Mokara

This will be going on for a while, at least until most people have been infected, which could run into the next year. Don't count on extra financial aid from the government, there may be some for a week or two but after that it will become too expensive.

Trust me, the guys on the ship received the best medical care once they were taken off. They were the first, they would have been seen as an example. When you get to the 10000th American infected, then maybe not so much, but the first ones would have been treated well because everyone was watching.

I was expecting him to turn around, point at one of them and say: "It is that guys fault. Don't know who he is. Never met him in my life"

What American scientists are saying it will go away in 2 months? None that I am aware of (Trump is not a scientist, no matter how much he thinks otherwise). Most pandemics last well over a year. We will still be dealing with covid-19 in 2021. Unlike the flu, no one has partial immunity from earlier viral strains and no one has been vaccinated. Probably about 70% of the population will eventually get infected before it is done if steps are not taken. We have only just gotten started. Right now the mortality rate world wide in closed cases is 7.07%. In the US there have been 91 closed cases so far, 50 of which have resulted in death. That is a mortality rate of 55%. That will go down as more active cases close as recovered, but you will still see significantly more deaths than the flu. In China, the mortality rate has leveled out at 4.6%. A smaller discrete data set where the exact number of people infected is known with certainty is the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and the mortality rate there is ~2% among those infected. In spite of attempts to quarantine people on board the ship, about 19% of the people on board got infected. Unlike China, we can be sure that all those folk received the best medical care, so that is the sort of number you are going to see in the US . Do the math, if there are ~350 million people in the US, and 70% get infected in a worst case scenario with a 2% overall mortality rate (the flu is 0.1%, or 20x less) then it is not out of the question that we could see as many as 4-5 million dead in the US if the outbreak is not contained. That is why everyone is so scared. You should be too. As for America "getting it right", their track record to date is not promising, all we have seen so far is a lot of bungling and incompetence. Take the tests for example, frankly it is just shocking that something as basic as that was not in place at least a month ago. They are going to have to get their act together and do it fast if they want to avoid that math playing out.

The problem with the CDC however is that the people actually overseeing it are appointees. They can't always be relied on for an objective assessment since there is an element of politics involved. If you go a few levels below that to the professional managers within the organization, that is where you start to see more objectivity.

That reflects the average intelligence of "regular people" unfortunately. And they still think they should have the same say in government as people who actually know what is going on. Trump was put in office by the basket of deplorables and now we have to deal with the consequences of the "wisdom" of that demographic. Those sorts of people should not have the right to vote. There needs to be some sort of threshold put in place, such as education and/or income, so we can minimize the effects of the ignorant over their betters on governance.

Recession in the short term is a virtual certainty.

In a very small number of cases. Mostly it is more like a severe cold or pneumonia, so a fever, cough and difficulty breathing.

Back in the day when there was civilization, before Mad Max showed up and everything degenerated into lawless anarchy. Even today I can vividly recall the days when roving bands of bandits roamed the streets in their cars festooned with toilet paper....

Out here it is toilet paper for some reason. I saw some reports on TV about people cleaning out stores but thought it may have been just a made up joke story that perhaps happened at one location, but last night when I went down to the local supermarket and went past the isle that normally has toilet paper/tissue paper/paper towels and the toilet paper part was literally empty. Why? Lol.....do people think they are going to be crapping like crazy? At work we have 20L drums of isopropanol, so we can make as much home made sanitizer as we want.

The number of people in serious or critical condition should decrease as medical care facilities become more experienced in treating cases, so the number of deaths per infection should decrease as we get further into the pandemic (in developed countries anyway - developing countries are another story, but the epidemic has not reached them for the most part yet). If you look at the historical mortality rate for the virus in closed cases you can see this. At first it was quite high, but as numbers increased it decreased, although the rate of decrease is quite low now.

The 3.5% number is arrived at by dividing deaths by the sum of active and closed cases, and therefore is not correct because it ignores the 15% of active cases that are in serious or critical condition. About a third of those people will probably die (that is the group new deaths are coming from - people who are classified as mild cases are not dying). They should only be using the closed cases for calculating the mortality rate, and currently that is 5.7%, not 3.5%. The mortality rate is slowly decreasing (it has gone from 6.1% to 5.7% over the last week or so), but that is not because they are picking up milder cases, but rather because they are becoming more experienced treating the critical patients and starting the treatment earlier for high risk patients so they are less likely to reach that point.

The ebb and flow of the infection was due primarily to relatively limited mobility at the time combined with the end of the first world war. Virus cases do fall off in summer, but the reason is not well understood. It is believed to be primarily due to social behaviour though, in cold weather people tend to congregate in confined spaces more than they do in warm weather, so it makes sense that infection patterns would be seasonal. It will take at least a year for a vaccine to be developed and produced. That is not going to help for what is coming. Even the newer technologies that in principle could be used to rapidly produce artificial vaccines are in very early stages of development and are highly unlikely to be ready for anything in the sort of time frame needed. I am telling you this as a fact, not speculation. If a pandemic comes in 2021, things will be different, the technology will be there, but not right now.

Those are the numbers for confirmed cases. Obviously there may be other milder cases out there that are not tested, so they would not be included, but we don't know because they are not tested. But 6% is a scary number, assuming 70% penetration in the event of a pandemic we would be looking at 300-350 million deaths globally. Mortality rates among confirmed cases among the elderly is pretty high, so I wonder what the effect on the US election is going to be. By the time that rolls around a significant number of Trump's supporters may be dead, and that could affect swing states, Florida for example. Hell, even the candidates from both parties may be dead, since both appear to be going to have senior citizens as their nominees. What will happen then? Does the electoral college then get to choose some random person for president?

Keep in mind that although the mortality rate reported in the media is about "1-2" %, the number of people sick enough to end up in hospital is probably an order of magnitude higher. This virus is VERY serious and should not be taken lightly. As of right now there are 32,851 (82%) cases listed as "mild" and 7,098 (18%) listed as "serious or critical" (those are the folk in hospital or otherwise being cared by some sort of medical professional). The highest mortality rate is among those 80+, where ~20% of those infected are dying. That means that pretty much everyone in that age group who gets infected is probably going to end up in hospital. Also, the mortality rate is not quite how people are currently calculating it, because they are including those currently ill as well as those recovered. It should really be the ratio of deaths/(recovered + deaths), or 3,120/(48,284 + 3,120), which comes out to 6.1%.

It is still early days in the outbreak, the shit has not hit the fan yet, we still have a long way to go. Summer is not going to help you. Things like the common cold and flu decrease in summer, but that is probably because people are not in such close contact during those months because of changes in social behavior. To minimize your chances of infection (not everyone gets infected in these sorts of outbreaks) you depend on firewalls to protect you. Basically the fewer people everyone comes into contact with, the less the chance of spreading. There will be a dynamic between the number who are currently infect and the number who can still be infected. So, if you immunize people (either from a vaccine or from prior infection) then there are fewer people to infect. Eventually the virus becomes isolated and when there are no more new hosts readily available it dies off. So the sorts of things that you can do is not touch your face and wash your hands frequently (failure to do these precautions is what usually causes infection). Try to avoid spaces that are social gathering points. Avoid traveling if you can. Wearing gloves when you are out and about probably will help as well, since you can remove them when you get home and thereby avoid contaminating home surfaces through touch. Firewalls through personal behavior, through social behavior and if you are lucky the number of infected people to immune people will drop off enough that you can avoid infection entirely.

It is not illegal to be crazy. As long as you are not endangering others or going somewhere you are not supposed to, most governments in democratic states give you a lot of leeway to do whatever you want. A better question would be why the Science Channel was taking part in this.

The point is you seem to think that young people do not die in these outbreaks, when in fact young healthy adults do, and precisely because they are healthy. This happens every flu season btw, but just in relatively few cases so you usually don't hear about them. The fact that the doctor who died was young does not mean he was murdered, he just got infected by the virus and he was one of those people who got taken out by his immune system. It happens, especially with virus that comparably novel to human immune systems. That is extremely evident when you look at the mortality figures for the 1918 pandemic, there is a huge spike in mortality rates for the population in their mid 20s and early 30s. The reason is because of the way immune systems work and what happens when they encounter a virus that is substantially different from what came before. People infected by Coronavirus mostly have mild symptoms, but if your immune system does not recognize it right away you are going to find yourself in those 1918 like demographics. That is pretty much what happened to that doctor. A7 sales may be thousands a month but PS sales are millions. Rerouting some DRAM is not going to significantly affect supply, and you still don't have a reasonable explanation for why they would rather use that DRAM to sell a few extra low margin products rather than high margin products. If they stopped all camera sales completely to direct the DRAM to PS units, it would increase the amount of DRAM for PS production by less than a percent, that would have absolutely no affect on production costs for the PS4. The A7S series are high margin products. They might not make a lot of overall profit from the camera compared to other sectors but the profit per unit will far exceed what they make from a PS4. In any case Sony are offering sensors with stacked DRAM for third party use, so why would they use this "precious" supply of DRAM to equip other companies cameras but not their own? Plus, if they are not using DRAM in the sensor stacked buffer then they have to be using it in a discrete buffer, which means they are still using the same amount of DRAM, lol.

That is incidental, in pandemics it is the very young and very old who die disproportionately. There is something called a cytokine storm which takes out those with strong immune systems, typically young adults. Basically if you have a strong immune system and have not previously been exposed to a particular virus you can generate a huge amount of the cytotoxic molecules that kill the infected cells. You will see this happening primarily in young adults. They don't only kill infected cells however, they kill anything they encounter. That results in organ damage which in turn will result in death if severe enough, that will be the case if you have an exceptionally vigorous response or are in generally poor health (ie less capable of surviving the effects of that damage). That is how most viral infections kill people in outbreaks. The biggest sample set in relatively modern times was the 1918 flu pandemic, you can read up on it if you want, but the groups hardest hit were the very old and young adults. As far as DRAM is concerned, as I pointed out before, supply is an issue primarily for low cost high volume products. It will have zero affect on high end cameras. Nobody in there right mind is going to take a small volume of DRAM feeding a high end high margin product and redirecting that to a low end low margin product where the actual amount of DRAM involved is negligible to the amount required. No one runs a business like that, and if they do they tend not to stay in business very long, because it is a stupid thing to do. If DRAM prices increase because of short supply (for example) the a7SIII price will increase from, say, $4500 to $4600, a 2% increase. Something like the PS4 may go from $500 to $600, a 20% increase. Obviously the effect is dramatic for the PS4 but negligible for the A7SIII. The increase will kill the competitiveness of the PS4 but have no effect on the competitiveness of the A7SIII. And just rerouting a few more units of DRAM to the PS4 is not going to change that calculation. If you have a vineyard and are producing wine in limited quantities, do you put it in the expensive bottles or do you put it in the cheap bottles? Keep in mind that your production cost is the same both ways. I find it hard to believe that you seriously would put it in the cheap bottle because you otherwise would not have enough wine to fill all your cheap bottles. That is just flat out a stupid. No business runs like that. In short supply the low margin product is the first to get cut.

The issue Sony have is not the sensor, they are fine with that. Their problem is that their processor is old and for whatever reason they don't/can't/won't update it. Until they do that they are not going to have a major improvement in overall specs. If the A7SIII is limited in specs, it is not going to be because of DRAM supply or cost.

I work at a pharmaceutical company as a research scientist. We are actually working on this stuff. You don't know what you are talking about.

The price is the price, there is no way something like the a7SIII could have any impact on PS4 cost of materials or production, the relative market size disparity is too large. I still call BS on that argument. They might have other reasons for not making the camera (the most probable one being that they can't make a processor that is competitive enough for the features they need), but DRAM cost is not one of them.

Actually virulent virus tends to take out proportionately greater numbers of young healthy people. The reason being that the virus itself does not kill you, it is your immune response to the virus that kills you. So the people who die are those who are generally in a weakened state (such as old folk or people in otherwise poor health), and also those who mount a very vigorous response to the virus (these tend to be young adults with a high level of general health). This is quite normal. It is not at all surprising that the doctors who raised the alarm died, they would fall in the young healthy adult category. In pandemics being too healthy is a bad thing, it is just as bad as being in poor health. Virus such as these tend to come from environments where domesticated animals are in close contact with humans. They frequently come from places such as Asia because there you have high density rural populations with perfect conditions for cross species infection.

Sounds fishy to me. The amount of DRAM used in high end cameras is minute compared to all other applications. If there is a shortage then you would be using stuff like that in high end products, not mass market products. I can see it impacting products like PS units, but not flagship cameras. If it cost more they would just increase the price by $100 and no one would notice. Escalating cost of materials primarily affects large volume low margin products (such as something like a PS4).

And did you read my response to that? Apparently not. I guess your knee jerked into your face so fast you were not able to, lol. "For DSLRs sure, they have gone about as far as they can go, but MILCs can go much further than that (which is why DSLRs are fast fading into the sunset at the moment)." I was agreeing with him ffs and then extrapolating to the future. As I said before, comprehension is lacking on your side. It is it really necessary for you guys to contest every and anything I say, no matter what it is?