More evidence that China is lying BIG TIME about the extent

[Flyguy]

On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 5:56:19 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:08:59 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 2:49:00 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:31:23 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 4:18:07 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 11:18:19 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:40:27 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 6:33:32 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:27:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 1:15:50 AM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/31/2020 2:21 AM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 7:00:42 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/30/2020 9:19 PM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 3:26:05 PM UTC-7, Uwe Bonnes wrote:

snip

Flyguy does see the world from his own unique point of view - one in which he gets things right.

R0 is simply the number of other people that an infected person infects.

If you do thorough contact tracing you can actually count the number of people infected.

The average value of R0 in a particular environment and social situation is stable enough to be worth knowing, even if the situation is chaotic (which means short-term unpredictable rather than random).

R0 is a theoretical concept with no basis in reality.

I just told you what the real basis is. The theoretical part is taking an average over a bunch of individual infected and infecting people.

No, you're the idiot - I already told you that was included in the infection rate I came up with.

But didn't pay any attention to the fact that when the infection first started is an equally important contributor to the number of people infected right now - probably more important before lockodowns and social distancing start reducing the R0.

You still don't seem to get that, which is one of the many failures of comprehension which make you perhaps the most blatantly idiotic poster here at the moment.

You can't follow that because you are an idiot. The fact that you don't want to helps, but you are stupid enough to think that you can get away it it.

LOL! If you are going to accuse me (or anybody else) of being "stupid" you better well SPELL IT RIGHT!

Typos are always with us.

People of superior intelligence, which you CLAIM to be, DON'T make typos!

If you could read, you could read up on "errors of action" and you'd find that everybody makes them. Intelligent people are more likely to proof-read what they write and catch some of them, but regular people catch about 30% of their errors and even trained proof-reader miss 5%.

I repeat, if you are going to accuse someone of being stupid, you had BETTER spell it right! Otherwise you are admitting that it is YOU that is "STUPD"

I deal in day-to-day realities with the data that is available, for which in your supreme superiority belittle me.

You don't. You take data which you don't understand and draw conclusions that the data doesn't support.

Only in your demented mind. You can't even compute your vaunted R0.

I have done it here from time to time. The ratio of last week's new case number to the number five or six days later can be used to do it. It's not a particularly reliable estimate when new infections from new communities keep on getting added into the published totals.

Telling somebody what the R0 is will get you a blank stare;

From anybody dumb enough to let you lecture them on anything.

Non-response noted.

Lack of appreciation of the insult involved noted. I'll have to be more explicitly contemptuous for you to notice.

Which seems to be your ONLY skill.

To you. You are too stupid to notice skills that you don't have.

Again, your ONLY skill is insulting people. You must lead a lonely life.

telling them that there state has dropped from 2nd to 10th in COVID cases and 3rd to 8th in the infection rate, as has happened for Washington state, will getting an appreciative nod. Your arrogance blinds your ability to comprehend.

Sure. Even the most mindless gets analogies with sports results. The fact that they are perfectly useless doesn't get noticed.

What sports analogies, sport? No, they go right to the heart of the matter. WA is being successful and the data prove it.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/washington-coronavirus-cases.html#map

None of the data you have posted. The new case per day rate peaked at about 600 per day a couple of days ago, but it's a bit early to claim success.

Your statement simply doesn't make sense (surprise!).

Not to you. No surprise there either.

Nope, senseless is what you wrote, you don't even try to defend it.

Here is my latest data:

Rank State Population Cases Infection Rate Infection Rank Rel to NY
1 New York 19,440,469 102,683 5,282 1 1.0
2 New Jersey 8,936,574 25,590 2,864 2 1.8
6 Louisiana 4,645,184 9,159 1,972 3 2.7
7 Massachusetts 6,976,597 8,966 1,285 4 4.1
4 Michigan 10,045,029 10,791 1,074 5 4.9
13 Connecticut 3,563,077 3,824 1,073 6 4.9
34 District of Columbia 720,687 757 1,050 7 5.0
10 Washington 7,797,095 6,597 846 8 6.2

If you will note, this data is VERY CLOSE to the NYT data. So, you are just CONFIRMING that I am on the right track!

Except that you haven't specified what you mean by infection rate.

The most recent new cases per day data for New York state seem to be around 8000 per day

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronavirus-cases.html

If you don't say what your numbers are they don't mean anything at all.

If you were as smart as you claim (which you aren't) you would have read where I explained it. To repeat for the dull, infection rate is cases per million residents, NOT cases per day.

And try not responding until you've actually computed R0.

I have computed R0 and shown my working. It wasn't a particularly reliable estimate, as I pointed out at the time.

For the US as whole there were 29,874 new cases on the 2nd April and 19,452 on the 28th March, which would be an R0 of 1.5. Less than the the 2.5 to 3 seen if you aren't doing anything to slow the spread, but more than the 0.99 you have to get if you want the epidemic to go away, and lots more than the 0.5 or lower you see if it is going away fast.

You are too full of yourself to see the problem with trying to compute R0 in real-time.

I'm well aware of the problems, which is why I say that approach doesn't give a particularly reliable number. You could probably do better with a weighed sum of the new case numbers for the day five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten days before the latest new case number, reflecting the distribution of the time it takes from infection to the date at which symptoms appear. The weights would have to normalised to add up to one.

It's doable, but you need the data on the distribution of the time from infection to visible symptoms/getting tested which has to be inferred from contact tracing.

You haven't done ANYTHING - just complained about what I did. My numbers don't suffer from these problems, they get right to the point. In fact, in Pres Trump's news conference today, Dr. Deborah Birx identified their problem areas beyond NY, LA and NJ: Conneticut, Michigan, D.C., Colorado. These are all in my top 10 by infection rate.

R0 is an exponent of differences; if the underlying data from which the differences are computed has a lot of noise present the exponent will be pretty much meaningless.

In this case it was a ratio of two numbers - no kind of exponent, which is the number of times you multiply one number by itself.

There's certainly no differencing (subtraction of one number from another) involved.

Growth in cases is a difference.

Integrated and filtered data (which is what I am doing), on the other hand, reduces this noise effect.

Unfortunately garbage in always produces garbage out, not matter what you do with it in the middle (which you haven't specified). Since you don't seem to have a clue about what you are actually doing, your telling us what you think you are doing probably won't help.

The "garbage" you're talking about comes from the CDC - I didn't manufacture it. It is far from perfect because most COVID cases are never confirmed, only the most severe ones. But it is all we have - and all you have to compute (if you ever do) R0. What is truly garbage is the data out of China.

 

[Flyguy]

On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 1:01:31 PM UTC-7, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 2:56:19 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:08:59 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
:




Typos are always with us.

People of superior intelligence, which you CLAIM to be, DON'T make typos!




Wrong! I make many typos. When I was a teenager, I took a bunch of tests and found that I was very good using tweezers and very bad using my fingers. _I am a lousy typist and could never touch type using a _Sholes keyboard. So I switched to using a Dvorak keyboard. Using a Dvorak keyboard I can touch type but make many typos.

As far as intelligence , I scored 72 on the Navy GCT.

Dan

No, you don't get it (therefore flunking the superior intelligence test): if you are truly superior you don't make mistakes. Period. You are merely of higher intelligence.

 

Flyguy <soar2morrow@yahoo.com> wrote in
news:4c89d266-2e9e-41af-842e-33d9f7358e80@googlegroups.com:

On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 1:01:31 PM UTC-7, dca...@krl.org
wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 2:56:19 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:08:59 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman
wrote:
:




Typos are always with us.

People of superior intelligence, which you CLAIM to be, DON'T
make typo
s!




Wrong! I make many typos. When I was a teenager, I took a bunch
of test
s and found that I was very good using tweezers and very bad using
my fingers. _I am a lousy typist and could never touch type using
a _Sholes keyboard. So I switched to using a Dvorak keyboard.
Using a Dvorak keyboard I can touch type but make many typos.

As far as intelligence , I scored 72 on the Navy GCT.

Dan

No, you don't get it (therefore flunking the superior intelligence
test): if you are truly superior you don't make mistakes. Period.
You are merely of higher intelligence.

Sorry CHUMP, but the Trumpesquian definition of superior doesn't
cut it in the real world. You embraced the wrong mentality.

 

[whit3rd]

On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:18:07 AM UTC-7, Flyguy wrote:

> R0 is a theoretical concept with no basis in reality.

Yes, we know about mathematical constants being a kind of abstraction
from reality. For a disease, R0 does certainly have a basis in reality.

> I deal in day-to-day realities with the data that is available...

But, we also know that real situations can be modeled and mathematical models
of situations are part of how we (thinking man :== homo sapiens) survive.
Day-to-day isn't how long-term planning and marshaling of resources works, either
in a war or in a pandemic. Long-term models need R0, and we need long-term models.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 4:33:07 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:

On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 5:56:19 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:08:59 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 2:49:00 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:31:23 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 4:18:07 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 11:18:19 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:40:27 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 6:33:32 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:27:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 1:15:50 AM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/31/2020 2:21 AM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 7:00:42 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/30/2020 9:19 PM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 3:26:05 PM UTC-7, Uwe Bonnes wrote:

snip

Flyguy does see the world from his own unique point of view - one in which he gets things right.

R0 is simply the number of other people that an infected person infects.

If you do thorough contact tracing you can actually count the number of people infected.

The average value of R0 in a particular environment and social situation is stable enough to be worth knowing, even if the situation is chaotic (which means short-term unpredictable rather than random).

R0 is a theoretical concept with no basis in reality.

I just told you what the real basis is. The theoretical part is taking an average over a bunch of individual infected and infecting people..

No, you're the idiot - I already told you that was included in the infection rate I came up with.

But didn't pay any attention to the fact that when the infection first started is an equally important contributor to the number of people infected right now - probably more important before lockodowns and social distancing start reducing the R0.

You still don't seem to get that, which is one of the many failures of comprehension which make you perhaps the most blatantly idiotic poster here at the moment.

You can't follow that because you are an idiot. The fact that you don't want to helps, but you are stupid enough to think that you can get away it it.

LOL! If you are going to accuse me (or anybody else) of being "stupid" you better well SPELL IT RIGHT!

Typos are always with us.

People of superior intelligence, which you CLAIM to be, DON'T make typos!

If you could read, you could read up on "errors of action" and you'd find that everybody makes them. Intelligent people are more likely to proof-read what they write and catch some of them, but regular people catch about 30% of their errors and even trained proof-reader miss 5%.

I repeat, if you are going to accuse someone of being stupid, you had BETTER spell it right! Otherwise you are admitting that it is YOU that is "STUPD"


I deal in day-to-day realities with the data that is available, for which in your supreme superiority belittle me.

You don't. You take data which you don't understand and draw conclusions that the data doesn't support.

Only in your demented mind. You can't even compute your vaunted R0.

I have done it here from time to time. The ratio of last week's new case number to the number five or six days later can be used to do it. It's not a particularly reliable estimate when new infections from new communities keep on getting added into the published totals.

Telling somebody what the R0 is will get you a blank stare;

From anybody dumb enough to let you lecture them on anything.

Non-response noted.

Lack of appreciation of the insult involved noted. I'll have to be more explicitly contemptuous for you to notice.

Which seems to be your ONLY skill.

To you. You are too stupid to notice skills that you don't have.

Again, your ONLY skill is insulting people. You must lead a lonely life.

It's by no means my only skill, and not one that I have much call to use.

telling them that there state has dropped from 2nd to 10th in COVID cases and 3rd to 8th in the infection rate, as has happened for Washington state, will getting an appreciative nod. Your arrogance blinds your ability to comprehend.

Sure. Even the most mindless gets analogies with sports results.. The fact that they are perfectly useless doesn't get noticed.

What sports analogies, sport? No, they go right to the heart of the matter. WA is being successful and the data prove it.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/washington-coronavirus-cases.html#map

None of the data you have posted. The new case per day rate peaked at about 600 per day a couple of days ago, but it's a bit early to claim success.

Your statement simply doesn't make sense (surprise!).

Not to you. No surprise there either.

Nope, senseless is what you wrote, you don't even try to defend it.


Here is my latest data:

Rank State Population Cases Infection Rate Infection Rank Rel to NY
1 New York 19,440,469 102,683 5,282 1 1.0
2 New Jersey 8,936,574 25,590 2,864 2 1.8
6 Louisiana 4,645,184 9,159 1,972 3 2.7
7 Massachusetts 6,976,597 8,966 1,285 4 4.1
4 Michigan 10,045,029 10,791 1,074 5 4.9
13 Connecticut 3,563,077 3,824 1,073 6 4.9
34 District of Columbia 720,687 757 1,050 7 5.0
10 Washington 7,797,095 6,597 846 8 6.2

If you will note, this data is VERY CLOSE to the NYT data. So, you are just CONFIRMING that I am on the right track!

Except that you haven't specified what you mean by infection rate.

The most recent new cases per day data for New York state seem to be around 8000 per day

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronavirus-cases.html

If you don't say what your numbers are they don't mean anything at all.

If you were as smart as you claim (which you aren't) you would have read where I explained it. To repeat for the dull, infection rate is cases per million residents, NOT cases per day.

That's sensible as far as it goes, but it doesn't tell you how fast people are getting infected, which is important during an epidemic

And try not responding until you've actually computed R0.

I have computed R0 and shown my working. It wasn't a particularly reliable estimate, as I pointed out at the time.

For the US as whole there were 29,874 new cases on the 2nd April and 19,452 on the 28th March, which would be an R0 of 1.5. Less than the the 2.5 to 3 seen if you aren't doing anything to slow the spread, but more than the 0.99 you have to get if you want the epidemic to go away, and lots more than the 0.5 or lower you see if it is going away fast.

You are too full of yourself to see the problem with trying to compute R0 in real-time.

I'm well aware of the problems, which is why I say that approach doesn't give a particularly reliable number. You could probably do better with a weighed sum of the new case numbers for the day five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten days before the latest new case number, reflecting the distribution of the time it takes from infection to the date at which symptoms appear. The weights would have to normalised to add up to one.

It's doable, but you need the data on the distribution of the time from infection to visible symptoms/getting tested which has to be inferred from contact tracing.

You haven't done ANYTHING - just complained about what I did.

I didn't do anything you understood, but you really don't understand much.

> My numbers don't suffer from these problems, they get right to the point.

They get to a point, but not a particularly useful one.

In fact, in Pres Trump's news conference today, Dr. Deborah Birx identified their problem areas beyond NY, LA and NJ: Conneticut, Michigan, D.C., Colorado. These are all in my top 10 by infection rate.

R0 is an exponent of differences; if the underlying data from which the differences are computed has a lot of noise present the exponent will be pretty much meaningless.

In this case it was a ratio of two numbers - no kind of exponent, which is the number of times you multiply one number by itself.

There's certainly no differencing (subtraction of one number from another) involved.

Growth in cases is a difference.

Actually it isn't. You record the case as they come in, and count up the new cases at the of the day.

You then change the total number of cases for the area, which is the integral of the cases that have come in.

Integrated and filtered data (which is what I am doing), on the other hand, reduces this noise effect.

Unfortunately garbage in always produces garbage out, not matter what you do with it in the middle (which you haven't specified). Since you don't seem to have a clue about what you are actually doing, your telling us what you think you are doing probably won't help.

The "garbage" you're talking about comes from the CDC - I didn't manufacture it.

No, you just selectively reported it.

>It is far from perfect because most COVID cases are never confirmed, only the most severe ones.

Some Covid-19 cases aren't confirmed. "Most" implies that you know how many unconfirmed cases there are, which you can't. If there were a lot of unconfirmed cases then the dynamics of the increase infections - which you don't seem to have any interest in at all - would be different.

> But it is all we have - and all you have to compute (if you ever do) R0. What is truly garbage is the data out of China.

You do like to think so, but you haven't got a clue what might constitute evidence that this was true, and have never bothered to produce anything that looks anything like it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 10:57:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 12:46:28 AM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 2:08:34 PM UTC-4, speff wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2020 13:15:50 UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

China has done a fantastic job containing this to Hubei. No city outside Hubei got more than about 500 cases due to aggressive contact tracing of something like a million people, using a staff of something like 5,000 people
working full time.

They are being very, very cautious in permitting businesses to re-open, so
I don't think we're going to see any major fumbles. Truly belt and suspenders. Masks are required, hand sanitizers are required. Various
other requirements for the businesses.

You can't get onto the subway without a clean bill of health. You can't
get into your own apartment without the security guard checking your ID
and temperature. If someone does turn up sick, they quarantine the whole
section that used the stairwell. Travel requires a "green" health check.
They also use travel history (to buy a train ticket you have to scan
your ID on the vending machine). They were able to identify every rider on a 4 hour bus journey using the CCTV security camera and show that the virus can infect over a much longer distance than previously thought.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074351/coronavirus-can-travel-twice-far-official-safe-distance-and-stay

South Korea and Taiwan have also been able to keep it out of their major
cities by using less invasive methods. All good examples of competent public health protection and they had to act fast and make decisions on the fly.

More detailed China info here: https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia
(use Chrome to translate, the English version doesn't have the domestic detail)

U.S. couldn't coordinate that kind of response in a million years. Wonder if that has to do with civil service in Asia being among the elite, whereas in U.S. it is ....errrr.... non-elite.

It probably could, and the surveillance technology to make it work is probably in place and working, but US politicians would prefer to see a couple of million Americans die of Covid-19 than admit they were invading the privacy of everybody who votes for them (and against them) just as relentlessly as the Chinese do.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Video images are not a biometric. In the U.S. law enforcement can't even use them for probable cause. They do use them for probable identification and then proceed to develop probable cause using conventional methodology to gather evidence that leads to a conviction. Most of this work is done at the local level.
U.S. can't even test the population for infection, so it's unlikely any kind of mass location tracking will materialize any time soon. And if they ever do start using one it will almost certainly involve their favorite tool, the ankle bracelet.
Money is tight at the federal level and it will only get tighter with time. They're pushing the envelope on accumulating debt with the FY2020 deficit approaching $4T and a similar expenditure for 2021. I'm pretty sure it will be much higher when they fully realize the totality of tax revenue loss compounded by massive giveaways for bailouts, unemployment bailouts, really expensive social welfare stop gap measures, and now developing massive bailouts for people defaulting on their financial obligations. And because of the extreme mismanagement of the epidemic making remediation ten times as expensive as it should be, as well as their ingrained idiotic belief that impulse spending massive amounts of money fixes everything, the idiots will end up doing far more damage than the virus.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:42:29 PM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 10:57:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 12:46:28 AM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 2:08:34 PM UTC-4, speff wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2020 13:15:50 UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

China has done a fantastic job containing this to Hubei. No city outside Hubei got more than about 500 cases due to aggressive contact tracing of something like a million people, using a staff of something like 5,000 people
working full time.

They are being very, very cautious in permitting businesses to re-open, so
I don't think we're going to see any major fumbles. Truly belt and suspenders. Masks are required, hand sanitizers are required. Various
other requirements for the businesses.

You can't get onto the subway without a clean bill of health. You can't
get into your own apartment without the security guard checking your ID
and temperature. If someone does turn up sick, they quarantine the whole
section that used the stairwell. Travel requires a "green" health check.
They also use travel history (to buy a train ticket you have to scan
your ID on the vending machine). They were able to identify every rider on a 4 hour bus journey using the CCTV security camera and show that the virus can infect over a much longer distance than previously thought.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074351/coronavirus-can-travel-twice-far-official-safe-distance-and-stay

South Korea and Taiwan have also been able to keep it out of their major
cities by using less invasive methods. All good examples of competent public health protection and they had to act fast and make decisions on the fly.

More detailed China info here: https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia
(use Chrome to translate, the English version doesn't have the domestic detail)

U.S. couldn't coordinate that kind of response in a million years. Wonder if that has to do with civil service in Asia being among the elite, whereas in U.S. it is ....errrr.... non-elite.

It probably could, and the surveillance technology to make it work is probably in place and working, but US politicians would prefer to see a couple of million Americans die of Covid-19 than admit they were invading the privacy of everybody who votes for them (and against them) just as relentlessly as the Chinese do.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Video images are not a biometric. In the U.S. law enforcement can't even use them for probable cause. They do use them for probable identification and then proceed to develop probable cause using conventional methodology to gather evidence that leads to a conviction. Most of this work is done at the local level.
U.S. can't even test the population for infection, so it's unlikely any kind of mass location tracking will materialize any time soon. And if they ever do start using one it will almost certainly involve their favorite tool, the ankle bracelet.
Money is tight at the federal level and it will only get tighter with time. They're pushing the envelope on accumulating debt with the FY2020 deficit approaching $4T and a similar expenditure for 2021. I'm pretty sure it will be much higher when they fully realize the totality of tax revenue loss compounded by massive giveaways for bailouts, unemployment bailouts, really expensive social welfare stop gap measures, and now developing massive bailouts for people defaulting on their financial obligations. And because of the extreme mismanagement of the epidemic making remediation ten times as expensive as it should be, as well as their ingrained idiotic belief that impulse spending massive amounts of money fixes everything, the idiots will end up doing far more damage than the virus.

The one consolation is that they will have to start collecting more in taxes from the rich, which US governments since Reagan have shied off big-time.

The US collects a good less of the US GDP in taxes - Pikkety says 30% - than most other advanced industrial countries.

Sweden collects 55%, and Germany about 45%. It isn't remotely wrecking their economies, as our resident right-wingers insist has to happen.

Trump and his administration will hate it, but they aren't going to have any choice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Flyguy]

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 6:07:35 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:42:29 PM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 10:57:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 12:46:28 AM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail..com wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 2:08:34 PM UTC-4, speff wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2020 13:15:50 UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

China has done a fantastic job containing this to Hubei. No city outside Hubei got more than about 500 cases due to aggressive contact tracing of something like a million people, using a staff of something like 5,000 people
working full time.

They are being very, very cautious in permitting businesses to re-open, so
I don't think we're going to see any major fumbles. Truly belt and suspenders. Masks are required, hand sanitizers are required. Various
other requirements for the businesses.

You can't get onto the subway without a clean bill of health. You can't
get into your own apartment without the security guard checking your ID
and temperature. If someone does turn up sick, they quarantine the whole
section that used the stairwell. Travel requires a "green" health check.
They also use travel history (to buy a train ticket you have to scan
your ID on the vending machine). They were able to identify every rider on a 4 hour bus journey using the CCTV security camera and show that the virus can infect over a much longer distance than previously thought.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074351/coronavirus-can-travel-twice-far-official-safe-distance-and-stay

South Korea and Taiwan have also been able to keep it out of their major
cities by using less invasive methods. All good examples of competent public health protection and they had to act fast and make decisions on the fly.

More detailed China info here: https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia
(use Chrome to translate, the English version doesn't have the domestic detail)

U.S. couldn't coordinate that kind of response in a million years. Wonder if that has to do with civil service in Asia being among the elite, whereas in U.S. it is ....errrr.... non-elite.

It probably could, and the surveillance technology to make it work is probably in place and working, but US politicians would prefer to see a couple of million Americans die of Covid-19 than admit they were invading the privacy of everybody who votes for them (and against them) just as relentlessly as the Chinese do.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Video images are not a biometric. In the U.S. law enforcement can't even use them for probable cause. They do use them for probable identification and then proceed to develop probable cause using conventional methodology to gather evidence that leads to a conviction. Most of this work is done at the local level.
U.S. can't even test the population for infection, so it's unlikely any kind of mass location tracking will materialize any time soon. And if they ever do start using one it will almost certainly involve their favorite tool, the ankle bracelet.
Money is tight at the federal level and it will only get tighter with time. They're pushing the envelope on accumulating debt with the FY2020 deficit approaching $4T and a similar expenditure for 2021. I'm pretty sure it will be much higher when they fully realize the totality of tax revenue loss compounded by massive giveaways for bailouts, unemployment bailouts, really expensive social welfare stop gap measures, and now developing massive bailouts for people defaulting on their financial obligations. And because of the extreme mismanagement of the epidemic making remediation ten times as expensive as it should be, as well as their ingrained idiotic belief that impulse spending massive amounts of money fixes everything, the idiots will end up doing far more damage than the virus.

The one consolation is that they will have to start collecting more in taxes from the rich, which US governments since Reagan have shied off big-time.

The US collects a good less of the US GDP in taxes - Pikkety says 30% - than most other advanced industrial countries.

Sweden collects 55%, and Germany about 45%. It isn't remotely wrecking their economies, as our resident right-wingers insist has to happen.

Trump and his administration will hate it, but they aren't going to have any choice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

If you think you will be consoled then you have ANOTHER think coming - there is NO WAY taxes will be raised under Pres. Trump. And you can take that to the bank.

And if you think high taxes haven't impacted Germany and the rest of Europe, you have a SECOND think coming - they were in virtual recession prior to the COVID crisis.

You obviously live in a libtard fantasy land from which you can't escape - hello Hotel California!

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 1:09:54 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 6:07:35 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:42:29 PM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 10:57:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 12:46:28 AM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 2:08:34 PM UTC-4, speff wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2020 13:15:50 UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

China has done a fantastic job containing this to Hubei. No city outside Hubei got more than about 500 cases due to aggressive contact tracing of something like a million people, using a staff of something like 5,000 people
working full time.

They are being very, very cautious in permitting businesses to re-open, so
I don't think we're going to see any major fumbles. Truly belt and suspenders. Masks are required, hand sanitizers are required. Various
other requirements for the businesses.

You can't get onto the subway without a clean bill of health. You can't
get into your own apartment without the security guard checking your ID
and temperature. If someone does turn up sick, they quarantine the whole
section that used the stairwell. Travel requires a "green" health check.
They also use travel history (to buy a train ticket you have to scan
your ID on the vending machine). They were able to identify every rider on a 4 hour bus journey using the CCTV security camera and show that the virus can infect over a much longer distance than previously thought..

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074351/coronavirus-can-travel-twice-far-official-safe-distance-and-stay

South Korea and Taiwan have also been able to keep it out of their major
cities by using less invasive methods. All good examples of competent public health protection and they had to act fast and make decisions on the fly.

More detailed China info here: https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia
(use Chrome to translate, the English version doesn't have the domestic detail)

U.S. couldn't coordinate that kind of response in a million years.. Wonder if that has to do with civil service in Asia being among the elite, whereas in U.S. it is ....errrr.... non-elite.

It probably could, and the surveillance technology to make it work is probably in place and working, but US politicians would prefer to see a couple of million Americans die of Covid-19 than admit they were invading the privacy of everybody who votes for them (and against them) just as relentlessly as the Chinese do.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Video images are not a biometric. In the U.S. law enforcement can't even use them for probable cause. They do use them for probable identification and then proceed to develop probable cause using conventional methodology to gather evidence that leads to a conviction. Most of this work is done at the local level.
U.S. can't even test the population for infection, so it's unlikely any kind of mass location tracking will materialize any time soon. And if they ever do start using one it will almost certainly involve their favorite tool, the ankle bracelet.
Money is tight at the federal level and it will only get tighter with time. They're pushing the envelope on accumulating debt with the FY2020 deficit approaching $4T and a similar expenditure for 2021. I'm pretty sure it will be much higher when they fully realize the totality of tax revenue loss compounded by massive giveaways for bailouts, unemployment bailouts, really expensive social welfare stop gap measures, and now developing massive bailouts for people defaulting on their financial obligations. And because of the extreme mismanagement of the epidemic making remediation ten times as expensive as it should be, as well as their ingrained idiotic belief that impulse spending massive amounts of money fixes everything, the idiots will end up doing far more damage than the virus.

The one consolation is that they will have to start collecting more in taxes from the rich, which US governments since Reagan have shied off big-time.

The US collects a good less of the US GDP in taxes - Pikkety says 30% - than most other advanced industrial countries.

Sweden collects 55%, and Germany about 45%. It isn't remotely wrecking their economies, as our resident right-wingers insist has to happen.

Trump and his administration will hate it, but they aren't going to have any choice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

If you think you will be consoled then you have ANOTHER think coming - there is NO WAY taxes will be raised under Pres. Trump. And you can take that to the bank.

He's not gong to like doing it - if he survives this years election, which seems unlikely, since he has screwed up big-time on dealing the Covid-19 epidemic - but he wouldn't have a lot of choice.

> And if you think high taxes haven't impacted Germany and the rest of Europe, you have a SECOND think coming - they were in virtual recession prior to the COVID crisis.

Nobody's economy was growing as fast as it should have been. It's an interesting question as to what was actually going on. There certainly wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with it, since they were exporting roughly as much as the USA despite have only a quarter of the population.

> You obviously live in a libtard fantasy land from which you can't escape - hello Hotel California!

In reality I live in the real world and you live in some right-wing fantasy bubble where Trump is going to be re-elected.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Flyguy]

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 2:47:38 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 4:33:07 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 5:56:19 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:08:59 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 2:49:00 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:31:23 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 4:18:07 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 11:18:19 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:40:27 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 6:33:32 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:27:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 1:15:50 AM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/31/2020 2:21 AM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 7:00:42 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/30/2020 9:19 PM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 3:26:05 PM UTC-7, Uwe Bonnes wrote:

snip

Flyguy does see the world from his own unique point of view - one in which he gets things right.

R0 is simply the number of other people that an infected person infects.

If you do thorough contact tracing you can actually count the number of people infected.

The average value of R0 in a particular environment and social situation is stable enough to be worth knowing, even if the situation is chaotic (which means short-term unpredictable rather than random).

R0 is a theoretical concept with no basis in reality.

I just told you what the real basis is. The theoretical part is taking an average over a bunch of individual infected and infecting people.

No, you're the idiot - I already told you that was included in the infection rate I came up with.

But didn't pay any attention to the fact that when the infection first started is an equally important contributor to the number of people infected right now - probably more important before lockodowns and social distancing start reducing the R0.

You still don't seem to get that, which is one of the many failures of comprehension which make you perhaps the most blatantly idiotic poster here at the moment.

You can't follow that because you are an idiot. The fact that you don't want to helps, but you are stupid enough to think that you can get away it it.

LOL! If you are going to accuse me (or anybody else) of being "stupid" you better well SPELL IT RIGHT!

Typos are always with us.

People of superior intelligence, which you CLAIM to be, DON'T make typos!

If you could read, you could read up on "errors of action" and you'd find that everybody makes them. Intelligent people are more likely to proof-read what they write and catch some of them, but regular people catch about 30% of their errors and even trained proof-reader miss 5%.

I repeat, if you are going to accuse someone of being stupid, you had BETTER spell it right! Otherwise you are admitting that it is YOU that is "STUPD"


I deal in day-to-day realities with the data that is available, for which in your supreme superiority belittle me.

You don't. You take data which you don't understand and draw conclusions that the data doesn't support.

Only in your demented mind. You can't even compute your vaunted R0.

I have done it here from time to time. The ratio of last week's new case number to the number five or six days later can be used to do it. It's not a particularly reliable estimate when new infections from new communities keep on getting added into the published totals.

Telling somebody what the R0 is will get you a blank stare;

From anybody dumb enough to let you lecture them on anything.

Non-response noted.

Lack of appreciation of the insult involved noted. I'll have to be more explicitly contemptuous for you to notice.

Which seems to be your ONLY skill.

To you. You are too stupid to notice skills that you don't have.

Again, your ONLY skill is insulting people. You must lead a lonely life..

It's by no means my only skill, and not one that I have much call to use.

telling them that there state has dropped from 2nd to 10th in COVID cases and 3rd to 8th in the infection rate, as has happened for Washington state, will getting an appreciative nod. Your arrogance blinds your ability to comprehend.

Sure. Even the most mindless gets analogies with sports results. The fact that they are perfectly useless doesn't get noticed.

What sports analogies, sport? No, they go right to the heart of the matter. WA is being successful and the data prove it.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/washington-coronavirus-cases.html#map

None of the data you have posted. The new case per day rate peaked at about 600 per day a couple of days ago, but it's a bit early to claim success.

Your statement simply doesn't make sense (surprise!).

Not to you. No surprise there either.

Nope, senseless is what you wrote, you don't even try to defend it.


Here is my latest data:

Rank State Population Cases Infection Rate Infection Rank Rel to NY
1 New York 19,440,469 102,683 5,282 1 1.0
2 New Jersey 8,936,574 25,590 2,864 2 1.8
6 Louisiana 4,645,184 9,159 1,972 3 2.7
7 Massachusetts 6,976,597 8,966 1,285 4 4.1
4 Michigan 10,045,029 10,791 1,074 5 4.9
13 Connecticut 3,563,077 3,824 1,073 6 4.9
34 District of Columbia 720,687 757 1,050 7 5.0
10 Washington 7,797,095 6,597 846 8 6.2

If you will note, this data is VERY CLOSE to the NYT data. So, you are just CONFIRMING that I am on the right track!

Except that you haven't specified what you mean by infection rate.

The most recent new cases per day data for New York state seem to be around 8000 per day

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronavirus-cases.html

If you don't say what your numbers are they don't mean anything at all.

If you were as smart as you claim (which you aren't) you would have read where I explained it. To repeat for the dull, infection rate is cases per million residents, NOT cases per day.

That's sensible as far as it goes, but it doesn't tell you how fast people are getting infected, which is important during an epidemic

And try not responding until you've actually computed R0.

I have computed R0 and shown my working. It wasn't a particularly reliable estimate, as I pointed out at the time.

For the US as whole there were 29,874 new cases on the 2nd April and 19,452 on the 28th March, which would be an R0 of 1.5. Less than the the 2.5 to 3 seen if you aren't doing anything to slow the spread, but more than the 0.99 you have to get if you want the epidemic to go away, and lots more than the 0.5 or lower you see if it is going away fast.

You are too full of yourself to see the problem with trying to compute R0 in real-time.

I'm well aware of the problems, which is why I say that approach doesn't give a particularly reliable number. You could probably do better with a weighed sum of the new case numbers for the day five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten days before the latest new case number, reflecting the distribution of the time it takes from infection to the date at which symptoms appear. The weights would have to normalised to add up to one.

It's doable, but you need the data on the distribution of the time from infection to visible symptoms/getting tested which has to be inferred from contact tracing.

You haven't done ANYTHING - just complained about what I did.

I didn't do anything you understood, but you really don't understand much..

My numbers don't suffer from these problems, they get right to the point.

They get to a point, but not a particularly useful one.

LOL because you ignored precisely where they are useful:

In fact, in Pres Trump's news conference today, Dr. Deborah Birx identified their problem areas beyond NY, LA and NJ: Conneticut, Michigan, D.C., Colorado. These are all in my top 10 by infection rate.

Note no response from the Slow Man. This was apparent in my data from Day 1.. Also, the trajectory (infection rank) of individual states shows who is doing things right and who isn't.

R0 is an exponent of differences; if the underlying data from which the differences are computed has a lot of noise present the exponent will be pretty much meaningless.

In this case it was a ratio of two numbers - no kind of exponent, which is the number of times you multiply one number by itself.

There's certainly no differencing (subtraction of one number from another) involved.

Growth in cases is a difference.

Actually it isn't. You record the case as they come in, and count up the new cases at the of the day.

HUH! Growth is the difference of the number of cases over a given time period. The daily counts may, or may not, be reported, but the totals certainly are. This goes especially so for periods other than days. If all cases aren't being counted - and most aren't - there is significant uncertainty in this number, what in signal processing we call noise.

You then change the total number of cases for the area, which is the integral of the cases that have come in.

Which is EXACTLY what I did!

Integrated and filtered data (which is what I am doing), on the other hand, reduces this noise effect.

Unfortunately garbage in always produces garbage out, not matter what you do with it in the middle (which you haven't specified). Since you don't seem to have a clue about what you are actually doing, your telling us what you think you are doing probably won't help.

The "garbage" you're talking about comes from the CDC - I didn't manufacture it.

No, you just selectively reported it.

Nope, the confirmed cases data comes from the CDC and local health authorities. I do not modify it in any way.

It is far from perfect because most COVID cases are never confirmed, only the most severe ones.

Some Covid-19 cases aren't confirmed. "Most" implies that you know how many unconfirmed cases there are, which you can't. If there were a lot of unconfirmed cases then the dynamics of the increase infections - which you don't seem to have any interest in at all - would be different.

I can - I have heard from doctors who are advising people with diagnosed COVID NOT to go to hospitals because they WON'T be tested anyway. And I have reported that here, but you missed it.

But it is all we have - and all you have to compute (if you ever do) R0.. What is truly garbage is the data out of China.

You do like to think so, but you haven't got a clue what might constitute evidence that this was true, and have never bothered to produce anything that looks anything like it.

No, you are the one that is clueless and you are not producing any analysis of any sort - even a bad one - just complaining about what I do.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 1:29:15 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 2:47:38 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 4:33:07 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 5:56:19 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:08:59 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 2:49:00 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:31:23 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 4:18:07 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 11:18:19 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:40:27 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 6:33:32 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:27:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 1:15:50 AM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/31/2020 2:21 AM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 7:00:42 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/30/2020 9:19 PM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 3:26:05 PM UTC-7, Uwe Bonnes wrote:

<snip>

I didn't do anything you understood, but you really don't understand much.

My numbers don't suffer from these problems, they get right to the point.

They get to a point, but not a particularly useful one.

LOL because you ignored precisely where they are useful:

Which is?

In fact your numbers tell you how many people have been infected.

What you what to know is how many more are going to get infected.

The number of new cases reported per - over a period about a week - tells you something about that. If you get a larger new cases every day, you've got an epidemic which is getting worse.

If the number of new cases is much the same over a number of days you've slowed down the rate of infection, but not enough.

If the number of new cases per day starts dropping, and you can keep it up, you will have beaten the epidemic.

> > > In fact, in Pres Trump's news conference today, Dr. Deborah Birx identified their problem areas beyond NY, LA and NJ: Conneticut, Michigan, D.C., Colorado. These are all in my top 10 by infection rate.

That is, the places with the largest proportion of population infected.

> Note no response from the Slow Man. This was apparent in my data from Day 1. Also, the trajectory (infection rank) of individual states shows who is doing things right and who isn't.

No response that the fly-blown guy could make sense of.

R0 is an exponent of differences; if the underlying data from which the differences are computed has a lot of noise present the exponent will be pretty much meaningless.

In this case it was a ratio of two numbers - no kind of exponent, which is the number of times you multiply one number by itself.

There's certainly no differencing (subtraction of one number from another) involved.

Growth in cases is a difference.

Actually it isn't. You record the case as they come in, and count up the new cases at the of the day.

HUH! Growth is the difference of the number of cases over a given time period. The daily counts may, or may not, be reported, but the totals certainly are. This goes especially so for periods other than days. If all cases aren't being counted - and most aren't - there is significant uncertainty in this number, what in signal processing we call noise.

Noise is what you are producing at the moment. The fact that some cases aren't being counted is an imperfection in the data, not noise.

That fact that you think you can claim that you know how many aren't being counted - which is what is implied by your claim that most of them aren't being counted - is evidence that you don't know what you are talking about.

You then change the total number of cases for the area, which is the integral of the cases that have come in.

Which is EXACTLY what I did!

And then call it a difference - which might be correct conversational English, but isn't hat's going on in any mathematical sense.

Integrated and filtered data (which is what I am doing), on the other hand, reduces this noise effect.

Unfortunately garbage in always produces garbage out, not matter what you do with it in the middle (which you haven't specified). Since you don't seem to have a clue about what you are actually doing, your telling us what you think you are doing probably won't help.

The "garbage" you're talking about comes from the CDC - I didn't manufacture it.

No, you just selectively reported it.

Nope, the confirmed cases data comes from the CDC and local health authorities. I do not modify it in any way.

But you don't think about what it is telling you, and you don't present it a way that tells anybody how well the efforts to reduce the rate of new infections is working.

It is far from perfect because most COVID cases are never confirmed, only the most severe ones.

Some Covid-19 cases aren't confirmed. "Most" implies that you know how many unconfirmed cases there are, which you can't. If there were a lot of unconfirmed cases then the dynamics of the increase infections - which you don't seem to have any interest in at all - would be different.

I can - I have heard from doctors who are advising people with diagnosed COVID NOT to go to hospitals because they WON'T be tested anyway. And I have reported that here, but you missed it.

I'm sure that advice is being given - in places which are seriously short of test kits - but it isn't evidence that most cases are being recorded.

Ypou could claim that "some" cases weren't being recorded, but not "most".

But it is all we have - and all you have to compute (if you ever do) R0. What is truly garbage is the data out of China.

You do like to think so, but you haven't got a clue what might constitute evidence that this was true, and have never bothered to produce anything that looks anything like it.

No, you are the one that is clueless and you are not producing any analysis of any sort - even a bad one - just complaining about what I do.

Why bother? You makes quite enough obviously fallacious statements to make it obvious that you are a half-wit, and wouldn't understand any kind of analysis or let it get in the way of your deluded self-confidence.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Flyguy]

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 8:35:52 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 1:09:54 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 6:07:35 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:42:29 PM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail..com wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 10:57:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 12:46:28 AM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 2:08:34 PM UTC-4, speff wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2020 13:15:50 UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

China has done a fantastic job containing this to Hubei. No city outside Hubei got more than about 500 cases due to aggressive contact tracing of something like a million people, using a staff of something like 5,000 people
working full time.

They are being very, very cautious in permitting businesses to re-open, so
I don't think we're going to see any major fumbles. Truly belt and suspenders. Masks are required, hand sanitizers are required. Various
other requirements for the businesses.

You can't get onto the subway without a clean bill of health. You can't
get into your own apartment without the security guard checking your ID
and temperature. If someone does turn up sick, they quarantine the whole
section that used the stairwell. Travel requires a "green" health check.
They also use travel history (to buy a train ticket you have to scan
your ID on the vending machine). They were able to identify every rider on a 4 hour bus journey using the CCTV security camera and show that the virus can infect over a much longer distance than previously thought.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074351/coronavirus-can-travel-twice-far-official-safe-distance-and-stay

South Korea and Taiwan have also been able to keep it out of their major
cities by using less invasive methods. All good examples of competent public health protection and they had to act fast and make decisions on the fly.

More detailed China info here: https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia
(use Chrome to translate, the English version doesn't have the domestic detail)

U.S. couldn't coordinate that kind of response in a million years. Wonder if that has to do with civil service in Asia being among the elite, whereas in U.S. it is ....errrr.... non-elite.

It probably could, and the surveillance technology to make it work is probably in place and working, but US politicians would prefer to see a couple of million Americans die of Covid-19 than admit they were invading the privacy of everybody who votes for them (and against them) just as relentlessly as the Chinese do.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Video images are not a biometric. In the U.S. law enforcement can't even use them for probable cause. They do use them for probable identification and then proceed to develop probable cause using conventional methodology to gather evidence that leads to a conviction. Most of this work is done at the local level.
U.S. can't even test the population for infection, so it's unlikely any kind of mass location tracking will materialize any time soon. And if they ever do start using one it will almost certainly involve their favorite tool, the ankle bracelet.
Money is tight at the federal level and it will only get tighter with time. They're pushing the envelope on accumulating debt with the FY2020 deficit approaching $4T and a similar expenditure for 2021. I'm pretty sure it will be much higher when they fully realize the totality of tax revenue loss compounded by massive giveaways for bailouts, unemployment bailouts, really expensive social welfare stop gap measures, and now developing massive bailouts for people defaulting on their financial obligations. And because of the extreme mismanagement of the epidemic making remediation ten times as expensive as it should be, as well as their ingrained idiotic belief that impulse spending massive amounts of money fixes everything, the idiots will end up doing far more damage than the virus.

The one consolation is that they will have to start collecting more in taxes from the rich, which US governments since Reagan have shied off big-time.

The US collects a good less of the US GDP in taxes - Pikkety says 30% - than most other advanced industrial countries.

Sweden collects 55%, and Germany about 45%. It isn't remotely wrecking their economies, as our resident right-wingers insist has to happen.

Trump and his administration will hate it, but they aren't going to have any choice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

If you think you will be consoled then you have ANOTHER think coming - there is NO WAY taxes will be raised under Pres. Trump. And you can take that to the bank.

He's not gong to like doing it - if he survives this years election, which seems unlikely, since he has screwed up big-time on dealing the Covid-19 epidemic - but he wouldn't have a lot of choice.

And if you think high taxes haven't impacted Germany and the rest of Europe, you have a SECOND think coming - they were in virtual recession prior to the COVID crisis.

Nobody's economy was growing as fast as it should have been. It's an interesting question as to what was actually going on. There certainly wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with it, since they were exporting roughly as much as the USA despite have only a quarter of the population.

You obviously live in a libtard fantasy land from which you can't escape - hello Hotel California!

In reality I live in the real world and you live in some right-wing fantasy bubble where Trump is going to be re-elected.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Hardly. It was Pres. Trump's decisive action in banning travel from China that saved us from a much worse fate.

How people view his actions in handling this crisis WILL decide the election - and right now they think he is doing a good job. Biden is now lost in action and has become irrelevant.

No, the world you live in is a demented fantasy land of the libtards. And you can keep it with you as far away from me as possible along with your puppet monarchs.

 

[Flyguy]

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 9:26:23 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 1:29:15 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 2:47:38 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 4:33:07 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 5:56:19 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:08:59 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 2:49:00 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:31:23 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 4:18:07 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 11:18:19 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:40:27 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 6:33:32 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:27:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 1:15:50 AM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/31/2020 2:21 AM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 7:00:42 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/30/2020 9:19 PM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 3:26:05 PM UTC-7, Uwe Bonnes wrote:

snip

I didn't do anything you understood, but you really don't understand much.

My numbers don't suffer from these problems, they get right to the point.

They get to a point, but not a particularly useful one.

LOL because you ignored precisely where they are useful:

Which is?

In fact your numbers tell you how many people have been infected.

What you what to know is how many more are going to get infected.

The number of new cases reported per - over a period about a week - tells you something about that. If you get a larger new cases every day, you've got an epidemic which is getting worse.

If the number of new cases is much the same over a number of days you've slowed down the rate of infection, but not enough.

If the number of new cases per day starts dropping, and you can keep it up, you will have beaten the epidemic.

In fact, in Pres Trump's news conference today, Dr. Deborah Birx identified their problem areas beyond NY, LA and NJ: Conneticut, Michigan, D.C., Colorado. These are all in my top 10 by infection rate.

That is, the places with the largest proportion of population infected.

Note no response from the Slow Man. This was apparent in my data from Day 1. Also, the trajectory (infection rank) of individual states shows who is doing things right and who isn't.

No response that the fly-blown guy could make sense of.

R0 is an exponent of differences; if the underlying data from which the differences are computed has a lot of noise present the exponent will be pretty much meaningless.

In this case it was a ratio of two numbers - no kind of exponent, which is the number of times you multiply one number by itself.

There's certainly no differencing (subtraction of one number from another) involved.

Growth in cases is a difference.

Actually it isn't. You record the case as they come in, and count up the new cases at the of the day.

HUH! Growth is the difference of the number of cases over a given time period. The daily counts may, or may not, be reported, but the totals certainly are. This goes especially so for periods other than days. If all cases aren't being counted - and most aren't - there is significant uncertainty in this number, what in signal processing we call noise.

Noise is what you are producing at the moment. The fact that some cases aren't being counted is an imperfection in the data, not noise.

That fact that you think you can claim that you know how many aren't being counted - which is what is implied by your claim that most of them aren't being counted - is evidence that you don't know what you are talking about..

You then change the total number of cases for the area, which is the integral of the cases that have come in.

Which is EXACTLY what I did!

And then call it a difference - which might be correct conversational English, but isn't hat's going on in any mathematical sense.

Integrated and filtered data (which is what I am doing), on the other hand, reduces this noise effect.

Unfortunately garbage in always produces garbage out, not matter what you do with it in the middle (which you haven't specified). Since you don't seem to have a clue about what you are actually doing, your telling us what you think you are doing probably won't help.

The "garbage" you're talking about comes from the CDC - I didn't manufacture it.

No, you just selectively reported it.

Nope, the confirmed cases data comes from the CDC and local health authorities. I do not modify it in any way.

But you don't think about what it is telling you, and you don't present it a way that tells anybody how well the efforts to reduce the rate of new infections is working.

It is far from perfect because most COVID cases are never confirmed, only the most severe ones.

Some Covid-19 cases aren't confirmed. "Most" implies that you know how many unconfirmed cases there are, which you can't. If there were a lot of unconfirmed cases then the dynamics of the increase infections - which you don't seem to have any interest in at all - would be different.

I can - I have heard from doctors who are advising people with diagnosed COVID NOT to go to hospitals because they WON'T be tested anyway. And I have reported that here, but you missed it.

I'm sure that advice is being given - in places which are seriously short of test kits - but it isn't evidence that most cases are being recorded.

Ypou could claim that "some" cases weren't being recorded, but not "most"..

But it is all we have - and all you have to compute (if you ever do) R0. What is truly garbage is the data out of China.

You do like to think so, but you haven't got a clue what might constitute evidence that this was true, and have never bothered to produce anything that looks anything like it.

No, you are the one that is clueless and you are not producing any analysis of any sort - even a bad one - just complaining about what I do.

Why bother? You makes quite enough obviously fallacious statements to make it obvious that you are a half-wit, and wouldn't understand any kind of analysis or let it get in the way of your deluded self-confidence.

You prove my case for me, Slow Man. All SHIT TALK and NO ACTION, just like your fellow libtards!

 

[whit3rd]

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:38:53 PM UTC-7, Flyguy wrote:

>It was Pres. Trump's decisive action in banning travel from China that saved us from a much worse fate.

Yeah, maybe, but... it was travel to and from NY city that produced the biggest cluster,
and he wasn't on top of the situation internally (which does matter), rather left that
to the states and municipalities... perhaps not wisely. Early informative conferences
were classified; your government locally knew... very little from the national authorities.

> How people view his actions in handling this crisis WILL decide the election -

So, we should elect a North Korean handler? Or Chinese? They were the
early responders, with good effective strategies. No, anyone who is mortal is
opposed to a plague, and I'm not seeing wisdom or leadership on any impressive
scale from the Donald. The CDC and health authorities he tried to defund are
working hard, under the imperious leader, but that argues not in his favor.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 4:41:39 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 9:26:23 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 1:29:15 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 2:47:38 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 4:33:07 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 5:56:19 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:08:59 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 2:49:00 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:31:23 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 4:18:07 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 11:18:19 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:40:27 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 6:33:32 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:27:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 1:15:50 AM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/31/2020 2:21 AM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 7:00:42 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 3/30/2020 9:19 PM, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 3:26:05 PM UTC-7, Uwe Bonnes wrote:

<snip>

You do like to think so, but you haven't got a clue what might constitute evidence that this was true, and have never bothered to produce anything that looks anything like it.

No, you are the one that is clueless and you are not producing any analysis of any sort - even a bad one - just complaining about what I do.

Why bother? You makes quite enough obviously fallacious statements to make it obvious that you are a half-wit, and wouldn't understand any kind of analysis or let it get in the way of your deluded self-confidence.

You prove my case for me, Slow Man. All SHIT TALK and NO ACTION, just like your fellow libtards!

Now I'm supposed to stage a coup and replace your elected government?

Trump is performing so badly that there are probably people thinking about it, but consequent mess wouldn't lend itself to getting more effective action to reduce the transmission of Covid-19. What's being done isn't totally ineffective but it's nowhere near as effective as it could be (and was in South Kora and China) and needs to be being done a whole lot better.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 4:38:53 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 8:35:52 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 1:09:54 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 6:07:35 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:42:29 PM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 10:57:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 12:46:28 AM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 2:08:34 PM UTC-4, speff wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2020 13:15:50 UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

China has done a fantastic job containing this to Hubei. No city outside Hubei got more than about 500 cases due to aggressive contact tracing of something like a million people, using a staff of something like 5,000 people
working full time.

They are being very, very cautious in permitting businesses to re-open, so
I don't think we're going to see any major fumbles. Truly belt and suspenders. Masks are required, hand sanitizers are required. Various
other requirements for the businesses.

You can't get onto the subway without a clean bill of health. You can't
get into your own apartment without the security guard checking your ID
and temperature. If someone does turn up sick, they quarantine the whole
section that used the stairwell. Travel requires a "green" health check.
They also use travel history (to buy a train ticket you have to scan
your ID on the vending machine). They were able to identify every rider on a 4 hour bus journey using the CCTV security camera and show that the virus can infect over a much longer distance than previously thought.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074351/coronavirus-can-travel-twice-far-official-safe-distance-and-stay

South Korea and Taiwan have also been able to keep it out of their major
cities by using less invasive methods. All good examples of competent public health protection and they had to act fast and make decisions on the fly.

More detailed China info here: https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia
(use Chrome to translate, the English version doesn't have the domestic detail)

U.S. couldn't coordinate that kind of response in a million years. Wonder if that has to do with civil service in Asia being among the elite, whereas in U.S. it is ....errrr.... non-elite.

It probably could, and the surveillance technology to make it work is probably in place and working, but US politicians would prefer to see a couple of million Americans die of Covid-19 than admit they were invading the privacy of everybody who votes for them (and against them) just as relentlessly as the Chinese do.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Video images are not a biometric. In the U.S. law enforcement can't even use them for probable cause. They do use them for probable identification and then proceed to develop probable cause using conventional methodology to gather evidence that leads to a conviction. Most of this work is done at the local level.
U.S. can't even test the population for infection, so it's unlikely any kind of mass location tracking will materialize any time soon. And if they ever do start using one it will almost certainly involve their favorite tool, the ankle bracelet.
Money is tight at the federal level and it will only get tighter with time. They're pushing the envelope on accumulating debt with the FY2020 deficit approaching $4T and a similar expenditure for 2021. I'm pretty sure it will be much higher when they fully realize the totality of tax revenue loss compounded by massive giveaways for bailouts, unemployment bailouts, really expensive social welfare stop gap measures, and now developing massive bailouts for people defaulting on their financial obligations. And because of the extreme mismanagement of the epidemic making remediation ten times as expensive as it should be, as well as their ingrained idiotic belief that impulse spending massive amounts of money fixes everything, the idiots will end up doing far more damage than the virus.

The one consolation is that they will have to start collecting more in taxes from the rich, which US governments since Reagan have shied off big-time.

The US collects a good less of the US GDP in taxes - Pikkety says 30% - than most other advanced industrial countries.

Sweden collects 55%, and Germany about 45%. It isn't remotely wrecking their economies, as our resident right-wingers insist has to happen.

Trump and his administration will hate it, but they aren't going to have any choice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

If you think you will be consoled then you have ANOTHER think coming - there is NO WAY taxes will be raised under Pres. Trump. And you can take that to the bank.

He's not gong to like doing it - if he survives this years election, which seems unlikely, since he has screwed up big-time on dealing the Covid-19 epidemic - but he wouldn't have a lot of choice.

And if you think high taxes haven't impacted Germany and the rest of Europe, you have a SECOND think coming - they were in virtual recession prior to the COVID crisis.

Nobody's economy was growing as fast as it should have been. It's an interesting question as to what was actually going on. There certainly wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with it, since they were exporting roughly as much as the USA despite have only a quarter of the population.

You obviously live in a libtard fantasy land from which you can't escape - hello Hotel California!

In reality I live in the real world and you live in some right-wing fantasy bubble where Trump is going to be re-elected.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Hardly. It was Pres. Trump's decisive action in banning travel from China that saved us from a much worse fate.

Rubbish. He didn't ban travel from anywhere else when it could have helped, and when the epidemic got under way in the US he was very slow to call for the kind of lock-down that was known to be able to slow the spread of infection, and if done right and backed up by vigorous contact tracing and isolation of potentially infected people, to stop it dead.

With China ans South Korea's examples of how to do it right already available, you've now got four times a many people infected as China had, and the number of new cases every day is still rising. It's not rising exponentially any more, but you really need it to go rapidly.

Italy and Spain have now managed to stabilise the number of new cases per day, and seem to be getting it to go down a bit.

Australia has got it's new cases per day down to a quarter of what it was when it peaked.

> How people view his actions in handling this crisis WILL decide the election - and right now they think he is doing a good job.

You may be a typical half-wit, but only a half-wit could think that the US is handling the crisis well.

> Biden is now lost in action and has become irrelevant.

It's not his performance that will be scrutinised.

> No, the world you live in is a demented fantasy land of the libtards. And you can keep it with you as far away from me as possible along with your puppet monarchs.

Who is supposed to be pulling the strings of our "puppet monarch"? And why would it matter if they were? She only gets to make decisions very occasionally, and they are mostly dictated by precedent.

You seem to be the one living in a demented fantasy land, one in which Trump has some faint chance of re-election.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com> wrote in
news:a625d99a-c2e6-4f0c-ad9a-6fda448e3cdb@googlegroups.com:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:38:53 PM UTC-7, Flyguy wrote:

It was Pres. Trump's decisive action in banning travel from China
that saved us from a much worse fate.

Yeah, maybe, but... it was travel to and from NY city that
produced the biggest cluster, and he wasn't on top of the
situation internally (which does matter), rather left that to the
states and municipalities... perhaps not wisely. Early
informative conferences were classified; your government locally
knew... very little from the national authorities.

The leader of the US response to Katrina says Trump failed big
time.

It is an MSNBC spot...
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N19rsIhMSPg>

How people view his actions in handling this crisis WILL decide
the election -

So, we should elect a North Korean handler? Or Chinese? They
were the early responders, with good effective strategies.

Well, I think you meant South Korea, but that aside... I trust the
So. Korean data and information. I do not trust that all of the data
from China is factual or complete. I do not trust the numbers Russia
is giving us either.

That said, the numbers China is giving us does provide some useable
data.

I wish other nations would give more localized numbers like here in
the US. China does break theirs down into provinces, but I dee no
other nation, not even Britain, providing John Hopkins with detailed
enough data, OR JH is not putting up the data of other nations in as
detailed a manner as that which they are for us.

No,
anyone who is mortal is opposed to a plague, and I'm not seeing
wisdom or leadership on any impressive scale from the Donald.

He had to interrupt his felony level treasury robbing cash
diversion of monies toward his wall to deal with us cake eaters.
He is right now all about making excuses for why he failed to get off
his fat ass two months ago, so yet more waste and failure is in the
pipe.

The CDC and health authorities he tried to defund are working
hard, under the imperious leader, but that argues not in his
favor.

And he even manipulates them. Do you really think the "make your
own masks" directive came from them? Or is it more likely that
Donald John Trump had them release that to make him look less stupid
for suggesting it? Watch the US Surgeon General describing to folks
with his little child voice about a 100% NON-medical procedure!

And we thought we were in his Twilight Zone for the last four
years... This sad universe he laughingly slapped us all into is
bigger than that. I want my old universe back. All this
dishonorable jackass Trump behavior going unchecked doesn't get it.

The criminal bastard should have been in prison decades ago!

Now, he has succeeded in becoming the worst leader in history
responsible for more deaths than any other, acting like he didn't do
it, and acting like he doesn't even care anyway. It is called
negligent homicide. But I think he knew. That makes it voluntary.

 

[Flyguy]

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 12:56:52 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 4:38:53 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 8:35:52 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 1:09:54 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 6:07:35 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:42:29 PM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 10:57:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 12:46:28 AM UTC+11, bloggs.fre....@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 2:08:34 PM UTC-4, speff wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2020 13:15:50 UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

China has done a fantastic job containing this to Hubei. No city outside Hubei got more than about 500 cases due to aggressive contact tracing of something like a million people, using a staff of something like 5,000 people
working full time.

They are being very, very cautious in permitting businesses to re-open, so
I don't think we're going to see any major fumbles. Truly belt and suspenders. Masks are required, hand sanitizers are required. Various
other requirements for the businesses.

You can't get onto the subway without a clean bill of health. You can't
get into your own apartment without the security guard checking your ID
and temperature. If someone does turn up sick, they quarantine the whole
section that used the stairwell. Travel requires a "green" health check.
They also use travel history (to buy a train ticket you have to scan
your ID on the vending machine). They were able to identify every rider on a 4 hour bus journey using the CCTV security camera and show that the virus can infect over a much longer distance than previously thought.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074351/coronavirus-can-travel-twice-far-official-safe-distance-and-stay

South Korea and Taiwan have also been able to keep it out of their major
cities by using less invasive methods. All good examples of competent public health protection and they had to act fast and make decisions on the fly.

More detailed China info here: https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia
(use Chrome to translate, the English version doesn't have the domestic detail)

U.S. couldn't coordinate that kind of response in a million years. Wonder if that has to do with civil service in Asia being among the elite, whereas in U.S. it is ....errrr.... non-elite.

It probably could, and the surveillance technology to make it work is probably in place and working, but US politicians would prefer to see a couple of million Americans die of Covid-19 than admit they were invading the privacy of everybody who votes for them (and against them) just as relentlessly as the Chinese do.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Video images are not a biometric. In the U.S. law enforcement can't even use them for probable cause. They do use them for probable identification and then proceed to develop probable cause using conventional methodology to gather evidence that leads to a conviction. Most of this work is done at the local level.
U.S. can't even test the population for infection, so it's unlikely any kind of mass location tracking will materialize any time soon. And if they ever do start using one it will almost certainly involve their favorite tool, the ankle bracelet.
Money is tight at the federal level and it will only get tighter with time. They're pushing the envelope on accumulating debt with the FY2020 deficit approaching $4T and a similar expenditure for 2021. I'm pretty sure it will be much higher when they fully realize the totality of tax revenue loss compounded by massive giveaways for bailouts, unemployment bailouts, really expensive social welfare stop gap measures, and now developing massive bailouts for people defaulting on their financial obligations. And because of the extreme mismanagement of the epidemic making remediation ten times as expensive as it should be, as well as their ingrained idiotic belief that impulse spending massive amounts of money fixes everything, the idiots will end up doing far more damage than the virus.

The one consolation is that they will have to start collecting more in taxes from the rich, which US governments since Reagan have shied off big-time.

The US collects a good less of the US GDP in taxes - Pikkety says 30% - than most other advanced industrial countries.

Sweden collects 55%, and Germany about 45%. It isn't remotely wrecking their economies, as our resident right-wingers insist has to happen.

Trump and his administration will hate it, but they aren't going to have any choice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

If you think you will be consoled then you have ANOTHER think coming - there is NO WAY taxes will be raised under Pres. Trump. And you can take that to the bank.

He's not gong to like doing it - if he survives this years election, which seems unlikely, since he has screwed up big-time on dealing the Covid-19 epidemic - but he wouldn't have a lot of choice.

And if you think high taxes haven't impacted Germany and the rest of Europe, you have a SECOND think coming - they were in virtual recession prior to the COVID crisis.

Nobody's economy was growing as fast as it should have been. It's an interesting question as to what was actually going on. There certainly wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with it, since they were exporting roughly as much as the USA despite have only a quarter of the population.

You obviously live in a libtard fantasy land from which you can't escape - hello Hotel California!

In reality I live in the real world and you live in some right-wing fantasy bubble where Trump is going to be re-elected.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Hardly. It was Pres. Trump's decisive action in banning travel from China that saved us from a much worse fate.

Rubbish. He didn't ban travel from anywhere else when it could have helped, and when the epidemic got under way in the US he was very slow to call for the kind of lock-down that was known to be able to slow the spread of infection, and if done right and backed up by vigorous contact tracing and isolation of potentially infected people, to stop it dead.

With China ans South Korea's examples of how to do it right already available, you've now got four times a many people infected as China had, and the number of new cases every day is still rising. It's not rising exponentially any more, but you really need it to go rapidly.

Italy and Spain have now managed to stabilise the number of new cases per day, and seem to be getting it to go down a bit.

Australia has got it's new cases per day down to a quarter of what it was when it peaked.

How people view his actions in handling this crisis WILL decide the election - and right now they think he is doing a good job.

You may be a typical half-wit, but only a half-wit could think that the US is handling the crisis well.

Biden is now lost in action and has become irrelevant.

It's not his performance that will be scrutinised.

No, the world you live in is a demented fantasy land of the libtards. And you can keep it with you as far away from me as possible along with your puppet monarchs.

Who is supposed to be pulling the strings of our "puppet monarch"? And why would it matter if they were? She only gets to make decisions very occasionally, and they are mostly dictated by precedent.

You seem to be the one living in a demented fantasy land, one in which Trump has some faint chance of re-election.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

YAAAAWWWWWWNNNNNNNNN...

Your insults are SO repetitious and BORING - someone of higher intelligence would come up with new material.

 

[Flyguy]

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 12:40:30 AM UTC-7, whit3rd wrote:

On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:38:53 PM UTC-7, Flyguy wrote:

It was Pres. Trump's decisive action in banning travel from China that saved us from a much worse fate.

Yeah, maybe, but... it was travel to and from NY city that produced the biggest cluster,
and he wasn't on top of the situation internally (which does matter), rather left that
to the states and municipalities... perhaps not wisely. Early informative conferences
were classified; your government locally knew... very little from the national authorities.

How people view his actions in handling this crisis WILL decide the election -

So, we should elect a North Korean handler? Or Chinese? They were the
early responders, with good effective strategies. No, anyone who is mortal is
opposed to a plague, and I'm not seeing wisdom or leadership on any impressive
scale from the Donald. The CDC and health authorities he tried to defund are
working hard, under the imperious leader, but that argues not in his favor.

I see that you are in complete denial - the infection came from China, not NY. Once travelers from China reached the US it was spread around the country by people who infected other people who infected other people who... The Chicomm delay in admitting to the source AND contagious nature of the virus has led us to where we are today.

I don't even know if you are a US citizen and, if you are, if you will vote.. Assuming that you are and you will, you can vote for whomever you please, including yourself. But your vote will not decide the election - what I described will. Libtards will NEVER vote for President Trump, so they won't decide the election. But many others with open minds will - as it should be.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 3:47:35 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:

On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 12:56:52 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 4:38:53 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 8:35:52 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 1:09:54 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 6:07:35 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 11:42:29 PM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday, April 3, 2020 at 10:57:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 12:46:28 AM UTC+11, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 2:08:34 PM UTC-4, speff wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2020 13:15:50 UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

<snip>

You seem to be the one living in a demented fantasy land, one in which Trump has some faint chance of re-election.

YAAAAWWWWWWNNNNNNNNN...

Your insults are SO repetitious and BORING - someone of higher intelligence would come up with new material.

Why would I waste it on you? That wasn't an insult, incidentally, but a simple statement of fact. That is exactly what you look like from my point of view.

I'm aware that it isn't a point of view you share, and the interesting question is how many other peculiarly retarded half-wits do share you point of view.

We will find out in November, if the US sense of self-preservation hasn't kicked in before then.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney