outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

i swear every time i complain about ukilxors on the us politics thread pom or someone is there to say "you know US politic affects the rest of the world you can't expect us not to follow it"

Who, apart from the Comrade, posts on US politics threads?

And he's only doing it because he's bored of UK politics.

"Are you now or have you ever been a poster on the the politics threads of the United States"

i don't think one has to regularly pay attention to trump to relish the spectacle of a major world leader saying something so impossibly stupid

in any case, it is currently the lead story on bbc dot com slash news

in the middle of the NYT rolling coverage is this little 5 paragraph piece, titled "Isolating at home has become dangerous for many Italians."

Before everyone else in the West, Italians received and largely obeyed an order to stay at home. “I’m staying home” became a hashtag, then the name of a national ordinance and then a motto hung from balconies and windows.

But while staying home has worked, reducing the rate of infections, bringing down the daily toll of the dead and creating breathing room for hospitals, home has become a dangerous place for many Italians.

Italian households now represent “the biggest reservoir of infections,” said Massimo Galli, the director of the infectious diseases department at Luigi Sacco University Hospital in Milan. He called the cases “the possible restarting point of the epidemic in case of a reopening.”

The family acts as a multiplier, said Andrea Crisanti, the top scientific consultant on the virus in the Veneto region. “This is a ticking time bomb,” he said.

The predicament of home infections is emerging not just in Italy but in hot spots across the globe, in Queens and the Paris suburbs, as well as the working-class neighborhoods of Rome and Milan. It is also a problem that local officials and epidemiologists say is getting too little attention, particularly as the government has announced tentative steps toward reopening in early May.

that's it. uh, care to expand on that?! i think i know what they're saying? is it that most italians have been quarantined at home with their families, and some of those households have coronavirus whether they realize it or not, so there are these little cluster households that all have it and would quickly spread it to others when they start going outside and being near other people again?

or is that wrong? what a strangely empty, frightening little series of paragraphs

oops! i didn't see that it was just a teaser article, and it linked to the full piece here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/world/europe/italy-coronavirus-home-isolation.html

The UK broadcast media, particularly the BBC, is slavishly devoted to US politics, which viewers complain about endlessly... and just switch over. I used to post on the US politics threads occasionally until I realized nothing was ever going to happen to Trump and he was probably going to win again.

(sorry for multiple posts; trying to clear up the confusion i caused)

ah, i see. it's about the fact that a lot of people who are diagnosed are then sent home to "quarantine" at home - with their families, who then also get sick. that seems obvious. i would also like to highlight this fun quote:

“As a doctor I would say let’s put tanks in the streets and let’s do a police state,” said Guido Marinoni, the president of the Bergamo doctors’ association. “But the Western world has different realities.”

it Italy i believe the word is “quarantino”

love too do a police state

Do the Police State. Possible song title there.

what's the dance tho

Goosestep natch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4wb-4sxE84

illinois extends stay-at-home order through May, this time with the requirement that people wear masks in public indoor spaces

also re-opens golf courses so that wealthy men can have locker room talk outside with the boys

my workplace has now changed from perpetually moving our “go back to the office” date and it’s now indefinite, with the caveat they will tell us the date two weeks in advance

downstate state senator suing IL gov over the order, cuz TYRANNY. good luck with that, buddy.

no problem with forcing 18 yr olds to go die in war, but you won't let me have my weekly bowling night?!? Sic semper tyrannis!!

my office in SF told everyone to WFH through Labor Day if they want (assuming it's a choice by then). they also made us take fridays off (and deducted it from our PTO in order to balance the liability at the end of the year) which everyone was mad about at first but now it's like I can't imagine working 5 days a week, in an office, fuck that.

German firms started doing that like 15 years ago iirc

Slack just announced their office will be closed until September.

hearing the summer already foreclosed in many areas makes me wonder if I should just be induced into a medical coma for a year

not enough hospital beds for us to all do that :(

so I guess the US is about to divide into "free states" and "lockdown states" (I wonder if the Compromise of 1850 is imminent)

So the poll is unscientific, but it’s still striking - almost 1 in 5 people who’ve answered said they plan to leave lockdown states for free states as early as June 1. I don’t think that’s realistic for people with families - more of a wish - but it shows the depth of the anger. pic.twitter.com/7bTRGY4cFR

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 23, 2020

should have gone with one of the dozen tweets clowning how ridiculous that one is

KNEW THAT WAS COMING

So the poll is unscientific, but

is this like when everybody said they were going to leave if Trump won?

hmm a bunch of unknowingly infected people going to a state with less infection/loosened social distancing, no idea what can go wrong here

lol at just like, renting a house in another state, a thing people do on a whim

There are millions of people with no jobs and no prospect of one. If there was a state with open restaurants and hotels and cinemas etc I'd be able to see the attraction, even with the near-certainty of getting it. A lot of people feel they don't have much to lose.

and now paying a second monthly rent with income they don't have?

plus, eventually, the federal unemployment will start arriving in all states (even though it's rollout has been sloppy af). my best friend and her b/f are both out of work but have started getting theirs and it's been a weight off of their shoulders, and it's paying my bestie more than she was getting prior (though for some, obv, it will be a paycut). my mother still waits, naturally.

Florida finally announced they are paying unemployment back to March 9 or your out of work date, whichever is later, due to the difficulties. thankfully. mom finally got her claim in.

but like, yeah, to mh's point, if you are cash-strapped, "moving" isn't exactly a cheap activity, even if it's temporary. just Uhauling a small amount of shit from one state to another is a few hundy.

Yeah if financial support is there then maybe the incentives go down. Just saying, we've had plenty of mass internal migrations in the past - the Dust Bowl, post-Civil War, etc. It could happen again. People may start to get desperate if the lack of national leadership continues.

And depending on how things go I wouldn't be surprised if the migration happened the other way - from "free" states to states that may be under lockdown but which are seen as safer and have more protections and public services.

Yeah it makes way more sense the other way.

nobody come to Florida, please God save yourselves.

WHO is now saying there isn't enough evidence to show that people with antibodies are immune to catching this a second time; but you'd think some anecdotal stuff would have slipped out. has anyone reported having this twice yet? I haven't seen anything. You'd think if this were happening you'd have heard about it from China by now.

a few people have yes, but it wasn't certain whether their first infection ever subsided or it was a true reinfection.

that's why the herd immunity strategy Sweden is doing is insane. there's no definitive proof yet that you're immune after getting it once, so your entire strategy rests on something that you don't have any clue about.

what are these "public services" you speak of

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-coronavirus-young-patients/?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_strokes-605pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

this is just one in a number of stories about odd blood clotting. can't find it at the minute, but apparently during autopsies, several hospitals expecting to find normal pneumonia symptoms in the lungs, they were finding a lot of blood clots

I guess that this is still cautiously being treated as a late stage side effect and not the primary effect of the immune response, but it's sounding more like a primary effect?

read about that, that is scary as hell.

on the bright side it means we're getting more data about the known immune reactions to the virus and can start coming up with better treatment regimens? on the bright side, none of the cranks seem to be jumping on this yet as Trump hasn't rambled about how we have to thin the blood or w/e

The stories coming out of Wuhan re: ‪reinfection/reactivation of the virus are not encouraging: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-patients-ins-idUSKCN2240HI‬

Can we have a COVID thread that only posts positive news for my mental well being? Jesus Christ.

i've got a john krasinski link for ya

a friend of mine was recently saying how annoyed he was that all the news was trump and coronavirus, coronavirus and trump, can't they talk about anything else and it took a lot of self control for me not to say "yeah, enough about godzilla destroying the city already; what's going on in botanical science?"