outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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?

Top 10 Coronavirus clusters in the US? Prisons, meat packing plants, a Navy battleship. Next 10? Prisons, meat packing plants, nursing homes. Next 10? And the 10 after that? Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes.... https://t.co/vdXEqlVymY

— Gina Neff (@ginasue) April 30, 2020

^that's a good (and depressing) thread

here's another good and depressing thread:

NEW INITIATIVE

Local action & ownership is the frontline of pandemic response. But there is little guidance out there designed for local leaders.

Over the past 2 weeks, a group of us have been working to start filling that gap: https://t.co/hKVb2d3Arg

— Jeremy TEST/TRACE/ISOLATE Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March 23, 2020

oops! i meant this one:

Welcome to May.

As I feared, the federal government wasted April much as it wasted February.

That is a harsh assessment given how much the country has been suffering. But without competent federal leadership, the best we are managing is to tread water. Some stats:

— Jeremy TEST/TRACE/ISOLATE Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) May 1, 2020

for those that don't like to read threads on twitter but like to read threads on ilx,

the gist of it is that the US isn't on the "decline" side of the curve, nationally. we're on a plateau, and what's more, there aren't any indications that it's going to go down any time soon. the existing lockdowns and policies have succeeded in halting the growth of daily cases/deaths, but they aren't enough to get rates down low enough to actually decline. to do that, we need substantial gains in testing and tracing, and there's no indication that the federal government is making progress on that.

it's an ugly situation. in order to get on the other side of the curve, we need to step UP the shelter in place policies, just as so many people are talking about how soon we'll be able to "open up" the economy. it's a shit show.

I'm in NY and there are people upstate who are clamoring to open. Despite hundreds of people still dying every day down here in our own backyard. People are idiots; if even people in my own state can't be convinced...

The people dead set on opening back up asap are just blinding themselves to how infectious this virus is and ignoring the degree to which it isn't spreading like a windblown wildfire is due to society being widely shut down. It's the old saw that 'there is none so blind as him who will not see.'

As sung by Ray Stevens, who is no doubt in favor of the re-opening.

don't look Ethelllll

lol

xxp - when is Branson reopening?

In WA, Inslee announced an extension of the stay-at-home order through the end of May and gave the outlines of what future phases of relaxed restrictions will look like

https://coronavirus.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-05/PhasedReopeningChart.pdf

I look forward to hang out with up to 5 friends per week. (5 is like…half of my friends though.)

this sounds really good. but i wonder about the logistics. rolled out by the military in 2 weeks - but a sophisticated program of prioritisation, tracking, tracing will be needed. who’s going to coordinate that? the military too?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/us-germ-warfare-lab-creates-test-for-pre-infectious-covid-19-carriers

presumably state and local public health departments. WA plans to employ 750 national guard as case and contact investigators starting next week

I have to admit I am mildly irritated by not eating red meat once or twice a week

i'll live though (for a bit)

any rationalizing of "opening up" NOW is homicidal Trump-enabling

re not eating meat, I made The NY Times spring tofu soup recipe today, it was good

also really love Meera Sodha’s chilli tofu recipe in The Guardian

this was my bible for many years

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142850.Madhur_Jaffrey_s_World_of_the_East_Vegetarian_Cooking

then I married a carnivore, I do my best

Non-outbreak aside: Soon as you get tofu home, stick it in the freezer at least overnight. Defrost, press out the water between plates in the sink, and the ice crystal growth leaves it with a meatier somewhat fibrous texture. Tofu's just a blank canvas, you have to marinate the hell out of it and use high heat cooking (saute/broil/deep fry) before its comparable in interest with less labor intensive meat. I'm keen on TJ's "high-protein" tofu (like extra-extra-firm) and jerk seasoning.

i thought this was insightful

There's really three phrases you need to know to understand the spread of the pandemic in America:

* Prisons
* Meat packing plants
* Nursing homeshttps://t.co/FaS3u17Rwy

1/

— Covered Dish People (@doctorow) May 2, 2020

^^ yes, in many ways that summarizes the basic problems with America

Prisoners and nursing home residents do not "spread the pandemic". They are recipients but are hardly active as vectors.

The IHME forecast that Trump has been relying heavily on for his projections has finally been removed from the CDC website's resource page.

The IHME's last projection through August 4th was 72.4k deaths, a number that should be surpassed in 4 days from now (May 5th).

Aimless stop quibbling. This basically summarizes what the real problems are in America: the prison-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, lack of health/elderly care, and big agriculture/factory farming. The virus strips the facade bare.

1, the thread explains that nursing home workers often work in multiple homes because they don't get paid very much so they are actually active vectors and 2, i don't understand your point? anyway i thought it was insightful in how it links these places together and hints at the forces they have in common.

I would just like to note that I was on the money when I said the ihme forecast had a bunch of problems.

We're all only in this position because of some pricks who wanted to eat exotic meat.

Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

As confirmed cases of a novel virus surge around the world with worrisome speed, all eyes have so far focused on a seafood market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the outbreak. But a description of the first clinical cases published in The Lancet on Friday challenges that hypothesis.

The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. “That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” says Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally

If someone wants to say that nursing home residents and employees, meat processing plant employees and prisoners are among the worst treated people in the USA, I'll sign up without hesitation. If someone wants to say that because nursing homes, prisons and meat processing plants are considered as full of expendable people, I'm good with that. Imply that those people may be largely responsible for "the spread of the pandemic" and my objecting to that construction doesn't feel like quibbling to me.

our Democratic mayor is lobbying to open hair salons as of Monday.

MOTHERFUCKING WHY?

people are very attached to their hair

i'd like to make their heads unattached from their body

maybe there's a youtube that shows how to do that

(sorry, I'll sign off now)