@MaineLonghorn that is so difficult to read - that this pandemic is reaching us so close to home. I think in the days to come all of us will have family or friends who are positive.
We have a tough few months ahead.
If that can happen, what about property taxes? In many places property taxes are as much or more than mortgage payments. Not that I think they’ll waive those.
Re: State and local taxes - municipalities are getting hit hard. Lots of unforeseen expenses right now combined with a drop in taxes - gas tax, meals tax, state income taxes, sales taxes…will all be down.
Lots of answers to lots of questions.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-stimulus-package-questions-answers.html
After Considering $1 Billion Price Tag for Ventilators, White House Has Second Thoughts
A deal with General Motors and Ventec Life Systems to produce tens of thousands of the critical lifesaving devices seemed imminent. Then the announcement was pulled back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/us/politics/coronavirus-ventilators-trump.html
By David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
March 26, 2020
WASHINGTON — The White House had been preparing to reveal on Wednesday a joint venture between General Motors and Ventec Life Systems that would allow for the production of as many as 80,000 desperately needed ventilators to respond to an escalating pandemic when word suddenly came down that the announcement was off.
The decision to cancel the announcement, government officials say, came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., where the ventilators would be made with Ventec’s technology.
Government officials said that the deal might still happen but that they are examining at least a dozen other proposals. And they contend that an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500, with even that number in doubt. Longtime emergency managers at FEMA are working with military officials to sort through the competing offers and federal procurement rules while under pressure to give President Trump something to announce.
By early Thursday evening, at the coronavirus task force’s regular news briefing, where the president often appears, there was still nothing to disclose, and the outcome of the deliberations remained unclear.
But a General Motors spokesman said that “Project V,” as the ventilator program is known, was moving very fast, and a company official said “there’s no issue with retooling.”
A Ventec representative agreed. “Ventec and G.M. have been working at breakneck speed to leverage our collective expertise in ventilation and manufacturing to meet the needs of the country as quickly as possible and arm medical professionals with the number of ventilators needed to save lives,” said Chris O. Brooks, Ventec’s chief strategy officer.
The only thing missing was clarity from the government about how many ventilators they needed — and who would be paid to build them.
A deal for thousands of ventilators seemed imminent, until the announcement was canceled.
The shortage of ventilators has emerged as one of the major criticisms of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus. The need to quickly equip hospitals across the country with tens of thousands more of the devices to treat those most seriously ill with the virus was not anticipated despite the Trump administration’s own projection in a simulation last year that millions of people could be hospitalized. And even now, the effort to produce them has been confused and disorganized.
At the center of the discussion about how to ramp up the production of ventilators is Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House aide, who has told people that he was called in two weeks ago by Vice President Mike Pence to produce more coronavirus test kits and who has now turned his attention to ventilators.
He has been directing officials at FEMA in the effort. Two officials said the suggestion to wait on the General Motors offer came from Col. Patrick Work, who is working at FEMA. Some government officials expressed concern about the possibility of ordering too many ventilators, leaving them with an expensive surplus.
As the agency has sorted through offers, trying to weigh production ability and costs, hospitals in New York and elsewhere are reporting a desperate need for more ventilators, which are critical in treating respiratory problems in a fast-rising tide of severe coronavirus cases.
A spokeswoman for FEMA said Colonel Work presented information on each contract in such meetings but did not make any recommendations. A White House spokesman declined to comment.
The involvement of General Motors was first floated this month as the carmaker’s factory floor in Kokomo was grinding to a halt and workers were being sent home — partly because the market was collapsing but also because workers would otherwise risk exposure to the coronavirus.
Last week, General Motors, Ventec Life Systems and a coalition of business executives called StopTheSpread.org issued a statement saying that Ventec would “leverage G.M.’s logistics, purchasing and manufacturing expertise to build more of their critically important ventilators,” including some portable units.
By Sunday, Mr. Trump appeared to suggest on Twitter that a deal had been completed to mass-produce the ventilators, even though it was unclear who would pay to equip the General Motors plant or how long that process would take.
“Ford, General Motors and Tesla are being given the go ahead to make ventilators and other metal products, FAST! @fema,” he wrote. “Go for it auto execs, lets see how good you are?”
Not for the first time has Mr. Trump jumped the gun.
Tesla officials had in fact met with engineers from the medical device company Medtronic in a separate negotiation, but no partnership has yet been announced. And while the chief executive of General Motors, Mary T. Barra, was enthused about the ventilator idea, Mr. Trump’s own aides had not embraced the G.M.-Ventec partnership — in part because they had not seen the specifics of the proposal.
Administration officials said Thursday that they were struggling to understand just how many ventilators the new venture could make.
The initial projection, one senior administration official said, was that after three weeks of preparation it could produce an initial run of 20,000 ventilators, or about two-thirds of what Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York recently said his state alone needed to cover the influx of coronavirus patients expected in two weeks, if not sooner.
That number then shrank to 7,500 ventilators in the initial run, or maybe 5,000, an apparent recognition that auto transmissions and ventilators had very little in common. Those numbers are in flux and so are the Trump administration’s because the White House cannot decide how many ventilators it wants.
Targets have changed by the hour, officials said, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, which approves the use of medical devices, and the White House try to figure out how many ventilators to request and how much they should cost.
Those issues appeared to come to a head on Wednesday afternoon, when FEMA told the White House that it was premature to make a decision.
The $1.5 billion price tag comes to around $18,000 a ventilator. And the overall cost, by comparison, is roughly equal to buying 18 F-35s, the Pentagon’s most advanced fighter jet.
So on Wednesday, despite the president’s tweet three days earlier, FEMA was still weighing competing offers in order to make a recommendation to Mr. Kushner. And it seemed clear to several officials that the agency would have to select multiple manufacturers, in part to avoid the risk that one production line runs into technical troubles, or that its workers contract the very virus the ventilators are being built to defeat.
FACT CHECK
Trump’s Baseless Claim That a Recession Would Be Deadlier Than the Coronavirus
The opposite is more likely to be true, according to research and experts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/us/politics/fact-check-trump-coronavirus-recession.html
By Linda Qiu
March 26, 2020
President Trump, in saying that he wanted to reopen the economy by Easter, has argued that an economic downturn would be more deadly than the coronavirus.
WHAT WAS SAID
“You have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies. You have death. Probably — and I mean definitely — would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about with regard to the virus.”
— at a news conference on Monday
“You’re going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression.”
— during a virtual town hall on Fox News on Tuesday
This lacks evidence. Though the question of the overall impact of recessions on mortality remains unsettled, experts disputed Mr. Trump’s claim that an economic downturn would be more deadly than a pandemic. (The White House did not respond when asked for the source of the president’s conjecture.)
“All these effects of economic expansions or recessions on mortality that can be seen, e.g., during the Great Depression or the Great Recession, are tiny if compared with the mortality effects of a pandemic,” said Dr. José A. Tapia, a professor of public health and economics at Drexel University who has written several studies on the topic.
It is difficult to disaggregate the impact of an economic downturn on health and mortality from other factors. Those who become unemployed do tend to have higher levels of depression and bad health. But for the general population, studies have found that death rates from other causes — cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases, and traffic and industrial injuries — were either unchanged or actually decreased.
For example, a 2012 study found that suicides did increase during the Depression of the 1930s, but the death rate for car accidents decreased and no significant effects were observed for 30 other causes of death in the United States. A 2009 study found that mortality actually decreased across almost all ages during the Depression. Researchers last year also found that mortality rates overall declined from 2005 to 2010, a period that covered the deep recession that ran from late 2007 through mid-2009.
In comparison, projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that deaths from the coronavirus in the United States could range from 200,000 to 1.7 million.
Mr. Trump is right to be concerned about the trend of increased suicides during recessions, said Aaron Reeves, a professor and sociologist at Oxford University and the lead author of a 2012 study that estimated an excess of 4,750 suicides in the United States after 2007, coinciding with the recession. But in a scenario in which workplaces and businesses reopen and social distancing is more limited but people continue to wash their hands, Mr. Reeves said, “my sense is that this virus would almost certainly kill more people under those conditions than suicides would.”
Moreover, it is not inevitable that a recession would lead to excess suicides. In countries and American states with adequate social programs in place, the impact of economic downturns can be reduced.
“There are some choices that governments have about how you potentially offset the consequences of recessions that may come,” Mr. Reeves said, pointing to the $2 trillion economic package passed by the Senate. “Trump could put in place more to protect those people if he’s worried about suicides.”
Experts also warned that the argument about whether to stave off a recession or contain the coronavirus was a somewhat false choice. If efforts to mitigate the coronavirus abate and cases and deaths spiral out of control, the economy would also be affected by self-imposed lockdowns.
The mental health effects of high levels of unemployment during a recession, too, would have its parallels if the United States suffered colossal loss of lives. That would bring about “communal bereavement,” where there is widespread distress and feelings of loss even among those who do not know the deceased, and its associated health risks, said Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley.
“I’d rather contain the epidemic first and then take my chances with the recession,” Mr. Catalano said. “Humans control recessions; mindless nature controls epidemics. It’s just bad medicine to mix epidemiology and economics right now.”
If you will get ventilators fast, they will come from China. If you really wanted to get them fast, you wouldn’t have postponed a phone call with President Xi for 1.5 hours in order to call in to Hannity’s TV show.
You’d also stop calling it the Chinese Virus is you want the stuff you need asap.
WHO says new study doesn’t provide evidence of airborne transmission
From CNN’s Jen Christensen
A study published earlier this month suggested that the coronavirus could linger in aerosols – the suspension of tiny particles or droplets in the air – for up to three hours.
But this experiment doesn’t reflect the situation in the real world, and so doesn’t offer any evidence of airborne transmission, said the World Health Organization in its daily coronavirus report on Thursday.
In the report, the WHO said the experiment used high-powered lab equipment that “does not reflect normal human coughing or sneezing nor does it reflect aerosol generating procedures in clinical settings.”
The findings “do not bring new evidence on airborne transmission” since it was already known that particles that contain the virus could spread during medical procedures that generate aerosols, WHO said.
Here’s what we do know about how the virus spreads. The WHO said evidence shows that the coronavirus transmits through close contact with respiratory droplets, like when someone coughs.
It is also transmitted by fomites, meaning materials that have been contaminated with droplets of the coronavirus.
It spreads directly between people when coronavirus droplets reach the nose, mouth or eyes of an uninfected person. Since the droplets are too heavy to be airborne, they land on objects around that person. People can become infected by touching those contaminated objects and then touching their eyes, nose or mouth.
So is it airborne? Not that we know of — the one way airborne transmission may occur is through aerosol-generating procedures used to help patients with coronavirus, said the WHO. It recommends health care workers wear medical masks for the regular care of patients and respirators for aerosol-generating procedures.
[ Well, I’m not taking any chances. Lots of conflicting info thus far. ]
Trump and Xi Jinping just spoke about the coronavirus
From CNN’s Shanshan Wang in Beijing
Chinese President Xi Jinping has spoken with US President Donald Trump, according to Chinese state television CCTV.
Trump also tweeted about the conversation, saying he and Xi were “working closely together.”
“China has been through much and has developed a strong understanding of the virus,” he said – notably omitting the term “China virus,” which he has used several times in the past week.
Earlier at a press conference, Trump had mentioned he was due to speak with Xi, but took a more cautious tone. “Number one, you don’t know what the numbers are in China,” he said of the case numbers, which have dropped dramatically in the past few weeks.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Just finished a very good conversation with President Xi of China. Discussed in great detail the CoronaVirus that is ravaging large parts of our Planet. China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the Virus. We are working closely together. Much respect!
From Guardian on the call:
China warns Trump he should take ‘substantive actions’ to improve relations
The latest now on that call between US president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Xi told Trump the US needed to take “substantive actions” to improve China-US relations, according to Chinese state media.
Xi told Trump China was willing to offer support to the US in tackling the outbreak, and that he hoped the US would take practical and effective measures to safeguard the lives and health of Chinese nationals in the US.
Xi added that China was willing to “enhance macroeconomic policy co-ordination to stabilise the market and secure growth,” according to state media.
“China-US relations are at an important juncture,” Xi reportedly said. He also said China had been open and transparent about the pandemic.
The South China Morning Post reports that during the call Xi “urged unity and solidarity and delivered three main messages: strengthen international efforts to stop the virus; shore up the economy amid downward trends; and a subtle call on the US to stop its hostile moves against China.”
The SCMP quotes the Chinese president as telling Trump:
The virus knows no boundaries, and the pandemic is our common enemy. All countries must join hands and put up the strictest network for joint prevention and joint control [of the disease]
Philippines top military commander tests positive for virus
Philippines Armed Forces Chief Felimon Santos Jr. has tested positive for the coronavirus, according to CNN Philippines.
Santos has been on home quarantine since March 24 after coming into contact with a senior officer who had tested positive for the virus. Santos received his results Thursday night and informed the Secretary of Defense Delfin Lorenzana, CNN Philippines reported.
There are 707 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the Philippines, and 45 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.
CNN
Vietnam limits domestic flights and stops public gatherings
Vietnam will limit domestic flights and stop public gatherings for two weeks from Saturday in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the government said in a statement on Friday.
Indoor gatherings of more than 20 people and outdoor gatherings of 10 people or more will be banned, the government said, citing an order signed by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc.
Vietnam has found 153 coronavirus cases but has had no reported deaths, according to the health ministry. More than 57,000 people are in quarantine.
The next 10-15 days would be decisive in Vietnam’s fight against the virus, Phuc has said.
In the statement on Friday, Phuc also ordered that flights between the capital, Hanoi, and the southern business hub of Ho Chi Minh City and cities across the country be reduced.
All major cities should temporarily shut down non-essential services until April 15 at the earliest and residents should stay indoors as much as possible, Phuc said.
UK government urges homebuyers to avoid moving
The UK government has urged people to avoid moving house during the coronavirus outbreak, as the pandemic brings the country’s property market to a near standstill, Reuters reports.
In guidance issued late on Thursday, the government said while “there is no need to pull out of transactions, we all need to ensure we are following guidance to stay at home and away from others at all times”.
The outbreak has restricted banks’ ability to offer new mortgages, while many have been swamped with inquiries from people asking for breaks on their existing home loans.
In line with the government’s advice, British lenders agreed on Thursday to give all homebuyers the option of extending mortgage offers by three months.
UK Finance, the banking industry body, said banks would grant homebuyers who have exchanged contracts the possibility of moving at a later date by extending their mortgage offer for up to three months.
Inside the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine
Defeating Covid-19 will call for more than vaccines; it will involve quarantines, social distancing, antivirals and other drugs, and healthcare for the sick. But the idea of a vaccine – the quintessential silver bullet – has come to bear an almost unreasonable allure. The coronavirus arrived at a ripe moment in genetic technology, when the advances of the past half-decade have made it possible for vaccine projects to explode off the blocks as soon as a virus is sequenced. These cutting-edge vaccines don’t use weakened forms of the germ to build our immunity, as all vaccines once did; rather, they contain short copies of parts of the germ’s genetic code – its DNA or RNA – which can produce fragments of the germ within our bodies.
Thus, for the first time ever, scientists have been able to muster up vaccine prospects mere weeks into a new, fast-spreading disease. Right now, there are at least 43 Covid-19 vaccines in development around the world – in Brisbane and Hong Kong, in the US and the UK, in the labs of universities and companies. Most of these are DNA or RNA vaccines. One vaccine, made in 63 days by an American biotech firm named Moderna, moved into human trials on 16 March, entering the bloodstream of the first of 45 healthy adult volunteers in Seattle. It was a “world indoor record”, said Anthony Fauci, the doctor who heads the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Nothing has ever gone that fast.”
More on the subject:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/inside-the-race-to-develop-a-coronavirus-vaccine-covid-19
US electric car maker Tesla plans to slash on-site staff at its Nevada battery plant by around 75% due to the coronavirus pandemic, the local county manager said on Thursday.
The move comes after its Japanese battery partner Panasonic Corp said it would scale down operations at the Nevada factory this week before closing it for 14 days.
The factory produces electric motors and battery packs for Tesla’s popular Model 3 sedans.
However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will reopen the New York plant “as soon as humanly possible” to manufacture ventilators for coronavirus patients.
Guardian
Angela Merkel says restrictive measures in Germany will continue
From CNN’s Fred Pleitgen in Berlin
The partial lockdown and restrictive emergency measures in place in Germany will continue for a while, said German Chancellor Angela Merkel today.
“Right now is not the time to be talking about the loosening of these measures,” she said.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany is currently doubling about every 5 days, she said, adding that it needs to go down to every 10 days for a loosening of measures to even become an option.
Financial fallout: After a G20 video conference call and an EU heads of state conference call, she also reiterated Germany’s position against Eurobonds, saying the European Stabilization Mechanism is the right instrument to deal with the financial fallout from the coronavirus crisis.
“We made clear from the German side, but also others did as well, that this is not the opinion of all states," Merkel said in reference to Spain and Italy’s desire to try new ways to deal with the crisis and asking for Coronabonds.
Social distancing: Merkel added that while she is busy and working well in quarantine, she, like many German citizens, misses personal social contact.
“I miss that I can’t be in the cabinet meetings and can’t see the people there. And I miss having personal contacts," she said.
“In the same way that New York is now the next Italy, and Italy is the next Iran, and Iran is the next China, no matter where you live, you are the next next, this virus doesn’t care where you live,” said Mayor Garcetti, echoing comments he previously made to CNN.
That is why I don’t have a TV. Because everybody with a mike becomes the next Nostradamus.
Boris Johnson!
It’s definitely easier to ignore something if one doesn’t see it happening. If it’s not where one can see it, it can’t be there and all is well, right?
My dad always used to tell us kids to, “Learn from other people’s mistakes. Life is too short to make them all yourself.”
It’s been good advice I’ve remembered for many moons now.
This doesn’t mean one has to believe everything they see or hear on any sort of media or from the clerk at the grocery store. But for those capable of thinking, it’s super good to have all the info and theories out there to consider IMO. Then consider the facts. In this case it’s also helpful to remember a little bit of Algebra when they covered exponential functions.
He needs to read the posts - not the screen names. There are some on here who claim to be adults, but their writing style is eerily akin to what I see in high school.
Never trust what people say about themselves. Take it with some thought. 
Meanwhile, Neil Ferguson, the originator of the Imperial College model that forecast up to 500,000 deaths in the UK has now quietly revised down his estimate to under 20,000 and also said it could well be many fewer. He is now coming closer to the Oxford model, which hypothesized that up to 50% of the UK is already infected and that the vast majority already cleared the virus.
Until there is widespread antibody testing, we simply have no idea. And we have no idea whether social distancing measures are actually flattening any curve. We might simply be seeing the ramp up right now in the very small part of the population that is susceptible. This will naturally trail off as the virus burns through that portion. We should know in a few weeks at most.
Speaking of facts and thought, I read late last night a post someone had put on that had Trump saying something to the effect that he had, “talked with two people who had the virus, but they didn’t go to the doctor. They stayed home and got well.” It implied a lot more people had the virus than we know about.
If they didn’t get tested and just had mild symptoms, well, the odds from those who are being tested in various places always show they were not likely to have had it. The vast majority with symptoms getting tested get negative results. Even in NYS it’s 85% negative to 15% positive.
There are folks who have had the virus and didn’t know it - just spread it to others. This is why we all have to be wary. But to think everyone who coughs has it, or even that the majority who cough have it, so far, is just plain wrong.
My brain tells me he (and they) have no idea if they were among the 85 out of 100 without it or the 15 out of 100 with it (odds can vary a little based upon location, but I’ve yet to see anywhere with open testing based upon symptoms or contact where the majority have it).
From NBC
"Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West announced Thursday that it located 39 million N95 masks and will make them available to state and local governments and health care systems that are fighting the novel coronavirus outbreak.
The union found a distributor with the masks, which are cleared for surgical use, after pleas from health care workers as new coronavirus cases surge across the state and the country as a whole.
Union officials said they also found a supplier that can produce some 20 million protective masks per week and another that can supply millions of protective face shields"
Something remain unchanged. And the poor taking on the chin in case of an emergency may as well be one of them, almost like force of nature.
Yes, throughout history pandemics have affected the lower social classes more than the higher, for various reasons. That will not change.