Mr.GRIM
1692
I wonder what the jerk/non jerk ratio is in our society. Gotta tell ya, I’m not feeling too optimistic.
I am more optimistic than you are! in my limited sorties, I haven’t met a single sick looking person outside.
Fortunately, games will save us:
Quaro
1695
Here’s a couple of really easy ones. Note that you can really up the effectiveness of all these multi-layer cotton designs by putting a disposable paper towel sandwiched in between with every use.
More Designs: https://masks4all.co/how-to-make-a-homemade-mask/
While it’s true these are more effective stopping spread from infected people and protecting the wearer, these improved versions are somewhat effective defensively as well. When you have both parties wearing a mask the combined effect is quite high, it has to get through both to reach you.
If you have a HEPA furnace filter laying around (or a vacuum bag, etc) you can make a really high quality one, quite a bit more work involved:
Found this article about virus tests informative. Hadn’t realized there was both an active-infection and post-infection test.
Sure, the second test is for antigens. Ideally we’ll all go to our next checkup in 6 months and ask the doctor for a COVID-19 antigen test and finally know if we had it or not.
Unfortunately, it sounds like antigen tests so far are quite low accuracy, so not yet a silver bullet.
They will become increasingly important as this progresses. Healthcare workers with antigens don’t need to wear masks, and people with antigens can donate plasma to save lives.
ELT is usually comedy, answering silly questions and making fun of absurd things. But this episode is a bunch of phone calls with everyday folks whose jobs are considered essential - delivery drivers, pharmacy workers, bus drivers. I know we’re all kinda saturated with “living with the pandemic” stuff, but for me this one stood out.
For sure. It is a bit disconcerting that the number of “reinfections” is getting harder to dismiss as just inaccurate initial testing, so it may be that the virus is so novel that bodies don’t retain the anti-body recipe for more than a few weeks – that would be completely unprecedented so is still unlikely, but we are getting more disturbing data. Same with cross-species transmission (humans-cat-dog-tiger - seems very unusual for that to occur with that mix of creatures, but it doesn’t seem common and there may be other explanations for those instances (like eating contaminated food rather than direct contact with another species). This virus is special and scary.
If you can get reinfected quickly, which seems really unlikely, it shouldn’t be a major concern as you should be able to fight it off easily. But as with everything else, we just don’t know yet.
I find it very easy to dismiss the supposed Chinese reinfections, since from the information we got in my country, there has been litterally zero such case out of our 30.000 patients with heavy symptoms.
But I am biased, as I find it very easy to dismiss anything coming from countries spreading bull all the time.
Agree. It is unlikely to be the case, but we can’t write off any data right now, even if we discount it. This illness is definitely going to be a transformational moment for data science/ML.
Hopefully that will allow us to finally accept a more reasoned consideration of possible factors, even if they lead to places that some people are less comfortable with for some reason (such as better understanding why more men are dying than women, or other possible genetic factors, and the role of obesity/type 2 diabetes/insulin resistance, sun exposure in warmer climates being relevant for UV killing virus on surfaces or enhanced vitamin D production, any relevance of blood type, etc.)
It’s sounds like reinfection is a detected due to faulty tests, which there are growing evidence of in China’s exports. Not saying reinfection is wholly ignorable, but it does have a logical explanation (they never fully recovered). This virus is known to have a very long recovery period for some patients.
tomchick
Split this topic
1707
All these distancing measures work a lot better if you start early enough and enforce them with an iron fist*!
*Not an endorsement of iron fist-ing.
tomchick
Split this topic
1783
Just a quick reminder that some folks following this thread are following it instead of the threads in P&R because they don’t want politics in their coronavirus threads. Which strikes me as a little unrealistic, but I think there are enough coronavirus threads to allow them that.
-Tom
