I made Steak-umm cheesesteaks Monday night.
They were good.
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I wonder if theyāll be able to develop something like a breathalyzer that can detect this thing? Apparently people shed 1000x more from their throat than with SARS. Maybe itās high enough levels you can detect it somehow.
Yo, anyone think we should have an Unstuck Cruise? Meet each other, hang out. You know, when cruises start running again. In June, obviously.
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Seems like another bigly bad data point for the current right wing derp nonsense that we have already all had this. Which of course it is because that narrative is out there to push us back to earn for our corporate pimps.
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This is bad, right? If most countries are like Iceland, that would mean we are nowhere close to herd immunity, that the IFR is quite high, and that reopening could be catastrophic.
Iām really struggling to see any way out of this (at least in USA#1) absent some kind of breakthrough treatment or vaccine.
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Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus ā even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become Chinaās first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassyās counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.
āDuring interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,ā states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassyās environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)
The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shiās team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as āgain-of-functionā experiments.
As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didnāt come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.
āThe cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this labās research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected,ā he said.
There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. Thatās important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.
Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems.
āThe cable was a warning shot,ā one U.S. official said. āThey were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.ā
As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese governmentās original story ā that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan ā is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didnāt sell bats.
Holy crap.
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Itās this 100%. Countries that let it get really out of control like USA, UK, Italy, Spain and probably many others are completely fucked. There will be no grand re-opening with hundreds of thoudsnds of active cases and no immunity.
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Glad I have a decent stockpile of albuterol for my nebulizer
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Yeah I was doing some math, like if that 0.6% random positives is replicated through Icelandās population and they get out of current caseload with only 4 more deaths (and they currently have 39 hospitalised and 8 in ICU) then thatās an IFR of 0.31%. That feels like the absolute best we can hope for, although the deaths are small numbers so thereās some variance to play with as well.
Iād be careful about generalizing from countries like Australia and Iceland as to what the community infection rates are, as while Icelandās case-to-population rate is very high, actually more than double Americaās current case load per capita, many of those cases were imported or acquired via direct contact with an imported case. Itās a very different situation to the widespread community transmission going on in places like the US and Europe.
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Iām really glad my Dad was able to stock up on a 3 month supply of his glaucoma medicine that keeps the pressure down in his eyes and heād probably lose his sight w/o it. I was sweating that one. Hopefully 3 months is enough.
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This seems like a great idea, but in order to socially distance, I think we should each get our own cruise ship. Shouldnāt be too hard at that point.
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Those Iceland numbers seem like good news.
8 deaths / (2000 known cases + 2000 estimated unknown) = IFR of 0.2%
The IFR will increase as more people die, but not a lot. Iām worried about bad tests.
Obviously sports teams are the most important sector when reopening things.
https://mobile.twitter.com/fishsports/status/1250204257468526594
Yeah, well these are PCR tests so there shouldnāt be false positives, so when you include the possibility of false negatives, it does look like good news overall.
Yeah, I dunno, Iceland seems like a different kettle of fish from other nations. Iām just ignoring IFR rates because the testing is so bad. Itās going to be like a decade before scholars have an accurate idea of what the IFR is.
Yeah but bill trump needs to blame WHO for him
Not doing anything for three months.
https://mobile.twitter.com/BillGates/status/1250292126643941376
Hmm, yeah, didnāt realize there were that few deaths in Iceland.
So maybe more of a mixed bag, suggesting low IFR but also low percentage of people who have already gotten covid. Need more random testing like this, obviously.
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Analysis: flying all over the country multiple times per week and touching all the microphones can increase the spread of contagious diseases