outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

jonathan meades has a good episode or two about the architecture of nancy iirc

Nancy the city is several centuries older than the English first name Nancy, so puh-leeze.

Which itself emerged from being a nickname for Ann

Like how you pronounce Annecy.

It is now yours for the taking.

ooh, i've always wanted my own baltic port

Turns out Sweden is ok. This is a bit ranty but there are a few truths on the discourse (at least the way it went in the UK)

Ok. The virus is pretty much over and done with in Sweden for now. Who knows if it will come back in September/October? (no one that's who, anyone who claims to know is an idiot) so I'll do a little rant because the discourse has been absurdly stupid

— grodaeu (@grodaeu) July 16, 2020

lol, that is very much not the consensus at all.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-15/sweden-says-latest-covid-immunity-not-enough-to-protect-citizens

Meanwhile, Sweden’s mortality rate per 100,000 is higher than that in the U.S.

^ seems pertinent

xp I read that thread and it seemed insane to me, didn’t it have the highest mortality rate of the Scandinavian nations? Who even is that person and what is their expertise?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html

LONDON — Ever since the coronavirus emerged in Europe, Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment. It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.

This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.

I think this is quite the thing to write when people have been dying alone without family allowed to say goodbye or give them the last kiss. Not to mention the fact that covid kills people horribly and even the people it doesn’t kill can have problems for an as yet unknown time afterwards.

And then death numbers started to pop up. And suddenly a *hundred* years of medical practice of judging health hazards by lost life years was thrown out the window. One 93 year old with four other diseases dying was the same as one case of infant mortality

— grodaeu (@grodaeu) July 16, 2020

They even acknowledged it a month ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/architect-of-sweden-coronavirus-strategy-admits-too-many-died-anders-tegnell

2xp

More than three months later, the coronavirus is blamed for 5,420 deaths in Sweden, according to the World Health Organization. That might not sound especially horrendous compared with the more than 129,000 Americans who have died. But Sweden is a country of only 10 million people. Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark.

this somebody also says the US is being irresponsible if they keep schools closed in Fall in another tweet, and i have no idea who this person is, so forgive me if I don't just accept it at face value.

the note about the economy is important. their economy still suffered despite mostly remaining open.

their cases have been on a downward slope for the last 10-14 days or so, buuuuut "over", idk, just a little over a month ago naive Floridians thought our infection rates were so low taht bars being open was something that'd not get interrupted again and suddenly our spikes showed up at an alarming rate.

grodeau's point seems to be "lol it was just fuckin' old people fuck them"

xp well tbf sweden _is_ unlikely to get waves like those in the US given they haven't actually changed their behavior.

gyac - don't know. With that first tweet I was taken aback because my understanding was that Sweden was fucked (however covid might have subsided recently like the rest of Europe) but what got me was the graphs discourse and what I liked was an acknowledgement of how much we just don't know or was a bit made up as we went along.

(It was RT-ed by a sane academic I've followed for a long time)

xpost yes very true

"I think this is quite the thing to write when people have been dying alone without family allowed to say goodbye or give them the last kiss. Not to mention the fact that covid kills people horribly and even the people it doesn’t kill can have problems for an as yet unknown time afterwards."

Not sure the tweet you linked warrants that. The tweet is about how do you count a death as due solely to covid (of a healthy infant) or what isn't quite (the 90 to with various issues).

Sweden's per capita death rate is insane but according to the FT coronavirus tracker both the number of cases and deaths is in decline. My assumption has been that's because people have been voluntarily locking themselves down but maybe there is a lower immunity threshold for reasons we don't understand yet. That last bit is probably wishful thinking.

that's a legit question but I hate how it's constantly co-opted into "if you get run over by a train they'll count it as a COVID death"

xxxpost i'm just wary of people prematurely overreacting to too little data and saying it truly was "much ado about nothing", because outside of the obvious (that what Sweden did couldn't realistically be implemented in the states), nonetheless, scores of idiots will do exactly that (just as they did earlier this year) and more people will disobey mask/distancing orders and beat up greeters at Wal-Mart for politely asking them to put a mask on.

xp it’s also summer and people are probably outside, cases are dropping everywhere in Europe too

meanwhile you have actual assholes in the US writing articles theorizing the "Lockdown killed people!" when the cases and deaths started dramatically increasing when the lockdown stopped and people stopped caring about distancing, esp in my state!

xpost yeah that too.

"I think this is quite the thing to write when people have been dying alone without family allowed to say goodbye or give them the last kiss. Not to mention the fact that covid kills people horribly and even the people it doesn’t kill can have problems for an as yet unknown time afterwards."

Not sure the tweet you linked warrants that. The tweet is about how do you count a death as due solely to covid (of a healthy infant) or what isn't quite (the 90 to with various issues).

I'm not reading callousness into that part of the thread, but ok.

The point is not people overreacted because they were screeching hysterics. The point is that lockdown happened to avoid the kind of outcomes that happened, and that all got glossed over in that thread for the author to sneer at people for not knowing precisely how deadly the disease would be, or indeed for caring that the elderly died at all.

I think the detail on the thread is to do with the incoherence of the approach, from Herd Immunity, and then when a lockdown was decided upon that there were guesses as to the length of it, lack of definition, the moralising park discourse and the like. That's otm to me.

TBH I think at this stage it's easy to lapse into that kind of thing, maybe not the'wake up idiots' tone of that account but more, idk, looking at the news and thinking 'only' 66 deaths today or whatever, the story becomes the decline rather than the 66 people who were loved by their families. A degree of callousness becomes unavoidable after a while.

That account is followed by four other people I follow, all of whom are economists or financial journalists, so I assume he's some kind of hedge fund data wonk and those guys are not always renowned for their high levels of empathy.

Faced with the swelling numbers, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) said Thursday that another lockdown was possible if the outbreak didn’t subside soon. He said he would meet with business owners Friday to discuss the move.

“If something is not done in the next few weeks to alter our course,” Suarez said at a news conference, “we could be in a dire situation.”

???

?!?!!!?!!

if this outbreak doesn't subside soon, we're gonna have to do something. but it's out of our hands for now...jesus take the wheel

has someone tried reasoning with teh virus

all of cable news for the past four years

Insert Mr Show killer rollercoaster sketch here.

Btw, this is person who RT-ed yesterday contentious thread on Sweden and on covid narrative into my TL. He had been pushing a narrative of lack of evidence for mask wearing/how little we know and how that flows into the narrative and the political choices taken. It's an ok read:

Quite annoying thing that's happened IMO has a false dichotomy about "what the science says" and "political (i.e. based on ideological / value judgements) interpretations of the science". It's not entirely wrong at all and it's an important distinction to make, but also...

— Daniel Howdon (@danielhowdon) July 17, 2020

Except that the people who are arguing against using masks (not to mention actively trying to prevent their use) are doing so on purely ideological/political grounds not out of some reasoned review of the evidence. They don't care about the evidence and would be doing what they are doing even if the evidence of mask use was overwhelming and peer-reviewed (cf. climate change).

Spain: Catalonia asks Barcelona residents to stay at home as much as possible again, after new cases tripled this week as opposed to the week before. There's about 150 local new outbreaks
Israel: New 'weekend lockdown' starting now due to high rise of new covid cases, 2000+ a day
Belgium: Authorities say "second wave" has begun, as they rack up 33% more daily cases this week compared to last week
Holland: A hundred more cases this week than last week
France: R is above 1 again, for the first time since May.
Germany: R is above 1 again as well

Second wave y'all.

UK: New daily COVID cases are no longer dropping in the UK
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/data-update-july-16

PBKR - yes I know this. I am not arguing around against wearing a mask just thought you all might like a look at the conflicting evidence for it.

Feel like governments are really just burying their heads in the sand and refusing to engage with the real issue here, that operating an economy reliant on social consumption might just be fundamentally incompatible with keeping a highly contagious and deadly virus under control. If these things meet head on there's no competition, the virus wins.

Until there's an acceptance of this then governments won't be able to even start on the task of ensuring the wellbeing of their citizens over the longer term, it appears they don't believe it's even possible.

Won't somebody please think of the economy

The reopenings will continue until morale improves

> UK: New daily COVID cases are no longer dropping in the UK

= increasing. just say increasing.

Good reporting on the battle between teachers and the federal govt in the US

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/teachers-back-to-school-protests.html?

⚠️Cautionary Tale!
60 y.o. John McDaniel died from #COVID after calling it a "political ploy"

He called the #Ohio shutdown "bullsh-t" "Does anyone have the guts to say #COVID19 is a political ploy? Asking for a friend. Prove me Wrong"

McDaniel leaves behind a wife and 2 sons. pic.twitter.com/jbIMdw4nmT

— Cleavon Gilman, MD🌵 (@Cleavon_MD) July 12, 2020

is anyone going to compile all these at the end of the year

this fucking fuck face

Georgia @GovKemp: "I am a believer that kids need to be in classrooms...every new school year has a challenge. We're gonna have cases that break out in the schools, either with personnel or perhaps students, just like you do with a stomach bug or a flu or anything else..." pic.twitter.com/qW9MhIWN1M

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 17, 2020

needs to meet the kids from Village of the Damned

school, where they freak out about head lice outbreaks, but a new novel coronavirus = "just a thing we have to live with"

Kemp is just unbelievably execrable.

PBKR - yes I know this. I am not arguing around against wearing a mask just thought you all might like a look at the conflicting evidence for it.

― xyzzzz__, Friday, July 17, 2020 8:13 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I read the thread. to be clear the evidence is not really “conflicting”, it is just weak by the standards medical scientists are accustomed to, due to the restrictions in study design inherent to mask-wearing — is it is impossible to use placebo, people in mask groups may not wear them while people in no-mask groups may wear them, etc. (this guy is a health economist, which instantly raises a red flag in my head, though he seems to have a good head on his shoulders.)

in medicine we are used to putting forth statements and drawing a distinction between the strength of the recommendation and the quality of the underlying evidence. taking a cholesterol pill after having a heart attack is a 1A recommendation: strong recommendation, good-quality evidence. wearing a mask in the midst of a pandemic caused by a respiratory virus would be something like a 1B recommendation: still a strong recommendation with moderate-quality evidence. it is a strong recommendation because the theoretical risks of wearing masks — I am struggling to really think of any legitimate ones, perhaps complacency with distancing and supply-chain disruptions — are so outweighed by the benefits even with only moderate-quality evidence.

it is regrettable that agencies like the WHO and CDC have so thoroughly bungled the messaging with masks when the recommendations should have been clear 4 months ago, and it is interesting (and possibly good, I’m still on the fence tbh) that laypeople have taken such a new interest in medical evidence, but really just wear a motherfucking mask