Kash-&-Kari's Plan To Lock Down The US For Six Weeks -- August 10, 2020

I will be updating my thoughts on this as we go along. I will post the original and then provide updates, as we usually do.

I track the coronavirus story here but I don't update it very much any more. I lost interest in this story when:

• I realized they were tracking the wrong metric;
• I learned the CDC's "definition of a case" which may or may not be the same definition that all states are using;
• the issue moved from the science/medical arena to the political arena
• I realized the whole reporting / analysis was a bunch of nonsense
  

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Updates

Later, 6:05 p.m. CDT, lock downs? Folks cheat. See this link. It's pretty obvious what happened here. 

An Argentine fishing boat that had been at sea for 35 days returned to land when some of its 61 crew showed symptoms of the new coronavirus, Tierra del Fuego Province's Health Ministry reported on Monday. 

Reports later that evening from local outlets said that 57 of the crew members had tested positive for Covid-19. The Ushuaia 24 news portal said that all of them remain isolated on the ship, the Etchizen Maru, and that they would not be allowed to disembark. Only medical personnel would be allowed to board, it added. 

The incident has attracted attention since prior to setting sail the 60 crew members had completed 14 days of mandatory quarantine in a hotel in Ushuaia, and before that they had been swabbed with a negative result, according to a statement from the Tierra del Fuego health portfolio, in the southern tip.

Later, 12:18 p.m. CDT, first some questions, quick:

• first, how many people are there in the United States?
• second, how man cases of Covid-19 have been diagnose in the United States?
• third: when did Covid first appear in the US?
• fourth: the first "lock down" -- when did it begin and how long did it last? What were the statistics coming out of that lock down?
• are there any cases of Covid-19 outside of the US?

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Original Post

Posted August 10, 2020.

This story got a bit of attention on talk radio Sunday: Fed's Kashkari calls for 6-week economic shutdown to control coronavirus spread. Google key words.

Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, called for a nationwide economic shutdown for up to six weeks to get the coronavirus pandemic under control on Friday, warning that the rest of 2020 could be much worse than what America has experienced so far.

"The next six months could make what we have experienced so far seem like just a warm-up to a greater catastrophe. With many schools and colleges starting, stores and businesses reopening, and the beginning of the indoor heating season, new case numbers will grow quickly," Kashkari wrote in a New York Times op-ed with Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Kashkari echoed comments he made a week ago on CBS's "Face the Nation," when he argued that "if we were to lock down hard for a month or six weeks, we could get the case count down so that our testing and our contact tracing was actually enough to control" the spread of coronavirus.

President Trump has insisted that states resist the urge to roll back reopening. He said earlier this week when asked about Kashkari’s comments that the country is “not going back to shutdowns.”

I will come back to this later, but for now:

• Kashkari obviously does not understand this virus nor viruses in general.