outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

there are already quite a few covid podcasts out there. I loved this tweet, though I should say I am also a podcaster, of a sort.

I know this time of self isolation is hard and scary for people but however bad you are feeling- please, please don’t consider starting your own podcast

Straight men under the age of 35 are particularly vulnerable to this and we all need to be vigilant of the dangers x

— Nicola Coughlan (@nicolacoughlan) March 16, 2020

DW: Iran, its dire.

supposedly the US had 1,748 new cases yesterday, as opposed to 983 the day before.

should be thought of exclusively as new proven/reported cases, of course

of course. it's just like when in Jurassic Park when they only found the 'extra' dinosaurs when they started looking for them.

hard to tell how much is true exponential increase vs people who were already infected who just hadn't been tested prior.

one kind of obvious thing i've been thinking about, and was just reminded of in the bold part above - is this the first time that a crisis has hit pretty much the entire world at the same time? speaking of WWII, maybe that was the last global-scale event of this nature?

AIDS

Toba supervolcano at 75 ka. The years 536-542: Icelandic volcano + Illopango volcano + Plague of Justinian. Black death of 1346-1353. Great Influenza of 1918.

WWII was perhaps the last global event of this magnitude, but there were places like Latin America and Subsaharan Africa where it mostly effected trade. Whereas the Great Influenza of 1918 was devastating pretty much everywhere, on all inhabited continents, and from Polynesia to remote Inuit villages.

Wales to shut all schools from Friday

The 1918 pandemic was so lethal precisely because of the conditions created by the First World War, right? Would it have been anywhere near as virulent if it had occurred in peacetime?

According to Crisanti, the director of the virology lab of U Padua, as little as 10% of #COVID2019 carriers show any symptoms at all. He sampled repeatedly the entire 3k+ population of Vo ', one of the initial clusters.

I'm struggling with a lot of the data tbh but if this is correct, and the data on negative testing is also correct, it suggests that 10% of people who have coronavirus think they do and 90% of the people who think they have coronavirus (or at least, have reason to be tested for it) don't.

Does this just behave incredibly differently to other similar viruses or is it broadly common for a lot of carriers to be asymptomatic?

1918/1919 pandemic was likely spread from large amounts of people moving around the world in unsanitary conditions on a scale not seen before - however the media blackout about it made it much worse - Spain was the only western country freely reporting it, hence the name.

Importantly, most died during the 1918 pandemic of bacterial pneumonia. That was decades before antibiotics.

xxp Typhoid Mary is the most famous asymptomatic carrier! But tl;dr it’s very common with viruses

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptomatic_carrier

DV, a former ILXOR, had a blog on "WWI 100 years ago"*, which had a category for the flu - definitely worth a read. TL;DR the war didn't help, but the initial outburst just hospitalised a lot of people - the second wave was a mutation that killed.

https://ww1live.wordpress.com/tag/spanish-influenza/

* an ideal accompaniment to being housebound for any period of time, particularly if you want to feel less miserable about your fate.

The information about asymptomatic carriers is one of the most confusing aspects right now, and the way it is being shared, even by the most intelligent health experts, is not helping at all.

xps:
It's generally believed late-war famine in Germany, Austro-Hungary, and civil-war torn Russia contributed to lethality of the 1918 influenza. But the worst mortality rates were actually places facing influenza for the first time, up to 22% in Western Samoa and among the Inupiaq people (their village of Nome lost 90%), places largely untethered to global politics or food supplies. The Alaska territory administration was posting armed guards to prevent traders and fur hunters from penetrating inland. So, malnutrition + global transit + absence of immunity to related diseases

Worth noting in this context that the most common comorbidity in Italian ICU patients is obesity (in Wuhan, it was hypertension followed by cardiovascular disease and diabetes).

yeah I was wondering about that

time for that crash diet (n.b. not *obese* as such, just...not quite what you'd want)

It would be great if we all learned a lot of lessons when this is done, about diet, personal health, emergency preparedness, and so on. I mean, we won't, but it would be great if we did.

not sure where to put this really:

Cambridge University Press has just made all 700 textbooks currently available in HTML format on Cambridge Core free to access until the end of May to assist readers during the Covid-19 outbreak. This also includes 58 textbooks in Language and Linguistics. https://t.co/TFhUaANkXE

— Michelle Sheehan (@MiShee54) March 17, 2020

Ha, I was gonna link to exactly that, with the exact same "don't know where to put this", but didn't because it was down due to too much traffic earlier.

good opportunity to finally do my course* properly amirite

*or a different, better one

also big up to MIT Open Courseware (watch free courses) https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

and this old reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ecscwk/what_free_things_online_should_everyone_take/

FYI lj the uk gov only lists high risk people as those with a BMI over 40 & the reason for potential complications is to do with visceral fat complicating ventilation if it gets to that point

Some more:

• Open Culture has a list of 1,150 movies to watch for free

• International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) Rotterdam has made 200 docs available to watch for free

FYI lj the uk gov only lists high risk people as those with a BMI over 40 & the reason for potential complications is to do with visceral fat complicating ventilation if it gets to that point

― gramsci in your surplice (gyac), Wednesday, 18 March 2020 15:22 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

that's good. BMI is kind of bullshit as it has me down as borderline obese when I really, really don't look it - doesn't account for broad-shouldered cypriot body type etc etc

same here. back when I was doing weight loss challenges a lot of people were pretty surprised to find out how much I actually weighed. I got the "are you sure it's healthy to be losing this much weight?" comment a few times and I was like...uh I'm still 220

Do you act smaller in person?

I can also attest to the advantages of broad shoulders - which reminds me, time to get some exercise in.

trump just opened up the press conference by referring to the "Chinese Virus", in his very first sentence.

And continuing to make whatever current testing is going on sound horrifying.

Trump wants everyone to know the invisible enemy happens to be chinese.

Ugh so my boss has info from someone inside downing st that it will be announced tonight that London is going into total lockdown as of Friday.

What does 'total lockdown' mean?

My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

Ok yeah I know obv grain of salt etc but this is pretty serious and another friend heard similar from someone. I think it would mean people are told to stay indoors and only grocery stores and pharmacies remain open.

Yep, FT reporters also saying this on Twitter.

My one direct report and messaged me to tell me that she’s heard it from someone in the army and was like uh can I go to the store before this is announced and all hell breaks loose? :/

we've been living like it's been total lockdown for a week now

nonetheless, does this mean no public transport?

They need key workers to get to work. Maybe they’ll enforce wfh for those who can but who aren’t being allowed to do so. Absolutely no way half the people on the train with me yesterday, minimum, needed to be there.

Guess we’re about to find out.

The French government today was saying that if the UK didn't tighten up its handling of the virus very soon, it would close the borders to British citizens.

we should have done so last week

"Ok yeah I know obv grain of salt etc but this is pretty serious and another friend heard similar from someone. I think it would mean people are told to stay indoors and only grocery stores and pharmacies remain open." well they're about a week late.

xpost

the lockdown in Paris hasn't affected public transport much, because it's needed to get people to work at hospitals, food stores, etc. though ridership is way down (as I can watch from up-close trains on one of the elevated lines of the métro from my apartment windows). I'm on a big boulevard and can also see that buses are still frequent but almost all entirely empty or with just a single rider.

in Wuhan - bigger than London - public transport has been shut for over a month iirc.

Ok so I guess public transport and bars etc still open?? Boss did say she heard it would be from Friday so maybe they won’t announce it until tomorrow or then? Maybe they think schools closing is enough to tell the public about right now? Who knows.

an article (in French) of testimonies from victims of the virus that has shaken me: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/03/18/il-y-aura-un-avant-et-un-apres-coronavirus-si-nous-restons-en-vie-des-malades-temoignent_6033492_3224.html

The issue with Coronavirus is that other similar epidemics have you at your most virulent, shedding most after you develop symptoms, whereas you shed at a ridiculously high rate in the early days of this virus