[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by h8kurdt

This shit is just gonna run on, and on, and on, isn't it.

Again from Zakaria's newsletter (July 1):

The Forever Pandemic

The pandemic may feel like it’s waning in some places, but numbers tell a different story, Adam Tooze writes for The Guardian, as the World Health Organization noted almost 190,000 new cases worldwide on Sunday. (Yesterday, that figure was just under 164,000; the US alone could see 100,000 new cases daily under current trends, top government epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested this week.)

Some of the rise can be attributed to more testing, Tooze writes, but “the crisis is not yet over. Far from it. Even as east Asia and Europe begin to experience recovery, the momentum of the disease at the global level is building. Nor is this the famous ‘second wave’. This is still the first wave spreading out across the world’s 7.8 billion inhabitants.”

Disturbingly, Tooze posits that Covid-19 could linger indefinitely: “[A]s the disease spreads to Latin America, Africa and south Asia, a grim new hierarchy threatens. The disease will divide those that are rich, and thus in a position to ‘cope’, from the rest. Covid-19 may become another of those ‘poor-country diseases’ that kills hundreds of thousands in a regular year. Think malaria or TB, but more infectious and thus requiring more rigorous social distancing.”

Given the globalized movement of people for work, Tooze sees this as a problem for everyone, not just the developing world.

Pandemics End When We Say They End

Won’t a vaccine put a definitive end to Covid-19, at some point? Maybe not, according to science historians Jeremy A. Greene of Johns Hopkins and Dora Vargha of the University of Exeter, who trace the “ends” of epidemics in a Boston Review essay, finding them ill defined.

Diseases rarely disappear completely, Greene and Vargha note: Smallpox is the only one to have been eradicated on purpose. Most, like HIV/AIDS, polio, and tuberculosis linger on. Even once there’s a vaccine, as is the case for polio and TB, distribution and uptake are uneven. “In Kano, Nigeria, for example,” they write, “a ban on polio vaccination between 2000 and 2004 resulted in a new national polio epidemic that soon spread to neighboring countries. As late as December 2019 polio outbreaks were still reported in fifteen African countries, including Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Epidemic “endings” are also social events, they write, apart from case rates and biological realities—meaning epidemics are over, as such, when we collectively decide they are. Sometimes, that means they drag on past their biological expiration dates, as fearful reactions lead people to keep experiencing a disease that’s gone: After the 1918 influenza pandemic, Greene and Vargha write, “[e]ven as late as 1922, a bad flu season in Washington State merited a response from public health officials to enforce absolute quarantine as they had during 1918–19. It is difficult, looking back, to say exactly when this prototypical pandemic of the twentieth century was really over.” In other cases, it means they just fade away. The AIDS epidemic never ended, but it did give way to lessened concern among those “no longer directly threatened” and came to be accepted by some as “a chronic disease endemic,” Greene and Vargha write. “More than 9,000 cases of tuberculosis were reported in the United States in 2018—overwhelmingly affecting racial and ethnic minority populations—but they rarely made the news.” For some, the social events of the HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics ended when those diseases stopped being newsworthy.

“At their worst, epidemic endings are a form of collective amnesia, transmuting the disease that remains into merely someone else’s problem,” Greene and Vargha conclude. “There will be no simple return to the way things were: whatever normal we build will be a new one—whether many of us realize it or not.”

[The Soup Nazi]

And now the fucking thing spreads faster. (And it ain't Chinese this time.)

https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqOQgKIjNDQklTSURvSmMzUnZjbmt0TXpZd1NoTUtFUWlPdF AtU2tJQU1FVVVPa0E4LUt2MGpLQUFQAQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

ETA: The new strain is European. OH LAWD, since it's already here, please let it be Slovenian or Norwegian...

[!@#$%!]

COVID FACE

 

[h8kurdt]

Ooh, can't wait to see if injecting bleach turns out to work! Proving those doubters one by one, isn't he #winning

[Bytor Peltor]

Dinesh D’Souza tweet

Finally even the media Left is catching on to the Coronavirus bogus counting on the part of the medical establishment


How Could The CDC Make That Mistake?

[!@#$%!]

don’t know if this belongs in the covid or the maga chud thread. same difference.

“A high-risk Florida teen who died from covid-19 attended a huge church party, then was given hydroxychloroquine by her parents, report says.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...s-coronavirus/

so many stable geniuses, so much winning

smh

[h8kurdt]

Yeah I saw that and did contemplate pointing out here. Quickly realised it's totally pointless. I'd get a more reasoned response from me mam and dad's dog and he's thick as hell.

[The Soup Nazi]

Paul Krugman's NYT newsletter, July 7:

The Kudlow-Moore effect and the coronavirus

Covid-19 cases are surging. Pandemic response is clearly a presidential responsibility — indeed, Donald Trump repeatedly bashed President Obama for what he claimed was a botched response to Ebola (although only four people in the U.S. got it.) So what is Trump’s plan?

According to The Washington Post, it is to change the subject, and hope that Americans become numb to the continuing toll. Both Trump and state TV, aka Fox News, are spending less and less time talking about Covid-19 and more and more time talking about Confederate statues.

But why did Trump abdicate responsibility for dealing with the coronavirus? Leaders who have actually taken action have been politically rewarded, while Trump’s failure to confront the problem has led to a striking decline in his political fortunes; the Economist model, which gave him roughly even odds of re-election in early March, now gives him only a 10 percent chance.

The answer, I’d suggest, is that Trump can’t deal with real problems, and knows he can’t. Nor is he willing to hire and defer to people who can.

How did I reach this conclusion? Largely by looking at who he has hired and tried to hire in an area I know something about, economics. Call it the Kudlow-Moore effect.

Larry Kudlow is, of course, the chairman of the National Economic Council, in effect Trump’s chief economist. He’s also famous among those who follow such things for his remarkable track record of being wrong about everything, from his dismissal of those warning about a housing bubble as “bubbleheads” to his declaration a few months ago that the coronavirus was completely contained and wouldn’t inflict any economic damage.

Now, all of us get things wrong sometimes. But Kudlow is in a class of his own; as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait memorably put it, he “has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a kind of performance art.” And he’s also notable because his solution to all problems is the same: cut taxes on rich people and corporations.

So who would want to listen to somebody with that record? Trump, obviously; but Kudlow didn’t come out of nowhere. He has long been the go-to economist for much of the Republican Party, along with Stephen Moore, who Trump tried to put on the Board of the Federal Reserve. Moore fell short, but not because of his inability to get facts right; he would probably be making monetary policy if he weren’t an alimony deadbeat.

So it’s not just a Trump thing. Republicans as a group seem to take their economic policy advice — and, as far as I can tell, policy advice in general — from people who have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no idea what they’re talking about. Why? I’ve speculated that it’s because their very hackishness makes them politically reliable. It’s obvious, by contrast, how much Republicans distrust someone like Anthony Fauci, who, precisely because he has an independent reputation, can’t be relied on to say what they want him to say.

But while you can trust incompetent hacks to toe the party line, one thing you can’t expect them to do is devise policy responses to a crisis they weren’t expecting.

Hence Trump’s policy paralysis. There’s nobody he trusts to be both competent and personally loyal, because those are, in a fundamental sense, incompatible traits. So he effectively decided early on not to even try to deal with Covid-19, and just brazen it through instead. Unfortunately, it’s not working, either for him or, more important, for the 130,000 and counting Americans who have already died.


Quick Hits

Hot spots are losing faith in Trump.

Many world leaders saw approval ratings rise in the pandemic, due to the rally round the flag effect. Trump, not so much.

Surprises happen, but Biden is in a much better position than Clinton was four years ago.

How did Texas get here?

[The Soup Nazi]

Two scientists are racing
For the cure of all mankind
Both of them side by side
So determined

Locked in heated battle
For the cure that is their prize
But it's so dangerous
But they're determined

Theirs is to win
If it kills them
They're just humans
With wives and children


From Zakaria's newsletter:

Is an International Race Bad for Vaccine Research?

The international race for a vaccine is on, and Elizabeth Ralph warns in Politico Magazine that it might not be a good thing.

“Friendly races can spur scientists to innovate better and faster, but experts in public health, biotech and national security see many ways today’s vaccine nationalism might backfire,” Ralph writes. “It can scramble priorities and lead to bad bets, as [Michael] Piontek [of the German firm ARTES Biotechnology] fears. It can goad countries to cheat and take shortcuts, ultimately rolling back progress. … ‘The danger in vaccine nationalism is that it’s not a race to the top, and of sharing, but it’s some sort of zero-sum game,’ warns Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at Oxford University.”

Among the risks, experts tell Ralph, are that countries will rush research into sloppiness; myopically pour investment into one firm instead of spreading it out; or hoard vaccine doses, as was the case during the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak.

A closed-off, competitive mentality has already emerged: “[b]oth the U.S. and Chinese governments have recently moved to chill international research collaboration,” Ralph writes. “The European Union, along with member states France, Germany, Italy and Spain, have all tightened restrictions on foreign investment since the start of the pandemic, along with Australia and Canada. Many countries are already inking deals to get their hands on whatever precious vaccine vials might emerge first, and dozens have restricted or cut off exports of protective equipment, medical devices or medicines.”

[Bytor Peltor]

University of Houston researchers create heated air filter that can kill coronavirus 'instantly'

[The Soup Nazi]

From Associated Press:

 

Beyond belief. OF FUCKING COURSE they should be mandatory, everywhere, we're way past the "debate" on it. As I've said before, here you can't do shit without a mask on and has been so for months; unfortunately, this measure has not been part of a comprehensive plan New Zealand-style, so when it comes to the pandemic we have some wretched statistics. In any case (and as much as Trump deserves to be shat on for letting his country fly blind): Britons returning to the pubs, the French back to their crowded cafés and sipping wine along the Seine, brutish Serbians violently protesting lockdowns... The human race is just too stupid to deal with this. An actual zombie apocalypse would be easier.

[h8kurdt]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

From Associated Press:

 

Beyond belief. OF FUCKING COURSE they should be mandatory, everywhere, we're way past the "debate" on it. As I've said before, here you can't do shit without a mask on and has been so for months; unfortunately, this measure has not been part of a comprehensive plan New Zealand-style, so when it comes to the pandemic we have some wretched statistics. In any case (and as much as Trump deserves to be shat on for letting his country fly blind): Britons returning to the pubs, the French back to their crowded cafés and sipping wine along the Seine, brutish Serbians violently protesting lockdowns... The human race is just too stupid to deal with this. An actual zombie apocalypse would be easier.

The government have been a total joke in handling this whole thing. God knows what the dithering about wearing masks is. I was walking through town yesterday and I could count on one hand how many people I saw wearing masks.

It's too easy to pass the blame onto the public and say "well they should know better" and that's exactly what the government wants people to do. Rather than hold the people put in charge to handle the whole mess.

[!@#$%!]

a bit of copypasta from new scientist:

Horror movie fans are better at coping with the coronavirus pandemic
Fans of horror films like Contagion seem to be coping better with the pandemic

Everyone is entitled to one good scare – and it may be good for us. People who watch a lot of horror films and those who are morbidly curious about unpleasant subjects seem to be more psychologically resilient to the covid-19 pandemic, a study reveals.

“Horror users tended to have less psychological distress,” says Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago.

The research was prompted by a question from New Scientist news editor Penny Sarchet. In a Twitter conversation with horror researcher Mathias Clasen at Aarhus University in Denmark, Sarchet asked “if people who like apocalyptic/horror movies (which I’ve always hated!) will be more resilient to the trauma of this pandemic”.

Scrivner, Clasen and their colleagues decided to find out. They asked 310 US volunteers which film genres they liked, including horror and other “prepper” genres such as post-apocalyptic and alien invasion. They also asked whether people had seen pandemic-themed films such as Contagion. The volunteers then took personality tests and a questionnaire designed to measure their morbid curiosity: their motivation to seek out information about dangerous situations or phenomena.

Coping with covid-19
Alongside this, the volunteers were asked how well they were coping with the covid-19 pandemic, both whether they were still having positive experiences despite the crisis, and whether they were experiencing unusually severe negative states like anxiety. Participants were also asked how well-prepared they had been – for instance, whether the pandemic’s consequences took them by surprise.

Fans of horror movies were less prone to negative mental states. “Which suggested to us, maybe with horror it’s about emotion regulation,” says Scrivner. Watching scary movies “allows me to give myself the experience of being afraid and then conquering that fear”. This may be one of the underlying reasons for people’s fascination with scary stories.

The prepper genres, which all feature society’s institutions collapsing, had an additional benefit. “We find that same decrease in psychological distress, but you also find an increase in preparedness,” says Scrivner. The team found a similar pattern for pandemic-themed movies. “People who’ve seen none at all were much less prepared than people who said they’d seen many.”

Finally, people with high levels of morbid curiosity showed a different profile. “It really predicted positive resilience, enjoying things despite the pandemic,” says Scrivner. “People who scored high in morbid curiosity were no different in the psychological distress, they weren’t more or less prepared, but they did exhibit more positive resilience.”


This may be because morbidly curious people are doing a lot of fact-finding. “Presumably a pandemic presents a really interesting opportunity to gather lots of really cool information,” says Scrivner.

Margee Kerr of the University of Pittsburgh would like to see the work peer reviewed to be sure the results are secure. Assuming they are, though, she says it’s not clear why horror fans should show this resilience. “Is it a matter of having learned better emotional regulation through viewing horror movies, or are they somehow better at emotional regulation to begin with?”

It isn’t clear how useful the findings will be in practice, says Scrivner. “Do I think you could watch a bunch of horror movies and then you’d be fine for wave two of coronavirus? No. There’s so many other factors.” For instance, it may be that only the real gorehounds show a meaningful increase in resilience. However, Scrivner adds that cognitive behavioural therapy also includes techniques for regulating emotions. “It could be trainable in some ways,” he says.

Reference: PsyArXiv, DOI: https://psyarxiv.com/4c7af/

Michael Marshall

[The Soup Nazi]

Paul Krugman's NYT newsletter, July 14. He absolutely nails it in the paragraph I put in bold:

A plague of petty grievances

The great re-closing has begun. California is entering a de facto second lockdown. Many southern states, which actually have worse outbreaks than California, should be doing the same, although it seems all too likely that Republican governors will, true to form, wait too long to take effective actions. Nonetheless, it’s now clear that the rush to resume normal life was an act of immense folly, for which we will pay a heavy price in both lives and money.

In today’s column, I emphasized, in particular, the folly of permitting large gatherings and opening bars. This was in part, I have to admit, because I liked the rhetorical device of suggesting that we compromised our children’s future so we could go out drinking. But it’s also true that drinking in groups, a situation in which people naturally become loud and boisterous, has to be among the activities most likely to fuel a pandemic spread by airborne droplets.

It occurs to me, however, that some readers might think that I have a problem with the idea of people having fun, or that I think we got into this mess because people wanted to have a good time. I plead not guilty on both counts.

There may be an element of censoriousness in some critiques of reopening; enough with the photos of crowded beaches! But Puritanism, which H.L. Mencken famously described as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” wasn’t a major factor in the alarm I and others felt as we barreled toward our current crisis.

And for what it’s worth, while bars aren’t my thing, indie music concerts — lots of people standing in a small space, beers in hand while the performers and sometimes the audience sing — are. Today’s music selection is a video I shot eight months, and an eternity, ago.

Nor do I believe that the natural human desire for a good time is what got us into our current crisis.

People are people, and can’t be expected to behave with inhuman self-restraint. Anyone who imagines that we can reopen colleges and expect undergraduates to practice social distancing has forgotten what it was like to be 19.

But fun-loving young people didn’t drive the disastrous March/April push to LIBERATE (as Donald Trump put it) states under lockdown. Much of that push, instead, came from the top down — from Trump and his allies who wanted to goose the stock market, from business interests who wanted to bring back lost profits.

And the psychology behind grass roots opposition to social distancing — behind all those people raging against being required to wear a face mask — doesn’t have much if anything to do with a desire to enjoy life.

What it reflects, instead — or at least that’s what I believe — is a pervasive resentment among some Americans at the idea that they might be asked to bear any burden, even a small inconvenience, for the sake of others. In fact, the small inconveniences seem to provoke the biggest displays of rage.

I first noticed this phenomenon decades ago, when I was living in Massachusetts and saw how a local talk radio host whipped up rage against the state’s mandatory seatbelt law. (The law was reinstated after a surge in deaths.) I’ve seen it on environmental issues, with right-wing pundits suggesting violent action against local officials over things like the ban on phosphates in detergents — hey, this was meant to prevent toxic algal blooms, but possibly means that your dishwasher doesn’t work quite as well.

In other words, the problem isn’t people who want to enjoy themselves, it’s people who act out their petty grievances — encouraged and empowered by the pettiest, most grievance-filled man ever to occupy the White House. And in the face of a pandemic, pettiness can be lethal.


Quick Hits

How New York and its governor, after a bad start, rose to the occasion.

Arizona’s governor didn’t, and the public has noticed.

The president doesn’t need experts, he can listen to game show hosts.

Of course Stephen Moore is leading the smear campaign against Anthony Fauci.


Facing the Music

I shot this on my phone at Rockwood Music Hall last November — without magnification. (I got a friend to hold my beer.) How long it will be before we can have experiences like this again?

[Bytor Peltor]

Chinese authorities confirm case of bubonic plague in Inner Mongolia (July 7, 2020)


Mongolia, China, now USA – bubonic plague detected (July 16, 2020)

[EVOLghost]

Originally Posted by Bytor Peltor

Chinese authorities confirm case of bubonic plague in Inner Mongolia (July 7, 2020)


Mongolia, China, now USA – bubonic plague detected (July 16, 2020)

?? The plague is still around. Thanks to antibiotics it's nowhere near the threat it used to be?

[Bytor Peltor]

Originally Posted by EVOLghost

?? The plague is still around. Thanks to antibiotics it's nowhere near the threat it used to be?

I wouldn’t think so, EVOL, but two stories about it over nine days caught my attention and I figured it was worthy of sharing.

[Bytor Peltor]

Texas Governor Now Says “There Is No Shutdown Coming” (July 17, 2020)

“Texas, the state still ranks near the bottom of the pack nationally when it comes to deaths. Per hundred thousand citizens, Texas has 13 deaths. By contrast, the now-lauded New York has 176. It’s no coincidence that the media suddenly shifted from reporting deaths to reporting cases.”

Total number of coronavirus deaths in Texas: 3759

 

The Port Neches-Groves ISD announced earlier this week online learning isn’t an option for the start of the school year. In a few short weeks school busses will run their routes and the children of this district are expected to be at their desk.

The following day, Houston ISD announced they were pushing back the start of school until after Labor Day and that the first six weeks would be conducted online.

[The Soup Nazi]

From Zakaria's newsletter, July 16:

Disease Is Nothing New, and Neither Is Resistance to Masks

Looking at yearly death rates in New York City, New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. writes that diseases plagued our recent ancestors to a degree we may have trouble imagining. In the 1800s, yearly deaths per 1,000 people were many times greater than today, even at baseline levels. “The sharpest peaks were the cholera epidemics of 1832, 1849 and 1854,” McNeil writes. “But plagues came in waves, sometimes more than one simultaneously: yellow fever, smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhus and meningitis.”

Society adapted over the decades, adopting better public-health practices and sanitation infrastructure—but, as is the case today, resistance was prevalent back then, too. “Libertarians battled almost every step,” McNeil writes. “Some fought sewers and water mains being dug through their properties, arguing that they owned perfectly good wells and cesspools. Some refused smallpox vaccines until the Supreme Court put an end to that in 1905, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. In the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, many New Yorkers donned masks but 4,000 San Franciscans formed an Anti-Mask League. (The city’s mayor, James Rolph, was fined $50 for flouting his own health department’s mask order.) Slowly, science prevailed, and death rates went down.”

Over a hundred years and the same bullshit, the same fucked-up mentality. What the fuck do they put in the water there WAIT, DON'T ANSWER THAT - more than one idiot here will say the deep state seeks to control your mind with lizard-people-modified H2O molecules...

[The Soup Nazi]

Yeah, this guy's A-OK to lead a country through this shit.