Forgot to wash my hands after coming back from food shopping.
Probably have coronavirus now.
Pray for me.
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Loot Crates for basic necessities might become a thing.
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When I did stuff in a lab I wore gloves, etc. mostly to protect the items I was fabricating from me. Ofc they protected me from some chemicals too, especially when I could see photoresist or whatever getting on them. But with solvents and acids I wasnāt so sure. We had a common-use set of gloves, apron and faceshield for the nasty acids. I always worried the last guy to use them might have got HF inside the damn gloves or the wrong side of the apron or on the headband part of the faceshield.
Anything that speeds up the shopping process is a good thing.
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Bras have some potential imo.
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Ethical dilemmaā¦
I have taken delivery in 4 days flat of 10x N95 and 90x Nursing (surgeon?) masks from a contact from China.
Pre-covid days, I take 4 deliveries monthly from many Chinese sellers so one of them offer to ship me a few masks. Iām about to spend $4k on non-mask items and the seller is offering to ship me a few hundred more.
UK hospitals are not reporting a shortage of masks at present.
Where do I send masks on to?
Nursing home workers?
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Hadnāt there already been like 16k+ deaths in Italy when they updated their predictions though? If it ends up being 40k deaths instead of 20k then thatād be a 500% underestimate.
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Trump was supposed to be the guy that saw through Chinaās bullshit. Now heās complaining that OFFICIAL CHINESE REPORTS are why his response was so delayed. Well, we know it wasnāt his fear of being branded a xenophobe.
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Sure. These exponential curves arenāt easy to predict and itās easy to be way off. Hereās where weāre at:
Where does this flatten out? 30k? 50k? Seems like it will be well under 100k, thatās the only thing Iād bet on.
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Canāt wait for the TP unboxing videos on Youtube.
Itās very very simple: a certain class of liberals feel immense guilt at having someone else do menial work for them.
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Gotta admit that I thought about taking a picture of the giant pile of toilet paper rolls at the drug store I was at earlier today.
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This is literally a MAGA talking point on the twitter
Youāre basically having to deal with a bunch of anti-vaxxers.
Nursing home, paramedics, grocery stores are all good.
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Coming to the US soonā¦
Higher pay for health workers?
Germany has more than 100,000 confirmed cases of the virus, although just over 2,000 deaths. It has won praise for its widespread testing, and for taking in patients from other countries.
Now, Health Minister Jens Spahn has suggested its doctors and nurses could be rewarded for their hard work.
As he told reporters, āapplause is nice but financial security and reward are even better. We are working on thisā.
The Germans may be taking the idea from Sweden. While the working week has been extended from 40 to 48 hours, medical teams and hospital workers In the capital Stockholm are getting 220% of their usual pay from 3 April.
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People are going to go to the store for food. This is a stupid fucking argument. Delivery services canāt deliver to everyone. Not everyone has extra cash to pay for delivery services, and not all stores offer delivery. Go less often, wear a mask, and get out as fast as you can. If your looking to keep me from getting too busy donāt go to a Coronavirus party, but feel free to head to Costco for a few weeks of supplies.
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I never understood going to chuch in general. For some reason, I always got a really itchy scalp every time I went in as a teenager.
When I finally got confirmed and made the decision to stop going immediately, my parents were disappointed but accepting of my desire for more sleep and a less itchy scalp.
This. I actually donāt know a place in my country that delivers groceries to people.
Plus, itās a 5 minute walk to the express shop and I go twice a week in a country where itās currently illegal to be outside without a mask and social distancing is mandated by all open shops.
Of course, things are a bit more under control in the CR. Not like Iām living in an American city or something.
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TLDR Post:
Iām trying to weigh the possibility of an outbreak that is far more widespread than we had suspected, but far less lethal (which Iāll call the Optimistās Theory). Iāve been on the fence about this dichotomy for over a month now, and am pretty shocked I still canāt find definitive evidence one way or another.
Hereās what I think the two sides come down to:
Description of the Optimistās Theory
The Optimistās Theory is that this is about as lethal as the flu, but we have been duped by incomplete statistics into thinking it is vastly more dangerous. The idea goes something like this:
Initial outbreaks in Washington and New York during very low testing/social distancing periods caused the virus to spread widely in these areas, and led to high rates of infection (10%+). These high infection rates overwhelmed the healthcare systems and led to elevated mortality. However, this is simply because a whole flu season hit 10-20% of the population at once, so to speak, and COVID-19 is not necessarily less lethal than the flu despite this excess mortality.
Areas well-connected to these cities, especially large cities in the northeast and south, experienced the same thing on a small scale. Infection rates in the single-digits, leading to barely noticeable mortality increases and not overwhelming the healthcare systems. In these areas, as well as NYC, COVID-19 tests routinely have 20-50% positive rates, since anyone who is sick is pretty likely to have COVID-19.
The rest of the country, generally with tertiary connections to Seattle and NYC, experienced slow takeoff, and infection rates <1%. Since COVID-19 is mild (under this theory), thereās no noticeable impact on the medical system. Nonetheless, they still find 5-10% positives in their limited testing of sick people.
Evidence in Favor of the Optimistās Theory
- Economist article about a Johns Hopkins study estimating 7,000,000 American cases (2% overall) as of March 15.
- Massachusetts sewage study supposedly suggesting 100,000+ people in a small metro area might have COVID-19 active cases.
- Exponential growth in testing capacity doesnāt seem to drive down %positive rates. Is this because the cases are increasing at the same rate, or have the total number of cases been elevated for quite a while?
- Rich people and celebs testing positive for COVID-19, very early in the pandemic, with no traceable cause, and seeming to get over the thing easily.
Evidence Against the Optimistās Theory
- Various anecdotal accounts of how bad COVID-19 actually is, from people of all ages.
- Antibody tests of places not hard hit find that almost nobody has antibodies.
- Highly similar growth rates of active cases and deaths across all states and regions of the world.
- The fact that there seems to be randomization in the initial growth. Louisiana is much harder hit than Texas (17k cases on 81k tests, versus 9k cases on 96k tests, with over 3x more deaths). In a scenario where the virus spreads to a much much larger population than was previously thought, this discrepancy would seem impossible.
- The expertsā apparent consensus is that this isnāt the case.
- The fact that China shutdown so aggressively, while if COVID-19 werenāt actually that dangerous, they probably could have successfully let the whole thing spread without much fallout (swine-flu-esque).
- NYC ED surveillance data shows that ER visits with COVID-like symptoms didnāt spike until roughly March 10. If the virus had in fact become widespread in the previous weeks, it would probably have spiked earlier, right?
If I can wrap my head around which scenario weāre in, I can think a lot more clearly about the best way for me to move forward, and for society to move forward. But right now Iām still stuck with almost no understanding of the nature of the problem.
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