Every now and then, we get a little serious… and this is one of those times.
This episode isn’t really served justice by just listening to it, given the number of graphs, charts, and tables involved during the conversation. We encourage you to hit our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ITinTheD/ and catch the video at https://www.facebook.com/ITinTheD/videos/168007971161634/ in order to really get the most out of this episode. We’re joined by Fred Brown, an infectious disease expert with incredible credentials. We were lucky enough that he gave us well over an hour and a half chatting about the COVID-19 outbreak… where we are, where here really is, and what you can reasonably expect moving forward…
https://www.facebook.com/ITinTheD/videos/168007971161634/
And we are good to go. What is up quarantine land? This is the one and only it and the D show where all the way to episode three 45 we got a phenomenal, we were very lucky to have a phenomenal guest this week. Mr Fred Brown, he’s an infectious disease expert. I feel like this is every now and then we get a little serious and I feel like just just, just to keep us on our toes. We have to get a little serious now and again. Oh, and by the way, happy birthday Dave. Thank you. I appreciate it man. Um, but yeah, uh, you made fire when ready and we’re looking forward to this week show. Hey, what’s going on? How’s everybody doing? I think our guests are still asleep with our, this is the one and only it in the D show. We made it all the way to episode three 45 do the math, Dave. So that’s Bob’s wrong plus 329 to close it. And the D that come to his favor, give us a, like on the socials and subscribe to us everywhere. Buying podcasts are sold yet again,
this is usually the point where we tell people about our upcoming events and we don’t have any, uh, and, and the reason we don’t have any upcoming events is why we have our guest on the show tonight. Uh, so yeah. Uh, I guess without further ado, let’s go ahead and dive in and, and talk about God. Uh, I guess the only topic that’s dominating conversation these days.
Oh, you got yourself muted.
Yeah.
Oh, you got yourself muted, Fred red, you’re on mute. There we go. There you go. I apologize.
I’m off and running. Well, thanks for having me, Dave. I appreciate it. Of course. No, I appreciate you taking the time to come in. Absolutely. It’s a pleasure. Well, you know, I, and I want to get the word out about, you know, what to expect a little bit with this. I, I’ve been in this game since 1984 we, uh, I actually helped develop the first, uh, AIDS back, uh, the first AIDS test, uh, with a company called Centocor. And we were lucky enough to find the good development first definitive test for AIDS. And from there, that was a 1986. And then from there I helped develop six or seven more vaccines effective for your guests. They have children, they, most of them have been vaccinated by, by my vaccines in the 1990s that we developed. Uh, and I’ve been involved with probably seven or eight pandemics.
We have, we have an epidemic vote every two years. People don’t really realize it because they’re able to call them now, but you know, they’re reasonably frequent. And so if you think about Ebola coming around twice, and we had Zika virus scare, which I was involved with malaria I’ve been involved with and failed it three times now. So it’s, it’s a, it’s an interesting game. And, um, you know, what, welcome to my world. I’m looking forward to talking a little bit about it. I want to talk about, go a little bit maybe in the background, like I gave a talk to, uh, the Harvard fellows were interested in, in what was happening and so they asked me to give a presentation and I got a little bit of that here just so people have a little bit of background before we talk about what’s going on in Michigan.
Okay. So right now I guess I’m, you know, my full set of credentials is that I’ve been in drug discovery, drug development and vaccine development for, uh, 35 years now. I’ve developed, uh, 27 major drugs, uh, six vaccines, uh, 13 major diagnostic products. I was head of Roche’s portfolio management, a team that was, I was global head of that for several years. And you’ll hear a little bit about my experience managing the H five N one epidemic that went into Europe and we just were able to contain that. There’ll be, and I’ve created a tool that I think it’d be helpful for the audience to eventually they can look at and see what we’re doing.
So what you’re saying is that you’re not some guy in a mask that I found at Meyer to just, you know, hop on the show. I’m working with Johns Hopkins,
so if you guys are looking at that, sadly I helped them. I helped do this. They should put up this, you know this, this clock just so we can watch the virus come up and then come down again at, that’d be fun. All the time
you say no, you’re one rung below a politician on their knowledge base on infectious disease. That’s what he’s, he’s, he’s, he’s, he’s somewhere underneath a Facebook certified epidemiology expert and a and somewhere above. Fred, let me keep it up. Let me give you some, I just got a quick question. You know, I’ve lived, you know, we joke around like I call our 2009 vacation to Mexico, the swine flu tour because the swine flu broke and then we didn’t know we should be flying home every two years. Something’s going on. Bird flu, SARS, you know, you kind of listed off a few of them. Also be bold on all that. Like why, what’s different now? Like, why, why this one? Because like again, I don’t mind doing all this stuff. The, the government, everybody has us doing it wasn’t that, but like I walked into this going, Hey, it’s nothing. I’ve been through this crap. And you know, it’s not, it’s something, yeah. You know, we, we sorta got caught with this one. Vernor’s and Robitussin is not curing this. That’s, that’s what I, yeah. You know, people
keep comparing a little bit to the flu and I’ll go into live with why that isn’t the case. Um, so with this one, you know, it’s funny, we do, we do, uh, we actually do prep work. So when you’re up in Asia, we do a lot of prep work and in fact it’s called prepare. And every two years we go through a couple of scenarios. And what was interesting was the U S was part of that in the early two thousands we went through the prep work and we had actually, we did so badly that we decided that we, that we should develop a plan for it. And in 2008, nine we put together a plan, part of bushes administration then moved into a balanced nutrition. We thought it was a pretty good plan, but we then it was sort of, well you know, it’s not that important but we’ll, we’ll, we’ll wait on it.
But what we found out was there a couple of scenarios where we do really, really badly and this particular virus is one of those scenarios. It’s human to human transmission. That’s the first problem. So let’s, you know, we’ve got a lot of population. People are close together. They traveled together for a global day. So anything that any small population can move in doing an open travel to a and really cause pandemics, that’s the first problem. The second problem is mode of transmission. This thing is really infectious. And so as you can start to infect people from, you know, just breathing and coughing, uh, and, and the, and the molecules on the aerosol stay on the air for enough time, up to, up to up to three hours. Actually. Unfortunately that that really is a bad scenario because, you know, if you think about the AIDS virus, it’s sexually transmitted.
You think about Zika was uh, had a vector of the mosquito and we weren’t able to stop it but vector. But here it’s just out there. And so it’s a, and unfortunately, you know, it’s got a, it’s got a high kill. It’s got a reasonably high kill rate, sort of moderate for fires. It was a hierarchal rate. Equity you would probably die out because it would lose hosts. But this one is just sort of in the, in the perfect area where you kill enough people that are able to survive. Um, and uh, and then we’ve got the transmission uh, problem. And the transmission problems is a big one cause because we have a lot of asymptomatic carriers in this space.
So viruses are getting smarter is what you’re saying. Great. That’s one. And this guy is hard,
great, great vaccines, but we still don’t have any back. You know, let’s think about the common pole. We’ve had it for a long time. He was trying to stop it for a long time. And we, it’s one of the grownup viruses. We don’t, we don’t have much against these guys. So we’ve, we’ve got a little bit of a wait.
So when actually in the end there’s, I guess there’s a good starting point, cause I’ve heard people use those terms interchangeably. They say Corona virus, they say covert, they say COBIT 19. They say like, so from, from a science perspective,
w w lay that hierarchy out. Absolutely. So this is called the scientific game is SARS co V to a, so it’s a Sargent [inaudible], uh, virus. Uh, and we’ve had, uh, two, uh, epidemics of SARS and virus. One was his first, the first one was SARS. And then we had murders. I was middle East virus, middle East had us set a very high kill rate and luckily died out in middle East. Stars almost got over here, you know, made it all the way through Asia and then all the way to Canada. And then all of a sudden, just sorta, you know, Peter DOE, this one is not petering out. So this is our second Sarz Cove. Uh, and it’s Covin 19 because it was founded and 20, 19, uh, we’ve actually have about seven.
It’s not, it’s not the 19th iteration of it. Like you see all the Facebook memes of that’s, yeah, that’s, yeah.
Oh, so you know, it’s a, it’s a tough one. And I thought one of the things I could, I should show people is, is, is something about, it’s important to understand why we’re having so much trouble and what, what, what’s, what’s funny about, about trying to manage, uh, viruses and that is they have exponential growth. I didn’t know if your audience really understood exponential growth. I can give you a first step sense of it. And then I wanted to show you a slide or two that actually showed what really happened and if it made sense for sure.
Absolutely. So like, so I mean we’ve, well, I mean, and that’s the thing we used to think we had a very it centric crowd. Um, but then we’ve learned, we have a lot
of folks that aren’t in it, that listened to us simulate from an it perspective. We’re familiar with, you know, computer viruses and that kind of stuff and dealing with that. But I mean, I would say assume nothing and start with layman terminology and, and go from there.
Okay. Well, you know, um, so what’s it about? The computer crowd is they understand networking and network. We’re working, you know, it’s just think about in fact working and how important it is. It works as end times and nine as one, right? We guys know, you guys know, uh, exponential growth once you hit the network, uh, to give you a sense of this network, uh, it took us about four months to kill a million people and then we killed another million people in 12 days. That’s exponential growth. So let me explain why that’s so hard to manage. Yeah, that’s a, that’s sort of a wild, wild little statistic.
Well, yeah, no, those numbers really kind of hit you like a sledgehammer in the forehead. Yeah.
Yeah. So once this baby starts getting going and I just show on the slide now, I’ll tell you what, what happened in China and why they were all thought, uh, so here what happened in China, this is, this is actually what happened. Um, you know, and I know a lot of those guys over there and they said, you know, when we first started off, you know, we, we found a couple of, of infected people and we even had a death and we had on a couple of packs of fake people. So at day five for example, if you, if you see, you know, uh, influence, uh, you’d expect to have one about one and a half people being infected and out with COBIT. What happens? So, you know, it has a 1.25 infection rate. In 30 days you’ll have the first case, uh, all the way through.
You do the math and to get 15 cases pretty manageable. We got 15 cases. Okay. Now Colby, it has a slightly higher, R actually has about a double with size. Art has a 2.37. I just use this used use 2.5 to make the math easy. Um, but here we have [inaudible] and if you let the infection go for 30 days with Kobe, but think you got influenza, you don’t have your 15 or 30 15 cases to work with. You’ve got a 406 cases. And if you wait another day or two, you’ve got thousands. So that gives you a sense of just how fast you have to act. And unfortunately, we’re used to sort of sitting back, let me look, let me figure this out. Or linear, you know, but this guy works fast. Once it gets started, it goes fast. So what’s happened in China is that they decided that Hey, you know, I think it’s, I don’t think it’s influenced.
They started seeing this curve coming up. So we said, let’s stop, let’s, let’s, let’s, you know, put in socialists and then distancing. Now let’s, let’s take a, let’s take this seriously. If they had, so at about the 12 they stopped. They said, no, we’re going to take it seriously. We’re going to go after it. If they had waited, if they actually made the decision a week earlier, they would have only had passed the cases to worry about if they waited a week longer, they would have had nine times the cases to worry about. So you know, you can see that, that, that, that decision,
you’ve got to really be able to hit it fast. So here’s, so here’s my thing, the analogy that I, cause again, a computer guy, the analogy I keep coming back to is I’m having so many flashbacks to Y two K right now because it’s, it’s so hard to prove the effect of a negative. Like everybody’s like, Oh that was such a joke. There was nothing really going to happen. No, no, no. You don’t understand how much work went into nothing happening. And so like, like, like I don’t think people understand math like this and, and just exactly how scary insane things can get so quickly. Like this.
Yeah. These biological systems really go fast and we’re just not used to working with them in our day to day life. You know, working with, you know, one on one to one, solely making our decisions, thinking it over. And you know, it was funny, in Italy, a friend, a friend of mine is in charge of I and I, I ran Europe. And so, uh, for, for Roshan middle East right next to us and Switzerland. And so what I did, I dealt a lot with the Italian border, uh, covenant CDC up there. And I, I saw what was going on. Literally, I was kind of monitoring it and I said, you know, I called him up and said, you’ve got a serious issue. He said, yeah, I know, you know, I went, I went to the prime minister, I went and talked to the, the, to the head of head of Milan mayor, and they said, what are you talking about? Everybody’s great, you got everything in control. We’ve got a couple of deaths here and there, but you know, it’s good. And besides, we’re coming up with, you know, weekend and so they let it go an extra week and that’s what happened.
And there’s your, there’s your number on what an extra week means. Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. So was it funny, you know? Uh, so I am a consultant, you know, and, and I had lots of clients and I was working along and all of a sudden and middle of February I told all my guys, you know, I think this is going to be serious. I want to stop consulting now and it’s going to focus on this. Cause you know, we’ve just had a mistake in the CDC and so I think it’s better. I work on this just to focus on it. And so there’s all this on everything I’m doing right now is free. I want everyone to understand it so we can get out and get a good solution to it if everyone understands.
Dude kudos. Wow. Thank you. That’s awesome.
Well it’s a pleasure but, but, but what was interesting, all my clients said, Oh sure. You know, go ahead. You know it, we’ll be back in a couple of weeks. It will be fine. Yeah. So here I am, I got my gum, I fell self caught in the tar.
Hey Fred, quick question. I don’t know if our jumping too far ahead or I really like the misinformation that’s thrown at us is, is obscene these days and I just want to like throw a couple of things at you because you hear like, Hey, the hospitals are packed. Then you hear they’re not. Then you hear the hospitals get paid more if they classify coven and then they get paid a lot more if they put them on ventilators and there’s like USA to even fact check. That is true, but it’s still, it seems weird and then you have things like they’re not classifying anything else. Anything else is a death. So regular flu deaths are stopping and their classmate, everything is cold man. I mean what, how do we make sense of of that? What, what?
What’s real? What’s not? Yeah, so a couple of things. The first thing I would say is don’t trust anyone who’s really confident because they will. No one really knows. I’m in this game for a long time. I talk with, you know, experts in the field all the time. We have our own arguments about what we think death rates are. Prevalence rates are what we think the R’s are. You’ll get it. We’ll get into that a little while. But you know, um, so first of all, don’t trust anybody who isn’t, isn’t coming to you with real data. And the USA today reports are about, uh, you know, are, are accurate. You know, they, they have the, they have some of the data, but they sort of selected it, you know, and you can’t, you can’t do that fairly. Uh, so there are some, I’m sure there’s some incidences of people pushing the envelope in terms of, uh, quantification of diseases.
But, but I’ll tell you, most of the people I know of, first of all, several of them have died. Sadly, most people I know who were on the front lines are working 12, 15, 16 hours a day. And these aren’t normal work days. You know, these, these are really high stress work days where you’re, you’re dealing with death or you’re trying to help people save people on the last minute of their lives. You’ve gotta be really on all the time. And so, you know, my heart goes out to them and I, they’re there, they’re working super hard and, and uh, so if there are a couple mistakes made here and there, I, I, you know, I give it to them. What happens is, interestingly, what we, what we’re finding in COBIT is that it’s not if you’re in control and some of this is luck and so on, but it’s great management.
But if you’re in control, we have the capacity in our hospital systems to actually manage it. Uh, if you’re, if what happens though, if you have a sudden outbreak and you’ll see, you know, you should make a slight decision like New York did, of keeping the school open an extra couple of days. Those of those small little decisions really start to overwhelm the hospital systems. And once the hospital systems get overwhelmed and they’re, you know, they’re already close to capacity anyway. They’re not used to dealing with COBIT is a brand new disease. We don’t know anything about it. So once those things happen, you, you, you have a very high fatality rate. If you have an overwhelmed hospital system, usually it’s two to 14 times higher than if the hospital’s system is, they’re just proceeding normally. And as it has it under control. That’s why we’re so concerned about whether you’re going to a peak or not.
Because if you can’t control that peak and you start to, you know, start to really go over it, you have a really high fatality rate with this particular, uh, disease. If you’re able to manage it. It’s not too bad. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s doable. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s probably, we think it’s about five to seven times worse than the flu, but at least it isn’t 20 times worse than the flu, which you get with a and others and AIDS. So that, uh, so like my, my, my counsel is to, um, so first of all, scientific literature don’t believe anything. It doesn’t peer reviewed and, and, and, and if you really look at the methodologies used, because there’s a lot of stuff going out really fast to try to demonstrate something and prove something, usually those studies are fairly biased. They’re looking at, they want to prove their, they want to prove a point that they already believe is the case. And so the way, if you look at the experimental design, it’s flawed and peer review will kind of come through, take a look at it, you’ll absorb it all. But, um, unless, unless you’re talking to a real expert, a medical doctor, epidemiologist, a drug designer, um, I would, uh, I understand where they’re coming from and they have a, they have a job. They have a representation. Me, I don’t have that. I don’t have that wrinkles restrictions, but most of my colleagues do. And they keep pretty quiet.
Well, that’s the thing I always talk about, you know, follow the money that’s going to tell you whether you’re done. It seems like there really isn’t an agenda though. It’s like some people are so dead set against this being a thing. There’s some people that are so set against this being a hoax. There’s some people, so like paranoid about like, and there’s no angle. Like, I don’t, you know what I mean? I guess it’s just they’re formulating their own hypothesis and then they’re kind of just running with it.
No, I, I, I, so there are a couple of things. Um, first, I, I, I, uh, I hope that we have a solution pretty quickly, but what’s happening in the, in the news media unfortunately is, well, actually why don’t I show you that?
Because I had to explain this to, I guess let’s, let’s start with the big one. Do you recommend a bleach injections and UV lights down your throat?
No. The president, the president is under a lot of stress. He’s doing the best he can, I think under the circumstances, but he, you know, we all, we all screw up that, that was truth. But you know, I like the fact that he’s trying to at least, you know, put this on the table and talk to people about it. And I think that’s positive. Unfortunately. You know, whenever you’re on the, on the dude on TV, as much as that, I’m not on that much, that office, I don’t have any skills. You know, everyone’s bit, two hours a day. It can be a bit much. Yeah. But, uh, you know, here are the, uh, the situation is, you know, the question is, okay, how do we proceed? And the thing that bothers me when I, when I listened to the, you know, the news media, especially up until about the last few days, is most of the people think that, you know, we’re going to have a vaccine in 18 months and everything’s going to go back to normal.
And even between that, you know, we’ll have a one quick peek and then we’ll be done and we’ll wait for the vaccine to come. And then everything. Uh, and you know, it is possible. You know, I don’t wanna, I don’t want to say that it’s impossible, but it certainly is. It’s not probable. What is more probable is, uh, and then the second option, of course, as you said, is let’s just let it run. You know, let, you know, we don’t think it’s that bad. We’re not really sure yet. But you know, if we just let it run through, people get hurt, immunity. And, you know, it looked like a Spanish flu. We’ll have a little bit of population, um, crunch and then we’ll be done. And I’ll go into that a little bit in a second. The last issue, the last, the last, uh, uh, option here is that this is going to be a long, hard slog and I think it’s going to be my experience is that are long, hard slogs. And so if you’re, if you’re managing a business out there and you think that everything’s going to be fine and may, uh, that’s fine. You know, you want to hope for the best, but, um, you want to prepare for something that’s going to last, my guess is at least 18 months of this kind of this, this kind of management of can we open up the economy, close down the economy, open up the company, and we’ll talk about how we can do that more effectively, uh, in a little bit.
I have never wanted to rely on get lucky. Um, as, as a strategy. Let’s, let’s just be clear. Um, and, and actually I was, I was just talking about this, uh, the whole Philadelphia thing specifically with the Spanish flu back in 1918, um, you know, the, uh, the war bonds parade that they did that, you know, Hey, we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to relax the restrictions before everybody else says we should. Um, and we’re going to hold this giant ass parade. And within like five days, every bed in the 41 hospitals in the city were full and people were dying by the tens of thousands. I mean that, that’s insane.
That’s what we want to avoid that because then you start to overwhelm everything and you get a, you and you have this. So I don’t think this is just a period of time. I think like the Spanish, I think this is going to be sort of an era. There’s going to be a new sort of sadly, sort of a period of time that we refer back to as the Kobe era. And I wish it was just a blip, but I don’t think it’s going to be a V-shape or anything like that. I think it’s going to take a little time.
We wanted the wonder years. We got the covert years. That’s
you terms of getting lucky. You, it’s your, your, your, your first, uh, first hope. Hope is, you know, right now, uh, I’ll tell you, I, I’ve developed six vaccines. It took me about an average of nine years each vaccine. Wow. Yeah. And actually I’m better than most. So usually about, it takes about 13 and a half years to develop a vaccine for novel virus. So, you know, on a normal platform, you know, proven, scaled, uh, ready to go with, uh, you know, uh, you start from scratch. You know, you’re talking about 13 years, 14 years. Right now we don’t have a single vaccine for a coronavirus. Everything we’ve tried for coat, you know, for, for, for MERS and SARS hasn’t worked. So, you know, right now there are actually over a hundred. This is, this is from, I gave this presentation, uh, in, uh, April, April 4th.
So, uh, Harvard and they publish it, uh, in world record time because I thought it was important to get out. But basically, you know, we’ve got, the good thing is we’ve got a lot of shots on goal here, you know, so we can, we can afford to have a couple of losers and still, and we got the whole world working at half the vaccine candidates are actually in China. Um, but there right now, you know, we’re still kind of getting a sense of where we think we can, we can go and, you know, one of these days we can talk about, you know, my area really is drug discovery and vaccine discovery. We can go into a lot of depth and other those options. But today I just want to talk a little bit about the, the it implications for this. Um, and then there we got lots of, lots of committed resources.
You’ll almost, almost every major vaccine manufacturer, the implicated is in this big time. Uh, uh, and you know, said they’re going to vote a billion dollars into it. But my guess if I had to say no, if we, you know, everyone’s saying 18 months to a vaccine, my guests of that occurring really is less than 20%. My base in my experience, we could get lucky, but we’re talking about everything working perfectly and you know, I know all the tricks and if we’re talking about, you know, ring trials and ways of, of, uh, of, of looking at, uh, master protocols and having, you know, uh, parallel manufacturing scale up while you’re doing phase three studies, doing phase one and doing what we’re talking about every possible trick in the book, even that I’m getting 19 months, uh, Mac, uh, you know, best. So my suggestion is we probably should have another plan just in case.
And he got it. Guy will tell you to have a contingency plan. That’s totally good. That extra 20%. You have the contingency plan and then we’ll talk about disaster recovery.
Well, right, that word disaster recovery. So true. So the other option is, you know, people say, look, you know, I’m a young guy, I’m strong. I’ve taught, I can, I can take this, just let it run right through. You know what, we’ll get a herd immunity, we’ll have some deaths. But overall, we’ll also have some deaths if we, um, if we don’t, if we, if we shut down the economy this way, there’s a lot of economic trouble. I mean, you know, what’d you call this David chickenpox parties when we were kids.
Yeah. That’s, yeah. Yeah. This isn’t like when like when we were kids and our parents would get us all together cause w one neighborhood kid got chickenpox. All right. You’re having a sleep over at his house cause you’re going to get it and get it out of the way.
That’s right. And you know, it might be when we know more about this that that isn’t a bad decision. But right now we don’t know nearly enough about this. My guess is that that’s probably never going to be a good decision, but don’t now that’s for sure. Don’t do that. Do not.
Yeah. I believe we’ve seen studies showing that people who have been reinfected in South Korea, so getting it once is not a guarantee that you won’t get it again.
Yup. You know, and that’s not something we don’t even know if the immunity is gonna you know, how long it is, how, how, how confirmed it is in terms of preventing disease. We don’t know those numbers yet. We think based on SARS and MERS and we’re gonna have a lot of, we’re going to get about a two year immunity. That’s going to be pretty good if based on a lot of different factors though it could be as little as 12 bucks or even less. Uh, first of all it’ll be, it could be slight or it could be full. We don’t know that either. But so, you know, as you said Randy, we there, there’s a lot of risk in terms of going after this cause it may not even work. So w we know it’s a big bet right now and I wouldn’t know a lot of, a lot of States are saying let’s just go for it.
I don’t think we’re ready to do that yet. If I had, if I had my brothers, but I think we have a better way of managing this even short term. And don’t forget, I mean this thing is all in, right. If you start, if you start the herd effect, it’s really hard to stop, you know, cause Oh well let’s, let’s, let’s slow it down. We made a little miscalculation that has all sorts of side effects. You want to word we know about. It kills more people than we thought. And then you want to stop it. You really can’t. It has its own life. And so, uh, right now you don’t have any drugs and we don’t have any immunity and you don’t know much about this thing. So I would take it, you know, I would take it slow and careful and learn. Learn as much as you can about it before you have to really have a big fight for sure.
Just jumping around with good. We’ve got a quick question. Have you seen the Dr. Erickson video on Kobe? Um, do you have any thoughts on it? I haven’t seen it. Not tell me about it. No. Someone just does somebody put it in the chat box on the video. So I don’t know. I don’t know. Dr. Erickson, uh, where’s he at? I don’t know. Do I have no, other than, I guess we’ll be Googling it after the show. I’ll take, I’m happy to take a look cause I, you know, there are a number of people who, so, so there are a number of studies where they’ve tried, they’re trying to do this in Germany. They’re trying to do this. There’s a guy named, uh, professor, uh, uh, clique, uh, S, S, C, H, R, E, K, C. K. And he’s, uh, he’s sort of in the middle of Germany.
They had a lot of COBIT there and he won. He has a hundred thousand tests that he wants to do on a population that’s quite structured and he’s going to look at what he thinks the right numbers are to do, to do better policy judgments. And it’s gonna take him a few years. He’s already released the first part of that study and it’s pretty interesting. But as far from conclusive, there are a couple of guys at Stanford who are also advocating this. They’re saying, look, you know, we don’t think it’s that big. We’re not really sure, but we don’t think it’s that big. So why don’t we just, you know, block off a part of the United States and see what happens. And so, and so they’ve actually, so you
know, submitted grants to do this since um, my guess is that there are countries that will do that, but probably, but hopefully not in United States cause that, that you’re, you’re really asking for, for potential things to go really wrong. This isn’t Sweden doing this right now. It’s interesting. You know, Sweden Sweden’s got Sweden is, is a, is is very interesting. They decided to um, go ahead and do this. They’re protecting their older people, which is smart cause the older people, you know, we look at the death rates and it just scares you. You know, if you’re my age, it just starts to take off. You know what you’re doing. You’re so, you’re almost, there’s almost no death semester compromised until you’re, you know, in their forties by the time you get to 50 now this isn’t, this is, this is population level. And I’m was saying as an individual you should go out and be, feel safe.
There are a lot of instances where you’ve got so at a population level and the statistical level, it just, it really takes off with compromised patients and older patients. So what they’ve done is they said we’re going to shelter all the older patients but you don’t shelter all this, uh, of the children, all the compromised patients. And then we feel like we’re not that population dense. Uh, and we are going to do some social distancing, but we, you know, we’ll keep some of the things open and we’re just gonna you know, see what happens. Right now in Sweden, everything’s pretty, you know, Sweden sun 24 hours a day. They, they’re out on the islands and not really concentrated. Once they get into fall, I’m a bit worried that it might come back to get them because people are, are blocked in more. It’s November, the flu seasons up. And also I think I’m just concerned that we might have a, we might sit back and then they’re going to get,
yeah, those were the, those were the two things that I heard that I, whatever that discussion about Sweden comes up. The two things that I keep reading and seeing are, um, the population density issue. Um, and then the, uh, they’ve got universal health care, so they don’t have quite as many issues with underlying conditions, conditions, and preexisting conditions like we do here.
Yeah. They’re healthier than we are. No doubt about it. Yeah, that’s true. And they have quite a, uh, yeah. So I don’t, I, that’s why we’re all watching Sweden very carefully. The other, the other countries to watch actually are completely the opposite, completely opposite. As Taiwan, Taiwan, these Asian countries got ready because they had SARS. And so if you were in Taiwan, you go to a hotel and your own, and my friend had this happen, this phone shut off and by lost battery power and at seven 30 in the morning, 20 minutes after he lost battery power, they were police at his door in his hotel door and he was quarantined 14 days. So that’s, that’s the, and they can, they can run their diagnostics. It takes us about, takes us about, right now with panel demand takes, you know, five, six, seven, eight days, Korea, seven minutes. So, you know, you can get a sense of just how much faster you can react. If you could get that kind of a throughput.
I keep saying, I keep joking and saying this episode of black mirror sucks, but I mean it’s, it sounds like that’s actually not that far.
Yeah, no, no, it’s a, yeah, it’s a [inaudible]. So there are different strategies and it’s, we’re lucky because we’re a little bit after everybody else, we can sort of look and see what’s working, what’s not working. So you know, that that’s actually an advantage to us if learn from the other group.
Yeah. And I, you know, I think that was one of the things that I re, you know, I remember, you know, there was the, uh, you know, the, all the YouTube videos that came out, um, the folks in Italy, you know, leaving a message for themselves 10 days ago, um, at basically as a warning to us that, Hey, this is where, you know, that’s where, that’s where you are right now. Here’s where we are right now. Open your eyes. And, and again, we were all kinda, uh, you know, like I said, I mean, I have no problem admitting that I was a little flippant about this when it first broke and, you know, the, you know, and it was, you know, an until thing, you know, until the numbers and the data really started coming out. It was like, Oh yes, we actually should take this seriously. Okay.
Yeah, you know, my life is at that, that, that doomsday clock and every morning I wake up and it’s on. And you just see, you know, how many deaths have occurred in that, that, that that’s reality, you know. Uh, and luckily there’ve been some, some areas in the United States that it skip and, uh, you know, uh, that’s great. Celebrate, because next time it’s going to come around a few more times.
Well, and for sure, I mean, and, and a lot of those areas, you know, it comes down to those things we were just talking about with Sweden. I mean, no, South Dakota and Wyoming are, aren’t seeing huge outbreaks. They don’t have the population density that in New York city, a Detroit, uh, Chicago and you know, do, so
it was interesting, there was a study out of university of Texas, a dr Merida to that and she’s very well known, very great epidemiologists. And they said, if you’re, if you’re in a very rural area of the country and you see zero evidence of Kobe, there is a 9% chance you’re actually having an epidemic. And if you see one case of [inaudible], there’s a 50% chance of having the paper. I said, well, the math all works, but Holy moly, this is, this is quite a conclusion. Well, what’s your take on California opening up the beaches already extended and I was a little bit premature, but you know, well actually I’ll tell you, uh, I can see it in the data. Uh, you can, and I’ll show you that in a little bit. Uh, how accurate some of this data is. It’s quite interesting. You can actually start to see what they call reproductive rates of the, of the virus started back up in California, was in very good control up until this weekend.
And now it’s out of control. And it, it happens that fast. You don’t notice it. You know, it’s, Oh, it had a nice time at the beach, but in two weeks we’re going to pay. Yeah, it’s too bad. Uh, they, they, they didn’t hold on quite long enough and you have to keep, you can go to the beach, but just maintain your social distance, you know, try to see that six feet and they weren’t, you know, and so I think that sadly, we’re going to see an, uh, we already see a blip and I’ll show you that in a second. So what I gave to the, what I gave to the business guys, I said, look, they’re going to call you forward is combustion. I love it.
We don’t know. So if you don’t know what, let’s think about some scenarios and how likely they are. So I said, you know, there’s, you know, it could be like SARS reaches Canada and all of a sudden the whole thing is, you know, we don’t like it anymore. We’re done. We’re good, we’re good. We had our, we had our fund for duct. It’s um, it’s unlikely it’s going to happen, but you know, I gave it a 1% chance. The magic bullet is one here. All about, you know, everyone sort of counting on, right, 18 months we’re going to have a vaccine wrong. I’ll go back to normal. We have to pay for a little bit of economy in the meantime, but going to be wonderful. Um, I give that about a 20% chance. Uh, unfortunately I wish it was bigger than that. But if you talk to epidemiologists and you talk to guys who, you know, create vaccines that are going to tell you, you know, uh, the chances of success before you get to phase three or which all the way through a vaccine development.
So, um, there are few cocktails. Good chance here. I think it will be likely that this is the most likely thing will I have happened. And worst thing that could happen is even though we’re working very hard on this, everyone’s active at it, we have all this new technology, it still takes about as long as it ever does before and that’s 10 years. So that was the sort of, and I give that about a 20% chance cause I think we got a lot of good stuff in life. Here’s what it looks like. You can see the different, the different options. Um, and um, so spontaneous combustion heard about magic bullet means we’ve got a vaccine in 18 months. Therapeutic cocktails. It’s much more like the way we manage AIDS. For example. You know, you can’t, you can’t, you don’t have a vaccine for AIDS, but you know, with a good cocktail and it’s tailored for you and you’re monitoring very carefully, you can really suppress the vaccine and sort of express the HIV virus enough that you really don’t have to have account anymore. You realize there are people’s heads exploding right now reading those years across the bottom of your chart. Right?
I’m sorry, I want to be responsible for it.
Yeah. Yeah. I’ll tell you, when people see this, they know this is sort of the timeframe we use to develop drugs. Normally, you know it’s like no, okay, in 15 years, so he’d always step one, step two, step three and he’s one phase two will be, we can do a lot to make things do things in parallel, but you also take a lot more risk when you do that. You have to kind of balance that and you can see it. Typically, you know, it takes about, you know, for lucky 10 years plus they develop a real full blown, okay, some plasma therapy. Okay, we’ve got some, I know repurpose drugs. Okay, we’ve got a couple of cocktails that really are designed just for this and eventually you get the vaccine. That’s usually what happens. So hopefully it will break that paradigm, but that’s sort of what it looks like. Could be more like a therapeutic cocktail. I have Newt and know Jerry
the therapeutic cocktails.
I’ll have to, I’ll have to bring my cup next time. I didn’t realize. So I think I, well, so what’s interesting is what I’ll talk, maybe we should just talk a little bit about where we’re at right now and then I’ll show you what we can do about it. And I won’t talk about drugs and vaccines. So I think a little bit further on it. We can always come back to that later if you want to, but maybe we should just talk about what’s going on now with absolutely all we have right now really is social distancing diagnostics. You know, we don’t have any backstop. So if this thing start going at us, all we can do is try to prevent it from hitting us and allowing it to reproduce. Um, and so if we know where it’s coming from with the diagnostics, we can then separate a way from those.
Everybody who’s contagious from us and we can, we can reduce the viral load in the environment, which is great, but it costs a lot of money as we, as we see, you know, that’s a big unemployment and we have the drugs. Once you have a drug that that was what I was dealing with with Tamiflu and H five N one I had, I had a great diagnostics, I was working at Roche, we had 80% cupboard. We have about, we had about eight times the coverage that we do in the United States right now. Uh, I’m sorry, no 800 times covered. We have in United States right now for this particular area, and I had a, I had a backstop, I had Tamiflu. So, and even then, even though I had that much coverage and I had a drug at work, we know at one point we, we, you know, it was, it was close to going out of control even with that much support.
And then when you get the vaccine of course, then you really have back to normal and then you can start to say, especially with now that’s if it’s a full vaccine and full, full immunity and everyone’s, you know, everyone gets a, enough of it probably about our case, it’ll have to be over 80% 85% of the population should be vaccinated. That point, you can really say, okay, I’m good. I can, I can avoid getting this, this disease and we can go back to normal. But that’s sort of where we at. And what’s interesting is once you’re in one of these boxes, when you’re in one of these boxes, there is not much you can do no to improve your performance, you know, to really fight your, your effectiveness is really limited when you jumped to the next area. So when we get our first drug, we’ll be able to do quite a bit more.
And when you get a vaccine, then of course you can do an awful lot more. So, you know, once you’re, once you’re in this box and we’re in the social distancing box right now, you know, you’re sorta, you don’t have many options and uh, but you know, hopefully it’ll, uh, we’ll, we’ll move quickly to the next and the next. But this social listening is all about to and behavior and he has, you know, it’s highly variable. People really good about it. They’ll do it if you will, don’t feel good about it. They won’t. And, um, yeah.
Well and honestly, I mean that’s, I, you know, we’ve had that conversation on here before. It’s, you know, the sad reality is, is we are forcing our government to legislate for the lowest common denominator.
Well, and, and you know, it’s really unpopular to do something. It doesn’t look like it needs to being done. But as you know, the exponential growth, sometimes you’ve got to take a stand and say, wait, you know, if it goes off, I can’t control it and I’m going to have overwhelmed hospital. So that’s, that’s sort of the idea. And yeah,
I think that’s the consensus too, is everybody thinks that the vaccine is going to come out in like two weeks, then we’re gonna go back to business. So everyone you talk to like, Oh yeah, vaccine. Maxine comes out
like, yeah, five years, you know that. Yeah, that’s, that’s the, so
dude, I’m gonna, I’m going to print out that one slide with all the years across the bottom. Like I’m going to print it out by the thousands. You just start leaving them in people’s mailbox.
Well, there’s, this is the other, this is the other two slides you should probably show because yeah, the, you know, it’s, it’s great if it happens and it happens, but you count on it, you know, that’s the problem. And I, and w I don’t see many other alternatives out there other than people saying, I’m going to count on it. You know? And when you really talk to you who’ve done this before, they all say, well, you know, it’s probably going to be a little longer. Uh, so you have to watch those kinds of words. Right. I’m hopeful that, I think that maybe it’s possible that those are all true statements that people who I know are epidemiologists who know that it could be 15 years, but we’re hopeful that it could be. If you listen to how G he’ll say that all the time. I’m hopeful that, I agree.
I hope that too. But you know, the realistic numbers anyway, you know, we’ve had this once and done, right? So China went through this, it went up, came back down. You can see that they had a peak peak case on February 10th in the slide and then, you know, by March and the March, they said, okay, we’ve got it now. And so we’re going to ease travel restriction. Now. That really wasn’t so much the case. They let people into restaurants, but if you want to eat in China, uh, initially when they let you out, they were, you know, and, and 95 masks and they had to take them off and put it in and everything he got was, you know, sanitized and plastic wrappings uh, you had to wear your plastic suit and just then to be waived when anybody across the way. I mean, we’re not talking about normal, we’re just talking about ability to do it.
I don’t know for sure. Like, I think, uh, I, I just saw like Texas is planning on, uh, starting to open up May 1st, and they’re talking about, uh, restaurants have to be at 25% capacity max. Um, tables have to be at least 10 feet apart from each other. Um, so I mean it’s, it’s gonna be interesting to see how that plays out. How do they expect them to stay in business? I mean that’s the thing. You restrict them to that they have a hard enough time to stay in businesses. Yeah. When their phone. Yeah.
I, I feel really bad for these guys cause it’s nothing they did wrong. It’s just that we got a situation where if you go to the restaurant tighter than that, I mean, we’ve done the study. We know, uh, you know, in a normal situation, a person whose problem is two things. Number one, the ventilation isn’t that good and all the restaurants and number two, you sit there for a long time and whenever those two things come together and you’re crowded, we’ve done studies that show that, you know, one person can infect at least seven or eight, even if you’re pretty far away from home. Um, and so that’s, uh, we have, we’ve, we’ve done those, those studies is sort of interesting to watch. Uh, there’s, you know, some at MIT, you can see that a study at any rate and then where they have the big outbreak areas.
And Mohan, uh, then, uh, they waited an extra two and a half, three weeks. But even now, they’re still pretty careful about what they’re doing. So that’s sort of a site. And the big question you’d have to ask is, is it once and done, you know, are we all done that, you know, we, we, we, we, we paid the price. No, we should be over. Right. Well, we’ve done the studies and what we’ve looked at is Mars and MERS and SARS. Excuse me. And if you look at MERS and SARS in the wild, we would anticipate actually, and, and if you, and this is the, this is their closest relative COBIT, you anticipate actually, that we’re going to have to go through this probably six times next year and the next, yeah. So we’ve got, we’ve got once, but probably in the United States, we’ll probably go through it another six times. So we’re going to have to figure this out pretty quick. Um, and herd immunity won’t happen even after six. We’re only gonna we’ll only be about 37% given the Gil rate and the infection rates. Uh, yeah.
Holy shit. Well, editing it, people don’t really talk about this very much because it doesn’t look very happy. Oh yeah, exactly. This is not shiny happy news. But I mean, so you know, and you kind of touched on this earlier, you know, I do, and Bob touched on this earlier. I think one of the biggest issues that everybody has is, you know, they want that flag in the ground, they want that answer. And science doesn’t work that way. Like that’s not how this is gonna play out. Like, cause nobody knows. And to your point, like if anybody sounds like they think they know, disregard them immediately because no, this, this is, this is a very fluid situation still.
Yeah. Just ask them what they got their MD degree in epidemiology degree and how many PhDs they’ve got after the name and you can get her and they only get their sense of rights.
Well, you know, three months ago everybody was a constitutional scholar. So, you know.
Yup. And this is our best guests based on the closest relative. So it made up. And you know, if you, if you look at the flu, what happens in the flu is then you know, what happens to the peaks drop in the summer because after March it gets hot in the car and the flu virus is actually very susceptible to heat. Unfortunately, the Corona virus from what we can tell isn’t so susceptible. I think we think it’s going to be a slight tick, but we don’t think it’s going to be like the flu. Sadly. It would be really helpful if it was cause it gives us a break. But um, uh, so far we see it in the summer. So that’s sort of the big question we’ve got. I’ll just show you this quickly because it’s important to the discussion about, about it and AI.
What’s interesting about this is it, is it a little bit of a different take on exponential growth. So what happens is suppose today you see one death, right? Well, if we think back about the Corona virus, it actually, that guy took about four or five weeks to die, right? Right. Now at that time, if you do the math, if you have a case spec calibrate of 1% and you go through the cycle, people at the time, right? Probably sick because you have one set set, the present fatality rate. So now you can see that one person come out and you got, so that means you got a hundred people right there at four weeks ago you had a hundred people with the disease. Well, if a doubles every, every week, then week two you got 200 people. Week three you got four people, we four, you got 800 people and a day you’re off the page, right?
So, so, so the problem with the problem with using death as an indicator is that it’s a really latent trigger, right? Right, right. Now they’re starting to say, well, let’s take a look at infection rate. Now that’s, that’s a better trigger. We want to have 14 days and infection rates going down. Uh, and that’s, that’s again, that’s a pretty late trigger because problem is we don’t have a very good diagnostic system. As I said, we do our diagnosis and then between five and 10 days later, sadly if you go to a doctor, it’d be nine days. If go to the hospital before five, then you find out what they’ve got and the problem. And that’s already allowed. You know, that’s another week or so, right? Even after you get started to get symptoms, which is already weekend. So we have to do is you have to get these, you have to get these triggers going earlier.
And I’ll talk a little about those triggers. Those are diagnostic tests that we do in the field. So you actually know where you can already at like day three or four. So that, that way it’s easy to stop if you wait until you see a death. And then if you’re not really sure and you say, well, let’s just see, see what happens. Wait another week. Well now you’re at 3,200. Right? You know, let’s wait one more week and you have four deaths. It’s not that many people. Right? Well, now you’re 64 and the problem with this is we think that this is a pretty easy, uh, this is a relatively good scenario. We think that the numbers could be 10 times this. So actually one death as he’s 16,000 people aren’t thinking that sort of the rate that’s sort of, you know, the level of unknowns we’re at.
So that gives you a sense of why these triggers are so important and why everyone’s talking about these diagnostic tests, diagnostic tests, they can push you into understanding whether you’ve got disease in day three, you’re not having to wait until week five. That’s a huge difference. And that’s the opportunity and we’ll get into how we can use that at the, toward the end we’re getting where we got some good stuff was that one of the issues in the beginning was they didn’t have a test and they couldn’t get accurate numbers. Yeah. That’s killing us. You know, we sorta, we sort of sort of, we sort of dropped the ball. What happened was, um, we thought that China had it and then, you know, had it properly done, they thought that they’re going to be able to stop it. They thought, we thought the testing would largely be done in China.
China, that’s very expensive. So the big companies said, you know, we’re not that interested in doing this test, you know, ramp up and I’m gonna have to do all this stuff and then we’ll turn out the whole thing. I’ll fizzle out like SARS and everything else did in the past. So we’re not gonna, you know, we don’t really want to create these new tests. And that happened in February kind of timeframe. And so it started to really ramp up. Like we couldn’t, we’re out, we’re taking the three weeks. We know humans as, as, as creatures. Um, so I mean, it did. I mean, is it safe to say that what happened was SARS kind of lulled this into a false sense of security? No. SARS is really dangerous if you, if you, if you were to Asia today. Well, no, no, no. I mean, just, just from the standpoint, like from an, from an, from a us perspective.
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know, I have to, I probably would say, yeah, we think, well, you know, apply that. Meanwhile, the Asian countries where they were really ready for this, right? They have the laws in place. They’d done a SAR if they had a lot of, you know, had a lot of deaths and so they were ready for a lot of this stuff. And so they were able to stop a lot of it early on and we were sort of, as you said, lulled into it, um, a little bit and, and, and we got a little, we lost that. We sorta lost that month, uh, in February, and that, that really hurt. Um, but, you know, it’s, it’s recoverable. It’s just, it’s a lot of, a lot of fatalities. So one of the things that’s sort of interesting on the it side is how you do these diagnostics, right.
And, um, you can start to see, president Trump said today that he wanted us to be able to test about 2%, uh, of the Americans. My, my numbers are going to have to do a little bit more than that. A 2% is a good start, but really controlled liars. You really have to probably be doing, uh, this is a test per week, says about 20 million a day and he would be down at about what, uh, 6 million a day. So I’m recommending kind of three to four times what he would recommend initially, but you know, but that’s a good start, right? So we have, we have three different kinds of tests. The first is surveillance. You come in, you and, and so if you go to a bar in China, they’ll actually take your temperature awesome about whether you’re, and they’ll take it outside the bar.
And actually if you see order, the best hospitals today, they’ll also do the same thing, right? They want to test out before you even walk in the door. They’re checking your temperature and that kind of stuff now. Yeah, exactly. And that’s good practice, right? If you see that that’s a much better situation than if you walk in the door and then they start taking the temperature or they don’t get the temperature at all. Go ahead and wander around the building and when we’ll figure it out, if you’ve already come in contact with a few people, then you’ve got a problem with taking your temperature at this. This actually reduces in Singapore, this reduced the number of cases by 58% and the hospitals that did this versus that. So it’s a very effective means of controlling viral barrel. It’s not that, it’s not very sensitive that very specific.
So this was, you have a theater doesn’t mean you got to go big. It’s a good start. And especially if they’re best practices, they test you outside in the parking lot. And then if you got a fever they say go get a test and don’t, don’t go into the building. And that’s the best practice. Uh, so I still have to a friend, I still have to see my orthopedic doctor cause I still have some problems with my knee and they wouldn’t even let me open the front door. Like they had someone opened it for me, testing me outside. We drove fine. And then inside like half of those roped off, we could only go here and good for them now that, that that’s really good practice, especially if it’s a maintaining distance all the way through in the waiting room and everything else that that’s, that’s a nice, nice job.
That’s a really good jet so that you’re going, you’re going to a good guy. The other thing I’d say is if at all possible to do a telemedicine wise over the, you know, over the internet, that’s even even better. Obviously with orthopedics you can’t do that. They got to test certain physical capabilities you’re having after the surgery. Uh, but uh, for, for, you know, if you’re doing psychological work or if you’re doing normal, just, you know, diagnostics initially, uh, to the extent you can do it with a telemedicine, you’re better off right now. Uh, just to do it cause sure. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the other, so there’s a surveillance. Yes. Uh, uh, the other kind of surveillance test is actually what they call Sentinel testing and they’ll actually, you know, they’ll say really interested in opening up this building. And so we’re going to really do a real area.
We’re gonna do a real high density testing just to that area. It’s a little rope it off and really look at what’s going on in that area. That’s, you know, setting all ties passing. We have to do a lot more of that. Um, especially if you want to start to preserve some areas of effective economic activity. PCR area is sort of interesting. That’s, that’s the test for the actual virus. So, uh, the, the, and this is unfortunately, this is the area where we made a little, we lost a little bit of time, uh, and we need to do about 75, in my estimation, somebody had billion deaths a week or so on this. This is to now, this is to manage the demand for viruses. If we’re con, if we’re actually treating them. There are other numbers that say I’m an epidemiologist, I’m just interested in sort of knowing what the prevalence of the viruses then you have.
Then you can do it at a much in a much lower rate of testing. But if you really want to manage the test, you know, you got a COPD patient, your doctor, you’re going to have to measure him, him or her, that the patient the five, six, 10 times to understand what the level of vital is that. So it isn’t just about the UVL just this test just once. Right. Gotcha. So that was, yeah, that was, I was actually, I’m like, I’m like, okay, so you’re testing the entire population every five weeks, but now that you’ve got multiple tests on, okay, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then what happens is you do more surveillance testing all of a sudden doing an awful lot more PCR testing because people are thought to be out of the disease because they have temperature truth. Only about 30% of them will have, so you’re over-testing by order by several, by a lot.
But you have to do that if you already want to manage the disease. So that, that’s why you see the difference. You’ll Harvard comes out and says, Oh, we have to do 5,000 tests a day. And I come out and I say, well, we have to do 20 million tests. That’s not the right number. But you know, that’s the reason that the difference, I’m trying to manage the disease. They’re trying to understand the epidemiology of the disease is different. So that’s, this is what, and eventually what’s going to happen is we’ll have an, in Singapore, they have something called, you can, you can check it out on your mobile phones. It’s called trace together. And basically it’s a, it’s an app on your phone, call it down. You can do it right now and it’ll actually tell you when you’re getting within 15 feet of somebody’s six feet of someone else’s Bluetooth.
And they, they have tokens, the tokens dissolve after 14 days. So that’s above the incubation period. And so what happens is you get, you get a, if you’re within 15 in six feet, then your phone will pick that up and it’ll say, Brooke, you know, you’re within and it won’t, it’ll just tell you the number of the person, right? It wasn’t, doesn’t have to have to identify if you’re on a subway or something and then it’ll register it for the next 12 days. Now, if that person gets sick or say you get sick, it’ll tell everybody who’s within that, who, who got the bleed, uh, that, Hey, you better go get tested because it turns out someone you got within six feet of thing down with the disease. It doesn’t have to identify who it was, but it’ll, it’ll let you know better. Go to the doctor, check it out. So that is what that looks like. And it’s called contribution an. As you look at what Apple’s doing and Google are doing, they’re coming together and trying to create this and actually make it part of the base
of the new releases of their phones. So if you, Apple just announced they’re going to wait for four weeks, um, and they didn’t say why, but my guess is part of it may have been, uh, but they want to have the next four phones they have with this, with this capability embedded in an operating system, uh, rather than to have it as an app, uh, so they can turn it on and turn it off. And Google’s doing the same thing. You manage the data. So it’s sort of interesting the way it’s moving. Uh, it, you know, it’ll be, it’ll still maintain your privacy. Uh, and what’s interesting is these contact traces go into a national registry. We already have a vaccine registry that people don’t know, but if every time you get a vaccine shot for your child, it goes into a national registry. So we already have these registries set up and it would be nice if we could expand that to include, uh, a registry for probing to understand what’s going on.
And after the 12 days, cause ALS and you know, and you know, that that window then continues moving forward. And what’s nice about that is if you think about all the work you have to do is you come down with Kobe, everyone who saw, but last 12 days you’ve got to go sit down and say, who did you see Joe and saw soothing. And then he got to visit Joe and Sue and then you say, Oh, Joey, Oh gosh. And you saw how many people and all of a sudden, you know, you’re right and in order to do it right, you know, you’ve got to [inaudible] people in that period of time. Uh, you, you have to at least do trace six of them and it’s better to do 12. So that’s sort of the absolute minimum to understand what the spread rate is. So if you have this, you’re all ready to go, right?
You don’t have to, you’ve got it all done. You ever go to the doctor? And eventually what’s going to happen is, you know, if this is a significant disease, um, and we’re not sure yet, you know, it might all made all blow up. But if it’s a significant disease, my guess is that you’re going to have a diagnostic test that saliva based and you’ll spit into a cup, it’ll register whether you’ve got any antibodies, uh, or uh, have any, you know, cases of COBIT in you, uh, that are active. And if you do, it will automatically register you until, and your phone will then send them to say, okay, please warranty and yourself for 14 days. Or, uh, you know, go see a doctor, uh, to confirm. Uh, but if you are, are, are negative, then you can go and do whatever you want. Cause you’re negative, you know, you can go and do your stuff.
Yeah. So I think that’s going to, what’s what it’s going to look like if this becomes a serious, you know, a serious pandemic with a high fatality rate. So that’s sort of the, that’s the little bit of the it, what’s interesting is that you can start to do, you can imagine that, you know, uh, when we do this in more controlled areas, we have AI systems that actually help us predict where the disease is gonna move and how fast it’s going to spread. And so on based on some real numbers. We don’t have those numbers yet, but you know, if you speak in an ad pending, you’ll have, you’ll have a training, a training dataset of, you know, 80 a hundred million dataset data points. And you can train a pretty sophisticated algorithm pretty quick, uh, against, you know, the a hundred and hundreds of millions of data points you’ll have in the future. So anyway, it came out. So it’s story that came in with Apple and Google and they’re grading the States and separate. So, you know, being separated. Was that accurate or was that just for like media stuff or was that, I don’t know. In fact, I’ll show you some of that great point. Why don’t we, I’ll show you one more slide and then I’ll show you where we’re at.
Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, the, yeah, the one you showed this afternoon was actually really, really fascinating with the Oakland County stats.
Yeah. W w we’ll show that it’s, it is cool, but they do admit I, Oakland County is that they don’t have quite enough data to do whatever they like. So we’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll, I’ll show you one last slide. This is what, this is the way China works. It, they’re ahead of us. You know, they’ve got a self-report, a surveillance capability on a contact track, a tracing capability. If you feel sick, you get shunted into a test and usually they find any about 30%. And this is at the height of the, of the problems they sound that 30% didn’t have [inaudible]. They went to the hospital, they went home, but 70% did. And if you weren’t feeling good, you’d go right to a triage clinic and you’d be there in a field hospital, which is more like a, you know, a tent set, uh, or a hospital if you’re really ill or if you weren’t doing so bad, you go right through a quantity and isolation system.
They don’t really have tele-health. That’s something we would do in our country. But they don’t, they don’t have full tele-health. So they, they basically quarantined everybody. Um, and then that what happens is that that’s sort of the current infrastructure. What you want to get to is a very, uh, precise, uh, uh, uh, precise monitoring capability. And I’ll show you what that the starts of that look like in the United States right now. But you can sit and get a sense of, you know, you’re trying to protect the very high risk patients all the time with whatever you can in terms of herd for X and other other capabilities. You’ve got lots of local tests, you’ve got vaccines that eventually are going to come in and you’ve got a lot of red registration occurring. So that, that gives you a sense on our show you how the, how that looks right now for our state. How does that sound? So, well, I’ll skip this. I’ll turn off
here. I thought I would, uh, I thought I’d just let you know. Uh, we have, I’ve gotten quite a few messages from people so far who say they usually drink while they’re sitting around and watching our show. Um, they are drinking a lot more listening.
Aye. Aye. Aye. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That same thing happened in Harvard. They weren’t very happy with, well, you know, if it’s nice, at least it’s something to think about. You, you can, as I said, no one knows the whole answer, but this is, this is probably likely to be, to be, um, to come into being.
Yeah, no, I mean, this is a, it’s scary stuff, but I mean, be, it’s, it’s fascinating and it’s stuff people need to know and they need to understand,
well, why don’t I, why don’t I shift to a, an oops, uh, to, to another two to where we are in Michigan. How does that sound? Perfect. Okay, well good. We’ll do that. And, uh, let’s take a look at how we’re doing. So this is, uh, this is the beginning of precision monitoring. And so, um, what, what we did, um, so right now, right now I’m, uh, I’m, I’m working with, uh, 11 States, department of defense for countries that have to help them with the way they’re managing their, their situation. And, um, unfortunately it’s not Michigan. I actually, it’s probably a good thing. Uh, Michigan is actually probably a little bit ahead, right? Cause, uh, we’ve had a big outbreak and we’ve got a lot of good people here, but other States are, aren’t quite as strong as we are with our epidemiology capabilities. And so, uh, this is about at least, uh, this is some of the data that is readily available.
And by the way, this is all already readily available. It’s all online. It’s all real time. We can take a look at it. Uh, and I’ll just, I’ll just zip through it pretty quick. How does that sound? So awesome. Here’s, here’s Colby. So the first thing you want to understand is, is how much in control is the virus? And the way we look at this as something called reproductive rate and reproductive rate at one means that the virus is reproducing one-to-one. It means it’s sustaining itself. If you go to low, and it means it can’t quite sustain itself, right? Cause it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s dying. It’s dying out because it’s not reproducing as much as itself over one, then it’s, it’ll, it’ll, it’ll expand. It’ll grow. So you can see back in March when we started the pro, uh, this, we were up at, uh, an R of 3.5.
That is a big, that’s a pretty big R, uh, you know, that that means you reproduce every time you, one person touches, uh, gets a virus, they’ll infect three and a half more. And that, that, that’s, uh, that’s a dangerous rate. And of course, we had a big outbreak here that you can see that we, you know, then, uh, you an a Whitmer put in the, uh, you know, it’s March, I think it was March 15th. He said, no more, let’s stop this thing. And you could see it had a big effect. Uh, this, this is the effective redirect rate. That means that there are two different members are, is reductive rate, natural state. We think it’s about 2.37 unless it’s got a lot of people that go after what you did in this case, we’re uh, uh, we’re settled, right? And then what we did is we started socially distance.
So our key, this is the, this is the, our key number, our key is our, is actually the first derivative of our, so it actually measures the change in our under stress. And we put the, we put the virus under stress by separating. We didn’t allow it to reproduce, so it was under stress. And by separating we actually got a reduction in the, what they call the effective reproductive rate. This is looking at the effective reproductive rate and you can see that basically we are doing good. And you know, basically we were saying, uh, you know, early, early April, things looking good. Look at that trendline, right? It came down and we started popping
up and you can see where we went over the line. Unfortunately, that was that weekend where, uh, we were getting antsy. People were complaining, you know, they were, they were, uh, having, you know, they’re, uh, they, they had a weekend, everybody wanted to plant their gardens and put their boats in the water the weekend it snowed. Yeah, no, absolutely. We’re right. We’re right there with you. Yeah. [inaudible] everyone was feeling Lancy cause a beautiful day. You know, that’s what happens. We all want her to go out and check it out. So, uh, sure enough w w we get to see the bump up a little bit and then going, and I got on the, you know, got on the TV and said, Hey, we’ve got to stop this. And sure enough, you know, we were, we were getting back in control, took it more seriously and you can see the dump dumped down.
And this weekend, uh, I guess it was a nice weekend. I can’t remember now. It was pretty nice. I was, I was working, I worked pretty much 24 hours a day these days. So, uh, Sarah called Sunday was pretty nice and probably we, we wanted to go out again. And so you can see that it’s quite a sensitive test. And for the it people, it’s, I actually, this is actually, uh, on GitHub and, um, uh, we, you know, we developed this as part of the H five N one. And if you go to my website, you can actually see the ritual papers we, we created around trying to look at effective reproductive rates. And what we do is we use a a seven day window of, of the dataset. So, uh, we, we, we have, uh, a moving seven day window. We take a look at blessed seven days.
We average it all out. Uh, there’s also the more advanced, um, and they were in the more advanced models. We actually have an annealing contract that eliminates, uh, the beta high beta, uh, output where you have a significant outliers. Those are eliminated from the analysis, but they’re put back in again. So we can think of, look at the reason for those outliers and decide whether they were true outliers or whether it was a mistake of the data. We have a lot of challenges with this because um, the data comes into batches. So sometimes you get up in the morning and you look at the data and you go, what the heck? No, we’re still consuming the data. So give us a little bit of time and it’ll sort of settle out. But it’d be really helpful if they would tell us we’re about to dump a big batch.
That would really help our modeling a lot. So it, anyway, that’s, that gives you a sense of what this gives you a sense of is how Michigan is doing and it’s all published. It comes out every day. And in my I can send, I can send it, if you go to my website, I can also send you guys the paper. It actually gives you the link and you can take a look at it. Absolutely. Fred brown.com just take a look. We pick it off and you can do it yourself. This took me about 15 minutes, about three minutes. You can look at it yourself, but actually cutting and pasting everything through a little bit longer. But this is today at two o’clock in the afternoon. Okay. So that’s that. Uh, that’s the effective rate. And uh, now I’m pushing the models as far as I can cause they want to get to a precision management system that I talked about that the Chinese have in place pretty nicely.
Now we don’t have quite enough data to do this really accurately with their model. You can see are are the gray, by the way, I’m sorry, as a confidence interval so you can see we’re still, you know, it would be nice to have that. Well, a lot tighter. So if you’re above one, you can see right now we’re just at about one, but the confidence interval we’re having, it could be as high as 1.5. So we’ll just look at that more more closely. And this is all of the States so you can get a sense of how we’re all doing. Uh, Oh, I, I thought I put a yellow box around it. But anyway, Michigan’s right. I don’t know if you can see us right in the middle. Pretty much New Jersey has that one side or mounts on the other. Yep. Can you see it?
So that’s where, um, that’s where Michigan is right now. Interestingly about what I showed you about a week and a half ago before we had a little bit of excitement about the new weather. Uh, we were actually way down on the control side. We were really controlled. We are sort of where Montana is now. Massachusetts, Matt Hanna is now, but we moved up sadly in the, in the rankings and you can see that Michigan right now is just below one, but our confidence interval pushes us over one. And so we probably, uh, the other thing is you’ll see on the death rates in the, and the, uh, the other rates that, uh, the, uh, the, the rates of, uh, of acquisition of the, uh, of the virus, you can see that we aren’t really exactly going down 14 straight days. So for those two reasons, we probably have to wait a little bit longer.
Hopefully we can hold a hold back and not go out and get those numbers right. But you can see the, it’s sort of interesting to see who’s in control. Interestingly, sand, uh, sorry. Uh, South Dakota doesn’t have any lockdown. They’re like Sweden and there are good, yeah. Okay. Hey Fred, what’s the deal with the New York? I was, I thought they were a hotbed. It’s showing they’re almost the same as South Dakota. Yeah, no, they, they got their act together right there. They’re managing this really carefully and people are taking the social distancing really, really carefully and they’ve got a lot of control, uh, in the city. Uh, I think when you get out of the country, they don’t have quite as much, uh, control, uh, of the, of the testing, uh, that the density is lower. And so I would say New York city right now it’s, uh, if you don’t take the mass transit and are careful and are wearing her mask and are wearing your garments, it’s, it’s a, it’s not too bad.
We’re seeing a high death rate still, but don’t forget, it takes two weeks for that. Just like go through. So, um, so it’s, it’s uh, New York actually is not bad. Actually. I had a friend of mine who called me up to the end of the house in New York cause I think about, you know, moving out down to Florida and actually Florida is still not in bad shape either. What’s interesting, you know what’s really interesting is California, California, uh, before last beaches and everyone went to the beach, had a great time and we, we saw it on the data right away. So it’s sort of interesting that that was that sensitive and you can, you know, you can kind of get a sense of, of where things are. It’s good to see that we’re beating Ohio. That’s always a good thing. So that, you know, so you can get a sense from this.
Now it’s not, it’s perfect. Yet when we get a lot more data it’ll be much more accurate, but it’s directionally correct and it’s pretty stable. Uh, and we’re still working a little bit if you talk to the department. Well anyway, I can’t talk about that a lot. A lot of these numbers, but there are some models that are better than this, but this is at least available publicly and you look at it every day. Gotcha. So the question is how do you get better and how do we get better? And the way we get better is we’d have more testing density because then you start to see, you know, you can start and right now we can only see Michigan. Right. And that’s not good enough. We’d like to be able to see our neighborhood and it’s going to be a little bit like if this becomes a significant disease, it will become a little bit like the weatherman.
You know, you get up in the morning, I’ll check out. No, I was with her a little bit of COBIT in the air. Okay, well I’ll bet her, you know where my protective gear and so on versus things are looking pretty good. And the way you get there is you have to increase your testing against. Again, that’s the president Trump talked about today. He wants to increase the density, which is absolutely the right answer. And you can see in the 15th we were doing 3,400 tests a day. We have about 10 million people. This is a test for a hundred thousand people per day, be about 30 we about 10 million people. So this is, we do about 3,400 tests a day. If you really want to, you’ll get up to what the epidemiologists say they need to get to to just measure what’s going on. You have to have a minimum of 12,000 deaths a day.
So it gives you a sense of just how much more we have to go. And some epidemiologists would say, really I need to get 25,000 I’m not, I don’t really feel comfortable. And I, and for me, I, I, I’d have probably about 10 times that if I wanted to treat the season. So that’s to give you a sense of the diagnostics then you want to look at, you know what’s interesting is your diagnostic, so your first line of defense, right? You’re going to find out what the diagnostic, we’re going to find out where the bug is and we’re going to then be able to attack it with our social distancing. If you get overrun like we were in New York for example, your next line of defense is your hospitals, right? Cause he, you know, it moves. And so you have a choice of building out a big diagnostic infrastructure which costs a little bit or having to build a hundred new ICU units, which costs a lot.
Or if you overcome the hospital units then you actually have to rebuild your economy and that costs even more. So diagnostic testing probably is a good idea. Uh, I like president Trump’s Trump’s decision to increase the density. So it was that story accurate with Kobo? They don’t, I guess like their own, they to use like 17 of those pods. There are a whole bunch of reasons for that. But that is true that that happened in New York to a, turns out that there was a big issue. Well, because um, you have to give consent. So suppose your patient with COBIT and they say great news, you know, you can go to Coldwell hall and you say, well you know, I’m not really sure. I think it’s sort of on a stay here and not feeling that great to begin with. So they have to provide their consent.
And so the result of that is that a lot of people said that they’d prefer to say in an overrun hospital than to go and get supported by. Um, interesting. Yeah. So that was a, yeah, it turned out to be a big factor in New York too. They didn’t use much of the ship because eventually they had to ship, you know, anyway, it turned out to be an executive. Uh, and we’ll get better at this as time goes on too. So here’s, here’s what happened with your hospital density. Everything looks pretty good for Michigan. You can see our, our, the green line is the capacity. We, we, we didn’t have quite as many ventilators as we thought we would. This, this, the model actually overestimated how many ventilators you needed. I used the one that president Trump uses cause I, you know, it’s pretty good. They’re not about to put out there.
I just use this one in the model. Uh, and uh, overall, you know, you can see basically we did, we did pretty good. Uh, we’re and we’re past our peak so you know, free, uh, for this route. So that’s good. And then we look at the how we do with deaths and you can see, uh, we’ve, we’ve gone past our peak by about 10 days now. So over over the top, unless we have another burst, I don’t think we will. We’re in good shape and we’re coming back down and we’re probably gonna end up, we had a, uh, we had, uh, overall fatality rate about 2.46%, which is pretty much average for the, for the, for the country. So, uh, we did good. We did good on the containment. So that’s the hospital layer of the question. And so now if you’re the governor, you got to fix that.
You have to sort of say, well, what’s happening, uh, with, with particular area, let me go into Detroit. And Detroit actually had, uh, they were, they were, they were roughed up quite a bit right there. Uh, this is, this is ton of tough, but you know, uh, and you can get a sense of, of who was, who was affected and some of the key parameters and more detail. And then if you want to focus a little bit more, you can start to look at, at the economy. And that’s the next question, right? Is, is the, you’re more expensive than the disease itself. And so what you have to do is you have to say, well, when I, when I start to shut down the economy, this is for Detroit, Warren, uh, this is, uh, this is from Harvard. And basically it’s a, it shows you that we’re expecting a job loss.
So 19.63%. This is for an economy of the overall United States where we’re expecting that it’s going to go down to about 22% unemployment. So comparatively, Detroit is doing better than, excuse me, better than average. Better than better than the 22% but you can start to see who exactly is being impacted. Right? And that’s important. So equipment manufacturing, we got to help help those guys. Right? This, this, this is going to be a big problem. If there’s that of if, if, if those jobs aren’t coming back fast so they can start to project, okay, if they’re not going to come back fast, I’ve got 30,000 people, 35,000 people, I got to worry about a, so maybe I need to go and ask for a little bit more federal assistance so I don’t back up the state. Uh, those kinds of things. You can start to decide or, or do I want to go ahead and open up the economy a little bit.
Give these guys their jobs back. It’s manufacturing some of the manufacturing. You can distance yourself, right? You can put on PPE, you can, you’re in pretty good shape. Other kinds of manufacturing, much harder. So you probably want to look at the, probably want to look at, can I distance it and isn’t really important to my economy. It’s really important that I can do the distance, then you want to do it, it’s really important and it can’t do the distance. Then you want to protect them as much as you can and probably not do that first. You probably want to do the easy one first. Explain, especially trade and so on. You can go down the whole list and then figure out exactly what your plan is when you know what’s, who’s going to be affected. So that’s what, how this chart is used in. And by the way, this will all come out in an, in a phone app and a couple of weeks. I think eventually you’ll be able to click through and be, be cool. So, uh, we’ll, we’ll see if we can get it up. I hope we can, I just need this by the time the bars open so that we can use that for bar arguments like that. Right. That would be helpful. That we could settle those bar arguments right then and there. That’s what we need. That’s right. I got, I got six points. Right. Exactly.
So anyway, that’s part of the economy. And then what you start to do, and this is a little bit more complicated, but you want to do a goodbye, talk about boxing. And the first slide I said, you know, I want to create this box. Turn off the County, turn on the County. So the question is how long you turned around, turn it off and eventually this, this is a different state. The state said, I want to turn on who’s there at the time and turn off one third of the time. I’m anticipating my employment level be 84% when I’m on 60% when I’m off. And so here’s my target box. Here’s where I am right now. They were actually a point of at about 0.6. Um, so they were already closing down a lot of their important locations. They want to open them up. So we said, you can open those up, know that you’re looking good, you’ve had your, you know, your, your, you’re in pretty good shape, but if you’re going to open them up, you’re going to have to make some compromises, right? You’re going to have to make a decision whether you want to have the Billy Joel concert, you know, with lots of people, or whether you want to have your electricity on.
It’s not that bad, but you know, you’re gonna have to make some decisions about which ones, what are your priorities and what do you want to find out? What do you want to keep? Where do you want your risk point to be? That’s absolutely right. Is it the bar or is it, is it the restaurant or there’s going to be some challenges and some tough decisions. These governors are probably going to have to think about this a lot. Every day. You want to go to hockey games where you want the car, you know the manufacturing lines back open. Yeah, yeah. That right. That, that, that, that’s a good example. That’s it. That’s a great example. Or can I do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and they’ll, and the answer is, yeah, we can get there, but you have to decide what your unemployment rate is and how do you want to make these arms off.
It’d be nice to kinda modulator rather than really have to say, Oh my God, we’ve got to put on the real breaks because we over, we overdid it and then that’s very painful, but it can sort of turn out are enough different sectors, you know, do it right. You’ll keep enough people going that it feels pretty good. Um, but it won’t be perfect. Like I said, you know, we’re talking about probably overall the economy will be down like 20, 25%. I mean, I hate to say it, even if we do it pretty well. Um, but that, and that’s, that’s it. That’s, if this is a really terrible, now it’s not as bad, bad as we think. Then maybe, you know, maybe we don’t need any of this. No, but uh, at least we go, at least we’re were planning for it. If you have the testing density up there so we can at least just make them make these decisions so you can start to see, you probably want to do, you probably want to continue to self isolation. All the courting. You want to shield the over seventies and the counter stations, you probably don’t want to have pop public gatherings unless you really choose carefully school closures. You probably want to keep the schools closed. Uh, you might want to do, you know, you can open like Germany, they just had an open up for the final exams, but that was it. But then canceled Oktoberfest. But then the, Oh, that’s a bummer. Which Bob is super, super angry about.
Especially the one that strict guard and the Munich. Yeah,
I mean that’s, that’s his, that’s his trip. To me, that’s his pilgrimage to Mecca is his Oktoberfest at me.
Okay. You’re getting on a plane these days. It’s tough. You know, I don’t know if you want to get on a plane for seven, eight hours, get over there. That’s it. I get swimming and stuff too. So it’s maybe good that they decided to let it go. Anyway, that gives you a sense of this. So a lot of this is going to be whether or not you, uh, how good you are at social distancing a little bit. That’s going to be come down to behavior like we were talking about. And so that was one of the questions you had about Google and Google coming through with their, uh, movements. And so I, I, this is Oakland County. This is a distancing today and you can see that compared to baseline, our retail and recreation numbers are actually lower than, than, than the average for the United States.
We’re doing a really good job. Their transit stations were doing better than that than the United States workplace. Actually, we’re slow. We’re actually more closed down in the rest of the United States, I think because we had a bigger hit than residents most. He’s like, you know, 46 47 but work 52 that’s big. You can see where we come up with a little bit in the middle of the week. What’s interesting is, um, you know, we, we love our parks and we’re actually, you know, we’re, we’re out and about. It’s, you know, we’re being shut out, shut into the winter. And so there are a lot of people at the parks. And so here you, you know, you want to choose a little bit carefully. You want to make sure you’re not in too crowded a park and you’re able to maintain your socialists and see if you can’t, and you’re jogging.
I try to wear your mask and it was a pain, but, but understand that there’s a lot more going on in the parks and it’s typical. You ready for it? And you choose a path that most people aren’t on. Uh, and, and our retail grocery pharmacy, we’re actually a little bit below, we were actually going a little bit more to, you know, grocery and pharmacy stores then the rest of the United States, the rest of United States is minus about 35%. We’re at 22% and like Wayne, it’s only down 11%, but that, that actually is bad as is, you know, that that could come back to haunt us a little bit.
Well, and actually what, so what I’ve heard from a lot of folks, um, you know, I’ve got a lot of friends in Detroit, uh, that live in the city and they’re saying that like, they’re, they don’t have the, like the stock issues that a lot of the suburban
grocery stores and that kind of stuff have. And so I’ve seen a lot of friends from the burbs that are going downtown to hit those neighborhood grocery stores. And so, I mean it’s, it’s almost so, I mean it’s so okay, you’re solving the problem, but now you’re cross contaminating, you know, kind of like the whole, Hey, no, don’t go to your place up North because they don’t have the infrastructure to handle an influx of people, you know, from a densely populated area just in case. So I mean it’s, it’s, yeah.
And so Bob, you know, you were asking about whether this is real and yeah, you can see they, they, they built it in Oakland County. They don’t have quite enough of the, of the coverage they, they’d like to, we need to have more cell phone users. But, but you know, it sort of does suggest what’s going on out there.
So it’s sort of, it’s sort of a, and as I said, we’ll try to get this up on a, on a, on a mobile app, you know, and then, and then it’ll be, it’ll go to the world cause we have all this data for the whole world. Hopefully everyone will be able to use it and you know, it’s all free. And, um, I got to talk to the developers that they may want to start a little bit, but hopefully it’ll be all free for us and we’ll be able to, you know, get our weather forecast every morning.
Wow. I mean I, I just, I, that’s all I, I feel like I just absorbed, I think I just drank from a fire hose.
A little bit about Kobe, you know, we can talk about some of the drugs and some of the next steps. Uh, I know if you want to get together next time, if you’d be happy to do it and we’ll talk about, because that’s really the bylaw I love, you know, what’s going on. And you know, the step four of the reproductive cycle of a virus. We’ve got Proteus inhibitors and percolating the DNA. We can go on.
See, and I, I will absolutely nerd out with you. One of my degrees is one of my degrees is in biochem. Bob’s eyes will probably glaze over it if you can find a way to relate it to beer or Jaeger Meister somehow
not a fermentation.
Oh yeah, no, I want to talk more toilet paper shortage. Let’s get in the jury room or my room. I got two theories. One is that now everyone’s got to eat their own cooking. Some stomach problems too is, you know, one person costs and then 30 people ship their pants.
There will be two critical areas of shortage that you know, your listeners should know about. Um, the first area, critical shortage will be in the area of PPE. So if you think about this, you know, right now the only people who really competing for a good protection are essential workers who have to be out there like the police and, and, and, and of course the health care workers. So that’s, that’s a small, it’s kind of, you know, we can kind of get by with say, you know, three, 400,000, uh, masks a day. You have to reuse them. And you know, uh, which, you know, probably the maximum capacity we really have right now about 4 million mass. That’s what we did in the demand for dope, for those people needing the masks. But if you think about it, when we open up our economy, everyone will be going back to work.
Everyone will be feeling like a little bit exposed and the end 95 maths are the better mask. And so I think there’s going to be a huge, I don’t forget, you know, we’re just one economy. That’s Michigan. We’re competing in a and compete against all the Europeans and all the Asians for the those masks. Um, and so my guess is that if that, my guess it’s, it’s, it’ll happen for sure. You’ll see a lot of, a lot of demand for that, that PPE and the, and the other big area is the, especially masks and PA and gloves. So those two areas will be really stuck.
Um, so the one, um, there was one, I think it was NPR, uh, that published, uh, this was actually one of the topics that we, we always start a new email thread every week with, you know, topics, we bounce back and forth. What NPR published out, a statistical model that said basically based on their data, their projections, all that kind of stuff. The opening, the opening update for Michigan should be about May 21st. So that’s, you know, and so like right now we’ve got through May 14th, so like is like, how do you feel about that week plus minus like is that within the margin of error or, yeah,
no, I, so originally when I did the modeling, you know, I didn’t think we were going to be as good as we thought we were. So I thought we’d be kind of dealing with a peak, uh, quite a bit higher peak. And it would last quite a bit longer before we could have opened up. So originally when I did my modeling, I thought it was going to be kind of out in early may. And, you know, we did so well that actually we pushed everything back and we went through the, uh, you know, at a lower level and we got through it faster, which is, which is great. Um, so we, a couple of things. First we, we, uh, we didn’t get the 14 straight days. We sort of went up and a couple of days of those days we have a little bit of ups and downs as, as the weather gets nicer, we want to go out and weekends. Um, and so those, those two things, if we can get that under control and we don’t have another upsurge like we did last Friday and this weekend, um, then, uh, then I think we’ll be ready. But I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t open up everything. You know, I wouldn’t be really careful about making that decision right. About. And that’s what, that’s what I’m talking about with other States as well and say, you know, let, let’s, you know, the auto plants, um, you know, some of our, our key, our key industries, we want to make sure, uh,
that open those up preferentially, which in Georgia is apparently bowling alleys and hair salons. That’s a, that’s those are their key industries.
Yeah, no problem.
Probably no, no offense to anyone watching from Georgia or listening to Georgia. I’m just saying
no where the challenge is going to be. The same thing happened in Singapore. You know, Singapore was pretty well controlled and w and we missed this, you know, I’m working a little bit with them. When we moved, we missed a small population of, of, of, of migrants that we weren’t controlling very well. And then seeing a port is such a huge hub of transportation hub that, you know, people fly into the airport and it just went everywhere and now it’s completely out of control. I really worry Georgia is actually in control right now, by the way. I’m George’s not that bad, even though, you know, they could go out of control.
Oh no, I was, that’s actually one of the States I was looking at when you pulled up that graph.
Yeah, no, I’m totally happy that George is in general. But the problem is they don’t have the testaments. They need know to keep it in control. And we had that huge air air base there. I didn’t know the air, the airport there, Hartsfield and well, and that’s the situation.
Well that’s one of the things that I, you know, again, just getting back to the fluidity of the situation, you know, we keep finding out that, okay, the first death he, you know, in the U S wasn’t end of February. It was first week of February. And okay. The first exposure here, Oh, by the way, we just discovered there was, there were at least a few people at CES the first week of January in Vegas. I mean, there’s 170,000 odd people that go to that thing and then fly back to all parts of the world from that. So, you know, and that’s so, I mean, I guess, you know, we, you know, we kind of jokingly said, you know, Hey, you know, the Spanish flu was 1918, it took until 10 years ago before that full pathology was, you know, available and all that kind of stuff. Like when like, when do you think we’re like, we’re gonna know like when like where this really like were really started and were really shit. Like when, when do you think that’s going to happen?
Yeah. So, uh, uh, when it really happened, um, so it really happened, it really did happen in China. There was no doubt about it. We can walk, we can trace back all the mutations and see where we’re, the first year we have about 14 options for patient one. Um, and that’s too many, right? You saw the death rate is you see one patient already have a hundred, so, and unfortunately there are some theories that, you know, originally I just kind of live in completely, but there seems to be a little bit more to it than that. Maybe a first up the eye that he could have been in the scape virus. I still don’t think that’s a very high probability, but there is a story of a storyline that says we were trying to go after a vaccine for um, uh, you know, for, for AIDS. And it would be logical. They would try to use, use this as a, as a vector. Uh, that’s a theory. Well, and there’s, and there’s,
there’s, there’s a, there’s two theories that go along with that theory though. One is, Oh, it was, you know, biochemical, you know, was chemical warfare and it got out or you know what, what you’re saying is it was, no, they were doing research into it and it,
yeah, the, the, the, the research to see what we’re trying to, we think that in the next 10 years we’ll be able to have a vaccine for AIDS. And what we’d like to do is we would like to use these factors that help that, that get in our, that get into our antigens as fast or faster than, uh, the virus is able to. So we use a viral vector in order to be transparent the, the cells that the virus is going after. So we get there first and then are able to stop the machinery before they reproduce. So that’s, that’s the way we do it. And you know, it, it, there is a storyline that says, you know, this would, this would make sense. There are a few, uh, AIDS type Geno genomic sequences that are in this virus, but I still give it a very low percentage chance of being real. I think it might probably start with bats and went to another animal and probably that much of humans. That’s, that’s by far the most reasonable explanation.
So that’s one of the things that I like the, I know, the first couple of weeks, um, a lot of the articles and a lot of the stories are, you know, use the word slippery when it comes to describing this virus. And you know, as far as how it was transmitting and how it was mutating. And I kind of haven’t seen that in awhile. And then of course, you know that Netflix drops the tiger King and the next thing you hear there’s a couple of tigers in a zoo in New York city that have it and all that stuff. So I mean, I guess that’s the thing, you know, like if people are worried about whether it’s their pets at home or you know, or that kind of stuff. Like what, what’s the reality of that situation?
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s, it is, it is real. The reason we watch is it doesn’t sound very significant, but having a, an extra animal that can, you know, if it’s only in humans then it only, it only mutates in humans and it has to, what happens is you put the virus under a certain level of selection pressure kind of species that you’re in, right? So if you’re in humans, you know, there’s certain kind of selection pressures that we’ve at a pretty, you know, pop, we have a population is pretty diverse, but it’s still within, you know, between species you get quite a bit more diversity or different kinds of social pressure and you have them, uh, you know, uh, a cache of a virus that’s sitting, waiting and possibly changing to uh, be in the cat that then can come back to us know you’ve got additional mutation factors.
Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s, that’s why we watch it and take it sounds like, Oh, the poor kitty cat. But it is something we take seriously and it’s a concern. I have talked, you know, it’s obviously, you know, one of the things that I really watch very carefully for is the mutation rates. And, um, I’m, uh, I’m not as a strong and expert in mutation rate analysis as some of my friends are. My friends say, you know, coronaviruses are pretty stable. We probably can find a vaccine. What’s nice about it is that it means we can, you know, we can actually hold a steady long enough where you find a vaccine and drugs for it. The problem we have with like the flu, pneumonia, um, malaria, even worse, um, uh, AIDS is they make you take so much that you can never find a conserved region of DNA and protein to go after. Uh, this one, uh, we think is not going to have that much rotation rate, but we, I’m, I’m still very concerned and watching it very carefully. There was a recent, there was a pre publication that came out by one of the top researchers in China that indicates we’re seeing a little bit more efficient than we will be. Were hoping.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the last one, I, the last thing I saw like a week ago, they were tracking 11 different strains, um, at the time.
Well, if you want you can go to, uh, I think it’s called, uh, there, there’s a, there’s a whole website of course, the real time and it’s called, I think it’s called new virus, I think.
Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s, I think that actually might have been where I was a week. Yeah.
Yeah. It’s great. You can watch all this stuff, but uh, but in truth, you know, there’s, if you think about the, the virus and how much rotation you’d expect if it was highly mutated, it’s not too terrible. It looks terrible, but it’s that it’s not too bad considering how prevalent the nurses and we, you know, I was worried about the, there there was, there were a couple of things that I’m worried about, but I won’t speculate on that. On TV. I’m watching pretty carefully. So, I mean, what would we be doing as a society if we didn’t have Netflix? [inaudible] baseball, right? I mean, you remember the first pitch, uh, president Bush, Boston, red Sox and Yankees that brought the country home and now really all we have to do is pray to God that they release more shit on Netflix because we watched everyday. I’m a little worried that they’re going to get to be able to get the actors together and the content is going to go to hell. What’s going to happen after the fourth iteration of,
I guess I’m watching the Sopranos again.
Dig it out. Old Kenny powers. Yeah, like I’m watching just the old crap that I’ve, you know, I know I’m doing the same. Well actually I’m working about 22 hours a day. It’s, it’s sort of peak season obviously for, for people who are for sure, but Hey, it was great. We should get together.
Yeah, I was going to say, speaking of which, I did not expect this to go an hour and 45 minutes and I know you’ve got a lot. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no apologies. No apologies necessary. This was amazing. Thank you so much for taking all this time,
but, and hopefully we’ll get together again under better circumstances. Talk about the drugs, talk about the vaccines. I love it.
Absolutely. You, you, whenever you have an open invite, that’s, that’s how that works.
We want to get the word out and they’ll be happy with you having a crispy.
Awesome. Thanks. Thank you so much. Feel free to drop off. I appreciate it.
Pleasure. Fred brown.com. It’s definitely one of the, I’ll put them in top 10 guests we’ve ever had and it’s been about six, seven years of doing this show. Is that the same song? Yeah. Wow. Really. Thank you.
Aye. Aye. How do we go yucky off after that? I don’t,
no, we’ll wrap things up. That’s perfectly, perfectly acceptable. This is a super happy.
Well, Hey, we uh, we did have uh, one uh, read in there. Let’s make sure I got a, we get that in there just to be safe even though, yeah. And I’ll probably add, I’ll probably edit it and put it back at the start of the episode just to keep them happy now. But Hey, so with the capital one Quicksilver card, you earn unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase. Everywhere. That’s unlimited. 1.5% cash back on everything you buy and unlimited really means unlimited. With Quicksilver, there’s no limit to how much cash back you can earn. Capital one, what’s in your wallet? Credit approval required at capital one, bank, USA and a, and I would just like to take a moment to just say that that conversation was so fascinating that it is my birthday and I have had, this is my second drink. Like I, I am not BA and this is the Randy special. This is the, uh, Yazzie and mountain Dew. Uh, and, and, and I did not overdo it. I D that was hands down, do that next to like the F, like the, the, the one we did with all the folks in from Flint. And that, uh, the guy that was doing the geological surveys, that was Holy shit. That was fascinating.
Indeed. So a slow clap for Dave. Not yet.
Hey baby steps. We take the little wins during, during the, during the quarantine.
All right, well happy birthday once again and we’re going to wrap things up for episodes.
Well, and for what it’s worth, I mean, you know, yours is May 1st yours is right around the corner and we’ll have enough, you know, we won’t have another episode before then. So happy birthday to you too, dude. And, uh, we do, we need to, when this is like we need to plan for next year, we need to do another good joint birthday party. Uh, cause every time I see those pictures bubble up on my memories. That’s that. That was hands down one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had in my life. And we need to do that again.
Yeah, it, it uh, no fat has this time.
Nah, maybe Randy’s, maybe we’ll do Randy’s fat. We’ll get a fat head of Randy’s at this time. My head’s already pretty big.
All right, well Hey, we’re going to wrap things up. Episode three, 45 of the item of the show. Thank you to Fred Brown, Fred brown.com. You want to look up more of the stats and research as he progresses throughout this madness we’re dealing with, I guess. Thanks to everybody on behalf of Bobby and writing to us all a favor, drink up your drinks, get your phone numbers. Uh, I guess stay home and uh, we’re going to get the hell out of here. Um, seeing you next week. Uh, stay healthy and beat it. Take care guys.
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