National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening

This is from the American Enterprise Institute (See I do read conservative) and written by Scott Gottlieb. I heard about this report from the progressive Brad Friedman on his "Brad Blog". Dr. Gottlieb's assessment is helpful and in an interview said it will take two years to reopen the economy.

Now Dr. Gottlieb per AEI:

Scott Gottlieb, MD, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

He returned to AEI in 2019 after serving as the 23rd commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). At AEI, he continues his work on improving public health through entrepreneurship and medical innovation and on expanding regulatory approaches to maintain patient and physician autonomy.

Dr. Gottlieb is also a special partner with the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates and serves on the boards of Pfizer, Illumina, Aetion, and Tempus.

The rest of his bio can be found at:

www.aei.org...

This guy is not a practicing physician, he is a pharma mouthpiece.

That said, his analysis is rather good, though a it draconian on 'surveillence'

Massively Scale Contact Tracing and Isolation and Quarantine.

When a new case of COVID-19 is diagnosed, the patient should be isolated either at home or in a hospital, depending on the level of care he or she requires. Current CDC guidelines recommend seven days of isolation.15

[color=yellow' Home isolation can be enforced using technology such as GPS tracking on cell phone apps. Also, the close contacts of confirmed cases (as defined by the CDC16) should be quarantined and monitored daily for 14 days. Monitoring of international travelers is also recommended.17

To scale these interventions to accommodate thousands of daily cases and tens of thousands of daily contacts, public-health infrastructure will need to be dramatically scaled up throughout the country, in coordination with the improving capacity of health care providers to prevent, diagnose, and treat COVID-19 cases.

I'm concerned that this 'enforcement' by tracking apps would be co-opted for other purposes, though I do see the need for some system for public health tracking.

Over all this is a very good breakdown of the issues involved in restarting the economy. It acknowledges that public safety is a key requirement of any restart if it is to be effective.



Here is the podcast:

www.aei.org...

Here is the Article:

www.aei.org...

outstanding thread

imo....we're not ever going back to how it was

up for conjecture but sure to happen....global digital I D and global currency....end to banks would be nice, I can see it but can anyone else! curious about that

a reply to: FyreByrd

There is no need to track anything, or more testing BS, if somebody warrants hospital visit go.We have sat tight for 4 weeks, first of May is 3 weeks away after that sorry we got to go back to work. Then we will have to see how well isolation works vs herd immunity.Which is likely what we needed to do in the first place.

originally posted by: putnam6
a reply to: FyreByrd

There is no need to track anything, or more testing BS, if somebody warrants hospital visit go.We have sat tight for 4 weeks, first of May is 3 weeks away after that sorry we got to go back to work. Then we will have to see how well isolation works vs herd immunity.Which is likely what we needed to do in the first place.

Whatever .... you think and I assume the talking head - who is that, what are their bone fides?

I suggest reading the Article referred for better understanding.

originally posted by: FyreByrd

That said, his analysis is rather good, though a it draconian on 'surveillence'

"a bit?" It's rather extreme. This guy sounds like a nutjob.

I predict the map to reopening will go like this.

In about a month and half if not sooner people will get fed up with staying at home and simply go out again; whether or not they are sectioned to do so by their local government.

Local governments will have two choices at that point; enact a real police state or just go with it. As much as we like talking about police states here on ATS our local governments don't have the stomach to pull one off.

At that point we will simply live with the increased deaths that it might cause. People will simply learn to compartmentalize them like they do with everything else from swimming pools, to automobiles, to firearms.

a reply to: FyreByrd

I think it is a bit of overkill, like everything else they have done so far.

The punishment just does not fit the crime. Something else is going on here, or we have truly lost it as people and as a country.

This all goes back to just a few basic, irrefutable facts.

1. The government (PTB, whomever you believe they are) utterly failed to shut down international travel when they knew for a fact this thing was coming our way. At the very least they could have given us more time to prepare. But they just sat there and told us to wash our hands. They did not even have the testing capacity to do anything.

2. The medical mafia that has been lounging around fattening itself up on large chunks of your income FOR DECADES (while completely locking large segments of the population out of needed medical care) was completely unprepared for anything like this and they continue to throw their weight around and use their influence to shirk their responsibilities and deny care to people who don't even know they have the virus (because the medical people are refusing to test them).

These dirtbags made one TV commercial after another for decades on end about how they'd be for you in your time of need if you just paid them a small fortune. Now that the chips are down those MFers can't even provide you with what used to be a cheap paper facemask.

Does anyone think these people ever tried to imagine a scenario where they needed far more resources than anyone paid for? Nope. The only scenario they ever planned for was passing the buck and avoiding the cost.


3. Now all of these parasites are blaming US for not being able to completely stop living long enough to wait out a plague that was brought on by their negligence.

I might be mixing a couple of things together in my memory, but I think that there was a scene in a western ( Possibly the Kevin Costner version of Wyatt Earp ) where an angry mob stormed the sheriffs office and the leader of the mob said something like "What are you going to do? There are a lot of us and you only have 6 bullets!"

"I only need one bullet to kill you Bob, and believe me that is what is going to happen. You will die first." was the gist of the reply.

Mobs rely on a Bob because nobody in the mob thinks of themselves as the Bob. In truth there aren't many Bob's in this world who are willing to commit to following through on the whole Bob endgame.

In the movie the mob dispersed. In the real world that's usually how it works as well.

This will pass. We will move back to normal, with the caveat that the new "normal" might be slightly different than the old. How that manifests only time will tell, but I doubt it will be the dystopian "nobody is allowed outside, ever" that seems to be the fear flavor du jour.

Society is a pyramid and most of us are on the bottom of that structure. There is no pyramid if the base is weak or refuses to hold up that which is above. In that sense, the people at the top are likely more eager to return to the status quo than we are.

originally posted by: BrianFlanders
2. The medical mafia that has been lounging around fattening itself up on large chunks of your income FOR DECADES (while completely locking large segments of the population out of needed medical care) was completely unprepared for anything like this and they continue to throw their weight around and use their influence to shirk their responsibilities and deny care to people who don't even know they have the virus (because the medical people are refusing to test them).

Don't forget the medical industry are one of the top spenders on lobbying Congress.

originally posted by: Hefficide

I might be mixing a couple of things together in my memory, but I think that there was a scene in a western ( Possibly the Kevin Costner version of Wyatt Earp ) where an angry mob stormed the sheriffs office and the leader of the mob said something like "What are you going to do? There are a lot of us and you only have 6 bullets!"

"I only need one bullet to kill you Bob, and believe me that is what is going to happen. You will die first." was the gist of the reply.

There's been similar dialogue in a number of movies. Stand By Me is another example.

originally posted by: FyreByrd

originally posted by: putnam6
a reply to: FyreByrd

There is no need to track anything, or more testing BS, if somebody warrants hospital visit go.We have sat tight for 4 weeks, first of May is 3 weeks away after that sorry we got to go back to work. Then we will have to see how well isolation works vs herd immunity.Which is likely what we needed to do in the first place.

Whatever .... you think and I assume the talking head - who is that, what are their bone fides?

I suggest reading the Article referred for better understanding.

I read the article it's a crock of BS it's overkill in a situation that's likely close to its downhill run already.

Read below who Scott Gottlieb is vs Professor Knut Wittkowski

Perspectives on the Pandemic, Professor Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design, says that social distancing and lockdown is the absolutely worst way to deal with an airborne respiratory virus.

Further, he offers data to show that China and South Korea had already reached their peak number of cases when they instituted their containment measures. In other words, nature had already achieved, or nearly achieved, herd immunity.

www.researchgate.net...

and who is Scott Gottlieb? Nothing but a Big Pharma shill....

F.D.A. Nominee, Paid Millions by Industry, Says He’ll Recuse Himself if Needed

www.nytimes.com... scott-gottlieb-recuse-conflicts.html

The nominee, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, has spent the bulk of his career working in the drug and health care industry, which experts say raises the potential for myriad conflicts of interest. If confirmed to head the F.D.A., he would wield considerable power over companies and investment firms that have paid him millions of dollars over the years.

From 2013 to 2015, for example, Dr. Gottlieb received more than $150,000 to advise Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a company whose two approved drugs are seen as breakthrough treatments for cystic fibrosis but carry list prices of more than $250,000 a year. He’s the acting chief executive of Cell Biotherapy, an early-stage cancer biotech firm that he helped found. He has served for years as a consultant to pharmaceutical giants like GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb and is paid by other companies for his expertise.

originally posted by: BrianFlanders
This all goes back to just a few basic, irrefutable facts.

1. The government (PTB, whomever you believe they are) utterly failed to shut down international travel when they knew for a fact this thing was coming our way. At the very least they could have given us more time to prepare. But they just sat there and told us to wash our hands. They did not even have the testing capacity to do anything.

2. The medical mafia that has been lounging around fattening itself up on large chunks of your income FOR DECADES (while completely locking large segments of the population out of needed medical care) was completely unprepared for anything like this and they continue to throw their weight around and use their influence to shirk their responsibilities and deny care to people who don't even know they have the virus (because the medical people are refusing to test them).

These dirtbags made one TV commercial after another for decades on end about how they'd be for you in your time of need if you just paid them a small fortune. Now that the chips are down those MFers can't even provide you with what used to be a cheap paper facemask.

Does anyone think these people ever tried to imagine a scenario where they needed far more resources than anyone paid for? Nope. The only scenario they ever planned for was passing the buck and avoiding the cost.


3. Now all of these parasites are blaming US for not being able to completely stop living long enough to wait out a plague that was brought on by their negligence.

You didn't miss nothing.
everything you wrote I agree 100+
If they keep up the shutdowns until the end of May, they'll need $5 trillion; if it's in August, $12 trillion. This is an inconceivable amount of public money.
It amounts to a total government takeover of the economy.

Our ruling class they could afford an indefinite shutdown.
Poverty kills. Despair kills.
This shutdown is deadly.
we are a victim of their negligence or is it much bigger?
we had enough reserves to close the borders.
In January I felt like I was trapped in a country that was more worried about the stock market..
Close the borders!!!!
All our great leaders kept watching the stock market....Dow fell 6 points.
Who gives a sht close the borders!!!
I started tracking Chinas air traffic.....close the borders!!!

Well, more ammo more food here we go!!!
Russia didn't mess around shtf..they said every country for their self.

originally posted by: face23785

originally posted by: FyreByrd

That said, his analysis is rather good, though a it draconian on 'surveillence'

"a bit?" It's rather extreme. This guy sounds like a nutjob.

Germany studies actually support what the professor says. Their studies indicate that 15% of population with covid-19 don't even realize they have been infected. When the virus spreads from person to person its dna changes to adapt to humans, becoming less virulent in the process. So the Professors argument is that if it were allowed to spread through children (less likely to become sick), it would have lost its virulency after 4 weeks.

So the more practical approach would have been to isolate the sick and elderly instead of the whole population.

a reply to: glend

That's not what I was calling extreme. The idea of tracking infected people with an app with penalties if they leave their home is #ing criminal.

a reply to: FyreByrd

Eeekkk - this wasn't meant to be a thread - oh well. - I see my error now.

a reply to: face23785

ok, sorry

a reply to: putnam6

Thank you for your opinion. It's seems to support my point. Oh well....

originally posted by: glend

originally posted by: face23785

originally posted by: FyreByrd

That said, his analysis is rather good, though a it draconian on 'surveillence'

"a bit?" It's rather extreme. This guy sounds like a nutjob.

Germany studies actually support what the professor says. Their studies indicate that 15% of population with covid-19 don't even realize they have been infected. When the virus spreads from person to person its dna changes to adapt to humans, becoming less virulent in the process. So the Professors argument is that if it were allowed to spread through children (less likely to become sick), it would have lost its virulency after 4 weeks.

Actually, the best studies are those done in places where the most testing was done. Iceland has tested a larger fraction of their population, per capita than almost anywhere else, including some random testing, and they found that about 50% of those who tested positive were asymptomatic.

The SARS-COV-2 virus is an RNA virus, it doesn't have any DNA in it. But you are correct that all RNA viruses tend to mutate rapidly as they move through the population and they tend to become less deadly in the process. But that is not why the professor was arguing that it would work through the population in 4 weeks.

All virus epidemics follow the same pattern if you don't change the behavior of the population in response to an outbreak (in other words don't suddenly start doing social distancing, etc.). They take off exponentially at first until they have infected about half the people they are going to infect and then they decline exponentially. As soon as the virus has infected about half the people it's going to infect, it increasingly runs out of new hosts. That's why epidemics decline, not because the virus mutates. They form nice, symmetric bell shaped curves. That's pretty much what happens every year with seasonal flu, and that's basically what the professor was saying should be done with COVID19--treat it like the seasonal flu. The problem is, it looks to me like he is quite a bit off on his numbers.

For example, he says we would have to infect about 80% of the population to develop herd immunity. Actually, the fraction of the population you have to infect for herd immunity is directly dependent on how infectious the virus is. The SARS-COV-2 virus has a reproduction number maybe as big as 2.5. That means that every person who has the virus transfers it to 2.5 other people, on the average. With that kind of reproduction number you would have to allow about 60% of the population to be infected to develop herd immunity. With a US population of about 330 million, that would be 198 million infected. If half of the infected population doesn't develop symptoms, that leaves 99 million who would develop symptoms. By the professor's own estimate, about 2% of those who develop symptoms would die. That would be about 1.98 million. The professor said that only about 10,000 would die, within a period of 4 weeks. More than 10,000 have already died in the US, and we are not over the hump yet, and we have been holding the deaths down artificially by our social distancing. It seems to me he just pulled that 10,000 number out of his bung hole.

And then there is the timing. Because the epidemic curve will be symmetric if you don't change any of the population's behavior in midstream, half the population that is going to get infected gets infected on the way up to the peak and half get infected on the way back down. That means that 99 million would have been infected at the peak of the epidemic curve. The doubling time of the COVID19 outbreak is about 3 days, and again, that's if you just let it run free like the professor wants to and you don't try to stop it in any way. If you start with one case, it takes between 26 and 27 doublings to get to 99 million cases. That's about 80 days to get to the top and another 80 days to get down. That's between 22 and 23 weeks to run the course from none of the population infected to 60% infected. Again, It seems to me he just pulled the 4 week number out of his bung hole.

a reply to: 1947boomer

Great information 1947boomer. The professor did say that the aged/sick should be isolated and mortaility rate of those under 60 is 20 fold less than those over 60. So instead of 1.98 million it would equate to something like 100,000 deaths on current mortality rates. But as you have pointed out, in iceland 50% of those who tested positive, were asymptomatic, So our current mortaility rates are highly likely to be inflated by lack of testing. Perhaps the Professor has included those probabilities in his estimate.

Its interesting that South Korea could control the spread of infection without implementing any lockdowns. Just one week after the country reported its first case they were manufacturing 100,000 test kits a day. Out of population of 50M they have had 214 fatalities to date.