Corona-chan comes for Prince Charles

Prince Charles has tested positive for coronavirus, suffering mild symptoms. He is self-isolating at his home in Scotland with the Duchess of Cornwall, who does not have the virus, Clarence House has confirmed. A statement released on Wednesday morning, said that it was “not possible to ascertain” from whom His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales had caught the virus, but that he had been continuing to work from home “throughout the last few days as usual.”

Well, that’s not going to inspire calm and tranquility in the UK. But in related news, Corona-chan is good for nationalist trade policy:

Pharmacists are urging UK drug firms to manufacture paracetamol in Britain amid a nationwide shortage caused by panic buying and production lines drying up in Asia amid the coronavirus crisis.

Britain relies heavily on India – the world’s biggest supplier of generic drugs – for the painkiller, but the South Asian nation has restricted exports of the painkiller after factories in China, where the ingredient is mainly made, ground to a halt…. UK manufacturers now need to step up and start making the painkiller in Britain to prevent the ‘grim reality’ of COVID-19 patients not being able to get pain relief, pharmacists say.

Free Trade Kills. That’s the important takeaway here. Open Borders = Open Virus.

Stilt-Man vs the SJWarriors

Science fiction grandmaster and classic comics aficionado John C. Wright contemplates the results of a minor Marvel villain, Stilt-Man, facing off against Marvel’s new superhero team, the new New Warriors (2020 SJW edition). Read the whole thing there.

Let us say Stilt-Man has decided to rob a helicopter. Let us moreover say that Screentime uses his power of the netsurfing to come across a police bulletin, twitter post, or cellphone selfie showing the crime in progress.

Perhaps the crime takes place very nearby to the Old Folk’s Home where Fat Chance, the diversity hire orphan girl, is pulling cakes and pastries out of her god-given backpack (not the god you are thinking of, however) to share with the elderly and unloved senior citizens. They watch in awe as she consumes whole peach pies in one gulp.

Now, according to the official Marvel continuity, vigilante activity is illegal in the United States, and the government has passed ‘Kamala’s Law’ making teenagers doing vigilante activity even more illegal. So the teen heroes don their supersuits, and the bold yet chubby leader dons her double plus extra large sized supersuit. Not a single one of them wears masks or otherwise hides his identity. Except for Safespace, who does not wear a mask mask to hid ‘their’ identity.

So Fat Chance, the leader, waddles to the scene, puffing!

Meanwhile, Snowflake and Safespace are embracing each other with undue intimacy for a brother and sister (but it is perfectly fine, since the sister is neither male nor female, so technically she is his sibling, but not his sister). They see the Fat Signal, which Fat Chance pulls from her god-given backpack (not the god you are thinking of, however).

The amazing powers of Snowflake do not allow her to create a giant slide made of ice, like Iceman, nor to fly, like Snowbird, so she and her brother just run there. Fortunately, despite his girl hips and lack of muscle tone, he is a stereotypical jock, and get there while the crime is still in progress!

Screentime uses his power of internet connection to hire an Uber. In this case, the driver is Willy Lumpkin, the mailman for the Baxter Building, doing odd jobs to pick up some extra cash in his off hours

So the combat is joined!

Fat Chance rummages into her god-given backpack (but it is not the god you are thinking of) and pulls out a tuba, or perhaps a tortoise shell, or a taco, or a tape recorder, or a tea set, or a tricycle. But let us say, against all odds, she pulls out something useful, like a Tommy gun, and opens fire. Her flab wiggles and flaps in an alarming yet unsightly fashion from the jarring recoil of the hammering gunfire!

At the same time, Snowflake creates a dozen whirling, razor sharp crystal shuriken, and throws then with the full strength of her non-binary arm!

Screentime gets out of the Uber car and pays the driver, Willy Lumpkin, using Paypal, a convenient service that allows one to pay for goods and services over the internet! And, uh, he looks up information on Wikipedia about Stilt-Man or something, diagramming the battle suit.

Then B-Negative finds a convenient updraft, and launches himself skyward, closing with Stilt-Man, his bad attitude of which he has proud ownership displayed in his nonchalant yet abrasive teen demeanor!

Stilt-Man can detect the attack with his rear and downward view mirrors (not show in the diagram above) and can duck under the initial swoop by quickly retracting his legs!

The Stilt-Man armor was seen to be bulletproof in its first appearance back in Daredevil comics. The non-binary arm of the shuriken throwing sexual deviant cannot possibly top a thirty-story building, nor strike harder than a bullet. So both the snowflake-shaped crystal shuriken and the Tommy gun (or whatever) pulled out of the god-given backpack (not the god you are thinking of) simply bounce off.

And they do not bounce off Stilt-Man’s chest, by the way. A Tommy gun’s effective range is about 300 feet when fired level, less so when fired straight up, so the man himself is out of range. Shuriken and bullets alike are bouncing from the lower or upper segments of his stilts.

Then Stilt-Man steps on Fat Chance.

But let us say her life is saved by Safespace, who has enfolded her instinctively in a pink force field, which can protect others but not himself. So Stilt-Man steps on Safespace instead, with a hydraulic ram able to smash through a brick wall. Now, the information says Safespace can protect others, so if he casts his pink bubble of protection around the beached-whale bulk of the team leader, he can hide in her voluminous and extensive shadow, safe from attacks issue from that quarter to that half of the horizon. But, alas, Stilt-Man is the one villain able to step over the massive flesh blob of the leader, and approach the unprotected Safespace from above.

Our stereotypical jock with his girlish hips and Bambi eyelashes is not noted for having the super senses and reflexes of Daredevil, nor the spidersense of Spider-Man, and so he gets pounded into the pavement like a tentpeg and will spend the next fifteen issues in a full body cast, while every bone in his body except his left ulna are mending.

With Safespace out of the way, the force-field goes away, and Stilt-Man punts the fat girl and the non-binary ninja wannabe across Times Square with one sweep of his stilt-legs that can overturn a truck.

Ah, but the kid who is not Morbius joins the fray!

His superhuman strength is … wait for it … exactly the same as Stilt-Man’s in his armor. And his speed when he glides is … wait for it … exactly the same as Stilt-Man’s with his legs extended. But Stilt-Man is armored and B Negative is not. So Stilt-Man simply clocks him from fifty yards away with his telescoping fist which is strong enough to shatter brick walls.

If that does not work, Stilt-Man shoots him with knock out gas, and the teen bloodsucker with bad attitude plummets to the ground thirty stories, also crushed into jelly and with all his bones broken. But he can regenerate from wounds, so he will eventually get better.

He will rise again, and give chase. But, as was before said, since Stilt-Man travels at the same speed on his Stilts as the glider wings of Morbius (and presumably, Morbius lite here), Stilt-Man carrying the loot from the robbed helicopter stilts away on his long legs.

Meanwhile, Screentime is watching nonbinary incest porn on the internet. Stilt-Man does not bother to step on him, because how would he even know Screentime is on the superhero team?

The answer to the “responsibility” objection

It’s quite common for stupid and self-righteous conservatives to object to student loan debt cancellation on the basis of “personal irresponsibility”, moral hazard, and the fact that the student signed the loan contract. But as Zippy Catholic points out, Thomas Aquinas conclusively answered that objection a long time ago.

Accordingly we must also answer to the question in point that it is by no means lawful to induce a man to lend under a condition of usury: yet it is lawful to borrow for usury from a man who is ready to do so and is a usurer by profession; provided the borrower have a good end in view, such as the relief of his own or another’s need. Thus too it is lawful for a man who has fallen among thieves to point out his property to them (which they sin in taking) in order to save his life, after the example of the ten men who said to Ismahel (Jeremiah 41:8): “Kill us not: for we have stores in the field.”
– Thomas AST II-II, Q78, A4):

Since borrowing at usury is inherently scandalous, it probably depends on the extent of the need. But you’ve got pretty wide moral discretion to hand over your property to thieves, so you’ve probably got similar prudential latitude here.  As a matter of intrinsic morality, usury – insisting on interest when making a mutuum loan – is a sin on the part of the lender, not the borrower.

The lender is the wrongdoer, not the borrower. Therefore, there is no moral hazard created by cancelling student loan debt, unless the government then proceeds to bails out the lender. It is bailouts, not debt cancellations, that are both immoral and morally hazardous by nature.

Of Boomers and Bergamo

In Bergamo, an elderly priest gave up the respirator his parishioners bought for him in order to save the lives of younger victims.

A 72-year-old priest who gave his respirator to a younger Covid-19 patient he did not know has died from coronavirus. Father Giuseppe Berardelli, the main priest in the town of Casnigo, refused a respirator which had been bought for him by his parishioners and instead gave it to a younger patient.

He died last week in Lovere, Bergamo – one of the worst-hit cities in Italy’s ongoing coronavirus crisis.

“He was a simple, straightforward person, with a great kindness and helpfulness towards everyone, believers and non-believers,” Giuseppe Imberti, the mayor of Casnigo, said in a statement, according to the Italian news website Araberara.

Although there was no funeral for the priest, residents of the town reportedly applauded from their balconies as his coffin was taken for burial.

Meanwhile, a reader writes from Florida:

Grocery stores in Florida have enacted a special early shopping time for “elderly” shoppers. Of course elderly is now considered 65 and up. Boomers line up in the hundreds, ignoring social distancing, and go through the store like a plague of locusts. Forget women and children, gotta give the Boomers first dibs.

Typical. All too typical. Because God hates the wicked, it is good to hate the Boomer. As with Father Giuseppe, there can be little doubt about what god they serve. The contrast demonstrates that being a Boomer is more than just a range of temporal mileage, it is, more importantly, a state of soul.

These are NOT the end times

All End Times preaching is nothing more than narcisissm + false prophecy.  A reader writes:

A preacher that I know, who has preached the end of the world for 40 years, and has been wrong for 40 years, when asked about this current situation, said assuredly that this was not the end! He has always been wrong, so either it is the end, or, and this is my prediction, he will change his mind and start declaring it the end, or the beginning of the end. He, to a certain extent, and I dare say all end times preachers, are false prophets. That may be harsh, but if what they say does not come true are they not false? Would not my Dad, Uncles, Aunts, Grandparents, and Cousins been better served by a different message before they died. Were they living in the end times?

Every single person who states a firm opinion about any time being the end times is a false prophet and a liar. Every single one. I’ve been hearing Boomers pontificate about this since the end of the 1970s. I still remember the idiotic pamphlet “88 Reasons for 1988”. Even at the time, I knew it was complete idiocy, given specious illogic like “1988 is the 100th U.S. Congress. Water boils at 100 degrees. Therefore, the world will end in 1988!”

In fact, Boomer eschatologists who breathlessly followed Hal Lindsay were one reason I rejected Christianity as a teenager. It was patently obvious even at the time that there was absolutely no truth in them, as events have subsequently confirmed. That being said, the one thing I will say for Mr. Lindsay is that he correctly predicted the rise of global Islam at a time when absolutely no one else did, and he did so on the basis of logic derived from the Bible.

Jesus made it very clear that even he didn’t know the hour. So you don’t either, and don’t start appealing to how you’re certain that it is “the season” either. Evil men that people were identifying as potential Antichrist candidates in 999 AD have been completely forgotten by history, and there isn’t even a moderately plausible candidate today. So get over yourselves, forget the idiotic and entirely non-Biblical rapture nonsense, and deal with the fact that you’re almost certainly going to have to deal with the fallen world as it is for the rest of your life.

Live, love, and leave off waiting for a deus ex machina.

The need for a debt jubilee

It’s not often that I agree with socialist economics, but in this case, my only disagreement with Michael Hudson’s argument is that we are quite obviously already in a depression. It’s too late to avoid it, but a debt jubilee – as commanded by the Bible – is both a way to end the depression and free the productive classes from the chains of a relentlessly rapacious and entirely anti-productive financial elite:

Even before the coronavirus appeared, many American families were falling behind on student loans, auto loans, credit card balances and other payments. America’s debt overhead was pricing its labor and industry out of world markets. A debt crisis was inevitable eventually, but covid-19 has made it immediate.

Massive social distancing, with its accompanying job losses, stock dives, and huge bailouts to debt-strapped corporations, raises the threat of a depression. But it doesn’t have to be this way. History offers us another alternative in such situations: a debt jubilee. This slate-cleaning, balance-restoring step recognizes the fundamental truth that when debts grow too large to be paid without reducing debtors to poverty, the way to hold society together and restore balance is simply to cancel the bad debts.

The word Jubilee comes from the Hebrew word for trumpet — yobel. In Mosaic Law, it was blown every fifty years to signal the Year of the Lord, in which personal debts were to be cancelled. The alternative, the prophet Isaiah warned, was for smallholders to forfeit their lands to creditors: “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” When Jesus delivered his first sermon, the Gospel of Luke describes him as unrolling the scroll of Isaiah and announcing that he had come to proclaim the Year of the Lord, the Jubilee Year.

Until recently, historians doubted that such a debt jubilee would have been possible in practice, or that such proclamations could have been enforced. But Assyriologists have found that from the beginning of recorded history in the Near East, it was normal for new rulers to proclaim a debt amnesty upon taking the throne. Instead of blowing a trumpet, the ruler “raised the sacred torch” to signal the amnesty.

It is now understood that these rulers were not being utopian or idealistic in forgiving debts. The alternative would have been for debtors to fall into bondage. Kingdoms would have lost their labor force, since so many would be working off debts to their creditors. Many debtors would have run away (much as Greeks emigrated en masse after their recent debt crisis) and communities would have been prone to attack from without.

The parallels to the current moment are notable. The U.S. economy has polarized sharply since the 2008 financial crisis. For far too many, the debts in place leave little income available for spending on goods and services or in the national interest. In a crashing economy, any demand that newly massive debts be paid to a financial class that has already absorbed most of the wealth gained since 2008 can only further split our society.

The way to restore normalcy today is a debt writedown. The debts in deepest arrears, and most likely to default, are student debts, medical debts, general consumer debts and purely speculative debts. They block spending on goods and services, shrinking the “real” economy. A debt writedown would be pragmatic, not merely a moral sympathy with the less affluent.

Financialization does not help the economy by making it more efficient. To the contrary, it makes the economy far more fragile while destroying the underlying society for the benefit of a few foreign invaders.

Mailvox: testing results

A lab technician emails and reminds of the important efforts that are taking place behind the scenes.

I work in a medical testing lab and have been involved in reporting out COVID lab results. From my experience, the negative result to positive result ratio is roughly between 5:1 to 10:1. Only the positives are being reported to public health agencies, and that’s what eventually makes its way to the Hopkins page and other pages.

As an aside, there is probably a 2-to-3-day delay in what happens in the lab, and what shows up on the internet. The latest numbers of new cases reported in the US for today are about 8,000. So this probably represents 40,000 to 80,000 new test results reported in a day. If you understand the work involved to produce a single test result, that is an astounding amount of test results for a test that no clinical labs had just one month ago.

The point is that the private sector industry has done an amazing job responding to this demand in a short amount of time. They are doing much better than any government effort could muster.

The lockdowns cometh

This paper appears to be the primary rationale behind the nationwide lockdowns that are being gradually imposed by governments around the world:

The optimal timing of interventions differs between suppression and mitigation strategies, as well as depending on the definition of optimal. However, for mitigation, the majority of the effect of such a strategy can be achieved by targeting interventions in a three-month window around the peak of the epidemic.  For suppression, early action is important, and interventions need to be in place well before healthcare capacity is overwhelmed. Given the most systematic surveillance occurs in the hospital context, the typical delay from infection to hospitalisation means there is a 2- to 3-week lag between interventions being introduced and the impact being seen in hospitalised case numbers, depending on whether all hospital admissions are tested or only those entering critical care units. In the GB context, this means acting before COVID-19 admissions to ICUs exceed 200 per week.

Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.

In the UK, this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK (previous planning estimates assumed half the demand now estimated) and with the NHS providing increasing certainty around the limits of hospital surge capacity.

We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound. Many countries have adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently.

Basically, the less strict the measures, the more likely it is that the number of people requiring treatment will overwhelm the available medical serves at the peak. Hence the term “flattening the curve” which refers to the peak of the bell curve. Different nations are at very different risk in this regard; Germany has 25,000 ICU beds with full respiratory support, or one for every 3,312 people, vs 4,000 for the UK, or one for every 16,610 people.

The USA has 32,000 ICU beds, which puts it right in between at one ICU bed for every 10,000 people. This means that if the mitigation calculations are correct, the medical resources would be overwhelmed by a factor of 8x, thereby leading to fatalities in excess of 2 million. The suppression measures are expected to reduce that by three orders of magnitude, which is why it is safe to expect that they will be imposed, sooner rather than later, in the US, the UK, and other countries that have not yet officially adopted them.

UPDATE: As expected, the UK announced a three-week nationwide lockdown.

The anosmia omen

If you lost your sense of smell, you may be a corona-chan carrier:

In the areas of Italy most heavily affected by the virus, doctors say they have concluded that loss of taste and smell is an indication that a person who otherwise seems healthy is in fact carrying the virus and may be spreading it to others.

“Almost everybody who is hospitalized has this same story,” said Dr. Marco Metra, chief of the cardiology department at the main hospital in Brescia, where 700 of 1,200 inpatients have the coronavirus. “You ask about the patient’s wife or husband. And the patient says, ‘My wife has just lost her smell and taste but otherwise she is well.’ So she is likely infected, and she is spreading it with a very mild form.”

It might be useful to keep in mind, anyhow. On the plus side, the latest numbers out of Italy may indicate that the peak has been passed, as new cases are down 27 percent and new deaths are down 24 percent since March 21.

Mailvox: notes from the frontlines

A nurse-practitioner from the Midwest:

The hotline for this medical system has been receiving 1500 to 2000 calls per day. It is the job of the various Providers to respond to these calls with a general medical prognosis and directions based on the symptoms the patient has described over the phone. Coronavirus has very specific symptoms and unless those symptoms are present it is unlikely the person has it. If they do have that list of specific symptoms, the patient is then told that they “likely have COVID19 and to continue to quarantine themselves for at least 14 days, and if symptoms get worse to go to the ER.” These patients are NOT being actually tested, nor recorded officially.

This specific medical system is big enough that they have developed their own, internal test for the Coronavirus, however patients are not actually tested unless they have to symptoms sufficiently severe to place them in to Tier 1/ER/ICU levels of care. Such symptoms would be a either a very high fever or problems breathing. Medical Professionals who have been exposed to the Coronavirus are also being tested. The phone system is a fairly effective way of dealing with patients at the volumes that medical professionals are needing to wade through them.

The main takeaways from what I have overhead and know is that Coronavirus cases that aren’t severe aren’t being tested, so what effect this will have on the reported numbers, I’m not sure. Also, that larger hospital and medical systems have developed the tests internally, so whether or not the CDC/HHS or any other Federal agency acquires them in bulk isn’t as urgent as it is being portrayed.

A medical security officer, also in the Midwest:

I went into the EOC and suggested that they push the idea up that since there are literally HUNDREDS of vacant restaurants all over, that they rent them for a song (using eminent domain or even Trump’s emergency declaration) and institute drive-through testing like they have in Korea… Literally powerwash them, slap your signs over theirs and use the drive-through and mic hookups already in place…

The lady who I told, who is a senior nurse and emergency response director, paused, thought for a few seconds and said “Well, that could work, but there’s so much more we have to do than just driving through, we have to take temperatures etc”

All I could think was, “bitch, that’s what the WINDOW is for!  Have a tent by the lane, have them rub the stupid thing on their own forehead!  Jesus, use your goddamn imagination!”

We’re fucking doomed… And it’s due to the same stupidity I saw in the senior leadership in the Army that led me to leave…

A nurse in the Southwest:

I can confirm that ED nurses have been instructed to forgo masks. In our particular situation, I believe that it is mostly due to supply issues. People off the street have come in and stolen boxes of masks that we usually leave sitting around and non-clinical people have come onto the unit and taken them as well. Nevertheless, it is frustrating because, prior to now, we have all worn masks on a regular basis during flu season.

The real idiocy is that our N-95 masks, for which we were all fitted upon hire into the ED, have been slated for provider-use only. We nurses do not have any, yet we are the people that go face-to-face more often than any other. However, there are some options, less than ideal, being made available. I am not completely sympathetic to these decisions but the supply matter has hit us hard and I have some understanding of the motives behind them.

A doctor from the South:

I am a medical doctor and I believe both my wife and I have contracted corona. We were unable to test for it because it was unavailable given the strict guidelines in place at the time. One of the things I noticed on a pathology report I saw from a patient in China are these so-called thick mucous secretions in the lungs . This reminded me of what happens to an asthmatic’s lungs when they are having an attack. For asthmatics, they die because they cannot oxygenate their bodies because there is so much mucous in their lungs.

I thought, why not treat these lung symptoms from corona  the way you would for an asthmatic .The reason for the mucous shouldn’t matter.  One of those ways is to use a medication called albuterol which you nebulize and give yourself a breathing treatment several times a day if necessary.

I had been listening to my wife’s lungs for several day,s and on one day I noticed a decrease in breath sounds in one of her lobes along with some wheezing. This is an indication that mucous was plugging up the bronchiole. A worrisome sign and a harbinger of pneumonia potentially coming. I started her on two treatments a day which immediately caused the mucous to break up. We knew this because she started coughing it up. One day later, her lungs were clear and there was no wheezing. I did it to myself just as a preventive measure one time a day. We continued this for about a week before stopping it. It appears we have recovered from the infection.

A retired nursing director from the South:

The corona virus has exasperated the shortage of nurses.  Many of them are mothers and now that schools and daycare are closed they must stay home to take care of their children.  The state medical system is now short hundreds of nurses. Observation – this is what happens when you have to have two parents working in order to be average middle class, no margin.  Not only have we leaned our supply system with no inventory buffer, but we have done the same to our labor pool.