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Formerly DT: COVID-19 - Featuring Lots of Politics, now CR because political talk not going away


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13 minutes ago, Junior Miller said:

Just spoked to a friend who's a doc in an Arlington hospital and they confirmed 3 cases this morning. All 3 Asians. 

this is breaking news, seriously, because AFAIK there are zero confirmed hospital cases in Arlington TX 

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11 minutes ago, VABuckeye said:

Or their healthcare and sanitary standards are so low that they're skewing the numbers. 

We're going to find out that all of the confirmed cases are just in their government.  The typical Iranians, particularly those outside of major cities where hospitals can be easily overwhelmed, are screwed.  It's going to be a bunch of kids that survive, Logan's Rune for 2020.  

And I doubt Iran has the capacity to start throwing up hospitals like China does.

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30 minutes ago, Parliament said:

This test they can do for the virus. Is it expensive? Time-consuming? Why not test every patient who comes in with symptoms?

Quote

On Feb 12, the CDC announced that several test kits sent to public health labs had an issue with a test reagent, which caused the negative control to generate a test response where there should have been none.

When pressed on when specifically the kits will be made available, Messonnier did not provide a date.

Currently, only 12 labs outside of the CDC—located in California, Illinois, Nebraska, Nevada, and Tennessee—have the capability to test for the virus. Peter Kyriacopoulos, the chief policy officer for APHL, told CIDRAP News the testing process could be dramatically shortened and expanded if 100 Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL)-member labs receive authorization to do their own tests.

He said yesterday that the APHL addressed a letter to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking for permission for member laboratories to use lab-developed tests between now and when the improved CDC kit is re-sent. Permission has to be granted because the FDA already issued Emergency Use Authorization for the CDC's test.

"We know because of the prevalence of this issue in the media, many of our labs may be called to do testing, and they will want to be responsive," said Kyriacopoulos. He explained that the labs could do manual extraction of the virus RNA, but testing would be more streamlined if they were allowed to use automated RNA extraction platforms. He said the automatic extraction devices would cost each lab about $200,000.

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/02/cdc-warns-us-covid-19-spread-labs-frustrated-over-lack-tests

 

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2 minutes ago, NoName said:

this is breaking news, seriously, because AFAIK there are zero confirmed hospital cases in Arlington TX 

It hasn't been made public. Probably won't for a while as they try to assess the damage. only reason I know is because he's my buddy and called me to say get a N95 rated respirator ASAP

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14 minutes ago, CleverNickname said:

Google tells me that US averages 20 full mechanical ventilators per 100k of people. So Austin MSA of 1M better not have more than 200-300 severe cases requiring ventilators at any one time. Checking some stats; about 7% of beds can do full ventilation (62,188 ventilators and 924,107 staffed beds in entire US).

Have we looked at Big Ventilation as the source for this virus?

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Even if they do, a bed and antibiotics don't treat viral pneumonia.

Once the, as we've realized, very limited number of ventilators are taken, anyone with severe form of this is in serious shit. Several high profile 30-something doctors in China have died. Maybe they were exposed to high concentrations of the virus treating the sick, but seriously fuck the selfish people that want to downplay this. 

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24 minutes ago, HiggyBaby said:

Thought this was an interesting read. Falls in line with what my sister in law, an internist, has been telling us. Much ado about nothing, other than it spreads easily.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/world/asia/coronavirus-treament-recovery.html

I agree.  It is very reassuring to know that only 1 in 5 people who get this easily-transmissible disease will die without intensive care.  

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3 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I thought they went through some cuts 4-5 years ago after the ebola hysteria started dying down a bit.

Still, if they can state publicly that there's no backlog and they had no problem testing 400 samples overnight, they should have already ramped up testing big-time, and they should be releasing the numbers.

This was a problem with China - nobody knew how many they were testing at any one time, so it was hard to get a feel if there were bottlenecks.

With that said, I think we are about to find a whole lot of new cases here in the US in the next 2-3 days.  No way the guy in Cali didn't infect at lease some of the people taking care of him.

I would guess that there are no commercially available tests. They probably are doing rt-PCR tests using specific primers provided by the CDC as well as a protocol developed by the CDC. The primer sequences can be made by any sequencing lab and the protocol is readily available so as long as labs have the equipment testing should be straightforward. However, the materials wouldn't be in the standard premade kits that most labs use. Keep in mind that I'm more familiar with products used for research purposes than those used by clinical labs.

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47 minutes ago, Skipper said:

I read that at this point the US doesn't have the capacity/ability to test at any scale.  Which, if true, is pathetic and doesn't give me a lot of faith in the Govt (not that I had much already, but I would think we could be as prepared as f'n Italy).  I'm also not convinced it isn't just a strategy to limit the panic.  You can't confirm cases if you don't test!

I will post select contents of this recent article from Fortune without comment to avoid being political.  You can choose to read the full article or not depending on your tolerance for potentially politically offensive material.

The cuts started in 2018, as the White House focused on eliminating funding to disease security programs. In March of that year, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, whose job it was to lead the U.S. response in the event of a pandemic, abruptly left the administration and his global health security team was disbanded.

That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was forced to slash its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak by 80% as its funding for the program began to run out. The agency, at the time, opted to focus on 10 priority countries and scale back in others, including China.

Edited by Goredho
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4 hours ago, Thetexashammer said:

What would you have had them do differently?

Since you asked.

  1. Stop having politicians going out and acting like everything is under control, while at the same time the CDC is telling us to prepare, and more importantly, we are finding out things are far from being under control(thanks to the massive cluster-fuck in California that could impact multiple hospitals). 
  2. Don't put a politician in charge of a task force - we have more than enough highly-experienced doctors who are used to navigating politics, who can deal with this, including plenty who worked with ebola, etc.  People need to have somebody that they can look at their background and say "yeah, he/she knows what they are talking about, I should listen to them."  We don't need a situation where it feels like the doctors/scientists are having to run their comments/instructions through politicians.  Not CRing, it's just more about leaving this to the experts who can actually explain it.
  3. More travel bans.  I think South Korea and Italy should have already been added earlier this week, and now our military is banning military travel to/from SK, so if the military is doing it, we should be for civilian travel as well.
  4. Tying into #3, temperature check on everybody coming in from overseas.  Other countries are doing it, we should be as well.  I still know people who are coming in from outside of the US, and they were surprised that they weren't checked.  It's not going to catch everybody, but it's quick and our healthcare system could use every break it can get, and even catching a small percentage of the people coming in would be huge.
  5. A helluva lot more testing in general.  If the UK is starting to do large-scale testing of the population, we should be testing those coming in from overseas, as well as those around them.  We should have already been doing this.
  6. Government should be ramping up a lot more in the areas of purchasing PPE for civilian healthcare and hospitals.  They are starting to prep more military bases, from what I've heard, but even those only have so many beds/barracks they can isolate and help folks.

Going back to the travel bans, TH, you've traveled a lot I believe.  Don't you find it odd that a country like Italy, with 500-600 known cases out of 60 million people, somehow has random tourists from other countries coming into contact with those 500-600 people (out of 60 million) who are officially carrying the virus, and then carrying it back?

This same scenario happened with Wuhan earlier on - people that were traveling through Wuhan, a city of 9 million, and who were basically not there very long, were still somehow being exposed and carrying it elsewhere.  It's got to be so much more prevalent, probably far more than even those of us adding 0s to the end of the official counts could guess.

If countries/businesses get their feels hurt over travel bans, they can go fuck themselves.   We need to give our healthcare system a fighting chance, because it sure as hell can't handle a surge.

Edited by atomheartbevo
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There are some parallels between this and wildfires.  For a long time we fought them aggressively and tried to stop them before they got started.  And then our forestry scientists came to learn there have always been wildfires, and that they are actually a part of the forest ecosystem and regenerative process.  The old, dead forest needs to be burned down regularly so new, healthy forest can grow.  And that by stamping them out all the time, we were disrupting the natural order.  In effect "creating" vast forests of old, dead wood that could not be protected from wildfires no matter what our efforts.  And then, we had the Yellowstone wildfires in 1988 where 792,880 acres burned.  It couldn't really be controlled.  It had to burn until moisture and snow put an end to it.  And in the wake, it looked like hell on earth.

Go there now, and you see young, healthy trees where there was blackened tree stubs and scorched earth in 1988.  A rebirth is in progress.  The forestry scientists were proven right.

Transfer that to our current predicament.  As we keep invading the habit of more and more animal species, the probability of a zoonosis goes up.  Our population keeps increasing and being pulled into cities, which means more dense populations and greater transmissibility.  Eventually, there is a viral jump between an animal species and a human in a densely populated area.  The virus has a high transmissibility of its own and given that its unleashed within a population center, we can't contain it.  The conflagration will rage through until natural forces put an end to it, just like the wildfires in Yellowstone.

We don't know if Covid-2019 is going to be that,  but I don't think there is any doubt the world would be better off in the long run if 5, 10 or 20% of the population died off.  It would be awful for us as individuals and families in the moment, but from the perspective of a healthy world populated by humans that spans generations and centuries, it would be a correction towards planetary homeostasis.
So we've got that going for us, which is nice.


I’m down for the 20 million fewer people as long as I get to pick who they are.
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18 minutes ago, Junior Miller said:

It hasn't been made public. Probably won't for a while as they try to assess the damage. only reason I know is because he's my buddy and called me to say get a N95 rated respirator ASAP

Masks don't do shit if a coronavirus victim is close to you - they are only good for helping sick people to keep from spreading it (unless your buddy thinks you're going to get sick).  There's a reason why those medical workers are in full PPE and going through strict disinfectant and clothing removal protocols (and still fucking up enough that thousands get sick).  

You're better off avoiding people, washing your hands well, and keeping all surfaces, interfaces, etc. cleaned.

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15 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Which hospital?  Memorial?

rather not say since he's technically not supposed to be releasing that information. Just an FYI I just bought my respirators online from advance Auto parts since Amazon and Walmart and all those places are pretty much sold out. They have 3M p95 rated half masks which do everything the N95 do but are rated to last longer and also work against oils and chemicals. For the time being they also have a discount code so you can save some money on it but I'd go there ASAP

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4 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Masks don't do shit if a coronavirus victim is close to you - they are only good for helping sick people to keep from spreading it (unless your buddy thinks you're going to get sick).  There's a reason why those medical workers are in full PPE and going through strict disinfectant and clothing removal protocols (and still fucking up enough that thousands get sick).  

You're better off avoiding people, washing your hands well, and keeping all surfaces, interfaces, etc. cleaned.

Quoted for truth.  Unless you're wearing a full ppe suit, and know how to remove it properly just stay away from people.

Speaking of, I just filled the truck with gas.

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13 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Tying into #3, temperature check on everybody coming in from overseas.  Other countries are doing it, we should be as well.  I still know people who are coming in from outside of the US, and they were surprised that they weren't checked.  It's not going to catch everybody, but it's quick and our healthcare system could use every break it can get, and even catching a small percentage of the people coming in would be huge

We probably should have done this 2 weeks ago.  I think the cat is out of the bag by now.

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1 minute ago, Loco said:

Why? so you can out run them?  I won't need gas in the cars if I'm not leaving the house.

Because the hordes are soon going to be hitting the gas stations.  Because it wouldn't take many falling ill to disrupt supply chains.

This is not that much different than hurricane preparation - assume you won't have access to stores for X amount of time, etc.

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53 minutes ago, HiggyBaby said:

Thought this was an interesting read. Falls in line with what my sister in law, an internist, has been telling us. Much ado about nothing, other than it spreads easily.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/world/asia/coronavirus-treament-recovery.html

Surlistanis knew all of that weeks ago.

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26 minutes ago, B00M said:

Sold out on Amazon. Wow

Yea, thats been the case for a couple of weeks now.  Run through all your local hardware stores and paint places.  The smaller the better, big box stores are wiped out too.  I snagged two boxes of N95s at a Foxworth Galbraith.  

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1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

Because the hordes are soon going to be hitting the gas stations.  Because it wouldn't take many falling ill to disrupt supply chains.

This is not that much different than hurricane preparation - assume you won't have access to stores for X amount of time, etc.

Yeah except the power, water, and internet are up and the AC is working...  So I'm gonna hang at home 

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51 minutes ago, VABuckeye said:

I'm not going to get political here but don't believe everything you hear.  If you take a look at the AP report published today you'll find those budgets were not cut and have, in fact, increased.

Not going to link it here but it's easy enough to find.

Thank you for posting this.  CDC and NIH budgets have not been cut.

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So Facebook just canceled their developers conference, Workday canceled their big internal sales meeting/boondoogle. I would be getting out of any hotel, airline, cruise stocks if not already. Expedia laid off like 12% of their staff (3,000 jobs) yesterday. Shit's getting real. I am curious to see if a conference I am due to go to soon gets nixed or not.

Just nutso.

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  • hayden_horn changed the title to Formerly DT: COVID-19 - Featuring Lots of Politics, now CR because political talk not going away


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