outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

the official projections are ridiculous. At this rate we’ll reach 74,000 dead by next week, not August

Yep. Most of the models/projections I've seen assume a normal distribution (perhaps why the Trump administration thinks this is just going to go away as fast as it showed up).

The current distribution shows that it's significantly right-skewed and could have a pretty long tail.

On March 27, as emergency rooms in New York and across the country began filling with coronavirus patients struggling to breathe, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter to urge Ford and General Motors to “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!”

One of the thousands of replies that the tweet attracted struck an equally urgent tone: “We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT.”

Its author was Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. A specialist in mobile phone technology, he currently has just 75 followers on Twitter and no apparent experience in government contracting or medical devices.

But three days later, New York state paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million. The payment was for 1,450 ventilators — at an astonishing $47,656 per ventilator, at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models.

Not a single ventilator ever arrived.

nice

we are already at 61,000+ deaths and losing 2000+ more each day. assuming a normal distribution at this point is gaslighting

the amount of newly printed money going to places that have no reason to get exponentially richer during this...sigh. I can blame people but it's just accepted at this point. No one cares.

am i wrong in thinking that ventilators are beginning to be acknowledged as not the best option for severe COVID patients unless it's that or death?

i think it's more now they are more prepared and have more time to start better therapies before it gets to ventilator level.

i feel like governments are looking at the flattening curve and going 'Wow! I guess the virus is getting... less deadly!'

It's fucked up. Israel is now also deconfining precipitously, while Germany is already seeing the virus rise up again after their dumb deconfinement.

The death rate isn't especially relevant to the question of easing lockdown, it's the *infection* rate that matters. Unfortunately most governments don't have anywhere near reliable enough data about the infection rate, whereas they do have a pretty good grasp on how many people are dying. The infection rate needs to be down way below the level it was in early March and that's a gigantic challenge that most governments aren't even close to solving right now.

But see Matt, I stopped drinking and my life improved, so things are better now, which means I can start drinking again.

I might start making plans for things - in the future - once I had a chart in front of me that looked like this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EW0GLuPUMAAuUt2?format=jpg&name=large

China: We discovered a new virus.
America: So what?

China: It's Dangerous
America: It's only a Flu

China: Wear a Mask
America: Don't wear a Mask
... pic.twitter.com/Qxugv8z73J

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) April 30, 2020

make sure to watch the video as well

"the world is laughing at us" was one of trump's catchphrases during his 2016 campaign

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8xpn/what-we-know-about-remdesivir-the-antiviral-drug-dr-fauci-says-can-block-this-virus

The stats don't sound that great for late-stage patients. Is the reason that Fauci is excited about this due to its efficacy for early-stage treatment?

I think antivirals commonly help most as an early stage intervention and their efficacy drops the later they are introduced. They also are not 'cures', so much as they reduce severity of symptoms and shorten the length of recovery. But that's still worth being excited about.

that 'bay area CEO' who took 69 million to build these ventilators appears to be a total grifter from my two minute cursory look at his linkedin profile; there's no 'company' he's CEO of, that's the name of his own consulting practice which has nowt to do with ventilators. No idea how he conned NY into paying him; maybe he said he had arrangements to have things manufactured.

“He's always a go-getter. Anytime there's opportunity, he's always been out there trying to help and make a buck,” said Ritter (his former supervisor at Google).

Of interest to those using cough syrup for symptom relief:

A seventh compound – an ingredient commonly found in cough suppressants, called dextromethorphan – does the opposite: Its presence helps the virus. When our partners tested infected cells with this compound, the virus was able to replicate more easily, and more cells died. This is potentially a very important finding, but, and I cannot stress this enough, more tests are needed to determine if cough syrup with this ingredient should be avoided by someone who has COVID-19.

The base is galvanizing the virus

If anyone needs a detailed/well-referenced guide to just how much this administration fucked up the response to the pandemic, this is a good guide:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/trump-coronavirus-timeline/

I don't think I will want to know about that for 30 years or so, give me time to get over it.

there's another one of these articles every day now, does this one have any revelations?

more than 30,000 new cases today in the US, with again more than 2,000 deaths, now almost 1,000,000 active cases

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/2020/04/29/trump-order-reopen-meat-packing-plants-create-anxiety-waterloo-farmers-who-face-destroying-pigs/3047760001/

i know this is kind of an obvious point, but people who eat meat should consider eating less meat right now

if you're eating meat, on top of all the other stuff i'm biting my tongue on, you're asking people to risk their lives to perform an "essential service" that is not at at all essential

I have been thinking that.

idk how easy it will be for low income folk to drastically change their diet on a whim

(but I don't want the plants to re-open)

the people who usually pitch a fit about not being able to eat meat every meal are not usually the people who are most vulnerable.

yeah, i know everyone has their own situation and that it's more realistic for some than others, but i just mean maybe the 7-days-a-week meat eaters could consider cutting a few of those days out

yeah, i actually have very strong opinions about people who feel a psychological need to eat meat every meal, every day.

as long as the peanut butter plants stay open

https://i2-prod.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/incoming/article7871269.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/JS47563228.jpg vs. https://thecounter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/chicken_processing_speeds-e1505425687673.jpg

That locally crafted faux blue cheese I once bought was probably more labor intensive than meat products, but I can't think of any vegan food whose market economics demand hundreds in one room at close proximity...

it's definitely more prevalent in meat-packing plants, but it's also becoming a problem at other food processing plants.

https://thefern.org/2020/04/mapping-covid-19-in-meat-and-food-processing-plants/

the only motherfucking peanut butter I can find right now is motherfucking Skippy, that shitass american import. normally we get peanut butter that's intended for Africans and is waaaaaay better because waaaaay less sugar. think it comes from the netherlands, but we can't get it right now. sucks.

peanut butter is one of the things we always bring back from the US because of that sugar problem everywhere else.

Skippy peanut butter is bad-bad not-good.

you know peanut butter is ridiculously easy to make? bag of salted or unsalted peanuts, blender, turn on, wait.

i thought you just sat on the peanuts real fast

American Airlines notified me that they will be requiring passengers to wear masks, which just further cements my lack of interest in getting on a plane any year soon.

we usually bring back the trader joes peanut butter.

a peanut sat on a railroad track
his heart was all a-flutter
a long came a choo-choo train
CHOO-CHOOOO CHOO-CHOO
peaaaanut butter

https://moniquevandervloed.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0487-1200x800.jpg

I'm supposed to not eat sugar (sucrose) but I have peanut butter everyday via a smoothie. Never had a problem finding sugarless version.
Well that's not true: once I couldn't find it at local stores so ordered some online of a brand I'd never seen before (Teddy).
Generally tho stores have either this Smucker's "all natural" or Adam's "100% Natural".

xpost Yay, five jars of anaphylaxis. I'll stick with meat, thanks.

Story about peanut butter in James and Kay Salter's Life is Meals:

At a lunch in France one day, we remarked that it was hard to find certain things in the local grocery store.

"What can you not find?" asked the hostess.

"Well, baking soda, for one thing. Peanut butter."

"I het it," she said simply.

Once Again is my brand.

Baking soda is easy to find here! Maybe that story is old?

Peanut butter is really only sold widely in immigrant neighborhoods: people from from subsaharienne Africa and East Asia cook with it. But it’s the sugarless kind. Yeah, I could grind my own, since peanuts have been relatively steadily in stock. Normally I shop at African and East Asian supermarkets, but the closest ones have been closed during the lockdown and we’re not supposed to go too far to shop.

Followup on Daniel Uhlfelder above:

holy shit pic.twitter.com/rVw24plXTp

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) May 1, 2020

Hey hip-hop nerds. What kind-of hip-hop is this?