~*Official #COVID-19 Thread of Doom*~ Revenge of Omicron Prime

[Remarkableriots]

2 hours ago, mclumber1 said:

 

Lifehack:  Just wear an old pair of tightie whities on you head.  They have elastic built in.  

Would help with social distancing when they see those skid marks!

[Remarkableriots]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/health/coronavirus-health-care-workers.amp.html

Quote

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday that 9,282 health care professionals had contracted the coronavirus in the United States as of April 9 and that 27 had died from it.

The agency cautioned that the numbers were most likely higher than reported because of inconsistencies in data-gathering and the lack of information during the outbreak. “This is likely an underestimation,” the report said, because the occupational status of patients was available for only 16 percent of the cases in the United States reported to the C.D.C.

Health care workers are among the most vulnerable groups during the pandemic because of their proximity to infected patients, a situation made worse because some have been working with inadequate protective equipment and clothing resulting from shortages.

 

[Guest]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/15/politics/us-intelligence-virus-started-chinese-lab/index.html

 

I don’t even know what the global community’s response would be if it turned out the PRC cooked this up in a lab.

 

I think US and European businesses might even have difficulty getting insurance policies to work with Chinese manufacturers if it turned out the government was so irresponsible. Could change the world economy.

 

 

Obviously just one of many things being looked into, but the implications of it if true are staggering.

[Remarkableriots]

 

[Chadatog]

22 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/15/politics/us-intelligence-virus-started-chinese-lab/index.html

 

I don’t even know what the global community’s response would be if it turned out the PRC cooked this up in a lab.

 

I think US and European businesses might even have difficulty getting insurance policies to work with Chinese manufacturers if it turned out the government was so irresponsible. Could change the world economy.

 

 

Obviously just one of many things being looked into, but the implications of it if true are staggering.

Just some clarification on this lab, it was doing surveillance testing and research on coronavirus in wild animals and due to mishandling could of infected people and then mutated to allow for person to person infection.  The virus itself was never cooked up in a lab.  We do similar testing in wild animal populations for avian flu and swine flu.  This still doesn't absolve the lab if they were responsible due to improper handling, but this lab was not the type of facility that could specifically engineer the virus.  Here is an article about the lab in question which the US supports and was being asked to send more support by the US officials that were inspecting the facility in 2018.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/

[Remarkableriots]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/04/13/anti-vaccine-activists-fire-fauci-furor-185001

Quote

When President Donald Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday night, he jolted a fringe conservative movement that viewed the boost as an acknowledgment of its cause.

And the #FireFauci gang was ready with a replacement: Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai.

Ayyadurai, or “Dr. Shiva” as his fans call him, is a controversial scientist and long-shot Massachusetts Senate candidate who is pushing a variety of claims that range from dubious to medically disputed to outright false. He has argued that a strict vitamin regimen can prevent and treat the coronavirus — an unsubstantiated view at odds with the medical community and existing research. And he claims Fauci is a deep-state plant hellbent on “forced and mandatory vaccines” to support “Big Pharma” — a claim for which there is no evidence.

 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Chadatog said:

Just some clarification on this lab, it was doing surveillance testing for coronavirus in wild animals and due to mishandling could of infected people and then mutated to allow for person to person infection.  The virus itself was never cooked up in a lab.  We do similar testing in wild animal populations for avian flu and swine flu.  This still doesn't absolve the lab if they were responsible due to improper handling, but this lab was not the type of facility that could specifically engineer the virus.  Here is an article about the lab in question which the US supports and was being asked to send more support by the US officials that were inspecting the facility in 2018.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/

Correct, I didn’t mean it in the literal sense, hence my later not about them being irresponsible. But thanks for adding more meat to it  

[Chadatog]

Trump is totally going to replace Fauci with a Qanon dude.

 

Edit:  sry @sblfilms I originally read it as responsible not irresponsible.

[thewhyteboar]

 

[Chairslinger]

28 minutes ago, thewhyteboar said:

 

 

 

You know, this is something that has me seriously worrying about our response the past few days. I see the rightwing response increasingly solidifying into a full on dividing line of turning "shut down" vs. "opening up" into a full blown, partisan, litmus test issue.

 

Which itself is bad enough. But I worry very much that they are going to find a receptive audience not just among true believers but a wide variety of Americans that are just plain stir crazy and ready to believe anyone who tells them it's safe to get out of the house again.

 

And something I wonder about is how a country like Italy fairly accurately gave us a look into our future when this first started blowing up, but I am not sure any country has shown us what it's actually going to be like for the U.S. moving forward because we are a large country both geographically and by population that we keep hearing about a "rebound" if distancing is lifted too early.....but what happens when people in nowhere Idaho and Wyoming see national news about how the worst is over in New York, so they think it's time to "open back up" but the first wave hasn't even hit them full force or even at all yet?

 

I keep thinking of this article from the end of March talking about how the virus might hit rural America later, but relatively even harder because of their limited ability to cope with a high column of such cases compared to big cities. This type of polarization could exacerbate that even more.

[Remarkableriots]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/news3lv.com/amp/news/local/las-vegas-mayor-open-our-city-being-closed-is-killing-us

 

[Remarkableriots]

https://www.change.org/p/the-people-of-las-vegas-and-henderson-nevada-impeach-las-vegas-mayor-carolyn-goodman

I agree she needs to go!

[PaladinSolo]

So much for Tuesdays jump from being a lag in reporting, Wed. was even higher at 2400 deaths, and then 1500-2k more were added from back log, over 30k deaths.

[skillzdadirecta]

This is some ironic shit right here Africans and other foreigners face increased racism and Xenophobia in China

 

Quote

After 16 years in China, a Congolese businessman thought he knew what being black there entailed. He had been subjected to racial slurs and denied apartments, but he had also learned Chinese and made local friends. He loved the country; he called it his second home.

But the businessman, Felly Mwamba, had not anticipated the coronavirus pandemic, during which he would find himself sealed in his home, prohibited from leaving and eyed as a carrier of the disease, simply because he was African.

“The way they are treating black people, you cannot accept,” Mr. Mwamba said by telephone. “We are not animals.”

As China tames the coronavirus epidemic now ravaging other countries, its success is giving rise to an increasingly strident blend of patriotism, nationalism and xenophobia, at a pitch many say has not been seen in decades. 

A restaurant in northern China put up a banner celebrating the virus’s spread in the United States. A widely circulated cartoon showed foreigners being sorted into trash bins. African residents in the southern city of Guangzhou, including Mr. Mwamba, have been corralled into forced quarantines, labeled as dangers to the country’s health.

Some of the uglier manifestations of nationalism have been fueled by government propaganda, which has touted China’s response to the virus as evidence of the ruling Communist Party’s superiority. And recriminations from abroad, including calls to make China pay for the pandemic that began there, have triggered defensiveness on the part of many Chinese.

 

It's not just black Africans getting heat.

 

Quote

China’s heightened us-against-them mentality is perhaps most apparent in its recent strictures aimed at foreigners. Though the Chinese government denounced racist attacks against Asians overseas when the outbreak was centered in China, it now casts people from other countries as public health risks.

Last month, China barred virtually all foreigners from entering, even though it had criticized other countries for closing their borders. Officials emphasize that most of China’s new cases are now imported — often without mentioning that many are Chinese nationals returning home. Fear of imported infections has at times exploded into, or provided cover for, xenophobia. In Beijing and Shanghai, foreigners have been barred from some shops and gyms, supposedly as part of a campaign to combat the virus. “We are temporarily not accepting foreign friends and people whose temperature is above 37.3,” read a sign in a hair salon near Beijing’s central business district. A salon employee said she didn’t see it as discrimination. “It is an epidemic, after all,” she said. John Artman, the American editor of a Chinese tech publication, said his office building in Beijing reopened last month after closing during the outbreak. But he was told that the building was not admitting foreigners. By coincidence, the company was already planning to move its office. But when he tried to visit the new office two weeks later, a colleague said the new site, too, would not permit foreigners to enter. Mr. Artman is still working from home. 

The authorities have said their outbreak prevention measures apply equally to Chinese and non-Chinese. But they have sometimes singled out foreigners in the same breath. A recent editorial in China Daily, a state-run newspaper, denied discrimination against foreigners, even as it said that “some foreigners choose to flout China’s rules” on containment.

Some expressions of antiforeigner sentiment have made no pretense about public health concerns. Last month, a porridge restaurant in the northeastern city of Shenyang displayed a banner that read: “Celebrating the epidemic in the United States and wishing coronavirus a nice trip to Japan.”

 

But Black Africans are getting the worse of it it seems.

 

Quote

Perhaps nowhere has xenophobia manifested itself more strongly than in Guangzhou, a manufacturing hub with a large African population. In recent days, African residents have reported being evicted from their homes and hotels, after five Nigerians there tested positive for the virus. Africans have also been ordered to undergo 14-day quarantines at their own expense, even if they have no recent travel history or have already tested negative. 

Images shared on social media showed groups of black people sleeping on a sidewalk, and a sign banning black people from a McDonald’s.

Mr. Mwamba, the Congolese trader, said he and other community leaders spent one night last week walking around the city, looking for lodging for Congolese students who had been ejected from their hotel. Soon after, his apartment door was taped shut with Mr. Mwamba inside, and local officials told him he could not go out for 14 days, he said.

The events in Guangzhou have drawn sharp — and unusual — condemnation from officials in Africa, where China has cultivated close ties and economic reliance through billions of dollars in loans and investments. Ghana’s foreign minister on Saturday criticized the “inhumane treatment” of Africans in China. A group of African ambassadors wrote a letter to China’s foreign minister denouncing “stigmatization and discrimination.”

 

Lastly, they are also discriminating against some Chinese nationals as well... those that don't tow the party line.

 

Quote

Foreigners are not the only targets of China’s swelling nationalism. Chinese people deemed insufficiently admiring of the government have been subjected to vitriolic online attacks by China’s army of “little pinks,” a nickname for the generation of young digital warriors who pounce on any criticism of the Communist Party. They recently targeted a novelist, Fang Fang, who for two months published a daily journal of life under lockdown in Wuhan, where the outbreak began. She wrote of the bravery of ordinary people around her, while also vowing to hold local government officials to account. 

When news emerged last week that her diary would be translated and published in English, she faced a torrent of abuse, accusing her of helping foreign governments undermine her own country.

“Her writings are being used to blackmail China, to demand that China pay compensation, to bring China to trial, to interrogate China,” Sima Nan, a Maoist scholar and well-known defender of Communist Party rule, said about Fang Fang in an interview. “She has become a political tool.”

Fang Fang has likened the harassment to her childhood during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when anyone seen as even mildly critical of Mao Zedong risked torture or imprisonment.

 

This continued Xenophobia, and if China is shown to have had any culpability in unleashing this virus, could cost them.

 

Quote

There are signs that the nationalism already threatens to create a backlash that could undermine China’s economic and diplomatic status.

Jörg Wuttke, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, said in an interview that the scope of limitations on foreigners in China was “much deeper” than in other countries and “excludes us from a lot of public spaces.” The chamber has called China’s restrictions on arriving foreigners an “unprecedented challenge” for corporations.

 

You guys should read the full article... it's fascinating shit.

[Signifyin(g)Monkey]

8 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

I'm sorry high school econ? Not everyone went to a well funded high school! We couldn't even get calculus. I should know, I was the only student eligible for calc! lol

 

But what's happening here doesn't appear to be reserve fractional banking.

There's really no other kind of banking.  Any institution that practiced what would amount to 'full reserve banking' would no longer be functioning as a bank but as a simple storehouse.  It would be pretty much incapable of providing the lending functions of a bank.

 

[CitizenVectron]

We're definitely about to see that the true enemy isn't the virus, it's people.

 

 

[CitizenVectron]

Jesus Christ:

 

 

 

[skillzdadirecta]

45 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

We're definitely about to see that the true enemy isn't the virus, it's people.

 

Zombie movies have been telling us this shit for decades. 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

1 hour ago, Signifyin(g)Monkey said:

There's really no other kind of banking.  Any institution that practiced what would amount to 'full reserve banking' would no longer be functioning as a bank but as a simple storehouse.  It would be pretty much incapable of providing the lending functions of a bank.

 

I guess what I mean is that if no reserves are required to make a loan it doesn't seem to be fractional reserve, though this is kinda squabbling over definitions

[chakoo]

7 hours ago, Remarkableriots said:

 

Kind of funny. 2 weeks ago my Mother in Law messaged us to tell us she was going crazy and wants ice cream. So we picked up a bunch at the store for her. 

[Amazatron]

1 hour ago, skillzdadirecta said:

 

Zombie movies have been telling us this shit for decades. 

I think every genre has been telling us this for decades, yes that includes romcoms.

[MarSolo]

I didn’t know where to put this but it made me laugh.

[osxmatt]

 

[CitizenVectron]

Did anyone here post the leaked "re-opening plan" from the US federal government? It was so ridiculous, and relied on a bunch of stuff that won't happen like (paraphrasing) "innovation in testing that increases capabilities 10x." Anyway, the first step was to completely re-open schools and day cares so that parents could get back to work. Yes, please, let's get those super spreaders out there right away. The administration literally only cares about money. I think there is a legitimate argument that re-opening parts of the economy will need to be done in the short-to-medium term for the sake of the supply chain, etc, but that's not why they want to do it.

[PaladinSolo]

Yeah, I wonder who they think watches all these peoples kids while their working after school?  Ohh thats right, grandma and grandpa.  Also i'm not sure if hes implying just 2-3% more or 2-3% of the total population, which is you know, like 7-10 million people.

[Firewithin]

45 minutes ago, osxmatt said:

 

 

[SaysWho?]

New York extends NY Pause (their stay-at-home) to May 15.

 

Interesting that it's not extended the whole month, and maybe that's more good news as it looks like the curve is flattening there.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

I hope there is a Hell where harpO can go be burned in a lake of fire and tortured by demons for all eternity.

[MarSolo]

Oprah gets the dull guillotine for bringing Oz into the world. Then Oz gets beaten to death with Oprah’s head.

[PaladinSolo]

Sweden is probably going to give up its Herd immunity strategy soon, parliament voted to give the PM temporary powers to begin lockdowns, as the last 3 days have seen 100+ people die, for reference Norway has only had 150 people die of the virus in total.

[SaysWho?]

What's funny is that the Lancet piece phrases it differently.

 

They say school "closures alone will reduce COVID-19 deaths by only 2-4%.”

 

He rephrases it saying we'll "only" kill off 2 - 4 percent of people (which is a lot of people).

[PaladinSolo]

5 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

What's funny is that the Lancet piece phrases it differently.

 

They say school "closures alone will reduce COVID-19 deaths by only 2-4%.”

 

He rephrases it saying we'll "only" kill off 2 - 4 percent of people (which is a lot of people).

This study just seems wrong, like maybe they could got to school with businesses shut down and have this happen, but even that seems wildly optimistic, 1 kid gets on a bus with 40 other kids, spreads its to like half of them, then to who knows how many in the school itself, who in a few days spread it to the entire school, bringing it into homes, who still have to go to stores and buy food, spreading it to the rest of the population.

[skillzdadirecta]

4 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

 

Zombie movies have been telling us this shit for decades. 

 Like I said...

 

 

[Jason]

 

[JPDunks4]

15 hours ago, Jason said:

 

Oh I didn't realize it was only for 8 weeks, I figured it was like what other countries were doing with covering salaries until the crisis is over. Stupid me for thinking we were doing anything even remotely right.

 

As someone that has gotten all our SBA Loans approved and funded pretty easily, we are using it to keep our roughly 500 employees employed during all this.  Using the funds to give extra pay as well as additional paid time off when its all over.

 

Small businesses vary so much in business models and everything else, that no matter what he gov't came up with, there would be issues.  Honestly the best way would be based on a P&L instead of just strictly Payroll costs.  Businesses with low Payrolls, this doesn't work that well for.  The restaurant industry, which is what I am in, this works out pretty well for us since Payroll costs are a huge portion of our costs.  

 

As long as things don't drastically change in the next few months, we should be using essentially 100% of the loan on payroll costs, so it should essentially all be forgiven.  

Not all businesses will be able to use it in the same way though.