Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickle?”

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Consistently wrong since 2002

Republicans in disarray!

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

The revolution will be supervised.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

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

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update: Sunday/Monday, April 19-20

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update: Sunday/Monday, April 19-20

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Comprehensive update:

Source: New England Journal of Medicine…


Reader Interactions

26Comments

  2. 2.

    CapnMubbers

    Not to disparage Anne’s Coronavirus updates; they’re thorough, informative, and a daily read for me.

  4. 4.

    Amir Khalid

    I’m following Malaysian DG of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah’s daily media conference. The news is good. Only 36 new cases, the lowest daily number reported so far, and  no deaths in the 24 hours to noon. Running totals, 5,425 cases and 89 deaths. 98 patients declared recovered, running total 3,295 recovered — about 60% of the total cases recorded here.

    In reply to a reporters question, Dr Noor Hisham cites WHO saying the war on Covid-19 could run on into 2021. Also, he reminds us, there is not yet a vaccine, and there might not be for a year and a half; so public-health measures will need to stay in place even after the movement control order is lifted.

  5. 5.

    prostratedragon

    From further down in that thread about the New England Journal article:

    Sharon MacMillan, MD
    @SMacMillanMD
    Replying to
    @Cathy_Wood
    and
    @marynmck
    I started buying masks January first. Prices were normal, supply was plentiful.

    By mid January prices had shot up, because supplies were being bought up & shipped to Asia.

    Jan. 1, a box of 20 masks cost $11.
    ($0.55 /mask)

    Jan. 31, 10 masks were selling for $195.($19.50 /mask)

    Sounds like radical evil to me.

  8. 8.

    Amir Khalid

    While Trump is shaking his fist at China’s leadership to distract from his own failure of leadership, Malaysia currently has a small group of doctors from China visiting to compare notes with Malaysian counterparts and share best practices in treating Covid-19 patients. I know which approach I like better.

  10. 10.

    syphonblue

    Research suggests many people have had the coronavirus without any symptoms. That means it may turn out to be much less lethal than feared, but it will complicate decisions about returning to normal life.

    What an absolutely idiotic and dangerous headline from AP. The virus has killed 40,000+ in a month. This is absolutely lethal and should not complicate any decisions about reopening. The AP should be shamed publicly and loudly for this.

  11. 11.

    prostratedragon

    Remember the Beijing shopper from years ago? We now have the Denver nurses, one of whom is in the video here:
    Body on the line.

    @syphonblue:
    Saw that earlier and quite agree with you. And fwiw the study I saw, from Santa Clara, can better be interpreted as indicating that by far most of the population is still vulnerable.

  13. 13.

    SFAW

    Re: the Sargent tweet and article: I’m sure the MSM will start adopting some variation of “Trump either completely ignored the dangers of COVID-19 and lied all the time about it, or was spending so much time watching Fox/Hannity that he had — and has — no clue about it, or both. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the ‘stable genius’ is just too stupid to understand the problem.”

     

    Yeah, any day now ….

  14. 14.

    SFAW

    @Anne Laurie:

    Also, I don’t believe Trump can even make a fist with his tiny, flabby baby hands!

    Don’t be a jerk! Of COURSE he can make a fist! You just can’t see it with the unaided eye.

    ETA: Trigger warning! Brain bleach alert!

    The same can also be said re: determining his state of “arousal.”

  16. 16.

    YY_Sima Qian

    A handful of new domestic confirmed and asymptomatic cases are being added to the Harbin cluster in each of the past two days. The good news is that the local CDC has been able to trace the new cases to the existing cluster, so they are at least keeping abreast of the outbreak. The bad news is that the transmission vector between the currently thought of index patient (student returnee from the US) and the family living downstairs seem tenuous, is touching elevator buttons really enough to cause transmission? Another link that is scary is that one person was infected by another, after chatting face to face for 10 minutes at the entrance to a convenience store, while wearing a mask (not sure if the other person wore a mask, maybe one with a valve). Harbin also exported a case to the neighboring Inner Mongolia, not sure of the link to the Harbin cluster, yet.

    There is a second cluster in the city of Mudanjiang, where Suifenhe border crossing to Russia is located. A couple visited a local hospital for non-COVID illness, and ended up infecting a doctor and a nurse. It is the claimed by the authorities that the couple may have been infected by an imported case from Russia, but the case reports are not yet published. This marks the third nosocomial cluster in China over the past week or so. Two hospitals in Harbin and one in Mudanjiang, both in Heilongjiang Province, plus one in Qingdao in Shandong Province.

    Southern city of Shenzhen (facing Hong Kong), has added a confirmed and two asymptomatic cases from Wuhan and other cities in Hubei. In the past two days. Guangzhou found 13 asymptomatic cases yesterday, all connected to imported cases. Foshan near Guangzhou added a new domestic confirmed case, also connected to imported cases.

    These are the kind of reports people can look forward to after the epidemic has been suppressed, and life returns to some semblance of normal. Reading case reports, trying to push away the suspense and dread, wondering whether each developing cluster might quickly turn into a major outbreak.

    It will take fast turn around on testing, very rapid contact tracing and isolation of cases, and transparent sharing of information, to keep the second wave in check.

  17. 17.

    Tony Jay

    Over in the Land of Union Jack Themed Make-Believe it looks like Bozo Johnson’s brush with mortality was considerably worse than the Conservative Party PR flacks who constitute the bulk of the British Media have been letting on. I say this partly because of the recent twinklings of something approaching entry-level journalism among parts of our 4th Estate, signalling that this Government’s bottomless capacity for bullshit has begun to lose its luster, but mostly because of the recent article in The Times (no linkee to Murdoch’s Empire) informing the country’s slightly higher-end Tory voters (by which, of course, I mean to imply the editorial and management ranks of every other national newspaper) that the Funny Fat Man is really a lazy, self-centered prick responsible for leading the country into this corpse-filled ditch by ignoring the warning signs back in January, mugging off going to COBRA meetings (the top national emergency council) in favour of fund-raisers and holidays, and a load of other failures of character and imagination that have been common knowledge outside the right-wing media bubble, but will be news to those who have been fed a relentless diet of “Isn’t he doing well? Gawd Bless that big, brave boy!” stories since the fan started receiving inbound solids.

    In other words, Murdoch’s people seem to think that Flobalob is either quite a few weeks away from slipping back into the cosplay PM suit or he’s too physically fucked to ever remount the Throne of Poor People’s Bones, either way, they’re throwing him under the bus and revving up the engines for yet another Tory Leadership contest. I can’t see The Times doing this if there were any chance that Johnson will recover, it’s simply not how Tories operate. The utterly slimy Michael Gove, Murdoch’s bought and paid for cuckoo in the Tory nest, was out there backstabbing his ‘good friend Boris’ on the morning Politics Shows with variations on “You might think these facts reflect badly on the Prime Minister, but I’m sure most of them have perfectly credible explications… that Boris will be happy to give you just as soon as he returns from his extended convalescence.“, so that’s one hat in the ring. Gove has been careful to keep his purse-cheeked face away from the Daily Briefing podium as things have got worse, leaving all the shit to stick to less sinuous placemen like Foreign Secretary Dominic (head like a peanut, brain like a vacuum chamber) Raab and Health Secretary Matt (even he wants to slap his face) Hancock. The Chancellor, Rishi (small print, big profits) Sunak, had a brief moment of media-led stardust early on by virtue of being the guy who got to (belatedly, under protest) tell the nation everyone’s wage bill would be going on the national credit card , but the fact that all of his financial schemes turn out to be hollow PR stunts with little to no organisational body to them (you can take the boy out of Goldman Sachs, etc) has started to muddy up that hastily constructed reputation for competence. He’s also been fingered as joining Gove in pushing for the Lockdown to end so the pandemic can sweep away the nation’s eugenic deadwood quicker, so it looks like Gove is also positioning himself as the leader of the pro-Trumpist ‘Get Britain Back To Work” campaign, but as usual he’s not sticking his neck out without dragging someone else right along with him as cover.

    Meanwhile, people are dying and the NHS can’t cope, but who cares about that when there’s power-politics to be played?

    These fucking people.

  18. 18.

    Chris Johnson

    My hunch on how all this works is, covid-19 is indeed not ultra lethal like ebola, but it’s ultra contagious and what’s happening is people are getting increasingly swamped with it until they die. So it doesn’t matter that much if you’re ‘immune’: eventually, the mass of coronavirus in you WILL become so great that it’ll cause a problem, and failing to quarantine will only hasten that. And if you got it and are counting on antibodies, that’s only effective if environmental coronavirus doesn’t simply swamp your antibodies.

    So, the mean commie blue-state approach turns out to have its merits as there’s basically no good way to do half measures on social distancing, and an authoritarian (you could say ‘slave’) state like China that’s willing to just go NOPE and compel people to not interact socially, is one way to address the situation. I keep hearing how much China is lying and covering up their situation, but in this light you could say they’ve been lying AND are practicing an approach that’s capable of stopping the problem, both.

    More on the study of a homeless population where half had coronavirus and all were asymptomatic: suggests that you can have a massive viral population in you and so long as you’re not boosting it with social interactions you sort of keep it in check? I don’t know how many Balloon Juicers can say this but I have been homeless, briefly. It is LONELY and people don’t want to hang out with you when you’re that kind of desperate, and you don’t generally wind up loving the company of your fellow homeless either. Granted we’re talking about populations in shelters so they ARE together, but understand that if you’re homeless, you’re wary, you’re lonely, you’re not real huggy or hand-shakey and don’t have lots of scintillating conversations. It’s isolating, and I feel that’s an insight to help explain why that population could be not dying as fast as some others.

  20. 20.

    zzyzx

    @syphonblue: 

    Something can be both bad and still less dangerous than we initially feared.

    Now of course, this is still data that we don’t have and won’t for a while, so this is a best case hope, not something we actually know.

  21. 21.

    sdhays

    The chief executive of a MA hospital, outbid for PPE by the feds multiple times, cut a deal, paid extra, hired the trucks — and then was interrogated by the FBI and had to get his Congressperson to intervene to keep DHS from heisting the shipment.

    This shit is just enraging. Not so much the seizure aspect, but the fact that hospitals are BIDDING on PPE during a NATIONAL EMERGENCY. Nobody should be PROFITING on this. If we’re at war with the virus, we should act like it and the government should be buying everything and directing it to the hospitals at no cost.

  23. 23.

    ziggy

    Some very interesting commentary and tweets here, thanks for all that! I’ll have to come back later to digest all of it.

  24. 24.

    J R in WV

    Some times in a real emergency the best that people can be shows up to cope. Heroic work to save lives and keep people fed and cared for, that we see right now in every hospital. So many of our friends decided to go into nursing in the recent past! So proud of those folks.

    Other times — often the same times — in a real emergency the worst that people are shows up. Greedy profiteering monsters stealing PPE to resell, self identified ministers selling fake holy silver water to cure whatever, we’ve got them all right now!

    Our dear leader, pres. trump is showing that second group how it is done! Helping them out in every possible way!!

    What would we do without him?!?!!!

  25. 25.

    BrianM

    Re: “South Korea’s entire #CoronavirusOutbreak fatality total happens in the United States every 2 hours.“, Mr. Pedant (me) used the USA (eyeballed) and South Korean data to calculate it as more like 2.8 hours. Adjusted for population, it takes the USA a whopping 18 hours to reach South Korea’s total deaths.

  26. 26.

    Trapped Lurker

    Thank you, Anne Laurie, for these daily updates. I read them every day. It is good to have this source, and I just wanted to say I appreciate what you do, even though I almost never comment. The BJ commentariat is so full of knowledge and good writers. It’s a comfort.

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