outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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.

i just had this really dark fantasy, a rip-off of a certain scene in lord of the rings, where "herd" of conservative gun-nuts with herd-immunity appear on the top of a mountain, looking down on the valley of uninfected people who are taking precautions. it is terrifying and they block out the sun with their coal-rolling tank-trucks, and the valley water is polluted by endless chewed-up wads of Skoal from the watching herd.

"THE PANDEMIC MAY OR MAY NOT BE OCCURRING", they say, before setting their trucks into gear and rolling coal down the mountain at top speed. "BUT EITHER WAY, YOU WILL JOIN THE HERD EVENTUALLY".

but just as all hope is lost, a non-dumb herd with immunity appears on the top of another nearby mountain. they are all rambo-like, and shirtless, ripped tom hanks is their leader, etc

Tbh highly recommend the Indigenous zombie flick "Blood Quantum." Has some resonance with your fantasy.

i didn't realize tom hanks was in that one, gotta check it out! ;)

i watched la llorona (the 2019 one) for the first time last night. obviously it's about very different things, but it certainly resonated with the current closed-in conditions as well. the mob of people in the movie were righteous, of course, but irl it often feels like a mob of total idiots closing in, and in fact, starting to infiltrate the house as well, putting you in physical danger.

save us, ripped Tom Hanks

https://amp.dw.com/en/belgiums-covid-19-health-care-collapse-it-will-happen-in-10-days/a-55451750?

:-(

Our NYC serosurvey paper is now out in Nature:
1) if extrapolated to the NYC population we found>1.7 million infected and IFR at 0.97
2) earlier introduction of the virus into city than officially detected
3) seroprevalence AND titers are stable so far https://t.co/XK3TWVveXf

— Florian Krammer (@florian_krammer) November 3, 2020

More than half of South Dakota's covid tests are coming back positive right now. pic.twitter.com/fNrhF1Z6je

— Dave Levitan (@davelevitan) November 3, 2020

From xyzzzz's article about Belgium:

I've hoped now, for six months, that it would never happen. That people would have understood the risk. And that people would have changed their habits for one year. Just to avoid that. But it's a failure of the solidarity between people in Belgium — and a question of balance between solidarity and individual rights. Some people choose their own rights compared to solidarity. And the result is now here. I've seen people dying and regretting that they didn't wear the mask. I saw that. I saw families that had big parties with all the family members. And all the family members were infected. And I've got a family right now where 80% of the family is in the beds here. Right now, just after a birthday party.

xp:
Hopefully South Dakotans will remember governor Kristi Noem's dismal Covid-19 performance in 2022. Last election in 2018 was the closest in decades (51.0% to 47.6%).

I'm reminded of Argentina hitting 60% test positivity a month ago. It's jumped from ~200 deaths/million to ~700/million since. Yesterday Argentina reported +483 deaths (in a 45 M population) vs +522 (in a 332 M population) for the US. Only Belgium is doing worse.

Slovakia is testing its entire population: Slovakia to test all citizens over age of 10 for coronavirus

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/30/slovakia-to-test-all-citizens-over-age-of-10-for-coronavirus

Denmark will cull its mink population of up to 17 million after a mutation of the coronavirus found in the animals spread to humans, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Wednesday. Health authorities found virus strains in humans and in mink that showed decreased sensitivity against antibodies, potentially lowering the efficacy of any vaccines, Frederiksen said.

The head of the WHO's emergencies programme, Mike Ryan, called on Friday for full-scale scientific investigations of the complex issue of humans - outside China - infecting mink which in turn transmitted the virus back to humans.
Outbreaks at mink farms have persisted in the Nordic country, the world's largest producer of mink furs, despite repeated efforts to cull infected animals since June. Minks have also been culled in the Netherlands and Spain after infections were discovered.”

Just don’t raise mink *touches forehead and winks*

(I know they’re not wild and letting them go would be an extremely bad idea)

This tells me we are going to be dealing with this virus for closer to 20 years than 2 years.