Coronavirus thread

[phlapjackage]

Yeah, this is a good point, I've been pooping at home alot more rather than at work. Also I've found I need alot more coffee at home, as I'm not able to drink the (free) coffee at work

[Maj]

I actually said as much on FB the other day. And I have an appointment with my therapist next Friday.

As for the media not covering Trump... Good. Nothing will piss him off more.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I think losing his Twitter account would piss him off more than anything that could happen to him in office. Including impeachment.

[erik]

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a job at Twitter that consisted of constantly monitoring the president's data to make sure that it didn't get hijacked for long. I cannot believe that someone other than Trump hasn't used it to manipulate markets or try to start a war yet. His has to be the most tempting target of all, and I doubt his password security is better than Kanye's.

[RobbyPants]

About 18 months ago my family moved to a First Nation common rural Ontario. We’re typically there about 10 months out of the year.

As of this afternoon, it’s official: the community is now on lockdown. You’re free to leave, but you can’t come back. Luckily, I think we can still get supplies flown in. I just got my groceries delivered today for about the next month (no TP, though).

[OgreBattle]

Juan Gimenez passed away fri, he did that rad Neuromancer art and Metabarons with Jodorowsky

[phlapjackage]

Florida successfully keeps unemployment numbers down, by....purposefully sabotaging the unemployment application process

[Hicks]

So, the governor of Arkansas can go straight to hell. This isn't wishing death on him or anything; I want the hell hounds to drag his screaming ass all the way to Satan's personal ironic comuppance dungeon, live.

https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/evicti ... id-19/amp/

[drdaiba]

A lot of the data seems inconsistent. Has anyone produced a solid analysis of mortality by age group?

[DSMatticus]

You know the joke - short answer, no, long answer, nope.

The problem right now is that the data we have is coming from different countries with different levels of testing and different levels of preparedness. And also that the level of testing and preparedness vary over time in the same country as they ramp up a response and as their hospitals are inevitably overwhelmed. And also all the countries have slightly different demographics. And also deaths lag infections by 2-3 weeks, meaning that any currently accurate tallies of the dead are accompanied by an army of zombies who are already dead but don't realize it yet and thusly cannot be tallied.

Germany, with its extensive testing, gave us all brief hope that the true CFR might actually be as low as .5% (after accounting for all the unseen infections alongside their known CFR of .8%). Then time happened and the army of zombies realized they were dead and now that hope has almost certainly been crushed.

So the data is inconsistent because the situations we're pulling the data from are inconsistent on a country-to-country and even day-to-day basis and it would be difficult to isolate enough comparable cases to do any real analysis on them. At least, for you or a journalist or a twitter epidemiologist. There are people definitely trying to do exactly this, but they're working for governments and have access to much more detailed and extensive data than anyone else does at this point. Not trying to imply a conspiracy of secrecy or anything (though that is almost certainly part of it in parts of the world), but if anyone out there has a giant file of Everything About Everyone Who Has Ever Died Anywhere From Coronavirus, it's a government team.

[Username17]

Everything that DSM says plus a very large number of the dead aren't being counted because no one bothered to test them before they died. Deaths from "Pneumonia" and "ARDS" are suspiciously high in untested people, and then you got people dying at home to be discovered later like a fucking horror movie.

Here in the UK, testing capacity hit 12 thousand per day this week. Now the country was only managing to fill two thirds of the lab capacity, but even if they managed to meet that bullshit hurdle, we're still talking fifteen years to test everyone in the country at 12 thousand tests a day.

In the UK right now people are dying in large but uncertain numbers without being counted in the COVID death numbers because testing levels are an actual joke. There is strong suspicion among the medical staff that somewhere between a quarter and 100% of us already have it and those of us still going to work are just the ones that haven't shown symptoms yet.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

For some reason, the number of deaths caused by pneumonia was 10x higher than the normal in several brazilian cities last month.

So yeah, covid-19 deaths here are being under-reported.

[Stahlseele]

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-52164358
what the fuck is wrong with people?

[Username17]

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-52164358
what the fuck is wrong with people?

So the conspiracy goes that the first major city that got a 5G rollout on its mobile network was Wuhan. I think that might even be true, especially if you narrowly enough define 'major' (Wuhan has ten million people in it and is the size of London or Chicago).

And... that's it. Just that correlation. The fact that COVID is spread by a virus and not a radiofrequency and there is no possible way for one to cause the other is beside the point.

But British people are scared and their government is telling them bullshit on a regular basis and the prime minister is in hospital after pointedly shaking hands with a bunch of assholes while grinning like an idiot. And that's just where we are. Obviously stupid conspiracy theories about a respiratory virus spreading via mobile networks are convincing people to burn down cell phone towers.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

And a train engineer derailed on purpose to try to crash into a hospital ship.

While the POTUS is recommending the use of drugs he can profit off of over ventilators.

[Thaluikhain]

The train also derailed 250m short of the target, so he's an incompetent terrorist as well as everything else.

In other news, don't drink methanol, ethanol or bleach to cure Covid. That is a thing people are trying, but often only once.

[RadiantPhoenix]

In other news, don't drink methanol, ethanol or bleach to cure Covid. That is a thing people are trying, but often only once.

Ethanol is drinking alcohol.

Small amounts (concentration appears to be irrelevant [1]) of ethanol are nonlethal, just don't expect it to cure COVID-19, and don't drive after drinking it even if you're not practicing social distancing.

[Thaluikhain]

True, I should have worded that better.

[Whatever]

So the conspiracy goes that the first major city that got a 5G rollout on its mobile network was Wuhan. I think that might even be true, especially if you narrowly enough define 'major' (Wuhan has ten million people in it and is the size of London or Chicago).

And... that's it. Just that correlation.

There was also some concern about Huawei and 5G before this. https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/why ... 53wf0.html has a pretty reasonable overview of the whole thing. For people to conflate the threats of a "chinese virus" and a "chinese technology" is not reasonable, but it's also not especially surprising.

[sandmann]

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52192604

So ... how high is the chance of Boris Johnson dying? And if he does, and that is arguably the more important question, what happens then? Both from the legal "who is going to be PM in 6 month"-point and the "how is Trump going to react to his most trusted international friend dying of covid"-point.

[deaddmwalking]

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52192604

So ... how high is the chance of Boris Johnson dying?

In the next fifty years? Almost certainly guaranteed. In the next 3-6 weeks? Probably around 2%, which is significantly higher than normal, but still pretty good odds. I'd be surprised if he didn't get better than standard care...

Edit - He has been moved to intensive care. That does correspond with a significant increase in mortality; 5% seems fair (double my prior estimate).

And if he does, and that is arguably the more important question, what happens then? Both from the legal "who is going to be PM in 6 month"-point

They don't have to have new elections. Someone else within his party would become the PM.

and the "how is Trump going to react to his most trusted international friend dying of covid"-point.

Putin is sick too?

[Nath]

So the conspiracy goes that the first major city that got a 5G rollout on its mobile network was Wuhan. I think that might even be true, especially if you narrowly enough define 'major' (Wuhan has ten million people in it and is the size of London or Chicago).

And... that's it. Just that correlation. The fact that COVID is spread by a virus and not a radiofrequency and there is no possible way for one to cause the other is beside the point.

I guess the good news are that people don't blame muslims for it (... yet?)

It more and more looks like this pandemic will be an event of historical proportions and significance on-par with the world wars or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Should China clearly took over the US as the diplomatic and economic superpower in the next few years, the pandemic will certainly be looked at as the turning point. So I'd expect conspiracy theories about China purposedly lying about the virus/hiding key data/having undermined medical supply lines for years/spreading the disease/... to become standard talking points of US nationalists.

[deaddmwalking]

I guess the good news are that people don't blame muslims for it (... yet?)

It more and more looks like this pandemic will be an event of historical proportions and significance on-par with the world wars or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Should China clearly took over the US as the diplomatic and economic superpower in the next few years, the pandemic will certainly be looked at as the turning point. So I'd expect conspiracy theories about China purposedly lying about the virus/hiding key data/having undermined medical supply lines for years/spreading the disease/... to become standard talking points of US nationalists.

Discussions of how China is going to eclipse every other civilizations (Yellow Peril) has been a consistent theme for at least two hundred years. With a population 3x greater than the United States, a geographic area equal to the US and similar resources, you'd expect them to be able to achieve success on par with the US. That said, there are some real weaknesses in China - economically, politically, and socially.

In the next 30 years, the United States is going to add 40 million people to our population. In that same time, China is going to lose 40 million people. They're not alone in seeing a net loss in population, but it's hard to know what that looks like.

A lot of what the Chinese leadership has accomplished has been with an implicit bargain that Chinese citizens put up with a lot of restrictions on personal liberty for the sake of economic growth. Human psychology isn't based on absolute standards of wealth but a sense of the direction. If there are economic shocks we don't know what that looks like.

When people talk about Chinese dominance, if it is in the US model (typically termed Liberalism), then it's not really a change. If it's anything else, it's likely to develop a significant amount of push-back (like Soviet expansion did).

Focusing on 'who's on top' is ultimately counter-productive. People in the UK now are generally better off than they were in 1913, even though Britain had 25% of the world's population and ~25% of the world's land area at the end of WWI. Denmark hasn't dominated world politics EVER and hasn't dominated European politics since at least the 11th century, but they're doing fine.

The United States can still 'dominate' in a collective framework with European/Oceanic/Canadian allies and ultimately the world is probably better off if we have a commitment in that direction rather than wanting to be able to beat EVERYONE in a fight. Fighting a two-front war is something the US is committed to, but World War II wasn't against the two largest economies/populations at the time.

[Whatever]

We have to be prepared for a two front war so that we can invade Canada and Mexico at the same time.

[DSMatticus]

Mechanical ventilation, which Boris Johnson is overwhelmingly likely to be on sometime in the next 24 hours if he isn't already, has a staggeringly high mortality rate - and I don't mean that in the context of COVID-19, I mean that generally. It is a last ditch effort to save a patient's life that falls short as often as a quarter of the time, and is often debilitating for those that survive. Studies attempting to find the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients requiring ventilation have seen results as low as 33% and as high as 75%. It's probably a statistic that is very sensitive to the age and comorbidities of the underlying demography. It's also a statistic that can only be underestimated - people who require ventilation but don't get it die, period. No one recovers on their own from a case like that. When Italy opens back up, they're not going to find a bunch of people who were drowning in their own inflammatory fluids but then magically got better. They're going to find a bunch of people that died at home and hadn't been counted yet. So while the overall case fatality rate is skewed towards overestimating in much of the world, the overall case fatality rate for the severely ill might be slightly underestimated depending on where - and when - the data you're looking at comes from.

5% mortality is an absurdly low guess. The mortality rate for severely ill patients of Boris's age with Boris's comorbidities is probably closer to ten times that, but no way we have enough data to put together a real number at this stage.