TSA officers who tested positive for coronavirus did pat-downs at SJC airport
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Public announcement of when exactly these folks were on duty in the last two weeks so that travellers who came into contact with them can self-identify and get tested.
Or better, just announcement that any traveller that passed through their checkpoint recently can get tested, regardless of the timeframe.
The virus has no interest in helping TSA or politicians save face. We have to start testing and publishing the results.
I assume nobody wants you to waltz right in, even or especially the ER.
So not only are they not going to fix things themselves, they are going to actively stop the market from solving things.
How about Norway currently? 43,000 equivalent.
How about Italy? 60,000 cases equivalent, with 5,500 deaths.
Switzerland? 25,000 equivalent.
Sweden? 20,000 equivalent.
But I understand, America bad. It's the same obnoxious theme in every thread on HN right now.
Europe's results - including Denmark - are not impressive at all. That's the actual situation.
The lack of testing is admitted by the head of the NIH, multiple times, most recently today: The idea of anybody getting it easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we're not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we're not. That is a failing. It is a failing. Let's admit it. Dr. Anthony Fauci
You do not know what the actual situation is.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/1/8701741/tsa-screenings-hom...
Instead we create jobs that inconvenience everyone and provide no real value. In fact, they're harming the airline industry, so you could argue they're a net negative on the economy.
The people doing the work could feel more fulfilled, shared resources and services could be improved, and it could encourage social cohesion instead of discouraging it like the TSA does.
Oh well.
TSA was created as a massive handout to the airline industry, in response to their request for relief in the wake of 9/11; they were previously responsible for security and the associated liability, but were relieved of the function and future liability by the introduction of TSA and at the same time given backward-reaching relief from liability.
Consider this rather later statement from Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the early proponents of creating a public airport security agency:
"Regrettably, some of my colleagues in the House and Senate are resolved to undermine TSA - and therefore airport security itself - by advocating for the pre-9/11 system of screening by private contractors. My response to that is: how quickly we forget.
Mr. President, we have already tried an aviation security system run by private contractors. It very tragically did not work. The 9/11 attacks did not occur because of one, two, or three specific vulnerabilities. They occurred because a number of our defenses - including our system of airport screening - were simply inadequate.
[...]
It became clear to many of us that aviation security was inseparable from national security, and we could not, and should not, rely on the private sector to do the job. The security of our skies would have to become a government responsibility. Americans need to be safe and secure wherever and whenever they traveled. And while I would not want to cast blame or criticism on any one contractor, we've already witnessed the results of a system utilizing private security companies which were constantly pressured to focus on costs first, and security second.", Senator Joseph Lieberman, Tuesday, February 7, 2012 [https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/majority-media/lieberman-...]
While that statement came later, it was very much in line with the argumentation in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and was broadly supported by left and right. More at stake, reading between the lines, was much less to do with any corporate interests and more with congress just wanting to appear to be "doing something" in the wake of a national tragedy. Consider this more contemporary testimony from Rep. Nancy Pelosi:
"Since the attacks, steps have been taken to realign federal agencies and change responsibilities, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security -- another brainchild of the senator from Connecticut, Senator Lieberman -- and the Terrorism Threat Integration Center being among the most notable.
These may turn out to be worthwhile actions; however, my concern has been that these entities were instinctive responses -- although Senator Lieberman had suggested his department long before September 11th -- to general perception that things were not right, rather than a result of an exhaustive inquiry across the government with specific findings and specific recommendations for change", Rep. Nancy Pelosi, May 22, 2003, [https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/archive/hearing2/9-11Com...]
Trying to couch what happened with the nationalization of airport security as being a handout to corporate interests after the fact is like trying to demonize health insurance companies by saying that current day efforts to nationalize the health care system is really just an effort to give hand outs to big businesses involved in health.
Given how historically my friends in various progressive movements are so often advocates of precisely this sort of government assumption of responsibility; perhaps if the parent comment is correct in their assertion, then maybe we should be discussing how easily duped those same progressives are.
[EDIT: added Pelosi comment]
No, it's not. It was actually covered in the news at the time, though it didn't get much attention.
> However, and I was plenty old enough at the time to be tuned into the political reality, was not that the airlines were begging to shift the costs of airport security to the government,
So was I, and, yes, they were (more specifically, the potential liability for security failures more than the cost.)
> but rather that proponents of expansive government responsibility insisting that something as important as airport security could not be trusted to the private sector.
Yes, that was the sales pitch used to the public by politicians after they decided how to respond to the industry lobbying.
> Trying to couch what happened with the nationalization of airport security as being a handout to corporate interests after the fact is like trying to demonize health insurance companies by saying that current day efforts to nationalize the health care system is really just an effort to give hand outs to big businesses involved in health.
If you mean mandatory insurance schemes like the ACA when you talk about nationalization of health care, rather than Medicare for All, that's exactly what it was conceived as. Before RomneyCare in MA (which was the most immediate model for both the Obama and Clinton health plans in the 2008 campaign), the same basic outline was proposed as a potential national reform by a group of insurance industry lobbyists and Republican strategists in the aftermath of the failure of the Clinton health care reform efforts when it looked like there might be another go around and the Republicans might be served by having something with the superficial shape of health coverage package and he industry wanted to make sure that what it was was a massive subsidy to the industry.
OTOH, I don't see how you could frame MFA that way (you could frame it as a relief to employers who don't want to be responsible for employee healthcare, but not to the healthcare industry, and while that's not the central purpose for most advocates, it has been cited as a positive and intended effect by many proponents, so it's not entirely wrong.)
I'm being sarcastic of course.
Politicians are so quick to bail out "critical" businesses, which, on the face of it, makes sense. But it's not like all those planes and pilots and crews disappear if an airline goes out of business. The corrupt crony companies need to be allowed to fail so that others can take their place and investors can learn from their mistakes.
It is optimal under these conditions to minimize employment from the state and where possible spread it across regions.
Also, you can't really create a new job for lots of people because when you get a sufficient size they become a powerful economic lobbying force with strong allies and good rhetoric. After all "should our X be paid only Y while NFL/NBA/mayors etc. get paid Z?" is pretty convincing to lots of people.
So when you create jobs you need to put them in places where there are opposing forces. If you just created construction jobs, you'd be paying them $150k each all the time, and you'd always have to expand it. The rhetoric works very well here "should the people responsible for the safety of our bridges only be paid Z?". Now, if you create jobs that people don't want people working on, you get natural limiters. No one wants a massive TSA. People will complain if there is over-sizing of the TSA and they see lots of people standing around.
This isn't necessarily conscious. Just the result of the constraints and people acting locally optimally. i.e. no one needs to say "let's choose TSA jobs over bridge maintenance jobs". All you need is someone in the room to say "I can't give you that budget for the bridge maintenance because then I have to give that other guy the budget for the tunnel maintenance and I don't think I can get approval for everyone because jurisdiction Y doesn't have any bridges or tunnels" while the TSA is pretty uniformly spread and so it applies to nearly everyone evenly.
That’s why our colleges are overrun and student debt is so high. We teach kids from an early age that if you don’t go to college you won’t get a cushy job and you’ll end up as a highway construction flagger or something. As if that is the worst thing in the world.
The alternative was to wait a few weeks until a large fraction of the teams had incomplete rosters, owners and fans were furious at the asymmetrical competition, and there was social/legal pressure to stop sponsoring events drawing large crowds into social proximity, and then cancel.
They knew that was coming and it's better to pull the plug early.
I suspect the TSA as a potential transmission vector was a consideration in restricting travel from Europe. This is not a scenario without existing contingency plans. Within hours of the WHO declaration, Doctors Without Borders was outside my local Walmart. That wasn’t a phone call earlier in the day.
Woah, so much spin, I think I could harvest the energy out of this sentence to solve the planet's energy needs.
The United States seems to be a hotbed of undiagnosed infection, and Americans are still streaming in. Tom Hanks (who, to be fair might have been infected in Australia) could be the tip of the iceberg.
Shutting down travel from the US to Australia might anger the US government, but it would seem to be a prudent action.
The US Schengen travel ban, exempting the UK, also seems to be cynical geopolitics, that could cost the UK more than the rest of Europe.
If geopolitics is a problem, then a full travel ban could be more palatable. The status quo is decidedly uncomfortable.
You still see fatalities and the symptomatic without testing.
It's just not preemptive detection, "wait and see" in this context just strikes me as "wait til the hospitals are overwhelmed".
Which is still dumb imho.
Next, do movie theaters and other large gathering spots.
Everyone is breathing the same moist air when studies are showing it can survive for up to three hours in the air AND that you can catch it more than once since for some reason the body doesn't fully make immunity.
And people feel absolutely no responsibility to isolate themselves, everyone coughing and sneezing at any store I try to go to. They are just going to do whatever they want to do.
Imagine the world by the end of this year. Possible literal decimation.
What studies are these? All the info I have seen talks about transmission requiring close contact with an infected person or directly breathing in droplets from their cough or sneeze.
> you can catch it more than once since for some reason the body doesn't fully make immunity
Where are you getting this from?
Where are you getting that from?
This has been debunked on the This Week in Virology podcast[1]:
Vincent Racaniello: There are a series of articles here, where there have been some claims about different circulating lineages and what that means. Are you on this, Cathy?
Cathy Spindler: Right. So, there was an article that I first saw in the LA Times "Chinese Scientists Say Second Coronavirus Strain Is More Dangerous"[2]. But in that there's a link to virological.org, which we talked about another article posted there a couple of weeks ago[3], and they really debunk this and think even that this Chinese article about a second Coronavirus should be retracted. Two of the key claims that are reached by misunderstanding and overinterpreation of data and an additional analysis suffers from methodological limitations. So this long thing on virological.org goes in to the reasons why there's no real evidence for two different strains, a more severe strain and a less severe strain.
Rich Condit: It also provides a nice summary of this sort of variation in sequence that's being observed in the virus over time, which is good.
Vincent: Yeah, it's a good aritcle. We'll put a link. It's worth reading, but as everyone should know, when these [indistinct] viruses, every replication cycle they sustain mutations in their genomes and the lethal ones are gone, the viruses don't reproduce, but some of them stay and if they're neutral they remain. So they can be characteristic. So the virus introduced in to the Washington area is a single introduction and then it's spread and you can tell that because it has a unique set of mutations compared to say, the Chinese isolate, but it doesn't mean anything biologically. It's just markers.
Rich: And the markers are really interesting because they give you insight in to, I mean the insight that I got from observing what came out of the Washington cases is that from looking at the sequence of the virus they concluded that in fact it had been circulating for some time, and they could even get a very very rough estimate of how many cases might be out there based on the variation in sequence and the time at which the disease first showed up in a person.
Vincent: I think there are some emails later about this. People are concerned that, and people suggest in these papers, at least the one here, that we're being critical of that it could be evolved to be more virulent or more transmissible. There's no evidence for that whatsoever.
Rich: This is the kind of thing that... it just won't go away!
Vincent: Oh, it doesn't go away... new outbreak and it comes back.
Rich: Yeah, and there's no evidence. People have looked at this. We've gone over this for several.. Zika, Ebola, where's there's been variation and people point to a particular variation and they say, "This is going to make it more virulent" or something, and then the experiments ultimately get done and no. It hasn't made a difference.
Vincent: And also the issue of increased transmissibility, I think this virus is already very transmissible as it is, and I think the mutations that made it effectively transmissible among humans, which happened very early on, I don't know, either in animals or in humans early on, before we knew about it, they're done, and it's going to be hard to know what they were. MERS coronavirus has never acquired those high transmissibility changes and it keeps fizzling out and then you have another reintroduction from camels but this particular SARS-Cov-2 sustained them probably early on and it's a very good transmitter. It doesn't need to get better, at least from my anthropocentric view. We never really know what viruses are selected by, but I don't think there's eny evidence, and it's very hard to get that evidence. That paper tells you what you need to prove that mutations are doing something phenotypically. It's very hard to get that.
Rich: It has occurred to me that people who don't think about this stuff every day might be a little confused by this discussion relative to the discussion that goes on all the time about variation in influenza virus strains, and new strains coming up and having to change the vaccine and stuff. But that's different. That's variation in the influenza virus that makes it evade the existing immunity, and those sorts of variations arise so you get circulation of viruses that you don't have as good an immune response to, but that's different than a virus making mutations that make it more virulent. It's a different story.
[1] - at about 13 minutes in to episode 590 - http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-590/
[2] - https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-05/chinese-sci...
[3] - http://virological.org/t/response-to-on-the-origin-and-conti...
Abstract: "32 HCoV-19 (SARS-2) has caused >88,000 reported illnesses with a current case-fatality ratio of ~2%. Here, we investigate the stability of viable HCoV-19 on surfaces and in aerosols in comparison with SARS-CoV-1. Overall, stability is very similar between HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1. We found that viable virus could be detected in aerosols up to 3 hours post aerosolization, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless steel. HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1 exhibited similar half-lives in aerosols, with median estimates around 2.7 hours. Both viruses show relatively long viability on stainless steel and polypropylene compared to copper or cardboard: the median half-life estimate for HCoV-19 is around 13 hours on steel and around 16 hours on polypropylene. Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for multiple hours and on surfaces up to days."
It's not peer reviewed yet so reader beware
A study from scientists at Princeton University, University of California and the National Institutes of Health indicated that the COVID-19 virus could remain viable in the air "up to 3 hours post aerosolization," while remaining alive on plastic and other surfaces for up to three days.
> A study awaiting peer review from scientists at Princeton University...
Also these things are probably a theoretically absolute best case scenario type thing. Not a practically viable mode of transmission.
I would not read a lot into the "awaiting peer review" bit. It normally takes at least a few months for an article to be reviewed, revised (if necessary) and re-reviewed. Things are undoubtedly fast-tracked for COVID-related stuff, but you can only do so much to speed it along.
Per their Table 1, the median halflife of an aerosol is about 3 hours, with a 95% credible interval of 1.81 of 5.45 hours, so it's not a a best (worst?) case number at all.
The plastic data in Figure 2 shows that it does decrease a lot by 48 hours (~1000x), but it's still above the limit of detection; they estimate the half-life to be 14.8 hrs. The 3 day claim is true, but is more of a best/worst case scenario
Don't forget that the traditional pre-publication peer review is more of a sanity check than a sacrament. All that happens is that ~3 people spend ~5-10 hours each reading the paper, thinking about it, and writing up their comments. This is often enough to flag major issues, especially in the interpretation of the data, but it's certainly possible for subtle errors to slip through.
It's tempting to imagine the same situation with Americans instead of Chinese would more resemble a Walmart riot on Black Friday.
But I think when it's a bunch of genuinely sick people filling the hospitals, they're a more docile and incapacitated bunch.
Those still healthy but panicky aren't going to be interested in being in close proximity to large numbers of strangers which is kind of a requirement for a mob to form.
I expect quiet streets, like a zombie apocalypse film, with people minimally venturing out for supplies.
But I've also experienced it with some Americans from NYC, and just assumed it was an emergent trait of people living in heavily-populated high-density cities.
Edit:
There's a similar phenomenon I've seen sharing space/food with guy friends who grew up with multiple brothers. The baseline aggression and competitiveness is visibly turned up a notch.