Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

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

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

White supremacy is terrorism.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

This really is a full service blog.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

T R E 4 5 O N

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Tuesday/Wednesday, Oct. 13-14

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Tuesday/Wednesday, Oct. 13-14

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… The finding suggests that the use of humidifiers may help limit infections during times when window ventilation is not possible, according to a study released on Tuesday by research giant Riken and Kobe University…

Air humidity of lower than 30% resulted in more than double the amount of aerosolised particles compared to levels of 60% or higher, the simulations showed.

The study also indicated that clear face shields are not as effective as masks in preventing the spread of aerosols. Other findings showed that diners are more at risk from people to their side compared to across the table, and the number of singers in choruses should be limited and spaced out…

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Reader Interactions

27Comments

  2. 2.

    Tony Jay

    I’m pretty sure that I jangled my crystal balls a few weeks ago to prophesy that the UK Government would piss about a bit more before instituting a half-arsed patchwork of local Lockdowns, and lo it hath come to pass.

    Johnson really is in a bind of his own making. His regime buggered up the first Lockdown by ending it far too early and turning the vital Test and Trace component of recovery over to incompetent private firms with no interest in or experience of doing anything but extracting profit from others misfortunes, then by throwing away any shreds of public trust in Government advice by refusing to remove or even chastise his Russian-owned handler Cummings when he openly broke the law to attend a couple of lavish birthday parties.

    Now the rush to force the country back to ‘normal’ has resulted in the inevitable resurgence of the pandemic they’re still just playing nasty politics and PR games. It’s got so bad, so quickly, that even the newish Leader of the Opposition has taken time out from grabbing his ankles to do what the left of the Party have been calling for him to do for months, namely stand up, talk to the country and tell the Tories what they should be doing to start crawling out of this hole. Better late than never, though he’s still only calling for half measures and hasn’t really called for taking Test and Trace out of private hands.

    We’ll see what happens.

  3. 3.

    greenergood

    Ireland spent 770,000 euros to start up  its track-and-trace programme, which works. The UK gave £12 billion to Boris’s Tory crony amateurs and we have bupkis (sp?). Imagine how things could’ve worked out if that £12 billion had been distributed to local health boards, which have community networks and just practical local knowledge.

  4. 4.

    WereBear

    I hated every single step of privatization over the decades. I don’t believe it has EVER worked. At all.

    Much like even the manufacture of consumer products, they get the money and lose all interest in doing anything right.

  5. 5.

    cmorenc

    Trump has painted himself into a corner bounded by his own limitations – both in how to appeal to others and how to feed his own needs for attention.  Yeah, so it worked back in 2016 when the unique constellation of circumstances lined up like drawing an inside straight (with a little help from Russian card mechanics dealing off the bottom) – but he hasn’t the flexible repretoire of responses and understanding to adapt to the circumstances and electorate of 2020, where he’s running as an incumbent who’s fumbled a crisis, and not as a challenger still successflly posing as a maverick businessman to just enough gullibule members of the electorate.

  7. 7.

    Tony Jay

    @greenergood:

    As Ozark so clearly states, there is a fundamental difference in opinion between Conservatives and Functional Human Beings when it comes to the definition of ‘success’.

    For them it’s “Has it made people who can do things for me richer or more powerful?”

    For everyone else? Well fuck them. If they wanted to be listened to they should have made themselves important in Conservative circles, shouldn’t they?

  8. 8.

    Tony Jay

    @WereBear:

    As a teen I used to read about the blinkered greed and entitlement that led the elites of Rome, France, Russia, et al, to keep on sucking up all the wealth while divesting themselves of any role in creating it, and I was baffled by their failure to understand that this simply could not last and would lead to the collapse of the very system they relied on for their position and power.

    I get it now. They were just really, really stupid. C’est la Vie.

  9. 9.

    TS (the original)

    Coronavirus spikes in two Australian states

    Not sure who writes these headlines.

    Victoria had one of it’s lowest days in recent time with 7 new cases. NSW had 11 cases all traced to known cases. The latter is not pleasing to the government, but if the cases remain in known clusters it is not alarming.

    The Federal government is now complaining because  the Victorian Premier is cautious about opening up Melbourne. Not difficult to understand as the PM and Premier belong to different political parties. It is so annoying that  the PM and his offsiders are turning covid into a political event.

  10. 10.

    MagdaInBlack

    @WereBear: My rant yesterday ( at work) was about how capitalism is an extraction process: extract the value, create a wasteland, move on to the next area to decimate. Lather rinse repeat.

  12. 12.

    TS (the original)

    It was pleasing to note that replies to the tweet from Gov Reynolds (Iowa) ran 100:1 against her thoughts on the rally.

  14. 14.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @greenergood: Yeah, I knew that, but apparently my fingers have as hard a time conceiving 12 billion as my mind has wrapping itself around the idea..

  16. 16.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s daily Covid-19 numbers. DG of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah reports 660 new cases, same number as yesterday, for a cumulative reported total of 17,540 cases. Also in today’s report is one new cluster.

    654 new cases are from local infection. Six are Malaysians who recently travelled to high-risk zones in the country: one in KL, three in Sarawak, and two in johore. Of the rest, Sabah has the most cases, 429: 197 close-contact screenings, 78 from existing cluster154 from other screenings. Second is Kedah with 113 cases: 112 from existing clusters, and one from miscellaneous screening. Third is Selangor, with 68 cases: 38 from existing clusters, 18 close-contact screenings, four from the new Kencana cluster, one case of severe acute respiratory illness, and seven from other screenings. Penang has 17 cases, all from existing clusters.

    KL has six cases:three from existing clusters, two from the Kencana cluster, and one close-contact screening. Johore has one case, a close-contact screening. Perak has three cases, two symptomatic screenings and one from the Simera cluster. Melaka has two cases, one from the 1Utama cluster and one symptomatic screening. And Negeri Sembilan has one case, a close-contact screening.

    The six imported cases comprise three arrivals from Singapore, two from Indonesia, and one from the Philippines.

    233 more patients recovered and were discharged, for a total of 11,605 patients recovered — 66.16% of the cumulative reported total. 5,768 active and contagious cases are currently in hospital; 108 are in ICU, 35 of them on respirators.

    Four more Covid-19 deaths have been reported today, again all in Sabah: an 80 year old man with hypertension and gout, a 63 year old woman with hypertension and diabetes, a 73 year old woman with hypertension, and a 47 year old woman with hypertension. Total deaths are up to 167 — 0.96% of the cumulative reported total, 1.42% of resolved cases.

  17. 17.

    Anya

    If you look at the governments that failed the most (democratic countries) in their response to the Coronavirus, they are the right wing governments lead by aspiring strongmen. It’s easy to use xenophobia, racism, bigotry and unrestrained lying to win elections but it turns out, those are not skill sets useful during crisis. I hope this massive failure in leadership will change our collective ideas of leadership and strength. We gotta stop electing psychopaths. Just look at Brazil, India, USA, UK and more. They’re all run by aspiring strong men who used demagoguery to win elections.

  18. 18.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @WereBear: Much like even the manufacture of consumer products, they get the money and lose all interest in doing anything right.

    I work in Biotech, it’s even more heavily regulated than Aviation. Going by my own experience it’s quite likely the FDA is jumping on Lily for paper work errors.

  19. 19.

    Sloane Ranger

    Amid all of the above, the figures from the UK for yesterday.

    There were 17,234 new cases reported, an increase of @3000 from the day before. There may well still have been an element of catching up from the weekend processing slowdown in Monday’s numbers but it’s @2000 more than we had reported on the 10th. The figures by home nation,

    England – 14,310 (up @2500)

    Northern Ireland – 863 (down 14)

    Scotland – 1297 (up @350)

    Wales –  764 (up @300).

    Deaths – We’ve jumped into triple figures with 143 deaths, 124 in England, 5 in Wales and 7 each in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

    Testing – 219,074 tests were processed out of a capacity of 344,159. This is a reduction of about 40,000 from what has become the norm. This may be the result of the Roche supply chain cock-up, which has, naturally, come at exactly the wrong moment.

    Hospitalisations – Patients admitted to hospital in England continue to rise, with numbers in Northern Ireland and Wales remaining steady. No recent figures available for Scotland. As of the 11th October there were 4367 people in hospital throughout the UK, about 300 more than on the 10th. Patients on ventilators has also increased from 477 on 11th October to 507 on the 12th.

    Apart from that nothing to report that Tony Jay hasn’t already covered. Oh, I’m in an area on the Medium Tier of the Government’s new “system” if anyone’s interested.

    Cheers.

  20. 20.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Yesterday, China reported 6 new domestic confirmed cases (all previously asymptomatic) and 0 new domestic asymptomatic cases, all at Qingdao in Shandong Province. There have been no new cases reported at Qingdao, for a total of 12 confirmed cases, 1 in critical condition, 3 serious, 6 moderate and 2 mild. As of 2 PM on 10/14, 532 Tier 1 close contacts have each been tested twice, 351 of them tested 3 times, all negative and remain under centralized quarantine; 269 Tier 2 close contacts have each been tested twice, 89 of them tested 3 times, all negative and remain under centralized quarantine; 859 regular contacts have all tested negative. 205,494 individuals among staff, patients and caretakers at medical facilities have been swabbed, 199,184 results obtained so far are all negative. 8,080,925 residents have been swabbed as part of the city-wide mass screening, 4,716,819 results obtained so far are all negative.

    Yesterday, China reported 14 new imported confirmed cases and 18 imported asymptomatic cases and 2 imported suspect cases:

    * Guangzhou in Guangdong Province – 6 confirmed cases, 2 Chinese nationals returning from Nepal, and 1 each returning from Bangladesh, the UAE, Mozambique and the Netherlands; 12 asymptomatic cases, 4 Chinese nationals returning from Ethiopia, 3 from Nepal and 1 each from Italy, Argentina, Liberia, Congo (Kinshasa) and Zimbabwe
    * Qingyuan in Guangdong Province – 1 asymptomatic case, a Chinese national returning from Singapore
    * Shanghai Municipality – 5 confirmed cases, 2 Belgian nationals coming from Belgium, and 1 Chinese national each returning from France, Switzerland and Japan; 2 suspect cases, no information released
    * Xi’an in Shaanxi Province – 3 confirmed cases (1 previously asymptomatic), 1 Chinese national each returning from Uzbekistan, Portugal and Cambodia
    * Chengdu in Sichuan Province – 1 asymptomatic case, a Chinese nationals returning from Nepal
    * Zhengzhou in Henan Province – 2 asymptomatic cases, no information released
    * Xiamen in Fujian Province – 2 asymptomatic case, 1 Chinese national each returning from Peru and Argentina

    I have not seen the update from Hong Kong today.

  22. 22.

    RM

    Okay, WTF? Oshkosh and Neenah are two SEPARATE towns—well, a small city and a town. They’ve got like a half hour of country between them or at least they did fifteen years ago, which was the last time I lived in that part of Wisconsin. Why the fuck are they listing them as two cities?

    It’s Neenah/Menasha. Those two are actually grown together. Those are the two where you say their names together like that.

    Oshkosh is its own damn place.

  23. 23.

    Yutsano

    A friend in the Netherlands tested positive. He’s had a relatively mild case so far except he’s been tired and a small amount of trouble breathing. It really bothers him as he’s a kickboxer and power lifter so he can’t do nearly as much exercise as he could previously. It’s a nasty bug. I hope we get sensible about it soon.

  25. 25.

    Fair Economist

    These staged plans like Britain’s are a recipe for continued contagion. The numbers are crystal clear here in OC CA. We had a huge wave after reopening in early summer, went to strong restrictions, and cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all fell sharply. Then it got low enough for a partial reopening – limited indoor dining and open schools (although some districts are still closed, and mine is on half-days). Predictably cases stopped dropping almost immediately, and hospitalizations followed about 2 weeks later. Now cases are slowly growing again.

    I still can’t do anything because although the current rates aren’t catastrophic, they’re still too high. We need to find a combination of controls that will contain the virus and stick to it until there’s a vaccine. Staged reopenings don’t work. They’re not as disastrous as no controls, but they still don’t work.

  26. 26.

    Fair Economist

    @Yutsano: Tell your friend to limit his exercising until he’s definitely past the infectious period. One study found exercise during the active part of the infection significantly worsened heart damage. It’s basically causing zillions of micro heart attacks and exercising then exacerbates the oxygen shortfall.

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