outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Reuters reports:

A British company behind a 10-minute coronavirus antibody test, which will cost about a $1, has begun sending prototypes to laboratories for validation, which could be a game-changer in the fight against the pandemic. Health technology firm Mologic, which created one of the first at-home pregnancy tests, is aiming for the test to be rolled out by as early as June if the trials are successful.

Antibody tests are designed to establish whether people have previously been infected, as opposed to antigen tests which show if someone actually has the COVID-19 disease caused by the virus. Mologic said assessment and validation of its COVID-19 diagnostic test had begun this week at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and St Georges hospital, and that global partners would also examine the prototypes.

elizabeth holmes at it again

Condolences fred 😞

xp that was my first thought!

missed it earlier, my condolences fred.

Terribly sorry Fred <3

Shit, Fred, that terrible. My condolences.

oh god, Fred. Hugs if I could.

I'm so sorry Fred, that's horrible. My sincere condolences.

The state with the prettiest name: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/26/coronavirus-tests-scarce-florida-home-millions-elderly-hospitals-scrounging/5083283002/

Sorry to hear that, Fred.

sorry to read it, fred

My 10 pm commute to work at Elmhurst Hospital. The 7 train still with plenty of people commuting home from Manhattan. Many of my patients work jobs classified as essential, be they cab drivers, construction laborers or delivery workers, without receiving any essential protections pic.twitter.com/LRFOoArNWX

— Ben McVane (@ben_mcvane) March 26, 2020

A N.Y. Nurse Dies. Angry Co-Workers Blame a Lack of Protective Gear.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/uw-model-says-social-distancing-is-starting-to-work-but-still-projects-1400-coronavirus-deaths-in-the-state/

For those interested in the 538 of covid death in the USA here you go https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

oof, that's a grim website. all based on one analysis, though. i see that it's based off of current information available, which makes sense, but it seems like the projections assume that the current amount of ICU beds available don't change over time. for example, for New York, it shows 718 ICU beds available right now (which seems really low? for Illinois they show we have 1,131 ICU beds right now. more than NY? holy shit if true), but also 718 ICU beds available a month from now, and in June. one would think NY will be able to at least slightly improve their situation? i don't know.

Australia is moving to enforced quarantine for new arrivals.(hotel in the city people land in), troops on the streets enforcing self- isolation.

xps Many condolences, Fred, to you and your choir family.

Fucking hell, nothing on rents yet. (Australia)

Condolences.

Really sorry for your loss, Fred.

Took my husband to the ER yesterday - he was complaining of shallow breathing, increased heart rate and night sweats. Thought it would be wise to get him checked out even though he didn’t have a fever and no known close contact with anyone positive. It wasn’t covid - turns out it was a panic attack. :/ He just didn’t know how to describe it. Take care of your loved ones, folks.

Very sorry indeed, Fred.

Kaiser Permanente is discontinuing routine chloroquine prescriptions for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and malaria patients to deal with a shortage driven by #covid19, and thanking them for their "sacrifice" https://t.co/TK1MzsosiT via @tanyachen and @dvergano

— Azeen Ghorayshi (@azeen) March 25, 2020

Condolences Fred

Kaiser Permanente is discontinuing routine chloroquine prescriptions for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and malaria patients to deal with a shortage driven by #covid19, and thanking them for their "sacrifice"

Yeah but socialist "death panels" would be wrong

Bevon Bloise, a registered nurse at Mount Sinai West, complained on Facebook that the hospital does not have sufficient personal protective equipment, or P.P.E. “I’m also very angry with the Mount Sinai Health System for not protecting him. We do not have enough PPE, we do not have the correct PPE, and we do not have the appropriate staffing to handle this pandemic. And I do not appreciate representatives of this health system saying otherwise on the news.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/nyregion/nurse-dies-coronavirus-mount-sinai.html

Boris. Welp.

plsss

roz, sounds terrifying

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/us/politics/coronavirus-ventilators-trump.html

sharpen the pitchforks, seriously

murder

does anyone even produce guillotines anymore?

Is there a country anywhere in the world that is dealing with this worse than the US?

Brazil maybe?

contrast that with this: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/border-wall-construction-continues-with-additional-contract-for-12b-proje/574917/

(in case you just read the URL, it's 1.2B not 12B)

this is straight up murder

fucking NYT:

But in an interview Thursday night with Sean Hannity, the president played down the need for ventilators.

“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he said, a reference to New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo has appealed for federal help in obtaining them. “You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

Yet no response from the governors; his claim just sits there.

Roz I hope your husband is doing better.

there are lots of them. on a per capita rate, it's still worse in many areas (including most of Europe)

for example, italy and spain are in the thick of it right now, with overflowing morgues

xposts to Matt DC

Matt DC's question wasn't whether the virus is currently hitting any countries worse than the USA at present (answer to *that* question: it is) but rather, whether any country is handling the crisis worse than the USA (answer seems no).

xpost to the hannity quote

it's always kind of newly shocking to realize the extent to which he does _NOT_ get it. like he truly doesn't even understand the problem of ventilator shortages and why you might need surplus capacity at this time? wtf

xp oops, i misunderstood the question! on who is handling it worse, i'd assume the US is near the bottom, but i would also assume that there are places with even more authoritarian leaders who are actively suppressing the bad news. for example, north korea miraculously has "zero" cases right now

I worry about Egypt.

(for people who find relief in tracking things, NYT has launched a new county-level

https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-county-data-us.html

No single agency has provided the public with an accurate, up-to-date record of coronavirus cases, tracked to the county level. To fill the gap, The New York Times has launched a round-the-clock effort to tally every known coronavirus case in the United States. The data, which The Times will continue to track, is being made available to the public on Friday.

...

In late January, not long after the first known case was reported in Washington State, The Times began tracking each known U.S. case as counties and states began reporting results of testing. Such testing, which had been delayed, gradually became more widely available. For the last eight weeks, a team of Times journalists has recorded an array of details — locations, dates, ages and conditions, when possible — about newly confirmed cases reported by state and local officials.

By Friday morning, The Times had tracked more than 85,000 cases in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories. There have been more known cases in the United States than in China, Italy or any other country, and more than 1,200 people have died in the United States. Researchers, scientists, government officials and business executives have requested access to the information. The Times is releasing its data publicly in an effort to broaden understanding of the virus’s toll.

they're posting this county-level data on GitHub

The Greatest Nation on Earth. https://t.co/HhyDm0ZHxe

— Nuha Serrac 💙 Bernie Sanders (@NuhaSerrac) March 27, 2020

'Literally why it's so great' — Republicans, probably.

well, you heard the man, let's get this thing back up and running

https://i.redd.it/xsn79wrgw6p41.png