''Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.'' ―Albert Einstein
Full disclosure per the Pistol-Forum CoC: I am the author of Quantitative Ammunition Selection.
The outbreak in Italy is scary... increasingly getting worse, now the fatality rate is 6.6% of al known cases (827/12,462), with 1,028 in serious/critical condition. All this in a little more than two weeks. I know... the death rate is just a poor indicator at this moment.
196 deaths in the last 24 hs!
And worth repeating, 85% of this is in Lombardy, one of the most developed and wealthiest parts of Europe.
No doubt there are many more cases (like in any outbreak of this type), but they have performed 60,761 tests so far, and not evenly distributed all over the country but 80%+ of theses tests in a region that has about 16 million people, at a rate of about 3,000 tests per million people.
Last edited by TiroFijo; 03-11-2020 at 01:21 PM.
Got this message from Grainger, a crazy big industrial supply company:
• We are working closely with suppliers to maintain the flow of product or find alternates where supplies may be limited. Like many, we are affected by the global shortage of pandemic-related product, including personal protective equipment, which we typically stock to well-exceed customer need–even in significant emergencies.
• To put the challenge in perspective, over the past few weeks orders for safety masks exceeded our entire on-hand supply by several years, and in some cases, decades. We are working through this challenge and are leveraging our supplier relationships to quickly obtain available merchandise, but in some cases, shipment timing is still undefined.
• Please understand we must prioritize orders to ensure customers such as the government, first responders and hospitals have appropriate resources to assist those impacted by this virus. All other orders are arranged based on Grainger inventory management commitments, contract obligations and order timing.
I thought the bolded was pretty crazy, decades. People have been ordering a metric shit ton of masks.
On the home front.
My wife just told me that her friends grandson (about 12) is pretty sick. His parents took him to a clinic and they tested for flu. Came back negative. The clinic said they couldn't test for CVD, that only people who check into the hospital can be tested. That would be Everett Prov. Not sure if they're going to do that but it seems ridiculous to me. Why tie up hospital staff with that when they already have their hands full with new confirmed cases everyday? My wife had coffee with her friend a few days ago so she is now unsure if her friend was exposed. Good news is her friends contact with her grandson was 10 days ago so I don't think she would have been exposed if he has CVD.
The take away for me here is there isn't enough tests still, or not enough labs to do the tests. So we've decided to stop all social interaction and we're limiting our non social interaction to trips for food, which will be once every few weeks. The entire area here is basically shutting down. According to the news nobody really has a handle on this except maybe China who will now quarantine everyone coming into the country.
State health agency here says they have enough tests and the ability to do those but it looks like they don't for people who don't want to check into a hospital.
Last edited by Borderland; 03-11-2020 at 02:12 PM.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
I feel for you and businesses of your type. No matter how sanitary you keep your facility, the type of activity you do requires you to go hands on and at bad breath distance. Just one infected person in the 4 day incubation period can put everything at risk.
Give me a robber with a gun anytime. At least if my guys keep their heads on a swivel they have a chance of seeing it coming.
We are discussing protocols here with handling as we do some of the dirtiest material in the world. Other peoples money.
Stay safe brother.
Last edited by rsa-otc; 03-11-2020 at 02:33 PM.
Scott
Only Hits Count - The Faster the Hit the more it Counts!!!!!!; DELIVER THE SHOT!
Stephen Hillier - "An amateur practices until he can do it right, a professional practices until he can't do it wrong."
I agree, but doing so requires upending the normal construction approval processes. Using normal processes, building a new plant takes months of prep work just to get the approval to proceed. And if the plant is anywhere near something the EPA covers or where endangered wildlife is, it becomes years. So that process needs to be tossed. The Pentagon was built in six months; it would take a decade to do so today. OSHA regulations would have to be waived.
Then we have to talk about raw materials. We rarely mine for stuff anymore. That is all done somewhere else. And setting up a new supply chain is not easy.
Then we talk about the people to do the work. Since NAFTA passed, US manufacturing has been dismantled, with basic manufacturing moving to other countries. A lot of skilled trades jobs went with those manufacturing plants. Finding a decent machinist is hard to do as all of the good ones have good jobs. It took decades to get us to this place, and we are not going to crawl out of it in months.
Quoting myself from waaaaay back on Page 1 of this thread (01/22/2020):
She's traveling again for work twice more this month, to Washington D.C. for a conference, and to Bucharest for a series of meetings. At nearly two months into this thing, I'm no longer sure that the "risks are pretty low."
"Worrisome" has become an understatement.