The Coronavirus Thread, brought to you by Randall Flagg

[michaelm]

Thought it might be helpful for us to have a dedicated thread to sharing news and information about what appears to be a nearly-inevitable pandemic.

I’ll start off with an excellent, in-depth story authored by an actual doctor:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi…ne/607000/

It’s long, but well worth your time. Obviously news and new information are going to be coming at us, but this is a solid summary and sort-of-debunking of a lot of what’s flying around right now.

[commodorejohn]

I’m sorry, but this thread desperately needs to be retitled The CHUD Coronavirus Command Center.

Anyway, I plan on just spending all my free time at home not interacting with anybody. Y’know, like usual.

[arjen_rudd]

No, this is already an excellent thread title.

[bradito]

I was calling it Captain Tripps just the other day!

[vtran]

The soundtrack for this thead…

[adam_72]

The mystery case in norcal where the person hasn’t travelled anywhere recently is seriously creeping me out.

---

I mean, Gods just fucking with us at this point right?

[history_buff]

I’m firmly convinced this started on a cruise ship somewhere in Asia. I’ve always believed those things were just giant incubators waiting for some kind of massive disease to manifest and then spread like wildfire.

I’m hoping that a lot of this is a little media over-exposing something that isn’t as giant a threat to the overwhelming % of the world. But if they can’t find a vaccine soon or a way to contain it, then I think we should start to get a little more worried.

[farsight]

The mortality rate is 2-3%, and younger, healthier people survive at nearly a 100% rate.

It’s almost impossible that a vaccine will be created for this outbreak. It’s also pretty much impossible to contain at this point, only delay.

People should be worried, but not panicked.

I’ll probably be eating out the rest of this week, in case I have to make my own food for a month. I already wash my hands the instant I get home, since the outside world is gross! If the virus gets any closer I’ll probably start wearing gloves any time I leave home.

Other than that… shrug… eat well, sleep well, stay healthy… and if anyone around you sneezes, RUN!

[bradito]

I came down with something a couple weeks ago and still can’t shake this damn cough. I haven’t dieded, tho.

[farsight]

@farsight

The mortality rate is 2-3%, and
younger, healthier people
survive at nearly a 100% rate.

@bradito

I came down with something a couple weeks ago and still can’t shake this damn cough. I haven’t dieded, tho.

I am so, so sorry.

[bradito]

Given how the past couple weeks have been, I’m sorry too.

[muzman]

I guess there’s probably PBS specials and so forth people can watch, but our antipodean effort is a pretty good primer too.

[michaelm]

Why we might not be very comforted by Mike Pence being put in charge of the national response to COVID-19:

The announcement has cast light on Pence’s record as a lawmaker and his handling of a major public health crisis during his time as governor of Indiana. The worst HIV outbreak in the state’s history happened on his watch in 2015, which critics blamed on Pence’s belated response and his opposition to authorizing a needle-exchange program.
In 2011, as a member of Congress, he voted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. Two years later, a Planned Parenthood clinic that had been the only HIV-testing center in Scott County, Ind., closed after public health spending cuts,
HuffPost reported
.
Two months passed from the start of the outbreak in 2015
before Pence declared a public state of emergency
.
The spread of the disease was attributed to people injecting Opana, an addictive painkiller, with shared needles. But Pence
didn’t agree with federal health experts that distributing clean needles was a good idea
.
“I don’t believe effective anti-drug policy involves handing out drug paraphernalia,”
he told the Indianapolis Star
at the time. Despite assurances from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it is an effective way to halt the spread of infections and diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B and C, Pence said that if state lawmakers tried to send him a bill for a needle-exchange program, he would veto it.
As cases spiked, Pence
reportedly turned to prayer
.
After 75 people were confirmed to be HIV-positive, Pence announced he would allow a 30-day needle exchange.
Public health officials weren’t the only ones to warn Pence about delaying action. State Rep. Ed Clere, a fellow Republican, also pushed Pence to approve a needle exchange.
“It was disappointing that it took so much effort to bring the governor on board,” Clere told
the New York Times
.
In 2018, researchers at Yale University found that the epidemic could have been prevented if Pence and state officials had acted faster. The study received financial support from the federal government.
“Our findings suggest that with earlier action the actual number of infections recorded in Scott County — 215 — might have been brought down to fewer than 56, if the state had acted in 2013, or to fewer than 10 infections, if they had responded to the [hepatitis C] outbreak in 2010-2011,” the paper’s senior author, Forrest W. Crawford, said in
a statement
at the time. Instead they cut funding for the last HIV testing provider in the county.”
One of the researchers on the study, Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, tweeted Wednesday that Pence’s assignment overseeing coronavirus efforts “speaks to a lack of seriousness by the White House.”
Pence also downplayed the risk of smoking as late as 2000,
Vox first reported;
he wrote in an
op-ed on his congressional website
: “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”

[sean_blackwell]

I can’t wait for the inevitable press conference a few months from now where Pence announces those who died from the virus simply didn’t believe in the healing power of prayer enough, and the world is a better place without those nonbelievers.

[fuzzy_dunlop]

@farsight

The mortality rate is 2-3%, and younger, healthier people survive at nearly a 100% rate.

I think the mortality rate almost has to tick down a bit as we learn more and the sample size gets larger, doesn’t it? I’m sure there are statistically significant amounts of people that have gotten sick with the virus and gutted it out without seeking a professional diagnosis.

Anyway, time to dust off the ol’ CONTAGION blu-ray.

[commodorejohn]

@fuzzy dunlop

I think the mortality rate almost has to tick down a bit as we learn more and the sample size gets larger, doesn’t it? I’m sure there are statistically significant amounts of people that have gotten sick with the virus and gutted it out without seeking a professional diagnosis.

If it spread as far and as fast as it sounds like it did before the Chinese government stopped pretending it wasn’t a problem, this seems likely to me - of course, with Xi and his buddies in charge of the PR mop-up, we’ll probably never actually know.

[michaelm]

The mortality/lethality rate can be a misleading stat. A virus with a high lethality rate is likely to be more easily detected, for one thing; COVID-19 appears to have a wildly varying incubation period, with symptoms that are generally hard to pin to a specific virus. Which means more people getting sick because it’s harder to detect or identify.

And if we’re going full worst case scenario, 2% of the U.S. population is 7 million people. That’s not a dismissable number. (That, of course, assumes a 100% infection rate, which seems, to put it mildly, very unlikely.)

[farsight]

@fuzzy dunlop

I think the mortality rate almost has to tick down a bit as we learn more and the sample size gets larger, doesn’t it? I’m sure there are statistically significant amounts of people that have gotten sick with the virus and gutted it out without seeking a professional diagnosis.

Yeah, it’s always a rough figure. Apparently, it’s common (10% or more) for people who contract this disease to never exhibit ANY symptoms, so those people are going to be hard to detect.

The mortality rate is also going to be much higher in regions of the world with poor health care.

Basically, the people acting like it’s an apocalyptic plague are overreacting, and the people acting like it’s nothing are underreacting.

Sadly, the US government is largely in one of those groups.

[fuzzy_dunlop]

Can’t wait to get my coronavirus updates from America’s most trusted news source:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/f…te-hegseth

[michaelm]

How can you post that image without providing a link to the actual story?!?