h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And just now Trump, again, insisted on opening today's briefing by calling this "The Chinese Virus".
I'm sure he's getting that from Trump Ne..., pardon, I mean Fox News.

I would guess that all of them *would* survive. To have gotten this far with arduous campaigns, they would have had to be pretty healthy. As for the medical care they would receive if sick, I'd expect it to be first rate. In Lombardy, Italy, where the number of patients has far outstripped the availability of ventilators, medical personnel are having to ration the equipment they have. So, ventilators can make the difference between life and death. presidential candidates would most certainly get ventilators if they needed them.

Wuhan and South Korea have gotten good results once they did a lot of testing. Massachusetts hope to be able to do as many tests per day as South Korea is doing.

When Wuhan was doing enough testing, they identified people who were infected but not yet showing symptoms. This cut way down on the number of new infections.

Here are the positive signs:

--everybody knows there's a serious problem.
--medical people know how to treat the patients
--government officials are scrambling to ramp up the supply of needed materials
--in Massachusetts, at least, the Governor is the former head of an HMO. I would trust him with my life, seriously. (Actually, for many years my life was in his hands, as it was his HMO that I have gone to.) You don't get better credibility than that.
--Sick people are quaranteened, some by choice.

Here are the negative signs:

--We need protective gear, cotton swabs, ventilators, fast test results, and enough hospital beds *now*. Even after we get enough of those, there may be tens of thousands of new cases, more than the hospitals can handle.
--Older people are pretty careful anyway (our local Whole Foods Market devotes the first hour in the morning to customers over sixty. This lets the shop in safety.) Much younger people, who face much less risk of death, seem to take self-distancing less seriously.
--Once the three or six weeks of restrictions run their course, people will likely feel as if it's all over. Judging by the repeated spikes of the Spanish Flu (1918-1919), it will *not* be over. Granted, once the first wave has peaked, a lot of people will have built up immunity, so successive waves won't be as bad.
--We have a lot of healthy doctors and nurses now. A long siege will wear down their resistance. If I were running things, I would train lots of volunteers in supportive techniques so the doctors and nurses will not be under such stress.

We have a problem with an incompetent prime minister in the UK but my heart goes out to the citizens of the US and also places like Brazil with leaders that make BoJo look like a genius

This disease doesn't care if you boost you immune system with supplements, stay the hell away from it if you possibly can. Easier said than done I know.

Can't help thinking Dyson's thousands of ventilators will arrive far too late. Still they'll be ready for the next crisis...

"stay the hell away from it if you possibly can. Easier said than done I know" [Orcus]

I'm doing my best.

We're all staying six feet away from each other. One local supermarket has markers in front of each checkout isle. The markers are six feet apart, and the shoppers are required to stand on them.

Some shops here have lines throughout the shop. Supermarkets have screens in front of te check-out girls (or boys), no cash payments, single shoppers only, shopping cart obligation, maximum number of clients in the shop (something like 1 client per 10 square meters of shop).

I just read about one place with extra issues: The community of Baarle has historically been divided in Dutch and Belgian enclaves, with the border even crossing through houses and shops. Since the rules are not entirely the same for Belgium and The Netherlands, strange dilemmas occur. Clothes shop:"Sorry, you can't buy any underwear, because that is the Belgian side of the shop. That's closed".

I pity the people who work on one side of the U.S.-Canadian border but work on the other. They won't get unemployment benefits from the country they work in, will they?

More than three million Americans have filed for unemployment. Our local public transportation system is 25 million dollars in debt. I don't know what their debt was before the restrictions took effect, though. Maybe not all the debt can be attributed to the virus response.

"This disease doesn't care if you boost you immune system with supplements"[Orcus]

No disease does. Science is trying to figure out why some people are exposed to a disease but resist it better than others.

http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/how-to-boost-your-immune-system
At the anove link, it says:

"For now, there are no scientifically proven direct links between lifestyle and enhanced immune function."

Nevertheless, it may be worth doing everything possible to give yourself the best possible shot at survival. Bad nutrition, insufficient sleep, and colossal amounts of stress all seem to correlate with extra susceptibility to disease.

For instance, it's axiomatic that in the year following a particularly harrowing set of stresses, your likelihood of dying form cancer or other causes goes up
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3341916/

On another level, the science of immunity has established that humans have a variety of immune responses. These are determined by genetics.

In this link, it expplains how survivors of diseses such as smallpox bequeathed their successful immune systems to their descendants:
http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html

"With each epidemic eruption, some people survived, acquiring antibodies and immunities which they passed on to the next generation"

Overall, there was much less diversity of immune responses in the American Indians than in the European settlers.

With the Covi-19 virus, we are all facing the "virgin soil effect." No one is immune to it anywhere.

So, all we can hope for is to catch it (if we catch it all all) as late as possible, after scientists have found a few things that can blunt the worst effects.

(I've read some detailed immune system material comparing the Americans with the Europeans. I can't find it now. A pity )

Maybe people are getting sick about hearing about this virus. I don't blame them.

Almost 100 cases have been connected with a Biogen meeting in Boston in late February. That's more than a month ago. You'd think someone would have looked back to see how those cases have turned out. Who has recovered, who is still sick, who has died? BY age group, how has the course of the disease tracked?

The only celebrity I know who has had the virus and recovered nicely is Tom Hanks, who is 63. It's not necessarily a death sentence, though some people with severe symptoms might wish they were dead.

The latest figures form Greta Britain suggest that roughly five percent of those infected have died. That seems a lot higher than I would have expected, given the statistics from China, where a little over 3,000 have died out of a total of about 66,000. Then again, one in 22 is more than four percent, so who knows? Once those who are still recovering have recovered,might the proportions be different?

Not everyone suspected of having it in the UK has been tested, so the percentages are skewed - the statistics only give 'confirmed cases'.

That's similar to the guesswork during the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919. 23 million officially died, but unofficial estimates range form fifty million to a hundred million, with the estimated number of cases set at up to 500 million.

We could arrange to test pretty much everybody, though the costs might be prohibitive. In my state, the only people who get tested are the ones with symptoms. I would rather identify people who don't have symptoms yet, so they can be isolated, and the people who might have caught the flu from them can be monitored..

Isn't there some suggestion that those with least or no symptoms may be the greatest spreaders. Perhaps simply because those with obvious symptoms are more likely to stay at home, except that they will have been infectious before showing signs.

Mass testing is only possible if you actually have enough kits - the UK doesn't, the government only starting taking this seriously a couple of weeks ago. Now the whole world wants kits and they can't get them.

Manufacturing lots of kits should be a priority, then.

Trump has ordered General Motors to make ventilators. There are unemployed people available, though who knows how many would have the right skills. Still, when China needed face masks, they repurposed factories for the job.

[and now a little poetic levity]

Mr. Toad has a patronus.
It helps him avoid any onus.
He's very desirous
Of avoiding the virus,
Especially all those Coronas.

http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06322-9

In that link, from 2017, a study shows that Holland is the main provider of financial products to avoid paying taxes, products for financial mafia.

I bring it here because the minister of Holland for finances says that Italy and Spain have not prevented the crisis, that we waste money, that we put old people in hospitals instead of letting them die, etc.
The same old rethoric from the hard-working morally neat folks from the north to the lazy folks of the south. The Pigs that their and German banks looted in the last crisis.

We know some scandals, but not all. The ING has been fined for money laundry. Deutsche bank, Vodafone... don´t pay their taxes in many countries, they are the owners of many public services, like hospitals, housing buildings, old people houses, etc in Spain.

To put it short:

Dear minister of Dutch finances, your opaque way of stealing, your letting old people die and other mafia acts do not allow you to tell us that we are the silly kids that go weeping to get fixed their failures.

This pandemia will get at your white elegant arse sooner or later.
You and others like Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro... you know, the smartest in the world, have choosen profit instead of the right to health.
You , supremacist sychopath fascist are f....ing wrong.

Many don´t understand that the root of the problem, this and many more, is in those greedy cynical attitudes.

We can be thankful that we have some ‘original thinkers’ working on the problem:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-52094804

Must have been pretty strong magnets…

Maria: I live in the Netherlands, and I definitely did not vote for that Prime minister. (although I can mention some other politicians here which would be even worse in that position) There are a lot of things that you can't measure in money, which they are trying to valuate nevertheless. A lot of social securities have been broken down here in the last few years. Several of the tax rules are controversial here as well...

Regarding the current crisis: In my opinion, everybody should be helped, and fast!

The Dutch political culture has always been one of compromises, made after usually a lot of discussion, so I am not surprised. As far as I understand it, our Prime minister asked for some/ any kind of framework to financial aid, to prevent a repeat of the long term "let's press more euro's if there is any kind of problem"-strategy that has prevailed under Mr. Draghi. This strategy was shunned by his replacement, but is inevitable for the moment (I think)

So why not start helping right away and discuss details about the longer term as we go? That's what I would prefer. (But I am not a politician)

Concurrently, I find the Hungarian government's limitless grasp for power without a timeframe quite scary… It helps maneuvering quickly, butthere is a huge risk of abuse.

That doctor with the magnets in his nose proves that you can win h Darwin Award even if you have an M.D. degree.

But don't let those magnets get anywhere near me!