Conoravirus ...

[Benno von Humpback]

Wife's PPP loan was approved last night!

[Jamie]

Wife's PPP loan was approved last night!

Great news. We bank with HSBC, so we got shafted.

[Benno von Humpback]

Wife's PPP loan was approved last night!

Great news. We bank with HSBC, so we got shafted.

I don't know if the bank deserves much credit. It was Suntrust, which I think is now Truist or something.

[Jamie]

Wife's PPP loan was approved last night!

Great news. We bank with HSBC, so we got shafted.

I don't know if the bank deserves much credit. It was Suntrust, which I think is now Truist or something.

HSBC is a furrin bank - so all their customers lost out.

[Slick470]

Great news OM. Our office was approved for a loan as well.

I do think that the bank you work with did make a difference and supposedly our bank was pretty easy. According to the industry emails I get lot of customers of capital one are pretty pissed because the process didn't work very well. Also, apparently as the funds started to get low, the bank just stopped taking applications and wouldn't pick up the phone.

And I just read that Wells Fargo is getting sued over their handling of it.

[Benno von Humpback]

Wife's PPP loan was approved last night!

Great news. We bank with HSBC, so we got shafted.

I don't know if the bank deserves much credit. It was Suntrust, which I think is now Truist or something.

HSBC is a furrin bank - so all their customers lost out.

Oh, that's terrible!

[TheOffice]

Bank of America was also sued because it put existing borrowing customers first.

Missed the first round, hoping to get in the second.

[Ajax]

My daughter works for the DC Metro. She reports the subways are operating at about 5% of the usual ridership, and they have closed some stations. The closures are because they don't have enough staff to disinfect the whole system as frequently as necessary.

Their biggest fear is a cluster of virus among the fairly small group of people who staff the control room and who know how to operate the system. If I recall what she said correctly, those folk are divided into to 2 groups who are to never mix or be in the same place. One half uses the regular control room and the other uses a backup site.

Bus drivers are most at risk. They are supposed to limit the number of riders on a bus so that social distance guidelines can be followed.

Hey, no kidding? I'm a big fan of the Metro. I avoid driving into DC whenever possible. Everything she says, is true. There's been a lot of maintenance and upgrades to stations and platforms. I wonder if they took advantage of the lull to accelerate repairs? The highway administration has certainly used the opportunity to re-pave and repair the roads.

[Chris Chesley]

We got our PPP last week. REALLY eased up the current cash flow challenges. BUT, in the Good News / Bad News department, it looks like the sale of our business is still in the ‘go’ mode and imminent. The bad news is that change of ownership means a default on the PPP loan (by definition and terms of the loan)

[LarryHoward]

Wife's PPP loan was approved last night!

Great news!

[LarryHoward]

Snip

Great news OM. Our office was approved for a loan as well.

And I just read that Wells Fargo is getting sued over their handling of it.

I'm shocked that people still use Wells Fargo.

Our bank stopped taking applications and started a waiting list when they had so many that they were backed up a week on processing. As we had started but not yet completed the process, we got a call from our account manager saying about 2 hours before the deadline with the "if you are intending to complete the process, put in your application now."

[kimbottles]

There are many different experiences with Wells Fargo.
Their problems were in their “retail” side.

We use their “Private Bank” and they are EXCELLENT.

On the side of full disclosure one of my younger brothers just retired from a very senior position with WF.
He was seriously PISSED at the retail side and the top management that let it happen.
It made it easier for him to cut the cord and retire to the English countryside.

[slap]

Hey, no kidding? I'm a big fan of the Metro. I avoid driving into DC whenever possible. Everything she says, is true. There's been a lot of maintenance and upgrades to stations and platforms. I wonder if they took advantage of the lull to accelerate repairs? The highway administration has certainly used the opportunity to re-pave and repair the roads.

There was a road repair crew working around the Rt 3 / 450 interchange yesterday - of the four workers standing right next to each other, only one had a mask.

[Ajax]

Hey, no kidding? I'm a big fan of the Metro. I avoid driving into DC whenever possible. Everything she says, is true. There's been a lot of maintenance and upgrades to stations and platforms. I wonder if they took advantage of the lull to accelerate repairs? The highway administration has certainly used the opportunity to re-pave and repair the roads.

There was a road repair crew working around the Rt 3 / 450 interchange yesterday - of the four workers standing right next to each other, only one had a mask.

They probably all rode in the same damned truck, too.

[Benno von Humpback]

I'm shocked that people still use Wells Fargo.

Who should be cleaner now?

Lightning strike fallacy.

[BeauV]

I have been talking to UCSC folks about serology testing. The big problem is that we still have about 20-25% false positives and false negatives on the current tests. Date of that info was two weeks ago. With that error rate, any projections on the percentage of a population which does or doesn't have antibodies could have an error rate of over 30%++. hardly something we can count on as accurate. The same guys say that serology will get a LOT better in the next month or two.

Importantly however, if the distribution of the testing error is known, even if biased, we can correct for it. And crucially, the error at the conclusion level having aggregated over a population will be small law-of-large-numbers style.

Let's not wait for perfect data. We won't get it and THAT would be bad science.

I'm not suggesting waiting. Only that folks understand what they actually "know" and what they are "forecasting" or "believing". Americans seem to have a big problem differentiating between knowledge and belief.

[Jamie]

I believe you are correct.

[BeauV]

Here's an interesting example of folks putting a bit too much faith in models. We do need to be careful here to upgrade our thinking to match what actually happens:

"Even as they are updated, though, many of the models remain symmetric. Reality isn’t." A quote from the link below. It turns out that the models which show a relatively rapid climb and a roughly equal decline aren't matching reality. Infections climb rapidly, but they decline relatively slowly if at all in may areas.

Article HERE

[kdh]

Beau, I don't know what people are thinking, other than to think that any notion of success in slowing the spread means we can reduce our efforts.

But given the mechanism of disease propagation this is ridiculous. Until at least most humans have immunity, the disease spreads exponentially until we isolate, when it will spread more slowly. When we stop isolating the disease will spread exponentially again.

We could get more detailed than that, I suppose, but I don't see the point.

[SemiSalt]

Here's an interesting example of folks putting a bit too much faith in models. We do need to be careful here to upgrade our thinking to match what actually happens:

"Even as they are updated, though, many of the models remain symmetric. Reality isn’t." A quote from the link below. It turns out that the models which show a relatively rapid climb and a roughly equal decline aren't matching reality. Infections climb rapidly, but they decline relatively slowly if at all in may areas.

Article HERE

This article makes me feel very smart because just about everything it says was apparent over a week ago.

It should be a story about how the strengths of a model are also its weaknesses. When the models first appeared, there was some thought that the death toll might be 2,000,000. The models said no. Without a model you can't predict a peak, and the models had the peak in the right month which is, in itself, pretty remarkable. But the features of the model that find the peak also have the steep decline baked in.

[Benno von Humpback]

Hope Tim didn't go out and buy Gilead https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/2 ... rug-204749

[slap]

Hey, no kidding? I'm a big fan of the Metro. I avoid driving into DC whenever possible. Everything she says, is true. There's been a lot of maintenance and upgrades to stations and platforms. I wonder if they took advantage of the lull to accelerate repairs? The highway administration has certainly used the opportunity to re-pave and repair the roads.

There was a road repair crew working around the Rt 3 / 450 interchange yesterday - of the four workers standing right next to each other, only one had a mask.

They probably all rode in the same damned truck, too.

I must have gotten there at quitting time - they all piled into the same truck.

[Chris Chesley]

So.

With this report https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/new-yor ... -says.html

The fatality rate is way overblown by all previous estimates.
It's down to a 'bad' flu.
Track and trace for testing is meaningless.

Time to open up the states....

[Ajax]

Yeah, if "bad flu" deaths were lumped into 2 months instead of spread out over a year.

[Chris Chesley]

Here's the deal...

Supposedly, we're trying to avoid excess deaths, not just deaths from old sick people, but excess deaths due to over loading the medical system.

We 'supposedly' value lives over the economy because, well, 'money' = bad and greedy when Gramma's life is at stake.

I say we have always made an economic decision at the expense of lives.

Example.

50,000+ motor vehicle deaths per year.

Solution.

Reduce all speed limits to 25 mph or less

Why not? (if life is SO important over economy?)

[JoeP]

From the article:

Global health officials have questioned the reliability of antibody testing, however, and whether it can accurately determine whether someone is immune to the disease. World Health Organization said on Friday that there’s no evidence serological tests can show whether a person has immunity or is no longer at risk of becoming reinfected.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

[Panope]

It does potentially answer my question about the discrepancy between rural and urban deaths per positive cases. Answer: There may be many many more cases (than we currently count) in the cities than elsewhere.

Steve

[BeauV]

Chris,

From everything I have read, including this above, COVID is between 20 and 100 times more deadly than the flu. This has nothing to do with auto deaths etc... This bug is much more contagious and much more fatal than the flu. That’s what the data says.

We need to avoid pretending that isn’t true.

Now, as to antibody testing, there are a growing number of patients who tested positive and then recovered. Then they caught it again. This shows that we do NOT know how long immunity lasts. Thus, we do not know if herd immunity works!

[Olaf Hart]

Some good news for a change

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-24/ ... t/12181500

[Benno von Humpback]

I also don’t get what’s non-scary about a virus that spreads insidiously in a city’s population and kills 11,000 in a couple of months, regardless of what the relative rate is. Then, let’s not forget about the untold number of people left with irreversible lung, kidney, heart and brain damage.

Stay tuned for data on the real world specificity of those antibody tests.

Finally, I think we should be able to exchange views here without mischaracterizing each other’s positions, viz. the kind of trolling this place was established to get away from.