outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Coming at things from a different direction, the CDC just added several symptoms to its official list, and they are so generic and mundane - like runny nose, stuffy nose and congestion, sore throat, diarrhea - that some have hypothesized they added them just to further encourage people to get tested.

Which, btw, everyone should, if there's even a chance you have it or might have been exposed. My wife got tested last week via drive-thru - she never left the car - and had her result back less than 24 hours later.

you know the testing situation is very different depending on where you live, right

it's almost like a consistent, coordinated federal response would have been a good thing!

but states rights

Fine, I get the message, every state is different. I'll just stop posting in this thread. Celebrate at will.

Scary thread of shitty long term effects of rona:

Hey, so, I got #Covid19 in March. I’ve been sick for over 3 months w/ severe respiratory, cardiovascular & neurological symptoms. I still have a fever. I’ve been incapacitated for nearly a season of my life. It's not enough to not die. You don’t want to live thru this, either. 1/

— Dani Oliver (@DaniOliver) July 3, 2020

I can't qualify for a test in NY and my elderly parents with health complications apparently don't qualify for getting them in MI either so idk idk

Completely, utterly insane that anyone should have to 'qualify' for a test at this point.

you know the testing situation is very different depending on where you live, right

― time is running out to pitch in $5 (Karl Malone), Sunday, July 5, 2020 2:19 PM bookmarkflaglink

it's almost like a consistent, coordinated federal response would have been a good thing!

but states rights

― time is running out to pitch in $5 (Karl Malone), Sunday, July 5, 2020 2:19 PM bookmarkflaglink

yep. where I live, you can take it for whatever reason. my best friend, who likely HAD the fucking 'rona, was denied a test several months ago, and still doesn't qualify for one (she lives in Richmond).

gee, wonder which state has the higher % of positive tests

Most of the time I don’t want to catch the coronavirus because I don’t want to spread it, and then occasionally I see one of these trip reports and I remember that I also don’t want to catch it because I really really don’t want to develop even moderate covid 19

You really don't. It can fuck you up very badly.

yeah I'm really curious what the long term prognosis is for some of these people. how many "mild" or "moderate" cases are going to become some sort of chronic illness, or will result in permanent lung damage?

I don't think they know how many yet, but it's obvious it's happening. of the five or so friends I know who had it, some had no noticeable long-term affects, some reported having minor reduction in breathing capability months later, one took two months of steroids and occasional hospital visitations to get back to normal.

my friend told me during the throes of it that she was breaking down crying one night due to how difficult it was to breathe, and that she felt a sharp stabbing pain a day or so later that almost sent her to the ER.

This is why that idiotic South Parkish take “you only have a 99.9% chance of survival” (in my age group at least) irritates me so much - like, it clearly isn’t just death or a bad flu, a lot of the stories I’ve read are downright terrifying and I’d be incredibly nervous about the long term effects

besides the fact that they have an overconfidence in what the mortality rate is, and their calculation is always much lower than what the numbers currently suggest, I would love to know why they're ok with overcrowded hospitals and people suffering permanent damage to their respiratory systems.

with the hospitals, their approach is simple - they just deny there's overcrowding. I've had people who live in places that I know have limited hospital beds with doctors and nurses confirming this proclaim loudly "hmm, where's the overcrowding??!!"

^this
And

This is why that idiotic South Parkish take “you only have a 99.9% chance of survival” (in my age group at least) irritates me so much - like, it clearly isn’t just death or a bad flu, a lot of the stories I’ve read are downright terrifying and I’d be incredibly nervous about the long term effects

Aside: for others like myself thinking of more vulnerable family members, the EVMS MATH+ protocol and its first 25 references has some ideas for lower-cost and potentially helpful prophylaxis. Eastern Virginia Medical School seems to have decent results with their inpatient protocols (3.5% hospitalization mortality, vs around 20% in NYC and for NHS).

― 4'33" at an abattoir (Sanpaku), Sunday, July 5, 2020 1:38 PM (six hours ago)

this is utter nonsense and please stop posting this stuff!

Readers can judge for themselves. The recs are, at worst, harmless. I think there's a good case to run some randomized controlled trials on some, given benchtop studies / negligible side effects / past RCTs with less lethal viral diseases. But I'm comfortable thinking about 0-5% benefits given the cost.

Sanpaku, youve been revealed to be a charlatan too often on here, kevin is a fuckin medical doctor please stop

but %s tho

Sanpak-oof

Now seeing friends wig out about this, because they apparently didn't realize bubonic plague never really went away, but we have antibiotics now

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/07/06/bubonic-plague-warning-in-chinas-inner-mongolia-here-is-what-it-means/

Big news from Harvard:

While some students will live on campus, "all course instruction (undergraduate and graduate) for the 2020-21 academic year will be delivered online"https://t.co/TRB8Gaap0t

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) July 6, 2020

but...it's not about the instruction...it's about the networking with future harvard grads and their families...

what, are the future presidents and supreme court justice members in the current harvard law program supposed to just ZOOM with each other??

I saw mini-thread on Twitter that made a good point about the overlap between the MAGA chuds that refuse to wear masks and the MAGA chuds incensed about Black Lives Matter. They are completely incapable of empathizing with something that doesn't personally impact them. While, ever so slowly, some of them may come around to wearing a mask because COVID is really starting to hit the red states, they will never be able to empathize with those who have suffered from systematic racism, which is what propels my ongoing despair for our country ever reversing this tailspin.

my friend would rather not return to the office full time, although he’d like to be able to stop in to do some things that aren’t easily done at home

someone in his office contracted the virus and he needs a negative test to return. apparently, there’s no easy way here for someone who has not had symptoms to get a test. even if it’s as a prerequisite to work. he finally made it over to the clinic on the other side of town run by the single publicly-funded hospital, the only place that will do on-demand testing without symptoms

yeah after trying to understand the thinking of that demographic after a family dustup last month I realized people think that way (re: masks, re: police brutality) just because they fucking want to and they absolutely are empathy-deficient and some of them in fact see "empathy" as a mental illness or some kind of problem itself that needs to be eradicated from humankind so there's just no way for me to ever connect with these people.

well, except with empathy

I need to find the article again, but there’s one making the rounds making the point that percentage of positive tests shows a very skewed view of the situation and the metric that is more useful as a primary point is “tests per positives”

the idea being that 1 out of 5 people testing positive seems bad, but if you only did five tests, your data is worthless. If you say “5 positive in 100 tests” then it’s a much more useful metric than the percentage alone, as it both encourages more testing and while the number of positives are higher, it’s a clearer view of the total situation — and if you care about the percentage, it’s right there

you’d also get a lot more of a push to test anyone who wants a test, asymptomatic or symptomatic, because the goal is to gauge the population (or at least the possibly-exposed population) as a whole rather than waffling about what tests mean

Solnit has a great essay about the maskless people of the pandemic (Masculinity as Radical Selfishness) where she brings up "self regulation". This is such a great word to describe where a large amount of people in the US just completely fail at living within an interconnected society.

"Self-regulation is defined as children’s ability to control their behavior and impulses, follow directions, and persist on a task."

This is the central problem of libertarianism

i don't follow the libertarianism scene, but i've been wondering how those guys have been doing with coronavirus. the appropriate response to coronavirus would seem to run exactly counter to everything their ideology suggests?

from the same essay "Which is exactly what libertarianish conservatives and the hypermasculine deny to justify an every-man-for-himself ethos instead. And as it turns out, radical self-reliance ends where social withdrawal actually begins to be a form of care for others in this pandemic. Thus the white men who have been telling us all along that they are rugged commandos of self-sufficiency who could live alone in the post-apocalyptic woods off what they could hunt with their bare hands suddenly claim they need help right away with their hair."

To me, it's less of an actual scene and more of an active ingredient in mainstream Republican attitudes these days. I suspect a lot of these anti-mask people see themselves as vaguely libertarian inasmuch as they can formulate any kind of plausible ideology.

"It's okay if YOU want to put blackout curtains on YOUR windows. Go ahead and be a prisoner of your fear. Not me. I'M gonna leave all the lights on and the window shades wide open because I'M not afraid of German bombers. And no government can make me!"

"Why should anyone else's life affect my own??"

*goes out and affects everyone else's life by being near them without a mask*

A weird libertarian acquaintance of mine said this: "I’ve always felt like Primus wrote the line, 'I’d rather regret something I’ve done than something I haven’t done,' for me."

Yeah, you selfish asshole, except that you're not just deciding your own risk tolerance, you're deciding for everyone you're going to breathe near, for the foreseeable future. They didn't get a say in how edgy and risk-tolerant you get to be. H8.

further Primus both sucks and didn't write that song but whatever

lol

primus would suck less if they had released 'Sweat Loaf'

LOL @ this thread, try living in the UK where next-to-nobody wears masks or has ever worn masks and it doesn't have anything to do with Masculinity as Radical Selfishness.

UK - the ultimate libertarian zone

It's nothing to do with libertarianism and everything to do with the government not advising people to wear masks.

yeah i was about to bring up the UK as having the same issue but decided I like it when an ilxor points out that the world is not the US.

(was jk about uk)

Most terrible things about the US were invented in the UK, I assumed that was another one.

oh, she does group Bolsanaro, Putin, Boris J., Trump all together in their handling of the pandemic.

masks compulsory on public transport and in shops (from 10/07) in this part of the UK

I thought they'd already introduced masks being compulsory on public transport in England but it doesn't look like it judging from the buses passing by me last night.

Boris Johnson and Masculinity as Radical Selfishness, it's a perfect fit!