Interesting twitter storm from an emergency room doctor working in New York City. Not much urban mythology about the U.S. healthcare system in this one.
Here's some arithmetic to put things in perspective. New York City has a population of 8,000,000. Currently they have about over 100,000 positives, and over 10K deaths. So that's 1 out of 80 people has it, and out of those, 1 out of 10 will die. If you were on campus at SUU, 1 out of 80 is roughly 2 positives in the typical student's classes. And, between you and 4 friends, you'd know 10 positives, one of whom would have died already.And with an R nought of 3 and a serial period of a week, it would go from 1 out of 80, to 3, then 9, then 27, then 81 out of 80 within a month. Glad you're at home? And the amazing thing is — in New York City they're feeling a little better about their situation because they felt it could be worse.
New research suggests the intermediate animal that transmitted the virus from bats to humans in Wuhan may have been dogs. The presumption is that feral street dogs at bats or bat droppings, and the virus thrived in them.
Of course, you've probably heard by now that China is requiring scholars at universities to get their COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 research approved by the government before submission to academic journals. Last time I checked, peer review meant review by your peers.
Trump is going to defund the WHO. Not good (at this time). But lost in all of the news about this is the strong suspicion that another one of the WHO's large donors told them the same thing about 3 months ago.
Yesterday was Day 1 for Austria starting to allow small businesses to re-open. Stay tuned.
This is personal opinion, but did it seem like the story du jour in the legacy media changed on a dime this week? From New York City is getting worse, to plans to "re-open the economy".
For those of you not getting this, governors have become so important because of the 10th Amendment. It states that any powers not given specifically to the federal government belong to the state governments. And pandemic response was not exactly something that the federal government was planning for. Already, there are two groups of governors planning on working in tandem to "re-open".
Interesting news in China: there have been quite a few factory fires. No one is sure why (China's insurance system does not work the same way as ours, so owner-arson seems unlikely). Not much news coverage of it inside China either. This bears watching.
Fake news: at a press conference Iran's health minister showed an image of an Iranian nurses PPE related bruises. Internet sleuths determined it is a photo of a nurse from Brazil. Meanwhile, dissidents report Iran's death toll to be roughly the same as the U.S., and about 5 times higher than the official toll. That's consistent with the WHO report from a month ago that the number of cases was 5 times larger than the official numbers.
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