cashnocredit

No kidding. It's as if they think people are too stupid to understand the underlying issues.

Yeah, I like to read. There wasn't anything new in the piece which was pretty consistent with what is currently known. I just really dislike BS headlines. The professor's statement that there has been no proven case of transmission from a pupil to teacher, together with the headline, suggests to the DailyMail readers that it doesn't occur and that's completely unwarranted. Many readers will just turn that into a Fact and it isn't. It's like the idiots in lots of the media that babble over how many cases there are as if that matters. If we were really good at testing there would be 5 to 20 times more cases. But no more deaths. Duh. When you do more tests you get more cases. When you do fewer tests, you get fewer cases. But either way the deaths are the same. What matters when testing is speed of results and use of the information to more quickly trace and isolate. We have sucked at that in the past. It's improving, but slowly. On the good side the media noise may have produced some good. Seems fewer people have been having parties and spreading the bug. New cases have been declining and, more significantly, new hospitalizations have been dropping significantly. Deaths, the lagging indicator of what happened a month earlier, are down in the South and South West. Drops are the largest in the states that saw the biggest increases in July. Good.

The headline is complete BS. Around 1 out of every hundred people are teachers. Given 500,000 deaths, there are about 1,000 dead teachers after factoring in that teachers are typically 25-65 y/o and lower death rates in that cohort. Some one would have to have some degree of certainty that every one of those thousand were infected by a non-pupil (who range in age from 5 to 18 if we cut off "pupils" at 18. So it's almost certainly a false headline in fact and an unwarranted assertion. But then it is the Daily Mail. Lot of that going around these days on both sides of this polarized issue. However the article's content is almost certainly true. In the large majority of cases it is not known how infected people, let alone dead teachers, were infected. Most places that have high numbers have abandoned or scaled back tracing. I would have been surprised if such an infection route has been established. I agree with the scientist's statement. It has become increasingly clear that children are nearly as susceptible to infection as adults though they are much less likely to experience anything serious and a larger percentage of children, especially younger ones, remain asymptomatic. There is evidence that the younger ones (under 12) do not often transmit it but as kids get just a few years older they become significant transmitters. My current estimate following this is that many if not most schools, and especially k-8, can be opened with careful monitoring. Teachers may be the biggest risk to each other. If we don't see much spread in two months or so allow more, possibly all, to open. If we do throttle back.

Um, Apparently they haven't heard of autopay.

Here's a popular press discussion. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/forty-percent-of-people-with-coronavirus-infections-have-no-symptoms-might-they-be-the-key-to-ending-the-pandemic/ar-BB17JpdS

Yep. Also the fast "spit test" (see your link) may not be as accurate as a PCR test but it isn't bad. There is a tremendous benefit in getting tests faster because every day that passes before a positive test comes back substantially decreases the effectiveness of trace and isolate. We need to start doing that. That the test has lower specificity and sensitivity is not as much as an issue as a delay of even 24 hours. And a test that comes back 2 or more days later allows far more spread and makes contact tracing close to useless. A cheap test that is nearly immediate would be incredibly helpful and may allow things to get back to some degree of normal within a few months. Otherwise it's just hanging on hoping for a vaccine which is realistically a ways away.

A Million made you wealthy back in 1920. In 2020, not so much. If you're retired, already own your own home and have a million bucks in the bank you are going to be comfortable but hardly wealthy or even rich. It puts you only around the 90th percentile. But it's nothing to sneeze at.

Evidence published in Science a few days ago that the common cold type coronaviruses can produce partial immunity to Covid-19. This could explain why studies of how often kids get covid-19 vary so much in different places.

Kansas has partial mandatory masking allowing each county to decide on it's own. As a result the state has been able to compare the cases over time between them. Strongest evidence I've seen yet that masks work and it's a surprisingly effect.

As others have said, this probably triggered because multiple payments on card is associated with fraud. Very few regular consumers do this. The technique is usually used on regular CCs where a fraudster pays with multiple paper checks that wind up bouncing leaving the issuer with a balance multiples over the CL. It's probably automated and they might have increased their thresholds due to Covid-19 and trying to reduce their overall risk. When using CCs is always best to be like everyone else and just make one payment each month. The other thing they do is calculate risk v profit. Discovery, more than most, likes and prefers people that carry a balance. So you aren't very profitable.

Ewww.

I hate mandatory insurance and drove for 20 years w/o insurance until Calif. required it to renew registration. Probably saved 25k. But I also believe one shouldn't drive w/o insurance or the ability to pay for damages. Too many drove w/o insurance and did not have the ability to pay for accidents which resulted in the law change. In Calif., if you had an accident w/o insurance you would have had to post a 35k bond or cash deposit in lieu of insurance. You can still deposit it in lieu of mandatory insurance and, given the currently low interest rates I was considering it but decided instead to bundle auto with homeowners and an umbrella and earthquake policy for enough coverage to matter. Unlikely events but potentially expensive. That's what insurance is for. My view on insurance is that it should be something for unusual risks that would impair finances. All insurance is negative ROI and I try to avoid negative ROIs. Things like washing machine insurance is a perfect example of a waste of money. One company I like, "Liberty" advertises insurance with the jingo "You don't pay for what you don't need." In states with mandatory insurance laws, you pay whether you need it or not.

It's remarkable how many similarities there are between Covid-19 and Polio. Many, sometimes most people get these and have no symptoms at all. Most others get it and have minimal symptoms and recover completely. But a small percentage of both die or, in the case of polio, fewer die but some develop long term paralysis. There also seem to be strange long term effects that afflict a small number of Covid-19 survivors. I recall my parents not letting me swim in public pools when Polio was out and about. But perhaps I'm more aware of the similarities since a friend of mine was struck down with Polio and consigned to an iron lung. Around the age of 11 I used to bike over to Mark's house and spend time with him. We'd often play chess or chat about school. He had a hookup to our local public school so he could monitor and interact with the classroom activity. Very early virtual learning circa 1959. Talking was possible but strained him. He had to time things to align with the mechanical breathing of is iron lung. He went on to make the most of his life and enrich others as well. Here's a NYT obit. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/11/us/mark-o-brien-49-journalist-and-poet-in-iron-lung-is-dead.html

My wife had her id hacked and an account set up by Wayfair and they delivered a few boxes of "furniture" and left it outside our door. Since she wasn't aware of the hack and never had a Wayfair acct. she just chalked it up some sort of addressing error and had UPS return the boxes. Hope the kid in the box was OK. roflmao

Good articles. Nice to see actuaries look at this. They have an eye and deep understanding of the statistical issues and see the anomalies between all the various scientist's papers. We really should have far more info on this disease by now but the USA doesn't have coordinated, consistent data reporting. Each state has their own database, dashboard, and different sets of data reported. Each individually website coded. Actually worse than that. Most states aren't even self consistent. Different counties have their own differences. Remarkably inept. Some things are getting better. There are more rapid tests of active infection some of which return results in under an hour like the new antigen tests. This will significantly improve tracing and monitoring which is essential to opening schools in the fall in the areas that have relatively low community spread. However, existing infrastructure's cability to acquire and use this info is currently pretty bad. It's critical to determine if children and younger teens spread Covid-19. We now have substantial evidence they can be infected but it isn't yet clear they, as compared to older 20 and 30 somethings, easily infect others though it is increasingly likely to be the case.