Coronavirus Impact

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Gasoline futures have tanked from a normal $1.50-$2.00 to 60 cents. Just when you don't need to drive, the prices at the pump should be dropping precipitously. Hmm, I've got a 3500 gallon water tank I'm not using. Is having 3500 gallons of gas on your property dangerous? Nahh.
 
Problem is you can't store gasoline very long especially if it has that garbage ethanol in it. Have to put additives in it to extend life. I've got a car now that has 91 octane with ethanol that has turned to garbage and gummed up my fuel pump which means dropping the differential and exhaust
 
Yeah, and not that it's football, but that it's fall.
And if it's bad in the fall, it's really bad- production and pandemic.

Though a friend of mine shot a 2 camera interview today at a house with the cameras just outside the open front door, and the subject in the living room.
And celebrated... wow.
 
groveChuck said:
Yeah, and not that it's football, but that it's fall.
And if it's bad in the fall, it's really bad- production and pandemic.

Though a friend of mine shot a 2 camera interview today at a house with the cameras just outside the open front door, and the subject in the living room.
And celebrated... wow.
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He shot that in Florida? How did he do sound?
 
ahalpert said:
In case you missed it - Trump now says social distancing guidelines in place thru at least April 30. Predicts we will be on our way to recovery by June 1st.
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Really!? Not wanting to spoil the party but that flies in the face of information from other parts of the world. Wish the USA well on that.

Germany is saying two years. The UK has just introduced tighter conditions and is breaking the reality softly to its population to hunker down for six months. Softly as the advice was that you would spook the populace if you said two years. If we don't see a vaccine for 12-18 months as most researchers and epidemiologist are saying we have to be looking at that sort of time frame as to open up the public to a virus that we have absolutely NO front line defense against would be very risky. Only mass and when I say mass I mean almost total population testing and the availability of an effective vaccine will give us a handle on this virus. Germany is keeping its mortality down to 0.6% with massive lock down. The Netherlands going with the herd exposure model is running 6.3% mortality. You don't have to be a mathematician to work out that any percentage between those two numbers for the USA with a population of some 327 million is going to represent a mortality range of between 1.9 and 18 million people. I don't think the higher figure is going to be anywhere near acceptable for the US population. Sad to say say the US is currently running way behind the pack with mass testing so has no idea what the spread of this virus really is. Until the government get ahead of the spread with elimination testing they won't have a clue as to the true asymptomatic number of carriers there have. If you can't see your enemy it's very hard to estimate his strength let alone combat him effectively. We all need to look outside of our own countries for news and information that has different perspectives to the ones presented by our own governments. All governments have agendas to drive and anything that has a bad taste is politically damaging to their prospects.

We are now in stage three of lock down. Like no more that two people together. Everything other than food, fuel and pharmacies shut. Everything nailed down. Touch wood we are now in our second day of total infections dropping. Australia now has the highest testing per capita in the world at the moment. It has been the information about the massive number of asymptomatic carriers revealed by this testing that has driven our massive lock down. Separation and lock down will exist until we can inoculate the population en masse.

Stay well all. Live long and prosper.

Chris Young

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03...merica-coronavirus-testing-is-so-low/12052936

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8121253/Coronavirus-crisis-TWO-YEARS-Germany-warns.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/monday-briefing-uk-lockdown-could-last-six-months
 
cyvideo said:
Really!? Not wanting to spoil the party but that flies in the face of information from other parts of the world. Wish the USA well on that.

Germany is saying two years. The UK has just introduced tighter conditions and is breaking the reality softly to its population to hunker down for six months. Softly as the advice was that you would spook the populace if you said two years.
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Well, that sucks. I'm still hopeful that effective antiviral treatments will emerge that change the game.

An American epidemiologist released a paper concluding that the US could loosen restrictions if infections declined in an area for 14 days straight AND hospital capacity could handle a potential surge in cases AND we could test a sufficient number of people per day.

In any case, this whole situation sucks. But at least I'm still alive... Too many people have already lost their lives or had near-death experiences.

PS: did you see the Italian article I referenced above? There's reason to believe that the actual mortality rate is 1%. (Not that that's low.)
 
cyvideo said:
Germany is keeping its mortality down to 0.6% with massive lock down. The Netherlands going with the herd exposure model is running 6.3% mortality.
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First of all the Netherlands is not "going with the herd exposure model" and second the mortality of a virus does not depend on the approach taken unless the healthcare system is overloaded which is not (yet) the case in the Netherlands.
The 6.3% simply indicates the Netherlands is not doing a lot of testing.

You can only determine mortality based on the actual number of people infected against the actual number of deaths (with a delay of around 8 days).
Determining mortality based on the total number of people tested positive against the actual number of deaths does not make any sense, it will give totally inflated numbers.
 
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groveChuck said:
Yeah, and not that it's football, but that it's fall.
And if it's bad in the fall, it's really bad- production and pandemic.

Though a friend of mine shot a 2 camera interview today at a house with the cameras just outside the open front door, and the subject in the living room.
And celebrated... wow.
Click to expand...

Everyone I know in the business is beyond concerned, at this point. It’s basically like someone threw a master OFF switch for production and it may stay that way for God knows how long. It’s entirely possible that a lot of us don’t see work again until 2021. Last week we had a multi-cam shoot come up and lined up out of state for the end of this week. Small crew, safety protocols being laid out, then they pulled the plug, because of concerns if something actually did happen and also just the optics of it(stay home, but we’re sending these people out). I’m sure there are plenty of others on here who have been around for some of the ups & downs we’ve had in the industry over the years/decades that made you pucker and worry, but we’ve never faced anything like this.
 
ahalpert said:
An American epidemiologist released a paper concluding that the US could loosen restrictions if infections declined in an area for 14 days straight AND hospital capacity could handle a potential surge in cases AND we could test a sufficient number of people per day.
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Every day brings something new. And every report brings an opposite report. Some say the French have approved the malaria drug and shown incredible success, others say the malaria drug is useless and shows no difference between treated and untreated cases.

If the Abbott Labs testing machine is available quickly, that could change the entire nature of testing. And widespread testing is vital, it's the only way to know what the real infection rate is. Speaking of which:
PS: did you see the Italian article I referenced above? There's reason to believe that the actual mortality rate is 1%.
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I looked at that, and was immediately put off by the notion that they're not making any claims based on evidence, they're making their claims based on assumed evidence. As in, they assumed that 100% of the population of those italian towns was infected. They have no evidence for that assumption (that I saw), they just claim it. And then they say "if that's true, then the death rate was 1%."

Contrast that with some reports on the ground from Wuhan, which are saying that the actual death count may very well be around 46,000 vs. the Chinese government's official number of 2,500. That would put the mortality rate (in, admittedly, a totally overwhelmed medical system) somewhere around 19x higher than estimated. Which further makes the case for extending the distancing and flattening the curve.

On the other hand, you have places like Tokyo which, while being the most crowded city on earth (with 35,000,000 people) seems to be going about business basically as usual, and has a very low reported infection rate. Why is it so low? Is it because culturally they already don't shake hands or generally otherwise touch? Is it because so many of them already wear masks? Is it because the official numbers are being astoundingly under-reported? Who knows the actual truth? Although I would point to the government's statements during the Fukushima crisis, which continually and repeatedly said "we have it under control, everything's fine" only to be changed two days later with "whoa, it was 10x worse than we thought, but boy, we sure do have it under control now, nobody worry", only to be revised two days later with "oops, really it was 100x worse than we thought, but trust us, we've got a handle on it now".

So who's right? Who's telling the truth? Whose policies are actually the best, going forward? What is the actual threat level? I'm convinced we still don't actually KNOW. As far as I'm concerned, the best news so far is that new Abbott Labs 5-minute test. Widespread testing is the only way to really know what the real infection rate is.
 
Barry_Green said:
So who's right? Who's telling the truth? Whose policies are actually the best, going forward? What is the actual threat level? I'm convinced we still don't actually KNOW. As far as I'm concerned, the best news so far is that new Abbott Labs 5-minute test. Widespread testing is the only way to really know what the real infection rate is.
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This is where I am at with it. Everything appears to be misinformation at this point. If you find when credible claim, you can find another credible claim that it is wrong. Hear one thing and within 24hrs it will probably have to be walked back. I just want to go back to work. The problem is that until we are not limited by tests and can get a representative sample of an entire country or region, we don't have any actual idea of a good response to limit the damage. In most of the Western countries, the only good indicator will be how much the overall death rate increases in April compared to the previous year. So we will have to wait.
 
cpreston said:
The problem is that until we are not limited by tests and can get a representative sample of an entire country or region, we don't have any actual idea of a good response to limit the damage. In most of the Western countries, the only good indicator will be how much the overall death rate increases in April compared to the previous year. So we will have to wait.
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Exactly!
 
Run&Gun said:
Everyone I know in the business is beyond concerned, at this point. It’s basically like someone threw a master OFF switch for production and it may stay that way for God knows how long. It’s entirely possible that a lot of us don’t see work again until 2021. Last week we had a multi-cam shoot come up and lined up out of state for the end of this week. Small crew, safety protocols being laid out, then they pulled the plug, because of concerns if something actually did happen and also just the optics of it(stay home, but we’re sending these people out). I’m sure there are plenty of others on here who have been around for some of the ups & downs we’ve had in the industry over the years/decades that made you pucker and worry, but we’ve never faced anything like this.
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We had a Live Stream bid out and accepted by a huge healthcare provider, with a panel of eight doctors in studio going out to a small audience of about 70 medical students. We could do the shoot without breaking the regulations since the healthcare provider is an "essential business". One client was hot to do it and we were heading that way, using safe distancing and disinfection protocols, it would be possible to do the shoot safely with minimal exposure to crew and doctors but for the same reason, possible negative public perception, the company pulled the plug. Sigh. Bills are due on Wednesday, crap. So close, yet so far out of reach to just earn a few thousand dollars.

Maybe we can all get back to work as soon as all of us can wear quarantine "Andromeda Strain" style suits? Seriously, we can't all survive just being quarantined for the foreseeable future, especially for many months or even years, something will have to give. I'm a scuba diver, I'm used to being in wetsiut with a mask and regulator.
 
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I think the best we can do is just looking at the biggest data set, which is reported worldwide cases. That is around 750,000 infections, and 36,000 deaths. That puts the case fatality rate at 4.8 percent. It's been hovering near this number for weeks now, although it is slowly creeping up. Speculating on anything else (under reported numbers etc), is just speculation.
 
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So many people I know got laid off last week or cancelled contracts indefinitely. I have been feeling a ton of guilt as I got really really fortunate with my current situation. I left freelance 2yrs ago to run a studio for a toy company and we had enough foresight to lock down a small local studio I could move our gear and continue to shoot tabletop for now and remain employed unlike most of my friends. A fortunate bonus my daughter is able to hand model for me at standard rate also. Since I've been fortunate I plan to look into making a donation to local support services helping gig economy workers who have been left without any safety net. Everything can change quickly but for now I'm one of the lucky ones.
 
Like I said a few days ago, we have no firm numbers, and so trying to calculate mortality rates, infection rates, severity of morbidity by percentage etc. are all wild estimates of completely uncertain value. As William Goldman said - and the older I get, the more areas I realize that is applicable to - "nobody knows anything". It's not just Hollywood.

Sweden is taking a different approach from the rest of Europe. Time will tell if they made the right call (or the right "guess" and simply got lucky):

Lockdown, what lockdown? Sweden's unusual response to coronavirus
 
Batutta said:
I think the best we can do is just looking at the biggest data set, which is reported worldwide cases. That is around 750,000 infections, and 36,000 deaths. That puts the case fatality rate at 4.8 percent. It's been hovering near this number for weeks now, although it is slowly creeping up. Speculating on anything else (under reported numbers etc), is just speculation.
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The only problem there is that neither all fatalities nor all infections are reported, both for lack of testing and for lack of transparency.

If the Wuhan death count was radically higher, why might the total number of infections not be radically higher as well?

The Italian study indicated a mortality rate of 1% based on the assumption that all excess deaths in that municipality during the outbreak were actually caused by covid (4x the reported covid deaths). The flimsier assumption was that everyone in the town had been infected - possible, but unlikely.

Also, the mortality rate in an overwhelmed hospital system will be much higher, so what are we really measuring?

I think we'll need statistics from random serological antibody tests of the general population before we can grasp how many asymptomatic or mild cases have occurred that went untested, and therefore the true number of infections and the true mortality rate.
 
ahalpert said:
The only problem there is that neither all fatalities nor all infections are reported, both for lack of testing and for lack of transparency.
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Yeah, but, in the absence of that, it's the best way to guess, more so as the numbers get larger, which was my point. You can only guess on what is known, not what is unknown. What's distressing to me, is that as more stats are reported worldwide, the fatality rate is creeping up. I would expect that to go down with more numbers, if the real fatality rate is much lower.
 
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