Yes we are all working remotely now
But my boss is a ruthless foreigner that doesn’t think we are working hard enough in a pandemic and wants everyone in the office.
I got put on the corona virus task force with a few others to draft employee safety measures. We will see how that goes.
Lol wat wat
Some people say…that the Renaissance only began after the discovery and distribution of a novel plant: tobacco nicotiana
I thought so too. I just that part made explicit
It’s not Trump’s pee tape. I can confirm that there is no peeing in the tape. Production value was low compared to today’s HD cameras.
A long delayed Indonesia update:
Testing is ramping up very slowly. Now there are 45 labs available to do tests, up from 1 in early March. Testing capacity in total is about 4,000-5,000/day from low hundreds earlier.
The president has asked for at least 10,000/day but a Health Ministry spokesperson has said that is impossible. Which is bunk, as obviously other countries, including poorer countries than Indonesia are testing much more. However, there are legitimate concerns about the availability of test kits/reagents, as those have to still be imported, and the competition for them is fierce.
There are now 8,211 official cases, another 18,000 or so suspected cases. The official death toll is 689, but reporters digging up burial records have found that there were about 1,400 additional deaths in Jakarta alone in the month of March. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the actual death toll is probably closer to 5,000, perhaps even higher.
Yet even at that number it is clear that the outbreak is less severe in Indonesia (pop 270 million) than it is in Europe or US. So maybe lots of sunlight/heat/humidity does play a significant role. That is the good news.
The bad news is that already an exodus of people from urban areas to rural areas has started. This is fueled by two main factors: 1) many unemployed migrant workers in the cities seeking the support of their home villages, where at least they can farm/forage for food, and 2) the annual travel home (called Mudik) for Eid, which normally would start about 2 weeks from now, but many have started already. Normally the Eid travel is analogous to Lunar New Year in China or Thanksgiving in the US. Last year about 20 million traveled.
So the gov’t has hemmed and hawed on whether to ban Mudik, but finally the president announced a ban on the 21st. To be effective on the 24th. So predictably a lot of people moved their schedule forward. Also, desperate people are trying to get around the ban, even going so far as travelling in baggage compartments. The government has also banned basically all air travel until June 1st, but that was already dying out on it’s own the last month or so.
Wow - that’s a crazy pic. Thank for the update.
My ex works for Fandango - the movie ticket company. Apparently they were scrambling to get stuff done ahead of Georgia re-opening their movie theaters. She doesn’t know if they’re forcing half capacity and people sit apart or w/e but they haven’t altered their seat pickers.
Movie theaters are just the worst idea. You could be 30 ft away from someone and still just get bathed in their virus for an hour and a half if the AC is blowing over them to you. You couldn’t pay me $1k to go to a movie theater right now unless I was the only person in it.
Well at least Georgia is taking one for the team as our idiot control group.
So far this one’s purely based on scientists and a study. I’m sure Trump will start over-hyping it soon, though. We do have two large-sample surveys in which smokers were very underrepresented among the COVID-19 positive hospitalized population.
Whether or not it’s the nicotine, something else in cigarettes, or something else altogether, who knows? This was in France and China, so I assume the differing brands of cigarettes means there may be some different chemicals used.
Interesting you bring this back up, because I remember hearing this once before and not wanting to look into it because I’m into the idea of various nootropics, and didn’t want to be tempted with nicotine due to the addiction risk.
From the SciAm article:
It stays in the air up to 3 hours - you also have to hope nobody from the prior showing had it!
I’d consider it if they were showing the grainy vid of Felstein’s alcoholic, chain-smoking ex tho
One nit tho. You spelled Feltstein wrong, and worse, you spelled it exactly like Ikes did at 22 when he was whining about me taking him apart. I miss that guy. I think the only thing this site needs is an Ikes.
Lolno
In a controversial opinion piece in the biomedical news outlet STAT, population health researcher John Ioannidis, at Stanford, argued back in mid-March that the mortality rate of COVID-19 may be much lower than expected, potentially making current lockdowns “totally irrational.” Health policy researchers Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, also both at Stanford, made a similar argument in The Wall Street Journal at the end of March. They called current COVID-19 fatality estimates—in the range of 2 percent to 4 percent—“deeply flawed.”
Ioannidis is a co-author of the study done in Santa Clara county, and Bendavid and Bhattacharya were leading researchers on both of the studies, which appeared online this month.
I definitely smell a rat on the LA and Santa Clara study.
lol I did exactly that. I was into nootropics and started chewing nicotine gum to help focus during long poker sessions. It’s definitely one of the best nootropics and does its work.
I chew gum in the morning now and at home sometimes though so I’m probably kind of addicted lol.
Gonna thump my chest on this one. I was pretty vocal pretty fast on that study.
Of all my skillz, numbers bullshit detector is #1. I got it from my Dad. He was head of the local hospital board. He noticed something off in the books, he didn’t know what—he just had that feeling. He called the administrator to talk. Guy confessed to embezzling on the spot. Dad was the star witness. the money had been blown on the guys wife’s failed dress business. He got 7 years and broke down crying in the courtroom.
Numbers that don’t make sense just stand up and yell “hey Dan” and I bite in hard until I figure out why.
How about the NY study and new Miami antibody study?
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242260406.html
This study comes back with actual infected = 15x confirmed cases - which at least seems in the ballpark of probably reality.
