Coronavirus spreading

[Giuliano]

Why not just answer the question? I obviously don't bore you that much or you wouldn't respond with that. You don't have an answer and we all know it.

It was posted twice. Shouldn't that be enough?

 

[reformed1689]

It was posted twice. Shouldn't that be enough?

What was posted twice? The reason the numbers are dismal compared to SK? No, that has not been posted at all nor the reasoning why those numbers are dismal.

 

[Giuliano]

What was posted twice? The reason the numbers are dismal compared to SK? No, that has not been posted at all nor the reasoning why those numbers are dismal.

If you don't know, I can't help you.

 

[reformed1689]

If you don't know, I can't help you.

Because you haven't told us. Why not just tell us why you think those numbers are dismal compared to SK? It's obvious it was just conjecture on your part.

 

[Yehren]

It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?

This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.

But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand, The Atlantic has found.

“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”
Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing


See here..
Testing for Zika Virus

That's what went wrong. Trump cut funding for public health, so when another crisis hit, we were understaffed, underfunded, an unprepared. Doubling down on his failed policies, he botched the response until it was too late to do much about it. Now we're trying to catch up. Predictably, he's touting travel bans, which are ineffective:
The national plan to try to stop the new coronavirus from spreading any further might fracture international trade, violate people’s rights, and make untenable the workloads of local and state public health departments. It almost certainly won’t slow the virus.

That’s the word from people trying to sort out what US secretary of health and human services Alex Azar announced last Friday. The plan: Starting last Sunday, US citizens who’ve been to Hubei Province in China (the apparent center of the outbreak), get 14 days of mandatory quarantine when they return home. US citizens who’ve been anywhere in China get health screening at airports and 14 days of self-quarantine—staying home, basically, with health workers monitoring them. Noncitizens who’ve been to China in the last two weeks are banned from entering the country.

Travel bans and quarantines are a centuries-old answer to the spread of disease. They’re also exactly what the World Health Organization asked everyone not to do. The same WHO committee that recommended calling the virus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern explicitly said the measures to stop it should include treatment, tracing of contacts, and social distancing, but not “any travel or trade restriction.” That’s because almost no one in the game thinks that works. “The travel ban on foreign nationals is counterproductive, unethical, and violates international law. There’s little evidence that a person who’s been to mainland China but not in the hot zone would be exposed to the virus, and there are far less restrictive measures we could use,” says Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown University. “I think it’s a huge overreach, and I worry that the White House is lurching from complacency to panic and overreaction.”
Travel Bans and Quarantines Won't Stop Coronavirus

"From complacency to panic and overreaction"; that will be the best description of the Trump presidency.

 

[reformed1689]

It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?

This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering.

This is not true. Negative tests tell nothing about how widespread a disease is, only positive tests.

 

[Giuliano]

But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand, The Atlantic has found.

And now we find that some kits the CDC did send out didn't have all the components needed to work.

California got incomplete coronavirus test kits – the governor says it's like getting printers with no ink

In a news conference on Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom raised another red flag about the current state of testing in the U.S.: Some of the test kits being sent to states by the CDC are reportedly missing key components needed to extract genetic material from the nasal and cheek swabs collected from patients.

Here are some more "dismal" stats for reformed1969 to pretend not to see. (I ran across this in the article so include them.)

As fears in the U.S. spread over the coronavirus outbreak that the World Health Organization has now deemed a global pandemic, many are now raising concerns about the shortage of adequate and widely accessible lab tests for the virus across America.

As of March 10, according to data from the University of Oxford, South Korea had tested 210,144 people. In Italy, 60,761 people had been tested. In the United Kingdom, 21,261 people had been tested. In the United States, however, only 8,554 tests had been administered, despite a much larger population — leaving the potential for people who do not know they are positive to continue spreading the virus to others.

They also didn't send enough reagents.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article241141876.html

Some of the kits the state received from the federal government lack chemical reagents, which are needed to actually run tests for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease, Newsom said.
It's imperative” that the federal government send more necessary chemical reagents, he said during a news conference at the Capitol.

 

[Justadude]

Bobby Lewis on Twitter

Jerry Falwell Jr. wonders if the coronavirus was created by N. Korea to get back at Trump. I guess that's why it started in China and hit Italy so hard?

 

[Giuliano]

Bobby Lewis on Twitter

Jerry Falwell Jr. wonders if the coronavirus was created by N. Korea to get back at Trump. I guess that's why it started in China and hit Italy so hard?

I see he was speculating that maybe it was Trump's Christmas present that he was promised. "“I had the owner of a restaurant ask me last night—he said, ‘Do you remember the North Korean leader promised a Christmas present for America back in December? Could it be they got together with China and this is that present?’ I don’t know, but it really is something strange going on.”

Trump should be worried a little about North Korea but not over the coronavirus. I've suspected that North Korea might both be cooking up things to do before the election in an attempt to hurt Trump. I think Iran might be planning something too. North Korea recently tested some more missiles. No one in the US seemed to notice. A few days ago a General warned about they may be testing more advanced missiles soon.

N. Korea may be ready to test more advanced ICBM: U.S. general | Yonhap News Agency

WASHINGTON, March 12 (Yonhap) -- North Korea's recent engine testing suggests the regime may be ready to test a more advanced intercontinental ballistic missile that could pose a greater threat to the United States, a U.S. general said Thursday.

Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy, commander of the U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, offered the assessment in a written statement to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces ahead of a hearing on fiscal year 2021 priorities for missile defense and missile defeat programs.

"Kim Jong-un has demonstrated the capability to threaten the U.S. homeland with nuclear-armed ICBMs," he said, referring to the North Korean leader. "In 2017, North Korea successfully tested an apparent thermonuclear weapon as well as two ICBM designs capable of ranging most or all of North America -- feats only the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council had previously achieved."

Trump didn't solve the problems with North Korea. He probably made things worse. (South Korea and Japan are no longer on very friendly terms since US policy wasn't geared to keep an alliance in the region working effectively.) Now we hear Falwell talking about North Korea and thinking maybe there was a conspiracy involving this virus? Why invent such fictional threats while ignoring the real ones posed by North Korea? Falwell has lost his marbles too, I think.

The sanctions Trump put on North Korea also encouraged them to invent ways to get around them. They got adept at it too.

This is how North Korea uses cutting-edge crypto money laundering to steal millions

Kim Jong-un’s regime is economically isolated by sanctions aimed at hampering its nuclear weapons program. In the past few years it has turned to the cryptocurrency world to generate revenue, mostly by stealing it. In August last year, sanctions experts told the United Nations not only that North Korea has used “widespread and increasingly sophisticated” cyberattacks to pilfer as much as $2 billion from crypto exchanges and other financial institutions, but also that it is using the money to fund its weapons program.

The North Koreans have also apparently become experts in the dark art of digital money laundering. It makes sense: very few businesses accept cryptocurrency, so the North Koreans need a way of converting their stolen crypto-cash into good old-fashioned dollars or some other fiat currency.

It encourages me a little that the US Justice Department figured some things out.

The Department of Justice charged Tian Yinyin and Li Jiadong with laundering over $100 million worth of cryptocurrency to benefit co-conspirators in North Korea. The Department of the Treasury placed their names (and 20 of their Bitcoin accounts) on a list of foreign individuals and entities that are blocked from doing business in the US.

The government also unsealed a legal document explaining why it wants to seize 113 cryptocurrency accounts associated with North Korean money laundering. That document painted a detailed picture of Tian and Li’s alleged crimes. And it lifted the curtain on a high-tech cat-and-mouse-style conflict going on behind the scenes, in which launderers have turned to elaborate automated schemes to obfuscate their cryptocurrency transactions and flummox law enforcement.

In one way the talk about this virus is a distraction . . . from some of Trump's other failures.

 

[Justadude]

I see he was speculating that maybe it was Trump's Christmas present that he was promised. "“I had the owner of a restaurant ask me last night—he said, ‘Do you remember the North Korean leader promised a Christmas present for America back in December? Could it be they got together with China and this is that present?’ I don’t know, but it really is something strange going on.”

Trump should be worried a little about North Korea but not over the coronavirus. I've suspected that North Korea might both be cooking up things to do before the election in an attempt to hurt Trump. I think Iran might be planning something too. North Korea recently tested some more missiles. No one in the US seemed to notice. A few days ago a General warned about they may be testing more advanced missiles soon.

N. Korea may be ready to test more advanced ICBM: U.S. general | Yonhap News Agency

WASHINGTON, March 12 (Yonhap) -- North Korea's recent engine testing suggests the regime may be ready to test a more advanced intercontinental ballistic missile that could pose a greater threat to the United States, a U.S. general said Thursday.

Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy, commander of the U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, offered the assessment in a written statement to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces ahead of a hearing on fiscal year 2021 priorities for missile defense and missile defeat programs.

"Kim Jong-un has demonstrated the capability to threaten the U.S. homeland with nuclear-armed ICBMs," he said, referring to the North Korean leader. "In 2017, North Korea successfully tested an apparent thermonuclear weapon as well as two ICBM designs capable of ranging most or all of North America -- feats only the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council had previously achieved."

Trump didn't solve the problems with North Korea. He probably made things worse. (South Korea and Japan are no longer on very friendly terms since US policy wasn't geared to keep an alliance in the region working effectively.) Now we hear Falwell talking about North Korea and thinking maybe there was a conspiracy involving this virus? Why invent such fictional threats while ignoring the real ones posed by North Korea? Falwell has lost his marbles too, I think.

The sanctions Trump put on North Korea also encouraged them to invent ways to get around them. They got adept at it too.

This is how North Korea uses cutting-edge crypto money laundering to steal millions

Kim Jong-un’s regime is economically isolated by sanctions aimed at hampering its nuclear weapons program. In the past few years it has turned to the cryptocurrency world to generate revenue, mostly by stealing it. In August last year, sanctions experts told the United Nations not only that North Korea has used “widespread and increasingly sophisticated” cyberattacks to pilfer as much as $2 billion from crypto exchanges and other financial institutions, but also that it is using the money to fund its weapons program.

The North Koreans have also apparently become experts in the dark art of digital money laundering. It makes sense: very few businesses accept cryptocurrency, so the North Koreans need a way of converting their stolen crypto-cash into good old-fashioned dollars or some other fiat currency.

It encourages me a little that the US Justice Department figured some things out.

The Department of Justice charged Tian Yinyin and Li Jiadong with laundering over $100 million worth of cryptocurrency to benefit co-conspirators in North Korea. The Department of the Treasury placed their names (and 20 of their Bitcoin accounts) on a list of foreign individuals and entities that are blocked from doing business in the US.

The government also unsealed a legal document explaining why it wants to seize 113 cryptocurrency accounts associated with North Korean money laundering. That document painted a detailed picture of Tian and Li’s alleged crimes. And it lifted the curtain on a high-tech cat-and-mouse-style conflict going on behind the scenes, in which launderers have turned to elaborate automated schemes to obfuscate their cryptocurrency transactions and flummox law enforcement.

In one way the talk about this virus is a distraction . . . from some of Trump's other failures.

But how can that be if Trump and Kim are buddies who write beautiful letters to each other?

 

[Justadude]

Truly though, I think there's a good possibility that foreign policy issues will barely make our radar screen this year. If enough people don't follow CDC's recommendations and do what's necessary to "flatten the curve", we could be looking at hundreds of thousands, or even over a million, deaths from the coronavirus in the next 12 months. If that happens, N. Korea doing anything short of attacking us (or S. Korea) won't matter.

 

[Yehren]

Jerry Falwell Jr. wonders if the coronavirus was created by N. Korea to get back at Trump.

His father was notorious for being the dumbest televangelist ever. Unfortunately, Jerry Jr. isn't quite as sharp as old Dad was.

 

[Yehren]

This is not true. Negative tests tell nothing about how widespread a disease is, only positive tests.

Yes, negative tests are important and give us significant information. Any widespread screening needs to have negative test data in order to evaluate the population. Baysian measures are important tools for epidemiologists.

PLoS Comput Biol. 2012 Nov; 8(11): e1002768.
Published online 2012 Nov 15. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002768
A Bayesian Inference Framework to Reconstruct Transmission Trees Using Epidemiological and Genetic Data
Marco J. Morelli, et al

 

[Yehren]

And now we find that some kits the CDC did send out didn't have all the components needed to work...
They also didn't send enough reagents.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article241141876.html

To be fair, a lot of experienced people left CDC over the past few years, as Trump removed public health emergencies from the National Security Council, and repeatedly called for more cuts in public health funding.

Amazingly... Trump still wants to cut public health funding.

 

[reformed1689]

Yes, negative tests are important and give us significant information. Any widespread screening needs to have negative test data in order to evaluate the population. Baysian measures are important tools for epidemiologists.

PLoS Comput Biol. 2012 Nov; 8(11): e1002768.
Published online 2012 Nov 15. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002768
A Bayesian Inference Framework to Reconstruct Transmission Trees Using Epidemiological and Genetic Data
Marco J. Morelli, et al

But it doesn't need to be public knowledge. They ARE tracking that data, just not publishing it public facing. You don't need that info, I don't need that info, your best friend's cousin doesn't need that info. It is just a way to slam the Trump Admin without cause.

 

[reformed1689]

Truly though, I think there's a good possibility that foreign policy issues will barely make our radar screen this year. If enough people don't follow CDC's recommendations and do what's necessary to "flatten the curve", we could be looking at hundreds of thousands, or even over a million, deaths from the coronavirus in the next 12 months. If that happens, N. Korea doing anything short of attacking us (or S. Korea) won't matter.

And the hysteria fear mongering continues...

 

[Giuliano]

And the hysteria fear mongering continues...

No reason to fear as long as Trump is President. He's God anointed one, right? Never mind what top military officers have to say. Remember to vote for Trump next November.

Now we're going to get charity from Jack Ma. Make America great again? We need foreign aid now? Nothing to worry about as long as rich foreigners will step up to help us.

Chinese billionaire Jack Ma to send 500K coronavirus test kits, 1 million face masks to US

Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced Friday that he plans to donate 500,000 coronavirus test kits to the U.S. as well as 1 million face masks.

"Drawing from my own country's experience, speedy and accurate testing and adequate personal protective equipment for medical professionals are the most effective in preventing the spread of the virus," Ma, who is the richest man in Asia, said in a statement posted to Twitter.

 

[Yehren]

And the hysteria fear mongering continues...

Don't worry. Last week, Trump's people told us the epidemic had been "contained." So we won't have any more cases. And if you believed them, I have some property in Florida to sell you.

 

[Yehren]

But it doesn't need to be public knowledge.

Yes, it does. Hiding the data makes people suspicious, and breeds panic. I realize Trump's impulse is to hide things, and that he fears information getting out to the American people. It's one reason I think that it's just possible that this tax returns don't show anything more than he isn't as rich as he told us; he compulsively hides things because he fears people knowing.

But in this case, distrust and panic are the last things you want to happen. But here we are.

Most Americans do not trust President Donald Trump to be honest about the COVID-19 threat, a new poll has found.

The latest survey from Yahoo! News and YouGov found that 53 percent of polled U.S. adults did not have faith in the president to tell the truth about the threat of the new coronavirus, while a third of those polled said they trusted the commander-in-chief.

A further 14 percent of the 1,635 U.S. adults polled said they were "not sure" whether they trusted Trump on the matter.
Majority of Americans don't trust Donald Trump to tell truth about coronavirus threat: Poll

 

[Yehren]

No reason to fear as long as Trump is President. He's God anointed one, right? Never mind what top military officers have to say. Remember to vote for Trump next November.

Now we're going to get charity from Jack Ma. Make America great again? We need foreign aid now? Nothing to worry about as long as rich foreigners will step up to help us.

Chinese billionaire Jack Ma to send 500K coronavirus test kits, 1 million face masks to US

One more embarrassment for America.

"The rest of the world is laughing at us!"
Trump 2016

Now they are, Donald. Now they are.