Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Thepersona]

Sure I do. Tests are still coming back mostly (85-95%) negative. And that's even considering that they only test people they think are likely infected. If the numbers were "astronomical", we'd be seeing more than 5-15% positive results.

That's why we need antibody testing. That way we know with full certainty how many people got infected and then got over the virus fast.

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People can be asymptomatic the whole time they're contagious.

I know that. I think i phrased my sentence badly. I was trying to mean that people that show antibodies, while testing negative for the virus (2 or 3 times) can go to work.

[Breccia]

Trump is a sociopath with zero capability for empathy towards anyone else.

Now hold on, before you go that route, you should read this wonderful, perfect letter he totally wrote himself to the nation's governors. In this letter, he announces his plan to divide the country up into high, medium, and low risk sections.

And then, he will directly issue instructions based on their risk factors.

Which is a nice way of saying "stop social distancing and get back to work".

And before you make your final conclusion on whether Trump is treating people as human beings or ways to make his money numbers go up, read this line:

There is still a long battle ahead, but our efforts are already paying dividends.

[Zaydin]

Now hold on, before you go that route, you should read this wonderful, perfect letter he totally wrote himself to the nation's governors. In this letter, he announces his plan to divide the country up into high, medium, and low risk sections.

And then, he will directly issue instructions based on their risk factors.

Which is a nice way of saying "stop social distancing and get back to work".

And before you make your final conclusion on whether Trump is treating people as human beings or ways to make his money numbers go up, read this line:

The only things that matter to Trump is money and his own re-election chance. I'm sure his reversal about social distancing has nothing to do with the fact that his company had to close six or seven of his most profitable money makers due to COVID-19 at the same time he started pushing to end social distancing.

[PhaelixWW]

But they aren't testing any significant portion of the populace - at least here in the U.S. India is locked down, no testing there. My only point is that we lack the info to make any significantly accurate statements about how many people are getting it. The data so far is "we need more - it's too varied". I mean, if I'm misunderstanding the links, help me out - I'll be the first to admit I was wrong.

I'm not challenging you, just seeking truth/fact from what little we know so far.

Even in Italy, where they practically stopped testing anybody outside an ICU, they've had only 22% test positive (80k / 360k). The US has even fewer at about 13% positive (80k / 600k).

All this is considering the fact that the test are mostly clustered around the largest hotspots, and primarily only going to the people that are seriously suspected of being infected.

Are there many more infected that are unknown at the moment? Absolutely. But the numbers indicate that it's not astronomical, otherwise more ancillary tests would be coming back positive.

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I know that. I think i phrased my sentence badly. I was trying to mean that people that show antibodies, while testing negative for the virus (2 or 3 times) can go to work.

Ah, okay. I thought you meant antibody tests instead of viral testing. I'm not sure we're going to have enough viral testing capacity to be running that many tests on each person just to free them back up to work, but maybe it will be done locationally.

[Dontrike]

Guess it's time to build a wall on the northern border too...

And Mexico will pay for it!

[Breccia]

This DailyKos article just fucking rips into the Easter issue.

And it's backed up with some truly frightening numbers.

Quoting the whole thing. Well...almost.

Donald Trump is suggesting that we should rescind efforts at coronavirus suppression in order to “save” the economy, while Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas calls on patriotic grandparents to sacrifice themselves to drive up the Dow. Across the pond, the U.K. government already mulled over the idea of allowing that nation to become a viral incubator until it reached the level required for “herd immunity”—though at least their plan called for sequestering the vulnerable while the nation sweated things out, rather than tossing them all into the Save the Stock Market National Patriotism Volcano.

There’s another name for the daring plan now being promoted by the right: It’s called “doing nothing.” It’s called letting the disaster play out, or allowing the disease run to its course, or simply permitting the wildfire to burn unchecked. But the problem is that when it’s done, what they get would not be a nation going “back to normal.” It would be ashes.

Any call for allowing the nation to move forward without every possible effort to restrict the spread of COVID-19 is profoundly foolish. For those who value their stock portfolio over their friends and relatives, it may seem like an obvious solution: Just pretend the disease isn’t there, send everyone back to work, and let God (and Adam Smith) work it out. But it won’t work. Because it can’t.

There are a plethora of reasons why this is both cruel and unforgivable, but there’s something that all the Money Men should notice—the numbers. The numbers show that this is simply an unworkable plan, one that would be far, far worse for the economy than the most locked-down lock-down. And, if anyone cares, it would also irrevocably destroy the nation’s soul. To understand the issue, let’s walk all the way back to the basics of an epidemic disease: rate of transmission, susceptibility, and outcome.

Transmission

Transmission rate is simply the number of people who are likely to be infected by someone carrying a contagious disease. It’s also known as R0 (pronounced “R zero”). For the seasonal flu, this number is around 1.3. For COVID-19, multiple efforts to calculate that number have placed it between 2 and 3; probably somewhere around 2.4.

Okay at this point, the author goes into a picture-based depiction of the difference between "one person infects two every five days" and "one person infects three every five days". In the former, sixty days turns one case to four thousand. In the latter, sixty days turns one case into five hundred thousand.

Susceptibility

That transmission rate can only be sustained if there are enough susceptible people on hand to become infected. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the novel coronavirus all the world’s a stage. Everyone is susceptible. Young, old, black, white—none of us have immunity. None. The body of every single one of us is prepared to become a factory for this mindless, living-not-living thing.

With other diseases there are vaccines, or there are portions of the population that had the disease in the past and are still protected by lingering immunity. Neither is true in this case. Humanity is standing here with arms thrown open wide, welcoming this invisible bastard to come feast on our cells.

Outcome

Obviously, no one would be worried about COVID-19 if the worst thing that happened was sniffles. (Pro tip: Sniffles are one of the things that seem to actually be extremely rare with this virus. If your nose is running, it’s probably not COVID-19. Probably.) But what happens with this disease follows a sliding scale from moderate to severe, where a very good portion of severe equals dead.

Trump has insisted on making supposedly favorable comparisons between the 2009 H1N1 “swine” flu epidemic and the current situation, so let’s take a quick look back at that one.

The virus may have actually moved from pigs to humans at a farm in Mexico owned by U.S. producer Smithfield Farms, but if so, it gave little warning before it was in the United States and spreading. The first case was actually identified in San Diego, the next in Texas.

When the first death happened a month later, there were already cases in 36 states. Until that first death, scientists had hoped this new flu would turn out to not represent a public health threat and the CDC had been optimistic that it was not a severe illness. By the time anyone realized this wasn’t the case, it was everywhere.

For epidemiologists, this was a nightmare scenario—here was a disease that had turned out to be deadly only after it had spread across the nation, and it had completed a coast-to-coast spread in just a few weeks. There was no way to contain the virus to a state or region.

Fortunately, the CDC had responded to that first case by crash-developing a test kit for the disease in two weeks. Before the first death, the CDC had already deployed 25% of the nation’s stockpile of protective gear and antivirals to the states. Two days after that first death, the FDA announced that it had already secured a facility to begin growing seed materials for a vaccine against H1N1 flu, and every agency of the federal government was preparing flu responses. On that same day, test kits were available in every state.

President Obama was prepared to issue a national order closing all schools, but it was May, and two things happened almost simultaneously: First, all those schools went on summer vacation anyway. Second, the flu really did subside to a low level of cases for the summer. Even so, a steady, slow drumbeat of cases and deaths continued. H1N1 had definitely not gone away.

As with COVID-19, most hopes while waiting for a vaccine were pinned on a therapeutic solution. With H1N1, it was the antiviral drug Tamiflu. Through the summer, this showed great effectiveness in many cases. But by August, cases of H1N1 appeared that were Tamiflu-resistant. As the flu came roaring back, President Obama declared a national emergency to focus funds on rapid production and distribution of the vaccine that had been in the works since May.

On October 14, the first 11 million doses of vaccine became available. By the end of October, 30 million doses had been distributed and vaccination increased going into November. By November 20, cases of H1N1 were in sharp decline. At the start of December, the CDC declared the H1N1 epidemic over, though it continued to urge that everyone get the vaccine.

And now the big numbers: Over the course of the H1N1 epidemic, there were 60.8 million cases, 274,000 victims were hospitalized, and 12,469 Americans died from complications directly related to the disease. This gives us a very good basis to use for comparing the disease to COVID-19.

• The transmission rate for the H1N1 flu was between 1.4 and 1.6.
• The hospitalization rate for the H1N1 flu was 0.5%.
• The case fatality rate for the H1N1 flu was 0.02%.

On every one of those values, COVID-19 is enormously worse.

When the H1N1 flu epidemic came under control in December of 2009, there were at least 110 million Americans who were immune to the virus, either because they had already had it, or because they had been given the vaccine. This wraps right back around to two of the topics we already hit—susceptibility and transmission rate.

Those 110 million Americans—about 35% of the population—made enough road blocks in the transmission chain to lower the transmission rate from 1.4 to below 1. That is, to the point where each person who was infected with the H1N1 flu infected fewer than 1 new person. That’s what “herd immunity” means—throwing enough immune people in the way so that the disease simply can’t sustain itself.

Herd immunity and COVID-19

Where a vaccine was a key component in providing herd immunity for the H1N1 epidemic, there is no such vaccine available now. The only way to confer herd immunity for COVID-19 at this point is to simply infect enough Americans to bring the transmission rate below 1. That’s what it means to “reopen” America—stop trying to slow transmission through isolation and count on immunity to do the job.

But the scope of that proposal is far bigger and far more awful than it seems, and it already seems plenty awful. Where the H1N1 flu had a transmission rate of about 1.4, with COVID-19 that value is more like 2.4. This means that a much higher percentage of the population will need to be immune to effectively contain the spread of the disease. Probably more like 60-70% rather than 35%. In other words, over 200 million Americans would need to be infected [EDITOR: or vaccinated] before the transmission chain could be broken in this way.

And where the hospitalization rate with H1N1 was about 0.5%, with COVID-19, that number is around 15%. Taking this approach would require 30 million hospital beds. That’s 29.1 million more than we have.

And while it’s tempting to simply map the current U.S. fatality rate of around 1.4%, or the current world fatality rate of around 4.5%, and say that taking this approach would lead to between 3 million and 9 million deaths in the United States, that’s not true. Because the truth is that it would generate something much higher. Something very close to 29 million. Because it would so overwhelm the national health care system that the system might as well not exist.

What Donald Trump is suggesting isn’t a cull of people in nursing homes. It’s the outright and absolutely preventable slaughter of 1 to 10% of the entire U.S. population. This isn’t just economically unsupportable—it’s an action that would be on the same scale as the holocaust. It would represent a level of depravity and disregard for human life that should immediately be rejected by any rational person, and any civilized nation.

Moving forward on this proposal wouldn’t mean putting America back to work. It would mean the end of America.

That's a lot to unpack, but, the numbers seem pretty sound. Herd immunity is a real thing, but its main component is immunity. We don't have that yet. The only way to get it is to find a vaccine -- none exists at time of writing -- or get exposed and survive. Of course, getting exposed means (a) you could transmit it to others, and (b) you could go to the hospital, and (c) you could die.

Based on the author's cited numbers, there seems to be 900,000 hospital beds in the USA. Let's assume he's wrong and it's double that, and also, let's assume people make a schedule about who goes to the hospital when so there's never someone sick who doesn't need a bed, and also, let's assume everyone is fine in 24 hours and nobody ever dies. In other words, let's assume three very stupid, very unrealistic things, which you have to when working around a Trump statement.

200 million people would take almost four months (111 point one, repeating of course, days).

Easter is in fifteen. Just throwin' it out there.

Oh, and you'll notice not only did we need 1.8 million people affected tomorrow, we also need nobody else to be sick or injured so those beds are freed up. That, I thought, was probably the most important part of the article: people following Trump's advice and in 5 days or so overcrowding their local hospital will throw other sick or injured people out on the street.

The reason why every medical professional on the planet is saying "this is deadlier than the flu" is for the same reason every scientist on the planet says "global warming is real". A reality TV show host with a fraudulent university and who skipped all his classes doesn't get to handwave that with "April Lol".

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I should also add, the JH map says we're at 1,296 now. As I said almost exactly 24 hours ago:

A fucking thousand.

That means the current spread rate is 25% per day. While this is down from the 40% from March 14-25, it's still pretty alarming for a country that's basically trying to self-quarantine.

[Orbitus]

And in a bit of irony, a Christian Pastor was one of the first ones to die in Virginia from Corona Virus. This guy was one of those that was saying it was just media "mass hysteria". The moron even shared the misleading meme about H1N1 and the Obama administration handling of it.

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/chr...ie-from-virus/

Just think, there are tons of other morons that think just like him. Just like the couple that took Chloroquine and one of them died, simply becuase Trump said it was useful.

[Thepersona]

And in a bit of irony, a Christian Pastor was one of the first ones to die in Virginia from Corona Virus. This guy was one of those that was saying it was just media "mass hysteria". The moron even shared the misleading meme about H1N1 and the Obama administration handling of it.

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/chr...ie-from-virus/

Just think, there are tons of other morons that think just like him. Just like the couple that took Chloroquine and one of them died, simply becuase Trump said it was useful.

Ok.. Chloroquine and whatever the couple took are not the same.

[Orbitus]

Ok.. Chloroquine and whatever the couple took are not the same.

I know, but they said Trump recommended it. They took Chloroquine Phosphate not Hydrochloroquine like he wanted people to. Trump shouldn't be saying ANYTHING, because people in Lagos, Nigeria also listened to him and they had a lot of Chloroquine poisoning there too.

[Thepersona]

I know, but they said Trump recommended it. They took Chloroquine Phosphate not Hydrochloroquine like he wanted people to. Trump shouldn't be saying ANYTHING, because people in Lagos, Nigeria also listened to him and they had a lot of Chloroquine poisoning there too.

Yeah i concur. He should never have said anything, and let the states, WHO and other agencies run the trials, in order to have preliminary results by next week/next 2 weeks

[alexw]

I know, but they said Trump recommended it. They took Chloroquine Phosphate not Hydrochloroquine like he wanted people to. Trump shouldn't be saying ANYTHING, because people in Lagos, Nigeria also listened to him and they had a lot of Chloroquine poisoning there too.

Umm those two are pretty much the same thing. They differ only very *slightly* in chemical structure so they aren't going to be too much different in terms of biological activity. From reading up on them both they are both anti-malarials and are used as such.

So they really did consume what Trump recommended. I'm guessing they just consumed a large dose which their body could not handle and it killed one and hospitalized the other.

[Twdft]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1243355519818928128



This guy's insane...

This alone should be enough to kick him out via 25th. Either he doesn't (after weeks and weeks of being briefed on the subject) know what the fuck he's talking about or it's on purpose. Unable to do his job.

[Orbitus]

Umm those two are pretty much the same thing. They differ only very *slightly* in chemical structure so they aren't going to be too much different in terms of biological activity. From reading up on them both they are both anti-malarials and are used as such.

So they really did consume what Trump recommended. I'm guessing they just consumed a large dose which their body could not handle and it killed one and hospitalized the other.

This Chloroquine Phosphate and Hydrochloroquine isn't the same thing. Chloroquine Phosphate is used for fish.

[Masark]

This Chloroquine Phosphate and Hydrochloroquine isn't the same thing. Chloroquine Phosphate is used for fish.

They're both used on humans. They're both on the WHO's List of Essential Medicines.

[Resurgo]

Ok.. Chloroquine and whatever the couple took are not the same.

Watch the video yourself.
https://youtu.be/3GuNbGC2D_8

He said ‘Chloroquine... and some would add Hydroxy...hydroxychloroquine...’

So yeah, even HE wasn’t being precise anyways, leaving the couple to read the package
CHLOROQUINE phosphate
as probably something they should take.

Especially when a google search like this;
https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-8...e-oral/details
says they’re the same.

Too bad they didn’t understand that it’s supposed to kill the parasites that carry Malaria not kill the virus itself.
(Which likely gives a clue as to why it’s in fish tank cleaner)

[Belize]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1243355519818928128



This guy's insane...

1 for Trump and as a backup for Trump! Plenty of ventilators.

[Paranoid Android]

"I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators": Trump questions New York’s plea for critical equipment https://t.co/0CGTAKjvXg

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/s...472245248?s=19

This was a quote by Trump on Hannity. No empathy from this guy at all. He just sees numbers, which I will get to later.

Since this is sadly political and in this forum, you have to wonder if Trump or say the Trumpkins care about NY.

Trump’s government pulls back from $1 billion coronavirus ventilator deal, expressing concern about the possibility of ordering too many ventilators, leaving them with an expensive surplus https://t.co/HwdnxkgCAh

https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/st...641152513?s=19

From a NY Times article.

Yes Trump seemed to be worried about cost over saving lives.

[Breccia]

Yes Trump seemed to be worried about cost over saving lives.

If he didn't buy them, now the states can. There's only so many to go around.

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The EPA has a bold new strategy on how to do their job, enforcing environmental laws and regulations, during the outbreak.

They're just not going to do it.

Cynthia Giles, who headed EPA’s Office of Enforcement during the Obama administration, called it a moratorium on enforcing the nation's environmental laws and an abdication of EPA’s duty.

“This EPA statement is essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future. It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way 'caused' by the virus pandemic. And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was,” she wrote in a statement to The Hill.

Giles and others say the memo signed Thursday goes beyond that request, giving industries board authority to pollute with little overnight from the agency.

“Incredibly, the EPA statement does not even reserve EPA's right to act in the event of an imminent threat to public health,” Giles said.

“Instead, EPA says it will defer to states, and ‘work with the facility’ to minimize or prevent the threat. EPA should never relinquish its right and its obligation to act immediately and decisively when there is threat to public health, no matter what the reason is. I am not aware of any instance when EPA ever relinquished this fundamental authority as it does in this memo.”

"But Breccia! Surely this only lasts until Easter, like Trump said."

The new lack of enforcement rule is indefinite. There is no specified end range.

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A new study from the University of Washington School of Medicine (so, based on the early days of the outbreak, one would assume they have good data to work with) includes the word "April" in it.

Specifically, hospitalizations will peak in the middle of April, and things don't level off till June.

And the number of projected dead is eighty-one thousand.

[ati87]

This Chloroquine Phosphate and Hydrochloroquine isn't the same thing. Chloroquine Phosphate is used for fish.

At this point you are arguing semantics though.
Fact is, Trump should not have recommended anything of any sort. No leader at any level is talking about potential cures for a good reason because at this point you don't have any. Trump ''suggesting'' anything is irresponsible at best.
You may have some news websites speculate about vaccines but not the same as the president shouting potential cures.

[Thekri]

So, in an entirely predictable exchange with Sean Hannity (Why is he talking to him right now?), Trump had some choice things to say about governors in hard hit states. Coincidentally, all the democratic governors.

The comment on Cuomo has already been covered here

"I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators, you know, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they'll have two ventilators and now all of a sudden they're saying, 'Can we order 30,000 ventilators?'"

So yeah. That is pretty interesting. Great Leadership there.

On Washington State

"We have people like [Washington state] Governor [Jay] Inslee -- he should be doing more."

Trump went on to mock Inslee as a "failed [2020] presidential candidate" who is "always complaining."

Just... wow.

On Michigan

"I don't know if she knows what's going on but all she does is sit there and blame the federal government," Trump said. "She doesn't get it done and we send her a lot. Now she wants a declaration of emergency and we have to make a decision on that. But Michigan is a very important state."

Not only is he attacking a state governor in the middle of crisis, instead of building confidence, he said the quiet part out loud here. "Michigan is a very important state". It is about his reelection, it is always about him.

This is Trump's path to reelection. He knows it, and has no moral qualms about pursuing this path. He can't do a competent job, he simply doesn't have the capacity. He can't contain this disaster, and he isn't trying. What he can do is whip up his base into believing it is all the Democrats fault. He can continue to refuse to take responsibility and just pass the blame to his political enemies. It is grotesque, immoral, and completely disregards human life, but I see no reasons why it won't work. It has always worked before. This is how he keeps his base loyal as they literally die from his actions. Dividing the nation further and attacking Democrats is his only strategy, and he is going to double down on this over the next few months. If he gets his way, we will have violence to deal with on top of the pandemic.