Covid-19 Public Service Announcement

[freeskier7791]

Since I opened with a discussion on exponential math, I noticed some good news this morning.

Found a handy link with state by state case load growth rates.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/03/18/u-s-coronavirus-growth-rates-show-many-states-could-close-behind-new-york/5072663002/

Scrolling down a bit and I saw this:

[attachimg=1]

At first glance some folks might think, oh look we're reaching a peak!  Good news right?  Wrong.  It's not a peak, this is a logrithmic scale.  Everywhere except South Korea is still accelerating like gang busters.  So why did I say it's good news?  The good news is that we're at least not on purely exponential curve.  On a log scale exponential growth is a straight line.



So that says the cruel calculus of 2^whatever-your-assumption doesn't fully hold and we don't really know whether we overwhelm the system or no.  A conservative posture remains important but at least intervention matters.

Stay safe and good success on all your projects!
-Joel

Unfortunately the validity of some of the data on that graph is questionable. China has changed their definition of a covid case at least 6-7 times throughout the past few months, which has caused the trends they report to look very odd and just not reliable. Korea is also using a test with both very poor sensitivity and specificity (in the 50% range.) I think the curve more fits with the EU countries.

I'm a physician in NC, and we had our first 2 cases in my clinic yesterday.  The next few weeks are going to be interesting.

Hey!  I am in Clemmons, thank you to everything you are doing,  Our neighbors are residents at Baptist and have the same sentiment as you, I think that there is a big spike in reported cases coming.

[Powaah]

Since I opened with a discussion on exponential math, I noticed some good news this morning.

Found a handy link with state by state case load growth rates.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/03/18/u-s-coronavirus-growth-rates-show-many-states-could-close-behind-new-york/5072663002/

Scrolling down a bit and I saw this:

[attachimg=1]

At first glance some folks might think, oh look we're reaching a peak!  Good news right?  Wrong.  It's not a peak, this is a logrithmic scale.  Everywhere except South Korea is still accelerating like gang busters.  So why did I say it's good news?  The good news is that we're at least not on purely exponential curve.  On a log scale exponential growth is a straight line.



So that says the cruel calculus of 2^whatever-your-assumption doesn't fully hold and we don't really know whether we overwhelm the system or no.  A conservative posture remains important but at least intervention matters.

Stay safe and good success on all your projects!
-Joel

Unfortunately the validity of some of the data on that graph is questionable. China has changed their definition of a covid case at least 6-7 times throughout the past few months, which has caused the trends they report to look very odd and just not reliable. Korea is also using a test with both very poor sensitivity and specificity (in the 50% range.) I think the curve more fits with the EU countries.

I'm a physician in NC, and we had our first 2 cases in my clinic yesterday.  The next few weeks are going to be interesting.

Hey!  I am in Clemmons, thank you to everything you are doing,  Our neighbors are residents at Baptist and have the same sentiment as you, I think that there is a big spike in reported cases coming.

I spend the majority of my time at Baptist as well. There has been an amazing effort by our community to do whatever they can to help prevent spread as well as health-care utilization. The number of people in the ED is about half of what it usually is. All of our routine clinics have been cancelled, all elective cases cancelled. Hopefully with all the measures being taken we can have a better degree of mitigation. Stay safe!

[freeskier7791]

I spend the majority of my time at Baptist as well. There has been an amazing effort by our community to do whatever they can to help prevent spread as well as health-care utilization. The number of people in the ED is about half of what it usually is. All of our routine clinics have been cancelled, all elective cases cancelled. Hopefully with all the measures being taken we can have a better degree of mitigation. Stay safe!

Thanks you too!  I have a car guy friend that is a PA at Baptist as well, you may know him.  After all this is cleared up we should hang out

[MPbdy]

Well, shit is getting real.

California, Nevada, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania are all shut down. It will be nation wide soon.

I’m currently working from home and they’ve stripped manufacturing down to bare minimum. Many people will be laid off in the short term. I’m fully expecting we’ll close entirely in a week or two. We’re a small business and privately owned. I can’t see my owner floating salaries with no cash flow when the world is shutting down around us.

My girlfriends company just announced they’re shutting down the entire operation for 2 weeks and they’re a very large multinational aerospace company. Dealing with that news right now. Thankfully we’re very minimal on debt and can make this work for quite some time if we have to, but it’s not great.

Good luck to everyone. I don’t agree with what’s happening here but they’re literally not giving us any options.

These shutdowns are going to change the world as we know it. This is just the beginning.

[cholmes]

I'm in Carson City, Nevada.
The shut down is interesting, from my point of view, it mainly affects sit-down restaurants, bars, casinos, and the type of stores often found in malls. Think of the businesses women, kids, and young adults like to hang out in, those are closed. Makes sense, those are the places people like to congregate.

Of course, churches are the definition of congregation, and those are open. Hmmm. Not being a regular church goer, I don't know if attendance is dropping or not.

Hardware stores, grocery stores, auto part stores, industrial supply stores are all open, so frankly, the shut down hasn't affected me much at all. The local Summit racing retail outlet has established a drive-through, no joke, and it works well!

Also, the idea of people working on their cars during this situation is real. Our internet company sells performance parts mainly for classic muscle cars, and our average daily sales volume so far is basically normal (knock on wood).

[Exidous]

Never thought I'd be thankful to be in the military. Poor timing and all, I'll be in the UAE for about the next 6 months. Hopefully my house is still there when I get back.

The world will get through this like the other scares listed. Hopefully we do so without loosing all the good we've created.

[frijolee]

Of course, churches are the definition of congregation, and those are open. Hmmm. Not being a regular church goer, I don't know if attendance is dropping or not.

Both my church on the Big Island and the one I used to attend in SoCal have canceled services indefinitely and will be doing online sermons for the time being.  Getting together in that regard is at least discretionary.  0.02
 
My office did a remote pau hana (aka happy hour) Firday afternoon.  It struck me as more than a bit odd so I didn't tune in on that one.  Zoom meetings with 100 folks where only one person can talk at a time?  I wasn't so sure about that and I had an even of projects ahead of me.   I kinda thought that frosty beverages at 4:30 pm were more like to impede progress than inspire it...   

It is weird to think that policy makers are destroying livelihoods in the name of saving lives.  Tough balance.
-Joel

[cholmes]

Yeah, shortly after I typed that about churches, my wife informed me that local churches had canceled services. Makes sense.

[Cobranut]

My company supports nuclear power plants and refueling outages, so we're deemed a critical business.
This means we won't be shut down, but it also means we still have to travel to sites, and we have to be extremely careful not to get exposed.  This kind of stuff infecting workers during an outage could be truly catastrophic for the energy grid.

I still think that the mortality rate is overestimated due to incomplete data, but it's still a very serious disease, at least until an effective treatment/ vaccine is available.

Be safe everyone.

[radiomike]

I came out of retirement to help out and took a semi laden with food essentials to a store near Coventry.  They were so pleased to see me that they invited me to their coffin dodger's happy hour before the public were let in.  Hoarding has been a huge issue even though the food producers claim to have ramped up production by 50% and food destined for restaurants and hotels has been diverted to supermarkets.

The big problem with this bug is that no one really knows the full story, it is now being suggested that it can cause such mild symptoms that you don't realise you have it and in the meantime you are passing it on to others.

[Cobranut]

I came out of retirement to help out and took a semi laden with food essentials to a store near Coventry.  They were so pleased to see me that they invited me to their coffin dodger's happy hour before the public were let in.  Hoarding has been a huge issue even though the food producers claim to have ramped up production by 50% and food destined for restaurants and hotels has been diverted to supermarkets.

The big problem with this bug is that no one really knows the full story, it is now being suggested that it can cause such mild symptoms that you don't realise you have it and in the meantime you are passing it on to others.

That's what I think as well.
There are likely many thousands of cases, where people get sick and recover, that never get reported, and are not included in the statistics.  Of course all the fatal cases are reported.
This has the effect of inflating the mortality rate, and is adding to the hysteria, to the leftist media's delight.
Every damn time my wife sees or hears another report she gets all freaked out, and I have to try to calm her down again.   

Hopefully, we'll have a vaccine before too long. 
If not, once enough of the population has had it, then herd immunity will begin to shrink the number of cases and it'll eventually become just another strain of the flu.

[FourAces]

I'm heavily ladened down under a self-imposed quarantine about 1500 miles away from the duece. And I dunno what the job prospects for truck driver if outside of necessities, the volume of freight in this country absolutely nose-dived.

One of the main things I hauled as an 18 wheeler driver, was those 1 day delivery laytex horse masks you buy on Amazon Prime for $10-$35.

https://www.amazon.com/Accoutrements-12027-Horse-Head-Mask/dp/B003G4IM4S

But Americans aren't buying necessities like those anymore. That was my bread and butter as an 18 wheeler driver, those 1 day delivery horse head masks, and the occasional HAZMAT load. But that was my route, they're staples of Amazon's profitability it felt like, hauling so many latex horse head masks from the factory to the fulfillment center.

Once the blue car was paid off I said I need a massive break from working 8 weeks 1 week off for 14 months straight, it was driving me absolutely nuts, the confined space and utter lack of free time except sleeping and trucking. And I took like 2 months off at this point...but christ. I don't know what the employment prospects are and transportation industry makes you prone a bit to catching an illness, and this sucker IMO pretty nasty, even if I retain a bit of youth I don't believe I'm being hyperbolic when I say this is the Spanish Flu of our time.

That said I need to get back to St. Louis so I can do some tune up work. I know you guys might find SW20's and 4cylinders even of the turbo variety kinda lame compared to FD's with alumunim block/90 degree angle LS's. However I'll just say if you are going to increase boost pressure or modify, I always do a massive tuneup on a vintage car and its engine. To me that is always step #1 before I go ballsdeep into modifications and crap tons of boost, because I am narrowing the safety envelope once I add mods.

I know a lot of you aren't knowledgeable an obscure SMALL Toyota turbo engine that's not the 2jzgte, but I maintain, especially a JDM 3rd gen 3sgte, technically it is a motor developed for Class A WRC, and JGTC (Technically that was a pure racing variant cousin 503e that really did well in JGTC in the 90's in the Supra, and Rod Millen's record setting Pike's Peak run, and I think a Group S MR2 that never got fielded because Group B got killed off), equipped with a transmission built like a block of granite.

 It's no LS, but it's very similar to the far more famous 2jzgte. I-4, 540cc injectors, MAP sensor (so no archaic AFM), stock oil catchcan, metal headgasket, iron block, DOHC, aluminum head...yea I'll work with it even though I said fuck 4 cylinders in an earlier post. It's no LS or 2jz, but I think I can still have fun with it and maybe even win a race or two after some key bolt ons have un-stifled its potential. IMO, besides the 2jz and 1jz, the 3rd gen 3sgte represents one of the biggest "fuck you's" to that 280ps Gentlemen's agreement of the era. When Toyota made this little engine, I can just tell on some level Toyota engineers at the drawing board were like "Man, fuck that agreement, we'll just massively over-engineer this thing and then massively detune it from its actual capabilities", similar story with the 2jz.

[frijolee]

Interesting read of the day.  Why hard, fast, TEMPORARY isolation might work, complete with arguments on how to avoid flare ups on the back end... and one that doesn't neglect the economic impacts.

First argument I've seen how we might shrink the area under the curve as well as flatten it.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

[wickedrx7]

Interesting read of the day.  Why hard, fast, TEMPORARY isolation might work, complete with arguments on how to avoid flare ups on the back end... and one that doesn't neglect the economic impacts.

First argument I've seen how we might shrink the area under the curve as well as flatten it.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

Really good read but it actually scares the hell out of me.  Mainly the end conclusion (Please read article and don't just take this from it)

On one side, countries can go the mitigation route: create a massive epidemic, overwhelm the healthcare system, drive the death of millions of people, and release new mutations of this virus in the wild.

On the other, countries can fight. They can lock down for a few weeks to buy us time, create an educated action plan, and control this virus until we have a vaccine.

Governments around the world today, including some such as the US, the UK or Switzerland have so far chosen the mitigation path.

It is clear our government isn't taking this seriously up to this point.  They haven't put the appropriate national measures in place to really fight this.  This isn't a political argument, just a fact if you pull videos of how seriously they took this 3 weeks ago.  And now they are indicating they want things to go back to normal in a week or two.  Some states are taking this seriously but it is going to take a national effort to really combat this.  I am scared for our country....

[largeorangefont]

Interesting read of the day.  Why hard, fast, TEMPORARY isolation might work, complete with arguments on how to avoid flare ups on the back end... and one that doesn't neglect the economic impacts.

First argument I've seen how we might shrink the area under the curve as well as flatten it.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

Really good read but it actually scares the hell out of me.  Mainly the end conclusion (Please read article and don't just take this from it)

On one side, countries can go the mitigation route: create a massive epidemic, overwhelm the healthcare system, drive the death of millions of people, and release new mutations of this virus in the wild.

On the other, countries can fight. They can lock down for a few weeks to buy us time, create an educated action plan, and control this virus until we have a vaccine.

Governments around the world today, including some such as the US, the UK or Switzerland have so far chosen the mitigation path.

It is clear our government isn't taking this seriously up to this point.  They haven't put the appropriate national measures in place to really fight this.  This isn't a political argument, just a fact if you pull videos of how seriously they took this 3 weeks ago.  And now they are indicating they want things to go back to normal in a week or two.  Some states are taking this seriously but it is going to take a national effort to really combat this.  I am scared for our country....

It is a tough decision to halt (perhaps ruin) the lives of the vast majority of the country via stopping the economy. The leadership of the country really had no choice. We tried travel bans early in Feb, of course those were politicized. No one has a legitimate playbook for this, and there are no winners. If you do a true hard stop of the country and economy, many many people are still going to die, and not because of the virus.  We are really going to know a lot more in another week to week and a have to see what we have done up to this point has had a real effect.