SARS-CoV-2: Electric Superflu

Lots of states, including here in Oklahoma, have issued a proclamation that unemployment claims during the COVID state of emergency will not be charged to employers at all. No change in contribution rate. The state is eating the costs completely. The employment security commission website here actually has a printable notice about it, and my employer is actually helping employees that have been laid off or had their hours reduced file claims.

Companies have to have the same number of full-time equivalent employees on June 30 as they do on the loan application date. If they don’t, the portion of the loan that is forgiven is reduced in proportion to the reduction of FTE’s.

Yeah, I have no idea about any of this. There are a lot of moving parts, I’m not gonna pretend like I know how this will play out.

One thing I’ve posted about before, but I really think the anit-vaxxer movement is a product of America having ~2-3 generations that have never experienced a disease outbreak like this. The super oldsters remember losing childhood friends to polio, but the Boomers and Gen-Xers and even the Millennials have gone their whole lives without ever worrying about epidemic diseases, And this is definitely not a normal state of affairs.

It’s like, I’ve just never known anyone from the Polio Generation that was an anti-vaxxer.

PS: Of course, in my lifetime there was the AIDS outbreak. But of course that was dismissed as a disease that just kills gays and drug users, so who cares if 40,000 people a year die. As a straight white Gen X’er, this was a part of the world around me that really got swept under the rug.

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Yeah I guess we’ll know in a couple weeks. Maybe. There are so many confounding factors we don’t even know the answers to and are changing all the time. The error bars on any prediction are huge.

With you on amtivaxers and having no experience of disease making you blithe to the risks. Seeing a similar thing w/r/t masks, etc. now. The Chinese supermarket near me wouldn’t let anyone in without a mask already 3 or 4 weeks ago (wtf is time anymore lol). Publix, still no mask/gloves for even employees as of yesterday.

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Yeah I read both of those. But read the other comments in the twitter thread. There is some interesting discussion there by people who at least sound like they know what they’re talking about.

The importance of viral dose is being overlooked in discussions of the coronavirus. As with any other poison, viruses are usually more dangerous in larger amounts. Small initial exposures tend to lead to mild or asymptomatic infections, while larger doses can be lethal.

From a policy perspective, we need to consider that not all exposures to the coronavirus may be the same. Stepping into an office building that once had someone with the coronavirus in it is not as dangerous as sitting next to that infected person for an hourlong train commute.

This may seem obvious, but many people are not making this distinction. We need to focus more on preventing high-dose infection.

Both small and large amounts of virus can replicate within our cells and cause severe disease in vulnerable individuals such as the immunocompromised. In healthy people, however, immune systems respond as soon as they sense a virus growing inside. Recovery depends on which wins the race: viral spread or immune activation.

Virus experts know that viral dose affects illness severity. In the lab, mice receiving a low dose of virus clear it and recover, while the same virus at a higher dose kills them. Dose sensitivity has been observed for every common acute viral infection that has been studied in lab animals, including coronaviruses.

That’s just sad. She should have to die for her idiocy. This is 100% on Trump and R leadership for calling this thing a hoax for a month or more.

Feels like deaths lag something like 2-4 weeks behind new cases.

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So Georgia governor Brian Kemp has issued an executive order, amending his stay at home order, that allows beaches to reopen this weekend. He is climbing the list of assholes.

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On Thursday’s episode of “The Daily Show,” the Microsoft billionaire told the host Trevor Noah that his philanthropic organisation, the Gates Foundation, could mobilize faster than governments to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

“Because our foundation has such deep expertise in infectious diseases, we’ve thought about the epidemic, we did fund some things to be more prepared, like a vaccine effort,” Gates said. “Our early money can accelerate things.”

Gates said he was picking the top seven vaccine candidates and building manufacturing capacity for them. “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don’t waste time in serially saying, ‘OK, which vaccine works?’ and then building the factory,” he said.

Gates said that simultaneously testing and building manufacturing capacity is essential to the quick development of a vaccine, which Gates thinks could take about 18 months.

This seems pretty cool.

but he’s a jerk as per Twitter for only donating 25 million dollars directly

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I’ve posted about this before, but my mom’s closest childhood friend died of polio. Every single year she nags me to get my flu shot. I feel like a lot of people here ITT will be nagging their kids and their grandkids every single year to get a coronavirus shot. This anti-vaxxer movement is 100% a product of Boomers being lucky and never having to deal with the devastation of a pandemic disease in their lifetimes. That is not normal at all, for real, diseases are working 24/7 all the time trying to figure out ways to get at us.

We’re on a war footing now, but we need to always be on guard all the time against this bullshit. Washing your hands regularly and using your knuckles to operate a touchscreen at Kroger needs to be an everyday thing. Like, coronacirus and influenza and all the other beasties out there never take a day off trying to find ways to fuck with us, we need to be vigilant every single day. Thew habits we are acquiring during this pandemic need to become an everyday thing.

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Every anti-vaxxer I know is Gen-X or millennial.

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Shaking hands is a dumb fucking custom. What if we all bowed instead?

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I have been cautiously suggesting that for a while. Saying that potentially getting it from some kind of secondary or tertiary transfer may be the way you want to get it. Say on the container of food delivery or something where the likely load is less.

Still not convinced they have this fully nailed down though so would feel bad to suggest people try to get it in such a manner.

The one upside of this is it might allow for an old school vaccine (one where they develop a weakened form of the virus and infect people with it in vaccine) that could be rolled out faster then the genetic program most vaccine testing is on right now.

If true, would this mean that if I got it via minor exposure and gave it to my spouse, all else equal, she’d be more likely than me to get seriously ill?

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Crotch punch, IMO

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AMLO is somehow managing to deal with this worse than Trump

I hated shaking hands before–definitely not gonna do that again, if they don’t like that–well most people I shook hands with I never saw again anyway so **** it.

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