outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

a baseball man woulda known COVID's just the flu!

So here's a Covid chart showing deaths in London, which of course suffered the worst of the outbreak in wave 1. https://t.co/aep6BrhV8m pic.twitter.com/h0RUAUPmKV

— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) October 28, 2020

Has this been posted yet? It's a pretty good visualization of how he virus can spread with/without various safeguards:

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-and-a-class-how-the-coronavirus-is-spread-through-the-air.html

I saw that, and I thought it was quite interesting as long as it is understood as an explanation of how people *can* become infected in those scenarios and not a predictor of how many *will* become infected (which is potentially exaggerated by the illustrations).

Yeah, I suppose there are odds on these things like there are on everything. It's certainly possible that in every one of the situations illustrated *nobody* is infected.

(1) the infected person may not be shedding as much virus as assumed there (especially if asymptomatic) (2) the infected person may in fact wear their mask properly (it sounded like they were assuming improper mask wearing) and (3) even if an infectious dose reaches your general vicinity I don't know if that means you necessarily become infected -- if you are also wearing a mask, you don't touch your face, and not enough of the virus reaches your eyes, IDK that it would happen.

that said, I'm gonna continue to stay out of bars and sticking to my plan of not hosting a thanksgiving dinner this year for extended family.

Iirc two of the biggest factors in their scenarios were duration of time spent in the same space together and air circulation.

supposedly the '15 minutes' of close contact that the CDC established puts you at risk if that person is infected is now 15 cumulative minutes, not consecutive

it's been that way for a bit. was relevant in my recent quarantine

in June we were training for tracing and i asked about the "15 minutes" thing. was told that the county i'm in considers *any* time in close contact with a case one is considered potentially exposed and should quarantine/test. which makes more sense to me

supposedly the '15 minutes' of close contact that the CDC established puts you at risk if that person is infected is now 15 cumulative minutes, not consecutive

I guess I don't understand this. Does this mean the virus, at whatever level, just hangs out in your system for some period of time? That is, say you need a 10/10 cootie level to catch Covid. If you get a 3/10 of cooties in your system, wait some time, and then later get an additional 4/10 cooties, then you'll have a cumulative 8/10 cootie exposure?

(7, I mean. Math is hard.)

that's kind of my understanding, you need a certain viral load to become infected, though idk when your levels "reset"...point is you won't become infected just walking by someone who's positive

Yeah, but the reset is the big question. If I get a little exposure, how long does that last in my system? And can that tiny exposure be not enough to give me Covid but enough to make me generate antibodies?

xp yeah, in fact there have been supposedly a handful of cases traced to a person having numerous, short exposures to an infected person over the course of a single day rather than one long exposure -- I think in a prison. Still pretty limited info on that but seems plausible.

Michael Bay has a typically nuanced take:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaumIOvp7mM

So gratifying that Bay chose to name the disease Covid-23, so everyone would know it was just blatant horror fiction and not get confused into thinking there was a scrap of reality associated with that story.

i'm beginning to lose any tinge of remaining sarcasm when i say "i am afraid of americans"

Reluctance to share information about coronavirus infections or contacts seems to run deep in the US — all the way to the White House, where an investigation into the spread of the virus there was called off soon after the outbreak was discovered.

According to results from a survey released Friday by the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of adults surveyed said they would be “not at all” or “not too likely” to talk to a public health official by phone or text message about the coronavirus.

The survey of more than 10,200 adults from the nationally representative American Trends Panel was conducted in mid-July, and its results align with earlier findings and anecdotal reports of contact tracers unable to reach or extract information from many individuals they tried to get in touch with.

“We get a variety of responses, from yelling and hanging up to those telling us that they have already contacted all of their friends and will not give us those names,” Jen Freiheit, the health director of Kenosha County, Wisconsin, told Reuters this summer.

one thing about hiv that i'm grateful for is that it has made testing and contact tracing a pretty regular/normal regular part of being gay.

had two bosses say in meetings yesterday that this might be over by spring and i'm like ............................... ok

Well, to be fair, sounds like the boss didn't specify which spring....

I read through much of a McKinsey (I know) report about COVID and when it might "end", i.e. either a vaccine is distributed well enough to make a huge difference or the point where testing/tracing/treatment is so far along that most restrictions could be lifted. Obviously there was a lot of hedging (understandably!) and unknown variables, but one thing I took away is that it seemed best case would be fourth quarter of 2021 and worst case would be that it would extend "into 2023 and beyond". Seeing how absolutely piss poorly the U.S. has been handling everything to date makes me want to just assume that worst case is actually our most likely, but I've actually been splitting the difference and kind of mentally aiming for some degree of "normalcy" (as relative as that may be) in 2022. If it comes sooner, great, but looking at numbers now and I'm not feeling good about that...

xxxp why the fuck would anyone want to watch a pandemic horror movie rn??

Don't you SEE? If we keep listening to the libs, we'll still be in our apartments in four years, hiding from the hypermilitarized CDC agents.

I am exempt from COVID, my mommy wrote a note

89,000 yesterday and 97,000 new cases today. Jesus Christ.

xxxp why the fuck would anyone want to watch a pandemic horror movie rn??

― error prone wolf syndicate (Hadrian VIII), Friday, 30 October 2020 21:24 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Outbreak was top of the Netflix chart at one point during summer lockdown.

New @Stanford study estimates that 18 Trump rallies have led to 30,000 COVID cases and 700 deaths

(via @AaronBelkin) https://t.co/zcR4yKwnEl pic.twitter.com/1yaPivbYFS

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) October 31, 2020

prison4all

I was thinking the same about the reports of people refusing to participate in contact tracing. It should be a fucking federal crime imo.

or at least state

Criminalizing things should not be your go-to move. "Defund police - but give them an extra round of prohibitions they can use vindictively against people of color and the poor first."

Well I'd generally hope that my fellow humans had enough regard for their own lives and the well-being of their loved ones that we wouldn't have to criminalize such a thing but we are where we are, unfortunately.

Sweden has also faced an explosion in new cases. That asshole Daniel Howden is still tweeting nonsense

i think one of the things that seems almost too frightening for public discourse is:

what happens when this happens again? i think we're all just hoping that we get through this and it doesn't happen again, but...what if it did? would we all be taken surprise? would we just resume again, at wherever we left off with covid-19, in conflict with total idiots?

Smarter, more effective leadership leads to better results.

across the world?

Well when you put it that way, I guess you're right: we're all fucked.

Farewell fellow humans, we sure had a nice run didn't we. :```(

It does make me nervous when people refer to this as a once in 100 years occurrence. I suspect the next one will come much sooner.

the next pandemic will be something with a high mortality rate that is difficult to transmit, and all of the idiots who have called this disease a nothingburger are going to react like it's the apocalypse like they did with Ebola.

Not if we don't ask them to even slightly curtail their daily trips to Applebee's, it won't. The only reason they are screaming about a "nothingburger" is because they've been asked to ever so slightly change their routine so as to not kill others and in America, that's just a bridge too fucking far.

to be fair, it is more than a slight change. it's disruptive af.

but to your point, the restrictions would have been much less constricting and for shorter periods of time if they'd just complied the first time (and if we'd locked down in timely fashion). they just keep kicking the can down the highway.

Oh absolutely, I don't mean to minimize the sacrifices people are actually making, but rather raging against the specific bullshit things I've seen people frothing at the mouth over.

yeah I mean the concern trolling by the non-maskers would be more amusing to point and laugh at if it weren't actually what's making this pandemic worse/killing more people.

instead of the constant refrain of "it's only 4% of our population" (really, we still do an annual 9/11 memorial for 3,000 ppl that died)
"what about the RECOVERY stats why don't u publish those?"

This article was....uh, terrifying. White supremacy and Covid denial go hand in hand...

In Boise, an outbreak at the Idaho State Veterans Home has resulted in 26 active cases and two recent deaths among residents, along with 16 employees who have tested positive.

Gov. Brad Little has restored restrictions on large gatherings but has faced blowback from some fellow Republicans and resisted a mask mandate. Last week, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin joined with a group of lawmakers in posting a video calling for an end to all state and local emergency orders, vowing to ignore them in the future. In the video, Ms. McGeachin laid a gun on a Bible.

“The fact that a pandemic may or may not be occurring changes nothing about the meaning or intent of the State Constitution in the preservation of our inalienable rights,” the political leaders said in the video and accompanying letter.

....

Mr. Van Noy, the Coeur d’Alene pastor who spent 18 days in a critical care unit, had expressed skepticism of masks before he got sick, did not require them in church and vowed to defy any order that he cancel in-person services. But he said that while his illness led doctors to at one point give him a 20 percent chance of survival, he has seen others in the congregation who have had only minor infections. So while he wanted people to be cautious to avoid spreading the virus, he said, he remained skeptical of government efforts to contain it.

“I’m not convinced that all of our efforts have had a great impact on the spread or lack thereof,” Mr. Van Noy said. “I do think that we’ve done a lot of harm to our economy, to the psyche of personages. I mean, we see depression. We see all kinds of issues that are developing because people have a sense of hopelessness.”

When he went to cast his ballot recently, Mr. Van Noy wore a pro-Trump mask to the polling site. As he arrived, he said, a poll worker told him he could not wear the mask because it amounted to inappropriate electioneering.

Mr. Van Noy removed the mask, and went inside to cast his ballot without one.

Sorry, forgot link https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/us/coronavirus-control.html

Racist honky death cult

“The fact that a pandemic may or may not be occurring changes nothing about the meaning or intent of the State Constitution in the preservation of our inalienable rights,” the political leaders said in the video and accompanying letter.

grrrrrr, fuck you

obvious, i know, but political leaders should be held to a higher standard. we all know there's a lot of everyday dum-dums out there who don't know wtf is going on in the world, ever. but when you're in office those excuses melt away, and instead the assumption is that if you're repeating blatant falsehoods, you're doing it on purpose. therefore, fuck them for life

It's the Dakotas and Idaho, bastions of white supremacist terrorists, down-home mildly racist honkies, and an immiserated and segregated population of Indigenous people. Beautiful country, and also incredibly scary.