Profile For midnight fox

They got me too, Jamie. I'm assigned to the same DC this week. Just returned with a backhaul of pallets after a two-stop trip up to South Dakota. Two lane most of the trip.

Snap a photo if you go to 3237, I used to stack those pallets for backhauls.

I'm not a driver yet so I could be wrong but I believe those just followed Turtle over from Prime...

Notice the truck number on his rig. Do any of our newbies know the significance of that number?

sounds vaguely familiar, I'll have a think on it after I have a big cup of Joe... got myself tired a-roamin' and bummin' around...

The only way you can truly stop it is 100% isolation, which is obviously impossible. Otherwise, stopping a virus is like stopping the rain or the wind or the ocean tides.

I agree it would require 100% isolation in order to stop viruses entirely, at least in the absence of intel on who is infected and who isn't. But with modern testing and contact tracing, like in South Korea, they don't stand nearly as much chance of spreading like an unstoppable natural force.

South Korea had their first confirmed case on the same day as us, but New York City alone now has more than seven times the amount of confirmed cases as their entire country, even though the city of Seoul, which has seen infections, has a higher population than NYC and twice the population density.

In Germany, they've done over one million tests now, with 100,000 more each day. It's one test per every 80 citizens so far, and 93% of them have come back negative.

Taken together, they are indications to believe the virus's spread can be seriously limited by protective measures, and that, so far, at least, it hasn't been running wildly unreported throughout the general population.

The other day I showed a list of the top 20 states by population. Of those 20 states, 17 of them are on the list for the top states by infection rate.

True. Those populations are also drawn from cities where the population density is also a lot higher, and that'll have a compounding impact on infection spread.

A large part of reducing mortalities will be slowing the spread, because when the hospitals are past capacity, more people will necessarily die without proper care.

But in principle I do think measures like this prevent people from getting infected too. Not everyone gets the flu every year, for example, they estimate at most only one-sixth of the population comes down with it each year. At the end of the day it's all about who has it and who doesn't and who they do or don't come into direct or indirect contact with, one individual could pass their virus replicas on to two people who each pass it along to no one, another individual could pass it along in a causal chain that ends up infecting one thousand people. We try to model this stuff on rates and averages but it's ultimately the chaos of individual behavior that determines what happens.

We've heard death estimates for the U.S. that started as high as 2 - 3 million, then drop to 1 million, then drop to 100,000 - 240,000, and in the coming days we may get my first prediction for what the numbers will show at the end of all this.

I believe the 100,000 to 240,000 you're referring to are the numbers the White House released this week. They assume the protective measures remain firmly in effect. The figures in the millions are estimates based on the idea of nothing being done to contain the spread. When they presented the 100,000 to 240,000 figures this week, they did so alongside an assumption of 1,500,000 to 2,200,000 deaths with no intervention.

The following day the institute that did the modeling input the next round of new data into their model and revised the # of deaths upward by 14%. The modeling is done through July, the numbers aren't yet accounting for the likelihood of the virus returning in the fall.

The issue with modeling is it's going to vary a lot depending on all the variables in the data. And what happens with the data is up to the pure (possibly random) chaos of nature.

Does anybody understand why I'm making a deliberate choice not to explain?

No.

As far as I can tell, you were dissatisfied with certain viewpoints expressed in the coronavirus thread. I don't understand the connection between that and why you derailed Rob's thread on a completely different topic.

Congrats!

Seems strange the medical issue wasn't addressed up front though, I'd thought they took care of all that during the first couple days of orientation.

But look at the third statistical data summary, which is total deaths of 82,000 (rounded up) through August.

I think it's fair to keep in mind the projections you link to "assume the continuation of strong social distancing measures and other protective measures". There aren't protective measures taken with the flu, so you can't use these projections for comparison.

The closest thing to objective #'s so far comes from places like South Korea and Germany, who have had the capacity of continuously adminstering copious amounts of tests to even people with milder or in some cases no symptoms. They've each administered hundreds of thousands of tests, Germany with 58k of them positive so far, South Korea with 10k positive, a death rate of 0.7% in Germany, and 1.5% in South Korea.

There are enough indications that for calculating plausible worst-case scenarios this virus spreads to twice as many people per infected individual than the seasonal flu.

During the 2015-2016 season there were around 800,000 influenza tests run in the United States, a year with a total of 23,000 deaths.

Since Germany and South Korea have also run hundreds of thousands of tests so far, I'm not certain why we should think the actual mortality rate with coronavirus is going to be so much lower, since the flu tests are also administered in respect to symptomology. If you wanted to throw out the possibility altogether that the coronavirus will spread to twice as many people as the flu tends to, and you shave Germany's 0.7% death rate down by nearly half to 0.4% to be more conservative, that's still four times as deadly as the seasonal flu.

That'd be 244,000 dead Americans compared to one of the most deadly flu seasons. Or 427,000 dead Americans, if you stick to Germany's current mortality rate. Or nearly one million if you account for the likelihood the coronavirus spreads to twice as many people.

But then, the mortality rate is highly dependent on access to proper health care. Those countries have not yet seen anywhere near the strain as other countries have. I don't think Germany and South Korea were sending in nurses in garbage bags trying to hook two patients up to one ventilator. Two million, three million dead Americans, when considering and attempting to plan for plausible worst-case scenarios?

A cost-benefit analysis of the protective measures is a whole different subject, if it's better or worse to let those potential numbers of people die, particularly in terms of hospital capacity and how many other people would die from unrelated causes due to them being over capacity. I don't know how to calculate that even as I'm mindful that it needs to be calculated. Federal agencies calculate the economic value of lives but the # varies depending on the context. I doubt the federal government will act on an actual data-driven analysis even if it did produce one. Easter needs pews full of congregants, after all, and of people's medical needs governors "can’t say, ‘oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that." ”.

Keep trucking my friends, and just ignore those voices if you're hearing them.

She was ungrateful for your help, I take it?

What does a single global currency have to do with this? Different countries have different types of economies with different monetary policy needs. If anything, the last global recession showed countries to be more hesitant to unify currencies. And why would countries like the U.S. and China give away their golden geese?

But what is the end goal

Towards that it's interesting to compare what's happening in the U.S. to the response in South Korea. South Korea had a lot more skin in the game when the last two coronaviruses jumped to humans, which had mortality rates of up to three times and fifteen times higher than this one. Staring down the barrel of that kicked their healthcare system and their emergency response system into high gear.

They're on a completely different trajectory than us at this point, and they never had to resort to ordering restaurants and businesses shut or locking down cities or coping with panicked citizens emptying supermarkets. They took it seriously from the start and had the tools and the competence and the intent in place beforehand.

It's like we're reenacting 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' and the irony is all summer we watched the minstrels tell us 'winter is coming'. Since we've had relatively no preparation for following through with widespread and comprehensive testing and contract tracing, we're seeing much more primitive methods of control at the hand of federal and state governments that can't admit they never prepared for a well-known and inevitable threat. It's like if a field doctor shrugged off the idea they needed to pack their scapel and, knowing they'd get fired if they didn't try to save the patient's life, decided to take out a sledgehammer to both the patient and the patient's family.

US military active duty, 30 days paid leave per year, every year, any rank.

True. There's an obligation to several years of service, too. I was saying more that needing that much time off shouldn't disqualify trucking any more than it would disqualify most any other type of work. He might need to change his expectations of what he can get, or be ready to quit jobs and seek reemployment a lot. Or sign himself over for a few years.

I don't think any other kind of work is going to give you more than 10 vacation days in your first year, either.

Trust me, driving jobs are and will be readily available. Your fears should never hold you back from pursuing this. But, I'll tell you it takes a lot of confidence to compete in this arena. You sound like you need to be bolstered up quite often. That should concern you more than the things you've mentioned.

The way I was seeing it, a hiring freeze would be the single obstacle outside my control. Otherwise I figure as long as places are hiring, one of them will give me a chance, and beyond that nothing can stop me.

Thanks for the help everyone. Of course now that l've thought further ahead to the future, with the way things are going I'm starting to worry places will stop hiring in a few months, and I'll be locked out from even starting.

For a virus that has a mortality rate of roughly 2% it sure is getting a ton more reaction than other illnesses.

Well, they estimate the flu infects between 10 to 45 million Americans each year. If the coronavirus spread as much as the flu and ended up infecting the same amount of people, that'd be 200,000 to 900,000 deaths. The mortality rate could be 3 to 4% or it could be 1%, the flu's is 0.1%.

Right now they estimate that on average one infected person is infecting 2.2 more people, the flu's basic reproduction number is 1.3. So that could potentially be 400,000 to 1,800,000 deaths.

The real problem is how it kills them. The flu brings bacterial pneumonia, but the coronavirus brings acute respiratory distress syndrome. There's medication for the first one, but they need ventilators for ARDS. If there's enough hospital beds and ventilators to go around, they can reduce the # of people with severe cases of infection who would die. But if the hospitals fill up past capacity all at once, more of them will simply be left to die.

Personally I don't think the problem is the way everything is being shut down in an attempt to slow its spread. I think the problem is nothing was done to be ready for all of the implications of shutting everything down. They knew this was coming, but there was no plan in place for how to mitigate the damage to the economy that the necessity of shutting things down would lead to. There should've been financial reserves to cover salaries and operating costs of businesses for at least three months. People should've been drilled for this like it were an impending nuclear war.

If this goes on much longer, this virus will be the least of our concerns. They're going to throw the global economy into a depression so deep the Great Depression will look like the best of times. The damage it's doing by the day is already incalculable.

I agree, and it's a particularly bad time to face that too since we were not only already due for a recession, but the government also kept amping up the deficit spending during a time of economic growth, limiting its means to respond to a new crisis.

The best thing probably would've been to have immediately isolated everyone fitting the profile of being at higher risk from this, and simply let it spread among everyone else. In my mind at least it would've been a hell of a lot easier and far less damaging to control what two percent of the population does than to disrupt everything for everyone to this level.

And it's not like no one knew this was coming, people at decision-making levels knew both that we were overdue and that we were underprepared. No one ever really wants to face taking a loss until they've already taken five times more of a loss by trying to avoid taking a loss.

Errol, do you know if Swift would have runs like this into Minnesota? I'd looked into linehaul opportunities in the state, just to have an idea of what I could transition into after being OTR for a few years, but since Swift is ideally my first choice, I'd be interested if everything works out of course to do something like that while staying in the same company.