Diddums
3094
Did she happen to mention goggles? Those are a big part of why the nurses in Wuhan and Italy are shown with “raccoon eyes” from leaving the PPE on for a full shift. I hope the paramedics and other health workers have them too.
Hansey
3095
She did not mention them specifically, but I can ask her the next time I speak to her. I assume they do include goggles, though. She’s been working in EMS pretty much her entire adult life (so for 30 years now) and takes her job and responsibilities very seriously. I imagine she would make sure they’re part of the required gear.
I’m almost tempted to put some real money down on far less than 10,000 people dead in 2 weeks in the US from covid19, but that just feels a bit wrong to place a bet on that. And remember, 10K dead is a lowball estimate for the next 14 days, as it could be upwards of 50K if the health care system starts to crumble.
OR, mortality rates are far, FAR lower than we think they are per case.
jpinard
3098
Can you imagine if the idiot in chief were 10% as intelligent and measured as Whitmer? Man she’s great.
Oghier
3099
Ouch.
That must vary so much, region to region. I went to my local grocery store (in St Louis) at 10:30pm, just before closing. There were maybe a dozen other customers there. It was funny as we all maintained at least 15’ of distance from each other.
Other than hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol, they had plenty of everything. The shelves looked perfectly normal. I bought way too much of shelf-stable foods I don’t like (oatmeal, peanut butter, bad flavors of protein powder mix). My theory is, I won’t snack on that stuff ;)
rei
3100
of FUCKING COURSE the travel ban to europe excludes his FUCKING TRUMP RESORT PROPERTIES.
I don’t like how everyone seems to just assume that if most of the world “self-quarantines” for a couple of weeks, that the power will stay on, and the water running, and the sewage pumping away. Making a few percent stay at home for a while guarantees there will be more fires, more neighbor-incidents or “domestic” police calls… We are talking about running pretty close to the metal here, and just a few more accidents added on will cause serious local breakdowns which will magnify the potential carnage.
Oghier
3102
If power, water or sewage fail for extended periods across a wide area, this is no longer Spanish Flu-level danger. It’s the Black Death.
I’m sorry, could you speak into the mic?
Easy does it, guys. Deep breaths. One day at a time, Sweet Jesus!
I don’t think that’s the right mindset. Essential personnel stay on duty. The vast majority of people will get ill and then get better and can get back to work to replace the newly sickened. Just buying time for heroic science stories to emerge and I CANNOT FUCKING WAIT FOR THOSE.
I don’t know. I trust my neighbors and my community and Americans everywhere to rise to the challenge for one another. I’m maintaining optimism, thankuverymuch.
Tman
3105
I humbly give you the NC Coronavirus task force… (someday I will learn how to embed gifs)
You want to know how you get the coronavirus? I give you the NC coronavirus task force.
Dejin
3106
Okay, that was hilarious and sad. But at least as far as I could tell none of them immediately touched their face or eyes that I noticed.
A million cases, mean 200,000 serious case (according the CNN special) a large chunk of which will be dry coughs without nasal congestion, which is unusual for the flu. I think we’d notice that.
…and another thing!
Shit like this brings people together. Most of us remember that post-9/11 period of compassion and camaraderie that lasted, what, two days, a week, a month? It was special. That was after a sudden, national tragedy but now we’ve got a slow-moving, global tragedy-in-progress. Perhaps we’ll see that same kind of restorative good will on a larger scale and maybe it lasts a longer time.
I’m thinking ahead to all those fortunate people finally able to poke their heads back out and look around with renewed gratitude for life, love, family, nature, work, education, entertainment, travel… hell pretty much the whole damn package.
I’ll also throw this in, and I’ll be blunt; people can handle the death of their loved ones, especially elderly loved ones. All of us can because we have to. I watched my dad die of pancreatic cancer across three years and then three months and then three days and it haunts me and lifts me up in equal measure.
When my best friend, college roommate, and best man Josh got diagnosed with a rare blood cancer at age 45 some years back, all his friends reached out in sympathy and concern… except our other college buddy Matt who waited a few days before calling him. And so every day on the phone with me, Josh would fixate on how rude Matt had been and he would cuss and call him bad names and I tried to play along, knowing how much emotional turmoil and fear Josh was going through and not wanting to be argumentative, but still, I didn’t get it… until one day after a Matt-rant he said, “It helps to have a villain in all this.”
I wanted to share that story just to point out we’ve got a really good one. I think it’s highly probable that we get through this without it being as bad as people are right now fearing it could be. And I can’t think of a better rebuke to Trumpism and whatever version of that is bubbling up around the globe. This could move the needle hard on global health care issues and restore faith in science and maybe even snap some desperately-needed attention to that other crisis we need to coordinate a response to yesterday… a crisis which is very much being addressed by this current lock down, proving once again that mother nature is a stone cold bad-ass.
Nice post
We do need our villains and God know Trump is a right out of comic book when it comes to villains.
Thanks, Strollen! Hang in there, buddy,
By the way, I’m super grateful for the board game thread and all the kind Qt3 folks who recommended games back when I was shopping for Christmas. The whole family is about to be home together for a month or more with, here’s hoping, loads of time for quality gaming.
Speaking of games, here’s one I’ve been playing all day… if you could erase COVID-19 from the globe right now in exchange for four more years of Trump, do you do it?
Depends on what the case definition is.
Italy has tested 60k people and has 15k cases, so 25% of those tested positive. Now, Italy might be counting symptomatic, not tested patients as cases, but they do have an inordinate CFR, which points towards there being more hidden cases in Italy than confirmed cases would show.
It’s the same as the UK officially estimating 10-20x the number of reported cases, for example . Remember China changed their definition to include untested symptomatic cases, and Madrid is going to do that starting today too.
Oh, the UK is absolutely right about the philosophy of timing this during the summer. I’m pretty sure that other countries have exactly the same philosophy (the Norwegian government explicitly stated that their expectation is that peak Covid-19 would be June-August) - it’s just that other countries think that the right way to achieve that is to attempt contain the virus now, rather than let it run uncontrolled through the populace.
Honestly, the more I think about what Boris put forward yesterday, the more appalled I become.
Boris is basically gambling thousands of lives on the accuracy of some models (and as I’ve said before, if you’ve done any work with scientific modelling, you know how little is required to throw such models off completely). At the same time, he’s essentially put a stop to testing (no more testing if you get sick -> stay at home), which means that the UK government’s ability to estimate the spread in it’s population is very, very rapidly going to deteriorate. Which again means that the priors being fed into those models will be increasingly error-prone, and models with incorrect priors are basically worth squat.
In that kind of situation, the only indication you’ll have that the model is out of whack with reality, is when people start getting admitted to the hospital at unexpected rates. And if that happens, you’re already too late to stop this effectively (cf. Italy). Which leads me to the same conclusion as Dr Sridhar: the UK government has already given up doing anything about Covid-19.
TLDR; this is the essence of what Boris said yesterday:
“Something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it.”
We’re literally seeing Stage Two of the Four Stage Strategy in real-life action, and I wish I was joking.
Well it is good we have a least two adults and one leader working on this crisis.
