March 30th US Covid Data, Doubling Rate Slows

That’s because the increase is unteased – it has gone out from NYC.

I’m not sure what you mean by unteased, but I think you have it backwards about NYC. It’s because NY’s doubling has increased to about 6 days that a national average would drop. (OK, I can’t remember if the 6 day figure is NY or NYC; Cuomo showed it graphed, if you want to look for it).

What might explain NY/NYC’s seemingly dramatic improvement in doubling time? I’m guessing large numbers of people taking hydroxychloroquine ( + zpak, hopefully).

On that score, from Michael Coudry’s twitter feed:

“BREAKING: The United States FDA has issued an emergency authorization of anti-malaria drug Hydroxychloroquine to be prescribed to COVID-19 patients.

Previously the drugs prescription to treat COVID-19 was considered “off-label” use.”

Useful exercise, attenuated somewhat by noise in the signal. Even where numbers are not being deliberately suppressed, undercounting may be an artifact of testing (backlogs, false negatives), lags in reporting, and in the case of deaths not attributed to COVID due to underlying conditions; over counting may be due to false positives, accelerated testing, and attributing deaths to COVID without tests confirming this.

In the Netherlands, 66-80% of ICU patients are obese. Obesity will likely turn out to be a major co-morbidity of COVID, which will be bad for the United States since there are a lot of obese people here.

Also, I wonder how many of the “healthy” young people who have died from COVID were obese?

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/03/coronavirus-death-toll-rises-obese-corona-patients-dominate-in-intensive-care/

England after WWII had its major cities in tatters, but still retained much of its internal industrial capabilities. The US is in the opposite situation. But like England we will be shedding our “colonies” at an unsustainable rate.

The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration”

This is about an arrogant and opinionated dingleberry with a law degree. He knows he’s smarter than you, and is better informed than you about everything. Substitute “you” for Climate Scientist, or Medical Doctor, and that’s our boy.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration

Why would hydroxychloroquine availability have much to do with reported infection rates? It’s not as though it’s an easy to acquire OTC medication that people can take and get better. Even assuming it is effective, which is based on two very poorly designed trials, the number of people who can access it without a COVID19 positive diagnosis is very small, limited to a few (unethical) doctors, their wealthy clients and maybe their immediate family members. The supply is so strained that people taking it for lupus and RA are having problems getting refills.

What’s more likely is that testing capability is being strained and that’s limited the reported infection counts. Or social distancing efforts in NY and WA are having an effect.

Dale

I would think that military planners in this country and around the world are shocked by the US inability to ramp up production of our basic medical needs,masks, respirators, clothing,etc., and wonder how in the world this country could even conceive of going to war with anyone. I also think our military must now be having discussions about rebuilding American industrial capabilities if for nothing more than defense of the nation. The neoliberals King’s New Clothes are visible for all to see. Same for neoconservative military goals.

That’s what our leadership has forgotten (maybe because they too drank the neoliberal Koolaid). We fought two major wars that hinged on getting tons of supplies–including food–to allies that could not make sufficient quantities themselves. And beyond the basics of food and clothing and fuel, then you have arms industries which in turn are predicated on having a domestic network of suppliers that make the components and sub-components.

Also, the government infrastructure to allow mobilizing this capacity into one grand effort (as some commentators have mentioned, Grover Norquist’s victory in ‘drowning government in a bathtub’ has left the US unable to mount a meaningful response). Moreover, what response we do mount is only at a cost—like in our medical system–of massively overpaying. Our current military costs nearly as much per year as we spent in WWI!!!–yet that money which supplied 300,000 planes, 90,000 tanks, a 2000 ship navy and enlarged merchant marine and whatnot, only can afford a few thousand aircraft, a few thousand tanks, and maybe a 10th as many personnel?

Speaking of which–given the reluctance of Trump to step in and order the manufacture of respirators, nor directing the distribution thereof, leading to the governors of various states to bid against each other–does anyone else not smell a rat here? This reeks of kickbacks. I’m sure the manufacturers, or the distributors, raked in a lot of profit from that.

And even

No, the neo-liberal order does recognize physical world supply chains. In fact, the were aggressive about it.

Dale wrote: ‘England after WWII had its major cities in tatters, but still retained much of its internal industrial capabilities. The US is in the opposite situation. But like England we will be shedding our “colonies” at an unsustainable rate.’

As far as this comparison goes: –

England after WWII retained much of its internal manufacturing and also 60 percent of the demand for what it supplied remained in the UK. (Though this was dismantled under Thatcher).

It was not food-independent, however. The U.S. is, and that is a considerable advantage.

(The U.K., however, had some world-class products — despite low industrial productivity — to sell overseas for food etc., like the Rolls-Royce jet engine design that it sold to the Soviets and that were then used in the Mig jets that could outfly the American fighter planes in Korea; the U.S. leaned hard on the U.K. to stop that kind of thing subsequently).

Dale: “I also think our military must now be having discussions about rebuilding American industrial capabilities if for nothing more than defense of the nation.”

Not just the U.S. military. Figures on both Right (like Pete Navarro in the Trump administration) and Left (like Matt Stoller) — have for some time been arguing against the insanity of global supply chains. The trouble is, the capitalists benefit more in terms of labor arbitrage and size of capital flows from a global-sized production empire than a merely country-sized one.

“The neoliberals King’s New Clothes are visible for all to see.”

They’ve been visible for all to see since the GFC in 2008, when Putin and the Russians decided the U.S. was “not agreement-capable” and could not be a trustworthy partner in any kind of activity.

After all, the GFC effected the planet but _originated_ entirely with American corruption and short-termist greed (granted, there was plenty more around the world, at places like Deutsche Bank). Post-GFC, the U.S. did not bring its oligarchs and capitalists to heel — as Putin had in Russia — but effectively enabled them to further loot the U.S. as a whole.

China also made the same observations, though it took a different course. Unfortunately, in much of the rest of the developed world — the E.U. particularly — neoliberal regimes aligned with the Washington consensus remained, and with them the long habit of deferring to American “leadership.” However …..

Dale: “Like England we will be shedding our ‘colonies’ at an unsustainable rate.”

American incompetence and arrogance will now be too evident for other countries to deny, yes. (Trump has helped appreciably in making that clear, though Trump wasn’t necessary to anybody paying attention.)

Comparing the post-WWII U.K. comparison and the U.S. now, however, it’s also worth noting that the U.K in 1945 did have several advantages over the U.S. currently. The U.K. had:

[a] Relatively competent leadership after years of war (since an existential threat has a way of driving out the normal grifting incompetents who proliferate as “leaders” during peacetime; to be fair, the U.S. also had relatively competent leaders then.)

[b] A long-standing culture of British working-class democratic resistance to capitalist demands, alongside a tradition of working-class education and intellectualism (the Fabians and such) which meant that when the Labour government under Attlee came to power in 1945 it had coherent plans developed over decades for the changes it aimed to institute, like the Nation Health Service, and knife-fighters like Aneurin (Nye) Bevan to push the NHS through.

It’s instructive, for instance, to compare milquetoast Uncle Bernie’s statements about “my friend Joe” with this from Bevan: “No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation.”

Bevan was a great man and his story is still instructive. The U.S. has nobody like this now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan.

[c] The U.K. also had the advantage despite its class system of a somewhat more communitarian national outlook than the U.S. has ever had, especially after the war years of “we’re all in this together.”

In practice, it was made clear to English elites that if indeed the British people had all been in this together during the war, then the British people — and particularly British servicemen as they were demobilized post-war — were _not_ prepared simply to return to the way things had been pre-war. One reason why British elites had to give up on holding on to India, for instance, were the mutinies at RAF service bases in Asia when the British government tried to keep them there post-war to deal with unrest in India. (Not that the history books mention this much.)

In the U.S. now, conversely, the population as a whole remains propagandized and divided. Not only that, but U.S. elites apparently remain committed to the same short-termist looting as after 2008. As things stand with the CARES act currently, the mass foreclosures will begin in three months time, and the 1 percent will then proceed with more of the same looting and immiseration of the larger population as in the wake of the GFC.

Such a course of action seems like madness, sure. But at this stage U.S. elites are probably best understood as institutionally sociopathic, and sociopaths mostly can only do short-term personal advantage.

Long-term, those elites do have in their favor the mass-propagandization and lack of education of Americans generally, and the tools that 21st century data surveillance provide them.

Particularly, the COV19 pandemic means much-expanded testing for the disease and contact-tracing. It’s not generally known, but America has seen this movie before. The data surveillance technologies that constituted the Total Information Awareness program, which were then covertly moved to NSA (and DIA), and that Edward Snowden documented publicly in 2013, all began as biodefense programs at places like MIT and Carnegie Mellon in 1998 after folks in the Pentagon and elsewhere lost their shit as intelligence emerged about what the former USSR’s Manhattan Project-sized bioweapons program, Biopreparat, had been doing for twenty years.

@Astrid
“Why would hydroxychloroquine availability have much to do with reported infection rates?”

It wouldn’t. At this time, that’s almost certainly mostly a function of the amount of testing being done (moreso than actual increases in the infection rate of the general population, though that’s certainly occurring, also).

The chart above also shows “Death Doubling Rate Days” increasing to 6.8. I have speculated that HQ use is to be credited, but claim no certain knowledge.

“It’s not as though it’s an easy to acquire OTC medication that people can take and get better. Even assuming it is effective, which is based on two very poorly designed trials, the number of people who can access it without a COVID19 positive diagnosis is very small,”

Are you aware of “official” use of HQ in NY? Google this exact string: “Gov. Cuomo to Administer 1,100 Hydroxychloroquine and Zithromax” to hear Cuomo saying “we are now using it on a large scale basis, particularly in the NYC hospitals ….” That was 2 days ago, might have started a day or 2 earlier.

As for “unofficial” use, my cousin is an optometrist, and told me that an anti-cancer drug was being prescribed for YEARS by eye doctors to treat macular degeneration, on an off-label basis, before it got some sort of official blessing. (Don’t remember details beyond that.)

The Michael Coudrey twitter feed appears to do a decent job in posting news about HQ use.

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Having written the above, I looked again at the chart, and the “confirmed cases doubling rate” was also up to 6.8. That seems inconceivable with what I had assumed to be an exponentially increasing (or otherwise “surging”) rate of testing occurring. (I’m also assuming at least a non-decrease of actual (not merely tested and confirmed) infections in the general population, at the very least; and, much more likely, an ongoing increase of actual infections (not merely tested and confirmed)).

One possibility is that testing supply has now (mostly) caught up to present demand, where “present demand” (by health professionals) is being de facto rationed, by only being given to patients exhibiting symptoms. So, in this case, the “test surge” effect has dissipated, and instead the positive test rate increase now directly mirrors the real infection rate increase.

Of course, we, as a society, should want ubiquitous testing. However, nobody is suggesting we’re there, yet, in the US. Or ever will get there. I think, though, the most rational way to “open up the economy” quickly is to have ubiquitous testing + quarantining of seniors, until we have a vaccine, or else some extremely effective drug therapy.

Which HQ + Zpac + zinc + intravenous vitamin C may prove to be.

Everyone has seen this? I hope I’m not duplicating someone else.

https://Coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html