They all fly to Switzerland and get the Chinese vaccine.

ugh i hate that you are writing non speculative fiction here

Maybe she stole a bunch of thirsty calves in order to develop a corona vaccine.

Seeing that I've had a sore throat / cough since Monday and a (declining) fever around then as well, I've been reading reddit "AMA" posts from people claiming to have the virus.

This might be the most useful response I saw to one such thread:


https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/fhhaps/im_infected_with_coronavirus_on_day_5_since_i/fkc4xv3/

I might look into some of these items, since I've had my own history of (very mild) asthma-like coughing whenever I get a bad cold. If the medical system is so overwhelmed that everybody starts getting the virus in the next week, it might be good to have these items on hand, seeing that an asthmatic Redditor is suggesting them as a DIY alternative to actual care.

This is a little ominous, though, since it's known that with COVID-19 (iirc) you develop the pneumonia-like symptoms after about 5 to 8 days in, and this Redditor, who is about our age, seems to be progressing exactly like so, now with a sudden turn toward shortness of breath after about a week of coughing and low grade fever:


The first part of her post is basically identical to mine (started Monday night with throat soreness, then fever, then cough), although she apparently knows the exact date of infection:

I don't have the source right now, but I just read that in Hong Kong doctors have detected damage to the lungs in some recovered COVID-19 patients. In a group of 12 people who have recovered from the illness caused by the virus, three had decreased lung capacity (by between 20 and 30 percent) and nine of the people were found to have changes in the lungs that indicate damage, whatever that means in practice.

Thanks. Also, I'm not sure if it's mentioned in that article (since I didn't read it yet), but damage to the lungs is actually common with these type of viruses, so this isn't really some new discovery that wasn't already suspected WRT this virus.

Pneumonia in general also hurts your lung capacity, btw. What is much worse I think is ARDS, which is an even worse complication, but is somewhat rarer than simply getting pneumonia from this.

Just ordered two of these three packs of 10L oxygen canisters on Amazon. No idea if product is a knockoff or not but inventories are low with people buying them up. They might be at REI too but prolly sold out.

Same Redditer updates us with timeline:


If I have it, I have yet to get any of this chest tightness.

That might be somewhat helpful, but just so you know oxygen delivery at the lowest end is generally 2 liters per minute through a nasal cannula on an ongoing basis. If people are really getting low on their peripheral saturation (below 94%) they're going to get more like 10-15 LPM with a nonrebreather mask unless they cant tolerate the mask in which case cannulas generally top out at 6 LPM. If you're genuinely concerned I would try to get hold of a home oxygen concentrator, I'm not sure how much 15 minutes worth of oxygen will help if you aren't on the way to higher care.

This is just from getting my EMT last fall, so take it with that dose of salt.

Search "lost job" or "cut hours" on Twitter. Travel, entertainment, food service are getting pounded. The odds that this doesnt lead to a recession seem pretty low. Prepare for bad news in the coming year.

Also, a big warning about the virus to you all. It has a long incubation period *and* is highly contagious during that period. It's best to simply not visit at risk family.

Yeah I would wager that in the medium term an appreciable amount of people are going to die from this, not from the respiratory syndrome but from hitting the bottle-pill or booze- after having their livelihoods pulled out from under them and being told by the ****ing reptilians on the hill that they should have saved more for an event like this.

Thanks. We'll see if the seller even sends it, since waking this morning I don't even see the item listed by them any longer.

It's interesting to imagine the extent to which any kind of oxygen supply equipment really ought to be in the hands of health workers at this point. Although if there are no more hospital beds, maybe...

If people would stay the **** home for a while I bet the hospitals in lots of places would sort of have enough equipment. But given that people are being their typical American selves our hubris probably does mean all that **** should be going to hospitals and whatever places they are going to set up for people to recover in.

Listening to my folks when they tell me about their daily activities I get the impression people don't have a good idea about how indirectly infectious diseases spread. For all they know, the realtor who was hosting the open house my mother *just* attended might well be an unwitting super-spreader.

Jones, I’ve enjoyed telling people your “maybe people will finally understand the exponential function if it’s counted in bodies” thing. I have credited you as “the Internet”.

They probably think you have to get bit.

"But the virus hasn't killed as many people as the flu, so it's not serious" - actual people who actually exist.

Yeah a lot of college educated people who even took science and statistics classes. It's something I knew in the back of my mind, that people are stupid and that humans are incapable of coordination at this scale, but god damn it's surreal to see people I didn't think poorly of say that ****. Some of these people even critique the healthcare system all the time and they are still saying that. No concept of complex systems or high school statistics even from people who should know better.

It just shows people are searching for reasons not to be scared and are making **** up to defend their sense of the world.

TBH I dont get it, in my experience learning and understanding things liberates my sense of anxiety.. when I can grasp the concerns and what to do, I'm fine. Living in a world of my own perceptions makes me more nervous.

Yay! I'm Internet Famous.

Beautiful.

Just saw Trump defend himself for shaking hands. That must have been the most humble most un-Trump response I have ever heard.

5G gives you COVID-19, which is why vaccines are bad and we should thank Trump for his space force.

The backwards thing here is that if an effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine had already been in place, conspiracy theories about non-pandemics wouldn't be necessary. I wonder if she'll refuse to vaccinate her children next year. Hey, maybe COVID-19 could deal a blow to the anti-vaxxer movement?

Social media was a mistake.

Lets go back even further, GUIs in general were a mistake. The population at large would not be coming up with this **** on MUDs and MUSHs it would just the the fringe weirdos and thats the way it should be.

#commandlineonlyinternet2020

agreed

In the days when crackpots wrote in text-only media where no normies tread, they were probably somewhat cognizant that their audience invariably saw straight through their non-sense. Therefore I imagine a hint of tacit self-deprecating irony was an essential part of all USENET crackpottery. E.g., set theory cranks would claim to have shown Cantor's work to be a fraud, and yet while comparing their persecution to that of Galileo, they would do so with a twinkle in their eye.

Unfortunately, this sense of humor no longer becomes a requirement when you have an audience that literally believes even the absolute dumbest things you could possibly write (don't get me wrong, these people posted on USENET too*, although usually their tldr.txt would be easily recognized as spam, and hopefully with their authors ending up in people's killfiles).

*Incidentally, since Google has taken over USENET as Google Groups, these seem to be the only remaining people that post there. Quite possibly because their completely borked and lard ass web UI is so broken beyond all hope of usability that nobody would ever use Google Groups for anything anymore except for mailing out p3n15 pill adverts

haha, wow, did I just discover a funny little analogy:
[INDENT]literal text of the Bible is to fundies as
internet crank ravings are to normies
[/INDENT]

Facebook is the harbinger of the Apocalypse!

Trump is trying to make a possible vaccine exclusive to the USA:

Of course he is. "America first" and all that. Of course we have to use a non-US company for it though, since our system has so much red tape it'll be a year or two before anyone stateside can get it approved/manufactured and it'll cost too much anyway.

Holy ****, that actually makes me angry.

The article I linked to cited a story in Welt am Sonntag, a German newspaper, which itself cited an anonymous government source. The German government has in fact confirmed the story to Reuters: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/15/coronavirus-germany-tries-to-stop-us-luring-away-firm-seeking-vaccine.html

Having an exclusive vaccine is the only way for the US to have a fatality rate lower than Italy’s, so