Some Ask a Taboo Question: Is America Overreacting to Coronavirus?

[PlayerRep]

I am not arguing that the flu is the same as coronavirus, or that coronavirus is not much more dangerous at this time. I found this article when I was trying to found out how many deaths are saved by the flu vaccines; didn't find that, yet. Nevertheless, note the following, from a 12/19 NPR article:

1. "The vaccine's ability to prevent flu cases last year hovered around 44 percent overall; it was about 59 percent effective in young children and just 16 percent in adults over 65. But even that low number for older adults elides how much death and disability the vaccine prevented.

"Effectiveness" only refers to the ability of the vaccine to prevent illness, and the vaccine does so much more than that," says Dr. LJ Tan, chief strategy officer for the nonprofit Immunization Action Coalition, based in St. Paul, Minn."

2. [Sound familiar?]

"In older adults, the flu shot prevents the loss of quality of life that can result from influenza complications, Tan says. That protection is also important for people with chronic conditions beyond heart disease, such as diabetes, asthma, and lung or liver disease. Doctors say flu shots are also indicated for patients with suppressed immune systems and for most people who have an autoimmune condition."

3. "The past two years have been the worst, in terms of flu cases and complications, in the past decade. An estimated 37 million to 43 million Americans had flu last season, resulting in as many as 647,000 hospitalizations and as many as 61,200 deaths. Preliminary numbers from 2017 to 2018 are similar: 45 million infections, 810,000 hospitalizations and 61,000 deaths."

4. "But here's the rest of the story: Even if you do catch the flu despite having been vaccinated, "your illness is very likely to be less severe" than if you had skipped the shot, Schaffner says. "It's more likely to be shorter, and you're much less likely to get the complications of pneumonia, being hospitalized and dying."

5. [I wonder if the coming C-19 vaccines will be 100% effective, or much less effective like the flu vaccines are. I suppose that may depend on weather the C-19 mutates/changes every year.]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/12/20/784608400/do-you-really-need-a-flu-shot-heres-how-to-decide

 

[PlayerRep]

I saw this quote in the Journal. Note the part on China.

"Italy is enforcing its lockdown by handing out fines, but without imprisoning people or welding shut the doors of apartment blocks, as China did."

 

[grizindabox]

No way this things makes it 17 pages...

 

[PlayerRep]

3 new cases in northeastern MT. 1 new one in Roosevelt and 2 in Richland/Sydney.

332 cases in total. 6 deaths. 135 recovered. 31 hospitalizations.

Missoula county has 25 cases. Ravalli has 3. Flathead now has 31. Bozeman has 120. 48 in Yellowstone.

7,398 test results in MT.

 

[PlayerRep]

1. "Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has suggested that the stricter measures violated personal liberties, and she said her state’s rural character made it better positioned to handle the outbreak.

“South Dakota is not New York City,” Ms. Noem said at a news conference last week.

2. “We’re behind the curve in rural America,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, who said his state needs hundreds of thousands of masks, visors and gowns. “If they don’t have the protective equipment and somebody goes down and gets sick, that could close the hospital.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-rural-america-cases.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

 

[cclarkblues]

3 new cases in northeastern MT. 1 new one in Roosevelt and 2 in Richland/Sydney.

332 cases in total. 6 deaths. 135 recovered. 31 hospitalizations.

Missoula county has 25 cases. Ravalli has 3. Flathead now has 31. Bozeman has 120. 48 in Yellowstone.

7,398 test results in MT.

5 people hospitalized in Yellowstone County.

 

[SaskGriz]

The Rich get Richer!

Yes, but that $25 helps my daughter offset the huge rent she pays for her NYC apartment, as it lays empty and she lives with us in Missoula, drinking alot of our good wine each night. Last night, we made a family rule to only drink beer at dinner.

We've all had to make sacrifices but this one really hits home.

 

[PlayerRep]

Airbnb bookings in US have dropped from 550,000 per week to 250,000. Down in European countries and China too, but not as much. Also, bookings in Europe and China are much lower generally. Now all below 100,000. Airbnb's valuation has dropped from $150 per share, to $90 per share, to under $30 Billion. Airbnb looked at doing an IPO a couple years ago, but didn't go public. Probably a good thing, as now they are more flexible as a private company.

 

[kemajic]

41 pages, headed for 117....

 

[PlayerRep]

Some Missoula teachers starting to get complaints, even nasty ones, from parents complaining that the online learning stuff is too hard to figure out or otherwise not good enough.

My teacher-wife looks forward to retirement when she can golf in the morning and play tennis in the afternoon, and throw away her computer. She's okay or better at tech, and lucky to have our 2 younger kids at home to help. She hasn't got any complaint yet.

Beautiful, sunny day in Missoula, on way to low 60s. Sunny and higher 60s for next two days. Then snow.

 

[PlayerRep]

41 pages, headed for 117....

That is from incomplete data and bad modeling. If Bullock keeps the shut-down going too long, there will be more posts/pages than there are people in eastern MT.

 

[PlayerRep]

"Wealthy City Dwellers Seek Refuge From Coronavirus at Remote Ranches

Urbanites are riding out the pandemic in shared ranch communities in low-density states like Montana, Wyoming and Utah, despite pleas from local and state officials to stay away"

"When Mark and Jenny Mummert heard about the coronavirus pandemic, they cut short their vacation in Cabo San Lucas, flew home to Atlanta to pick up one daughter and their two dogs, and chartered a flight to Ulery’s Lakes—a gated community at the Moonlight Basin resort in Big Sky, Mont., where they bought 23 acres for $975,000 in 2014.

Big Sky’s Yellowstone Club, where list prices start at $3.85 million for an undeveloped half-acre lot, emailed its members in mid-March—the peak of its ski season—asking them to stay away. Many members were already there. The slopes are closed along with all club amenities, except one restaurant offering curb-side pickup.

Gallatin County’s Big Sky Medical Center, the closest hospital to the Yellowstone Club, Moonlight Basin and Spanish Peaks Mountain Club, another resort community, has only four beds. The other option—Bozeman Health Deaconess Hospital, with 83 beds—is an hour’s drive away.

Christopher Coburn, public information officer for Bozeman Health, the integrated healthcare system that oversees both medical facilities, said one person is hospitalized for Covid-19, but would not disclose where this person is being treated or where they are from.

[This seems to say that Bozeman and Big Sky hospitals have only 1 Covid hospitalization. Interesting for the county with the most cases, if true.]

Jim Taylor, 74, a principal director of Hall and Hall, a ranch brokerage firm, and his wife, Anne Kent Taylor, 72, who has a travel consultancy, have been hunkered down since late March at their 5,000-square-foot vacation home at Sun West, a 2,000-acre ranch community on the Madison River near Ennis, Mont. [He lives in Billings. Hall and Hall is one biggest ranch brokers in the West.]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wealthy-city-dwellers-seek-refuge-from-coronavirus-at-remote-ranches-11586373662?mod=hp_featst_pos2 paywall

 

[ilovethecats]

Careful PR. I've found that people get pretty defensive when you mention other viruses and incidents that kill far more people than the Corona. For whatever reason, lives lost to this virus are much more important to lives lost due to other illnesses. I haven't figured out why, but that seems to be what we've learned.

At least their projections of deaths' seem to be getting a bit more realistic. Even Fauchi said yesterday he's optimistic it'd be lower than 100,000 in our country. An expert said this morning he believes much lower than that. I hope he's right, that's still a lot of lives lost.

Meanwhile domestic violence, child abuse and suicides are up. We're really walking a fine line currently.

You don't see refrigerator trucks parked behind hospitals to store the bodies during the flu season.

This is true. However, 99.9% of places dealing with this thing don’t see refrigerator trucks outside of hospitals either.

I never saw anything like planes flying into skyscrapers either. That was shocking. But if we would have shut down the country because of what NYC was dealing with I would have not understood that either.

 

[Htowngriz]

You don't see refrigerator trucks parked behind hospitals to store the bodies during the flu season.

This is true. However, 99.9% of places dealing with this thing don’t see refrigerator trucks outside of hospitals either.

I never saw anything like planes flying into skyscrapers either. That was shocking. But if we would have shut down the country because of what NYC was dealing with I would have not understood that either.

NYC waited too long to start taking measures. The Bay Area and Seattle appear to have done it just in time, and aren't being hit nearly as badly, despite also being very densely populated.

 

[IdaGriz01]

This is true. However, 99.9% of places dealing with this thing don’t see refrigerator trucks outside of hospitals either.

I never saw anything like planes flying into skyscrapers either. That was shocking. But if we would have shut down the country because of what NYC was dealing with I would have not understood that either.

NYC waited too long to start taking measures. The Bay Area and Seattle appear to have done it just in time, and aren't being hit nearly as badly, despite also being very densely populated.

And "ordinary" New Yorkers are -- seriously -- making it hard to maintain a high level of sympathy for their ordeal: https://nypost.com/2020/04/07/park-goers-threaten-to-cough-on-officers-enforcing-social-distancing/

Here's how the article opens:

It’s dangerous to be a city parks enforcement officer these days.

Several officers told The Post on Tuesday that some park-goers are so angry over being called out about social distancing amid the coronavirus that they threaten to spit or cough on them if they try to enforce the safety rules.
...

 

[ilovethecats]

Kind of my point. We have built up some immunity and have a vaccine to the flu yet we will still lose more people this year than to this corona virus in the US. Why are the corona deaths more important than the flu deaths? My answer is because we are sheep being lead by the media and our attention span is about as long as my ****! Remember right before this crisis when we were dying and overwhelming our medical facilities with vaping deaths? Not a peep about that today. Before that the world was going to come to an end over the Australian fires. Before that, before that, before that.... I'm not saying that we shouldn't pay attention to this new virus, but I think the response is Chicken Little-ish and sometimes our responses are just to feel like we are doing something whether it makes a difference or not (buying toilet paper and wearing flimsy masks when we are not sick). Many people's mental status would immediately improve if they would turn off the TV, stay off the internet, put down their phones, and go outside and take a walk and enjoy nature.

Nobody knows how many will ultimately succumb to Covid, be we do know that the number would be substantially higher if we didn't do anything to slow the spread of it. We're talking in the millions.

I can agree with the first part of your comment. The 2nd I can’t get on board with. There is absolutely nothing to substantiate that. The numbers have been widely overblown for 3 weeks now.

I have no doubt that social distancing works. That’s just science. To what extent we’ll just never know. I maintain it was never as serious as people were fearing. Now others who were deathly afraid of this thing are acting like shutting down the economy was the one and only reason this thing is looking overblown.

Just like this entire debate, there will still be two sides. Those that felt we were completely overreacting to a virus, and those that felt the virus was set to end mankind but listening to government guidelines saved the day. Line almost everything the truth is probably in the middle.

I’d like to see us dance this dance for a couple more weeks laid out for us and open it back up. Though little will change for me. I own “essential” businesses and have been dealing with hundreds of people every day since this thing started.....

 

[PlayerRep]

I'm watching MT, N.D., S.D. and Wyo. Only MT has stay at home for the state. South Falls area may skew things a bit for SD, as it has Sioux Falls metro with a 250,000 population, which is about 1/3 of the state population.

Deaths are 6, 4, 6, 0 (Wyo). Cases are 332, 251, 393 and 222.

 

[PlayerRep]

"Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, and other government experts suggested at the briefing that the strict measures being taken by Americans to stem the spread of the virus may be leveling new cases in areas like New York, Detroit, Chicago and Boston.

As evidence showed that efforts to reduce the spread were yielding results, Dr. Birx pointed to one of the models used to predict mortality from the University of Washington, which has dropped its estimate to 61,000 deaths from 86,000. She said the model was based on what Americans were doing."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-live-updates.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage#link-615a98a6

 

[PlayerRep]

Multiple states, like CA, have now banned the use of re-usable bags (due to virus), after banning the use of single-use plastic bags a dozen or so years ago. Starbucks has stopped refilling reusable cups.

 

[PlayerRep]

"C.D.C. issues new back-to-work guidelines for essential workers.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new guidelines on Wednesday detailing how essential employees can go back to work even if they have been exposed to people infected by the coronavirus as long as they do not feel sick and follow certain precautions.

Those employees can return if they take their temperature before heading to their workplaces, wear a face mask at all times and practice social distancing while on the job, Dr. Robert Redfield, the C.D.C. director, said at the White House briefing. They should not share headsets or other objects that touch their faces, and they should not congregate in break rooms or crowded areas, he said.

Dr. Redfield said that employers should send workers home immediately if they developed any symptoms. He also said they should increase air exchange in their buildings and clean common surfaces more often. The goal, he said, was to “get these workers back into the critical work force so that we don’t have worker shortages.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-live-updates.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage#link-78cc9ad

[Without saying whether I like this or not (I don't know enough), this is the type of thinking and action that I believe MT and other parts of the country need. The country needs to start moving in this direction, as soon as it reasonably can. One size doesn't fit all. The country is not going to be able to completely open up, or get rid of social distancing. But there are things that can and should be done, to mitigate economic and other damage.]