Can we start a list of Tine things which benefit from Coronavirus? I'll start:
- Houston Astros
- Non-violent offenders in HC jail
- Crooked-ass scumbag HISD school board trustees

Shife said:

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Can we start a list of Tine things which benefit from Coronavirus? I'll start:
- Houston Astros
- Non-violent offenders in HC jail
- Crooked-ass scumbag HISD school board trustees

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An opportunity to turn the Astrodome into a hospital [/Ed Emmett]

CowtownAg06 said:

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Disagree on this. We did take measures must faster than NY, plus we advantages with lower density. The biggest issue in NY is hospital capacity and we've got plenty. The other evidence is the fact that you're not seeing California over run in the same way. I'm not saying that we're out of the woods, but we are not headed toward being NY.

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We also didn't have woke city leadership on the news telling us to go cozy up to the Chinese in our community during Chinese NY celebrations.

Milwaukees Best Light said:

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Shife said:

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Can we start a list of Tine things which benefit from Coronavirus? I'll start:
- Houston Astros
- Non-violent offenders in HC jail
- Crooked-ass scumbag HISD school board trustees

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Dumbass Texans and Bill OB need to be on this list. Trading away Hopkins for a busted ass RB. SMH.

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The Texans fired O'Brien this morning

Milwaukees Best Light said:

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Shife said:

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Can we start a list of Tine things which benefit from Coronavirus? I'll start:
- Houston Astros
- Non-violent offenders in HC jail
- Crooked-ass scumbag HISD school board trustees

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Dumbass Texans and Bill OB need to be on this list. Trading away Hopkins for a busted ass RB. SMH.

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I had put that out of my mind for awhile.

Thanks for the reminder.

Shife said:

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Can we start a list of Tine things which benefit from Coronavirus? I'll start:
- Houston Astros
- Non-violent offenders in HC jail
- Crooked-ass scumbag HISD school board trustees

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Liquor stores, breweries, and alcohol distributors.

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Nielsen reports sales of booze in the U.S. rose 55% in the week ending March 21.

Among the biggest categories chosen by those trying to boost their spirts were spirits with tequila, gin and pre-mixed cocktails leading the way.

Sales in those categories jumped 75% compared to the same period last year.

Wine sales are up 66% and beer sales foamed up 42%.

And it appears people are getting alcohol while practicing social distancing; Nielsen says online alcohol sales are up 243%.

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If we all manage to survive this virus, Ts&Ps for our livers.

Ducks4brkfast said:

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Milwaukees Best Light said:

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Shife said:

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Can we start a list of Tine things which benefit from Coronavirus? I'll start:
- Houston Astros
- Non-violent offenders in HC jail
- Crooked-ass scumbag HISD school board trustees

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Dumbass Texans and Bill OB need to be on this list. Trading away Hopkins for a busted ass RB. SMH.

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The Texans fired O'Brien this morning

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Don't tease us!

No. We've never tracked anything real time anywhere close to like this.

For reference, we are currently testing, in the US alone, more people every day than tested positive during the entire 18 month swine flu pandemic. There were only 115k positive tests. The reality is until we have antibody testing, we are going to drastically underestimate the number of positive cases that have been resolved or were asymptomatic. But the reality is, there isn't really a good reason for most people to get tested because there isn't any change in treatment for most people. You just stay at home and have little to know symptoms or you have flu-like symptoms. It seems that many people just want to be validated that they have it but it a waste of resources for a large part since ~90% of tests are negative. Which leads me to address the number of people that I see on facebook that say, "they most definitely have it but they can't get tested." It would seem that since we are doing significant screening prior to testing and we are still getting mostly negatives, that most of those are still false. What this leads to is, since we are drastically underidentifying cases, the uniformed assumptions of rates of hospitalization and fatality are higher since the denominator is woefully below actual rates.

Also, the way different countries are currently counting deaths varies. In Italy, if you have Covid-19 and die, you are counted. Regardless of any co-morbidities which most of the people currently dying in Italy have 2 or more. Something like 99.2% of the deaths in Italy had a co-morbitity. Estimates for the UK is that 50% of deaths that will occur there would have happened from other causes by the end of this year regardless of the virus.

Then the media comes in and causes a panic by saying that if Dr. Birx says that 113 million americans will get the virus and currently our hospitalization and fatality rates are 20% and 2% then that means 25 million americans will need to go to hospital and 2 million will die. So over counting of deaths and underidentifying of positive cases leads to bad final data.

Just for clarification, I am also not necessarily calling for widespread testing more than if we have serious cases. It just doesn't provide much information unless you are going to aggressively contact trace like they are doing in Singapore and HK. I think that is just going to require too much manpower at this time for the US. And Americans are not generally happy about the government in their business.

Hopefully, there is some relief due to the normal seasoning of viruses like these and we can end the stay at home generally for the summer months and hopefully by the time the fall rolls around, we have enough data emergency rush the vaccine into production and distribution.

The reality is that this is the first widespread virus in the social media world. Not too much different than why the OJ trial was the way it was. It was the first major trial of the 24 hour cable news channels. People are getting extremely overwhelmed with scary scenarios and data that is not well understood before it is interpreted by people who have an understanding of what the data means. This scares people into thinking that everyone is going to die. Yes, it is a serious situation, but it is not nearly as serious as the media makes it out to be. If there was a running ticker and 24 hour news coverage of the flu deaths every year, people would go crazy too and the flu regularly kills babies which would be even more sad. The media coverage is causing more of the panic and response than the actual virus.

Breweries are taking huge hits. Basically all of them have laid off 80-90% of their staff. Even well established breweries like Jester King laid off 90% of their work force.

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Which leads me to address the number of people that I see on facebook that say, "they most definitely have it but they can't get tested."

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This is the one that gets me and why I'm glad I'm not on Facebook......stay the f-ck home and stay away from people if you aren't having breathing problems. People have been trained these days to think that everyone in the world cares about them personally. Sorry, bub, doesn't work that way.

To be fair, I'm assuming that most of the layoffs in breweries are bar/tasting room staff and promotions people. They're definitely taking a hit, but I think at this point most of the layoffs are about staff that essentially can't work.

Are those craft beer trucks still going around doing home delivery?

Texaggie7nine said:

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Are those craft beer trucks still going around doing home delivery?

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AFAIK Hop Drop is still active.

https://gohopdrop.com/

Lots of breweries, including Holler, have basically shut down for now. Eureka is open for to go as is Saint Arnold; I biked to Saint Arnold yesterday and they said business has been steady and grocery sales are up but obviously down in bars/restaurants but they're still brewing.

Exactly. Many craft breweries have a majority of their sales from the brewery itself, whether it is taproon (bar sales) or take-away. If not, all of it. Not all of them have canning operations and I assume aren't too keen in this time to let people bring their own growlers in to be filled. Due to the differences in brewery licenses, certain licenses can essentially only self-distribute a very small amount to bars in the forms of kegs.

First two deaths in Montgomery Co. Residents at the senior living apartment complex, one in his 80s, the other 90s.

https://www.khou.com/mobile/article/news/health/coronavirus/immediate-shelter-in-place-order-issued-at-apartment-complex-in-the-woodlands-after-12-residents-test-positive-for-covid-19/285-8c1bd9f2-a59e-4b2c-a4c7-91db001a520b

FHKChE07 said:

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Breweries are taking huge hits. Basically all of them have laid off 80-90% of their staff. Even well established breweries like Jester King laid off 90% of their work force.

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The distributor and spirits manufacturing tiers are in the same boat.

That Nielsen data reflects business during that week vs prior year, and there's also a big jump vs the previous week - it's essentially panic-driven buying like toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

For wine and spirits, there's generally 60 days of inventory on floors and in the pipe, but virtually the entire industry lost more than half of its daily business. For craft breweries who rely on that on-premise trade, it's even worse.

More than half of distributor sales teams and a quarter of the operations folks (ironically enough the backward-ass Class B system in Texas means there aren't as many loaders/drivers/etc for restaurants and bars like in 48 other states) are sitting at home hoping they don't get bad news from HR. Major liquor manufacturers are starting to lay people off and unfortunately that trend accelerated today.

The booze business isn't going anywhere but like most industries it's definitely not a safe place to be right now.

BohunkAg said:

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Which leads me to address the number of people that I see on facebook that say, "they most definitely have it but they can't get tested."

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This is the one that gets me and why I'm glad I'm not on Facebook......stay the f-ck home and stay away from people if you aren't having breathing problems. People have been trained these days to think that everyone in the world cares about them personally. Sorry, bub, doesn't work that way.

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They're really limited to who they're allowing to take the test right? Must show symptoms, etc.

I think I read that 90% of tests are still coming up negative. If that's the case, this thing isn't as widespread as I was originally thinking.

CoachRTM said:

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BohunkAg said:

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Quote:

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Which leads me to address the number of people that I see on facebook that say, "they most definitely have it but they can't get tested."

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This is the one that gets me and why I'm glad I'm not on Facebook......stay the f-ck home and stay away from people if you aren't having breathing problems. People have been trained these days to think that everyone in the world cares about them personally. Sorry, bub, doesn't work that way.

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They're really limited to who they're allowing to take the test right? Must show symptoms, etc.

I think I read that 90% of tests are still coming up negative. If that's the case, this thing isn't as widespread as I was originally thinking.

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There are doctors over on the coronavirus board saying the false negative rate is something like 30%, IIRC.

There's a distillery in Galveston that has converted over 100% to making hand sanitizer. Last I heard it was only being sold to law enforcement but they were hoping to make enough for walk-in sales.

maybe, but we still don't have too good of a handle on the numbers of asymptomatic or have a test for those that have resolved to see total numbers of people infected. There is some belief that it could have been around much earlier than we think because we didn't really know about it yet. There were tons of suspicious flu cases this year that came back negative on the flu tests but were killing people. if that is the case, we might be in a better situation as more people have gotten exposed to it so there is some level of herd immunity. And that also means that the fatality rates might go down more. There is a whole lot that we don't know yet but we are learning more each day.

I agree with much of what you wrote but wanted to comment a bit on the notion of Italy counting all their Covid deaths.

I don't believe Italy, and any other countries, are successfully counting all the deaths that may be initiated by COVID. Here are two stories mentioning some of this with respect to nursing homes but honestly I don't even think they are counting everything in the hospitals.

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But no one knows for sure how many people have become sick. Governments in Europe's hardest-hit countries - Italy, Spain and France are not routinely testing for coronavirus among elderly residents who fall ill in nursing homes or even those who eventually die there, including those who suffered from symptoms of the disease.

The heavy dependency upon hospitals to count coronavirus fatalities poses particular problems for evaluating the spread of COVID-19 among the oldest citizens. Hospitals are increasingly reluctant to admit elderly coronavirus patients judged to have little chance of successful treatment.

In France, once two residents of the same nursing home test positive, any other residents who fall sick and ultimately succumb to the disease are "assumed" to have the illness, but they are not actually tested or counted among the national toll, which so far only includes those who have sought care in a hospital. The government has promised to include nursing home residents early this week but has yet to implement widespread testing of residents. The supply of body bags is dwindling, according to Marc Bourquin of the French hospital federation, an umbrella organization for half of the country's 7,000 nursing homes.

A study by Italy's national health institute used sampling to approach the question of how many elderly in nursing homes died with the coronavirus. In the hardest-hit region of Lombardy, half of all residents of nursing homes who died since Feb. 1 either had the virus or its flu-like symptoms, but most of the deaths only cited flu because tests were carried out irregularly. About 1 in 10 Italian nursing homes said they struggled to get residents into hospitals, and 1 in 4 had problems properly isolating those who tested positive for the virus.

More - https://apnews.com/44b668a1e983f4f7c06e47f102307819

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As the official death toll from Italy's coronavirus outbreak passes 2,500, a silent surge in fatalities in nursing homes, where dozens of patients a day are dying untested for the virus, suggests the real total may be higher.

But strict testing rules mean only patients hospitalized with severe symptoms are normally being swab tested.

While no detailed data is available, officials, nurses and relatives say there has been a spike in nursing home deaths in the worst affected regions of northern Italy since the virus emerged, and they are not showing up in coronavirus statistics.

In the absence of detailed data and testing, it is impossible to know exactly how many deaths in elderly care homes may be due to COVID-19 or to other causes like seasonal influenza or pneumonia

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-homes-insigh/uncounted-among-coronavirus-victims-deaths-sweep-through-italys-nursing-homes-idUSKBN2152V0

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This issue with the data has been a sticking point with me since reports started coming out of Italy.

If you're 70+ and living in an assisted living facility and/or severely immuno-compromised, does it really matter what ultimately causes death? Whether it be coronavirus, flu, pneumonia (caused by whatever), etc., if you're old and/or sick, something is going to get you.

And how are we counting deaths of, for example, cancer patients (similar to that ESPN reporter who died of pneumonia, but it was later revealed he had an aggressive form of cancer)?

The scientist in me is interested in testing people, not so much to know how many people are infected, but to try and identify the most common sources of infection. There are so many cases of people literally having no clue how they got sick. When I think back to the times I've been really sick with the flu (or tick virus), at least I have a good idea of how I contacted the illness.

How worried do we really have to be about going in an elevator and touching a button with live virus on it and infecting ourselves vs. being directly sneezed or coughed on by someone?

If you read the stories about the choir practice in Washington and the funeral in Georgia, both of which seem to have resulted in dozens of infections, the route to infection is very interesting and highly relevant to dealing with this in the long term.

Things getting weird in DFW

And the MoCo LEO is improving...

APRIL 1 3:30 p.m. There's good news from Montgomery County with an update on their first coronavirus patient. The Patton Village police officer, who's been hospitalized since early March, is finally improving. He had been in critical condition for weeks but is now in fair condition, according to the hospital.

The officer and two other local COVID-19 patients were in the same barbecue cook-off tent in late February.

The Montgomery County Public Health District also reported 17 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday, bringing the total there to 110.