General Corona virus updates

Welcome to our Community
Wanting to join the rest of our members? Feel free to Sign Up today.
Sign up
Splinty

Splinty

Shake 'em off
Admin
Dec 31, 2014
44,116
89,915
Greenbean said:
7% mortality rate in Italy? That’s awful. Shit is serious y’all.
Click to expand...

That is what happens if you don't social distance.

Literally just stay the hell home and call your rep to find you wtf they aren't testing?!?!

Could easily be 0.5%.
7.5% awaits us if we don't social distance.
 
silentsinger

silentsinger

Momofuku
Jun 23, 2015
21,038
14,457
Hauler said:
Greater Cincy metro area is over 2 million people.
I go camping a lot, but it ain't like I live in the woods. Not yet anyway.
Click to expand...
I should drop this hillbilly shtick with you, but it's fun sometimes. I was being serious in that case though, everything here is fucked. I'm understanding the panic. Not just the contracting the virus but the financial ramifications for so many people.
 
Greenbean

Greenbean

Posting Machine
Nov 14, 2015
2,943
4,284
silentsinger said:
I should drop this hillbilly shtick with you, but it's fun sometimes. I was being serious in that case though, everything here is fucked. I'm understanding the panic. Not just the contracting the virus but the financial ramifications for so many people.
Click to expand...
So much this.
 
silentsinger

silentsinger

Momofuku
Jun 23, 2015
21,038
14,457
No socialising? Well no sh*t!

My Arsenal bar isn't showing any football because football has been suspended

Oh wait, all bars in California have been ordered to close

My socialising is buggered. The only people I really hang out with are Arsenal beer drinkers!
 
silentsinger

silentsinger

Momofuku
Jun 23, 2015
21,038
14,457
What the merry hell is wrong with people? Apparently people are falling for the 10 second holding your breath thing. I did 20 seconds and my lungs are fucked.
 
Splinty

Splinty

Shake 'em off
Admin
Dec 31, 2014
44,116
89,915
‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response


Outtakes on an ongoing flu study that caught the coronavirus early, could have been used to quickly evaluate the community spread (person #1 and person #2 weeks apart), and all the CDC and FDA red tape that stopped this...

Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time.

In late January, the first confirmed American case of the coronavirus had landed in her area. Critical questions needed answers: Had the man infected anyone else? Was the deadly virus already lurking in other communities and spreading?

As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.

To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.


By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.

What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.

“It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”

In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days.
Click to expand...

The agency also released criteria for deciding which individuals should be tested for the virus — at first only those who had a fever and respiratory issues and had traveled from the outbreak’s origin in Wuhan, China.

The criteria were so strict that the sick man in the Seattle area who had visited Wuhan did not meet it. Still, worried state health officials pushed to get him checked, and the C.D.C. agreed. Local officials sent a sample to Atlanta and the results came back positive.

Officials monitored 70 people who were in contact with the man, including 50 who consented to getting nose swabs, and none tested positive for the coronavirus. But there was still the possibility that someone had been missed, said Dr. Scott Lindquist, the state epidemiologist for communicable diseases.

Around this time, the Washington State Department of Health began discussions with the Seattle Flu Study already going on in the state.

But there was a hitch: The flu project primarily used research laboratories, not clinical ones, and its coronavirus test was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And so the group was not certified to provide test results to anyone outside of their own investigators. They began discussions with state, C.D.C. and F.D.A. officials to figure out a solution, according to emails and interviews.

Dr. Scott F. Dowell, a former high-ranking C.D.C. official and a current deputy director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds the Seattle Flu Study, asked for help from the leaders of the C.D.C.’s coronavirus response. “Hoping there is a solution,” he wrote on Feb. 10.

Later, Dr. Lindquist, the state epidemiologist in Washington, wrote an email to Dr. Alicia Fry, the chief of the C.D.C.’s epidemiology and prevention branch, requesting the study be used to test for the coronavirus.


C.D.C. officials repeatedly said it would not be possible. “If you want to use your test as a screening tool, you would have to check with F.D.A.,” Gayle Langley, an officer at the C.D.C.’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, wrote back in an email on Feb. 16. But the F.D.A. could not offer the approval because the lab was not certified as a clinical laboratory under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.

Dr. Chu and Dr. Lindquist tried repeatedly to wrangle approval to use the Seattle Flu Study. The answers were always no.

“We felt like we were sitting, waiting for the pandemic to emerge,” Dr. Chu said. “We could help. We couldn’t do anything.”
Click to expand...
On the other side of the country in Seattle, Dr. Chu and her flu study colleagues, unwilling to wait any longer, decided to begin running samples.

A technician in the laboratory of Dr. Lea Starita who was testing samples soon got a hit.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’” Dr. Starita said. “I just took off running” to the office of the study’s program managers. “We got one,” she told them. “What do we do?”

Members of the research group discussed the ethics of what to do next.

“What we were allowed to do was to keep it to ourselves,” Dr. Chu said. “But what we felt like we needed to do was to tell public health.”


They decided the right thing to do was to inform local health officials.

The case was a teenager, in the same county where the first coronavirus case had surfaced, who had a flu swab just a few days before but had no travel history and no link to any known case.

The state laboratory, finally able to begin testing, confirmed the result the next morning. The teenager, who had recovered from his illness, was located and informed just after he entered his school building. He was sent home and the school was later closed as a precaution.

Later that day, the investigators and Seattle health officials gathered with representatives of the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. to discuss what happened. The message from the federal government was blunt. “What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu,” Dr. Lindquist remembered. “Stop testing.”
Click to expand...
 
silentsinger

silentsinger

Momofuku
Jun 23, 2015
21,038
14,457
Splinty said:
Check your PMs
Click to expand...
Fuck me I am so confused. My search function stopped working for a bit and I thought you had suspended it.

I have no idea about that PM and the majority of the people involved I have no interest in ever talking to again. WTF is going on? Do I have Corona of the brain again?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom