COVID-19: Chapter 4 - OPEN FOR BUSINESS

I’m assuming someone explained to this idiot the problem therein.

Jonathan Frakes on Patrick Stewart:

When Patrick [Stewart] took the photon torpedo hit, he would grumble under his breath: ‘Jonathan, 25 years in the Royal Shakespeare Company, for this!’"

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Yea, I was fortunate to find some super soft games in Cambodia (and not get robbed) in the last few years. Now that I have to play online I realize how much I still suck. I was going to do a European poker trip this summer. Sigh.

The UK’s R rate is still dangerously close to one, having risen in the past week to between 0.7 and 1, bringing lockdown-easing moves into question. An R value above 1 means the epidemic will start to grow exponentially again, which wold result in a second wave of cases. The latest data from Sage is based on the levels of transmission from two to three weeks ago, calling into question whether England should be easing its lockdown restrictions just yet.

I’m not using them to go get my packages/mail, but I’m doing it after midnight, pulling my hat down low and walking with my head down. I’ve considered it a few times, but it’s one of those where I just can’t quite get myself to do it. It feels extra apocalyptic and weird.

Ehh, that’s not necessarily true. They’re an island, albeit a massive one. If they eradicate it and test/quarantine at their airports and anyone coming off ships, they’ve got a chance to keep it out. More realistically, they can keep cases low enough and contact trace aggressively enough that outbreaks are limited to 10s of people instead of hundreds/thousands. That alone allows you to live a pretty normal life - maybe just no big crowds.

Hypothetically, if you go into a lockdown with an Rt of .67 two weeks after the new wave starts, how long would it take for the virus to burn out, @Danspartan?

In other words, if countries operating competently open up except for big crowds, and keep testing as much as possible to identify the start of a new wave, how effectively can they squash it with a similar level of lockdown?

One strategy I’d also be interested in seeing is what if we did something creative in the fall/winter, like working 10 days on, 4 days off or two weeks on, one week off, and put lockdowns on in the off periods? Could we keep the economy running that way while doing enough to keep squashing the virus and keeping the curve flat?

I’ve been invited to three home/underground games so far, and have declined all of them obviously. I’m genuinely fearful about losing my access to games by the time this is over. If they never go back to casinos, and I’m on the outs with the people in the games, I’ll be fucked.

You don’t have to suck up or anything, you just have to be a social human being, play reasonably fast, have good etiquette, and don’t act like a pro at the table. So like if you’re saying “Show one show all!” when someone flashes a hand to a whale, you’re not doing it right.

Maybe grab a beer after the game occasionally, grab dinner, etc, but like I play with a group that I genuinely enjoy doing that stuff with. It took them a long time to start to suspect that I was a pro, I’m still not sure if they all know but a few seem to have figured it out.

If testing becomes available to private citizens with quick turnarounds, and affordable enough, I will probably use it to try to run a game. 10-15 people max, everyone pays for their test each session, maybe try to keep a window open or something… I think that lowers the risk enough. One of the big problems with poker overall is that you’re talking about 100-200 people in a room, air circulating around, dealers circulating around, chips circulating around. If you cut it down to 10-15 people and test well, that’s waaaaaaay better than all those other types of precautions.

I wouldn’t even rake the game, I’ll make my money in the game, let everyone chip in for the cost of testing/food/beer and just run it as a home game with dealers.

Starting hand selection is also going to have an impact on #1.

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I don’t know because I deleted the app and the bookmark. The person who posted that lives down the street from me and has pro-life stickers all over their cars. I don’t need the anger that rises when I read that shit, and I don’t want open warfare with someone I see on the regular.

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Hold up, hold up. I skimmed the transcript, and they’ve got surgical masks blocking like 90% of virus particles and homemade masks blocking about 50%.

But my skimming saw no mention of the viral particles distribution pattern. In other words, if a cough/sneeze without a mask can send particles 10-12 feet away, how far away do they get if they make it through a mask? Obviously there’s a huge difference in 100% of particles making it 10-12 feet and 50% making it 3-5 feet or something like that.

Now let’s say that a homemade masks reduces it by 50% in both directions… So Person A coughs, 50% gets through. Person B is within the radius, 50% of the 50% gets through. We’ve reduced viral load by 75% now! Plus, we’re reducing the transmission radius for the cougher! The radius should be even lower for regular breathing.

So to draw the conclusion from this link that masks are not particularly useful seems odd. We don’t know what viral load it takes to be infected, but it seems pretty obvious that we’d prefer 25% of the available viral load to 100%, and it seems pretty obvious we’d prefer a smaller radius of possible transmission.

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I’m not sure if there’s a better thread for this, but at what point are you all comfortable with allowing people in your house again? We used to have cleaners come by every other week, and they haven’t been coming by for 2 months or so. I believe they’ve already started cleaning other houses again, and I’m not sure when we should start again. We just paid them yesterday for the next two cleaning dates, but my wife has told the company that we tentatively plan to start back up next month. I have very mixed feelings.

You should bring a rock instead.

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In the case of the cleaners it would totally depend on testing protocols being in place and adherence to a mask protocol. If they were testing weekly and wearing non-vented N95s while cleaning, I’d start to consider it. I’d still pass, but then I can WFH for a while still and have never had a cleaning service, so my risk-reward there is probably quite a bit different from yours.

For now I’m comfortable having my parents over after a mutual 2-week quarantine, might do the same with a friend and his wife and daughter, I know they’ve been almost as careful as I have. Even in those cases, though, we’d try to pick a nice day and hang out outside.

The main problem appears to be effective use and cross contamination. Also there is a general lack of scientific research on the subject. As I said I’m wearing mine and they say the same on the show.

Bold of you to assume I was ever comfortable :mask:

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Please tell me that’s real and she’s a hero

I take it to be an anti-abortion sign rather than a pro-drunk-driving sign.

No shit Sherlock

Europe could face deadly second wave of winter infections, WHO warns

European countries could face a deadly second wave of coronavirus infections in the winter, the World Health Organization’s top official in Europe has said.

Dr Hans Kluge, director for the WHO European region, warned countries beginning to ease their lockdown restrictions that now is “time for preparation, not celebration”.

Dr Kluge told the Telegraph that countries should use the current period to build capacity in hospitals and strengthen public health systems.

Dr Kluge said:

Singapore and Japan understood early on that this is not a time for celebration, it’s a time for preparation. That’s what Scandinavian countries are doing – they don’t exclude a second wave, but they hope it will be localised and they can jump on it quickly.

He had also warned about the real risks of a second wave:

I’m very concerned about a double wave – in the fall, we could have a second wave of Covid and another one of seasonal flu or measles. Two years ago we had 500,000 children who didn’t have their first shot of the measles vaccine.

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Heh guess I didn’t know what he meant by “real”. I see no reason not to believe some lady actually held that sign, though I’m sure there are sign-holding memes that can be filled in.

Proper use and safely avoiding contaminating yourself are certainly issues, those fall on the individual wearer. Also it still has to be safer overall to wear one. If you cross contaminate yourself with it, that means logically you already would have been exposed if you weren’t wearing it.

I feel like them putting this out as if it’s open for debate whether we should all be wearing masks is just fuel for the fire of the anti-mask covidiots.

I wasn’t expecting you to have done it. I just figured that given where you live there have to be other sane people around and one of them might have done it. If no one said anything, that’s, um, interesting.