COVID-19: Chapter 10 - Mission Achomlished!

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I got to work with anthrax spores as a grad student. Supposedly they were a special deactivated strain or something like that. Always kinda spooked me out.

Weā€™re running into crisis mode here in Ontario too. Hearing stories like 911 canā€™t dispatch ambulances because ambulances are tied up at hospitals with nowhere to drop patients in the ER. Could all be BS I guess but if not this could get really wild. People are going to die that otherwise would have gotten emergency treatment.

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You better put your phone on DND.

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Not going to lie, Iā€™m worried.

I may be a sucker, but I volunteered for what was thought to be an extremely high risk covid job with little pay (about 20 bucks per hour at the time) out of a sense of duty. That sense of duty still is a big part of who I like to think I am, but fortunately thatā€™s mainly focused on the daughter right now.

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in my younger grad days, i got to play with online bidding algorithms that would eventually be used to cause genocidal pogroms in poor countries. itā€™s just that it never made sense to me to ban something anyone could do from their garage.

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ā€œReply with YES to confirm receiptā€¦ā€ is a modern day ā€œPlease respondā€

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Plus $937.50 is only $634.78 after taxes. Makes you think.

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THATā€™S SOCIALISM!!!

Thatā€™s if youā€™re lucky and it doesnā€™t push you into the 78 percent tax bracket. You could end up losing tens of thousands.

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How world the world wide numbers be relevant?

Either way he is out of line.

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Thatā€™s a reasonable point. Iā€™m just saying Iā€™d like to read the transcript to see what heā€™s talking about.

Consider yourself lucky your birthday isnā€™t February 29th. (I hope it isnā€™t, anyway)

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In a sign of the healthcare situation, the assisted living facility my wifeā€™s grandparents live at is shutting down. They have one week to find somewhere to move to.

This is the facility.

I have a feeling these stories are going to become more common in the next few weeks/months.

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The Jewish home where my father in law lives sends an alert every time a staff member tests positive. So far itā€™s at 40. I think the home is too big to fail but at some point theyā€™re going to run out of people

Good luck to your wifeā€™s family.

One of those new positive at work was a decently high risk exposure for me. Rapid negative, no symptoms. 6 days out. Dodging rain drops right now.

My wife quit a mid level supervisor job at one of these places the second our house closed last year. She would have been gone months earlier if the build had finished on time.

People are fleeing elder care like rats on a sinking ship right nowā€¦ and honestly for good reason. My wife genuinely likes working with old people (for some unfathomable reason that I cannot begin to understand) but the way they treat the people who work with them is morally wrong and now hopefully impossible.

I know this is not a convenient time for the national nursing staff to decide enough is enough after years of pretty extreme abuse from the larger healthcare system, but itā€™s been a long time coming. Iā€™m not just talking about nurses here, Iā€™m talking about everyone doing front line care giving to old/disabled people. At the low end itā€™s backbreaking risky work that now pays less than fast food and is primarily performed by poor women of color. At the high end itā€™s people with 1-4 years of full price college education and the loans to go with it doing a job with similar physical wear and tear to roofing for <30 bucks an hour. Those people are usually also women who grew up poor, theyā€™re just lower middle class instead of straight up impoverished.

Fuck this entire healthcare system I hope this is the thing that kills it. It deserved to die a long long time ago and I want all the people who are about to die to die for somethingā€¦ and honestly with the level of obvious fucked uppedness that the general population has ignored going on in healthcare for the last 30-40 years we all deserve it.

Do your best to keep your elderly out of any kind of elder care facility over the next year or two. It was always bad, but now itā€™s decidedly worse.

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Cornell (a pretty big hospital system in NYC) is asking med students to ā€˜volunteerā€™ to be part of medical teams covering covid patients.

Are they affiliated with Cornell the university? The university is sitting on a $10 billion endowment fund.

Yup, tbf IIRC itā€™s free to go to med school there if you qualify for any aid. Not sure about the details of that though.