[News] Coronavirus

A place to discuss the now-global coronavirus outbreak.

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:
AUs_TBirD wrote:
Jonman wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

protesters have also been pretty rigorous about mask us, and re-openers... are not.

This.

My friends that were at the protests were bathing in hand sanitizer the whole time they were on the protest lines.

Or...
Next up on Fox News: Pepper spray and tear gas work on the virus.

We've discovered the secret to the Hong Kong miracle!

I mean, that could possibly be true if not the right lesson from that. Those chemicals are obviously pretty harsh.

"So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's pepper spray or just a very powerful tear gas — and I think you said that hasn't been checked because of the testing," Trump said, speaking to Bryan during the briefing. "And then I said, supposing you brought the pepper spray inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."

A bunch of Texas bar owners staged a Bar Lives Matter protest.

A Texas bar owner who is one of several currently suing Gov. Greg Abbott (R) over reimposed restrictions on bars organized a “Bar Lives Matter” concert and protest Sunday.

Tee Allen Parker, owner of The Machine Shed Bar & Grill in Kilgore, about two hours southeast of Dallas, hosted the gathering outside the bar Sunday. A second protest is planned on the steps of the capitol in Austin Tuesday, according to KLTV, a local ABC affiliate.

“You can’t tell me that my tiny little bar is the problem. He’s the problem,” Parker, who is one of multiple Texas bar owners who have banned the wearing of masks in their establishments, said of Abbott in an interview with The Washington Post. “He’s targeting us, and it’s discrimination.”

AMC pushed opening back 2 more weeks to the end of July.

Stele wrote:

AMC pushed opening back 2 more weeks to the end of July.

lol

Why are they bothering?

DSGamer wrote:
Stele wrote:

AMC pushed opening back 2 more weeks to the end of July.

lol

Why are they bothering?

Are you talking in the larger sense or just this in particular?

They’re on the verge of bankruptcy apparently and might not reopen at all.

kazar wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
Stele wrote:

AMC pushed opening back 2 more weeks to the end of July.

lol

Why are they bothering?

Are you talking in the larger sense or just this in particular?

I just see things like this and I don't understand what difference those 2 weeks will make. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Movie theaters should definitely not be open. What's going to change in 2 weeks?

CEO's gotta get those bonuses somehow. Ahem I mean they are opening for the employees benefit.

Do we even know at what concentration of the virus is the most infectious? Is it any minuscule amount? Because it seems like either we are all just very lucky or it needs some a measurable amount in order to infect.

Have we done studies to compare it to other viruses with things like rate of infection stage severity? Because deadliness is meaningless if we don't consider many factors. Is something more or less deadly if it is more likely to kill you at advanced stages but takes longer to get there versus something less likely to kill you but doesn't always present in infected people and ramps to advanced stages in mere days?

It probably goes back to lack of leadership at the national level but it seems like we aren't asking a lot of helpful questions. We aren't communicating findings that can guide the public and limit this impact of selfishness and lack of intestinal fortitude.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/mxTFcye.png)

DSGamer wrote:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/mxTFcye.png)

Sorry, that sounds like commie talk.
We'll freedum our way to victory.

ruhk wrote:

They’re on the verge of bankruptcy apparently and might not reopen at all.

Their public statement about a possible bankruptcy is nothing but rumours. I'm sure they're hurting, but not as bad as some of the initial reports were about.

DSGamer wrote:
kazar wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
Stele wrote:

AMC pushed opening back 2 more weeks to the end of July.

lol

Why are they bothering?

Are you talking in the larger sense or just this in particular?

I just see things like this and I don't understand what difference those 2 weeks will make. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Movie theaters should definitely not be open. What's going to change in 2 weeks?

It had nothing to do about the pandemic except it caused a stack of movies to be pushed by 2 weeks so they moved their reopening to match.

FYI Regal is also now on the same schedule.

Rodent-themed foodertainment chain and disease incubator files for Chapter 11 restructuring.

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

Rodent-themed foodertainment chain and disease incubator files for Chapter 11 restructuring.

Now every child shall feel the disappointment and sadness I felt back in 1989.

fangblackbone wrote:

Do we even know at what concentration of the virus is the most infectious? Is it any minuscule amount? Because it seems like either we are all just very lucky or it needs some a measurable amount in order to infect.

Have we done studies to compare it to other viruses with things like rate of infection stage severity? Because deadliness is meaningless if we don't consider many factors. Is something more or less deadly if it is more likely to kill you at advanced stages but takes longer to get there versus something less likely to kill you but doesn't always present in infected people and ramps to advanced stages in mere days?

It probably goes back to lack of leadership at the national level but it seems like we aren't asking a lot of helpful questions. We aren't communicating findings that can guide the public and limit this impact of selfishness and lack of intestinal fortitude.

I'm not sure *exactly* what your question is, but maybe this will help: from what I've read (NOT a medical person, just a layperson that reads a lot, so), this is such a tricky virus because it goes from being an upper respiratory infection at first to a lower respiratory infection.

Upper respiratory infections spread easily, because they're in the nose and throat so a light sneeze or cough or just breathing is enough to get lots of virus out of you and into the air, and it only has to get as deep as someone else's throat or nose. But that also means you only get a runny nose or a sore throat.

Lower respiratory infections are dangerous because they're down in your lungs. But that also means they take a lot more to get out of you and into the air, and then they've got to get down into the other person's lungs. MERS and original SARS are more deadly, but also so much easier to contain because the lag between becoming infectious and becoming symptomatic is so much smaller than COVID-19--everything I've read says you're not infectious until you're symptomatic for those.

COVID-19 is so dangerous because it spreads with the ease and symptoms of the common cold, but does damage like the viruses that can cause pneumonia. Not nearly as deadly as original SARS or MERS, but so much more infectious, it's impossible to contain like those were. I think maybe that's the question you're asking?

to quote Fauci: "I’ve been dealing with viral outbreaks for the last 40 years. I’ve never seen a single virus — that is, one pathogen — have a range where 20% to 40% of the people have no symptoms," he told a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on the Trump administration's response to the novel coronavirus pandemic."

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

Rodent-themed foodertainment chain and disease incubator files for Chapter 11 restructuring.

The URL mentions Chuck Cheese. I'm surprised they didn't go with the more formal Charles Cheese.

fangblackbone wrote:

Do we even know at what concentration of the virus is the most infectious? Is it any minuscule amount? Because it seems like either we are all just very lucky or it needs some a measurable amount in order to infect.

Have we done studies to compare it to other viruses with things like rate of infection stage severity? Because deadliness is meaningless if we don't consider many factors. Is something more or less deadly if it is more likely to kill you at advanced stages but takes longer to get there versus something less likely to kill you but doesn't always present in infected people and ramps to advanced stages in mere days?

It probably goes back to lack of leadership at the national level but it seems like we aren't asking a lot of helpful questions. We aren't communicating findings that can guide the public and limit this impact of selfishness and lack of intestinal fortitude.

My pulmonologist told me that, as he suspected, he had seen data or studies showing that how much virus you get blasted with can effect how bad it gets.

But I don’t think we really know yet.

Each link may be of interest - some links have multiple off shoots that you can follow down a rabbit hole as you desire.

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-tech...

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-tech...

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-tech...

https://www.dhs.gov/publication/st-m...

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-tech...

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-tech...

https://www.dhs.gov/publication/st-r...

No we dont know the infectious dose, but yes we are trying to determine what it is. The viral dose is much lower than was expected which may be an indicator of why it is in fact so infectious.

Where this work was done: https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-tech...

Where's the insult to us mask wearers?

You know we're days away from some evangelical asshat declaring masks the Mark of the Beast.

That hasn't happened already? I mean 2 of those Florida women sort of covered that already with "blocking God's breath" and "demon laws".

I mean, it’s hard to argue that mask wearers aren’t more rational, the evidence being (of course) that they wear masks during a saliva-borne pandemic...

We are so f*cked.

Hollowed-Out Public Health System Faces More Cuts Amid Virus

AP and Kaiser Health News wrote:

The U.S. public health system has been starved for decades and lacks the resources to confront the worst health crisis in a century.

Marshaled against a virus that has sickened at least 2.6 million in the U.S., killed more than 126,000 people and cost tens of millions of jobs and $3 trillion in federal rescue money, state and local government health workers on the ground are sometimes paid so little that they qualify for public aid.

They track the coronavirus on paper records shared via fax. Working seven-day weeks for months on end, they fear pay freezes, public backlash and even losing their jobs.

Since 2010, spending for state public health departments has dropped by 16% per capita and spending for local health departments has fallen by 18%, according to a KHN and Associated Press analysis of government spending on public health. At least 38,000 state and local public health jobs have disappeared since the 2008 recession, leaving a skeletal workforce for what was once viewed as one of the world’s top public health systems.

KHN and The Associated Press sought to understand how decades of cuts to public health departments by federal, state and local governments has affected the system meant to protect the nation’s health.

KHN and AP interviewed more than 150 public health workers, policymakers and experts, analyzed spending records from hundreds of state and local health departments, and surveyed statehouses. On every level, the investigation found, the system is underfunded and under threat, unable to protect the nation’s health.

...

Ohio’s Toledo-Lucas County Health Department spent $17 million, or $40 per person, in 2017.

Jennifer Gottschalk, 42, works for the county as an environmental health supervisor. When the coronavirus struck, the county’s department was so short-staffed that her duties included overseeing campground and pool inspections, rodent control and sewage programs, while also supervising outbreak preparedness for a community of more than 425,000 people.

When Gottschalk and five colleagues fell ill with COVID-19, she found herself fielding calls about a COVID-19 case from her hospital bed, then working through her home isolation. She stopped only when her coughing was too severe to talk on calls.

“You have to do what you have to do to get the job done,” Gottschalk said.

Now, after months of working with hardly a day off, she said the job is wearing on her. So many lab reports on coronavirus cases came in, the office fax machine broke. She faces a backlash from the community over coronavirus restrictions and there are countless angry phone calls.

Things could get worse; possible county budget cuts loom.

But Toledo-Lucas is no outlier. Public health ranks low on the nation’s financial priority list. Nearly two-thirds of Americans live in counties that spend more than twice as much on policing as they spend on non-hospital health care, which includes public health.

More than three-quarters of Americans live in states that spend less than $100 per person annually on public health. Spending ranges from $32 in Louisiana to $263 in Delaware, according to data provided to KHN and AP by the State Health Expenditure Dataset project.

That money represents less than 1.5% of most states’ total spending, with half of it passed down to local health departments.

...

At times, the federal government has promised to support local public health efforts, to help prevent similar calamities. But those promises were ephemeral.

Two large sources of money established after Sept. 11, 2001 — the Public Health Emergency Preparedness program and the Hospital Preparedness Program — were gradually chipped away.

The Affordable Care Act established the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which was supposed to reach $2 billion annually by 2015. The Obama administration and Congress raided it to pay for other priorities, including a payroll tax cut. The Trump administration is pushing to repeal the ACA, which would eliminate the fund, said Carolyn Mullen, senior vice president of government affairs and public relations at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat who championed the fund, said he was furious when the Obama White House took billions from it, breaking what he said was an agreement.

“I haven’t spoken to Barack Obama since,” Harkin said.

If the fund had remained untouched, an additional $12.4 billion would eventually have flowed to local and state health departments.

But local and state leaders also did not prioritize public health over the years.

In Florida, for example, 2% of state spending goes to public health. Spending by local health departments in the state fell 39%, from a high of $57 in inflation-adjusted dollars per person in the late 1990s to $35 per person last year.

In North Carolina, Wake County’s public health workforce dropped from 882 in 2007 to 614 a decade later, even as the population grew by 30%.

In Detroit, the health department had 700 employees in 2009, then was effectively disbanded during the city’s bankruptcy proceedings. It’s been built back up, but today still has only 200 workers for 670,000 residents.

Many departments rely heavily on disease-specific grant funding, creating unstable and temporary positions. The CDC’s core budget, some of which goes to state and local health departments, has essentially remained flat for a decade. Federal money currently accounts for 27% of local public health spending.

Years of such financial pressure increasingly pushed workers in this predominantly female workforce toward retirement or the private sector and kept potential new hires away.

More than a fifth of public health workers in local or regional departments outside big cities earned $35,000 or less a year in 2017, as did 9% in big-city departments, according to research by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the de Beaumont Foundation.

Even before the pandemic, nearly half of public health workers planned to retire or leave their organizations for other reasons in the next five years. Poor pay topped the list of reasons.

Armed with a freshly minted bachelor’s degree, Julia Crittendon took a job two years ago as a disease intervention specialist with Kentucky’s state health department. She spent her days gathering detailed information about people’s sexual partners to fight the spread of HIV and syphilis. She tracked down phone numbers and drove hours to pick up reluctant clients.

The mother of three loved the work but made so little money that she qualified for Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for America’s poorest. Seeing no opportunity to advance, she left.

“We’re like the redheaded stepchildren, the forgotten ones,” said Crittendon, 46.

Such low pay is endemic, with some employees qualifying for the nutrition program for new moms and babies that they administer. People with the training for many public health jobs, which can include a bachelor’s or master’s degree, can make much more money in the private health care sector, robbing the public departments of promising recruits.

Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, said the agency “intentionally underpaid people” in a training program that sent early-career professionals to state and local public health departments to build the workforce.

“If we paid them at the very lowest level at the federal scale,” he said in an interview, “they would have to take a 10-20% pay cut to continue on at the local health department.”

As low pay sapped the workforce, budget cuts sapped services.

...

When the fiercest of enemies showed up in the U.S. this year, the depleted public health army struggled to hold it back.

As the public health director for the Kentucky River District Health Department in rural Appalachia, Scott Lockard is battling the pandemic with 3G cell service, paper records and one-third of the employees the department had 20 years ago.

He redeployed his nurse administrator to work round-the-clock on contact tracing, alongside the department’s school nurse and the tuberculosis and breastfeeding coordinator. His home health nurse, who typically visits older patients, now works on preparedness plans. But residents aren’t making it easy on them.

“They’re not wearing masks, and they’re throwing social distancing to the wind,” Lockard said in mid-June, as cases surged. “We’re paying for it.”

Even with more staff since the HIV outbreak, Indiana’s Scott County Health Department employees worked evenings, weekends and holidays to deal with the pandemic, including outbreaks at a food packing company and a label manufacturer. Indiana spends $37 a person on public health.

“When you get home, the phone never stops, the emails and texts never stop,” said Hall, the preparedness coordinator.

All the while, she and her colleagues worry about keeping HIV under control and preventing drug overdoses from rising. Other health problems don’t just disappear because there is a pandemic.

“We’ve been used to being able to ‘MacGyver’ everything on a normal day, and this is not a normal day,” said Amanda Mehl, the public health administrator for Boone County, Illinois, citing a TV show.

Pezzino, whose department in Kansas serves Topeka and Shawnee County, said he had been trying to hire an epidemiologist, who would study, track and analyze data on health issues, since he came to the department 14 years ago. Finally, less than three years ago, they hired one. She just left, and he thinks it will be nearly impossible to find another.

While epidemiologists are nearly universal in departments serving large populations, hardly any departments serving smaller populations have one. Only 28% of local health departments have an epidemiologist or statistician.

Strapped departments are now forced to spend money on contact tracers, masks and gloves to keep their workers safe and to do basic outreach.

Melanie Hutton, administrator for the Cooper County Public Health Center in rural Missouri, pointed out the local ambulance department got $18,000, and the fire and police departments got masks to fight COVID-19.

“For us, not a nickel, not a face mask,” she said. “We got [5] gallons of homemade hand sanitizer made by the prisoners.”

...

In most states, the new budget year begins July 1, and furloughs, layoffs and pay freezes have already begun in some places. Tax revenues evaporated during lockdowns, all but ensuring there will be more. At least 14 states have already cut health department budgets or positions or were actively considering such cuts in June, according to a KHN-AP review.

Since the pandemic began, Michigan temporarily cut most of its state health workers’ hours by one-fifth. Pennsylvania required more than 65 of its 1,200 public health workers to go on temporary leave, and others lost their jobs. Knox County, Tennessee, furloughed 26 out of 260 workers for eight weeks.

Frieden, formerly of the CDC, said it’s “stunning” that the U.S. is furloughing public health workers amid a pandemic. The country should demand the resources for public health, he said, just the way it does for the military.

“This is about protecting Americans,” Frieden said.

Cincinnati temporarily furloughed approximately 170 health department employees.

Robert Brown, chair of Cincinnati’s Primary Care Board, questions why police officers and firefighters didn’t face similar furloughs at the time or why residents were willing to pay hundreds of millions in taxes over decades for the Bengals’ football stadium.

“How about investing in something that’s going to save some lives?” he asked.

In 2018, Boston spent five times as much on its police department as its public health department. The city recently pledged to transfer $3 million from its approximately $60 million police overtime budget to its public health commission.

Looking ahead, more cuts are coming. Possible budget shortfalls in Brazos County, Texas, may force the health department to limit its mosquito-surveillance program and eliminate up to one-fifth of its staff and one-quarter of immunization clinics.

Teresa is a lawyer at a midsize firm here in St. Louis. She’s an appellate attorney and most of her work is research and writing, so working from home is working out well.

But it’s complicated. Most of the partners are of the mind that working from home is weak, worrying about the virus is weak, and they want the office opened. They had a date in June, but had to put it off because the building had not prepared. Now they have a July 8 target.

This worries Teresa’s for two reasons. One, if she gets sick, my odds of surviving are low. But, she is also in line to possibly be the managing partner in the next year or two when it comes up. Working from home could impact that. Worse, because the firm is pretty sexist, the first thing she noticed was that only women had signees up to stay working at home, and she doesn’t feel like she can if that’s the case. That did change, as more men also said they would work from home.

Yesterday one of the attorneys that never started working from home announced that he had gone to a bar with 8 friends, and they all have now tested positive. Today, it was confirmed he was, too.

That led to them sending home 10 employees that were exposed to him, and one has shown symptoms or tested positive. That lawyer’s boss is the guy they call the firm super spreader because he talks to everyone, thinks masks are lame, and is touchy-feely. He was not one of the 10 that went home. He’s still there.

She got a call from an attorney that has just let this partner in without a mask to talk to him in his office. The partner asked if he could leave the mask off, but the lawyer didn’t feel comfortable saying no because of job implications. Now he has to go home, and because of remodeling issues and three kids at home, it’s hard for him to be productive there.

They have three floors, but they aren’t restricting people to one floor, which would be better, so that one infection doesn’t spread to everyone.

But with 10, and now potentially more in quarantine, plus the possibility that some will get very sick, one guy going to a bar has now set the official opening of the office back indefinitely and upended a bunch of lives.

If that guy had been working from home, then his night out would have had less impact. And if he was a mask wearing guy, that might help, too.

And this is what it has been for me. Watch the data each day, see all the trends, see the bad thing happening, hearing all the excuses as to why this state is different, and then wait for it to get that bad before people react, knowing that waiting has made it that much worse.

Rinse, repeat.

Jayhawker wrote:

Teresa is a lawyer at a midsize firm here in St. Louis. She’s an appellate attorney and most of her work is research and writing, so working from home is working out well.

But it’s complicated. Most of the partners are of the mind that working from home is weak, worrying about the virus is weak, and they want the office opened. They had a date in June, but had to put it off because the building had not prepared. Now they have a July 8 target.

This worries Teresa’s for two reasons. One, if she gets sick, my odds of surviving are low. But, she is also in line to possibly be the managing partner in the next year or two when it comes up. Working from home could impact that. Worse, because the firm is pretty sexist, the first thing she noticed was that only women had signees up to stay working at home, and she doesn’t feel like she can if that’s the case. That did change, as more men also said they would work from home.

Yesterday one of the attorneys that never started working from home announced that he had gone to a bar with 8 friends, and they all have now tested positive. Today, it was confirmed he was, too.

That led to them sending home 10 employees that were exposed to him, and one has shown symptoms or tested positive. That lawyer’s boss is the guy they call the firm super spreader because he talks to everyone, thinks masks are lame, and is touchy-feely. He was not one of the 10 that went home. He’s still there.

She got a call from an attorney that has just let this partner in without a mask to talk to him in his office. The partner asked if he could leave the mask off, but the lawyer didn’t feel comfortable saying no because of job implications. Now he has to go home, and because of remodeling issues and three kids at home, it’s hard for him to be productive there.

They have three floors, but they aren’t restricting people to one floor, which would be better, so that one infection doesn’t spread to everyone.

But with 10, and now potentially more in quarantine, plus the possibility that some will get very sick, one guy going to a bar has now set the official opening of the office back indefinitely and upended a bunch of lives.

If that guy had been working from home, then his night out would have had less impact. And if he was a mask wearing guy, that might help, too.

And this is what it has been for me. Watch the data each day, see all the trends, see the bad thing happening, hearing all the excuses as to why this state is different, and then wait for it to get that bad before people react, knowing that waiting has made it that much worse.

Rinse, repeat.

If you could protect yourself, I would said this directly to St. Louis media. Jackassery like this is exactly what will continue to make something potentially manageable, not.

Yup. That has been the main thrust of many of Teresa’s calls today. These are are lawyers, and Teresa is having to explain simple things like why restricting people to one floor protects the firm.

She is also having to raise Hell that the second person confirmed with it is not being named. So no one knows if they interacted with this person. This followed an email that admonished them for mentioning the two positive cases they have to the front desk guard in passing.

I was worried about her going back before. But this is ridiculous. It sounds like they will push official opening until August now.

And people still don’t get why this level of spread is what is killing the economy. The shutdown is just the painful medicine to treat it. But, like any infection, letting slide turns it into a bigger and more expensive issue to deal with.

But again, we had to let it happen because freedom.