Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[bennymac]

Thanks for that reddit link

key quotes include:

"China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic. In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.

"Much of the global community is not yet ready, in mindset and materially, to implement the measures that have been employed to contain COVID-19 in China. These are the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans. Fundamental to these measures is extremely proactive surveillance to immediately detect cases, very rapid diagnosis and immediate case isolation, rigorous tracking and quarantine of close contacts, and an exceptionally high degree of population understanding and acceptance of these measures."

-- Ok, time to see if North America's society can come close to this type of response!

New Hampshire's first coronavirus patient, a hospital employee, went to an event tied to Dartmouth business school on Friday despite being told to stay isolated, officials say, and all others who went to the event are now being told to stay isolated.

https://www.necn.com/news/coronaviru...shire/2240615/

----

Ok never mind. See you on the other side.

[old goat]

I doubt that most countries will adopt practices as aggressive as China's until there is a significant case load. In the US one problem is the fragmentation of the health care system--public health is for the most part dealt with on a county by country basis. The federal and state health authorities can make recommendations but it is up to local public health officials, who are generally woefully understaffed and underfunded, to implement them.

[patxi]

The best part about this is that 2 guys from different stores' seafood departments are friends. It's like there is a club for professional fish slicers.

Worshipful Company of Fishmongers


it's been around since the 1200s

[powdork]

Thanks for that reddit link

key quotes include:

"China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic. In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.

"Much of the global community is not yet ready, in mindset and materially, to implement the measures that have been employed to contain COVID-19 in China. These are the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans. Fundamental to these measures is extremely proactive surveillance to immediately detect cases, very rapid diagnosis and immediate case isolation, rigorous tracking and quarantine of close contacts, and an exceptionally high degree of population understanding and acceptance of these measures."

-- Ok, time to see if North America's society can come close to this type of response!

New Hampshire's first coronavirus patient, a hospital employee, went to an event tied to Dartmouth business school on Friday despite being told to stay isolated, officials say, and all others who went to the event are now being told to stay isolated.

https://www.necn.com/news/coronaviru...shire/2240615/

----

Ok never mind. See you on the other side.

Been thinking about this and the precedents they have set. They have been using drones to intercept and warn people outside. Arming drones to control the population is just a policy decision by those removed from the repercussions at this point

[powdork]

FWIW, I contacted the worldometers folk about the Diamond Princess mortality rate. In regards to the first Australia death, who was actually a Diamond Princess passenger. They said it was counted as an Australia death because the positive result occurred when he was in Australia, even though he contracted while onboard. I'm not sure how many times that is replicated in terms of cases or deaths

[SB]

That 4 ply looks tempting

[SB]

Was saving these for special occasion




What would they be worth?

[zartagen]

Meanwhile in Australia:

Attachment 318724

At last, a good use for the GMO dog! Will corona virus stop the pandemic spread of the doodles?

[Benny Profane]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...avirus/607306/

"Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact. The Chinese have already paid a high price for the secretiveness of their system, and for the top-down bureaucratic culture that led many, initially, to conceal the disease. By contrast, one of the reasons Italians aren’t panicking more is that they have confidence in the public-health system, and indeed the system in the broader sense of the word, despite Salvini and his disinformation campaigns. Italy has already tested many thousands of people for the virus—testing is free, of course—which is one of the reasons the numbers are so much higher there than elsewhere. People know this, and repeat it to one another, sometimes joking about it (“We Italians are too honest”) but it is a source of pride. Few others in Europe, so far, are testing that widely. And, of course, the U.S. is not doing anything of the sort.

In the U.S., I am afraid we might learn that neither our public-health system nor our “system” more broadly understood how to build feelings of trust. Even though we have the highest-tech health-care system in the world, even though we have the best surgeons and the best equipment, we have not created a public-health culture that induces confidence. The hospital system has been pared down to the bone; there is no extra capacity, and everyone knows it. If people have to pay to be tested, then many may refuse. If people have to be quarantined, they may escape."

[whipski]

Haven't heard the availability and cost of the sampling/lab testing assay for the virus? We sure dont have it in the ER where I work.

[summit]

I heard a cost of $100 but not sure if true or who pays

[Mofro261]

Yeah 50-100 sounds about right for most rtPCR tests. A few automated platforms out there otherwise theres a bit of labor for RNA extraction and reagent prep.

[BmillsSkier]

Does the test come with free Shen Yun tickets?

[KQ]

I doubt that most countries will adopt practices as aggressive as China's until there is a significant case load. In the US one problem is the fragmentation of the health care system--public health is for the most part dealt with on a county by country basis. The federal and state health authorities can make recommendations but it is up to local public health officials, who are generally woefully understaffed and underfunded, to implement them.

Then there is this - wonder if it will help put universal health care front and center in this election cycle:

Worries over medical bills, lost pay could worsen spread

The race to curb the spread of the new coronavirus could be thwarted by Americans fearful of big medical bills if they get tested, low-income workers who lose pay if they take time off when sick, and similar dilemmas that leave the United States more vulnerable to the epidemic than countries with universal health coverage and sturdier safety nets.



After traveling to China and Italy, Osmel Martinez Azcue went to a Miami public hospital with flu-like symptoms and wound up with a flu diagnosis, a Tamiflu prescription — and a $1,400 bill.

As the test for the virus becomes more widely available, health-care experts predict that some people with flu-like illnesses — or those who may have been exposed — will avoid finding out whether they have been infected because they are uninsured or have health plans that saddle them with much of the cost of their care.

Making sure the right people get tested — and keeping them away from others if they are infected — is crucial to help diminish the virus’s spread within communities as it pops up in a growing number of states.

Now that federal health officials have ironed out initial problems with the test itself and enabled more labs to take part in the hunt for infection, this work of testing and quarantining is the essential second stage. Yet the government has not yet begun to tell Americans where to go for testing, and neither public nor private insurers are changing their rules to buffer people from testing-related charges.

Some preparations recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are incompatible with the way benefits work. Officials have urged people to keep an adequate supply of their routine medicines in case they end up quarantined. But insurance companies seldom permit refills until a patient is nearly out of pills. The agency also urges people with respiratory illnesses to stay home from work. But with no federal sick leave requirements, some experts predict the virus will spread more rapidly.

For an international, fastspreading epidemic, the nation’s health-care system and many workers’ benefits are “certainly not optimally designed,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

Federal funds cover the cost of the coronavirus test itself when it is run in federal, state or local public health laboratories. But that changes as academic and commercial labs get involved. In neither case does the government buffer people from bills for visiting a doctor’s office, urgent care center or emergency room, though nearly half of the 160 million Americans with insurance through their jobs have health plans with high deductibles.

“Deductibles are designed to make people think twice about going to the doctor if they are feeling sick,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-research organization. “In a potential pandemic, the last thing you want people to do is thinking twice about going to the doctor.”

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s main trade group, has issued guidance called “Keeping Americans Safe from Coronavirus.” The statement says insurers are “carefully monitoring the system” and working with the CDC to share information.

But it does not urge insurance companies to eliminate out-ofpocket costs for the tests or for visits to doctors or clinics for respiratory illnesses, saying that health plans may want to determine “whether policy changes are needed to ensure that people get essential care.”

Thomas Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said eliminating the financial disincentive to get tested “needs to be at the top of the list” of problems that federal health officials tackle.

Inglesby said that other countries, including Western democracies with government-financed health-care systems, have not been fully publicizing their testing strategies. But he said, “Countries where patients could get large bills for diagnostic testing will have additional challenges identifying people.”

Even before the test was widely available in the United States, a few instances of people ending up with large, coronavirus-related medical bills have lit up Twitter.

In one case, a 29-year-old Miami engineer, Osmel Martinez Azcue, had been in China for work, returned home briefly, then flew to Italy for another quick assignment. By the time he arrived home on Jan. 27, he said in an interview, he had spent a miserable, feverish night in the Lisbon airport, popping ibuprofen as he waited for a connecting flight.

His mother, who lives in his apartment building, started researching the coronavirus and convinced him that he needed a test.

He thought it was probably the flu, but the next morning, he called an urgent care center, which told him that only two hospitals in town could help him.

He went immediately to Miami’s public hospital, Jackson Memorial, where emergency room workers, already alerted, said they rushed him into a quarantine room. A nurse in protective gear quizzed him about his travels, and a doctor told him he needed a CT scan, Azcue said.

He knew the inexpensive insurance he had switched to in the fall requires him to pay $5,000 upfront, so he asked the doctor to first give him a routine flu test, and, if it was positive for influenza, to send him home.

Less than two hours after he arrived, he left the hospital with a flu diagnosis and a Tamiflu prescription.

On Valentine’s Day, a bill arrived from National General Insurance that upset Azcue so much that he did not take his longtime girlfriend out to celebrate. It said he owed $3,270.75 unless he sent the insurer three months of records to prove that the flu had not been a preexisting medical condition. After his story appeared in the Miami Herald, the insurer withdrew the records demands late last week, saying he would owe $1,400.

Said Hopkins’s Inglesby: “It is in the public interest for us to have free testing available for people — not just the test itself but the process of getting tested.”

So far, doctors are not getting a lot of calls from worried patients, said Robert Mclean, president of the American College of Physicians — the professional association of internists — and medical director of a 400-doctor medical group in southern Connecticut affiliated with the Yale New Haven Health System.

The health system has designed protocols so that “if someone is sick with a cough, everyone gets asked whether they have been to China” or other outbreak sites. “If there is any of that stuff, it gets triaged to a doctor for a phone call.”

But Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, said he was thinking about the health system’s capacity the other night, when his wife wasn’t feeling well after work with what turned out to be the flu. They went to an urgent care clinic in suburban Maryland that was crowded.

“I’m thinking, this place is busy, and it’s a one-and-a-halfhour wait now. And we don’t have community spread here. What’s going to happen? We are going to quickly overwhelm clinics,” he said.

Meanwhile, Georgetown’s Corlette said work-related worries may also deter people from taking time off to get a test or staying home if they are sick. She noted that nearly one-third of all workers — and more than two-thirds of all low-income workers — do not get paid sick days.


“Workers who serve our food, take care of our elderly, take care of our kids, change our sheets — that’s a thing that should be keeping people up at night,” she said.

[BmillsSkier]

Can you please boil that down to about the length of a Chinese episode of South Park?

Thanks

[KQ]

Can you please boil that down to about the length of a Chinese episode of South Park?

Thanks

Our healthcare system sucks. Insurers could give a rats ass about their clients. This is going to get really ugly.

[Timberridge]

Can you please boil that down to about the length of a Chinese episode of South Park?

Thanks

Cartman won't go to the school nurse because he'll miss a math test and because if he has to make it up alone, he's worried he might get molested by Mr. Garrison.

[Benny Profane]

Our healthcare system sucks. Insurers could give a rats ass about their clients. This is going to get really ugly.

I posted this in the Trump thread, but, I'll say it here. If Trump was smart, he'd come out and declare, at least, all testing paid for by the government, if uninsured. Easy, price of one F35. But, that assumes Trump is smart. He has this awesome wide open window right now. Just throw money at the problem, make a big stink about it at his rallies. Biden will still be trying to figure out what day it is.

[up an down]

I posted this in the Trump thread, but, I'll say it here. If Trump was smart, he'd come out and declare, at least, all testing paid for by the government, if uninsured. Easy, price of one F35. But, that assumes Trump is smart. He has this awesome wide open window right now. Just throw money at the problem, make a big stink about it at his rallies. Biden will still be trying to figure out what day it is.

Trump seems to have a few amoral and smart people influencing him...So.. Your idea may be part of a new tax cut bill.. A few crumbs have to be thrown to the idiotic Trump base voters to make another give away to the 1% palatable.

[Benny Profane]

Trump seems to have a few amoral and smart people influencing him...So.. Your idea may be part of a new tax cut bill.. A few crumbs have to be thrown to the idiotic Trump base voters to make another give away to the 1% palatable.

No, no, that's stupid. No "tax cut". Most people know the last tax cut was bullshit. Free shit. It's an election year. Taxes take time, too. In a month there's going to be a hundred thousand, probably more, sick. They want treatment. Bam.

[Rideski]

Saw a clip on ABC, didn’t verify. WHO announced 3.4% dead rate.

5:45 a.m. COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu, WHO says
The disease caused by the novel coronavirus, known officially as COVID-19, is more than three times as deadly as the season flu, according to the head of the World Health Organization.
"Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Geneva on Tuesday. "By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected."

[MontuckyFried]

Saw a clip on ABC, didn’t verify. WHO announced 3.4% dead rate.

Interesting to look at WHO's latest situation report for all the details on a country by country breakdown:
https://www.who.int/docs/default-sou...3-covid-19.pdf

[CascadeLuke]

Well my house and cars are clean n sterile. I’ve packed on a few lbs from my food stock pile - eat everything at home pledge. Need fitness but it’s a war zone

[bodywhomper]

At the grocery last night: TP shelves: empty, hand sanitizer shelves: empty, rubbing alcohol shelves: empty, Truckee sourdough shelves: empty. Coincidences?!

[glademaster]

There's better sourdough to be found in Grass Valley.