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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-31
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
On two Coronavirus pieces on other websites:
The piece debunks itself when it quotes a Swedish epidemiologist who says:
“The truth is that we have a policy similar to that of other countries,” says Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, “Like everyone, we are trying to slow down the rate of infection … The differences derive from a different tradition and from a different culture that prevail in Sweden. We prefer voluntary measures, and there is a high level of trust here between the population and the authorities, so we are able to avoid coercive restrictions”
Sweden can do without orders of social distancing because its people will socially distance voluntarily when asked. That works because "there is a high level of trust here between the population and the authorities". That does not hold for the community of Somali people and other immigrants in Sweden more of whom are dying than in any other group.
Now project such a voluntary attempt onto the U.S. public where there is little, if any, trust between the population and the authorities. It simply would not work and one would soon have a runaway epidemic with all its bad consequences. Whitney's conclusion that we should all do like Sweden is thus not justified.
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The piece was posted on April 17. One of the 'experts' it quotes is Dr. John Oxford, "an English virologist and Professor at Queen Mary, University of London." Here is the quote as posted on Off-Guardian:
Personally, I view this Covid outbreak as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic. In this case we have had 8000 deaths this last year in the ‘at risk’ groups viz over 65% people with heart disease etc. I do not feel this current Covid will exceed this number. We are suffering from a media epidemic!
– “A VIEW FROM THE HVIVO / OPEN ORPHAN #ORPH LABORATORY”, blog post on Novus Communications website, March 31st 2020
Two remarks:
a. On April 17, when Off-Guardian posted the piece, the United Kingdom already had 14.607 deaths from Covid-19. Those were 6.600 more than the total number Dr. John Oxford predicted. If the real numbers, which are still increasing, are already 80+% higher than the expert's guestimate should one really use that expert to claim that the 'coronavirus panic' is unjustified?
b. Dr. Oxford made his claim in a "blog post on Novus Communications website". Novus Comes is a public relations agency which provides "financial social media & digital communications for small caps". The company is paid by its clients to talk up certain sectors of the stock market. Should one really use paid PR posts on a PR company's website to judge if some 'panic' about an epidemic is justified?
As for the other 'experts' Off-Guardian quoted. Yes, there ar some doctors who do have a different opinion than most of their colleagues. But that does not make them right.
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An astroturfing campaign was launched in the U.S. to end the lockdowns. It is paid for by rightwing big money:
Somebody did some extremely basic WHOIS searching and found that the person who set up all the "reopen $STATENAME" protest web sites is in fact one guy in Jacksonville. -> reddit thread
and:
[Thread] 1/ Much talk this morning about numerous Facebook groups cropping up with "insert state name" + "against excessive quarantine". Some are suggesting that there is mass astroturfing campaign occurring to pressure state governors to reopen after Donald Trump's tirade
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Covid-19 is a really, really nasty disease:
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We need to learn from this:
Use as open thread …
Posted by: Bemildred | Apr 21 2020 2:03 utc | 430 Concerns with that Stanford study of coronavirus prevalence
Thank you for that link. That led me to several articles of interest…
Don’t Believe the COVID-19 Models
That’s not what they’re for.
https://tinyurl.com/rmvkup3
Basically, they’re saying that models are only as good as 1) the data, 2) the calculations, and 3) what happens after someone notices the model exists… So they’re only as good as the last calculation made using the last data obtained.
As I recall, back in the ’70’s, the so-called “Club of Rome” came out with a computer model that predicted dire consequences for the world by the year 2000. I recall reading a review of that model in a journal which was directly concerned with computer modeling. They trashed it mercilessly… I myself noticed a variable called a “Unit of Pollution” – I’m like, say what? Of course, today we have much more sophisticated models and better computers to run them on. But mistakes still get made.
The point of the article above is that the models give you a *range* of possibilities – not all of them are going to happen. So yes, the virus might be far less damaging than some versions of models say, and OTOH it could be far worse than some models predict. The proper course of action is to err on the side of caution – so you lockdown, not “let ‘er rip.”
Our Pandemic Summer
The fight against the coronavirus won’t be over when the U.S. reopens. Here’s how the nation must prepare itself.
https://tinyurl.com/u8pekef
Both groups agree that before relaxing the guidelines on social distancing the U.S. urgently needs to expand its ability to test for the virus, and to shore up hospitals with sufficient supplies. These recommendations are sensible, but they hinge on the expectation that the U.S. can recover the ground it lost due to its early inaction. It might not be able to.
For example, with help from private companies and academic institutions, the U.S. is certainly testing more people than it was before. Over the past week, about 145,000 people have been tested every day, according to the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer collaboration spearheaded by The Atlantic. Those numbers look to rise even further, thanks to a new, rapid test from Abbott Laboratories that can deliver results in less than 15 minutes. But as testing capacity has grown, so has the pandemic. As my colleagues Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal have reported, private labs have taken on more orders than they can fulfill, and are experiencing huge backlogs. Demand for tests has ballooned, fueled by a rise in actual infections and the fact that Donald Trump keeps wrongly assuring the public that testing is no longer a problem. “The net gain just hasn’t been there,” said Kelly Wroblewski of the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
Crucial medical drugs are also running out. According to a University of Minnesota analysis, about 40 percent of the 156 drugs that are essential parts of critical care are becoming limited. Many of these depend on supply chains that involve China (where the pandemic began), Italy (the hardest-hit region in Europe), or India (which halted several exports). These chains have been discharging their contents like a sputtering garden hose that has now begun to run dry. “The medium term is going to be particularly perilous,” said Nada Sanders, a professor of supply-chain management at Northeastern University. “Global demand is so high, and supply is so far behind, that it’s very hard to envision enough of a ramp-up.”
Meanwhile, hospitals are still struggling. There aren’t enough masks and gowns to adequately protect staff, ventilators to deliver oxygen to patients who can’t breathe, or respiratory technicians and nurses to operate those ventilators. Overwhelmed and underprotected, doctors and nurses are falling sick. In Michigan, more than 700 employees at one hospital have tested positive for the coronavirus; at another, 1,500 are out of work with consistent symptoms. Hospitals are now bringing back retired physicians, graduating medical students early, and re-tasking orthopedists and dermatologists to emergency rooms to help with the coronavirus surge.
If it turns out that, say, 20 percent of the U.S. has been infected, that would mean the coronavirus is more transmissible but less deadly than scientists think. It would also mean that a reasonable proportion of the country has some immunity. If that proportion could be slowly and safely raised to the level necessary for herd immunity—60 to 80 percent, depending on the virus’s transmissibility—the U.S. might not need to wait for a vaccine. However, if just 1 to 5 percent of the population has been infected—the range that many researchers think is likelier—that would mean “this is a truly devastating virus, and we have built up no real population immunity,” said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and immunologist at Harvard. “Then we’re in dire straits in terms of how to move forward.”
There’s a risk in trying to be too clever, though. Dylan Morris of Princeton, who also models infectious diseases, notes that exponentially growing epidemics are not just harder, but riskier, to control. Slight delays in action can have huge consequences, as the United Kingdom learned last month. Relying too heavily on models, the British government believed that it could precisely control the spread of COVID-19 by rolling out social restrictions at carefully chosen moments. Its hubris led to a substantial spike in cases. Now that the U.S. is slowing the pandemic, gently easing back on social distancing would be safer, Morris argues, than snapping back to business as usual when small missteps could be catastrophic. “If we’re judicious about how we lift restrictions, we might never have to go back into lockdown,” he said.
Bottom line: It ain’t gonna be that simple – so if it happens, great. Hope for the best, expect the worst is always good policy.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Apr 21 2020 3:08 utc | 427
In the process of looking up this Cavolo guy on LinkedIn, I found another rant by him which is really heavy.
Here’s his own description of his page:
Mario Cavolo is based in China for 21 years. He is an Italian American author, writer and national media commentator on China and international relations. Mario also recently accepted invitations to be a non-resident Senior Fellow, Center for China & Globalization in Bejing, and as a contributor to Huawei’s Global KOL leadership platform. So, in other words, if you’re anti-China, you probably already don’t like this guy very much. Far more important though, is the universal message of this article, to our world’s leaders and billionaires as we face the worst rapidly escalating crisis of our lifetimes.
Here is his latest article:
There is No Choice. This is What Must Happen. Its Up To The Billionaires.
https://tinyurl.com/y8cb3fjp
I used a shorter version of the link this time – I think the last article link had a “tracker” attached at the end by LinkedIn, which may be why Peter’s AV went off…
They have swindled and yanked the American capitalist system and society (that’s you) and now the virus pandemic is shining a spotlight on what they did. They have taken all the money, trillions upon trillions and placed it in their own billionaire’s and multi-millionaires’ bank accounts. It was just a shift. What they did is they used rules and laws just to shift the money because they figured out they could. When needed, they actually adjusted the laws to make the swindling legal. Then after they got caught, none of them went to jail. There were no prosecutions, remember? But we do remember twenty years earlier when bond trader Michael Milkin went to jail for his egregious bond scheme, yet that was miniscule in size compared to what these rascals have pulled off since. It all began in sync with the Clinton era repeal of the Glass Steagall Act; the risk trade avenues to do so became available and they ran amok in the system, leveraging it up far beyond where it was ever intended. Just ask Goldman Sachs who spent the past twenty years mastering the art of blowing industry and sector asset bubbles like they were playing a game of musical chairs, stuffing billions in fees into their coffers while doing for the society exactly what?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing but sucking it dry to the bone.
Don’t believe me? Here, just consider this one single statistic. And again, if you can prove me wrong or whatever, add your comments below.
According to OxFam, the world’s billionaires combined have an estimated
$24 TRILLION IN CASH.
THAT’S JUST IN THEIR
PERSONAL BANK ACCOUNTS.
So in other words, the billionaires could give the world half of it now, that’s $12 TRILLION. And they would STILL possess the other $12 trillion in cash PLUS all of their other assets including their massive businesses, stocks, bonds, private jets, Bentleys, mansions and super yachts.
Imagine this. A $12 TRILLION CASH contribution to stave off the societal meltdown of the century would not make one tiny iota of a difference to any one of them.
Here, let’s imagine something together. You’re relatively poor, right? Let’s say you only have $20,000 in the bank. Next week it suddenly dawns on you that in fact you are worth $50 MILLION dollars because I put it in your bank account. Take a day and figure out for yourself how that is an indescribably massive sum of money. Next, take half of it, $25 MILLION and immediately give it back to me. Take another day and figure out for yourself how even $25 MILLION is still an indescribably massive sum of money!
And now do the same thing with BILLIONS, even tens of billions, because that’s what these rascals have done to our society, our economy and to you. $2.5 Billion is 100X larger than $25 MILLION. That’s 100 $25 MILLION stacks.
And Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Bloomberg and on and on and on, these guys are worth upward of FIFTY to ONE HUNDRED BILLION, though I can’t speculate how much cash they have. Who cares. They could sell off a TINY PITTANCE of their stock to give BILLIONS to their society. Wait, you say, some of them do, some of them are donating. You’re missing the point then. For a single individual person to be worth such billions upon billions while the world around them is deteriorating in misery and death speaks even more clearly to the cancer that has corrupted the American capitalist system which was previously the standard bearer of the world for all family households to be able to live a decent, comfortable life. Now it comes alive how it is the world’s sword of destruction at the hands of the elites who mostly turn a blind eye. Ask any hard working middle class family and they will exactly describe to you how this has been taken away from them. Once again, where did the money go? Into the hands of the billionaires, adding billions to the billions they already had and you STILL don’t have reasonable healthcare and mothers STILL don’t have paid maternity leave and a job to go back to, What sense is this? Where is the morality and ethics in any of what the elites and powerful have done to our society?
There’s a lot more where that quote came from. He really rants about this – should go over well with all the socialists here. LOL And me, since I don’t like corrupt rich people, either.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Apr 21 2020 7:57 utc | 489
In response to the question ” how can the governed use human crisis, like pandemics, to weaken the focusing power of the grid surveillance system used by those who rule the nation states? Without information those who govern cannot operate their feedback systems effectively. Without informants the politicians might be forced to obey the needs and demands of the masses instead of complying with Oligarch dictated orders?
Behavior of the governed is controlled to target goals, and adjusted to maintain those target goals, in accord to the information the surveillance system reports back to those who manage the nation state system. How visible we are is called the resolving power. The global world, 8 billion humans strong world, divided by name space into a 15 units wide * each 15 units deep (squares on the checker board, AKA cells) they form 225 cells (each nation state name can be assigned to be the name of a particular cell). If more cells are needed make a 16 square wide by a 16 square deep checker board (16*16 grid) on a piece of paper. (make a list of all nation state names, and assign to each cell a name on the 16 by 16 grid). The resolving power of the grid system is quite powerful. Surveillance grids can be built in layers, more about that latter.
In a 16 by 16 grid, if we assume that the cell located 2 units along X axis and three units up along the Y axis is grid location 2,3 we can look up what we named that cell. In this case let’s assume cell 2,3 is named Russia. So another name name for Russia would be grid location 2,3, because the cell at 2,3 has been named Russia. Every nation in the world could be identified to one of the cells on the 16 by 16 square board; that is each cell is given the name of one of the nation states in the Nation State System [NSS]. hence, all nations can be identified by its name space (Russia) or by its grid coordinates. The man on mars can identify 2,3 cell and look up that it has been named Russia, So the telescope used by the man on the moon is one cell out of 256 cells, or 1 out of 256 cells. Merely determine the coordinates on the grid (looking up the name space is optional). Even though the name space of the square formed by x=2, y=3 has been assigned Russia, it is not necessary to know the name space by the name of Russia, it could just be the 2,3 square.
so visible to those who control the nation states through the resolving power of the nation state system telescope is 1 nation out of 256 nations. Suppose the name space of the cell at 2,4 has been named USA, and suppose we are interested in the different states since there are 50 states and several territories so we need 81 cells to account for them all that is 9 squared. . So we divide cell at 2,4 into another check board and re raise it in a plane just over the 2,4 square(cell). Now we have 2,4 and 3,7 to identify USA, NY hence grid at level one defines the nations in the nation state system and grid at level 1 defines the states and territories used by the nation state at 2,4. But the problem with this is that nations are named by territories and so they are not even. So instead of trying to use the gird to identify the nations; we use the grid to identify people and we divide the 8 billion people in the world into 256 groups of 31,250,000 people each. and we name each group by its grid coordinates. the 31,250,000 people at grid 2,4 and the 31,250,000 people at grid 2,5 and the 31,250,000 people at grid 3,6 and so on.. 256 groups of people, each group consist of 31,250,000 people.
Now the people in Grid 2,4 can speak to people in 3,5 with out identifying the people in either group as Russia, Chinese or Syrian.. they are just people. In my opinion this is the first step in taking back the people power we allowed the nation states to take from us
BD @ 505 answers
” we know we must pressure the governments to improve the health care situation, and the financial situation of the states. ”
<= seems to me there are two routes.. within the NSS and external to the Nation State System(NSS)
pressure is an interesting word.. a measure of stored or potential force? what is meant by pressure?
we is an interesting word, who is we .. do all of the persons in we wear green bandannas or what?
But you are correct, some kind of way must be found to improve the health care situation, however, I think
it we reorganized the world into what's good for humanity, instead of what's good for those who control the people by and thru the nation state system, we don't need a financial situation, we need human contribution and participation, instead of pitting one human against another human in life long struggle to get ahead.
Posted by: snake | Apr 21 2020 9:22 utc | 492
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