outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

the researchers haven't been able to identify what the ideal ratio is of THC to CBD

oh, i know that one

right there with ya, buddy

Kinda fed up with the whole weed-as-panacea trend tbh.

cannabis probably good for everything it turns out

hell yeah i've been inoculating myself with WEED this whole time

Except for those cancers that only LSD and/or magic mushrooms can cure.

xp

some uptight assholes told me back in march that i should stop smoking to protect my lungs from covid but i told them to fuck off and my health thanks me for it <3

Is the ratio in the vicinity of 1:5 maybe

^ cool guy who knows about drug jokes

i can't think that inflaming one's lungs with hot vapor is a good idea tbh as much as it pains me to say it

xp Mordy: there's been some work on both smoking and nicotine that suggest a mixed role. Basically, smokers and vapers are underrepresented in hospitalized cases, but if hospitalized, smokers have worse progression. A protective role for nicotine is hypothesized, and the French are doing a trial with nicotine patches in hospitalized patients.

My local snus outlet (a cigar/pipe tobacco shop) closed, so I've been surviving off convenience store vapes.

We've been eating pot brownies mostly. Slower to act, but mellower.

And CBD for the hyper kid.

One month ago today, Trump claimed that the American death toll from COVID-19 could reach as high as 50,000 fatalities by August 4th.

We will pass 100,000 deaths by the end of this week.

yeah, but many are saying it could be as high as 2-3 million, so compared to that, we're actually doing #1 in the entire world in terms of how good we are

three years pass...

this seems scary: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/19/asia/china-coronavirus-spike-intl-hnk/index.html

― JoeStork, Monday, January 20, 2020

From that CNN article:

SARS infected more than 8,000 people and killed 774 in a pandemic that ripped through Asia in 2002 and 2003.

It's interesting to track ilx's conversation about it going forward up through the end of March. It has been one hell of a year so far.

It's a 'badge of honor', he said.

xp

during hard times, when thinking about how bad things are and how much better they could have - no SHOULD have - been, i find it useful to take a deep breath and then say:

"i did the very best job that has ever been done"

fwiw the WH's predictions that we could reach 3,000 deaths/day by June 1 probably aren't coming true so I guess that's a small bit of good news

Larry Kudlow, close advisor to the President, said on February 25: "We have contained this, I won't say airtight but pretty close to airtight."

Words are meaningless and forgettable.

god if only anything else were

If someone is in an airtight space they will suffocate and die, so... Kudlow... otm?

Enjoy the virus.

xp

All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is something like SARS

You'll see your problems multiplied
If you continually decide
To faithfully pursue
The policy of truth

No one in this red suburb (in one of the most effected metro areas) is wearing masks out shopping.

https://i1.wp.com/digbysblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/download-97.jpeg

It's appalling. We may hold under 3k deaths/day through 1 Jun, but I'll be surprised if that number isn't regularly broken through the month.

fwiw the WH's predictions that we could reach 3,000 deaths/day by June 1 probably aren't coming true so I guess that's a small bit of good news

― frogbs, Wednesday, May 20, 2020 4:40 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not so sure. the current death rate and trajectory is a function of the social distancing that was happening a month ago.

also, what is the percentage of actual covid related deaths we think are accurately being reported in the US? 60%? 70%?

Maybe we all died

My suburb is where the first covid-19 case in the state of Oregon was discovered, in a janitor working at a local elementary school about 2 miles from my house; my town of 30,000 has a large concentration of professionals and college grads and leans more to the liberal-moderate side of the political spectrum. Very white middle class or wealthy, very polite.

Here I see masks aplenty when grocery shopping, but almost no masks worn among people out for daily walks on the street. It is dead easy for those walkers to maintain a 6 ft distance when passing one another and that amount of proximity is only momentary. I can live with that. Since I have no other contact with anyone around here other than on walks or grocery shopping, I can supply no wider observations for comparison.

Here in small town AZ, nobody was wearing a mask. Then all the sudden everyone was. Mine finally arrived in the mail, and then once I started wearing it, it was back to nobody wearing one! I assume everyone thought the cooties magically disappeared once the Gov opened stuff back up.

god aimless i didn't realize we were basically neighbors

Clay, too, I think. I know he grew up in LO.

i mean sure if you call that "local"... :)

While we are talking Portland, I drove past Voodoo Donuts last weekend and there was a line of about 60 people, elbow to elbow. Only a few were wearing masks.

They’re not even good donuts

seriously... of all things put yourself at risk for

Clay, too, I think. I know he grew up in LO.

― A is for (Aimless)

yah and that's where i've been since just before this started, caring for an older relative, hi everybody!

if you're standing elbow to elbow then masks probably aren't effective anyway

what is the percentage of actual covid related deaths we think are accurately being reported in the US? 60%? 70%?

About 60% is the norm in the developed world. NYC did considerably better, closer to 80%.

And Mexico appears to be reporting only 40% of their covid deaths. Reuters: Mexican funeral homes face 'horrific' unseen coronavirus toll

Based on information from 13 funerals homes in the capital belonging to Mexico’s two biggest chains, the excess mortality rate in the first week of May could be at least 2.5 times higher than the government’s official coronavirus tally during that period, according to Reuters calculations.

this is pretty fucking raw
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-hospital-morgue-worker.html

Ms. Sander has not been sleeping well. She thinks about the silhouette of a stomach under the body bag, the jiggling of skin on a dead body.

Her lower back aches. Lifting a body from the lowest shelf in the trailer is grueling. When she pushes a stretcher through winding hallways and on steep ramps, she often bumps into the wall, causing a twinge in her back.

She carries a thin, older woman whose body is still warm. The feeling reminds her of hugging her grandmother, who died earlier this year.

She calls her mother — “just sort of to talk to someone,” she says, “to confirm that yes, this is really happening, that my life hasn’t just become a strange dream in which I work in a morgue and the only people I touch are the dead.”

Also: recent CDC guidance updated to suggest contact with surfaces is an unlikely vector:
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-cdc-coronavirus-does-not-spread-easily-on-contaminated-surfaces-20200521-qew7vcei25bedftqv6v3ov67py-story.html

Feel like she was signing onto some gruesome sights when she decided to work in a NYC morgue whether or not it was during a pandemic.

xp I'm not listening to anything coming out of this CDC until (if) it is rehabilitated in January

i guess? that article (and everything else i've read) suggests this is like doing that work during wartime.
I'm still spending four or five day a week at the brooklyn cemetery. Whenever I get up near the front, the main building is constantly belching smoke. it's intense.

oof

this op-ed by jonathan safran foer is one of best pieces on this topic that i've seen:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/coronavirus-meat-vegetarianism.html

excerpts for those without subscriptions to the failing nyt:

Most everyone has been doing more cooking these days, more documenting of the cooking, and more thinking about food in general. The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.

Is it more essential than the lives of the working poor who labor to produce it? It seems so. An astonishing six out of 10 counties that the White House itself identified as coronavirus hot spots are home to the very slaughterhouses the president ordered open.

In Sioux Falls, S.D., the Smithfield pork plant, which produces some 5 percent of the country’s pork, is one of the largest hot spots in the nation. A Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa, had 730 cases of the coronavirus — nearly 60 percent of its employees. At another Tyson plant, in Waterloo, Iowa, there were 1,031 reported cases among about 2,800 workers.

....

Animal agriculture is now recognized as a leading cause of global warming. According to The Economist, a quarter of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 say they are vegetarians or vegans, which is perhaps one reason sales of plant-based “meats” have skyrocketed, with Impossible and Beyond Burgers available everywhere from Whole Foods to White Castle.

Our hand has been reaching for the doorknob for the last few years. Covid-19 has kicked open the door.

At the very least it has forced us to look. When it comes to a subject as inconvenient as meat, it is tempting to pretend unambiguous science is advocacy, to find solace in exceptions that could never be scaled and to speak about our world as if it were theoretical.

Some of the most thoughtful people I know find ways not to give the problems of animal agriculture any thought, just as I find ways to avoid thinking about climate change and income inequality, not to mention the paradoxes in my own eating life. One of the unexpected side effects of these months of sheltering in place is that it’s hard not to think about the things that are essential to who we are.

We cannot protect our environment while continuing to eat meat regularly. This is not a refutable perspective, but a banal truism. Whether they become Whoppers or boutique grass-fed steaks, cows produce an enormous amount of greenhouse gas. If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.

...

We cannot protect against pandemics while continuing to eat meat regularly. Much attention has been paid to wet markets, but factory farms, specifically poultry farms, are a more important breeding ground for pandemics. Further, the C.D.C. reports that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic — the result of our broken relationship with animals.

yeah that was very good I thought

It's interesting to look back and try to pinpoint the pivot from "wash your damn hands" to "wear a damn mask" was, seems like months ago in this current time warp.

It probably happened during a bathroom break the speed at which news developed