Corona Virus, general conversation

This Spartanburg County resident is eagerly awaiting Appalachian Rendezvous to tell all the other tales of local crazies. The above mentioned sick note is just one, but I imagine others will have plenty of their own too.
 
Animal shelters in New York and California have a fraction of workers on site — and restricted or suspended adoption policies — amid the
coronavirus outbreak employees and advocates said Friday.

In California, where a shelter-in-place order is in effect, needy animals are pouring into rescue centers even as adoption programs are temporarily halted, said Karalyn Aronow, Vice President of Operations at the East Bay SPCA.

“There is certainly concern because there’s a backlog of shelter animals,” Aronow told The Post. “Animals are coming in and not getting adopted.”

She said staff caring for dogs and cats had been cut by 75 percent at some shelters.

In New York City — which is still considering a shelter-in-place rule — animal rescue centers limited pet surrenders to “emergencies only” and
restricted outsiders from entering buildings, making adoptions harder.

“[Only] interested adopters, fosters and emergency-only pet surrenders will be allowed in the building,” Animal Care Centers of NYC announced

In other cases, like in Elk Grove City, Calif., adoption programs were suspended completely and volunteers were significantly reduced.

Some staffers are finding creative ways to place pets, using the internet and their own houses, said Jill Tucker, CEO of the California Animal Welfare Association.

“Some shelters are having people go home and work remotely to connect pets with potential adoptive parents,” Tucker said.

She said feeding and caring for shelter animals is considered “essential business” — a state-sanctioned reason to leave home while shelter-in-place rules are in effect.
 
One of the top doctors on President Trump’s coronavirus task force warned Friday that data suggests that men are more than twice as likely
as women to die from the pathogen — and that no one is immune.

“From Italy we are seeing another concerning trend. The mortality in males seems to be twice in every age group of females,” Dr. Deborah Birx
said at the White House daily briefing.

“This should alert all of us to continue our vigilance to protect Americans that are in nursing homes.”

Birx also said the data showed that younger people remain at risk of contracting the disease but in most cases recover.

“We continue to review the data and we continue to see signs that individuals under 20, 19 and under may have severe disease but the
majority have all recovered to date,” she said, adding that containing the virus will take a whole-community effort.

“Frankly, this requires all the communities, and when you see the sacrifices that many Americans have made and service industries have made to close their restaurants and bars so the spread can stop and you understand how all Americans must have to make the same sacrifice,” she said.

And she insisted that anyone can contract the virus.

“Finally, no one is immune. I sometimes hear people on radio or others talking about being immune to the virus. We don’t know if the contagion
levels are different in age groups, but it is highly contagious to everyone,” she said.

“Do not interpret mild disease as lack of contagion or you are immune.”
 
This opinion piece is specifically about New York State, but I rather suspect that ALL state governments are going to be facing similar revenue shortfalls in the near future.

Government revenues of all types — sales and income taxes, tolls, transit fares, casino levies, lotteries, you name it — are dropping further and faster than at any time in history, thanks to unprecedented emergency restrictions imposed to minimize the spread of the coronavirus.

But while the federal government can effectively print money to finance deficit spending on huge stimulus and bailout packages, our state and
local budgets must be balanced.

It’s painfully obvious that all those budgets will have to be cut, and by a lot.

There’s an obvious place to start in New York: Freeze state and local government employee pay. The combined estimated savings for every level of government could at least be a down payment on the massive reductions that will be necessary in the year ahead — and probably for years to come.

Consider the backdrop:

Compared to pre-pandemic forecasts, tax receipts in the year ahead are expected to drop at least $7 billion for the state government, $3.2 billion for New York City and up to $1 billion for county governments.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are losing their jobs. Thousands of Main Street businesses face bankruptcy. And those private-sector workers
who remain employed will consider themselves lucky not to experience outright cuts in their pay and hours.

But in the public sector, the outlook is very different.

Under current union contracts and civil-service rules, the vast majority of state and local government workers across New York can expect to receive pay increases this year — and next, and in many cases the year after that, too. For many of these employees — including a sizable share of the nation’s best-paid teachers — an annual increase in base pay will be further increased by automatic seniority “step” increments.
 
What happens after this is over will show who we are as individuals, local communities, states and a country. People do overall seems to be coming together to help one another. based on current information 98-99% of us will survive this physically. Some will not survive the emotion strain. Many will not be in a good financial position.

I am certainly looking at reducing the level of want and need. My wife has been consumed by work, she is the head of HR for her company, and recovering physically from not the flu nor pneumonia. I am certainly worried about secondary pneumonia.

I believe the service and hospitality industries will be hit very hard. Brick and mortar retail will struggle even more. Amazon, Walmart and Target will have an even larger market share. I think we may end up seeing "Delivery only" markets in larger metro areas.

Humans are a gregarious lot and public gatherings will return. Most humans tend toward extroversion. We, that tend towards introversion, are quite less common.

The next 2 months will be difficult as the first wave of infection passes.

the global economy will take a long time to recover from this.
 
I'm watching the debate over who to spend money on and how much. Some people are proposing incredible amounts. Unemployment benefits of 100% of lost wages as long as the pandemic lasts. Money to support small businesses. Money to bail out entire industries. Bail out the airlines. Bail out the cruise lines. Hell, I saw one proposal to bail out the casinos. Now they're saying the state governments are running out of cash and will go bankrupt if the feds don't bail THEM out.

Where is all this money coming from? There's only one place it CAN come from. The government is going to have to just start printing money.

Now, I'm not an economist. I WAS a history major in college, and I remember studying how hyperinflation destroyed the Weimar Republic in Germany when THEY just started printing money. Wives used to meet their husbands at work on payday, to rush out and spend it all on goods before it devalued so much it was worthless. I just looked on Wikipedia. A loaf of bread that cost 160 marks in late 1922, cost 200,000,000,000 marks in late 1923. There are pictures there of single bank notes marked 50 Billionen Marks.

Scary stuff.

You know, it's funny. We expect a chemical engineer to understand the science of chemistry, and an electrical engineer to understand the science of electricity. The politicians in our legislatures practice economic engineering all the time, and practically none of them understand the science of economics.
 
I fear the cost of recovering from this will be similar to the spending Pres. Obama started after the 2008 banking fiasco. Our economy is still the strongest in the world. The Fed is buying foreign currency to help stabilize other major economic blocs. The Dollar is still the most safe haven currency. This has the effect of creating a stronger dollar. While there is some benefit to a stronger dollar, for U.S. consumers, it can have a negative affect on U.S. manufacturers.
 
The uber-rich are discovering that there are some things that money just can't buy . . .

Forget Birkin bags, Botox shots or Brazilian butt lifts. The sought-after accessory for the ultra-rich these days is anything that guarantees them oxygen should they get hit by the coronavirus.

Brother, can you spare a ventilator? Or, how much is that nebulizer in the window? But how to get one? Especially the ultimate breathing machine, the ECMO

Reports of old people being refused the dwindling supply of ventilators in the coronavirus catastrophe engulfing northern Italy are making high-net-worth types in the US panic.

At least 950,000 coronavirus patients in the US could need ventilators, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, but hospitals here have just 160,000. Between five to 10 companies in the world supply most of the planet’s breathing machines and they weren’t ready for this.

President Donald Trump said testily at a recent press conference that he was ordering “a lot” of ventilators although he was vague on the details. Trump has invoked the wartime Defense Production Act of 1950 to ramp up production of ventilators and hospital masks.

But it may be too little too late.

Thomas Herbert, a ventilator salesman in the New York area for 35 years, said that GE Healthcare, where he works, and some of the big global
ventilator companies got caught without nearly enough stock when the virus hit.

Herbert said GE got 2,500 orders for ventilators for Italy and other parts of Europe and shipped them there before the outbreak caused demand in the US to kick in.

“You go where it’s worst first,” Herbert said. A spokesman for Medtronic in Minneapolis, one of the world’s biggest ventilator makers, said the
company had “contributed” machines to China in February.

Daniele Macchini, a doctor at a hospital in Bergamo, Lombardy, the region in northern Italy with skyrocketing coronavirus cases wrote recently that the “tsunami” of 4,400 patients means “every ventilator becomes like gold.”

As a result, the wealthy in the US are calling both their doctors and ventilator manufacturers hoping to get a machine on demand. They’re even
trolling the dark web to no avail as they face an uncomfortable truth:

Money can’t buy something that’s not there.
 
Legal groups across the country are fighting to protect inmates from the spread of the coronavirus, urging jails and prisons to come up with
plans to mitigate the risk to their populations and even calling for the release of the most vulnerable prisoners.

There’s a growing concern about the potential risk facing inmates and the possibility that the virus could spread inside correctional facilities that house inmates that are older or have underlying health issues, factors that make people especially vulnerable to the virus.

The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world, with more than 2.2 million people in jails and prisons administered by federal, state and local authorities. The often crowded conditions in the facilities also makes them susceptible to a rapid outbreak.

“They also are living in filthy conditions and often without adequate access to soap, other hygiene products, other cleaning supplies, and that exacerbates the likelihood of the spread of a contagious illness,” said Maria Morris, a staff attorney with ACLU’s National Prison Project.

“And prisons particularly have a high number of people with serious chronic medical conditions.”

“It is really important that states and the federal government act quickly, because once the virus gets into these facilities, it can do terrible things to people who are sitting ducks and are more likely to suffer very severe consequences from the virus than a lot of people anticipate,” Morris added.

The ACLU this week sent letters to officials at all levels of the justice system asking that they take major precautions against the virus, limit the number of arrests during the pandemic and even consider releasing inmates who are considered vulnerable due to their age or underlying health conditions.

. . .

Jails and prisons present different problems for addressing the outbreaks. Jails typically house inmates who are awaiting trial or are serving shorter sentences, meaning that their populations have high turnover rates. Prisons generally hold people who have been convicted of felonies and are serving multi-year sentences, and house more older inmates who could be at risk to the infection.

. . .

With courts around the country closing their operations, many police departments have taken steps to reduce the number of arrests in order to
slow the flow of inmates into their jail systems and to protect officers from exposure.

In Washington, D.C., the police department announced that for many infractions it would issue court summons instead of arresting suspects and holding them until they can appear before a judge.

Police in Portland, Ore., have announced that they won’t even respond in person to many calls that aren’t life threatening, and have directed
residents to report certain crimes online.

The Philadelphia Police Department ordered its officers not to make arrests for nonviolent crimes like drug offenses and prostitution, the
Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Friday.

But advocates say it’s not enough to just slow the flood of people being admitted to the jails.

“Unless there's a real public safety threat, we just think they ought to really figure out how to reduce the population,” said Jonathan Smith, the legal director for Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. “Thirty percent of the population in jail in D.C. today is there for less than seven days. If there's no public safety reason to keep them longer than seven days, then there's no public safety reason to keep them there at all.

"Once it takes hold in a jail it's going to be a real nightmare,” he added.
 
Here's an interesting site. State by state info.

It's main message is to demonstrate to public leaders & health officials of each state in the US that what matters most right now is the speed of their response.

"This model is intended to help make fast decisions, not predict the future."

https://CovidActNow.org
 
Most military hospitals are small and NOT trauma centers.

As Dave said most military bases dont even have hospitals anymore let alone Urgent Care Centers or UCCs. There are only a few "Regional" Medical Centers (West Coast for example has Balboa Naval in San Diego, David Grant at Travis AFB and Madigan Army Medical Center at Joint Base Lewis Mcchord in Lakewood, Wa) (Camp Pendleton and Nellis have large hospitals but lack the specialized infrastructure like the bigger regionals)for the military and they are losing capabilities and capacity as the military as a whole is losing over 17000 medical positions. While each branch has their own medical with the Navy/Marines sharing theirs they are no longer individually controlled. They all come under one umbrella called the Defense Health Agency or DHA and headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia. Most bases transport off the installation to local civilian facilities and only maintain small clinics for basic services with general practice physicians, pharmacy, lab, and xray. They are not set up to handle patients inhouse. Now the Army have their Combat Support Hospitals CSH and the Air Force has the Expeditionary Medical Support System or EMEDS which are similar in size and capability but they are maintained for deployment in hostile environments and not for domestic use and pull personnel from the existing medical staff around the services. The Navy hospital ships like Dave said also pull staff from around the services and not just the Navy and Marines as they are a joint service endeavour due to the sheer magnitude of there size and capability. The days of using military medical to fall back on are gone. Even the medical capability they had at the onset of the GWOT are gone. We have to rely on civilian medical that is stretched so thin they are near or at their breaking point.
 
Lots of discussion here and elsewhere on this topic, HERE is our official position on the current COVID-19 situation.
.

Great piece, thanks to everyone at American Adventurist for the time and work put into this.

I couldn't agree more.

Stay safe, stay clean, stay positive!
.
 
Last edited:
Article from Politico . . .

Fast Vaccine - Pros and Cons

President Donald Trump has pledged to “slash red tape like nobody has even done it before” to accelerate the development of a coronavirus
vaccine. But his push could backfire if the government moves too fast, according to public health officials and scientists with decades of
experience in the field.

In some cases, a vaccine that hasn’t been properly tested could make people sicker. And if there are complications, the public relations problems could mount, spurring an anti-vaccination sentiment.

“There’s a lot of hope for a [coronavirus] vaccine but there obviously has to be a lot of caution,” said Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt
University pediatrician who helped test vaccines against whooping cough, pneumonia, flu and other diseases.

NIH infectious disease leader Anthony Fauci has said it could take 12 to 18 months to make a vaccine available, but even that timetable could be
overly ambitious. The most promising technologies haven't been tested on massive groups of people. And public health officials typically take
their time when vetting vaccines targeted at millions.

There are several examples of how fast-tracking vaccines can backfire. A massive campaign to vaccinate against the 1976 swine flu flopped when
the disease turned out to be mild, but hundreds of people suffered a rare nerve disorder after vaccination. And a vaccine used in some
European countries against H1N1 flu in 2009 caused some people to develop the sleep disorder narcolepsy.

The Trump administration has already allowed one vaccine maker to begin testing its coronavirus shot in people before completing standard safety
testing in animals — normally the first step in the long process of determining a vaccine’s safety and efficacy.

The president wants to show that he is activating the full power of the federal government in pushing for the health care system to react, treat and find a vaccine. But the infrastructure of vaccine development is not conducive to political pressure or a runaway pandemic.

And while no one is saying the current candidate vaccines are dangerous, they warrant dutiful examination “because in contrast to drugs, vaccines
are given only to healthy people,” said Barry Bloom, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We have to be enormously careful not
to harm anyone.”

If there are harms, he added, “the antivaxxers can set back not only this vaccine but all vaccines.”

A growing anti-vaccine movement contributed to the U.S. measles epidemic last year — the worst since 1992. Anti-vaxxers are already spreading
conspiracy stories about the virus and predicting massive injuries from any vaccine, said Renée DiResta, who monitors such groups at the
Stanford Internet Observatory.

Lives in the balance

Most people will be eager to get vaccinated if the coronavirus continues on its terrifying course. Experts say the vaccine types with the best
chance of early approval seem safe, though none has been licensed for human use. If properly warned of possible side effects, people might
accept them in exchange for a shot that keeps them from getting sick or spreading the disease.

Some even suggest it would be unethical not to accelerate the approval process at a time when the virus is killing thousands worldwide.

“The normal development of a vaccine is long and large and defensive because you’re developing something to be given to healthy people, most
of whom will stay healthy and will never need the benefit of the vaccine,” said Michael Watson, who has developed vaccines for 25 years —
including at Moderna, which is working on a vaccine with the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “If you’re
developing a cancer treatment, you can take quite a bit of risk for saving someone’s life. And the situation also changes when you’re in a
global pandemic.”
 
I believe there is quite the difference in fast tracking approvals for ventilators, which are produces by the thousands every year and skipping proper testing of vaccines. As @Optimistic Paranoid pointed out, the anti-vaxxers are already a problem. A bad vaccine is worse than no vaccine.

My wife was finally able to have a couple of days to rest and seems to be getting better. My daughter was able to return home from Europe, as her university recommend foreign students return home if they. Classes and exams would be online.
 
Back
Top Bottom