.This is the thread for non-political news and events.
German police detain suspect after deadly shooting outside synagogue
Two people were killed in a shooting in the eastern German city of Halle on Wednesday and police said they had detained one person.
Mass-selling daily Bild said the shooting took place in front of a synagogue, and that a hand grenade was also thrown into a Jewish cemetery. An eyewitness told n-tv television that a perpetrator had also fired shots into a kebab shop in Halle.
There have been some corona cases in schools in Bonn and Cologne, leading to those schools being shut down.
So… if it turns out there’s a pupil with corona in my school, I won’t be able to go to work for a few weeks. Just imagine
The worst and the best of what the internet can do in one story:
A 13-year-old boy who was taunted for his online book reviews has received messages of support from bestselling authors.
I mean, okay, those guys were really mean for mocking that kid in a chat group and inviting him so he could see it and all that, but… his reviews are kind of shit. I mean, all he says about any of those books is “It’s brilliant” or “Sherlock Holmes is great” or that kind of thing. His review of Lord of the Rings is “If u liked Game of Thrones, you should read this”. And that kind of makes me question that Crime and Punishment is really his favourite novel.
I’m just saying, it’s cool that people want to support this kid, but his reviews do not deserve 300k+ followers.
There have been some corona cases in schools in Bonn and Cologne, leading to those schools being shut down.
So… if it turns out there’s a pupil with corona in my school, I won’t be able to go to work for a few weeks. Just imagine
So you’re using bio warfare on children to get out of work now?
Great job!
Shelves were still empty of TP when I went to the supermarket for some bread yesterday. Paper towels too. Face masks are running low – most GPs have 2 days’ worth only.
It’s so wasteful too – is there not a way to hot-water wash and reuse masks if you absolutely need to wear one?
The first coronavirus death in the UK has been reported.
Boring old common-variety influenza:”Hold my beer…”
Flu-related deaths in the UK in the 2017/18 season: 26,408. (Source: Public Health England)
Let’s contemplate the phrase “proportionate response” for a while…
The cases show very different mortality rates per country. Germany has hundreds of cases now but not one fatality yet.
I think the mortality rate will go down as it becomes obvious more people are infected than are currently registered as such. South Korea has done lots of screening and has confirmed 6 thousand cases now, and a mortality rate lower than 1 %.
I suspect demographics will play hugely into that too. We know that those most at risk are the elderly or those weakened by other conditions. So if its spread in an old folks home or a hospital ward then your mortality rate is likely to be much higher than a university campus. The former could have a mortality rate at 20% and the latter at zero.
I’m all for short reviews. Don’t tell me everything that happened, or what your own profound insights are, just tell me if it’s good.
This post was terrible.
I’m all for short reviews. Don’t tell me everything that happened, or what your own profound insights are, just tell me if it’s good.
This post was terrible.
This post was wonderful.
There aren’t enough stars in the sky.
Christian, you’re being one of those guys on the internet right now. He’s 13. He’s reading books. He’s telling other people to read books. And as I just said, he’s 13.
I may have realised that and been somewhat facetious about it myself.
But his reviews are still crap!
Who reviews the reviewers?
Meanwhile, in Vietnam.
Coronavirus miracle? Vietnam says all its infected patients cured
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam – Amid the rapid spread of the coronavirus outbreak around the world, Vietnam has announced that all 16 infected patients in the country were discharged from hospital and declared cured.
As of Wednesday, all 16 patients, including the oldest who is 73, had been cured and discharged from the hospital.
For the past 15 days, including on Friday, the government also detected no new cases of infections, the last one having been reported on February 13, even as a village north of Hanoi remains under a 20-day lockdown.
“If fighting COVID-19 has been a war, then we have won the first round but not the entire war because the situation can be very unpredictable,” Vietnam’s Ministry of Health quoted Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam as saying, referring to the illness caused by the coronavirus, during an online conference with city and provincial officials on Tuesday.
Worldwide, the outbreak has already killed almost 3,000 and infected more than 83,000 as of Saturday.
It is a different story, however, in Vietnam. World Health Organization (WHO) officials and health experts said the government’s swift response to the emergency was crucial in containing the crisis at the early stage.
Ha ha, that is insane. It’s a 14 day quarantine not 14 months!
Now people in the UK are behaving the same way – footage from Hampshire Costco is on Twitter. We started a trend!
Reporting from the US pandemic epicenter of Redmond Washington…. I’m down to 4 rolls of toilet paper and starting to panic! 
(Sung to the tune of the theme song to the TV show “Branded”):
Stranded on the seat of a toilet bowl
Stranded, and you haven’t got a roll.
To prove you’re a man, you must wipe with your hand.
You must prooooooooove you’re a man.
The second lyric should be “What do you do when you’re stranded, and you haven’t got a roll.”
We analyzed more than 150 coronavirus deaths. Here’s what we found.
While the coronavirus has spread quickly, 4 of 5 patients who develop the disease recover without needing special treatment, statistics from the World Health Organization show. Experts say people shouldn’t panic and should instead focus on practicing proper hygiene, including frequent hand-washing.
The messaging about all of this is wildly contradictory. And I don’t mean from the crazy conspiracy sites, from the regular news sites. It’s shameful. I am quite sensitive to this stuff, and I know there are people who are worse and who are going insane over all this.
It’s good advice (the refraining from handshakes thing, not the chopping) – it’s what our health departments are recommending here too. Hand washing is a must (no change for me; I wash my hands dozens of times every day anyway), especially if you’ve been in public, touching surfaces that others may have touched.
If we get through this current mini-crisis hopefully new habits will have formed (wash your hands, don’t touch your face so much) in sufficient numbers of people that will reduce the incidence of other similar older ailments in coming years.
Better hand washing would be good but I think not touching your face is a rather impossible task for many. I saw long before this studies that the majority of people subconsciously touch their faces every 2 minutes or hundreds of times a day.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/09/uk/prince-andrew-epstein-investigation-gbr-intl/index.html
Must be nice when authorities ask you friendly to cooperate with your pedo investigation rather than throw your ass in jail.
I found 8 rolls stashed in a cabinet last night, the panic has subsided for the moment.
Unfortunately Emerald City Comic Con has been postponed (was supposed to start Thursday), ironically Amber was going to dress as Nurse Joker and I was going to patient Harvey Dent. 
Coronavirus handling, Texas style:
Good.
On the previous comment from David, I do have some sympathy and the press are natural panic merchants but there’s also other context to those numbers.
Firstly they are all annual averages. To take Italy for example they had two coronavirus cases on the 30th of January, in barely over a month that number is over 10,000 with 631 deaths. 168 of those deaths in the last 2 days.
To take a different look:
You have roughly 20 times more chance of dying of Covid-19 than seasonal flu, if it’s contained then it will result in fewer deaths. If it spreads to the same degree it will result in 20 times as many deaths.
There’s also a selfish element in there, a lot of the deaths in the top level of the chart are in poorer countries, very few people in the west get dengue or malaria unless they take an exotic holiday. In countries with access to the latest drugs almost nobody dies of HIV/AIDS any more, theo numbers are undoubtedly coming from Africa.
To take Italy again their deaths from TB in 2017 was around 500 annually, that’s been exceeded by Covid-19 in two weeks.
When comparing the data on diseases keep in mind statistics can be used to prove anything that’s even vaguely true…14% of all people know that.
The graphs I showed came from this page, which seems to have pretty well sourced data:
I’m not questioning the validity of the data. What I’m doing is attempting to put it into some context. 4 weeks or so back you were talking about why anyone would make a fuss about something that killed 6 people, now that number is many thousands.
‘The fuss’ has always essentially been about the potential spread. The virus is less deadly than MERS/SARS/EBOLA by some way but has also spread much faster than any of those too. The number that matters is by the end of the year how that matches up to the likes of TB or Malaria. A snapshot isn’t really worth much at all because as you have said here, it was 6, it isn’t 6 any more, it’s closing on 6000. It could be 60,000 or 6 million 2 months from now but we don’t know, it depends how it spreads.
To add to that there’s a big chance right now that the data is incomplete. It is being reported that cases in Melbourne in Australia are from people that only travelled to the US. The US is denying certain levels but also refusing to test anyone who hasn’t been in direct contact with a verified sufferer.
Probability says it’s very unlikely I would die from Covid-19, my kids even less so, however we could carry it to their grandma who lives with us and her chances as someone who is nearing 80 are not as good.
That has me worried a bit. I am currently sneezing, but I am not coughing, nor do I have a fever, and I called the doctor to ask if it was acceptable for me to visit the old folks home. They told me not to worry.
Yes, don’t worry, you probably only have a common cold, and that’s not going to ki–
However, infection with rhinovirus or one of the other viruses responsible for common cold symptoms can be serious in some people. Complications from a cold can cause serious illnesses and, yes, even death – particularly in people who have a weak immune system.
… oh.
(Source: Edinburgh Napier University https://www.napier.ac.uk/about-us/news/conversation-peter-barlow-common-cold )
Finally, someone is daring to ask the right questions.
Hands Off! Can orgies survive in the age of coronavirus?
Italy closing down entirely, Denmark shutting down the schools, the US closing its borders to the EU…
This is probably where things are headed for most of us pretty soon. I expect they’ll shut down schools over here soon, maybe next week so we’ll have 4 instead of 2 weeks of Easter holidays.
I think a lot remains to be seen. However corona has been around since the beginning of January, or maybe the end of december, it seems people are not getting infected that quickly. The flu can infect 100s of millions in a regular flu season, we’re not seeing that number with corona yet. Or that may still happen? I dunno, I guess that is something an epidemiologist has to answer. Does Mike still hang around on the forum?
Not at the moment, I don’t think. But… the way I understand it, that’s the thing about exponential growth. As long as the number is low, the absolute number of growth also seems low, but from a certain point, exponential growth explodes.
This also means that a large part of the population is likely to get infected with coronavirus – the Robert Koch Institute, the most important German public research institute for these matters, says that it’s not unlikely that up to 70% of the German population will get it.
This also means it’s pointless to be afraid of an infection, as such – it’s pretty likely to happen to you anyway. The important thing is that if it happens slowly, we’ll be fine. But if it happens very quickly, hospitals and the health system in general will be strained, and will make matters much worse.
Thus, the current measures.
It’s Spring Break at UT Austin next week, and it will be extended to two weeks.
I called the doctor to ask if it was acceptable for me to visit the old folks home. They told me not to worry. However it feels weird.
Some of the first cases in Sydney were at retirement homes so restrictions apply to visitors. They’re certainly being very careful with allowing children to visit since they are potentially “super-spreaders”.
Despite fears from some quarters the Rugby League season launched last night, tens of thousands of people in a stadium. The F1 Grand Prix in Melbourne has been canceled, one day out. On a smaller scale, the Indian Parramasala community festival scheduled for this weekend has also been called off.
TP is still scarce. Hand soap, wipes, paracetamol – all absent when wife went shopping this morning.
Our office shifted to “flexi-work” last year so anyone can work from home when needed – the office is pretty empty this morning.
I work part-time as a receptionist at an acupuncture clinic and my boss just decided to close for two weeks (at least), which is definitely the right call. I’m surprised patients were even coming in tbh. Appointments dropped by about 50% this week but I thought it’d be even more of a dead zone. Thankfully my boss is a really good person and will pay desk staff and the other acupuncturists out of her own pocket if her business insurance won’t cover lost wages.
My wife is a nurse though so she’ll have to keep working. Luckily she works on a post-partum unit so she won’t work directly with any covid patients, but it’s still worrying.
We’ve also decided to keep our daughter at home with us rather than send her to my parents’ on the days I’d normally be working, more for their safety than hers or ours.
There is truth to the thinking that big corporates take extreme action to minimoze liability. And then the man on the street sees that and panics.
At theend of the day it comes down to poor preparation. Trump axing Obamas pandemic response unit will prove fatal. Globally.
It is nice that the dutch PM is saying not to shake hands but importantly you should listen to Jurgen Klopp.
https://www.sportbible.com/football/news-klopp-tells-liverpool-fans-to-put-your-hands-away-you-fking-idiots-20200311
Jurgen Klopp is amazing. I loved the press conference when he was asked about Coronavirus:
A couple of days later the BBC had Nigel Farage on to discuss it, a man with no more knowledge in the field of medicine than me or Klopp or the man in the pub (unless that man in the pub just happens to be an epidemiologist).
Trump axing Obama’s pandemic response unit will prove fatal. Globally.
This bears repeating. Constantly. At every Trump rally from now to November 3rd.
The shops here have been ratfucked to hell and back – practically no fruit and veg, low stocks of pasta, bread and toilet roll and other cooking ingredients.
Annoying when all you want is a pack of sprouts and some sun dried tomatoes though
Shit, it’s the same here…bread was gone. People are dumb. There was just little bread rolls.
I was noticing people outside seemed agitated today. But I may be too a bit oversensitive to that.
Trump axing Obama’s pandemic response unit will prove fatal. Globally.
This bears repeating. Constantly. At every Trump rally from now to November 3rd.
This x 10,000. And every workplace who, like Trump, only value keeping the numbers looking good for short-term gain.
Also poverty will spread it further. There are people who know they should self-isolate but are afraid to risk their jobs.
Beer is a nice thing to drink in self isolation to relieve anxiety.
Its hardly the case that modt people will drink 24 beers and accidentally stab themselves with a broken bottle.
There was some beer left in the supermarket too, but it was just Corona. Fuck that shit.
Why stock up on beer? The last thing you want if an emergency like this happens is to have impaired judgement.
But if you’re gonna die anyway, you might as well die drunk.
I’m not sure if places closing down have thought this through. Do they think they can hide for a couple of weeks and it will blow over? We’re (optimistically) a year away from a vaccine. Are schools going to close for a year? If not, they aren’t solving the problem they are just kicking it a few weeks down the road.
I’m not sure if places closing down have thought this through. Do they think they can hide for a couple of weeks and it will blow over? We’re (optimistically) a year away from a vaccine. Are schools going to close for a year? If not, they aren’t solving the problem they are just kicking it a few weeks down the road.
If we close as much as we can down for two weeks we vastly limit the further spread of the virus – Anyone who has already contacted the virus when the shutdown comes in will be showing symptoms by the point it’s reviewed, and by limiting public interaction the number of people exposed is reduced, allowing the healthcare system to better deal with the increased patient load in the interim.
Yes, this is about slowing things down to manageable levels so it doesn’t all blow up at once, rather than believing that closures are a long-term solution.
Kicking it a few weeks down the road for a majority of people is actually very beneficial.
I’ve seen the argument about not swamping the health services, and I still don’t think it adds up. Let’s not swamp them this week, let’s swamp them next month instead! Yay? To make a shutdown work to maximise healthcare resources, it would need a level of coordination I’m not seeing
However, the trouble judging the response is that there is very little precedence in recent times to look back upon. It could be that the response is the best that it could be. For example, it would be easy to say that if airport security or military response units simply “did their job” then 9-11 would never have happened. However, that’s only because 9-11 happened that we can look back and say that “mistakes” were made. Same for hurricanes, earthquakes and mass shootings.
The response here in California was pretty strong, but only after cases were already spreading. In places where Covid19 and Coronavirus cases haven’t arrived, like Alabama at present, for example, it is probably likely that they should be instituting even stricter policies than places where the virus is already widespread. We’re catching up to a collection of mass events or infections that probably happened two weeks to a month ago, so the actions we take now are still likely to look like “mistakes” based on information we’ll have in two weeks to a month from tomorrow.
Governments will get blamed for inaction, but at the same time, it really isn’t under government control. The virus is being spread by people and the medical community has learned a lot about it. Alongside the question of whether or not the government responded well or poorly to the outbreak, each person, community and business also has to ask if they personally acted responsibly based on the information known at the time their personal decisions were made. Everyone has known for a while what its symptoms are, how it is spread and how to prevent infection.
I’ve seen a lot of coordination in communities, from companies and businesses that show they take it seriously. California is known for scary earthquakes, wildfires, flash floods and landslides, but honestly, these are random unpredictable emergencies for the most part. We know they are going to happen eventually, but not every year or even in twenty years. Tornados, Hurricanes, snow and ice storms are yearly occurrences for the Eastern US and it is likely that more people die each year in the US from icy roads than have ever died in an earthquake. But when one happens, people will likely say “well, they knew one was going to happen eventually. Why weren’t they ready?”
Usually, the answer is that we thought we were ready.
However, medical science does seem much more prepared to deal with this today than previous epidemics. It took 30 years to completely deal with polio. Flu, TB and HIV/AIDS are all still very active and medicine is still improving its effectiveness against them as well. Covid19 will continue to spread and kill a number of people, and it may turn out that what doctors, communities and governments learn from this pandemic will actually save far more lives in much worse epidemics that are going to happen but can’t be predicted. To make us more ready for something we can never really be prepared for.
I’ve seen the argument about not swamping the health services, and I still don’t think it adds up. Let’s not swamp them this week, let’s swamp them next month instead! Yay?
Well yes, it’s about not having everyone who requires treatment needing it all at once.
“Let’s not have 100 patients this week, let’s have 50 this week and 50 next week” seems like a fairly reasonable approach.
It’s about staggering the difficult period and stretching it out.
Do they think they can hide for a couple of weeks and it will blow over?
While it’s not practical or possible, extending this to several months (and if everyone actually did it) would see it completely blow over. It’s passed from person to person. I don’t have it now, nor does my wife (as far as we know). If we stay in we won’t get it. The same applies to everyone else.
Keep your mouth shut when you’re out and about, only be out and about if you have to, and wash your hands properly as often as possible – assume your hands have the virus on them until they’ve been washed – that means no touching food, no touching eyes, nose, mouth until you’ve washed your hands.
I ducked out this morning to the local grocer for a few items – they were as busy as usual on a Saturday but the nearby carpark which adjoins a small mall with a supermarket was completely full; pretty much like Christmas. People here are panicking, needlessly.
To be fair I think David, albeit I have disagreed with him a lot on this, does have some valid points. I do sense an element of populism in some of the responses so far.
These last two days there was a massive clamour for the Welsh Rugby Union to call off their game against Scotland because of risk of infection, like it was a fatally crucial position to take. It built to a crescendo of anguish until they did call it off with 24 hours to go. Will it make any difference? Probably not.
It’s one example with my inherent bias but I do think we should analyse beyond just the ‘shut it down now’ panic on social media.
It is true that if you close a school and then don’t close workplaces then kids are more likely to be cared for by grandparents. If you set up a creche to avoid that then you are just replacing the school risk with an equal or worse one. While sports matches gather together 50-80k people briefly for 2 hours the London Underground has 5 million passenger trips a day in hugely cramped conditions, there are 66 trains a day to and from Cardiff and London and none of that is being talked about. Minor leagues with one man and his dog attending are off though definitely so we can ‘flatten the curve’ while 5 million commute by train.
It needs to go beyond just ‘shut it down’ for ease of mind to what actually has the greatest impact in spreading the virus. There seems a satisfaction around saying ‘we did something’ which reminds me of work in 2003. There had been a bombing in Turkey at a branch of a bank I worked for and another bomb at a Marriot hotel in Indonesia. We were staying at a Marriot hotel. The bosses game the advice to stay put and not go out that weekend, go to work or stay in the hotel, in the two places that were targets. They’d put $500 behind the hotel bar to keep us happy. When I pointed out their advice was to stay in the two places most likely to bombed the big boss said ‘well we feel the need to do something’.
It’s one example with my inherent bias but I do think we should analyse beyond just the ‘shut it down now’ panic on social media.
That’s not what this is though. This is politicians listening to the experts on the matter. Who I am sure have considered these aspects. I’ll go and look for some quotes later.
It is true that if you close a school and then don’t close workplaces then kids are more likely to be cared for by grandparents.
This one is definitely a tricky one. The closing down of the schools and kindergartens here was accompanied by the warning for the parents not to have the grandparents be the ones to take care of the kids, but there of course many people who have little in the way of other choices. What I expect will happen, though, is parents forming groups to take care of the children together taking turns, and compared to thirty pupils in a classroom and a thousand pupils at a school that’d still be a relatively minimised contact.
I’ve seen the argument about not swamping the health services, and I still don’t think it adds up. Let’s not swamp them this week, let’s swamp them next month instead! Yay?
The idea is to do this:
I’m not normally one for mob justice, but I would share zero tears if this guy’s neighbours strung him up and set him on fire
<p class=”css-exrw3m evys1bk0″ style=”margin: 0px 0px 0.9375rem; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.25rem; line-height: 1.875rem; font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, ‘times new roman’, times, serif; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px; max-width: 100%;”>On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.</p>
<p class=”css-exrw3m evys1bk0″ style=”margin: 0px 0px 0.9375rem; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.25rem; line-height: 1.875rem; font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, ‘times new roman’, times, serif; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px; max-width: 100%;”>Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”</p>
That’s not what this is though. This is politicians listening to the experts on the matter.
To a degree. I want to be clear here I think most of these measures are sensible and necessary, I fully understand ‘flatten the curve’ which is why it’s mentioned in my posts, but they don’t always follow as much logic as the ‘optics’ of them.
Science would say you close down a closed transport system used by millions with poor ventilation over a 4th team football match 20 people watching in an open field. The latter is absolutely shut down, the former not even discussed.
My niece is a palliative care pediatric social worker in Indianapolis, which means her clients are kids dying from cancer who need assistance getting services to make their final days as comfortable as possible, at home or in a hospice. She was supposed to be part of a bachelorette party in Palm Beach next weekend for one of her cousins, but she is dropping out because she is concerned about potentially exposing her clientele to this virus.
I wish my niece was old enough to run for president.
Science would say you close down a closed transport system used by millions with poor ventilation over a 4th team football match 20 people watching in an open field. The latter is absolutely shut down, the former not even discussed.
None of this stuff can be considered in isolation, though. You shut down the London Underground and you’re going to cause panic and inconvenience and prevent people from working (including some people in fairly essential jobs) and there are going to be lots of knock-on effects that are very negative for society.
The decision is whether the positives outweigh the negatives, and it’s always going to be very difficult to judge something that’s so key to society’s infrastructure like that. By comparison it’s far easier to cancel a sporting event because it’s largely inconsequential, there’s no real cost to it not happening.
I’m no expert on any of this, and I also feel that the tube carries a high risk (I’ve stopped making my regular work trips to London for the last few weeks partly due to this) but I’m also aware that there are lots of unintended consequences to those kinds of big decisions, however well-meaning. It’s why working out the best overall strategy is so difficult.
You shut down the London Underground and you’re going to cause panic and inconvenience and prevent people from working (including some people in fairly essential jobs) and there are going to be lots of knock-on effects that are very negative for society.
Essential staff could easily survive with the exceptional bus service they have in London, the most subsidised public transport system on the planet. They run every 5 minutes.
I’m not going against general policies but I will challenge what seems to be this populist idea of what is essential.
We just seem to have different rules when things could possibly hit MPs and their staff. The Charlton v Sheffield Utd game is off but what does that actually mean in terms of risk? Next to fuck all is my estimate compared to a city of 8 million taking no action against anything other than sporting and musical events.
