I had to google what that was and one of the first articles said
According to Google, at least, Vegemite tastes like sadness.
Don’t think I want to try it anytime soon.
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My local still has some Surströmming left and there certainly aren’t enough Nords to take it.
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Global thermonuclear war
Seems it is the smelliest food in the world. 
Shocking that no one wants it.
This is REALLY not a good sign for where we’re headed. Like if people are stealing from others carts inside grocery stores ~10 days before the shit really starts hitting the fan and 3-4 weeks before we really start running into supply chain issues, we’re fucked.
I don’t think this is getting enough attention, so I wanted to point out for everyone that novel coronavirus causing a walking pneumonia is considered a mild outcome.
This scares the shit out of me, not because I could get it without coughing - that would probably be a good thing, no lung issues. Because I assumed the prevalence of different systems was kind of random and depended on your immune system. This many people getting it without coughing indicates that the difference in symptoms probably relates to different strains, which seems like this thing is mutating pretty fast. That’s scary to think about, like Spanish Flu level scary.
Yep. What’s amazing to me is that you can be smart enough to be a doctor, and not smart enough to have the slightest inclination of how exponential growth works. These dumbass people are just like “Hurr durr 40 dead, chill out snowflakes! The flu kills thousands!”
Right now I’m genuinely curious how they’re going to react if/when this thing kills six figures of Americans. Pretend they saw it coming all along? Freak out worse than any of us did? It’s all on the table. I know if we get to that point the last thing I’ll give a shit about is their reaction, but for now I can’t help but wonder.
I heard something passed on from a doctor in Italy on CNN or something. I think he called/texted a doctor in New York he knew to give him some info. Given all the talk about how this thing doesn’t impact the young, he was shocked and dismayed at the parade of young people coming in with severe cases that needed to be hospitalized. It seems like it’s still a pretty high percentage of young people that’ll need hospital-level care, they just have a way better chance at surviving as long as they get it.
Let me guess, we’ve got a shortage of those? Wait… Tell me we at least have some of those?
Chun believes if the United States had access to Seegene’s system, the country could test 1 million patients a week. But for now, the US isn’t using the test on patients – it doesn’t have approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Their test can test for all three genes at once, all automatically. Ours cannot. Meanwhile, with the party of deregulation running the show, regulations are keeping us from using this. And we all know why… It’s cause LabCorp’s gotta make some fucking money, if 50% more people have to die, oh well, that’s un-free market capitalism.
It reduces the spread. You’re able to spread it in the incubation period, and one study showed that it is actually more contagious at that point due to a higher rate of viral shedding. So catching a case on Day 2 rather than Day 6 can reduce the spread a ton if people properly isolate.
Also, South Korea is administering some anti-viral treatments BEFORE people start getting symptoms. We couldn’t even do that if we wanted to (which I doubt we do, because who’s going to pre-authorize that and what’s the billing code even going to be?).
Like, we’re on a wartime footing against a virus and it’s going to be, READY, AIM, SEEK PRE-AUTHORIZATION, CHECK BILLING CODES, FIRE!!! Hey, I didn’t say you could fire that, that bullets on you. That’ll be $17,000.
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The way the system works is breaking down. Like, the media is working its sources, right? Who are its sources? Hospital administrators? Who are they getting word from on the number of cases to expect, CDC? They don’t have a fucking clue what they’re doing.
Then there are governmental sources, and they don’t have a fucking clue what they’re doing.
Then there are doctors, and some of them still think this is a hoax.
Then there’s the administration itself and, hey Mr Journalist, can we put you on hold? Kushner isn’t done his Facebook research yet.
Then the media hears from some data scientist or epidemiologist who’s like freaking out, “OMG THE HOSPITALS ARE GOING TO BE OVERRUN!” But the media’s used to like the one crazy person yelling something that’s never right, and they’ve got the White House, the federal government, the hospital administrators, the doctors and Kushner’s Facebook group telling them it’s all going to be okay.
If the data scientists and epidemiologists are right, the level of panic in this country when people realize what’s happening is going to be absolutely and utterly insane. People are going to be shell-shocked.
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Are spillover events more common now than 50 years ago?
Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production.
Are there any signs that this coronavirus will kill itself?
This one has a lower pathogenicity. The lower its virulence, the more likely it’ll become part of an endemic, part of a seasonal event. That’s one of the big things that’s going to be a worry. If it does go quiet over the summer months, then the question’s going to be, “Is it still infecting people?” We could be walking around in the middle of summer with influenza viruses, but they’re not active. They’ve just gone quiet. When the right ecology comes into play, it starts getting cold, and damp, then it starts replicating like crazy. If it’s able to park itself, and not kill its host over the summer months, then we’ve got a virus that has all the telltale signatures of establishing itself as part of our normative landscape, much to our detriment.
Why do you think there’s been silence in this White House?
Because the Trump administration is only interested in America first. Populism here and across Europe and elsewhere has fragmented the global networks, which had been so instrumental in being able to bring together a global approach to problems like this. I’ve not seen any reports coming out of the White House that showed that as China was struggling to bring the virus under control, our president reached out to President Xi to talk about how to coordinate action. I’m stunned by the absolute absence of global dialogue for what is a global event. In Europe right now, you would never believe that there was a European Union. From where I sit, it looks like every country is making this up as they go along. Italy isn’t coordinating with Brussels. Brussels isn’t coordinating with Germany. There’s no coherent regional approach to this problem in Europe, even though they have a platform for doing it.
So what will it take to make people aware of the global threat of zoonotic diseases?
There’s nothing like a serial assault to heighten your awareness, and that’s what we’re looking at. We’re on a cycle of about every three years of getting something like this. And each time that happens, there’s more awareness that these investments need to be made and sustained. The problem is getting these monies as part of the annual regular non-emergency funding.
FML
They don’t know, they think we’re overreacting.
Yes but if you want to survive it, from now for about a month is the worst time to get it. Once the hospitals aren’t stressed if you’re under 60 your odds of surviving are good, and if we get our heads out of our asses and ramp up testing to a proper capacity here and, I don’t know, give approval to the South Korean company that can do it for $20 a pop, we can start administering treatment to people before the onset of symptoms.
I think after 2-3 months we’ll start getting back to our new normal until the vaccine, and that’ll be people under 50, maybe under 60, basically living their lives with more work from home and more precautions and no big events with crowds, and the economy will get moving again. We may be in a recession, but it’s not like we’re going to just shut it all down for 1.5 years.
Just wait til we overcome this crisis in like a year with the vaccine, we all celebrate, and the GOP is like ok cool time to slash that CDC funding again.
I keep Vegemite (or sometimes Marmite) at home, but I also made a limburger and braunschwieger sandwich at home within the last week.
I’m comparing timelines with Italy to see just how fucked we are, and it turns out… we may have a shot and doing way better than they did.
Edited to add: just hit post and saw what a wall of text this ended up being. Cliffs: we instituted some containment measures way earlier than Italy, but they put more severe measures in than we did (although way later than we are on the timeline now). The big question is do the less severe measures work enough against this virus at an R0 in the 2.2 range, and how far behind them did we lag in testing and does that throw the timelines out of whack? We should be around a week from when their hospitals were overrun, but given our lack of testing you just don’t know.
At least, I think, there’s a chance for us. Depends which variables prove more important.
Alright here’s the rest of the original post:
I don’t think it’s reasonable to do a national to national comparison. If we have 50 cases, one in each state, that’s a lot different from 50 in Seattle. We’re going to deal with a series of outbreaks, sometimes they might merge and overlap, but what’s happening in Seattle now likely has ~no bearing on what happens in Houston or Miami.
So I think it’s better to compare Washington to Italy and New York to Italy.
Washington
March 5 in Washington we had 11 deaths and 70 cases. We had closed some schools, some businesses were starting to shift to some work from home.
March 8 in Washington they got to 123 cases.
March 10 they hit 269 cases.
March 11 374 cases, Inslee banned gatherings of 250+ and it looks like pretty much all the schools closed.
March 12 457 cases, more businesses, state and local offices and services shut down, still no official mandatory lockdowns though.
As far as I know, Washington hasn’t done anything more drastic than that since.
Italy
Italy didn’t close schools until they had 150 cases, the question is who was doing a better job of testing? They also quarantined 11 cities at 150 cases on 2/23. This puts us roughly two weeks behind their timeline, and likely with weaker prevention efforts.
On March 1 Italy was at 1700 cases, hospitals start getting a lot of cases. They go on over the next several days to start having trouble staying staffed because of doctors and nurses getting infected, but they’re still able to deliver care.
March 8, 7400 cases, patients are being turned away, Lombardy and 14 provinces get locked down, jail riots.
March 10 10,150 cases whole country locked down
March 12 15,000 cases Retail shops closed, enforced isolation - proper, full lockdown.
This tells me that we have a chance to lock down fully earlier in the process than they did, that we’ve taken some precautions earlier than they did (although they were doing more when there were <200 cases). Overall this gives me some hope. We have about one more week before we’re at the point where they were getting hospitals overrun, and I think we’re doing a little better than them comparatively. But, they got really serious 10-12 days into our future on our timeline because their other measures hadn’t worked.
The question is will our less draconian measures flatten the curve enough? Or are we ~7 days away from hospitals being overrun to the extent that patients are turned away? The other thing is we don’t really have any info on how much our hospitals have been able to scale up. There’s been a lot of talk about flattening the curve, but not as much about raising the capacity.
New York
Alright, this is the big one, let’s see what their timeline looks like.
March 7 - State of Emergency in NY, 89 Cases.
March 10 - Containment Zone goes in for New Rochelle, 173 cases in the state. Schools close in New Rochelle. New York City’s at 36. This corresponds to being about two weeks and two days behind Italy’s timeline, school closures at this point appear to be better than Italy did. The containment zone is way better - if you compare it to city lockdowns, we’re doing stuff two weeks earlier than they did.
March 11 - 212 cases in the state, 48 in NYC, events start being cancelled, classes for colleges start being cancelled.
March 12 - State of Emergency in NYC, 95 cases there. Broadway goes dark, museums close, Cuomo bans gatherings with 500+ people, 328 cases in the state. Again, this appears to be more containment that Italy did.
I guess the big question is how much containment is enough containment. This gives me quite a bit of hope that we might flatten the curve enough to stay below capacity, especially if we elevated the capacity line a bit.
But the million dollar question is how bad does our lack of testing hurt us? It definitely closes the gap quite a bit, because they tested at a way higher rate.
If we manage to flatten this curve, largely due to people like Inslee, Cuomo, Wolf (PA governor who shut down Montgomery County way earlier than I would have expected), mayors, etc, I hope one of them punches Trump in the face when he takes credit.
A lot of times in the Trump era we’ve been looking for the grown ups in the room to step up and save us. Turns out the problem was that they couldn’t save us on the federal political issues… The grown ups are the governors.
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This is why your whole analysis is pointless. We have no idea of knowing the actual # of cases there are/were in those American cities.
Ohio’s governor estimated there are already 100k cases in his state. That’s probably a far more accurate # than the ones in your post.
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Calm down
Grocery stores in my area have announced that starting tomorrow they are putting limits i place on how many essential items people can buy (milk/eggs/tp/soap/bread/frozen stuff, etc.).
Wonderful. Went to bed and woke up finally feeling a bit calmer. Then read cuse’s posts and will now be panicked all day.
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While I’m highly suspect of reported positives because so many are not being tested w symptoms and known contacts, I think that while deaths to date may be undercounted, now that all the state and local health agencies are fully engaged that we will at least get a decent count of deaths and serious cases (ventilator requiring?)
Why we aren’t doing rt-PCR I have no idea. My fermentation plant used this to scan for. A particularly troublesome bacterial contamination back in 2003. It’s no big deal. There are private companies that have oodles of these machines for molecular biology purposes. They can be readily adapted. And I believe there tons of diagnostic ones in the US. Results in an air and should be able to detect to fairly low virus titers.
The CDC is next to useless currently. I’ve read several books on history of disease. In the past with Ebola, Cholera, SARS, these folks were the heroes of the story. I’m sure that the pandemic response teams Obama put in place would have done a tremendous job.
Think about it. Electing Donald could kill more Americans than the roughly 1.35 million lost in ALL the wars in hour history combined (civil war was about 1/2 of the total).
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Something I’ve considered with Trump is that the military budget has to be worth like 1/4 it’s value while he’s commander in chief.
It’s like having a not that good high school freshman as QB of an NFL tram.
Disney has pushed up the release of Frozen 2 to Disney+ by 3 months to tomorrow so people with kids have something to do while they’re stuck in their houses.
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