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Love in the Time of Coronavirus (#3)


Mlle. Zabzie

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Your thread title was exactly how the pastor of my church phrased it on Sunday when he explained we were doing communion by having the servers wear gloves and hand the pieces of bread to those taking it, and that we would do "passing the peace" by just waving or elbow bumps instead of shaking hands.

Things seem like such a wild combination of caution and obliviousness today. We got an email at my university saying that as of this moment the "Faculty Development Day" scheduled for Friday March 20 would still be held, right after we got an email that was a link to "A list of resources compiled on the Faculty Resources Department website, in an effort to assist with transitions to online teaching during the current Coronavirus Disease 2019 outbreak." As usual the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing at my institution.

   

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As i posted elsewhere, Trump doesn't want to do anything until he hears back from Jared fucking Kushner. He also doesn't want to call a state of emergency nationally - which is crucial for states like Washington to deal with things - because it would hurt his narrative that it's as bad as the flu.

 

 

 

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Don’t say coronavirus doesn’t spread easily.

Massachusetts has 95 cases. 70 are linked to a ‘leadership’ meeting Biogen had in a Boston hotel on the last weekend in February. There were 125 attendees.

More and more officials I see on tv are saying the US is headed for what Italy is going through.

 

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And testing still isn’t being done.

At least not in northern Louisiana.

A friend went to see her doctor with a cough and fever and asked if she could be tested, just in case. She was told she doesn’t meet the criteria for testing. 

(Not that we think she actually has it, it’s probably just a cold. I hope so anyway, because whatever the hell  it is, I now got it)

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18 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Don’t say coronavirus doesn’t spread easily.

Massachusetts has 95 cases. 70 are linked to a ‘leadership’ meeting Biogen had in a Boston hotel on the last weekend in February. There were 125 attendees.

More and more officials I see on tv are saying the US is headed for what Italy is going through.

 

Seems fairly logical. They had 600 cases a week and a half ago and now they're at 9,000. We just eclipsed 1.000. The scary thought is they're being very proactive to stop the spread and have been for some time now, while we, as posted above, are relying on a family of idiot grifters to save us.

Seems safe. I hope one of his cabinet members starts violently coughing near him during one of his press availabilities, not to get him sick but to see if he reacts the same way he did to the mean, scary eagle.

 

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28 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Don’t say coronavirus doesn’t spread easily.

Massachusetts has 95 cases. 70 are linked to a ‘leadership’ meeting Biogen had in a Boston hotel on the last weekend in February. There were 125 attendees.

More and more officials I see on tv are saying the US is headed for what Italy is going through.

 

Michigan got its 2 cases today.

Some models put us 12-15 days behind Italy, and many European countries as well (different number of days, but lagging Italy)

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And here's a good thread to show HOW COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT Pence was about the number of test kits out there. Basically while there might be more test kits out there (and that's likely not that true) the capacity to process them is entirely not there, and so we get a whole lot of nothing.

 

 

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Of the 900,000 hospital beds in the US, only 45,000 are ICU beds.

I see hospitals want to set up test tents on their grounds where it’s possible, so people don’t have to enter a hospital itself.

But of course, they need test kits.

 

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London (where I live) has the highest number of cases of any UK region. Everyone is just toddling along as normal for the moment - the only noticeable difference is the length of time men spend washing their hands in the gents. We're trialling working from home at the office. A third of the workforce are supposed to wfh everyday. 

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1 hour ago, Ormond said:

 As usual the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing at my institution.

   

Same. There’s an all employee town hall tomorrow at 10 am. Let’s just get all.the.adults on campus in a little room to cough on each other. 

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

as bad as the flu.

But!!!!! it isn't a flu!  Thus we don't have antibodies. Or antibiotics or anything else to treat it effectively at the moment (though the people allowed to actually do actual honest work on the virus are doing an incredible job of deciphering it).

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2 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Continue with the low key and totally justified panic here, please

Oh, well-fucking-played. Bravo!

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When the first reports came out that the US federal government was blocking testing for coronavirus, I couldn't believe it and knew that Trump completely fucked up any chance of we had of containing the spread of the disease.  He and his administration has wasted 3 months of lead time, and even now, we don't have the capacity to test all the people that need to be tested.  The virus has been circulating in the US for months, so the +1000 confirmed cases in the US is just the tip of the iceberg. 

And Trump has admitted why this is occurring.  It's because he wants to artificially keep the numbers of confirmed cases low.  I think he's still clinging on to his hope that the virus will just magically disappear once summer comes in few months.  If he can prevent widespread testing for the next several months, and COVID-19 does die down through the actions of the state governments, local governments, companies, and communities to restrict social contacts, he is going to claim that many of these deaths are from the flu.  That it was not that bad and everyone overreacted. because of liberal media driven hysteria  This is the only reason that I can think of that explains why the federal government has been so slow to perform widespread testing for coronavirus.  

We had a poster alleging, without citing any credible evidence, that China was fabricating data.  Well, there is actual evidence that the U.S. government has been actively trying to cover up how its decision to prevent testing has allowed COVID-19 to explode in the US.  From the New York Times (great article on how the federal government has deliberately prevented coronavirus testing - limited clicks):

Quote

On a phone call the day after the C.D.C. and F.D.A. had told Dr. Chu to stop, officials relented, but only partially, the researchers recalled. They would allow the study’s laboratories to test cases and report the results only in future samples. They would need to use a new consent form that explicitly mentioned that results of the coronavirus tests might be shared with the local health department.

They were not to test the thousands of samples that had already been collected.

These samples were from a influenza study that collected samples from patients that presented symptoms that are common in influenza, which happens to overlap almost completely with COVID-19.  Why on earth would you prevent a lab from testing these samples on their own dime?  There is no legitimate justification.  The alleged patient privacy concerns are laughable in a situation like this.  We don't allow a person that tests positive for COVID-19 from preventing contact tracing because of privacy issues.  That the testing lab wasn't clinically certified also is a non-issue.  Any positive test results from the unaccredited lab can be confirmed by a clinically accredited lab.  The negative samples can be later tested again, if there is any indication that the tests run be the unaccredited lab were inaccurate. 

The real reason for preventing the testing of the old samples is that the federal government is aware that they have fucked up in a major way and are trying to make it more difficult for people to find out how badly they fucked things up.  The limited testing by the flu researches suggests that COVID-19 has been circulating in Washington state for at least 6 weeks.  Given the pressing need for testing of current samples, I hope this doesn't get swept under the rug.  Many people are going to die because of this.  I've already seen the federal government start to shift the narrative that they were confident that they could contain COVID-19 with their approach to that it was inevitable that it was going to spread throughout the US and that their procedures bought us months of lead time to prepare.  It's sickening.  I already thought Trump was a piece of shit, but I've lost a lot of respect for the leaders at the CDC and NIH (Redfield and Fauci), both of which had very good reputations but have allowed all this to happen.

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I assume people like Fauci have made the devil's bargain that they need to go along with Trump to a certain extent to be able to do any good at all. Unfortunately, they should've seen how this has worked out for everyone else who tried it. They should've gone public immediately if they knew of wrong-doing and incompetence. And I think it would've made a difference; unlike pretty much anything else, Congressional Republicans do seem inclined to address this issue; at least to some extent.

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Trump just announced a travel ban from Europe starting Friday at midnight for 30 days, with some exceptions.

A friend of my family had to go to Romania last week to take care of his sick grandmother. (not coronavirus related, I believe) He is a doctor, and the only infectious disease expert at my local hospital. So damn. 

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‘A foreign virus’.

Fuck you Trump.

Like I said, his administration has been saying Wuhan virus and China virus all along.

As if stopping air travel is going to stop the spread of the virus.

eta: and do you know what a disruption to the economy this is going to be?

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