Let’s Call It Trumpvirus

[homersapien 12,172]

12 hours ago, Grumps said:

I am pretty sure that President Trump and his minions don't expect the left and the media to stop criticizing him over his handling of ANYTHING. The rest of this sounds like the sky is falling again.

Pay attention. 

Actually listen to what Trump says and does.  He is totally ignorant of the subject and doesn't have the intelligence to appoint experts on the subject to manage it. 

It's obvious that the ONLY thing that concerns him is how this is affecting him politically.  He either doesn't know or doesn't care about what is in the country's interest in his response. It's all about him.

[augolf1716 21,939]

1 hour ago, SaltyTiger said:

Mrs. Salty cooked Chicken Chow Mein last night. I was scared of it.

Was it good?????

[homersapien 12,172]

1 hour ago, SaltyTiger said:

Brother Homer you do an excellent job of helping Trump "make everything about him".

BS.  He doesn't need any help in doing that.  That's his basic nature.  I am pretty sure you are smart enough to know that if you are honest with yourself.

[Grumps 3,706]

1 minute ago, homersapien said:

Pay attention. 

Actually listen to what Trump says and does.  He is totally ignorant of the subject and doesn't have the intelligence to appoint experts on the subject to manage it. 

It's obvious that the ONLY thing that concerns him is how this is affecting him politically.  He either doesn't know or doesn't care about what is in the country's interest in his response. It's all about him.

I pretty much agree with everything you just said. I just think (maybe naively) that the pieces to deal with COVID-19 were already mostly in place, thus reducing the need to appoint many experts on the subject.

[homersapien 12,172]

16 minutes ago, Grumps said:

I pretty much agree with everything you just said. I just think (maybe naively) that the pieces to deal with COVID-19 were already mostly in place, thus reducing the need to appoint many experts on the subject.

Well, not all of the pieces were in place.  (China didn't help with their initial response.)  And the significant pieces - such as testing kits and eventually, vaccines will take some time.

My point is that Trump's response - which treated this as a purely political challenge - was totally counterproductive.  He didn't address any of the facts because he didn't understand them and doesn't trust the people who do, because it's bad news politically.  This is transparent to most Americans.

[SaltyTiger 8,526]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

BS.  He doesn't need any help in doing that.  That's his basic nature.  I am pretty sure you are smart enough to know that if you are honest with yourself.

Of course he is an egotistical maniac. It could rain on our homecoming parade and you would find a Vox article saying Trump was responsible. You make him proud. 

[SaltyTiger 8,526]

1 hour ago, augolf1716 said:

Was it good?????

Mrs Salty said it was good.

[Grumps 3,706]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

Well, not all of the pieces were in place.  (China didn't help with their initial response.)  And the significant pieces - such as testing kits and eventually, vaccines will take some time.

My point is that Trump's response - which treated this as a purely political challenge - was totally counterproductive.  He didn't address any of the facts because he didn't understand them and doesn't trust the people who do, because it's bad news politically.  This is transparent to most Americans.

Again, I agree with you that Trump sees this as more of a political issue, and that is certainly disappointed though not surprising. But would it do any good for him to sound as panicky as the media and the liberals? If Trump says, "We have the smartest scientists on the planet working like crazy to come up with a vaccine in record time." That can be a true statement and a comforting statement. It doesn't do any good for him to say, "A LOT more people are going to get sick and die and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and it will take at least a year for a vaccine."

What specific things do you fault Trump most for in dealing with COVID-19?

[TexasTiger 14,070]

1 hour ago, Grumps said:

Again, I agree with you that Trump sees this as more of a political issue, and that is certainly disappointed though not surprising. But would it do any good for him to sound as panicky as the media and the liberals? If Trump says, "We have the smartest scientists on the planet working like crazy to come up with a vaccine in record time." That can be a true statement and a comforting statement. It doesn't do any good for him to say, "A LOT more people are going to get sick and die and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and it will take at least a year for a vaccine."

What specific things do you fault Trump most for in dealing with COVID-19?

I fault him for lying his ass off.

[TexasTiger 14,070]

Just now, TexasTiger said:

I fault him for lying his ass off.

Confirmed cases include only the handful tested— 60 cases and 6 deaths? If that’s accurate we have a 10% death rate.

[homersapien 12,172]

22 hours ago, Grumps said:

Again, I agree with you that Trump sees this as more of a political issue, and that is certainly disappointed though not surprising. But would it do any good for him to sound as panicky as the media and the liberals? If Trump says, "We have the smartest scientists on the planet working like crazy to come up with a vaccine in record time." That can be a true statement and a comforting statement. It doesn't do any good for him to say, "A LOT more people are going to get sick and die and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and it will take at least a year for a vaccine."

What specific things do you fault Trump most for in dealing with COVID-19?

Where to start? 

How about labeling the outbreak as a "Democratic hoax"?

It does absolutely no good to put a "happy face" on a threat (minimizing the danger) when you start with such a ridiculous lie.

The POTUS's job is to lay out threats in a realistic way and to assure the populace the government is doing everything possible to address it.  Trump has no idea of what the threat is, nor does he have any idea of what can be done and how long it will take.  His gaslighting only goes to demonstrate that.

 

 

https://www.nationalmemo.com/trumps-catastrophic-boast-about-coronavirus/

When President Donald Trump stood before the country last week and delivered his first press conference on the coronavirus crisis, my first reaction was to declare that his utter ignorance of public health was on display. And indeed, since then, the shallowness of his knowledge on the topic has only been exposed further.

 

But one line from Trump’s first conference — called out at the time as preposterous and since then as deeply misguided — stands out now as the crisis has grown. He was addressing the number of cases of the infection in the United States when he said:

 

And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.

Even then, Trump’s obsession with the figure “15” was just wrong. As Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had explained earlier in the press conference, there were 15 Americans who had been detected to have the virus while within the United States. Another three cases involved Americans in the United States who had been diagnosed with the infection in Wuhan, China, and there were another 42 Americans who had been infected and discovered to have the disease while on a cruise ship from Japan.

So there were a total of sixty Americans in the country who had been found to have the virus; Trump was trying to downplay that number by focusing on a specific subset, clearly for PR reasons And just after the press conference, it was revealed that doctors had discovered the first case of the virus that had been transmitted within the United States.

Since then, Trump’s optimistic statement that the cases would be “going to be down close to zero” has looked increasingly absurd. By Tuesday afternoon, the United States has now reported its ninth death from the virus as its spread continued. And there have now been a reported 118 cases of the infection in the United States, a number that is sure to climb, not decrease.

It’s worse than Trump simply being wrong about exactly how big the crisis could become. Anyone can make a mistaken prediction, even when acting reasonably and in good faith. The problem is Trump seemed to misunderstand entirely the nature of the crisis he was facing and the ways in which his administration was slow to respond to it.

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has been pointing out, one of the biggest failings of the administration’s response to virus is in failing to have enough or sufficient testing. The CDC initially designed and used a test that is now believed to be flawed. New York state has sought to develop its own test to make up for these failures. There’s also been mixed messages about the tests, with Azar saying days ago that 3,600 tests had been run, while the CDC was saying it had conducted fewer than 500 tests. But regardless of which figure was accurate, it was clear there hadn’t been nearly enough testing for authorities to be confident about the spread thus far of the virus in the country, meaning they had even less reason to expect the number of cases should be declining soon. (And indeed, none of the experts shared Trump’s prediction.)

Despite all this uncertainty, Trump did what he always does: lies. He misrepresented the meaning of the only numbers he had, numbers which anyone in the administration could have told him were not very informative, and then he fabricated his own projection of how the number of cases was likely to decline.

Trump’s baseless optimism about the spread of the disease wasn’t a one-off remark. He made similar rosy and shortsighted predictions throughout the press conference:

And we have a total of 15 cases, many of which, or most — within a day, I will tell you most of whom are fully recovered.

…

 

So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.

 

And just as his focus on the “15” number was erroneous and discordant with the claims of others in the administration. Asked to respond to the Centers for Disease Controls and Prevention’s report that the spread of the infection was inevitable, Trump told reporters:

Well, I don’t think it’s inevitable.  It probably will.  It possibly will.  It could be at a very small level or it could be at a larger level.  Whatever happens, we’re totally prepared.

…

Now, it may get bigger, it may get a little bigger.  It may not get bigger at all.  We’ll see what happens.  But regardless of what happens, we are totally prepared.

It seemed pretty clear then that what the president was trying to do was calm the markets, which had already plunged on fears of a pandemic. But since investors are smart enough to see through the president’s brazen attempts at manipulation, Trump’s words did nothing to calm the markets. It’s possible they only made things worse because they revealed that the head of the U.S. government is more interested in putting on a happy face than grappling with reality.

[SaltyTiger 8,526]

43 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Where to start?

How about labeling the outbreak as a "Democratic hoax"?

What's True

During a Feb. 28, 2020, campaign rally in South Carolina, President Donald Trump likened the Democrats' criticism of his administration's response to the new coronavirus outbreak to their efforts to impeach him, saying "this is their new hoax." During the speech he also seemed to downplay the severity of the outbreak, comparing it to the common flu.

What's False

Despite creating some confusion with his remarks, Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax.

[homersapien 12,172]

21 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Confirmed cases include only the handful tested— 60 cases and 6 deaths? If that’s accurate we have a 10% death rate.

I don't think there's any way of knowing what the death rate is because we don't really know the number of cases.  If an accurate death rate is determined, it will likely come from China - or maybe Iran.

The last death rate I heard was 2%, in China.  But again, I think that was based on an under-estimate of the number of cases so 2% may be too high. ( 2% would be about 40 times higher than the death rate from more "common flu" (0.05%*), assuming my math is correct.)

* https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html

Here's an interesting article on the true "case fatality rate" (CFR)

 

 

https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-rate-lower-than-we-think.html

COVID-19 Isn’t As Deadly As We Think

Don’t hoard masks and food. Figure out how to help seniors and the immunosuppressed stay healthy.

There are many compelling reasons to conclude that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is not nearly as deadly as is currently feared. But COVID-19 panic has set in nonetheless. You can’t find hand sanitizer in stores, and N95 face masks are being sold online for exorbitant prices, never mind that neither is the best way to protect against the virus (yes, just wash your hands). The public is behaving as if this epidemic is the next Spanish flu, which is frankly understandable given that initial reports have staked COVID-19 mortality at about 2–3 percent, quite similar to the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people.

Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold. The true case fatality rate, known as CFR, of this virus is likely to be far lower than current reports suggest. Even some lower estimates, such as the 1 percent death rate recently mentioned by the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likely substantially overstate the case.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the numbers are inflated. In past epidemics, initial CFRs were floridly exaggerated. For example, in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic some early estimates were 10 times greater than the eventual CFR, of 1.28 percent. Epidemiologists think and quibble in terms of numerators and denominators—which patients were included when fractional estimates were calculated, which weren’t, were those decisions valid—and the results change a lot as a result. We are already seeing this. In the early days of the crisis in Wuhan, China, the CFR was more than 4 percent. As the virus spread to other parts of Hubei, the number fell to 2 percent. As it spread through China, the reported CFR dropped further, to 0.2 to 0.4 percent. As testing begins to include more asymptomatic and mild cases, more realistic numbers are starting to surface.

But the most straightforward and compelling evidence that the true case fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 is well under 1 percent comes not from statistical trends and methodological massage, but from data from the Diamond Princess cruise outbreak and subsequent quarantine off the coast of Japan.

A quarantined boat is an ideal—if unfortunate—natural laboratory to study a virus. Many variables normally impossible to control are controlled. We know that all but one patient boarded the boat without the virus. We know that the other passengers were healthy enough to travel. We know their whereabouts and exposures. While the numbers coming out of China are scary, we don’t know how many of those patients were already ill for other reasons. How many were already hospitalized for another life-threatening illness and then caught the virus? How many were completely healthy, caught the virus, and developed a critical illness? In the real world, we just don't know.

Here’s the problem with looking at mortality numbers in a general setting: In China, 9 million people die per year, which comes out to 25,000 people every single day, or around 1.5 million people over the past two months alone. A significant fraction of these deaths results from diseases like emphysema/COPD, lower respiratory infections, and cancers of the lung and airway whose symptoms are clinically indistinguishable from the nonspecific symptoms seen in severe COVID-19 cases. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the death rate from COVID-19 in China spiked precisely among the same age groups in which these chronic diseases first become common. During the peak of the outbreak in China in January and early February, around 25 patients per day were dying with SARS-CoV-2. Most were older patients in whom the chronic diseases listed above are prevalent. Most deaths occurred in Hubei province, an area in which lung cancer and emphysema/COPD are significantly higher than national averages in China, a country where half of all men smoke. How were doctors supposed to sort out which of those 25 out of 25,000 daily deaths were solely due to coronavirus, and which were more complicated? What we need to know is how many excess deaths this virus causes.

This is where the Diamond Princess data provides important insight. Of the 3,711 people on board, at least 705 have tested positive for the virus (which, considering the confines, conditions, and how contagious this virus appears to be, is surprisingly low). Of those, more than half are asymptomatic, while very few asymptomatic people were detected in China. This alone suggests a halving of the virus’s true fatality rate.

On the Diamond Princess, six deaths have occurred among the passengers, constituting a case fatality rate of 0.85 percent. Unlike the data from China and elsewhere, where sorting out why a patient died is extremely difficult, we can assume that these are excess fatalities—they wouldn’t have occurred but for SARS-CoV-2. The most important insight is that all six fatalities occurred in patients who are more than 70 years old. Not a single Diamond Princess patient under age 70 has died. If the numbers from reports out of China had held, the expected number of deaths in those under 70 should have been around four.

The data from the Diamond Princess suggest an eightfold lower mortality amongst patients older than 70 and threefold lower mortality in patients over 80 compared to what was reported in China initially. But even those numbers, 1.1 percent and 4.9 percent respectively, are concerning. But there’s another thing that’s worth remembering: These patients were likely exposed repeatedly to concentrated viral loads (which can cause worse illness). Some treatments were delayed. So even the lower CFR found on the Diamond Princess could have been even lower, with proper protocols. It’s also worth noting that while cruise passengers can be assumed to be healthy enough to travel, they actually tend to reflect the general population, and many patients with chronic illnesses go on cruises. So, the numbers from this ship may be reasonable estimates.

This all suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported. Given the low mortality rate among younger patients with coronavirus—zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China, and 0.2-0.4 percent in most healthy nongeriatric adults (and this is still before accounting for what is likely to be a high number of undetected asymptomatic cases)—we need to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control—and commit most if not all of our resources toward protecting those truly at risk of developing critical illness and even death: everyone over 70, and people who are already at higher risk from this kind of virus.

This still largely comes down to hygiene and isolation. But in particular, we need to focus on the right people and the right places. Nursing homes, not schools. Hospitals, not planes. We need to up the hygienic and isolation ante primarily around the subset of people who can’t simply contract SARS-CoV-2 and ride it out the way healthy people should be able to.

Yes, this disease is real. And, yes, there truly do appear to be vulnerable patients among us, those far more likely to develop critical illness from it. And that relatively small subset, if infected in high numbers, could add up to a tragically high number of fatalities if we fail to adequately protect them.

The good news is that we have huge advantages to leverage: We already know all of this and have learned it remarkably quickly. We know how this virus spreads. We know how long people are contagious. We know who the most vulnerable patients are likely to be, and where they are.

Healthy people who are hoarding food, masks, and hand sanitizer may feel like they are doing the right thing. But, all good intentions aside, these actions probably represent misdirected anxieties. When such efforts are not directly in service of protecting the right people, not only do they miss the point of everything we have learned so far, they may actually unwittingly be squandering what have suddenly become precious and limited resources.

By Jeremy Samuel Faust

March 04, 2020

 

[homersapien 12,172]

1 hour ago, SaltyTiger said:

What's True

During a Feb. 28, 2020, campaign rally in South Carolina, President Donald Trump likened the Democrats' criticism of his administration's response to the new coronavirus outbreak to their efforts to impeach him, saying "this is their new hoax." During the speech he also seemed to downplay the severity of the outbreak, comparing it to the common flu.

What's False

Despite creating some confusion with his remarks, Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax.

Now, that's what I would call a "desperate distinction".