Well, one wouldn’t want the proles to get used to the idea that they should be treated like, you know, human beings or anything.
Quaro
4985
We are so lucky we didn’t get in winter, during the peak of normal flu season.
Nesrie
4986
Flu season this year was not great. The vaccine wasn’t spot on but all that is being overshadowed.
I believe Australia and the southern hem is about to hit that duo issue… hard.
Mr.GRIM
4987
Just got this in the email, looks like schools will be closing for the rest of the year in BC, and schools will be required to provide a way to do schoolwork at home.
Districts will also be required to provide service for children of people performing essential services, so thats good.
vyshka
4988
Arizona is apparently looking at closing schools for the rest of the school year.
Edit: looking at the article from my wife, I’m not sure where she got calendar year.
The wheels are moving slowly, and mainly in response to the fact we can all see what other countries are doing, and denial isnt working anymore.
Rates freeze for one year.
£10k to 700,000 businesses that are too small to pay rates
Various guarantees on loans to businesses.
Banks are offering mortgage holidays
Promises around wages and rents “coming soon”
Oh, and the schools are finally shutting on Friday. One reason given was there are staff shortages due to suspect cases/family isolating or high risk isolating, which hints to me that they are everywhere.
Wifes sister is NHS nurse and its being geared up for massive influx, but they are restructuring and reorganising at an astonishing rate. It’s now pretty much split into a smaller number of wards and surgery units for emergency cases and everything else is converted to coronavirus units. She was in day unit/dialysis centre and she’s about to be moved to a hospital.
The Big 3 are going to close all of their North American factories.
There’s been reports of using HIV medicine to cure Covid for weeks now. Spain did it (also lopinavir/ritonavir), China also has reports of it working sometimes (same deal, that’s why Spain tried it).
Maybe the malarial angle is new, but otherwise, seems like something that’s been shown to help sometimes, cure some people, but we’d have heard if it was a proper cure.
KevinC
4994
Poor Italy, I feel for them. :( And I fear they are just a preview of what is going to be walloping the United States within a week.
What sucks about a global pandemic like this is that it’s not like the US or most other countries can just send over a bunch of doctors and ventilators to help out (not that the Trump administration would ever even consider such a thing) since we’re all affected. Although I did hear that China sent a bunch of doctors and equipment? Good on them, if so.
That’s almost a 10% death rate in Italy. Coworker this morning said the death rate was 10% and I was like “Where are you getting that from?” Now I know!
Surely the actual rate must be lower. How many unconfirmed cases are there?
I assume the rate is worse due to their healthcare resources being overloaded, with so many cases?
KevinC
4997
It seems so hard to say, given people being asymptomatic, etc.
Like I’ve said to my management recently, regardless of what the percentage ends up being what we do know is that thing is horrific and scary. 1%, 5%, 10%… whatever it is, the healthcare system is buried and 475 people lost the fight today. So sad.
Fuck. New study in the NEJM. Virus can survive up to 3 days on plastic/steel. And it can linger in the air for up to half an hour. The researchers are from the National Institute of Health’s Rocky Mountain Lab, which is one of the few Biosafety-4 facilities in the country. These are the guys and gals who study stuff like Ebola.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973
Fuck, even made my trip to the corner shop today risky.
Which should be concerning because wasn’t their healthcare system rated much higher than ours? Though we might have the capacity to ramp up in reaction to things going to shit. (Manufacturing plus military resources.)
And Kevinc, the world’s smallest bright spot, aren’t we more like two or three weeks behind Italy? Not that I have faith in the Government being competent enough to take advantage of that window.
Menzo
5001
We are 11 days behind Italy and even slightly outpacing their diagnosed case # from 11 days ago. So It’s likely to be worse.
Mr.GRIM
5002
This is what I fear, because there seems to be multiple hotspots in the US (NY, Seattle) compared to the single northern region in Italy.
KevinC
5003
My very brief Googling a week or so ago showed that Italy has more beds and doctors than the US by a decent margin, but the US has the most ICU beds (speaking in terms of per capita, not total numbers).
And as @Menzo mentioned just now, we’re ~11 days behind Italy but we’re not looking good. :(
These people are my friend’s 2nd cousins. He just told me. 3 more of them are on their deathbed now including the mom.
