861–870 of 919 posts
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Which makes total sense since the UK is a haven from this pandemic... oh wait. Nope. It's spreading at bloody Heathrow itself: https://www.airport-technology.com/news/coronavirus-heathrow...
UK is currently 29th on total cases per million population (6.7). That's pretty far down the list.
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a) is because as I understand it it's /very/ hard to legally refuse to readmit a US citizen. You can seize all their stuff at the border but besides arresting them for a crime you can't really keep them from coming home.
As a US citizen currently on a business trip out of the country, that's really good to know!
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I’m ok with their precautions. Not only are they keeping things super clean, but they are giving my kid more hygiene education and training then I could possibly do on my own. For example, washing hands at home is a bit of a struggle because the sink is so high, it is much easier to drill in the habit at daycare, not to mention the peer pressure they apply by making a game out of it for all the kids at once. Child ps…
> washing hands at home is a bit of a struggle because the sink is so high Buy a stool for crying out loud, they're like $10
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Thanks, that's interesting and not something I've heard before. I think the CDC etc should make this clear : it isn't "an infected person sneezing near you" but "a volume of air into which someone has sneezed in the past few hours". If people knew this I think they would be more inclined to accept the distancing measures.
It gets mathematical and statistical really fast. So there's a constant conflict between simple and easy to understand but not totally correct info, and scientifically correct but incomprehensible to most info. Someone sneezing in your face = really bad. Someone sneezing an hour ago vs. touching something they just sneezed on... hard to say which is worse.
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I'm betting we've been seeded since even before Wuhan's quarantine started. My folks and I all got pretty thoroughly sick during a cruise in early January, and they're becoming increasingly convinced it was COVID (especially since my stepmom tested negative for any sort of flu, and this was well before there were reports of COVID outside of China so of course the doctors wouldn't think to test for it even if they hap…
Small sample size but: similar experience here (in the middle of the USA). One of my son's friend's mother was even hospitalized for "pneumonia" for a few days. This was the first time I heard of a fairly young fit person having pneumonia due to the flu.
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Those are valid points. As to the test kits, I keep hearing conflicting info -- e.g. that there was a shortage of ingredients, too much FDA red tape, etc. There will plenty of root cause analysis in the future, but I think we have to reshore critical infrastructure and there is lots of red tape to cut in both CDC and FDA.
My personal theory is that someone in the executive branch wanted to secure an exclusive contract for a personal friend. Something similar happened in the first few months of the Kuwait oil fires, with certain american fire fighting firms being given exclusive contracts to fight the fires, despite lacking the technology and expertise to extinguish them. But I'm just a cynical man. It could very well be something else…
Similarly in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, a politically connected one-man "energy company" called Whitefish, with no experience or skills, emerged out of nowhere and was given the contracts to rebuild the entire Puerto Rican grid.
Months later nothing had happened other than he hired a few people as unskilled as himself who were just dorking around down there, while people died.
So they fired that guy and hired another company called Cobra, with the same terrible terms, and the same ineffective response. Eventually it was found out that Cobra people had paid massive bribes to officials to ensure the deal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/puerto-rico-fema-arres...
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Nobody is giving chest x-rays to older people here who have died, apparently of pneumonia.
I'm not a clinician, but getting to the diagnosis of pneumonia usually involves imaging, as I understand it: https://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0601/p1299.html
In order to not significantly undercount the number of coronavirus deaths attributed to other causes in the US, there would need to be wide-spread testing here... which there isn't.
Imaging (by the way, you're referencing tests on live patients not dead ones) could be used as another kind of coronavirus test, though an extremely inefficient one, so probably is essentially un-used. Anyway, for pneumonia I believe we're talking about x-rays which is poor at distinguishing coronavirus (see link). Not to mention all of this is brand new. So approximately zero Radiologists are trained and using radiology in a clinical setting to diagnose coronavirus in people who have apparently died of pneumonia.
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Nah, all planes are just going to be routed through a non-European destination en route back. The Azores are about to be very popular.
or Britain, or Turkey
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It's all about flattening the curve at this point. You can do your best to identify those infected and have them self-quarantine, but if the gates are open and infected people are streaming into your country, you're not going to get far.
You’re describing the opposite of flattening the curve. Closing the gates now does nothing. I do not mean to be patronizing, but this is literally life or death and the math is very simple. Today there are k infected people. Tomorrow there will be kn people. If n is unsustainable, any positive value for k is equivalent. Arbitrarily large changes to k today make an arbitrarily small contribution to the final doubling.…
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It sounds like you've never been outside of a city in Europe and never been to a city in the US? Urban population in the EU in 2018 is 76% while 82% for the same year in the US according to The World Bank.
Got a citation for those numbers? Another poster claims that the US suburb population alone is 175M, and that's roughly half the country right there. Add in the rural population (46M), and 82% urban seems not even remotely correct.