I Called In Sick Today

[brvheart 1,752]

On 6/21/2020 at 10:53 PM, Ron_Mexico said:

I started dating a 40 year old for fun while I was 38, and while staying true to who I am, a child, she helped make me a better, more responsible person, that cares about having great credit, a 401k, saving over spending and having no debt. 
 

That wasn’t me at 25 or 35.  People change, people grow, and a good partner can help with that.  It isn’t all in you to find this perfect mate.  
 

 

Your wife is totally awesome, Mexico.

[SuitedAces21 2,722]

i don't think we'll be taking any chinese studies seriously. 

If there is a drastic decrease in the average age of someone dying from the Rona then we can all freak out. so long as the average death age is over 80 then the old people who want to need to stay tightly locked away at home, and we don't let Cuomo be in charge of nursing home policies, and we'll be doing all we can do. the world cannot be shut down forever. time to face the music for everyone else.  

 

 

[brvheart 1,752]

On 6/22/2020 at 11:01 PM, Ron_Mexico said:

I may have a blind spot regarding kids 

Strong agree.

[brvheart 1,752]

23 hours ago, Theraflu said:

Arizona is starting to run low on ICU beds. Houston is at 97% capacity. 

The anti-mask rhetoric might be mostly to blame. Something simple everyone can do, and it's become a politicized thing about rights and manliness. 

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/06/23/texas-coronavirus-hospitalizations-icu-houston/

 

“To be clear, in Houston, the percentage of beds occupied by COVID patients is currently 12.9%. In Austin, the percentage of beds occupied by COVID patients is 10.2%,”

 

I'm a mask wearer for other people's sake.  But this whole thing feels way blown out of proportion, and maybe even deceptively pushed by the media.  For instance you can google any 3 digit number (and a crap-ton of 4 digit numbers) + [new cases] and there is an entire page of articles about new coronavirus cases.  That feels:  shady.  

For two weeks nobody cared about reporting.  As soon as #NeverTrump had his rally, corona was all any media outlet was talking about again.  With a 0.26% overall death rate (and only 0.04% for people under 70 according to this Stanford study), this feels really unimportant and I'm solidly in the let's all get back to work and play ASAP like we did as kids with the chickenpox.

The 97% figure that was being repeated on every news channel all day was for a single hospital in the system called Texas Med Center.   https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/tmc-icu-bed-capacity-modeling/?fbclid=IwAR29Aca6nlBczzH-2SImgbmPM9z4-1pjE4B2XPTQVP6Sl1Jxdz4Gk1FQJm8

 

[Theraflu 1,035]

Because of lackadaisical formatting, I don't know what you're quoting, and what's a sentient thought from you, but right after the part that you quoted:

"Carrie Williams, a spokesperson for the Texas Hospital Association, also said Texas has enough hospital capacity, though she added that hospitalizations numbers are "definitely a concern."

“Right now we’re in good shape, but if this trend continues, it’s not sustainable,” she said."

 

The media has done a terrible job with everything for a long time. Rich people long ago figured out that buying the news is a good thing for them. There's no good answer for it, and it's impossible to tell what is real, and what isn't, especially for anyone who actually wants to know what's going on. Look at the insane cops + Shake Shack story. If you wait a very short 12 hour  overnight period before anything goes public, no parts of that story ever hit the media. The cops weren't sick, the manager knew it was a poorly cleaned machine, no one vomited or felt ill. Instead, an aggressive sergeant and his boss hit their local reporters immediately, based on assumptions, the story goes viral, the truth comes out, everyone mocks the cops who did nothing wrong, and it's all a big dumb joke, and it only makes the police force look stupid, even though they started the whole thing.

Again, I don't know what parts of your post are you speaking, but to say no one cared about the reporting numbers isn't true. It's only true based on the news you consume. I follow very leftish sports twitter people, and few actual news people of any side, and there hasn't been a single day where I'm not getting 3rd party retweets about the increasing case numbers. The two things to watch were the states that held big protests, and the states the reopened under ominous circumstances. California managed to be both, but the rest of the states that reopened with skeptical policies are all seeing huge increases in positive cases.

And the googling a random number + cases thing seems really stupid to me. There's 32k new cases in the country today. Spread it over a week that's 200,000 cases. You can make a lot of 3 and 4 digit numbers out of 200,000, especially when factoring the inconsistencies in reporting, as different counties/town/cities voice their totals their own way. 

 

Also, the point of ICU beds running full capacity at non-Corona persons isn't the point; the point is that they're full, and only 10% of those are COVID related. The system, as designed and mentioned by Strat, is that it stays consistently busy.

 

You also managed to include an extra zero in one of your quotes, that throws your point off by a factor of 10: "Among people <70 years old, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.26% with median of 0.05% (corrected, 0.00-0.23% with median of 0.04%).

 

Sketchy, Brv.

[Napa_Don 688]

Herd immunity is nonsense. There’s no way we can realistically get there in any reasonable time frame from infections alone without mass deaths from not only covid but from other preventable deaths and basically killing off an entire generation. Just simple math will tell you that.  If we didn’t have the dumbest fvcking person in the world in charge we could have a) had an actual stockpile of PPE and they wouldn’t have been on the “no need to wear a mask” message as early in order to save it for healthcare workers and b) used these last few months of boughten time to shore up those supplies and institute an actual federal level response we would be so far ahead. Instead we got dipshit McBankrupt convincing people wearing a mask makes you a cuck and that testing is bad because it looks better if we don’t actually identify cases and people that need to isolate. 
 

open shit up all you want but that doesn’t mean people are going to go back to their normal patterns overnight. The vast majority of people realize how serious this is and will still be adjusting their habits. just look at fvcksticks Tulsa rally. Even his most ardent supporters knew it was a terrible idea to show up. 

Fact of the matter is the people who decided tax cuts and trying to protect masses of cells are more important than anything else are now willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable amongst us in defense of the all mighty dollar and it still probably won’t even work. 

[Ron_Mexico 4,219]

The hero we needed     💖

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

The thing is, I don't know how anyone knows whether herd immunity as a concept is BS or not.  For example, I don't believe for a second that 20%+ of NYC has had covid-19, but that's what the random sampling antibody testing has said thus far. Seems like we still don't know how far it got, or when it even started, at this point.  (I don't know if you saw the Harvard study on hospital parking lots and search engine trends going back into the summer months, but that evidence says it's possible that the first case was earlier than November.)

I just think we're going to end up looking at this differently over time, because there's no practical way to deal with it. It spreads via all sorts of normal daily interactions and we can't just repurpose 50% of the economy in the time window that stimulus can provide.  I've said this here before, I look at it as very similar to the discussion about mortality related to having interstate highways, automobile travel in general.  We're OK with these things having an associated death rate, someday we're going to be in the same place with covid, like we currently are with other kinds of viruses that have evaded any attempts at a vaccine.

I would just say that the economic argument has a compassionate angle to it.  The human toll to doing this to the economy--murder, suicide, etc.--is very real. I am not a small business owner, my paycheck is gonna be there regardless of how the government handles this, so this is not some personal motivation for the viewpoint.  Policymakers and central banks gave us six months to stop and figure out what this would look like, and now it looks like we can manage this a lot better than Italy was in the early days, between better treatment methods and the generic steroid from a week or two ago.  

I hope I'm wrong, I hope a vaccine is found sooner than later, but what we're spending to keep this all afloat, it cannot last forever.  If we keep it up, I think it's ultimately going to just wreck anyone on fixed income.

Don't get me started on the mask stuff.  That's a joke and there's no excuse.  Wear the mask, stop being a dbag. Also, stop with the god damn hand shaking.  

[Napa_Don 688]

I didn’t mean to imply herd immunity as concept is nonsense. Just that using it as an excuse to loosen up is ridiculous. The lowest figures I’ve seen is 70% needed, so, to be conservative and say 20% is still 60m people need to get infected and say we double the current daily positive rate is still basically 3 years to get there.

The best hope is 100% mask adoption and a massive testing/contract tracing effort until we have better therapeutics and/or a vaccine. 
 

I don’t see how anything can return to anything resembling normal until that’s the case and the people in charge seem to be doing everything possible to make that happen. 

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

Yeah, we absolutely don’t have capacity for three years of supportive policy. I think we just ringfence the vulnerable and let it run wild among the less at risk population. The original measures taken to stop the spread were reasonable at the time, given our understanding of the virus. That said, I talk to people my age-ish, who have no risk factors, but are still hardcore self-quarantining, and I just scratch my head.  

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

I talked to my new boss this morning about the whole partner buyout thing happening. I asked because I have cash sitting around waiting for the potential to buy, and I’ve been just patiently watching the market roar back. He says, “we are going to open it up to directors, so you’ll have a chance to buy.” I respond “yeah but I’m not a director” and he says “I still have to figure out what your title will be, but I’m going to make you a director before the offering.”

Good news of course, but it means I’m probably taking a bunch of leverage to do it, so it’s kind of bittersweet. Certainly settles the question of whether I’m sticking with this company. 

[Theraflu 1,035]

I don't understand anything you just said, but congrats!

I gotta tell ya, I like shaking hands. Gonna miss it. As a referee, on a 3 game set, I could shake well over a hundred hands. Some of it has transitioned to fist bumps and stuff, but the forearm bump looks and feels real weird. I could go for lots of bowing. Maybe we can get that going. 

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

I could go for a good bow every now and again. 

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

It’s basically like I’m being made partner, except it’s not free stock, it’s me buying it from someone else who was mostly given it for free. Just means I won’t be buying a house for at least five years, unless my future girl is a baller. 

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

The reason it’s worth doing is, it should grow at 10-20% per year, plus or minus whatever the market does, plus or minus whatever quality of decisions leadership makes. And if the company sells some or all of itself someday, I may become pretty wealthy.

But it is a pretty lean lifestyle for the next several years. 

[Theraflu 1,035]

Thanks for the breakdown. 

[SuitedAces21 2,722]

4 hours ago, InternetExplorer said:

Yeah, we absolutely don’t have capacity for three years of supportive policy. I think we just ringfence the vulnerable and let it run wild among the less at risk population. The original measures taken to stop the spread were reasonable at the time, given our understanding of the virus. That said, I talk to people my age-ish, who have no risk factors, but are still hardcore self-quarantining, and I just scratch my head.  

there's no real alternative to making it known that if you are at risk you need to make a choice - stay isolated or accept the risk. for many, the risk will be worth it, and some of those people will die. the rest of us must carry on and prevent further collateral damage. a few outliers will die, of course, but that is true every day. sad to say, hard to accept, but we all die eventually. 

Maybe we can keep people in nursing homes safer. if new york had done that things would look significantly different. 

[brvheart 1,752]

On 6/25/2020 at 1:10 AM, Theraflu said:

You also managed to include an extra zero in one of your quotes, that throws your point off by a factor of 10: "Among people <70 years old, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.26% with median of 0.05% (corrected, 0.00-0.23% with median of 0.04%).

 

Sketchy, Brv.

That extra zero wasn't intentional.  I'm thankful I provided a source.

 

Today:

"Nearly 25 million Americans may have contracted the coronavirus, a figure 10 times higher than the number of confirmed cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday."  

So it's even less deadly now.  (By a factor of 10)

 

EDIT:  New Penn State study (June 22nd) says spread was up to 80 times higher than reported which lowers the death rate even more:  

https://news.psu.edu/story/623797/2020/06/22/research/initial-covid-19-infection-rate-may-be-80-times-greater-originally

“Our results suggest that the overwhelming effects of COVID-19 may have less to do with the virus’ lethality and more to do with how quickly it was able to spread through communities initially,” Silverman explained. “A lower fatality rate coupled with a higher prevalence of disease and rapid growth of regional epidemics provides an alternative explanation to the large number of deaths and overcrowding of hospitals we have seen in certain areas of the world.”

[brvheart 1,752]

19 hours ago, Theraflu said:

nd the googling a random number + cases thing seems really stupid to me. There's 32k new cases in the country today. Spread it over a week that's 200,000 cases. You can make a lot of 3 and 4 digit numbers out of 200,000, especially when factoring the inconsistencies in reporting, as different counties/town/cities voice their totals their own way. 

 

 

Oh, it's solidly in the wacko conspiracy theory camp.  Agreed.

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

I'm meeting up with this really cute, nice-seeming girl next weekend.  She's 36, has a kid, but apparently has a doctorate and a great job.  She asked me if I felt like covid was keeping me from meeting people, and I told her I could not in good conscience blame my results on covid.  Apparently she liked that answer.  I'm pretty excited, this would be the first one I've met from online. 

[SuitedAces21 2,722]

good for you, sir.  will you wear a mask?  just curious.

I havent worn one yet. i did buy one last night becuase it seems to me they will become mandatory at some point, though enforcement will be selective i'm sure. only places i go are to target and the grocery store and it's about 50/50 mask v. no mask. the number of people i see wearing them but they have their nose exposed the whole time or they are touching it constantly is much higher than it should be, but most people are incredibly stupid. 

i'm starting to think i'll be working at home through next spring, which would be a year straight of work from home. long as there are sports to watch i'll be fine, but if we dont have any sports for a year i might lose my mind. 

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

I don’t know the etiquette. I am okay with wearing a mask normally but I want to make sure she can recognize me. It’s a weird one. 

[Napa_Don 688]

Maybe you should text her and ask. Say you want her to be comfortable. Score some easy points. 

[InternetExplorer 2,609]

I will have one on hand, for sure.

I did end up getting a Peloton. It gets here in a few weeks. I just had a few days where I was not able to spend two hours walking, for one reason or another, and I’ve started to feel like I might have hit a plateau at 170. 0% financing for 39 months is pretty crazy. 

[brvheart 1,752]

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

 

Good news for all of us: