outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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

hint: profiteering and killing poor people, like always

this is schmaltzy but I'll take any positive i can find just now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mndkG32D5Cg

Fauci:

“When you gradually come back, you don’t jump into it with both feet. You say, ‘What are the things you could still do and still approach normal?’ One of them is absolute compulsive hand-washing.

“The other is you don’t ever shake anybody’s hands. I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you."

https://time.com/5818134/anthony-fauci-never-shake-hands-coronavirus/

Suits me, I hate shaking hands. We need an elaborate system of bowing in its place, possibly involving little dances too.

The federal government will end funding for coronavirus testing sites on Friday. While some sites will transition to being state-managed, others will close as a result. This as criticism continues that not enough testing is available.https://t.co/DuBCbJoRDO

— All Things Considered (@npratc) April 8, 2020

I like shaking hands with people...the prospect of living in a world where people are afraid to touch each other is dreadful

^^ I love shaking hands. This whole sterilize-the-world movement is shortsighted.

shaking hands, totally fine with never doing that ever again.

What will dogs think?!

I love a hug and a kiss but I hate shaking hands

Can we still shake cocks

perfectly fine way of saying hello to someone is a wee nod of the head and saying "awrite" ime

Had no idea we were going to cure Parkinsons through this.

Finger guns are surging right now.

great news for groping presidential candidates

Also, Mike Love.

The Faroe Islands veterinary scientist who converted his salmon virus testing lab to SARS-CoV-2 testing in early March:

Guardian: Veterinary scientist hailed for Faroe Islands' lack of Covid-19 deaths

The 5300 tests his lab has run account for 10.8% of the island's population. For comparison,Iceland has tested 9.6%, NY state 2%, the US 0.7%, and the UK 0.4%.

so many men are so cavalier about hand washing, gotta think I’ve touched a lot of pee via handshakes

"Urine is sterile!", shouts the non-handwashing guy.

i cut out the middle-man and wash my hands in piss

I have seen so many men, and not the ones you'd think, completely skip the sink after both urinal and stall.

me too and I've been informed a fair amount of women don't wash too

Japanese tv is telling me about an Australian trial to test the effectiveness of BCG vaccine in reducing coronavirus viral load. Which juts tells me I know even less about vaccines that the tiny amount I thought I knew.

Immune systems have a lot of moving parts. T-cells are just the most specialized. It's possible the BCG vaccine triggers some generalized immune responses that are helpful against COVID-19, but not specialized to it. I leave this stuff to the people with the fancy labs and decade-long post-grad educations.

Ed I linked a couple of pieces about this here

BCG vaccine is not a conventional vaccine. "It does not prevent primary infection and, more importantly, does not prevent reactivation of latent pulmonary infection". Its used in treatment of superficial bladder cancer, and experimentally as an adjuvant in cancer immunonology. So, seems to be some sort of generalized immune stimulant.

Serious issues with BCG supply, it seems. I'm not sure this could be scaled up quickly.

BCG is a generic and it’s stable, if it turns out to be effective, they’ll scale it up. It’s cheap to produce as well.

Which also means trump is less likely to invest in it and then rant about it.

Have been wondering if theirs childhood (and possibly pre travel) BCG Japan’s would still do anything for me.

BCG confers a degree of long term immunity (some vaccines like MMR are this way, flu vaccines not so much), but one of the articles I linked said it’s safe to reimmunise anyway. Though the guidance says it doesn’t work for over 35s, but maybe that’s just the on label use? Can’t imagine bladder cancer is that common in that age group.

Everybody dreaded getting the BCG jag when I was at school, so many horror stories circulated the classroom!

I don’t remember getting mine though I have that big scar to show for it.