outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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)

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

Doctorow does not label members of either of those categories as being responsible for spreading the pandemic, nor being active as vectors, in that thread.

But analysts say that without centralized governance and coordination, the national effort remains a competing coalition of state and local outfits hampered by duplicated work, competition for supplies, siloed pursuits of non-transferable solutions and red tape that leaves some labs with testing backlogs and others with excess capacity.

All of which leaves the US without a unified, coherent strategy for testing and contact tracing to contain a virus that does not respect state borders and has already killed more than 60,000 Americans.

This is what I mean. The DARPA test could be a gamechanger (ugh sorry) but it needs a functioning bureaucracy. The state-by-state patchwork doesn’t seem like it would be enough.

These protesters defied the lockdown to gather in central London.

Their reckless actions are more likely to prolong lockdown and add to the burden on the NHS. pic.twitter.com/o2maYW3DYW

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) May 2, 2020

the 5g/anti-lockdown/anti-vax posse, thankfully at what looks like a small turnout in London. Shouldn't really laugh at them ... actually fuck it loool - "fits together like a glove - wake up people!"

Blonde shoulder bag woman clearly heading towards a major breakdown, 'fits like a glove' guy already there

It’ll be like nazi Germany but dystopian

Nazi Germany without the good points.

Future nazi : need to sort out these millions of corpses in our newly conquered leopardsprawn, it's like a bloody nazi dystopia round here!

shit like this is why I won't give the "you have to cut them slack, they're scared and struggling" defense any time of day:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oklahoma-city-ends-face-mask-rule-shoppers-after-store-employees-n1198736?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma

Once again, it's a real shame that it won't be just these "muh freedom!" assholes who die.

between the example above and the horrible shitstain of a human who carried the sign reading "ARBEIT MACHT FREI, JB", directed towards the Jewish governor of Illinois, there are a lot of people I want flayed or drawn and quartered rn.

Russia's either peaking or, more likely, they're going to end up right behind the US in caseload.

http://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/russia/

I was expressing skepticism about their numbers a few weeks ago; I guess it was just a matter a time, although the delay still seems odd.

Good article on how the administration, 538, even Fauci leaned too hard on overly optimistic models such as the IHME until this past week to encourage quarantine breaking:

The IMHE model, in particular, has come under increasing criticism — “It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious-disease epidemiology field think is well suited,” Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch told Stat News. That’s especially true after a paper found that on 70 percent of days, the death count fell outside the IMHE’s 95 percent confidence interval (this sounds wonky, but it means that the model gave a range it expected to contain 95 percent of all possible outcomes, and only 30 percent of real outcomes actually fell within it). But in part because it made a name for itself early in the epidemic, IMHE remains a trusted name in the media (on the FiveThirtyEight podcast last week, Nate Silver interviewed its main author and offered praise for the model) and, in fact, its projections have ticked back up recently, though just by a few ticks, with a present estimate of 72,433 deaths by August 4. If the country stays on Wednesday’s pace, it will hit that number by May 4.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/what-the-coronavirus-models-cant-see.html

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is [Removed Illegal Link] from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.

The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/coronavirus-updates.html#link-7b42d0f5

They'll deny, and then once we get there say "who could've known?"

buried in that article is the link to the actual report, which is interesting.

here's the chart where the " reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1" comes from:

https://i.imgur.com/8kOaAhq.png

sure would be nice to know why they think the plateau is going to change back into an incline. i assume it's because of the re-openings, but of course as moodles said, they'll just deny the entire thing exists for a while. transparency

considering that leaked to press, i'll just assume the actual likely outcome is much more dire

People gonna die twice

the range of outcomes on there is pretty dire already. the mean projection (the red line) is 3,000 deaths a day, but the 25-75% confidence range (the red zone) goes all the way up to about 8K daily deaths on the other side, it also goes down to 750 deaths a day.

translated:

if you run their model a million times:

50% of the time, the deaths exceed 3K per day. the other 50% they're less than 3K a day.
25% of the time, the deaths exceed 8K per day. the other 75% of the time they're less than 8K per day.
25% of the time, the deaths are less than 750 per day. the other 75% of the time they're more than 750 per day.

sorry if that's obvious, but there's a ton of info packed in those kinds of charts and i'm always worried people are missing it. but basically THAT model is already very, very dire.

hopefully that's just some mid-tier internal model that is not actually very accurate? it's tough to know with the trump administration

My optimistic take: Unless the CDC data is incorporating additional sources not found in any of the public data repositories, I don't think the current "plateau" is as flat/horizontal as their model suggests (I'm showing USA reported deaths trending ~-9% over past 2 weeks).

Yeah, the range on that chart is pretty huge, tells me they don't have much of a clue.

However, if they really think a big spike tied to re-opening is likely, that's kind of a big deal. Not sure how they explain that one away, but they'll figure out a way.

xp: Lockdown has been successful in NY and NJ, states hit early with a lot of seeding events from travelers from Europe and high public transit use...

Elsewhere in the country, its a different story. 2 months of half-assed mitigation that flattened the curve but didn't offer prospects for containment by less invasive public health measures.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXLboksU8AMYEIC?format=jpg

This tweet seems like not the right way to think about it? Seems more like the original models were terrible and they redid them with a drastic upward shift? I wouldn't expect them to stay 97 percent range if actual major reworking was done to shift upwards.

The CDC projection for 3,000 deaths a day is getting a lot of attention, as it should. But that is a 50th percentile projection. To date, actual deaths have ranged north of the 97th percentile. The 97th percentile projection for June 1 is 15,000 deaths per day. (1/2) https://t.co/TLNvzR7Ldj

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) May 4, 2020

he's used to worst-case thinking cause his primary beat is climate change

It was the persistence of 97th percentile results that clued them in that their models had to be off. Assuming that 97th percentile results are somehow baked into the viral results, regardless of the model, is ass-backwards.

Lot of news in the past few days about how the IMHE model has been wrong. So what are the other models?

Not a fan of Nate Silver (a beef that has existed since his days at BaseballProspectus), but 538 has collected a half-dozen here:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-forecasts/