5491

Seems likely.

I think if you live in a multi-generational household with fewer bathrooms than people, the odds of giving it to your relatives are high. All the more so if you don’t have proper PPE to wear every time you enter their room. As I understand it, Italy has a lot of small homes where you have children, parents and grandparents living in exactly those conditions.

5492

Time to bust this out again!

Seriously, as soon as I saw that the account was created on Friday, I was pretty much convinced we had another sea lion (or maybe our most notorious one – what did he go by again?) on our hands.

5493

I’m going to speculate that this is the norm for like 99% of people.

5494

Yeah… I guess I should have said, “a household where you can’t give the infected their own bathroom.”

5495

The problem - as I understand it at least - is that testing a person only tells you whether they’re positive for Covid-19 right now. it doesn’t tell you whether that person will test positive tomorrow. So even if you’re in the clear, you still need to stay quarantined for the full period in case you start developing symptoms later.

5496

This is my oh so very shocked face.

5497

Look, he was just asking questions.

5498

It’s very early.

Italy is not testing as much as China did. Looking at the situation in Madrid (that we have some numbers for) you could extrapolate in Italy 5x as many symptomatic cases as confirmed cases. Now, numbers are different, but surely there are loads of symptomatic yet not counted cases. If they start testing more widely, those are going to show up, so even if right now we were seeing less infected since March 8th (lockdown date) the testing could still show cases increasing and mean little. This is why the WHO is calling for widespread testing, sadly it’s not something trivial to execute in this scale.

Probably a better measure is daily hospitalizations + deaths. There’s no site tracking daily hospitalization numbers, but we can see deaths might be stopping their growth.

However, while you would see a decrease in infections at the 10th day or so after lockdowns (so starting about now if the testing regime didn’t change), it takes up to a week more for that to show in deaths. Let’s wait some more days to see if there’s a change in the tendency.

5499

So much this. Different countries are following different strategies for testing, many countries have changed testing strategy (see, e.g., Denmark, Norway) which means you can’t even compare the numbers withing the same country, and countries have differing testing capability. At this point, I’m beginning to feel that the corona case numbers are not only misleading, they’re directly harmful.

The number of Covid-19 hospitalizations would be a significantly more meaningful measure, if we had it.

The other thing to keep in mind with the Italian situation, is that once a system is overwhelmed (as the Italian health care system is), it generally takes longer for it to to stabilize due to the knock-on effects of the crisis (i.e., there are people coming into the system today who will die unnecessarily because hospitals remain overwhelmed).

5500

@Mark_Asher,

I am not currently in the United States, so I have limited access to the information on the back-end of things, and the supes who talked to me today had only that limited information to relay. With the systems I can access, I do not see any flights being suppressed.

Definite information:

  • there have been ground stops issued now at a few facs due to the virus; all are lifted or scheduled to be lifted.
  • management at some facs has been pushing the CDC to have controllers who have been exposed to known positives to continue to work.
  • all trainees who are not qualified in at least one position that works live traffic have been summarily sent home as of today and are on indefinite leave.
  • induction of new controllers and current job bids in process have been terminated.

The proposal to curtail air traffic services would seem to me to be absolutely extraordinary. That it has been floated to supes (who are not part of the union) is mind-boggling. My best guess is that the current Administration expects things to get much worse before they get better, and are looking at ways of winding down non life-essential services.

I will let you know if I learn anything else before we all do! However, if anyone has anywhere to be, I think that it would be best if they got there ASAP, just in case movement is soon curtailed.

5501
5502

That GOP proposed package mentioned above is utterly inadequate, and tying it to tax liability to get the maximum benefit just adds insult to injury.

Unless adequately addressed, this is is going to make the financial crisis look like a little kid’s backyard tea party.

5503
5504

In case ya missed Fräulein Merkel.

“This is serious. Take it seriously.”

5505

That too, but charity is never enough, or we wouldn’t have come up with unemployment benefits, food stamps, Section 8 etc. etc.

5506

Fair enough. But starting with something that you and I can control at least gives a feeling of empowerment in uncertain times.

5507
5508

The most recent case in my town is a friend of mine. (I haven’t seen him for months So I’m worried about him, not exposure.). He almost certainly got it at the gym which means it’s got to be widespread in the community here.)

5509

I just spoke to my friend Walter. I have not spoken to him in a while. He’s a Trumpet. We had a decent talk at first. How you doing etc. Then he was telling me that a guy he knew told him that COVID was a bio weapon. I really tried to explain that this was not a fucking bio weapon. That he had to be careful. He said that he has been taking vitamin D and he would be fine. Then he hung up on me.

Dude is insane. How do you fix this?

5510

Darwin Awards?

I mean I wish I had a better answer, but realistically I think we are going to be a bunch of winners or attempted award winners in the coming months.