Coronavirus and Pandemics

I just got an email that my bank needs my account number before they can accept the Federal check.

SCAM!

If your bank doesn't know what your account number is, then find another bank that's competent.IOW, that is obviously a scam. We're going to see a lot of scams like that.Besides, what I'm hearing is that it will take a few weeks for Munchkin to get around to disbursing those checks. Talk about lack of competence.

Don't know who was stupid enough to play you as a sucker, but I would report this to all who might listen.Obvious fraud.

But they even provided a link to make it easy to update all my information and if I do that I won't have to go to the bank. You may not realize how difficult that would be, I'm old and don't like driving at night and I'm in deep south Texas while my bank is in Brunswick, GA. That's over a thousand miles each way.

and Jar obviously knows that .

What puzzles me is that these emails work. The scammers send them out BECAUSE it works; people send them money or personal data or bank account numbers or bit coins.Why? Why are so many folk so unbelievably gullible?It is as baffling as the reaction to covid-19.On another forum there is a nutjob going on about how covid-19 was engineered and set loose to bring down the whole world's economy so those in the Deep State can step in afterwards.How can folk be so utterly stupid?Edited by jar, : there is an n in bankEdited by jar, : mor appalin spallin

I almost never use a link provided in an email and even then only if I have very high confidence that it's legit. Instead, I go to the bank's website and log into my account there. Or I get on the phone and call the bank with the number that I look up on my own, not the number provided in the email.Unfortunately the elderly are common victims.

They voted for Trump, didn't they?When you realize how stupid the average American actually is, remember that half the population is stupider than that.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

dont forget to send them your maiden name, pets name, pin, social security nr, name, surname, date of birth and address. Just to simplify things for them.

Guess that makes three of us and counting.

Ah, shall we range and play average, mean, median and mode?

This information comes from ArcGIS Dashboards Classic. Here's the latest graph showing US infections rising to nearly 215,000. The increase declined slightly from yesterday to around 25K: Here's the latest log graph, the last datapoint indicating today's slightly smaller increase: Today's number of infections isn't too far off from my projection, but this will be the last day I include this projection. It isn't that the number of infections is a little too variable to project very far out, though that's true. It's more that I don't trust the infection numbers. I think they greatly underestimate reality by about a factor of a thousand and that there are actually around 5 million infected: There's another website with data, COVID-19, but they project deaths rather than infections: The two graphs at the top are not consistent with this one. If you project the top two graphs forward to April 15 it yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000 infections, while this graph tells us that deaths will be 32,441 by that date (if you go the webpage the graphs are active and you can hover over them - there's are a selector at the top to select individual states). That's a mortality rate of 5.4%, incredibly high. It's currently around 1.8%.I think it's safe to assume that the death rate data is more solid since they have a baseline of actual deaths, while the number of infections is a function of testing, which we know is incomplete since they're still making people jump through hoops to get tested in many places. Rather than 600,000 infections by April 15 the actual number will likely be several tens of millions if my belief that the mortality rate is actually around .1% holds up.--Percy

Why do so many articles about the coronavirus downplay the risk of infection? Many articles stress that keeping a distance of six feet is sufficient and don't seem to worry much about the risk of infection from the air or from grocery store packaging.This logic comes from experts who are taking viral load into account (see Opinion | These Coronavirus Exposures Might Be the Most Dangerous - The New York Times). Viral infection and the body's defenses are in a race between how fast the virus can infect versus how fast the body can mount an antibody response.A large viral dose can establish a base and begin expanding faster than the body's immune system can respond. In this case the patient can become very sick and even die.A small viral dose that takes longer to establish a base and begin expanding will still cause an immune response which will likely win the battle against the virus, resulting in a patient with mild or no symptoms.Doctors and nurses working on the front lines come in regular contact with very ill people, they risk large viral doses, and they could become very ill very quickly. People walking around in the grocery store not so much.The article puts it very succinctly:

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In healthy people, however, immune systems respond as soon as they sense a virus growing inside. Recovery depends on which wins the race: viral spread or immune activation.

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And of course viral spread is a function of the initial viral load.Assuming infection grants immunity perhaps a mild dose is the best defense against the possibility of severe illness. Of course whether this is safe and what the proper dose is would have to be worked out in double blind studies with volunteers, and that would take time, but it could be available well before any vaccine, which is likely about a year and a half out.--Percy

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I think it's safe to assume that the death rate data is more solid since they have a baseline of actual deaths, while the number of infections is a function of testing, which we know is incomplete since they're still making people jump through hoops to get tested in many places.

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Deaths are probably also understated, but I think that more of those with severe symptoms will be tested, so the count of deaths will be more accurate than that of infections.The infection rate still looks roughly linear, just at a higher rate, so I suspect it is still largely due to restrictions on testing.