outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

As mentioned, our schools here in Vietnam have been closed since Lunar New Year and could be closed another month. The official decision is coming today I believe. The ministry of education has said that schools have to finish the school year by mid-summer so the current plan being floated is to allow some grade levels, the ones with important end of year exams, to resume school, in order to stagger students turning to school. The small test prep school I work for has pivoted hard to online lessons to stay running

it's odd to me -- trump is such a germophobe (remember his comments about the ebola doctor?) i figured he'd lock the infected americans out. but i guess he's worried about panicking the markets . . . and also the infected americans were probably white

I saw it reported that he supposedly did not make the decision and was upset that the decision was made.

xpost how has it been playing out, practically speaking?

There was an item about the first person to test positive for the virus locally (ie, not via travel), but the chaser was that this person had been hospitalized for a week-plus and only was able to be tested for it yesterday. So basically, it's far more widespread than people believed because the test is so hard to meet the requirements for.

Every time he opens his fucking mouth downplaying this he is panicking the markets.

I actually miswrote above, schools only get one extra month to finish the school year, so it'll be beginning of summer they have to finish by. It's been rather difficult. Lot of teachers out of work, lot of parents struggling to find someone to watch their kids, and like you suggested, Josh, I see a lot of kids hanging out together anyway (what else are they gonna do?). But I suppose it's still better to have those kids in isolated groups. Some of the international schools have not stopped lessons, they just teach them online; not sure about the public schools. There's still mask and hand sanitizer shortages here, no food shortages yet thankfully

Should also mention that this is the first case in the USA that the patient has contracted the virus from an unknown source:

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/coronavirus-patient-and-precautions-uc-davis-medical-center

This patient was transferred to us from another Northern California hospital. Since the patient arrived with a suspected viral infection, our care teams have been taking the proper infection prevention (contact droplet) precautions during the patient’s stay.

Upon admission, our team asked public health officials if this case could be COVID-19. We requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, since neither Sacramento County nor the California Department of Public Health is doing testing for coronavirus at this time. Since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered. UC Davis Health does not control the testing process.

Sunday (Feb. 23), the CDC ordered COVID-19 testing of the patient, and the patient was put on airborne precautions and strict contact precautions, because of our concerns about the patient’s condition. Today the CDC confirmed the patient’s test was positive.

(I guess when I wrote locally, it could mean local to my region or local to all Americans)

Our household also contracted what Lily Dale experienced a bit upthread in the past 6-8 weeks, came back for seconds (thirds with my wife). Our little one had to get an injection at the pediatric ER for her cough (they deemed it common croup based on obvservation i.e., no swab/sample/bloodwork).

It occurs to me that if anything could get the attention of the Trump administration properly focused on mitigating the COVID-19 outbreak, it would be the stock market completely tanking over fears that a pandemic will slow down or shrink the economy... in a presidential election year.

it's too late, it will slow down the economy

Do we really need 372 million ppl in America?

We need to downsize IMO

We were supposed to meet someone today and they oddly missed the time and they texted they had to go to Costco. And now I've learned that today is the day where everyone seems to be stocking up. So many people seem to be symptomatic here but like above not meeting the full criteria to test even though there are no kits. Supposedly they might try to get some from outside the US?

PSA: supposedly in 90% of coronavirus cases, you do not get a runny nose.

good to know

The symptoms that are pretty common in early stage cases are fever, fatigue and dry cough.

80+%: fever, fatigue, dry cough
~30%: shortness of breath, sputum production
~10%: muscle ache, confusion, headache
~5%: sore throat, runny nose, coughing up blood
~2%: chest pain, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting

Not looking forward to my turn with this.

also if you have an iphone you're *not* the villain -- apple does not allow films to show bad guys with their products

Buckle up America, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

xp lol

I'm feeling kind of run down and am going to an international convention tmrw... pray 4 me

pretty impressive how 3000 ~particular~ people dying can transform the world

It's something of a grassroots virus.

Yeah, I kind of had mild versions of all these things last month (sore throat, sooo tired) for three weeks but it never got bad enough so I chalked it up to extended jetlag and ennui. A friend thought it was mono but my lymph nodes were fine. And no one else around me caught it so i think it was just me. Xpost

Like I said mookieproof this is basically 9/11, Trump’ll be interning Chinese nationals within weeks

Regarding schooling at home in China, via https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n05/wang-xiuying/the-word-from-wuhan

Children were presumably glad to be off school – until, that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk’s rating plummeted overnight from 4.9 to 1.4. The app has had to beg for mercy on social media: ‘I’m only five years old myself, please don’t kill me.’

pretty impressive how 3000 ~particular~ people dying can transform the world

they may be the most powerful beneficiaries of global capitalism, but global capitalism would survive their deaths and continue on with scarcely a hiccough.

This is how we find out Bezos and Musk have actually perfected their Mars colony tech, we're just gonna see a giant rocket take off from Nevada.

it's about time

I did also learn today that costco put limits on paper goods and bottled water (at least they did here) that people could take because people stock up before any imminent disaster scenario, leave the stuff outside their home and return it all back to costco months later.

THIS IS NEIGHBOR RUMOR MILL.

is aimless having epiphanies roughly one week behind everyone else or

i think he's doing a tl; dr for this thread.

My neighbours are ahead on the stockpiling.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0nt4ulvci7imotc/C1416CAD-E961-47E3-9556-146A3D347692.jpg?raw=1

bauhausvirus

So our kids (ages 11 and 15) will be on spring break the third week in March, and last fall we booked tickets for a big family trip to .... Italy!

Unclear what is going to happen now. I guess if the airline gives us vouchers or something, we'll go ahead and take them. I hate to cancel because everyone's been super excited about it. But I'm not sure we're going to have a choice. We're supposed to be flying in to Venice.

don't french kiss anyone or lick any toilet seats and you'll be fine

dammit

I booked a second travel insurance policy for a trip to Colombia in a couple of months. Obviously Latin America is largely unscathed for now so I'm not especially worried other than suddenly being quarantined and not able to fly in the first place. The first policy had loads of convenient exceptions for pandemics, epidemics and quarantine, which isn't really something we thought about at the time of booking.

If the government is actively telling you not to go to Northern Italy then you may be covered. A lot of airlines are letting people rebook for different flights without giving money back so it might be worth a try. Whether that will continue as losses mount who knows.

Also FFS we've just thrown out our No Deal Brexit stockpile after it attracted mice. This apocalypse shit is trickier than people would have you believe.

Excellent summer to have a major international football tournament with players and fans flying all over Europe in multiple different directions at once.

also the Olympics in Japan of course

World’s biggest pop band axe April stadium tour

https://www.nme.com/news/music/bts-cancel-shows-in-south-korea-over-coronavirus-fears-2615780?amp

imo chicken littles going 10 cloverfield lane already is bad but insisting that a likely global pandemic is fine actually is also bad and not really any less irresponsible (nb I don’t live in the united states)

arah the world isnt ever fine actually anyways its not a case of less or more responsible its a case of can we not

Excellent summer to have a major international football tournament with players and fans flying all over Europe in multiple different directions at once.

also the Olympics in Japan of course

I mean, the idea that these will still be happening is kind of what I'm talking about?

My wife is going to be at SXSW in a few weeks. I wonder how even something like that might be affected.

There was an excellent episode of The Daily podcast about the virus the other day. It was definitely alarming but in an informative way. One of the biggest concerns broached is if this virus does what the Spanish Flu did (which had a similar mortality rate) and returns to finish its course in the fall. Granted, medicine and hospitals have improved, um, significantly in the last 100 years - that was pre-antibiotics - but it still sounded pretty serious. It did have some clearheaded thoughts about who is affected and how. So far kids under 9 (I think) they said were still mysteriously resistant or immune, which he postulated was due to recent exposure to so many other coronaviruses. The other is that, predictably, the older you get the more at risk you are, but considering mortality rates are still being estimated based on a single Chinese paper, and that the virus in China disproportionately killed men, who also disproportionately smoked like chimneys, it's still a little unclear how bad this actually is, even if it's easier to theorize how bad it could get.

I've been contemplating a brief vacation in Los Angeles in a couple weeks, and now I'm not sure if it's a great idea. I think it will be ok, but definitely a little nervous.

I think it will be ok. Because if your concern is catching it, I don't see how you're necessarily much more at risk there than anywhere else in this country. Now, if you're worried about travel disruption ... who knows, right? But on the other hand, maybe there will be shorter lines at Disneyland.

I was sitting next to a woman on the plane whose dad was the flight attendant (she was just flying with him for the quick leg, he has been a flight attendant for 35 yrs etc.) She said the flight was supposed to have 70 empty seats and it was now full from rebookings/ last minute standby. They had stayed in one of the japanese owned properties on the water that the airline always uses and the staff said they had so many empty rooms, unheard of.

shame on all of you

So, the Coronavirus, which started in China and spread to various countries throughout the world, but very slowly in the U.S. because President Trump closed our border, and ended flights, VERY EARLY, is now being blamed, by the Do Nothing Democrats, to be the fault of “Trump”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2020

Our family was planning a trip to Italy in March. That’s now not happening but at least the airline has waived fees for rebooking.

xp the real coronavirus was us all along