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Some Ask a Taboo Question: Is America Overreacting to Coronavirus?
- Thread starter PlayerRep
- Start date
PlayerRep said:
"The bill requires"... (Wink, wink, fingers crossed)... That's cute. Corporations are NEVER shady, except when they are shady every day and twice on Sunday. If they weren't constantly scandalous, they wouldn't need you.
Some airlines bought more jets, some gave Millions in bonuses to their execs. Because they will be bailed out now, they will do stock buybacks, and give Millions more in bonuses to their fat cats while NOT doing anything to prepare for the next time this fake shit happens.
TCCGRIZ said:
Yeah, I would say simply because he is for getting rid of guns. That of course would never happen, but they like to flirt with it.
How deep can Pelosi dig her hole
A nationwide mandate for ballot harvesting$300 million for foreign refugees abroadAn automatic visa extension for all foreign workersAn expansion of foreign-language ballotsSame-day voter registration for the 2020 presidential electionAn amnesty for nearly 800,000 DACA illegal aliens
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/24/pelosis-coronavirus-plan-up-to-1000000000-for-sanctuary-cities/
A nationwide mandate for ballot harvesting$300 million for foreign refugees abroadAn automatic visa extension for all foreign workersAn expansion of foreign-language ballotsSame-day voter registration for the 2020 presidential electionAn amnesty for nearly 800,000 DACA illegal aliens
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/24/pelosis-coronavirus-plan-up-to-1000000000-for-sanctuary-cities/
Cuervohola said:
Stock buybacks, bonuses, and pay raises for execs not allowed under the bill. It's the law. It will be adhered to.
Airlines announced a week ago that they would
do stock buybacks.
Nothing wrong with them anyway. Money goes to investors who then invest the money elsewhere. Even if spent some of it, the money goes into the economy. They don’t hide it under their mattress. Dems don’t understand money or finance. People
complain out buybacks is a signal that they don’t understand finance or business.
Coronavirus in N.Y.: ‘Astronomical’
Surge Leads to Quarantine Warning
The White House advised people who have passed through or left New York City that they should place themselves in a 14-day quarantine.
New York Considered ‘High-Risk Area’
About 60 percent of all new cases in the United States were in New York City’s metropolitan area, officials said.
Anyone arriving in Florida from airports in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut during the coronavirus outbreak will have to self quarantine for two weeks or risk facing criminal charges, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared in an executive order, CNN has reported."
Surge Leads to Quarantine Warning
The White House advised people who have passed through or left New York City that they should place themselves in a 14-day quarantine.
New York Considered ‘High-Risk Area’
About 60 percent of all new cases in the United States were in New York City’s metropolitan area, officials said.
Anyone arriving in Florida from airports in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut during the coronavirus outbreak will have to self quarantine for two weeks or risk facing criminal charges, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared in an executive order, CNN has reported."
PlayerRep said:
So, you know what's in the bill, even though it hasn't passed yet? You're planning on reading the 1500 or so pages? Corporations are Evil, and they will break all the rules anyway. They might end up paying a fine, AKA the cost of being scumbags, but they are fine with that. You know all this, but are too shy to play.
Stock buybacks can help investors, but it really helps corporations. It's how Millionaires become Billionaires.
Cuervohola said:
Yes, it's not hard to see important parts of the bill.
No corporation will intentionally violate these requirements. The agreements may get set up so that the loan defaults upon a violation.
Stock buybacks don't make money for the investors who sell the stock. It gives the investors liquidity. They sell their stock for cash. Their stock is bought on the open market by third party broker dealers, or 95% is. Sometimes the price of a stock will go up a little when the buyback in announced. The announced buyback will keep the share price from dropping due to heavy selling.
PlayerRep said:
Yeah, the important parts of the bill are talked about all day long, at least on Fox. It's because the Democrats are obstructionists for the most part. They don't talk about the bailouts on Fox because that's their side politically.
Corporations never follow the rules, OR YOU wouldn't be needed. You're acting like someone in blank corporation is following all your posts to make sure you're towing the line or something. Corporations push past the limit all the time, that's why they pay fines in every sector. That's why there is CA and MT lawsuits in every sector.
There will be no loan default because the people passing the bill are bought by the corporations. There will probably be fines if it gets noticed by the public. If it doesn't get noticed by the public... Crickets.
Cuerv, I don’t know if you are joking with Player or not. I was employed by a major chemical company for several years and represented many corporations in a food brokerage business for 25 years, thus, have experience with some of the world’s largest corporations. Without corporations, where would our country be regarding the car you drive, the food you eat and the TV you watch? As for the corporate executives, some of the more quality people in our world.
TCCGRIZ said:
The only way to get rid of corporations is to get rid of politicians that protect them, which is of course 99% of them. That will obviously never happen, despite the member of congress or wannabe member of congress preaching about "term limits".
People can always get jobs. They might not get jobs in their sector, but jobs will always be there.
Spanky2 said:
I'm not joking with him at all. Corporations used to be okay, maybe the time reference you are speaking of is the 70's and 80's? Anybody that lived through that time period knows that appliance corporations can't make a damn thing that works anymore, for one instance.
The tech corporations don't make anything that doesn't spy on you and record everything you say.
As far as executives, Bill Gates is one of the most Evil people on the planet. He hides behind that "Philanthropist" tag. If you have 60 Billion, it's easy to say you're giving away 55 Billion. So what?
"First, we've got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent."
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_innovating_to_zero/transcript#t-281346
wbtfg said:
Cuban gets it as an outsider like some of us. Members of congress have to keep shoveling the shit for the corporations or the money doesn't flow back to them in their election cycle.
Wall St Journal op-ed:
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.
Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.
The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.
Population samples from China, Italy, Iceland and the U.S. provide relevant evidence. On or around Jan. 31, countries sent planes to evacuate citizens from Wuhan, China. When those planes landed, the passengers were tested for Covid-19 and quarantined. After 14 days, the percentage who tested positive was 0.9%. If this was the prevalence in the greater Wuhan area on Jan. 31, then, with a population of about 20 million, greater Wuhan had 178,000 infections, about 30-fold more than the number of reported cases. The fatality rate, then, would be at least 10-fold lower than estimates based on reported cases.
Next, the northeastern Italian town of Vò, near the provincial capital of Padua. On March 6, all 3,300 people of Vò were tested, and 90 were positive, a prevalence of 2.7%. Applying that prevalence to the whole province (population 955,000), which had 198 reported cases, suggests there were actually 26,000 infections at that time. That’s more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases. Since Italy’s case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%.
In Iceland, deCode Genetics is working with the government to perform widespread testing. In a sample of nearly 2,000 entirely asymptomatic people, researchers estimated disease prevalence of just over 1%. Iceland’s first case was reported on Feb. 28, weeks behind the U.S. It’s plausible that the proportion of the U.S. population that has been infected is double, triple or even 10 times as high as the estimates from Iceland. That also implies a dramatically lower fatality rate.
The best (albeit very weak) evidence in the U.S. comes from the National Basketball Association. Between March 11 and 19, a substantial number of NBA players and teams received testing. By March 19, 10 out of 450 rostered players were positive. Since not everyone was tested, that represents a lower bound on the prevalence of 2.2%. The NBA isn’t a representative population, and contact among players might have facilitated transmission. But if we extend that lower-bound assumption to cities with NBA teams (population 45 million), we get at least 990,000 infections in the U.S. The number of cases reported on March 19 in the U.S. was 13,677, more than 72-fold lower. These numbers imply a fatality rate from Covid-19 orders of magnitude smaller than it appears.
How can we reconcile these estimates with the epidemiological models? First, the test used to identify cases doesn’t catch people who were infected and recovered. Second, testing rates were woefully low for a long time and typically reserved for the severely ill. Together, these facts imply that the confirmed cases are likely orders of magnitude less than the true number of infections. Epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for these factors.
The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.
This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible.
If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions.
A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.
Dr. Bendavid and Dr. Bhattacharya are professors of medicine at Stanford. Neeraj Sood contributed to this article.
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.
Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.
The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.
Population samples from China, Italy, Iceland and the U.S. provide relevant evidence. On or around Jan. 31, countries sent planes to evacuate citizens from Wuhan, China. When those planes landed, the passengers were tested for Covid-19 and quarantined. After 14 days, the percentage who tested positive was 0.9%. If this was the prevalence in the greater Wuhan area on Jan. 31, then, with a population of about 20 million, greater Wuhan had 178,000 infections, about 30-fold more than the number of reported cases. The fatality rate, then, would be at least 10-fold lower than estimates based on reported cases.
Next, the northeastern Italian town of Vò, near the provincial capital of Padua. On March 6, all 3,300 people of Vò were tested, and 90 were positive, a prevalence of 2.7%. Applying that prevalence to the whole province (population 955,000), which had 198 reported cases, suggests there were actually 26,000 infections at that time. That’s more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases. Since Italy’s case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%.
In Iceland, deCode Genetics is working with the government to perform widespread testing. In a sample of nearly 2,000 entirely asymptomatic people, researchers estimated disease prevalence of just over 1%. Iceland’s first case was reported on Feb. 28, weeks behind the U.S. It’s plausible that the proportion of the U.S. population that has been infected is double, triple or even 10 times as high as the estimates from Iceland. That also implies a dramatically lower fatality rate.
The best (albeit very weak) evidence in the U.S. comes from the National Basketball Association. Between March 11 and 19, a substantial number of NBA players and teams received testing. By March 19, 10 out of 450 rostered players were positive. Since not everyone was tested, that represents a lower bound on the prevalence of 2.2%. The NBA isn’t a representative population, and contact among players might have facilitated transmission. But if we extend that lower-bound assumption to cities with NBA teams (population 45 million), we get at least 990,000 infections in the U.S. The number of cases reported on March 19 in the U.S. was 13,677, more than 72-fold lower. These numbers imply a fatality rate from Covid-19 orders of magnitude smaller than it appears.
How can we reconcile these estimates with the epidemiological models? First, the test used to identify cases doesn’t catch people who were infected and recovered. Second, testing rates were woefully low for a long time and typically reserved for the severely ill. Together, these facts imply that the confirmed cases are likely orders of magnitude less than the true number of infections. Epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for these factors.
The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.
This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible.
If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions.
A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.
Dr. Bendavid and Dr. Bhattacharya are professors of medicine at Stanford. Neeraj Sood contributed to this article.
Wall St J op-ed:
Aerospace manufacturer Honeywell plans to hire 500 workers at its plant in Rhode Island, which currently produces safety goggles, to make millions of N95 face masks for medical professionals. 3M has doubled its global output of N95 masks and this week is sending 500,000 respirators to hot spots in the U.S.
Corporations including Apple, Facebook, Tesla and Goldman Sachs are donating millions of medical masks stockpiled for wildfires or a biochemical attack. Apparel manufacturers are repurposing textile mills to produce personal protective equipment. Hanes plans to manufacture masks using U.S. cotton at factories in El Salvador, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Diverse supply chains can help businesses operate more flexibly during a crisis since they don’t depend on any single country for materials or workers. That’s why an America first or America only government supply order would be a mistake.
Maine-based Puritan Medical Products, one of America’s top sources for nose swabs, says it has been rushing to keep up with orders even as some workers have become sick. Directing the company to produce more coronavirus swabs won’t do any good if it can’t get more workers and could create a shortage of flu tests if it has to divert resources from other lines.
Businesses know their workforce capacities and supply chains better than the government—and how to retool them to maximize efficiency. Dozens of breweries and distillers including Anheuser-Busch and Pernod Ricard USA are churning out hand sanitizer. General Electric plans to hire more workers to produce ventilators even while it lays off thousands in aviation. Fuel cell manufacturer Bloom Energy is retrofitting hundreds of old ventilators for the state of California.
Ford said on Tuesday that it would start assembling plastic face shields and work with 3M and GE to make respirators and ventilators. General Motors is also exploring how to use its global automotive supply chain to make ventilators. Ford’s CEO said its ventilators could be available by June, and it isn’t obvious that a government takeover of manufacturing would speed this up.
Aerospace manufacturer Honeywell plans to hire 500 workers at its plant in Rhode Island, which currently produces safety goggles, to make millions of N95 face masks for medical professionals. 3M has doubled its global output of N95 masks and this week is sending 500,000 respirators to hot spots in the U.S.
Corporations including Apple, Facebook, Tesla and Goldman Sachs are donating millions of medical masks stockpiled for wildfires or a biochemical attack. Apparel manufacturers are repurposing textile mills to produce personal protective equipment. Hanes plans to manufacture masks using U.S. cotton at factories in El Salvador, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Diverse supply chains can help businesses operate more flexibly during a crisis since they don’t depend on any single country for materials or workers. That’s why an America first or America only government supply order would be a mistake.
Maine-based Puritan Medical Products, one of America’s top sources for nose swabs, says it has been rushing to keep up with orders even as some workers have become sick. Directing the company to produce more coronavirus swabs won’t do any good if it can’t get more workers and could create a shortage of flu tests if it has to divert resources from other lines.
Businesses know their workforce capacities and supply chains better than the government—and how to retool them to maximize efficiency. Dozens of breweries and distillers including Anheuser-Busch and Pernod Ricard USA are churning out hand sanitizer. General Electric plans to hire more workers to produce ventilators even while it lays off thousands in aviation. Fuel cell manufacturer Bloom Energy is retrofitting hundreds of old ventilators for the state of California.
Ford said on Tuesday that it would start assembling plastic face shields and work with 3M and GE to make respirators and ventilators. General Motors is also exploring how to use its global automotive supply chain to make ventilators. Ford’s CEO said its ventilators could be available by June, and it isn’t obvious that a government takeover of manufacturing would speed this up.
Cuervohola said:
I whole heartedly agree with you on term limits, problem with that though is you have to figure out the " Adviser and Aides " who spend their entire lives in Washington.
Term limits on them as well ??
Now regarding the other part of your comment.
I'm not sure of the percentage but qu iui te a few people are in a different field from what their degree is ..
So if we get rid of big corporations, you get countries like china take over and start building more than they do now . How is what they are doing now working for us .90 % of antibiotics are made in china . What morons allowed that to happen .
Who in congress is in bed with china , Pelosi , Biden and Fienstien. I'm sure both sides of the aisle are to b li ame .
So who takes over the auto industry? You know how much money it takes for R&D ?? Just imagine the debacle you'd have if you had 200 small companies making automobiles . ( maintenance and parts ???) Or let's say the same for, appliances, heavy equipment, toilet paper , cell phones , computers , structural steel for ships and buildings, copper wire , PVC pipe , ceiling tiles , floor tile and carpet .
The list goes on .
Please explain how all that would work .
Dillon
Well-known member
PlayerRep said:
Well I am an old guy & use Medical Pot for 2 reasons, to sleep better & it loosens up my muscles. I originally thought it would help me with the chronic pain I have had forever but use it primarily to help me get 5 or 6 hours of sleep per night instead of just 2 or 3. So for me I am in agreement that pot shops should stay open!