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Made in ca
[DCM]
Dankhold Troggoth






Shadeglass Maze

Question for the hive mind, or in case there's an expert here:

How does the US government determine your income level for the purposes of the coronavirus stimulus check? Our income changed after filing our taxes in 2019, so we'd have less income for our 2020 filing, but we haven't submitted it yet. I'm wondering if we should hurry up and submit it to show this, or if the government would somehow already know our income level?

This is probably detailed in an article somewhere, but I didn't see it in the ones I found...

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2020/03/26 15:09:54


 
   
Made in us
Stormblade



SpaceCoast

Unless it changed in the final you like me are just SOL. The plan I saw was to use 2018 Taxes (2019 filing) and only use 2019 taxes (2020 filing) for those who didn't file 2018 taxes. There's one newer FAQ in the NY Times that implies you can use your 2019 taxes even if you had 2018 taxes but they make it sound like you have a choice when I see this as being fairly automatic on the IRS end with little taxpayer input. In my case my current income level changed significantly at the end of last year so even using 2019 taxes wouldn't help. Unless there's a good reason not too why not submit them just in case ?

Found another article from today that says the IRS will use the most recent they have so maybe ?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/03/26 15:48:30


 
   
Made in ao
Wolf Guard Bodyguard in Terminator Armor




If you don't try it you'll definitely get the worst option, so send it in. The worst they can do is say "no", and you'll be right back at the previous sentence and have lost nothing except maybe some stamps and a few hours - which should not currently be a problem.
   
Made in us
Shadowy Grot Kommittee Memba




The Great State of New Jersey

Good read: How the Pandemic Will End

Spoiler:

How the Pandemic Will End

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.

A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”

So, now what? In the late hours of last Wednesday, which now feels like the distant past, I was talking about the pandemic with a pregnant friend who was days away from her due date. We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.

As we’ll see, Gen C’s lives will be shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks, and by the losses we suffer as a result. But first, a brief reckoning. On the Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed.

“No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,” says Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at the Boston University School of Medicine. More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza, the new coronavirus is also stealthier, spreading from one host to another for several days before triggering obvious symptoms. To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the United States did not.

As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.

The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country. Overstretched hospitals became overwhelmed. Basic protective equipment, such as masks, gowns, and gloves, began to run out. Beds will soon follow, as will the ventilators that provide oxygen to patients whose lungs are besieged by the virus.

With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency. That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition; some worried hospitals have bought out large quantities of supplies, in the way that panicked consumers have bought out toilet paper.

Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the president’s ear. Instead of springing into action, America sat idle.

Derek Thompson: America is acting like a failed state

Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”

I. The Next Months
Having fallen behind, it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the United States to catch up. To an extent, the near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April. As of last weekend, the nation had 17,000 confirmed cases, but the actual number was probably somewhere between 60,000 and 245,000. Numbers are now starting to rise exponentially: As of Wednesday morning, the official case count was 54,000, and the actual case count is unknown. Health-care workers are already seeing worrying signs: dwindling equipment, growing numbers of patients, and doctors and nurses who are themselves becoming infected.

Italy and Spain offer grim warnings about the future. Hospitals are out of room, supplies, and staff. Unable to treat or save everyone, doctors have been forced into the unthinkable: rationing care to patients who are most likely to survive, while letting others die. The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one. By the end of the summer, the pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans, notwithstanding those who will indirectly die as hospitals are unable to care for the usual slew of heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents. This is the worst-case scenario. To avert it, four things need to happen—and quickly.

The first and most important is to rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment. If health-care workers can’t stay healthy, the rest of the response will collapse. In some places, stockpiles are already so low that doctors are reusing masks between patients, calling for donations from the public, or sewing their own homemade alternatives. These shortages are happening because medical supplies are made-to-order and depend on byzantine international supply chains that are currently straining and snapping. Hubei province in China, the epicenter of the pandemic, was also a manufacturing center of medical masks.

In the U.S., the Strategic National Stockpile—a national larder of medical equipment—is already being deployed, especially to the hardest-hit states. The stockpile is not inexhaustible, but it can buy some time. Donald Trump could use that time to invoke the Defense Production Act, launching a wartime effort in which American manufacturers switch to making medical equipment. But after invoking the act last Wednesday, Trump has failed to actually use it, reportedly due to lobbying from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and heads of major corporations.

Some manufacturers are already rising to the challenge, but their efforts are piecemeal and unevenly distributed. “One day, we’ll wake up to a story of doctors in City X who are operating with bandanas, and a closet in City Y with masks piled into it,” says Ali Khan, the dean of public health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A “massive logistics and supply-chain operation [is] now needed across the country,” says Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That can’t be managed by small and inexperienced teams scattered throughout the White House. The solution, he says, is to tag in the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

This agency can also coordinate the second pressing need: a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests. Those tests have been slow to arrive because of five separate shortages: of masks to protect people administering the tests; of nasopharyngeal swabs for collecting viral samples; of extraction kits for pulling the virus’s genetic material out of the samples; of chemical reagents that are part of those kits; and of trained people who can give the tests. Many of these shortages are, again, due to strained supply chains. The U.S. relies on three manufacturers for extraction reagents, providing redundancy in case any of them fails—but all of them failed in the face of unprecedented global demand. Meanwhile, Lombardy, Italy, the hardest-hit place in Europe, houses one of the largest manufacturers of nasopharyngeal swabs.

Some shortages are being addressed. The FDA is now moving quickly to approve tests developed by private labs. At least one can deliver results in less than an hour, potentially allowing doctors to know if the patient in front of them has COVID-19. The country “is adding capacity on a daily basis,” says Kelly Wroblewski of the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

On March 6, Trump said that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” That was (and still is) untrue, and his own officials were quick to correct him. Regardless, anxious people still flooded into hospitals, seeking tests that did not exist. “People wanted to be tested even if they weren’t symptomatic, or if they sat next to someone with a cough,” says Saskia Popescu of George Mason University, who works to prepare hospitals for pandemics. Others just had colds, but doctors still had to use masks to examine them, burning through their already dwindling supplies. “It really stressed the health-care system,” Popescu says. Even now, as capacity expands, tests must be used carefully. The first priority, says Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, is to test health-care workers and hospitalized patients, allowing hospitals to quell any ongoing fires. Only later, once the immediate crisis is slowing, should tests be deployed in a more widespread way. “This isn’t just going to be: Let’s get the tests out there!” Inglesby says.

These measures will take time, during which the pandemic will either accelerate beyond the capacity of the health system or slow to containable levels. Its course—and the nation’s fate—now depends on the third need, which is social distancing. Think of it this way: There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time. Group B must now “flatten the curve” by physically isolating themselves from other people to cut off chains of transmission. Given the slow fuse of COVID-19, to forestall the future collapse of the health-care system, these seemingly drastic steps must be taken immediately, before they feel proportionate, and they must continue for several weeks.

Persuading a country to voluntarily stay at home is not easy, and without clear guidelines from the White House, mayors, governors, and business owners have been forced to take their own steps. Some states have banned large gatherings or closed schools and restaurants. At least 21 have now instituted some form of mandatory quarantine, compelling people to stay at home. And yet many citizens continue to crowd into public spaces.

In these moments, when the good of all hinges on the sacrifices of many, clear coordination matters—the fourth urgent need. The importance of social distancing must be impressed upon a public who must also be reassured and informed. Instead, Trump has repeatedly played down the problem, telling America that “we have it very well under control” when we do not, and that cases were “going to be down to close to zero” when they were rising. In some cases, as with his claims about ubiquitous testing, his misleading gaffes have deepened the crisis. He has even touted unproven medications.


Away from the White House press room, Trump has apparently been listening to Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has advised every president since Ronald Reagan on new epidemics, and now sits on the COVID-19 task force that meets with Trump roughly every other day. “He’s got his own style, let’s leave it at that,” Fauci told me, “but any kind of recommendation that I have made thus far, the substance of it, he has listened to everything.”

But Trump already seems to be wavering. In recent days, he has signaled that he is prepared to backtrack on social-distancing policies in a bid to protect the economy. Pundits and business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is seductive, but flawed. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk, and to somehow wall off the ‘high-risk’ people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit ‘low-risk’ groups, and how thoroughly hospitals will be overwhelmed if even just younger demographics are falling sick.

A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care. There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.

If Trump stays the course, if Americans adhere to social distancing, if testing can be rolled out, and if enough masks can be produced, there is a chance that the country can still avert the worst predictions about COVID-19, and at least temporarily bring the pandemic under control. No one knows how long that will take, but it won’t be quick. “It could be anywhere from four to six weeks to up to three months,” Fauci said, “but I don’t have great confidence in that range.”

II. The Endgame
Even a perfect response won’t end the pandemic. As long as the virus persists somewhere, there’s a chance that one infected traveler will reignite fresh sparks in countries that have already extinguished their fires. This is already happening in China, Singapore, and other Asian countries that briefly seemed to have the virus under control. Under these conditions, there are three possible endgames: one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long.

The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.

The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting. But it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems. The United Kingdom initially seemed to consider this herd-immunity strategy, before backtracking when models revealed the dire consequences. The U.S. now seems to be considering it too.

The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.

It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.

But it’s also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones. The initial trial will simply tell researchers if the vaccine seems safe, and if it can actually mobilize the immune system. Researchers will then need to check that it actually prevents infection from SARS-CoV-2. They’ll need to do animal tests and large-scale trials to ensure that the vaccine doesn’t cause severe side effects. They’ll need to work out what dose is required, how many shots people need, if the vaccine works in elderly people, and if it requires other chemicals to boost its effectiveness.

“Even if it works, they don’t have an easy way to manufacture it at a massive scale,” said Seth Berkley of Gavi. That’s because Moderna is using a new approach to vaccination. Existing vaccines work by providing the body with inactivated or fragmented viruses, allowing the immune system to prep its defenses ahead of time. By contrast, Moderna’s vaccine comprises a sliver of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic material—its RNA. The idea is that the body can use this sliver to build its own viral fragments, which would then form the basis of the immune system’s preparations. This approach works in animals, but is unproven in humans. By contrast, French scientists are trying to modify the existing measles vaccine using fragments of the new coronavirus. “The advantage of that is that if we needed hundreds of doses tomorrow, a lot of plants in the world know how to do it,” Berkley said. No matter which strategy is faster, Berkley and others estimate that it will take 12 to 18 months to develop a proven vaccine, and then longer still to make it, ship it, and inject it into people’s arms.

It’s likely, then, that the new coronavirus will be a lingering part of American life for at least a year, if not much longer. If the current round of social-distancing measures works, the pandemic may ebb enough for things to return to a semblance of normalcy. Offices could fill and bars could bustle. Schools could reopen and friends could reunite. But as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.


Much about the coming years, including the frequency, duration, and timing of social upheavals, depends on two properties of the virus, both of which are currently unknown. First: seasonality. Coronaviruses tend to be winter infections that wane or disappear in the summer. That may also be true for SARS-CoV-2, but seasonal variations might not sufficiently slow the virus when it has so many immunologically naive hosts to infect. “Much of the world is waiting anxiously to see what—if anything—the summer does to transmission in the Northern Hemisphere,” says Maia Majumder of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Second: duration of immunity. When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer. Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 lies somewhere in the middle, people who recover from their encounters might be protected for a couple of years. To confirm that, scientists will need to develop accurate serological tests, which look for the antibodies that confer immunity. They’ll also need to confirm that such antibodies actually stop people from catching or spreading the virus. If so, immune citizens can return to work, care for the vulnerable, and anchor the economy during bouts of social distancing.

Scientists can use the periods between those bouts to develop antiviral drugs—although such drugs are rarely panaceas, and come with possible side effects and the risk of resistance. Hospitals can stockpile the necessary supplies. Testing kits can be widely distributed to catch the virus’s return as quickly as possible. There’s no reason that the U.S. should let SARS-CoV-2 catch it unawares again, and thus no reason that social-distancing measures need to be deployed as broadly and heavy-handedly as they now must be. As Aaron E. Carroll and Ashish Jha recently wrote, “We can keep schools and businesses open as much as possible, closing them quickly when suppression fails, then opening them back up again once the infected are identified and isolated. Instead of playing defense, we could play more offense.”

Whether through accumulating herd immunity or the long-awaited arrival of a vaccine, the virus will find spreading explosively more and more difficult. It’s unlikely to disappear entirely. The vaccine may need to be updated as the virus changes, and people may need to get revaccinated on a regular basis, as they currently do for the flu. Models suggest that the virus might simmer around the world, triggering epidemics every few years or so. “But my hope and expectation is that the severity would decline, and there would be less societal upheaval,” Kissler says. In this future, COVID-19 may become like the flu is today—a recurring scourge of winter. Perhaps it will eventually become so mundane that even though a vaccine exists, large swaths of Gen C won’t bother getting it, forgetting how dramatically their world was molded by its absence.

III. The Aftermath
The cost of reaching that point, with as few deaths as possible, will be enormous. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote, the economy is experiencing a shock “more sudden and severe than anyone alive has ever experienced.” About one in five people in the United States have lost working hours or jobs. Hotels are empty. Airlines are grounding flights. Restaurants and other small businesses are closing. Inequalities will widen: People with low incomes will be hardest-hit by social-distancing measures, and most likely to have the chronic health conditions that increase their risk of severe infections. Diseases have destabilized cities and societies many times over, “but it hasn’t happened in this country in a very long time, or to quite the extent that we’re seeing now,” says Elena Conis, a historian of medicine at UC Berkeley. “We’re far more urban and metropolitan. We have more people traveling great distances and living far from family and work.”

After infections begin ebbing, a secondary pandemic of mental-health problems will follow. At a moment of profound dread and uncertainty, people are being cut off from soothing human contact. Hugs, handshakes, and other social rituals are now tinged with danger. People with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder are struggling. Elderly people, who are already excluded from much of public life, are being asked to distance themselves even further, deepening their loneliness. Asian people are suffering racist insults, fueled by a president who insists on labeling the new coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” Incidents of domestic violence and child abuse are likely to spike as people are forced to stay in unsafe homes. Children, whose bodies are mostly spared by the virus, may endure mental trauma that stays with them into adulthood.

After the pandemic, people who recover from COVID-19 might be shunned and stigmatized, as were survivors of Ebola, SARS, and HIV. Health-care workers will take time to heal: One to two years after SARS hit Toronto, people who dealt with the outbreak were still less productive and more likely to be experiencing burnout and post-traumatic stress. People who went through long bouts of quarantine will carry the scars of their experience. “My colleagues in Wuhan note that some people there now refuse to leave their homes and have developed agoraphobia,” says Steven Taylor of the University of British Columbia, who wrote The Psychology of Pandemics.

But “there is also the potential for a much better world after we get through this trauma,” says Richard Danzig of the Center for a New American Security. Already, communities are finding new ways of coming together, even as they must stay apart. Attitudes to health may also change for the better. The rise of HIV and AIDS “completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic,” Conis says. “The use of condoms became normalized. Testing for STDs became mainstream.” Similarly, washing your hands for 20 seconds, a habit that has historically been hard to enshrine even in hospitals, “may be one of those behaviors that we become so accustomed to in the course of this outbreak that we don’t think about them,” Conis adds.


Pandemics can also catalyze social change. People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that they might once have dragged their heels on, including working from home, conference-calling to accommodate people with disabilities, proper sick leave, and flexible child-care arrangements. “This is the first time in my lifetime that I’ve heard someone say, ‘Oh, if you’re sick, stay home,’” says Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University. Perhaps the nation will learn that preparedness isn’t just about masks, vaccines, and tests, but also about fair labor policies and a stable and equal health-care system. Perhaps it will appreciate that health-care workers and public-health specialists compose America’s social immune system, and that this system has been suppressed.

Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved to not live in fear. But SARS-CoV-2 has no interest in their terror, only their cells.

Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too. Citizens who saw China as a distant, different place, where bats are edible and authoritarianism is acceptable, failed to consider that they would be next or that they wouldn’t be ready. (China’s response to this crisis had its own problems, but that’s for another time.) “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”

Veterans of past epidemics have long warned that American society is trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. After every crisis—anthrax, SARS, flu, Ebola—attention is paid and investments are made. But after short periods of peacetime, memories fade and budgets dwindle. This trend transcends red and blue administrations. When a new normal sets in, the abnormal once again becomes unimaginable. But there is reason to think that COVID-19 might be a disaster that leads to more radical and lasting change.

The other major epidemics of recent decades either barely affected the U.S. (SARS, MERS, Ebola), were milder than expected (H1N1 flu in 2009), or were mostly limited to specific groups of people (Zika, HIV). The COVID-19 pandemic, by contrast, is affecting everyone directly, changing the nature of their everyday life. That distinguishes it not only from other diseases, but also from the other systemic challenges of our time. When an administration prevaricates on climate change, the effects won’t be felt for years, and even then will be hard to parse. It’s different when a president says that everyone can get a test, and one day later, everyone cannot. Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.


After 9/11, the world focused on counterterrorism. After COVID-19, attention may shift to public health. Expect to see a spike in funding for virology and vaccinology, a surge in students applying to public-health programs, and more domestic production of medical supplies. Expect pandemics to top the agenda at the United Nations General Assembly. Anthony Fauci is now a household name. “Regular people who think easily about what a policewoman or firefighter does finally get what an epidemiologist does,” says Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Such changes, in themselves, might protect the world from the next inevitable disease. “The countries that had lived through SARS had a public consciousness about this that allowed them to leap into action,” said Ron Klain, the former Ebola czar. “The most commonly uttered sentence in America at the moment is, ‘I’ve never seen something like this before.’ That wasn’t a sentence anyone in Hong Kong uttered.” For the U.S., and for the world, it’s abundantly, viscerally clear what a pandemic can do.

The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, especially at a time when online algorithms and partisan broadcasters only serve news that aligns with their audience’s preconceptions. Such dynamics will be pivotal in the coming months, says Ilan Goldenberg, a foreign-policy expert at the Center for a New American Security. “The transitions after World War II or 9/11 were not about a bunch of new ideas,” he says. “The ideas are out there, but the debates will be more acute over the next few months because of the fluidity of the moment and willingness of the American public to accept big, massive changes.”

One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero. During the second term of his presidency, the U.S. turns further inward and pulls out of NATO and other international alliances, builds actual and figurative walls, and disinvests in other nations. As Gen C grows up, foreign plagues replace communists and terrorists as the new generational threat.

One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation. Buoyed by steady investments and an influx of the brightest minds, the health-care workforce surges. Gen C kids write school essays about growing up to be epidemiologists. Public health becomes the centerpiece of foreign policy. The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.

In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.

Edited by RiTides - Spoiler tags for large block of text

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/03/26 18:19:18


CoALabaer wrote:
Wargamers hate two things: the state of the game and change.
 
   
Made in gb
Ridin' on a Snotling Pump Wagon






Got a TL/DR version


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Not Online!!! wrote:
Considering Funds will be more readily available due to , dare i say, untimely departure of certain members, i'd argue that not all pension systems will suffer equally.


Depends.

I’ve got a private pension through work. If I snuff it before retirement, it all goes to my nominated person.

Except, I’ve not nominated anyone as yet.....it’s meant to go to my God Sprog. But me being me, and humans tending not to really think about mortality, I’ve not done it yet.

Must hit up her Mum for the right details. As it stands, the fund is, well, it’s pretty effing healthy considering it’s only existed for 8 years. Enough to see Wilf through University should it come to it.

Because if I don’t, I think it goes to my next of kin. Or worse, the government.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/03/26 17:26:16


   
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 Sqorgar wrote:
 Vulcan wrote:
I've read opinions that to determine the IQ of a group of people, divide the average IQ of the individuals in the group by the number of people in the group. One author compared a marching company of 100 men to a centipede.
You must be missing something there, because a group of 100 individuals with an average of 100 IQ would have a collective IQ of 1. You could divide the sum of each individual's IQ by the number of people, but that's kind of how you would determine the average of anything.

Of course, using the mean, median, or mode would all contain relevant information for a group of people, but I doubt it would accurately convey the intelligence of their behavior, since mob mentality usually involves people reverting to their reptilian brain, acting on fear and need for conformity, with an individual leader making the decisions for the group. Therefore, the most accurate measure of a group's IQ would be whatever the IQ is of the leader. But that then begs the question of whether Plato's concept of a philosopher king might not be appropriate, but that's a whole different ball of wax.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is that people will make the best decisions for themselves based on the information that is made available to them. If they get bad information, they will make bad decisions. The real problem occurs when people get conflicting information. People can't handle that, and tend to give up on making their own decisions and defer decision making to someone they trust. You can't blame the college kids going to spring break - they wouldn't have done it if they thought they were in any real danger. So the real culprit would be whomever gave them their information. But then you have to wonder, what if you are acting on bad information, yourself? How would you even know? You wouldn't. So what it all comes down to is trust, not IQ.


That was more or less the author's point. One person can be smart, a group of people is usually quite dumb. One has only to look at the government to see how that works.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Future War Cultist wrote:
A British diplomat apparently just died from the disease. He was only 37.

I keep telling myself, it’s always darkest before the dawn.


Sadly, I don't think we've hit that darkest hour yet.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/03/26 17:54:59


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jouso wrote:
 Vulcan wrote:


I've read opinions that to determine the IQ of a group of people, divide the average IQ of the individuals in the group by the number of people in the group.


That's actually a Pratchett quote, or one of several Pratchett quotes on the same subject.

Always accurate.



I read it from Leo Frankowski, but it's quite possible he borrowed it from Pratchett.

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Switzerland now at
close to 11'000 sick and 160 dead.
https://www.bag.admin.ch/bag/en/home/krankheiten/ausbrueche-epidemien-pandemien/aktuelle-ausbrueche-epidemien/novel-cov/situation-schweiz-und-international.html


Well. That escalated fast.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/03/26 17:58:44


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The Great State of New Jersey

Not sure how I would TL;DR that article, the article doesn't exactly answer the question posed in the title, but rather somewhat ties in to my previous post about where we are at and what will likely need to happen moving forward.

Did some quick back of the envelope math though out of boredom, just out of curiosity as to how long this might last.

So, theres still some disagreement as to what the threshold for effective herd immunity is for Coronavirus, but I'll assume 50% as that seems to be roughly the midpoint of most experts ranges.

We also don't know what percentage of cases go unreported, but if we assume that the number is similar to influenza and based on public health experts estimates, somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 30 cases are being reported.

So, based on those numbers, for the US (pop 370 million) to reach "herd immunity" - assuming a uniform distribution of cases across the country - we would need between 6.1 and 18.5 million cases reported. Currently we have 75K cases, and the number doubles every 3 to 4 days (we'll assume 3.5), which means we have between 7 and 8 doubling periods before we reach that threshold, or between 24 and 28 days. Of course, most of the case growth in the US is coming from one city which is aggressively trying to flatten the curve, so we may see a slow-down in the growth rate, though it will depend on whether or not efforts elsewhere are successful in doing the same, otherwise another state or city will fill in as substitute for New York. On the surface this timeline doesn't sound too bad, but of course the healthcare system would be overwhelmed and collapse several times over if this was to occur, and the mortality rates would skyrocket as a result.

If these numbers were true of the world (they aren't) then to reach global herd immunity (earth pop 7.53 billion) would require between 125 and 376 million cases reported. Currently we are at 510k, doubling roughly ever week. We need between 8 and 10 doubling periods, or between 56 and 70 days.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/03/26 18:11:45


CoALabaer wrote:
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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Got a TL/DR version


The US public has not taken COVID-19 seriously, and the US government has been tardy in reacting to it. Therefore everyone will have to assume the position.

n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.

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What.

Fun.

   
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UK: Youngest CoVid death is a 28-year old man. Mother describes him, "He went into hospital with viral pneumonia, but other than that he was healthy."

Also, important, the article describes the hospital system. "We tried ringing 111 but it was an hour to get through. ... “When Adam died they had somebody (another victim) coming into his bed straight away. She was on a trolley in the hallway just waiting there to go in. While I was visiting Adam two people flatlined. When the machine started going off you can see it. They all rush in and rush over.”

So not only do you need to practice social isolation, but also avoid needing an ambulance or hospital bed entirely.

http://camdennewjournal.com/article/this-can-kill-anybody-warns-mother-after-28-year-old-son-dies-from-coronavirus/

Crimson Scales and Wildspire Miniatures thread on Reaper! : https://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/103935-wildspire-miniatures-thread/ 
   
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Leeds, UK

 ced1106 wrote:
UK: Youngest CoVid death is a 28-year old man. Mother describes him, "He went into hospital with viral pneumonia, but other than that he was healthy."

Also, important, the article describes the hospital system. "We tried ringing 111 but it was an hour to get through. ... “When Adam died they had somebody (another victim) coming into his bed straight away. She was on a trolley in the hallway just waiting there to go in. While I was visiting Adam two people flatlined. When the machine started going off you can see it. They all rush in and rush over.”

So not only do you need to practice social isolation, but also avoid needing an ambulance or hospital bed entirely.

http://camdennewjournal.com/article/this-can-kill-anybody-warns-mother-after-28-year-old-son-dies-from-coronavirus/


Sadly we have had younger deaths in the UK. A 21 year old girl with no underlying conditions died a couple of days ago, and an 18 year old with underlying issues died too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-52041709

   
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"Viral pneumonia" describes coronavirus, no?

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New Oxford study suggests millions of people may have already built up coronavirus immunity

A model predicting the progression of the novel coronavirus pandemic produced by researchers at Imperial College London set off alarms across the world and was a major factor in several governments' decisions to lock things down. But a new model from Oxford University is challenging its accuracy, the Financial Times reports.
The Oxford research suggests the pandemic is in a later stage than previously thought and estimates the virus has already infected at least millions of people worldwide. In the United Kingdom, which the study focuses on, half the population would have already been infected.
   
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UK

I'm not quite sure how that model works; especially since if it had already spread through the population surely those who were not immune would have got the virus then instead of now. So if that theory is correct then it should have peaked way back in January with deaths and sickness overwhelming the NHS then.


Instead the suggestion that the vast majority have immunity and that those who are vulnerable seemed to manage to slip the infection net then but aren't now - seems strange when its hitting all areas of most countries.


On the face of it, its a nice message to suggest many might be immune and thus safe; but the reality of the situation doesn't seem to hold up to that conclusion.

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An interesting part of Chaosxomega's story was that they had "wargamed" the scenario in 2018. Well, interesting to me on this particular board anyway.

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Not to mention the use of "a study suggests". Whenever I hear that statement, alarm bells start ringing, and my first thought is "how are they going to misrepresent science while simultaneously completely misunderstanding even the one study they're reporting on this time?".
   
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UK

Yeah either the study is being miss understood or miss reported or a bit of both. I can accept that things could be further along in the infection curve than estimated, which would be a great thing. The UK not doing mass population testing means that it would be impossible to know until after.

That said I'd have thought it would be a matter of weeks rather than several months worth of difference.

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 Overread wrote:
I'm not quite sure how that model works; especially since if it had already spread through the population surely those who were not immune would have got the virus then instead of now. So if that theory is correct then it should have peaked way back in January with deaths and sickness overwhelming the NHS then.

Instead the suggestion that the vast majority have immunity and that those who are vulnerable seemed to manage to slip the infection net then but aren't now - seems strange when its hitting all areas of most countries.

On the face of it, its a nice message to suggest many might be immune and thus safe; but the reality of the situation doesn't seem to hold up to that conclusion.


There's definitely some ropey statistics going on here. To be able to get to this conclusion you effectively have to argue that for the first couple of months, for some reason, it didn't cause significant deaths and only now are these deaths occurring. Except the infection growth tracks death grow reasonably well (barring a few weeks delay). So you'd have to explain why are our tests are now identifying an increasing fraction of the population that have not had it before compared to previously; and secondly why in this group do deaths occur compared to those that had it previously but which caused no measurable deaths. This is compounded by that the virus will have much less people to infect and kill which implies that the virus is actually getting more lethal over time (as the you are getting more deaths from a smaller infectible populace). This is an extreme scenario and not very likely.

On an aside we went to Sainsbury's today to get some bare essential supplies. We recorded the experience...




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 Overread wrote:
I'm not quite sure how that model works; especially since if it had already spread through the population surely those who were not immune would have got the virus then instead of now. So if that theory is correct then it should have peaked way back in January with deaths and sickness overwhelming the NHS then.

Instead the suggestion that the vast majority have immunity and that those who are vulnerable seemed to manage to slip the infection net then but aren't now - seems strange when its hitting all areas of most countries.

On the face of it, its a nice message to suggest many might be immune and thus safe; but the reality of the situation doesn't seem to hold up to that conclusion.
I've read a lot of testimonials of people who have gotten really sick in the past few months with symptoms similar to this virus, and even a few that were hospitalized because of it. It's possible that the simple fact that nobody was counting these cases and putting them on a pretty map, nobody made the connection that they were related or even out of the ordinary. Nor that it was something to even be worried about. It's also possible that the highly publicized nature of the virus has made people more eager to seek medical help, when they may have tried to tough it out before (maybe successfully, maybe with deadly consequences). The plural of anecdote is not evidence, though.

In the US, we've only been testing more than a few people for what, two weeks? We don't even know how many cases there are now, much less how many cases existed before we started testing. It is feasible, even likely, that the virus has been around a lot longer and spread much further.

New York City has an average of 420 people dying every day. Since the first confirmed case of the coronavirus in the US, New York City will have lost an average of 28,980 people. The ENTIRE United States has under 1,000 deaths attributed to the coronavirus. If you didn't know to look for it, would you even see it? If you didn't know it was deadly, would you even seek medical help?
   
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Apparently Bosch has developed an quick Corona test: https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/combating-the-coronavirus-pandemic-bosch-develops-rapid-test-for-covid-19-209792.html
Reliable test results enable differential diagnosis in under 2.5 hours
   
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 Whirlwind wrote:
This is compounded by that the virus will have much less people to infect and kill which implies that the virus is actually getting more lethal over time (as the you are getting more deaths from a smaller infectible populace).
The conditions of this disease would almost certainly be recorded as the flu, which is already very lethal (more lethal than this disease, even). It would seem like a particularly bad flu year up until this virus was isolated and identified.
   
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Decrepit Dakkanaut




UK

 Sqorgar wrote:
 Whirlwind wrote:
This is compounded by that the virus will have much less people to infect and kill which implies that the virus is actually getting more lethal over time (as the you are getting more deaths from a smaller infectible populace).
The conditions of this disease would almost certainly be recorded as the flu, which is already very lethal (more lethal than this disease, even). It would seem like a particularly bad flu year up until this virus was isolated and identified.


I thought all the current data pointed toward Corona being more deadly than flu, hence a big reason for a lot of the national shutdowns and major steps being taken. I forget the numbers but wasn't flu in the 0.2% or so of cases causing death whilst Corona seems to be pushing into the 2% or greater regions

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Philadelphia PA

 Overread wrote:
 Sqorgar wrote:
 Whirlwind wrote:
This is compounded by that the virus will have much less people to infect and kill which implies that the virus is actually getting more lethal over time (as the you are getting more deaths from a smaller infectible populace).
The conditions of this disease would almost certainly be recorded as the flu, which is already very lethal (more lethal than this disease, even). It would seem like a particularly bad flu year up until this virus was isolated and identified.


I thought all the current data pointed toward Corona being more deadly than flu, hence a big reason for a lot of the national shutdowns and major steps being taken. I forget the numbers but wasn't flu in the 0.2% or so of cases causing death whilst Corona seems to be pushing into the 2% or greater regions


Welcome to the merry-go-round of the last 20+ pages. The lethality and magnitude of the current pandemic have no impact on someone who's covering their ears and just repeating the word" flu" over and over.

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Mario wrote:
Apparently Bosch has developed an quick Corona test: https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/combating-the-coronavirus-pandemic-bosch-develops-rapid-test-for-covid-19-209792.html
Reliable test results enable differential diagnosis in under 2.5 hours


Nice. I just got my test results from... 8 days ago. That's way too inefficient even though I knew I didn't have the bloody thing, and the staff just panicked themselves into testing me.
   
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SpaceCoast

 ScarletRose wrote:
 Overread wrote:
 Sqorgar wrote:
 Whirlwind wrote:
This is compounded by that the virus will have much less people to infect and kill which implies that the virus is actually getting more lethal over time (as the you are getting more deaths from a smaller infectible populace).
The conditions of this disease would almost certainly be recorded as the flu, which is already very lethal (more lethal than this disease, even). It would seem like a particularly bad flu year up until this virus was isolated and identified.


I thought all the current data pointed toward Corona being more deadly than flu, hence a big reason for a lot of the national shutdowns and major steps being taken. I forget the numbers but wasn't flu in the 0.2% or so of cases causing death whilst Corona seems to be pushing into the 2% or greater regions


Welcome to the merry-go-round of the last 20+ pages. The lethality and magnitude of the current pandemic have no impact on someone who's covering their ears and just repeating the word" flu" over and over.


Try reading what he wrote instead of just trying to attack. What he and what fits in with the study is early deaths/hospitalization could have been misrecorded as flu cases just like happened in China before they figured out what was happening. Given the first case was likely mid November it may have escaped China earlier than originally thought. Might be interesting to see the study since as mentioned, news media rarely gets tech details accurate.
   
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Bodt

 Whirlwind wrote:
 Overread wrote:
I'm not quite sure how that model works; especially since if it had already spread through the population surely those who were not immune would have got the virus then instead of now. So if that theory is correct then it should have peaked way back in January with deaths and sickness overwhelming the NHS then.

Instead the suggestion that the vast majority have immunity and that those who are vulnerable seemed to manage to slip the infection net then but aren't now - seems strange when its hitting all areas of most countries.

On the face of it, its a nice message to suggest many might be immune and thus safe; but the reality of the situation doesn't seem to hold up to that conclusion.


There's definitely some ropey statistics going on here. To be able to get to this conclusion you effectively have to argue that for the first couple of months, for some reason, it didn't cause significant deaths and only now are these deaths occurring.



Maybe they were and we just didn't know? I mean, how many people die in hospital daily, due to those underlying medical conditions or complications due to them? Has there been any comparisons done to investigate the statistics?

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Philadelphia PA

Jerram wrote:
 ScarletRose wrote:
 Overread wrote:
 Sqorgar wrote:
 Whirlwind wrote:
This is compounded by that the virus will have much less people to infect and kill which implies that the virus is actually getting more lethal over time (as the you are getting more deaths from a smaller infectible populace).
The conditions of this disease would almost certainly be recorded as the flu, which is already very lethal (more lethal than this disease, even). It would seem like a particularly bad flu year up until this virus was isolated and identified.


I thought all the current data pointed toward Corona being more deadly than flu, hence a big reason for a lot of the national shutdowns and major steps being taken. I forget the numbers but wasn't flu in the 0.2% or so of cases causing death whilst Corona seems to be pushing into the 2% or greater regions


Welcome to the merry-go-round of the last 20+ pages. The lethality and magnitude of the current pandemic have no impact on someone who's covering their ears and just repeating the word" flu" over and over.


Try reading what he wrote instead of just trying to attack. What he and what fits in with the study is early deaths/hospitalization could have been misrecorded as flu cases just like happened in China before they figured out what was happening. Given the first case was likely mid November it may have escaped China earlier than originally thought. Might be interesting to see the study since as mentioned, news media rarely gets tech details accurate.


Try reading the rest of the thread, it's just another set of obfuscation. Other posters have already dissected why the study is questionable, especially since it doesn't jive with the lethality we're seeing now.

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British Columbia

The lethality is way too difficult to determine as the lack of testing/accuracy of testing isn't giving us a true sense of the actual number of infections.

I personally don't think this thing could have been lingering much longer than we believe as the exponential spread we are seeing and mass waves of hospitalizations wouldn't go unnoticed.

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