outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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

three years pass...

this seems scary: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/19/asia/china-coronavirus-spike-intl-hnk/index.html

― JoeStork, Monday, January 20, 2020

From that CNN article:

SARS infected more than 8,000 people and killed 774 in a pandemic that ripped through Asia in 2002 and 2003.

It's interesting to track ilx's conversation about it going forward up through the end of March. It has been one hell of a year so far.

It's a 'badge of honor', he said.

xp

during hard times, when thinking about how bad things are and how much better they could have - no SHOULD have - been, i find it useful to take a deep breath and then say:

"i did the very best job that has ever been done"

fwiw the WH's predictions that we could reach 3,000 deaths/day by June 1 probably aren't coming true so I guess that's a small bit of good news

Larry Kudlow, close advisor to the President, said on February 25: "We have contained this, I won't say airtight but pretty close to airtight."

Words are meaningless and forgettable.

god if only anything else were

If someone is in an airtight space they will suffocate and die, so... Kudlow... otm?

Enjoy the virus.

xp

All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is something like SARS

You'll see your problems multiplied
If you continually decide
To faithfully pursue
The policy of truth

No one in this red suburb (in one of the most effected metro areas) is wearing masks out shopping.

https://i1.wp.com/digbysblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/download-97.jpeg

It's appalling. We may hold under 3k deaths/day through 1 Jun, but I'll be surprised if that number isn't regularly broken through the month.

fwiw the WH's predictions that we could reach 3,000 deaths/day by June 1 probably aren't coming true so I guess that's a small bit of good news

― frogbs, Wednesday, May 20, 2020 4:40 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not so sure. the current death rate and trajectory is a function of the social distancing that was happening a month ago.

also, what is the percentage of actual covid related deaths we think are accurately being reported in the US? 60%? 70%?

Maybe we all died

My suburb is where the first covid-19 case in the state of Oregon was discovered, in a janitor working at a local elementary school about 2 miles from my house; my town of 30,000 has a large concentration of professionals and college grads and leans more to the liberal-moderate side of the political spectrum. Very white middle class or wealthy, very polite.

Here I see masks aplenty when grocery shopping, but almost no masks worn among people out for daily walks on the street. It is dead easy for those walkers to maintain a 6 ft distance when passing one another and that amount of proximity is only momentary. I can live with that. Since I have no other contact with anyone around here other than on walks or grocery shopping, I can supply no wider observations for comparison.

Here in small town AZ, nobody was wearing a mask. Then all the sudden everyone was. Mine finally arrived in the mail, and then once I started wearing it, it was back to nobody wearing one! I assume everyone thought the cooties magically disappeared once the Gov opened stuff back up.

god aimless i didn't realize we were basically neighbors

Clay, too, I think. I know he grew up in LO.

i mean sure if you call that "local"... :)

While we are talking Portland, I drove past Voodoo Donuts last weekend and there was a line of about 60 people, elbow to elbow. Only a few were wearing masks.

They’re not even good donuts

seriously... of all things put yourself at risk for

Clay, too, I think. I know he grew up in LO.

― A is for (Aimless)

yah and that's where i've been since just before this started, caring for an older relative, hi everybody!

if you're standing elbow to elbow then masks probably aren't effective anyway

what is the percentage of actual covid related deaths we think are accurately being reported in the US? 60%? 70%?

About 60% is the norm in the developed world. NYC did considerably better, closer to 80%.

And Mexico appears to be reporting only 40% of their covid deaths. Reuters: Mexican funeral homes face 'horrific' unseen coronavirus toll

Based on information from 13 funerals homes in the capital belonging to Mexico’s two biggest chains, the excess mortality rate in the first week of May could be at least 2.5 times higher than the government’s official coronavirus tally during that period, according to Reuters calculations.

this is pretty fucking raw
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-hospital-morgue-worker.html

Ms. Sander has not been sleeping well. She thinks about the silhouette of a stomach under the body bag, the jiggling of skin on a dead body.

Her lower back aches. Lifting a body from the lowest shelf in the trailer is grueling. When she pushes a stretcher through winding hallways and on steep ramps, she often bumps into the wall, causing a twinge in her back.

She carries a thin, older woman whose body is still warm. The feeling reminds her of hugging her grandmother, who died earlier this year.

She calls her mother — “just sort of to talk to someone,” she says, “to confirm that yes, this is really happening, that my life hasn’t just become a strange dream in which I work in a morgue and the only people I touch are the dead.”

Also: recent CDC guidance updated to suggest contact with surfaces is an unlikely vector:
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-cdc-coronavirus-does-not-spread-easily-on-contaminated-surfaces-20200521-qew7vcei25bedftqv6v3ov67py-story.html

Feel like she was signing onto some gruesome sights when she decided to work in a NYC morgue whether or not it was during a pandemic.

xp I'm not listening to anything coming out of this CDC until (if) it is rehabilitated in January

i guess? that article (and everything else i've read) suggests this is like doing that work during wartime.
I'm still spending four or five day a week at the brooklyn cemetery. Whenever I get up near the front, the main building is constantly belching smoke. it's intense.

oof

this op-ed by jonathan safran foer is one of best pieces on this topic that i've seen:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/coronavirus-meat-vegetarianism.html

excerpts for those without subscriptions to the failing nyt:

Most everyone has been doing more cooking these days, more documenting of the cooking, and more thinking about food in general. The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.

Is it more essential than the lives of the working poor who labor to produce it? It seems so. An astonishing six out of 10 counties that the White House itself identified as coronavirus hot spots are home to the very slaughterhouses the president ordered open.

In Sioux Falls, S.D., the Smithfield pork plant, which produces some 5 percent of the country’s pork, is one of the largest hot spots in the nation. A Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa, had 730 cases of the coronavirus — nearly 60 percent of its employees. At another Tyson plant, in Waterloo, Iowa, there were 1,031 reported cases among about 2,800 workers.

....

Animal agriculture is now recognized as a leading cause of global warming. According to The Economist, a quarter of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 say they are vegetarians or vegans, which is perhaps one reason sales of plant-based “meats” have skyrocketed, with Impossible and Beyond Burgers available everywhere from Whole Foods to White Castle.

Our hand has been reaching for the doorknob for the last few years. Covid-19 has kicked open the door.

At the very least it has forced us to look. When it comes to a subject as inconvenient as meat, it is tempting to pretend unambiguous science is advocacy, to find solace in exceptions that could never be scaled and to speak about our world as if it were theoretical.

Some of the most thoughtful people I know find ways not to give the problems of animal agriculture any thought, just as I find ways to avoid thinking about climate change and income inequality, not to mention the paradoxes in my own eating life. One of the unexpected side effects of these months of sheltering in place is that it’s hard not to think about the things that are essential to who we are.

We cannot protect our environment while continuing to eat meat regularly. This is not a refutable perspective, but a banal truism. Whether they become Whoppers or boutique grass-fed steaks, cows produce an enormous amount of greenhouse gas. If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.

...

We cannot protect against pandemics while continuing to eat meat regularly. Much attention has been paid to wet markets, but factory farms, specifically poultry farms, are a more important breeding ground for pandemics. Further, the C.D.C. reports that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic — the result of our broken relationship with animals.

yeah that was very good I thought

It's interesting to look back and try to pinpoint the pivot from "wash your damn hands" to "wear a damn mask" was, seems like months ago in this current time warp.

It probably happened during a bathroom break the speed at which news developed

i wish i could find this article i read a while back (that iirc was credible but if i can't remember where i read it...) about how there are super meat eaters in the US who consume a major % of all meat consumed despite being a small minority. my memory says it's something like 30% of ppl eat like 70% of meat? i'm totally making those numbers up but some extreme discrepancy like that - maybe someone knows what i'm referring to? i tried google-fu'ing it the other day but couldn't find it.

Much attention has been paid to wet markets, but factory farms, specifically poultry farms, are a more important breeding ground for pandemics. Further, the C.D.C. reports that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic — the result of our broken relationship with animals.

Zoonotic disease was not better avoided when the great majority of people lived and worked on farms in daily close contact with animals. Much bigger factors in the spread of modern pandemics would be the fact that billions of people now live crowded together in urban metropolises, and the prevalence and speed of long distance travel, especially by airplane. Covid-19 spread to every place on earth, remote islands included, in a matter of months.

Veg isn’t necessarily safer with the e-coli issues that have been coming up recent years. Time to develop a taste for insect protein? joy.

afaics, all food processing that requires workers standing at a conveyor belt performing hand-processing will present the same problems as pork or poultry processing plants. Here in Oregon, one frozen food plant that processes field-harvested vegetables, and a seafood plant that processes ocean-harvested seafood have been hot spots, cited for unsafe working conditions, but no meat-processing plants. Many non-food manufacturing plants have not become hot spots for the simple reason their assembly lines are shut.

I'm in tune with citing meat consumption as a major problem in global warming. Factory farming is often cruel, too. But trying to use the current pandemic to indict meat-eating by playing on the fact that covid-19 is zoonotic is very special pleading that would never originate from an epidemiologist, because the causal link being flogged here is far too weak to support the argument.

afaics, all food processing that requires workers standing at a conveyor belt performing hand-processing will present the same problems as pork or poultry processing plants. Here in Oregon, one frozen food plant that processes field-harvested vegetables, and a seafood plant that processes ocean-harvested seafood have been hot spots, cited for unsafe working conditions, but no meat-processing plants. Many non-food manufacturing plants have not become hot spots for the simple reason their assembly lines are shut.

if i understand what you're saying, you think that meat processing plants are no more dangerous to workers than non-meat processing plants?

i honestly can't respond to that with certainty. i know for certain what factory farm meat processing facilities look like, and i understand why they're dangerous. i tried to look up, just now, what it looks like inside of food processing plants that don't involve meat. as you might expect, it seems to vary widely depending on the product.

all i know is that in all of the coverage about how nationwide, meat processing plants have been popping up as hotspots, it's almost always emphasized that it's meat. if the conditions in meat and non-meat processing facilities are the same, it would be very odd for this pattern of covid19 infections to emerge in just the meat facilities:

Case numbers spike in meatpacking cities
Across the country, production at meatpacking plants and other food processing centers has slowed or stopped because of large outbreaks, including one at a Smithfield facility in South Dakota that sickened more than 1,000 people and three at Tyson facilities in Iowa that sickened hundreds of people.

The Times has identified more than 100 food processing facilities across the country with coronavirus outbreaks. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at least 4,900 meat and poultry processing workers had been infected across 19 states, and at least 20 had died. Though outbreaks have been reported in every region of the country, the rural Midwest and South have been especially hard hit.

Some companies, including Smithfield, have refused to answer even basic questions about the size of their outbreaks. And in some places, state and local health officials have also been silent. In Kansas, state officials said there were more than 2,100 meatpacking-related cases and six deaths spread across 10 clusters, but they refused to name those facilities. In Nebraska, where the National Guard has helped with the mass-testing of meatpacking workers, state and local officials have often refused to provide details. Officials in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina, among other places, have also not provided that information.

Small counties with large meatpacking industries have reported some of the country’s highest numbers of cases per capita. In Nobles County, Minn., 631 workers at a pork processing plant have tested positive. In Cass County, Ind., where at least 900 Tyson workers tested positive, the number of known cases surged from roughly 50 to more than 1,400 over three weeks. And in Dakota County, Neb., which has the second-highest per capita infection rate of any American county, roughly one of every 13 residents has tested positive.

The outbreaks have proved devastating to the immigrant communities that often supply much of the labor at those plants, as well as to the farmers who depend on the facilities for their livelihoods.

Mr. Trump recently declared the meatpacking plants to be critical infrastructure, part of an effort to keep the facilities open. But restaurants have already reported meat shortages, many grocery stores have imposed quotas on meat purchases and some farmers have euthanized animals they could not take to market. In central Nebraska, the mayor of Grand Island called for federal help testing employees of his city’s hard-hit JBS USA beef processing plant. And in Illinois, where there have been multiple meatpacking outbreaks, Attorney General Kwame Raoul called for federal action to keep workers safe.

“This executive order lacks meaningful safety measures and puts workers at processing plants at risk,” said Mr. Raoul, a Democrat.

(yes, i know that article refers to "other food processing centers" as well. but in almost all the specific examples that have emerged, at least that i've seen it's a meatpacking plant)

you think that meat processing plants are no more dangerous to workers than non-meat processing plants?

When you speak of "dangerous" I will presume you are speaking of the danger of spreading covid-19, not the dangers of wielding razor sharp knives or being spattered by fecal matter. In which case, I would expect a major difference in the danger of contracting covid-19 between the Oregon frozen vegetable processing plant and the Smithfield or Tyson plants would be sheer size and number of workers crammed together.

a Smithfield facility in South Dakota that sickened more than 1,000 people and three at Tyson facilities in Iowa that sickened hundreds of people.

The Oregon processors could not begin to duplicate those kinds of numbers, if only because nowhere near those numbers were employed there. Much like the super spreader in the Korean mega-church, one highly infectious person is going to spread the virus more widely in a factory employing 5000 workers than in one employing 80. It's still just one infectious person, but the opportunities are far greater.