outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

trump is good, things he doesn't like are bad. that's the logic

Maybe the solution is for the left to shadow the right until it becomes indistinguishable from it. Then he'll decree universal healthcare and prison reform and the defunding of police departments and the abolition of ICE, etc., just to pwn the libs.

doesn't a rushed vaccine kind of cut against the natural antivaxx instincts of his base?

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, September 2, 2020 4:22 PM (forty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i have no idea who they think the target market for a vaccine rushed under the trump administration is? people who like trump won't get it. people who don't like trump won't get it. if this is their october surprise it seems like a longshot.

same logic as the "see, I love the Mexican people!" photo of the taco bowl and unearthly sadistic grin, the target audience of which was definitely not Mexican-American. in this case, whether or not his supporters believe a vaccine is valuable, they will enjoy telling the libs that ACTUALLY trump brought a vaccine and nobody gives him credit for it and the liberal fake news media have blocked out the truth that he's done more than any president ever has done for vaccines and the Vaccine People, etc etc.

yep, i agree

I don't really see the presence of a vaccine on Election Day helping him at all honestly

Pretend you are an elderly voter who is sympathetic to republican issues and fearful and mistrustful of social change, especially 'socialism' which is a thinly veiled fear of minorities. iow, you are a natural Trump voter. Except you are scared to death of covid-19. You saw all the pictures of swamped hospitals in Italy and NYC. You know friends or else friends of friends who died in ICU, and you can't understand why Trump claimed it would disappear "like magic", and has been so slow to stop this horrible, horrible frightening situation.

In that case, delivering a vaccine by election day might just reassure you and remove that nagging idea that maybe that nice Joe Biden would do more to save you from dying.

the "vaccine" is just going to be a Snickers bar

he's done more than any president ever has done for vaccines and the Vaccine People, etc etc.

Aimless - I know people like that. They’d still vote Trump even if they were on their deathbed.

Thinking about Nixon and Vietnam and how he handled that just prior to the election in '68, obviously he would have been in back-channel negotiations with the drug companies to postpone any positive vaccine-related news until the day after the election (meanwhile touting his secret plan to end COVID).

The idea that a vaccine is going to be available to the general public by election day is blatant political propaganda. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the NYT would make a headline out of it and keep it up on their website all day

More than 1,000 students at the University of South Carolina tested positive for the coronavirus in the month of August, bringing the positivity rate for the most recent reporting period to nearly 28 percent, according to the university’s data dashboard.

By comparison, the World Health Organization has advised countries against reopening when positivity rates are higher than 5 percent.

That total is nearly double the 553 cases that had been detected when the university last updated its data a week ago, WLTX reported.

Over the weekend, a crowded pool party in an apartment complex near campus raised concerns after the fire chief described a scene that was “like Mardi Gras,” with about 200 mask-free revelers. On Tuesday, USC President Bob Caslen said that students’ off-campus behavior had been “both disappointing and unacceptable,” and that the number of active infections was “larger than we expected at this point.”

...There are no plans for USC to close down, Caslen said at a Wednesday town hall, according to the paper. He expressed hope that the alarming case count would serve as a wake-up call and help the school get the outbreak under control.

“If I don’t test, I don’t have any positives,” he said. “If I don’t have any positives, you don’t make them news and no one pays attention.”

uh, ok. what a weirdass threat, at the end

listen, i could let these people die in secret, if i wanted. ok. by not doing my job. they could die and you wouldn't even know about it until it was too late.

These administrators at these universities ought to get the guillotine anyway, but their pivot to blaming students when the administrations were the ones who forced a re-opening is ridiculous.

Of course the students shouldn't be partying, but what the fuck else do these idiots think is going to happen? That Chad and Billy from the Alpha Sigmas and Ashley and Brynne from the Delta Pis are going to hunker down and study in their frat and sorority houses?

My school cancelled the last vestiges of in person instruction a few weeks ago - before move in week - and told everyone to stay home.

A colleague was on the task force that spent the summer studying density and airflow and distancing requirements and they determined that to be safe they could only have 2,000 people max on campus every day. But a typical day means there are usually around 28,000, and this is a big sprawling suburban campus, one of the biggest in the world.

But a ton of students had already signed leases so they moved back anyway because why not party with your friends instead of living with your parents? There are limits of 25 people per outside gathering in place but this means that I now three or four houses on the same block with 25 people each.

We haven’t had a huge uptick yet but I expect one soon

My younger kids started in-person classes yesterday, in middle and high school, respectively. France is really going in on "all we need are masks". There's not much social distancing going on at their school, which has about 2000 students: the students mostly stay in one room while the teachers move around, to minimize mixing, but they haven't reduced class sizes at all. I guess we'll see! Paris has been having a lot of new cases lately, and nationwide we had 7000 new cases yesterday: by late next week we'll begin to know how bad the school restart has been.

I don't start teaching for a couple of weeks. I have 4 hours per week of in-person teaching, and some hours of distance teaching as well. We don't really have dorms here & college kids here party less...intensely than in North America, so again the admins hope masks and visors will be enough to keep the classrooms safe enough. We'll see!

sounds about the same as the UK, except nobody is wearing masks in UK classrooms.

the numbers in France look..... pas bon

yeah the trends here aren't good, I'm expecting a second lockdown (at least in Paris) in a few weeks. I figure they want a "normal' rentrée just so that everyone has books and has spent a little time with their teachers before everything shuts down again.

ah the music of clattering wheelie cases laden with dictionaries and cahiers du soir

c'est doux non ?

si si, unless you’re a cranky old man who lives on the road to the school like my father-in-law. every year he swears he’s going to take it up with la mairie.

The odds of the Trump administration successfully producing and rolling out a vaccine months, even years, ahead of schedule seem so, so low, considering it would literally be the first thing in four years that they did not royally fuck up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=tjkRd288caQ&feature=emb_logo

erm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjkRd288caQ

frick, wrong thread, never mind

ah the music of clattering wheelie cases laden with dictionaries and cahiers du soir

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Thursday, 3 September 2020 14:22 (fifty-five minutes ago) link

c'est doux non ?

― Joey Corona (Euler), Thursday, 3 September 2020 14:24 (fifty-three minutes ago) link

si si, unless you’re a cranky old man who lives on the road to the school like my father-in-law. every year he swears he’s going to take it up with la mairie.

BREAKING: #PennState's director of athletic medicine, Wayne Sebastianelli, says that cardiac MRI scans revealed that roughly 30-35 percent of Big Ten athletes who tested positive for COVID-19 appeared to have myocarditis. https://t.co/md4p1IoaLh

— Parth Upadhyaya (@pupadhyaya_) September 3, 2020

what???

Saw that.

Oh my god, UIUC reopened because of an ISING MODEL where CV+ students randomly interacted with their nearest neighbors. https://t.co/hllrVNTjwF

— Quantian (@quantian1) September 3, 2020

never let nerds be in charge

lol as soon as I saw it was uiuc physicists i knew it would be G01d3nf31d

still take them over gmu economists

sitting in classes together all day every day possibly spreads the virus but then we don't get to blame irresponsible students

the “clusters” tab here is fucking grim:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

just an endless list of prisons and meatpacking plants. maybe somebody should.... do something about this?????

marshall project has been reporting damning evidence on the prison population covid disaster more or less nonstop; it's a lack of political will
https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/8793-covid-19

This is why I posted my high horse comment on the politics thread a few days ago about donating to the National Bailout Fund. We need to get as many people out of those hellholes as possible, and absent advocating for early release or burning the prisons down, Bailout funds are the next best thing.

Go outside (with a mask, 6ft from others), everyone!

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/09/03/Vitamin-D-deficiency-raises-COVID-19-infection-risk-by-77-study-finds/7001599139929/

got em

i actually had been prescribed Vitamin D due to deficiency before this all started.

also sad lol @ 77...been on irc too long

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/06/as-other-cities-go-into-lockdown-why-isnt-london-having-a-second-wave?CMP

I've been wondering about this a lot over the past few weeks, New York doesn't appear to be spiking again either. Has any big city or region that experienced a massive early spike seen a second one? In eg Spain are things escalating in different regions to the first time round?

I think it's been suggested that herd immunity doesn't work quite the way we thought - that it's not so much a matter of percentages as of who got infected. The idea is that in cities with a huge initial outbreak, the people who are most likely to get and spread it have already done so, so the infection rate goes way down.

Given some of the numbers we've seen around asymptotic carriers - and the fact the virus was circulating uncontrolled much earlier than originally thought - I wonder if the proportion of people exposed to the virus is much much higher than that 17.5%. London was going about its business perfectly normally until well into March.

they also think some people might have hidden immunity to COVID, though a lot of this is still theoretical rather than proven:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200716-the-people-with-hidden-protection-from-covid-19

I could have sworn that whenever they do bigger studies of general populations, a surprisingly small percentage have antibodies without having knowingly had covid. that is to say, it's not as widespread as people might assume.

my rule of thumb is that for obvious reasons useful population-level statistics are hard to come by in the middle of global pandemics

yeah... when they say "surprisingly small" i've seen stuff like, oh, it's only 20% of the population instead of 60-70%. though of course it'll vary by region

I’m pretty sure I’ve also read that antibody tests are likely to underestimate the number of people who’ve had the virus, since they quickly fall below detectable levels particularly if it was a mild case.

my younger brother (back at secondary school in s yorks today) just sent me a whatsapp video of the corridor between lessons that looked like the ones that did the rounds in the the US south a couple of weeks ago (i.e. insane crowding, followed days later by the inevitable), the the difference is almost none of them are wearing a mask in the UK.