For WHOm the Bell Tolls - Covid-19 #11

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

I think it depends on the cat. Cats that are kept as pets can vary a lot in how useful they are as hunters. If you're talking about rats as well they're towards the tougher end of what cats will prey upon so some cats won't bother with them. My cat has caught a couple of rats over the years but I wouldn't trust him to actually be determined enough to hunt down and exterminate any sort of infestation.

Apparently rats do tend to avoid places they think there are cats though. So basically having a cat isn't a bad way to avoid getting rats in the first place but if you want to actually deal with an existing rat problem there's a good chance getting a cat wouldn't be much use.

Those cats from the days of yore who were ratters, literally called ratters, that farmers welcomed into their barns, they and their litters, were nothing like the house pets of today. Nothing at all.  They were scrawny, perpetually hungry -- they stayed around coz the farmer would give them bowl of milk maybe once a day or so -- one cannot allow vermin hunters -- or even prized predator hunters like raptors -- to not be hungry.

Today's house pussies have had all that bred out of them, pretty much.

But a real hunting cat will perpetuate her genes as well as train her litters to do the same.

Ya, I grew up on a working farm with barns and all the rest and that's how cats were regarded on our farm and the farms all around. There were NO house cats / pet cats to be found in our world.  Maybe, once grandma and grandpa retired, left the farming to the oldest son and his family, moved to town, maybe, just maybe, grandma might get a cat, but it was extremely unlikely.  The prevailing attitude was "cats are dirty because they work for their living and I'm not having one in my house.  Dirty things, they shed too."

 

[The Anti-Targ]

20 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I suppose an accurate description would be that I use it to mow the field in which I grow my fucks.

 

He does need at least some hair on his head to balance out his Eugene Levy eyebrows. Really the main issue is I don't think a personal groomer is meant to clip hair as thick as scalp hair (we both have thick heads of hair) and it could get blunt or snag too much when the little guy is getting clipped.

Are you talking about your son, or something else?

[lessthanluke]

41 minutes ago, Tears of Lys said:

Well, some idiots have decided to picket and protest Michigan's Governor Whitmer's closing of non-essential businesses and invoking "shelter in place" and the rest.  They've also filed a federal lawsuit saying she's encroaching on their Constitutional rights.  I can only assume they're talking about the right to die, which I wasn't aware of.

She just gave a really great speech on why these steps are necessary.  I really like our governor, no matter what our "asshole-in-chief" says about her.  

 

ETA: Apparently, some of these yahoos blocked the entrance to a hospital.

I know a guy who was at the protests.

I understand why he's upset as hes probably gonna lose his whole business and be financially ruined but wrong way to go about it

[The Anti-Targ]

I certainly think govts should be making sure there are business support packages for SMEs so that they don't go bust on mass before restrictions are lifted. But States are limited in their funding, whereas the federal govt, as the currency issuer, has no limit on money supply except what it imposes on itself.

Protesting to demand that more businesses can be open and increase contagion risk while shit is still going sideways is stupid.

Govt guarantees on pre-pandemic loans, so that no one defaults and gets foreclosed on, and low or no interest govt guaranteed lines of credit to help cover ongoing costs including continuing to pay workers a subsistence wage would be what is useful now to keep people afloat while not increasing disease risk. Then when it's all over a whole lot of surprise debt forgiveness for debt incurred during lockdowns to give people a big feel good boost.

And a total tax holiday, since national govts don't need tax to be able to spend.

[DanteGabriel]

1 hour ago, Tears of Lys said:

Well, some idiots have decided to picket and protest Michigan's Governor Whitmer's closing of non-essential businesses and invoking "shelter in place" and the rest.  They've also filed a federal lawsuit saying she's encroaching on their Constitutional rights.  I can only assume they're talking about the right to die, which I wasn't aware of.

She just gave a really great speech on why these steps are necessary.  I really like our governor, no matter what our "asshole-in-chief" says about her.  

 

ETA: Apparently, some of these yahoos blocked the entrance to a hospital.

Run them over! You get what you deserve!

That was, after all, the MAGAT response to left wing protesters who tried to close off a prison parking lot in Rhode Island that was involved in ICE's detentions.

[Tears of Lys]

31 minutes ago, lessthanluke said:

I know a guy who was at the protests.

I understand why he's upset as hes probably gonna lose his whole business and be financially ruined but wrong way to go about it

There are plenty of people who are suffering, in various ways, due to this virus.  Many, many businesses won't survive this. I can relate. I was a sole proprietor of a retail establishment for almost 10 years.  You live and breathe your business.  

But as long as you have your health, you can rebuild.  While there's life, there's hope, as "they" say.  But dead lasts forever.

 

[maarsen]

5 hours ago, Fez said:

So here's another study (preprint, no peer review yet), that I definitely want to see a follow-up on. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20059618v1

It's another population study finding a large number of positive cases, but very high asymptomatic rates. Is it another example of it being too early to see symptoms or is something else going on? For instance, maybe homeless individuals are overexposed to Vitamin D and that plays a role in helping fight off the virus? I've no idea.

One of the reasons for this is that the virus is not really good at infecting people. It is good at spreading between people but since it has only recently acquired humans as a host it is still not really effective at using humans to replicate. Now that it is in our environment, I expect that it will adapt and become much more of an infective disease but a less lethal one also as diseases with high lethality tend to not last as long as those that just make you sick enough to infect lots of others.

[Ormond]

42 minutes ago, maarsen said:

One of the reasons for this is that the virus is not really good at infecting people. It is good at spreading between people but since it has only recently acquired humans as a host it is still not really effective at using humans to replicate. Now that it is in our environment, I expect that it will adapt and become much more of an infective disease but a less lethal one also as diseases with high lethality tend to not last as long as those that just make you sick enough to infect lots of others.

Covid-19 has way too high a lethality for most humans to accept -- but is its lethality really high enough that those natural selection factors will quickly make it less lethal than it is? I would have assumed that an infectious disease would have to kill way more than the less than 5% Covid-19 seems to kill for evolution to quickly make it less lethal. Or is that incorrect? 

[lessthanluke]

57 minutes ago, Tears of Lys said:

There are plenty of people who are suffering, in various ways, due to this virus.  Many, many businesses won't survive this. I can relate. I was a sole proprietor of a retail establishment for almost 10 years.  You live and breathe your business.  

But as long as you have your health, you can rebuild.  While there's life, there's hope, as "they" say.  But dead lasts forever.

 

Indeed. Unless losing your life's work causes you to kill yourself.

 

Like I said I understand why he's pissed off even if I don't agree with the protest 

[The Anti-Targ]

40 minutes ago, lessthanluke said:

Indeed. Unless losing your life's work causes you to kill yourself.

 

Like I said I understand why he's pissed off even if I don't agree with the protest 

I have no idea what your friend's work is, obviously, but whatever it is I imagine there will be demand for it again once this is all over. And in some cases increased demand for a time. I know I will be going a bit stupid on take out food as soon as those businesses can reopen. Partly because I want to indulge myself in comfort food, but also because I want to help businesses get back on their feet as quick as possible. Help to get through is important, and that should include mental health support to help people contextualise the situation and internalise that this is temporary even though disruptions might continue for some time yet.

But the whole thing has not been helped by certain leaders saying things like this will all be over by Easter, and the full on religious services would be able to happen at Easter. Easter came and went and it's still a shit show in most countries. So that is clearly going to upset a lot of people in a way that would not have happened if certain leaders hadn't been blatantly falsely optimistic about the course of the disease, and been more realistic about having to hunker down for a longer haul. And then you have idiot "experts" saying all transmission and deaths will be ended before the end of June, because reasons.

Leaders and experts have a responsibility to not cause panic and also to not create false hope and expectations.

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Tears of Lys said:

There are plenty of people who are suffering, in various ways, due to this virus.  Many, many businesses won't survive this. I can relate. I was a sole proprietor of a retail establishment for almost 10 years.  You live and breathe your business.  

But as long as you have your health, you can rebuild.  While there's life, there's hope, as "they" say.  But dead lasts forever.

 

My partner's business was already 1/2 shut down by chiefbloodonhishands stupid ploys back some months ago, but it was coming back, but now it's dead dead dead.  And it was TRAVEL business.  But we still both agree that mass tourism was shyte for the planet and for people and cities. 

It really sux, that the business is gone.  So much went into it, including from many many many other people in other countries which made this a prosperous very well working small business. It's especially bad for the employees in the other countries, who were able to support a whole buncha people with it.  And now they're probably going to starve. (Big difference right there between a TRAVEL organization that gives back as much as it gets, and mass tourism of idiots doing selfies for instagram.)  And it's all gone because the asshole is a cruel, ugly, mean, corrupt asshole and stupid about financials all together.

[The Anti-Targ]

And here we go again with CDC advising states to make plans for controlled reopening on 1 May, before daily case numbers have achieved a consistently decreasing trend. The US curve has not even begun to flatten, there shouldn't be significant talk of a reopening date until the daily increase drops substantially. If they want to aim for a 1 May reopening then it should be "reopening on 1 may is possible if X, Y and Z conditions can be met by or before then.". If the USA is still getting 20-25K cases per day with roughly the same amount of daily testing then there's not much rationale for loosening things up, even a little bit. If anything it's evidence that current measures are proving inadequate.

News today is that in my region of the country all 8 cases have now recovered, so we have zero active cases right now. If that lasts for another week our region would have a strong case for moving to basically no controls within the region and just strict limits on movements (ie essential movements only) into the region. There has been an excellent rate of compliance with staying at home and social distancing in my town. I would still be working at home, because my office is out of region where there are active cases and still a small daily increase (3 new cases today).

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

And here we go again with CDC advising states to make plans for controlled reopening on 1 May, before daily case numbers have achieved a consistently decreasing trend. The US curve has not even begun to flatten, there shouldn't be significant talk of a reopening date until the daily increase drops substantially. If they want to aim for a 1 May reopening then it should be "reopening on 1 may is possible if X, Y and Z conditions can be met by or before then.". If the USA is still getting 20-25K cases per day with roughly the same amount of daily testing then there's not much rationale for loosening things up, even a little bit. If anything it's evidence that current measures are proving inadequate.

News today is that in my region of the country all 8 cases have now recovered, so we have zero active cases right now. If that lasts for another week our region would have a strong case for moving to basically no controls within the region and just strict limits on movements (ie essential movements only) into the region. There has been an excellent rate of compliance with staying at home and social distancing in my town. I would still be working at home, because my office is out of region where there are active cases and still a small daily increase (3 new cases today).

 

[Tears of Lys]

5 hours ago, Zorral said:

Those cats from the days of yore who were ratters, literally called ratters, that farmers welcomed into their barns, they and their litters, were nothing like the house pets of today. Nothing at all.  They were scrawny, perpetually hungry -- they stayed around coz the farmer would give them bowl of milk maybe once a day or so -- one cannot allow vermin hunters -- or even prized predator hunters like raptors -- to not be hungry.

Today's house pussies have had all that bred out of them, pretty much.

But a real hunting cat will perpetuate her genes as well as train her litters to do the same.

Ya, I grew up on a working farm with barns and all the rest and that's how cats were regarded on our farm and the farms all around. There were NO house cats / pet cats to be found in our world.  Maybe, once grandma and grandpa retired, left the farming to the oldest son and his family, moved to town, maybe, just maybe, grandma might get a cat, but it was extremely unlikely.  The prevailing attitude was "cats are dirty because they work for their living and I'm not having one in my house.  Dirty things, they shed too."

 

Re the above bolded:  As a thread-drift, my late, great "Dozer" mongrel kitty was death on all lizards that strayed into our house in Southern California.  All we'd find as evidence of their presence was the occasional tail - lizard tail, that is.  

RIP, liz. 

[Wall Flower]

22 minutes ago, Tears of Lys said:

Re the above bolded:  As a thread-drift, my late, great "Dozer" mongrel kitty was death on all lizards that strayed into our house in Southern California.  All we'd find as evidence of their presence was the occasional tail - lizard tail, that is.  

RIP, liz. 

If it makes you feel better, lizards can escape predators by shedding their tail. So maybe they didn't all meet a grizzly fate.

[Fury Resurrected]

9 hours ago, Zorral said:

Those cats from the days of yore who were ratters, literally called ratters, that farmers welcomed into their barns, they and their litters, were nothing like the house pets of today. Nothing at all.  They were scrawny, perpetually hungry -- they stayed around coz the farmer would give them bowl of milk maybe once a day or so -- one cannot allow vermin hunters -- or even prized predator hunters like raptors -- to not be hungry.

Today's house pussies have had all that bred out of them, pretty much.

But a real hunting cat will perpetuate her genes as well as train her litters to do the same.

Ya, I grew up on a working farm with barns and all the rest and that's how cats were regarded on our farm and the farms all around. There were NO house cats / pet cats to be found in our world.  Maybe, once grandma and grandpa retired, left the farming to the oldest son and his family, moved to town, maybe, just maybe, grandma might get a cat, but it was extremely unlikely.  The prevailing attitude was "cats are dirty because they work for their living and I'm not having one in my house.  Dirty things, they shed too."

 

I have had many pampered and beloved house cats who were stone cold killers. My cat growing up loved to be 26 and used to drop full grown rabbits and squirrels on our feet. I had a very small former feral about 3lbs names Chupacabra who used to bring rabbits larger than herself to my 140lb dog. I had another cat who grabbed a flying bat out of the air in a single leap. Domestic cats also destroy songbird populations to this day. Make no mistake, these cute little babies are still top predators and they convince you otherwise because they are masters of manipulation.

[The Anti-Targ]

Some interesting machine learning work being done, by a brother of my sister's friend. The work has 3 parts to it but this one I thought was particularly interesting:

Quote

An additional project focuses on a convenient test for COVID-19. Researchers at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco are developing the test which involves using spectroscopy data to analyze samples of saliva. They hope for a test that can be processed locally - as opposed to being shipped to a lab - and completed in minutes.

Bertsimas and his group recently received data from about 100 samples from Morocco. Their group is using machine-learning to augment the test, coming up with results that are more precise than they would be otherwise. Currently, the model can accurately detect the virus in patients around 90% of the time, while false positives are low. In theory, a future version could be deployed in countries where resources are even scarcer than in the US.

https://www.jclinic.mit.edu/post/the-covid-19-pandemic-machine-learning-for-dilemmas-at-the-front-line

A "curb side test" with high specificity and 90% sensitivity is a pretty good quick test esp early in its development. The pharangeal swab that's currently used sound bloody traumatic, so if I can spit into a tube and have that run through a spectrograph with a 90% chance of not having to do a pharyngeal swab I'd be down for that. With a 10% false negative, any negatives would have to be directed to have a pharyngeal swab, but that would save a heck of a lot of time and unpleasantness.

[ljkeane]

On the rare positive news front here in the UK a 99 year old Second World War veteran decided to do sponsored laps of his garden last week to try and raise £1000 for NHS charities. So far he's raised over £12 million.

[Ran]

Epiforecasts.io is an epidemic forecasting site from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Seems quite interesting, because their forecasts seem to fit the information the Nordic countries have shared regarding their own understanding of where R is at in their respective nations.

[JoannaL]

14 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Anyway, before I got distracted by making a joke that would equally annoy cat owners and Asians, wanted to say, that Germany has prodcued a timetable for the stepwise lifting of the current restrictions. Starting monday small shops (size<800m²) and libraries open up again.

Starting May the 3rd schools do partially open up again. Little kids to stay at home, as in, they are too small to grasp the necessity to wear face masks and the social distancing. Oh, also barber shops open then up again. Presumably.

Mass gatherings to be banished till August.

I thought Merkels press conference very interesting not only for these baby steps openings but more for her declaration of strategy. Her goal is to get definitly back to "trace the trail", no more "flattening the curve". She wants permant R lower than 1 (at the moment it is almost 1) and absolut contact tracing. she said "in the moment we have about 3000 new infections per day, and it is absolutly possible to track these. She announced much more testing,  to hire much more personel for tracking and the devolpment of a tracking app.

I think "trace the trail" is a very amitious goal for a 80 million country with 8 neighbours, but if it works out it will save many lifes.