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Daily coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - April 1
This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
This might warrant its own topic...
Racism against Asian-Americans is a real thing in the US right now.
Spouse has a friend who's an ER nurse at a hospital in South Florida, and she reported that they're receiving more Asian people who've suffered violent attacks than potential COVID-19 cases.
I spoke with a Miami-area Korean friend yesterday. She mentioned going to the grocery store (she lives in a mainly Cuban-origin neighborhood) and having people leave her checkout line until she was the only one there, even though the other lines were ten people deep.
I've tried hard all my life not to hate people, but I have never wished so much ill upon Donald Trump as an individual villain, as since the rhetoric he's emitted about COVID-19.
And his actions/inactions... I can't even begin. It's clear he's punishing states because their governors are Democrats who aren't nice enough to him - he's f*cking KoKo the Executioner from The Mikado.
I live near one of the highways in NYC, somewhat close to several hospitals. Since I switched to working from home last week I was hearing ambulance sirens every 15 to 20 minutes. They got more frequent yesterday, more like every 10 minutes, all day long and well into the night.
I'm curious how beginning a new month will set off the domino effect in the economy. My mortgage is due today, and I'm billing clients for my own work. It's a race to get your bill in front of the client first before they start the triage process due to inability to pay.
Case numbers have been looking promising thus far. The +9%/d we're getting is actually rather decent. 4000 cases daily seems sustainable in terms of healthcare system capacity - if we can get a sustainable supply chain of consumables to match it. As long as it stays a linear growth and we don't have too strong a propensity for local/regional clusters. All going well, I hope we'll see a slight (e: we have that, but it might be noise) decrease in case numbers soon. Then, we'll see... either we see some much-needed normalization in essential daily life (supermarkets stock flour again - it's the one thing I didn't stock anywhere near adequately it seems) or alternatively, we might see some undesirable non-compliance with necessary hygiene protocols.
I'm cautiously optimistic. Of course, 4k infections daily is still a big burden on the system and if we can halt it, we can curb it entirely too1, so I'd rather we get on that first, then help out in europe with the capacity we free up. But I'm not sure why testing more would make it look better: Our case numbers are higher than the other major european nations, but our death rate betrays it's because we know what's going on. Ehh, I dunno. +9% exponentially is still a giant fucking crisis. 4000 a day, maybe even shrinking is manageable. We'll have to wait and see where this ship is headed.
How would yeast work without carbs?
1 the argument being that a exponential growth as is the basic mode, would imply the 4k new infections/d turns into 5k, then 6k and change the next day etc. The effort to keep that to 4k is not far from the effort to get it to 3.9k and closer to zero in turn each day
Edit: Quick simulation shows that at 9%/d, we'd still have to expect 40% of the population to get sick within the same 4 week window - I don't need to tell anyone that that can not be allowed to happen. However, it pushes the peak back from day 100 (at 35%/d) to day 250 - both counting from a single patient zero, so I'd have to adjust those timelines to match them up to wherever we are now.
Between the airline connections to China, lack of testing to indicate existing spread, and pushback from the business community, Michigan was a couple of days slower than needed to lock down, so we've got a major regional outbreak.
Local to me, it seems we're getting an influx of people with second homes in the region, who are fleeing the southern part of Michigan and the Chicago metro. This is very bad news - northern Michigan doesn't have the hospital capacity or specialists to handle COVID-19.
This is probably overly morbid of me, but if there were a "Factorio: Pandemic Edition" I would definitely check it out.