cryoshon

we have absolutely no clue regarding the long-term impacts of exposure to this virus for asymptomatic people or otherwise.

we cannot gamble with our future so carelessly on the basis of preliminary data. here is a vignette to explain why.

once someone is infected with HIV, most people experience flu-like symptoms for a week or two which then resolve either with or without treatment. in some people, the virus is cleared so effectively after the initial infection that they will test negative for HIV. then, over the span of months and years, their immune system is silently and entirely asymptomatically destroyed, leaving them none the wiser until they progress to AIDS and get extremely sick.

COVID hasn't given us any indication of similar activity. but we know so very little that we can't take the risk, especially not with millions and millions of people. i will also note that we are unlikely to rule out these kinds of hypothetical risks anytime soon. so caution is our only defense against disaster.

unfortunately this article ignored around the elephant in the room: one of the two dominant political parties has an entire platform devoted to stopping institions from expanding while also eating away at the existing capabilities of those institutions. they pursue this platform relentlessly, and have done so for roughly the last 40 years.

faced with staunch refusals to consider any type of revolutionary building at the institutional level, would-be builders reduced their hopes to incremental changes, bringing us to the current state of affairs.

after enormous legislative efforts, incremental and generally insufficient changes are made to support the strength of US institutions. then, as part of the dealmaking necessary to make any changes whatsoever, other institutions are degraded incrementally in trade. the system of the country's institutions never becomes stronger in terms of its total sum of capabilities, it only reshuffles them.

imagine trying to build a house when half of your building team never lets you purchase any new materials, only permitting you the use of bricks that are already built into the house. you have to remove a brick from the foundation to place it on the top of a half-constructed wall. that's the situation the US is in. it's untenable.

there isn't going to be a tidy legislative solution to this kind of intractability anytime soon because the people with the most money prefer the current situation and fund politicians accordingly.

lest you think that the point of my comment is to blame republicans or democrats, let me tell you that it isn't. my point is that america cannot build because it cannot accept that building requires spending, as spending would require contradicting the will of the political donor class. we needed to get money out of politics back when occupy wall street was calling for it. the next best time is now.

in a nutshell, the rich need to do their part to contribute to society and accept that their influence must be curbed if the country is to flourish once again. as we know, there's no chance of them doing this of their own accord. i'll leave the details of how we can get them on board with rebuilding the country to the imagination of the reader.

>If I were Charlie Baker I would call up the National Guard and tell them to retrieve the masks that were sized by any means necessary. This is an absolute disgrace, and blatant theft by the Feds.

you are not the first to suggest this. and, in fact, the massachusetts national guard defended the shipment from kraft's plane to ensure it was not seized upon arrival.

by all appearances, the federal government is stealing and redirecting life saving and critical equipment on the basis of cronyism and political loyalty. this is an attack on the population of the states being stolen from.

make no mistake: just a bit further down this very road is the dissolution of the union between the states that comprise the country.

this is a really good point. AFAIK, 100% of the canonical pre-existing conditions which are highly dangerous with COVID are disqualifiers for joining the military.

this cohort will give us a much better picture of how the virus impacts a totally healthy and young population. as with countless other pieces of evidence, it should also help to put the "it's just a flu bro" falsehood to bed.

$1200 is barely enough for one month for most people. for a lot of urbanites, that check will get eaten by rent more or less immediately. if not this month's rent, next' month's rent, and so on. if not rent, then food. or healthcare. or essential utilities, or car payments.

when things get tough and there is scarcity, people save more and spend less. as far as the unemployment benefits go, i think most people will still be very reluctant to spend on anything other than staples until they have a sustainable way of generating income that isn't dependant on a government program.

many of today's workers remember the duration of the unemployment benefits offered during the great recession -- and they remember for how many years economic conditions were difficult long after those benefits ended, even including the extension programs. everyone sees that there is a substantial chance of an extended and deep COVID depression which might dwarf the great depression and will certainly dwarf the great recession. you're not going to convince people to spend money in that environment.

plus, most of the things people would usually spend on are either explicitly off-limits or unlikely to be purchased in the current situation.

>if you're spending your day on Twitter right now, it's shredding your psychological health

>Twitter seems to have evolved more into just really stressed out people yelling at public officials

these are both good points, but i think that there should be a bit of context: by and large in the US, public officials are performing unexpectedly, astoundingly, and utterly unforgivably poorly in their responses to the coronavirus.

it's the correct response to be anxious about the wholesale failure of public and private institutions, and it's the correct response to be livid about it and to channel anger towards those who are letting the country down in its greatest time of need.

it's fashionable to say that disconnecting is important for your mental health. it isn't that the idea of disconnecting for the sake of mental health is in any way incorrect. but democracies function via the will of the public being reflected in the actions of individuals and institutions. if public officials don't have people giving them an earful, they will in all likelihood continue to act in a way which harms the public.

in other words: without the endless hammering of the anxious and unstable twitterati and those like them, the public health response to the coronavirus in the US would likely be even worse than the near worst-case response that we're seeing. it's bad for the people doing it, but it's part of the democratic process at this point.

according to the OP paper, that's an unproven strategy. i can't find anything else supporting it in the literature linked by that paper either. so the real answer is that we don't know.

however, while it appears to be unproven, given what we know about how long the virus survives on different materials, i would say that it is probable that leaving a mask aside in a dry spot for a week or so is effective at ensuring there are no viable viral particles remaining on the mask.

as long as we're using unproven decontamination methods, i'd say to also leave the external surface of the mask in direct sunshine for a few hours too.

as the OP paper notes, sun bleaching / UVR does degrade the quality of the filtration by a small amount (around 1.5% if i recall) but it's also effective at destroying viral particles in a short period.

>It should be a balance.

the situation you describe is not a "balance". it's whatever the employer desires. you've all but guaranteed low morale. when you demand loyalty and team spirit on top of that, it justifies cynicism.

in such a situation, you should expect people to do the bare minimum.

honestly, i'm surprised that their demands are so few and so modest. i was expecting significantly higher numbers for the hazard pay portion of their demands.

i can't understand what might prevent amazon and instacart from assenting to these demands as soon as they have the logistical ability to provide the necessary items to their staff.

the national situation isn't permissive of corporations dragging their feet when essential services are down at the moment.

on the other hand, workers treated to a hopefully quick victory will not forget this when the pandemic ends. if we're lucky, the balance of power will shift to their favor.

rising health insurance premiums will drag down any notion of economic recovery once the pandemic recedes, much like rising health insurance premiums led to the middle class being hard-pressed in the aftermath of the great recession.

quite simply, there is no economy without consumer demand for services. and consumers who pay higher rents to their health insurance company have less money to spend. the money doesn't ever trickle back down into the economy once it is lost inside of the insurance system.

nevermind that millions of people have lost their employer-provided health insurance after being laid off. for them, these discussions of health insurance premiums rising are a bit academic; there is no chance of care being accessible or affordable, even if the monthly toll of maintaining expensive insurance is rising astronomically.

it's clear the the US healthcare system cannot continue in its current form. it is my hope that people will no longer entertain delusions of perseverating the present system. it's decidedly non-serious to consider that the ACA might be reformed further to keep the current system.

the only true debates remaining are about how much of the healthcare system should be under the public's control, which we can boil down to two camps: above 70% public ownership, or above 40% but less than 70%. the former camp includes ideas like single payer and medicare for all, whereas the latter camp includes hybrid systems which are closer to switerland's or germany's systems.

framing the US as the world's "richest country" is a disservice here.

a few people are very rich, and many people are well off. but the institutions of this country are, despite being the product of the "richest country", entirely poor and weak.

public institutions have been hollowed out by decades of intentional neglect and austerity. the CDC has no help to offer hospitals in need and is still like a deer in headlights, months into the crisis. before their weakness was exposed, the national stockpile was mostly empty. the cracks in the system were never filled, and many were barely papered over.

private institutions have been optimized to extract profits rather than to serve their stated social purpose. hospitals are now on the brink of going out of business and closing down as the pandemic starts to ramp up. their readiness was low beforehand, too, as there's no money to be made in being prepared for a public health emergency.

so, how did the world's richest country run out of face masks? easy: we organized our society around the idea that buying them and keeping them around was too expensive to bother with.

it's more or less unforgiveable that our american healthcare workers don't have the PPE they need to protect themselves. attrition among our healthcare workers is going to be very high, especially because unlike singapore, we use the most inefficient quarantine guidelines when we suspect that they have been exposed.

people are sewing masks to make up the difference between what is needed and what we can supply. the federal government can't seem to supply the states with much of anything. and purchasing domestically-produced masks is becoming rapaciously expensive, with some manufacturers charging $7 per mask. allegedly our domestic manufacturers are ramping up production. but let's face it, that takes time. and we don't have time, because once one of our healthcare workers gets sick, they're out of commission for weeks.

i will not abide by this disaster for our heathcare workers. i am working with an established charity to raise money to purchase thousands of n95 respirator masks from chinese manufacturers so that those masks can be shipped and donated directly to hospitals in epicenters like new york.

i'm calling it the million mask campaign because i hope that we can eventually donate at least a million masks to hospitals in need. in reality, we will need many millions of masks if we want to protect our healthcare workers, but everything we can bring to bear on their behalf will be beneficial.

please consider contributing to our campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-million-mask-campaign?utm_sou...

disinfection isn't going to do much of anything. the virus lives in people and spreads between people, even when they are mostly asymptomatic, at least for a few days.

sure, it'll stop people from picking up trace viral particles on surfaces, which is better than nothing.

but i see many places "closing for disinfection" as their go-to response to the virus, and if you understand the way that this disease transmits, it's mostly for show.

>corticosteroids may have no treatment effect

isn't the point of the corticosteriods to rapidly reduce widespread pulmonary inflammation that would otherwise kill the patient?

a vaccine might be 18 months away, if we're lucky and divert resources to the effort. if we're unlucky, it could be four to five years or even longer. remember, there's no guarantee that we can even make a vaccine for any arbitrary viral disease. we can't do nothing while we wait for a vaccine.

placeholder antiviral therapies are also a non-starter. we can't manufacture the drugs at the scale we need them unless we massively expand our production capabilities, and that takes time as well as money.

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as things stand currently, there has been no substantive response by the US federal government to the coronavirus which will lead to the lessening of infections or mortality.

china and south korea both explicitly stated that they were transitioning to wartime footing to combat the virus. we need to follow in their footsteps. we need billions of dollars in spending, suspension of normal daily life, and requisitioning of the necessary resources from private entities if needed. and we need to do this today. now. this afternoon. preferably before 5 PM. this isn't a problem to be left until tomorrow.

yet we're still here, conducting life as normal as the infection reaches the exponential part of its spread. people are still going to work, going to church, and riding the subway. hospitals and prisons don't have any special measures in place.

we aren't even testing people after weeks of knowing that we are at risk for local transmissison. we have no extra resources queued up. as of today, our congress can't even agree to pass a funding bill to combat the disease. we have no leadership, and it's going to kill quite a few people.

if you think i'm being "alarmist", please revisit my here comment in six months, when we'll have a clearer idea of the death toll. i don't know if this virus will kill a million americans, or only a few hundred. either way, if we act with more vigor over the last few weeks, i can say with confidence that more people will live.

i think this article misses the mark.

consider that the preliminary WHO incident report regarding the chinese response to the outbreak in wuhan essentially said that the radical and severe measures taken by the chinese government were the only thing which allowed for some semblance of control over the course of weeks. if we assume that the chinese are not fabricating their numbers, it's not much of a relief for us because they still had thousands of deaths despite their colossal efforts. if we assume that the chinese have been faking their numbers, the picture is much more grim.

a lot of the hysteria in the US is stemming from the fact that the CDC is asleep at the wheel as a result of political pressure or potentially severe incompetence. after seeing how seriously the chinese took the outbreak and how badly iran is getting hit by it right now, it is extremely disconcerting to see our own government doing absolutely nothing as cases continue to mount.

we're barely even testing people. daily life is continuing as normal when perhaps it shouldn't be.

i know that this isn't the end of the world, but i'm starting to expect that this epidemic might make life a bit less comfortable for a while.

if the US gets hit very hard and some of the preventable/fixable weaknesses in american society end up being exposed and exacerbated by the epidemic, i think we'll be in a severe crisis.

school and business closures should have happened two or three weeks ago when it was clear that the US still had a chance to nip the infection in the bud.

now, it's way too late. we've had numerous instances of community transmission where we can't track the origin of the infection. we'll need to shutter everything for a longer period if we want to prevent widespread infections.

>This is going to cost you money, time, and opportunity

herein lies the problem. everyone knows the virus is costing time and money. but how much do you want to bet that unscrupulous people are going to want to try to keep their employees working in-office or on their retail sites so that their bottom line doesn't get hammered as hard?

without a public health response mandating certain measures -- a response which the US public health bodies have been woefully slow to initiate -- many people will be left at risk.

then there's the other issue: what do we do about people who can't afford to stop working or work remotely? at present, we have no plan. these people are a ticking time bomb because our political apparatus refuses to mobilize in response to this threat.

my take on this is that those masks are probably useless, and even if they were useful, most members of the public will not utilize them correctly.

so, i advise people to leave the face masks of all types for utilization by our healthcare workers, as there will soon be a shortage and as a member of the public you should mostly be sitting at home rather than wandering around areas with other people anyway.

>there are clearly agendas on both sides and everything needs to be validated

one side features scientists who have been developing the same story for nearly 40 years with ever-greater detail. they don't have paid PR professionals or troll farms, but they have a body of facts, which, when taken as a whole, are unimpeachable in their prescription for what needs to happen to prevent future global warming. perhaps you may say that an individual paper's finding is refuted. sure. we expect that to occur with no fewer than 5% of all papers within most fields. the other ~95%, while imperfect, will continue to support the same broad stroke conclusions as well as many of the most relevant supporting details.

in contrast to this standard of evidence, the other side features people who stand to lose money by allowing the body of facts to be acted upon. they have the money to pay PR professionals and make advertising campaigns, etc. they can pay their own scientists to do some fake research, but the cat is already so far out of the bag that it's career suicide to do so. in other words, their position is so hopelessly lost that they can't even find credible fall guys within the field of climate science to make up nonsense which supports their agenda. think about that for a minute.

in this situation, we should expect the scientists to continue doing what they've always done: developing their research to be ever-more comprehensive and detailed, thereby giving the other side a smaller and smaller space to live in. in reaction, the other side will try to muddy the waters as much as possible for as long as possible to give them time to pivot their money to somewhere where the scientists can't harm it by exposing facts. this is what they're doing with the bot campaigns: repeating talking points like you have to muddy the waters and prevent meaningful organized action which would harm their financial bottom line. it's appallingly clear.

this isn't really a situation where you talk about "both sides" having agenda and "needing to validate" everything. there's no contest anymore. everything has been validated. the agenda of one of the sides has been exposed as utterly devoid of merit, not to mention egregiously underhanded. the agenda of the scientists has been simply to be listened to all along, so that the common good can be serviced rather than discarded.

>serious questions about how much of that is natural cycle and how much we are doing. We know we are doing some, we don't know how much, but we keep saying that this is settled science when more valid questions need to be asked

your statement is false, and it's a climate denialist talking point which was important enough such that climate scientists systematically examined and refuted it in the context of numerous pieces of peer-reviewed literature:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044...

""Despite a high degree of consensus amongst publishing climate researchers that global warming is occurring and that it is anthropogenic, this discourse [that humans may not be responsible for some degree of climate change], promoted largely by non-scientists, has had a significant impact on public perceptions of the issue, fostering the impression that elite opinion is divided as to the nature and extent of the threat [when it is not]."

>a secret that they will never admit to

what evidence makes you think that this is the case? what's the technology to fix PTSD that you're speaking of?

for me, happiness at work means four things:

1. a worthwhile mission that i find meaningful 2. competency and effectiveness at serving that mission 3. freedom from interference from management and other people who typically get in the way of being productive 4. compensation at the level commensurate to the value that i add

i assume for most people a job which met the above four factors would be a job where the person is happy. i also assume that employers intuitively grasp the above points. however, to squeeze as much value out of a worker as they can, i also know that employers intuitively understand how to exploit their ability to minimize their provision of the factors which they are poorly able to provide -- like money -- to make up fofr others. in essence, this means that is is reasonable to assume that most employers will intentionally game the four factors to offer as little as possible while still retaining the employee. this is also exactly how "passion jobs" like science and video game coding are habitually underpaid and abused.

i'll be honest, i've only found this combination of factor at the first job i had. in the 8 years since then, it's been a lot of compromising or surrendering on #1, facing hard realities about my talents regarding #2, suffering through #3 with a smile, and swallowing my pride to carry #4 as best i can without letting the resentment become visible. in other words, finding "happiness at work" has, for me, been a pipedream in comparison to the more immediate concern of avoiding misery at work.

i feel like i'm in the same boat. if i don't suceed in my entrepreneurial labor to make my own (new and unique) path, there's no way i can express myself and be accepted most of the time.

until then, going with someone else means conforming in a way i simply can't, even when i desperately want to.

yep. if the choice is "taking a risk" and burning down your meagre savings without the promise of a payout, or grinding away at a low-risk and low-reward job, the choice is exceedingly clear for most people.

you need slack capacity to take risk. millenials haven't ever had it, and they've repeatedly recieved strong economic signals to carefully hoard any slack they can find rather than risk it to get more.

saudi arabia isn't a great power. it has economic power via oil, but this power is eroding at a lightning speed thanks to the end of the petrochemical era. it has no military power to speak of, nor any cultural influence whatsoever outside of the muslim world. at the same time, its own culture is being eroded by the west's at a blinding pace. its institutions are weak and too corrupt to be taken seriously. its labor force is non-competitive. its citizens are not educated, nor are they interested in a transition to being more educated and competitive.

it is entirely reliant on foreign labor, foreign weapons, and foreign intellectual property. it has no natural resources to speak of, other than oil. it isn't a member of any powerful geopolitical blocs, and its fear of its more powerful neigbor (iran) has dictated its disposition for a long time.

in short, it's a billionaire's playground, but it isn't a nation that's very formidable. in the realm of cybersecurity/cyberwarfare, i'd put my money on bezos.

hacking of bezos' phone by MBS of KSA suggests an effort by the saudis to influence news coverage so that their backwards petrostate is not excoriated as routinely or as comprehensively for its cornucopia of egregiously unacceptable faults. there may also be some sort of wrondoing on behalf of trump in this incident, but i think it's too early to say either way.

on the bright side, this flap is a battle of billionaires. whoever loses, we win. at the current stage of the news cycle, it looks like MBS is down for the count, meaning that we're that much closer to being able to exclude KSA from world affairs until it modernizes. but, we'll have to see where it goes. if the media and the UN don't carry this investigation to its conclusion, there's still a chance the perpetrators could weasel away.

relatedly, this is the second incident in which someone has sought to blackmail bezos and failed horribly. i usually don't appreciate bezos, but the guy's unflappable. i wonder what bezos is doing behind the scenes to get back at the perpetrators, if anything.

>Welcome to corporate America.

enjoy it while it lasts. there will be more bloodshed soon

>Maybe we need an acceptable way for people who can't mentally handle work to be able to exist in society.

agreed. in america, the "acceptable way" is rapidly becoming suicide. of course, it's unacceptable. but that's what we've left people with.

>Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments.

yes, i've found this as well. the reason is that employer-based constraints on your schedule are always arbitrary, rarely compensated for in full, never equitable across power structures, and only tenuously negotiable in your favor.

in other words: your life becomes theirs to control in spirit, if not entirely in practice. it doesn't matter if they expect you to be at work from 9 to 5 or whatever else. if your employment is contingent on holding their schedule, they effectively hold control over the rest of your life's schedule.

and they excercise that control to the detriment of your life as a matter of course, routinely, ruthlessly, without hesitation, and without consideration, in nearly 100% of cases -- yes, even in the "cool startup" you're working for.

remember, you need to ask them to take time off to care for your sick relatives. you need to ask them for permission to not be at work to spend time for yourself on vacation. you are explicitly their property for however many hours per day, but they also own enough of you to implicitly dictate where you're allowed to be and when, and for what reasons.

i guess some people find it a good bargain to trade their autonomy for a wage. it's very hard to respect that kind of thinking a lot of the time, but i've learned to do it simply because most people accept the bargain and it'd be too isolating to behave otherwise. for me, it's an intolerable situation to bear, even for a moment.