Platystemon posted:

RandolphCarter posted:

it’s fun seeing other people at work in masks because it means they’re sick.

Shady Amish Terror posted:

mild severe acute respiratory syndrome

Pingui posted:

5) Finally I will note, that 1 (one) accepted donor donated 448 samples out of 77561 (0.58%), making up to $33,600 in the process. How many there are in this category is not indicated, but I am positive he is not alone.

gently caress COREY PERRY posted:

excuse me i can make a full time salary by jackin it relentlessly?

silicone thrills posted:

When you are ready to read another horrifying book - Check out The Viral Underclass by Steven Thrasher too.

Bixington posted:

Whoever talked toop out of pulling the shirt-rip superman act after not dying of COVID thanks to bixsexuality inducing drug cocktails should have been executed.

Steve Yun posted:

hey guys haven’t been here in a while and now I’m 1000 posts behind, what’s new?

I’ve been masking same as always, refusing to go to restaurants and basically settled into the possibility that this will be forever. Luckily my friends still invited me to parties and nobody gives me poo poo about wearing a mask

Ursine Catastrophe posted:

I checked out of keeping up to date on things and just started assuming everything was bad all the time and it's kind of funny that every time "maybe it's not that bad, nobody else is talking about it anymore" starts to even start to enter into my brainspace, 20 people call out of work and a mainstream article drops about "yeah poo poo's still bad actually"

Platystemon posted:

Colin Mockery posted:

Currently, actively, H5N2 has killed one person in Mexico. H5N1 is in the US (and many other places - this is the 2022 strain I think). H7N3 is in Australia.

Potato Salad posted:

Wait, how many 9/11s of traffic deaths are there daily?

Potato Salad posted:

Wait, how many 9/11s of traffic deaths are there daily?

Platystemon posted:

We can’t even keep accurate numbers. A pedestrian struck by a drunk truck driver east of Timbuktu is more likely to be reflected in official statistics than is a mother dying of COVID-19 at the UC San Francisco Medical Center.

Platystemon posted:

Like one and a quarter, globally.

COVID-19 came along and will kill more people than cars do, in perpetuity, and we’re not supposed to care, take action, or even notice it.

Countless governments, businesses, nonprofit organization, and individual human beings spend innumerable hours on the problem of traffic deaths.

In the time since 1950, deaths per mile have decreased by a factor of ten. Success in the last decade is more limited, but people are empowered to try.

COVID-19 is the complete opposite. There’s nothing like the NTSB investigating and issuing recommendations to NHTSA. Instead we have CDC undermining OSHA with an eleventh-hour operation to burn masks as the “scarlet letter of the pandemic”.

We can’t even keep accurate numbers. A pedestrian struck by a drunk truck driver east of Timbuktu is more likely to be reflected in official statistics than is a mother dying of COVID-19 at the UC San Francisco Medical Center.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/covid-cases-new-variant-hospitalisations-data-b2567094.html posted:

UK Covid hospitalisations increase following emergence of new variant
The rise is thought to be due to waning immunity and a new group of Covid variants collectively referred to as FLiRT
(..)
According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Covid hospital admissions increased by 24 per cent in the week to Sunday, with a rate of 3.31 per 100,000 people compared with 2.67 per 100,000 in the previous week.
(..)

no lube so what posted:

gently caress, never thought about it but also more sure about this then most things

Pingui posted:

It is very childish, but seeing this pop up in the headlines made me smile.

Pingui posted:

It is very childish, but seeing this pop up in the headlines made me smile.

quote:

[…]One of the stories in the book I tell is about my friend Randy Richardville. We had a lot of knockdown dragouts when I was the Democratic leader in the Senate. He was the Republican leader. He was in the majority. We did battle. We also, though, often ended the day going and grabbing a beer together, because I think that it’s important to not take things personally but to stay focused on doing the job and also trying to continue to build relationships with diverse sets of interests and people. That’s what our system’s supposed to be about.

quote:

It’s supposed to be about that, but one of the things that I know other Democrats have pointed to is that the Republican Party under Donald Trump has gone in a particular direction that makes that, they feel, very, very difficult. So that sounds great to sit and have a beer with your political adversary, but at the same time, there are huge chasms at the moment.

quote:

It’s challenging. I don’t ever want to imply that it’s easy. It takes thick skin and a short memory. During the pandemic, when things were really at their hottest, when the former president singled me out and called me “that woman from Michigan” and I was getting a lot of threats, my Republican-led Legislature, who had worked with me pretty well up until that moment, really turned on me. That was the moment when everything kind of changed. I share a picture in the book from the window that I took on my phone when they had a demonstration. People showed up in their cars and shut down the capital city, and they were holding up signs calling me a Nazi. We saw Confederate flags. We saw a Barbie that was dressed like me and hanging from a noose. And it was shocking. I also had a Republican leader who took to calling me names and shared a stage with some of the folks who ultimately were tried for the plot to kidnap and kill me. And yet I had to keep negotiating with that guy, because I had to get a budget done.

quote:

[…] And let’s be clear, they weren’t going to keep me for ransom. Their intention was to, like a terrorist organization, have a sham trial and then execute me. […]

quote:

You write in the book that you want to meet with one of the plotters who pleaded guilty who is in prison now. What do you want to know?

quote:

I’d like to understand what drove this group of people to take this extreme position. I want to understand it.

quote:

You think there’s something to understand?

quote:

Maybe. Maybe there’s not. But I’d like to see. I’d like to know. Is it because there wasn’t, for that person, economic opportunity? Was it because they got laid off during the pandemic and they were really worried about how they were going to make their house payment? What was it that set them off?

quote:

Separate from what happened to you during this period of the pandemic, I do want to ask you about some of the lessons that you may have learned. Michigan’s stay-at-home order did last longer than other states’. You closed all the schools in March 2020, and you didn’t urge them to be reopened until a year later. Now that we have the fullness of hindsight, do you think schools should have reopened earlier?

quote:

I have said many times that if I could go back in time with the knowledge we’ve accumulated now, there certainly are things that I would have done differently. I also want to remind everyone that during that period of time, Michigan was so hot compared to the rest of the country. It was New York, Detroit, it was Chicago and it was New Orleans that were having a massive impact from Covid. Our hospitals were at a real brink.

quote:

No one really knew how to deal with this. It’s less about what you were facing but more specifically about schools. You’re seeing in Michigan chronic absenteeism, students performing below pre-pandemic levels in reading and math.

quote:

I think we have to remember that we were looking at lessons from the Spanish flu, and that particular virus absolutely was devastating to younger people. And as a person taking in as much information as I could from our epidemiologists and our public-health experts, the thought was that we might have a lot of school-age kids that were going to die from this virus. That’s really what motivated our actions and the actions of lots of governors when we stopped kids going to school. It has carried a long, hard price tag with it. We’ve made massive investments in early childhood and in free breakfast and lunch for all 1.4 million Michigan kids, and literacy coaches. So we’re working to help get our kids back on track. But absolutely, if I could go back in time with the knowledge we have now and knowing this virus didn’t disproportionately kill children, would I have done some things differently? Yes.

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

In the US alone there are over 238,000 estimated covid orphans. It was nice of our elected officials to open everything up and make things Normal for them

Platystemon posted:

The Times interviewed her recently. (archive)

She’s not great. They’re not great.

I’m going to jump into a story she starts to tell after the formalities are out of the way.





Lady, I get how that would be traumatic, but goddamn did you ever take some destructive lessons away from it.

They talk about some of the details.









What is the takeaway from this? Terrorism works?

When people say things like “I would kill to have an elected official take me that seriously”, I think that usually they don’t mean it. They’re just frustrated that politicians don’t operate out of basic human empathy when they see vast human suffering.

But the Times wastes no time in immediately following up that answer with an invitation to kiss the ring of the immiserating terrorist ideology.







So that’s where we’re at. Terrorists win.


The interview winds down with burgerposting about Gaza, how a sprightly Biden is actually doing a heckuva job despite what voters’ lyin’ eyes tell them, and that the problem is messaging.

Finally, they congratulate each other on being part of the greatest generation, by which I mean 𝕏, and noncommittally tut tut SCOTUS.

tl;dr: She’s running.

Psycho Society posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuL2QwsNeM8&t=5s

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/24/mask-ban-north-carolina-new-york/ posted:

Masks are going from mandated to criminalized in some states
Lawmakers in North Carolina and New York say mask bans in response to pro-Palestinian protests would not target medical mask wearing, but critics are skeptical.

State legislators and law enforcement are reinstating dormant laws that criminalize mask-wearing to penalize pro-Palestinian protesters who conceal their faces, raising concerns among covid-cautious Americans.

Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are poised to overturn Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) recent veto of legislation to criminalize masking.
(..)
Immunocompromised Americans and civil libertarians who have long criticized mask bans as a cudgel against protesters of police shootings, economic inequality and environmental injustice say the bans are being revived because covid is no longer treated as a public health emergency. Coronavirus levels in wastewater are reaching high levels across much of the Sun Belt and Florida, early indications of a summer covid wave, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Lawmakers eager to reinstate pre-pandemic mask restrictions say legislation would not target medically vulnerable people and others trying to avoid respiratory viruses. But critics say such an approach would be impractical and sets mask wearers up for further ostracization and harassment by police and fellow citizens.
(..)
“People are still going to think you are breaking the law if you’re wearing a mask. They don’t care what’s wrong with you,” Stuart told The Washington Post. “I’ve thought I should wear masks with something printed on it like ‘immune deficient’ or ‘cancer patient.’ But we should not have to do that.”

Others fear people of color will face the brunt of enforcement.

“Any time you see these kind of laws where we are mandating a certain thing someone can do with their body, who is going to be most affected by that? Black and Brown people,” said Diana Cejas, a Black pediatric neurologist in Chapel Hill, who masks in part because she faces elevated risk from respiratory illness because of scar tissue around her airways from cancer treatment. “At the same time, I’m not going to let it deter me from trying to keep myself safe and my patients safe.”

In a statement accompanying his veto, Cooper said the legislation “removes protections and threatens criminal charges for people who want to protect their health by wearing a mask.”

GOP lawmakers have called such concerns overblown because of the bill’s health exception. Republicans have enough votes in their majority to overturn Cooper’s veto.
(..)
Opponents of mask restrictions question how a health exception could work if protesters wearing medical grade masks say they’re trying to stay healthy in a crowd.

“I don’t understand when there’s a political protest exactly how the authorities plan to sort out those who are wearing masks for health purposes versus those who are wearing masks to protect their identity,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union who has written about the issue. “It really sets up a situation where we are likely to see selective enforcement against protesters that the authorities don’t like.”

Sylvie Tuder, one of the protest organizers for the University of North Carolina chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, said attendees are encouraged to wear masks specifically to limit the spread of communicable disease and called the GOP bill an effort to suppress protest.

“As defenders of Palestinian life, it’s our duty to honor the real danger that infectious disease poses to all people, whether in Chapel Hill or in Palestine,” said Tuder, a doctoral student in sociology.
(..)
He said people who face elevated risk from covid should be able to wear medical grade masks but does not believe masked demonstrators are motivated by public health because many use ineffective cloth coverings and masking was far less common on campus before the protests.

“You cannot just say you are selectively worried about it only when you are out there protesting,” Goldstein said. “If you are at high risk, you probably shouldn’t do high-risk activities like congregating in large public groups.”
(..)
Meredith Cann, a telehealth psychotherapist in Manhattan who largely serves immunocompromised and disabled people, said she has prospective clients seeking mental health care because they are terrified after hearing Hochul’s and Adams’s calls to limit masking.

“Average everyday people are going to hear what our governor and mayor are saying: People who wear masks are criminal,” said Cann, who receives weekly injections of an immunosuppressive drug for a chronic condition. “We are afraid for our quality of life and our ability to just exist in public.”

https://www.wired.com/story/wired-health-disaster-planning-lucy-easthope-pandemic/ posted:

Post-Pandemic Recovery Isn’t Guaranteed
The aftermath of a disaster like Covid can be divided into roughly three stages: the honeymoon, the slump, and the uptick. The aim is always to build back better—but in some cases that never happens.

LUCY EASTHOPE, ONE of the UK’s top experts in disaster planning, has advised the UK government on major international incidents such as 9/11, the Grenfell Tower fire, the war in Ukraine and, of course, the Covid pandemic. “If you were a pandemic planner in 2020, then there have been few surprises over the past few years,” Easthope says. “In those pandemic plans we wrote a reasonable worst-case scenario—and now we get to live it.”

Emergency planners such as Easthope know that the aftermath of a disaster can usually be divided roughly into three stages: the honeymoon (“Or, as we call it now, lockdown one”), the slump, and the uptick. “We’re still in the slump,” she says, of the UK. “We’ve reached a stage where all signs of institutional collapse are here. Basic reliance on the health care system for the most privileged is now gone. Failure gets talked about loudly.”

However, Easthope warns that the uptick, the stage when societies rebuild, isn’t always guaranteed. “It’s really important to have no issue be off the table and [to keep things] nonpolitical,” she says. “To be very aware that the Titanic can sink, and to leave the hubris at the door.”

Disaster planning research, for instance, shows that the post-pandemic mental health crisis will continue for the next 30 to 40 years, with an increased prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse in affected communities. “Recovery after these sorts of events is not a spring, but the worst kind of endurance,” Easthope says. “The only good thing that comes out of a disaster like a pandemic is that it creates one single opportunity to reexamine structures and institutions.”

quote:

"You cannot just say you are selectively worried about it only when you are out there protesting,” Goldstein said. “If you are at high risk, you probably shouldn’t do high-risk activities like congregating in large public groups.”

https://www.voanews.com/a/senegal-tightens-anti-covid-controls-after-mecca-deaths/7667919.html posted:

Senegal tightens anti-COVID controls after Mecca deaths

Senegal said Monday it had implemented voluntary COVID-19 screening tests and reimposed the wearing of masks at Dakar's international airport for returning pilgrims fearing the virus was linked to the deaths of some Mecca pilgrims.

Dakar suspects that a number of the some 1,300 deaths — according to a Saudi tally — are down to a respiratory syndrome ailment such as COVID-19, Health Minister Ibrahima Sy said on Sunday.

"Initially, we thought it was related to heatwaves because the temperature was excessively high, but we realized that there is a respiratory syndrome with the cases of death," Sy said of the deaths during the hajj pilgrimage, which took place during intense heat.

"We told ourselves that, probably, there is a respiratory epidemic, and it was our duty to be able to monitor the pilgrims on their return by putting in place a screening system for everything COVID-19 related," said Sy in remarks carried by Senegalese broadcasters.

The health ministry said it had "strengthened the health surveillance system" by deploying a team at the airport to provide voluntary screening tests and identify pilgrims suffering from flu-like illnesses.

The ministry also urged the population "to be vigilant, to show restraint and to be more serene to avoid an epidemic."

Out of 124 rapid diagnostic tests, 78 proved positive for the COVID-19 virus, 36 of which were later confirmed by PCR tests, the ministry said.

Charles Bernard Sagna, chief medical officer for the airport, said the alert was raised when the Senegalese medical team based in Jeddah had reported "a significant number" of passengers with respiratory problems.

"There is no cause for alarm but there also has to be prevention," the ministry said Sunday.

Senegalese daily L'Observateur reported that five of the dead at the hajj were Senegalese nationals.

They were among an around 12,000-strong officially registered Senegalese contingent.

Saudi Arabia's official SPA news agency earlier reported 1,301 deaths at the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, where temperatures climbed as high as 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the country's national meteorological center.

More than 80 percent of pilgrims attending mainly outdoor rituals were "unauthorized" and walked long distances in direct sunlight, according to SPA.

The hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam that all Muslims with the means must complete at least once in their lives.

Saudi officials have said 1.8 million pilgrims took part this year, a similar number to last year, and that 1.6 million came from abroad.

https://dakaraeroport.com/en/airport-guides/health-covid-19-guides posted:

Health Info & Covid 19

To enter Senegal:

Sanitary measures in force:

You need a vaccination certificate called a health pass with a mandatory QR code or present an RT-PCR test dated less than 72 hours from the day of sampling.

Any passenger wishing to travel to Senegal is required to respect these conditions.

To leave Senegal, the traveler is required to respect the policy of the country of destination.

NB: sanitary measures differ from one country to another.