Social distancing into the summer here stateside. Should be interesting. I guess I won’t be heading out westward this September.
Where's WYK been, and what trouble is he making?
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USFS put a memo out about a month ago regarding this issue... They’re cancelling fire season.
In all seriousness, looks like no big fire camps anymore, lots of smaller ones and all of the things involved. Fewer crews will be travelling this year, seems like we’ll be doing with less. RT-130 and pack tests are waived if you had them last year. Other than that is seems like it’s a work in progress. We’re supposed to be following CDC guidelines but wildland is a pretty hard place to do so.
At home we’re limiting to 4 personnel/apparatus in the corners of the cab. I’m keeping my ears on but it seems like it’s a moving target. But I’m just an AD or a contractor for feds/state agencies, depending on where I am.
We're stretched thin enough that we can get away with one person per engine. Mixed blessings.
UK statistics office released this the other day:
But things are looking up:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average
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It's difficult to know how this is going since different countries seem to count Covid19 deaths differently. We also don't know yet what will happen when the restrictions are lifted.
I noticed that Sweden and Ireland have the same amount of deaths/million, so it would seem to me that the virus either spreads anyway or was much faster than we thought initially and already was spread over our countries before actions were taken.
It may be similar... for now. Ireland is waning, whilst Sweden is waxing. We also had unseasonably warm weather when it did hit(20's!), and a lot of people were out and about in social situations that wouldn't normally have been happening this time of year. The whole idea was to keep the numbers low enough so the health systems could handle the load while we try to get a grip on exactly what we are dealing with. For each country, that will be different. I doubt our health system is as good as yours. We were having public debates about how to fix it before this Covid thing even happened.
Now that we've managed our health systems and have a bit of a clue what this thing is, the idea is to keep people from dying, full stop. Which in most of the developed world is a goal that has to be balanced with the economy. After all, if the economy collapses, more people will die as well, regardless of the disease. But we certainly have to take a better approach than I often see American tout like 'people die every day, just let it wash over us!'. While the lethality will most certainly drop once we have more testing done(it's difficut to get tested here unless you are in the health care system AND showing symptoms), the fact it can be lethal and is incredibly esily transmitted means it will need to be taken seriously until enough people are inoculated one way or the other.
Known problems so far with Covid-19 we have to contend with:
r0/contagiousness as high as 16+ measle-like territory. The Flu is usually r1 or less. With as much as 2 weeks incubation, and with evidence up to 50-80% people are not even symptomatic(not even a fever), that gives a lot of people time to rub their noses and then touch or cough all over a lot of things in the world, this thing spreads like wildfire. I think when this has blown over, they will probably show it is even more contagious.
It is often severe or fatal in people with hypertension, diabetes, Sickle Cell anaemia, and minorities(with evidence low vit D can be a factor, but this stat still needs to be investigated), and fatal in men more so than women by nearly twice as much in some places. South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, the countries with the best handle on Covid so far, are in the 2% lethality range. This is still much higher than the flu.
They are finding high levels of antibodies in people previously infected. But it's anyone's guess how long they will stick around. Could be a couple of years, could be for life. But in other coronavirus cases like the common cold, it lasted only a 1-2 years(which is why the common cold is so common). The idea is to inoculate people, which is why scientists want to open up restrictions gently and require masks now that we've made more. Having said that, a fried of mine who is a health care worker just told me N95's are like unicorns. They are all just wearing surgical masks, and for the entire day before discarding them unless they are actually coughed on or bled on by a known patient.
Oxford, as well as two other companies in the US, have begun vaccine testing on humans. Which is sort of crazy. Usually it takes months before you test this stuff on animals.
People have volunteered to be guinea pigs. Those people are going to save thousands of lives. Bless 'em. Usually they use a placebo in these tests, but I have heard the labs are reluctant to do so with volunteers.
No one has found Gwyneth Paltrow yet. There has yet to be a patient zero. With something that spreads like this, that's easy to understand.
Bats. They are a problem. One thing I often saw back in Texas was the 'Rabies Warning' sign. It was posted in areas where they found them. The problem is bats are mammals and they freaking fly. You can not contain them. If they catch something, it's gonna spread to other mammals. Having said it, birds do a decent job of spreading stuff too. It's just that bats like to nibble on our fruit, and they have huge hives. So when one gets sick, loads of others do as well.
Btw, one of the clues to why this causes so much trouble with folks that have heart conditions, aside from the usual health issues, is in the name of the receptor on your cells that Sars-Cov-V2 attaches to. The ACE2 receptor regulates your blood pressure amongst a few other things. That A in ACE2 stands for Angiotensin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiotensin-converting_enzyme_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiotensin-converting_enzyme_2
This situation is becoming even more interesting by the day. It’s been... 18 years since I had a college level biology class, and 8 years since I used any microbiology, but the microbiology of the way this virus works is fascinating. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather not be learning this for these reasons, but the science here is fascinating.
^ with you 100%, fascinating but dang maybe a bit of a rest would be OK too
As an engineer, I only took one college level bio course. And I did it electively. I was always curious about everything(it took me 5 1/2 years to graduate I took so many electives, so many that I rolled some in to a minor). Nowadays, we gots da youtubez
But, yeah, this is a terrible way to learn about how coronavirus works
But are any of us really surprised? RNA mutates so readily, it was only a matter of time before one of them fit well enough to cause troubles.
Here's a bunch of preliminary sciency stuff bout da mutants:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.09.034942v1.full.pdf
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https://www.npr.org/sections/corona...schools-child-care-and-summer-camps-is-leaked
Ugh. The CDC guidelines are reasonable. What is wrong with this administration? Handling this properly is a better way to be reelected than trying to force an economic recovery at the expense of citizen’s lives, which, of course, hurts economic recovery.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6883736/CDC-documents.pdf
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/CDC-Business-Plans.pdf
Ugh. The CDC guidelines are reasonable. What is wrong with this administration? Handling this properly is a better way to be reelected than trying to force an economic recovery at the expense of citizen’s lives, which, of course, hurts economic recovery.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6883736/CDC-documents.pdf
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/CDC-Business-Plans.pdf
its not about the economy, or people, it's about control, regardless of who is hurt or how.
I fully expect the Trump to refuse to step down when he loses the election, likely claiming voter fraud, or crisis or?
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I'm inclined to believe that he won't go away easily no matter what happens, even if he served two complete terms.
You’re right, I keep expecting this administration to be playing the political game. They’re not... They can’t even rationalize any reasonable response to anything, literally anything. A modicum of decency is beyond its grasp.
