COVID-19 Mega thread

[Crumpets]

Some of us have grandparents who survived both World Wars.

He we are complaining about surviving Swine Flu and Coronavirus. Perspective, please.

The mass hysteria is once again why the MSM can’t be trusted.

Is anyone comparing the current outbreak to WWII? As long as people are dying and we don't have a good way to control it, it's worthy of concern, even if other people have died worse deaths or on a larger scale before.

[Crumpets]

Just looking at the numbers on Wikipedia, it looks like the number of new reports in China have gone down pretty substantially today. So either the it's just noise, quarantine is working or China is fudging the numbers. Any seems reasonable.

EDIT: Okay, scratch that. I must have been looking at some kind of preliminary numbers because now the new reports statistics look pretty much in line with previous days.

[Crumpets]

It's refreshing to have an epidemic where the only two inhabited continents to not have any confirmed cases are Africa and South America.

[Crumpets]

Remember when Trump attacked Obama for not shutting down flights from West Africa over Ebola?
Where the **** is he now?

Also note the ebola epidemic was going down right before the 2014 midterms. All those fearmongering Republican candidates are now up for reelection and we can finally see how they actually respond to a global health crisis.

[Crumpets]

Okay, tin foil hat conspiracy time. A friend of mine who, while not necessarily a "China expert," probably knows more about China that 99% of non-Chinese people and has spent extensive time there, floated this possibility: The virus originated from the bioweapon lab in Wuhan BUT was not an agent intended to kill significant amounts of people. Rather, it was specifically designed to have a high transmission rate and low mortality rate in order to track and model its spread overtime, so that China can improve its development of the actually lethal stuff for later use.

As I said, conspiracy theory, but I'M JUST ASKING QUESTIONS.

[Crumpets]

Tbh my guess is that 800,000~ people will die. Bad, but not terrible.

Thank you, Comrade Dyatlov.

[Crumpets]

Man, can you imagine the consequences if the virus spreads to our gerontocratic government?

[Crumpets]

Trump says US is ‘very close’ to a coronavirus vaccine

Amid mounting fears that the coronavirus outbreak could turn into a pandemic, President Trump on Tuesday defended the repatriation of almost two dozen Americans suffering from the illness — adding that “we are very close to a vaccine.”

The article did not go on to explain the vaccine if be released very soon, right after his taxes.

He also lied about the number of cases in the United States,

"We're really down to probably about 10," Trump said, referring to the number of cases of the virus in the country.

(There are currently 53 confirmed cases in the United States, per Johns Hopkins.)

In Trump's defense on the second point, I think the number if you exclude people evacuated to the U.S. from the cruise ship is still only around 10 (12 I think?).

[Crumpets]

Oh good, they guy who banned safe injection sites as Governor because those lowlifes deserve what's coming to them is taking over from the barely-functioning wannabe strongman. Yay.

[Crumpets]

I'm still not terribly worried about this in the sense that it looks like the China outbreak is going to max out at a few thousand deaths, despite China being the most populous country in the world and having a so-so response to the initial outbreak. It's not impossible that we will see another outbreak of similar scale elsewhere, but just by sheer readiness and non-size-of-Chinaness, I have a hard time seeing any other country suffering more than a few hundred deaths as a result of this particular outbreak. I think as long as everyone stays alert and doesn't just blatantly go around coughing on people in Times Square, we shouldn't be expecting this to completely destroy the economy or kill tens of thousands of Americans in a matter of months.

[Crumpets]

That's what you want to see... :/

https://twitter.com/KIRO7Seattle/status/1233993919416811520

[Crumpets]

I just saw a headline that was "Trump vows traveler screens after first US death," but the headline was off to the side of the screen so all I saw was "Trump vows t... after first US..." So immediately my brain filled the gap to "Trump vows to avenge coronavirus victims after first US death." Sadly, that is not the president we have, but if anyone wants to make that into an action movie, please do.

[Crumpets]

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1234302421280542721

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1234287334209867776

[Crumpets]

Florida now.

https://twitter.com/TB_Times/status/1234313797566914560

[Crumpets]

Grim but true - everyone who thinks Florida is safe R is going to be proven wrong when it starts sweeping its way through those FL retirement homes.

Also apparently Indonesia has its "first" 2 cases now. I guess they are dropping the Don't Test Don't Tell policy, just like the USA is now starting to do.

IIRC, Indonesia has one of the worst ratings in terms of vulnerability to epidemics because of the high population density combined with poor access to quality healthcare.

[Crumpets]

I don't have the source on hand, but I saw there was the first case of unknown origin in New York (and possibly the East Coast?) in Westchester County.

Also, according to my parents in Seattle, the run on grocery stores and pharmacies is in full swing right now. I'm thinking of buying up a bunch of purell here in DC and selling it at a big markup next time I head back like Levis in the Soviet Union.

[Crumpets]

Will the emergency in WA state have any effect on Super Tuesday 2? Will people be afraid to go vote?

WA has vote by mail, but I expect that will increasingly be a problem for remaining primaries and potentially for the General Election, depending on how things go from here.

I doubt there will be any extra precautions, but I wonder if the virus can be transmitted to election workers by someone coughing on their ballot even if it's a mail-in ballot, or even just licking the envelope.

[Crumpets]

University of Washington is starting to ramp up testing and seems to be finding a fairly high % of tests positive, so expect the # of confirmed cases in the Seattle area to start rising more sharply soon.

https://twitter.com/UWVirology/status/1236017803162873856

Those numbers are honestly better than what I was expecting. I figured we would be getting in the order of over 100 new cases a day in greater Seattle as testing became more ubiquitous. Not saying the situation isn't still bad, but a couple dozen new cases a day is at least more on the scale of what hospitals can handle for now.

[Crumpets]

Muriel Bowser is set to give a press conference at 7:30 ET to announce the first presumed positive case in DC. Politico is reporting this is separate from the CPAC and AIPAC cases.

My boss has been freaking out in the last couple of days, not just because of the potential for people to get sick, but because our jobs don't really lend themselves well to at-home work. It'll be interesting to see how DC as a whole tries to plan around this and how much day-to-day government work might have to change.

[Crumpets]

CBS: Rector of prominent D.C. church tests positive for coronavirus

Washington — The first person to test positive for coronavirus in Washington, D.C., is the prominent leader of a historic Episcopal church in Georgetown, the church said Sunday.

The Reverend Timothy Cole, rector of Christ Church Georgetown, was diagnosed at the hospital Saturday night and is in stable condition, according to the Reverend Crystal Hardin, the assistant to the rector, who spoke at a press conference outside the church Sunday.

In an email to parishioners obtained by CBS News, Cole confirmed he has tested positive, and said services were suspended "out of an abundance of caution for the most vulnerable among us." All services were canceled Sunday, the first time the church has closed since a fire in the 1800s, Hardin said.

[Crumpets]

Tbh, I wouldn't be surprised if we soon read the headline "Trump infected". I'm not wishing for this by any means, but I wouldn't be shocked.

Probably more along the lines of "Trump heads to hospital for routine 14-day-long checkup," but yeah.

[Crumpets]

https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1237147543701803008

[Crumpets]

At what point does societal breakdown occur where people are mugging/murdering each other over toilet paper and such?

I'd say it's when hospitals have to start triaging patients wartime-style, so not far beyond where Italy is now. It's hard to overemphasize the potential threat of an overwhelmed medical system, far beyond just people dying from one specific disease.

[Crumpets]

Who could have guessed three years ago that the world would be this dystopian in 2020, but that Trump was only a mild exacerbating factor?

[Crumpets]

What happens when the lolz (or those who take it seriously) of the conspiracy bubble burst when faced with the reality of this epidemic?

Are people willing to die to own the libs?

"Me being incapacitated in the hospital with pneumonia for two weeks is no different than when I normally get a cold. So what if my wife died? I'm not some snowflake millennial who's going to whine about it."