US Exports

(thanks, Allan)

We don't make much anymore here in USAmerica, Inc.

We make noise. We make asses of ourselves all over the world. But we don't make a whole lot of stuff, so we don't export too much.

'Cept now, we can proudly crow about being a leading exporter of COVID-19 infection.

LA Times:

The Trump administration has deployed a team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Guatemala to “review and validate” the country’s coronavirus testing after officials there reported more than 70 deportees on two recent flights from the United States were infected, according to authorities in both countries.

At the same time, Guatemalan officials said Thursday they have indefinitely suspended deportations from the U.S.

About 30 deportees on a March 26 flight from Arizona and 44 more on a flight Monday from Texas tested positive soon after arriving in the Central American country, Guatemalan officials said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement subjects deportees to a health screening before boarding but does not test them for the coronavirus. Guatemalan officials have been testing them after arrival.

Oops. I'm thinking Stephen Miller is one bummed-out Nazi vampire today.

What We Don't Know

Almost 4 months into this COVID-19 thing, and we're still in the fucking dark about the two main points:

1. Who has this shit?
2. When somebody gets this shit, what are their chances?

The Hill:

The novel coronavirus has killed more than 31,000 people in the United States and top health officials project about 60,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by August, but two experts say the majority of deaths may have been avoided if social distancing measures were implemented just two weeks earlier than they were.

Epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell Tuesday wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times that 90 percent of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. could have possibly been avoided if social distancing began March 2, when there were only 11 deaths recorded in the nation. If such policies would have been put in place one week earlier, on March 9, the epidemiologists say there could have been a 60 percent reduction in fatalities.

“Whatever the final death toll is in the United States, the cost of waiting will be enormous, a tragic consequence of the exponential spread of the virus early in the epidemic,” the experts wrote.

NYT:

Coroners in some parts of the country are overwhelmed. Funeral homes in coronavirus hot spots can barely keep up. Newspaper obituary pages in hard-hit areas go on and on. Covid-19 is on track to kill far more people in the United States this year than the seasonal flu.

But determining just how deadly the new coronavirus will be is a key question facing epidemiologists, who expect resurgent waves of infection that could last into 2022.

As the virus spread across the world in late February and March, the projection circulated by infectious disease experts of how many infected people would die seemed plenty dire: around 1 percent, or 10 times the rate of a typical flu.

But according to various unofficial Covid-19 trackers that calculate the death rate by dividing total deaths by the number of known cases, about 6.4 percent of people infected with the virus have now died worldwide.

In Italy, the death rate stands at about 13 percent, and in the United States, around 4.3 percent, according to the latest figures on known cases and deaths. Even in South Korea, where widespread testing helped contain the outbreak, 2 percent of people who tested positive for the virus have died, recent data shows.

These supposed death rates also appear to vary widely by geography: Germany’s fatality rate appears to be roughly one-tenth of Italy’s, and Los Angeles’s about half of New York’s. Among U.S. states, Michigan, at around 7 percent, is at the high end, while Wyoming, which reported its first two deaths this week, has one of the lowest death rates, at about 0.7 percent.

Virology experts say there is no evidence that any strain of the virus, officially known as SARS-CoV-2, has mutated to become more severe in some parts of the world than others, raising the question of why there appears to be so much variance from country to country.

Under the best of circumstances, figuring this out would be a real bitch. It doesn't help when the people running a dozen or more countries are complete assholes who think their political careers are more important than the lives of those who keep them in power - and who put them in power in the first fucking place.

COVID-19 Update

I don't know what it means - if anything, but:

• We've tested just over 1% of the US population
• 19.6% of those tested have been confirmed as COVID-19
• We're being told that anyone can get a test, but nobody really knows where to go or who to ask
• If the numbers are correct (and nobody trusts they are), then the Case Fatality Rate in the US is right at 5%, while the world CFR is at 6.7%.

Today's Brian

Brian Tyler Cohen

45* is playing his old familiar tune - "I'm mad too - I'm just like you - they never told me - they kept me in the dark and now I have to fix it for you - blah blah fucking blah."

He's the president.

And he's the guy who claims absolute authority while never accepting even the slightest responsibility.

Some Parodies

...are better than others.

And sometimes I love people - as long as they don't get try to get too cozy.

click

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How Stoopid Are They?

...pretty fuckin' stoopid.

WaPo:

If all roads in Michigan lead to the state capitol, conservative protesters on Wednesday made sure they were closed.

For miles, thousands of drivers clogged the streets to demand that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) ease restrictions and allow them to go back to work. They drowned downtown Lansing, Mich., in a cacophony of honking. They blared patriotic songs from car radios, waving all sorts of flags from the windows — President Trump flags, American flags and the occasional Confederate flag.

- and the kicker -

But in the massive demonstration against Whitmer’s stay-at-home executive order — which they have argued is excessive and beyond her authority — the pleas from organizers that protesters to stay in their vehicles went unheeded. Many got out of their cars and crashed the front lawn of the capitol building, with some chanting, “Lock her up!” and “We will not comply!”

So these boneheads decided to organize a protest against an order that says they need to stay away from each other, which brought them all together, while admonishing the protesters to stay in their cars and away from each other.

Do we kinda see the fucking problem here?

And we wonder why the Chinese cops were welding people's doors shut - just a coupla months ago.

Men In Black

J: "People are smart - they can handle it."

K: "A person is smart. People are dumb panicky dangerous animals - and you know it."

My dearest conservative brothers & sisters:

When we ask "How stoopid can you get?"

it's a rhetorical question -

please stop taking it as a challenge.

COVID-19 Update

Idiot Republicans refuse to do the right thing, and the plague continues apace.

And to this rolling fuckup, we can add the fairly high probability that the number of cases in the US is under-reported because we can't get the fucking testing straight, which means the number of dead is being under-reported too.

Today's Tweet

Follow the thread

I've compiled a side-by-side comparison of the reaction to coronavirus by Trump and the World Health Organization.

The timeline is utterly, comprehensively damning to Trump.

What it shows about him is far worse than what it shows about WHO.

New piece:https://t.co/ujv6EVqIEr

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) April 15, 2020

Today's Pix

click

⬇︎👁👁⬇︎

COVID-19 Update

As suspected, we found out yesterday that some COVID-19 deaths weren't reported as such, so the death toll rose rather sharply.