re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

yeah, i believe it was discussed several pages back...

Bayer set to donate large amount of Chloroquine to FedGov.

LINK

It was! I forgot it was one of their factories. We had already scrambled to get packs from other places and move supplies around until we could get Merit to make more. Damn it China, you guys are interferon with my good times.

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Can't they sterilize a plastic poncho?

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I’m sure stuff like that will start happening.

There’s all kinds of rules what to wear and when. It’s very wasteful and mandated by the government. All that is going out the window.

If a surgeon performed a surgery in a poncho a month ago he’d lose his license. But who knows how things will be in a month.

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What site is that?

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Quickest google news search that came up... I’ve seen it reported other places too

LINK

149 deaths reported now for the US. 31 more were added

Just had 2 guys from the Local 28 tell me Union personnel were told to leave the Bayport and Barbors Cut Terminals of the Port of Houston. They were told not to report back until told so by a Union rep. Fear there is a confirmed case of a worker there. POHA released a "all is well" memo just a few minutes ago so I'm really not sure what to think.

The Port of Houston shutting down in any way is going to have an insane domino effect

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And, most importantly, the recoveries are far understated.

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That's good to hear.

I know of a couple peeps that tested positive a week or so ago and were in the hospital. One was ok, other wasn't doing so well. They are both back at home now though. Good signs.

OK, so I am a bit late to the discussion about the Imperial study, but I have some thoughts.

I think that the Imperial College study is useful, and if it was what persuaded President Trump to change his tune and take COVID-19 seriously, then I am tremendously grateful for it, but I think that it suffers from a number of poor assumptions:

1) It assumes that COVID-19 is NOT seasonal, which I believe to be very wrong. The study that compared R values for Chinese cities outside of Wuhan is, I believe very clear, as is the basic observation that the world's serious outbreaks have occurred in cold, dry weather. That Chinese study, as an example, predicted a R value of 1.3 in Tokyo for the Olympics -- with zero intervention! (For those of you who don't know what that means, it means that instead of spreading the disease to about 2.6 people, which is what happens now, the average person would only infect half as many people.)

2) It assumes zero testing. South Korea did not need an extended period of suppression, because it turned out that mitigation is enough when combined with heavy testing. As we ramp up our testing capability, we should also eventually be able to identify and isolate people quickly enough to turn from a suppression to a mitigation strategy. I have seen estimates that we need a testing capacity of 125,000 - 150,000 daily to do that, and that seems right to me. I think that we will likely reach that point in two to three weeks, though an actual switch to a mitigation strategy might not come until a couple of weeks after that.

3) It assumes that we do not develop and implement treatment strategies that reduce the mortality of COVID-19 and the average time in ICUs and on ventilators. I feel sure that this is false, as we have already seen very promising early results from chloroquine and Remdesivir.

4) Finally, I think that this is flat-out wrong: "Stopping mass gatherings is predicted to have relatively little impact (results not shown) because the contact-time at such events is relatively small compared to the time spent at home, in schools or workplaces and in other community locations such as bars and restaurants." This assumption completely ignores how close people get to each other at mass gatherings. When people crowded together at Mardi Gras, their personal space was much reduced, and a cough from an infected person would expose many people to the virus. If, as many believe, this virus is mainly spread by coughing, then proximity is as important as time together in evaluating potential spread. Those microdroplets coming out of an infected person's mouth only spread out in a limited radius. I have seen another study that assumed that mass gatherings were a key vector in the spread of COVID-19, and I agree.

Certainly, in South Korea, Patient 31 infected 1160 people in her church by attending two services and a lunch buffet. Those mass gatherings had a tremendous impact on the spread of the virus in South Korea. To minimize their impact likely overestimate the current R value in the US right now.

I do not write any of this to minimize the threat. I support stronger action on COVID-19 right now to stop the spread of the virus. I instead write this to state that I think that we are going to win, and we are going to win by late April.

Totally agree. And it's better to go with aggressive measures now so that this can be brought, probably not to an end, but to a much more manageable situation by late April.