Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

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

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

People are weird.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

T R E 4 5 O N

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

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

We won’t go back.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

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

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update: Wednesday/Thursday, May 13-14

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update: Wednesday/Thursday, May 13-14

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Since we’re coming into the months when Americans most want to be outside, it would be really convenient if the ‘almost exclusively spread indoors’ hypothesis were true. Experts, however, not convinced yet…

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16Comments

  1. 1.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s daily numbers: 40 new cases, all from local infection; total 6,819 cases. 70 more patients recovered, total recovered 5,351, or 78.47% of total cases. Of 1,356 active cases, 16 are in ICU, of whom four are on ventilators. One death, total 112. Case fatality rate 2.05%.

    Friday prayers and other congregational prayers are now allowed at mosques starting tomorrow, subject to conditions, including:

    • Maximum of 30 congregants. Mosques here typically see hundreds or thousands of worshippers on a Friday.
    • Male worshippers only, because of space constraints. Those under 15 or over 70 are regarded as especially vulnerable and not permitted to attend.
    • Worshippers must perform pre-prayer ablutions before coming to mosque, and bring their own prayer mats.
    • Worshippers must also sign in with their national identity cards to facilitate contact tracing if it becomes necessary. After prayers, they must disperse immediately.
  3. 3.

    ThresherK

    TASS is still doing business like in the old days, da?

    Rick Bright is someone I don’t know anything about, but I trust him because of his Dickensian name implicitly.

  5. 5.

    Amir Khalid

    @WereBear:

    Just the one session for each service. If you’re no. 31 at the mosque, you have to go home. Social distancing during the prayers themselves is also going to be awkward. Worshippers used to a lifetime of closing ranks will now have to stay 1 metre apart. I also wonder about the efficacy of masks worn with a full ZZ Top beard, as is common among devout Muslim men.

  6. 6.

    mrmoshpotato

    Thank you very much for the daily updates, Anne.

    But Moon57574832902u023r52 just screams BOT.

  9. 9.

    Sloane Ranger

    One piece of good news from the shitstorm here in the UK. Public Health England has OK’d an antibody test that they say has tested as being 100% accurate. It’s made by Swiss firm, Roche.

    The bad news, it will take months to get the quantities we need.

  10. 10.

    Amir Khalid

    From the top of the Guardian’s liveblog:

    The European Union has insisted that any coronavirus vaccine must be available fairly to all countries, after the British chief executive of French drugs company Sanofi said it was reserving the first shipments of its vaccine for the US.

    “The vaccine against COVID-19 should be a global public good and its access needs to be equitable and universal,” European commission spokesman Stefan de Keersmaecker was reported as saying by Reuters.

    His comments came after Paul Hudson, chief executive officer of Sanofi, told Bloomberg News that any vaccine invented by his firm would go to the US first since America had done the most to fund the company’s research. He said:

    The US government has the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk. That’s how it will be because they’ve invested to try and protect their population, to restart their economy. I’ve been campaigning in Europe to say the US will get vaccines first.

    Ministers in President Emmanuel Macron’s government slammed the move by Sanofi – a French company – as “unacceptable”.

    “For us in one word it is very important that, as the virus is a global virus, that we work on this globally,” de Keersmaecker said.

  11. 11.

    terben

    From Australian Dept of Health:

    ‘As at 3:00pm on 14 May 2020, a total of 6,989 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Australia, including 98 deaths and 6,301 have been reported as recovered from COVID-19.

    Over the past week, there has been an average of 15 new cases reported each day. Of the newly reported cases, the majority have been from Victoria.

    To date, over 943,000 tests have been conducted nationally. Of those tests conducted 0.7% have been positive.’

    Since the previous report there have been 14 new cases and no deaths. As can be seen from the numbers above, there are 590 active cases in the country. Of those, 51 are hospitalized and 18 are in ICU.

  12. 12.

    Sab

    I don’t have kids so I shouldn’t care, but the rare Kawasaki syndrome with Corona is terrifying. Permanent  heart problems for kids under five. I am over 65 and I have a congenital heart problem that finally blew up to be annoying and ocassionally scary.

    I cannot imagine the lack of empathy that allows these anti-maskers to inflict that level of fear and danger on pre-school children.

  13. 13.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Zeynep Tufekci is clearly letting her sympathies for the Hong Kong protest movement color her analysis, to the point of ideologically based wishful thinking. Rapidly escalating and rapidly radicalizing protest movement, and a public health crisis, are two very different challenges government for an. It is not surprising that the Carrie Lam administration (as have past administrations in Hong Kong) failed in the former challenge, she is a colorless and technocratic bureaucrat trained in the British Colonial administration, not a political leader (because the British were not interested in training political leaders, and the CCP does not encourage their development), and she is hemmed in by the radicalized and polarized public opinion, by the monied real estate interests that dominate the city’s economy, and by Beijing. An epidemic, however, is a technocratic challenge.

    The way to contain COVID-19 is test, trace isolate. Tukefci does not describe the protest movement organization doing any of that, it is being done by the Hong Kong government, and only the Hong Kong government can do it. The elaborate process for foreign entries described by Laurel Chor is not set up by the  protest movement, but by the Hong Kong government. The community activities organized by the protest movement is surely helpful and commendable, but it is impossible to assess their impact based on anecdotes, and not data, Tukefci does not offer any data. Fighting an epidemic is ultimately a numbers game. Of course the leaders of the protestors agitated to close the border with Mainland China, they look for every excuse to cut links with Mainland China, and are not above manufacturing outrage or fabricating “facts”. However, it is telling that the protest leaders were not clamoring to shut down flights from North America or Europe, even though the surge in imported cases were coming from these places in Mar. and straining Hong Kong’s capacity to contain. Hong Kong ultimately saw many more imports from the rest of the world, and relatively few from Mainland China. Hong Kong’s economy relies on the quadruple pillars of retail/tourism, real estate, logistics and finance. Retail/tourism have already collapse due to over half a year of unrest (including strong anti-Mainlander nativism, and Mainlanders make up the vast majority of visitors to Hong Kong), followed by the pandemic. Completely shutting off the land border with Mainland China would have taken out the logistics leg, too. Only the top 1% benefit from the finance and real estate parts of the Hong Kong economy, and the huge wealth disparity in the city fueled much of the popular anger against the Establishment to begin with. Then again, there is a strong anarcho-nihilist streak to the Hong Kong protest movement, “burn it all down” was a prominent slogan.

    The protest movement in Hong Kong was increasing characterized by violence and vigilanteism, aspects largely ignored by western MSM. I can’t believe Tukefci is actually praising violence and vandalism in pursuit of political goals. Firebombing quarantine centers? Threatening to bomb border crossing? Isn’t that terrorism?

    Finally, it is very easy mistakenly believe that the protest movement enjoyed/enjoyus universal support in Hong Kong. A clear majority are sympathetic to their stated goals, a lot fewer are sympathetic to their methods, particularly as violence and vigilanteism escalated toward the end. The anti-establishment candidate swept the district council elections in Dec., winning something like 85 – 90% of seats. However, those candidates won only 55 – 60% of the total votes, so 40 – 45% of Hong Kongers voted for the establishment, after everything. I highly doubt all of the efforts the protest organizations could amount to an effective epidemic response, if they could cover no more than 70% of the population (probably a lot less).

    Politics and the population in Hong Kong are extremely polarized right now, as much as in the US. Those sympathetic to the anti-establishment side absolutely refuses to give any credit or benefit of doubt to the SAR government, so no surprise the government polls so low. Then again, the set of surveys that Tufekci cites, reported by the South China Morning Post, shows the top performing governments are the authoritarian states of China and Vietnam, that the South Korean governments barely cleared 30% approval despite its universally acclaimed response, and that the Trump administration managed secure the approval of > 40% of Americans, in spite of botching everything. What are we supposed to conclude from that set of data? Either the surveys were poorly done, or an awful lot of people are irrational.

  14. 14.

    PenAndKey

    @Sab: As some of you are aware I have a 1-month old newborn. Hearing that this not only does actually affect kids in profound ways isn’t that big a surprise to me, but hearing it appears to cause Kawasaki is downright terrifying. Especially since we’re in Wisconsin and our State Supreme court decided by a 1-vote margin that our secretary of health and governor don’t have the authority, despite a law explicitly granting it to them, to lock the state down. We’re now “back open”, but my kids are going to remain isolated until this is over.

    That’ll tick off my conservative family members, but I simply don’t care. Pediatric heart conditions are no joke.

  15. 15.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Three more domestic confirmed cases yesterday from China. One in Fengman District of Jilin City, a street vendor, adding to the cluster there. She developed a fever on the evening of May 10, and visited a fever clinic on May 11.

    Two were in Shenyang in Liaoning Province, now a cluster seeded by an import from Shulan in Jilin Province, Both are co-workers of the case from Shulan, one was traced and tested positive and classified as asymptomatic before, now reclassified as confirmed. The other somehow was not identified as a close contact, and was only tested when he developed fever and visited a hospital on May 12. Clearly there was an oversight in Shenyang’s contact tracing efforts. Since the infected are often the most contagious a few days before onset of symptoms, who knows how many more people may have been infected.

  16. 16.

    MoCA Ace

    @Sab:  I don’t have kids so I shouldn’t care

    Yet you do… congratulations on having a moral center.  Fundamentally this is what separates republicans from humans.

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