outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

They should build a wall and make us pay for it

https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/opinion/editorial_cartoon/2020/07/11/patrick-corrigan-canada-us-border/patrick_corrigan_canada_us_border.jpg

warning: the following video contains extreme patriotism

Anti-mask protesters march around the #Indiana State House chanting “USA” & “We Will Not Comply.” pic.twitter.com/5EhmLBlzqK

— Karen Campbell (@KarenCampbellTV) July 19, 2020

it's gonna be a hard winter

P sure that's Offred at the end there.

What's with the people wearing masks?

its so fucking weird that those people never get tear gassed. i wonder why

They're already shedding tears for what is happening to their once-great nation. Try to keep up.

Number of covid +ve patients on ventilation in English hospitals went below 100 for the first time yesterday. pic.twitter.com/CzZKGkQ0cJ

— Daniel Howdon (@danielhowdon) July 23, 2020

in other news, tories seen pushing hospital beds into scotland.

more offended by the "abbreviation" "+ve"

oh you’d love medical charts

56F w/ PMH COPD and T2DM BIBEMS c/o SOB x3d

I once had a dire temp job translating hand-scrawled referral forms into diagnostic codes. My favorite was "HCG+" to mean "you're pregnant."

techno/house BIBEMS 2020

medical charts are the great white whale of ML/NLP research. whoever figures them out will make a ton of money, but they are literally the toughest language problem around given the accuracy requirements/high stakes.

The sole hospital in a remote South Texas county has become so overwhelmed with covid-19 patients that officials could soon start sending home those least likely to survive the disease caused by the coronavirus.

A health board in Starr County debated Thursday whether to authorize critical care guidelines to help workers at Starr County Memorial Hospital make painstaking decisions about how to allocate beds and other dwindling resources as infections soar.

Patients with little chance of recovering could be denied hospital care, said Jose Vasquez, the top health official in the county of 61,000.

“The situation is desperate,” Vasquez said. “We cannot continue functioning in the Starr County Memorial Hospital nor in our county in the way that things are going. The numbers are staggering.”

Oof. That is scary.

the whole RGV is getting slammed rn. high population of uninsured people, predominantly mexican american.

RGV=rio grande valley

Awful. Have a dear friend with lots of family there, just checked and she says they're okay but it's bad.

this whole article is harrowing and awful, but one detail in particular i had never heard of before:

a mysterious paralysis that has afflicted about a dozen others at Houston Methodist Hospital

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/26/us/coronavirus-family-houston-masks.html

she came back from work sneezing one day in mid-June and thought it was allergies. Soon she had a cough, fever, headaches and diarrhea, and lost her senses of taste and smell, telltale symptoms of the coronavirus.
...
Mr. Roberts and his wife started sneezing, then coughing, just like their daughter, and developed fevers and severe body aches.

Every piece of "is it covid" advice from day one has said sneezing isn't a symptom.

yeah could easily be coincidental.

Last I looked the CDC had updated their official list of symptoms to include basically everything/anything, but yeah, as of right now sneezing is not one of them.

I got invited to do another test on the symptom-tracker app, purely on my write-in response of 'sneezing and runny nose'. Friends with sore throat etc did not. I don't understand it either.
And due to the time lag and posting I will be doing the test 4 days after I reported this symptom (and 3 days after it cleared up).

i would guess sneezing didn't get listed as a symptom simply because it's something that frequently happens due to things like pollen-sensitivity and often sneezing doesn't necessarily indicate sickness, whereas a cough almost always means you have something if it recurs.

Google has officially pushed back reopening its offices by a year; Googlers are all working from home until July 2021. This will be the first of many such acknowledgments of the inevitable. https://t.co/OSoiJvWFLx

— Laurie Voss (@seldo) July 27, 2020

Been in western Kansas all day and have not felt so out of the “bubble” in a very long time. Counties out here opted out of mask mandates — apart from some businesses and buildings being closed you’d think all was normal. This is from a political meet and greet tonight pic.twitter.com/L7JSKyu2c4

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) July 27, 2020

more like a political hi and die

caek I'm officially wfh through the end of 2020 at minimum, this at a university department where as recently as February senior leadership was saying they were planning to consider devising updates to the remote work policy to be fractionally more flexible about it

i'm probably wrong about this on multiple levels, but it seems like the whole baseball thing might be a turning point of sorts in the US. for those who don't follow, the MLB season just opened the other day and already one of the teams (the florida marlins) has TWELVE players with covid19, along with 2 coaches. games are already being cancelled, and the story is just beginning. if/when multiple teams encounter this, it's likely the season will be cancelled. (note that this is me just being an internet guy, guessing).

in spring, the schools shutting down was one of those turning points - a lot of people didn't start to grapple with the repercussions until then, even though it was obviously a HUGE and obvious thing that those with eyes to see could see coming for weeks. the baseball thing is obviously very different, but it might serve as a similar marker of public acceptance/denial in the US.

As support for Karl Malone's point, I think the real "wait this is serious" moment for a lot of people was not so much schools closing as the NBA shutting down.

we have now crossed completely into the era of Magical Thinking

As support for Karl Malone's point, I think the real "wait this is serious" moment for a lot of people was not so much schools closing as the NBA shutting down.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Monday, July 27, 2020 12:31 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i've been collecting these because it's also the night my wife went into labor and i figure one day my son might want to read them

An Oral History of the Day Everything Changed
On March 11, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic seemed to crystallize in the national consciousness. Americans look back on the turning point
https://www.wired.com/story/an-oral-history-of-the-day-everything-changed-coronavirus/

'Then God said, "Hold my beer"': The inside story of the night that changed L.A. clubs forever
An oral history of the coronavirus pandemic, as told by the staffs of four iconic L.A. nightclubs: the Troubadour, McCabe's Guitar Shop, Sound and the Satellite
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-06-02/la-nightclubs-coronavirus-troubadour-mccabes-sound-satellite

(tom hanks announced he had it and trump suspended non-resident entry from europe, plus the NBA, all in the space of about 2 hours)

caek I'm officially wfh through the end of 2020 at minimum, this at a university department where as recently as February senior leadership was saying they were planning to consider devising updates to the remote work policy to be fractionally more flexible about it

― all cats are beautiful (silby), Monday, July 27, 2020 11:54 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was already fully remote, my employer moved their reopen date back to october a few weeks ago, but i suspect they'll move it back again.

i'm also dabbling with interviewing right now, and am making it clear that i will still be remote after this is over and a bunch of places that are (in)famous for being anti-remote are all like: yeah, whatever, no problem, i don't think we're coming back any time soon.

xxp
“I’m never leaving a party early ever again.”

love too be currently unemployed with no end in sight

small mercies, but there's a pretty clear flattening of US cases (this data is from states/cities, not the federal govt)

https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-positive

(tom hanks announced he had it and trump suspended non-resident entry from europe, plus the NBA, all in the space of about 2 hours)

yea this was a seriously surreal moment especially since it was preceded by weeks of "uhh...is this going to hit the USA?"

there was a time when every time someone coughed there'd be a dude saying "heh heh....coronavirus" and everyone would laugh...

3/10 was awful. woke up hungover from a concert that I hd a blast at the night before to see the world was permanently changing. i basically started quarantining immediately even before the shutdown orders, so I didn't get much in the way of wind-downs with friends. our rehearsals for Fringe and the fundraiser I was doing were cancelled immediately. some of them I haven't seen in person since.

it's not like there was NO warning before 3/10. it just...got to where it did faster than we expected.

I was starting to worry on 3/9 after the Waffle House I went into was devoid of condiments and sparking clean like the restaurant just opened. said if Waffle House is taking this seriously enough to not operate like a waffle house then damn

I mean...I'm pretty up on current events, pretty much every medical expert outside of Trumps people said it was gonna go from 2 to 200 to 50000 basically overnight, but yeah I was just like..."cmon, that shit doesn't just happen"

like I remember asking the managers at work "uh..is there any plan for this" and they were all like, "nothing yet, we'll wait and see", which was weird to hear when an entire sports league just cancelled their season...any time pro sports is disrupted it's a pretty big deal no?

the part I didn't anticipate was the length of time it was gonna take, I figured "ok we all quarantine 2-3 weeks and then we'll know who has it and who doesn't"...back then it wasn't really clear what this was, it was just "kinda the flu but it's randomly killing people"

I kept getting emails about moving online during our very early spring break, the first full week of March, and so on the 9th and 11th, I took time from each class I was teaching to talk about what was going to happen if we moved courses online, polling students about their preferences, and also taking questions. By the time I let class go on the 11th and got in my car to go home, I was pretty convinced that nothing was ever going to be the same.

And then that weekend, asking my mother whether we could have some toilet paper because we were running low, and she said, "I can spare about 6 rolls," I was like, "jesus fuck."

I remember that first weekend of March, the 7th/8th, things were getting worrisome in NY. Everyone at my school wanted to close - parents immediately started pulling their children, and everyday classes were getting smaller and smaller. Finally that Friday the district allowed us to shut down over the weekend, and a couple of days afterward NY formally went on pause.

Saw a couple of movies that first week of March, actually, now that maybe weren't safe to be at. Then again, I think my screening of Wake in Fright had like five people there total, so...

caek, I know nothing about your situation but I changed jobs in June. Weirdest possible time to do so.

Roughly, in 4 weeks I did about 15 interviews with 10 companies and got 3 offers. No company was even considering in-person operations any time soon. Everyone I talked to had no expectations other than remote work for the foreseeable future.

Your industry may vary but that is what I found.

i'm in tech. i've done maybe half a dozen informational calls so far. just today i had the first call where they said: we're remote now, but we're not talking to anyone who isn't willing to relocate to us in the new year and i was like "lmao i have you seen the news? ok good luck this that!"