SARS-CoV-2: Electric Superflu

Somehow my company is still aggressively hiring, including conducting interviews over Skype and starting people working remote from day 1. (Our offices are closed and we are 100% remote.) We made multiple offers this week.

This is amazing considering it took me a couple of years to get them to let me work one day per week remotely, and another couple of years for me to get up to two days per week remotely.

I still feel like we’re going to crash and burn within a month or so. But maybe with a Japanese parent company and long term horizon, somehow we will pull through.

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Can we talk about the fact that in the movie Contagion the hero of the story is a techbro pharma CEO who ignores WHO orders and goes all in on his own goes into a lab and finds a way to grow the virus? JFC, the cult of Big Man techbros has been hammered into our heads since birth, it’s going to take generations to beat it out of us. We’ve all spent decades watching Tony Stark make an Iron Man suit all on his own in a cave and shit like that.

Fast forward to the corona pandemic of 2020 and Jack Dorsey is refusing to take down wildly irresponsible tweets from Elon Musk that mislead the public about coronavirus and some patent troll firm that holds Theranos IP is suing to stop coronavirus tests from being made.

The techbros are not coming to save you. Let me repeat that: the techbros are not coming to save you. They’re rapacious sociopaths who cultivate weird affectations in order to mimic the heroic techbros you see in Hollywood movies. They’re all frauds, don’t trust them ever. It’s just the 21st-century version of fascism.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html

TLDR:

U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.

That’s the executive summary, however I got your best bit of the article right here:

Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president.

Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market, the senior administration officials said.

My wife’s company is still aggressively hiring. And she works in HR. They are still making her to conduct in person interviews, and run in person orientations. Ffs how hard is it to at least do interviews via telephone. And they will likely keep working even if Ohio locks down, because they make a shit ton of the countries cups and food packaging.

I’ve been inside for like 12 days now? can’t count.

finally went to the grocery store, outside there were 3 employees sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench right outside. they should be paid 10x more and i feel for them big time and damn i would hate to be in their position, but it still skeeved me out. inside there was one community bottle of spray which i didn’t touch. got two feet in and people were 2 feet apart in line. noped right out of there. delivery for the rest of time.

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https://mobile.twitter.com/deray/status/1241181782940188678

https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1241040891910991873

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Same here. 8 days isolated. I’m trying to mount a strategy for grocery store trip. Its where we can go (and only place we can go) to share our germs. And if its only going to get worse then sooner may be better even though I have a week’s worth of food in stock. Any ideas to make the trip less daunting?

Man, I’m watching Contagion and there’s a line about how they want to build a medical ward for first responders but unions and safety regs are holding it up. The corporate propaganda is burrowed so deep in our culture that you almost don’t even notice it.

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Bring your own bags, use your knuckles to work the touchscreen, go late night when there are fewer people around, be extra nice to the people who have to work there. Some grocery stores have online delivery/pickup options? Like you can order online and pickup your order at the store; I’m trying to get my parents to do this.

Good luck with that lesson.

Assuming spots, not spot - most likely a multifocal pneumonia - antibiotics would be appropriate, and it doesn’t do you any good to die from bacterial pneumonia to try and dodge Covid. Sounds like the appropriate play.

MM MD

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i can’t imagine how you can keep six feet apart from people in the grocery. I tried to maintain extra space between me and people who seemed to care about social distancing. Otherwise, I just tried to grab my stuff and go. Lucky for me, I tended to be interested in things in the less popular aisles. I’m used to going in the middle of the night and avoiding crowds.

I normally just wander around and pick stuff up. First I get meat, then I roam while thinking about what ingredients can be used with it. It’s intellectually stimulating and I get an hour of walking for exercise. I’m going to have to change up my strategy and just grab stuff with the intention of figuring it out later and go in there with an actual shopping list.

They should pay their workers in bonus merchandise, set aside some toilet paper or whatever in the back just for employees and just give it to them…don’t make them pay for it.

from what i saw a pretty easy fix would have been for everyone to take 3 big steps back

Gloves, sanitizer, bags, wipes are all in the plan. Beyond that i guess its just “if I get it, I get it” approach. The pre-ordering sounds good but may not be practical at my store. I’ll be hoping to see a safer way of making it happen but I don’t know what that will be. And the grocery employees seem super vulnerable.

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My local grocery stores are all 10+ days out to schedule a pick up order. Whole Foods won’t do the Prime pre-order thing because we live too far away. My wife called and offered to prepay, nope, can’t do it, computer won’t let me enter the order.

I’ve had mild chills for a few days now. Bad chills today. The problem is everything imaginable seems to be an early symptom for covid. Who knows.

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There’s a scene in Contagion where people are looting a grocery store and there’s still more stuff on the shelves than there was the last time I went shopping.

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It’s kind of hard to stay six feet apart and pass someone in an aisle. You’d have to make aisles one-way to avoid coming within six feet of someone.