outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

nationalise everything now:

The government of Italy has announced it is to re-nationalise the former national carrier Alitalia to make sure Italian nationals are never again left stranded overseas by a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic.

The takeover, part of a 25bn euro coronavirus response plan, will cost taxpayers up to 600m euros, AFP reports. Deputy economy minister Laura Castelli told Italian radio on Tuesday:

At a time like this, a flag carrier gives the government more leeway. We all saw the difficulties our compatriots faced in returning to Italy. Our decision stems from this.

Transport Minister Paola De Micheli said a “national carrier was strategic for our country” at a time of crisis”.

Nationalising Alitalia is more of a hobby for whoever is in government in Italy. Last year it was going to be nationalised through the back door by having the state railway company buy it. It seems to get nationalised and part privatised or part sold to a foreign airline on a regular cycle.

isn't it famously shit?

Not that it isn’t a good outcome for the people that work there but it not exactly a bold first step on the road to a socialist Italia.

It's not implausible that all the major airlines are going to be bankrupt if something approaching normality hasn't resumed by this time next year so i think it's certainly possible this will be the first of many.

airports are certainly going to be bankrupt shortly too

(is it wrong to be pleased about the carbon benefits of this? I feel v. v. much for the staff)

real weird "last helicopter out" vibe in the office last night. We had to say our goodbyes to someone who resigned last week (d'oh) even though he's still working with us for 10 more weeks.

This is basically me, I spent a lot of Friday clearing out an old cupboard and my desk (including printouts of a senior partner being a complete prick to an ex-employee on Facebook that I was planning to use if ever I was in danger of working for him again). In the middle of last week I sent around an email saying "my last day's the 9th of April, I'll be going to the pub then", then after we were told on Thursday to prepare to go home, I was telling people that I'd probably go to the pub before I move to Scotland in May.

Like, if you asked me, I'd have said "Oh no this will be massively disruptive", but I still adhere to the old plans.

(is it wrong to be pleased about the carbon benefits of this? I feel v. v. much for the staff)

We're still all at work today. Tate Modern has shut up I here.

... shut up shop, that is.

Lothar Wieler, the president of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin, the National Public Health Institute in Germany, has said the risk to Germans was now ‘high,’ adding that is the highest gradation there is.

He told a daily conference said that 99 per cent of registered cases had so far survived the illness, and although he had “no idea” what the death rate will eventually be, at the moment all evidence points to the fact that only 1/5 of persons infected will be seriously ill.

Four out of five people will suffer only light symptoms or none at all. And according to information based on existing and previous cases, only around half of those who will be infected, actually get sick, “the other half do not notice it at all”, he said.

Alarming, wrt self-isolation, if half the people who have it aren't going to have any idea.

friends have just posted new pictures from the warhol exhibition at TM, so it's open today but today is the last day. it currently plans(!) to reopen may 1st.

(xp) I was wondering about that every thing.

my sister works at tate britain and stayed home in hastings today -- she's not public-facing and routinely wfh a couple of days a week anyway but i gathered from her yesterday that BJ's announcement was creating decision cascades in the correct direction within management

presumably there is a way of testing if someone has had this and recovered, though seeing as they're not intending to test people who have symptoms if they don't also need hospitalisation there's not much chance of testing actually being done on the recovered. would certainly seem like a useful thing to know tho.

xxp

Yes, there are antibody tests which tell you if you're believed to be safe – they're being ramped now (in the UK at least)

Yeah the antibody tests should show this.

I may have overdone it. I have liquid handsoap, next to bar soap, next to clorox wipes at the main sink by the door.

next to my slingshot.

thx stet and gyac. i was expecting to have picked up this virus over the last few weeks working at gatwick but had zero symptoms but now apparently that doesn't necessarily mean anything which is a bit worrying as i have been in contact with my elderly mum.

thanks mini mike, very cool!

Bloomberg Philanthropies, the multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg’s charitable foundation, has announced it is to fund a $40m global initiative to fight the spread of coronavirus in low- and middle-income countries.

Announcing the plan, Bloomberg, who recently spent about 26 times that amount in an abortive bid for the Democrat presidential nomination, said:

I know it's Amazon, but short-term, anyway, any kind of hiring has to be good news.

http://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/tech/amazon-shipping-coronavirus/index.html

ideal time for amazon to perfect their stranglehold on the market as their competitors all tank, great job lex luthor jeff bezos

I know. But I'm trying to think of people who'll need money to get through this.

yeah, and i can't disagree - there are very few correct answers available right now afaict

Meanwhile:

AUSTIN — Thousands of asylum seekers crammed in border towns near the Texas-Mexico border awaiting U.S. immigration hearings are at risk of dying from coronavirus because of poor health access and unsafe conditions, advocates say.

In Matamoros, where around 2,000 migrants live in a sprawling outdoor camp where they sleep in tents and share portable bathrooms and sinks, health advocates warned the coronavirus could spread rampantly. The camp is located across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.

Last week, Global Response Management, the nonprofit that operates the only health clinic in the camp, launched plans to erect a two-tent, 20-bed field hospital in the camp to house coronavirus patients if and when the virus arrives, said Helen Perry, the group's executive director.

"We are very concerned," she said. "You have a vulnerable, displaced community in poor living conditions without access to health care, where food is communal and housing is communal. It's a recipe for explosive infection and transmission

Can't help thinking about how the English are going to react when the story shifts to "hospitals overwhelmed, cannot take more patients" because yeah it's not going to be good.

― Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, 17 March 2020 12:00 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

We've had that for a decade and the English overwhelmingly voted for more of the same. It doesn't take a million COVID-19 sufferers to fill the hospitals, there was barely a spare bed before.

Sure it has been severely overstretched for the last decade, this is of an entirely different degree though, we are talking about middle class mail-reading white people being left to die rather than be admitted.

I'm not saying the reaction will be a good one, or that it will make anything better, that would be a massive stretch, but there will be a shitshow for sure.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/health/coronavirus-uk-model-study/index.html

I don't get this. how can the US "shift" its strategy? surely containment is impossible now, no matter how dire the report looks? Italy is on lockdown and it isn't as if their cases are disappearing currently.

Iran now done good:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/coronavirus-iran-releases-85000-prisoners-effort-combat-virus

Saw somewhere that the number of cases are flatlining in Italy

Poor choice of words!

total cases in italy increased 13% from 24,747 3/15 to 27,980 on 3/16.

the day before that, the increase was 17%. so i guess...that's improvement?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

Looks like slowing down/falling on daily new cases and daily deaths.

Yeah the cases are decreasing, I believe..

that's uh...really good news isn't it?

the number of daily _new_ cases in in italy slightly decreased, for one day.

https://i.imgur.com/xPHizeR.png

daily new cases also decreased on march 2, march 10, and march 13, so i think we'd want to wait for a few days to see if there's a downward trend

I didn't realize you could click on certain countries there. Iran shows improvement. Spain and the U.S. are not good. They don't have daily breakdowns for Canada.

Don't know what to do with the info, but Cuomo reported that NY state (for example) has tested 10,000 people, which is reportedly twice what was reported just yesterday. So testing is ramping up, at least in some places, to some degree, which will mean at least a spike in confirmed cases (of course).

one would hope that extreme isolation + quarantine measures would bring down the curve! that's why we're doing it!

the best single graph resource that i've found: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#trajectories-since-the-100th-confirmed-case

(it's interactive as well, so you can hover over particular countries to the see the growth rates over time)

((clemenza, elsewhere on that same page there's a daily breakdown of Canada's cases)

You’re probably not going to see a big drop until the last lagging incubation period cases show up - you’d expect to see the same drop in China. Then what?

oops, posted all this in the wrong thread.

https://i.imgur.com/HNfXfZp.png

this is why i'm hesitant to think that italy is approaching any sort of peak for new cases. their growth rate is in the same range as many other countries right now.

(a growth rate of 28% per day will double the cases every 3rd day. a growth rate of 42% per day will double the cases every 2nd day)

(((((of course, lack of testing availability damages the integrity of this kind of analysis, but it's the best thing we have at the moment, i think)))))

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/combination-of-two-anti-hiv-drugs-proved-crucial-in-coronavirus-treatment-rajasthan-official/articleshow/74653762.cms

Is this good news? This feels like good news, even if four is a very small sample size.

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/coronavirus-health-ministry-recommends-anti-hiv-drug-combination-lopinavir-ritonavir-case-to-case-basis-1656488-2020-03-17

Apparently not appropriate for all cases according to this but still.

Deaths seemed to take a big jump today. I check the worldometer way too often--they hit 7,500 around the time I got up at 9:00, now they're almost at 7,900. That's a much faster rate than previous days.

It's going to be positively shocking the first time the US's infection total triples.

Matt that’s touched on in the BBC doc about Wuhan. AIDS patients there are actually donating their retrovirals to coronavirus patients, even though it’s not an approved treatment, and there’s an unofficial network of delivery guys who collect the donations and bring them to the infected. Or at least there was, before everyone was ordered to stay indoors completely.