Covid-19 discussion and humor thread [Was: CDC says don't touch your face to avoid Covid19...Vets to the rescue!

[K-9]

1 hour ago, BillsFan4 said:

 

They are officially invoking the defense production act. Was announced today. 

Very happy to hear that. Hopefully production of ventilators, masks etc will be ramped up. About a week ago I saw a company that produces ventilators saying that they have the capability to ramp up production 5 x. So hopefully that will happen now.

 

edit - here’s the article I was referring to:

 

Another example of what health care providers have been warning us about for over a month would happen and we are just now getting around to it. 
 

Let’s hope that any new thing they warn us about today doesn’t take a month to heed.

[GoBills808]

1 hour ago, Foxx said:

Trump just suspended all foreclosures and evictions till the end of April.

No

 

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/488227-trump-orders-hud-to-suspend-evictions-and-foreclosures

[Gugny]

3 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

 

At Cornell University, the campus is a ghost town, but Touchdown the Bear is prepared!!!!!

 

 

The man, whose shadow you see, is @Cripple Creek, filming for his "Live Bear Cam."

@BringBackFergy

[K-9]

2 minutes ago, Sundancer said:

 

People need to keep paying if they can. If they can't, the last thing anyone will do is evict. It's the reality of the situation that we need capital flowing through the system. If you don't pay the bank, the bank can't loan the restaurant that closed money. If the bank doesn't make that loan, the waiter living paycheck to paycheck who is still getting something gets $0. Imagine that times 100000 permutations of downstream effects. $$ has to keep moving. 

I understand the dollar velocity argument here and it’s more than valid. But the sad fact is that nearly half the country isn’t prepared to meet a $400 unforeseen emergency with no disruption to their working lives. 
 

The trillion dollar + infusion of liquidity into the markets will help. 

[Sundancer]

2 minutes ago, K-9 said:

I understand the dollar velocity argument here and it’s more than valid. But the sad fact is that nearly half the country isn’t prepared to meet a $400 unforeseen emergency with no disruption to their working lives. 
 

 

Agreed. 

 

2 minutes ago, K-9 said:

The trillion dollar + infusion of liquidity into the markets will help. 

 

That's nothing to the large number of people not getting checks. Almost literally $0. 

 

In 2008, people were not about to have $0 in the bank and mouths to feed. That is where we are now. So it's find to send out cash but we need to get back to work, very very soon. 

[GoBills808]

2 minutes ago, Sundancer said:

 

Agreed. 

 

 

That's nothing to the large number of people not getting checks. Almost literally $0. 

 

In 2008, people were not about to have $0 in the bank and mouths to feed. That is where we are now. So it's find to send out cash but we need to get back to work, very very soon. 

 

$2k/citizen will buy a couple weeks max

[Sundancer]

Just now, GoBills808 said:

 

$2k/citizen will buy a couple weeks max

 

That is literally what I was thinking. It's nothing--and those checks aren't being sent for a few weeks. 

[BillsFanNC]

On 3/17/2020 at 12:17 PM, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

If you look at the linked stories I gave, it is not clear at all that the problem was a "contaminated negative control".  That would actually not fit with the data that 5 state health labs were able to run tests from the kits successfully.  I don't want to go into it too deep here, but if you want to say that's what the problem is, provide sources and let's see how they stack up for cred with what I provided.  The sources I gave say the problem was the CDC ignored the WHO standard, and decided they wanted to design a test that would test simultaneously for several coronaviruses including SARS and MERS.  The result was susceptibility to picking up environmental contamination with a wide range of harmless viruses in their negative control.  That's not a 'contaminated negative control', that's a testing design flaw that rendered the test unusable except to the highest standards of operation.

 

Surveillance testing means you are able to screen a section of the population (test on a mass scale) not limit testing to people who are critically ill.  In the past, the CDC has developed and rolled out large numbers of novel tests for other potentially epidemic diseases quite quickly.

China and at least one other country (I think Korea, might be Taiwan) are now rolling out two different versions of a true screening kit that provides 15 minute results.  One is based upon detecting covid-19 antibodies, the other is based on detecting an early antibody response that covid-19 seems to trigger more than flu.

Testing every American is stupid, but we should at this point be able to test everyone who has symptoms (fever most common) and everyone who has known contact with a Covid19 positive person.

 

Early on I had read that the problem was with false positives in patient samples which would indicate a problem with primer design that might result in a test that lacked adequate specificity as you suggest.  Later on I had read this article:

 

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615323/why-the-cdc-botched-its-coronavirus-testing/

 

Quote

On February 5 the CDC began to send out coronavirus test kits, but many of the kits were soon found to have faulty negative controls (what shows up when coronavirus is absent), caused by contaminated reagents. This was probably a side effect of a rushed job to put the kits together. Labs with failed negative controls had to ship their samples to the CDC itself for testing.

 

As someone who has done a fair amount of PCR that suggested to me that the kits suffered from a negative control that had been contaminated with target sequence amplicons, something that can happen quite easily if routine PCR guidelines aren't followed.  Without seeing the data we can only guess what the true failure was, but it was indeed a major failure by the CDC no matter how you slice it.

 

22 hours ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

I think you should probably stop posting on this, because this demonstrates lack of understanding of the process of test design, the meaning of surveillance testing, the process of validating a clinical test etc and thus is not helping clarity here.

Validating a test that is fully developed and in use elsewhere is a standard process that should take a scientist who knows their ***** a small amount of time - weeks or even a week, if a team is assigned to the task, equipment is fully available (both of which could have been done).

The regulations that were partially lifted were a rather ponderous bureaucratic process that the current FDA had imposed to qualify tests developed OUTSIDE the FDA under "emergency use authorization".  Because their own test development was struggling, the CDC finally took the step of allowing state and university laboratories to validate and use their own tests and clearing some of the hurdles to validating them under EUA - but it's not entirely clear that they've lifted enough of them (see above)

The problem is if the validation requirements are unreasonable or pose an undue burden beyond the necessary science of "does this test detect what it should, does it not detect what it shouldn't, and what are the error estimates?"  Example: Alexander Greninger, an assistant professor in laboratory medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center, said after he submitted his COVID-19 test, which copies the CDC protocol, to the FDA, a reviewer asked him to prove that his test would not show a positive result for someone infected with the SARS coronavirus or the MERS coronavirus — an almost ridiculous challenge. The SARS virus, which appeared in November 2002, affected 26 countries, disappeared in mid-2003 and hasn’t been seen since. The MERS coronavirus primarily affects the Middle East, and the only two cases that have been recorded in the U.S., in 2014, were both imported.  There are labs that can create parts of a SARS virus, but the FDA’s recommended supplier of such materials said it would need one to two months to provide a sample, Greninger said. He spent two days on the phone making dozens of calls, scrambling to find a lab that would provide what he needed.

Greninger said the FDA was treating labs as if they were trying to make a commercially distributed product. “I think it makes sense to have this regulation,’’ he said, when “you’re going to sell 100,000 widgets across the U.S. That’s not who we are.”

 

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-south-korea-scaled-coronavirus-testing-while-the-us-fell-dangerously-behind
 

 

 

 

I agree with the bolded, but my response in terms of IVD validation was based on my experience in dealing with both the CDC and FDA in the past.   Having dealt with them specifically in developing a surveillance test for antiviral resistance, albeit when we weren't in the middle of a global pandemic, still gave me no reason to expect that they would react in a manner or with the appropriate speed that this situation required.

 

21 hours ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

Thanks for info on flu surveillance testing.  I believe in 2009 for H1N1, a more massive scale was done, but I'd have to go look it up to be sure.

Certainly 2000 tests per day in 5 cities is way more than got done for Covid19 (I think even, more than is being done now), right?  It would have helped, you must admit....

To my understanding, I believe surveillance testing in the public health sense means what public health officials decide it needs to mean.  In the case of flu, they know it's out there and spreading, so they're interested in subtypes and lineages to see how well it matches the year's vaccine and to pick up any strains that might be particularly problematic.   Here's a link to an article about Active Surveillance Testing for MRSA.

In the case of a novel disease such as Covid-10, public health officials are more interested in "where is it, and how widespread is it?".  Surveillance testing could mean testing everyone who returns from a country or set of countries, or everyone who reports a certain symptom (fever, say; or contact with an infected person).  Or it could mean random screening of a sample population, though I feel that would be of less use at present.

The distinction (again as I understand it) is that you're testing widely, not just limiting to people who traveled to specific countries AND report specific symptoms.

 

But I'd love to hear more about flu surveillance testing with regard to how it might or might not help here.

 

With flu the the overall umbrella of surveillance is two pronged, diagnostic results (Flu A/B) are gathered from clinical labs in all states and territories to monitor how much flu is out there and where it is.  These diagnostic data can be collected from rapid tests (both antigen and molecular based) and from traditional PCR.  The rapid molecular and antigen based tests are something we did not have for covid19, although the Roche isothermal PCR test that was granted approval under the EUA should help in this regard.  A smaller subset of samples are tested at public health laboratories for subtype (A/H1N1, A/H3N2, B) and lineage, which as you stated is primarily for identifying circulating strains to assess vaccine efficacy.  And yes, they certainly do ramp up surveillance efforts when a novel strain appears such as in 2009.

 

I think we are largely in agreement here that the CDC/FDA failed on both technical and bureaucratic levels in a big way.  They clearly failed in rolling out enough tests that would have helped in giving an earlier picture on the spread of covid19.  You can be certain that there will be congressional inquiries into this when all is said and done.

[K-9]

40 minutes ago, Sundancer said:

 

Agreed. 

 

 

That's nothing to the large number of people not getting checks. Almost literally $0. 

 

In 2008, people were not about to have $0 in the bank and mouths to feed. That is where we are now. So it's find to send out cash but we need to get back to work, very very soon. 

Of course, but I think that infusion it will help the banks and other institutions. 

[GoBills808]

6 minutes ago, K-9 said:

Of course, but I think that infusion it will help the banks and other institutions. 

It should not be looked at as anything but an emergency bandaid. Certainly not as financial lubrication.

 

Printing money to increase liquidity in the markets, as proven, is not a long term solution. 

[John in Jax]

11 hours ago, K-9 said:

From a VOX report dated 3/8:

 

 

For weeks we’ve heard empty promises of the imminent shipments of millions of test kits. For weeks we’ve heard from the scientists how critical it is to have this testing done ASAP.  And for weeks we’ve heard story after story of how people with symptoms have been denied the test and/or given the bureaucratic run around when trying to obtain one. Sure looks like a deliberate plan to keep the numbers low from where I sit. 
 

Like I said, we all know why that is. And it should piss us off to no end. 

I guess I’m not as smart as everybody else in here, because I don’t know “why that is.” Maybe you can be more specific, and explain it more thoroughly. Maybe if it gets explained, I’ll be pissed off too. Thanks.

[SlimShady'sSpaceForce]

2 hours ago, Foxx said:

Trump just suspended all foreclosures and evictions till the end of April.

 

Will he put my mortgage on hold until then too  w/o interest or penalties? 

 

[chit eating grin]

[K-9]

19 minutes ago, GoBills808 said:

It should not be looked at as anything but an emergency bandaid. Certainly not as financial lubrication.

 

Printing money to increase liquidity in the markets, as proven, is not a long term solution. 

I agree. There is no panacea. But in the short term a trillion dollars of capital infusion into the markets should help to offset those liquidity concerns, even if just a little, and help lenders when needing to postpone payments from some of their customers. 
 

Question: since those receivables are still assets, can’t lenders borrow against those future payments to further offset liquidity issues? I’m really not sure. 

29 minutes ago, John in Jax said:

I guess I’m not as smart as everybody else in here, because I don’t know “why that is.” Maybe you can be more specific, and explain it more thoroughly. Maybe if it gets explained, I’ll be pissed off too. Thanks.

I think I’ve had enough posts get deleted for one day as they attracted this kind of trolling element. Go troll a different pond. 

[GoBills808]

Just now, K-9 said:

I agree. There is no panacea. But in the short term a trillion dollars of capital infusion into the markets should help to offset those liquidity concerns, even if just a little, and help lenders when needing to postpone payments from some of their customers. 
 

Question: since those receivables are still assets, can’t lenders borrow against those future payments to further offset liquidity issues? I’m really not sure. 

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is yes. I mean under normal conditions you can find equity in basically anything provided there's credit available lol...the issue being now lending's basically frozen as Fed moved to cut interest to zero...normally you'd find someone willing to take on the risk of backing those loans in anticipation of climbing out of this but as of right now not seeing it.

[K-9]

17 minutes ago, GoBills808 said:

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is yes. I mean under normal conditions you can find equity in basically anything provided there's credit available lol...the issue being now lending's basically frozen as Fed moved to cut interest to zero...normally you'd find someone willing to take on the risk of backing those loans in anticipation of climbing out of this but as of right now not seeing it.

Good points, all. I’m afraid that until we see the first report of a reduction in CoVID-19 cases, the markets will lack the kind of confidence required in the meantime. 

[Hardhatharry]

 4207 new cases and 475 new deaths in Italy. 1084 new recoveries were also reported today. Is this the peak? Seems like the worst day so far for them, so many health workers contracting it, couple of the older doctors have also died. 

 

 

http://www.ansa.it/canale_saluteebenessere/notizie/sanita/2020/03/18/coronavirus-morto-il-segretario-della-federazione-dei-medici-di-lodi_9c0a5f1e-e938-4308-bd05-01486266df84.html

 

[OldTimeAFLGuy]

2 hours ago, K-9 said:

Heard the CEO of BoA say in an interview on Sunday that if you’ve been impacted by the crisis all,you have to do is call the bank, explain that, and your payment due will be suspended. This needs to happen across the board for all mortgages, all loans, all rents, all utilities, etc. It’s our moral imperative. 
 

My cynicism says, “good luck with that.” 

 

 

...imagine if they pursued foreclosures under these circumstances and the explosion of bank owned properties in a depressed real estate market?...makes perfect sense (COUGH).......

[RaoulDuke79]

Some stuff to break the monotony of the doom and gloom.

https://thechive.com/2020/03/18/real-heroes-making-the-coronavirus-pandemic-a-little-easier-to-handle-xx-photos/

[Sundancer]

I would like to see statistical compilations in more detail by age that do not include China's numbers in a week. I see glimpses of these now but not tabled. 

 

Anyone who thinks they can draw conclusions from China's numbers, especially their decreasing cases and apply them elsewhere, may not have their thinking hat on straight. 

- We are not China and lockdowns there are not the same as in the west

- China has a very loose relationship with the truth. 15000 to 15 patients does not ring true with what the rest of the world is experiencing.  

 

Edited March 18, 2020 by Sundancer

[Warcodered]

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