Friday morning pandemic update
I tweeted yesterday that we should give Mike Pence a chance, but upon more reflection and more information, it looks like the purpose of Mike Pence is to get the CDC to shut up and stop doing their own press releases and press briefings. Trump thinks the virus is a propaganda problem and not an actual health problem. I hate to agree with the MSM when they attack Trump, but indeed Trump is acting more like China and Iran than democratic countries like South Korea or Italy. Immediately adding Larry Kudlow and Steve Mnuchin to the virus task force is another bad first move, indicating that the administration is more worried about the economy than saving lives. Mike Pence has not publicly addressed the issue of why we can’t test anyone and what he’s doing to fix the problem.
Japan also has a problem testing people, but at least they are acknowledging that there might be a serious problem. They’ve shut down all schools, and called off all sporting events, theme parks and other tourist attractions are shutting down. We’re not doing these things in the United States because the government is pretending the virus isn’t here, which they can’t possibly know because they aren’t doing any testing at all for community transmission.
Regarding countries with larger outbreaks, South Korea now reports 2,337 confirmed cases and Italy 655 confirmed cases. But with Italy, it seems that a whole bunch of travelers from Italy have tested positive in other countries, indicating that Italy has a bigger problem than just 655 people infected.
A week ago today, I wrote that “people will remember that while this crisis is brewing, Trump is going to campaign rallies and saying stupid stuff about who won the Academy Award for Best Picture. When it’s all over, it’s not going to look very good for Trump.” I’ve heard the term “Trump’s Katrina” today on Bloomberg radio, but it’s going to be worse than that for Trump, it will also be like Herbert Hoover having no chance of winning re-election because the stock market crashed on his watch.
There are a lot of stories now appearing in mainstream media condemning Trump’s response to the virus. And it’s about time too. The fakestream media was ignoring this virus for too long, because they thought that talking about the virus would spark racism and xenophobia against Chinese people. As I, sadly, also predicted, the virus would only become the number one story in the media after it became an anti-Trump story. And now we see that happening. Yesterday I tuned into CNN, the virus was the #1 story.
Also, I may add that the market futures are down again this morning. I predicted this back on February 6th. I said sell sell sell. I took a lot of shit for this. Commenters said crap like “you cant time the markets,” “just the flu, bro,” “when you say to sell, that’s when we should buy.” Well looks like those people were wrong. And I say the market can only get worse. In a few days we will verify that there’s widespread community transmission in the United States, and we will close schools and shut down stuff like they are doing in other countries, and that will push down the market a lot more. The market is still in denial.
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Japan’s public news service now has a chart that shows you have many cases they have although it seems to have fewer cases than the BNO News tracker.
There are total of 12 new cases in Hokkaido for a total of 66 cases. That seems disproportionate relative to Hokkaido’s population, so maybe this is evidence that the virus spreads more in colder weather. But at this point, the weather connection is just hopeful thinking, not a proven deal.
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Commenter Maciano writes:
I can’t stand in Trump’s shoes and the weight he carries is unimaginable for me, however I would have taken this epidemic way more seriously and I would not have commented until I knew the facts.
I wouldn’t tweet about stock prices or push my economic advisor into a pandemic workgroup for obviously selfish reasons.
Star Trek: Picard S01E06
Still the best Star Trek series ever.
Thursday morning pandemic update
No good news this morning.
We have the first case in the U.S. of community transmission.
Italy now has 528 cases and 14 deaths (although many, maybe all, of the deaths are people who were in a hospital for other reasons who got infected), South Korea has a whopping 1,766 cases, an increase of 555 in just one day.
How many cases would we know about in the U.S. if we could test as many people as South Korea is able to test? I bet a lot more than one. This one case in California is the tip of a large and scary iceberg.
The same applies to Japan, which is also not testing a whole lot of people, even as the number of cases in the country now stands at 207. There is a strong suspicion that it’s worse in Japan. Japan announced today that ALL elementary through high schools will be closed in the ENTIRE country beginning on Monday and through April. I think if we were doing enough community testing in the United States, we would be doing the same thing.
Cases are appearing all over Europe, apparently spreading out from Italy. And all over the Middle East spreading out from Iran.
S&P 500 futures are down another 0.91% as of 7:16 AM EST. On February 6th, I told you to sell your stocks. People who didn’t listen should have listened.
More info about the community transmission in California
This is extremely disturbing.
The patient arrived on February 19th in bad condition. The doctors at the hospital wanted to test the patient for the virus, but the CDC said NO doesn’t meet the criteria for getting tested. But finally, on Sunday the 23rd, they convinced someone at the CDC to finally do the test. And then it took another 3 days to finally get the result. So many days wasted that could have been used for contact tracing to find out who else might be infected.
This person probably first came into contact with the virus 3 weeks ago. That’s a lot of time for whomever infected this unfortunate person to have infected other people as well, and then those other people infect more people.
Also, the patient was not put on airborne precautions and strict contact precautions until Sunday, which means there was a lot of time for medical works at the UC Davis Medical Center and whatever hospital the patient was transferred from to catch the virus.
How many other virus cases are out there that we don’t know about because the CDC is unable to test anyone? I truly hope that now that Mike Pence is the virus czar, he can get fix whatever the hell is wrong with our government response to this looming epidemic.
The virus is loose in the United States, it’s happening
Just in from the Washington Post:
February 26, 2020 at 7:00 PM EST
BREAKING: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been informed of the first case of the coronavirus in a person who did not recently return from a foreign country or have contact with a confirmed case, according to a person briefed on the case. Officials have begun tracing the contacts of the resident to find out how the person may have been infected and who else might have been exposed.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
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I remind you that a few days ago Italy found ONE case, then suddenly they found 453 cases. Does the US even have the testing capacity to do enough tests to find the cases?
How talk about the virus is being censored
Notice how a misspelling of coronavirus is trending, but not the correct spelling.
All of the major internet companies are shadowbanning or algorithmically deprecating posts about the virus. We rightly decried the heavy-handed censorship in China, but something very similar is happening in the United States. Instead of the government arresting people for posting about the virus, we have the soft censorship of “private” companies like Twitter hiding posts about the virus from people who aren’t going out of their way to look for them.
However, it looks like the censorship algorithm isn’t smart enough to hide “caronavirusoutbreak.” (And the reason this is trending is because people are making fun of Donald Trump for misspelling it in a tweet.)
Wednesday morning virus update
This WaPo article makes me very concerned that the government is screwing up with the coronavirus because Trump is hampering containment efforts because he’s more concerned about the stock market prices than saving lives of Americans. Trump is said to be pissed at the CDC for alarming people today and spooking the stock market. My guess is that no one is communicating with each other, and therefore there’s no coordination. And the result is screwups like no one being tested. How do we know if there’s a northern Italy somewhere in the U.S. if we don’t test anyone?
This tweet demonstrates how bad the U.S. is doing:
So we have a guy who returned from northern Italy and has symptoms, but he’s NOT BEING TESTED. People in the same situation as this patient have been tested in many European countries and they have found many positives. The U.S. is letting the virus into the country.
High school students returned from trip to Italy, including Venice where there have been virus cases, they’re ill, BUT THEY ARE NOT TESTED.
In Iran, President Hassan Rouhani says that there will be no quarantines and that all the corona virus stuff is just “rumors,” and that the flu is worse. Rouhani stressed the need “not allow enemies to convert Corona virus into a weapon in their hand in order to disrupt work and production in Iran.”
You can look down on the backwardness of Iran, but Donald Trump seems to be following the exact same playbook. Ontario health authorities, this morning, confirmed another case of coronavirus in a woman who returned from Iran.
In South Korea, there are now 1261 confirmed cases, including an American soldier from the military base that we have there, and 12 deaths. In Italy, 374 confirmed cases and 12 deaths. In Japan, 172 cases, but only 2 deaths. There are two new cases in Sinagpore, they now have a total of 93 confirmed cases, but they seem to have the situation under control there.
Virus in Bahrain
Bahrain is a tiny kingdom of only 1.2 million people, but they have confirmed 23 cases of the Wuhan coronavirus, all of them people who traveled from Iran. The virus must be completely out of control in Iran.
By the way, note that this tiny little backwards country can test 23 people in two days, which is all that the United States is able to test, but with our tests taking much longer to process. Our government response to the virus has been pathetic.
Bahrain has closed all schools:
In line with the directives of the Government’s Executive Committee, chaired by Prince Salman Bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister, the Ministry of Education on Tuesday announced that all public and private schools, including kindergartens, will be closed for two weeks starting from Wednesday.
This is a smart move, but the problem I see is that they have not closed the mosques. If they don’t close the mosques, the virus will continue to spread if it exists in the community of worshipers. Religious services are how the virus spread in Singapore and South Korea, and probably how it spread in Qom, Iran. Allah will NOT protect them.
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Meanwhile, Italy is up to 323 confirmed cases.
How many cases would we find in the United States if we were testing people?
Election update
Since the last time I wrote about the elections, it appears that Biden did better in Nevada than I thought he would, doing slightly better in first-round polling than predicted by the polls, while Buttigieg did slightly worse than predicted by the polls. This slight difference adds up to a big difference, between coming in second or coming in third. Biden looks stronger than he did last week, finally coming in second.
I previously thought Bernie could beat Biden in South Carolina, totally obliterating any chance that he might have, but now I think that Biden will pull of a narrow win in South Carolina, and Buttigieg will do really bad because blacks hate gays (black people being much more prejudiced than white people). This means that Biden will stay in the race for Super Tuesday, splitting the votes with all of the other not-Bernie candidates.
Could Bloomberg, thus, emerge as the non-Bernie choice? Things are starting to point that way, even though I’ve been saying all along that money can’t buy an election. Maybe money CAN buy an election if you’re willing to spend enough of it.
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Bernie is very smart about how he sells his candidacy. He has a lot of crazy extreme leftist positions, but he never talks about them; he stays laser-focused on Medicare for all, because he is confident that the voters will want that. Even I support Medicare for all.
I also hold the view that the healthcare crisis caused by the pandemic will reveal the severe shortcomings of America’s dysfunctional over-priced for-profit private-insurance healthcare system, and that will only help Bernie.
Bernie also talks a lot about student loan forgiveness, which is something I would have jumped to vote for back when I had student loans. No wonder why he is most popular with younger voters.
Tuesday morning pandemic update
Things can only get worse.
In South Korea, there are now 977 confirmed cases and 11 deaths.
In Italy, there are now 283 confirmed cases and 7 deaths.
In Japan, there are now 160 confirmed cases, but I think there must be a lot more cases in Japan that they don’t know about because they aren’t testing enough people
Don’t forget the outbreak in Iran where the official numbers surely vastly understate the real extent of what’s going on.
Two new cases in Austria. One new case in Croatia of a patient who returned from Milan. In the Canary Islands, and Italian tourist has tested positive and a hotel has been locked down.
There are no new cases in the U.S. outside of quarantine, because if you don’t test anyone then you don’t find any cases.
In Florida, a man with crappy health insurance got billed $3.270 because he got tested for the coronavirus. I think an outbreak in the United States is going to propel Bernie into the White House. People will want Medicare for all after they see how dysfunctional our profit-based healthcare system is when faced with an epidemic.
There’s a dead cat bounce going on in in pre-market trading. The market is still way above where it was just a year ago. When we are facing a pandemic that will be a massive black-swan disruption of both supply and demand, followed by President Bernie who will undo all of Trump’s pro-stock-market tax cuts, this is just ridiculous complacency.
Lion of the Blogosphere 