Coronavirus - those in China, and general discussion

[roddy]

Who else do we have in the US, bar @abcdefg? Things there make the UK look organised, was wondering what the on-the-ground reports were...

[Meng Lelan]

I'm in the US, a two hour drive from New Orleans. Because I work with blind veterans in a low vision clinic located on the hospital grounds, my job is deemed "essential" and I am still required to go to work after passing two checkpoints to screen out fever and possible contact with COVIDs at the main gate. I just go to work and I go home. My ex-spouse is in infectious diseases and my ex-brother-in-law is a pulmonologist with whom I maintain contacts and their twitter feeds/Facebook posts are significantly dire. 

[889]

There's a story today that Texas is now requiring motorists from Louisiana to self-quarantine for 14 days, with the usual exceptions.

[Meng Lelan]

From the Houston Chronicle: 

 

Quote

 

Gov. Greg Abbott is tightening travel to Texas by ordering some motorists from Louisiana to self-quarantine for two weeks.

The new travel restrictions come as Louisiana's status as a novel coronavirus hotspot grew Sunday to more than 3,500 positive cases statewide. Abbott said drivers with commercial, medical, emergency response, military or critical infrastructure purposes for entering Texas would be exempted.

 

 

[ChTTay]

2 hours ago, Lu said:

2 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

I wonder, who paid for the hotel quarantine?

I don't know, good question. I assume it's the travellers themselves.

Yes, it’s at the persons in QT’s expense. Other expenses depend on hotel. 
 

 

[imron]

2 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

China only started to spread this rumour after Trump called it the "Chinese virus"

Not defending Trump’s usage, but I believe this was the other way round - Trump started calling it the Chinese virus after a Chinese diplomat suggested that it was of US origin. 
 

 

[杰.克]

44 minutes ago, imron said:

Not defending Trump’s usage, but I believe this was the other way round - Trump started calling it the Chinese virus after a Chinese diplomat suggested that it was of US origin.

 

Imron, in my opinion you have sage status.

 

But my memory is that the first oddball wacky statement was trump called it the virus a Hoax

[Lu]

It really, really doesn't matter who started it. It doesn't matter in kindergarten and it doesn't matter when it's the presidents of the two major world powers. Both are clearly in the wrong here.

[杰.克]

9 minutes ago, Lu said:

It really, really doesn't matter who started it. It doesn't matter in kindergarten and it doesn't matter when it's the presidents of the two major world powers. Both are clearly in the wrong here.

 

It not the presidents though is it? Its a president, and a foreign ministry spokesperson. A not insignificant difference.

[Lu]

1 hour ago, 杰.克 said:

A not insignificant difference.

It still doesn't matter who started it. Both parties are doing stupid/harmful stuff and both are wrong.

[dtcamero]

i’m sitting this thing out in new york because there was a time when it seemed safer here than asia ?

frequent sounds of ambulance sirens flying down empty streets.

 

with regards to Cuomo and the idea of locking down the tri-state area, he said something to the effect of “it’s not who we are” - i.e. infringing on civil liberties or immoral, take your pick... and more importantly that it would be ineffective in controlling the flow of the virus.

he said as soon as you declare a quarantine then you have a flood of people leaving the area, as we saw in wuhan, and the virus will spread regardless. better to strongly advise the public to isolate themselves in his opinion.

 

also i saw an earlier post about how he’s on the ropes politically because of all the impending deaths in the state.

on the contrary Cuomo is very highly regarded now following a series of press conferences he gave illustrating the problems facing new york and what he’s doing about them.

he and Fauci are generally considered to be the only adults left in the room to help americans now. he has become enormously popular in the US overall and if he gets through this without unforeseen downturn he has a good shot at running for president in the future.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD1eg3vMO2A

[abcdefg]

9 hours ago, roddy said:

Who else do we have in the US, bar @abcdefg? Things there make the UK look organised, was wondering what the on-the-ground reports were...

 

Some of the incorporated suburbs of Dallas have recently passed a "shelter in place" order that means everyone needs to stay home if they are not going to and from their "essential" jobs or shopping for groceries/prescription pharmaceuticals. Other suburbs nearby have adopted a "libertarian" stance in which they decline to do that because it would infringe citizen rights. It has created a patchwork quilt. 

 

The small town in which I live has been a little more relaxed up to now. Many restaurants open for takeout. I have personally found grocery stores to be clean and orderly. They have hired quite a few temporary workers to wipe down the shelves and put up arriving supplies. They no longer have 27 brands of breakfast cereal, which I always found somewhat ridiculous in the first place. Fruit and vegetables and meat are coming in fresh, again with slightly less selection, but no way could it be considered a hardship. 

 

The local hospital (where I worked for many years) is seeing patients more or less as usual, with temperature screening as one enters the premises. No tent on the parking lot. More personal protective gear in use. Texas has started way too late and has dedicated way to little effort into preventive medical measures. I doubt they can ever catch up. People arriving from Louisiana are required to self quarantine, as mentioned above. Lots of the things the officials are doing now seem to be mainly for show. They are closing the barn door after they cows have escaped and scattered.  

 

I am having a new roof put on. Spoke with the contractor an hour ago (Monday morning) and he said everything is still on schedule. They will bring out the new shingles and other materials this afternoon, and will do the actual work tomorrow and the next day if it's not raining. He said he still has adequate labor crews. (Construction is deemed an "essential occupation.") 

 

Banks have closed their lobbies, as have most other businesses. Drive-through service is still available for check cashing and deposits. E-banking is less developed in small-town Texas than it is in China. 

 

Nobody here wears masks. Hand sanitizer has been sold out for over a month. I still meet people when out and about who want to shake hands. They give me a look when I decline. Happened as recently as yesterday. 

 

Republicans and Democrats are squabbling about how to administer a big, headline-grabbing aid package. So the actual grass roots response gets delayed. An ER doctor friend in Atlanta told me last week that during his last shift his hospital had 31 needy candidates for each available ventilator. They are having to do very difficult triage. Despite having written guidelines available, the burden falls on the doctor explaining things to the relatives. 

 

Texas Medical Association, of which I am still a member, has prevailed on the legislature to allow retired physicians to return to limited practice, mainly doing telemedicine handling less pressing patient inquiries and concerns. I phoned them and learned that the regulation only applies to physicians who retired 2 years ago or less. I hung up my spurs/stethoscope a decade ago, so unfortunately cannot contribute in that manner. (Probably a good thing since I'm woefully/dangerously out of date.) 

 

MODERATOR: What do you think about splitting these last couple of posts off into a separate thread? One dedicated to Coronavirus response in other countries. Perhaps as compared with China. In fact I will start such a thread and cross-post this item. Thank you.

[abcdefg]

 

-- removed by poster-- 

[mikelove]

Here in SW Connecticut - adjacent to but not right in the current US epicenter of NYC - things are busy but not utterly insane AFAICT; good supplies of almost everything at grocery stores (even toilet paper), hospitals are very busy but still enough PPE for the moment and nobody's wearing garbage bags (though a couple of hospitals have put up emergency tent facilities in parking lots to deal with the pending influx), vast majority of deaths appear to have been very old and/or unwell, and the governor (who's been in office for 2 years and up until now had kind of a poor track record, having picked a lot of fights with a lot of entrenched interests and gotten his butt kicked each time) has generally done a great job rolling out new measures at the earliest possible point people were ready to accept them.

 

Restaurants closed 2 weeks ago, and school closures started happening at a town-by-town level almost 3 weeks ago and they've been closed statewide for 2 weeks, with the earliest possible reopening date currently pegged at May 1st. Commuter rail to NYC has started running on a severely reduced schedule so that should hopefully stem some of the new cases coming out from there; well-to-do New Yorkers have apparently been snatching up every short-term rental they can find in the suburbs (and farther out, e.g. in the Hamptons) but we don't have very many of those here and most people aren't interested in renting their house to somebody for 3 months so I doubt there'll be too many new cases introduced that way. And it's mostly single-family detached housing around here, so frankly with all of the major places of gathering closed there's not much room left for it to spread.

 

Both kids' schools have been making good efforts at distance learning; older kid's school has been posting daily lessons / videos / activities / etc but without anything real-time or the expectation that we'll do any of it that day or do all of it at any point - definitely the way to go when people are trying to juggle homeschooling with work - while my preschooler has had daily Zoom meetings with his classmates which are again purely optional and not necessarily *teaching* that much but are at least a tiny bit of socialization with other kids his age to remind him how to do that.

 

They seem to be learning at least as much with our little bit of homeschooling as they were learning at school before, so I'm not really worried about long-term consequences of this for them, but obviously we're luckier than most people and I think everybody is frankly way too casual about the dire consequences long-term school closures can have on less fortunate kids; there needs to be a conversation about how we can reopen schools without them turning into viral hotbeds, e.g. by restructuring schedules so that kids stay in the same room with the same peers all day and thus can only spread the virus to that room and not the entire school.

 

Re masks, there's been pretty consistent messaging in the US that we don't have enough masks and you should save them for front-line medical workers; until we have masks in such abundance that nobody worries about that problem anymore, it's going to be very hard to remove the social stigma around them. But once there are boxes of masks piled up at the front of every grocery store / drugstore / Costco / etc, I think we can get people to start wearing them pretty quickly; suspicion of mask-wearing is widespread but shallow, and a couple of videos of Taylor Swift or whoever donning a mask and explaining why everyone else ought to do so would change minds in short order.

[dtcamero]

brooklyn is not very representative of the united states, but i find more than half of the normal folks on the street now are wearing facemasks, many of them n95 types (don’t know where they all found them)

seems like the stigma is receding here at least

 

also mask memes trending on IG ?

 

[Lu]

1 hour ago, abcdefg said:

An ER doctor friend in Atlanta told me last week that during his last shift his hospital had 31 needy candidates for each available ventilator. They are having to do very difficult triage. Despite having written guidelines available, the burden falls on the doctor explaining things to the relatives.

I find it interesting (in a bad way) how doctors of different countries react to triage, either the prospect of it or the actual practice. I first saw it reported from Italy, heart-broken doctors who were in tears as they explained they had to choose who to help and who to let die, and were warning other countries to act now or it would be too late. Today I read about a doctor in Brazil, who was well aware of the shortages in her hospital and dreading the prospect of doing triage, it was horrifying to her. Then on the very same page of the newspaper the fairly sober daily 'diary of a hospital nurse', where the nurse explained how 80-year-olds don't come out of intubation well, and every COVID-19 patient who came in had explained to them what the short-term and long-term consequences of an IC stay would be. Basically old sick people are asked to step aside, both in their own interest (they would not recover from an IC stay) and in the interest of other patients who will need the bed & the ventilator. The nurse did not use the term 'triage' for this at all, but that is basically what it is. And then your story of a Texas doctor who is already doing triage, and this is the first I read about triage in the US.

[Jan Finster]

1 hour ago, mikelove said:

it's going to be very hard to remove the social stigma around them. But once there are boxes of masks piled up at the front of every grocery store / drugstore / Costco / etc, I think we can get people to start wearing them pretty quickly; suspicion of mask-wearing is widespread but shallow, and a couple of videos of Taylor Swift or whoever donning a mask and explaining why everyone else ought to do so would change minds in short orde

 

Just start wearing them yourself. You can even make them yourself (see my earlier post). The more Caucasian people wear them, the earlier it becomes the norm. I have started wearing them a couple of days ago. Folks either ignore you, give you a wide berth or eye you suspiciously. No hostility. I feel cashiers at the grocery store really appreciated it!

[Flickserve]

6 hours ago, dtcamero said:

brooklyn is not very representative of the united states, but i find more than half of the normal folks on the street now are wearing facemasks, many of them n95 types 

 

That's a lot. Perhaps people are making them last longer by reusing them.

[StChris]

 

14 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

China only started to spread this rumour after Trump called it the "Chinese virus". Even though this may all be childish, China is not going to let the US/Trump bully them

 

I'm happy to be corrected, but this appears to be untrue. Here is an article from the 13th of March quoting a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman concocting conspiracy theories, and here is a CNN report on Trump being criticised for saying "Chinese virus" dated 19th of March. Seems like a pretty clear line of cause and effect. The CNN article even quotes Trump himself saying that him using that terminology is a direct response to the Chinese propaganda:It appears that the anti-Trump media themselves 

 

Quote

 

Trump claimed that he is using the term because China tried to blame the virus on US soldiers.

" 'Cause it comes from China. It's not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that's why. I want to be accurate," Trump said on Wednesday.

Pressed again, he said: "I have great love for all of the people from our country, but as you know China tried to say at one point ... that it was caused by American soldiers. That can't happen. It's not gonna happen, not as long as I'm President. It comes from China."

 

 

It appears that the anti-Trump media themselves were quite content with calling the variously the "Wuhan virus", "Chinese virus" and "China virus" for a long period of time, as this video shows.

 

[StChris]

11 hours ago, 杰.克 said:

It not the presidents though is it? Its a president, and a foreign ministry spokesperson. A not insignificant difference

 

Do you really believe that any foreign ministry spokesman (or any Chinese newspaper for that matter) would dare to spread such conspiracy theories without authorisation from anyone higher up? These conspiracy theories didn't originate from some random internet users, they have been spread by actual foreign ministry officials. Having someone in his level disseminate this fake news gives it just enough credence to get attention, while being far away enough from Xi and the higher ups so as to claim that they knew nothing about it. 

 

There are plenty of reasons to dislike or oppose Trump, but that shouldn't mean automatically jumping on the side of anyone who is against him, especially the CCP. We need to get the basic facts straight before there is any chance of a productive conversation about this.