Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Everybody saw this coming.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

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

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Sunday/Monday, April 26-27

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Sunday/Monday, April 26-27

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Actual expert, ‘Infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist’, endorses the NYTimes‘ hopeful editorial:


Test case, from overseas:

Less happy, but probably significant, thread:

Thread – Notes from a respected Australian virologist:


Reader Interactions

22Comments

  1. 1.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s numbers today: 40 new cases, total 5,820; one death, total 99 deaths. 99 patients recovered and discharged, total 3,957; 1,764 active cases: 37 of them in ICU, of whom 17 are on respiratory aids. The case fatality rate stands at 2.44%.

    At the Q&A after his daily media briefing, DG of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah noted that the Ministry of Health has sufficient PPE on hand, and there are no procurement issues at the moment.

  2. 2.

    Amir Khalid

    Re Josh Marshall’s tweet: I think I now understand the recent run on toilet paper.

  4. 4.

    Brachiator

    I had a conversation with someone trying the “just a bad flu season” argument.

    And some folks are trying to seize upon comments made by VP Pence that things will all blow over by Memorial Day. We won’t even need herd immunity. It’s magic.

    I don’t have time for this nonsense.

  5. 5.

    David C

    I go for early morning walks, weather permitting, and weekend walks on the C&O Canal or Monocacy Battlefield. And gardening – all thanks to losing 3.5 hours of commuting time. Gave away tomato plants to my daughter, two coworkers, my wife’s friend and maybe a couple of people in the neighborhood – I just have to repot. Stay healthy!

  6. 6.

    terben

    The latest bulletin from the Australian Dept of Health:

    ‘As at 3:00pm on 27 April 2020, there have been 6,720 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia. There have been 9 new cases since 3:00pm yesterday.
    Of the 6,720 confirmed cases in Australia, 83 have died and 5,586 have been reported as recovered from COVID-19. More than 517,000 tests have been conducted across Australia.’
    In my state, South Australia, we have had our fifth straight day of zero new cases and are down to 20 active cases. Schools reopened today for the 2nd term of the year. In SA, this means a choice of face-to-face or remote learning. Or it would have if the online system hadn’t crashed on day one. ie when people actually tried to log on. There is always tomorrow.

  8. 8.

    New Deal democrat

    @Amir Khalid: One issue with using human waste to gauge COVID-19 infection: it directly attacks via the ACE2 receptors on enterocytes that line the small intestine and are involved in nutrient absorption. So the intestines might have a bigger viral load than for a typical respiratory disease.

    Also, in re the massive heart attack of the first victim: it also binds to an iron ion in hemoglobin, causing sometimes massive numbers of blood clots.

  9. 9.

    YY_Sima Qian

    China just reported that three Chinese nationals have died of COVID-19 in Russia in the past week or so, two traders and a doctor (an immigrant, not one of the doctors from the medical team sent by China). The Chinese Embassy in Moscow also worked with the Russia authorities to test the 300 or so Chinese traders still remaining in Moscow, and over 100 tested positive.

  10. 10.

    TS (the original)

    The new Australian COVIDSafe app on a phone has been dowloaded nearly two million time

    I wouldn’t trust any government – including the Australian one (& I live in Australia) – to not use such an app for nefarious purposes.  Cannot believe people are willingly doing this. No-one even knows exactly what it does and when it will be used and what data is stored etc etc.

  11. 11.

    CarolPW

    @YY_Sima Qian: I had occasion to think of you several times last week. Ended up in the emergency room Tuesday with what turned out to be a massively bleeding stomach ulcer. It was actually nice to know I’m not the only person that has stupid stuff like this happen, worried about a particular risk and then having something entirely unrelated go wrong instead.

    One big difference here (eastern Washington State) is we have a small case load and no elective procedures so the hospital wasn’t very busy.

  12. 12.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    Again, Anne, thanks for the daily summary.  I was very interested in the Financial Times article regarding excess mortality as that method was important to determine the effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico.  I too have some acquaintances who claim this is just a “bad” flu season.  Not with those percentages.

  13. 13.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @CarolPW: Damn! I hope you are recovering quickly! Internal bleeding is so tricky, easily missed and dismissed until dangerous, cumbersome to treat. It was certainly a sobering experience for me.

    I am very curious about the protocols and PPEs for non-COVID section of hospital in the US, how are the staff protecting themselves from potentially pre-symptomatic patients that come in for other illnesses. How are patients (like yourself) protecting themselves?

    Nosocomial clusters have a tendency to explode quickly, with the traffic and the density in the hospitals, unless a great deal of attention is paid to every detail, and all medical staff thoroughly drilled. It certainly helps if the staff is not overworked, and that PPEs are readily available.

  14. 14.

    CarolPW

    @YY_Sima Qian: It was actually comforting to know that someone else had gone through something similar under worse conditions than me and got through it.

    All staff wore gloves and masks, generally no other protective gear. Lots of hand washing and sanitizer use. I went in with a mask on, they removed it when they admitted me, and I took no other precautions except hand washing. They seemed somewhat understaffed (lots of waiting for them to get around to change IVs or answer calls). The were probably operating with minimal staff to save money. The day after I arrived they started doing elective surgeries again so should be staffing up.

    They had no problem figuring out I had internal bleeding because almost immediately after checking in I barfed up what looked like about three gallons of blood. Even a little blood looks like gallons, but they ended up giving me 3 units of whole blood and one of cells, so the loss was not trivial. Because of the blood that incident it is the one time I saw everyone fully and elaborately suited up except for a couple of people that dashed in to make sure I didn’t kick the bucket while everyone else was suiting up. Endoscopy and cauterizing the ulcer happened a couple of hours later, and I got to go home Friday (and restarted my clock for time from most recent potential exposure to the virus).

    For me, the danger is that I might relax vigilance against exposure. I’ve been very careful for two months worrying about the virus and expecting bad things to happen. And then a very bad thing happened. There was a period where I felt relief as if I had managed to get through that crisis. Except what I got through was a whole different crisis. I’ve spent a couple of days working on my attitude to regain the proper level of personal concern about Covid-19 but it’s odd.

  16. 16.

    CarolPW

    @YY_Sima Qian: Forgot: No one was allowed into the building except staff and patients. There were lots of questions from the paramedics during the trip to the hospital and then again in emergency about potential exposure, coughing, fevers etc. They seemed pretty relaxed about it othewise. Several patients, including the earliest patient in the area, were treated there and they managed to keep it contained so in the COVID section they must have reasonable procedures in place.

  18. 18.

    CaseyL

    @CarolPW: Very glad to hear you’re back home recovering!  Also very glad to hear that, even though the Covid-19 caseload is light, the healthcare folks in Eastern WA are vigilant about taking precautions.  I’ve wondered what the mood was, out there, as Eastern WA is so very different from us here west of the Cascades.

  19. 19.

    CarolPW

    @CaseyL: Lots of people are not taking it very seriously. There is often poor distancing and mask use in public. I do parking lot pickup at the grocers, and at a 7 am pickup everyone going into the store wore masks. Later in the day few use masks. The only public place I’ve been inside, Rite-Aid, has poor customer distancing and mask use so I spent a lot of time dodging people.

  20. 20.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @CarolPW: Yikes! Sounds like your bleeding ulcer was much more serious than mine! I am amazed that you were able to go home in just a few days (not that hospitals are a good place to be these days).

    My hospital stay was extended, with the much more elaborate check in process to guard against COVID-19 infection, as well as Wuhan hospitals not doing any endoscopy except in life threatening situations. Doctors had to assess my progress via vital signs, lab results and external symptoms.

    In hindsight, my experience was not all that nerve racking (despite my possible close brush with an infected doctor), as Wuhan’s epidemic was already substantially suppressed by the time of my ER visit in early Mar. It would have been a different story in early Feb., before there were designated non-COVID hospitals, or mid-Feb. when 20% of “non-COVID” patients were also infected.

    Very good that your hospital was taking precautions, although I am curious why the staff took away your mask. Universal masking protects everyone. During my stay, all patients wore masks even while sleeping. I assume COVID-19 cases are fairly few in eastern WA? At a hot spot like NYC, I would think much more rigorous protocols and better PPEs would be needed even in the non-COVID wings, to prevent nosocomial transmission. Of course, PPEs are still in dire shortage for COVID-19 staff, too, and improvised equipment and methods are still far too  common. It’s depressing to see that community volunteers, restaurant workers, flight attendants and building receptionists in China have better PPE than doctors and nurses on the front lines at NYC…

  21. 21.

    Just Chuck

    Is that a red dot over Greenland?  Everyone who’s played Plague Inc knows what that means.

  22. 22.

    CarolPW

    @YY_Sima Qian: They said they took off the mask because they didn’t want me to choke if anything went wrong. And if I had been wearing it when I puked it would have been a real problem so I’m glad they did it.

    400 cases in the county so far, a lot of them originating in extended care facilities. Because we are sparsely populated, the number per capita is similar to Seattle.

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