Corona Virus: It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint

[hepcat]

Welp, looks like I should make a New Glarus run before Illinois puts Wisconsin back on the mandatory quarantine list.

Edit: never mind, it already was put back on the list, it seems. Not surprising, sadly. I was up there a few weeks ago for supplies and no one seemed to want to wear a mask or even practice social distancing in any reasonable manner.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

I’m sure the CDC didn’t need that $300 million...

https://twitter.com/iansams/status/1309 ... 17217?s=21

Spoiler:

The Trump administration took $300 million from the CDC mid-pandemic so they could make ads with Dennis Quaid saying Trump did a good job. Unreal.

[malchior]

So $300M that Trump stole for his campaign and siphoned through his companies. Cool. Throw the story over on the impeachment pile that we are about to light on fire.

[LawBeefaroni]

The $15 million contract, which has not been previously reported, was officially awarded to Atlas Research on Aug. 26. An FDA spokesperson said that the funding for the contract was provided by HHS and the contract is being overseen by HHS.

As part of the contract, HHS recommended that Atlas use a subcontractor firm called DD&T, according to spokespeople for Atlas and the federal government.

HHS identified DD&T "as a potential organization with the qualifications required by the government," Weber said, declining to specify who at HHS chose the subcontractor.

DD&T is also a firm run by Caputo's longtime business partner, Den Tolmor, who has now spent weeks working to produce the government's videos, said five people with knowledge of the arrangement. Tolmor was Caputo's client as recently as April 2020, compensating Caputo at least $5,000 per year to handle his public relations, according to a copy of Caputo's ethics disclosure form obtained by POLITICO. The two men also went into business together to launch a video streaming platform and other services in 2017 and 2018.

Two HHS officials said that Caputo had spent weeks extolling Tolmor's work, arguing that the Russian-born filmmaker — who had been nominated for an Oscar, but had no prior experience producing U.S. public health campaigns — would bring a fresh eye to the work and could execute Caputo's vision.

It's leeches all the way down. And of course, some obligatory Russians.

[Defiant]

https://twitter.com/sophigarrett/status ... 8461322242

[Skinypupy]

Along those lines, I’m in a bit a pickle today.

My aunt passed away on Thursday. Not COVID related, she was 95 years old. She’s been ill for a while, and it’s a blessing that she went.

Her viewing is tonight and I obviously want to go and support. However, that entire side of the family are vehement anti-maskers. I can pretty well guarantee that there likely won’t be a mask in sight in a packed funeral home.

I want to go and pay my respects, but am having a hell of a time justifying being there. My 74 year old mom - who is typically very careful about these things - has put caution aside and is going because it’s immediate family. She’s quite upset with me that I’m having some hesitation, going so far as to pull out the “their entire family came to the funeral when dad passed” guilt trip.

I fucking hate this.

[Zarathud]

Go, but wear a mask.

[Skinypupy]

Go, but wear a mask.

That goes without saying, i always have a mask on in public.

I’m concerned about being in a crowded indoor room with a shitload of maskless people. Especially given the huge spike in cases Utah has seen over the past couple weeks.

The funeral home does require masks to be worn, but I have no idea how strict they are about enforcing it. (Side note: I can’t think of a worse possible job than having to try and enforce mask usage during a funeral service.)

I’ll probably end up going, but maybe will just try and hang out outside and say hi to family as they come in, or something.

[El Guapo]

Go, but wear a mask.

That goes without saying, i always have a mask on in public.

I’m concerned about being in a crowded indoor room with a shitload of maskless people. Especially given the huge spike in cases Utah has seen over the past couple weeks.

The funeral home does require masks to be worn, but I have no idea how strict they are about enforcing it. (Side note: I can’t think of a worse possible job than having to try and enforce mask usage during a funeral service.)

I’ll probably end up going, but maybe will just try and hang out outside and say hi to family as they come in, or something.

Yeah, I think the best course is ultimately figuring out what you can do there without exposing yourself to undue risk. Do you know the funeral home layout well? I also wonder whether it'd be worth calling up the funeral home and asking for advice.

[Holman]

Go, but wear a mask.

That goes without saying, i always have a mask on in public.

I’m concerned about being in a crowded indoor room with a shitload of maskless people. Especially given the huge spike in cases Utah has seen over the past couple weeks.

The funeral home does require masks to be worn, but I have no idea how strict they are about enforcing it. (Side note: I can’t think of a worse possible job than having to try and enforce mask usage during a funeral service.)

I’ll probably end up going, but maybe will just try and hang out outside and say hi to family as they come in, or something.

The hardest part will be dodging handshakes and hugs. People at a funeral are going to expect them.

[stimpy]

I just attended a funeral.
Masks were mandatory and stickers were given out as you walked in.
Green for hugs are allowed.
Orange for fist bumps only.
Red for no contact.

[Isgrimnur]

I don't think the virus can distinguish colors.

[Alefroth]

I don't think the virus can distinguish colors.

Then why did blue states get hit so hard? Hmm?

[Isgrimnur]

[Smoove_B]

In case anyone was wondering (or not clear), Trump is going all-in on the vaccine.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1310247071396573185

Asked about a number of states experiencing record one-day increases in new coronavirus cases, White House Chief of Staff tellingly immediately pivots to talking about vaccines. They've given up trying to contain this thing.

[Defiant]

Four Covid-19 sniffer dogs have begun work at Helsinki airport in a state-funded pilot scheme that Finnish researchers hope will provide a cheap, fast and effective alternative method of testing people for the virus.

A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... r-covid-19

[stimpy]

I don't think the virus can distinguish colors.

I put on one of each color just to confuse the shit out of everyone.

[Isgrimnur]

Four Covid-19 sniffer dogs have begun work at Helsinki airport in a state-funded pilot scheme that Finnish researchers hope will provide a cheap, fast and effective alternative method of testing people for the virus.

A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... r-covid-19

Man, the first person that's positive and holding is going to freak the hell out.

[Paingod]

https://twitter.com/sophigarrett/status ... 8461322242

This gives me a thing to call my complete emotional burnout. For weeks now I've been among the walking dead. The only reliable emotions I seem to have left are disappointment and anger.

Over the weekend I was grasping for words to describe it to my wife. This sums it up, I think, but mine also encompasses the political idiocy that ties in with COVID denial. Her solution was that I should ask my doctor to dial up the strength of my anti-depressant. My solution is to try and survive until January 21st 2021 and then take a LONG goddamn nap.

[Skinypupy]

Go, but wear a mask.

That goes without saying, i always have a mask on in public.

I’m concerned about being in a crowded indoor room with a shitload of maskless people. Especially given the huge spike in cases Utah has seen over the past couple weeks.

The funeral home does require masks to be worn, but I have no idea how strict they are about enforcing it. (Side note: I can’t think of a worse possible job than having to try and enforce mask usage during a funeral service.)

I’ll probably end up going, but maybe will just try and hang out outside and say hi to family as they come in, or something.

The hardest part will be dodging handshakes and hugs. People at a funeral are going to expect them.

I did end up going. Everyone was thankfully masked up, but there was no social distancing at all.

I was there supporting my 89-year-old Aunt (literally...she's not steady on her feet and had a death grip on my arm all night to keep from falling over), so I was forced to be right in the middle of a number of hugs. Held my breath a lot, made very liberal use of the hand sanitizer, and will hope for the best.

[Jaymon]

The decision to go or not go for family gatherings is a difficult one. With social distancing still going and no end in sight, some things just can't be put off indefinitely. How long do you wait to pay respects. Where do you draw the line between personal safety and family responsibility. Going to a funeral is a risk. But so is going to the grocery store. In the end, its the same as nearly everything we have for 2020. There are no right answers, only various wrong answers, and you have to make a personal choice about which wrong answer is the least wrong for you.

[The Meal]

Four Covid-19 sniffer dogs have begun work at Helsinki airport in a state-funded pilot scheme that Finnish researchers hope will provide a cheap, fast and effective alternative method of testing people for the virus.

A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... r-covid-19

How was that not a link to The Onion?!?

[Little Raven]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... r-covid-19

Uh...someone send up the Smoove signal. This can't possibly be real....can it?

[Isgrimnur]

Bio Rxiv

This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review

The percentages of success of the dogs to find the positive sample in a line containing several other negative samples or mocks (2 to 6) were 100p100 for 4 dogs, and respectively 83p100, 84p100, 90p100 and 94p100 for the others, all significantly different from the percentage of success that would be obtained by chance alone.

We conclude that there is a very high evidence that the armpits sweat odour of COVID-19+ persons is different, and that dogs can detect a person infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

[Max Peck]

It appears to be real, and also real complicated.

From early August: Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs

Over the past several months, several teams of researchers have been training dogs on what COVID-19 smells like, in hopes they can detect it in humans. In some places, like the Dubai airport, dogs are already being deployed to sniff samples from potentially ill travelers. COVID-sniffing dogs might seem like the future, but there are real logistical challenges we’ll need to figure out first.

First, it’s quite the process to train dogs to sniff out cases of COVID-19, and it’s basically impossible to do unless you have a research lab and considerable equipment at your disposal. (This will likely be a disappointment for my dad, who texted me a news story at the beginning of the pandemic about COVID-sniffing dogs with the message: “Please train your dog.”) When researchers train dogs to recognize COVID-19, they’re actually training dogs to recognize the smells that people with the illness make, not the virus itself, which doesn’t have a smell. As your body works to fight the virus, it releases what researchers call “volatile organic compounds”—and smells differ depending on the specific ailment. Dogs have also been trained to sniff out malaria, cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and a whole host of other diseases.

[$iljanus]

Unsurprisingly, Trumps approach to distributing something that could be useful during the pandemic is the "throw paper towels to the crowd" approach. He has his talking point of distributing millions of the most beautiful tests and he can go back to warning suburban housewives about the hordes of poor black and brown folks coming to their block parties.

Trump administration’s new rapid coronavirus tests plagued by confusion and a lack of planning

President Trump heralded new rapid coronavirus tests on Monday as game changers — fast, cheap and easy to use. But his administration’s deployment of the new tests to nursing homes has been plagued by poor communication, false results and a frustrating lack of planning, state leaders say.

Health officials in several states say they have been allowed no say in where the new tests are being sent and sometimes don’t know which nursing homes will receive them until the night before a shipment arrives. That has left some facilities ill-trained in how to use the tests and what to do with results. And it may be contributing to false-positive test results — when people are identified as being infected but aren’t.

The lack of federal planning also has left states with no standardized way to capture results from the new tests and include them in daily counts of infections and tests. Consequently, as the rapid tests become more widely distributed, the data and dashboards being used each day to guide the nation’s coronavirus response are becoming more inaccurate.

I'm really surprised he doesn't have MAGA volunteers just throwing the damn things at nursing homes off the back of their pickup truck.

Fueling such problems, public health officials say, is the White House’s continued refusal to take responsibility for leading the country through the pandemic and to lay out an overarching strategy on testing, instead of repeatedly pushing that onus onto the states.

“It’s the utter lack of planning and guidance that’s creating problems,” said one state official, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear that federal officials might retaliate by giving the state less aid. “Their approach is to just throw things over the fence to the states and to say, ‘Take this, and deal with the problem.’ ”

And this kind of mentality is just criminal. Essentially, "Tracking is hard so we shouldn't even try." If we only had an agency that could help collect the data and report trends...

At a news briefing Friday, Assistant Health Secretary Brett Giroir dismissed complaints about false-positive responses. “We know with every test that there are false positives,” said Giroir, whom Trump appointed the testing czar in the spring.

Similarly, Giroir dismissed the lack of a standardized reporting system as a result of the administration moving swiftly to implement testing.

“If we wanted to get everything perfect, we would have waited months to do that. The important thing was to get these out to nursing homes now,” he said. “We’d rather save lives.”

You stupid fucking asshole, you can definitely do both.

And why not throw this in to feed the dumpster fire:

Adding to the confusion, state officials say shipments have arrived with little guidance for those facilities about the circumstances in which the antigen tests can be used most effectively.

“There’s been little national guidance to say, ‘These are the best places to use them, this is what you do under various circumstances if you get positives and this is how to report the data,’ ” said Michael Fraser, chief executive of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents state health departments. “We are still waiting to reach consensus on when and where health departments should use these tests.”

In a phone interview, a senior Trump administration official disputed that characterization. “I have no idea where these people have been hiding,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The official said the administration has held weekly conference calls with state leaders and said health officials should raise concerns then.

Several state health officials said they have repeatedly highlighted problems in those meetings.

[Smoove_B]

I wish I had something to add to the above story, but I've got nothing. It's above my paygrade, but no one I know that would be involved with dealing with (receiving, coordinating use of, etc...) those tests knows anything.

In other news:

https://twitter.com/jasonfechner/status ... 4626702339

#BREAKING: Ahead of President Trump's scheduled campaign rally in #GreenBay, #Wisconsin Saturday, @BellinHealth
just said their hospital there is now at 94% capacity as #COVID19 continues to spike in that community-- the state's positivity rate is now at 23.66% since Sunday.

23%+ positivity rate? Good luck Wisconsin. Stay safe OOers.

[Kraken]

I wish I had something to add to the above story, but I've got nothing. It's above my paygrade, but no one I know that would be involved with dealing with (receiving, coordinating use of, etc...) those tests knows anything.

In other news:

https://twitter.com/jasonfechner/status ... 4626702339

#BREAKING: Ahead of President Trump's scheduled campaign rally in #GreenBay, #Wisconsin Saturday, @BellinHealth
just said their hospital there is now at 94% capacity as #COVID19 continues to spike in that community-- the state's positivity rate is now at 23.66% since Sunday.

23%+ positivity rate? Good luck Wisconsin. Stay safe OOers.

Geez, we're sweating in MA because our positivity is back above 3% after being under 1% for weeks.

[Smoove_B]

In case anyone else is into reading about what happened in North Carolina:

What is added by this report?

A North Carolina university experienced a rapid increase in COVID-19 cases and clusters within 2 weeks of opening the campus to students. Student gatherings and congregate living settings, both on and off campus, likely contributed to the rapid spread of COVID-19 in this setting.

What are the implications for public health practice?

Enhanced measures are needed to reduce transmission at institutes of higher education and could include reducing on-campus housing density, ensuring adherence to masking and other mitigation strategies, increasing testing for SARS-CoV-2, and discouraging student gatherings.

[Victoria Raverna]

23%+ positivity rate? Good luck Wisconsin. Stay safe OOers.

Not enough testing?

[Smoove_B]

23%+ positivity rate? Good luck Wisconsin. Stay safe OOers.

Not enough testing?

Not sure. I haven't been following WI closely, but the chart on this page seems to suggest their testing effort is steady-ish, though they are doing more testing of late. Given whats happening, they likely need to do more, yes.

https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/covid-19/data.htm

[malchior]

23%+ positivity rate? Good luck Wisconsin. Stay safe OOers.

Not enough testing?

Not sure. I haven't been following WI closely, but the chart on this page seems to suggest their testing effort is steady-ish, though they are doing more testing of late. Given whats happening, they likely need to do more, yes.

https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/covid-19/data.htm

@Smoove_B - you saw the numbers from Lakewood, right? In that range right now...

[Smoove_B]

Yeah, if Lakewood was a different state, people leaving that town and coming into NJ would need to self-quarantine for 14 days. I haven't seen the NJ governor using language (yet) like Governor Cuomo, but he basically called out local government officials as being partially responsible by not enforcing public health mandates. I have a feeling it's going to get ugly (in both states). Other than making pleas to local religious leaders, I'm not sure what they're going to do.

[Scoop20906]

COVID has reached my street. The father of the family has it and has affected his oxygen levels. When he is out working he gets short of breath easily. I’ve had coworkers who have it but I’ve been safely remote from them. Now it’s officially across the street.

[Jeff V]

23%+ positivity rate? Good luck Wisconsin. Stay safe OOers.

Not enough testing?

Not sure. I haven't been following WI closely, but the chart on this page seems to suggest their testing effort is steady-ish, though they are doing more testing of late. Given whats happening, they likely need to do more, yes.

https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/covid-19/data.htm

We canceled the long weekend to the Dells we had planned for next weekend.

[Zarathud]

My best man’s grandmother died from Covid.

[LawBeefaroni]

I have a meeting tonight that was moved to zoom because 2 people (from the neighborhood) are in quarantine after exposure. One has a kid at college who has it as well but that's not related to this exposure.

Actual proximity doesn't bother me that much, since I'm literally feet away from a COVID clinic at work but the proximity numbers, those get concerning.

[malchior]

Hope Hicks gets Coronavirus - she was with Trump all week.

https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/sta ... 2587619333

[$iljanus]

Hope Hicks gets Coronavirus - she was with Trump all week.

https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/sta ... 2587619333

Thoughts and prayers.

[Unagi]

Shouldn't that put Trump in quarantine during the next debate ?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/02/hope-hi ... virus.html

Centers for Disease Control guidelines say people should stay home and quarantine if they might have been exposed to the virus. The agency says people should quarantine for 14 days. Two weeks from Thursday is Oct. 15, the date of the second presidential debate between Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden.

I mean, the very idea that Trump is actually going to quarantine for 2 weeks is just hilarious.