outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

“don’t go in there. no i mean REALLY don’t go in there”

hoo boy

sorry man, sorry

Eh, that story itself has sort of lingered for months. But I don't think there's any indication that active Covid virus lingers that way, is there?

yeah that is a story i heard before it was even officially declared a pandemic

genuinely ready to read the word "droplets" way less than i do currently

otm

ploplets

Good name for a power pop band, The Droplets.

Spinal Tap's 2nd incarnation after the Originals

Flushing a toilet can generate a cloud of aerosol droplets that rises nearly three feet.

This is true at all times. The fact that active virus may appear in human feces has been known since February at least. Combine the two facts and this makes public bathrooms with flush toilets a known source of 'community spreading'. This not 'new' news, unless you didn't hear it sooner than this.

https://i.ibb.co/JCjL1QM/unnamed.jpg

There's a lot of "can," "may" and "could" in that Times piece, which also states that scientists have no idea whether it will actually be transmitted by aerosol droplets that way. There's enough shit we don't know about this that we should not need to add to the litany just for the sake of it. Could Covid be transmitted in space? Maybe! Could we get it from eating whales? Maybe! Does Covid prefer Pepsi or Coke? Scientists have no idea.

Scientists have no idea.

On the contrary, scientists have many ideas. Many of them are suggested by the known behavior of similar viruses. They are trained to qualify their educated speculations that have not yet been accurately tested, measured and verified, using words like "may" or "could". But when they say "can" it should mean they know for sure that it can happen.

biggest hotspots in the US. let's see if we can spot a pattern:

Marion Correctional Institution — Marion, Ohio 2,439
Pickaway Correctional Institution — Scioto Township, Ohio 1,791
Trousdale Turner Correctional Center — Hartsville, Tenn. 1,374
Harris County jail — Houston, Texas 1,283
Lompoc Prison Complex — Lompoc, Calif. 1,107
Smithfield Foods pork processing facility — Sioux Falls, S.D. 1,098
Cook County jail — Chicago, Ill. 1,065
Chuckawalla Valley State Prison — Blythe, Calif. 1,048
Tyson Foods meatpacking plant — Waterloo, Iowa 1,031
Cummins Unit prison — Grady, Ark. 1,028
Avenal State Prison — Avenal, Calif. 969
U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt — Guam 969
Lansing Correctional Facility — Lansing, Kan. 931
North County jail — Castaic, Calif. 930
Tyson Foods meatpacking plant — Logansport, Ind. 900
California Institution for Men — Chino, Calif. 876
Northwest Correctional Complex — Tiptonville, Tenn. 834
Lakeland Correctional Facility — Coldwater, Mich. 827
Tyson Foods beef processing plant — Dakota City, Neb. 786
Gus Harrison Correctional Facility — Adrian, Mich. 760
JBS USA pork production facility — Worthington, Minn. 749
G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility — Jackson, Mich. 748
Butner Prison Complex — Butner, N.C. 744
Tyson Foods meat processing plant — Perry, Iowa 730
Forrest City Prison Complex — Forrest City, Ark. 716
Elkton Prison Complex — Lisbon, Ohio 667
Seaboard Foods pork processing plant — Guymon, Okla. 654
Miami-Dade County jail — Miami, Fla. 623
Bledsoe County Correctional Complex — Pikeville, Tenn. 617
Sterling Correctional Facility — Sterling, Colo. 595
Tyson Foods pork processing plant — Storm Lake, Iowa 591
Parnall Correctional Facility — Jackson, Mich. 573
Tyson Foods meat processing facility — Wilkesboro, N.C. 570
South Woods State Prison — Cumberland County, N.J. 534

iirc that was foucault's thing, that meat processing plants are prisons

export I get that, but that story hinges on a simulation they ran, noting that "it remains unknown whether public or shared toilets are a common point of transmission of the virus." So ... they don't know. But maybe! The article elaborates later: "While Dr. Wang acknowledged that scientists had yet to look at toilet aerosols in real-world situations involving the new coronavirus, other research has shown that viral RNA was found in shared toilet areas at one hospital in Wuhan, China." Sure, but "viral RNA" has been found all over the place. Like when they found Covid virus on the surfaces of cruise ships 17 days after passengers disembarked, but have absolutely no idea if it was or even could be transmitted in that state. It reminds me of a story a friend posted some weeks back about a simulation that showed large amounts of aerosol droplets could be drafted up to 25 feet behind someone riding a bike. Maybe! But simulations aside, there is absolutely no reason to believe that is the case, which is why work-in-progress articles like this, imo, just add to the confusion, like when people were claiming Ibuprofen made Covid worse, based on iirc absolutely nothing.

Here is a Twitter thread about the city council of Montgomery, Alabama — where ICUs are at capacity and 90% of the COVID patients are black — considering a mandatory mask ordinance. TL;DR: it doesn't end well.

Montgomery City Council about to consider a mandatory mask ordinance. Mayor Steven Reed: Our ICUs are at capacity. Our hospitalizations are up. ... I don’t want to see any more deaths in this city.

Urges the council to take action. pic.twitter.com/rs6e58THLq

— Brad Harper (@BradMGM) June 16, 2020

Ugh

The Aimsplaining is strong tonight

Let him without sin cast the first stone.

nah

too late

haven't looked at this chart in a while. it's sobering and depressing af.

COVID Excess Mortalities

Florida, last 10 days.

for reference, the positives/test rate in NYC is now around 1%, and it's been hovering between 1-3% for the last week or so in Illinois/Chicago. The national average (excluding NY) has been around 5-7% for the last month or so.

forgot the image.

https://i.imgur.com/mHzljuP.png

read the WashPo "The rest of the world concludes that the US has given up on Coronavirus" article, and yes, that's true. not the "U.S.", exactly, but the administration's stance is very clear - they've moved on. this is in keeping with their stance on everything. karl rove was right, they make their own news, they make their own truth now. and half of our states have governors that have to demonstrate fealty by subscribing to the fantasy

I can't begin to say how frustrating and disheartening this all is, we completely wasted the last few months

it wasn't entirely a waste—those of us who *have* coooperated stemmed the hospitalization tide, stalled for vaccine research etc.

but yes fucking infuriating

obviously i think the current national administration has done about the worst job imaginable, and certainly any plausible democratic president would have done better...

but i do think the US is set up in a way that pretty much guaranteed this outcome. fractal federation, harmful incentives in the healthcare industry, extreme inequality, and a self-fulfilling culture in which people assume governments of all levels are incompetent. these are all bad!

no kidding

I mean was it too optimistic in March to think that we'd get a handle on this by May or June?

the extremely stupid ideas about what constitutes 'freedom' add that little extra

xp to caek
i think all that is true. the self-fulfilling distrust of government, especially, is tailor-made for disaster in a situation like this.

but there are different levels of bad outcomes. imagine where we'd be if CDC successfully implemented a nation-wide testing strategy, back in erly February, for example. it's absurd that we still don't have a consistent federal strategy. they're not even trying any more!

yeah as shitty as our health infrastructure is it didn't have to be *this* horrible

yeah the absentee landlord situation at the CDC is particular to the present administration, and it's bad!

but i'm skeptical a nationwide anything is possible in a nation in which half the states are actively hostile to efforts from the federal government to help them... i dunno.

they're actively hostile to the federal government - unless it's got the seal of approval from their thought leader, donald trump. if trump was even 10% serious about coronavirus, it would give these governors political cover to do the right thing (not absolving the governors there - they are fucking pathetic). instead, as per the authoritarian way, he has decided to do the exact opposite of the helpful thing and focus on the fantasy where problems just don't exist.

granted anti-gov't energy has always been strong w/ these idiots, but in this case they are dismissive of the (already seriously comporomised) federal effort because the administration is encouraging them to be! it's twisted

its just crazy that we knew about this in December 2019 and....did nothing. we knew it was coming. we watched it hit everywhere. and we knew then that wasting even a week could make a huge, exponential difference. I didn't have that much faith in our federal government but I do remember thinking, "surely this can't be *that* big of a deal if our national response was just to shrug our shoulders?"

like I'm not gonna be one of those #resistance dudes who just blames Trump for everything but this culture of "all the experts are wrong and their only motivation is to bring down the President, whom they've been brainwashed to believe is bad by CNN" directly feeds into not only our failure to act but also outright hostility towards people who are actually trying to help

i'm not just talking about the fact that red states would refuse help from a competent democrat-run federal government because of anti-expertise or whatever.

i'm also talking about the fact that there are states.

in a country in which people don't like government, and in which governing is by and large extremely badly done (these two are related), we sure have a lot of layers of government!

so sad that what they're being asked to do - DON'T HOLD GIANT MEETINGS INDOORS. WEAR A MASK. - is not hard at all.

i was really worried about the effect of the Floyd/police brutality demonstrations, everyone standing shoulder to shoulder, shouting and chanting, all the police who don't wear masks (because they follow the model of their fascist leaders), etc.

but *knock on wood* i don't think those fears have materialized. i meticulously follow chicago and Illinois covid19 updates, every day. we haven't seen a bump from the protests, and we're well beyond that initial 2-3 week gestation period now. our hospitalization and ICU numbers are still on a downward trend; the positives/test rate continues to decrease. i think the same is true in many other areas that had significant protest activity. obviously these protests aren't "safe", but i think they demonstrate how important it is to avoid -indoor spaces-, and how much of a difference it makes that the protesters tend to wear masks universally, and hand out free masks to people who show up without one. those things make a big, big difference.

but MAGA wants to go bowling! they want indoor activities! they want to cram into a 20,000 arena and proudly demonstrate their opposition to the idea of coronavirus by pretending it doesn't exist. it's so fucking stupid

this culture of "all the experts are wrong and their only motivation is to bring down the President, whom they've been brainwashed to believe is bad by CNN"

i always retreat to thinking about the history of climate change activists vs climate deniers as an important forerunner of this. there are probably better examples. but seriously, the whole goddamn "movement" on the right has been training themselves to ignore scientists and "experts" for decades now. not just to ignore them but to actively support the exact opposite stance, the anti-science position

like I'm not gonna be one of those #resistance dudes who just blames Trump for everything but this culture of "all the experts are wrong and their only motivation is to bring down the President, whom they've been brainwashed to believe is bad by CNN" directly feeds into not only our failure to act but also outright hostility towards people who are actually trying to help

― frogbs, Friday, June 19, 2020 12:51 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah I mean it's not like Trump somehow hypnotized 1/3 of the country into not giving a shit about the health of themselves or their loved ones in the name of FREEDOM! He's a symptom of the broader and more entrenched disease which has in turn promoted the spread of this more recent disease.

in the past there were at least dudes willing to present "alternate science" which I suppose is better than the straight up "every medical expert in the world suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome" line

since this tweet, AMC has revised their stance and will be requiring masks. but look at this deep fucking hole we're in:

AMC Theater CEO Adam Aron says their cinemas won't require masks upon reopening because they didn't "want to be drawn into a political controversy" https://t.co/zNjy9wzGMK

— Variety (@Variety) June 18, 2020

i'm a centrist, independent. but since all scientific issues are also political issues, and i'm in the center there as well

maybe we can do no masks, but double the hand sanitizer? in a good scientific compromise, no side ends up happy

the fact that there's a culture war over masks is pure Trumpism...do Republicans get this whiny if it's say, President Rubio? I think they'd just wear the fucking mask

I understand that under a different leader there may have been pushback from certain states, but I believe the utter absence of a top down federal plan to tackle this is what has really doomed us. Pretty much any other president would have attempted to take a coordinated approach that spanned the country instead of just letting many different players and localities sort it all out for themselves. Yes, some people would bristle at it and not comply, but having a coherent approach would have been far better either way.

otm