outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I could walk out my front door right now or any other given Sunday, walk a mile in either direction, and not come within 20 feet of another human.

Lucky you. Try living in Islington.

I think it is literally impossible, during daylight hours, to walk down Seven Sisters Road and be 6 feet away from someone.

You need pavements designed for walking more than two abreast (if they're even that wide) for a start.

yeah, I am watching a Cuomo (NY governor) presser for the first time and he's pissed about people in nyc still congregating.

xp just make them all one-way and confine slow walkers to one road

they are likely turning the NYU dorms into covid hospitals.

the key data to look for is not a reduction in the number of new cases, necessarily, but a reduction in the number of deaths to doubling only ("only") every three days or more

i was mentioning that upthread so i think you might be referring to it. just to clarify - the doubling every 3 days thing isn't a sign of success/failure in itself. i was just citing it as an indicator, a way to compare the situations of different countries/regions. in general, though, looking at doubling rates (rather than absolute numbers) is the better way to track it. for example, look at the charts on this reuters story from a couple days ago, which uses a 6-day doubling rate as a means of comparison:

https://i.imgur.com/tyz2Me9.jpg

So once we get over Covid 19 how ready would anybody be for the next whatever.
Is this going to be like multi hundred year storms were a couple of years ago.

& is there any possibility of getting prepared for another not fully expected widespread disease.
Like is anything being done now getting people ready for further development or is it just depleting necessary stocks.

& on that light note.
Hope this is a short term thing relatively like.

I don't know if anyone knows/reads the Above the Law news site (it has Elie Mystal writing a lot for it) but the creator was just put on a on a ventilator from covid after being in the hospital for I think almost a week? He's 44, runs marathons and only has exercised induced asthma as an underlying health problem. It really really sucks.

Lucky you. Try living in Islington.

Just saying why it's not 4/4 Americans being asked to shelter in place. Believe me, I'm not boasting about my lucky status living where I do.

I remember seeing that guy’s twitter thread about what it was like to have covid 19 a week(?) ago, he was saying it was taking him an hour to eat his breakfast as he just didn’t have the energy and everything was a struggle. Yikes that he’s got even worse since, not what this non-marathon running asthmatic wanted to hear

I just looked up the thread and it was 4 days ago, the days are passing slowly

they are likely turning the NYU dorms into covid hospitals

saw a saucy tweet: "I refuse to die at NYU"

number of tested and confirmed cases in my state went from 45 to 90 over two days so... the rate of spread is making me anxious

Cuomo saying 40-80% of New Yorkers are gonna get it, that is uh...terrifying

they should stop En Vogueing then

See? Not so easy, is it? https://t.co/LY9Qha35RK

— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) March 21, 2020

Lmaooo

got emmmmmm

Rand Paul tests positive

NYC accounts for about 5% of recorded cases globally

"Covid-19" as a term seems like it was pulled straight out of a dystopian novel. Well done.

651 deaths in Italy in the last 24 hours. Down from the day before for the first time.

It's almost 2 weeks since the Italy lockdown started so that figures

is there any possibility of getting prepared for another not fully expected widespread disease.

The countries that have had the best containment response (travel restrictions, testing, contact tracing, quarantine) are those that experienced the worst of 2003 SARS (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam), and South Korea (which only had 3 cases, no deaths). And those countries, because they were so urgent about containment, will return to normal life long before the rest

I think its fair to say every pandemic changes minds about the value of public health for a generation or two of those effected. The West had been spared for a century from anything of this potential scale, which lead to complacency.

We had FDA administrators who were sending out letters to COVID-19 test developers in mid-February to halt their work, when they should have flown out the same administrators to every university and state lab to do the emergency use authorization applications for them. We could have had 20 labs competing to be the first with the best, instead of waiting for CDC to resolve the technical issues with its test. That's complacency of the highest order, and it all came from the top, the administration and political appointees who weren't mentally prepared to recognize the gravity of this, when the epidemiologists have been screaming about it since January.

Next pandemic, if it comes in the next 20 years, won't be faced with this sort of complacency. Rational travel restrictions will be instated early. There will be a national reserve of old but functional mechanical ventilators, hundreds of millions of masks, and the testing and contact tracing capacity of the CDC and state labs will be beefed up.

Axios: Sen. Rand Paul tests positive for coronavirus

Still asymptomatic.

rip big man, heaven needed a nightmare neighbour

We are now at a new stage. .@DrAmyActon just signed a statewide #StayHome order for Ohioans.

— Governor Mike DeWine (@GovMikeDeWine) March 22, 2020

My new favourite thing is Italian mayors and regional presidents LOSING IT at people violating quarantine. Here's an eng subtitled compilation. "I hear you wanna throw graduation parties. I'm gonna send the police over. With flamethrowers." #Covid19 #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/NbYuWePIVt

— 🌈 (@protectheflames) March 21, 2020

seriously, I think it was reported that healthcare workers were 10% of the infected numbers in Lombardy. The US needs to get it's shit together in protecting them and it's not looking good.

This crisis has made me realise I like a bit of authoritarianism in a pinch. Given the choice between Boris pleading with us to try to follow the advice of blah blah blah and mad Italians threatening me with flamethrowers I'll take Vincenzo De Luca every time.

xp no it is not

the nurses and staff at my oncologist's are heroic ppl and it pains me to know theyre in mortal danger

Draconian measures are the only solution now. Fuck it, I want the military delivering food supplies to people's houses.

Problem is that politicians tend to get very attached to authoritarianism once they've had a go on it.

in MAGAmerica I expect to be eventually removed from my house by the military, in what biological state I can't say

Your fellow citizens have stockpiled enough AR-15s to take down at least three successive tyrannical governments so you're golden.

the idiots don't have armed drones though

This is a very good piece by the people who did the Vo study.

The nature of this crisis means that establishing a structured response like this is key, while widespread testing is crucial in telling an accurate story of how many people are affected, and what the mortality rate of the virus actually is. In Italy, we have struggled with a rampant rise of mortality (the number of casualties divided by the number of infected people), which has reached an apparent value of 8% – far higher than the mortality rate in China and grimly close to that during the 2002-2003 Sars outbreak.

This high rate is misleading, though. After the first few days of the initial outbreak, cases were classed as all of those found to be infected by the virus. Yet since then, only the obviously symptomatic subjects – those needing medical care – have been tested for the virus and thus counted as cases

651 deaths in Italy in the last 24 hours. Down from the day before for the first time.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Sunday, 22 March 2020 18:08

It'll probably fluctuate for a while but this is still quite a relief after seeing yesterday's and thinking they could go over a thousand in one day before the curve flattens.

xp you mean that the data informing the 'mortality rates' are not counting what one might expect, or that widespread testing is crucial?
Afaik only people hospitalised here (UK) are getting tested (even then I don't know if it's everyone with symptoms?). Healthcare workers, people flying in from abroad, people who are sure they have the symptoms - are not. I would have no idea how to extrapolate meaningful data with that to go on.

xpost my friend is losing her mind because they have nonunionized people hired to admit people into the hospital she works now and they were not given masks or gloves and are not allowed to wear them.

I think they are all preparing for the time when they will not be allowed to go home for fear of infecting their families.

sorry they are not admitting people i went back and it's
"They are using young nonunionized people who are not clinicians to screen people as they walk into the hospital. They are providing them with neither masks nor gloves and have told them they will be let go if they wear either. They are not having them check temperatures but instead simply ASKING people how they feel, on the assumption that everyone is presumed positive."

As a friend of mine is fond of saying, the demand for certainty greatly outstrips the supply. At this point, I trust that the technically skilled and experienced people who are responsible for the response to this outbreak (as opposed to the political figures, whose abilities are all over the map) are doing their jobs at a high level and under great duress. My job is damned simple: follow their expert advice and try not to be an obstacle to them.

yeah, she wrote a very long thing entitled The Fun with Neoliberal Healthcare Fuckery Report:

So once we get over Covid 19 how ready would anybody be for the next whatever.
Is this going to be like multi hundred year storms were a couple of years ago.

The climate crisis is still very much with us it, didn’t disappear and we are still 30-40 years behind where we need to be with this. We just turned the world on a dime to confront Corona and now have a unique opportunity to rebuild our economies in much more sustainable way. If we’re going to spend trillions on restarting the economy, we have to do it right or this will be the next thing that kills us.

If anyone says ‘now is not the time to deal with this’ or ‘it can’t be done’; the rage should and will be immense.

Just like after WW2 nations built a new social compact with their people, social safety nets were build , health services came into being... We have to build a better world than the one we dismantled in the last few weeks.

extremely otm

yep

Re: Rand Paul testing positive

The Coronavirus Hoaxhttps://t.co/BUai4gGt2d pic.twitter.com/qJ1f04jZm8

— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) March 16, 2020

Yerac that is nuts. Do you mind sharing where that is? I’m an ICU nurse in the Seattle area and not only do we have RNs screening everyone at entrance (inc temp), wearing masks and gloves, but often hospital executives are there to help out as well.