outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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

Yeah I started reading that one and stopped after the third testimony. Ignorance is bliss.

xp

I don't get why Italy was hit so hard. 35,713 confirmed cases and 2,978 deaths ffs.

combination of old population and immune systems that don't usually have to deal with grim and frostbitten northern european colds/flus?

it's the whole reason for the #flattenthecurve approach, i think - they just didn't/don't have ICU and equipment capacity to deal with the upspike in caseload

to the extent that the answers are deterministic, i would start with medical infrastructure

honestly hard to believe that last week at this time we still had basketball

as horrible as this whole thing is, am I correct in thinking that this might eventually provide a case study in the effects of reduced emissions and not constantly fucking with nature?

Here's an unexpected side effect of the pandemic - the water's flowing through the canals of Venice is clear for the first time in forever. The fish are visible, the swans returned. pic.twitter.com/2egMGhJs7f

— Kaveri 🇮🇳 (@ikaveri) March 16, 2020

Tesla appears to be defying officials in Alameda County, California—the site of its only North American factory, in Fremont—who have ordered Tesla to stop operations. TechCrunch reports that a Wednesday email from the company's human resources department instructed employees to come to work.

"We still do not have final word from the city, county, state and federal government on the status of our operations," the email said. "We have had conflicting guidance from different levels of government."

In an email published Tuesday by Eletrek, Tesla's head of HR argued that Tesla didn't need to shut down because the company counts as National Critical Infrastructure, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security. The category "includes auto manufacturing and energy infrastructure," according to Tesla.

"People need access to transportation and energy, and we are essential to providing it," the email said.

frogbs I thought that was debunked as not being Venice?