By David Futrelle
Fuck. This is all I can think about these days. It looks like it’s going to be bad. And this is the President’s response:
I”m linking to a bunch of articles I found useful; they’re (almost) all from reputable publications you’ve heard of, though I (as a complete non-expert on these things) can’t vouch for everything in them.
How to Prepare for the Coronavirus (NYT)
Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S. (Scientific America)
You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus (The Atlantic)
One-page beginner’s guide to the Wuhan coronavirus (theprepared.com)
Trump’s flailing incompetence makes coronavirus even scarier (Vox)
Is It a Pandemic Yet? (NYT)
Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response (Foreign Policy)
Pence Will Control All Coronavirus Messaging From Health Officials (NYT)
Let’s Revisit Coronavirus Czar Mike Pence’s History on Public Health Initiatives (Slate)
Oh, and here’s a post that’s totally not helpful, but it’s revealing about the right-wing’s attempts to downplay the virus.
Overhyped Coronavirus Weaponized Against Trump (Rush Limbaugh)
DIscuss! Add links to articles you found helpful! And stop touching your face!
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Capitalism – an elaborate and artificially sustained circus act.
It’s about as racist as the idea that the outbreak started in China — meaning it’s a fact, and racists latch onto it to justify their hatred.
The link to wild meat is based on most initial cases being around a particular market, and environmental samples of market show the wild-meat part of the market is where the virus was found the most. It’s particularly likely the origin because that’s how SARS is believed to have jumped from bats into humans. The two viruses are closely related.
China temporarily shut down wild meat markets after SARS. It’s very possible they’ll do it permanently now. Farmed meat is a much less likely source of zoonotic diseases.
Note: racists are also out saying China is hiding data and so on… despite enormous amounts of data coming out of China about the disease. Dozens of journal articles, daily briefings, etc; it’s easy to find this stuff. Meanwhile we now learn the US has failed to even get test kits ready, and fewer than 500 people total have been tested — about as many as Canada has tested.
Sadly, what Anna said probably IS the unofficial Republican/libertarian line of thought.
Lately I feel like we learned nothing from World War II.
“Life unworthy of life” can’t be how we do things. Not only is it evil and monstrous but it ALSO straight up, demonstrably does not work.
@Anna
I’m disabled, making me someone who “costs resources,” and immuno-compromised, making me especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. So I supposed you’ll be pleased if the coronavirus kills me and frees up all those resources that were being wasted on my dialysis.
In other words, fuck off.
@Alan
My medical condition requires a heavy meat intake. I just love it when you turn each and every thread into talking about what a bad person that makes me, and saying that if my meat-eating causes me to die from the coronavirus I don’t deserve any sympathy is even better. /sarcasm
@ David
Fair enough. I respect it’s your site and your rules. And I do have sympathy for people generally. But I have to be honest, unless and until we rethink our relationship with the planet, and the other lives we share it with, then we can expect more of the same. Whether that’s diseases from the meat and dairy industry or ‘natural’ disasters from climate change.
But I’ll shut up now.
Just stick the flounce, please.
On a more positive vibe, and by way of brain bleach, here are some cats reacting to those cat face filter things. I’ve put as a link because there’s a bit of an uncanny valley thing and the imagery might be a bit creepy.
What I find really interesting though is how the cats clearly understand that the screen is showing real life.
Oh, the link vanished. That’s one way of being safe I guess.
Trying again
h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59j5o_lperw
(delete the space between h and t)
China, Japan and Korea consume far less meat than the US and considerably less than the UK, so the idea that’s it the fault of Chinese people specifically for being meat consumers doesn’t really make sense to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption
@WWTH: Ragdolls are so appealing, aren’t they? My late sister wanted one. She worked for a veterinarian before she died in Oct 2018. She was on the hunt for a ragdoll.
@Hippodameia: So, a man in his 50s succumbed. That’s very disturbing, since I thought the virus was most dangerous to the very young, and the very old.
I plan to work from home as much as possible. I’m grateful to have that option.
Not sure why my post is gone for whatever reason. Oh well. It was basically three paragraphs about the notion of “unwashed masses” influencing the problematic responses to this epidemic as demonstrated by some of the posts here.
@Dormousing_it:
“a man in his 50s with underlying health problems”
It’s like those groups for whom flu is considered to present a particular risk of causing pneumonia: people over 65, anyone with a weakened immune system, pregnant women, and anyone with certain existing medical conditions like COPD. A marathon-runner in her seventies might be at less risk than a heavy smoker twenty years younger.
Oh, we learned something all right– “Never again… unless we run the camps ourselves.”
As for the rest of this thread:
These are more fun in movies.
Taking precautions for dealing with this is a privilege of those whose work environments actually allow for the ability to do that in the first place. For the rest of us, who have inadequate sick time and/or cannot isolate ourselves, like, oh, most food, retail, or other service workers? We can’t do that. I’m here, staring down the barrel at fifty, in a retail job that doesn’t allow me to isolate myself or give me the sick time to do so. So… yeah. I’m probably fucked.
Mr. Dakry has more sick time, more flexibility, more understanding work environment and better bennies in his job, but he’s also staring down fifty, and he’s a diabetic and with hypertension, both of which are risk factors. So he’s probably in trouble, too. My mother has hit her seventies and is immunocompromised. Do the math.
This is something that is asymptomatic for several days, is fairly easily transmitted, and is probably already spreading even as we speak, with no sign of it showing in a lot of carriers who don’t even know they have it yet and are continuing to spread it. And our bloody wonderful healthcare system makes no accommodations for taking sane precautions for us little people. It’s either isolate ourselves or eat. And this is before we take into account our administration is currently run by heartless fucking idiots.
If we have a pandemic in the USA, and we have the associated mortality, it will be the fault of decades of a toxic work system and of the toxic people that have made it happen over that time. But of course, it will be *our* fault that we couldn’t fly when they plucked every possible feather that could out of our wings.
It’s going to be a shitty epitaph.
I mentioned once that I am a letter carrier. I work apartments, residential, and businesses. I have limited sick leave, and am out in public for a ten hour day four days a week, with an eight hour one to round it all out.
My route in a high homeless area. Homeless people cannot isolate themselves. They have even fewer resources than those of us who have homes, little as those resources are. So we’ll say that four of those ten hours are spent being in the area that the homeless are populating.
I’m pretty certain that there are going to be cases not just in my city but on my route. I’m expecting to get sick because I have a pretty bad immune system.
You know what happens if I don’t eat a rather high percentage of meat? My immune system tanks and I get sicker, faster. I am very tired of people judging me for trying to keep myself as healthy as possible in order to avoid going into crippling debt due to medical bills I can’t afford. Especially right now, expecting to get this virus. If I’m lucky I won’t, but in this world can any of us depend on luck?
Meh, I have some of that problems in smallscale too and I was allowed a bottle of cider for tonight, so:
Some of my friends like to hoard useless masks they got for cheap (they are for patients who are sick and for medical personell who deal with a lot of patients a day and actually know how to properly wear them and dispose of them). Not only does this drive up the price and cause panic, but it will be an improvised bioweapon once the mask is soaked with germy moisture and will probably be touched a couple hundred times then stored of in a handbag, then worn again and disposed of behind a running heater.
Some friends like to have a politically optimized diet (pure natures goodies – noble idea but you gotta do it right and starving your body means becoming more vulnerable) and also some dangerous hobbies like smoking pure mariuana (which is way more damaging to the lung than tabacco). Since we are both kinksters I have offered to attend her birthday party in the nicest and cleanest dress ever and to become basically a kindergarten teacher in cleanliness and level of personal grooming (having good skin health as well as clean skin is a migitating factor against diseases), to brush my hair whenever there is konfetti or smoke in it and to wear one of her damn masks if she really requires me to be that humiliated. In return I want her to visit a party where everyone takes life a bit more relaxed and some will smoke pipes like normal adults. Also I tried in vain to talk her out of some bad eating and sex habits that weaken the body trough microtears and blood loss. I dunno, maybe I am doing something good.
Yet other friends like to drive up my pulse rate by telling me medical stories that invariably start with “I know you will not believe this at first but I read in an american nutrition/medicine/science journal” and usually end on something that is either a dangerous half-truth or outright bunk. I can understand the human impulse to survive but attempting to talk people out of their magic placebo is…hard. I already considered offering people powdered sugar so they can take their non-alleopathic/homeopathic believe in wonders made of sugar and hope and snort them or to throw pies made from the stuff in the faces of especially tough proponents. But that would be a bitchy thing to do. Maybe I’ll just do it a little.
Then of course, there is driving: Some people really like the smell of burning petroleum and they like it so much that people around them have to breathe it in all day. Tom Lehrer sang this a couple of decades back about the issue and it really helps you see movies like an old disney cartoon against nazis and that one other cartoon about how petroleum is gonna save the world in a different light. Also, if you didn’t know it yet, check out: .
Now my country is famous for our wonderfully big sport utility cars which serve as rolling fortresses of doom and also produce a lot of smoke which sometimes manages to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal>obscure business tactics.“.
I could go on as we usually do that sitting in front of a computer and burning up tons of watts just so you can play an egoshooter or watch porn is a bad thing when you could also go off the gridd like a real pre—err good housewife,well prepared gentleman or your standard well prepared agender person or your typical well prepared enby ..but yeah, the housing market and environment and all. I recently got in a fight with a friend in Australia because I we where on vastly different levels of addrenaline, hadn’t talked in ages and where both stressed out. My point is: I would like to run around with you folks and be helpfull but the best thing I can do is to post some stupid jokes in here. The internet sucks and apart from the american healthcare system sucking too —
does anyone share medical books anymore? There’s sites that, you know I recommend reading anything that is not a hyperspecific paper on a very special case that sound like a silver bullet for everything to lay people and does sound like it was written by an actual doctor with an actual plan to treat a disease. For German speaking users, the Pschyrembel can work and if push comes to shove there is also this book)
—
I think the problem is really the carbon thing with all the energy we waste just to keep us entertained instead of doing the logical thing, getting our houses in order if possible (some people have dirty litter boxes and dust and junk at home, that’s a problem), building communities with neighbors, sharing ressources and stories and taking care of one another. Sure, you can also take a hike to the wilderness if you prefer but if you catch anything there..well you should really feed your mind and pack your back beforehand.
All in all this whole thing and the various levels of paranoia remind me of the HIV pandemic where everyone blaming minorieties helped the dissease spread a lot. I believe that we should stick together, try to become team humanity fighting against a rogue virus and sort out who except trump was to blame for what and what needs to be changed later.
Finally the thing about old people — since I am still not really over it. The horrible thing about old people is that they love their children and sometimes those children can love them right back — sadly, old people sometimes decide that they have had enough out of life and that they are ready to move on because they do not want to become a burden and it’s….incredibly painfull if you are in a position to to help and are prevented from doing that and have to fight to even..argh. Anyway, consider talking to old people in your community if you have the time. They could use the extra attention, it will make you feel a lot better than watching kittens on youtube and they tend to be great listeners and storytellers who carry a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. Also they are often very kind and nice humans. Of course, there is the old-and-bitter-sort too, but it’s very very easy to err here if you do not take the time to get to know them. Health crises are a great opportunity to reconnect to families, to pool ressources and knowledge and to learn how to game the capitalist system (books also work).
Mhm..I hope some of that was usefull in any way. I dunno, writing on a computer is so weird still.
@Cats In Shiny Hats
I totally get where you are coming from. I tried to be vegetarian because it is less of a problem for me but doing fun paramedic work and eating in the timeslots that happen to open up (“oh, you are one of those girls who don’t eat meat, here have the main course without the meat, do you still want the sauce?”) sucked because the one option I had was very often something with lactose which caused my digestion to fail and me to want to throw up. Not very good. Switching back to my standard cat diet (some meat, some fishies, some nibbles of everything and, well milk (yeah, not a real cat) ) helped me a lot.
I mean can be a huge boon if it works for one (less cost, less worries about processing / efficiency etc) but being vegan is hardcore (I try to reduce meats) or impossible (“mother nature” does not love anyone, “she” mercilessly goes with what works and people dying works for her) and hard to do when you start your training on data that was won by killing dogs and when a lot of medicine is bought by animal suffering.
@WWTH ragdolls are SUPER cute. They were my fav kind of cat til i met a British Shorthair. They have so few cares to give, even for a cat! I love that. Also like their super plush teddy bear fur.
We had our first NZ Coronavirus case confirmed on Friday. Caused panic buying in some Auckland supermarkets.
Racist incidents had already been occurring, for weeks.
I wonder how our health system will cope. I am super worried for my Dad, who falls into the vulnerable category. That concerns me most.
Okay well I didn’t mind at first, but I spent more time on that post than I probably should have, and it actually threw off almost everything else I was doing for the rest of the day in terms of timing. At first I thought maybe the post was intentionally deleted to force people to move on from the general topic, but it seems like a couple of other posts stuck, so I dunno. It was definitely up, and I’d even edited it once. Maybe something happened during the edit.
Anyway, I’d still rather not waste another hour and a half or however long it was retreading everything I said, but my last post also seems a bit lacking for what I wanted to convey, but also a bunch of other people expressed a lot of my reactions to what was being talked about. I just wanted to emphasize how much it bugs me when an event potentially causing lots of casualties happens, and then suddenly the “humans are a cancer” takes pop out. I had a whole explanation as to why I think this kind of thinking is rooted in racism, ableism, and historical revisionism, but again, I’d rather keep this brief. I think most of us have held some version of this belief at some point, and so did I. Nonetheless, ultimately I can’t imagine any progressive movement succeeding at anything if it isn’t life-affirming, especially one dedicated to animal justice. I don’t see how that’s much different from the so-called “red pillers” who missed the little point that Agent Smith is the bad guy and is wrong about humanity.
Also, to be more directly on topic, I hate that, with these epidemics, so much effort goes into asking whether I as an arbitrary individual should be worried about dying. Both yes and no answers lead to problematic implications. It’s completely the wrong question to ask.
@KindaSortaHarmless:
You may know it’s impossible, but does Trump know? :/
@opposablethumbs:
And then there’s the creepy surveillance to ding you if you even take ten seconds aside to blow your nose:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21155254/automation-robots-unemployment-jobs-vs-human-google-amazon
In capitalist America, means of production own you!
@Naglfar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pKRP1DmRAU
My biggest worry here though is that this virus will give Trump, and other wanna-be authoritarian rulers around the globe, just the excuse they need to suspend or cancel elections and start clamping down on civil liberties, the latter in the name of “quarantine” of course but just so happening to result in many of their main critics disappearing and marginalized ethnic groups finding themselves confined to ghettos where the disease then runs rampant due to a lack of proper care, while any quarantines for whites with the “right” politics will be in much nicer, less crowded conditions with access to halfway-decent medical care … for those who can afford to pay, of course.
@Surplus
Speaking of which: I wonder if QAnon fans think this is part of the “storm.” They must be finding a way to integrate it into their bullshit conspiracy.
Just an update on the ongoing attempt by my own government to kill me:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/04/onta-f04.html
I don’t think we can get rid of these murderous Tories before October of 2022, so what do I do about this “province-wide roll-out” that will undoubtedly occur earlier in that year?
Should I just start putting my affairs in order on the assumption that I will not survive the following winter to see the spring of 2023? Or is there some remote possibility of survival? Preferably one neither reliant on luck nor on backbreaking levels of hard work.
Seriously? WSWS links result in being held for moderation? Why the fuck?
Six fucking weeks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/01/coronavirus-live-updates/
But we’re a majority Democratic state, especially in western Washington, so I doubt Drumpf cares.
@Hippodameia
You have a Democratic governor, how has he been handling the situation? Hoping you all can stay safe and healthy.