outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

lol aren't we still in a "national emergency" because of border crossings or whatever

My own state is taking drastic steps w/52 confirmed cases:

Actually only 5 confirmed cases in OH so far, but wait 1 or 2 weeks

All OH schools to close until April 3rd

Los Angeles schools still open. As of less than 24 hrs ago still getting calls regarding how it was cool to send kids in despite oh idk canceling all field trips and not allowing anyone to attend school events who wasn’t student or staff. We’re keeping our kid home, up till the schools close (whispers of them closing Monday for three weeks which seems like not quite long enough...)

worried about the large, close-knit, multigenerational families of new mexico, esp if the kiddos are vectoring

the local public schools are announcing they'll be closed until at least march 30 following this week

Pornhub is making their premium content free throughout Italy, to comfort those in quarantine, plus donating money to hospitals. (via Reddit) https://t.co/vVg63QBXl5

— Eric Nelson (@literaryeric) March 12, 2020

Disneyland closes.

No idea how they got the number, but impetus for Ohio school closures is reportedly an estimated 100k infected, obviously most of them as yet untested.

i'm having trouble processing those two posts together within the same few minutes

xp

today governor made a big announcement that schools are closed for 2 weeks beginning monday and state buildings will be closed to the public, and state employees who can telework are supposed to. i can only partially telework. i am taking tomorrow off for no reason and i want to grocery shop but i'm afraid it's gonna be a mess.

Wuhan now recording new infections in single digits for the first time since this started, according to the Straits Times. Apparently only fifteen new cases across the whole of China yesterday and, outside of Wuhan, six of the seven were infected abroad.

I'm sure Trump's solution will be to drown everybody who gets Coronavirus in the Pacific or Atlantic oceans

awesome news from Wuhan.

that's great news for china obv but it sounds like it only came with the sort of control measures that just wouldn't be possible in most other societies

western liberal democracy really killing the game these days huh

yeah, plus their government was initially slow to react and denied the existence of it at first, which lead to the epidemic explosion to begin with.

xpost yeah, pretty much never wanna hear how the US is the greatest nation again. we have a shortage of tests because our CDC decided to go rogue and then botched theirs, and our President insists we have the best tests, tests for anybody that needs them, superb tests

the tests were perfect

When it became a scandal that the United States simply didn’t have enough tests to screen people—and that an early version of the test was faulty—Trump said that the tests “are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect.” It’s a telling comparison: His slow coronavirus response and his extortion of Ukraine are linked together in his mind as two things he needs to narrate as the opposite of what they are.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES8IxqCXsAICn45?format=jpg&name=large

feel like I'm bout to wake up Christopher Walken in Dead Zone style

good atlantic article about how the coronavirus was a failure of authoritarianism before it was a failure of democracy

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/coronavirus-and-blindness-authoritarianism/606922/

yes there's enough failure to go around

seems like america has the worst of both systems:
-- an obsequious, authoritarian executive branch unwilling to face the unpleasant truth
-- lumbering, conflicted legislature delaying needed relief (and to go deeper, unwilling to provide obviously beneficial social programs in general)
-- population used to doing whatever it wants all the time, and not used to listening to credentialed experts about anything.

yeah we go all in

yet when it was Ebola, Republican Senators wanted like all of Texas put in a bubble.

america - don't talk to me til you're bleeding out of your every orifice

This is just sad:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/12/coronavirus-iran-mass-graves-qom

felt awkward clicking the "I'm okay with that" eurobutton

Trump said that the tests “are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect.”

lolol he seriously said this????? blows my mind that there's ppl who can't spot a pathological liar when they see one. He's sooo bad at it.

Like, uh, like my tax returns are perfecrt! I mean, perfect!

America, where nothing can possibly go worng

I saw him throw a perfect spiral

saw Trump having a Pina colada at Trader Vic's

what if this is the rapture

― frogbs, Thursday, 12 March 2020 18:34 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was thinking about that this morning. There are lots of people in or close to power who have been checking their watches for an apocalypse their whole lives and who wouldn't be minded to avert one.

2. There's evidence that the vast majority of the population is still susceptible in Wuhan - we estimated around 95% at end of January. As soon as control measures are lifted, there is the risk of new introduced cases - and another outbreak. Source: https://t.co/0nw3zHP8hG 2/

— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) March 12, 2020

That's not great.

So we're really hoping for a vaccine or an effective treatment, then.

Or everyone to die and the population to go down to Medieval levels

have we posted katie porter?

Holy shit. Katie Porter holds the CDC Director's feet to the fire and gets him to commit to FREE TESTING for coronavirus for ALL AMERICANS.

Watch every second of this.pic.twitter.com/dQMbhR5Oaa

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) March 12, 2020

if we survive this and it's worth having kids afterward this is gonna be my "in my day we had to walk backwards uphill in the snow" story for them

xpost That was great. Although when the doctor said at the end ~ "You are an excellent questioner', I just thought, "Obviously this man has not been punched in the throat enough."

I have a feeling the markets will explode the first time the death toll doubles in a single day.

Might actually quintuple based on Ohio's estimates

Like if nobody gets through to the caveman in chief soon, people who have previously believed their idiot MAGA friends that this is a nothingburger are going to flip out the moment the toll spikes.

In an unprecedented move, three of the country’s largest medical organizations demanded on Thursday that President Trump declare the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency.

The letter to Vice President Mike Pence from associations representing the country’s hospitals, nurses, and doctors asked that Trump declare a national emergency under the 1988 Stafford Act, which frees up resources and cash for states to more effectively respond to the crisis.

Trump’s ongoing refusal to make the declaration has stunned and frustrated state officials either struggling to contain or planning for inevitable outbreaks of the highly contagious respiratory disease. Politico reported on Wednesday that Trump did not want to declare an emergency for fear of contradicting his earlier statements that the virus was similar to the seasonal flu, and that he had instructed son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner to research the issue."

wtf is his problem? why won't he do it? is he STILL in active denial?

I can't really work out how the UK putting basically FUCK ALL in the way of controls in place to flatten the curve will flatten the curve.

Chart from my live on #Newsnight just now. Right or wrong, there’s no doubt the UK is increasingly an outlier in our Covid response. pic.twitter.com/ZczXx8M48c

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) March 12, 2020

Because the UK curve is only getting going - we are at 600 cases. France’s lockdown today came at 3000 cases. They are not trying to do stop this, Wuhan-style, for the reasons above, they’re trying to keep cases at a manageable level.

Terrifyingly risky.

Scientist from Denmark saying tonight that he thinks that approach is too risky (they are closing schools now). But he went on to say he fully expects another wave of epidemic there in the autumn as the flu season gets going again.

One way or another this is coming to us all, seems to be the grim truth. Vaccines are too far away, so yeah, the countries in lockdown are effectively betting on effective treatment coming very soon.

(Sorry forgot to say - those controls are coming to the UK, they signalled that pretty heavily today. Just not yet)

We heard today it's more likely we are at 6000 cases though I accept the comparisons are difficult as each nation has a different testing regime.

Yeah, there's a hard to quantify multiplier between tested cases and actual cases, which with handwaving amounts to the same point — if we're at 6000 actual, France is at 30,000.

I dunno where this belongs (maybe not here) but with so many universities moving to online teaching this week, a professor friend of mine posted on FB urging other professors to abstain from doing lectures via teleconference systems until the University administrations document whether and where these lectures are being recorded and stored. The implication, I assume, was that Universities might store up such lectures and then fire professors and.... what? just use their recorded lectures? give said lectures to an AI firm to develop teacherless courses? I don't know! Is this something people are actively worried about? and should they?