Well here in Oklahoma there have already been a few drive-by shootings. I think it was 1 in OKC and 1 in Tulsa.

@Flash wrote:

Luckily our bars are not yet reopened. It has been very refreshing because the local news has not reported any bar brawls in the month they have been closed. There have not been shots fired in the parking lots of the bars and clubs that are closed and the number of horrible 'accidents' and DUI fatalities has gone down close to zero. My understanding is that people are not drinking less, they just are doing it at home where they don't have to drive anywhere to get home. While there supposedly is more domestic abuse, there have been fewer at home shootings by far. There appears to be less drug violence and there have been no drive by shootings reported for the month we have been shut down. Heck, we haven't even had a bank robbery! Refreshing.

One of the employees at my favorite liquor store told me that everyone was drinking at home. That was why they were out of my favorite wine for a while. The distributor had trouble keeping up with the demand.

@Flash wrote:

My understanding is that people are not drinking less, they just are doing it at home where they don't have to drive anywhere to get home.

@Equine24 wrote:

Was it Wisconsin?

No, Virginia. I have heard our beaches are opened and people are ignoring social distancing there too. There is not effective enforcement.

Our state is one with a rising case curve:


Hoping we don't get an exponential rise after easing.

I would love to see public service announcements aimed at encouraging and possibly even shaming people into wearing masks, distancing and just in general acting like there's a pandemic going on.

@MickeyB wrote:

We have public service announcements literally telling people to go to the damn doctor.

The hospital here and in a nearby county (I haven't heard about the nearest counties yet) have lost so much money due to COVID that they are offering staff a choice of termination with a hefty separation package or unpaid furlough for 4 months. Those who take the separation package will be allowed to reapply for their jobs in 18 months. The folks being asked to choose are ones more aligned with elective surgeries, which have been prohibited since early March. My sister is in need of 'elective' revision surgery on a knee replacement done a decade ago. It is considered 'urgent' but not 'emergency' and finally they have been able to provisionally schedule her for early July.

Much of our local hospital is and has been empty to be prepared for waves of COVID patients. With the reopening they need to get ready because in the past 7 days our new confirmed cases have gone in oldest to ,newest sequence 15, 18, 35, 16, 55, 25, 39. More troubling is that within the past two days our median age has dropped from 55 to 47. Evidently it is not us old fogeys in our fashionable masks who are getting sick now.

re: flu comparison

We actually don't count the number of people who die of the flu each year. Keep in mind whenever you hear X number of people died of the flu in America this or that year, it's all a modeled estimate. The ONLY actual flu deaths we count are ones of kids/pediatric. All other flu deaths - you often hear numbers like 10's of thousands die a year of flu - are pneumonia and certain respiratory deaths that are included and then a multiplier added onto all those deaths (i.e., pediatric + pneumonia + respiratory). It's often anywhere from a 5x...to a 8x multiplier.

The end result is a range estimate of the number of flu deaths. No one actually knows the real number. EVEN with the range, COVID-19 deaths are far greater.

This Washington Post piece explains that if we counted flu and COVID-19 deaths the same way, you'd see how much more deadly COVID-19 is (they propose it's about 8-10x more deadly AT LEAST):

[www.washingtonpost.com] (May 2, 2020)

@ wrote:

Months into the coronavirus pandemic, some politicians and pundits continue to promote ham-handed comparisons between covid-19 and the seasonal flu to score political points.

Though there are many ways to debunk this fundamentally flawed comparison, one of the clearest was put forth this week by Jeremy Samuel Faust, an emergency room physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School.

As Faust describes it, the issue boils down to this: The annual flu mortality figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are estimates produced by plugging laboratory-confirmed deaths into a mathematical model that attempts to correct for undercounting. Covid-19 death figures represent a literal count of people who have either tested positive for the virus or whose diagnosis was based on meeting certain clinical and epidemiological criteria.

Such a comparison is of the apples to oranges variety, Faust writes, as the former are “inflated statistical estimates” and the latter are “actual numbers.”

To get a more accurate comparison, one must start with the number of directly confirmed flu deaths, which the CDC tracks on an annual basis. In the past seven flu seasons, going back to 2013, that tally fluctuated between 3,448 and 15,620 deaths.

It's important to understand that COVID-19 deaths can sometimes have an estimate built in sometimes too (you have to look at how they're being reported). We do have official counts, but everyone agrees those are undercounts, as many die without ever getting tested. Excess mortality in a region is one way people can try to estimate how many extra COVID-19 deaths there have been that haven't been officially recorded.

Either way, whether based on actual counts or based on estimates, COVID-19 comes out much more deadly than the flu from what I am understanding.

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2020 07:54PM by shoptastic.

I live in Nebraska, and although there wasn't exactly a "lock-down", we did receive specific instructions on safety. Our stores immediately masked employees and put face shields in front of cashiers, etc. We got e-mails, texts, and flyers in the mail emphasizing what we should/should not do. People who went out of town to shop or visit VOLUNTARILY quarantined themselves for 14 days after. TV announcements, and in the local newspaper, too. The Senior Center was closed, the nursing home did not allow visitors. Every business in town put large notices up about safety -- usually on their front doors, so you could see/read before entering. No store allowed more than one family member in at a time.

I thought our small local businesses did an A+ job of protecting employees from exposure. I mean, the masks, face shields, and safety instructions were right there, immediately, for each and every employee. Each cashier had sanitizer wipes, gloves, etc.

The last day I worked, March 18, one of my shops was out of state.

Without a car, it was relatively simple for me to self-quarantine.

Plus, all the jobs I would ordinarily complete disappeared. That helped make it easy, too.

For the last couple weeks, anyone here can get tested for free.

They fired a person in Florida with the state because she would not fudge data that would show that it was safe to open everything. Darwin strikes again.

The woman was a scientist. She was in charge of a database that showed positives/deaths, etc., and she was fired when she would not willingly change some information so as to falsify the integrity of the data.
**Correction** One of Florida's newspapers reported today that this woman was not a scientist, nor was she the sole originator of this database. She was forced to "tweak" data, with which she took offense.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 11:14PM by Opanel.

People like her are heroes. Like the Chinese doctor in Wuhan who tried to warn people early of the virus.

Sad we try to shut these people up.

There was a CDC or HHS guy who was a whistleblower too and in the news recently.

On one side of the scales, there might be a smaller number of covid deaths. No one has determined the exact number of deaths, so this remains to be determined. On the other side of the scales, there are the wrecked lives of people who lost livelihoods, opportunities for other aspects of health and well-being, and respect. So many people and the larger pictures of their ongoing needs were dismissed! They were thrown under the bus! This is never okay, in my book. YMMV.

@Shop-et-al wrote:

On one side of the scales, there might be a smaller number of covid deaths. No one has determined the exact number of deaths, so this remains to be determined. On the other side of the scales, there are the wrecked lives of people who lost livelihoods, opportunities for other aspects of health and well-being, and respect. So many people and the larger pictures of their ongoing needs were dismissed! They were thrown under the bus! This is never okay, in my book. YMMV.

What approach would you have gone for, Shopetal?

Would you do a Swedish herd immunity approach? ...a South Korea aggressive testing, "intrusive contact tracing," and isolation approach?

I feel for the economically distressed. Although, I argued early on that we could handle that buy bailing out everyone (not just favoring the rich, hedge funds, private equity, and large corporations) for 60 days in a coordinated, mandatory national lockdown. I think we didn't do enough to bailout small companies who seem the most hurt in all of this.

Regardless of the approach one takes, I do think (as I've said before) that every country would have likely had some significant economic effects. I just think a good number of people would have stayed home and been scared away from businesses. Would it have led to the projected 1/3rd small business closings that Facebook's recent survey found? Maybe not. It's all very speculative.

Also, don't count out the possibility of a second, more fatal wave this fall/winter.

The second wave of the Spanish flu was the one that killed the most people, as the initial virus mutated and soldiers spread it globally:

[www.history.com]

@ wrote:

From September through November of 1918, the death rate from the Spanish flu skyrocketed. In the United States alone, 195,000 Americans died from the Spanish flu in just the month of October. And unlike a normal seasonal flu, which mostly claims victims among the very young and very old, the second wave of the Spanish flu exhibited what’s called a “W curve”—high numbers of deaths among the young and old, but also a huge spike in the middle composed of otherwise healthy 25- to 35-year-olds in the prime of their life.

In all, the Spanish flu infected 500,000,000 people world-wide and killed 20-50 million (estimated).

A recent study argues COVID-19 could last 2 years just like the Spanish flu and have a worse second wave later this year: [www.usatoday.com]

@ wrote:

If COVID-19 follows a pattern set by the 1918 Spanish flu, the pandemic is likely to last up to two years and return with a vengeance this fall and winter – a second wave worse than the first, according to a study issued from the University of Minnesota.

"States, territories and tribal health authorities should plan for the worst-case scenario," warns the report out of the university's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, "including no vaccine availability or herd immunity."

"Risk communication messaging from government officials should incorporate the concept that this pandemic will not be over soon and that people need to be prepared for possible periodic resurgences of disease," the authors suggest.

The study team, headed by Dr. Kristine A. Moore, medical director at the University of Minnesota center, included pandemic experts from Harvard and Tulane universities.

Although there doesn't absolutely have to be a more vicious second wave, it's a sobering possibility to at least keep in mind. I'd rather be prepared with true possibilities than false, comforting information that leaves me unprepared. In my own mind, I've already prepared that my parents could die from this at anytime.

@ wrote:

The worst-case scenario – a more lethal resurgence this fall and winter – is based on the Spanish flu outbreak a century ago, when a small wave hit in early 1918, followed by a huge spike that fall and a third major wave in early 1919.

Studies suggest social distancing measures had worked against the 1918 epidemic until they were hastily lifted by some cities, like Denver, in early celebrations. Instead of continuing to “flatten the curve,” these cities experienced a second spike in cases.

“A lot of the confusion, in general, is premised on the misunderstanding that if you control the epidemic once, then you’re done,” Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told the USA TODAY Editorial Board last month. “There’s no reason to think that.”

It could be far from over. The worst could be yet to come. Something we have to keep in mind.

I don't want to get too complacent - as I'm sensing in my mom.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 03:11AM by shoptastic.

Scientists are not allowed to falsify data. That's what statisticians are for. I hope she sues them and wins.

@Opanel wrote:

The woman was a scientist. She was in charge of a database that showed positives/deaths, etc., and she was fired when she would not willingly change some information so as to falsify the integrity of the data.

Statisticians don't get to change it either, just slant interpretation of it.

It is a shame that this situation has provided many "experts" with an opportunity to slant the numbers to best suit their needs. Evidently part of the issue in this case was the date that the patients first reported having symptoms. The accurate data--some of which was allegedly deleted--appeared to indicate that people were falling ill earlier than the public was led to believe.

Sweden becomes country with highest coronavirus death rate per capita

@ wrote:

Sweden has now overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium to have the highest coronavirus per capita death rate in the world, throwing its decision to avoid a strict lockdown into further doubt.

[www.yahoo.com]

I would have located a humanizing force who would have remembered that a wide variety of vulnerable populations exist on our large planet. This humanizing force would have organized the resources for all kinds of situations in which people cannot adapt quickly for whatever reason or reasons. his humanizing force would have plainly identified the hints, tips, helps, and copes for the people who attempt to help others.

The dratted disease affects everyone, but not all persons can identify or process needed changes. Some could not do this pre-covid and they will not be able to so at any time, even if covid risk evaporates someday. Statistics will never mean anything to some people. These people need to get through a day, and sometimes just one minute at a time every day!

But there is some good news about that: some school districts are beefing up their mental health systems and re-organizing resources to accommodate as many ongoing and the new, covid-related situations as possible.

@shoptastic wrote:

@Shop-et-al wrote:

On one side of the scales, there might be a smaller number of covid deaths. No one has determined the exact number of deaths, so this remains to be determined. On the other side of the scales, there are the wrecked lives of people who lost livelihoods, opportunities for other aspects of health and well-being, and respect. So many people and the larger pictures of their ongoing needs were dismissed! They were thrown under the bus! This is never okay, in my book. YMMV.

What approach would you have gone for, Shopetal? .....

Limited testing and slow test results definitely make a lot of this questionable. When it may take several days to get the prescription to get the test, then several days for the test appointment and then possibly as much as several weeks to get test results there is lots of room to 'legitimately' select a date for counting a positive result as a 'confirmed COVID case'. Whatever protocols have been adopted for reporting, they have not been shared with the public so the reported numbers defy common sense and just point once again to politicians trying to assure the public that they are not wading in pure unpreparedness and chaos.

We elect politicians and pay their salaries for them to safeguard an orderly and safe society. Evidently they have been too busy feathering their own nests and taking care of their financial backers to be bothered with that orderly and safe society stuff.

No! Lives have been ruined and people are having to watch their livelihoods go down the drain.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 06:18PM by iblori.

That quite frankly is bulls*it.

Even though some large and small businesses were floundering pre-covid, the covid shutdowns and other responses have made it more difficult or impossible for these to recover. These well known businesses are in the news more than smaller or less known concerns. Some of the smaller or less known businesses were well pre-covid, and through no fault of their own they now struggle or failing. Employees who lost jobs through no fault of their own are losing money, benefits, perks, and opportunities. The state and federal benefits will have some tax effect for some people, even as they provide more or less money than individuals and families earned pre-covid. So the people who are better financially now than they were before do not have the same needs as the people who now have less money and other resources than they had before covid.

The potential employee and employer pools are severely damaged. To what extent can they recover or at least improve?

Some lives were precarious at best for a myriad of reasons. Now, the healthy strands of the stuff of life that they used to know are being challenged or have disappeared altogether. The shutdowns and commands did not consider the needs in these often quiet and/or overlooked groups. I and some others are so concerned about people we know that we are trying to find ways to help, stay out of the way, or at to least to know if there is anything for us to do that is useful.

Is any of this loss justified? If yes and/or if no, there are unmet needs in our vast world. Money is not the answer to all the needs, even though it helps in many ways.

@iblori wrote:

No! Lives have been ruined and people are having to watch their livelihoods go down the drain.

@shoptastic wrote:

I feel for the economically distressed. Although, I argued early on that we could handle that buy bailing out everyone (not just favoring the rich, hedge funds, private equity, and large corporations) for 60 days in a coordinated, mandatory national lockdown. I think we didn't do enough to bailout small companies who seem the most hurt in all of this.

Regardless of the approach one takes, I do think (as I've said before) that every country would have likely had some significant economic effects. I just think a good number of people would have stayed home and been scared away from businesses. Would it have led to the projected 1/3rd small business closings that Facebook's recent survey found? Maybe not. It's all very speculative.

Quoting myself above, a recent article I read highlighted the absurdity of financial markets going up/rebounding at best rate since The Great Depression, as economic conditions deteriorate at the same level:


That picture says it all.

Not unlike 2008, when Wall Street was bailed out and Main Street left for dead, we have some similarities today as well. My gripe has been the unequal aid given to the rich vs. the average person and small businesses.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 07:14PM by shoptastic.

Exactly. Statistics can make the scientists' raw data say whatever the "higher ups" want them to say.

@Flash wrote:

Statisticians don't get to change it either, just slant interpretation of it.

@Shop-et-al wrote:

Even though some large and small businesses were floundering pre-covid, the covid shutdowns and other responses have made it more difficult or impossible for these to recover.

One type of business - zombie companies - were bound to fail (although, many have been temporarily bailed out right now and awaiting possible insolvency issues later this year) in any downturn:



They are companies with so much debt that they cannot service their interest payments without borrowing more debt. They've been kept alive as "zombies" by gorging on low interest rates. They have increased in number since 2008 and were a source of financial system fear the past few years. Any recession we had, be it one caused by COVID-19 or any other, would have led to serious issues in this sector.

Similarly, any recession would have collapsed "borderline/struggling" businesses as well. This happens in every recession.

The COVID-19 recession/depression seems to more severely affect front-facing and crowd-gathering businesses the most: airlines; cruises; restaurants; concert venues; gyms, etc.

Restaurants are probably a unique COVID-19 casualty. Lyn Alden has done some historical research showing that restaurant traffic and earnings don't really get hit much in recessions. I was surprised by this. For whatever reason, people still go out to eat a lot even during recessions.

Unfortunately, they are a unique target of COVID-19's recession. Maybe gyms too. Gold's Gym recently filed for bankruptcy. Lockdown or no lockdown, I think these front-facing and crowd-gathering businesses would have faced a sizable business hit from consumer fear with the virus. I sound like a broken record now. But, I think it's more the scale that is arguable. Hard to know for sure what would have happened without a "lockdown" (in quotes, because we didn't have a true nation-wide lockdown). Can a restaurant stay afloat with 15% less customers (my made up number for how many people would've voluntarily stayed away from businesses sans a lockdown)? I dunno.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 08:32PM by shoptastic.

basically, to me we're going to have a recession NO MATTER WHAT with COVID-19...lockdown or no lockdown...a U.S. and global recession were going to happen...did the lockdown make the economics worse than they would've otherwise been??? that's the debate, I think.

Looks like there may be a lot of people joining the Homeonwheelsalliance.org when they start having to live in there cars or vans. I have thought about running away from everything and doing that.

You want to run away from everything? What do you expect to find... wherever you go?

Just to get away from people and be left alone.

Flyy1220
You might want to check how states determine the death rate. It is my understanding that death rate data is not computed the same in all states.