Banning Travel From Europe and Other Coronavirus Developments

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President Trump suspended travel Europe for 30 days. American citizens can return will need more screening and temperature checks. The Europe ban includes shipping goods.

Tom Hanks and his wife have coronavirus.

There have been about 8000 coronavirus tests performed in the USA. There have been hundreds of thousands for coronavirus tests in South Korea and millions tested in China.

World meters and Covid Tracking were the source of this article.

SOURCES – Worldmeter, Covid Tracking Project, John Hopkins.
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

155 thoughts on “Banning Travel From Europe and Other Coronavirus Developments”

  1. Nothing is certain about this particular virus. However, judging from the normal flu season, which starts to ebb about April in the Bay Area, there is hope that Corona may follow the same pattern. We will have to wait and see. This thing may go through the entire summer without a break, I hope not.

  2. At least it is a amusingly bizarre standard! 0°F was chosen as the melting point of an ice-and-ammonium-chloride solution, since again … anywhere one could obtain the materials and make a standard temperature solution.

    With probably thousands of little 18th century makers trying to crank out thermometers, having the 0 and 100 standards fairly reproducible at least allowed all the inaccurate glass-tube melting-and-pulling exercises to produce still-valuable-and-reasonably-accurate measuring devices. All shapes sizes and colors.  

    The Fahrenheit scale is one of my favorites. 
    Perhaps obviously.
    The most steampunk of them all.

  3. excellent post. Don’t forget the R0, it is almost 2x as contagious which means a lot in the Land of Exponents.

  4. Please Stop mockingly and morbidly twisting things I write. People are not idiots and understand what you are doing. I see multitudes of similar comments of yours here with the same mal intent. You can play a better role than that here.

  5. I’m not clear on why mail-in voting would completely change the political process.

    I speak as someone who voted by mail in about 50% of the elections for the last 15 years (ie. since I moved to my current address).

    I didn’t really find it that different. Except that you do need to get yourself organised a couple of weeks in advance of voting day, so that would disadvantage the unorganised in society who always leave things to the last moment.

  7. You still aren’t being clear. Do you mean there were no tech news websites in the early 19th century?

  9. Yah, you’re right.
    The claim is multiple reinfection cases, in China.

    People after 4 weeks of active quarantine, given a ‘free to go’, get sick within the week.  

    I propose this: IF you ‘just got over’ a CV19 infection, are released, go out in public and catch the equally pervasive influenza virus, you’ll kick up a fever, get pneumonia, and it is all bad.  

    Yet, when they take your serum and hunt down various antibodies, lo’ and behold: you’ve STILL got plenty of QV19 antibodies swimming in the bloodstream.  

    Not exactly surprising, is it?

    Mimics “being reinfected”.  
    Indeed: you very well COULD be ‘reinfected’ just by virtue of your body fighting off another disease.
    Lowering the defenses.  
    Oops.

    Point is though, apparently statistically still quite an outlier. 

    We can FULLY EXPECT the same here, as case loads grow. 
    And yet, statistically, still outliers.  

    So, in that, we really ought to leave the statistics to the statisticians. Although juicy morsels primed to fuel the media’s fear-uncertainty-and-doubt campaign, not statistically meaningful.  Especially when in the near future, beds will be in short supply.  Very short.  

    The apparently-recovered should be allowed to go home, to free up space.  

    As media titillating as it is.

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  10. He was talking about reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 among people who recovered from SARS-CoV-2, as a counterargument for acquired immunity within that population.

    He claims there are multiple cases of such reinfection. I’ve heard of maybe one such case, and don’t know if even that one is true. But then again, I’m not intimately familiar with the medical literature on this virus. There may indeed be such cases that I’m not aware of.

  12. The elderly with their own homes can and likely will stay on their property. They probably are well stocked up. The ones in trouble are the ones with little condos or apartments or in eldercare facilities. Little condos increase contact and have less room for storage of stockpiled food and other necessities.
    Though, if elderly homeowners have professional gardeners, they should probably not pay them face to face.
    Now the ones that go to church or other meetings every week…that can be a problem. Or the ones that see the grand kids every weekend, or have to care for their grandchildren…well not encouraging. And the elderly smokers who run out of cigarettes and have to go to the store and buy more…that sounds like a really bad situation. Smokers are more vulnerable. Hopefully they will have the good sense to stop when they run out instead of going to the store to buy more.
    If this virus gets completely out of control, in the US, It will probably be small apartments that will be freed up.
    Some houses could even come off the market. People that recently moved to eldercare facilities may choose to go back to their homes that are not sold yet because they are less likely to be exposed there. Others who were thinking about moving to eldercare will avoid that.
    It is also possible that the tens of thousands that die of flu every year won’t, because the efforts to stop cronavirus.

  13. Insofar as I have gleaned from the sparse actual science announcements, the ‘problem’ of this particular SARS, like SARS1 is that it causes granular degradation of the lungs, for those individuals where it migrates to lung tissues. And the damage caused leads to runaway pneumonias, and in an alarmingly high fraction, permanent lung damage. Setting the affected up for lifelong COPD.  Not good, at all. ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  14. Not really.

    The more ‘interesting’ case is the rare person who a few years back caught SARS–1 … and anecdotal evidence points to them not getting full-blown SARS–2 (which is what CV₁₉ is). Similar-pathogen immunity. 

    But most of us didn’t catch SARS–1.
    Hence no ‘community immunity’.

    Which is why it is such a problem, now.
    Much higher infectious rate, absolute.
    Much larger reservoir of sub-clinical infectious persons walking about
    Much shorter emergency-development time since it started.

    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  16. I especially like the “wine tasting issue” angle. Being a former winery owner and maker. It truly is amazing how much bbb-bb-b-bûllsnot is in the ‘wine professionals’ circles.  

    However, I think this on the general-level. 

    People, especially “the pridefully well informed”, tend to adopt a life-purpose of becoming experts at things. Doesn’t matter whether we’re talking aobut knowing wines, organic vegetables and products, European cheeses, bespoke audio amplifiers, ever-changing high-tech, or Bible, Secular or Quranic studies. 

    People are driven by pride and ego, interest and talent, to become super-specialists in complex broad domains. 

    Amongst the self-made experts is a large fraction who are more impelled by Ego and Belief than by anything remotely quantitative, and often not even qualitative. Advocates, pushers, dinner-party loudmouths, magazine article writers, bloggers, Youtube makers.  

    This is NOT TO SAY that they’re the majority.  
    But they’re LOUD.
    Hard to ignore.
    Combative if you don’t like their Koolaid.

    These are the folk that bother my sense of purpose as a mensch. 
    Because they’re proselytizing to find groupees. 
    And their theories and positions don’t survive quant analysis.

    I try hard to exclude them from my social circles.  
    Especialy the wine schnobs.  
    Because that is my domain, and I actually use SCIENCE critically. 
    Even when my own product falls to the bottom of the list.

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  17. Very few. Containerization and diesel power have greatly reduced the number of people involved. They can even give them fairly large personal accommodations onboard. They generally get one night on the town and then they are back aboard and on their way to the next stop.

  20. Exposed and sick? Contagious too? So either too sick to vote, or contagious and they may or may not know it. Nearly all states will need to change their vote-by-mail rules and align them. VBM fraud in contested areas….voting before the final days of the election etc etc. Our voting system is notoriously prone to abuse and “confusion”. Florida and sunshine states with large elderly populations who are most at risk could just decide not to vote.

    If the election is on by November, I bet that D and R will both figure out how to game the “new and adjusted” system whatever that may be.

    interesting times.

  21. things are not like they were 100 years ago re the Spanish Flu. Back then they didn’t even know what a virus was. The chief medical official in Chicago recommended wearing a rabbit’s foot.The Philly medical board recommended “stay warm, feet dry, and bowels open”. They had no clue.

    If you ask people now to stand in line to vote, while all sports events are closed, large gatherings cancelled, quarantines in place, and so on, I seriously doubt people will go to the polls. By November who knows. I think it’s better to cancel the election if the virus hasn’t been controlled by then because the only other alternative is vote by mail, which is a state level decision and varies. That, or mail-in becomes the mandatory method, which will completely change the political process. And how will the ballots be handled physically??

  23. The USA didn’t postpone the election during the civil war. (Though they did not count the votes from those in the rebel states, which I think was fair.)

    And not during the Spanish flu either.

  24. You missed my question. I wasn’t asking why the mortality rates are going to be highest for the elderly.

    I was asking why it was sad that it was the elderly who had the highest rates.

  25. The employers I am aware of (albeit largely in a different nation and legal system than you) have been quite eager to get people working from home.
    If for no other reason than once some employers adopt this, it can now be spun as the “standard of care” should your workplace not do so, and have a disease outbreak.
    5% or whatever of your employees (concentrating on the most senior ones) now having lifetime lung issues, with associated medical expenses, and it’s because you chose not to do what everyone said was the smart thing to do, and that other work places had already done??? No corporate board wants to be in the sequel to the asbestos law suites.

    This is ignoring the reality that corporate decisions are made by humans who are also working in the office, and socialise and have good relationships with the other staff.

    Sadly my work is much too hands on to do from home. Though I guess we could probably consolidate all our meetings to have maybe 1 day at home per week.

    On the bright side my hands-on work means I’m covered up in nitrile gloves, face mask, eye goggles etc.

  28. The actual time of Cholera ended when they solved the problem and ended up with the world of today.

    So clearly there IS a next future.

  29. When someone claims that they think X, but it turns out that X is wrong… well we’ve all been there. To err is human. No big deal.

    But when someone assures you that they are an expert, that they have a whole bunch of reasons (they won’t go into them, too complex, but absolutely rock solid reasons), to know X, to be completely sure about X. When they start to insult anyone who disagrees. When they accuse anyone who disagrees with X of having nefarious motives. When they… oh look, X just got shown to be wrong.

    Oh well, better luck next time right? You can’t blame us…

    Yes we damn well CAN blame them. Not necessarily for the original mistake about X, but we can definitely blame them for the ridiculous levels of claimed confidence, for the aggressive insistence that they couldn’t be wrong, bordering on attacking anyone who disagrees. Which then makes us suspicious about how they got to the position of X in the first place, because it doesn’t seem like it was bias free searching for truth.

    I originally came up with this rant as a response to a wine tasting issue. So this isn’t just politics.

  31. Any short term reduction in smoking will not help. The damage to your lungs is already done. But you are right that the high death rate in China was in part due to respiratory issues exacerbated by smoking.

  32. Unless you try you will never know. If anything it will show the world we’re actively trying to beat a common enemy.

  34. That was three years to get a Little Boy.
    Sometimes there are bottlenecks that need
    time no matter the resources and Manpower engaged. Spmetimes that time
    can be measured in decades. Not in this
    case, but two months is bad scifi.

  35. Nothing wrong with using antibiotics, even if you are not sure what is going on. By the time you know, it is often too late.
    This fantasy that we are making superbugs in otherwise healthy people is bunk. Most of the superbugs are made from using the antibiotics on billions of animals, and treating people with very dubious health. I don’t blame doctors or using them on the very unhealthy, they just need to be very careful not to spread any version of the disease they might make…especially if it looks like they are going to loose their battle with whatever infected them. Use of antibiotics for animals to prevent disease rather than to treat should end.
    The big pressure to reduce using antibiotics is a scam. Big pharma lost billions when some chronic diseases were being accidentally cured. First it was peptic ulcers, then it was lower back pain.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori
    https://nationalpost.com/health/link-between-bacteria-and-back-pain-is-for-real-has-researchers-wondering-if-parkinsons-diabetes-may-be-tied-to-infections-too
    Of course, antibiotics generally do not cure viral infections…though if the patient has another condition that can be cured while also infected with a virus, that may reduce the burden on the immune system.
    I believe we need more effort in antivirals. Stuff that can attack many kinds of viruses. I think when we have powerful broad acting antivirals, there will more accidental cures.

  36. I think the US needs a strong anti-smoking campaign right now. Apparently, the reason for the virus killing more men than women in China was that more men smoke.
    I think if the President got off his KFC loving fanny and told his fathful to stop smoking until there is a vaccine, to possibly save their lives, a good number would listen. Much more effective than playing this down.

  39. Indeed, with the technology we possess now they don’t need to all be physically co-located. Many things can be done remotely.

  40. You might wanna google Manhattan project.

    It was a concentrated effort to solve a problem by bringing together the greatest minds of that time.

    We need to do something similar.

  41. The risk is cumulative. (x+y)^n will always rise faster than x^n or y^n for any positive x and y. And you want it to rise as slowly as possible.

    Until the US gets the tests in place, and gets hard data from those tests, you don’t know which of x and y (local and imported infection) is bigger, and by how much. Assuming that either is negligible is too dangerous.

  42. Right now we are the infected, most EU countries have a better handle on this, we cant even test enough to know how bad it is, and we’re still showing that its spreading.

    At this point were probably in less risk from those traveling, then we are from our local folks.

    And thts why this travel ban is nonsense. It would have been a good idea—1-2 MONTHS ago, but now its just not relevant. We’ve lost the containment battle, and need to focus on mitigation, producing medical equipment, and prepping camps to put the infected into to recover.

  43. There may indeed be a lot more infected, but most of those are asymptomatic, or at most mild. The same can be said about seasonal flu, so if we’re comparing between them, it cancels out.

    Furthermore, as I noted above, a bunch of the cases that are counted for SARS-CoV-2 are also asymptomatic or mild. For seasonal flu, most of such cases aren’t counted at all.

    And finally, the technical definition for these numbers is:

    case fatality rate (CFR): the proportion of deaths from a certain disease compared to the total number of people diagnosed with the disease for a certain period of time.

    (emphasis added; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate )

    The undiagnosed cases aren’t considered for CFR, because there’s no way to know how many there are.

  44. I think the number of people infected is much higher than what we are estimating. The virus has been here for a while spreading. We haven’t noticed because the death rate is low and we have been assuming that people were dying of the flu. I think the virus is very contagious like “Chicken Pox” but it isn’t as deadly as initially estimated. I think we already have many tens of thousand already infected. The rate of infection will decrease because of social distancing. But we will have more than a few thousand dead if we are lucky.

  45. I think the death rate is lower because the number of infected people is much higher than we estimate.

  47. Airlines announce NO BLACKOUT DATE flights to Italy and Cruise ship bargains – buy 1 week – get 14 extra days for free!

  48. Read up. It’s called flattening the curve. In 4 weeks time the Virus will hit a number that will overwhelm the US hospitals. If we can flatten that curve, the hospitals will survive until the end of flu season.

  51. Yes, there are some employers that are being more proactive, but they are the outliers.

    Unless forced to do so, the majority will not approve telework, even for those who jobs allow it, “pending further developments.”

    Which means not until the situation deteriorates to the point where it doesn’t do any good.

  55. Una bella vita semplice … the Italian ideal, is really compromised by isolation-quarantine. 

    The problem is, as I answered elsewhere, to really put the quabash on this, requires a whole lot of civli liberties and Dolce Vita squashing.  

    Which is completely against the Western (and specifically Italian) ideal. 

    Hard road ahead.

    Sorry,
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  56. Bretton butter.

    For whatever reason, as a temperature standard (which you can read a lot of misinformation on in Wikipedia), the melting point of butter churned from Bretton milk cows was chosen as the 100°F point. 

    My guess would be that it is fairly precise, so in France where the °F scale was invented, easily obtained, and would produce reproducible results. 

    At lesat that’s what I remember from reading about it in a public library, 60 years ago.

    LOL!
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  59. It all depends on how much ‘civil liberty‘ our society is willing to forego in order to squash the person-to-person propagation of CV–19 A+B.

    Assuming that China’s reported numbers are what they say they are (which is somewhat doubtful), then it warrants asking, “how did they do it?”

    There is an interesting ‘Rachael Maddow’ Youtube video, yesterday, with an epidemiologist that goes directly to this. 

    In short, 

    • pervasive public ‘temperature-taking’.  
    • “pink gloves” arrest if you have a temperature
    • rapid testing of NON-CV illnesses.
    • … ‘catch and release’ if you’re clearly not CV
    • “black gloves” quarantine if you appear to have the bug.
    • NO visits from friends and family. ZERO. None. 

    What they (say) they discovered was the majority of new cases during the height were being propagated inside ‘family clusters’.  Wife → kids → aunt → husband → grandmother → grand aunt → kids → … as example. 

    So, to break that chain, … break it quickly, efficiently, remorselessly. 

    As I said.
    Civil Liberties.

    Would that work in The West?
    I doubt it.

    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  60. At 60 the mortality rate begins an exponential increase relative to everyone below that level. Complications rapidly escalates if one is older. This mortality level is correct if one has access to the ICU.

    Once those ICU beds are filled, the death rate regardless of age exceeds 10% of all patients needing major medical assistance. That’s on a good day.

  61. I like how user: Lol wants to get all the experts together during a disease epidemic. That’s like getting all the mob bosses together in one place for a meeting… always a good idea.

  62. I’m not sure why you would blame the media for accurately reporting the aggregated opinions of a bunch of pseudo-randomly selected people. You didn’t think they were looking into a crystal ball, did you?

  63. Or Klobuchar.

    And Gabbard is officially still in the race, though the DNC changed their rules to keep her out of the Mar15 debate, after changing them to let Bloomberg into the previous couple debates.

    Maybe Gabbard is gambling that either Biden or Sanders or both will get sick and have to drop out. Given their respective health issues, it isn’t such a long shot, especially in the current environment.

  65. South Korea is a free society and it’s done quite well dealing with the virus, using standard public health measures. We can’t use freedom as our excuse here. Our problem is incompetence.

    The WHO gave testing kits to 60 countries and they work fine. The US said nah, we’ll make our own thanks, and botched it. South Korea tests 10,000 people every day and the US has done about that much total.

  68. If the disease is mostly transmitted directly from person to person and if one stays in a nice AC cooled building nearly all the time in summer, how would a hotter outdoor temperature help slow the virus?

    For that matter, it seems to get colder indoors in the summer here in Arizona due to the AC being cranked. But we seem to follow the normal flu and cold season all the same, which is supposedly related to colder weather.

    There are, of course, some people who are outdoors a lot in the summer – so perhaps it’s a “herd” thing and we pampered and air conditioned indoor types benefit from their suffering in the heat?

  70. That’s just not true. Both stopping imports of new infections and other means inside the country can slow down the spread. That can be the difference between a healthcare system that can still provide reasonable care to the patients, vs one that is overwhelmed like in Italy and ends up leaving patients to choke to death.

  73. Who said? It would be good to have a source on this before we start speculating on a cure.

    Anyway, normal body temp is 97°F (36.1°C) to 99°F (37.2°C) so if 95 was the cutoff just about nobody would get the disease.

    (Off topic, if body temp is not 100°F, then was IS the basis of Fahrenheit?)

  75. Pandemics are damned if you do, damned if you don’t for politicians. Had they locked down the country – and keep in mind it took a Supreme Court order yesterday to keep the administration’s immigration policies in place – and no one got sick, they’d be castigated for over reacting.

    That’s not really true proving there are lots of other countries that do not stop the pandemic.

    If government A introduces strict rules in week 1 of the crisis, and nobody gets sick and they get criticised for over-reacting, but they can point over the border to countries B through Z that all had major death tolls, then they will shut down those critics pretty fast.

  76. The problem isnt that its that there are a lot of people who are getting sick enough they need constant medical care they just arent dying.

    One of the marks of this seems to be people taking weeks to get better in many cases. Some people with bad hearts or asthma or other things are almost dying and only make it if they can get emergency room access.

    In Itally apparently they are having to decide who dies,

  77. Mers and Corona are in the same family. MERS happily infects people in 110 degree deserts. Heat might help but i wouldn’t count on it.

  78. They said the virus doesn’t reproduce well above 95 degrees F in your lungs…does that mean you can sit in a really hot Sauna once a day as a preventive treatment?

  79. Are you extrapolating based on ONE data point?

    Admittedly a single data point produces a very straight line.

  81. If the hospital beds are filled up with people who don’t need them, then they can be kicked out once things become desperate.

  83. I don’t see how the elderly being killed is worse than any other age group.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s terrible. But why would it be any better if the mortality rate was highest for 20 year olds?

  84. Well obviously mass transit will have to be banned.

    If only someone was designing a public rail system where you travelled in your own private car… Elon Musk wins again.

  85. Take the Manhattan project approach.

    Start nuking cities in Asia? Might just have worked, actually…

  88. In Texas we have those things in our favor, too (if the warmer weather does turn out to slow it down). We have a LOT of people who could work remotely if necessary. It’s already starting to get warm, here. My office is currently testing for possible remote work. Universities are switching to online classes.

  91. If your shutting the door to Europe, why not Great Britain? More testing is necessary. Your St. Patrick’s analogy misses the point; no coherent plan was presented. The market responded; Yo play in ‘the Foo’, up.

  92. We’re NOT that far (US) from Italy, when it comes to an ‘elasticity curve’ perspective. There are only so many ICU beds. There are only so many anti-viral cocktails. There are only so many test kits.

    And the virus remains, insofar as I can tell, on its unbridled exponential growth path.  

    Well, with this weekend’s closure of DiddyLand and very soon I’m assuming a lot of domestic as well as ALL international air traffic, and as we’re seeing locally, the eschewing of public use of public commuter mass-transit facilities, it’ll rapidly deëscalate from 3.5 day doubling to 10 day. Then 15 day.  

    But, even when you do those numbers, it will still be in the millions, come May. And the lethality in the elder population will remain high.

    I’m betting on a housing crash. 
    Lots of ancient fixer-uppers coming on the market come Autumn

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  97. This problem is easily solved. Take the Manhattan project approach.

    Trump should have requisitioned the best disease research facilities in the US, invited all the experts from around the world and got them to brainstorm the !@#$! out of it. A couple of months and $10 billion dollars would be enough to stop this thing dead in its tracks.

  98. Let me offer a translation for that. It’s too late to mitigate, it’s already here in large amounts. It’s now going to run its natural course. A travel ban is useless at this point.

  100. On board with everything, there. I’ve also been hoping for RNA medicine to really take a big hold forever.

  101. Things are going to be a lot worse before they get better. Here in California, there are a few factors in our favor.

    1. a lot of folks can and do work from home.
    2. It will get warm in a month or so.
    3. The population density is not that high.

    NY could be pretty badly hit.

  102. Why bother closing the barn doors if the horses have already left?

    Because only some of the horses have left. People traveling from infected areas can infect more people, which will speed up the local spread as well. The name of the game is slowing down the spread as much as possible.

  103. As I point out in more detail elsewhere, this virus has at least 10 times higher death rate. Seasonal flu is 0.1%, this virus is, generally speaking, 1-7% so far.

    Actually, the difference is bigger, because most asymptomatic and mild cases of flu are ignored and treated at home with standard over-the-counter medicines. This virus is being tested more carefully, at least in some places, so while many of its asymptomatic cases are missed, many of its asymptomatic and mild cases are counted.

  104. no different from any other bad flu season

    In terms of death percents, it’s clearly worse. 3.9% in China, 4.2% in Iran, 6.7% and rising in Italy, ~1.5-3% in several other countries. World average excluding the outliers is currently 1.4%.

    People keep pointing out that a bunch of asymptomatic cases aren’t detected, so the actual death rate is much lower. But they forget that asymptomatic cases of flu aren’t detected either. The seasonal flu’s 0.1% death rate is for symptomatic cases only. And this virus is at least ten times as much, depending on how well the local healthcare system holds. If it collapses like in Italy, we may yet see 10% death rate in some places, which would be 100 times worse than seasonal flu.

    That said, in absolute numbers, this may indeed be less severe. But only if governments act on time.

  105. You are speaking like the governor of Lombardy two weeks ago. Now he is the staunchest supporter of total closure. This
    has nothing to do with flu, or with flu complications. Nobody takes old (and not-so-old) people to the hospital. They went
    with their legs, because they were getting
    unable to breathe. Had it happened in 1918,
    effects would have been equal to the Spanish, owing to less efficient hospitals
    and worse overall health and nutrition of the
    general population. From a privileged observer on the edge of the war zone (Genoa).

  109. I agree that it can be limited to tens to low hundreds of cases per country, but there isn’t an “average country” at the moment. It depends very much on the steps that each country will take, and the timing of those steps. If they’re too slow, we may see a lot more confirmed and symptomatic cases, as well as higher death rates as healthcare systems are overwhelmed. We’re seeing an example of the latter in Italy right now.

  111. We should focus on ramping up the whole chain of testing up to 50,000 a day to have a chance to stop the spread in this country as S. Korea did. Right now we are going very quickly the Western European way.

  112. The US approach has been contact tracing, two week quarantine for anyone who we suspect might be a carrier and test once you are showing signs.

    Per capita our # of cases per person is still low compared to Spain, France, etc. and most of our cases are concentrated in cities where mass transit is commonly used.

  113. Yes the virus will re-import to China from elsewhere.

    Also their numbers aren’t accurate. I have friends of friends in China who have personally seen more body bags than deaths reported in their province.

  114. By the time the election comes around i’d imagine that the majority of the country would have been exposed.

    Also we can vote by mail.

  115. Close the schools, tell employers to by default have their workers work remotely.

    Its all about slowing the spread so that Health care providers aren’t overwhelmed. Its all a simple but important math game where we change the exponent from 2.0 to 1.6 so that a fixed number of doctors, nurses, beds can not be overwhelmed.

    In my county (OC, CA) we have 6 cases, all of which are quantified by age, gender, and how the patient contracted the virus. So far it is all travel related. At my local supermarket last night customers were wearing latex gloves.

    Again it is all about reducing the exponent.

  116. “And the prophets can get a benefit, if they are lucky in predicting doom for once.”

    All the preppers are living in Utopia right now.

  117. Also nobody is really flying. Cancelling the flights helps airlines reschedule and reduce fuel & maintenance costs.

  118. Stay home and stay safe with your declawed cats…

    The same media told me for a year that Hillary Clinton was going to be president… ‘all the polls said so’. I couldn’t even bring myself to vote. Then one morning I wake up and Donald Trump is president. now every morning wake up Trump is president. Some are saying he should resign over how he handled the Coronavirus? I actually heard that today. I can’t listen to a word the media says… lost all credibility.

  119. They’re doing the expected procedure for any pandemic. The first responsibility is to public health & safety, not to stock traders.

  120. They don’t want the system to get flooded/overloaded. I don’t see this creating an enduring downturn. This thing won’t last longer than the typical flu season. Also, it seems timed to hit during the warmer months.

  121. Spent some time in the military, and some more time living near military bases. Got real used to wearing BDUs and seeing other people in them.

    Driving away from the house today. Lot of GIs out working here and there. Wonder what’s . . . wait a minute . . . here? What are GIs doing here? Oh, National Guard, right.

    Seriously, other than closing a few schools and other meeting places. I don’t know what they can do without a real lock down. We just come and go.

  122. Sadly, mortality rates are going to be highest for the elderly. This is what Italy and other countries with a huge senior population are seeing.

  123. Correct. People already infected. It’s the old chicken pox parties. If you already got it, it’s not getting going to get worse.

  124. What does any of that have to do with a travel ban? People in the US are already infected. Stopping travel just creates uncertainly and rattles the economic market, and won’t do anything for the already infected people. Why bother closing the barn doors if the horses have already left? Illogical.

  125. If YOU think the travel ban is ‘ridiculous’, then why don’t YOU volunteer to have a few dozen of your neighbors over for a nice big St. Patrick’s Day feast, you know? What could go wrong? I just picked up a bunch of corned beef at $2/lb, and lots of the requisite veggies are dirt cheap at the same store.  Since our fraternal organizations, churches, the like are cancelling their St. Paddy’s Day festivities, really ought we not be just as scornful of their ridiculous censure?

    Yo playin’ tha Foo’, up.

    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  128. I worry that there won’t be hell to pay for what the media and social media influencers have done to stoke panic.

    Usually there’s no repercussions at all for wrong prophecies of doom. We are too relieved to care.

    And the prophets can get a benefit, if they are lucky in predicting doom for once.

  129. Besides people running to the hospital at the slightest symptom only effectively shuts them down and turns hospitals into mass infection centers.

    Seems like governments should start recommending people with mild symptoms to stay at home, ask to be diagnosed there and not go to the hospital, or even returning them home if they show up, just to leave room for the serious cases and to other diseases that continue happening regardless.

    But of course, when you feel your life is at risk, any case is serious.

  130. Ridiculous travel ban accomplishments nothing. People are already infected here. But congratulations on a leadership and decision-making platform that oozes uncertainty and confusion. The market reacts accordingly. Good luck if doesn’t make 1929 look like a kids birthday party.

  131. The illness with no name (at that time) caused infections as early as late November in Hubei Province. Samples from some of the pneumonia patients (attributed to influenza) were retroactively processed for forensic tracking purposes, and came up positive for SARS-2 / Wuhan Coronavirus.

    The researcher in Washington State is likely too conservative in pronouncing the virus has been within the population of the west coast for more than six weeks—more likely late December.

    This year’s influenza outbreak remained widespread since mid January. Many of those cases, in review, will document Cov19 movement in the U.S. population far more early than the nursing home cases reported as newsworthy.

  132. As I understand, the problem of Covic19 is how contagious it is.

    Because so many people get the disease so fast, it creates near collapses of public health systems. And THAT in itself causes more deaths and problems than the virus directly.

    Governments know that most of the population WILL be infected. And most will come out fine. And become immune (as apparently it is not a very mutable virus like Flu) IF public health systems do not collapse.

    Thus the plan is to SPREAD in time, as much as possible, contagion, so as to have the capacity to attend people.

    And once they are cured of the disease, there will be herd immunity and cases will massively drop.

  133. If you read reports from doctors working in Italy, the situation is beyond control. They let everyone over 65 and everyone with existing conditions die, basically without even trying. People can’t breathe on their own because lungs stop working. The only thing they can do is give oxygen but that doesn’t help. One needs equipment to oxygentate blood outside the body but that is too scarce, hence 6.5 percent death rate among tested.
    Looking back how this has played out, it sure looks as if the Chinese knew exactly what was going to happen. They prioritize money over lives so they would not have locked down everything if this was just another flu. The most worrying aspect is the rate of mutation. If CV19 mutates a few times a year and keeps hitting the planet with a few percent death rate, it will be impossible to get old in a very near future.

  134. Pandemics are damned if you do, damned if you don’t for politicians. Had they locked down the country – and keep in mind it took a Supreme Court order yesterday to keep the administration’s immigration policies in place – and no one got sick, they’d be castigated for over reacting.

    It’s been 49 days since the Chinese government had to admit to the scale of the problem. And people complained when the US government began quarantining travelers from Hubei province in response to that. Other than China and Iran, I’ll give most governments a solid B for doing what is logistically, financially and politically possible within the time available. Although Italy might be a C, not sure how much the average age of Italians is a factor in the spread and mortality of the virus their.

  136. covid19 seems to be a bit worse than the regular cold/flu. So its death toll might be higher and be on top of other diseases. On the other hand, the actions taken will also reduce flu and common cold cases so we might even end up having less commutable respiratory diseases.

    As a result of this pandemic our society will have a few shifts. Like more telecommuting, improved sanitary culture and more funding to research/fight flu-like diseases.

  137. If we had not identified it as a new virus, statistically it would probably be little distinguished (both cases and deaths) from flu and common cold.

    In fact, since people dying from corona virus are the same ones that will usually die from fly or common cold, the total death rate from ALL the respiratory diseases combined might remain stable, meaning corona virus death toll may “eat” at flu % of death toll.

  139. no rallies, no convention. Maybe even a postponed election. I just can’t see crowds standing in line to vote for local, state, and national offices. I mail-in, but that isn’t the norm.

  140. very good points Brett. The widespread use of antibiotics for just about everything in places like Africa and India will not be good for them. Mix into this mess a lot of “traditional medicine” and I suspect we will see huge numbers succumb.

  141. Jan: Since when have statistics out of China ever been reliable?

    My guess would be that they’re deliberately not doing anything in Uyghur regions, taking this as an opportunity to do some deniable ethnic cleansing. And so not reporting any deaths out of there.

  142. Good to hear from you, Brian. We had started suspecting you might have caught it.

    Free societies have a bit of trouble responding to pandemics, they’re reluctant to take the sort of actions that would cut them short, until it’s too late. Of course, totalitarian states have their own problems, as China demonstrates, so on net it’s far better to be a free society.

    I think corona-virus is going to end up giving us a needed kick in the rear as far as the way we deal with contagious disease. A lot of things like RNA vaccines, that have gradually been working their way through research, will be jump started into use. Perhaps we’ll start routinely culturing/sequencing infections, to keep track of what people are getting sick from. Instead of, “That’s bacterial, here’s a random antibiotic.” or “That’s viral, take some OTC cold medicine and a few days off from work.”

    I’ve been rather disturbed over the last decade or so with just how little interest the medical profession has in finding out what you’re infected with, until you’re at death’s door already.

  143. In Sweden, the system has now collapsed. They announced they are now giving up testing people in Stockholm. The health care system was overloaded due to mass immigration and incompetent management even before this. The incompetent politicians put in charge of everything ignored all warnings and claimed everything was under control and no worries – be happy until too late.
    The Italian situation is likely to repeat itself in Sweden within a couple of weeks.
    Interestingly, the second biggest city (Gothenburg) does not show signs of spread yet. Perhaps due to lack of testing. The tracking map is interesting. A pity they can’t keep up the testing anymore.
    https://c19.se/l1/

  146. Yeah, incompetence. Little testing … little containment.
    “There have been about 8000 coronavirus tests performed in the USA. There have been hundreds of thousands for coronavirus tests in South Korea”
    I predict the US govt will improve its game, but because of the slow start, many lives will be lost that would have otherwise not have been lost. It is sad.

  149. It concerns me a bit that Trump, Sanders and Biden are ALL in the ‘more likely to get it, more likely to die’ demographic. And Bernie and Biden are kind of forced into heavy public contact, and will be for the next few months even as the chance of exposure continues to increase exponentially.

    Then there’s the question of what to do about the up-coming crowded political conventions and then the typical crowds of voters on election day, assuming this doesn’t quickly die out over the next few months.

    If you can and haven’t already, consider signing up to vote-by-mail.

  150. Surgeon General, Mar 9th: “Initially, we had a posture of containment, so that we could give people time to prepare for where we are right now,” Adams said:Now we’re shifting into a mitigation phase, which means that we’re helping communities understand, you’re going to see more cases. Unfortunately, you’re going to see more deaths.”https://edition.cnn.com/asia/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-03-08-20-intl-hnk/h_1cc572c8faf993478064db4b8a8acc62

    So… you undertook ineffective containment methods that persistently and blatantly failed. [National US daily case growth rate ~33% per day for at least the last 10 days, number of states with cases doubled over the past 6 days, and NONE of the states with more than 1 case just 4 days ago have kept their growth rate low.]

    But “Sorry for the coming deaths everyone…”

  151. If the Chinese statistics is to be believed, there ate almost no new cases of the Corona virus in China. Meaning, the development can be turned around…

  152. Freighters have small crews and turn around in 24hours without any need for the crew to leave the ship.

  153. I noticed that during the speech. It was especially crude and badly written, clearly heavily dependent on Trump himself and close aides like Miller. The real Trump voice was there and he clearly said in that botched syntax that trade goods would be included. It made zero sense so I assumed it would be changed but it wasn’t a slip, he clearly read it off the prompter.

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