COVID-19: Chapter 4 - OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Lol I had a cold so “close enough” That means I must be safe

1 Like

Haiti update:

My Haitian friend (I hesitate to use the term because of the stark imbalance between my life and his; this is a fisherman whom I’ve kept up with after meeting and talking to there) told me his mom has COVID-19. He sent me a picture of his mom in the hospital with a facemask on.

If it’s truly COVID-19, this is very bad. The probability of these of his family contracting it seems really unlikely if there are only 250 cases in all of Haiti (they aren’t even in Port-au-Prince). It’s much more likely that COVID-19 is very widespread already.

This would also bode ill for the idea of heat and humidity being really important. (Coastal) Haiti is freaking hot and humid, and not “so hot everyone stays indoors” since there’s barely any AC. Granted, Haitians spend lots of time in poorly ventilated places.

There were also major demonstrations/borderline riots against social distancing. The government tried to shut markets down certain days of the week to reduce contact. Of course, these people weren’t protesting about not getting a haircut; they literally cannot eat that day unless they work that day.

I was in Haiti when Chikungunya spread through (2014) and the stats on it were just completely laughable if you asked locals. There were supposedly 60,000 cases at the time, yet locals would tell me they and literally everyone they knew had gone through it. I’m worried this is happening again.

11 Likes

That and the summer air should make things all good!

Suzzer, i feel like since I don’t post often it may seem like a disproportionate amount of my posts are joking at you but I think you are one of the better posters here and at 2p2 so don’t take my posts personally.

2 Likes

In between that and the study posted a few posts earlier it has been a rough morning for the heat savior theories. I too worry about some of the people I have met over the years traveling. Poorer countries would normally be looking to the US and Europe for aid in these situations. This time they will likely be ignored by the powers that be and the media most likely as the focus is on what happens at home. Seems unlikely any of these places will have any significant testing or treatment for the virus and it seems ripe to just rip through the entire population in no time.

Anecdotally, it also seems like traffic is back to being pretty awful and large gatherings of unmasked folks are way up.

Good news. It’s been two weeks and no one else at the nursing home has tested positive!!

From what I understand the nursing home was doing some aggressive screening and testing and were able to catch the positive case before it was symptomatic.

11 Likes

Maricopa County has changed a ton over the last six weeks. End of March was like Super Bowl Sunday, now it’s almost back to normal.

I’m glad today was the day that the White House predicted that we would be down to zero deaths. So happy this is over and that we are getting back OPEN FOR BUSINESS:

5 Likes

Looks bad, thankfully no one catches corona on the weekends, so we have a chance to get those trends back down.

21 Likes

The new deplorable line is that hydroxychloriquine is simply synthetic quinine so we should all just get shitfaced on tonic mixers and we will beat this thing

1 Like

Sorry I got way behind with this thread again. Has this been posted yet?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/t-cells-found-covid-19-patients-bode-well-long-term-immunity

This raises quite a few interesting questions and discussion points but I’ll wait in case the thread has already “done that” with this.

2 Likes

Well, earlier this morning the thread was discussing the opposite of that article, so good timing.

Fuck off. The context was an article about certain kinds cold possibly having antibodies that help with covid.

If you paid any attention on here - I talked about the antibody test. I was curious about the process and like a good scientist I wanted to rule out the very low probability that that weird cough that everyone got was some kind of mild strain.

I came away of the whole process with no confidence in the antibody test, but the negative result was still enough to satisfy my curiosity, A positive result would have made me a lot more curious to dig in more.

1 Like

Maybe post less if you’re not really going to pay attention to this thread.

Again, no one thinks you can’t get it in a hot humid place with high population density, just that it’s not the virus’s sweet spot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-haiti-dominican-republic-hispaniola/2020/05/14/a51d0664-947f-11ea-87a3-22d324235636_story.html

Haiti could definitely become a problem.

In the Dominican Republic, which draws tourists from around the world, cases surged to the highest level in the Caribbean. In Haiti, which had grown more isolated during a year of political violence, the population appeared to have been largely spared.

But over the last few weeks, that has begun to change, as tens of thousands of Haitian workers have returned from the Dominican Republic to their own country, many bringing the virus with them. That flow of returnees is expected to spark an outbreak that the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere will be unable to fight.

“This epidemic is a tinderbox in the process of burning and will explode in the coming weeks,” said Jean William Pape, a doctor who is the co-director of Haiti’s presidential commission on the novel coronavirus.

Haiti has four medical centers with a total of 200 beds treating patients with covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. The government and NGOs are planning to set up more facilities, but several communities have opposed the construction of such centers, which they worry could spread the virus in their neighborhoods.

“There are 200 beds, and models predict that we will need up to 9,000 beds at the peak,” Pape said. “The number of predicted cases is as high as 313,000. Haiti is not prepared — many hospitals are refusing to work to diagnose and treat covid patients due to lack of [personal protective equipment], stigma and no preparation.”

If Haiti doesn’t blow up and somehow muddles through this, like a lot of poorer hot weather countries are, wouldn’t you say that is a data point in the favor that heat and humidity at least knocks down R a little?

Prana this is the context of my post on 2p2 that you made fun of because you couldn’t even be bothered to follow the conversation and just latched onto a sentenece that looked funny to you.

The results suggest “one reason that a large chunk of the population may be able to deal with the virus is that we may have some small residual immunity from our exposure to common cold viruses,” says viral immunologist Steven Varga of the University of Iowa. However, neither of the studies attempted to establish that people with crossreactivity don’t become as ill from COVID-19.

In before, my friend’s grandma got covid, and she had a cold once - so bad news for team “past colds are going to save us”. (Repeated several times a week for however long this lasts.)

I don’t care how you do it, but this story needs to get into your book somehow.

6 Likes

https://twitter.com/politicsreid/status/1261694569483251713?s=21

3 Likes

Dems really should just propose a waiver that allows people to do whatever they want, in exchange for being deprioritized at hospitals if they get sick. Go lick some doorknobs and make out with some strangers, but with freedom comes personal responsibility for your choices - you don’t get to be an idiot and then take a ventilator or a bed away from a locked down granny.

Obviously this doesn’t flatten the curve and is a horrible plan in general terms, but relative to available alternatives… It’s worth considering.

2 Likes

For the it only kills the olds crowd. 43yo male, no significant medical history, zero comorbidities, dead on day 27 post positive covid-19 test.

3 Likes