His tummy is really very luscious. If I stay here long enough I'll probably get some for myself.
I think that's a Buddha, not The Buddha (who is being sued by Ohio State).
Yes to this post, should have waited and posted this here.
Walking on eggshells to not offend your Trump cultist family in order to help keep them alive is a helluva thing.
It's the Chinese Buddha. The other Buddhas tend to svelte and sensual.
I can't believe Chicago has not cancelled the St Patricks parade.
Shitty paper with no detail beyond the below, apparently initial clinical trial results:
Thus far, results from more than 100 patients have demonstrated that chloroquine phosphate is superior to the control treatment in inhibiting the exacerbation of pneumonia, improving lung imaging findings, promoting a virusnegative conversion, and shortening the disease course according to the news briefing. Severe adverse reactions to chloroquine phosphate were not noted in the aforementioned patients.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32074550
No dosage information.
I think we should all reflect on just how being trapped at home with a teenager would raise my blood pressure.
Third clueless post in the same number of days, but what the hell. NW thinks I'm being utterly paranoid to even entertain the fear that the White House might take advantage of a pandemic that lasted into the summer in order to declare a state of emergency and postpone the elections. Am I? Would it even be possible?
(from a rather empty plane somewhere over Siberia. Paranoia and in-flight wifi are seriously undermining my in-flight work productivity)
6. Dublin has cancelled, if that would help you pressure them.
I don't think you're being paranoid. IIRC the election date is actually written in the constitution, but no doubt Barr could finesse it and McConnell fellate it.
You can't finesse it. It's an open declaration of the end if the Republic.
10. Click the link. The one that's capital of the country where Patrick is the patron saint.
That's just what the Democrats and the media say.
It's never the one in Ohio. She obviously means the one in Texas.
Huh, turns out he actually went to undergrad at UW-Madison. Who'd a thunk. (Came back to OSU for postgrad and wrestle-abuse-ignoring.)
18: Oops wrong thread (about Jordan). Quit mentioning Ohio in the wrong thread.
And it was totally the one in California.
Cancelling parades is easy and obvious. Cancelling school, not so much. Children are carriers of the virus but they tend to suffer only mildly. Closing the schools will
leave lots of kids in the care of grandparents or other elders all day, spreading infection. Especially if, say, mom is a housekeeper at a nursing home, and has to bring the kids to work.
Also the loss of school-based breakfast and lunch will leave many families poorer and some kids hungrier; loss of school nurses will effectively deprive many of any medical care; and arranging day care outside of the school system on short notice in a time of crisis will be expensive for all and impossible for many.
I've actually been impressed by how seriously people seem to be taking this and am hopeful that it will to some extent offset the CDC's bungling.
In terms of cancellations, closings and general interruptions to business as usual, this is the most disruptive event of my lifetime apart from the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And all this is happening before the hospitals start overflowing (unlike in Italy).
So I'm hoping that we can avoid a worst case scenario.
I'm still going to the office even though we're told we can work from home. I would feel cowardly sending my family out of the house while I was staying home.
They shut down all the schools and universities here but not the large, landmark, public fucking library I work at. Where the fuck do they think parents with kids out of school are going to go? We already had a problem with overcrowding in the children's library that they instituted a ticketing system a few months ago.They should close us to the public too. Positively livid about this.
Also, my office has fun-sized Milky Way bars and my house doesn't.
Relaxing by drinking a lot of booze and watching Soderbergh's Contagion.
IIRC the election date is actually written in the constitution
Inauguration date, not election date.
I hope I don't have to cancel the sleeper-car train trip I scheduled to replace Japan. I'm going to a desolate part of Colorado, so the main issue is the train conditions.
My stomach isn't letting me drink at all. Sunday I had four whiskies and two beers. I'm just now feeling regular.
Is there a good popularish book on the Spanish Flu or 1830 Cholera or something? We could do a quarantine bookclub. Or the smallpox eradication campaign if we want optimism.
18 is awesome here if you read it, as I did, as "St. Patrick, the missing years"
30: You realize you're casting yourself in Snowpiercer.
21: school was closed near me for a day b/c kid had symptoms and parent had been exposed at Biogen. Kid and sibling are quarantined at home.
Our departmental seminal series is cancelled for the rest of the semester. Based on the number of emails reminding us to go look at the webx tutorial that have been sent out this week, I expect the "Classes online only until further notice" announcement any time now.
On the upside, this whole thing has made me much better about not biting my nails.
Election dates are occasionally changed at the last minute due to emergency situations, most famously in New York State on September 11, 2001, which was a primary date for various state and local offices. They rescheduled for a few weeks later and replaced Mayor Giuliani on schedule. Guiuliani had suggested that either the general election or the inauguration of his successor should be pushed back by a few months because of the city emergency, but backed down.
A state legislature could in theory cancel the election, and decree that the electors for the electoral college should be selected by the state legislature (or appointed by the governor) rather than by voting.* I don't see that happening. Among other problems, they would have to decide what to do about state and local elections on the same day. A bunch of state senators who tried to extend their own terms without an election would not last long.
*Well, maybe. There would be lots of interesting constitutional arguments, e.g., if the State Senate has a minimum age of greater than 18, would this violate the 26th Amendment?
Serious question:
Our spring break plan is to drive to see my parents in Florida. No encountering any crowds or airports. Is there a risk just being a vector between parts of the country? Or is that what hand sanitizer is for?
We could do a quarantine bookclub.
Vote for the Decameron of Boccacio here.
NW thinks I'm being utterly paranoid to even entertain the fear that the White House might take advantage of a pandemic that lasted into the summer in order to declare a state of emergency and postpone the elections. Am I? Would it even be possible?
I think it is within the realm that attempts would be made and rage and chaos would ensue.
6. The amount of Chloroquine phosphate in tonic water is small: 5mg vs. 200mg or more. The tablets you get a prescription for are (a) expensive and (b) prescription only. Hydroxychloroquine, which sounds similar, is cheaper and non-prescription, but maybe not the same thing at all.
I'm thinking that there are people at the NCAA realizing that they need to cancel March Madness, but no one has the nerve to do it.
hmm, WebMD implies the "hydro-" version is prescription only. It also has potential annoying side effects, some of which are similar to covid-19 (such as headaches).
It's not called "March Careful Risk Assessment."
43: I heard they were thinking of playing the games, but with no crowds, just TV cameras.
https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/52/2/188/719755 :
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), is a 4-aminoquinoline drug used widely in autoimmune disease, but has also been employed for the treatment of malaria,1 where it is reported as being half as toxic as the closely-related chloroquine (CQ) yet equally active against Plasmodium falciparum.
40 genuine lol. I'm watching Soderbergh's Contagion now
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-cancel-everything/607675/
44. They're strong medicines, hard on the liver. There are a bunch of counterindications.
I don't know about the public health calculation behind discussing unproven therapies; probably any relaxation of standards opens the door to televangelists selling snake oil.
A decent discussion of election complications less severe than full cancellation.
> Is there a risk just being a vector between parts of the country?
Yes, which is why China and Italy have shut down most internal travel. How large a risk it is though, pretty impossible to evaluate without good numbers which are structurally unavailable in the US currently.
Not trying to reopen the closed thread below, but if Tia is reading or someone is willing to pass this on to her, I wanted to share my perhaps-relevant experience with similar-sounding intense but transitory depressive episodes. Including the seeming ability to control them by intense daily exercise. In my case, they turned out to be PMDD, and there is in fact a well validated protocol for using SSRI's for about 4-5 days/month for that. It has been lifechanging for me. If there's a possibility that there's a correlation between your menstrual cycle and your mood, I think it's worth exploring with a psychiatrist.
51: A lot of uncertainty and complications (and potentially exploitable chaos).
Fortunately as a strong stable first-world democracy we have no important interests or political actors who would exploit that kind of thing ...
I do worry about the effects of the disease in who votes very much.
A state legislature could in theory cancel the election, and decree that the electors for the electoral college should be selected by the state legislature (or appointed by the governor) rather than by voting.
This is actually how it was originally done, and the shift to a popular vote for electors was part of the expansion of democratic institutions in the early nineteenth century, along with the removal of property requirements for voting. The constitution leaves the method and timing of choosing electors up to the state legislatures, and originally the dates varied widely. Standardizing on the November date came later but I think is still technically up to the states, so Trump doesn't have the power to change it by fiat even if he declares an emergency.
(I'm reading What Hath God Wrought, which has lots of fascinating information about this sort of thing.)
My greatest electoral fear (and, for other purposes, my greatest hope) is that Trump will turn out to be more or less right. The pandemic ends before long, without affecting very many Americans. for no particular reason. The total number of deaths remains less than the flu, and are concentrated among the elderly and the already sick. Possibly the Democratic National Convention is cancelled, but the Republican Convention happens on schedule and nothing bad happens. The nations that shut themselves down are deep in recession but the U.S. is doing pretty well, and the stock market is coming back. Everyone criticizes the schools that shut down for panicking, and Trump's own commercials feature his ridiculous statements of the past week.
Greater than 50% probability, depending on how you define "ends soon" and "affecting many Americans."
That crossed my mind, too. Suppose it's already mutating to something less virulent, for some weird selection reason.
We were told to work from home if you can, followed by individual emails saying whether they consider us requiring access to the building or able to work remotely. I somehow made it into the former even though I only do online work and meetings but I guess senior management is giving me credit for doing other stuff too. (To be fair I occasionally lend a hand in lab but there's nothing where I'm the only one who knows how to do it.)
I am struggling with overwhelming anxiety over this whole thing.
I mean, I usually do not suffer from anxiety, so this is not an escalation of a normal state. But I also think anxiety is one of the most unpleasant feelings in the world, and this uncertainty is really feeling chaotic to me.
Can someone sketch a very realistic scenario for me to grab onto? Is it realistic to say that in three months, it will have swept through the country and quarantines will be ending, and we'll be in the middle of a recession? That schools will resume on schedule in the fall?
I am a bit freaked out by the existence of airplane wifi, and the apparent ability to have even tenuous contact with someone high over belarus.
More freaked out by a conversation at my mother's home with two of the carers. They are nice people, alert to the dangers of bad personal hygiene. But so far as they were concerned, the most notable feature of the pandemic was people hoarding toilet paper. They had endless anecdotes about that. I was trying to drag the conversation round to what the fuck was actually planned in the way of quarantine, but they still thought of it as something that would happen only to other, stupid and rather ridiculous people.
"It's all man made anyway" said one of them. "Swine flu, sars, ebola ..." -- and this is one of the kinder and more thoughtful of the young carers. She added that someone on the staff was going ahead with a planned holiday to some country now on the black list, because it is so cheap "but of course she'll stay at home for a fortnight after that." The unquestioned assumption was that she wouldn't actually catch the disease.
However, the local cottage hospital has set up some isolation units. Someone is thinking. And while we were talking I got a text from the NHS telling me not to go to the surgery if I had any symptoms and had been in contact with the countries where it is raging. So how the hell would I be supposed to get tested?
I worry that this disease will -- how can I put this? -- diminish the urgency of the social care crisis for ten year or more.
Your genes have gotten four offspring through their most vulnerable years. What else are you worried about?
("the social care crisis" is what we call the problems that arise because hospital care is the responsibility of the NHS, but residential care, or care at home, is the responsibility of local government, which has even less money. So old, ill, people spend a lot of time in hospital because there is nowhere else for them to go.)
67: Feelings exist so you don't drop a baby when trying to escape from a dinosaur.
I am much more hopeful than I was in January/early February.
I expect that we will get 5-10K cases in the US in the next two weeks or so. People will go absolutely apeshit. There will be widespread quarantines and imposition of social distancing. In the three weeks after imposition of these measures, the number of new cases will peak and begin to decrease. All told, about 30K will get the virus and about 600 will die in that time period.
After that it will get weird, as there will continue to be 10 - 20 cases per day and 1 or two deaths. People will remain vigilant, but panic will decrease. The economic toll will be brutal, but confined to certain industries (e.g., entertainment and hospitality).
JFC this is the chain email I get from my dad, some good with a lot of dangerous bullshit, anyone want to help me write a response? Which I'll send when sober in the am, it looks like a chain email:
Please share with all family and friends!
The new NCP coronavirus may not show any signs of infection for many days and if so, then how can one know if he/ she is infected ?
Latest information is that the incubation period may be up to 28 days before the symptoms of COVID 19 are evident. By the time a person has a fever and/or cough and goes to the hospital, the lungs are usually 50% fibrotic and it could be too late! Taiwan experts provide a simple self-check that we can do every morning:
Take a deep breath and hold your breath for more than 10 seconds. If you complete it successfully without coughing, without discomfort, stuffiness or tightness, etc, it proves there is no fibrosis in the lungs, basically indicating no infection. In critical times, please self-check every morning in an environment with clean air!
SERIOUS, EXCELLENT ADVICE by Japanese doctors treating COVID-19 cases.
Everyone should ensure your mouth & throat are moist, never DRY. Take a few sips of water every 15 mins at least. WHY? Even if the virus does enter into your mouth...drinking water or other liquids will wash them down through your esophagus and into the stomach. Once there, your stomach ACID will kill the virus. If you don't drink enough water more regularly...the virus can enter your windpipes and into the LUNGS. That's very dangerous.
The following information comes from a very reputable doctor in Shenzhen Hospital (Guangdong Province, China) regarding the treatment procedure for the Corona Virus:
1. If you have a runny nose and sputum, you have a common cold
2. Coronavirus pneumonia is a dry cough with no runny nose.
3. This new virus is not heat-resistant and will be killed by a temperature of just 26/27 degrees Celsius (25C = 77F).
It hates the Sun.
4. If someone sneezes with it, it takes about 10 feet before it drops to the ground and is no longer airborne.
5. If it drops on a metal surface it will live for at least 12 hours - so if you come into contact with any metal surface - wash your hands as soon as you can with a bacterial soap.
6. On fabric, it can survive for 6-12 hours. normal laundry detergent will kill it.
7. Drinking warm water is effective for all viruses. Try not to drink liquids with ice.
8. Wash your hands frequently as the virus can only live on your hands for 5-10 minutes, but - a lot can happen during that time - you can rub your eyes, pick your nose unwittingly and so on.
9. You should also gargle as prevention. A simple solution of salt in warm water will suffice.
10. Can't emphasize enough - drink plenty of water!
Carry a bottle of water, and sip it every 15 minutes or so.
THE SYMPTOMS
1. It will first infect the throat, so you'll have a sore throat lasting 3/4 days
2. The virus then blends into a nasal fluid that enters the trachea and then the lungs, causing pneumonia. This takes about 5/6 days further.
3. With the pneumonia comes high fever and difficulty in breathing.
4. The nasal congestion is not like the normal kind. You feel like you're drowning. It's imperative you then seek immediate attention.
SPREAD THE WORD - PLEASE SHARE - AND MAY THE WORLD RECOVER FROM THE CORONAVIRUS SOON.
This probably is a good time to retire Darwin from the thread.
24 cases now, all the latest community transmission. fucking hell I'm a complete hermit now.
What is it with Chinese people and avoiding iced beverages?
59. I hope you're right. It's going to be a rough month here. Hospitals are going to be overwhelmed. "The Dutch National Institute for Public Health (RIVM) said 4% of employees at several regional hospitals in the province, who had mild respiratory symptoms, had tested positive in tests conducted from March 7-8."
If it's bad, they'll blame foreigners or poor people. Electoral outcome will be determined by how many accept that, I think.
Drinking water all the time sounds harmless. Since I'm old and on blood pressure medication, I'm going to be peeing like a KGB asset anyway. It makes me wash my hands often too.
Trump wants a payroll tax holiday from now until his election. I'm not sure even the Tea Party can swallow that big of a pile of shit.
Cancelling school, not so much
Yeah, there are issues. But you couldn't really make a better disease spreading mechanism than having 500 people with horrendous hygiene gather every day and then go back to their families. Well, maybe chemtrails.
The Superintendent wrote back to me to say YADDA YADDA YADDA MONITORING YADDA INFORMATION YADDA BE ASSURED SAFETY YADDA YADDA. It was actually very polite and the key bit was that they wouldn't hassle anyone who wanted to keep their kids home, which had been my fallback suggestion.
One of the issues I've seen raised with closing schools is that historical evidence is that parents will get their kids together anyway - whether for care reasons or for they're-driving-me-crazy reasons, either way it's not all that effective as an isolation mechanism.
I sent my mom that same Snopes response to that same chain email this morning (except she had somehow managed to copy its contents into a text message). Where would we be without Snopes, and why is it named after such an untrustworthy bunch of Faulkner characters.
So, we're hosting candidate forums for the state-wide contested Democratic primary races. AG forum is tomorrow night. I think we'll go forward with that, but the 3 we have planned in April? I'm on team 'we really have to talk about this' but so far team 'it's silly to overreact' seems to be winning. Attendance would like be 150-200. It might be that the university, where we have rented a lecture hall, is going to make the decision for us.
Our biennial fundraising dinner is in mid-April. This is the money we use for this cycle, and really makes a difference in local races.
Can someone sketch a very realistic scenario for me to grab onto? Is it realistic to say that in three months, it will have swept through the country and quarantines will be ending, and we'll be in the middle of a recession? That schools will resume on schedule in the fall?
Alright Heebie. Let's do this. I'm basing my timeline on this thread. It says that we have five or six more weeks before we're seeing corpses piled in the streetshospital beds outnumbered by COVID19 cases.
Until April: it'll be like now. Lots of news stories. Complete indecision about whether regular things are still OK to do. More and more events cancelled. Lots of anxiety. You won't know anyone with it.
During April: it'll arrive in your town. Another round of panic-buying, as more people realize it could really mean them, despite American invincibility. More uncertainty. More stringent voluntary self-distancing.
End of April: You will know someone who has it. Probably schools will close til the end of the school year. You will be home with your children ALL DAY EVERY DAY. All govts will be taking it seriously. There'll be non-essential travel restrictions.
May: You and most people will have it, be fine, be a lot more concerned about near-fatal boredom. You will peripherally know 3-5 old people who'll die. The news will look like triage wards. You'll start to break curfew and go on river walks, scurrying away if you see other people. You will crave going out to dinner and hate your own supplies at home. Some of Trump's authoritarians turn on him.
June: You and the other moms are like dude. We've all had this. Can we get the kids together again? One of your precious old people will die. The virus spread slows down, either for the summer or because a lot of the population has now had it. People will be back out at parks and restaurants. You've completely had it with caution and wish for summer camps/day care to re-open.
July: simmer, and lots of analysis about How COVID 19 Changed Everything But Will It Change THE ELECTION. Or, hopefully, How Can The Democrats Appoint A New Nominee Since All The Old Ones Died. Also, How Fast Can We Go Back to Normal.
August: simmer. Beds are opening up at hospitals, but you don't generally hang out in hospitals, so it won't change anything to you. Endless articles about Is It OK To Go Back To School? Schools will re-open.
September: Second wave! With new season and complacent people, it'll be a second wave! But since we don't have the concentration and will to take good measures twice, it'll be just like the regular flu and we will just accept those flu deaths. We'll have returned to the regular timeline, only with more deaths, but when have we ever cared about that. People will get flu shots, though, for probably a few more years out and by the following year, the flu shot will be good against corona virus.
There you go. There's my predictions. I am trying really hard not to make glorious predictions about Republicans dying en masse because they are older and men and defying safe practices because that would admit that Trump doesn't have it handled. It would only have to be a differential of a few tens of thousands of voters to swing the fucking three swing states.
In my experience, the time between realizing the threat and the threat landing is the worst of it, even worse than the threat landing. When we're in it (five weeks!), at least it will be happening and moving on to the next steps and you won't be spiraling between 'oh god it will be awful' and 'maybe there will be a miracle intervention'.
I think there will plausibly be maybe two more weeks where it would be reasonable to do nice things (go somewhere, eat out, socialize, relocate). After that, you'll be in limbo, increasingly constricted in daily life until it hits, but when it hits, your experience will be boredom and managing your household and your time.
Consider planning your own activities. What can you do, solo at home while the kids are on screens? Write? Math? Cross-stitch? If you don't plan that, you'll waste it all away hitting refresh on Twitter, and that would be a shame.
(Of course I mean "me" everywhere it says "you".)
Dublin, Ohio also cancelled their Saint Patrick's Day parade.
It isn't that great of a prediction (in that it also includes bad things). Also, I don't know any better than any other layperson.
But it is plausible, so if it settles your mind, then I'm glad.
85:. Keep up, Megan! We already decided we're all writing novels.
What can you do, solo at home while the kids are on screens?
The fucking Archives.
It didn't feel that long when I was writing it.
What's the problem with going outside for a walk outside during a quarantine? I'm assuming typical U.S-type situation in which there's not many pedestrians.
92: Or for that matter taking a drive to a remote location and going for a walk there? I don't see why there would be a situation where everyone is stuck inside all the time.
38, 51, 56: Thanks, especially for the link in 51. There obviously will be a lot of issues around campaigning and voting that aren't being planned for yet, but I should really be focusing my anxieties on the next couple of months, rather than displacing them onto an election eight months away that isn't even in my own country.
I'm going to self-isolate for two weeks when I get back from Japan, to be on the safe side. It would be awful to give the virus to either my own mother or NW's.
[Waves at NW from somewhere over Mongolia]
Well, if we get quarantined like Wuhan and Italy, then we wouldn't be allowed to. But I suspect that fucking helicopter parents busybody scolds there may be community disapproval.
I figure we'll be going to our usual river access anyway, because I can't handle being inside all day.
Preparing for two week quarantines is one thing. If everything shuts down for 2-3 months, there'd be some rule about being allowed out every few days for supplies? How are they doing that in Italy and China?
I'm still undecided on our road trip, where we leave on Saturday. Going on it is compatible with Megan's hypothetical. Also we can leave any time it starts to feel risky.
I suppose one fear I have is that we'd be quarantined at my parents' house.
92 cases in Mass, more than doubled overnight. Schools, etc, are still open. I don't know why they're fucking around.
96. I've heard families/households have designate people with passes, i.e. this particular person can go out for this long on this day - this seems to handle the necessities.
If they move Coachella to October and I can't make that time, do I get a refund?
Things here seem pretty normal, except that last night some of the shelves at Trader Joe's were bare, and over the weekend, the fancy Chinese mall was less crowded than usual. (I asked a salesclerk at Uniqlo about it, and he said that for the past month, attendance was down maybe 50%. But there were still long lines at Din Tai Fung.)
I'm still planning to go on a transcontinental plane trip next week. I'm not sure how irresponsible this is.
In Wuhan itself the rule seems to be that every third day you can leave your apartment to collect the groceries that have been delivered to your front door.
it's not all that effective as an isolation mechanism
Where'd you see that? This thread has a different take.
Yes. I only know him from being yelled at by students, but he's been tweeting about this a lot.
My dad scoffed at me when I recommended that they prepare a couple of weeks ago. He probably won't let my mom prepare, and my grandmother is 89 and newly widowed and I'm not sure I can get anyone on that side of the family to put InfoWars down long enough to buy some fucking hand sanitizer.
Taiwan is so far, cross fingers, knock on wood, and let their experts get on with it, doing much better than expected -- but they've been planning in general for years and for COVID-19 since December. List of actions.
Is the entire British government going to have to self-isolate?
Nadine Dorries, a health minister, has become first MP to be diagnosed with coronavirus.
She has been in Westminster for past week, met hundreds of people, and attended a No 10 reception hosted by Boris Johnson on Thursday
101: dammit, now I want to eat at Din Tai Fung and I probably won't have any opportunity for decent XLBs for weeks, if not months.
Is this going to wreck havoc on census counts? There's a big community event later this week to get people to fill it out. The schools are having kids perform at it, etc.
113: Only among marginalized communities (sigh). The Census this year is online-first -- meaning American households will get two (2) mailings from the Census Bureau telling them to go online and fill out a Census form* using their unique identifier code before they ever get a paper form. Prior testing suggests that a sizeable chunk of the population (hello, better-educated and higher-income people) will do this.
Who will be left out? Those who don't have a computer at home (though it's allegedly doable on a smartphone), those who have low literacy, can't get to a library to ask for help, etc.
More concerning is whether mass quarantine will either slow down the mobile Census van/nonprofit outreach, or shut down the ability of Census workers to get to people's homes individually. I'm betting that this won't really hurt things in the long run, because enumerators already have to work into the summer months to catch people who didn't respond to the first umpteen reminders.
*Is this hackable? Good question! Not enough reassurance from the feds on this point! But anyway!
The Pittsburgh St. Patrick's parade isn't canceled. It will be nice to continue my tradition of never going.
My girlfriend's school is going online-only for a month, at least some of which I hope she'll spend living with me in part because it's the only way I'll survive having kids home if/when their schools and in part because I'm tired of schlepping the dog back and forth several times a week because I'm the one with a car. But I'm writing this from the Children's ER while she tucks in the other girls and the dog, so I owe her and will of course respect whatever she wants to do with her extra quarantine time.
Yarn shop traffic hasn't been noticeably improved by people stocking up, which surprises me. I assume we'll go out of business if it closes for any extended amount of time, but the $100/week unemployment I could then get is probably preferable anyway.
You can't expect the dog to have a reliable car.
Hope the ER visit works out quickly and well. That doesn't sound like a good way to spend an evening.
It's not great, but it's sure tons easier to be able to do it with just the one child who's going to be released soon after having been treated than it was when I had to drag all three along.
Re: post title. Very much this. I am realizing that all of my models of "crisis" behavior are basically variants of "Keep Calm and Carry On."
For instance I have a number of volunteering "obligations" coming up over the next few weeks that I am finding myself loath to back out of. (Helping register new voters in high schools and colleges being the one I would *really* like to proceed with for
potential benefit to the world, but probably one of the worst in terms of potential community spread.)
Appropriate responses to happy situations are all alike; the appropriate response to each unhappy situation is unhappy in its own way.
Boy, we'll all be so well-rested during our coming months of enforced boredom.
A potentially interesting paper: "Temperature and latitude analysis to predict potential spread and seasonality for COVID-19." Of course it is a "rush" job and they include many caveats, but does seem consistent with general seasonal flu patterns. They point out the generally slower spread in places relatively close to China but with much colder climates such as Bangkok.
Striking maps, but as I said they do of course heavily caveat the work.
The above factors, climate variables not considered or analyzed (cloud cover, maximum temperature, etc.), human factors not considered or analyzed (impact of epidemiologic interventions, concentrated outbreaks like cruise ships, travel, etc.), viral factors not considered or analyzed (mutation rate, pathogenesis, etc.), mean that although the current correlations with latitude and temperature seem strong, a direct causation has not been proven and predictions in the near term are speculative and have to be considered with extreme caution.
122 is a pretty easy way to pad a publication record, I suppose. Pretty maps, though.
120: I also see my Midwestern stoicism/ "don't discuss the important unpleasant personal thing because it's unpleasant" coming into play. I'm fine discussing it in the abstract, following the politics, looking at the maps; but not so much how it affects me, Al Franken.
Up until now everything around here has been, well, pleasant. Recently certain things have become unpleasant. Now, it seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant.
123: I like the way the at-risk zone is defined as basically everything except Northern Canada, Scandinavia, and the colder parts of Russia. News you can use!
Maybe we'll have massive global warming this summer and that will keep the pestilence at bay.
Argh. On the verge of canceling my replacement vacation to Colorado, because categorical imperative and if I were a carrier I wouldn't know it.
Everything is a puzzle to me now.
Should I fly to Chicago to visit my sister for Passover (I do this every year)?
Should I still be riding the bus to work?
I am still torn on driving to Florida on Saturday!
On the plus side, if we go, we can leave at the drop of a hat if it seems like the quarantines are coming.
129: That's a given. I need to know what to do this year.
Should I put down a deposit on my son's school trip to D.C.?
Right now I'm hoping for a refund on my son's school trip to D.C.
To my shame, I probably have enough yarn in my stash to last through many, many months of quarantine. Some people are suggesting mail ordering from indie dyers to help make up their income loss from festival cancellations (though oddly enough Stitches United hasn't cancelled yet), so that might be a factor in buying habits also.
The drug slang is getting incomprehensible to me.
"Son, if someone offers you yarn at a festival, just say no."
Not touching yarn at a festival might be the only thing harder than not touching my own face. Save me from myself, Coronavirus cancellations!
Yarn shop traffic hasn't been noticeably improved by people stocking up, which surprises me.
They're ordering it online, he said with rueful certainty. (8 skeins of Lana Grossa Super Color for a wedding present for a wedding I assume is going to get postponed. FWIW it's a yarn I definitely wouldn't have found at a LYS.)
For couples where the bride is pregnant, there's going to be great pressure not to postpone a wedding.
ROC Island is virtually COVID free; here's how they did it https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689?guestAccessKey=2a3c6994-9e10-4a0b-9f32-cc2fb55b61a5&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=030320
I'm guessing it wasn't just a financial stimulus that was given only to the employed and mostly benefiting the well off.
A combination of early travel bans, nationalising key industries, compulsory tracking and quarantine, very good public information, and acting early.
There's a list here:
What about a wall through a desert? Did they try that and find that it helped?
More of a fence in most places?
There's a tortoise on its back on the desert. You flip it over and touch your face. Now you have Coronavirus.
It turns out to be Jimmy Buffet dressed as a turtle. Now you have coronavirus and cheeseburger-in-paradise-virus.
They did cancel the Pittsburgh St. Patrick's parade. They better cancel the Columbus Day one also or the Irish will feel singled out.
Chicago just cancelled their parade. Really relieved for my mom.
They should still pollute the river for tradition.
Hope the girls are okay, Thorn! My office just announced a "work from home stress test" Friday, where they'll see if the company can operate with every single employee working remotely.
132: Kosher every square millimeter of your house while confined, of course! Presumably while singing cutesy songs about plagues.
||
This twitter thead feels like everything that's demoralizing and soul-crushing about the Democratic primaries (in both 2016 and 2020) in one place -- the combination of righteous indignation and weirdly over-theorized (but disingenuous) comments is . . . something.
Original tweet: "I'm not trying to piss people off but it's a little rich that some prominent voices who spent months saying how awful Warren was compared to Bernie are now furious at Warren for failing to endorse him."
Sample response: "It's not about Warren or about helping Bernie, it's about helping the people progressive policies would save from death, bankruptcy & suffering. Millioms of women. I believe Warren owes them, as a progressive politician. She doesn't owe Bernie, just them."
Different response: "This is sort of implying that Warren's resentment of digs at her by Sanders' supporters were more important to her than progressive unity which is exactly what Sanders supporters allege."
All three of those statements make a point which is (at least partially) valid, but if politics today means trying to reconcile all three of those in some ways . . .
|>
146: They had such a big moat that they couldn't really figure out where to put the wall.
(Alternatively, some of their outer provinces already had a wall, but it turned out the virus was coming from inside the house.)
Hope the girls are okay, Thorn! My office just announced a "work from home stress test" Friday, where they'll see if the company can operate with every single employee working remotely.
I was just having a conversation this morning about the logistics of working from home. For myself, I much prefer coming to the office, and am not well set up to work from home. So I realize it's not just a question for my employer, I need to decide how much time I want to invest in preparing to work from home if I have to.
I don't understand the logistics of working from home. My house doesn't have a pokestop.
The nice thing about Jimmy Buffet is when some people tried to claim there's a woman to blame, he didn't take the easy way out and instead admitted his own fault.
128
Should I still be riding the bus to work?
Depends on how healthy you currently are, how many cases are in your area (obviously a big unknown), and what the alternative is. Bike to work? Walk to work? Drive to work? Work from home? Self-quarantine with paid leave? Self-quarantine with unpaid leave?
I'm healthy and there are at least 4 cases in my region (4 confirmed, probably a ton more due to high-profile vectors). My office has fairly liberal WFH policy, but I can't do it totally freely. I bike to work most days and doing so only looks more attractive now.
Depends on how healthy you currently are, how many cases are in your area (obviously a big unknown), and what the alternative is. Bike to work? Walk to work? Drive to work? Work from home? Self-quarantine with paid leave? Self-quarantine with unpaid leave?
I feel fine, but I'm 56 years old and immunosuppressed. As far as I know now the only reported cases in Ohio are in Cuyahoga County, which is a 2-3 hour drive away.
If I didn't ride the bus I would drive to work. Unless my office closes, working from home isn't an option.
My office has started tentatively trying to figure out what it would take for everyone to work from home. We could totally do it in theory, but in practice our workflow is very paper-based so it would take a lot of adjustments to set it up.
I would suggest to them that they need to be a bit less tentative about that.
154: I didn't pay close attention to this stuff in 2016, but so many of the online Bernie boosters I see now give me vivid flashbacks to Nader 2000. They are truly and deeply sincere, and they see only the halo. Their vision of the world is simultaneously grim and saccharine (this is something you see on the right as well, among Catholics in particular, I've noticed). No one here trips this particular switch for me, and I voted for Bernie myself, but it is a little unnerving how our political system seems to generate and sustain these fantasies of top-down justice every few years. And then they just rot away.
I just went in to my office to move a bunch of files onto disk I can access from home so I can work from home for the next few weeks. Graduate classes already switched to online only and for the rest of the students the school just told them not to return to campus after Spring break, classes will be online.
I'm a bit worried about my mother, who is in her 70s but basically healthy. She's in California and has not only not made any stay-at-home-for-a-while arrangements, she's still substitute teaching (she's retired but does it part time, more to keep busy than for the money). Her attitude to the whole thing seems to be "Meh, whatever".
167.last: same here. It is only reluctantly that she has decided to stop singing in her volunteer choir (which is of course mainly people of her age gathering regularly to exhale vigorously at each other) and that was only when a) one of their sopranos self-isolated on returning from Italy and b) my uncle the doctor told her very forcefully to STAY THE HELL AWAY.
My father is older but still in pretty good health and I think is probably quite looking forward to a bit of self-isolation in the Highlands somewhere.
Of course, neither of them are going to give up regular visits to/from grandchildren, so there's that as well.
109: I feel you on this one. My mother's still calling it a hoax. My father, meanwhile, is in a very no-frills nursing home of the sort where you don't expect the best possible outcome should the virus arrive there.
I've been knocking myself out to get data for some conference deadlines in April and May, and now it seems likely that at least one of them, maybe both, will be cancelled. But I can't stop with the break-neck experiment schedule until I know for sure. Really hoping the meeting planners will make up their minds soon. Either way, if I have to stop coming to work, it will be bad. On the other hand, it would be kind of awesome if they only sent the students home.
It's so much nicer on a campus when they're gone.
163: I'm just happy they're working on it at all. The regulatory state adjusts slowly.
There are still no confirmed cases in Alaska, which is actually kind of surprising given how dependent we are on transportation links through Seattle. The state claims to be testing vigorously but the current administration is not very credible so who knows.
What we should do, see, is bail out the fracking industry.
OMFG: I typed "COVID-19" into the searchbar to look for a count of cases by state, and the first autocomplete was "COVID-19 in toilet paper".
Yes. Don't reuse toilet paper and don't share it with anyone else.
Evolution is a bitch. The hoarders are dead by their own shiny butthole.
What is the evolutionary biology explanation for the urge to constantly touch one's own face?
Seeing if your fingers smell like a butt.
Oh, you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal, if you ever get COVID in the alimentary canal.
Apparently its instinctive to smell your hand after shaking hands with someone. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27070-after-handshakes-we-sniff-peoples-scent-on-our-hand/
It looks like they're going to shut down the library. Thank fucking christ.
180 also after scratching your butt, so keep that in mind.
Is that a butt question or a breathing one?
Better though I should probably stop vaping (I know, I'm cutting down and steeling myself to quit). I'm taking the day off tomorrow too and Friday/Saturday is the weekend here. I won't do the deep desert trip to the Inland Sea on Friday with the hot Greek ecologist friend of mine who I'd like to be more than a friend.
... and now high schools in Austria are going remote starting next Monday, lower grades from Wednesday (but with daycare available at the schools for kids who need it); parents encouraged to not bring their kids to daycare/kindergarten if possible. Glad we just got grandparents here for reinforcements! I hope they're looking forward to lots of childcare, since lots of the touristy stuff is also closed -- museums, concerts, the zoo...
Shit got real, fast.
Holy Fuck!!!! We went from 24 to 262!!!
188 human heads/guts are really bad at exponential growth
And now the governor has declared an emergency. Still no confirmed cases.
human heads/guts are really bad at exponential growth
Or maybe mathematicians fail to put enough emotion on them!
Don't reuse toilet paper and don't share it with anyone else.
I always flip it over before reuse, I'm good.
I was expecting maybe at most double that? But holy shit. I am a fucking hermit now. Glad I have plenty of booze and pasta.
If you run out of toilet paper, you can make your own bidet by poking holes in the lid off a water bottle.
Just wash your ass in the shower.
You're in a desert. I'm trying to save you water.
We went 100% WFH across the US starting today. It's a good thing that it's a bit warm, because my WFH space is a not-really-climate-controlled attic room. Developer productivity seems to scale directly with screen area, so I have to figure out how best to rig up my laptop and its crappy keyboard with some real hardware. Already feels very quiet. And refreshing things like this and reading all day is not helping me get work done, for sure.
I was working from home this week because I watch too much news and got paranoid, but today got the all-company email that everybody who can work from home should do so starting on Friday.
And refreshing things like this and reading all day is not helping me get work done, for sure.
Why is that any different from usual? Or is it?
188: WE WENT FROM 25 OR 6 TO 4.
201: It is a bit different. While it's definitely spent a long time in "I can quit any time I want" territory, most days and weeks I'm not glued to a half-dozen channels of information all day, just dipping in now and then. Crisis situations, though, I'm extremely on edge and have a hard time paying attention to anything else.
<Gothic>I went Fifty for Forty or Fight.</Gothic>
We just got the order to start working from home.
I am having an insanely hard time concentrating, with all this uncertainty. Just wanting to keep reading and trawling for new bits of information.
Maryland currently has 9 confirmed cases, all people returning from the same river cruise in Egypt. Given the pathetic testing situation, I don't know what that really means.
So just texted a lot of cow-orders and my maid who hasn't been here for a while (and the place looks it). Think I will have her here tomorrow to clean up the place since it looks like I'll be in for a long time and front/gift her a bunch of $ since she lives very close to the edge and it looks like it's going to get really bad here.
208: Denial isn't just a river cruise in Egypt.
208 even worse in Egypt since they were only reporting a handful of cases just last week
Is it working from home when you're playing through the entire Halo franchise? Asking for a friend
I wonder if we can get people to stop spitting on the sidewalk for the duration.
Failing that, to look a bit guilty when they do it near you.
So the NCAA now announced that men's and women's basketball tournament games will be played without fans.
I guess that's a good move, but now they also need to shut down all sports bars.
"I have no clue if we could have already or could be now spreading this to others," a 38-year-old woman who lives near Austin, Texas, who asked not to be identified for privacy reasons, told us.
After returning from Western Europe in late January, the woman and her husband came down with a mysterious illness, which sent them in and out of week-long fevers. She and her husband would wake up coughing in the middle of the night, their ribs aching so badly that they needed to vomit. She has tested negative for the flu, twice, and also tested negative for strep. She has been diagnosed with pneumonia.
On her trip, she had frequently been in large, international crowds, where she could easily have been exposed to the coronavirus. But despite having all the symptoms, she has not been tested for it. When she called Austin's public-health department to ask for guidance, she was told that unless she was hospitalized or had traveled to China, she could not be tested for COVID-19.
"The woman who I talked to said, 'There aren't any cases here [in Travis County],'" she told us. "And I said, 'There hasn't been any testing, so how do you know?'"
Sorry to keep harping on my road trip to my parents. I'm just using you all as my anxiety-absorbers.
This kind of thing makes me think that my kids could already be carriers, and that we shouldn't go for that reason, even if they lived locally.
208: DC has four. But one of them was a rector at a church, and that total of 4 is only DC residents with the virus so presumably it doesn't count the CPAC attendee who shook hands with two Congressmen, so, you know, I'm going to guess it's an undercount.
Am I the only one who is becoming interested in far-fetched scenarios? Twitter is speculating that Kudlow is sick and all of a sudden I'm all, President Pelosi by June? Biden/Sanders getting sick, since they are required to be around people for the next few months.
If the news is going to keep up its pace for ever-increasing densification, it is going to have to be mindblowing and we've got all the ingredients.
It would be the first president since W. Harrison to die in office out of personal negligence regarding his own health.
I think we're all thinking "no such luck", the only prominent people to die of this will probably be good ones.
220. Who knows. We have a Tory MP down with it, and one of her aides is already diagnosed. They're running round like blue arsed flies trying to follow up everybody who's done business with her, been at receptions with her, etc. Plus she's been in Parliament sitting in the middle of her party and going through the voting lobbies, so the whole lot might get it with a bit of luckwhich would be a tragedy.
We're all still shellshocked from 2016, but it can't be that only the good old men will die. And Trump is still willing to hold rallies (as of yesterday) and he thinks he controls reality with his brain. There's differential risk behavior for the good ones and the bad ones and this time it is in our favor.
220: I'd bet on the reverse. Trump will be fine. He's clearly sold his soul to Satan, and more importantly he's a known germophobe. Biden will survive until a week before the primary and then be hospitalized. Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg will fight it out in a brokered convention.
153.1: We're fine. They didn't bother x-raying to determine if there was a nose fracture because they'll just wait and see how it heals either way.
204 is the absolute best.
224: He thought he was, but because of a typo, he sold his soul to Santa. That's why he mostly gives things to white people, wears a red hat with white trim, and only works one day a year.
only works one day a year
Summed together from 3 minutes 57 seconds a day.
220.1: It would be irresponsible to speculate, but he really does look sick and not a little bit sick either. It could be another heart attack.
On the other hand, it could just be standing that close to Pence.
The commenters are all 'nah, he's just drunk again' and I'm sortof astounded. Is it an open secret that he drinks? Why didn't I know? Do cabinet members just get to be drunk on the job without anyone mentioning it? Agreed that he is definitely feeling it, whether drinking, sick or in withdrawal.
This is how quickly this thing has escalated:
On February 27th, I posted something about how I keep hearing it's not as bad as the flu.
On March 5th, it occurs to me for the first time that I could really be quarantined for two weeks.
On March 11th, we're realistically planning how to cancel the next three months of life.
I'm just saying it's a lot to wrap your brain around.
I went down to the pub this evening for, I thought, the last beer and board games meet for some time. No one was there. I had got the day wrong. The reason people meet for board game there is that it is usually almost deserted. The landlord is my accountant's brother, and the accountant drops in most evenings to help keep the business afloat. He and his wife, three other people and I were all of the custom. I sat quietly to one side and listened.
The landlord ran through any number of Trumpish conspiracy theories: that it was a Chinese plot against the West is the one I remember most clearly; also it's all a huge fuss about nothing. This was very obviously a recital of things he needed to be true because otherwise his already comorbid business would tank. But it was still a little frightening to realise how much and for what pressing reasons people want to believe that crap.
I decided this would be my last shot at normalcy for some time. Self isolation apart from mother and sister, a little shopping, and possibly my friends F&J. I reckon that limits my potential guilt to my mother (old); everyone else in her care home; my sister (immunocompromised, she says); and a couple of distinguished Christian intellectuals who ought to be OK until the NHS collapses because they're not in a risk group. She has been celebrating communion of course, with lots of people, sharing a cup, exchanging the peace, but for the most part with tiny congregations in the cathedral ... Perhaps this disease is God's way of showing that he's bored of large evangelical congregations.
I keep whipsawing back and forth. Do I need to calm down, or is it time to panic? I'm still scheduled to fly across the country next week. It's irresponsible and at this point probably an outright antisocial act, but M is bent on going -- he has a meeting with a museum which he is unwilling to cancel (is the museum even going to be still open by then?) -- and superstitiously I feel like if I go too it's less likely something bad will happen.
I figure the most likely bad outcome is that we get stuck in a quarantine or travel is suspended, which is mostly fine -- we don't have kids, and I'll take my computer and can still work from wherever I am. We are as likely to catch the CV here as there, except for the 20 hours or so that we'll be spending in planes and airports and so forth. I suppose the most likely bad outcome is what Minivet says in 127, that we're defying the categorical imperative and also acting as disease vectors. Ugh, I don't know.
"Biden/Sanders getting sick, since they are required to be around people for the next few months."
I TOLD ALL YOU MFERS I HAD A PLAN DIDNT I.
I talked to a colleague who should know better, but is nevertheless somewhat right-adjacent, and he was going on about how its an over reaction and people shouldn't be panicking and if there is going to be a recession its because of panic and over-reaction, not the actual virus. And its just going to kill the most vulnerable demographics anyway.
So, yeah.
And on the other end, I'm on a mailing list with someone who was just speculating about how the deployment of 5G networks contributed to the situation in Italy, and wondered if Wuhan was used for testing of 5G. Also not helpful.
I am actually really kind of relieved to see the response. I don't/didn't think it would be that severe, but the consequences of being wrong are high. It's still a pretty fucked up response, because our government is a dumpster fire, but this looks like a legitimate, responsible course of action to close things. I wonder how much is private/state level response vs federal.
Basically all public universities in MI are online only but the dorms remain open, with added measures to try to keep food service safe. There are two cases (out of a lot tested, surprisingly). The governor just declared a state of emergency and gave a televised address.
That said, we'd gotten tickets for the Frozen Four, the NCAA hockey final, in Detroit this April. It's going to be played in an empty area; I assume we'll get refunds. I'm selfishly kind of bummed, even though I think it's the right call. A doctor friend holding the same tickets thinks it's ridiculously premature to cancel a month out, but he's also a bigger hockey fan than I am.
If Larry Kudlow gets a fatal case of COVID, I will never again make fun of Jewish people for celebrating the deaths of their enemies from disease for millennia.
Nobody answered Mossy's question in 32 above. I too would be in the market for a good flu book.
It's all going to be better now due to the President's leadership.
Holy Fuck what a world.
So he said "Oh Fuck" on the C-Span feed which was broadcasting a bit early? Best line of his presidency. or as George Conway* said: "It's okay--tens of millions of people at home were saying the same thing."
*I know, I know.
Someone claimed that is what he said but then C-Span clip I saw was not that.
And now Tom Hanks has the virus. Not Tom Hanks!
Yeah, something seems off about it. The President is known for his decorum and never swearing.
242, 38. John Barry's is a good popular work though he has a stylistic tic that bothered me and that his editors should have fixed. Gina Kolata's focuses mainly on the post-pandemic work to track down what caused it (it wasn't H. influenzae). I like Alfred Crosby's older book best (it has a revised edition from 2003). It's by an environmental historian (he wrote The Columbian Exchange) and reads as work by an historian who can write for a general audience.
Thanks. I say that Barry book as the first hit on Amazon, but wasn't willing to pull the trigger. I may try Crosby.
The Columbian Exchange looks more interesting.
I have a cunning plan to let the Pirates be tied for first in their division in May.
The first fruits of Brexit. British people can move down a peg on Trump's list.
yeah 251 is more concerning than a number of other developments
Honestly, I'm most worried about shutting off travel in half-assed ways.
260: oh, I filed that under "this administration is being run by idiots". The NBA thing though, was "a bunch of really, really rich people who stood to lose quite a bit of money agreed this is a good idea". I'm assuming their information is better than mine (you would think I would assume the same of this administration, but no).
NB in 261 I obviously assume the administration has *access* to the best current information.
At least we'll get a great cameo when Tom Hanks plays himself in the movie version.
We cancelled our road trip. I am overwhelmed with emotion - what if my parents die and this would have been the last chance to see them? But I just got too nervous that one of the kids could be carrying it or something.
Tom Hanks is 102. Even with the nicest ventilator in Australia, that's a concern.
I guess an NBA star tested positive.
I am constantly reminding myself about Megan's advice that the waiting for the shit to hit the fan is the worst part, even worse than the shit actually hitting the fan.
I bet the fan prefers the waiting.
Also what a hilariously gross metaphor. How have I never reflected on that before? Even with the Leslie Nielson humor, I hadn't really considered the full splatter implied.
266 : right. but the response was "shut it down" not "we can manage this". I'm not disagreeing, mind, it's just telling.
My high school was not air conditioned. To provide air circulation, they would put a giant fan, on a pole so that the hub as about eye-level for a freshman, at each end of the hall. There were also water fountains at each end of the hall. We learned to watch out.
The NBA can make missteps, their reaction to the Morey thing this summer was morally wrong, but the people running it are very smart. I'd feel a lot better if Adam Silver were running the country.
272 I wouldn't trust them morally on basically anything, but for self interest - absolutely.
Well, self-interest for the NBA often overlaps with morality on US issues. It's very international and very African-American.
I got over my panicky read everything bit around the time I sent my first post in approximately 73 subjective years ago.
Meanwhile here in Japan the head of the preparatory committee, a rugby-playing former prime minister who looks like a particularly stupid bull and has the intellect to match, is saying that the Olympics will still definitely take place, and one of his underlings who suggested putting them off for a year or two has been forced to make a public apology. Pretty much the entire country is rolling its eyes.
Speaking of fantasy, NYT (Karni/Haberman) sort of captures some of the gobsmackedness of the Oval Office Speech and Trump's response in general* but still ...
But his measured tone belied the frustration Mr. Trump has been venting behind closed doors in recent days over the spread of coronavirus, the tumbling financial markets it has caused and the blame he has directed at Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, for not making more moves to reduce the economic effect.
His "measured tone"!!!???!!! For God's sake.
Also:
There were also surprising -- and significant -- inaccuracies in the speech, which administration officials and the president had to clarify almost immediately afterward.
Surprising! (And see their own reporting later in the article below.)
*For instance--buried deep in the article but at least clsoer to "lied" than they usually allow themselves:
For his part, Mr. Trump has continually made false statements and misinformed the public about the severity of a virus that has left at least 37 people in the United States dead. Instead, his focus has been on repeating how well he thinks the response has gone rather than focusing on the response itself.
WaPo renders the tone much more accurately:
He spoke with a curious affect, his voice sounding raspy.
Someone on Twitter claims that the GOP has given instructions to call it the Chinese or Wuhan virus. It's what Fox News is doing anyway and sounds extremely plausible, but no actual evidence.
It's obvious trolling designed to provoke liberal reactions so that conservatives can think that liberals care more about playing the race card than they do about public health. Then, in a little while, there will be a narrative spun that the GOP had wanted to take harsher measures to protect America but liberals were too concerned about seeming racist.
It's obvious trolling designed to provoke liberal reactions so that conservatives can think that liberals care more about playing the race card than they do about public health. Then, in a little while, there will be a narrative spun that the GOP had wanted to take harsher measures to protect America but liberals were too concerned about seeming racist.
I get a different read. I'd say it's about directing attention away from Tromp & co.'s incompetence and onto those sneaky furriners. It lets the R's off the hook while simultaneously proving we need to keep the father-figure R's in power to protect us.
You say these things as if they're mutually exclusive. Also as if someone actually knows what the fuck they're doing, even in an evil sense.
285: Yes, I did see that today. The clip I saw was from after with a weird "Oh Kay."
It was because he got an ink spot on his shirt.
He's probably not used to writing.