outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I had a horrible 9 day cough + wheezing session over the week before last and came out the other end. Did an e-visit with my HMO and they told me to suck it up, get over my cold and pick up some cough medicine from their pharmacy if I felt up to it.

That's not to diminish what anybody else is going through.

just found out a friend of mine had to fly to florida to retrieve her hubby and kids after he fucked up his achilles tendon. so I'm feeling relatively fortunate today lol

Tom, plz be well

also collardo, frogbs and all your people

Thanks morbs, you too

I'm more worried about you Morbs. Hang in there yourself.

finally some good news: bolsonaro's test is positive

― shosple colupis (bizarro gazzara), Friday, 13 March 2020 13:55 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

we’re back in the bolsonaro business babey

After a week of denial, Brazil's far right President Jair Bolsonaro has just announced that he thinks he might be infected with coronavirus and suggested he is going to take another test.

— BrianMier (@BrianMteleSUR) March 20, 2020

Infections specialist goes on vacation to Spain, brings back COVID-19 didn't self-isolate. Now in intensive care and a whole load of people including doctors on quarantine in Stavropol

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4298603

Ed, Frogs, Collardo, all of you: be well guys.

Grim thread on how bungled the lockdown has been in Italy.

In Italy it’s been now ten days of nationwide restrictions - the first country in the world to do so. I want to summarise all that is wrong with the current situation, which gets more concerning every day. (longish thread) 1/10

— Andrea Bagnato (@andreabagnato) March 19, 2020

People have been going to work over there so this has gotta a long way to go.

People are still going to work everywhere though, right? Even in countries with the tightest lockdown.

Hubei (and the rest of China to a certain extent) stopped people from going to work.

Article from Italy published on RTE today. This was interesting:

Stefano Paglia and Enrico Storti, the chief medic at the Resuscitation Unit in Lodi, have devised a no-nonsense technique for immediately identifying patients with Covid-19 - one we could christen the 'Lodi method' - that will go down in medical history.

"It's not based on the temperature of the patient, but on breathing difficulties, and the area it stems from," explains Castelli. "This method was used to identify the first patients who needed to be isolated, then to distinguish between the most severe cases and the milder ones; they would have a chest X-ray, and the level of oxygen saturation in the blood would be measured after having made them walk up and down the corridors for 50 meters. That's how they managed to deal rationally with the emergency throughout the night of 20 February.

Stuck in Lodi again

People are still going to work everywhere though, right? Even in countries with the tightest lockdown.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Saturday, 21 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Hubei (and the rest of China to a certain extent) stopped people from going to work.

― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Saturday, 21 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Even if China (and maybe South Korea and Taiwan) hadn't done it Italy ought to have.

everyone take care! and if there is anyone in your life that is still vaping anything, now is a great time for them to stop.

c’mon what about a little bit of weed in the evening eh. is that reallllly so bad

bein stoned is one of the few things getting me through this

cook it down, make some snacks?

I hate to be a party pooper but sending your lungs into overdrive is definitely not a good idea right now.

please don’t police other functioning adults

that italy thread xyz posted is hideous. Jesus fucking Christ.

I’m not a functioning adult so it’s my prerogative.

next they’ll be telling me not to go outside

i switched to vaping from smoking bowls largely to relieve my lungs! idk what to tell yall but i’m not stopping, i’ll let you know if i die immediately for the schadenfreude

Thanks for the well wishes everyone. Still no fever so that’s a good sign. I guess the uh...good news is that if this is gonna get serious we’ll know pretty soon

Btw with respect to vaping, if you’re just doing dry herb through a convection style vape I don’t think that’s gonna do much to your lungs other than irritate them with hot air

Just make sure it doesn't contain vitamin E acetate.

And good luck, frogbs!

yeah, I am not anyone's mother but a nurse friend in CA was venting last night (while we were talking about how younger people in the US were ending up in the hospital) and the least controversial things she said was that people "need to stay the fuck home and stop vaping anything."

( I am not an expert on anything vape)

NYT (no paywall); four days old, sorry if already posted

Working at a breakneck pace, a team of hundreds of scientists has identified 50 drugs that may be effective treatments for people infected with the coronavirus. Many scientists are seeking drugs that attack the virus itself. But the Quantitative Biosciences Institute Coronavirus Research Group, based at the University of California, San Francisco, is testing an unusual new approach.

The researchers are looking for drugs that shield proteins in our own cells that the coronavirus depends on to thrive and reproduce. Many of the candidate drugs are already approved to treat diseases, such as cancer, that would seem to have nothing to do with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Scientists at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have already begun to test the drugs against the coronavirus growing in their labs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/science/coronavirus-treatment.html

this thread is on the blood test we'll need to show immunity which we'll need to reopen the country. has any U.S. official mentioned... how far off they are? https://t.co/du8RhazCRa

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) March 20, 2020

thanks for easing my fears about vaping bud frogbs

Was talking with a friend yesterday whose sister in law is Chinese but was in America while it was at its worst in China. She was all "screw that" and didn't go back. But last week she decided to go back to China, because she didn't think the US had its shit together the way China does. She may be right!

Regardless, the station at home stuff is really just (at least in America) a strong recommendation of social distancing, a strategy of mitigation. Has any country truly implemented a literal lockdown? Did China? For how many people, just the cities at the center of the outbreak(s)?

Anyway, afaict the best way to protect yourself (aside from staying in) remains: wash your hands a lot and don't touch your face, and don't get close to people exhibiting symptoms. Stay home if you feel sick, but going outside is not otherwise bad, going for walks is not bad. Even seeing friends (from a distance) shouldn't be bad. I also assume going to work, while not ideal, is also not necessarily bad. Though I don't know how companies notorious for imposing rigid productivity standards will adjust to recommendations of distancing and hygiene and so on. Amazon, Walmart et al. have all announced they are adding hundreds of thousands of jobs. Will they be given gloves? Will be they be allowed to wash their hands as often as they need?

I disagree, going to work if you're not in an "emergency" field is bad. I walked past thru a crowded urban park (Prospect in Brooklyn) to get to chemo yesterday and did not feel good about it. Of course I am immunocompromised, my standards need to be higher.

Current Worldometer percentages.

Active cases: 96% in mild condition, 4% serious or critical
Closed cases: 89% recovered/discharged, 11% death

I would think you'd want it the other way around--this suggests many more cases move from mild to serious than the other way around. But there could be lots I'm overlooking (I'm groping around in the dark on whatever theories I derive from these statistics I post)--cheer me up and let me know what I'm missing.

the fuck? 11%?

xpost the staying at home thing doesn't mean people can't go outside to get exercise/air as long as they keep distance from other people. but people generally seem to not be able to make this determination for themselves so I think the people already overworked and stressed in a dangerous environment (and the US is only at the beginning of this) just want to convey a simple message. I also agree w/ morbs that people should not be going to work in non-essential fields.

ugh, i should've made my mom go to stay in taiwan and now that's not an option.

lots of people jogging yesterday near pier 76, where i had to pick up my car from the pound. they were not staying 6 feet apart.

on the sidewalk, people are not trying to keep a distance either. i was briefly on the jersey shore, and there people were, but not here in midtown.

Has any country truly implemented a literal lockdown? Did China? For how many people, just the cities at the center of the outbreak(s)?

Wuhan was on literal lockdown (remember when the Western media thought China were basically imprisioning an entire population against their will?) for months (pop is ~60 million, so that's like Italy or the UK). I can believe the cases have gone down even if the figures aren't exactly as reported.

xp To Clemenza, that's what I got from it, too. Death % and absolute numbers are ramping up

Very good (and mostly optimistic--realistically so) interview with the technical advisor on Contagion. I took out a subscription to Wired a few days ago, so this may be behind a paywall, I don't know.

http://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/

Can read it fine

I don’t think it really matters if you pass a couple of feet away from someone jogging outside. If you’re queuing in a shop or working at your job - i.e. next to people for some time, hard surfaces everywhere that people are constantly touching - that’s different

In other news I washed some change today

Whenever you use the word "optimistic" now, I feel it's important to differentiate between the helpful kind of optimism and the brainless Trump variety.

xpost ha, partner made last trip to the grocery store today for the foreseeable future (he said they sprayed everyones' hands down before they were let in the store). I totally wiped down his glasses, credit cards, wallet, phone when he came back and made him take a shower.

In the absence of available testing I read this earlier, it describes how there are four categories of people who get COVID-19:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/21/coronavirus-what-happens-to-lungs-covid-19

And I think (in the absence of fucking testing) I had category 2 mid-week:

The least serious are those people who are “sub-clinical” and who have the virus but have no symptoms.

Next are those who get an infection in the upper respiratory tract, which, Wilson says, “means a person has a fever and a cough and maybe milder symptoms like headache or conjunctivitis”.

He says: “Those people with minor symptoms are still able to transmit the virus but may not be aware of it.”

The largest group of those who would be positive for Covid-19, and the people most likely to present to hospitals and surgeries, are those who develop the same flu-like symptoms that would usually keep them off work.
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A fourth group, Wilson says, will develop severe illness that features pneumonia.

Had a slight fever and a weird little dry cough during the day that went on for most of the week, and then I had a pounding headache at 4am one night.

Today the cough is gone so hopefully I am done with it but I'll keep as far away as I can from everyone for another week.