Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

The IRS site changed a bit from the last time I tried looking into it.  Now it needs my adjusted gross income, which I don't have, because I only have my w2 from last year, not my 1040.  So that's fun, too.  I type in all the info to get the check soonerish, but it doesn't accept what I type in.

Every progressive step is another dead end.

your government at work

you didn't marry an illegal?  did you?

I know we've talked about overcounting... Some evidence suggests the problem is the opposite.

U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported, C.D.C. Data Suggests

The key is that total deaths in the hardest-hit states are up FAR higher than normal. Death rates are normally quite predictable year to year, so it's easy to quantify the deviation from normal trend. If you take the difference between normal death rates in those areas and you subtract out the deaths attributed to COVID-19, you end up with ~9000 excess deaths.

Now, if you read the article, they do conflate two things here.

The article points out that some of those deaths could be unrelated to COVID-19, or could be related but not caused by COVID-19 (i.e. deaths of people who didn't seek treatment for something at a hospital because they were scared of contracting COVID-19). But of those 9,000, it's highly likely that at least some of them were directly caused by COVID-19.

which would mean under reported virus cases of about 2,000,000

My kid in Texas definitely had it and was not reported, not tested, never saw a doctor.

I suspect this is fairly common, coupled with the number of asymptomatic cases out there.

Of course, if the outcome is death, it was not asymptomatic.

I had a nagging cough for a little over 2 weeks last October then it just went away

I had never had anything like this before

sets one to wondering

which would mean under reported virus cases of about 2,000,000

Well, the degree of undercounting of cases and the degree of under/overcounting of deaths are independent of each other... 

Both are important, because the goal is to figure out the true mortality rate. 

I agree with you that we need more antibody testing to get much better estimates of case rates. NY testing suggests about a 10x difference between confirmed cases and actual infections. CA testing had even higher multiples, as high as 55x [but low sample sizes and much lower rates, which make them more susceptible to false positive test results].  The spread on those numbers is SO massive that we really don't know what to do with it, because when trying to calculate the mortality it means we'd either be 5x too high or 5x too low depending on which one is "right"--or maybe it's somewhere in between. 

But if we're undercounting or overcounting deaths, that gives us error too. If we're at 60K deaths with up to 9K additional [probably lower, but that's the upper bound] in just 7 states, you're looking at a 15% or so difference. It's not as impactful as the wide ranges of antibody testing, but it's enough to make a difference.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-confusing-uncertainty/610819/?fbclid=IwAR1bsjdFGyedx1AryAscgrbZmET6ouEUyn3H556NwswYJ4MSkkHF6E6inHo

Pretty interesting article, including thoughts about whether this was around last fall (apparently it was not).

Well, ya gotta remember it's a state of 40M people. All it takes is a couple hundred thousand selfish assholes and you'll fill up the major beaches. And we've got PLENTY of those...most here in California of my generation are trying to do our best to comply with all these changes in the hopes that doing our best right now will shorten it. And as a result, people like me are PISSED at the morons who decided to go to the beach and are going to ruin it for the rest of us.

Yup. This.

In our county, which has been a model of response so far, we are cautiously reopening some public areas (like county parks) and loosening some other restrictions (including allowing more businesses to reopen), but everyone is worried that a few bad apples will ruin that for everyone else.

And a friend of mine is celebrating her beach trips on social media, and threatening revolt if the governor closes the beaches down (literally because of people like her who can't follow guidelines, so need orders). That's more of a SoCal thing because in NorCal the weather isn't really all that conducive to large beach gatherings (and they tend to be harder to get to). Very frustrating.

I'm not questioning your accuracy just the people who said it but if they have a corona cure for animals WTF - does that make sense?And if they have a cure what the ails the animals why didn't researchers keep going.There is robo information regarding everything involving this and that just doesn't pass the say it out loud test. "We've found a corona cure for animals but we're gonna quit now we're tuckered out" - maybe if someone stayed the course this would have been nipped in the bud,they've had since 2003 as you pointed out

They didn't find a cure, they created a vaccine. And the variant of coronavirus that they created the vaccine for is not SARS, or MERS, or COVID-19 and would not work for this. Those are different diseases than what affects dogs, even though both are caused by a form of a coronavirus.

https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/dp/4

That's the link to the Merck website, the page with their vaccine for "Enteric Canine Coronavirus". That vaccine will not prevent COVID-19 in either dogs or humans, because it's designed for a completely different coronavirus disease.

They also have one for an enteric coronavirus disease in cows: https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/dp/68

I brought it up because we were discussing whether it's POSSIBLE to vaccinate against a coronavirus or to confer long-term (or even short-term) immunity. We've never created a human-successful coronavirus vaccine, but I think part of that is that SARS flamed out before research was completed and MERS vaccine research is still ongoing. The concern might be that it's impossible to vaccinate against any coronavirus because we don't have a successful human version for any previous disease.

The fact that vaccination against coronavirus type diseases is POSSIBLE in dogs or cows, and showing promise in recent tests with monkeys, is promising that someday we might actually have a vaccine against COVID-19.