outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

my group is on unofficial 'feel free to work from home if you wanna', but some believe it will be mandatory soon

i'm on official "i'm working from home and not telling anyone, doubt anyone will notice"

Ireland cancelling all St Patrick’s day parades!

I saw this old food delivery guy coughing and spluttering while he was getting out of his car last night. Might have just been a smoker's cough, but good lord, I'd still be throwing that takeaway straight into the bin if it was arriving at my house.

“Work from home” is fine and good if you are a professional person on a salary at a job that does not require your physical body. But it generally just slows the spread of disease for a small, privileged class. How many wage workers, teachers, medical personnel are fucked by the loss of income? It just sucks.

I would imagine most businesses that rely on such workers won't bother shutting down or changing things up much at all, just issuing "anti-flu best practices" or whatever. I'm not worried about loss of income for them as much as I am that workers in those industries won't have the luxury of effectively reducing the risk of exposure.

“Work from home” is fine and good if you are a professional person on a salary at a job that does not require your physical body. But it generally just slows the spread of disease for a small, privileged class. How many wage workers, teachers, medical personnel are fucked by the loss of income? It just sucks.

― rb (soda), Monday, March 9, 2020 10:20 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

boom this is why we need paid sick leave. (and M4A).

like at this rate, im also thinking about if we have to cancel classes this spring, how many kids wont be able to take their exams to graduate, their AP tests, go to graduation, shit.

oh yeah, for sure. it is a fucking mess.

gig economy people without benefits, uber/lyft drivers, hard to see how they aren't fucked at some point. wish someone would have pointed out the problem with these paycheck-to-paycheck jobs before a crisis happened!

the USA- every man is an island.

one of the UK's pro political commentariat arseholes caught himself thinking aloud about how terrible it is that poor ppl on zero hour contracts will end up spreading COVID 19 to him because they can't afford to self-isolate.

the good news here in the U.S. is our surgeon general who I just saw on TV appears to be very bright for a14 year old boy

easy mistake, but that's eric trump, and he's actually a very dumb 14 year old boy

shit I thought I knew him from somewhere

“Work from home” is fine and good if you are a professional person on a salary at a job that does not require your physical body. But it generally just slows the spread of disease for a small, privileged class. How many wage workers, teachers, medical personnel are fucked by the loss of income? It just sucks.

xp he was showing how to do something called “bare hand wipe”?

One proof that deplatforming works is that I have no idea what Alex Jones is saying about all of this.

false flag

xp he was showing how to do something called “bare hand wipe”?

― Webcam Du Bois (Hadrian VIII), Monday, March 9, 2020 10:41 AM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Please tell me this is not in response to the sudden run on TP

I was jk

*does a bare shit in the woods*

that's the pope iirc

But it generally just slows the spread of disease for a small, privileged class. How many wage workers, teachers, medical personnel are fucked by the loss of income? It just sucks.

― rb (soda), Monday, March 9, 2020 10:20 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

agree with the implication of the second sentence, but the first sentence is just not true.

Love getting texts from almost everyone I know asking "Are you feeling OK?" Kevin shut the fuck up

like at this rate, im also thinking about if we have to cancel classes this spring, how many kids wont be able to take their exams to graduate, their AP tests, go to graduation, shit.

The good news that there is technology and infrastructure to enable study from home. The bad news is that this T&I is already proving inadequate to demand, and is nowhere nearly distributed equitably.

im guessing that this will accelerate the adoption of and bolster the infrastructure for wfh in our civil service, and many other areas where it should've been in long before now

President Trump shakes hands with people after arriving in Orlando, Florida. pic.twitter.com/rGVDaa9JsA

— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 9, 2020

Oh please oh please oh please

Hey, at least he's putting his money where his mouth is. Hopefully his tiny hands too.

LOOOOL xpost Oh please oh please oh please

Vanity Fair: “He’s definitely melting down over this”: Trump, germaphobe in chief, struggles to control the Covid-19 story

Last week Trump told aides he’s afraid journalists will try to purposefully contract coronavirus to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me.

not a big chait fan, but his likening trump to this guy was good

https://blakes1967catastrophe.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/amity-jaws1.jpg

i have a suspicion that trump's manifest incompetence is hiding the fact that U.S. administrative capacity is really bad, and that even a supremely competent exec would have trouble containing or mitigating an outbreak given available institutions and tools

— Max Read (@max_read) March 9, 2020

Vanity Fair says that Trump’s definitely melting down every fucking week, I really wish people would stop believing their anonymously sourced center-cannot-hold bullshit.

Trump is freaking out he's going to have to tap in to the strategic TP reserve.

What are the chances that a severe public outbreak in the US could be used to delay the election?

About as good as Trump getting it and dying.

re: max's tweet, the thing is, when ebola hit during the obama administration that is very much what they found - very bad/non-coordinated federal governance regarding outbreaks. so the administration built a much more capable response and backed it up with funding and staff and governnance.

then trump came in and saw that it was something obama liked, and obliterated it for no reason (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/).

that said, not saying the obama admin would have been able to "contain" coronavirus. but mitigation-wise, there's a direct line between trump's incompetence and the lives that are stake

What are the chances that a severe public outbreak in the US could be used to delay the election?

― Matt DC, Monday, March 9, 2020 2:27 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

discussed on the US politics thread IIRC. would require the cooperation of the states, who would be unlikely to give it.

the only way a germophobe like him could shake hands like that is if he was wearing normal human hand sized gloves over his tiny hands imo

vanity fair voice: it's a dumpster fire and i'm living for it *cough*

xpost FWIW he's also a death cultist, so

Age breakdown of Italian fatalities

463 have died (97 today)

Of these:

1% 29-50yrs
10% 60-69yrs
31% 70-79yrs
44% 80-89yrs
14% over 90yrs

— James Longman (@JamesAALongman) March 9, 2020

I mean, even under ordinary circumstances, he doesn't exactly live like he cares about continuing to live.

xp I was interested to read that Italy’s population is like 25% people over 65? We have less than half that % in Ireland, but the Italian proportion is incredible.

about 15% in US (~ 50M out of ~~327M)

Isn't Italy one of the countries always listed as suffering from a population bust? It was either them or maybe France that actually had a Pr push to get people to have more kids,

BTW, I don't know where this "Trump is a germaphobe" stuff comes from. It seems as much BS as anything he's claimed. No doubt he doesn't even know what it means and just trots it out as an excuse.

"Show us your taxes!"
"Sorry, can't, I'm a germaphobe. Meanwhile, watch me feast on fast food and have unprotected sex with porn stars."

I was interested to read that Italy’s population is like 25% people over 65?

... and falling.

i only know about italy's population problems because of all those "move to this village and buy a house for a euro" things.