Dog Case posted:

I know it seems like a lot of people dying is a bad thing, but really the more people die the less each individual death matters. After all, we're in this together and we each have to do our part

gradenko_2000 posted:

Chamale posted:

I'm not giving up, but I'm also preparing to live with covid forever. That means I'll go to a movie theater or a concert, as long as my respirator stays on the whole time.

Tulip posted:

The anti-doomer option for dealing with COVID is to adapt: take stock of what your needs are, and figure out how to meet your needs without getting COVID. I am an extroverted person who loves talking to people - Discord has been an incredible blessing, for one example, some friends and I are gonna watch a movie over screen sharing and I've got a book club later this week. Save for when I was subject to a brief experiment in RTO, I've been in some of the best mental health of my life.

Anyway I have made one actually useful post about COVID:

Thoguh posted:

Fly Molo posted:

google’s brain fog has been getting pretty bad these last few years

TehSaurus posted:

Yeah it isn't like anyone knows how these things work or can be held accountable...

Wait what's that you say? There's a whole field of research on explainability in ai systems??? Ah, well, nevertheless

Shear Modulus posted:

if joe biden's state of the union kills clarence thomas then I'll have to begrudgingly say biden did a good thing as president

quote:

A quiet change to how the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publicly reports Covid death details underscores the need for the agency to communicate clearly and transparently about rapidly evolving science, experts say.

The past two years have created numerous communication challenges for the agency, which works with massive amounts of data from scores of different sources, including states and territories.

“Mistakes are inevitable because humans are fallible, but there should always be an effort promptly to explain what happened and what’s being done to prevent it from happening again,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director and the president and CEO of Results Save Lives.

“You have to over-communicate, basically,” he said. “Any time there is something that needs to be corrected, be upfront about it: here’s what happened, here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know.”

Last week, after reporting from the Guardian on mortality rates among children, the CDC corrected a “coding logic error” that had inadvertently added more than 72,000 Covid deaths of all ages to the data tracker, one of the most publicly accessible sources for Covid data.

The agency briefly noted the change in a footnote, although the note did not explain how the error occurred or how long it was in effect.

A total of 72,277 deaths in all age groups reported across 26 states were removed from the tracker “because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not Covid-19-related”, Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the agency, told the Guardian.

The problem stemmed from two questions the CDC asks of states and jurisdictions when they report fatalities, according to a source familiar with the issue.

One data field asks if a person died “from illness/complications of illness,” and the field next to this asks for the date of death. When the answer is yes, then the date of death should be provided.

But a problem apparently arose if a respondent included the date of death in this field even when the answer was “no” or “unknown”. The CDC’s system assumed that if a date was provided, then the “no” or “unknown” answer was an error, and the system switched the answer to “yes”.

This resulted in an overcount of deaths due to Covid in the demographic breakdown, and the error, once discovered, was corrected last week. The CDC did not answer a question on how long the coding error was in effect.

A general view of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
A general view of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Photograph: Tami Chappell/Reuters
“Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported,” said Reed.

The death counts in the data tracker are “real-time and subject to change”, Reed noted, while numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, a center within the CDC, are “the most complete source of death data”, despite lags in reporting, because the process includes a review of death certificates.

Reporting on causes of death is difficult even in non-pandemic times, experts said.

“It’s really hard to get accurate numbers,” said Glen Nowak, a former director of media relations at the CDC and co-director of the Center for Health & Risk Communication at the University of Georgia’s Grady College. “It’s not just with Covid – it happens with pretty much any infectious disease or even foodborne illnesses and waterborne illnesses, where there’s a large outbreak.”

There are a few reasons for that. Healthcare providers usually report the initial data, but treating patients is a more pressing priority. Death certificates take time to complete, and the cause of death may be subject to political pressure or difficulty determining the underlying reason or reasons. States and other jurisdictions may have lags in sending the data to the CDC; currently, one-third of deaths are reported after 10 days. Then the CDC processes the data, which can also be an involved process.

Most CDC data comes from state and local governments, and the quality can vary widely “because there has been a decades-long under-investment in public health at the national, state, city and local levels,” Frieden said.

“The public health and healthcare system we have in this country makes it extraordinarily difficult to collect data well.”

The CDC estimates that more than 968,000 Americans have died of Covid, and this change does not seem to have affected that estimate. The tracker shows demographic data on about 785,000 deaths, which means there may be more than 180,000 deaths not yet tallied in these breakdowns.

The recent change to demographic data shows the difficulty of offering up-to-date assessments while data reporting and analysis have lagged in the face of a massive outbreak. Data on the same topic across the CDC can also vary depending on the source and how numbers were calculated.

“The level of precision that you see in these numbers makes you think that they must be really super accurate,” Nowak said. Instead, they are informed estimates that help contextualize the scope of Covid compared with other illnesses.

“I don’t think public health and others do a good-enough job of reminding people that these numbers have significant margins of errors,” Nowak said. “The caveats need to be clear that these are our best estimates based on the data that has been reported to CDC.”

As the scientific evidence accumulates, adjustments and changes are inevitable and frequent. But significant changes in calculations and records need to be explained clearly, particularly in an emergency where the public is frequently attuned to data – and to unexplained changes – like this.

“The best practice, really, is to have virtually daily briefings, so that you’re updating daily about what you’re seeing and you’re answering questions daily,” Frieden said. That’s how the agency addressed past outbreaks of Ebola, Zika and H1N1, also known as swine flu.

These briefings should be held by the scientists with expertise in many areas, not just the director of the CDC, he said. The current CDC administration has “gradually been getting back in the habit of doing that, and I hope that trend will continue”.

The CDC is a government agency that provides data to inform national policy, and public health policies often have some political component, Frieden said. It can never be apolitical. “But you should never have any concerns about the accuracy of the data.”

WampaLord posted:

chairman daou has a wine label?

Pingui posted:

Considering the timeline, the weakened sense of smell and taste will likely do the opposite. Just a thick syrup of fat and sugar with a brown color.

Edit: I mean thicker than now.

quote:

Americans are gravitating to coffee, drifting from energy drinks for fuel during pandemic, Packaged Facts finds
23-Sep-2020 at 17:38
By Elizabeth Crawford

The slowdown in energy drink sales and corresponding uptick in coffee consumption can be traced back in large part to shifts in where consumers are shopping during the pandemic, but also to their emotional needs and the corresponding benefits each beverage offers, according to Packaged Fact’s US Beverage Market Outlook 2020: Grocery Shopping & Personal Consumption in the Coronavirus Era​.

The report explains that energy drink sales have slowed – but are still growing year-over-year – during the pandemic because most are sold in convenience stores, which have experienced a dramatic drop-off in foot traffic since the coronavirus outbreak occurred.

“Some 56% of energy and sports sales are from c-stores, with energy drinks relying on the channel for about 70% of sales,”​ according to the report.

“During the coronavirus pandemic, especially in the initial panic wave, most consumers shifted grocery purchases to large grocery chains, mass merchandisers and club stores,”​ where they could purchase all their household needs in one stop, it adds. “Beverage sales in convenience stores, especially those linked to gas stations, have been hurt the most, as people are driving far less and core customers like laborers are not working in many areas.”​

Wide distribution gives coffee an edge​

Coffee, on the other hand, is sold in most of the places that shoppers have gravitated since the outbreak, including online – where Packaged Facts reports it does extremely well compared to other foods and beverages.

“Internet food sales are growing rapidly, but still represent a very small share of sales. E-commerce’s impact varies by category, ranging from less than 1% to 3% of sales. Coffee and tea sell the best, while dairy beverages and juices underperform,”​ the report notes.

Coffee’s success online relies in part on it being shelf stable, but also because many coffee brands embraced the direct-to-consumer model, offering subscriptions of unique offerings that both gave consumers something to look forward to and took care of a necessity, according to the report.

For example, MistoBox is a coffee subscription service that allows consumers to create a taste profile to personalize deliveries; Seattle-based Bean Box offers selections from local roasters; Trade offers coffee from artisanal roasters and Canary Cold Brew offers ready-to-drink cans of cold brew, according to the report.

Overall, coffee sales are projected to increase 8.3% from $14.7b in 2019 to reach $15.98b in 2020, according to Packaged Facts, which predicts the category will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3.1% from 2019 through 2024.

Energy drinks have a strong outlook​

While energy drinks may be projected to grow only 3.67% from $23.7b in 2019 to $24.5b in 2020, Packaged Facts predicts sales will rebound as pandemic related restrictions ease to reach a compound annual growth rate of 6.1% from 2019 to 2024.

It notes that part of this growth comes from the category tapping into other growth driving trends, including plant-based.

“Energy drinks have become an active segment for inclusion of plant ingredients into formulations”​ that allow manufacturers to make claims about enhanced memory, focus and mental clarity, the report notes.

For example, it points to MatchaBar’s Hustle plant-based energy drink made with matcha and fruit juice and Monster Energy’s Java Monster Farmer’s Oats, which is the company first vegan energy drink.

In addition, a new generation of cleaner label energy drinks are coming to market and gaining traction with more wellness-oriented consumers. For example, Mamma Chia’s Clean Energy Beverages, which are made with chia and ‘clean’ caffeine from yerba mate and green coffee bean, or Proper Wild’s plant-based fruit- and vegetable-packed shots, which are marketed as “Clean All Day Energy,” the report notes.

Finally, Packaged Facts sees long term potential for both energy drinks and coffee in the emerging ‘hybrid drinks’ category, which caters to consumer desire for “functionality, uniqueness and pleasure from beverages.”​

For example, energy drinks are adding electrolytes and touting hydration, while coffees are being blended with plant-based waters, such as coconut and maple, the report notes.

Looking forward, it adds: “This is a trend that should see continued expansion since consumers seem to have an insatiable desire for new and more satisfying drinks that often defy categorization.”​

Chad Sexington posted:

Reading Hanya Yanagihara's new book and it's mostly tortured literary fluff, but the third of three stories is a future story set in New York after successive waves of various pandemics in the 2090s or plus various knock-on climate change side effects.

It feels both grimly plausible and yet also totally out of reach because she describes pandemics getting so bad that society is actually spurned to become authoritarian instead of just slowly drifting that way naturally while letting people die in droves.

I guess once we got to the point where there are large numbers of visible climate refugees, people would take an airborne pandemic seriously... as a reason to holocaust other people.

quote:

The new book by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Part detective story, part historical epic—a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague taking over a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire.

It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria—the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire—located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives—brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria—the island revolts.

To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island—an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And then a murder occurs.

As the plague continues its rapid spread, the Sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island’s governor and local administration and the people’s refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the Sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves.

Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago, with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.

Petanque posted:

but i drink tea

NeonPunk posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/maxplanckpress/status/1507308961292247046

All those posters who wear goggles or protective eyewear are not overreacting. Fun thing is that this could also explain the hallucinations in some covid patients!

Thoguh posted:

Yeah, everything is stupid and I'm really hoping it's just a minor pregnancy complication thing where the kid is a little small and maybe has to spend a few days in the NICU or something as a worst case scenario. It's just crazy how much people that are normally very reasonable have internalized the "it can't happen to me" mindset.

Same with her grandma - she's vaxxed and boosted and the CDC told her that means she doesn't need to wear a mask and that COVID is over so she did that and now she's sitting in the ER waiting to find out if she'd got COVID or if she just needs to take a course of antibiotics to clear out some pneumonia.

Thoguh posted:

She doesn't know yet, she has to find out because the baby has a small head, I have no idea how long the turnaround on something like that is or what the odds are that it's that vs some other birth defect that's unrelated vs a scary but ultimately not a big deal thing. It's just the fact that it's now even something that has entered the conversation that's loving wild but also a direct result of decisions they had control over.

Thoguh posted:

They gotta have him on prep

https://twitter.com/tmz/status/1507446789523267584?s=21

Jokerpilled Drudge posted:

gonna be honest my rat horde with at best 65% sensitivity feels worse than useless and I am a bit upset they exist at all. Just device that tricks people into thinking they don't have covid

Louisgod posted:

with China popping off and the huge supply chain crash that’ll come with it, think it’s time to buy some high priced items while I can. any recommendations for a relatively inexpensive laptop that’s still pretty good and can handle music production?

Kylaer posted:

Yes, let me just list everything on a public forum. Shelf-stable goods and durable goods that are either essential or highly useful and vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. Most recently I bought a rowing machine, just got that assembled today.

It prevents long covid and you can't have any

Kylaer posted:

If you're going to take the position that none of the data can be trusted, then just make up whatever numbers you want I guess. I'm working from what is available, CPU Abuser was pulling numbers out of thin air. Maybe we're still having daily 9/11s right now and it's all being covered up, why not claim that

It's the one from Costco, I haven't really put it to use yet. Too busy arguing on the internet.

Why Am I So Tired posted:

Getting nervous about the supply chain thing too. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, affordable treadmill (that can be delivered or fit inside a Honda Civic)? Or spinning bike? Don't really want to splurge on a Sole F63 but maybe that's the smart option if I can figure out the delivery situation.

Why Am I So Tired posted:

It's apparently become policy since Bartells got taken over by Rite Aid. Everything has become something of a mess there since that happened, but I can't really complain since it's free again and the drivers are finally starting to leave it outside our door. Can't get xanax though, which is annoying, but I only end up having to take it a couple times a year anyway.

Wish we could do mail order but our apartment complex doesn't do packages via USPS due to the pandemic. We have to get everything else shipped to one of my old dog people who has been nice enough to let us do that.

kreeningsons posted:

What's the best black disposable N95 with headstraps and what's the best one with earloops (any color)?

silicone thrills posted:

Still loling that in like 1992 my brother at 12 started smoking so my mom took him to the pediatrician to figure out what the gently caress to do.

Pediatrician shoved a bunch of nicotine patches on him and said the sickness he would get would cure him


Spoiler alert: it didn't. He puked and then stole another pack of cigs.

Shiroc posted:

lol that my job says that tomorrow is the mandatory everybody should be in office day, just in time for the explosion.

I'm currently planning to handle it by ignoring them and hoping I get a different job before anyone notices.

Google Butt posted:

at what age is it dangerous to eat a whole bag of microwave popcorn

UnfortunateSexFart posted:

Kinds like my Premier (like Governor)

https://twitter.com/DanielAndrewsMP/status/1506954143537446915?t=vOLRK1ojIckYUXNgJUwmCA&s=19
https://twitter.com/DanielAndrewsMP/status/1508239830937120769?t=Mszi4aYPQouizDYGOx99qQ&s=19

This is the same guy who locked us down and put in 5km travel limits and 9pm curfews multiple times for two cases.

We're hovering around 10k cases per day now with ba2 just hitting Australia.

ReadingZucchini posted:

I think they're just jokingly referencing how the old soviet filtration cartridges used to contain asbestos and how those have been commonly sold as military surplus. Also I think an early version had a lead lining, as a treat.

NeonPunk posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/1509943907156647943

Tzen posted:

my wife has gotten really good at cutting the entire families hair as well, it rules

Shiroc posted:

[COVID] WHO Advisory: Kristen Stewart Is Good, Actually

Rhesus Pieces posted:

https://twitter.com/nbcconnecticut/status/1510788778494992384?s=21&t=l08MIFmObbNTaRZTWyadKA

lol