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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 7:57 am 
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I'm not trying to sound sarcastic, but I've rewritten this several times and can't not sound sarcastic:

Wow, part of the US is realizing that health care works better as a whole and can help more people this way! I'm happy for its citizens and hope this idea spreads!

....okay, I could have tried harder. But your existing system is one giant facepalm. I'm just glad that people are getting help. Our system is already centralized, but is also overwhelmed. We have/had stupid govt officials making a ton of cutbacks on healthcare the past long time. We could have prepared better, too. We were working at capacity before the pandemic. So what does that mean now....

People need to work together :|. We wouldn't be relying on all these big corporations donating health products if we simply properly funded healthcare in the first place. I hope this is a lesson they carry on past the pandemic!

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 2:26 pm 
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Maybe, maybe not. Our situation is basically rooted in racism, so changing it has certain difficulties.

But that aside, China and Oregon are sending ventilators to New York. I can't help but suspect the Chinese Government will mention this once or twice in days to come. Hopefully US Customs won't seize them the way they made off with a shipment of masks bound for Massachusetts.

On the subject of masks. The CDC is promoting ordinary folks wearing cloth masks. Just so it's understood: unless you're wearing N95 masks they will do nothing to protect you, already aeresolized virus will sail through the weave without slowing down. What they do is to protect everyone else from you, since the droplets with the virus that you may exhale or cough up are still too big to get through the mask. And for what it's worth they do not want us wearing N95 masks. There are too few to go around now, and the health care workers need them.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 11:56 pm 
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Apparently Airbnb is waiving their fees for the first 100,000 first responders to book shelter near their gigs. From what I have read the units are either free or reduced rate as well.

Oh, and the ICU usage in Italy is going down. The sparkling isolation seems to be working.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sun Apr 05, 2020 11:00 am 
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Image

And they say epidemics don't have their uses.

And now for something completely different: a look at epidemiological models and what good they might be. It's not bad.

Just noted: someone did a study on the coronavirus and face masks. They work at keeping infected people from exhaling them.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 7:15 am 
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Online advertisements have weired effects. Initially i got the usual advertisements for online dating sites, maybe even more then usual, but that impression might be due to confirmation bias. I suppose they just kept their advertisements running, but i had a "really NOW?" reaction.

Now they seem to have gone, but yesterday i did see an ad for meeting Ukrainian women, that i have seen never (conciously at least) before. Thats not only meeting new people, but international travel as well, thats really odd for times like this.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 1:12 pm 
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There has, alas, been a lot of false information being spread about this virus online and in the media. One major outlet is now being sued in a state court on the basis that their false information was a violation of the local consumer protection act. That is to say that they've had any claim to free speech rights stripped from them because this is a matter of commercial speech, and so the bar is a lot lower to prove the case. But if it is found as a matter of law that they are guilty of such falsehoods? Coming soon to a courtroom near you...

In other speech news, Queen Elizabeth 2 reminds us that we got through WWII and we can get through this. Presumably with fewer Yanks being overpaid, oversexed, and over there.

Meanwhile, deaths in Italy and Spain are both down again. It's been that way four a few days now. That mostly leaves the UK and the US as the major countries still growing quickly. Catch up, guys.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 8:13 pm 
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Another county heard from: someone has turned the amino acid chains on the Coronavirus spike into music. It's blended with a track which describes the physical structure as well. It's actually not bad, but " Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)" may not be the catchiest of titles.

Oh, and one of the Tigers in a New York City zoo has tested positive for the virus. Leaving aside the implications of it being able to jump to felids, I'm kind of impressed that someone actually carried out that test.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 11:04 am 
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Weremensh wrote:
Now for an interesting thought experiment. There are two military hospital ships taking up station in American cities to handle hospital cases not related to the virus: heart attacks, trauma, accidents, what ever. So if someone is taken to one, is there a bill? These ships don't have business offices, and the US Navy isn't on anyone's insurance network...


That's if they let patients onto those ships to begin with. You can't get on the ship unless you test negative for coronavirus, but you can't get tested for coronavirus unless you look like you are pretty obviously suffering from coronavirus. I don't even know how they're going to figure this one out.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 11:25 am 
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Weremensh wrote:
On the subject of masks. The CDC is promoting ordinary folks wearing cloth masks. Just so it's understood: unless you're wearing N95 masks they will do nothing to protect you, already aeresolized virus will sail through the weave without slowing down. What they do is to protect everyone else from you, since the droplets with the virus that you may exhale or cough up are still too big to get through the mask. And for what it's worth they do not want us wearing N95 masks. There are too few to go around now, and the health care workers need them.


Not quite; it's not that easy to aerosolize this virus, and most of the infection is still spread by droplets. If you're talking about a medical worker who's intubating patients on the regular, a cloth mask is going to do bugger all, but for the average person passing a coughing person at the grocery store, it'll help.

Back in the old days, medical staff wore five layers of gauze over their faces, and old timey studies showed they had some protective effect against droplet-transmitted diseases.

The Hong Kong Consumer Council did some lab studies on various household materials and found that two layers of paper towels, or three layers of facial tissues, were about 85% as good as a surgical mask, which is considerably better than just cloth, which only about 30% as good. You need to turn each layer of tissue/paper towel 90 degrees from the previous layer for maximum effect. You know how it's easier to tear a paper towel in one direction than the other because the fibres are more lined up in that direction? Well, you want crosshatching to make the holes even smaller.

Cut up vacuum bags would be even better since they're designed to hold particles in.

So try to stuff a couple layers of paper towel into your improvised cloth mask. This YouTube video shows you how to fold one out of hanky and two elastic bands, no sewing required. You can slip a few layers of paper towel inside.

Oh, and they're no use once they're wet. So if you start getting sweaty and damp, change your mask. Do not re-use cloth masks without laundering. Put in the laundry, and then in the dryer, on hot. Or if you haven't got a dryer, leave it out in the sun for a couple of days, or iron the sucker.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 2:24 pm 
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Kea wrote:
Weremensh wrote:
Now for an interesting thought experiment. There are two military hospital ships taking up station in American cities to handle hospital cases not related to the virus: heart attacks, trauma, accidents, what ever. So if someone is taken to one, is there a bill? These ships don't have business offices, and the US Navy isn't on anyone's insurance network...


That's if they let patients onto those ships to begin with. You can't get on the ship unless you test negative for coronavirus, but you can't get tested for coronavirus unless you look like you are pretty obviously suffering from coronavirus. I don't even know how they're going to figure this one out.

In the case of the ship in New York, they're supposedly turning it into a Covid patient ward. There just aren't enough non-Covid patients to be bothered with right now. Though one of the crew of that ship has already tested positive, so it looks like we're going to need a lot of military personnel to handle that and Javits before this is over.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2020 3:20 pm 
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Just a note for what it's worth: the current Covid test is apparently 73% accurate if you've really got it. So the roughly 400 thousand cases detected in the US as of yesterday actually also represented about 150 thousand false negatives among the roughly 1.7 million thought clear, and proportionally for the 1.5 million cases formally detected in the world. Granted that 73% is better than flipping a coin, but hopefully the new faster tests supposed to come on line are also more accurate.

One hears that there is no Covid 19 in Turkmenistan, largely because it's forbidden. One also hears there's very little in the rest of the 'developing world', largely because there's no testing. One suspects this is going to be a major problem sooner or later.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2020 7:04 am 
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I appreciate the stories. I was going to post more, but kept rambling in annoyance and ended up deleting what I was going to say. At least every other day.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2020 6:14 pm 
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Apparently someone has been referencing a French study on Hydroxychloroquine in the media. The journal that published it has disavowed it. It seems the authors ignored the test subjects who dropped out owing to adverse affects when they drew up their findings, though the folks that dropped out (or died) were a fifth of the total. Now there are other studies, equally small, which suggest it might be useful for some subset of Covid patients; but any real indication one way or the other is still pending.

Oh, and per the BBC...It seems there's a food wholesaler that normally supplies restaurants and such like which is now selling directly to the public. Well, they saw 40% of their business evaporate overnight, and they saw what was happening in the supermarkets; and figured if the public is willing to buy baked beans in a #10 can then why not? They also do deliveries on behalf of the government. I wonder if that idea's going to spread?

And a bit of only in America courtesy the Washington Post: a lot of hospitals and doctor's groups are cutting staff. They're losing vast sums of money on normal operating costs and there's a sizable cost in addition to get ready for Covid patients. Granted 100 billion bucks was allocated in the last bill, but that's one months normal revenues and apparently mostly aimed at providers who take care of the insured. Absent considerably more money, which is not a given, a significant surge in cases in rural and poorer areas will be met with a rather reduced capacity to take care of them. This bodes.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 7:09 am 
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That's because the French doctor who authored the study is a notorious crank with a history of cherry-picking data and falsifying results.

And you might be interested in this: Outbreak.Asia, which has situation reports on several Asian developing countries.

It's been put together by an open source fact checking group that's been reporting on the Hong Kong protests for the last year, doing stuff like verifying and time-stamping phone footage and photos. They've switched to pandemic reporting.

Their report on the situation in the Philippines got chased off Facebook by Duterte trolls. It's not good.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:09 am 
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An interesting video on social distancing from Ohio.

Here in the States the national stockpile of PPE and ventilators is exhausted, fewer than 12 million masks and 8 thousand ventilators were shipped to states and localities, and no new supplies of either are expected until the end of this month at the earliest. Meanwhile the cash strapped states and localities are paying up to five times what these supplies cost 6 months ago trying to get them themselves. I'm posting a link to an article about why in POOP, it being a discussion of policy choices and hence of political actors. With that said, it's not an opinion piece and hence the mention here.

Oh, and apparently a billionaire donated one billion dollars to help deal with the epidemic. It would be nice if that became a trend, wouldn't it?

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