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Coronavirus Open Thread

“We’re almost all better now.”

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)

U.S. Health Workers Responding to Coronavirus Lacked Training and Protective Gear, Whistle-Blower Says (NYT)

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!

Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.

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kupo
kupo
4 years ago

@An Impish Pepper
FYI, you can email David when your post gets stuck in moderation. Thanks for saying something.

Victorious Parasol
Victorious Parasol
4 years ago

I needed to be reminded of small acts of heroism today.

Hippodameia
Hippodameia
4 years ago

@Naglfar, Inslee declared a state of emergency yesterday and he’s directed all state agencies draw on state resources and do everything reasonably possible to assist affected communities.

I really hope we’ll be able to start doing large-scale testing soon.

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
4 years ago

@Hippodameia:

Six fucking weeks.

Believe it or not, that might be good news. If it went undetected for that long, then all of the cases that initiated within the first four weeks of that must have failed to get the attention of the medical community to the degree that they got diagnosed. Which likely means that all of those cases were too mild for those affected to do more than seek out OTC cold remedies and the like. At the end of that four weeks someone got infected whose case went on to become serious enough to be diagnosed in the past few days. The first such, out of all those in the state who has been exposed over four weeks.

This is (circumstantial, to be sure) evidence that the cases serious enough to diagnose are a small, exceptional group against a background of very many mild cases, and the 2% mortality rate is then grossly overestimated as that’s the mortality rate among cases serious enough to get diagnosed, and that set is a small subset of the total cases.

If most of those exposed become immune, to boot, then this is not going to be nearly as terrible as many are fearing.

But the overreaction to it might be, if it gives Trump license to unleash a Gestapo and/or it blows up the economy sufficiently badly.

Diego Duarte
Diego Duarte
4 years ago

@An Impish Pepper

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.

Please do elaborate, I share a mind with you on that issue as well. As a “Third-World citizen” every time I hear some idiot praising a new epidemic or Climate Change for doing away with dirty, dirty humans, I never fail to notice that these sort of tragedies are always felt significantly worse in the global South, where most impoverished and economically colonized nations reside.

I remember an article from either the WaPo or the NY Post a while back that linked a study more or less confirming that Climate Change denialism was strictly tied to misogyny and racism. I feel one of the most significant reasons why citizens in developped nations simply do not care for these catastrophes is because they are well aware of the fact that they won’t suffer the consequences as badly as developping countries, despite the fact that they are the ones doing the most polluting.

And I bet you half of these people who salivate at the thought of millions of deaths, wouldn’t think “humanity is a cancer!” if it were one of their loved ones catching these viruses or facing these climate catastrophes. So yeah, even the whole liberal, hippie take on “humanity is a cancer” is, IMHO, intrinsically tied with racism.

rv97
rv97
4 years ago

@Diego Duarte

They also think it’ll “purge the world of the unholy”.

Naglfar
Naglfar
4 years ago

@Diego Duarte

I remember an article from either the WaPo or the NY Post a while back that linked a study more or less confirming that Climate Change denialism was strictly tied to misogyny and racism.

I recall seeing that article or something similar. It doesn’t surprise me seeing as both views are right wing in nature, and the right wing is built on bigotry and money über alles. And the racism is related because racists wouldn’t care if the people they view as inferior are harmed by climate change.

So yeah, even the whole liberal, hippie take on “humanity is a cancer” is, IMHO, intrinsically tied with racism.

Interestingly, you only seem to hear this take from privileged folks who are unlikely to get sick, never from the people actually affected by the virus. I wonder why that is… /s

Diego Duarte
Diego Duarte
4 years ago

@Naglfar

Interestingly, you only seem to hear this take from privileged folks who are unlikely to get sick, never from the people actually affected by the virus. I wonder why that is… /s

It beyond pisses me off because, despite the fact that we are one of the countries least contributing to Global Warming, we’re among the ones which will be hit the hardest. Peru already leads the entire world on solar radiation, factor in ozone layer depleting (mostly in the South) and guess who gets screwed over?

Not to mention I distinctly recall Peru losing Spring and Autumn over the course of my life, to get about 7 months of Summer and 5 months of Winter (give or take). And that is without the “El Niño” phenomenon that now occurs every other year, when it used to come every 9 to 12. We had to pretty much endure an almost winterless year in 2017.

This might be a shitty take on my part, but I hope the coronavirus keeps the malevolent Boomers, wildly intent on voting for Trump, at home once the election rolls around. We cannot afford to sit around and do nothing and, unfortunately, elections in the US impact us all whether we like it or not.

Ohlmann
Ohlmann
4 years ago

@Diego Duartes : in addition to what you have said, no epidemics in the last 100 years have been anywhere near close enough to slow down human expansion. In addition to be racist, the belief that it will weed out manking is stupid, one would need either a disease that kill 70+% of a population, or bank on a country complete collapse to have it significantly alter demographics.

(note : a disease can make a society collapse rather fast. And the current news about how it have made an actual dent in China pollution mean maybe it can do good, but the coronavirus won’t kill enough people to do a change by killing people. Only the panic and change of heart created by it can change anything)

kupo
kupo
4 years ago

And the current news about how it have made an actual dent in China pollution mean maybe it can do good

What, and I cannot stress this enough, the actual fuck

Ohlmann
Ohlmann
4 years ago

@Kupo : by that I mean that if the end result of the epidemics is that mankind at long last stop destroying the planet, then it will have done something good.

That don’t mean the deads will be a good thing. All the dead from the epidemics are a tragedy, and there’s exactly 0 good coming from thoses deaths. Doubly so since a lot of them could have been prevented anyway.

Naglfar
Naglfar
4 years ago

@Diego Duarte
Sorry about the situation in Peru. And I’d imagine the altitude doesn’t help either. Americans feed global warming because the majority of them will not see the effects. And a lot of boomers wouldn’t live to see the worst anyway so they don’t care.

Diego Duarte
Diego Duarte
4 years ago

@Ohlmann

Please do mind that when you say something like this:

And the current news about how it have made an actual dent in China pollution mean maybe it can do good, but the coronavirus won’t kill enough people to do a change by killing people.

You do realize that this wording makes it seem like you’re implying that the “good” is directly related to the coronavirus actually killing people?

I get that there’s a “silver lining”, so to speak, regarding China’s pollution levels temporarily plummeting, but let’s address the notion that China is responsible for such pollution in the first place (which is directly tied to what I was saying before concerning racism and developping nations bearing the brunt of the damage for developped nations).

Over 70% of Green House Gas emissions come from manufacturers all over the world. If China is currently leading the world in the emission of GHG (though the USA is still the historical GHG emitter by a large margin) it is because most companies all over the world have taken their manufacturing plants to China. Reason being mainly capitalism: low or unexisting minimum wages, labor security norms, anti-union policies, oversupply of workforce, etc.

To blame China, a developping nation with high levels of income inequality that is all but communist safe in name, for the amount of pollution produced to meet the Western markets’ ridiculous demands is amoral. Once again, westerners get to enjoy cheap products, whereas the social costs of such a rate of production are passed on entirely to the Chinese population.

And that makes the earlier statement seem all the more callous, because it is precisely this same exploited workforce, which does not even make enough to afford a single unit of the products they are producing, that is being the hardest hit by this epidemic.

Capitalism as a whole needs to be abolished. There will never be justice or equality so long as it is allowed to flourish anywhere on this planet.

Diego Duarte
Diego Duarte
4 years ago

@David

Yeah, let’s not speculate on the “silver linings” of mass death; it’s ghoulish.

Sorry about that. I should clarify though, the drop in pollution has more to do with people being sick and not able to go to work, and other quarantine measures than mass deaths. So my comment wasn’t intended in that way, though I understand how it could be construed as such.

Valentin
Valentin
4 years ago

There is nothing good about coronavirus and no one who dies from it deserves it.

Cats In Shiny Hats
Cats In Shiny Hats
4 years ago

There has been a case of Corona at the Network Distribution Center that supplies my station with parcels.

Lisa Siebel
Lisa Siebel
4 years ago

Uhm @David
Can we talk about Deep green resistance types who seems sorta inhumane and antifeminist to me because they seem to like a lot of those genocidal solutions all of us seem to abhor?

(also they want trans people dead, but that’s not a huge bar to clear as we are seen as a brand new phenomenon and have the magic power to be both as old as the other genders and the eternal hipsters of gender (except for black disabled… trans people who are rarer yet))

In my mind they are part of the logical solution capitalism and the moral philosophy of utilitarism / consequentialism / the standard anglosaxon moral calculus cheaply sneakily stripped of any deontological rules, offers for overpopulation. Do a quick calculus how many humans are optimal for the next hundred n years, have a part of the planet nuked, cross your fingers and hope to live and make a tidy sum, then rebuild. There’s a couple books and text I read from them and they make me sad. Is it ok to talk about them? Their specific brand of anarchy & cruelty is often archieved by radicalizing activist to the point of self-sacrifice and hope for the cataclysm that will finally cull humanity so that the better animals will run around in a bambilike fashion and there will be perfect harmony (and lots of charred skeletons / burnt ash or fertilizer and probably chaos, carnage and little chance to survive for all the animals) and we will not have about overpopulation for a long time. However in discussing this we would have to discuss the uncomfortable topic of women’s power in choosing not to have kids and the arguments are quite sexist. Is it ok to talk about these books like this here?

numerobis
numerobis
4 years ago

Killing 2% of the population at large — mostly elderly and poor — isn’t going to help with climate change at all. Nor is knocking the economy down by 25% for a quarter or two. The people who are dying are not the ones polluting. The economy will bounce right back, there’s just going to be some serious hardship in the short term.

Nanny Oggs Busom
Nanny Oggs Busom
4 years ago

The flu pandemic of 1918-20 killed 6% of the world population, up to 100 million people, and infected many, many more . It killed otherwise healthy people in the range that flu doesn’t normally kill, as well as the very young and the elderly. It didn’t discriminate based on income or class. It wiped out entire families, especially in places where the flu was uncommon.

Let’s hope coronavirus covid-19 isn’t as bad. Nobody likes a pandemic.

Jennifer Wells
Jennifer Wells
4 years ago

Well, It seems that Australias answer to covid-19 is to stockpile toilet paper. People have been getting into fist fights at supermarkets, and today my father could not find any in out small city. I wonder if this is happening in other countries as well.