“I think they’re blowing it way out of proportion…”

Please take a look at this short video:

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1240371160078000128 

So, when you have a segment of the population in “denial mode” (hey, we’re politically used to that, aren’t we?!), how does the greater society get through to them?

Sure, I get it.  Youth gonna be youth… until they finally aren't.  I know how they think… I was there once.  You have this feeling of invincibility.  And while a very small fraction of the youth that contract the virus will actually succumb to its effects, they are the carriers and spreaders to the more vulnerable populations out there.  That’s a real, existential threat, among so many others with which we are having to cope.

A huge amount of people here in the U.S. are already on paid leave from their jobs.  Schools are considering, and are likely to end the school year early, while they are figuring out how to make up for it.  Small businesses, at least here in Ohio, are being ordered to, or are volunteering to close, since there is very little demand for their services.  Large businesses, such as Ford and GM, are on shutdown.

Question: Other than critical services (food, medical, Fire and Police) and planning-type preparations and meetings, should there be a nationwide ban on excessive gatherings, such as these recreational ones above?  Like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, is it finally a situation of personal freedoms versus (losing out to) sensibility?

Give us your thoughts.  And thanks for passing this OP along, via recommending.

Some Coronavirus Biology

The images below convey some information about how coronaviruses infect cells and reproduce. This is to try to demystify what is going on in an infected person and what some relevant biology considerations are.

Credit: By https://www.scientificanimations.com - https://www.scientificanimations.com/wiki-images/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86436446

Credit: By Crenim at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26529404

Mutations tend to weaken viruses, not make them more virulent (lethal) & etc.

An explainer article that Nature published on Jan. 31, 2020 includes the following comments:

Is the virus here to stay? When a virus circulates continuously in a community, it is said to be endemic. The viruses that cause chicken pox and influenza are endemic in many countries, but outbreaks can be controlled through vaccination and keeping people at home when they are ill.

One big question is whether the coronavirus is also here to stay. If efforts to contain it fail, there’s a high chance that it will become endemic. As with influenza, this could mean that deaths occur every year as the virus circulates, until a vaccine is developed. If the virus can be spread by people who are infected but don’t have symptoms, it will be more difficult to control its spread, making it more likely that the virus will become endemic.

Is the virus likely to change? Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease researcher at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, is not concerned about the virus becoming more virulent. He says that viruses constantly mutate as part of their life cycle, but those mutations don’t typically make the virus more virulent or cause more serious disease. “I can’t think of any examples of this having happened with an outbreak pathogen,” he says.

In situations where a virus jumps from one animal host to another species — which is probably how the new coronavirus began to infect humans — there might be a selection pressure to improve survival in the new host, but that rarely, if ever, has any effect on human disease or the virus’s transmissibility, says Andersen. Most mutations are detrimental to the virus or have no effect, he says. A 2018 study2 of SARS in primate cells found that a mutation the virus sustained during the 2003 outbreak probably reduced its virulence.

How many people will it kill? The fatality rate for a virus — the proportion of infected people who die — is difficult to calculate in the middle of an outbreak because records on new cases and deaths are constantly being updated. With 213 deaths so far out of nearly 10,000 infections, the new coronavirus has a death rate of 2–3%. This is significantly lower than SARS, which killed around 10% of the people it infected. The known death rate for the new coronavirus is likely to decrease as mild and asymptomatic cases are identified, virologist Mark Harris at the University of Leeds, UK, told the Science Media Centre in London.

If the virus spreads throughout the world, the number of deaths could be substantial. The current death rate of 2–3% — while not as high as for SARS — is still quite high for an infectious disease, says Adam Kamradt-Scott, a global health-security specialist at the University of Sydney, Australia. The 1918 influenza outbreak, known as the Spanish flu, infected around half a billion people, one-third of the world’s population at the time, and killed more than 2.5% of those infected; some have estimated that as many as 50 million people died.

The China coronavirus probably won’t trigger such an apocalyptic scenario, because it isn’t typically infecting or killing young, healthy people, says Kamradt-Scott.

Coronavirus Update 3: We Still Fly Blind, But at Least Trump Seems to be Awake Now

The president's press conference yesterday heralded a major, yuuuuge!, change in his demeanor and tone. It appears that the president has come to realize we have a bona fide public health emergency on our hands. Until yesterday, he was treating this as a public relations problem for himself, i.e., his fragile, endlessly needy ego, and his re-election. God only knows what brought this miracle about. Maybe it was God itself. Whatever it was, it sure wasn't the president on his own. He's not that self-aware.

We still fly blind because large scale coronavirus testing is still not in place or possible. Maybe by the end of this week testing will ramp up. Our eyes will begin to open a few days later so that we will probably start to see just how many people in America are infected. At present, we still have no idea.

An infectious disease expert, Ian Lipkin, on Rachael Maddow yesterday argued that total, nationwide social distancing is necessary at this point. He points to what 7 counties in the San Francisco bay area is doing as the model for what the nation needs to do. Maddow pointed out that America has no coordinated national response. That has left states and localities to act on their own in the information and leadership vacuum our inept president has created through his inaction.



Maddow played very persuasive comments by New York governor Andrew Cuomo asking for the president to deploy the Army corps of engineers to start building hospital overflow facilities right now. Cuomo points out that the federal government is the only government function in America with the authority and resources to act now to try to avoid a collapse of health care infrastructure in areas with high coronavirus infection rates.



Cuomo was pointed in arguing that America's for-profit business model does not allow for the building and maintaining of excess health care facilities. Unused hospital beds do not generate profits and thus there are no excess hospital beds for people who become critically ill. In other words, American capitalist for-profit health care does not care about public health emergencies. Capitalism cares only about profit, not the public interest.

So, the good news is that our president has probably risen above himself, at least for a day, and experts and governors are acutely aware of the situation and know what to do. Whether our stable genius president has the guts to act intelligently is an open question. Maybe we should be happy that he is simply awake, even if he is too inept to act on his awareness.

The Doom Loop

In my state, our response to coronavirus has made the situation far more dire than the virus itself.

The virus primarily kills old people, and quarantine is impossible.

So of course, being the brilliant tactician that he is, Jay Inslee decided to make it illegal for 50 people to gather anywhere in our state. Smart politics - the first thing to do when implementing a lot of bad policy is make it essentially illegal to protest.

Also on the chopping block, restaurants and bars, meaning a lot of the workers, aka renters are about to get evicted because they can't pay their bills.

And who is dying? People who don't work, don't congregate in bars, and don't have kids that depend on them.

The economic fallout can't speak to the real, family destroying power of these measures. With no end in sight of this moratorium on living the poorest among us will be hit the hardest and see no relief.

And the virus is still spreading.

What will be left of our state when this is done? How many homeless can we bear?

And more personally, what will I do if we lose our home, the first property we've owned in the states?

Trump Corrupts the Secret Service to Service His Own Income

The Editorial Board at the Washington Post wrote an opinion piece about how the president has tried to hide how much money US taxpayers are overpaying for government employees to stay at his expensive resorts. The president has been fighting against information requests like this since January of 2017. That was the month the president was sworn into office. It's been stonewalling to hide the depth and scope of his corruption for his personal profit at our expense.

The editors write: “AFTER A Post investigation showed the Secret Service being charged high rates to stay at Trump Organization properties while guarding President Trump, his son Eric, who helps run the company while his father is in the White House, disputed the account. “I joke all the time,” he said Feb. 14 on “Fox News Rundown,” “that I would like nothing more than to never have another person from the government stay at one of our properties because it displaces a true paying guest.” He suggested the company is actually doing the government a favor in what it charges, claiming it has lost “a fortune.”

Turns out the joke is on U.S. taxpayers.

Documents recently released by the Secret Service to the watchdog group Public Citizen in response to a three-year-old public record request reveal that Mr. Trump’s company charged the Secret Service $157,000 more than had previously been known, billing the agency for rooms at Mar-a-Lago and other clubs at rates higher than his company had claimed. Previous reporting by Post reporters who had pieced together receipts from other public record requests identified $471,000 worth of payments, bringing the new known total to about $628,000. Most of the spending detailed so far in the publicly available records is from 2017 and 2018, so the full extent of what the Trump Organization is charging — in an unprecedented business relationship between a president and his own government — is still unknown.

‘That is not how the process is supposed to work. Responding in 2020 with information from 2017 and 2018 is not okay,’ said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. Indeed. Why has there been such secrecy? The Secret Service has failed to include payments in public databases, as has been past practice, and has not filed the required reports of its spending to Congress. The Trump Organization has refused to provide information, and its claims — ‘If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,’ said Eric Trump last year — have been proved false.

One of the more revealing — and disturbing — details to emerge from reporting on this matter by ProPublica centered on the difference in the room rate charged to Secret Service agents and to an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The non-Secret Service government employee — unlike the Secret Service — had to adhere to government limits on hotel rates and paid less than half of what was charged to the Secret Service. For the same night.”

Corruption, sleaze and lies

The brazenness of the president's lies and self serving corruption are not just staggering hypocrisy. It is both deeply immoral and deeply insulting to Americans who are forced to overpay to support the president's personal income. What is even more troubling, it apparently is legal. What the president has done over the last three years is plainly show just how weak to non-existent defenses of democracy, the rule of law, honest governance, ethics and transparency really are.

Both parties, democratic and republican (now the Trump Party), are fully responsible for their massive, inexcusable failures to install laws that heavily penalize the kind of corruption and authoritarian behavior that the president gets away with. These matters should have been dealt with decades ago.

American taxpayers have been deceived, betrayed and stolen from by a corrupt, incompetent two-party system. Their failures are unforgivable.

And, there's this

Re: Coronavirus (COVID-19)

First, please don’t get me wrong.  As a bleeding heart liberal, I do not wish hardship or suffering on anyone (or anything, for that matter).  I don’t even kill bugs, unless they can carry potential diseases (fleas, ticks mosquitoes).  Then I will quickly extinguish them with a regretful cringe on my face.  I’ve always been more of a life “promoter” than “destroyer,” forever rooting for the underdogs in life.  That being said…

In a few more weeks, refrigerators and cupboards, along with accommodating supermarkets, will begin looking mighty bare.  Medicines for what ails you will be harder to find.  Need your prescription refilled, “Sorry we don’t have that in stock now.  Maybe in a month or so.” No more pizza delivery or fast food take-out.  Nonchalantly trashing that over-abundance of leftover food on your plate will no longer be a complacent option.  Pets crying for food?  Sorry Fido.  In other words, if it hasn’t already, my guess is that life’s gonna get pretty damned “real” for a lot of people out there.  More real than it’s ever been before.

Let me hone in on America; the good old opulent U.S. of A., and my home.  Will this virus be a crude awakening to Americans’ lifestyles?  Or, once everything settles down and the worst is over, will we just go back to business as usual?  Will anybody even remember it (lessons learned)?

Give your thoughts on what this virus will (or does) mean to us, here in America.  Or, what it will (or does) mean to you, wherever on the planet you may live.

Thanks for posting and recommending.