The Econo Lodge at 1233 Central Ave North in Kent will be the state’s first permanent quarantine area for COVID-19.
King County Executive Dow Constantine announced the purchase of the 84 unit motel on Central Avenue for $4 million but KOMO News learned the county has not closed on the property, a necessary move to take ownership.
The motel is still being run as a motel and is accepting guests. The County plans to start putting patients into rooms within 9-10 days.
Speaking with two receptionists, a housekeeper and a guest, all were unaware of the new future of the motel. The news came as a big surprise to Kent’s Mayor Dana Ralph.
I find this very interesting. Media gathering for a tour arrange by King Co at the Econolodge in Kent the new location for a quarantine village for #Covid_19 patients but motel employees they have no clue motel’s new purpose. Receptionist didn’t know anything #komonews pic.twitter.com/jFM8CpXPrm
— Matt Markovich (@mattmarkovich) March 4, 2020
Expect more. 84 units cannot possibly be enough.
Mike Pence to the Rescue
I will be traveling to Washington to meet with Governor @JayInslee tomorrow. We are here for every American and will continue to work with state and local leaders as we protect their health and well-being.
— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) March 4, 2020
United Airline to Cut Flights
United Airlines plans to cut its domestic flights by 10% in April and international flying by 20% as the coronavirus depresses bookings https://t.co/oGHiVLUihr
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 5, 2020
CDC Finally Allows Testing
Coronavirus Testing Available With a Doctor’s Approval, C.D.C. Says. “The move greatly increases the number of patients who qualify, but it’s not clear there are enough tests for those who will want them” #TESTVIRUSNOW #COVID19 https://t.co/KlbtU2kqu2
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 4, 2020
Questions Remain
So CDC okays anyone to get test, but who will fill the gap to actually run them? We will likely need to rely on commercial labs as well. This ramp up in testing will need a huge lift if America wants to match South Korea 🧪 testing. #TESTVIRUSNOW #COVID19 https://t.co/0bWZ3EzTGZ
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 4, 2020
First Death in California
First death in California – in Placer County – an elderly patient who died after being purportedly infected returning from the GRAND PRINCESS cruise🛳 (another Sonoma case also from 🛳). Oy. Gonna personally avoid cruise ships until epidemic over. #COVID19 https://t.co/Knkd6PZU5O
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 4, 2020
US Tests
This table says it all
— Hejsvej 🍌 (@Hejsvej3) March 4, 2020
Treat that comma as a decimal point.
More cases in Seattle – now a @Facebook contract employee tested positive for #COVID19. And so the coronavirus marches on. https://t.co/1JRpkRb4AJ
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 5, 2020
Bad Move Here – Stay Away
Asking for trouble: “South by Southwest, the annual tech, film and music conference in Austin, will proceed as planned despite concerns about coronavirus”… okay but don’t say I didn’t warn you @sxsw 🤦🏻♂️ #COVID19 https://t.co/1eWxPdFdM6
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 5, 2020
1,000 New Yorkers Asked to Self Quarantine
https://twitter.com/kr3at/status/1235418343156224001
As I said the other day, Expect More Cuts
The Fed cut 50 yesterday. But, as of this writing the market has 165% of a cut priced in for the March 18 meeting
That is 100% of another 25, and 65% the Fed cuts 50 on Mar 18.
Restated, the Fed is now EXPECTED to cut 100 bps between Mar 3 and Mar 18, a 100 in 15 days!
(1/2) pic.twitter.com/ldHgUDp57u
— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) March 4, 2020
Yet Another Princess Cruise Fiasco
Another Princess cruise ship is embroiled in an outbreak of coronavirus—this time the Grand Princess, which was en route to Hawaii and now is returning to San Francisco following the death of a former passenger in California https://t.co/K9Ki49tgjE
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 5, 2020
Major lawsuits coming up.
King County Advises Stay Home
The King County Public Health News and Blog
People at higher risk of severe illness should stay home and away from large groups of people as much as possible, including public places with lots of people and large gatherings where there will be close contact with others.
That’s a recommendation, not a requirement.
Public Health is not recommending closing schools at this time.
That’s guaranteed to change. Too late of course.
Addendum
My Boeing contact says “It’s getting tough in SEATTLE. Big impact if all those over 60 stay home. A good chunk of Boeing is >60.”
https://twitter.com/kr3at/status/1235433775783428096
That came in about 2 minutes after my post.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
No big deal. Trump had an interview with FoxNews where he:
Looks like you guys owe Mish an apology 😉
It’s just a hoax!!!!
He is obviously trying to lose the election by a landslide. That’s insane.
Lose the election. He’s also claiming now that the coronavirus will HELP him win. Mind you, I am not a Trump hater, but man, his brain must be going nuts now.
The virus could help him get elected, if that was the path he chooses to take. To have it help him, he needs to treat it seriously, defer to the experts, and increase communication frequency and accuracy to the public. He needs to keep the public calm with timely, accurate information. I’m willing to bet that the popularity of the S. Korean leader is at an all time high because of his response to the virus.
Official reponses are a study in themselves. Here Trump has lost the plot if the virus is at all as dangerous as made out to be – I always keep in mind there is a small possibility it is completely exaggerated. I don’t think poor information would responsible for a misinterpretation, there are enough people in his admin and outside underlining the danger. So what is up with his statement is hard to guess, unless it is to be an attempt at an excuse if there is serious epidemic. Seriously, he could just be airing the informal personal view he has of it, how he chooses to see it as an everyday person might, or he could be playing a polemicist role, or identifying with those who see it that way.
So, the study of media and bureaucratic portrayal has some history to it, in UK you could even bring in the Skripal psychosis of poison being everywhere, but a more obvious one is swine flu
“Meanwhile, the world has wasted billions of dollars that could have been spent on diseases like tuberculosis, which each year kills 70 times as many people as swine flu did, according to the WHO. Now add in the “crying wolf” factor, which means many people will ignore public-health warnings when a truly nasty disease comes along, and you’ll see how much damage was done by the swine flu disinformation campaign.”
Or for a different perspective for balance
I actually think the current pandemic is out of politicians hands, it does not fit with the roles they have been “educated to” or understand as theirs in modern power structures.
Trump’s not a politician. He is a businessman playing the role of a politician. To him, business is first, second, third, and last. Since America is not a country, but a business, that’s all fine as long as things are humming along. However by that very nature, it will be very difficult for him to consider moves that are anti business. That’s why the US will do worse than other countries when it comes to this pandemic.
As a businessman, where his handling of the company is measured publicly by a notion of “can do”, superior ability and organisation, and then along comes a pandemic… and he decides in house is better (for whatever reason, there are good like supervision and bad like corruption)… and it screws up and the US is last at testing or monitoring an outbreak… he must be besides himself. He stands up on behalf of what the US is capable of and gets handed failure.
So, well I would go for full investigation on if there was foul play in the testing fiasco, but for him that is hard, because it is already admitting defeat and incorrect choice, even if that outcome was not his fault. I don’t discount the possibility that he has been framed, but as a whole, and not directed at him, it looks like incompetence.
Look at other countries and the same is to be found in one way or another.
So I’m not fast to judge, but then I’m not directly subject to the result, being outside the US…plus I don’t expect much from government or bureaucracy in the first place :/
I work in downtown Seattle and the mood and seriousness definitely changed yesterday. We were told to wfh indefinitely. Facebook, Nordstroms (corporate), Redfin, Microsoft, other have all done the same. Whereas downtown felt normal ish yesterday, it will be a ghost town going forward for the forseeable fuure.
They really should rent cruise ships for quarantine housing. Manage them better than the Diamond Princess of course where passengers were allowed to mingle and dine together for several days before being confined to their cabins. Might be the only way to keep Carnival and others from going bankrupt.
Same with the hotel industry. Rather than build hospitals like China, you could make hotels into wards with individual rooms. Travel is going to be depressed anyway…
Better yet, get rid of idiotic zoning and land use nonsense. Hence enabling house builders and developers to respond to people’s demand for more/better privacy and isolation from neighbors, even in non-outbreak times.
Nobody wants to live in mold infested $20mill Pelosi style shacks in SF, where you get to listen to police helicopters keep you awake at night, and smell your neighbor’s burned microwave popcorn, if they had other options.
Given the opportunity, people wold pick properly bullet and break in resistant, isolated and ventilated/air filtered dwellings any day. If only builders were 1)allowed to provide them unrestricted and 2)forced to do so in unconstrained competition with any other punter who may want to give it a try.
Econo Lodge?
Death match between bed bugs and virus?
Either gross incompetence or somebody really does want the public to see the truth
“The senators were briefed Thursday by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security.
“It’s going to take a couple of weeks,” Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland said. “Even though the kit arrives, they say by the end of the week, I don’t think they’ll be ready for tests by the end of the week.”
They were supposed to be testing a million by the end of this week
Anyone who believes that the CDC/FDA was capable of going from a virtual handful of test kits to a million in a week needs to have their head examined. It was a lie before it left their mouths.
The only conceivable way to get 1 million kits in a week was to order them from an overseas manufacturer. The WHO gets theirs out of Germany and doctors have said the kit costs $5 each.
Wonder what US labs will charge the US taxpayer.
Is it true that Trump told people that coronavirus is mild, and that people will most likely get over it without even seeing a doctor, and that they should just go to work, even if sick?
So what will our great neo liberal governors and mayors do to stop the virus without offending people?
They are way too incompetent for it to matter, no matter what they try to do.
So they’ll do what all progressives do: Run around and “hold” each other “accountable” for failing at absolutely everything at all even remotely useful.
As long as the population is hostage to the decisions of that kind of bureaucracy, it suits it to be the way you described… but then we wouldn’t be paying for it to be that way if we disagreed, would we (/s) ?
“The coronavirus outbreak in the Seattle area is at a critical juncture and could see explosive growth in cases much like Wuhan, China, if public officials don’t take immediate, forceful measures, according to a new analysis of genetic data.”
If there has been “community transmission” in Seattle for a month and a half, it’s no longer even remotely confined to Seattle. There is way too much travel for that to be the case.
Wuhan is an outlier, so I don’t really see the point in using it as a model for anywhere else.
But Lombardy looks much like Seattle, just a week or two early. And with the rest of Europe playing the role of the rest of the US. Except the Euros have access to at least some test kits, helping them confirm it’s not “a hoax” confined to a Little Villa, in an Old Italian Town
You know you live in retardtopia, when people competent enough to put together a test kit, have to resort to special case “excuses”, like “research” bah, blah, mumbo jumbo; in order to be allowed; by a bunch of useless halfwits who wouldn’t know how to test for water in a swimming pool; to gather valuable information about a critical public health issue.
Kevin McCarthy
@GOPLeader
✔
What a scam—Speaker Pelosi held up the vote on coronavirus funding so that her campaign team could run ads against Republicans for Super Tuesday.
Instead of putting America first, she is putting politics first.
“Instead of putting America first, she is putting politics first.”
As do every single politician anywhere, throughout all of history. From past, to even future. In any possible universe not just ours.
Simply because those who don’t put winning political races first, tah-dah, don’t win political races. Hence don’t get to be politicians.
Oh that’s nice………..I hope the hotel employees get something!
Last night after lunch we were called into a meeting and our entire shift was eliminated and tariffs and coronavirus were cited as reasons. However, being on the ground I have watched business slow over the entire past year these 2 reasons were just the final nail. Also, i’m seeing trades out of work lists steadily creep higher they are often the first to get hit and last to recover.
No need for condolences it was a crappy warehouse job I already have a paid off residence i’m mainly working to maintain(Pay taxes) and insurance Ill find another but I might be staying home for awhile and see how corona plays out.
Unfortunately, I believe theres a lot more layoffs coming. Seems a lot of companies are doing the attrition thing in not replacing employees who quit, soon to be replaced by layoffs?
I live an hour and a half from Spokane, where there is a possible case of the coronavirus related to Gonzaga University. And an additional one in the neighboring county of Grant County. Two possible cases in eastern Washington — opposite side of the state from the cluster in the Seattle area. As you can imagine, we’re all waiting with bated breath to see if a cluster has broken out in what is called the Inland Empire.
Diminution strategy…absence of evidence is being sold as evidence of absence.
If you don’t have tests, you don’t know.
If you only test people that have had contact with known cases, you don’t know.
Right now, we don’t know and the great American mixer churns on.
How much will they pay people to change the linens in the Econo Lodge turned quarantine facility?
Good question.
As the Emerald Princess fiasco demonstrated, asking amatures to understand and execute quarantine level sanitation is foolish.
This early ham-handed blundering style of big government will improve over time. Let’s hope the lessons will be learned and corrected quickly before too many unnecessary bodies pile up.
My doctor’s called yesterday to remind me of an appt. for today. The girl asked if I had any flu like symptoms as Sarasota got its first confirmed case the other day and has 12 people awaiting test results at the hospital. I said no but then thought about it. I’m 68 and the appt was just a routine follow up to generate revenue for the doctor. I called the office back and said if they are worried about me I am more worried about them. I cancelled the appt as I did not want to sit for 15 or 20 minutes in a crowded lobby in a medical office building. I bet I am not the only geezer cancelling doctors appointments for that reason.
Without a doubt, you will find a higher percentage of sick people in a doctor’s office than anywhere else other than a hospital.
To find sick people, go to the doctor….
To find unhealthy people, go to a “health” food store…..
Works pretty reliably…
Coronavirus is mutating: Chinese scientists find a second strain of COVID-19 link to fortune.com
But the weaker strain is the one that is spreading.
Over time, that is always the case.
Host species select more effectively against more symptomatic strains. (Over time, as a higher order effect hence likely much, much less efficiently at least in the beginning, also against more virulent strains. But selection against symptomaticness, is more straight forward.)
For novel-to-a-new-host mutating genomes like virus ones (in reality all pathogens, but higher ones mutate slowly enough, and have non-genomic-variability adaptability mechanisms in place to make up for it, to blunt the effect), there is simply no way for them not to effectively set up what amounts to an auto-vaccination program against the more severe strains of themselves, in this manner:
As weaker strains are selected against less harshly, they spread easier, hence wider, than harsher ones. So, the probability of a patient’s first contact being with a weaker strain, increases. He then gets infected, but survives. And in the process builds some immunity. Then, later he may run across a more severe strain. And again get infected, but because he now has some latent immunity against variants of the new genome, he again won’t die. And so forth and so forth. Until he has enough immunity against variants of the novel genome, that even contact with a real Wuhan Bad Boy will again only make him sick. But won’t kill him.
Over time, this symptomatic attenuation, is how viruses which once started of with a clinical bang in a new host, over time drop below the noise floor to either be an endemic seasonal flu, or perhaps even less. It’s how a new viral genome and a new host, over time adapt to coexist in a sustainable fashion.
Of course, while that’s all cute and neat and ultimately reassuring in models, it provides zero guidance wrt how long this attenuation may take, nor how much carnage the new host has to endure in the interim….
A good example of disease progression information from the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. (Editorial aside: HK has a good track record in many areas. Too bad they didn’t take over the PRC instead of the other way around.)
Looks like panic has taken over in the Federal Reserve. A panic.
Apparently Northshore district has pulled the plug.
For all the dread, if not panic, there is sever lack of factual info. Lack of testing! Lack of transparency about the known cases. Etc. No wonder there is sense of panic.
This is it. I’m guessing that in S. Korea, with 6,000 cases, there is a sense of calm because they have testing and they have information. The lack of testing and the lack of information leads to uncertainly, and it also leads to seeking other, more speculative sources of information. When rumors replace facts, the result can be panic.
I cannot possibly grasp how comes King county schools are still open. At the least high and middle schools.
I’d ask if you’re kidding about them being open but i’m sure you probably aren’t by seeing what people are doing. Like my inlaw who is moving to Washington outside of Seattle in a week. People just don’t get it. They think digital zeros can save them from anything.
Closing schools has other effects too- someone has to watch over them! Lots of employed folks idled…
“People at higher risk of severe illness should stay home and away from large groups of people as much as possible, including public places with lots of people and large gatherings where there will be close contact with others.”
Like Bernie Sanders? Like political rallies? Like political conventions?
It’s just like the flu!
Like Trump?
Anyone know if there is any truth in the belief this has mutated into a deadlier form than the original?
Yes and No. Chinese researchers found a mutation that made it more aggressive, BUT that strain became less common after late January.
Viruses often trade lethality for transmissibility, so this is not unexpected.
More efficient expansion of a virus includes by increasing incubation and transmissibility during that time, evasion of immune system, longer activity once out of the host and so on.
Severity of its effects can work either way besides those. A virus that has severe effects is usually expanding rapidly on the host, and so is more transmissible for sheer numbers of virus shed.There are other vectors, so you could have carrion scavengers spreading the virus due to amount of casualties, or in human terms a saturation of virus everywhere or in care settings if there were a rapid pandemic, leading to faster propagation. You would think higher fatality or more visible effects would create a reaction by other potential hosts that limited it, but that cannot be assumed. There is no technical reason it could not become more transmissible (say by transmissibility during incubation) and lethal at the same time, even if there were certain realities that would seem to work against that. There are other unusual factors also, like being able to reinfect. One of the oddest suggested by a study was that Spanish flu was so severe biased towards younger population not only because older generation had old immunity, but that first wave immunity in younger generation was part of what created their overreaction in second wave ( as opposed to current theory of no immunity).
Just to say it is not a good idea to make any assumptions as to how it will evolve 🙁
It might do you good to check out the relative age and health profiles between a Sanders rally and a Trump rally….just sayin…
He was comparing the candidates themselves, I think. The coronavirus could affect the election in more ways than one.
“He was comparing the candidates themselves, I think.”
Indeed I was. But who, in the campaign machinery, is going to be able to remain unexposed? njbr has that right, many staffers will just have a short illness where they need to stay away, but there are many old guys and gals on both sides for whom this campaign year might very well meen their death. Severe cases that recover typically mean three weeks of hospitalization!
Covid 19 will surely leave a mark in every campaign, at many as yet unforeseen ways.
Bernie’s electorate of most likely light symptom young guys, may end up winning by simply loitering around and coughing outside voting booths, scaring more vulnerable Biden and Trump demographics from daring to get close….
Fed is expected to cut 100 bps in 15 days? Doesn’t Jay Powell keep emphasizing that the US economy is “in a good place?”
Also, if the Fed cuts when the bond market is responding to a coronavirus shock, does that actually help anything? Can they actually increase stock multiples enough to prevent virus demand disruption from hurting stock prices and how will they possibly take that back in an orderly way when it is all over? President Trump notwithstanding, wasn’t money extremely cheap already?