i wish awval still posted
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Yup. My mother has already taken this angle.
The states fucked it up and Trump is trying to save them is her line.
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Agree with you when you say the olds aren’t willing to sacrifice for pretty much anything, I’m just not sure that “owning the libs” is not the one exception.
Absolute humidity is measured in grams of water per m^3 of air. Relative humidity is the percent of moisture in the air compared maximum absolute humidity at a given temperature. As temperature rises the maximum amount of water vapor in the air increases rapidly. For instance 100% humidity @ 30C is 30g/m^3. 100% humidity @ 0C is 5g/m^3.
As to why viruses like the flu spread easily in high relative humidity but cold temperatures, but not at higher temps combined with high relative humidity, I can’t say. I’ve never bothered to get into the weeds of why, but plenty of lab tests show the flu doesn’t do well when absolute humidity is high. This gives some good background information. His opinions as to whether covid19 is seasonal are just that, educated opinions.
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So given drier or wetter air at say 30-50 degrees Fahrenheit (Seattle and Milan), which does the virus like more?
The flu would probably prefer drier conditions, but the flu does just fine in wet as hell washington winters.
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Maybe it’s just some combo of fitter people, less smokers, social distancing working, less population density, less old people, and X?
Would we know if this thing has mutated and only Italy, China and Iran somehow got the really potent version?
Or variance, and it’s still 10%+ new cases per day this past week. Not great but better than anyone else who is trying to actually test people.
Lockdown in the Czech Republic has been extended another week to April 1st. It’ll probably be expanded on a weekly basis. It’s more politically wise to not extend it by a month in one go though most seem to know that that’s going to be the case.
The lockdown is working as people are obeying it but it’s pretty slow. Right now, the number of new cases is similar everyday as are the number of tests performed. We really need to upgrade our testing capacity here. That was supposed to happen with the new fast-acting tests but a region reported that 80% of their tests showed the wrong result when checked with a more reliable though slower test. It was only that region though. So that shipment may have been contaminated in some way.
The schools are the last thing that will be opened. The Ministry of Education is stating that they will open at earliest the middle of May. Again, I’m pretty skeptical of that. If the lockdown is lifted before then (which it certainly will be), we’ll likely see a spike in coronavirus cases which will delay that opening further.
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And how many infected show up as cases? Oh right, no one has any fucking clue, but you pretend it’s 100% to make it more like CONTAGION.
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Short answer is no. Today’s TPWKY podcast addressed this: start listening at 26:50
http://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/2020/03/23/covid-19-chapter-1-virology/
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Venting…
It really pisses me off when I see social media posts about “What to do with all this free time on your hands” or “This is finally the time to learn GUITAR!”
I’m working harder than ever, less efficiently than ever, with a pissed off wife (hates working from home and not being able to go anywhere) and a kid off school with no friends to play with or places to go. I get that I haven’t been drafted to go to war or anything, but I’m literally working 14-16 hours a day between full-time stay-at-home dad, full-time employment at-a-distance plus a side gig as a marriage counselor, and memes about how you’ve waited your whole life to sit on the couch and do nothing are tilting me really bad.
Also: I am super lucky to have work, I get that. The fact that I’m pissed off even though many have it worse pisses me off even more…
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Is there still a sliver of hope that we are vastly underestimating cases, and overestimating mortality? I don’t think anyone has threw out a test to a random sample of their population yet have they?
There’s nothing dishonest about using case fatality rate here. Nobody knows the true fatality rate of the flu in any given year either.
Gotta say, working from home as a teacher is pretty depressing. Basically, I have little to no resources to work with and am restricted to doing only half of my job. All I can really do is assign homework and give written answers later since the school has no online interface.
Sure I spend less time actually working but the students are gaining almost nothing from this and I feel like a failure as a result. I can’t give them an online exam (aside from writing assignments) since I have no way to tell if they’re cheating. It’s a really infuriating position to be in.
That said, I am grateful to be a salaried employee who is paid year round. Not all employees here are salaried. Even if their salary is being mostly reimbursed by the government, that can only be done for so long.
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It sure seems like Washington state should be tipping over right now if they had the same mortality/critical care needs as Italy. Which points to something.
I looked up obesity - Lombardy is 41% obese. Wash St. is 26%. Seattle where the population density is is probably even less.
For smoking Italy says 21% current smokers. No idea what current and former for 70-year-olds is but I’d bet it’s high. Wash St. says between 12.4% and 15.9% for current smokers.
We may dodge a bullet in the US in that most of the big dense city dwellers tend to be fit non-smokers.
Italian town of Vo tested all 3000 people. The number of deaths in the town (1) and the progress of the virus (seems to have been eliminated) don’t say much about the rest of the world because they treated the situation so much differently, but what was of note was that 70% of people infected were asymptomatic. I haven’t heard of anywhere else that was testing randomly or entire populations and therefore broadly testing people without symptoms or having known exposure. So, yeah, the number of cases have been vastly underestimated.
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I hear you, brother. I spent the last year designing and tweaking an intro to academic writing course that intentionally does things that can’t be done online. I promise my kids that every class has a purpose, and that purpose is linked to in-person instruction that is better in measurable ways than what a youtube video can get done. And now I get to teach that class online…via video lectures…
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