Coronavirus Impact III

Peter C. said:
I wasn't well informed. But once I started the application process I was surprised how funds were allocated. How I understand it the more you made the more you were entitled to. I used my 2019 tax return and the calculation was made off of Schedule C gross profit not on how much your business went down during the pandemic.

I didn't apply to last year's PPP because I didn't know the loan was guaranteed to be forgivable (I never heard of such a thing). When my income went to zero for six months last spring I had no desire increase my debt. If I put it in the bank, the interest rates are almost zero.

I read that mostly big business got last year's PPP loans because lenders would be paid a commission on percentage of the entire loan. If it took the same time to approve $100,000 loan why would you waste your time with a $10,000 loan. This time around they paid flat rate so the banks would loan to small business owners and sole proprietors. The banks have been making loads of money. The government could have used the income tax records to identify who actually reports as a business and send them aid directly but instead they funneled it through the banks so they could profit off it.

I heard about the a second draw PPP loan but found out I'm not entitled because only people received the first draw can get the second draw. So if you got money you can get more money but if you didn't get any then you are not entitled to anything. It's laughable how it's structured. I don't like taking hand outs but it hurts double when millions of people got it who didn't even need it... I recommend my close friend to apply for the PPP who was hesitant. She felt bad for me because she applied long after I did and received her money in a week. I can't be bitter because at least I was able to help someone.
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After reading this post, I'm not sure whether to cry or scream. What a wonderful world we live in
 
ahalpert said:
Isn't it a loan though? It's not going to be forgiven, will it?
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If spent properly, it is forgiven. And one of my friends who just got the PPP this year said up to $25K, if not forgiven, they still have no recourse or mechanism for collection on it if you choose not to repay it, so his accountant told him to take it. It was for all intents and purposes free money. And Peter is right, they did a very poor job of explaining things and letting people know.

Of course, if it was just rumor and misunderstanding about no repayment and no recourse for collection and they do go after people, then I don’t have to worry about that. But, because I missed out on it, it’s as good as carved in stone.
 
Run&Gun is right. My colleague's accountant said the same thing. The government can afford to do this because they didn't have to earn the money or even collect it in the form of taxes. All they had to do is tell the central bank to digitally print a trillion dollars. Because the dollar is no longer backed by gold they can print as much money as they like. Everyone is happy now but this could trigger hyper inflation that you see in 3rd world countries where the currency has become worthless because the government has printed too much money.

Btw the PPP money is also tax free. I just finished my tax returns, I had over paid my tax estimate and they sent me 1099-INT on the interest that it accrued. Imagine getting taxed on your tax payments!
I was only going to accept the PPP money because my earnings have been crippled, and its rare when any money is ever given to small businesses. When it comes to taxes, unemployment, or healthcare, all the policies are against small business owners.
 
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I heard there was a lot of fraud for the first PPP. My brother's neighbor said he straight out lied, made up in a bunch of numbers and got $67,000. He said no proof was required. Seems outlandish but all of this is pretty crazy. This time they set a provision that if they discovered the borrower committed fraud the lender wouldn't be responsible for paying back the loan but they wouldn't receive their commission. And that's why this time it wasn't as easy to get the money.

Some sort of the government is dumb/wasteful and people are cleaver when there is easy money to be had. The government wouldn't be so careless if this wasn't money the created out of thin air.
 
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filmguy123 said:
. The flat rate approval is a good first step, but they really should have had a certain percentage of the total pool allocated only to smaller loans of, say, $100k or less to help the smaller businesses. I've heard of a ton of people who likely need the loan most not getting it, and many who have needed the loan least getting it. Too bad, because we just printed a lot of money to pay for this and from a thousand foot away armchair critic perspective, it sure anecdotally seems like a lot of it went to sub-optimal places.
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I so agree. I'm all for government intervention for the sake of helping people get through hard times. (Just a smart social investment if you ask me, aside from being the right thing to do.) But nothing makes me feel sicker than seeing government comfort the comfortable and pass out bonuses to the rich and well-connected, or just the lucky. Whilst padding wall street balance sheets
 
ahalpert said:
I so agree. I'm all for government intervention for the sake of helping people get through hard times. (Just a smart social investment if you ask me, aside from being the right thing to do.) But nothing makes me feel sicker than seeing government comfort the comfortable and pass out bonuses to the rich and well-connected, or just the lucky. Whilst padding wall street balance sheets
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last40yearsofneoliberalism.jpg
 
I just got declined for the $10K "targeted EIDL" grant. Stipulations were you had to demonstrate revenue loss of 30% during the date range and be located in a low income area. My income loss exceeded 30% easily. But following my business partner stealing ALL my money and wrecking my business I lost the business location. So I temporarilly listed my business at my residence when I had to register my business until I can get a building. My residence is a small humble house in a very modest neigborhood, but sure enough is not in a low income zone (according to their chart), though the houses here sell for only $80-109K. But a few blocks away is high dollar commercial real estate.
 
The lab leak hypothesis has gone from being branded a deranged conspiracy theory to mainstream acceptance as a plausible origin of the pandemic.

Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said Monday that there is growing circumstantial evidence suggesting that COVID-19 may have originated in a lab and not in nature.

CNBC's "Squawk Box" co-host Rebecca Quick asked Gottlieb what he made of a Wall Street Journal article published Sunday that said three employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had sought hospital treatment for flu-like symptoms around the same time COVID-19 began to emerge in China.

"I think the challenge right now is that the side of the ledger that supports the thesis that this came from a zoonotic source, from an animal source, hasn't budged. And the side of the ledger that suggests this could have come out of a lab has continued to grow," said Gottlieb, who left the FDA in April 2019 and now sits on the board of Pfizer.

"People a year ago who said this probably came from nature, it's really unlikely it came from a lab, maybe a year ago that kind of a statement made a lot of sense because that was the more likely scenario," Gottlieb added.

He said the source of COVID-19 has yet to be identified and noted that the origins of related diseases were usually identified at this point following the initial outbreak.

"It's not for lack of trying. There has been an exhaustive search," Gottlieb said of COVID-19.

"I don't think we're ever going to get to the bottom of this," he added. "Because unless we have a whistleblower - assuming it did come out of a lab, and I'm not saying it did, but assuming it did - unless we have a whistleblower or a regime change in China, you're not going to truly find out."

"The question for a lot of people is going to be: When are too many coincidences too much? When does it seem that there's too many things suggesting that this could have come out of a lab?" Gottlieb said. "And right now there's more and more circumstantial evidence, certainly."

Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden and the nation's top infectious diseases expert, said during an event earlier this month that he was "not convinced" that COVID-19 originated in nature.

"I am not convinced about that. I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened," Fauci said.

"Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals. But it could have been something else, and we need to find that out," Fauci added. "So, you know, that's the reason why I said I'm perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus."
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https://thehill.com/policy/healthca...-circumstantial?amp&__twitter_impression=true
 
filmguy123 said:
2nd dose of pfizer. Arm felt like I had surgery on it overnight, that deep sort of ache. Today I feel like I just got back from a 3 day ski trip on the alps and hopped straight onto a 40 hour return flight... sore and jetlagged feeling.

But no fever or chills or flu like symptoms, feeling mostly fine just a bit tired... good day to bum around.
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It’s kind of crazy how ‘all over the map’ people’s reactions are. I was kinda worried, because of all the people that were reporting that afterwards, especially the second dose, that they felt horrible, with some saying it was like the worst flu they’d ever had.

My Mom said she was 100% fine and felt no effects whatsoever after either one of her shots and even said the shot didn’t hurt, with no pain or soreness afterwards. My Dad said he got sorta sick after his second and felt like he had a cold or mild flu the next two days. It put him in bed, but he said it was nothing severe.

After my first shot(Pfizer), I felt a little “floaty headed” about six or seven hours after the shot for about 30-60 mins and found it really hard to get up the next morning for a shoot. But was fine once I got going. At least one or two other people I know that had been vaccinated before me said they had the same brief “floaty head” feeling. The shot itself didn’t hurt as bad as I thought, but my arm was sore for several days(couldn’t sleep on that side).

When it came time for my second shot, I had been told by a few people to drink lots of water before and after. So the night before I drank a bottle of water before bed and drank part of another on the drive to get it. The shot itself seemed to hurt a little more, but not excessively so(lots of factors could be at play, there). Finished off the bottle of water when I left and continued to stay hydrated throughout the day. Around bed time, I did start to feel a little worn down, like a long day of work and a tiny bit achey when I did lay down. The worst part was I didn’t sleep worth a damn that night and got up at least three or four times to pee(!)(guess I was well hydrated). I had to work the next day, but felt completely fine, even considering I didn’t sleep well. My arm was even less sore this time around.
 
Matt Gottshalk said:
Factcheck.org is not an unbiased source.
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And I'm sure your sources are. I read that whole thing through. It gives a balanced analysis, looking thorougly at every side of the debate, and actually doesn't completely let Fauci off the hook for the research the Wuhan Lab was doing.
 
Matt Gottshalk said:
Got my J&J vaccine.

I am more than done with wearing a mask anywhere.
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Since they loosened restrictions the other week, almost no one is wearing a mask out in public, now, even though in the surrounding area/counties, we are only ~25%-30% fully vaccinated(~35% for the entire state). I wonder if we will see a spike here in the next week or two.

I had one client tell me yesterday that even though we must still be tested before shoots(their talent is SAG), we don’t have to wear masks on the shoots IF we’ve been fully vaxed. And another client/sanctioning body for a sport I shoot for lifted their mask requirements outdoors.
 
The concept of being an unbiased fact-checker arbiter of truth is sort of BS. I don't see how it differs from any standard reporting.

Anyway, from Axios, it seems like the Wuhan lab received NIH funding at some time...but perhaps not for the gain of function research...:

China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located just miles from the market where the first COVID-19 outbreak was detected, previously received funding from Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

The EcoHealth grant partially funded research at WIV that involved analyzing bat specimens collected from caves in China to study their potential for infecting humans. EcoHealth's work in China started in the aftermath of the 2002–2004 SARS epidemic, which also likely originated from bats.
Shi Zhengli, a lead researcher at WIV, was known from public documents to be conducting controversial gain-of-function experiments, which involve genetically modifying viruses to make them more infectious in an effort to better understand them, according to the Washington Post.
Shi has said that the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus that caused the pandemic does not match bat viruses that the lab had earlier sampled from caves in China. However, the Chinese government's lack of transparency about the early days of the outbreak has raised questions that weren't fully answered by a WHO-led investigation earlier this year.
Key exchanges:

PAUL: "For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create superviruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. ... Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH lab in Wuhan?"
FAUCI: "With all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect. The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
PAUL: "Do you fund Dr. Baric's gain-of-function research?"
FAUCI: "Dr. Baric is not doing gain-of-function research, and if it is, it is according to the guidelines and is being conducted in North Carolina. ... If you look at the grant and if you look at the progress reports, it is not gain-of-function, despite the fact that people tweet that, write about it."
...

PAUL: "Will you categorically say that the COVID-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory?"
FAUCI: "I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I am fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
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I don't have that info, although apparently the median age of vaccinated covid patients who died while sick with covid is 82, and the CDC conclusion is that covid may not have been the primary cause of death (though I assume it didn't help). 10k covid cases out of 101 million vaccinated people, 1k went to hospital, 160 died.

From NYT today:

By the end of April, when some 101 million Americans had been vaccinated, the C.D.C. had received 10,262 reports of breakthrough infections. A study found that of those cases, about 995 people were hospitalized and 160 had died, although not always because of Covid-19. The median age of those who died was 82.

Going forward, however, the federal government will have a lot less data to work with.

Our colleague Roni Caryn Rabin, who covers health for The Times, reports that this month the C.D.C. stopped investigating breakthrough infections except for the most severe cases.
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Of course, that's over a 5-month period. Many vaccinated people only got vaccinated 2 months ago. So, I'm not sure how the numbers compare to mortality rates for unvaccinated people over the same period of time. But the numbers are definitely good.

EDIT: Well, on December 13th there was a 7-day average death toll of 2,431. 2 weeks prior to that, the 7-day average caseload was 161,000. So, about 1.5% of discovered covid cases were dying before anyone was vaccinated. That's actually the same mortality rate as the 160/10,262 vaccinated breakthrough cases, although the median age of death for covid patients as a whole is a few years lower than for breakthrough cases among vaccinated people. So, I feel like the big impact of the vaccine is in how few people get infections in the first place. And it's quite possible that those who do become infected had compromised immune systems due to age.
 
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I think I read that the UK variant is now dominant in the US as of a couple months ago. The Pfizer at least seems to handle all or almost all variants. Here's hoping we're over the hump (in rich countries)...
 
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