Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

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

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

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

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

The National Guard is not Batman.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

This really is a full service blog.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

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

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

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Wednesday/Thursday, March 18/19

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Wednesday/Thursday, March 18/19

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(TCM = Traditional Chinese Medicine)

From the United Kingdom:

Interesting thread (via Ian Mackay’s feed):

Reader Interactions

33Comments

  1. 1.

    WereBear

    But, in the U.S., 40% of those hospitalized with serious symptoms are age 20-54

    Doh! Once again, sound bite information is wrong…

  2. 2.

    OzarkHillbilly

    NYT:

    Grace Fusco — mother of 11, grandmother of 27 — would sit in the same pew at church each Sunday, surrounded by nearly a dozen members of her sprawling Italian-American family. Sunday dinners drew an even larger crowd to her home in central New Jersey.

    Now, her close-knit clan is united anew by unspeakable grief: Mrs. Fusco, 73, died on Wednesday night after contracting the coronavirus — hours after her son died from the virus and five days after her daughter’s death, a relative said.

    Four other children who contracted coronavirus remain hospitalized, three of them in critical condition, the relative, Roseann Paradiso Fodera, said.

    Mrs. Fusco’s eldest child, Rita Fusco-Jackson, 55, of Freehold, N.J., died Friday; after her death, the family learned she had contracted the virus. Her eldest son, Carmine Fusco, of Bath, Pa., died on Wednesday, said Ms. Paradiso Fodera, the family’s lawyer who is Mrs. Fusco’s cousin and is serving as a spokeswoman.

    Mrs. Fusco, of Freehold, died after spending Wednesday “gravely ill” and breathing with help from a ventilator, unaware that her two oldest children had died, Ms. Paradiso Fodera said.

  3. 3.

    Lapassionara

    Thank you for this, AL. Very informative.

    I went to my doctor yesterday and was handed a mask at the registration desk. Elsewhere, I hear of nurses on the front lines who cannot get masks.

    Anybody know the shortage of masks story.

    And good morning, everyone

  5. 5.

    Mary G

    W00t!

    I’ve taken that first drug – hydroxychloroquine – continuously since 1985! Maybe I am safe! It can ruin your eyes so I get them checked once a year, but there haven’t been any side effects over the 35 years.

  7. 7.

    WereBear

    @Mary G: Happy about any GOOD news :)

    My own management of my autoimmune, which was horrible last January, is so much better. I took heroic efforts to revamp my response, and the peace of mind was worth all the sacrifices :)

  10. 10.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Lapassionara: Via the NYT:

    The Latest Obstacle to Getting Tested? A Shortage of Swabs and Face Masks

    Plenty about swabs:

    At the UCSF Health — a San Francisco hospital system at the heart of one of the nation’s coronavirus outbreaks — officials said they would have to stop testing patients in about five days because they will run out of nasopharyngeal swabs, which are inserted into patients’ nasal passages to get samples for testing. Other hospitals elsewhere in the country were ending their practice of using a second swab to test for the flu in an effort to preserve their supply.

    The main manufacturer of the swabs, Copan, is an Italian company whose manufacturing plant is in Northern Italy, a region that has itself been hard hit by the coronavirus outbreak. It says it has ramped up manufacturing to deal with the extraordinary demand for an otherwise unassuming product to which many doctors gave little thought, until now.

    “We weren’t really thinking about, ‘Wow, what’s our swab supply?’ because we haven’t really faced anything that depleted our swabs before,” said Dr. Josh Adler, the chief clinical officer of U.C.S.F. Health. Making matters more difficult, the swabs must have just the right ingredients — the shafts cannot be wood, for example — or the virus might not be properly detected. “You can’t go to your local store and get Q-tips,” he said.

    Other than a mention of “A shortage of masks, gowns and other protective gear,” next to nothing

  11. 11.

    SFAW

    “NextDoor” in my area has had multiple threads discussing/dealing with COVID-19. Initially, some of the responses were akin to “Don’t tell me what to do!! Murica! Fuck yeah!” Others were “It’s a choice (not to social distance), just like not taking MMR vaccines because autism mumble mumble.” (One of those commenters claimed to be a nurse who had “done all the reading” or some such.) Fortunately, most responses to idiocy like those were “Show us the peer-reviewed research. Don’t have it? Then FOAD, moron.” When the moderators deleted one anti-vaxxer, and later a whole thread of “vitamin C will cure it,” that set of persons complained.

    Amazingly enough, I don’t have a sad that those numbskulls are getting their comments deleted. Liberal Fascism strikes!!!

  12. 12.

    Lapassionara

    @OzarkHillbilly: Thanks. Another thing to worry about.

    I’ve had more than one young person tell me that the press is blowing this way out of proportion. Really?

  14. 14.

    SFAW

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    But Orange Plague said he was leading the charge against COVID-19, like 3 years ago! And he gave himself a 10 out of 10 rating/score for his efforts to keep the Chinese Virus away from ‘Murica!

    I hope Biden (or blue-friendly PACs) run myriad ads showing the Liar-in-Chief’s “It’s a Demon-rat hoax” (with a Fox logo) side-by-side with his “I never said that” horseshit.

  15. 15.

    La Nonna

    Re-posting from earlier, the time difference makes it interesting…if you need/want to make facemasks which are washable and re-usable, youtube has some good tutorials labeled EasySew…you need a sewing machine, but I made half a dozen in less than an hour, complete with metal/plastic twist tie for nose fitting.  Still enjoying lockdown in Puglia, long walks, spring cleaning, outdoor painting jobs, gardening, and the morning dose of opera instead of just the awful news.  Looks like my US based children are in for a world of hurt, small business owners, chef, teacher…worried about the brutal triage coming, they are in the 35-50 years old range.  And the economics look awful, too.  We don’t expect to be ojt of lockdown before summer soonest.

  16. 16.

    SFAW

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Tell them this is a great time to see Italy or Iran. Lots of good deals to be had.

    Or run ads of that nature on Fox. [Only because the kiddies might just be stupid (as some otherwise-decent kiddies have been), not malicious.]

  17. 17.

    WereBear

    @Lapassionara:

    I’ve had more than one young person tell me that the press is blowing this way out of proportion. Really?

     

    A lot of it is defensiveness. And the more Republican their thinking, the more their Denial muscles are big and strong!

  18. 18.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Lapassionara:

    Re: masks – when SARS hit the US over ten years ago an American manufacturer of medical PPE and masks ramped up production massively, invested in new machines and stocks of materials and took on more workers. After the epidemic died down their customers went back to buying these items in bulk from cheap Chinese suppliers and they were left in the lurch.
    They’re ramping up production again but this time round they’re insisting on five-year contracts before they will fulfill orders.

  19. 19.

    Chyron HR

    @WereBear:

    The virus only harms boomers, thus anyone younger that gets hospitalized must be in league with the boomers.  Our Revolution PAC says so.

  20. 20.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @SFAW:My thinking is that they would be smart enough to figure it out when they found that they quite literally can’t go there just now because too many people are dying. Of course, you may be right. They may actually be stupid.

  21. 21.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WereBear: A lot of people don’t seem to understand the vast gulf between “you probably won’t die” and “you’ll be fine”.

  22. 22.

    Amir Khalid

    The number of cases in Malaysia has jumped to 900 as of today, the most in southeast Asia. There’s now a problem of people just disregarding the current movement restrictions, so the government is reportedly considering deploying the army at roadblocks to help in enforcement.

    There have so far been two coronavirus fatalities here, a man who attended a big gathering for Muslim missionaries in KL and a Christian pastor in Sarawak. These deaths were reported on Tuesday.

  25. 25.

    rikyrah

    If you want to understand how catastrophically Trump has failed in this response, consider that the first cases were in the US and South Korea on the same day. And because of testing, honesty, and a swift government response, South Korea has already flattened the curve. t.co/XlH1EtGKgQ— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) March 18, 2020

  26. 26.

    debbie

    @rikyrah:

    26 mins ago, I wrote we would soon break through 9,000 COVID-19 cases & had just moved from 7th to 6th most infected country.Now – 26 mins later -we've moved from 6th to 5th most infected. We just hit 9,200 cases. But Trump praises himself. His incompetence is killing people.— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) March 18, 2020

  29. 29.

    SFAW

    @rikyrah:  @debbie:

    Those tweets should be disseminated far and wide. I would think that the more they’re spread, the likelier it becomes the “Trump Virus.”

    Well, were this a rational country, I would think that. But since 40-plus percent of the populace seems irrational …

  30. 30.

    Ken

    Neil did the Imperial College study that convinced #BorisJohnson & #DonaldTrump that their #COVID19 policies would kill tens of 1000s of people and fail.

    It convinced them?  I’ve seen no evidence of that.

  33. 33.

    logicman

    As the number of coronavirus cases grows, Canada’s chief public health officer says she’s concerned about hateful comments targeting minority groups including Chinese-Canadians.

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