The Walls Come Down: No Travel Betwen US and Europe for 30 Days

[Ziggy Stardust]

The incubation period of covid-19 is about 5-10 days, that is, it takes that long from the time someone gets infected until he starts showing symptoms. If you have a wave of people showing up with infections this weekend, it means they got infected on Monday or Tuesday at the latest, which was before the lockdowns got lifted. The spike of infections (if there is one) resulting from the reopenings won't hit until later this week.

This is what pisses me off about the media. When & how to do the reopening along with its effects and how to deal with them is a legitimate concern and requires serious discussion. But we can't have a reasoned discussion if they're chumming the waters with "record number of cases on reopening weekend!!!" while conveniently leaving out the fact that the two are unrelated because of the incubation time. If this article came out a week from now it would be cause for legitimate concern and re-evaluation of policy. But now? It just makes people with functional brains distrust the media & authorities.

Um, the conclusion that a person with a functional brain gets from this news is that re-opening is premature, because it's idiotic to re-open while you are in the middle of a spike of infections.

[MKSheppard]

TWITTER

FOX 5 DC @fox5dc

Montgomery County hospitals on BLUE ALERT: As of 8pm, all area hospitals are reporting critical care unit beds are mostly full, supervisors must manage patient transports, meaning you may not be brought to the nearest hospital.
8:53 PM · May 3, 2020·TweetDeck

Yikes. To give you some background:

Maryland in FY2018 had 1,200~ ICU beds in the entire state.

Per (https://coronavirus.maryland.gov) which is updated 10 AM every day:

563 are in "intensive care", or about 46.9% of all ICU beds in the state are full of Corona patients.

Montgomery County, MD has 5,384 cases, or 20.3% of all the state's 26,408 confirmed cases.

Per MD FY2018 report, Montgomery County has just 144~ Critical Care beds.

So this shows how even with overall state services being well under "saturation level" at 46% occupancy, localized hotspots can arise.

[Zaune]

And just for a change of pace, some vaguely good news. Amazon's VP has just tendered his resignation in protest at the company retaliating against workers complaining about inadequate coronavirus-related safety procedures.

Tim Bray, a well known senior engineer and Vice President at Amazon has “quit in dismay” because Amazon has been “firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.” In an open letter on his website, Bray, who has worked at the company for nearly six years, called the company “chickenshit” for firing and disparaging employees who have organized protests. He also said the firings are "designed to create a climate of fear."

Amazon’s strategy throughout the coronavirus crisis has been to fire dissenters and disparage them both in the press and behind closed doors. There have been dozens of confirmed coronavirus cases at warehouses around the country, and workers have repeatedly said the company isn’t doing enough to protect them. Last week, Amazon ended a program that allowed workers to take unlimited unpaid time off if they fear getting sick from the coronavirus. Last Friday, Amazon workers together with Target, FedEx, Instacart, and Whole Foods workers, went on strike to protest their working conditions.

In statements to Motherboard, Amazon has said its own protesting workers are “spreading misinformation and making false claims about Amazon,” and that it “objects to the irresponsible actions of labor groups.” Last month, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, an Amazon worker in New York City. In a meeting, Amazon executives said that they believe Smalls is not “smart or articulate,” and that publicly they would focus on “laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal,” according to leaked notes from that meeting obtained by VICE News.

In his resignation letter, Bray said that “firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.”

At least someone at board level has a working moral compass. Or had one, because the dilemma everyone in his position must face is what will happen if everyone who gives a damn about Amazon's duty of care towards its employees resigns in protest and leaves the company solely in the hands of those who regard labour laws as an unfortunate impediment to making money and consider anyone whose next-of-kin can't afford good lawyers expendable.

[aerius]

March 14th was when we shut down all schools, public libraries, community centres, and government services
March 25th was when the lockdowns went into place with all non-essential businesses closed down and full social distancing
April 14 was when we finally started restricting nursing home workers to working in only one location

Locking down the nursing homes was what finally got the curve headed in the right direction. Gee, ya think we should've done that earlier? Considering that around half our deaths were nursing home residents? Nah, it's different here, we're not Italy.

[Solauren]

To be perfectly honest, I was shocked to learn that nursing home workers had more then 1 work location. I honestly thought it would be a full time position.

It's possible that the non-health sector of the government thought the same thing.

Not trying to deflect blame, but if I am right, then the health-sector of the government needs to explain why they didn't make the restricted work recommendation quicker.

[Jub]

To be perfectly honest, I was shocked to learn that nursing home workers had more then 1 work location. I honestly thought it would be a full time position.

It's possible that the non-health sector of the government thought the same thing.

Not trying to deflect blame, but if I am right, then the health-sector of the government needs to explain why they didn't make the restricted work recommendation quicker.

A lot of the staff will only work at one location, but the cleaning staff could easily be contracted and work a couple of locations based on the needs of the company they're contracted with. The same goes for the servers who get meals to residents.

[Solauren]

Ah, the support staff for the support staff. That makes sense.

[The Romulan Republic]

Huh, apparently BC has the lowest death rate per capita of any Canadian province or US state with over five million people (despite being one of the first places in Canada to get hit with covid). Provincial government will be announcing plans and timeline for reopening Wednesday, though nothing will open this week: https://cbc.ca/news/canada/british-colu ... -1.5553303

Feeling a rare sense of pride in my province right now.

[mr friendly guy]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-04/ ... a/12211696

WA has no new coronavirus cases for fifth day, Minister says 'no sustained community transmission'

Western Australia has recorded its fifth consecutive day with no new cases of coronavirus, WA Health Minister Roger Cook has confirmed.

Key points:
The low numbers pointed to "no sustained community transmission"
Community restrictions could be reviewed as early as Friday
But there are three principles that will determine if businesses reopen
A total of 527 people have recovered from the virus, leaving WA with only 15 active cases across the state.

The salient points aside from good numbers are, on friday my state of Western Australia is reviewing whether the restrictions on friday. They have already relaxed restrictions from gatherings of 2 to 10, so a few days ago my best friend and myself caught up and did our usual 17 km walk. We did see groups cycling, walking about but within the 10 to a group rule.

The rumour is that diners/eateries may be able to go back to trading after the friday meeting. My personal view is, even if that is the case, I am still going to self isolate (when I am not working) for another week just to see what the numbers show before deciding what to do. Currently our testing criteria has expanded to anyone with respiratory symptoms and temperature, so its pretty broad now.

Australia is now capable of doing more tests after billionaire and mining magnate Andrew Forest purchased 10 million testing kits from China. Naturally the conservatives are ungrateful little shits, but that's another story.

[The Romulan Republic]

Administration quietly increases its projected death toll to 134,000 by August, predicts 9/11-scale death tolls every day by June:

https://theguardian.com/world/2020/may/ ... ump-report

As Donald Trump proclaimed success in America’s fight against the coronavirus and continued to push for the US economy to reopen, it was reported on Monday that internal projections show the administration is expecting 3,000 deaths a day by 1 June.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 deaths are currently being reported in the US each day.

The New York Times said it had obtained an “internal document” containing projections “based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema)”.

CDC and Fema “forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now”, the paper said.

The Times report followed a Washington Post report on Saturday that said the Trump White House had followed a model for economic recovery written by Kevin Hassett, an adviser “with no background in infectious diseases”.

“By the end of April,” the Post reported, “with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam war, it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true. ‘A catastrophic miss,’ as a former senior administration official briefed on the data described it.”

The White House attempted to pour cold water on the New York Times story.

In a statement, a spokesman, Judd Deere, said: “This is not a White House document, nor has it been presented to the coronavirus taskforce or gone through inter-agency vetting.

“This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the taskforce or data that the taskforce has analyzed.”

According to data from researchers at Johns Hopkins University, by lunchtime on Monday the US had recorded nearly 1,160,000 Covid-19 cases and nearly 68,000 deaths. The states worst hit are on the east and west coasts, with New York by far the hotspot, although Michigan and Louisiana have also been hard hit. Cases are rising in cities and rural areas.

But more than half of the 50 states are now attempting some form of easing of lockdown measures. Some states led by Republican governors have sought to move more swiftly.

Also on Monday, the influential Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington (IHME), a team that has been cited by the White House, revised a key piece of coronavirus modeling and almost doubled its prediction for the US death toll in next three months.

The IHME is now forecasting at least 134,000 deaths in the US by 4 August, while previously it had predicted just over 74,000 deaths.

Trump, who is heavily dependent on economic recovery for his hopes of re-election in November, spoke in favor of reopening measures at a Fox News town hall at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Sunday evening.

“I really believe that you can go to parks, you can go to beaches … [if] you stay away a certain amount,” Trump said, adding that it was possible to balance the demands of anti-lockdown protesters with those of governors and public health experts who warn against reopening too soon.

One of those experts, White House coronavirus taskforceresponse coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx, told Fox News Sunday the anti-lockdown protests were “devastatingly worrisome to me personally, because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or a very … or an unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives”.

Birx also said the administration expected between 100,000 and 240,000 people to die in the coronavirus outbreak, “and that’s with full mitigation and us learning from each other of how to social distance”.

Hours later, Trump said he thought “we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people”, which was up from his previous prediction of 65,000. He also said the administration “may have to put out a fire” later in the year, if the virus returns.

In recent weeks, the president and his senior adviser Jared Kushner have repeatedly proclaimed success in handling the coronavirus pandemic.

Many observers have not shared their view and public health experts have warned that the US will need to dramatically ramp up testing if it is to effectively reopen the economy.

In his statement on Monday, Deere insisted the “phased guidelines to open up America again are a scientific-driven approach that the top health and infectious disease experts in the federal government agreed with. The health of the American people remains President Trump’s top priority and that will continue as we monitor the efforts by states to ease restrictions”.

However, a majority of Americans do not agree with Trump’s assessment of how he has handled the pandemic. A poll last week showed 53% of respondents disapproved.

Meanwhile, Christopher Murray, director of the IHME, said the team was gathering data about US residents’ mobility during the pandemic. He pointed out that some data was being processed in order to “reflect the effect of premature relaxation of social distance, which has a substantial effect”.

They know this. And they reopen. This is not negligence. This is not incompetence. This is not stupidity.

This is deliberate, systematic, cold-blooded mass-murder. Who's victims will disproportionately be the poor and minorities.

Never forget: all of these people were murdered by Donald Trump and his regime. Just as many argue that the Ukrainian famine was a genocide, brought about either by incompetence or deliberately by Stalin's policies, so too these deaths are an atrocity committed by the tyrant of the United States.

[mr friendly guy]

Australia's chief scientist warns about the accuracy of current antibody tests

https://www.ausdoc.com.au/news/chief-sc ... gifQ%3D%3D

Chief scientist warns against serology for identifying past COVID infection
No good for diagnosis, now concerns about the accuracy of the blood tests suggest their use is limited even for identifying antibodies, says Professor Alan Finkel
2 minutes to read 5th May 2020By Antony Scholefield
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There are no serology tests accurate enough to detect an individual’s immunity to COVID-19 or identify the disease's true prevalence, Australia’s Chief Scientist is warning.


Some 1.5 million of the tests have been ordered by the Federal Government and their approval for use fast-tracked by the TGA.

But concerns about their value continue.

A review by Professor Alan Finkel has concluded that the global evidence on the current crop of serology tests shows they are not even adequate for retrospectively tracking the spread of the virus.


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“For as long as the prevalence of COVID-19 is low in Australia and available serological tests are not approaching 100% specificity, serological testing to measure the prevalence of COVID-19 will not be meaningful,” his review, released last week, says.

Read more: Greg Hunt's 1.5 million point-of-care tests for GPs of 'limited use' for diagnosing coronavirus

The TGA has so far approved more than 20 different serology tests for use in Australia after a fast-tracked, less rigorous assessment process of their safety and efficacy.

But it has also asked the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity to confirm their sensitivity and specificity - work that is still ongoing.

It remains unclear which tests have been purchased by Australian Government, which it originally said would be for use by GPs.

Nor have the promised details on the protocols for their use been published.

The UK Government reportedly spent more than AUD$30 million on two million serology tests earlier this year, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying they had “the potential to be a total game changer”.

But Professor Finkel, in his review, cites research from Oxford University on the nine most promising serology tests considered for potential use in the UK.

None of the tests reached the target of 98% specificity, which researchers said was essential to avoid putting people at unnecessary risk if they were wrongly declared immune to COVID-19.

Read more: Coronavirus 'bounce back' likely without more community testing, epidemiologist warns

In Australia, given case numbers are still low, the minimum expectations for the accuracy of the tests should be even higher, Professor Finkel said.

“For example, if a test is 99% accurate (sensitivity and specificity are each 99%) but the disease prevalence is only 1% of the population, then the false positive rate will be 50%.

“This creates a significant challenge in identifying immunity within populations in a country with a low rate of infection.”

He added that serology tests also relied on “a clear understanding of the full immune response to SARS-CoV-2" but that understanding was still lacking.

He referred to one preprint study suggesting antibody concentrations might start to wane just eight weeks after symptom onset.

Concerns about false positives rates has already led WA and SA to ban GPs from using serology for diagnosis.

Those ignoring the rules face fines of up to $20,000.

Read more: How the Reverend Bayes is key to coronavirus serology testing

So far, the main use of the tests in Australia has been in specific contact tracing cases.

Two weeks ago, Queensland health officials investigated two COVID-19 cases in workers at a pathology lab in Cairns.

Initially, they struggled to understand why the workers had been infected because they were not close contacts, said Chief Health Officer Dr Jeanette Young.

However, serology tests identified three more workers who had been infected then recovered — the missing links in the chain.

Professor Finkel’s report stressed there was evidence from the UK suggesting some laboratory-based serology tests could be more accurate than point-of-care versions.

"If highly accurate serological techniques operating in some academic labs are validated against national standards, they could offer a means for predicting prevalence at the population level."

However, he said no lab-based serology tests have been approved by the TGA for use in Australia.

Another point of note is this line from the article

He referred to one preprint study suggesting antibody concentrations might start to wane just eight weeks after symptom onset.

While he was talking about it in the context of detection (ie antibodies may have already faded), I want to discuss in the context of immunity. Traditionally AFAIK low antibody titres were thought to suggest you're not immune. For example one way to verify success of Hepatitis B vaccine was to measure antibodies, and if the levels were low, we get further boosters. This is now somewhat disputed as there is a school of thought that someone might still be immune even with low titres. The reason is of course, that the immune system still remembers the viral antigens and should be able to generate antibodies faster than someone who hasn't been exposed before.

This might mean that we can get covid reinfections several weeks down the track, and not necessarily in the short time frame of current "reinfection cases"(because these quick reinfection seems to be errors in testing, so patients are discharged when they haven't cleared the virus, or at least the virus is in very low levels).

[aerius]

While he was talking about it in the context of detection (ie antibodies may have already faded), I want to discuss in the context of immunity. Traditionally AFAIK low antibody titres were thought to suggest you're not immune. For example one way to verify success of Hepatitis B vaccine was to measure antibodies, and if the levels were low, we get further boosters. This is now somewhat disputed as there is a school of thought that someone might still be immune even with low titres. The reason is of course, that the immune system still remembers the viral antigens and should be able to generate antibodies faster than someone who hasn't been exposed before.

This might mean that we can get covid reinfections several weeks down the track, and not necessarily in the short time frame of current "reinfection cases"(because these quick reinfection seems to be errors in testing, so patients are discharged when they haven't cleared the virus, or at least the virus is in very low levels).

Well, now we've got a problem. If it turns out that there's no long-lasting immunity from antibodies and no vaccine on the horizon, we're going to have some hard choices to make in our public policy. We might be looking at a return to something like the tuberculosis sanitarium system where everyone with the disease is locked away in dedicated facilities while everyone else gets on with their lives. And we'll have to accept that we're unlikely to get full containment and X number of people will die every year.

[ray245]

While he was talking about it in the context of detection (ie antibodies may have already faded), I want to discuss in the context of immunity. Traditionally AFAIK low antibody titres were thought to suggest you're not immune. For example one way to verify success of Hepatitis B vaccine was to measure antibodies, and if the levels were low, we get further boosters. This is now somewhat disputed as there is a school of thought that someone might still be immune even with low titres. The reason is of course, that the immune system still remembers the viral antigens and should be able to generate antibodies faster than someone who hasn't been exposed before.

This might mean that we can get covid reinfections several weeks down the track, and not necessarily in the short time frame of current "reinfection cases"(because these quick reinfection seems to be errors in testing, so patients are discharged when they haven't cleared the virus, or at least the virus is in very low levels).

Well, now we've got a problem. If it turns out that there's no long-lasting immunity from antibodies and no vaccine on the horizon, we're going to have some hard choices to make in our public policy. We might be looking at a return to something like the tuberculosis sanitarium system where everyone with the disease is locked away in dedicated facilities while everyone else gets on with their lives. And we'll have to accept that we're unlikely to get full containment and X number of people will die every year.

Or you go for a New Zealand style elimination of the virus via temporarily lockdown and use contact-tracing to hunt down the virus for good. The attitude in the US and in parts of Europe that we have no possibility of eliminating the virus is rather odd.

[Zaune]

Funny you should mention that... UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Britain is sleepwalking into another coronavirus disaster by failing to listen to global consensus and expert analysis with the release of the NHS COVID-19 contact-tracking app.

On Monday, the UK government explained in depth and in clearly written language how its iOS and Android smartphone application – undergoing trials in the Isle of Wight – will work, and why it is a better solution to the one by Apple and Google that other nations have decided to adopt. It has also released a more technical explanation.

Unfortunately for folks in UK, while the explanation is coherent, calm, well-reasoned and plausible, it is likely to be a repeat of the disastrous "herd immunity" policy that the government initially backed as a way to explain why it didn't need to go into a national lockdown. That policy was also well-reasoned and well-explained by a small number of very competent doctors and scientists who just happened to be wrong.

Here's what's happening: there are broadly two types of coronavirus contact-tracing apps; those that are centralized and those that are decentralized. The first takes data from people's phones and saves it on a central system where experts are trusted to make the best possible use of the data, including providing advice to people as and when necessary.

The second, decentralized approach, as set out by Apple and Google, puts users in more control of their information, and alerts them automatically with no intervention from a third party. Apple and Google have also banned apps that use their decentralized and anonymized API from accessing location services to track and identify people, despite pressure to do so. And they have said they will only allow one app per country, or state in the US.

Both types use Bluetooth to detect other nearby phones also running the software. Thus, when someone catches the coronavirus, people can be warned if their phone was within 6ft of that patient's phone for more than a few minutes.

Leave it to us

In his post, the technical director of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Dr Ian Levy, explained in persuasive terms why allowing health service experts to have access to all the data is a good idea for beating back the virus.

"The health authority can use risk modelling to decide which contacts are most at risk, and then notify them to take some action," he noted, adding: "Importantly, the public health authority has anonymous data to help it understand how the disease appears to be spreading, and has the anonymous contact graphs to carry out some analysis.

"So the health authority could discover that a particular anonymous person seems to infect people really well. While the system wouldn't know who they are, encounters with them could be scored as more risky, and adjust the risk of someone being infected by a particular encounter appropriately."

He used two famous epidemiological stories to prove the point: Typhoid Mary and John Snow. Mary Mallon was a cook in New York in the early 1900s who had typhoid fever but showed no signs of it, and ended up infecting a number of households who were otherwise separated from the wider population. No one could figure out why they were falling sick until someone figured out Mary was the link.

Likewise John Snow tracked down the source of a cholera outbreak in London in the 1850s down to a water pump in Broadwick Street in Soho and put a stop to it by removing the handle, although later research suggests the outbreak was already dying out by that time. There is, incidentally, a plaque and a pump on the same spot, and the John Snow pub opposite where this reporter whiled away many happy hours.

The argument is that while the Apple-Google decentralized model protects people's privacy, it leaves the authorities blind. It puts a public health disaster outside the reach of those who can help most through analysis of the population. Meanwhile, the undertone of the centralized NHS method, where people's data is collected and analyzed together, is almost explicit: we all know how important privacy is but let's leave this to the experts, shall we? Give up a little bit of data and save lives. Let's not go too European on this.

So, um, a problem...

But there is a problem with the NHS's approach: it probably won't that well work on your phone, and probably won't be terribly accurate at measuring the spread of the virus.

That's because the proposed system will only work in the way the UK government claims it will if everyone does what it says: a classic failing of the Whitehall mindset that stretches back to the World War One trenches and further back still to the days of Great Houses and Men Who Knew Better.

Despite what the NCSC has continued to imply, the app will not, as it stands, work all the time on iOS nor Android since version 8. The operating systems won't allow the tracing application to broadcast its ID via Bluetooth to surrounding devices when it's running in the background and not in active use. Apple's iOS forbids it, and newer Google Android versions limit it to a few minutes after the app falls into the background.

That means that unless people have the NHS app running in the foreground and their phones awake most of the time, the fundamental principle underpinning the entire system – that phones detect each other – won't work.

It will work if people open the app and leave it open and the phone unlocked. But if you close it and forget to reopen it, or the phone falls asleep, the app will not broadcast its ID and no other phones around you will register that you've been close by. There is even a handy video of someone in Australia showing this (Australia has gone for a similar system with its COVIDSafe app.)

Because people seem interested here's some video of the COVIDSafe app failing on iPhone. It is literally impossible to broadcast the UUID needed for the app to work without the screen on and the app in the foreground. pic.twitter.com/X5lpyeKL1A
— Joshua Byrd (@phocks) May 1, 2020

We cannot state it plainer: on iPhones, apps cannot send out their IDs via Bluetooth when the software is in the background, and on newer Android builds, IDs cannot be transmitted after a few minutes in the background. And Apple and Google have refused to allow the tracing app to send out IDs in the background.

The NHS has insisted its engineers have worked around this problem "sufficiently well" by waking the app after it detects itself running on a nearby phone emitting an ID: the software is blocked from sending out its ID when in the background but it can passively listen for IDs of apps still allowed to broadcast. However, this assumes there are a sufficient number of phones running the tracing app nearby still broadcasting to keep enough people's apps awake: there needs to be a critical mass of users while we're all supposed to be socially distancing. If two or more people pass each other and their apps have stopped broadcasting, the software will never know they came in contact.

And it could be a battery hog, which may make people leave the app off, preventing the app on other phones from waking up.

Little choice

What Levy doesn't say is that he – and NCSC and the UK government – are assuming that when people are moving around, and so are close to one another, they are likely to be on their phones or have recently opened the app. It's an assumption they have no choice to make because otherwise they don't get the data. By contrast, the Apple-Google solution that Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Ireland, among others, are following will allow the IDs of phones to be recorded in the background all the time, due to being built into the operating system, so it will be more accurate and kinder to battery life.

The other big problem with the UK approach is that while it insists it will keep data private, and location data will not be stored nor attached to individuals, the truth is that it will only work as promised if that data is not kept private and location data is stored and attached to individuals.

Levy repeatedly tried to square this circle, leading to some ludicrous assertions. He stated boldly in bullet points that the app "doesn't have any personal information about you, it doesn't collect your location and the design works hard to ensure that you can't work out who has become symptomatic" and that "it holds only anonymous data and communicates out to other NHS systems through privacy preserving gateways."

But what is literally the first thing the app does when you install and open it? It asks for your postcode, and logs the exact make of your phone.

Levy explained "a big random number" is also generated, which is tied to the copy of the contact-tracing app on your phone. This 128-bit ID is what the app on one phone exchanges via Bluetooth with itself on a nearby phone when they come in range. This exchange includes when exactly the IDs were encountered, how long the phones were near each other, and the signal strength, allowing the distance apart to be calculated. This is the data that is ultimately shared with the NHS, when you choose to.

The exchanged data is also encrypted in such a way that the NHS can decrypt it but not other users. We understand these ID numbers are generated server-side, and are people's unique fingerprints in the centralized system.

Levy also noted that "currently" only "the first part of your postcode" is taken and stored "for NHS resource planning, mainly." He goes on: "Nothing identifying and no personal data are taken from the device or the user."

Does it matter?

Presumably the goal with this kind of explanation is to comfort the vast majority of UK folk who don't understand how the entire internet economy works by connecting vast databases together.

So long as you can rely on one piece of per-user data – like a "big random number" – everything else can be connected. And if you also have a postcode, that becomes 100 times easier. Ever heard of Facebook? It's worth billions solely because it is able to connect the dots between datasets.

Indeed, it may be possible to work out who is associating with whom from the app's ID numbers. Bear in mind, the Apple-Google decentralized approach produces new ID numbers for each user each day, thwarting identification, especially with the ban on location tracking.

Levy also glossed over the fact that as soon as someone agrees to share their information with UK government – by claiming to feel unwell and hitting a big green button – 28 days of data from the app is given to a central server from where it can never be recovered. That data, featuring all the unique IDs you've encountered in that period and when and how far apart you were, becomes the property of NCSC – as its chief exec Matthew Gould was forced to admit to MPs on Monday. Gould also admitted that the data will not be deleted, UK citizens will not have the right to demand it is deleted, and it can or will be used for "research" in future.

And then there's the not insignificant issue that the entire approach may break privacy and human-rights laws, anyway, as one legal firm has advised:

A de-centralised smartphone contact tracing system – the type contemplated ... by governments across Europe and also Apple and Google – would be likely to comply with both human rights and data protection laws. In contrast, a centralised smartphone system – which is the current UK Government proposal – is a greater interference with fundamental rights and would require significantly greater justification to be lawful. That justification has not yet been forthcoming.

Oh yes, and "the UK Government's announcements for sharing health data between the private and public sector appear to be flawed. This means such data sharing is potentially not in compliance with legal requirements."

Just get it out

What Gould and Levy are not admitting is that they expect the vast majority of UK citizens to opt in, download the app, and share their data anyway, no matter any of these concerns, out of a sense of civic duty.

So long as they can get through the objections and push past the criticisms and get the app launched, they will get what they no doubt honestly believe will be a better end result for the country because the data will be in the hands of the experts. And they might – might – be right. But they might also be completely wrong.

At the heart of this decision by the UK to fall back on the belief that a central authority is going to be a better solution, no matter what compromises have to be made, is that central planning will work better when it comes to COVID-19.

But will it? So far the clear evidence is that greater control of populations has worked better at stopping the coronavirus spread than a more relaxed attitude, The US and UK have notably refused to put limits on their citizens until forced to, and are almost certainly going to end up the worst affected countries on the globe as a result.

But does population control work beyond lockdown? When the economy is opened up, will a centralized approach where hotspots can be identified and dealt with from a command post be more effective than a decentralized approach where individuals are left to decide for themselves?

We may be about to find out. Although if people can't be persuaded to download the app in the first place because they don't want their data to be floating around the government's servers for the next 100 years, then the whole question is moot anyway. The government is continuing to play a giant game of chicken with our lives.

Oh, and people who either don't have smartphones or have smartphones that don't run IOS or Android? They're just shit outta luck as far as I can tell.

[Nicholas]

Well, now we've got a problem. If it turns out that there's no long-lasting immunity from antibodies and no vaccine on the horizon, we're going to have some hard choices to make in our public policy. We might be looking at a return to something like the tuberculosis sanitarium system where everyone with the disease is locked away in dedicated facilities while everyone else gets on with their lives. And we'll have to accept that we're unlikely to get full containment and X number of people will die every year.

Or you go for a New Zealand style elimination of the virus via temporarily lockdown and use contact-tracing to hunt down the virus for good. The attitude in the US and in parts of Europe that we have no possibility of eliminating the virus is rather odd.

There are two problems with that.

The first is scale, the US and EU are vastly larger and more diverse then New Zealand which is going to make getting the levels of compliance with lockdown and contact tracing required to make this thing extinct far far more difficult then it was in New Zealand. Note to at least in the US there seems to be an emerging consensus that the costs of eliminating COVID-19 are unacceptably high and we prefer living with COVID-19 to spending fortunes and lives (lockdowns cause domestic violence and suicide so they do cost lives although obviously not as many as COVID-19 is taking) trying to eliminate it.

The second problem is that neither the US nor Europe can effectively control their southern boarders well enough to keep COVID-19 from reentering from the Africa or Central America and there is no way that this can be eliminated on those continents. We can barely manage universal vaccination there.

Between those two things the permanent presence of COVID-19 seems unavoidable, at least unless a long lasting vaccine can be developed.

Nicholas

[ray245]

There are two problems with that.

The first is scale, the US and EU are vastly larger and more diverse then New Zealand which is going to make getting the levels of compliance with lockdown and contact tracing required to make this thing extinct far far more difficult then it was in New Zealand. Note to at least in the US there seems to be an emerging consensus that the costs of eliminating COVID-19 are unacceptably high and we prefer living with COVID-19 to spending fortunes and lives (lockdowns cause domestic violence and suicide so they do cost lives although obviously not as many as COVID-19 is taking) trying to eliminate it.

You can conduct contact tracing on a more local scale. In fact that's what contact tracing is meant to do. Local authorites have to operate at a more local level to contain the cases, and not simply leaving everything at the national level. In many counties in Europe, this is already possible because cases has fallen in the double digits in some countries.

The second problem is that neither the US nor Europe can effectively control their southern boarders well enough to keep COVID-19 from reentering from the Africa or Central America and there is no way that this can be eliminated on those continents. We can barely manage universal vaccination there.

Between those two things the permanent presence of COVID-19 seems unavoidable, at least unless a long lasting vaccine can be developed.

Nicholas

That is indeed a challenge, but there is currently not a high level of travel into Europe or the US anyway because of the shutdown of most transport links across the world anyway. If there is ever an opportunity to do so, it is when most of the world including Central America and Africa are imposing some sort of lockdown as well.

[The Romulan Republic]

Even while the White House is adjusting their projections drastically upward, Trump is looking to disband his coronavirus taskforce:

https://cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/whi ... index.html

(CNN)The White House coronavirus task force will start to wind down later this month, a senior White House official told CNN on Tuesday.

The official said the task force "will be phased down around Memorial Day. We will continue to have key medical experts advising (President Donald Trump) daily and accessible to press throughout the coming months ahead."

The New York Times first reported the White House's plan to wind down the task force.

The move would quash the most visible nerve center for the federal government's response to the virus. But a senior administration official told CNN to expect members of the task force to still be involved in conversations with governors and industry leaders because the White House is aware that leaders still want to hear from doctors as they reopen their states and businesses.

News of the plan to phase out the task force comes as the rate of the country's daily new Covid-19 cases and reported deaths plateau, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Research Center. However, the influential model created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington projected a doubling of US deaths -- to 134,000 by August 4 -- and an increased daily death toll as governors, urged on by Trump, relax social distancing measures.

The news comes a little more than a week after CNN reported that the task force might soon begin slowly scaling back its number of meetings altogether, according to a source, as Trump and Vice President Mike Pence schedule other events.

Officials said that the task force's end may never be officially announced and no clear replacement group appears ready to commence in its wake, the Times reported. A second senior administration official told CNN, "This does not mean doctors are being removed from the equation or pushed out."

The second senior administration official told CNN that the White House is shifting its focus toward reopening the economy "and putting Americans back to work." That shift will take place over the next few weeks and doctors such as Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who have been prominent figures in the President's task force briefings with reporters, will still play "an important advisory role" in the process, the second senior administration official said.

"Members of the task force will continue providing input, though the group but will not be meeting as regularly as the focus changes toward vaccines, therapeutics, testing, and ultimately reopening the economy," the second senior administration official said. "Keep in mind the task force was always a temporary arrangement. Health experts will continue providing input even while not meeting together every day."

Pence confirmed to reporters on Tuesday that the White House is having conversations about when the timing would be right to disband the task force. The comments were made in a small briefing with reporter to which CNN was not invited. The vice president's office later provided a partial transcript of the comments.

"We're having conversations about that and about what the proper time is for the task force to complete its work and for the ongoing efforts to take place on an agency-by-agency level," Pence said, adding that the White House has begun to discuss a "transition plan with FEMA."

Pence added that the White House is "starting to look at the Memorial Day window, early June window as a time when we could begin to transition" away from the task force.

One source familiar with the task force conversations said that one of the reasons they are starting to discuss the phase down is because Pence wants to get out and travel more. He can't lead a task force while doing that, such that it would be better for the Department of Health and Human Services and other relevant agencies to take the lead at that point, the source added.
When asked if the President pushed this idea, the source insisted Trump did not but added he is not opposed to it.
It's another sign that change is looming on the state of the federal response.

The task force held an in-person meeting Tuesday morning -- its first in-person meeting since Friday. On Monday, The New York Times reported the Trump administration has an internal model projecting a rise up to about 3,000 daily US deaths from coronavirus by June 1.

Trump has been anxious to reopen the nation and push an economic message, as his campaign had been counting on the economy to boost him in November but had been forced to change tactics.

He has been notably inconsistent in his response to states reopening, expressing seemingly vacillating comments on Georgia's reopening as recently as last week. He also sided with protesters -- some of whom were armed -- in Michigan last week for their protests demanding the state reopen after Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer extended her emergency declaration keeping some businesses shuttered.

This story has been updated with additional information and reporting on Tuesday.

This isn't incompetence. This is knowingly, willfully engineering the deaths of hundreds of thousands of mostly poor/elderly/minority Americans.

This is a genocide.

At this point, the only reason I am not supporting armed resistance against this regime is pragmatic- I don't think we're in a position to do it and win, or to do it without killing more people than by doing nothing. There isn't enough support, either from people in positions of power or the general populace, and I think the attempt would likely be quickly crushed, and potentially strengthen Trump while discrediting his opponents. Maybe it would have the opposite affect, inspire a larger uprising, but I doubt it. And I am not ready to bet everything on the alluring fantasy of a short, victorious war.

So, I'm waiting to see how things unfold, particularly with regard to the election. My hope is that the election will lead to one of two outcomes. Ideally, Trump will clearly lose, be forced out relatively easily, and we can get to work on rebuilding and reform under a sane administration, hopefully with state governments if not the Feds pursuing charges against Trump and others in his inner circle. Chaos and loss of life are minimized. To anyone with a shred of conscience, this should be the preferable outcome, however increasingly unlikely.

The more negative scenario is that Trump wins, likely by fraudulent means, or loses but refuses to step down. At that point I would urge Democrats not to concede, but to set up a rival Presidency while workers declare a national general strike. Such a scenario would likely lead to widespread violence, but such a scenario would also make Trump more clearly illegitimate, and mobilize much more of the country in support of his removal. Its the only relatively short-term scenario where I can see enough of the country backing his overthrow for a rebellion, either by non-violent resistance or armed revolt, to have much of a chance at succeeding.

It should go without saying that I will never condone the targeting of civilians or unarmed persons under any circumstances. That would be an atrocity even in a state of declared war, and is more the kind of action the Trumpers would condone. A revolution which succeeds by becoming the people it overthrew is no revolution at all.

[mr friendly guy]

https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-dismi ... eo-1501924

DR. FAUCI DISMISSES WUHAN LAB AS SOURCE OF CORONAVIRUS, CONTRADICTING TRUMP AND POMPEO
BY DANIEL VILLARREAL ON 5/4/20 AT 10:43 PM EDT

r. Anthony Fauci, the scientific face of America's pandemic response, dismissed the theory that coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, contradicting the president and his Secretary of State in an escalating confrontation with China.

"The best evidence shows the virus behind the pandemic was not made in a lab in China," Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an exclusive interview with National Geographic published on Monday. "Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species."

He added that he doesn't believe the alternate theory that someone discovered coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab and then it accidentally unleashed it on the public.


Fauci's statement contradicts an April 30 comment by President Donald Trump that he had seen convincing evidence that the coronavirus originated from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he'd seen "enormous evidence" supporting the theory, but didn't elaborate.

The New York Times also reported last week the administration is pressuring some within the intelligence community to lend weight to the WIV theory. There is not yet any publicly available evidence supporting the WIV's involvement in the pandemic.

U.S. intelligence has concluded that the COVID-19 novel coronavirus was neither man-made nor genetically modified, though officials are investigating whether it could have been released from the WIV.


China has roundly rejected any accusation that it mishandled the outbreak or that the WIV was involved in the pandemic. On Monday, The Global Times newspaper—owned by the official publication of the Chinese Communist Party—published an editorial demanding that Pompeo provide any evidence for his claim, suggesting he was "bluffing."

Dr. Anthony Fauci
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks at a press conference on July 22, 2007.
GREG WOOD/AFP/GETTY


The Chinese government has often rejected criticisms that it mishandled the epidemic, stating that international critics are merely spreading propaganda to distract from their own countries' mistakes during the pandemic.

Trump and Pompeo's claim about the WIV lab has escalated tensions between the U.S. and China. Officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have accused China of concealing the severity of the epidemic early on to hoard medical supplies.

The DHS report also claimed that Chinese leaders deliberately didn't notify the World Health Organization (WHO) of the virus' contagion status through most of January to downplay its severity.

The Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the U.S told Newsweek that it considered the report just another "groundless accusation."

Regardless, a May 1 poll from The Economist and YouGov found that almost twice as many Republicans as Democrats now see China as an "enemy" of the state since the U.S. coronavirus outbreak began. The poll also revealed that nearly half of all Americans believe that the virus was "definitely" or "probably" created in a lab. While 29 percent of Democrats believed the statement, more than two-thirds of Republicans did.

<snip>, the rest is on US China tensions not related to covid 19)

So how long will Dr Fauci keep his job. Taking bets now.

[The Romulan Republic]

AOC's district is now the coronavirus epicenter.

That's a hell of a thing to have dumped on a freshman Congressmember, but how she handles this, and how she's perceived to have handled it, will probably make or break her political future.

[Zaune]

AOC's district is now the coronavirus epicenter.

That's a hell of a thing to have dumped on a freshman Congressmember, but how she handles this, and how she's perceived to have handled it, will probably make or break her political future.

If I were paranoid yet naive enough to give any credence to the conspiracy theories about this virus I'd say someone did that to make an example of her.

And on a personal note, I just had to listen to my girlfriend ramble about coronavirus conspiracy nonsense before going into a dissociative episode from stress and anxiety. I won't go into detail but I am now severely worried about her.

If she comes to harm as a result of this shitshow then I'm going to take it very, very personally.

[The Romulan Republic]

America's reputation is taking a beating- polling shows the percentage of Canadians who trust Americans has dropped from 58 to 34% since November:

https://globalnews.ca/news/6906367/covi ... nada-poll/

WASHINGTON — A new online poll suggests COVID-19 has damaged the trust Canadians have in their American neighbours, while U.S. residents have more faith in their northern counterparts than they do in themselves.

The poll from Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies finds only 34 per cent of respondents expressed trust in Americans, compared with 58 per cent from a similar survey in November of last year.

Of those living in the U.S., 72.5 per cent said they trusted Canadians, compared with 70 per cent who expressed trust in their fellow citizens.

Some 66 per cent of Canadian residents who participated said they are worried about COVID-19 cases arriving in Canada from the U.S., while only 19 per cent of U.S. respondents felt the same way about the novel coronavirus travelling south.

The poll also found 34 per cent of Americans surveyed would be comfortable taking a vacation in Canada once travel restrictions are lifted, compared with 19 per cent of Canadians asked about heading south of the border.

The online research, conducted April 24-26, surveyed 1,515 Canadians and 1,012 Americans. Since online polls do not carry a margin of error, they are not considered representative of the population at large.

Anectdotal, but given that I just got in an argument on Facebook with a Canadian who basically said that Americans would kill Canadians if they could and that Canadians shouldn't care if Americans die, yeah, I can believe this.

If this shit keeps up, its going to be America on the receiving end of "build that wall" soon.

[MKSheppard]

Cuomo continues to win friends and alienate people:

LINK

NEW YORK — Health care workers that came to New York to help fight the coronavirus pandemic at its epicenter will have to pay state taxes, according to the governor.

He addressed the issues Tuesday at a news conference.

"We're not in a position to provide any subsidies right now because we have a $13 billion deficit," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. "So there's a lot of good things I'd like to do, and if we get federal funding, we can do, but it would be irresponsible for me to sit here looking at a $13 billion deficit and say I'm gonna spend more money, when I can't even pay the essential services."

[Ralin]

Whelp, hard to argue with that logic.

[MKSheppard]

Sweden's now cranking up to a higher level than us:

DAILY HEIL -- Sweden surpasses US in COVID deaths per million

Sweden is nearing the 'horrifying' death toll of 3,000 from coronavirus, with 87 new fatalities, including a child under ten.

The Scandinavian country, which has taken a softer approach to containing the virus, reported another 87 deaths, compared to 85 fatalities the day before. There were another 702 cases, compared to 495 on Tuesday, taking its total to 23,918.

'We are starting to near 3,000 deceased, a horrifyingly large number,' state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell told a press conference.

Among them, according to Aftonbladet, a child aged under ten who had been in intensive care. Tegnell told the paper it was investigating the death but would not confirm whether it was as a result of COVID-19.

...

Sweden's virus death rate of 291 per million inhabitants is far higher than Norway's death rate of 40 per million, Denmark's rate of 87, or Finland's rate of 45.

In the United States, which has suffered the most coronavirus deaths, the toll per million inhabitants is lower than Sweden's at 219.

[LaCroix]

It also is worth mentioning that despite not locking down, their economy took pretty much the same hit as anyone else, due to the amount of sick leave and other things...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronav ... urope.html

Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors
Published Thu, Apr 30 20206:25 AM EDTUpdated Thu, Apr 30 20207:31 AM EDT
Holly Ellyatt
@HollyEllyatt
Key Points

Sweden did not impose a full lockdown on public life or businesses, despite the coronavirus outbreak.
Data released from the country’s central bank and a leading Swedish think tank show that the economy will be just as badly hit as its European neighbors.
Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, gave two possible scenarios for the economic outlook in 2020, both are bleak.



Sweden has attracted global attention for not imposing a full lockdown, as seen in most of Europe, to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

Nonetheless, data released from the country’s central bank and a leading Swedish think tank show that the economy will be just as badly hit as its European neighbors, if not worse.

Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, gave two possible scenarios for the economic outlook in 2020, which it said “depend on how long the spread of infection continues and on how long the restrictions implemented to slow it down are in place.” Both possible economic outcomes are bleak.

In the first scenario (scenario A in the chart below), gross domestic product contracts by 6.9% in 2020 before rebounding to grow 4.6% in 2021. In a more negative prediction (scenario B), GDP could contract by 9.7% and a recovery could be slower with the economy growing 1.7% in 2021.

So yeah - the conservative wisdom of "save the economy" is wrong - shutting down is no worse than not doing it, it just saves more lives.