Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[MacCruiskeen]

^^ observe and learn. Revelation of the method(s). It is instructive. There is no there there.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Cross-posting from the economic thread:

How long before people are begging for martial law?

They can beg all they want; they're not going to get it. Except for New York and Florida, maybe Chicago and Seattle and Boston, and even then, it will be "military support." That military support will be carefully monitored and studied in the years to come as a crucible of lessons about martial law, to be sure, but it won't be The Real Thing.

I realize that after years -- decades -- of InfoWars & Hollywood messaging about the great lockdown, it's reasonable to assume that FedGov has the capacity to mobilize the military and take over the United States, but: do they? I have doubts.

It's not like the DOD has exactly been itching for more power over average Americans, here, they already own Congress and they've already got total information awareness. We're discussing all this on their machine, after all: wave for the cameras.

Control is a matter of leverage points, threats and incentives. I suspect that nobody involved can afford to actually "take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, and move the tables and chairs out of the way," as Zappa used to put it. The more I've read about the actual logistics and parameters of martial law over the past 60 days, the more I suspect they're desperately hoping nobody calls their bluff. And having major cities breaking down is going to do exactly that, so we'll get to find out! Exciting times.

The first and most merciless chokepoint is simply personnel. There is not enough "martial" available for mobilization, here and now, to impose that "law." (Again, I'm open to the notion there is perhaps some kind of secret army, clones maybe, they've been keeping hidden in deep underground bases for exactly this contingency. Won't believe it until I see it, though.) In a nation with two coasts and hundreds of millions of people, restoring order once things go seriously south is going to be incredibly difficult.

There are no quick fixes for this manpower shortfall, either. Essentially all veterans will have to be pressed back into service. There are millions of draftable 'military age men' but they will all have to be trained, armed, outfitted, transported and supported. Both of those steps increase the demands on your already over-taxed system, and that also pushes back your calendar for roadblocks in every city.

The problem of providing law enforcement under pandemic conditions is exactly like the problem of providing medical care under pandemic conditions. The systems are remarkably similar, too, running on under-paid employees and hollowed out by a bloated, disconnected administrative class. In this barely hypothetical crisis, the military will first be faced with the problem of triage -- the biggest shows of force will have to be dispatched to the biggest problem areas. There are currently a lot of problem areas, and by the weekend of April 3rd, there will be a lot more.

All of which ain't to imply that martial law will be totally ineffective, just totally overwhelmed.

That same information awareness, not to mention the tens of thousands of embedded agents and informants that alphabet agencies run on, will allow DOD to trace the human networks of resistance pretty easily. (They have a list, as you know.) A lot of these problem citizens live close to each other and live in cities; they could be rounded up easily.

For more serious threats, theoretically, it's a matter of dispatching SOF teams to do what they do best. And remember, that's not just killing people, it's killing people incredibly fast -- "tempo of operations" -- to disrupt the ability of their opposition to even form a response to what they're doing.

Those operations will be spun & reframed into heroics, rather than wetwork, and amplified by the DOD's biggest force multiplier, their owned media. That messaging will, as ever, be mostly effective ... as long as people have food, shelter and running water. So again, it comes down to the importance of logistics, even at the most extreme, no-holds-barred level of direct military intervention.

So, back to 'roadblocks in every city.' Shutting down the US interstate system would be the inevitable first step, and also one of the easier hurdles, since it was designed for the US military, after all. (Really.)

This is a simple enough leverage point to gain control over, the much harder part will be managing cities -- 80-85% of the US population, depending on whose numbers you trust. Gaining control over rural areas will mostly be a matter of starving people out, cruel but effective. There is little strategic value in the eternal recursion of dealing with the last mile problem over and over across millions of miles of nothingburger terrain, so they'd be left to fend for themselves, and either manage their business to specs, or get cut off from supplies.

And managing the supply chain is a huge shift, sure, but not a huge stretch. There are already National Guard units helping to stock shelves in America, here, now. Seemingly sweeping changes like nationalizing Wal Mart and Amazon won't be hugely difficult since both are already highly integrated into the defense system; AMZN works closely with DOD and Wal Mart is basically a private branch of FEMA.

All of this mobilization & implementation is feasible. The bigger challenge is maintaining it. There will be steep costs, there will be all manner of problems in the chain of command, and every single day will make the whole enterprise more and more difficult. Every single use of force mistake will get rolled into a backlash narrative that will grow on social media no matter what kind of censorship gets implemented. Time is their biggest enemy.

Consider Los Angeles, a notoriously trigger-happy, sunny city known for militant law enforcement. They've had their top cops on local TV bragging about going block to block and enforcing curfew on anyone causing problems and acting crazy. They're not scared of your guns. Without question, they have the means (and motivation) to win a firefight on any given block of that city.

But -- how many blocks? And for how many nights? How long are their men willing to pay the cost of that attrition? Especially when they know damn well much of their opposition are men willing to do that shit for decades, because they already have? For all the cinematic (and war gaming and thinkpiecing) emphasis on white nationalists as NatSec threat, urban neighborhoods will prove the bigger problem in practice, especially since most white nationalists 1) fuckin' love Trump and 2) are 90% Feds to begin with. And those problems will get dealt with just like warlords in Agfhanistan did: ID local stakeholders with power and start giving them wads of USD measured by the pound.

It's all napkin math guesstimates from a dumb hick, though, don't take any of this seriously. Of course the greatest military in the world can conquer it's own country, just as easily as they did in Iraq and Vietnam. They'll just use drones, right? Bombing blocks is easy, ask anyone in Philly.

Still, at least consider the possibility that "martial law" in the United States of America is a Samson Option, and nobody involved with implementing it wants to see it happen. Once you do it, there's no going back, and you'll never have that card up your sleeve again. I would wager that the cost not only exceeds the benefits, it exceeds their resources.

Instead, we will probably have the same ongoing slow grind of state failure, day after day after day. Because really, where is this imaginary breaking point where Americans will rise up as one and scream "ENOUGH?"

A: It doesn't exist and never did.

[alloneword]

^^^ A well-written, thoughtful and thought-provoking post. Thanks, WR.

~

This is from a couple of weeks back, but still worth a read...

Richard Schabas is a retired physician. He was Ontario’s chief medical officer of health for 10 years, and was chief of staff at York Central Hospital during the SARS crisis in 2003.

[...]

Is COVID-19 a global crisis? Certainly for people who can’t add.

I learned some powerful lessons from SARS in 2003. Maybe the most important one was how important it was to focus on what has happened rather than on what might happen. In other words: “Just the facts, ma’am."

[...]

But we also need to be sensible. Quarantine belongs back in the Middle Ages. Save your masks for robbing banks. Stay calm and carry on. Let’s not make our attempted cures worse than the disease.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... as-a-dire/

~

On a lighter note... It's nice to see some Brits making good use of their time in confinement:

[Harvey]

Love it, thanks Alloneword^

Thanks to Wombat^^ and to Jack, for his long piece half a dozen pages back (both being particularly memorable.) Mack was a bit of a shit (Kos certainly didn't deserve that) but his heart is always in the right place and as usual I don't disagree with much in what he's said. Disaster capitalism, war opportunism, confusionism and propaganda as usual, more so than usual.

[MacCruiskeen]

Do not trust random Operators, especially when they spread fearporn. Trust them even less when they try to curry sympathy while refusing all assistance. Resist emotional manipulation. Do not Netflix, do not chill. Think. Breathe. Live.

If you follow that simple and effective health routine you will be insulted non-stop, but that too will strengthen & stimulate your immune system, which really does want to help you.

[thrulookingglass]

How are you supposed to wash your hands regularly if you have no running water or soap? How are you supposed to implement “social distancing” if you live in a slum or a refugee or containment camp? How are you supposed to stay home if your work pays by the hour and requires you to show up? How are you supposed to stop crossing borders if you are fleeing from war? How are you supposed to get tested for #COVID-19 if the health system is privatized and you can’t afford it? How are those with pre-existing health conditions supposed to take extra precautions when they already can’t even access the treatment they need? - Making the Pandemic Worse, Kathy Kelly, The Progressive

God bless inequality.



Happy Christ angle birthday to me...

[Iamwhomiam]

Sorry it couldn't be more joyous, thrulookingglass. Wishing you the best today and everyday. Blessings, Peace and Love.

[alloneword]

More from the 'Swiss Doctor':

March 26, 2020 (I)

• USA: The latest US data of March 25 shows a decreasing number of flu-like illnesses throughout the country, the frequency of which is now well below the multi-year average. The government measures can be ruled out as a reason for this, as they have been in effect for less than a week.

US Influenza Trend (March 25, 2020)

USA: Decreasing flu-like illnesses (March 25, 2020, KINSA)

• Germany: The latest influenza report of the German Robert Koch Institute of March 24 documents a „nationwide decrease in activity of acute respiratory diseases“: The number of influenza-like illnesses and the number of hospital stays caused by them is below the level of previous years and is currently continuing to decline. The RKI continues: „The increase in the number of visits to the doctor cannot currently be explained either by influenza viruses circulating in the population or by SARS-CoV-2.“ But maybe by fear?

Deutschland: Atemwegserkrankungen 2019/2020 ggü. Vorjahren


Deutschland: Krankenhausaufenthalte durch Atemwegserkrankungen nach Altersgruppen

Germany: Decreasing flu-like illnesses (20 March 2020, RKI)

• Italy: The renowned Italian virologist Giulio Tarro argues that the mortality rate of Covid19 is below 1% even in Italy and is therefore comparable to influenza. The higher values only arise because no distinction is made between deaths with and by Covid19 and because the number of (symptom-free) infected persons is greatly underestimated.
• UK: The authors of the British Imperial College study, who predicted up to 500,000 deaths, are again reducing their forecasts. After already admitting that a large proportion of test-positive deaths are part of normal mortality, they now state that the peak of the disease may be reached in two to three weeks already.
• UK: The British Guardian reported in February 2019 that even in the generally weak flu season 2018/2019 there were more than 2180 flu-related admissions to intensive care units in the UK.
• Switzerland: In Switzerland, the excess mortality due to Covid19 is apparently still zero. The latest „fatal victim“ presented by the media is a 100-year-old woman. Nevertheless, the Swiss government continues to tighten restrictive measures.

March 26, 2020 (II)

• Sweden: Sweden has so far pursued the most liberal strategy in dealing with Covid19, which is based on two principles: Risk groups are protected and people with flu symptoms stay at home. „If you follow these two rules, there is no need for further measures, the effect of which is only marginal anyway,“ said chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. Social and economic life will continue normally. The big rush to hospitals has so far failed to materialize, Tegnell said.
• German criminal and constitutional law expert Dr. Jessica Hamed argues that measures such as general curfews and contact bans are a massive and disproportionate encroachment on fundamental rights of freedom and are therefore presumably „all illegal“.
• The latest European monitoring report on overall mortality of March 26 continues to show normal or below-average values in all countries and all age groups, but now with one exception: in the 65+ age group in Italy a currently increased overall mortality is predicted (so-called delay-adjusted z-score), which is, however, still below the values of the influenza waves of 2016/2017 and 2017/2018.

Albert Camus, The Plague (1947): „The only way to fight the plague is honesty.“

[JackRiddler]

The thread title has been changed to something more general with Belligerent's agreement.

[alloneword]

Someone help me out here.

That top graph above:

us.png

Is accompanied by the following text:

How to read this chart:

This chart allows you to compare Kinsa's observations of the influenza-like illness level in the U.S., in orange and red, against where we’d expect them to be, in blue.

Based on our data, influenza-like illness levels in the U.S. are higher than what we’d expect at this time of year.

Am I missing something?

[JackRiddler]

Very weird. Both motions, up and down.

What's the data set on that one?

[alloneword]

Kinsa smart thermometers? +Oregon State University - a chap named Benjamin Dalziel (Assistant Professor) who teaches Evolutionary Biology, apparently.

The 'smart' thermometers: https://www.kinsahealth.co/products/#buynow

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29432526

I'd like to get a handle on the size of the dataset (read: sales figures).

[JackRiddler]

Well, if it's thermometer gun data, then I expect they aren't (yet) breaking into people's houses to, erm, shoot them -- is that the right idiom? -- or chasing them down the street when they're trying to keep six-foot distances. So March 25 is going to be a very different sample from earlier, could that be it?

[alloneword]

I'd imagine that there's been quite an up-tick in sales/use amongst certain demographics. Also a selection factor, in that you wouldn't be getting it out of the drawer and shoving it in your ear in the first place if you didn't think something was wrong, so maybe that's what's being reflected in their data... fear?

From their (Kinsa) FAQ:

We are not directly measuring COVID-19 infections. This is a map of unusually elevated prevalence of flu-like symptoms. There are a number of possible causes, all of which may be contributing to elevations in reported illness levels:

Increased healthcare seeking behavior in light of the COVID-19 pandemic
Seasonally abnormal cold/flu viruses circulating in particular communities. Per CDC, as of March 16, “flu activity as reported by clinical laboratories remains high.”3
COVID-19 Infections

That said, since March 1 we’ve seen a very strong correlation between cumulative atypical illness incidence and positive COVID-19 tests (at the state level) in terms of geographies affected and timing within affected geographies, which suggests that our data provides a useful indication of where COVID-19 may likely be occurring.

[...]

Are you seeing increased activity and does this affect your illness signal?

As of March 2020, we are seeing 2-3x the number of users taking temperatures than we've tracked in previous flu seasons. This does not impact our illness signal, as our modeling already accounts for rapid changes in our user base. We also benchmark our signal against the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at the end of every flu season when the CDC has finalized their illness reporting. We regularly see an in-season correlation of R2 of >= 0.95.

Key Takeaway: A significant and rapid change in temperature readings does not affect our illness signal.


How often is the map updated?

Illness incidence levels are updated nightly.

More details here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29432526 (I can't currently access it).

[JackRiddler]

Ok, so you're saying a bunch of upper income people ordered these gadgets until they were out of stock, and started shooting each other incessantly to check that they haven't got sick in the six minutes since the last shot?