Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Everybody saw this coming.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Monday/Tuesday, March 30/31

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Monday/Tuesday, March 30/31

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  1. 1.

    La Nonna

    Week 4 of self imposed isolation here in Puglia, Italy finally possibly turning a corner.  I was reduced to tears early this morning while reading the John Prine post and listening to Joan Baez sing Hello In There.  Just pent up anxiety, not so much for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren in the US, knowing that whatever happens we will not be together for good or ill for many months, perhaps another year.  Video calls helping for sure.  Getting masked and gloved to set out on another grocery run, thank goodness no hoarding or panic buying here, rural Italy still feeding us just fine, it’s asparagus season, 2 eu per kg., frittata tonight.  Grazie mille to all bloggers here for helping me maintain a semblance of sanity while staying informed.

  4. 4.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Amir Khalid:   I am never in the mood for April Fools day.   Let’s all go around and tell lies for a day.

    Today, March 31, is a holiday in California, not that anyone can tell the difference these days.

  5. 5.

    Uncle Cosmo

    Latest communiqué from my friend Milan in the suburbs of Prague: They are in near-complete lockdown – people can leave home for food & Rx but must be masked. “Olds” get to go to the local supermarkets from 10 am – noon.  He continues:

    I go & buy some eatables 1-2 times per week, first, I don’t have much storage space and, second, things would rot if I keep them too long. Basically, everybody has backed into his home shell, and the city is deserted – have a look here: https://www.respekt.cz/galerie/praha-v-karantene

    I’ve stayed with him many times & he’s not joking about the lack of storage space. Fortunately there are 2 supermarkets within easy walking distance of his flat.

    Click on that link for midday views of Prague like you’ve never seen it before: Deserted. Anyone who’s been there (and fought their way through the tourist mobs most any time of year) will be stunned. It reminds me of the montage late in the movie Before Sunrise – silent stills of places Jesse and Céline visited during the night, empty and gray and drained of their magic in the cold light of dawn.

  8. 8.

    Jim Parish

    Why is the sign on the Pyramids in English, as opposed to Arabic? Are they aiming at tourists? Are they cycling through different languages?

  9. 9.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @La Nonna: Very glad that Italy seems to have seen the inflection point. If Wuhan and Lombardia can turn the corner even after massive community transmission has started, so can greater Madrid and NYC. The process is long and often feel dark, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. It takes perseverance, rigor and discipline from all levels of government and society.

  10. 10.

    Amir Khalid

    For those not familiar with Indian English, a lakh is 100,000. That is, the Hindustan Times tweet says Indian Railways’ prototype isolation coaches can carry a total of 300,000 beds.

  12. 12.

    Amir Khalid

    @Jim Parish:

    What I’m wondering is, why bother with a sign? The tourist sites are surely all closed. Who is going to be at the pyramids to see it?

  14. 14.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Baud: “Dump has ruined lying.” LOL I never thought of it that way.

    “I would lie to you, but then I’d feel like an orange Soviet shitpile mobster manchild who was responsible for thousands of deaths.”

  15. 15.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Uncle Cosmo: Wow! Charles Bridge without a soul and Old Town Square deserted! I have very fond memories of Prague, despite being overrun with East Asian tourists at the time of my visit.

  18. 18.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @YY_Sima Qian: It takes perseverance, rigor and discipline from all levels of government and society.

    So what you’re saying is, we’re screwed.

  19. 19.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Uncle Cosmo:  I love Prague. I have only had two very brief visits, and both times it was “butts to nuts” , as my brother often says when describing crowded places. I am no expert, but I probably heard more than two dozen languages spoken when I was there. So strange to see it practically empty.

  20. 20.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @OzarkHillbilly: I think most places will eventually get there, after faced with the undeniable calamity of the epidemic, but some sooner than others. The longer it takes to get the act together, the longer and darker and more painful the road. All of the nations in Europe and North America had the chance to be Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan (or the non-Hubei provinces in China, for that matter), and missed it. They could have been South Korea, and missed it. In a couple of weeks, places will be regretting that they could have been Wuhan! It’s never too late to respond to an epidemic. A strict lock down will immediately slow transmission, no matter how widespread it is. However, if democratically elected establishment leaders fail to get their act together, at some point charismatic maverick authoritarians will swoop in to fill the vacuum as self-styled saviors.

  21. 21.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Baud:   That is objectively funny.

    Someone should explain the concept of April Fools Day to him.  It might cause his circuitry to fail like Norman’s did when confronting a liar saying he is lying.

  22. 22.

    Princess

    Wouldn’t it make more sense to warn people to stay home on the pyramids in Egypt in Arabic rather than English? or is this just a PR instagram/social media stunt they are doing?

    Also, anyone, any website, any news organization who tries an April Fool’s joke on my tomorrow is cancelled by me forever.

  23. 23.

    Sloane Ranger

    Just looking at the BNO chart and assuming it’s accurate, I can’t get over the wide differences in death rates between countries. If these hold and aren’t just a factor of where individual nations are in the progress of the pandemic, researchers are going to spend lots of time trying to find out why this happened. Is it demographics, what actions Governments took or didn’t take and/or when they took them, effectiveness of national health provision, something else? I wonder what the answer will be?

  24. 24.

    WereBear

    @Sloane Ranger:  Is it demographics, what actions Governments took or didn’t take and/or when they took them, effectiveness of national health provision, something else? I wonder what the answer will be?

     
    According to two prominent doctors in a FNYT op-ed recently, Americans are far too sick to go back to work.

    When only 20% of young adults meet the lab markers of “functional metabolism” we can’t lift lockdown any time soon.

  25. 25.

    Sloane Ranger

    @WereBear: I did wonder if comparative health was a factor in China having such a low rate of mortality among children and young people. We all know that obesity leads to other health issues and I suspect that Europe has a higher level of obesity and morbid obesity that China and the US probably has higher rates of both than Europe.

    But I’m not a Doctor so what do I know?

  26. 26.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Sloane Ranger: A combination of factors: Italy and Spain (CFR ~ 10%) have older demographics with higher mortality rates, overwhelmed medical systems not being able to effective treat as many people, as well as lab capacity constrains that forced them to primarily test people who are worse enough to be hospitalized (thus decreasing the denominator). Some of that is happening in NYC right now. At the opposite end of the spectrum, South Korea has a much younger infected population (especially among the members of the cult), and a medical system that was locally stressed but not overwhelmed, and very thorough testing and contact tracing that found most of the mild and some of the asymptomatic cases (increasing the denominator). For a while, South Korea had < 0.5% CFR, as they were finding infected cases to add to the denominator, and few patients had progressed to death to add to the numerator. Now, as SK is adding few cases and more of the active cases are reaching resolution, so CFR has slowly creeped up to 1.6% and still rising, and may end up near 2%. Germany is just SK a month ago, with similar dynamics, at a larger scale.

    Within China, Wuhan was a less severe version of Lombardia (CFR ~ 5.6%, also missed many mild cases due to lack of testing capacity before Feb. 12), but only less severe because of a massive effort to convert most of the public hospitals in the city to COVID-19 only with thousands of ICU bed, building 2 temporary hospitals with 2600 ICU beds in two weeks, and adding 16 makeshift facilities for quarantine and medical observation of ~ 20K mild cases. Not to mention the 42K medical personnel from the rest of China to staff these facilities. The rest of Hubei province was a less severe version of Wuhan (CFR ~ 3.5%). The rest of the Chinese provinces (CFR ~ 1%) ranged from a few dozen cases in some, to a few hundred in others, to under two thousand in the worse hit ones. They could bring significant medical resources and expertise to bear for each patient to keep them alive. Hospitals in the province of Jiangsu actually performed double lung transplants on two patients with several co-morbidities, just to keep the CFR 0 for the province. There was an unspoken competition among the provinces.

  27. 27.

    VOR

    I made the mistake of looking in a comments section on a Trump tweet. The consensus among Trumpies seems to be that the death toll from COVID is exaggerated. They claim Blue states are assigning COVID status postmortem so every death, from any cause, is a COVID death. The goal is to make Trump look bad, of course. It’s still all a hoax and hysteria propagated by the MSM to attack the Great Leader.

    This is going to get really ugly when the bodies start piling up in Red States and rural areas.

  28. 28.

    susanna

    At a glance, the BNO information is useful and better overall, imo.  Yet I’m unable to identify “Who are they?” so far.

    Anyone here able to clarify?

    Thank you!

  30. 30.

    SFAW

    @VOR:

    This is going to get really ugly when the bodies start piling up in Red States and rural areas.

    I can envision (at least) two types of responses from the RWMFs when that happens:

    1) “Well, at least more of those damn urban-types died than we did.”

    2) “The Lie-berals and the MSM are the reason Dear Leader was prevented from saving us, so let’s start shooting them.”

    3) “But her e-mails.” [OK, technically, that would be coming from the FTFTFNYT et al., not the run-of-the-mill RWMFs.]

  31. 31.

    Another Scott

    @YY_Sima Qian: I saw a report that one of the reasons why Spain’s infection rate is so high is because of mass rallies during and around International Women’s Day (Sunday March 8).

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43324406

    Women workers in Spain are marking International Women’s Day with an unprecedented strike targeting gender inequality and sexual discrimination.

    Unions said 5.3 million women had joined the 24-hour strike, backed by 10 unions and some of Spain’s top women politicians.

    Hundreds of thousands of women have joined street protests across Spain, shouting “if we stop, the world stops”.

    Events marking the day are being held in dozens of other nations.

    […]

    :-(

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  32. 32.

    Fair Economist

    @La Nonna: Glad you are hanging in there, and now I’m going to look for some asparagus!

    This is hard on us, but I was just thinking that similar confinements used to be the norm in rural areas in far northern climates – but they didn’t have the internet. So while it feels rough, we should come out OK in the end – and the “Spring” will feel wonderful!

  34. 34.

    Fair Economist

    Imperial College has a paper out estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions in Europe.

    Takeaway messages:

    Interventions are worth it. 20,000-120,000 lives saved at present. This number will increase very rapidly in the near future as the lives potentially lost explodes into the millions.

    Virus is more infectious than generally thought, with an R0 of 3.86, as opposed to 2.5-3.0 in the existing “paper consensus” (including the previous IC paper). Control may be more difficult. If we’re lucky, this is because masks are widely used in China where most earlier data came from, but not in the West.

    Stay at Home orders barely adequate for control and inadequate for suppression. The Italian March 11 “Lockdown” (really more a stay at home order) is estimated to have reduced R0 to around 1 – meaning the epidemic will continue at a steady level (although error bars are large). Suppression needs it to shrink. This was later extended to more of a lockdown on March 21, and that will probably be adequate (my conclusion; not in the paper) – but that’s more than any state is doing in the US.

    One speculative hope on my part is that stay-at-home orders (or lockdowns) may deliver more benefit over time. Initially stay at home reduces transmission between households, but increases transmission within it. After one or two transmission intervals, though, either everybody in each household will have caught it, or none will have it. At this point the benefit to prolonged stay at home will increase.

  35. 35.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Fair Economist: 75 – 80% of transmissions in Wuhan were within household, after the lock down. Wuhan had to convert arenas and conferences centers into makeshift facilities for quarantine and medical observation/treatment of mild cases, to really knock down the curve and shorten the duration of the epidemic. Quarantine  of suspect cases and close contacts are also critical. These isolation and quarantine measures were also successfully employed in South Korea. Self-isolation of mild cases is not enough.

  36. 36.

    joel hanes

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    morels

    Oh, man.

    Back in 1971 when the Iowa elms were standing dead in on the hillsides, a friend took me out to a pasture where we found, between the wide-spaced skeletal trees, enough morels to fill two grocery bags and still leave most of them unpicked.

    Sliced, dusted with flour, fried in butter …

  37. 37.

    charon

    “I wonder what the answer will be?”

    @Sloane Ranger:

    Check out this piece, see the sort of advice the Administration is getting and listening to:

     

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration?irclickid=1nG2cDz78xyORC7wUx0Mo3cjUki0spWoES1TzA0&irgwc=1&source=affiliate_impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_Viglink%20Primary&utm_source=impact-affiliate&utm_medium=27795&utm_campaign=impact&utm_content=Subscribe%20to%20The%20New%20Yorker%20Now%20and%20Get%2012%20issues%20for%20%246%20%2B%20Free%20tote%21&utm_brand=tny

  38. 38.

    MoCA Ace

    @VOR:

    This is going to get really ugly when the bodies start piling up in Red States and rural areas.

    Any thoughts on which red state starts dumping bodies in unmarked graves by cover of darkness to keep the numbers down and own the libs?

    I think this snark.

  39. 39.

    J R in WV

    @joel hanes:

    Sad but true that morels are really common around reall big dead trees, abandoned orchards, they appear to especially like dying fruit trees. They grow underground and the roots of the trees are their food source. The ‘shrooms we fry and eat are just the sporulating bodies with which they reproduce.

  40. 40.

    hotshoe

    @Jerzy Russian:

    Lord, I live here and I didn’t even know.
    Cesar Chavez Day
    Since it’s a state legal holiday, state offices and schools would have been closed for it, if they weren’t already closed for Covid-19.

    But in this valley ranching/crop growing little town, City Hall is still open. About one minute ago I saw two workers leaving City Hall for lunch break (but not too close together — they had to speak loudly to talk to each other — so maybe at least a little of the state’s keep-your-distance campaign is sinking in for the good ol’ boys and girls around here.

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