Coronavirus

Gregarius wrote: It was... the Salmon Mousse!

No, it really WAS the Peach Melba. It was Mary's specialty, and it wasn't cooked. So double helpings closed the deal on even her heartiest customers.

Matt Thrower wrote:

Joebot wrote:

jeb wrote: It's time this whole anti-science thing goes away. Fight it.

Is this virulent strain of anti-science running through American culture a uniquely American phenomenon? Are other cultures around the world seeing this too? Just curious.

No, it's present in Britain too, bound up with a long-standing resentment and suspicion of knowledge that leads many people to indulge in a perverse celebration of ignorance.

We have it too in Australia, highlighted dramatically by our summer from hell with the fires and the response to those from some quarters.

We have protesters too. Fortunately
- they are not (as) armed
- our situation - partly through mostly good management, testing etc - and partly through our environmental factors - isolation and space, I'd say, have to be a part of it - is starting to head back towards normality (at least for now).

But there is definitely an increasingly strong strain of anti-science here. My partners uncle was staying with us over summer and his take on the fires was that it was a deliberate push by liberals towards a one-world-government.

I sincerely apologise for the gift of Murdoch to the world. We have access to Fox and also we have Sky down here as well. Again, I don't think it is so prevalent - access to it, I mean - so there's a bit less crazy. But the man and his organisation still has a significant influence down here. Maybe not like for you guys, which, again, I can only apologise.

I also apologise for the Peach Melba.

ubarose wrote: Damn you.

Now I want Peach Melba AND Salmon Mousse!

AND Typhoid Fever!

The one thing that is likely unique to the United States during this pandemic is the near absence of any federal policies regarding the crisis. I assume that all the other countries have national policies about this pandemic. I was proud to see almost 100% of the folks at the grocery store wearing masks today, and more than half were wearing gloves. But I live just 30 minutes from the Wisconsin border, where their state supreme court overruled the governor and forced the dropping of all restrictions. One Wisconsin business owner even declared that masks are now prohibited in her place of business. But since we all live in the same stupid country, those reckless Wisconsinites are free to cross our border any time.

I am not sure I’ve ever seen a federal response to a national emergency amount to “you’re on your own.”

n815e wrote: I am not sure I’ve ever seen a federal response to a national emergency amount to “you’re on your own.”

In some respects, it's even worse than that. The Trump Administration has been delivering conflicting information about the virus and the response, to the point where taxpayers are less likely to take any direction the next time we have a pandemic. And then there has been the sorry spectacle of the federal government hording ventilators and masks and forcing the individual states to compete with each other for those life-saving supplies.

For years, I have been hearing conservatives talk about how business does things so much more efficiently than the government, and that has always sounded plausible. But the reason why a businessman is not necessarily the right person to run the federal government is because a businessman will instinctively seek profits on behalf of shareholders, while a president is supposed to represent all citizens. Before Trump, the only previous American president who came from a corporate background was Herbert Hoover, the man who presided over the worst years of the Great Depression.

I guess everyone where I live has decided just fuck it for real, in the face of our states largest single day new case numbers. Presumably the message "you are required to go face a deadly disease at work with inadequate testing and no safety net because fuck you, but also you are not allowed to see anyone else or do anything else" isn't going down very well with a lot of people. I wonder how well the general nihilistic stance will hold up once the theoretical disease happening to other people becomes much more personal in the very near future.

Just about every politician that is advocating others need to go out and die for the economy are taking strong measures to protect their own lives.
Including El Presidente.

We now have evidence that you can get infected by COVID-19 again, even after surviving it once. This means no herd immunity, and no immunity at all. Hope we can get a vaccine ASAP:

www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-up...e-for-covid-19-again

"13 USS Roosevelt Sailors Test Positive For COVID-19, Again"

^there's still a good amount of dispute over the above finding in terms of what it means, but it's definitely not a good thing.

Shellhead wrote: We now have evidence that you can get infected by COVID-19 again, even after surviving it once. This means no herd immunity, and no immunity at all. Hope we can get a vaccine ASAP:

www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-up...e-for-covid-19-again

"13 USS Roosevelt Sailors Test Positive For COVID-19, Again"

Can someone who knows more than me answer a question about this article. Even if the sailors don't get sick and show symptoms the second time, do they still act as a carrier? Does this behavior by COVID-19 effectively create unlimited typhoid Marys?

Someone please tell me what my gut is telling me is wrong.

I received a Jury Summons over the weekend. It's at The Old Bailey which will mean little to most of you but what it means for me is a couple of hours a day on four crowded trains for at least two weeks and probably longer (only serious cases get tried there and generally run for six weeks or more), and spending each day in an old-fashioned building uniquely unsuited to social distancing. They might as well just come round and spray the virus directly into the faces of me and my family.

The current vague re-opening plan from Transport For London is to queue outside stations and to skip stops all the way to terminus if the train is too full (good luck if you wanted to get off along the way), with no clear idea of how to manage platform transfers (what happens when the internal queue backs up onto other platforms? Do you have to leave the station completely and queue to get back in again for the other line?)

Driving is not an option as the cheapest solution to cover congestion charge and parking would be at least £34 per day before even thinking about fuel. I'm not even sure what time I'd need to leave in the morning to make it there on time or whether I'll get home while anyone is still awake. It's about a four-hour walk which might end up being as good an option as queuing for hours for an erratic and uncomfortable train journey. I could try cycling but I'm not experienced on roads and going all the way through London twice a day on a bike quite frankly terrifies me.

The kicker is that my work is in walking distance so I never normally go into the heart of the city even under normal circumstances, but here I am court-ordered to do so against all common sense. I feel like the only thing missing in the envelope was a fold-out poster of our incompetent populist government all giving me the finger. I'd be tempted to ignore the summons except I'd only end up back in the very place I'd be trying to avoid.

mezike wrote: The current vague re-opening plan from Transport For London is to queue outside stations and to skip stops all the way to terminus if the train is too full (good luck if you wanted to get off along the way), with no clear idea of how to manage platform transfers (what happens when the internal queue backs up onto other platforms? Do you have to leave the station completely and queue to get back in again for the other line?)

Is there anyone in charge who knows anything about traffic management? Although I am in general IT, I have seen what happens when you have too many conflicts. While in Guangzhou every time the situation in HK flared up the Chinese would fuck with our network traffic going to the US.

We had a 70MB pipe but 30-40MB of traffic at any time. At 10% packet failure rate we would still work just fine, but max out the pipe. 30% failure rate is unbearable and people will complain non-stop as the retry rate for dropped packets crowds out new traffic. Above 30% and you are dead, doesn't matter what size pipe you have. The retries outnumber the legitimate traffic.

What the Washington DC metro has done to cope is to close specific stations especially if they are in walking distance to another station, and close entrances for those stations that have multiple entrances. Every train is an eight car train (before quite a few are six car, and even a few four car). Seems to work wellish here. It is mainly to deal with the additional cleaning requirements and reduced staff. I went full telework since the last time I went in on the metro a homeless person verbally assaulted me while riding in the car.

mtagge wrote:

Shellhead wrote: We now have evidence that you can get infected by COVID-19 again, even after surviving it once. This means no herd immunity, and no immunity at all. Hope we can get a vaccine ASAP:

www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-up...e-for-covid-19-again

"13 USS Roosevelt Sailors Test Positive For COVID-19, Again"

Can someone who knows more than me answer a question about this article. Even if the sailors don't get sick and show symptoms the second time, do they still act as a carrier? Does this behavior by COVID-19 effectively create unlimited typhoid Marys?

Someone please tell me what my gut is telling me is wrong.

I don’t think anyone knows the answers yet.
The tests still seem unreliable. The sailors may have recovered but still been positive and tests showed negative. I know of someone who continuously tested positive for a month after he recovered from the virus’ symptoms and he didn’t know if that meant he could still get sick or spread it.

We’re in “exciting” new ground here.
I wish we could all go back to “boring” lives but - too bad for us - we cannot and people need to learn to accept this instead of trying to force reality to conform to their wishes. It’s not going to work like that.