CORONA Main Coronavirus thread

I got a call from a survey company yesterday. I usually say no thank you and hang up if I even answer the phone when they call but I had a hunch it was going to be political and I was in the mood to give Pres Trump a plus in his column so I told the woman to proceed. Yep! It was about the election, Biden vs. Trump, and how did I rate Trump's approach to COVID. She said it would only take a few minutes but I was on the phone for a little over 20 minutes. The questions were all skewed towards orange-man bad so I asked her if this was paid for by the Biden campaign and she said she didn't know, they don't tell the phone operators who the survey is from, just give them the questions and the phone numbers. She was also calling from the Phillipines so doubt was vested in our election either way. I told her I approved of everything Trump did and is doing with regards to covid. That is not entirely true - I think he's doing great now, but I think he dropped the ball early on - but heck if I was going to tell the Biden campaign that ! Lots of emphasis on whether or not the economy was more important or keeping everyone safe, should people go back to work or be locked in, did I know anyone who had it (this was a good question, I imagine if you don't know anyone, you're more likely to say open it up and if you do know people, you're more likely to say keep it closed), also asked about church attendance and level of education.... Anyway, it was an interesting experience, and I was glad to do it for our president, but that survey was really biased in how the questions were being asked (which I pointed out to her with each biased question).

HD

Yes, There Are Tradeoffs Between Disease Prevention & Economic Destruction

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 13:35

Authored by Claus Wiemann Frølund via The Mises Institute,

The COVID-19 pandemic has really highlighted how differently economists and noneconomists think. All over the world, variations of the same discussion have taken place over the last week or so. It goes as follows.

An economist discusses the cost of the governmental responses to the pandemic and is quickly met with accusations of cynically trying to "put a price on a life." The economist camp tries to explain its reasoning while the noneconomist camp is horrified that anyone would "let old people die to protect the rich" or "prioritize economy over health."




What is really going on here is that economists and noneconomists have vastly different mindsets. Economists are constantly thinking in tradeoffs. It is second nature. It lies at the very core of economics. All of the problems economists attempt to solve involve various possible choices and finding the most optimal one.

This is based on the understanding that we live in a world of scarcity. All means are scarce, so allocating them to serve certain ends must necessarily leave other ends unsatisfied. Economists attempt to ensure that scarce resources are used efficiently. This is not as simple as putting two numbers on a piece of paper and choosing the largest one. All choices happen under uncertainty. We do not have full knowledge, and as such there is always the possibility of making the wrong choice.

The concept of opportunity costs is one of the first things budding economists are taught. The benefit of every action should be weighed against the missed benefit of the action not taken. Opportunity costs are by definition unseen and thus can be easily overlooked.

Notice that the concept of priorities has deliberately not been introduced so far. Economists and noneconomists alike are generally looking for the choices that will bring the highest amount of human well-being, now and in the future. In this case, economists are questioning whether the extensive actions taken by governments to limit the spread of COVID-19 are hurting the economy too much. Now this is not because the economists are worried about the bank accounts of the richest people in the world, but because economic depressions carry a plethora of bad effects and limit our future options. It is well established that economic depressions lead to more stress-related deaths and suicides. But utilizing our scarce resources to battle COVID-19 at all costs, thus sacrificing our economic well-being and limiting our future growth, also means that we will be relatively poorer in the future and may then be unable to save as many lives then as in an alternative scenario where we do not use such drastic measures against the pandemic.

This basically equates to a trolley problem, the ethical thought experiment in which a runaway train is about to run over five people. The only way to save them is to actively divert the train to a sidetrack, killing another person in the progress. This, of course, represents a clash between utilitarianism and deontology such as Kantianism. It seems that noneconomists, met with discussions about the tradeoffs of the COVID-19 response, unwittingly refuse to acknowledge the limitations of the trolley problem. “We should save everyone—today and tomorrow!” But just as we cannot make the trolley fly and avoid either proposed outcome, we cannot at the same time commit all of our means to multiple ends. There simply has to be a tradeoff. It is no less of a law of nature than gravity.

What many economists these days are imploring is that the decision-makers remember this and do not blindly push all the chips to the middle of the COVID-19 table, with no concern for other valued ends. If they evaluate the benefit of the current efforts and find that they do indeed outweigh the cost, including the unseen opportunity cost, then great! Sharing the analysis with the public will most likely help convince the skeptics that the current course is the right one.
To conclude: no, economists are not cynical bastards who are so blindly obsessed with the stock market that they do not care whether your grandmother dies.

They, like everybody else, want to maximize human well-being. In general, when met with an opinion that seems crazy, there are two options: try to understand the argument or assume that the other person is stupid and/or evil.
These days, too many people are choosing the latter.

And for the record, I know this is hurting our economy, but I think safety comes first. I have read all the hysterical (woo) op-eds that this is not about a disease, it's about a big brother takeover. And/or that the economy will never recover. We recovered from the Great Depression, we recovered from 9-11 we recovered from 2008. We will recover from this too, in some form or another. And we have been losing our civil liberties all along, having nothing to do with COVID. The extreme steps being taken now are not going to be permanent and are not going to be part of what will eventually happen to our once great country. Restaurants will reopen, sporting events will reopen, stores will reopen. It will go back to normal. We will lose our civil liberties because we have generations of kids who are communists and who don't understand or appreciate our liberty and will willingly give it away. They're going to vote it in when they become the majority. And because they are dead set on developing technologies that steal our privacy and are relying more and more on them for their everyday use. But it won't be because you can't go to a store to buy a game right now. Or to the beach or to a park. These things will pass. Give our president some credit. He is not a NWO stooge.

HD

US Treasury To Ask For $200 Billion More In Small Business Loans

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 12:08

Amid a surge in demand for the first tranche, the US Treasury is preparing to ask Congress for a further $200 billion for the small business lending program, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.


This would increase the total size of the so-called Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to $550 billion.

As WaPo notes, Banks and the Small Business Administration have been overwhelmed by applications since the program began operating on Friday, leading President Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) - who authored the program - and others to predict the need for more funds.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday said he would work with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.):

"Congress needs to act with speed and total focus to provide more money for this uncontroversial bipartisan program. I will work with Secretary Mnuchin and Leader Schumer and hope to approve further funding for the Paycheck Protection Program by unanimous consent or voice vote during the next scheduled Senate session on Thursday," McConnell said in a statement.

Click to expand...

The fact that Treasury would make the request on just the third day of the program's existence underscores the surging demand for businesses to obtain financing as many of them struggle to avoid closing.

Helicopter money is truly here...

Ragnarok said:

I didn't say anything was wrong with it... Just laughing at how things have changed as I type on my computer that has 2 TB of memory...

I remember hearing from someone that 64MB would be more than anyone could ever use in their life...

Click to expand...

I remember when Bill Gates said that it would take you a lifetime to fill up a ten megabyte drive. Hell, I can sneeze and fill up a 20 megabyte with a .wav file.

The Global Food Supply-Chain Wasn't Designed For This

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 11:30

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

In the early 1980s, doctors and medical researchers around the world were confounded by the growing number of young, otherwise healthy patients who were dying of rare infections that typically only occurred in people with very weak immune systems.

The situation was so alarming that the CDC in the United States set up a special task force in 1982 to study the condition and stop its spread.

By 1983 the medical community had found the answer: they discovered a terrifying new retrovirus that utterly and permanently vanquished the human immune system.

This retrovirus eventually became known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus– HIV. And nearly four decades later, while there has been substantial progress in treatment and prevention, there is still no vaccine.

Then there’s shingles – an infection caused by the varicella-zoster virus– which is brutally painful for older adults.

GlaxoSmithKline produces a vaccine for this virus called Shingrix that took them more than 10 years to develop and test. And the company has stated repeatedly that they are overwhelmed with demand: hundreds of millions of people want the vaccine.

A few months ago, Glaxo announced that they already reached maximum production capacity of the vaccine, and they’ll have to build a new bioreactor facility just to increase production to ~20 million units per year.

That new facility won’t be online until 2024.

Obviously the novel Coronavirus is different. Its biology is different, the circumstances are different.

But there does seem to be a prevailing attitude worldwide that there will be a vaccine ‘within 12-18 months.’

We can certainly hope so. Fingers crossed.

But this “12-18 month” estimate has been repeated so many times by politicians, reporters, etc. that the public now views it as a foregone conclusion.

And there seems to be zero consideration given to the possibility that, maybe just maybe, vaccine development could take a lot longer.

Or perhaps, even if a vaccine is rapidly developed, that it would take at least five years to produce, transport, and administer BILLIONS of vaccines.

Think about it– Glaxo will spend the next four years building a new facility just to be able to produce 10-20 million annual units of its Shingles vaccine.

How many biotech facilities worldwide will be needed to produce billions of coronavirus vaccines?

And even if existing production centers are able to quickly switch from producing other drugs and start producing coronavirus vaccines– what will be the opportunity cost?

If the world manages to be able to produce billions of vaccines, who will be left to produce cancer drugs? Or antibiotics? Or the countless other life-saving drugs that people depend on?

I’m not writing all of this to be negative. Far from it. And it’s important to remember that absolutely every scenario is on the table right now, including positive and favorable ones.

But there are clearly a number of reasons why this pandemic could last much longer than most people probably think. So it’s prudent to be physically, mentally, and financially prepared for that reality.

If this virus has taught us anything, it’s that tomorrow can be radically different than today.

This goes against some of our most basic human tendencies, what psychologists call ‘cognitive bias’.

The bottom line is that our brains cling to the idea that tomorrow is going to be just like today. And we have a very difficult time accepting rapid change.

And even when radical changes do take place and we eventually become accustomed to our new realities, we still cling to the belief that things can’t get any worse.

They can. Again, anything is possible now. All scenarios are on the table. So it would be dangerous to assume that it can’t get any worse, or that the pandemic won’t drag on for a longer period of time.

Back in early February before the virus became a global concern, I suggested that you stock up on food and masks before it all hit the fan.

I want to suggest the same thing again today– at least the food part.
It is entirely possible that we could see supply chain disruptions. It’s not a certainty—nothing is certain right now. But there are pretty obvious risks.

Chances are high that whatever you ate for breakfast this morning probably originated in some far off place.

The food on your plate can easily travel hundreds if not thousands of miles before it arrives to your table, starting off in a farmer’s field, to an inspection center, and then to the port where it is shipped/trucked/railed/flown to a regional distribution center and ultimately to your grocery store.

The global food supply chain is incredibly complex and not especially resilient; I’ve seen this firsthand over the past few years from running a large agriculture business.



I don’t think it’s likely that the global supply chain would shut down completely. But there’s definitely a risk for hiccups, i.e. slowdowns that cause delays and sporadic shortages.

This kind of scarcity could create some high stress situations in the grocery store; just take a look at Black Friday videos on YouTube to get a sense of what I’m talking about.

It’s best to avoid that kind of environment altogether. So I’d definitely encourage you to stock up on food, and remain stocked up.

This isn’t about being paranoid. We can hope for the best, but still acknowledge this pandemic could last a lot longer, and understand that the supply chain wasn’t designed to function under such stress.

Nothing is certain. But stocking up on food is a simple precaution to offset some obvious risks

Some Bad News From JPM: This Is What Happens After We Pass The Virus Peak

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 05:55

Yesterday, when giving an update on the global coronavirus infection curve, and highlighting where various nations currently reside on the curve, we said what has become conventional wisdom, namely that "with every passing day, the world - most of which is currently on lock down - gets closer to the infection inflection point, and as the updated "corona curve" chart shows, all the nations that were in the exponential rise phase (acceleration), are now moving into the stage of infection growth rate slowdown (accumulation), suggesting that a peak for most countries is now just a matter of time, at which point the number of new cases will start slowing down aggressively. This means that while US cases continue to soar, the light at the end of the tunnel is now visible."



Some, such as JPMorgan's delightfully permabullish quant Marko Kolanovic (who is so keen on giving flashbacks to his notes from x weeks ago, if not so much his "once in a decade" call to buy value/short low-vol stocks last July), ran with this data to its extreme conclusion, writing today that his models "have indicated that social distancing is working and that the apex of the pandemic will come sooner and require significantly less peak hospitalizations than projected by the models used by government officials at the time."

In short, it's all downhill from here on the corona-curve... literally, which is great news if that was all there is to it as every analyst-trader-amateur-epidemiologist jumps to conclude.

Unfortunately, it turns out that there is much more to it what happens next than "conventional wisdom" hot takes and amateur Wall Street virologists would have you believe, because in a separate not from a far more erudite JPM analyst - at least when it comes to coronavirus analysis - the bank's MW Kim writes that the first apex is just the beginning, and then - as China is learning now as it reports the most new cases in a month...


... it gets much worse again as the second infection wave is unleashed, then the third, and so on.

So what's really going on?

First let's do the good news, which as JPM's MW Kim notes, have to do with the slowdown in global infections which grew 62% w/w to 1,275,542, while infection growth momentum has slowed compared to ~95% w/w ten days ago.


Furthermore, as we reported yesterday, several of the larger impacted countries are now in the slower infection growth rate accumulating stage (the latest curve chart as of this morning is shown below)...


... and JPM is optimistic that post Easter holidays, market focus could likely shift towards "infection peak"/ "recovery statistics" from the current ‘daily new additions’.

Now, and as is customary, are the not so good news: MW Kim cautions that his findings on COVID-19 so far include (1) the lack of a vaccine makes it difficult to clear the virus; (2) social distancing is an expensive strategy in terms of economic/ social cost perspective; (3) it may perhaps prove challenging to build popular acceptance of stricter social distancing for more than a month.

Therefore, and this is the key part, JPMorgan (at least the non-quant part of JPMorgan) "cannot rule out the possibility that global infection curves propagate secondary waves, shaped similar to seismic aftershocks until a vaccine is broadly available."

Some more details from JPM on how and why "reducing new contacts” aka social distancing has been the primary containment strategy:

Most countries so far have taken the strategy of reducing the virus transmission rate in the community to slow the infection curve. We have proposed that COVID- 19 seems to have a higher basic reproduction number (Ro: 2) compared to the Spanish Flu (Ro: 1.5-1.8). Also, it could take 12-16 months for a vaccine to be under mass production. As a result, the spread of COVID-19 could potentially paralyze the hospital system in a short period. Majority of countries have implemented strong social distancing measures including city lockdowns to reduce the pressure on hospital capacities. This way, new contact with potential infection pool could be reduced which would lead to smaller new infection additions.

Click to expand...

Meanwhile, it allows time for governments to build up healthcare capacities such as intensive care units, which could then minimize the mortality risks.

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So far so good, and social distancing does indeed show success. But, as JPM asks, the question is if authorities will face challenges in acceptance to extend strict social-distancing for longer periods (say over a month).

Therefore, the bank's analyst cannot rule out the possibility that successive global infection curves form until a vaccine is broadly available. The strategy then may shift to society living with COVID-19, but minimizing infection scale/scope.

Which then brings us to the $64 trillion (roughly in line with global GDP) question: is the coming "second reinfection wave" going to be smaller or bigger, similar to the Spanish Flu pandemic, where deaths in the second wave were 5x greater than those from the first?



Here JPM believes that next waves could be at a smaller amplitude with lower mortality rate potential compared to the current first wave. This is due to (1) strong risk awareness among stakeholders; (2) faster government response potential at the infection tipping point; and (3) enhanced risk manual at the containment stage. However, even a substantially reduced amplitude of wave 2 (and 3 and 4), suggest that ongoing economic shutdowns will be recurring feature of life for quarters if not years!


The amplitude could be higher, however, a la the Spanish Flu pandemic, if it turns out that the life cycle of the coronavirus is far longer than assumed. As JPM notes, the COVID-19 infection life cycle could last for 4-5 weeks including a 2-week incubation period.

The bottom line, and somewhat counterintuitively, the sooner the world declares victory against the Wu Flu, the faster the general population will rush back into "social undistancing", sparking countless new case clusters as the infection restarts from scratch, forcing authorities to re-establish social distancing once again, and so on, as the entire process repeats from square one.

Haha


Hundreds Of Iranians Dead, Thousands In Hospital After Consuming Fake Coronavirus Cure
By Ryan SaavedraDailyWire.com
Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
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Hundreds of Iranians have been killed and thousands more hospitalized after they drank high-concentration alcohol because they falsely believed that it could cure coronavirus.

“More than 600 people have died after attempting the cure and some 3,000 are now in hospital, Iranian judicial spokesman Gholam Hossein Esmaili said Tuesday,” The Daily Mail reported.

“The numbers are very high and are beyond our expectations,” Esmaili said. “Alcohol consumption is not a cure but can be lethal.”
“A number of people have been arrested… and we will deal with them decisively,” Esmaili continued. “They must be held accountable for their criminal acts, for causing death and damage to citizens.”
The Associated Press reported on March 27 that hundreds of Iranians had been killed from drinking “industrial alcohol.”
“Iranian media report nearly 300 people have been killed and more than 1,000 sickened so far by ingesting methanol across the Islamic Republic, where drinking alcohol is banned and where those who do rely on bootleggers,” the AP reported. “An Iranian doctor helping the country’s Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Friday the problem was even greater, giving a death toll of around 480 with 2,850 people sickened.”
It is unclear whether the deaths reported by The Daily Mail were new deaths or if they were just updated numbers from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The AP added, “The poisonings come as fake remedies spread across social media in Iran, where people remain deeply suspicious of the government after it downplayed the crisis for days before it overwhelmed the country.”
On March 16, Reuters reported that Dr. Rick Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) new Emergencies Program, said that the coronavirus outbreak was much worse in Iran than the Islamic Republic was reporting.
“Iran has the third highest case load after China and Italy, with nearly 13,000 confirmed cases, according to WHO data,” Reuters reported. “However, Brennan, who just returned from a mission to Iran last week, said that the number of cases reported could represent only about a fifth of the real numbers.”
“We’ve said the weakest link in their chain is the data,” Brennan said. “They are rapidly increasing their ability to test and so the numbers will go up.”
The Daily Wire previously reported:

Back in late February, Iran’s government claimed that only 388 people had been infected and that 34 people had died from the coronavirus, which originated in China.
At the time, the BBC reported that the real number of deaths was believed to be at least 210, a number that came from sources inside the country’s health system.
New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi reported at the same time: “Real infected numbers about 10,000 to 15,000, says head of health committee of Tehran city council.”

Click to expand...

Farnaz Fassihi

✔@farnazfassihi
https://twitter.com/farnazfassihi/status/1233417739668262912

#Iran coronavirus Friday:
Tolls climbs 34 dead & 388 infected.
Likely spread to 22 provinces.
Peak will come next weeks as tests kits are more available, health minister.
Real infected numbers about 10,000 to 15,000, says head of health committee of Tehran city council.
#كرونا

264
11:44 AM - Feb 28, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy

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245 people are talking about this




Foreign Policy highlighted just a few ways of how the coronavirus spread rapidly throughout Iran: “They include the government trying to hide the outbreak; insufficient testing capacity; refusal to cordon off cities and Shiite shrines; superstition, politicization, and propaganda blaming Iran’s usual enemies; and the lack of seriousness in dealing with the crisis.”

Ragnarok said:

NOT A GOOD IDEA!!!

Click to expand...

The chinese, led by their communist cult of death, have no conscience, no morals, no ethics, no values, and no desire to accept anything less, than total world domination. It is a scourge upon the face of the earth. History has shown chinese dynasties to be inherently corrupt- for it's only a matter of time, before they revert to type, and the corrupt tyrannies

As individuals, the chinee is no different from any other. However, as a civilization, their "tribes" or "families" seem to be predisposed towards all manner of tyranny. They should not ever be allowed to coalesce into groups of political or military power. For more than 5,000 years, the chinee have sought to enslave all who are not of them. Xenophobic, arrogant, vicious, and murderous, they will stop at nothing to reach their goals. Plans of a century duration are not uncommon. They ALWAYS take the long view.

Just a few things for folks to think about...

The chinee haven't changed, and one day, they'll come here...

Until then, and from now until you leave this mortal coil, pack very heavy, walk light, take no shit from anybody, and never, ever trust the chinee...

OA

Nowski said:

I posted previously, that all hell would eventually come,
once Corona started its march, through the major metro area
inter city ghettos.

More information is needed, as to the group of Africans that
are getting Corona.

Remember, the vast majority of Africans in the major metro areas,
do not work, many of them never have worked.

Is it the Africans who do work, that are coming down with Corona,
or is it the ones that are seen jumping up and down on cop cars?

IMHO, its their culture, that is the primary reason that the
KIA numbers for the Africans are higher than for Whites.

Its Katrina on steroids, and the result will be the same.

Please be safe everyone.

Regards to all.

Nowski

Click to expand...

Remember my fictional "fiction" novel that I never wrote and I'm really glad I didn't now - the one where the "bad guys" distribute a virus in a working-class minority and poor white communities that has a long incubation period, early symptoms like a cold or flu, is infective before symptoms appear and by the time people started dropping like flies the janitors, home-health aides, fast-food workers, grocery clerks, orderlies, nurses, bus drivers and small business owners (like car shops or liquor stores) would already have infected thousands if not millions?

The reason is that the people that DO WORK in those communities (and I've worked beside them as waitresses, day-care providers, and civil servants) tend to do that sort of hands-on, low-paid, often uninsured work and the best jobs are held by people like NURSES and BUS DRIVERS, along with elementary school teachers and daycare center operators or restaurant managers/cooks.

Now add into that, all their unemployed often multigenerational welfare relatives with very poor diets - they may be obese as heck but the diet is horrific from a nutritional point of view - mostly refined carbs, sugars, fat salt and highly processed - that's what you can get at the local place at the end of the block, I had a job for a period of time in that sort of area and that was as true 35 years ago as it is now.

Finally, the small business owners in such an area are it Hispanic in East Los Angeles, African American in Atlanta, Native American just off the Res or White in South Mississippi (fast food joint services the casino trades) you not only probably have no health insurance, but you will also lose both your business and possibly your home if you get sick and have a major hospital bill - so people just don't go to the doctor unless they are nearly dead.

In fact, the one thing most of these jobs for working people in these communities have in common besides low-wages is with a few exceptions for a civil servant or permanent bus driver positions, there is no medical insurance at all.

So it is no surprise that Corona-Chan/COVID-19 is becoming as deadly as it is in the minority and poverty-stricken areas, especially the inner cities and rural South.

The only difference between it and my mythical disease spread by "Bad Guys" (terrorists, aliens, mad scientists, whomever) is that the kill rate is a lot lower than you would want for a novel.

But otherwise, it fits the pattern perfectly and people who study this stuff in real life or as a hobby on they affect historical events, are well aware of this and suspect it from the days when the first reports started to come out of China.

Heliobas Disciple said:

I got a call from a survey company yesterday. I usually say no thank you and hang up if I even answer the phone when they call but I had a hunch it was going to be political and I was in the mood to give Pres Trump a plus in his column so I told the woman to proceed. Yep! It was about the election, Biden vs. Trump, and how did I rate Trump's approach to COVID. She said it would only take a few minutes but I was on the phone for a little over 20 minutes. The questions were all skewed towards orange-man bad so I asked her if this was paid for by the Biden campaign and she said she didn't know, they don't tell the phone operators who the survey is from, just give them the questions and the phone numbers. She was also calling from the Phillipines so doubt was vested in our election either way. I told her I approved of everything Trump did and is doing with regards to covid. That is not entirely true - I think he's doing great now, but I think he dropped the ball early on - but heck if I was going to tell the Biden campaign that ! Lots of emphasis on whether or not the economy was more important or keeping everyone safe, should people go back to work or be locked in, did I know anyone who had it (this was a good question, I imagine if you don't know anyone, you're more likely to say open it up and if you do know people, you're more likely to say keep it closed), also asked about church attendance and level of education.... Anyway, it was an interesting experience, and I was glad to do it for our president, but that survey was really biased in how the questions were being asked (which I pointed out to her with each biased question).

HD

Click to expand...

Some of these ‘polls’ are designed not to get information from the people polled but the questions are manufactured to push a specific narrative into the persons consciousness.

Why does fake news continue to repeat proven lies and distortions they think if you repeat the lie enough it will reinforce to many sheeple the lie as truth.

I would think the high infection rate in black community's may also be attributed to the same underlying issue of high crime, tendency to loot and high out of wedlock births. Low impulse control is a major scocial factor. I'll refer to it as LIC. Fighting the urge not to touch your face with your hands must be very difficult for someone who has societal LIC.

I want it....I steal it. I want it....I screw it. I want you dead....I kill you. My eyes itch....I rub them.

It could be something as simple as that coupled with co-morbidities.

naegling62 said:

I would think the high infection rate in black community's may also be attributed to the same underlying issue of high crime, tendency to loot and high out of wedlock births. Low impulse control is a major scocial factor. I'll refer to it as LIC. Fighting the urge not to touch your face with your hands must be very difficult for someone who has societal LIC.

I want it....I steal it. I want it....I screw it. I want you dead....I kill you. My eyes itch....I rub them.

It could be something as simple as that coupled with co-morbidities.

Click to expand...

That is true of the real underclass (happens in Ireland among white folks in Limerick its a nasty cultural issue) but the serious overcrowding also helps spread the disease that the gainfully employed members of the community then take outside of it.

I heard an interview a few years ago with an African American millionaire who had a side business building homes and providing mortgages for working people in really bad neighborhoods and he said something like:

"I knew growing up here that all over the place there were good, hard-working people that got up early, unlocked their locked apartment doors, did their job and came hope to lock their doors again and pray they would be safe."

He also went on to say they existed in every low-income community he had worked with and he said those people can handle a mortgage and are a good business investment for the right company, but the big guys take one look at their address and won't even talk to them.

Hmmm.............









Nigeria:

OldArcher said:

The chinese, led by their communist cult of death, have no conscience, no morals, no ethics, no values, and no desire to accept anything less, than total world domination. It is a scourge upon the face of the earth. History has shown chinese dynasties to be inherently corrupt- for it's only a matter of time, before they revert to type, and the corrupt tyrannies

As individuals, the chinee is no different from any other. However, as a civilization, their "tribes" or "families" seem to be predisposed towards all manner of tyranny. They should not ever be allowed to coalesce into groups of political or military power. For more than 5,000 years, the chinee have sought to enslave all who are not of them. Xenophobic, arrogant, vicious, and murderous, they will stop at nothing to reach their goals. Plans of a century duration are not uncommon. They ALWAYS take the long view.

Just a few things for folks to think about...

The chinee haven't changed, and one day, they'll come here...

Until then, and from now until you leave this mortal coil, pack very heavy, walk light, take no shit from anybody, and never, ever trust the chinee...

OA

Click to expand...

Texican said:

When in college from 69 thru 74, we used a card punch and card reader for input into main frame. Not only did you have to write the program, but punch it correctly. Debugging was a pain. Definitely a vast improvement today.

Cell phones now have faster and more computing power than that old main frame.

Texican....

Click to expand...

I seem to remember using Fortran on an IBM 360 back in the 1960's. . Manage to program in a continuous loop and lots of exciting things happened until somebody managed to shut down the machine.

Melodi said:

Remember my fictional "fiction" novel that I never wrote and I'm really glad I didn't now - the one where the "bad guys" distribute a virus in a working-class minority and poor white communities that has a long incubation period, early symptoms like a cold or flu, is infective before symptoms appear and by the time people started dropping like flies the janitors, home-health aides, fast-food workers, grocery clerks, orderlies, nurses, bus drivers and small business owners (like car shops or liquor stores) would already have infected thousands if not millions?

The reason is that the people that DO WORK in those communities (and I've worked beside them as waitresses, day-care providers, and civil servants) tend to do that sort of hands-on, low-paid, often uninsured work and the best jobs are held by people like NURSES and BUS DRIVERS, along with elementary school teachers and daycare center operators or restaurant managers/cooks.

Now add into that, all their unemployed often multigenerational welfare relatives with very poor diets - they may be obese as heck but the diet is horrific from a nutritional point of view - mostly refined carbs, sugars, fat salt and highly processed - that's what you can get at the local place at the end of the block, I had a job for a period of time in that sort of area and that was as true 35 years ago as it is now.

Finally, the small business owners in such an area are it Hispanic in East Los Angeles, African American in Atlanta, Native American just off the Res or White in South Mississippi (fast food joint services the casino trades) you not only probably have no health insurance, but you will also lose both your business and possibly your home if you get sick and have a major hospital bill - so people just don't go to the doctor unless they are nearly dead.

In fact, the one thing most of these jobs for working people in these communities have in common besides low-wages is with a few exceptions for a civil servant or permanent bus driver positions, there is no medical insurance at all.

So it is no surprise that Corona-Chan/COVID-19 is becoming as deadly as it is in the minority and poverty-stricken areas, especially the inner cities and rural South.

The only difference between it and my mythical disease spread by "Bad Guys" (terrorists, aliens, mad scientists, whomever) is that the kill rate is a lot lower than you would want for a novel.

But otherwise, it fits the pattern perfectly and people who study this stuff in real life or as a hobby on they affect historical events, are well aware of this and suspect it from the days when the first reports started to come out of China.

Click to expand...

And covid 19 has now been said to affect blacks more than whites ....

et2 said:

And covid 19 has now been said to affect blacks more than whites ....

Click to expand...

Maybe here, but I doubt that. Also, there are 750,000 cases currently in Europe. I'm sure most of them are white.

et2 said:

And covid 19 has now been said to affect blacks more than whites ....

Click to expand...

For what it's worth here is he latest percentages of racial breakdown of c19 in Alabama:

50 percent of patients are white; 37 percent are black. 11 percent unknown; 1.3 percent Asian and 2 percent are listed as other.

The population of Alabama is 68 percent white, 27 percent African American.

Krayola said:

CDC weighs loosening guidelines for some exposed to virus

Click to expand...

I’m seeing more and more of these articles but haven’t read howpeople are supposed to show the proof. it can’t be just verbal. Will we get official documents? Will they try to mark people?

Jeez !!





Read comments:

View: https://twitter.com/MarketWatch/status/1247854588432207872





Huh. I had no idea that Indians were boozers:

marsh said:

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Government To Decide What Items Are Essential Purchases And What Things You're Not Allowed To Buy

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 23:40

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
Living under lockdown restrictions, prevalent in nearly every state, is about to get a whole lot worse. The government in the United States and Canada has decided to take away the guesswork in the stores that are still open and decide for you what’s “essential” and what’s not.


When I have gone to the store to pick up groceries (I’m still getting fresh produce while I can), I also like to pick up a couple of things that are pleasant diversions: magazines, a crossword puzzle book, coloring pencils, some craft supplies. It’s nice to have some things that are enjoyable on hand to keep lockdown from feeling so grim and torturous. If the store is already open, getting a sunny yellow pillow for the living room is a pick-me-up, not a frivolous jaunt to a place I wasn’t already going. When we had a birthday in the family, we even picked up a few small gifts on our regular trip to the grocery store to provide a sense of normalcy.

But the days of getting a random item to brighten a family member’s day may be numbered. The government (at least in some places) wants to make this already unpleasant time as dismal as possible for us all.

Vermont has started a worrisome trend.
Vermont has decided to choose for you what is essential and what is not, banning the sale of non-essential items at stores like Target, Walmart, and Costco.



Retailers are asked to close certain areas of the stores, rope them off to deny access, or pull non-essentials from their shelves.

What’s considered non-essential?
The Burlington Free Press reports the following items have been deemed non-essential purchases:

• Arts and crafts items.
• Beauty supplies.
• Carpet and flooring.
• Clothes.
• Consumer electronics.
• Entertainment (books, music, movies).
• Furniture.
• Home and garden.
• Jewelry.
• Paint.
• Photo services.
• Sports equipment.
• Toys.

So a store you’re already at is telling you that grabbing some hand lotion to soothe your dry, cracked skin from the constant application of hand sanitizer is non-essential? Getting a book to read while you’re locked down is against the rules? You can’t do a home improvement project while you’re stuck at home?

I fail to see how this is going to stop the spread of a coronavirus if the shopper is already at the store and the employees are also already at the store.

In fact, it seems to me that this would be helpful to our gasping and dying economy. But what would I know? Dinesh Iyer, Assistant Professor of Management at Rutgers School of Business-Camden, says the stores don’t need our frivolous little purchases.





It’s rather curious how Iyer thinks us “common folk” will be able to do those things around the house and learn new skills without the supplies to do so.

One of the most alarming things is that garden supplies are considered non-essential.
Of all the times in the world you need most to plant a garden, now is the time. But in Vermont’s directive, even the sale of garden supplies is non-essential.

And readers shared this photo from a store in Vermont.


The government of Vermont says that it isn’t really accurate.


Okay. You can just buy them online…or can you?

Buying seeds online isn’t an option either.
Almost every seed company readers in the preparedness community have tried to make purchases from has said, sorry, but we’re just selling to commercial operations this year.

Johnny’s Select Seeds has the following announcement on their home page:

• At this time, we are accepting new orders only from commercial farmers shipping to the U.S. and Canada and international wholesale customers. We plan to resume taking orders from all customers on April 14th. This restriction applies to all orders placed via our website, phone, and email. This was a difficult decision and we apologize for the inconvenience.
• Commercial Farmers only: Please login to your website account before placing your order or call our contact center at 1-877-564-6697 for assistance. If you have forgotten your password, you can find information on resetting your password here.
• Orders placed with our standard shipping option prior to March 31st, 2020 may experience a shipment delay of 5–10 days. Commercial orders placed on or after March 31st, 2020 may experience a shipment delay of 1–2 days.
• You may experience a longer than usual response time when you phone in your order, call on us to answer growing questions, or email us to make inquiries.
• We have closed our retail store in Winslow, Maine, and will not be hosting farm tours until further notice.

So…you can’t get seeds from your local Walmart garden center if you’re in Vermont and you can’t order seeds from seed stores. Good luck with that garden you were hoping would help see you through this disaster unless you’ve already got seeds put back from previous years.

What can we expect?
I think it’s extremely likely that Vermont’s idea will catch on and spread across the country. Just like lockdowns began in a couple of areas then spread state by state, don’t be surprised when this trend does also. The province of Ontario in Canada has just closed all their hardware stores and is limiting purchases only to curbside pick-up. Here’s what you need to be prepared to see:

• Don’t expect that you’re going to be able to pop over to Lowes or Home Depot to pick up seedlings – or even seeds – for your summer garden.
• Don’t expect that you’ll be able to replace your children’s flipflops or sandals for the summer regardless of the growth of their feet – this could be considered “non-essential.”
• Don’t expect to be able to replace clothing for growing children – at least not in person.
• Don’t expect to get any summer toys for the kids to play with while they’re in the back-yard – non-essential.
• Don’t expect to be able to buy a bigger size of pants because you ate all your quarantine candy. You’re going to have to squeeze yourself into your old pants.
• Don’t expect to be able to get the fabric to make masks – remember? Craft supplies are non-essential.

Really, don’t expect anything. Because for some reason, it seems like governments want to make an already difficult and stressful time even worse by taking away the possibility for any kind of pleasant past-time unless you already have all the supplies you need for that.

This senseless crackdown not only makes things even more unpleasant, but it takes away even more streams of revenue for struggling businesses. And more than that, it’s limiting our ability to be as self-reliant as possible, leaving people to fight it out at the grocery store for dwindling resources with few options for creating our own food supplies.

Those living in Vermont have unfortunately missed their window for anything but mail order. For the rest of us, if there are some things you were hoping to get – be it new curtains, paint for the living room, tile for the bathroom, pots for your container garden, or the supplies to make a new chicken coop – you’d better get it now before your state follows the lead of Vermont.

Click to expand...

If you don’t have a good stock of seeds by now you are way behind.

Melodi said:

Remember my fictional "fiction" novel that I never wrote and I'm really glad I didn't now - the one where the "bad guys" distribute a virus in a working-class minority and poor white communities that has a long incubation period, early symptoms like a cold or flu, is infective before symptoms appear and by the time people started dropping like flies the janitors, home-health aides, fast-food workers, grocery clerks, orderlies, nurses, bus drivers and small business owners (like car shops or liquor stores) would already have infected thousands if not millions?

The reason is that the people that DO WORK in those communities (and I've worked beside them as waitresses, day-care providers, and civil servants) tend to do that sort of hands-on, low-paid, often uninsured work and the best jobs are held by people like NURSES and BUS DRIVERS, along with elementary school teachers and daycare center operators or restaurant managers/cooks.

Now add into that, all their unemployed often multigenerational welfare relatives with very poor diets - they may be obese as heck but the diet is horrific from a nutritional point of view - mostly refined carbs, sugars, fat salt and highly processed - that's what you can get at the local place at the end of the block, I had a job for a period of time in that sort of area and that was as true 35 years ago as it is now.

Finally, the small business owners in such an area are it Hispanic in East Los Angeles, African American in Atlanta, Native American just off the Res or White in South Mississippi (fast food joint services the casino trades) you not only probably have no health insurance, but you will also lose both your business and possibly your home if you get sick and have a major hospital bill - so people just don't go to the doctor unless they are nearly dead.

In fact, the one thing most of these jobs for working people in these communities have in common besides low-wages is with a few exceptions for a civil servant or permanent bus driver positions, there is no medical insurance at all.

So it is no surprise that Corona-Chan/COVID-19 is becoming as deadly as it is in the minority and poverty-stricken areas, especially the inner cities and rural South.

The only difference between it and my mythical disease spread by "Bad Guys" (terrorists, aliens, mad scientists, whomever) is that the kill rate is a lot lower than you would want for a novel.

But otherwise, it fits the pattern perfectly and people who study this stuff in real life or as a hobby on they affect historical events, are well aware of this and suspect it from the days when the first reports started to come out of China.

Click to expand...

The kill rate as far as we know right now may be lower, but I think we need to reserve judgement on this thing for a few years, so we have a chance to see what the long-term effects may be.

Also, I had a horrible thought this morning. This virus may not have been released deliberately, but now that the left has seen all of the ways they can use a pandemic to push their agenda, what if they decide it would be worth it to do a deliberate release of another one?

Kathleen

was

jward said:

...uhoh this calls for a math brain. If all deaths with CV present are recorded as CV deaths, but many are never tested and die of it, but don't get counted...what time will it be in NY city when the train leaves boston?

Bill Mitchell
@mitchellvii
7m

Just as I have been saying. This means we are using the "Italian Method." Only 12% of Italy's COVID-19 deaths were direct. This means as many as 88% of US recorded deaths are FAKE COVID. The whole mess is one giant scam.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1247732626733125633

View: https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/1247732626733125633?s=20

Click to expand...

I don’t understand this tweet. If a person had other conditions and they caught the virus and died, that would be because of the virus, yes? They wouldn’t have died otherwise. For example, if a person had diabetes or heart disease, they’d still be alive today if not for the disease. So how is that “fake” numbers???

TorahTips said:

Northwestern Medicine in Chicago just healed a person using ECMO. Essetially, they pumped the person's blood out, pumped oxygen in, and put it back in. Some time back we had talked about the theory that a blood issue was primary and the lung issue was secondary due to the lack of oxygen. There ya go....

Click to expand...

Well, to be fair, they *kept him alive* with ECMO, which apparently gave his body a chance to catch up and begin to heal.

Summerthyme

Bps1691 said:

Hum...

Had a chance to buy the stockpile of ventilators they needed and spent the money on other things

… now we are finding out that they sold 500 of the ones they had!!!

"A 2006 pandemic plan warned that New York City could be short as many as 9,500 ventilators. But the city only acquired a few hundred, which were ultimately scrapped because it couldn’t afford to maintain them"

How New York City’s Emergency Ventilator Stockpile Ended Up on the Auction Block

How New York City's Emergency Ventilator Stockpile Ended Up on the Auction Block

The city only acquired a few hundred ventilators it needed — which were ultimately scrapped because it couldn’t afford to maintain them.

www.rollingstone.com

In July 2006, with an aggressive and novel strain of the flu circulating in Asia and the Middle East, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a sweeping pandemic preparedness plan.

Using computer models to calculate how a disease could spread rapidly through the city’s five boroughs, experts concluded New York needed a substantial stockpile of both masks and ventilators. If the city confronted a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu, the experts found, it would face a “projected shortfall of between 2,036 and 9,454 ventilators.”

The city’s department of health, working with the state, was to begin purchasing ventilators and to “stockpile a supply of facemasks,” according to the report. Shortly after it was released, Bloomberg held a pandemic planning summit with top federal officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, now the face of the national coronavirus response.

In the end, the alarming predictions failed to spur action. In the months that followed, the city acquired just 500 additional ventilators as the effort to create a larger stockpile fizzled amid budget cuts.

Even those extra ventilators are long gone, the health department said on Sunday. The lifesaving devices broke down over time and were auctioned off by the city at least five years ago because the agency couldn’t afford to maintain them.

Click to expand...

Yeah, because providing free medical and legal services to illegal felons is expensive! Apparently, they believed their "Sanctuary City" status would give them protection from a pandemic...

Morons.

Summerthyme

marsh said:

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Yes, There Are Tradeoffs Between Disease Prevention & Economic Destruction

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 13:35

Authored by Claus Wiemann Frølund via The Mises Institute,

The COVID-19 pandemic has really highlighted how differently economists and noneconomists think. All over the world, variations of the same discussion have taken place over the last week or so. It goes as follows.

An economist discusses the cost of the governmental responses to the pandemic and is quickly met with accusations of cynically trying to "put a price on a life." The economist camp tries to explain its reasoning while the noneconomist camp is horrified that anyone would "let old people die to protect the rich" or "prioritize economy over health."




What is really going on here is that economists and noneconomists have vastly different mindsets. Economists are constantly thinking in tradeoffs. It is second nature. It lies at the very core of economics. All of the problems economists attempt to solve involve various possible choices and finding the most optimal one.

This is based on the understanding that we live in a world of scarcity. All means are scarce, so allocating them to serve certain ends must necessarily leave other ends unsatisfied. Economists attempt to ensure that scarce resources are used efficiently. This is not as simple as putting two numbers on a piece of paper and choosing the largest one. All choices happen under uncertainty. We do not have full knowledge, and as such there is always the possibility of making the wrong choice.

The concept of opportunity costs is one of the first things budding economists are taught. The benefit of every action should be weighed against the missed benefit of the action not taken. Opportunity costs are by definition unseen and thus can be easily overlooked.

Notice that the concept of priorities has deliberately not been introduced so far. Economists and noneconomists alike are generally looking for the choices that will bring the highest amount of human well-being, now and in the future. In this case, economists are questioning whether the extensive actions taken by governments to limit the spread of COVID-19 are hurting the economy too much. Now this is not because the economists are worried about the bank accounts of the richest people in the world, but because economic depressions carry a plethora of bad effects and limit our future options. It is well established that economic depressions lead to more stress-related deaths and suicides. But utilizing our scarce resources to battle COVID-19 at all costs, thus sacrificing our economic well-being and limiting our future growth, also means that we will be relatively poorer in the future and may then be unable to save as many lives then as in an alternative scenario where we do not use such drastic measures against the pandemic.

This basically equates to a trolley problem, the ethical thought experiment in which a runaway train is about to run over five people. The only way to save them is to actively divert the train to a sidetrack, killing another person in the progress. This, of course, represents a clash between utilitarianism and deontology such as Kantianism. It seems that noneconomists, met with discussions about the tradeoffs of the COVID-19 response, unwittingly refuse to acknowledge the limitations of the trolley problem. “We should save everyone—today and tomorrow!” But just as we cannot make the trolley fly and avoid either proposed outcome, we cannot at the same time commit all of our means to multiple ends. There simply has to be a tradeoff. It is no less of a law of nature than gravity.

What many economists these days are imploring is that the decision-makers remember this and do not blindly push all the chips to the middle of the COVID-19 table, with no concern for other valued ends. If they evaluate the benefit of the current efforts and find that they do indeed outweigh the cost, including the unseen opportunity cost, then great! Sharing the analysis with the public will most likely help convince the skeptics that the current course is the right one.
To conclude: no, economists are not cynical bastards who are so blindly obsessed with the stock market that they do not care whether your grandmother dies.

They, like everybody else, want to maximize human well-being. In general, when met with an opinion that seems crazy, there are two options: try to understand the argument or assume that the other person is stupid and/or evil.
These days, too many people are choosing the latter.

Click to expand...

Excellent article! The most articulate I've read from what could be called the pragmatic viewpoint.

How would one debate this? One would have to attack the primary flaw in the pragmatic logic. What might that be? Here we go. CAUTION: if you hated philosophy class in college, don't read any further.

In our human thought processes, we cannot establish pre-determined outcomes. We must always allow for human error. We can be 99.999 % sure of an outcome, but we can never be certain. There is always that slim chance of an unexplainable event, a miracle, altering an outcome. Many anecdotal examples could be listed.

So, when the pragmatist claims in the article above that the train must be diverted to kill one rather than five (utilitarianism), they are establishing a pre-determined outcome. How do they know that five will die if the train is not diverted?

Now, the flip side of this debate also has a potential trap. We don't want to become fatalists who ignore the odds and never make triage decisions. It is "Allah's will" that the ship is burning, so let's not try to extinguish it. That is ridiculous.

What is the philosophical solution?

Do the right thing. Make the moral choice. Be one with God/the universe at the time of the decision about whether to divert the train. Listen to the inner knowing. It's either time for triage or time for a miracle.

The pragmatist never allows for the miracle because he/she is limited by pre-determined outcomes.

The fatalist never allows for the triage because he/she is limited by ignoring the odds, and also by removing himself/herself from the creative process that is inherent in being alive.

The moralist seeks to do what is right. Sometimes it's divert the train. Sometimes it's not.

summerthyme said:

Well, to be fair, they *kept him alive* with ECMO, which apparently gave his body a chance to catch up and begin to heal.

Summerthyme

Click to expand...

Actually, ECMO was far more than a passive agent. It put oxygen back in the blood that had been taken out by CV19.

Ok - very interesting. All is not lost or everyone is tired of bleeding money.

On a leadership call right now and they're (the hospital) is getting ready to start doing ELECTIVE PROCEDURES again. Too me, that's pretty big.

Anecdotal story of one of our clinic's ordering a shipping container's worth of PPE from the chicom's and the tracking made it all the way through customs and then the broker said F the customer and sold it on the open market for, I'm sure, a much higher profit. Kind of f'd if you ask me.

The private hospital probably feels they have to start doing elective procedures again or go under, this is one to watch because if they manage it great but the first patient that catches the virus in the hospital for an elective procedure is likely to make headlines (and a lawsuit).

mzkitty said:

Jeez !!

View attachment 191101

View attachment 191102

Read comments:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1247854588432207872

View: https://twitter.com/MarketWatch/status/1247854588432207872



View attachment 191103

Huh. I had no idea that Indians were boozers:

View attachment 191104

Click to expand...

With that first tweet, I have run across that account before, and I am 90% sure it is a bot or paid troll. If you do reverse image search on the profile pic it is from a model, and almost all of the history is CCP positive

marsh said:

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Government To Decide What Items Are Essential Purchases And What Things You're Not Allowed To Buy

Tue, 04/07/2020 - 23:40

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
Living under lockdown restrictions, prevalent in nearly every state, is about to get a whole lot worse. The government in the United States and Canada has decided to take away the guesswork in the stores that are still open and decide for you what’s “essential” and what’s not.


When I have gone to the store to pick up groceries (I’m still getting fresh produce while I can), I also like to pick up a couple of things that are pleasant diversions: magazines, a crossword puzzle book, coloring pencils, some craft supplies. It’s nice to have some things that are enjoyable on hand to keep lockdown from feeling so grim and torturous. If the store is already open, getting a sunny yellow pillow for the living room is a pick-me-up, not a frivolous jaunt to a place I wasn’t already going. When we had a birthday in the family, we even picked up a few small gifts on our regular trip to the grocery store to provide a sense of normalcy.

But the days of getting a random item to brighten a family member’s day may be numbered. The government (at least in some places) wants to make this already unpleasant time as dismal as possible for us all.

Vermont has started a worrisome trend.
Vermont has decided to choose for you what is essential and what is not, banning the sale of non-essential items at stores like Target, Walmart, and Costco.



Retailers are asked to close certain areas of the stores, rope them off to deny access, or pull non-essentials from their shelves.

What’s considered non-essential?
The Burlington Free Press reports the following items have been deemed non-essential purchases:

• Arts and crafts items.
• Beauty supplies.
• Carpet and flooring.
• Clothes.
• Consumer electronics.
• Entertainment (books, music, movies).
• Furniture.
• Home and garden.
• Jewelry.
• Paint.
• Photo services.
• Sports equipment.
• Toys.

So a store you’re already at is telling you that grabbing some hand lotion to soothe your dry, cracked skin from the constant application of hand sanitizer is non-essential? Getting a book to read while you’re locked down is against the rules? You can’t do a home improvement project while you’re stuck at home?

I fail to see how this is going to stop the spread of a coronavirus if the shopper is already at the store and the employees are also already at the store.

In fact, it seems to me that this would be helpful to our gasping and dying economy. But what would I know? Dinesh Iyer, Assistant Professor of Management at Rutgers School of Business-Camden, says the stores don’t need our frivolous little purchases.





It’s rather curious how Iyer thinks us “common folk” will be able to do those things around the house and learn new skills without the supplies to do so.

One of the most alarming things is that garden supplies are considered non-essential.
Of all the times in the world you need most to plant a garden, now is the time. But in Vermont’s directive, even the sale of garden supplies is non-essential.

And readers shared this photo from a store in Vermont.


The government of Vermont says that it isn’t really accurate.


Okay. You can just buy them online…or can you?

Buying seeds online isn’t an option either.
Almost every seed company readers in the preparedness community have tried to make purchases from has said, sorry, but we’re just selling to commercial operations this year.

Johnny’s Select Seeds has the following announcement on their home page:

• At this time, we are accepting new orders only from commercial farmers shipping to the U.S. and Canada and international wholesale customers. We plan to resume taking orders from all customers on April 14th. This restriction applies to all orders placed via our website, phone, and email. This was a difficult decision and we apologize for the inconvenience.
• Commercial Farmers only: Please login to your website account before placing your order or call our contact center at 1-877-564-6697 for assistance. If you have forgotten your password, you can find information on resetting your password here.
• Orders placed with our standard shipping option prior to March 31st, 2020 may experience a shipment delay of 5–10 days. Commercial orders placed on or after March 31st, 2020 may experience a shipment delay of 1–2 days.
• You may experience a longer than usual response time when you phone in your order, call on us to answer growing questions, or email us to make inquiries.
• We have closed our retail store in Winslow, Maine, and will not be hosting farm tours until further notice.

So…you can’t get seeds from your local Walmart garden center if you’re in Vermont and you can’t order seeds from seed stores. Good luck with that garden you were hoping would help see you through this disaster unless you’ve already got seeds put back from previous years.

What can we expect?
I think it’s extremely likely that Vermont’s idea will catch on and spread across the country. Just like lockdowns began in a couple of areas then spread state by state, don’t be surprised when this trend does also. The province of Ontario in Canada has just closed all their hardware stores and is limiting purchases only to curbside pick-up. Here’s what you need to be prepared to see:

• Don’t expect that you’re going to be able to pop over to Lowes or Home Depot to pick up seedlings – or even seeds – for your summer garden.
• Don’t expect that you’ll be able to replace your children’s flipflops or sandals for the summer regardless of the growth of their feet – this could be considered “non-essential.”
• Don’t expect to be able to replace clothing for growing children – at least not in person.
• Don’t expect to get any summer toys for the kids to play with while they’re in the back-yard – non-essential.
• Don’t expect to be able to buy a bigger size of pants because you ate all your quarantine candy. You’re going to have to squeeze yourself into your old pants.
• Don’t expect to be able to get the fabric to make masks – remember? Craft supplies are non-essential.

Really, don’t expect anything. Because for some reason, it seems like governments want to make an already difficult and stressful time even worse by taking away the possibility for any kind of pleasant past-time unless you already have all the supplies you need for that.

This senseless crackdown not only makes things even more unpleasant, but it takes away even more streams of revenue for struggling businesses. And more than that, it’s limiting our ability to be as self-reliant as possible, leaving people to fight it out at the grocery store for dwindling resources with few options for creating our own food supplies.

Those living in Vermont have unfortunately missed their window for anything but mail order. For the rest of us, if there are some things you were hoping to get – be it new curtains, paint for the living room, tile for the bathroom, pots for your container garden, or the supplies to make a new chicken coop – you’d better get it now before your state follows the lead of Vermont.

Click to expand...

This is idiocy beyond even that the most rabid commie central planners have tried! Absolutely beyond stupid (then again, if the general run of humans wasn't so stupid, taking the whole family of snot nosed kids out for a "Wal-Mart field trip", it might not have occurred to the official morons

But... is anyone really surprised? There is NO possible crisis or problem the government can't make worse. Ever.

And this is why my preps over the years expanded to include tons of assorted craft/sewing/building stuff, kids' toys (generic, "old fashioned" stuff like balls, badminton rackets and net, crayons, lots of paper, coloring books)... and sufficient multi-sized, basic clothing patterns -plus fabric and notions- to keep everyone warm and decent if for some reason, it's not possible to shop for new items.

I don't know why (although I do believe it's what I call a "nudge" from God), but I've never completely trusted the supply chain.

Summerthyme

TorahTips said:

Thanks so much!!!! Now I don't need to sneak around trying to figure out what is going on. Having been on the ground right there, however, that raises some questions. The big yellow concrete barriers, for example. what are those for? The lobby is heavily protected by CPD. Why? This could be the case but there are some red flags. What about the undercover cop parked down the street? Why such a strict environment for what the Mayor says its for?

Thanks again for the info. I'll continue to watch from ground zero. I'll try to get more pics.

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Why all the extra precautions? Because people are morons, and many are evil. Anything from an attack on the premises from cop haters, or someone who is pissed their relative couldn't be saved, to a terrorist going in and deliberately contaminating every possible surface, in an attempt to take out a whole bunch of the people who are trying to keep society running and people alive.

Summerthyme

summerthyme said:

This is idiocy beyond even that the most rabid commie central planners have tried! Absolutely beyond stupid (then again, if the general run of humans wasn't so stupid, taking the whole family of snot nosed kids out for a "Wal-Mart field trip", it might not have occurred to the official morons

But... is anyone really surprised? There is NO possible crisis or problem the government can't make worse. Ever.

And this is why my preps over the years expanded to include tons of assorted craft/sewing/building stuff, kids' toys (generic, "old fashioned" stuff like balls, badminton rackets and net, crayons, lots of paper, coloring books)... and sufficient multi-sized, basic clothing patterns -plus fabric and notions- to keep everyone warm and decent if for some reason, it's not possible to shop for new items.

I don't know why (although I do believe it's what I call a "nudge" from God), but I've never completely trusted the supply chain.

Summerthyme

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From the article:

The Burlington Free Press reports the following items have been deemed non-essential purchases:

• Arts and crafts items.
  Beauty supplies.
  
• Carpet and flooring.
  
• Clothes.
  
• Consumer electronics.
  
• Entertainment (books, music, movies).
  
• Furniture.
  
• 
  Home and garden.
  
• 
  Jewelry.
  
• 
  Paint.
  
• 
  Photo services.
  
• 
  Sports equipment.
  
• 
  Toys.
  

So this means planting a garden this year might be off? Holy shit - the noose is tightening DEEPLY. Next will be food coupons and what you can, can't and what day you can buy food.

Big troubles I see with this.

FYI: According to Breaking in post # 42772, France has discontinued use of HCQ due to cardiac events. Sweden has discontinued HCQ due to other serious side effects. And, this is why we do studies.

TorahTips said:

Actually, ECMO was far more than a passive agent. It put oxygen back in the blood that had been taken out by CV19.

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I understand, but it's nowhere near a "cure". They are amazing machines, but if the underlying disease process isn't stopped and reversed by either the body's natural defenses or other medical intervention, you won't be any better off no matter how long you're on the machine.

Summerthyme