestorm]

The flip side is we also have scare mongering from the other side about 30 million dead in the US alone. Even when COVID-19 was on the rampage in China, the death toll came nowhere near those numbers. Those who are crying wolf cannot blame others for not believing them.

Sir, the Chinese lockdown was incredibly strict. I mean they were forcibly barricading people in their own homes at one point. We saw the videos. You cannot say in one post that we don't need a full lockdown and also point to China and say that hey the numbers aren't that bad. USA already has more infected people than both China and Italy now.

Also, I don't think anyone mentioned 30 million dead. That is 10% of the US population. But if 60% of the population gets infected and the virus has a 2% death rate, that is 3.6 million dead. Those are realistic numbers. And that death rate will increase or decrease depending on how much spare intensive care capacity the US health system has available at any given point. If the spread is not slowed down and the curve flattened the consequences may be disastrous. I don't understand why people find it hard to understand this.

[Firestorm]

nope, this is mostly a function of partisanship.

IE, it's just Republicans that have had, ah, relaxed views about COVID up until this last week. and the following increase in the number of Americans "concerned"/"taking action" about it have matched Republicans changing their minds about the subject.

even now there's a vocal minority of Republicans thinking all of this is overblown, that Dr Fauci is a deep-state anti-Trumper trying to deliberately sink the economy to ruin Trump's chances of re-election. you don't see independents and Democrats thinking the same.

There were idiots thronging the beaches in the SF bay area after the shelter-in-place orders were put in place. I'm willing to bet most weren't Republicans considering how few of them live in the bay area. Stupid people (or those who intentionally don't like to listen to the authorities) abound in every country and political party.

As George Carlin (Peace Be Upon Him) had once said, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." (I know I know it should be median not average but you get the point)