Coronavirus

[ceecee]

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
​

I wonder how long it's going to take for all the anonymous sources to come forward once this family of psychos leaves the White House. I think their contributions will have exponentially more credibility once they do. Trump has thoroughly and brazenly exemplified the psycho vindictiveness that's been stopping them.

But Trump's betting odds are creeping back up (even though I found no evidence of that).

 

[Z Buck McFate]

With Day Trips To The Bean And Deep-Dish Pizza Outings, Tourists Defy Chicago’s Quarantine Order

It's interesting that a lot of people cite "it's unenforceable" as justification for breaking the mandate. Restaurant workers washing their hands after using the restroom isn't an especially enforcable rule either, but it's still important. (If people are wearing a mask and keeping their hands washed/sanitized, as many of these people claim they are, then I don't particularly care - except maybe when it comes to public restrooms, which can be problematic because of the aeresols that bypass typical masks).

In other news, in NW Indiana, most stores have actually finally stopped admitting people without masks. It went into effect last week. Prior to that, just less than half of the public would wear masks inside stores.

 

[Jaguar]

New Technology Can Detect Traces Of The Coronavirus On Surfaces | NBC News NOW - YouTube

Testing. Testing. Testing.

 

[Jaguar]

In other news, in NW Indiana, most stores have actually finally stopped admitting people without masks. It went into effect last week. Prior to that, just less than half of the public would wear masks inside stores.

This is stunning for me to read. In my state, we were required to wear masks in stores since April. You could not enter and they had people at the door checking. I was wearing one even before it was mandated. All I had to hear was what happened with the singing choir in the state of Washington and I knew the country was in for trouble: Airborne. And that was in March.

How coronavirus spread to 87% of the singers at a Washington choir practice - CNN

 

[Jaguar]

Photos: COVID-19 Survivors Journal Symptoms and After Effects – NBC 7 San Diego

 

[Jonny]

 

[anticlimatic]

Whitmer vetoes GOP-backed bill to house nursing home coronavirus patients in separate facilities - mlive.com

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Friday vetoed legislation that would have directed COVID-19 patients to dedicated facilities instead of nursing homes with uninfected patients.

Senate Bill 956 would have required the state to inspect and designate one dedicated facility for coronavirus-positive patients in each of the state’s eight health care regions by Sept. 1.

A person who had tested positive couldn’t be transferred to a nursing home until recovered. Nursing home residents who contract coronavirus would need to be moved to a physically separate building or to the COVID-specific facility the state had designated.

Currently, the state has designated regional hubs that can either be separate facilities or separate units within nursing facilities to house COVID patients needing long-term care, but not hospitalization.

“Politics should not prevail over the health and safety of our seniors and health care workers, and I urge my colleagues in the Senate and House to consider passing a veto override,” he said. “We owe this to our citizens, especially the seniors and vulnerable members of our communities who cannot speak for themselves.”

The coronavirus has, in Michigan and elsewhere, particularly affected elderly populations. According to data released by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services last month, 34% of COVID-19 deaths in Michigan are linked to nursing homes.

Another slow clap for Gretchen Whitmer, ladies and gentlemen.

 

[Jaguar]

After two hours of sleep a night for four months and seeing a member of his team contract the virus, Joseph Varon, MD, is growing exasperated.

"I'm pretty much fighting two wars: A war against COVID and a war against stupidity," Dr. Varon, MD, CMO and chief of critical care at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, told NBC News. "And the problem is the first one, I have some hope about winning. But the second one is becoming more and more difficult."

Dr. Varon noted that whether it's information backed by science or common sense, people throughout the U.S. are not listening. "The thing that annoys me the most is that we keep on doing our best to save all these people, and then you get another batch of people that are doing exactly the opposite of what you're telling them to do."

In an interview with NPR, Dr. Varon said he has woken up at dawn every day for the past four months and has headed to the hospital. There, he spends six to 12 hours on rounds before seeing new admissions. He then returns home to sleep two hours, at most.

 

[Lexicon]

Thousands Protest Against Coronavirus Restrictions in Berlin | Time

 

[Red Herring]

Thousands Protest Against Coronavirus Restrictions in Berlin | Time

I know!

It's a small minority but a loud and weird alliance of rightwing extremists (some nazi flags and slogans), antivaxxers, believers in alternative medicine, conspiracy theorists, aged hippies and frustrated relatively normal citizens.

Here in Germany we were extremely lucky. We had few losses with just a relatively mild lockdown because it came early and people complied. Now these idiots (as well as people vacationing abroad and not social distancing there) are driving up the numbers.

I am a bit torn about how to view our current situation. Absolute numbers are low (900 daily new infections compared to 200 at the best days before the recent uptick). But relative growth and development are bad. The R value is bad and the spread is getting more evenly distributed geographically. All warning signs. Exponential growth is just so unintuitive to humans, it seems.

However, six days ago I read that tests had gone up from 500.000 a week to 530.000 within a short time while the positivity rate remained the same: 0.6%
A low positivity rate tends to be a good sign.

 

[Red Herring]

I'd like to add that shops are open again as well as schools and kindergarden and most restaurants. Only very few places remain closed. There is financial help for those affected and relatively few jobs were lost due to government financed short-time work. What these people are demonstrating against is basically just wearing a mask in shops and on public transport. Boo f*cking hoo!

Seriously, it's ideological and has little to do with the real situation here in Germany.

 

[Virtual ghost]

Thousands Protest Against Coronavirus Restrictions in Berlin | Time

Well, this is basically the byproduct of social networks that produced the "alternative reality". While without cleaning up that in content and rhetoric we will see even more shit in the future. This is because good chunk of global problems are closely related to the false info on such networks. Until COVID we perhaps could have pretended that everything is going to be ok but at this point it is obvious that there is a problem with alternative reality. Which has very serious social implications for everything we see around us. In other words we are all waiting for the COVID vaccine but if 35% of people are anti-vaxers then the whole master plan is basically falling apart. What is simply because the ability to carefully choose all the content you will see inevitably leads to the social networks as they are now. What is cult like mindset by decent margin since you can cut off everything you don't like (reality included).

 

[Jaguar]

Barron Trump's school won't open for in-person classes - Business Insider

As The New York Times previously reported, St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, previously planned a virtual-only return to class or a hybrid model that would have allowed students in classrooms.
President Trump and his administration have for weeks been adamant that schools reopen to students for the upcoming school year despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The Maryland county home to the school attended by President Donald Trump's son, Barron, has ordered private schools to remain closed through the month of September.

"Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have based our decisions on science and data," Montgomery County, Maryland, health officer Dr. Travis Gayles said in a Friday press release. "At this point the data does not suggest that in-person instruction is safe for students or teachers."

Gayles said a rise in transmission of the novel coronavirus, particularly among "younger age groups," in Maryland and nearby Washington, DC, and Virginia, led him to order private schools to close. The county's public school system — the fourth largest in the US by per-pupil spending according to the US Census Bureau, announced last month it would complete its entire first semester via virtual-only education.

Anyone who is found to have "knowingly and willfully" violated the county's Friday order could be convicted of a misdemeanor, subject to jail time up to one year, and a fine of up to $5,000, according to the press release.

 

[Virtual ghost]

I know!

It's a small minority but a loud and weird alliance of rightwing extremists (some nazi flags and slogans), antivaxxers, believers in alternative medicine, conspiracy theorists, aged hippies and frustrated relatively normal citizens.

Here in Germany we were extremely lucky. We had few losses with just a relatively mild lockdown because it came early and people complied. Now these idiots (as well as people vacationing abroad and not social distancing there) are driving up the numbers.

I am a bit torn about how to view our current situation. Absolute numbers are low (900 daily new infections compared to 200 at the best days before the recent uptick). But relative growth and development are bad. The R value is bad and the spread is getting more evenly distributed geographically. All warning signs. Exponential growth is just so unintuitive to humans, it seems.

However, six days ago I read that tests had gone up from 500.000 a week to 530.000 within a short time while the positivity rate remained the same: 0.6%
A low positivity rate tends to be a good sign.

Yeah, you can take those back at anytime.


In other words my intuition was correct, our tourist season wouldn't be such a flop as most people thought. The virus devastated good chunk of our competition, political instability also destroyed good chunk of our competition, while distance put many destinations out of the picture. Therefore plenty of Europeans are coming here since it is close and you can come with a car, plus the place is with minimal infections. The only problem is that perhaps too many people are starting to come. What perhaps isn't good due to obvious reasons, even if those are mostly people from countries with decent numbers and all mass events are canceled. What in combination with the fact that most of our tourism is compatible with social distancing makes this kinda ok-ish from pandemic point of view. However if I am wrong I am possibly sitting on the egg of Europe's second wave. It is nothing personal but it will be more comfortable when all those people leave with the end of summer. (just in the last month we had tourists that are in number equivalent to 60% of our population, while this number will probably get even bigger this month)

 

[Jaguar]

Israeli scientist invents one-minute coronavirus breath test - Science & Health - Haaretz.com

A fascinating read. Now, how do we get it to the USA when there's a crazy person in the WH who would do just about anything in his power not to reveal the actual case numbers to avoid "looking bad"?

Meanwhile, the news that infected people spread coronavirus when they speak, published in PNAS on Wednesday, is hardly shocking.

Speaking produces thousands of oral fluid droplets per second, report Philip Anfinrud, Adriaan Bax and colleagues, who used lasers to examine the small-sized droplets – which may linger in the air for up to eight minutes after you emit them.

If there’s good news, it’s that the droplets you spew while you speak slowly evaporate – really. But the bad news is that their calculations show that 1 minute of loud speaking could generate more than 1,000 virus-containing droplets that would remain airborne for 8 minutes or longer.

So, wear masks everywhere, including at the office and absolutely on public transportation, folks. Normal speaking confers a real risk and a lot of people are infected with the coronavirus and don’t even know it yet – but can be spreading it everywhere just by saying hello.

The next steps are to conclude the validation process then get Food and Drug Administration approval, for which there is a COVID-19 fast-tracking system in-place, meaning that the tests could be seen in public as soon as September.

Israel invents one-minute coronavirus breath test – The Australian Jewish News

 

[Virtual ghost]

I really don't get American politics sometimes, the eviction wave is on the door and they just can't make some kind of a deal that would prevent the mess. I mean if families in mass lose the place to live they basically lose the ability to do their job/school in almost all cases (this is basically game over scenario). Not to mention that they are becoming more vulnerable to the virus this way. It is so bad that in a way you don't have that many options on the table to debate this over and over again (if you actually focus on the real problem).

 

[Jaguar]

Top Federal Reserve official says US needs another lockdown to save economy | TheHill

Another? We never had one to begin with. There's no national leadership. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

 

[anticlimatic]

Have we figured out what we are doing with school yet? Just a few weeks away now..

 

[Maou]

I really don't get American politics sometimes, the eviction wave is on the door and they just can't make some kind of a deal that would prevent the mess. I mean if families in mass lose the place to live they basically lose the ability to do their job/school in almost all cases (this is basically game over scenario). Not to mention that they are becoming more vulnerable to the virus this way. It is so bad that in a way you don't have that many options on the table to debate this over and over again (if you actually focus on the real problem).

Makes perfect sense when you realize the political parties involved care more about party power, than the health of Americans. We are heading towards a civil war in my opinion. Forget schools reopening, the very government is fracturing and not following the rule of law or proper procedures. All because of right vs left bullshit. People refuse to work with each other, or will only do so if they trade up in party power.

 

[Coriolis]

Makes perfect sense when you realize the political parties involved care more about party power, than the health of Americans. We are heading towards a civil war in my opinion. Forget schools reopening, the very government is fracturing and not following the rule of law or proper procedures. All because of right vs left bullshit. People refuse to work with each other, or will only do so if they trade up in party power.

Not at all. We have had right and left for decades. Honest political differences never stopped the likes of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill from working together for the good of the nation. Something else is going on now.