outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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?

@stet has a great point about the correlation between the amount of positives vs the amount of testing.

eg, I don't believe anyone's mentioned yesterday's NYT article about the doctor who was testing patients in JANUARY for COVID-19 (iirc she discovered a dozen positives) but she was silenced by the CDC.

Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time.

In late January, the first confirmed American case of the coronavirus had landed in her area. Critical questions needed answers: Had the man infected anyone else? Was the deadly virus already lurking in other communities and spreading?

As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.

To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.

By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.

What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.

“It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html

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?

― akm, Thursday, March 12, 2020 9:28 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

well, for one, there's the complaint with the FTC about zoom hijacking browser and webcam security settings (https://epic.org/2019/07/epic-files-complaint-with-ftc-.html), as well as the usual data collection banquet that such things are

teacher ownership of (self-produced) teaching materials has long been a professional/labor issue in schools, and there has been some history of, or at least a history of anxiety about, schools requiring additional uniformity across online offerings and/or illicitly exploiting technological access to effectively retain teacher content (e.g. to use in future versions of the course).

(many of these issues were discussed at the university level during the MOOC craze since it was seen as posing an outsized risk of such things happening, with bigger economic/financial drivers behind it, but it's just as relevant to non-massive online teaching)

xxpost I listened to the Daily podcast about that, and tbf it seemed pretty ethically tricky. There are protocols and standards in place that doctors etc. are supposed to follow. This seemed like an instance where that was hampering the work that needed to be done, but it's just as easy to see other situations turning out worse. A lot of the podcast discussed the ethical considerations and challenges, irrc. Kind of equally frustrating and fascinating.

One of my wife’s friends likely has it. Thinks she picked it up at Disneyland last week. She can’t confirm though because they didn’t have a test and couldn’t get her one. The doctor just shrugged and said “it’s everywhere now.”

To clarify they ruled out basically everything else via other testing and the doctors believe she has it as well.

good times

I'm somewhat surprised Trump continues to let Fauci go on CNN.

I'm surprised Fauci hasn't put his hands around Trump's throat

Friend of a friend tested positive in New York. Community transmission. Fever for three days and felt shitty, so went in and got the test, currently sounds very much like a really bad flu (in their case). Barfing, feeling terrible, etc.

i got worried due to what felt like a sore throat today, but the moment I tried to start talking, I realized I was extremely dried out and dehydrated, and also fatigued from leading 8 hours of lecture based training non stop for 7 straight days. a little water and I was fine.

I tend to psychosomatically convince myself I have things though so it's only a matter of time. though atm I have only gone out to shop for groceries and get dinner cos I was out of groceries.

a friend of mine's mom may have it, she got back from vacation and immediately started displaying flu symptoms; I am extremely worried for my own parents

My 75-year old brother-in-law is recovering now. He said for a while he felt like he was going to die, but he'd rather die at home, so he didn't seek hospitalization. My wife is feeling pretty relieved. He was her last sibling alive out of four.

just in time for hay fever season

Australia now recommending against all travel overseas and all gatherings over 500 are banned. Although not till after Scotty has gone to the footy on Sunday.

Unfortunately he will, most likely, recover.

pic.twitter.com/9XieecxPr3

— Peter Dutton (@PeterDutton_MP) March 13, 2020

Updated trolley problem: will the pandemic have been worth it if it kills Trump?

Just got a call from my son's school district, Austin public school is canceled today. Next week is spring break, who knows what happens after. I checked the Austin COVID-19 page, and as of 2:00 am they've officially gone from 0 to 2 confirmed cases, neither community spread.

Look, I fully support banning travel from Europe to prevent the spread of infectious disease.

I just think it’s 528 years too late.

— Rebecca Nagle (@rebeccanagle) March 12, 2020

Just days after mocking COVID-19 as a media farce & a flu, Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro — in isolation as the country waits to learn his test results — addresses his followers wearing a mask, telling them not to attend a long-planned protest on Sunday in his defense: pic.twitter.com/62ORFdUhUM

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 12, 2020

I have no shame in saying I hope that cunt dies.

... Bolsonaro not Greenwald!

oh thought you meant Twitter

Looking back to New Year's Eve and it just feels absolutely insane that we just walked blithely into 2020 without having even the slightest idea that this was already going on, and now it's dominating every single aspect of life basically right around the world and will do for the foreseeable future.

At some point soon we're all going to be two-tier societies where some people will still be creeping around in fear and others will be striding around like golden immuno-gods.

On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are "overreacting" to coronavirus, the national response is "their next attempt to get Trump," and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020

breakfast viewing for the president^

pls fall in well, falwell

Trump will get coronavirus and survive

Updated trolley problem: will the pandemic have been worth it if it kills Trump?

......no?

If you had a time machine would you go back and infect baby Hitler?

How many people at or close to power in UK/US believe in strong genes and strong breeding stock and think thinning the weak out of the herd makes the nations stronger as a whole? Is it a coincidence that the two major govts perceived as taking the least/slowest actions have frequently been associated with eugenicists?

Sorry for tinhattedness - just throwing shit around

finally some good news: bolsonaro's test is positive