outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Bordeaux today:

A Bordeaux, ce samedi, les consommateurs étaient de retour dans la rue Sainte-Catherine.https://t.co/7nsMwN4Qt5 pic.twitter.com/CuDubnjcok

— Sud Ouest Bordeaux (@SO_Bordeaux) May 16, 2020

consommateurs gonna consommateurs

tis devoutly to be wished
seriously though: yikes

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-coronavirus-per-capita-death-rate-among-highest-2020-5

tbf it is easy on rue st catherine to take a telephoto shot that exaggerates the crowds and how close people are. from the camera position to the end of the road is about a kilometre probably. what i worry about is all the people in those shops! even if they do limit the clientele.

xpost

I saw several people wearing masks under their noses today. Not for two seconds to take a breath. Permanently affixed there

I have a theory about why a few of them had so many kids with them

Was on a plane yesterday (necessary family-related issue) and saw a good deal of mask-under-the-nose styles during the flight, and also switching planes in Dallas.

about as effective as wearing it in yr ass

Imo cock masks >>> ass masks.

Last night I saw a guy walking along coughing hard and spitting, not covering his mouth at all, while wearing a mask around his neck. Fortunately he was on the other side of the street from me. First person I've seen out walking around who seemed obviously sick.

Today I was coming back from a dog walk just as our mail was being delivered, and the mailperson followed me up onto my porch to ask if she could say hi to the dog and stood just outside the door so I would have had to basically shut it in her face. I told her he wasn't good with strangers (true), but she said, "Oh, I know him." Eventually I just gave up and put the dog outside so I could close the door and get away from her.

there is at least some ill-fitting masks slipping off noses going on, but, yeah, a lot of people will never ever get it.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/05/15/good-news-on-the-human-immune-response-to-the-coronavirus

^ recent paper found that people infected with the virus have been producing strong adaptive immune responses, which bodes pretty well for people not getting re-infected, eventual effective vaccines, and possible monoclonal antibody treatments in the shorter term. idk if anyone has linked it upthread, but that whole blog is pretty good for sifting through the virus treatment news churn.

I saw several people wearing masks under their noses today.

Mouthbreathers, it's OK.

every one of them was David LEe Roth

Thanks for that circles

yes, excellent source, circles. thank you.

Was on a plane yesterday (necessary family-related issue) and saw a good deal of mask-under-the-nose styles during the flight, and also switching planes in Dallas.

― ... (Eazy), Saturday, May 16, 2020 3:24 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

What's air travel like right now? Do airports and planes seem kind of empty? What kind of precautions are they taking?

https://twitter.com/HorsemanKovpak/status/1261723559082278916/photo/1

lool!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYKK4rMWkAEMi0c?format=jpg&name=medium

Quarantine day 100: pic.twitter.com/TLwubAkwiR

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) May 15, 2020

^ worth a chuckle

Yes, but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWD_VPiMlso

for like just a second, i thought that guy had managed to duplicate the golden girls guy voice

anyways, no "hallelujah" no credibility

The state of Georgia made it look like its covid cases were going down ***by putting the dates out of order on its chart*** May 5 was followed by April 25, then back to May again, whatever made it look like a downslope. https://t.co/H8pSvY6rxn

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) May 17, 2020

Pools WERE OPEN in NYC yesterday! So much for allegedly having smarter politicians.

My best bet for staying alive seems to be staying in the hospital as long as possible.

xp
"The x axis was set up that way to show descending values to more easily demonstrate peak values and counties on those dates. Our mission failed. We apologize. It is fixed."

I wonder how long I could get away with this if I tried it...

haha hoos asked whether ppl could see how they were playing tricks w that on tweeter, i didn't see it because WHO WOULD EVEN EXPECT THAT A GRAPHMAKER WOULD SCRAMBLE THE ORDER OF VALUES ON THE AXIS wtf

my wife jots down Georgia cases/deaths stats every day and she noticed those graphs were wrong as soon as she saw them

Wow

BREAKING: President Trump says he is taking hydroxychloriquine and has been doing so for weeks. @CBSNews #Covid_19

— Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) May 18, 2020

God please give him a heart attack brought on by hydroxychloriquine

Anyone got a 100% effective tiger protection charm bracelet they can flog him? Protects against 100% of tigers.

he's putting it on his blackheads

Medical geographies are also caste geographies in India. Scholars such as Aniket Jaaware, Sanal Mohan, and Shailaja Paik have outlined what they term both the promiscuity and modernity of caste practices of touching and distancing—practices that have outlived the legal outlawing of untouchability in contemporary India. Thus contactless human interaction, although currently medically and scientifically ordained, will also consolidate caste prejudice in India. In a nation where physical and social distancing comes only too naturally for the large majority of upper castes, one can only shudder at the political reinforcement geofencing allows in demarcating infected (read: polluted) geographies. In historian Gopal Guru’s searing critique, untouchability is nothing but the upper castes’ fears of a “walking danger” that needs to be “quarantined.”

From this piece on Indian tech fascism.

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/technofascism-in-india/

CNN had a lead piece up last night on Worldometer, which I've made reference to numerous times the past few weeks.

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/05/world/worldometer-coronavirus-mystery/index.html

It's very long--I just skimmed. I take it some of their numbers are a little dicey, which didn't come as a big surprise in view of the relative anonymity of the site. I use it more for a general idea of what's happening, and I think it serves that purpose. Their numbers always seem a little bit ahead of what I see on CNN and on the CBC site in Canada, but the discrepancies aren't large. (A lot of the piece looks to be about a larger discrepancy having to do with Spain.)

while we celebrate the Merkel-Macron Pact, in another true European moment, Romanian and German workers march together against deeply exploitative working conditions on German farms https://t.co/A9PsFg5yKi

— Daniela Gabor (@DanielaGabor) May 19, 2020

Mashable reports:

Ahead of tennis courts reopening in parts of Long Island, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran emphasized the importance of only handling your own balls. If you and another player are from another household, she explained during a press conference last week, you can touch each others’ balls, but players should otherwise take every precaution to avoid coming in contact with balls of unknown origin. “You can kick their balls, but you can’t touch them,” Curran said to a giggling crowd.

Gah, you don't pick up other players' balls anyway! You trap them between shoe and racket frame and flick them up onto the strings. Or, if you're really good, you just bounce them up off the ground with racket (strings or frame). Never could manage that. Then you sky them over the fence in a ham-fisted attempt to return them.

Thank you for that glorious paragraph Morbius

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-19/covid-patients-testing-positive-after-recovery-aren-t-infectious

Cautiously, this looks like positive news:

The findings, reported late Monday, are a positive sign for regions looking to open up as more patients recover from the pandemic that has sickened at least 4.8 million people. The emerging evidence from South Korea suggests those who have recovered from Covid-19 present no risk of spreading the coronavirus when physical distancing measures are relaxed.

The results mean health authorities in South Korea will no longer consider people infectious after recovering from the illness. Research last month showed that so-called PCR tests for the coronavirus’s nucleic acid can’t distinguish between dead and viable virus particles, potentially giving the wrong impression that someone who tests positive for the virus remains infectious.

Excellent news.

The most definitive analysis yet of the effect of the #coronavirus on global emissions finds a 17 percent plunge in early April. But this will be short lived, and total 2020 emissions may only fall 3 to 7 percent https://t.co/FuPcdqvoC6 w/ @brady_dennis @JohnMuyskens pic.twitter.com/BPrAdPvtMN

— Chris Mooney (@chriscmooney) May 19, 2020

i saw stuff going around a few weeks ago claiming that the drop in emissions was negligible by way of making the case that individual consumer choices (even extremely dramatic ones like everyone stay home for 3 months) is not sufficient. they were conflating a few things when i saw it (like arguing that this was only a temporary disruption which - fair enough - but not totally related to the question of whether there would be a significant drop in emissions or not from COVID-19 pandemic). ZS - does this contradict that broader argument (that massive shifts in consumer behavior - temporary or not - could make an impact on emission reduction)?

if you’re talking about the same article i read (can’t remember what it was now) the thrust was that decades of hell-for-leather carbon emissions won’t be offset by a few months, or even a few years, of reduced emissions that then go back to “normal”

fair enough - i seem to remember they were arguing not that it was too temporary of reduced emissions but that actually covid had not shut down the real producers of emissions (large corporations / energy companies) and so even during the shutdown the reduction was negligible.

xposts - it depends on what you mean by "impact", or "sufficient".

covid19 has certainly made an impact on global emissions. but compared to where global emissions need to be in order to avoid the worst of climate change? not even close. there was this bit in the WaPo writeup that stood out to me:

The unprecedented situation produced by covid-19 has offered a glimpse into the massive scale required to cut global emissions, year after year, in order to meet the most ambitious goals set by world leaders when they forged the 2015 Paris climate accord. Last fall, a United Nations report estimated that global greenhouse gas emissions must begin falling by 7.6 percent each year beginning in 2020 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

so in a sense, yes, there's a pessimistic takeaway, which is that even a global pandemic that wrecks the economy only amounts to a decent start on the kind of reductions that need to happen every year for at least 30 years.

in short, i think what you said here sounds right: "covid had not shut down the real producers of emissions (large corporations / energy companies) and so even during the shutdown the reduction was negligible."

but i don't think that adds up to an argument that consumer behavior isn't an important factor, though - but i think that's a topic one of the climate change threads, because it has to do with how consumer spending, energy/industry production, and laws and regulations relate to each other.

confirmed U.S. cases have now reached 1.5 million

oh good

Haven’t heard anyone else talk about this so I will: hydroxychloroquine will give you FUCKED UP NIGHTMARES. My research group took it daily while we were in Ghana and about half of us dreamed about being buried alive. So next few days should be a real roller coaster ride.

— David A. Banks (@DA_Banks) May 19, 2020

The chances he's actually taking it are very low, I'd have thought.

anyone else had the nose swab test? because GAHHHHHH that is some intense shit