I do pray, and I do agree with you. In fact, our former rector preached a sermon about just this topic, specifically in the context of how offensive it was for people to say "our thoughts and prayers are with the families" after each episode of gun violence. Prayer, he said, was about listening and getting the strength to go out and do things like changing gun laws.
Actually, unusually for the US, he was our vicar. The Bishop is our Rector.
Hey, Mossy, a friend in the field of infectious disease was praising the South African president's leadership on the crisis. She has lived there much of her life (she moved to the NYC area three weeks ago, poor thing), and is pretty well-informed on public health. Is the policy generally good but enforcement awful? Is there going to be high variability by city? I know Cape Town is known for having one of the highest rates of HIV and TB in the world and consequently a pretty good medical infrastructure to support clinical trials but also a very high risk population. Predictions?
The way people use this--I'm praying for you--is just a way of saying I sympathize with you and I am thinking of you--and can be a social nicetie. However, I think of personal prayer as a kind of meditation--it helps me deal with my emotions, put things in perspective, and ground myself. Like Bostoniangirl said, prayer should work to give you internal strength to fight for social justice (or currently, home school my children without murdering them, a talent their teachers have but I lack)
Actually, unusually for the US, he was our vicar. The Bishop is our Rector.
So who is your bishop?
Both 1 and 4 are describing a much more respectable prayer process than what I described.
5: Our diocesan Bishop. Our church didn't have enough money to support itself and contribute to the diocese, but it along with a couple of others was considered too important to close, so we're under the direct supervision of the Bishop, though we do have a Vestry/church council. The diocese does ask our input about what we would like, but the vicar is appointed by and works for the Bishop. Normally, a Rector is employed by the Church Wardens and Vestry.
Your vicar has, as Sam Johnson would put it, a bottom of good sense.
3: I've been out of country for years and don't track, so discount accordingly.
- I haven't been following Ramaphosa*, so I'll take your friend's word for it. Calling a lockdown looks like the right thing from here, anyway.
- Your friend might be worse off in NYC this month, but she'll definitely be better off over the next year.
- HIV and TB prevalence are nationwide, not just CT. Plus poor air quality. How Covid will affect HIV+ people on ARVs I've no idea.
- There are lots of good doctors and researchers and hospital units, but there aren't enough of them, even on a normal day.
- Abundant experience with TB** hopefully will pay some dividends with Covid (which OTOH may cause more TB infections, who knows).
- The HIV experience shows the state will be able to distribute treatments/vaccines when they become available at scale.
- Enforcement: the state in general and police in particular are not widely trusted, with good reason. Lockdown is probably the best policy, but given the state of policing it will inevitably be brutal.
I won't hazrd predictions. My guess at this point is there'll be essentially three epidemics:
- The rich (first infected, traveling in Europe). They can isolate in their houses, and most/all clusters will be identified during the lockdown. This may peak within the next two weeks or so and I imagine won't be very severe.
- The rural poor. I'm hoping there won't be many infection chains and the state will be able to interdict movement between settlements (if not within them) so there may be large clusters, but they'll be few and contained***.
- The urban poor. (The OP link talks about the highest density area in the country.) High-density, weakly governed, low social trust, lots of infection chains. Finding and isolating clusters will be hell and I seriously doubt the state will be able to do it fast enough. If there's going to be an explosion of cases we'll know in the next week; the first hospital to go under would be Chris Hani Baragwanath, if you want to stand watch.
*I have very low regard for him in general; he's one of the smarter kleptocrats, but kleptocrat nonetheless.
** I'm within 2 degrees of separation from 2 MDs killed by XDR TB.
*** This may be pure wishful thinking. Some of the rural settlements are vast, hundreds of km^2; "rural slums" as they're frequently called.
I'm pretty much an atheist for >50 years but I was raised a Methodist and went to church every Sunday until I went away to college. I still do pray every once in a while. Never for outcomes, though, but more to help internally with my own raging emotions. (1) dear lord give me strength to bear this and wisdom how to deal with it. (2) please protect my wife and children and give them strength and wisdom as in #1. and (3) probably the most important for me, to give thanks. Sometimes I realize how fortunate I have been and just doing good acts isn't enough, I feel the need to give thanks in some more general way.
When one of my children was on trial facing the possibility of mandatory minimum 10 year jail sentence, the only thing that kept me sane was getting on my knees at the side altar of a nearby Catholic Church (not an institution that I am fond of) and doing (1) and (2). And (3) when he was acquitted, when I thought my heart would burst and I cried and cried uncontrollably kneeling in front of the altar.
Prayer has a lot of useful functions. Many of them work regardless of God. Its not blasphemy to be aware of that.
The urban poor bit may be alarmist. Depends how much community spread there's been. Which, check back in a week.
And it may be Jhb Gen not Bara.
There urban poor across the world is what I'm worried about. That and the involuntarily confined.
Both situations in 15 have the potential to become horrific pretty fast.
Hey, the 'bad' description of prayer you start with sounds pretty good to me right now
Another country where this is likely to become a horrorshow is Mexico. AMLO is somehow managing to fuck this up even worse than Trump did (though maybe not quite as bad as Bolsonaro).
Ah yes, confirming my suspicion that I hadn't been keeping up with the news from Mexico because I really, really, really didn't want to know. Do we still have a commenter in Mexico City?
Also, wtf's with this?
On Sunday, after López-Gatell had already begun to urge Mexicans to stay indoors as much as possible, López Obrador flew to the northern state of Sinaloa. There, he tweeted a video praising the town of Badiraguato's landscaped median strip, with its newly planted flowers and palm trees. Badiraguato, of course, is not just any Sinaloan town but the birthplace of infamous drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. The setting was no coincidence. That afternoon, a video of López Obrador walking over to warmly greet Guzmán's 92-year-old mother--directly violating social distancing guidelines in the process--perplexed even his most dogmatic supporters.
COVID blitheness aside, is this meant to telegraph that he's made a deal with the cartels or something?
https://adamtooze.com/2020/03/29/crashed-to-corona-2-mapping-the-global-funding-squeeze/
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-24/coronavirus-china-inc-will-feel-dollar-squeeze-in-debt-payments
19 Who was the commenter in Mexico City?
24 Oh right, I forgot. They haven't been around in awhile. Hey Seeds, check in.
We're at 1075 confirmed cases. 3 fatalities, 979 active cases. There are days when it looks like they've flattened the curve here then a couple of days later and it shoots up again. There's an industrial area to the south of the capitol city that they've largely shut down.
The UAE is looking bad. I'm worried for Chani and my other friends there.
To be clear there are only slightly more cases in the UAE than here but the curve just keeps going up and Chani tells me many are ignoring the social distancing.
Arrakis gets it's money from natural gas so it's been pretty well insulated from the oil wars. I don't know about the UAE as a whole, but Dubai doesn't have much oil left anyway and has been hurting badly on account of the blockade. This is making it so much worse. I've heard the Dubai Expo 2020 which is a major deal there is to become the Dubai Expo 2021.
They are supposed to be putting a halt to all non-essential construction here, meaning I suppose construction on the stadiums and other infrastructure needed for the World Cup but I still here construction going on in my neighborhood. They need to get more serious and halt everything for 3 weeks.
10: Thanks for the outline, particularly where to watch. I have a few friendly acquaintances there I'm worrying about. I am more worried about TB/COVID-19 than HIV+ patients on ARVs. I'd kind of expect folks with latent TB to convert into active TB at higher rate, and folks with already damaged lungs from cured disease to struggle, but I dunno.
And you're right that clinical research definitely doesn't translate into ICU beds and critical care equipment, but I can't imagine the folks doing it would stay walled off in ivory towers, plus there should be a lot of PPE available. I just don't know how the rest of the country outside Cape Town would look or how goods and services could be distributed. I heard someone saying there are so many trials run in CT that it is hard to enroll patients in new trials who aren't already in another trial.
Re: prayer, I'm a pretty standard atheist, but I feel like right now, I keep finding new people to worry about. I am not a "send energy into the universe" sort or even a "good vibes" sort, but yeah, a way to do "And god bless Dr. Matt at his respiratory clinic and Dr. Brittany serving inner city patients and please protect Karen's sister who's dying of cancer anyway but this would be worse because no visitors and please let someone find a big stash of ventilators somewhere and maybe if you could, please let the plague run rampant through the people fucking up this response" and then stop thinking about it for a while might be nice. (I'm not normally a hamster-wheel worrier, but as I go about my day, I keep coming up with new things to worry about.)
The only times I can dimly remember praying, way back when Christian, were either pure rote bedtime-type stuff, or purely transactional. The one specific time I remember I was lost in a nature reserve. The praying did actually help me calm down and figure my way out.
20. Or that he has a new strategy to fight the cartels by making their mothers so sick they don't have time to shoot each other?
31: The other day I was watching Mitch McConnell and thinking that it would be worth it, to be infected with COVID, if I could then go and cough all over his doughy face.
It's hot, and flies are everywhere. Amid the barging and haggling, many people have removed their old and dirty masks and are wiping sweaty hands over sweaty faces. Amid the fruit stalls, a barber has set up shop and is cutting a customer's hair. Similar scenes play out in Quinta Crespo market, in the city's downtown, in Catia, in the west, and in Petare, in the east. Some people don't have enough money to buy more than a day's worth of food, and return to the markets again and again.
https://qz.com/africa/1831067/south-africas-hiv-researchers-are-turning-on-coronavirus
While walking the dog last night we passed a 3-4 bedroom house on the next block that college students rent. There were 17 cars parked in the driveway or on the lawn and another one pulling up. Thanks for undoing what the rest of us have been doing, guys.
41: Not sure it's a second wave as much as little flares at this point.
The flares we're being allowed to see, on top of the large numbers of asymptomatic cases we know were never quarantined, and the huge number of contagious patients released prematurely in Wuhan.
||
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-03/virus-lockdowns-are-reshaping-election-fight-for-senate-control|>
I saw a translated Portuguese news item that I'm pretty sure now is fake, that there had been a quiet coup against Bolsonaro and a general installed Acting President.
A Reddit commenter on that news (which Reddit removed the link to) item agrees it's fake, but says with some Reuters confirmation the entire government (Congress and Cabinet) have basically agreed to ignore him for decisionmaking purposes. Which is a weird situation, but not as bad as the US's, on the whole.
Ugh, and there are some good rebuttals to that commenter as also amplifying rumors. Just read the Reuters link, not him.
A bonfire of the populists would be so delightful. Almost worth the heaps of corpses.
To the South Africa conversation above - Ramaphosa's been good, but it's an unwinnable situation. You can't do lockdown in townships, not really. No one has enough food to last, and houses are too crowded. I've heard some interesting suggestions on how to modify it (lockdown by courtyard, not house, since people will mingle there anyway) but I don't think they've been enacted. And the legacy of police-public interactions is too toxic to fix in the timespan available now. South Africa is actually underpoliced by most metrics, but the post-apartheid police force is if anything more routinely violent towards the general public than the pre-1994 service.
Plus AIDS and TB. It's going to be a massive, massive shitshow. I disagree with Mossy about the AIDS experience - the last few years have shown that the state actually can't handle the logistics of drug distribution in much of the country. Maybe the networks of aid organizations will kick back in, but I doubt it, since SA won't be a global focal point for this pandemic. SA also has a high heart disease burden.
I can't think about it for more than 5 minutes at a time before getting legit panic attacks.
the last few years have shown that the state actually can't handle the logistics of drug distribution in much of the country.
I've been out of country. Any handy links on that would be appreciated.
A bonfire of the populists would be so delightful.
I am not yet ready to surrender the term "populist" to the shitheads, though I admit that it is looking increasingly necessary to do so.
This is from 2015: https://www.msf.org/south-africa-drug-shortages-threaten-progress-made-world%E2%80%99s-largest-hiv-programme. Stuff's gotten a tiny bit better since then - SA is definitely a case study in why you'd rather have a competent oligarch than an incompetent one - but shortages are still a persistent problem. They were relying on capacity from MSF and PEPFAR to distribute drugs, so when those partnerships ended, it turned out that the national health system was not entirely up for the job.
For example: https://www.health24.com/News/nationwide-arv-shortages-is-south-africa-heading-for-disaster-20181012, and https://allafrica.com/stories/201906120681.html.