outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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

https://www.thecut.com/2020/05/dr-steven-levine-on-plastic-surgery-during-quarantine.html

Extremely successful people are used to getting what they want, when they want it. That is the reality of their life. One very well-known entrepreneur wanted to come to my office on the Upper East Side and get her face done, like, yesterday. She offered me more than four times my usual fee, all cash, and told me she’d have her lawyer draft a nondisclosure that she wouldn’t tell anyone we did it. I told her, “I love you to death, but no.”

A lot of my clients have cornered themselves off in their mansions around the world, and they want to get things done while they’re there. I’ve had people be flirty or playful to convince me to come over with injectables or open up the office for surgery. There’s a lot of, “Hypothetically speaking … would you come over and treat me in my house if I let you leave with my car?”

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

― sleeve

Yes. Hated it.

But results were negative :)

had the swab today. not that bad tbh, thought it would be worse.

you wouldn't imagine you have that much space for them to cram it in, but you do

it's such a weird feeling, like your body knows damn well nothing should be up there

of course, i've had it in the ear before

lol

seeing Cuomo take the swab test right there definitely reassured me about it somewhat

I’ve had my sinuses MRIed as a prelude to having and alien removed from up in there and there are vast unexplored realms.

my 18 month old also had it today (throat and both sinuses) and he cried for less than a minute.

Cuomo's had his nips pierced which I assume is worse

I aint so tough, but the swab isn't as rough as a bone biopsy

ouch, I bet

Oh yeah i mean the swab is unpleasant but it's over fast.

hmmm

https://interestingengineering.com/cannabis-might-block-covid-19-infection-study-shows

So yes, while the findings are promising they are yet to be peer-reviewed. The results cannot be taken as conclusive evidence of cannabis’s ability to treat the virus since the researchers haven't been able to identify what the ideal ratio is of THC to CBD, or even if the active ingredient is CBD or some other component or combination.

the researchers haven't been able to identify what the ideal ratio is of THC to CBD

oh, i know that one

right there with ya, buddy

Kinda fed up with the whole weed-as-panacea trend tbh.

cannabis probably good for everything it turns out

hell yeah i've been inoculating myself with WEED this whole time

Except for those cancers that only LSD and/or magic mushrooms can cure.

xp

some uptight assholes told me back in march that i should stop smoking to protect my lungs from covid but i told them to fuck off and my health thanks me for it <3

Is the ratio in the vicinity of 1:5 maybe

^ cool guy who knows about drug jokes

i can't think that inflaming one's lungs with hot vapor is a good idea tbh as much as it pains me to say it

xp Mordy: there's been some work on both smoking and nicotine that suggest a mixed role. Basically, smokers and vapers are underrepresented in hospitalized cases, but if hospitalized, smokers have worse progression. A protective role for nicotine is hypothesized, and the French are doing a trial with nicotine patches in hospitalized patients.

My local snus outlet (a cigar/pipe tobacco shop) closed, so I've been surviving off convenience store vapes.

We've been eating pot brownies mostly. Slower to act, but mellower.

And CBD for the hyper kid.

One month ago today, Trump claimed that the American death toll from COVID-19 could reach as high as 50,000 fatalities by August 4th.

We will pass 100,000 deaths by the end of this week.

yeah, but many are saying it could be as high as 2-3 million, so compared to that, we're actually doing #1 in the entire world in terms of how good we are