outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

the follow up is the winner imo

we're a frozen meat brand posting ads inevitably made to misdirect people and generate sales, so this is peak irony, but hey we live in a society so please make informed decisions to the best of your ability and don't let anecdotes dictate your worldview ok

steak-umm bless

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) April 7, 2020

i had no idea they went full irony ad as of last year, the twitter account is on brand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxLemhqG3L8

I imagine there are quotes like this all over the place, but here's Fauci a year ago:

"Now what I’ve essentially done is paint the picture of a pandemic influenza. Now it doesn’t have to be influenza. It could be something like SARS. SARS was really quite scary. Thankfully, it kind of burned itself out by good public health measures. But the thing that worries most of us in the field of public health is a respiratory illness that can spread even before someone is so sick that you want to keep them in bed. And that’s really the difference."

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dr-fauci-has-been-dreading-a-pandemic-like-covid-19-for-years/

that video originated on Reddit iirc. There were a couple of self-described physicians arguing about whether it was good advice or not but amazingly the argument devolved into petty name-calling with no real evaluation of the advice given.

― kinder, Monday, April 6, 2020 5:33 PM (yesterday)

this has not been studied usefully in patients who are not critically ill as far as I know, but "proning" (we are calling it "tummy time" because humor is needed) is a technique that has demonstrated effectiveness in ventilated patients with ARDS (the severe pneumonia COVID leads to) that is refractory to our usual methods of improving oxygenation. it is probably zero-risk but if it is beneficial the effects are probably very small. I do wish everyone had an incentive spirometer in their house, though

btw re: the 5G thing, after a night shift last weekend I screamed at a guy in dunkin donuts who was mocking everyone in line for physically distancing, who was saying it was all radiation and a government plot, and got a free wake-up wrap for my efforts. just doing my part

man I'm gonna scream at an assload of people at Dunkin if it gets me free shit

https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kerala-couple-elopes-gets-booked-violating-lockdown-rules-122117?

It’s outrageous that while states and cities around the country are struggling to procure masks and other PPEs the U.S. Department of Defense is giving the Israeli military 1 million masks ordered from China and shipped directly to Israel. pic.twitter.com/XvdvhcQmnN

— Jamil Dakwar (@jdakwar) April 8, 2020

This work will give a sense of undercounting:

Here's an analysis from The Economist of the increase in all causes mortality for regions of Italy and Spain. (h/t @kyle_brightnj)

Would love to see the equivalent for the US.https://t.co/e041jaL3zT pic.twitter.com/TkMuHnLTdH

— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) April 8, 2020

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/032/738/Screen_Shot_2020-02-06_at_10.46.47_AM.jpg

‘you worked for a country that was fixing mortality rates’

Some preliminary scientific conclusions from the Dutch today:

- There are serious doubts about people having had the virus being automatically immune
- Patients that only had mild symptoms, also show a very low number of antibodies, being susceptible to catching it again (and being a transmitter of it again). The more your infection flares up first time 'round, the more you're immune to it the next time. Alas it works the other way around, too.

that’s... unreassuring

does that mean that vaccines might not be a realistic option?

Obv I'm not an expert, but I'd say a vaccine is still a realistic, and the best option. But that can take a while. They're conducting further research into the 'mild symptoms = only mild defense for next time, and no immunity' right now.

I'm really glad there are roughly 30 vaccines in development. Most of them will either have unacceptable side effects, or won't provoke the innate immune system enough. Scylla & Charybdis.

^ innate adaptive

Dammit:

South China Morning Post: Coronavirus: low antibody levels raise questions about reinfection risk

That's bad news, but if you can't trust China to self report cases, or accurately count deaths, or offer their research up for peer review, and their tests and testing itself has been erratic (giving false positives and negatives, which is where that rumor of reinfection came from), and it's a more or less autocratic regime that prizes and weaponizes secrecy and controls the population with misinformation or lack of information, and even all the countries that do or are *none* of those things are making mistakes, and bad predictions, or are otherwise in the dark, let's just say I'll wait for conformation.

Regardless, most interesting thing in there was actually this, I thought: "All of the patients had recently recovered from mild symptoms of the disease and most of those with low antibody levels were young." So if any of this limited study (175 patients) pans out, then I guess it stands to reason that those with mild or no symptoms would also be the ones with low antibody levels, which I suppose might explain why they have mild or no symptoms. Or related, maybe a low antibody count is all it takes for young people to fight it off, but older or other people need more. Who knows.

Terrific piece of lockdown writing:

I wrote a little thing just based on some thoughts coming out of the lockdown and how we've been talking about households. Give it a read and I'd love to hear from other people on this https://t.co/mPVutlwITG

— Wail Qasim (@WailQ) April 7, 2020

w/r/t the quirkiness of reported fatalities dipping on the weekend (culled from a much longer thread):

Oh, one final thing before I log off:

Courtesy of a brilliant tip-off from @Crick247, here’s a very interesting bit of weekly "seasonality" in reported UK daily deaths:

Every Sunday and Monday, reported deaths are lower than Saturday. Every Tuesday, they rise sharply 🧐

Why? pic.twitter.com/ZQglhKHcsc

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 8, 2020

My theory:
• We know these numbers are allocated to a day based on when they can be reported, not when that person died
• We also know they are deaths that occurred before the day of reporting
• NHS England only reports a death once family members have been informed pic.twitter.com/KjIeLKwiQL

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 8, 2020

• Hunch: NHS either make fewer attempts or find it harder to get through to relatives over the weekend (or some other bit of processing slows at wknds)
• So despite deaths occurring on Sat & Sun, fewer get processed over the weekend, depressing the reported numbers on Sun & Mon pic.twitter.com/rSByEZ8uUM

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 8, 2020

• And then on Mon, that processing/informing bottleneck is cleared, resulting in a glut of deaths in Tuesday’s report
• This happened like clockwork today pic.twitter.com/ylTMh6hh5K

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 8, 2020

Yeah, there's no point trying to perceive a trend in day-by-day totals. Quite glad to see the FT switch to average-over-seven-days as the basis for their accumulative graphs.

There's so much noise in daily stats anyway. The ONS (at a significant delay behind the NHS figures) releases all this data for free anyway, so that's easy to download and comb through. I note that, in 2020, UK weekly deaths (usually 11k-14k for Jan-Mar, with about 15-20% due to respiratory illness) have been flitting either side of the five-year average by several hundred anyway, so there's no way (yet) to pinpoint (as others claim to have done with some Italy and NYC stats) a great leap in deaths which is not adequately explained by the official Covid-19 toll. But the ONS stats are only up to w/e Mar 27.

wasn't there a guardian article a week or so ago which mentioned that some backdated data is assimilated into official figures on a Tuesday?

I'm probably thinking of this:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/covid-19-deaths-outside-hospitals-to-be-included-in-uk-tally-for-first-time

"Every Tuesday the statistics authority will provide a backdated weekly count of all suspected coronavirus deaths of people who have died in their homes, care homes or hospices, which will be published in a combined form with the figures drawn from the daily death toll announced by the NHS in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The figures will be backdated to the previous week, starting with the week ending 20 March. It will include the ages of the people who died and give a regional breakdown."
so aiui this wouldn't automatically mean a spike on Tuesdays.

12 deaths at Elizabeth nursing home

This place is two blocks from where I live. My father-in-law stayed there for a little while a few years ago, before he was hospitalized and died.

A New Jersey nursing home is being closed to new admissions after at least a dozen deaths there were linked to the pandemic.

Eight staff members and another 16 residents at the Elizabeth Nursing and Rehabilitation Center have tested positive for the virus.

Five others are waiting for test results.

"Health officials have confirmed that at least 12 out of the 22 deaths in a nursing home were tied to the COVID-19 virus and at least eight staff members have tested positive, said Mayor J. Christian Bollwage. "This is truly heartbreaking for the families and my thoughts and prayers go out to them during this difficult time."

More details from another report:

Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage told NBC New York that 22 individuals at the Elizabeth Nursing and Rehabilitation Center have died dating back to March 21. Ten of those residents had confirmed cases of COVID-19, while the other 12 were never tested or were awaiting results when they died.

The deceased individuals represent more than 20 percent of patients at the Grove Street center, which has 102 beds in total, the mayor said. There are still 58 residents at the facility — 12 of whom have tested positive for coronavirus, according to Bollwage. Eight members of the staff have also contracted the virus, including the director of nursing and a physician who have both been hospitalized, and four others are awaiting test results.

I honestly cannot believe people are still getting on to cruise ships. wtf?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/04/08/coronavirus-latest-news/#link-5D5IK2DBH5BIZFQ2DHHD3SKCV4

Cannot fathom (no pun intended) what would entice a rational human to get onto the S.S. Tube of Death now, or any time in the last month.

This is what separates us from the death cultists, I guess.

Just read the first graph, and it says they departed March 15. Shelter in place did not even get formerly ordered here until March 20 (for example). Error in judgment, for sure, but at the time there was at least a hint of ambiguity/hope.

(Counterpoint: the dangers of covid on cruise ships was for sure a thing by then, so serious error in judgement, especially on the part of the fucking boats themselves.)

personally i think it was very, very clear that it was a bad idea, long before march 15

Probably about as sad as it gets during this:

http://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-leilani-jordan-grocery-worker/index.html

departed March 15

Cruise lines were asked March 13 by US govt to stop outbound trips

My immediate household suffered through a savage illness with COVID-19 symptoms in January through February (it kept coming back), I posted about it upthread... but now this study seems to be shedding some light on whether that was possible or not:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Study-investigates-if-COVID-19-came-to-Calif-in-15187085.php

The same thing happened to my household immediately after Thanksgiving. At first we thought that was too early for the timeline, but...

why the fuck is Victor Davis Hanson the expert in that piece?!

Getting overwhelmed with the amount of online school crap with the kids. I have no idea what grading is even going to look like. What about kids that don’t have internet? What about kids with shit parents?

1. there will be no grades, a billion and a half people are getting a season with an asterisk. don't worry about it

2. given the equity problems - kids that don't have internet, kids with shit parents, kids with special needs (like mine) - the answer is that people with relative privilege should slow-walk it. Best effort. Try. if it's not happening today, cool. Say fuckit and let them go watch BrainPOP or Magic School Bus.

If kids are a little iffy on fractions next year, so what? It's not like it matters if they're OMG FALLING BEHIND THE ASIAN KIDS or whatever. Pretty much everybody's doing their best, everybody's pretty much sucking at it.

Mental health and coping are way more important; frog dissection (or whatever) can wait.

My immediate household suffered through a savage illness with COVID-19 symptoms in January through February (it kept coming back), I posted about it upthread... but now this study seems to be shedding some light on whether that was possible or not:

I keep thinking back to some weird fatiguing fever thing I had in late February as well but it just seems so unlikely that it could have been circulating anywhere without enough people dying for someone to notice.

My cousin who died in February came down with horrible pneumonia in mid-January - two weeks of coughing followed by hideous chest pains. On the face of it, she was immunocompromised and caught a flu bug from one of her sons. She recovered by February but cancer got her three weeks later. Minnesota had no Coronavirus until March and I am definitely not bringing this up within my family. Losing her to cancer is bad enough.

xp I think it's possible. Even now, Covid deaths are being hugely undercounted because of attributions to different causes.

in the UK today it was 936 but I read somewhere ONS reckon it's often at least 8% higher than reported, but possibly this type of counting shenanigans is also probably going on everywhere else.

I read that big thread someone posted from the Hillbilly Elegy guy, where he noted that places where there were a lot of people who tested positive with no symptoms still correlated to a significant number of local deaths. And the places with no recorded local covid deaths similarly didn't have anyone asymptomatic testing positive. The conclusion he came to, which he concedes could be incorrect, is that it isn't that pervasive, relatively speaking, and that the notion that there has been a significant population of people who had it and didn't know it is very optimistic.

I'm glad noted public health expert The Hillbilly Elegy Guy is part of the discourse now

fauci was saying he thinks about half the people who get it are asymptomatic the other day.

but the hillbilly elegy guy is probably right. he did after all write a book with the thesis "the pound cake speech but for white trash", so is obviously a brain genius

Australians were still bear ting Australian on tourism related trips after the do not travel advisory and there was definitely a section of people who were either ‘fuck it, everything is cheap right now’ or ‘i can’t imagine cancelling or postponing this holiday of a lifetime’. This attitude seemed to skew towards older Wealthier Australians and there were plenty who were planing to take advantage of cheap cruises even after the diamond princess.

This I all based on a travel forum I occasionally dip into. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to go on a cruise even before this all happened, getting aboard a germ filled environmental catastrophe full of terrible people, never really held much appeal.

(BTW all these dickheads want rescuing by the Australian government now)

I was pretty sick in February, got tested for the flu, and was shocked to find out I didn't have it.

I didn't say the guy was smart or anything because he wrote Hillbilly Elegy - I've never read the book and don't know anything about him - just that he had an interesting post with lots of good citations (that I thought I saw posted here?). I think he's conservative, but wrote the big thread specifically to counter all the claims making the rounds in right-wing circles:

I’ve been reading a lot of the contrarian (primarily from fellow righties) COVID19 opinions, and I wanted to work through them in good faith. I find most of them pretty unpersuasive. As they say, THREAD:

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) April 8, 2020

Anyway, I think what he wrote wasn't at odds with Fauci. It's quite possible, per Fauci, that 50% of all cases are asymptomatic. What the Hillbilly guy was saying was that in places where a big number of all cases are asymptomatic, there is a still a significant number of deaths. But in populations with no reported covid deaths, there are also no reported asymptomatic covid cases, which indicates it's not completely widespread yet.

NYT:

New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that it was brought to the region mainly by travelers from Europe, not Asia.

“The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review.

A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.

The research revealed a previously hidden spread of the virus that might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place. On Jan. 31, President Trump barred foreign nationals from entering the country if they had been in China — the site of the virus’s first known outbreak — during the previous two weeks.

Hope this news doesn't lead to any vigilante attacks against European-Americans

They should go back to where they came from!

Gross incompetence or malignant intent?

Los Angeles Times: Hospitals say feds are seizing masks and other coronavirus supplies without a word.

In Florida, a large medical system saw an order for thermometers taken away. And officials at a system in Massachusetts were unable to determine where its order of masks went.

Hospital and health officials describe an opaque process in which federal officials sweep in without warning to expropriate supplies.

Jose Camacho, who heads the Texas Assn. of Community Health Centers, said his group was trying to purchase a small order of just 20,000 masks when his supplier reported that the order had been taken.

Camacho was flabbergasted. Several of his member clinics — which as primary care centers are supposed to alleviate pressure on overburdened hospitals — are struggling to stay open amid woeful shortages of protective equipment.

“Everyone says you are supposed to be on your own,” Camacho said, noting Trump’s repeated admonition that states and local health systems cannot rely on Washington for supplies. “Then to have this happen, you just sit there wondering what else you can do. You can’t fight the federal government.”

i have a friend who was incredibly, incredibly sick in late november in California with something that has every symptom of COVID-19. He was relieved to see that article about it possibly being in CA around that time. Hopefully he can get an antibody test.

xp oh a rhetorical question, how cute, what the fuck do you think these fascist pigs are doing