outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

xp this is also the country where mike pence's ignorant fear of needle exchange programs directly led to 127 HIV infections in southern Indiana that could have been averted (out of a total outbreak of 215 cases)

btw, remember last week when trump named pence head of the response, to the surprise of Azar (who was the nominal head of the response until then), who then awkwardly took to the podium to say that he was still co-leading the project, as trump literally gave a thumbs up and walked out of the room?

There was a noticeable absence on stage Wednesday when members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force gave a press conference: Health Secretary Alexander Azar.

According to Politico, that wasn’t an accident: Vice President Mike Pence asked Azar not to attend the briefing. A spokesperson for Pence told Politico, in the publication’s words, that “officials wanted to make room on stage for Ben Carson,” the Housing secretary. A spokesperson for Azar said simply that the task force members would be “rotating through as necessary” in the group’s daily briefings.

At first, Azar was the top Trump administration official leading the White House’s task force. Then, at a press conference last week, Trump said Vice President Mike Pence would be leading the effort — reportedly to Azar’s surprise. Pence has since brought on Dr. Deborah Bixby, an AIDS expert, as another point person.

office_space_milton.jpg

Two days old, but India is restricting exports of some 26 pharmaceutical drugs, including paracetemol, acyclovir, and a bunch of antibiotics that are commonly used to prevent opportunist infections in hospital settings. Slowdown of Chinese production of drug precursors, noted last month, is probably responsible. Probably a matter of time before supply interruptions hit US healthcare.

Azar was not a 'Trump inner circle' guy. Trump wanted one there, not to run anything, but to look out for his interests, which mainly consist of deflecting blame for bad stuff away from Trump and claiming credit for Trump whenever there is good news. Also, he needed a mouthpiece who would spin everything properly, instead of a public health official who, if allowed, would just tell the truth without thinking first about how that might affect Trump.

Isn't Azar a Pence guy, from Indiana?

Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Wonderful book. Great last paragraphs, emerging from illness into a weird world emptied of so many people.

Alex Michael Azar II (/ˈeɪzər/ born June 17, 1967) is an American attorney, politician, pharmaceutical lobbyist, and former drug company executive

he is also co-leader of the executive task force designated to lead the effort to provide suggestions to mike pence on coronavirus [disputed - citation needed]

we're in good, washed, hands

welp this has hit the SF school system - one of the big high schools (Lowell) has closed because one of the students is related to one of those idiots on the cruise ships

For your acquaintances still saying its just a flu:

news.com.au: Chinese doctors say coronavirus 'like a combination of SARS and AIDS'

the AIDS comparison seems p irresponsible

That whole article seems pretty irresponsible. Iirc none of the Chinese findings have been peer reviewed, and I'm not sure how down I am with "Communist Party mouthpiece the Global Times."

yeah a lot of garbage in there

i'm not going to mention it to my acquaintances. it doesn't even explain why AIDS. because clickbait.

This is a pretty cracking what-we-know summary https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

2 unrelated mystery cases confirmed in SF. Authorities assume the virus is spreading in the city.

The comparison to AIDS:

Diao et al, 2020. Reduction and functional exhaustion of T cells in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). medRxiv.

And yes it's 2 weeks old and not yet peer reviewed. There are about 4000 Scholar results to date, and very few have gone through the whole peer-review process. One has to look at the authors and whether they have a credible background. These guys do. There are definitely some who aren't.

Can you understand why “Chinese doctors say coronavirus ‘like a combination of SARS and AIDS” is still a bad headline?

one important way in which nCoV-2019 is very much unlike HIV is that the mutation rate is positively glacial by comparison:

the greatest divergence from reference known in nCoV is 10 nt point mutations in 4 months: https://nextstrain.org/ncov?m=div

HIV mutates more than that within an untreated host within weeks of infection. From a vaccination perspective, the chances nCoV will be more like HIV (herculean efforts over the course of decades have yet to produce a viable vaccine) than like the flu (pick some peptide variants and make a vaccine of them) are basically zero

comparisons to AIDS given the nature of HIV are deeply irresponsible and Sanpaku also lay off the doomsauce

News.com.au is an Australian news and entertainment website owned by News Corp Australia. 

like, the divergence of flu virus worldwide in 35 years is roughly comparable to the divergence of HIV in an untreated host in 9 months

it's straightforwardly ignorant to draw any comparison between this virus and HIV, or this disease and AIDS

like fuck off

silby dropping HIV science I was about to

like, just because something damages the immune system does *not* make it like AIDS or HIV

Even if they were similar in that way, it would still be an irresponsible headline

All headlines are irresponsible

FWIW news.com.au is a Murdoch paper/news source so approach with relevant caution (ie wipe on arse).

some kids at some diploma-mill university 2 blocks from my work (a non-diploma-mill university) got COVID. it's coming for me baby, woooo.

Coworker coming back from 2-week holiday in Indonesia is going to be told to stay home for 2 weeks.

some kids at some diploma-mill university 2 blocks from my work (a non-diploma-mill university) got COVID.

see kids, this is what happens when you don't study for real

please don't riot and set the "diploma mill" on fire

Why the heck are people stockpiling water?

(Besides silly.)

to purify the body

a desire for things to go back to the same as it ever was

I drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol. Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face.

I should really have at least a few days’ worth of water in the house for three people and a cat. a shelter-in-place scenario is highly likely in the event of a major Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake or eruption of Mt Rainier.

I have been meaning to do this for several years.

Saw this posted, a timeline of the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, at least from a US perspective:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-pandemic-timeline.html

How much we forget, and how soon we forget it.

If people are worried about a disaster scenario where they run out of water, it would make more sense to get five-gallon jugs and fill them up with tap water, rather than buy up cases of bottled water.

Locally, there are so many water line breaches in the old infrastructure that we get "boil water" advisories every 6 months lately. I've just refilled some gallon jugs with tap for that, and for hurricane season.

https://www.isitcanceledyet.com

I've arranged to see my mother tomorrow, who gets by fine-ish most days but has an ever-growing number of complications from decades of chronic illness - we still have some Christmas presents to deliver, so it's a long overdue visit, already repeatedly postponed due to some non-COVID health concerns and practical inconveniences - and now I'm listening to certain coworkers coughing a lot and hoping I'm not asymptomatically carrying any plagues to see the family

(it's pretty unlikely, and I finally decided to sort it out ASAP because I figure the risk is only going to go up from here on in tbh :| - just wanted somewhere to voice my anxiety among people who mostly take both a) this thing and b) anxiety seriously, I guess)

My mom is a retired MD who travels a lot and is in her '70s. Currently she is not concerned in the least. She's pretty blasé about it, in fact. She's a pediatrician, and she told me that 200 kids have died of the regular flu this year alone, and across all age groups, per the CDC, "So far, 16,000 people have died and 280,000 people have been hospitalized during the 2019-2020 flu season." That's the flu, it happens every year, and not many people freak out about it. This could get worse, and maybe it is worse, but we deal with death and disease and viruses every year and few people give it a moment's notice.

Re: air travel, no idea if it is related to current events, but we just found round trip tickets to LA this summer for $130. I'm going to spend all my savings on health care and toilet paper.

Starting Monday, March 9, classes at UW campuses will no longer be meeting in person thru the end of winter quarter March 20. Campuses will remain OPEN. This action is to support social-distancing steps the region is taking to fight #COVID19. More here: https://t.co/Gr0eGivlWG

— University of Washington (@UW) March 6, 2020

Is that Comic Con there still on?