My masters has been over zoom for the last 5 weeks. Everyone else is whinging and asking about special consideration for exams… But I love it.
Stay at home. Eat dinner with the girlfriend during the break. Get to bed early after it’s done instead of a 45 minute tram ride.
I’d be even more keen if I didn’t live somewhere with a good university. If the best unis in the world don’t massively ramp up online learning but with significant contact/lecturer time after this they are idiots.
One quality of life improvement that hopefully will come out of all this will be the realization that daily commutes are a total waste of time and money for millions of people. And the poor souls who will still have to commute every day should at least be able to do so on quieter roads and public transport.
There is more detailed info now about this, but even a month or two ago I was reading similar things about very low O2 levels with patients still functioning “normally” being a bad sign. There was also an article about patients presenting in two very different ways, and they needed to be treated as if they had different diseases. One of the main differences was these patients with very low O2 but who seemed “OK” needed to be treated differently. (i.e. - venting actually cause bigger problems iirc.)
Florida has a pretty bad outbreak. If they were a country they would be the 16th most infected country in the world. Maybe the heat/sun/humidity is keeping the virus down some but it is still doing some pretty significant work there with over 27,000 confirmed cases.
Yeah like Florida has a smaller population than Australia and has a 4.5x higher caseload. That’s not a good or stable situation at all.
I’ve been largely ignoring COVID for the last week or more as I have to work and look after a 2 year old, but France is gearing up to end confinement on May 11th so I figured I should re-engage. They always say progressively, but today they outlined the school opening timetable which would see everyone back after three weeks. They will be distributing masks, making them compulsory outside and wanting everyone who can to continue teleworking. We’ll see what the restrictions on movements and businesses will be, but I’d guess restaurants, cinemas and so on will stay shut.
I’m not sure if what’s planned is bad but it is being sold as ‘an end to lockdown’, which I don’t think is a good message. It appears there’s a political push to be seen to end it, I think because France was caught unawares and ill prepared and Macron wants to be seen as proactive, he is obsessed with his image as a ‘strong’ president above most everything else. Personally I have no confidence in him.
Anyway, enough waffle, for actual content this is a study on COVID in France. It’s way beyond me, but it’s all about how they are modelling the outbreak here and where it will go, so is maybe of interest to cleverer people (e.g. @Danspartan ). The abstract:
France has been heavily affected by the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and went into lockdown on the 17th March 2020. Using models applied to hospital and death data, we estimate the impact of the lockdown and current population immunity. We find 2.6% of infected individuals are hospitalized and 0.53% die, ranging from 0.001% in those <20y to 8.3% in those >80y. Across all ages, men are more likely to be hospitalized, enter intensive care, and die than women. The lockdown reduced the reproductive number from 3.3 to 0.5 (84% reduction). By 11 May, when interventions are scheduled to be eased, we project 3.7 million (range: 2.3-6.7) people, 5.7% of the population, will have been infected. Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown.
A friend of mine made an interesting observation and it may of already been talked about ITT.
If Obama or a democrat was the president right now Republicans would be saying this virus was sent by god because of our sins.
Since a republican is in office they think it’s made up.
One stat that gets repeated here (France) a lot is that since schools closed the system has lost contact with between 5 and 8% of pupils. That’s pupils who have done literally nothing via the distance learning stuff put in place.
As someone who rolls out business software for a living I’m a little surprised it’s so low. On the other hand I’m not sure how much of a problem it represents. That’s a lot of pupils for quite some time, but I did go to school so I don’t think every single second is as crucial. Does this seem about right to any of the teachers here?
It was sent by God because the Democrats were trying to impeach the Chosen One, silly!
For people not in USA#36:
Are there any protests like the ones you’re seeing in this thread and on the news of the “government can’t tell me what to do crowd” in your countries? Or is this a uniquely American thing?
For a hot second I thought this was it, but they’re actually protesting their job loss rather than the shutdown itself.
I havnt heard of anything here in Canada.
Just in case you have ever wondered if America is the only place with a healthy chunk of total morons:
They’ve been responsible for some of the most intensive coronavirus outbreaks, but Australians are not deterred from going on cruise ships and some would jump aboard tomorrow if they could.
“Just bring the cruise ships back – tomorrow would be great,” retiree Mark told A Current Affair on Tuesday evening.
“I’m not going to stop living our lives. I’d take the risk and that’s why I’m not going to hesitate getting back on board.”
Just USA and Brazil
My theory of karma is that the virus really is strongly susceptible to light and temperature. The South opens up right when the virus is tapering off. Everyone cheers Republicans for nailing the nail on the head out of pure luck and then my karmic justice is that the virus comes roaring back in the fall and we don’t even close because “Why would we? It did all that isolation for nothing” and the death toll spikes
Even if otherwise asymptomatic, I would notice low blood oxygen during strenuous exercise, right? It’s one of the reasons I run every day - I figure if I can run five miles, I’m not sick.
Is there any reason to believe that Germany’s reopening is not going to be a big disaster?
We don’t really know how significantly the virus will spread in a situation with businesses open but people still very wary about hygiene, social distancing, masks, etc. Combine that with lots of testing and maybe it could be OK.
I just don’t see how wearing a mask - or something over the mouth and nose - isn’t a sensible thing to do.
I’ve been donning the lower leg of an old pair of jogging bottoms for the last month but will now be rocking this thanks to a friend who is a wiz
Those of you with school age kids, how much are they doing each day? I’ve got a 9 year old in a relatively affluent school district, and I was impressed they got online immediately after shutting down the school. She does about an hour and a half or two hours of work a day, and she has at least a short Zoom meeting every day (some full class, but mostly smaller groups). But they’re taking 4 day weekends regularly, and having Wednesdays off regularly. And then they announced today that school will end on May 28th, even though it was scheduled to go until at least June 10th (depending on snow days).
I don’t want to be too critical, because obviously they didn’t plan for this, and weren’t set up for this, and I think getting something going in just a few days is tremendously commendable. Lots of the teachers are young and probably are stuck home with their own kids. I now know how hard it is to get work done like that (as my kid just busted in to ask if we have any objects that are “math related”). I guess I’m not hung up on the 1.5-2 hours of work a day, but it feels like ending the school year early is the opposite of what they should be doing. And my guess is this school district is probably on the upper end of the distance learning spectrum for public schools, so maybe I’m just being ungrateful for what they are doing.