Quarantine

ndiecity: Quarantine feels like that episode of the twilight zone where the last man alive finally has all the time in the world to read but breaks his glasses but instead of glasses it’s just my whole brain
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Blasphemous Rumour

So...

Everything we usually do to signal to other humans that we’re not dangerous – smiling, shaking hands, embracing – is now dangerous. 

And everything that usually signals unfriendliness –  physical distance, keeping interactions brief, social isolation – is now polite. 

Ok. 

SAVE RESTAURANTS

https://videopress.com/v/lt9z9JgS?muted=true&persistVolume=false&preloadContent=metadata
Without federal aid, the pandemic threatens to permanently close 85% of independent restaurants. 16M people risk losing their jobs. It’s time Congress steps up to #SaveRestaurants by passing the RESTAURANTS Act. Share this video and take action now at SaveRestaurants.com.

If you aren’t filled with rage at Trump, you aren’t paying attention

“Let me take you for a moment to a fantasy land. In this place, the coronavirus pandemic was bad for a couple of months but now it is largely under control. If you lived there you’d still be a little uncertain about going to a concert or a movie, but your life would have largely returned to normal. You wouldn’t have lost your job; the government would have had a comprehensive support program that kept unemployment low. You’d be able to see your family and friends without fear. Your children would be returning to school in September. There would be some precautions to take for a while longer, but there would be no doubt that the pandemic was on its way to being defeated. To us here in the United States, this picture seems magical, like a dispatch from the far future. But it isn’t. It’s the situation that exists right now in many of our peer countries around the world. And the fact that our situation is so different? That shouldn’t just make you feel disappointed, or anxious, or upset. It should make you enraged. That is the proper response to where we find ourselves today.”

— If you aren’t filled with rage at Trump, you aren’t paying attention 

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Why covid cases are spiking but deaths aren't

mostlysignssomeportents:

The number of covid cases in the US is spiking but the death count isn’t. This mystery has spawned many explanations, most of them optimistic (“it’s young people who are recovering,” “our therapies are better,” etc). But the real explanation is simpler, and it’s sad.

As epidemiologist Ellie Murray explains, it’s almost certainly just “lead time bias.”

That’s when you test more people, including presymptomatic people, and thus discover the disease earlier than before.

https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1280305393516904448

That means we learn people are sick earlier, which means that the time between detection and death gets longer - not because people are surviving longer from the onset of symptoms, but because we’re detecting sick people before they exhibit symptoms.

Lead-time bias emerges whenever we ramp up testing: routine mammograms and colonoscopies appeared to change the course of related cancers, but what was really going on was earlier, presymptomatic identification of cancers.

And while it’s true that we measured earlier cases from the first symptoms, we didn’t know what some symptoms were (loss of smell, for example) and we relied on self-reporting by gravely ill people, which isn’t as good as actual tests.

That’s called “recall bias.” Sometimes we’d ask family members, who only knew about the symptoms that were severe enough to warrant mentioning (“proxy respondent bias”).

Bottom line: “When you start identifying people at earlier stages of a disease, it looks like they survive longer (or have the disease longer) compared to when you identify based on severe symptoms.” -Ellie Murray

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