Coronavirus COVID-19 - Global Health Pandemic #47

[10ofRods]

California's Newsom announces $125M fund to give coronavirus stimulus checks to immigrants in state illegally

California's Newsom announces $125M fund to give coronavirus stimulus checks to immigrants in state illegally

This makes no sense to me....I admit that I do not know a lot about how illegal immigrants live (jobs or support from government) in California. But still does not sound right.
Couldn't that money be filtered into the small businesses that are hurting the worst?

There are all kinds of reasons, with a long history. Small businesses are getting other aid. But the small businesses depend on the labor of many of those undocumented workers.

In the UK, where anti-immigrant sentiment is very high, and they effectively have barred all Romanian labor - they've quietly (almost secretly) had to import thousands of Romanians, to work for very little money, or else their fruit isn't getting picked. Thousands of bushels of fruit crops have wasted. England has a real problem right now with food security, for obvious reasons.

So these lucky Romanians get to pack onto a plane, during a pandemic, be transported to low quality housing, work long hours, and get sent home with a check.

We don't do that in California. We did it a long time ago (google the Bracero Program) and it didn't work. It was so hard on the children of the families (unlike UK, we don't fly people in - they come across land). We're not. big into family separation in California. Most of us believe that all workers should be treated with dignity

So, since we need fruit pickers here (badly) and we export enough produce from California to feed several other states, it's important that even those these workers do not meed federal standards for entering the US, we have them here.

They are small in number. They are permitted to send their kids to school. They have to be vaccinated to go to school, just like everyone else. We know where they live, they have to provide utility bills or housing contract to go to school. That way, health improves and criminality is reduced.

So don't worry about how California is doing it. We've got an economy that recognizess all essential workers.

I'm listening to Gov Newsom's live conference right now. He is talking about how in our second list of objectives, we have to secure our food supply. It's picking season for many crops, and it's also packing season so that people outside of the Central Valley and outside of California can get food - that may include some of you here on WS.

We produce almost all your almond milk, for example. Shelf stable and fresh alike. Many of those workers are undocumented because the federal government doesn't think they qualify to be "essential." But no one else will pick almonds. So California officially regards them as essential and treats them as essential.

Strawberries, lemons, limes, oranges, avocados, tangerines are all going from field to market right now. We hear the lemon trains every morning. The workers at the lemonade/lemon juice plant are about 10% undocumented, the rest are legal residents. Right now, that plant is shut down and soon the refrigerators will be full, so Gov Newsom is authorizing food production workers to go back to work, with a specific social distancing plan (and masks).

Personally, I like citrus. I can live without strawberries. Lots of people get frozen strawberries, apparently. If that industry fails, I'm not sure the owners have the means to restart easily - eventually, sure. But no rancher I know is making huge money, they are making an okay living, the workers (documented or not) get $15 an hour, but that doesn't go far in California. With 4 wage earners in a household, though, it's a good living - and that's how most agricultural workers live. It's worse in most other states.

 

[Reasonable & Just]

Agree opening May 1 is a pipe dream. I'm accepting we are in isolation for the long run. Prepared to be on lockdown through the end of 2020. It is what it is.

I really cannot wrap my head around this going on like it is now through the end of 2020, without some steps out into the world and more ways to keep businesses humming and get students back to school. We must keep working on solutions. We have tremendous wealth just in this country alone, plus a world full of diverse thinkers and technology that was unimaginable 20 years ago.

 

[10ofRods]

I am really worried about Las Vegas. Are people going to feel comfortable flying back to Vegas and going to the casinos and the shows, after we are allowed to?

I love going to our local casino with my friends. But being in a high risk group, over 65 with asthma, I cannot see myself feeling comfortable in that crowded casino, touching chips and slots and being in the crowds.

I hope enough other people feel OK enough to go back and party...

I would have said Las Vegas's chances of recovering soon were small, but now I'm way more optimistic. Yes, there will be health consequences, but people will come back. I'm a longtime DE on TripAdvisor and it's clear people are chomping at the bit to get back to California/Nevada/Arizona for their traditional holidays. All are winter destinations as well as summer destinations. Las Vegas attracts risk takers! It'll be one of the first major destinations to reopen and it will come back like gangbusters.

Airlines are beginning to announce their plans for future travel. Pricing will be interesting at first. We'll see whether they'll fly with fewer passengers or not - that's the key variable for Vegas. But international carriers seem to be optimistic for last minute fares and maintained reservations from Europe to LAX for this summer.

I think lots and lots of people will want to party, and if the elderly/medically fragile feel differently, Las Vegas would not be the place for them (just as it has never been a great place for the immune compromised or the severe asthmatics). Nevada's overall CV stats aren't too bad, either.

 

[Chelly]

Wow !......There I would be, with $4,500 more a month to spend.......and not a roll of toilet paper in sight anywhere........moo

Cody, git back to ya grass-cutting and down't be thinking of a family fishing trip for your 30th in May. I'd worry ever so much about you.

 

[Tillicum]

Coronavirus: Ohio's reopening process to begin May 1, DeWine says
Gov. Mike DeWine said he hopes to start reopening the state May 1.


It will start with businesses that have put together protocols and have demonstrated the ability to operate safely.

The governor has asked Lt. Jon Husted to work with businesses throughout the state to create a best practices guideline that will keep staff and customers safe as businesses begin to reopen.

 

[10ofRods]

Please post a link showing more than a couple of anecdotal cases of kids under 20 possibly dying from Corona.

CDC doesn't use "under 20" as its data point, it uses "under 24." Still kids, I guess. Anyway, in the US, 13 people aged 1-24 have died. No one under the age of 1 has died. Only 2 children 1-4 have died. Both had serious underlying conditions (one was a longterm cancer surviver, needed immune suppressants, succumbed to CV).

Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

I don't know any place that is keeping separate stats on just under-20's. But if you split the deaths in the group 14-24 (10 deaths), we can reasonably assume that 4-5 of those were under 20 (since CV's morbidity goes up with age, let's say 4 deaths).

So, about 7 people in the US under 20 who have died. We don't have worldwide figures, but it would seem that it's similar everywhere else.

7 is "very few" but more than "a couple." IMO

 

[LadyL]

Rachel Maddow looks at the six criteria listed by the World Health Organization for countries considering lifting precautionary restrictions against the spread of coronavirus and notes that the U.S. is not even past step one and remains distressingly distant from step two.

U.S. not remotely ready to re-open, according to WHO criteria

 

[MyBelle]

Well, the trial results are coming back so far, it's not looking promising whatsoever. Using the meds without clinical trials doesn't tell you anything. Individual person getting meds and recovering could have recovered without any of these meds just as well.
For instance, I might get sick and decide to eat apples. If I recover I could claim it was due to apples. Which is why you need to feed hundreds of people apples, and compare them with people who don't eat apples, and see if it really makes a difference.
Otherwise you are giving people useless and potentially dangerous drugs for no reason.

My link doesn't agree with your opinion and neither do I. The physicians are the ones trained to decide what drugs to use. They don't have the luxury of waiting until trials conclude because people are dying now. If you want to ignore a physician's advice and eat apples rather than take a medication, that's your decision.

JMO

Treatments for COVID-19: Drugs being tested against coronavirus | Live Science

 

[10ofRods]

Kids seem to not be affected as much. They maybe get it but are either immune or asymptomatic. Not really sure but they have not supposed to be seeing Grandparents who are a high risk group so maybe they think kids have social distancesd enough to not be contagious any more. Eventually we will know more about this virus but it is probably very low risk in schools. In UK, some schools have still been open for kids of NHS and essential workers anyway.

In real life though, grandparents continue to take care of or living in households with grandkids. About ⅓ of households in California where there are children rely on grandparents for care, or have grandparents living in the home.

Even if grandkids didn't see grandparents, their parents will be in the workplaces where we all work. Teachers themselves are not all young people. Many of us are older. I am a grandparent *and* a teacher.

I do accept some level of risk, however. But there's no way I'm going to hang out with other people's kids and not see my own. And even though my students are the parents of the school children and not the children themselves, it's the same risk. They too can be asymptomatic carriers. So we'll have a huge pool of K-12 silent carriers, then a huge pool of adult workers back at work, and then, of course, the college students. And we all know how that goes.

So effectively, if the schools open up, social distancing as it's being practiced right now is out the window.

 

[jjenny]

My link doesn't agree with your opinion and neither do I. The physicians are the ones trained to decide what drugs to use. They don't have the luxury of waiting until trials conclude because people are dying now. If you want to ignore a physician's advice and eat apples rather than take a medication, that's your decision.

JMO

Treatments for COVID-19: Drugs being tested against coronavirus | Live Science

Well, unfortunately there is no data that any of these drugs are effective. After these trials are completed, most likely physicians will end up not prescribing these drugs anymore, if trials don't show any positive results.

 

[10ofRods]

So are these kids still contagious or all ok now as they have effectively been quarantined for well more than 14 days ?

The teachers and other education employees could have caught the virus anywhere before the lockdown like everyone else, on sidewalks, shops and restaurants, transit systems etc. They don't know.

Given how viral loading works, schools would be a primary hypothesis when a teacher gets CV. Sure, they could have gotten it anywhere else, but many were social distancing except for going to work. Everyone I know was.

But the real problem is that no one knows yet how long people are contagious. Each of us can go read the scientific literature, it's easy enough to find. It is contradictory. 14 days, seems to me, a pretty conservative view. If we find out there are differences in the two main strains of CV19 in terms of how long it lasts in the body (and I think this will be ultimately the finding), then it might be 14 days for one strain and 28 for the other.

Of course, that would mean we were testing way more people and not just people who show up at hospital. We're no where close to that yet.

We'd also have to start testing broadly and have researchers look at phylogeny of the virus to see if there are correlations between virus strain/point mutation and how long it lives. Viruses love to evolve to live a long time if they possible can. (Sorry for anthropomorphizing the virus, but that's how it looks to me)

 

[CSIDreamer]

Coronavirus: Ohio's reopening process to begin May 1, DeWine says
Gov. Mike DeWine said he hopes to start reopening the state May 1.


It will start with businesses that have put together protocols and have demonstrated the ability to operate safely.

The governor has asked Lt. Jon Husted to work with businesses throughout the state to create a best practices guideline that will keep staff and customers safe as businesses begin to reopen.

It sounds like Indiana and Kentucky have loosely banded with Ohio for this May 1 goal.

 

[Teche]

Deleted by me

 

[Trino]

I would have said Las Vegas's chances of recovering soon were small, but now I'm way more optimistic. Yes, there will be health consequences, but people will come back. I'm a longtime DE on TripAdvisor and it's clear people are chomping at the bit to get back to California/Nevada/Arizona for their traditional holidays. All are winter destinations as well as summer destinations. Las Vegas attracts risk takers! It'll be one of the first major destinations to reopen and it will come back like gangbusters.

Airlines are beginning to announce their plans for future travel. Pricing will be interesting at first. We'll see whether they'll fly with fewer passengers or not - that's the key variable for Vegas. But international carriers seem to be optimistic for last minute fares and maintained reservations from Europe to LAX for this summer.

I think lots and lots of people will want to party, and if the elderly/medically fragile feel differently, Las Vegas would not be the place for them (just as it has never been a great place for the immune compromised or the severe asthmatics). Nevada's overall CV stats aren't too bad, either.

Vegas tourism survey. Average age is 45. Tourism survey indicates fewer visitors to Las Vegas from California

 

[pocketaccent]

‘Herd immunity’ without a vaccine could mean 840,000 coronavirus deaths in California – Daily News
...
Amid Gov. Gavin Newsom’s scenario of a post-sheltering world, there are two chilling words: herd immunity.

Tomorrow’s tableau — waiters with masks, distant desks, split-shift schools — will be the new normal, he told reporters in his Tuesday press briefing, “at least until we have herd immunity.”
...
What does “herd immunity” look like in the age of COVID-19? Without a vaccine, about 28 million infected Californians.

Based on current estimates, about 5 percent of infected people — or roughly 1.4 million Californians — would get severely ill. Of these, 840,000 could die, although there’s hope of holding that number down.
...
As if in synchrony, on Tuesday scientists at Harvard’s prestigious Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health also conceded the inevitability of continued infections.

In a set of mathematical models published in the journal Science, they proposed a strategy of intermittent restrictions that would help us approach herd immunity as slowly as possible, so hospitals aren’t overwhelmed.

Rather than hiding from the virus, a goal is to spread out the number of infections at any one time, so fewer people die, they concluded.
...
To reach herd immunity, “there’s no light switch here” of all-or-nothing restrictions, said Newsom. “It’s more like a dimmer … toggling back and forth.”

 

[Deleted member 158085]

It sounds like Indiana and Kentucky have loosely banded with Ohio for this May 1 goal.

That sounds like a reasonable coalition of sorts. Certainly better than banding with Tennessee.

 

[MyBelle]

I would have said Las Vegas's chances of recovering soon were small, but now I'm way more optimistic. Yes, there will be health consequences, but people will come back. I'm a longtime DE on TripAdvisor and it's clear people are chomping at the bit to get back to California/Nevada/Arizona for their traditional holidays. All are winter destinations as well as summer destinations. Las Vegas attracts risk takers! It'll be one of the first major destinations to reopen and it will come back like gangbusters.

Airlines are beginning to announce their plans for future travel. Pricing will be interesting at first. We'll see whether they'll fly with fewer passengers or not - that's the key variable for Vegas. But international carriers seem to be optimistic for last minute fares and maintained reservations from Europe to LAX for this summer.

I think lots and lots of people will want to party, and if the elderly/medically fragile feel differently, Las Vegas would not be the place for them (just as it has never been a great place for the immune compromised or the severe asthmatics). Nevada's overall CV stats aren't too bad, either.

I don't believe many people are going to want to be breathing the recirculated air on airplanes until this pandemic is more under control. Events for this summer have been cancelled. I don't know how Vegas Casinos could set up and manage social distancing.

Coronavirus travel: Bailed-out airlines seek to cut flights to cities

JMO

 

[Trino]

In real life though, grandparents continue to take care of or living in households with grandkids. About ⅓ of households in California where there are children rely on grandparents for care, or have grandparents living in the home.

Even if grandkids didn't see grandparents, their parents will be in the workplaces where we all work. Teachers themselves are not all young people. Many of us are older. I am a grandparent *and* a teacher.

I do accept some level of risk, however. But there's no way I'm going to hang out with other people's kids and not see my own. And even though my students are the parents of the school children and not the children themselves, it's the same risk. They too can be asymptomatic carriers. So we'll have a huge pool of K-12 silent carriers, then a huge pool of adult workers back at work, and then, of course, the college students. And we all know how that goes.

So effectively, if the schools open up, social distancing as it's being practiced right now is out the window.

Average age of US teachers is 42.
The Nation's Teaching Force Is Still Mostly White and Female

 

[tresir2012]

There are all kinds of reasons, with a long history. Small businesses are getting other aid. But the small businesses depend on the labor of many of those undocumented workers.

In the UK, where anti-immigrant sentiment is very high, and they effectively have barred all Romanian labor - they've quietly (almost secretly) had to import thousands of Romanians, to work for very little money, or else their fruit isn't getting picked. Thousands of bushels of fruit crops have wasted. England has a real problem right now with food security, for obvious reasons.

So these lucky Romanians get to pack onto a plane, during a pandemic, be transported to low quality housing, work long hours, and get sent home with a check.

We don't do that in California. We did it a long time ago (google the Bracero Program) and it didn't work. It was so hard on the children of the families (unlike UK, we don't fly people in - they come across land). We're not. big into family separation in California. Most of us believe that all workers should be treated with dignity

So, since we need fruit pickers here (badly) and we export enough produce from California to feed several other states, it's important that even those these workers do not meed federal standards for entering the US, we have them here.

They are small in number. They are permitted to send their kids to school. They have to be vaccinated to go to school, just like everyone else. We know where they live, they have to provide utility bills or housing contract to go to school. That way, health improves and criminality is reduced.

So don't worry about how California is doing it. We've got an economy that recognizess all essential workers.

I'm listening to Gov Newsom's live conference right now. He is talking about how in our second list of objectives, we have to secure our food supply. It's picking season for many crops, and it's also packing season so that people outside of the Central Valley and outside of California can get food - that may include some of you here on WS.

We produce almost all your almond milk, for example. Shelf stable and fresh alike. Many of those workers are undocumented because the federal government doesn't think they qualify to be "essential." But no one else will pick almonds. So California officially regards them as essential and treats them as essential.

Strawberries, lemons, limes, oranges, avocados, tangerines are all going from field to market right now. We hear the lemon trains every morning. The workers at the lemonade/lemon juice plant are about 10% undocumented, the rest are legal residents. Right now, that plant is shut down and soon the refrigerators will be full, so Gov Newsom is authorizing food production workers to go back to work, with a specific social distancing plan (and masks).

Personally, I like citrus. I can live without strawberries. Lots of people get frozen strawberries, apparently. If that industry fails, I'm not sure the owners have the means to restart easily - eventually, sure. But no rancher I know is making huge money, they are making an okay living, the workers (documented or not) get $15 an hour, but that doesn't go far in California. With 4 wage earners in a household, though, it's a good living - and that's how most agricultural workers live. It's worse in most other states.

I really hope you have a link for all these undocumented Romanian workers flooding into the anti immigrant UK illegally to work.

 

[MyBelle]

Well, unfortunately there is no data that any of these drugs are effective. After these trials are completed, most likely physicians will end up not prescribing these drugs anymore, if trials don't show any positive results.

Physicians world-wide would not still be prescribing the drugs if they are not effective. Doctors are focused on the patient in front of them and doing what is best for them.

JMO